South Park’s (Plant-Based) Beef with LeBron James
A few weeks ago, South Park burst into the zeitgeist with one of their most talked-about episodes in years: “Band in China,” which chastised U.S. companies for yielding to the Chinese government’s pressure to censor its critics. Perhaps most impressively, the episode proved extremely prescient. Days after it aired, Blizzard, a U.S. video game developer, banned a non-American player from its tournament for voicing his support of the Hong Kong protests (a move that was later mollified), and more recently, banned a whole college team for holding a “Free Hong Kong” sign. Similarly, the NBA scrambled to do damage control after Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey tweeted his support for the protests. In last week’s episode, South Park continued to skewer people’s willingness to compromise their dedication to freedom in exchange for monetary gain.
In the fourth episode of the season, “Let them Eat Goo,” Cartman is incensed to learn that climate-conscious students are looking to replace meat in the school cafeteria with more sustainable, healthy plant-based options. Wanting to stuff his face with BBQ ribs and Sloppy Joe’s without being burdened by concerns about climate change, Cartman demands that his right to be a glutton in peace be respected. But when faced with the student protesters’ right to free speech, he can only offer an awkward, eerily familiar rebuke: “Yes, we all do have freedom of speech, but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you’re not thinking about others and only thinking about yourself… They’re trying to change people’s lunch but they don’t realize it harms people financially, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.”
The line is a reference to LeBron James’ recent statement condemning Daryl Morey’s public support of the Hong Kong protests, saying “so many people could have been harmed, not only financially, but physically. Emotionally. Spiritually… Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.”
Clearly, show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are continuing to sprinkle salt on the wounds of those who have come forward to shamelessly admit that they care more about money than freedom, but there may be more to the episode’s take on free speech. At the end, Cartman learns that the plant-based options are just as salty, processed, and unhealthy as his precious ribs, so he concedes and apologizes to his classmates, saying “We were actually all on the same page all the time. At least we learned that freedom of speech truly doesn’t matter.”
This moment is quite puzzling. While the bulk of the episode focuses on criticizing plant-based food companies for opportunistically appealing to people’s desire to do good while selling them unhealthy garbage, the discussion of freedom of speech, and its implied relevance to the LeBron controversy, abruptly comes back at the end. Why does freedom of speech no longer matter now that Cartman realizes he’s still eating junk food? Here, it seems like the show, rather than criticizing people’s dedication to money over freedom, is criticizing people’s tendency to invoke the First Amendment inauthentically.
We often cite the First Amendment to elevate our opinions to a position of moral urgency, when, in reality, we’re just trying to beef up a simple disagreement. When athletes or celebrities like Colin Kaepernick voice a political position, a common refrain from one side of the aisle is that they should “shut up and play the game” or, conversely, that they, like every American citizen, has the right to protest, celebrity or not. But, as the episode seems to suggest, these positions are just a proxy for the real argument: Do you agree with Colin Kaepernick, or not? When LeBron invokes freedom of speech to criticize Daryl Morey, it’s not really about engaging with the merits of the First Amendment, and how it may or may not hurt people. It’s about shutting up and making money — the only American right that really matters.
So when Cartman admits that everyone was on the same page the whole time and that free speech doesn’t matter, it’s his way of saying that both parties’ appeals to freedom are just a means of hiding everyone’s desire to keep eating garbage with a clean conscience. It’s classic South Park cynicism: that people only invoke free speech when trying to distract from the real argument that’s happening, whether that’s over school-lunch preferences, or keeping quiet to make a ton of money.
