At Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday, roast comedian Tony Hinchcliffe told a controversial joke when he said, “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It was immediately condemned by the mainstream media as “racist” and proof that Donald Trump is an unapologetic bigot. Trump tried to distance himself from the joke by saying, “I don’t know him [Hinchcliffe]. Somebody put him up there. I don’t know who he is.” And then added, “nobody has been better to Puerto Rico” than me.
The courageous modern-day comedians stood up to denounce the joke and even called for censorship and canceling of comedians. On The View, co-host and former comedian Whoppie Goldberg said, “My generation fought tooth and nail so that you would not have to hear that kind of speak again.” So, she is in favor of repressing certain jokes and voices, especially comedians' voices. No one has to hear anything, Whoppie. If you do not like Tony Hinchcliffe’s comedy, don’t listen to him. I think The View is a vile, disgusting, hateful program, that is why I do not watch it. I would never call for their opinions or voices to be censored or repressed.
Far-Left talk show host Jimmy Kimmel lashed out at Hinchcliffe and Trump’s rally at MSG, calling them, “mean,” “hateful” and “racist”. NBC’s Seth Meyers referred to Hinchcliffe’s jokes as “racist remarks.” On Monday, Late Show host Stephen Colbert, immediately tried to politicize the joke by claiming there would be “massive repercussions” when he pointed out that there are “470,000” Puerto Rican voters living in Pennsylvania – a vital swing state.
The only comedian who defended Hinchcliffe and stood up for free speech was leftist comedian Jon Stewart who said, "Obviously, in retrospect, having a roast comedian come to a political rally a week before election day and roasting a key demographic … probably not the best decision by the campaign politically, but to be fair, the guy's just really doing what he does… I find that guy very funny. I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, bringing him to a rally and having him not do roast jokes? That'd be like bringing Beyoncé to a rally and not…," alluding to the criticism of Kamala Harris who brought Beyoncé to a rally, and did not have her perform.
Puerto Rican celebrities, such as Rita Moreno, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ricky Martin tried to score political points for Kamala Harris by publicly condemning Hinchcliffe and Trump’s rally. Martin shared a clip of Hinchcliffe’s set on social media with the caption: “This is what they think of us.”
You are wrong Ricky Martin; Hinchcliffe wasn’t calling Puerto Ricans garbage; he was calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage”. And he was not the first to make that assessment.
May 14, 2016, the PBS News Hour ran a story entitled, Puerto Rico struggles as trash piles up.
December 14, 2017, NPR ran a story called, Puerto Rico Struggles Under The Weight Of Its Own Garbage.
August 7, 2019, the website waste360.com, posted an article, Puerto Rico Landfills: Is the Problem Around Capacity or Noncompliance?
February 16, 2021, the Global Press Journal, ran an article entitled, Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink’
October 21, 2022, an organization called, “Economic Hardship Reporting Project”, ran an article, Disaster Debris Is Pushing Puerto Rico’s Landfills To The Brink
For all the people who are so concerned about Puerto Rican people being the victims of a racist insult, not one of them addressed the fact that there is a major waste management and garbage issue on the island which not only destroys the beauty of the island but threatens the health and the lives of those who live there. Instead of politicizing this joke to help push Kamala Harris over the finish line or to use it to call for woke censorship of comedians, they should have used the joke as a call to action to help the people in Puerto Rico solve this growing and dangerous garbage problem which is infecting their island and destroying their lives.
The people who are lashing out at Tony Hinchcliff’s supposed racist joke against Puerto Ricans do not really care about Puerto Ricans. They are content to allow that health crisis harm Puerto Ricans citizens so they can clutch their pearls and feign outrage in order to call Trump a racist once again, so Kamala Harris will win the election and we will continue to have 100,000 Americans die of drug overdoses every year, tens of thousands of Central and South American children be victims of sex and human trafficking every year, and 20-year-old nursing students be raped and murdered by criminal aliens allowed to cross our wide open southern border so Democrats can continue to win elections. That’s how much these people care about others.
The reason why free speech is so important is that the truth comes out when people are allowed to speak freely. And even if Tony Hinchcliff’s motivation for his Puerto Rico joke was not to bring this crushing issue in Puerto Rico to light in order to mobilize our government to fix it, the truth of his joke should have mobilized all those voices who claim to care about Puerto Rico when they condemned the joke, to demand that something is done to help those poor people in Puerto Rico. Yet not one said one word about fixing the waste management problem in Puerto Rico, they chose instead to try to exploit the joke to score political points in the upcoming election to favor their preferred candidate.
The real harm that Puerto Ricans are facing is not that a roast comedian called their home a “floating island of garbage”, but that increasingly Puerto Rico is in fact becoming a floating island of garbage. And if the joke-critics actually cared about Puerto Rico and its citizens, they would be condemning the politicians and public officials who allowed such a beautiful island to fall into such a disastrous state rather than condemn the comedian who merely observed the disastrous state Puerto Rico has fallen into.
But the Biden-Harris administration has acted more proactively in fixing Joe Biden’s “garbage” comment directed at American citizens in response to Hinchcliffe’s joke than they did in fixing the actual garbage problem in Puerto Rico the last four years. Once again, people of color are being used as a political football by politicians trying to score political points by calling their opponents racists. And once the election is over, both sides who claim at this moment to care so much about Puerto Ricans will completely forget about Puerto Rico and its growing and insidious garbage problem until the next election cycle when it’s time to score more political points. And we will fall for it all over again.
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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.
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