By PJ Grisar July 28, 2023

The songwriting tradition boasts a great many rhetorical questions. “How many roads must a man walk down?” “How does it feel to be on your own, like a rolling stone?” And, now, “Why can’t we talk about them?”

“Them” of course, being the Jews. The answer isn’t exactly blowing in the wind so much as it is screaming into the void.

Hannah Pearl Davis went viral last week for a song asking why YouTubers can’t talk about Jewish influence or discuss ways Hitler may have been right. 

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Television personality Piers Morgan brought Davis, who had previously been a guest on his show to discuss why women shouldn’t vote, in for an interview on Thursday’s episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored. At first, Morgan seemed to give her the benefit of the doubt:

“You deleted it,” Morgan said of the video. “You obviously thought you shouldn’t have posted it.”

But over the course of 15 minutes, Davis, who argued the song was about cancel culture and free speech absolutism rather than a paranoid antisemitic rant set to music, insisted that she only deleted the video because it proved to be a “headache.” 

Watching her spar with Morgan and End Jew Hatred’s Brooke Goldstein, I was the one who needed an aspirin.

‘It’s not something we can debate’

Morgan attempted to tease out why Davis posted the video — and what, exactly, she wants to know about Hitler and Holocaust denial. Davis maintained the preferred stance of internet gadflies: 

“I don’t really have a strong opinion either way,” Davis said. Ah, yes, just asking questions. 

When Goldstein tried to address the harm done by Davis’ conspiratorial thinking, it went nowhere fast. As those who use social media know well, if you engage someone whose only intellectual curiosity is built around a counterfactual, you end up talking past each other. And so, Goldstein didn’t even try to poke holes in Davis’ argument.

“It’s not something we can debate, that we can engage in a rational argument with,” Goldstein said. “This is a mistake that my community makes — the Jewish community, very often — that they think they can bring facts to the table, that they can debate somebody like Pearl.”

At that point, Pearl interjected with her only good point in the whole segment: “Then why are you here?”

Free speech and cancel culture

The debate about cancel culture, which Morgan and his guests all agree is a problem, is at its most insipid when placed in prime time. Davis’ supposed cancellation, stemming from a song about what you can’t discuss, resulted in more attention. Goldstein stated that Davis will, from her provocations, make a lot of money and then “disappear.”

But how can that happen when people like Davis are given a platform and Jewish experts agree to show up as a voice from the other side?

It’s hard to feel like free speech — whether of the antisemitic or pro-Jewish, pro-Israel variety — is imperiled when the media rewards the controversy. You can’t convince me the discourse is restricted when Morgan grants bigoted internet trolls like Davis airtime to speak their piece.

Throughout the interview, Davis objected to the fact that Morgan didn’t show the end of her song, in which she sings “we can’t even have the conversation.”

Here, she’s right. Some things aren’t up for discussion. We’re doomed if we try to have the conversation anyway.

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