"'Just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right,' the show declares smugly, spewing racial slurs and casual homophobia."
"... The truth is that no one seems to have really made much effort to censor South Park in quite some time. They are no longer the outsiders fighting back against the establishment: They are the establishment, two of the world's richest comedians whose signature show cost Comedy Central $192 million to renew back in 2015. But so long as they position themselves as underdogs, they risk empowering those who seek to use their invented victimhood as a smokescreen for bigotry. This is Fox News' gambit when they talk about the war on Christmas, Trump's angle when he attacks the 'fake news' for criticizing him—bullies acting like victims to spark that particular, put-upon sort of outrage that ignites their base. When South Park acts like it's still the rebel throwing rocks at the establishment, rather than a platform for the grievances of two insanely rich straight white men, it's playing the same game."
"At some indistinct point in the recent past, the left lost its monopoly on rebellion. To rebel was to be conservative or libertarian. It was more transgressive to buck the sensitivities of the age on race, gender, sexual preference, climate change, civil liberties, mental health and religion than to walk on eggshells around them. This shift in what it meant to be a radical was the price of the left’s success in the culture wars. The more it policed language, the more it inadvertently glamorised anyone who gave voice to unreconstructed sentiments — even if, as you sense with the mischievous creators of South Park, they almost never mean them.
"It is not such a great leap from there to the alt-right, which can resemble an extended South Park episode for people who have forgotten that it is meant to be a joke. There is the same anti-elitism, the same appeal to educated young men who resent being trammelled in thought and speech. But none of the same lightheartedness and humanity, none of the same rigorous equidistance between the absurdities of right and left.
"... At bottom, Parker and Stone are just contrarians."
"Especially when Cartman, the racist, xenophobic murderer, is the most popular character."