“In this world, every act is a political act.”
-Andrew Sullivan, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
This weekend’s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher created a bit of controversy when Maher decided to have a one-on-one feature interview with writer and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, a professional provocateur or, in more prosaic terms, a troll. Yiannopoulos is an Englishman of Greek descent who has his hair styled and frosted in such a way that he resembles David Bowie, specifically Bowie just before he realized that endorsing fascism was a terrible mistake.
Yiannopoulos had already been a controversial figure for his “alt-right”, anti-feminist and pro-Donald Trump statements, to the extent that his planned speech at Berkeley got cancelled after violent protests. With regard to this interview, Maher’s other guest, left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill, refused to appear on this week’s show specifically because it would give Yiannopoulos attention – which of course only gave him more attention. This was something that Maher himself pointed out to Milo when he said, “You are so helped by the fact that liberals always take the bait.”
But in the body of the interview, Maher went over the issue of Yiannopoulos’ provocative stance and “I’m just kidding” demeanor. He said, “I think a lot of people miss your humor, and I’m a guy who always defends jokes- right up to the point that they pointlessly hurt people.” Maher went on to say that he DID hurt some people intentionally, for the sake of the truth, and Milo concurred that “I hurt people for a reason.” But then Milo got to explain his perspective: “The reason (the Left) want to police humor, which is very important to both of us, is that they can’t control it. What all authoritarians hate is the sound of laughter.” And Maher responded, “And also because when people laugh, they know it’s true… laughter is involuntary.”
Which is actually a good measure to start with when examining good humor versus bad humor and “good” trolling (what Yiannopoulos would call ‘virtuous’ trolling) from bad trolling.
For instance, along with Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift was famous for writing the essay, “A Modest Proposal” in which he proposed that babies be sold and eaten as food. This was NOT ACTUALLY MEANT as an endorsement of eating babies. It was rather an attack on the contemporary culture of the English-occupied Ireland where Swift lived: “I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.” In other words, to “get the joke” you have to have a finely developed sense of sarcasm, which, to take Maher’s implication, means a sense of how the joke contrasts with reality. But in the 4chan culture of the alt-right, irony is so overused that one’s sense of sarcasm is burned out, since most participants don’t have much engagement with the real world of consequences to begin with.
So when you are capable of getting the comparison between satire and reality, your satire works. If you have to explain a joke, then it’s not very funny. Likewise, if you have to explain why your offensive statement is “just kidding” then either it’s not a very good joke or you were being disingenuous about something you really believe. One of the reasons Milo creates such disgust (and often creates sympathy for his targets) is not only that his jokes are often unfunny, but that he is taken as inspiration by people who are not joking at all. Last year, when Saturday Night Live stars Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon and former star Kristin Wiig did an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters with Melissa McCarthy, this attracted a lot of ire from a mostly male section of the fan community who acted like this very concept ruined their childhood. (I’ve seen the movie, and while it’s not going to make anyone forget the original, it’s actually pretty good in itself.) But this hate got that much worse towards Jones, who is black. Several Twitter posters compared her to Harambe and other gorillas. As it happened, Milo (under his Twitter handle ‘nero’) had not only egged on the anti-Ghostbusters campaign but had posted Jones’ Twitter address so as to get his fans to let her have it. And because that was not the first time that “nero” was reported for violating Twitter’s terms of service, the medium banned his account permanently.
That is impressive in itself. Getting kicked off of Twitter for being an insensitive troll is like Dave Mustaine getting kicked out of Metallica for drinking too much.
But then you see the difference between “good” trolling and bad trolling. Calling Leslie Jones a gorilla isn’t necessarily “punching down” when, as Milo points out, she’s a fairly successful celebrity. The question is, what’s the point? This isn’t a punchline where you tell the joke and everybody gets it. Unless the punchline you want to convey is “(I think that) Leslie Jones is an ape.” Which means the punch line is “I’m a racist and I expect that to be socially acceptable.”
I have already mentioned how normalizing bad behavior only serves to make that the standard, and how that point USED to be a conservative argument. Encouraging the fellow travelers of actual fascists like Richard Spencer is not only dangerous in terms of who you let into government, it is immediately dangerous on a street level. It is that much more dangerous when you’re a flamboyant Brit who repeatedly brags about getting fucked by big black cock. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the racist Right or the Stalinist Left. With collectivists, it is far more dangerous to be their friend than their enemy, because you would expect your enemy to stab you in the back.
I cannot put this point any better than J.K. Rowling did. See, the week before the Milo interview, Real Time With Bill Maher previously made news when Maher had Australian comic Jim Jeffries on a panel with British “journalist” and professional twit Piers Morgan, talking about Donald Trump’s order against immigration from seven Muslim countries, and when Morgan insisted to Maher that “there is no Muslim ban,” Jeffries responded, “Oh, fuck off.” And then Harry Potter author Rowling got on her Twitter account to say, “Yes, watching Piers Morgan being told to fuck off on live TV is *exactly* as satisfying as I’d always imagined. ” To which Morgan sniffed that he’d never read Harry Potter books. (When it turned out that he had.) Rowling responded, “.@piersmorgan If only you’d read Harry Potter, you’d know the downside of sucking up to the biggest bully in school is getting burned alive.”
That’s what it comes down to. At some point there is a line to draw. And that is why, whatever my issues with the Left and the moribund Democratic Party, I do not endorse Trump, Trumpism and what calls itself “conservatism”, not even in an antinomian, punk rock, “Belsen Was a Gas” kind of way. Because some of the people cheering the joke don’t think it’s a joke.
But maybe I’m overthinking this. See, I’ve done some online research into Milo’s history with a website he co-founded, called The Kernel, now owned by The Daily Dot, and it turns out Yiannopoulos has a dark past. No, not his status as openly gay AND openly Catholic and guilty about his own sexuality and “lifestyle.” I mean his dangerous brushes with tolerance and liberalism. Specifically, he wrote an essay for The Kernel in 2012 called: “The internet is turning us all into sociopaths.” And in it, he writes, among other things: “There has always been abuse on the internet, but, before the social revolution, it was largely restricted to anonymous comment threads, message boards and chat rooms. Any site owner who allowed anonymous comments could reasonably be held responsible, morally and legally, for the content appearing on his site.
But now there is a disturbing bleed from anonymous hatred to defamatory and spiteful language being posted under the authors’ real names using their social networking profiles. It’s as if our usual moral safeguards are being broken down by a terrifying new online landscape in which the default mode of communication is a form of attack. … It’s as if a psychological norm is being established whereby comments left online are part of a video game and not real life. It’s as if we’ve all forgotten that there’s a real person on the other end, reading and being hurt by our vitriol.”
At which point, my response to Milo would be: “So… what happened?”