Shut Up and

Opinions are tricky things. If your opinion is about pizza toppings or what weather you prefer, that’s up to you. If your opinion is about the validity of another person’s existence or a detail of science, less so. Even when it comes to such simple things as movies, there are some people whose opinions I trust more than others, based on conversations I’ve had with them in the past. Not necessarily how much they know about movies, but how much they know about my tastes—after all, “I liked it but you’d hate it” is perfectly understandable. At least one of the problems comes from our trusting celebrities more than other people and also expecting their opinions to line up with our own.

Recently, I’ve been rewatching Phase One of the MCU for a YouTube channel I’ll be going on. There’s a certain grim satisfaction to the moment where Terrence Howard proclaims that he’ll be in the Iron Man suit next time and then seeing Don Cheadle in it instead. There are a lot of reasons for this, but Terryology is definitely one of them. He doesn’t believe in zero and refuses to accept that one times one is one. Those are opinions you don’t get to just have, because they are objectively bonkers. Your Oscar nomination doesn’t enter into it here.

I don’t want to hear from celebrities who are transphobes, anti-vaxxers, anti-climate change, or anything else where the science is against them. Even Mayim Bialik. She’s got a PhD in neuroscience, true, but unless she trots out some credentials in epidemiology or something, I don’t want to hear from her about it. If her pediatrician advised her against getting her kids vaccinated on schedule, she needed a better pediatrician. If you have science behind you, put it through peer review like everyone else.

Politics? Yeah, that’s the complicated one, isn’t it? To me, politics, too, is a sliding scale from “you’re allowed to disagree” to “no, there’s objective right and wrong there.” You can’t have the opinion that crime is up in the US, because the statistics show that it isn’t. You can’t have the opinion that immigration makes us less safe, because immigrant communities have lower crime rates regardless of the status of their documentation. You can’t have the opinion that raking the forests of California is all that’s needed for wildfire prevention, because that is . . . I don’t even know where to begin with that one.

But within the “you’re allowed to disagree” scale, yes, celebrities have the right to express their opinions just like everyone else. They can even run for office. I grant you that I can’t think of a celebrity who ran for office off the top of my head that I would have voted for, but just because I can’t think of one doesn’t mean I don’t support their right the same as anyone else’s. They have a larger platform than I do to express their opinions, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t allowed to use that platform as they choose. Even if I disagree with them.

Free speech has to mean everyone’s speech. I suppose technically even Terrence Howard has the right to express his opinions. It’s not that he can’t; it’s that he has no right to think anyone will take him seriously. You also have to suffer the consequences, be it having everyone know that you’re a loon or having your fan base stop supporting you because you’re a raging transphobe. If you complain about that, well, that’s when you should maybe consider that it was time to shut up.