You don’t have to take my word for it. I’m watching NBC’s YouTube clip that they posted earlier and the like to dislike ratio should tell you something. Not only is this video the number one trending thing on YouTube, as of this writing it sits at 114k likes vs. 1.5k dislikes. This is not a small thing.

Last night you got a very public spanking from comedian Ricky Gervais. I hope it hurt, and I’m not saying that out of some spiteful need for vengeance against the incessant lecturing and virtue signaling you’ve forced us to endure. I hope it hurt because I want very badly to like you and I want the dismembering you suffered last night at Gervais’s hand to be something of a wake-up call.

Here you have a lot of people eagerly watching and rewatching the dressing down you all received with glee. What he said resonated so loudly that it’s bouncing around the internet at the speed of thought.

“You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg,” he told you.

And he’s right.

The reason we loved what he said so much is because we’ve sat and watched as you made it your self-imposed responsibility to “guide us” like we were wayward children. You, who sit in the lap of luxury in a place so cut off from the rest of us dare to virtue signal about what is and isn’t moral to us and tell us we’re bad people for holding things dear that don’t fall in with your sense of coastal elitism.

You refuse to let anything into your bubble that doesn’t pass this elitist smell test and you don’t even seem to notice that this creates an ignorance that festers amongst you all. You hardly resemble anything that remotely looks like the rest of the world now, and yet you still think you can be thought leaders?

It’s true that there are constantly cameras on you, but I want to remind you that the entire reason that’s happening is that you proved that you can look and act a certain way at someone else’s direction well enough to be believable, or at the very least, entertaining. You’re not there because you’re some kind of intellectual powerhouse or symbol of courage and bravery.

You’re just an actor.

And you actors, or any other cogs in the Hollywood machine, know very little about what it’s like to be me, or members of my community. Even if your life began humbly, I think we can both agree that this isn’t you anymore.

You’ll never have to wake up before sunrise every single morning and make sure the animals are taken care of and equipment fixed. You’ll never have to worry about whether or not you’ll be able to afford groceries and there will always be someone there to feed you, take care of your kids, and see to it that every little detail about your life is taken care of. You have teams of people at your disposal to help you navigate life and the wealth you accumulate from it will see to it that money is never an issue.

But money is an issue for me. It is for my neighbor. It is for my parents, and my siblings and their children.

We take very seriously that you seem to promote the idea of raising taxes because it won’t affect you as it affects us. We don’t even like the idea of you promoting taking it from the people who own our companies because we, unlike you, understand economics and know that attacks on them could result in us losing our jobs due to downsizing.

While you and your social justice wokeness glob on to every fashionable virtue that slides your way we haven’t sold out. We still think men aren’t villains and that it actually is okay to be white regardless of the way you try to make us feel guilty for things we never did.

You become outraged at the way women are mistreated but it was your industry that was filled with rape and sexual assault. You start preaching at us about how society should do better, but we here in everyday America already knew it was bad and were already fighting against it while y’all were raping each other.

What’s more, we think that being a stay at home mom is a stupendously important job and that feminism is pretty backward for making people think otherwise.

We watch as you promote abortion then pretend like you cherish human life more than we do. You become outraged over the idea of Republicans sending us to war again, but we noticed your absence when Obama was sending a samba line of drone strikes to wartorn areas. What’s more, you make it seem like U.S. troops are baby killers, but those are our brothers, sons, and fathers that you’re talking about.

I’ve accepted the fact that your platform is always going to have a spotlight and that your microphones will always be louder than everyone else’s. It’s caused no shortage of stress on society and I’ve tried what I could to try to make the damage you’ve spread in your ignorance less impactful.

But I’m not the only one doing that and Gervais should have made that point slightly clear. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not one of us. You have no right to lead us, nor do you have the position or moral authority. You have no right to lecture us.

I want to like you. I want to gleefully show up at your movies because I like the art you make. I want to be transported to somewhere else, but let’s not get it twisted. The majority of you aren’t role models. Many of you could hardly be considered good people. Our attention may be on you, but it’s not there because we want to hear your position on taxes or abortion.

The stage and spotlight you have are for acting and performances. Don’t think we care about anything more than that.