NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Stephen Colbert Keeps Wading into Fox News Christmas Tree Being Lit on Fire in the Most Cringeworthy of Ways.
Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld took the unfunny joke in stride, responding that it is “already beating [Colbert] in the ratings.” The tweet has performed far better than Colbert’s.
Colbert also went after Fox News during his monologue on Wednesday night’s show, as he called for “thoughts and prayers,” and it got worse from there. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, but the ghost of Hugo Chavez has an alibi,” Colbert joked. “Of course, this never would have happened if the tree had a gun. Give a squirrel a gun or something like that.”
The host also went after a former Fox News host, Bill O’Reilly. “Homeless and mentally ill? Oh my God, the fire was set by Bill O’Reilly! So it doesn’t look like this holly jolly arsonist was politically motivated, but Fox News is still going to eight maids a milk it,” Colbert joked, also making fun of the suspect.
Tamanaha, as Joe Marino and Jesse O’Neill reported for the New York Post, is indeed mentally ill. “Oh, he’s a nut. I can’t control him,” Richard Tamanaha of Hawaii said about his son. “Mentally, he’s not all there.”
Notice how the rival networks are egging on further arson, as long as it doesn’t happen to their office building. (See also: CNN’s Atlanta offices last year. “Riots for thee, but not for me,” Amy Holmes wrote at the time for Spectator World, when the radical chic crowd saw the urban destruction they called for get way too close to their stylish homes.)
What could go wrong, this time? When You Condone Chaos, You Condone the Consequences of Chaos, Freddie deBoer wrote last month:
At the time of the Kenosha riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another. I know quite a few people who were willing to say that riots were just good on the merits, and there were also many saying in some terms or another that these particular riots could not be judged by progressive people due to what had inspired them. This sentiment stretches back a long way but has picked up steam in the last decade and the past year and a half particularly. Here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-riot piece and here’s a pro-rioting interview and here’s a pro-looting interview and here’s a riots-aren’t-necessarily-good-but-they-do-good-things piece and here’s a both-sidesy rioting piece and on and on. (And this is merely hilarious.) Pro-rioting sentiment is perfect for our edgelord media; it makes for good, click-farming headlines and engages in the kind of moral simplicity and righteous hectoring that defines our current culture.
Well, look: chaos is chaotic. Bad shit happens when people riot. When you create environments where anything can happen… anything can happen. Some people are going to take advantage of that opportunity to do things that you don’t like. You can’t endorse spasms of directionless violence and then complain when some of it plays out in a way that you hadn’t intended. This seems totally obvious to me, and yet so many out there want to both condone riots and condemn their chaotic outcomes. It’s like putting on music and getting mad when people dance.
The left-liberal stance towards political violence, at present, is beyond confused. . . . For many posers on the left antifa is less the expression of authentic political strategy and more a tool to define oneself as an aesthetic radical. If you go to various protests and riots and encounter the self-defined antifascists there, I can assure you very few of them will be remotely interested about what happens in the courts at all. Because – and I’m sorry to break this to you romantic types – most people who self-select as antifa in 2021 are just bored white people attracted by the possibility of an excuse for mindless violence.
Related: How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class. “For a long time, the notion that America is an unrepentant white-supremacist state—one that confers power and privilege to white people and systematically denies them to people of color—was the province of far-left activists and academics. But over the past decade, it’s found its way into the mainstream, largely through liberal media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, MSNBC, the Washington Post, Vox, CNN, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. What changed? Most obviously: white liberals. Their enthusiasm for wokeness created a feedback loop with the media outlets to which they are paying subscribers. And the impact has been monumental: Once distinct publications and news channels are now staggeringly uniform.”
More: Working-class people of color hate the riots the lefty elite keeps cheering. “The thing is, it’s a lot easier to encourage violence when the consequences happen to someone else. Too much of upper-class America is cocooned from real risk. For the people in poor and working-class neighborhoods where riots and looting tend to happen, the consequences are much more apparent. That’s why the cavalier attitude of so many Democrats toward riots makes sense. Democrats are now the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and upscale suburbs. The people who have to deal with consequences will have to go somewhere else politically. And they will.”