The Joy of Hate

by Greg Gutfeld

  I say this only because the left have been great at churning outrage for a far longer time, and without impediment. In a few years, the right may be just as obnoxious and humorless as the left (I hope not). But for now, the left are the New York Yankees of repressive tolerance and manufactured outrage—the right are the Bad News Bears.

  But I need to ask myself: When I get mad, do I get mad because something really bugs me? Or do I just hate the people getting me mad? Because outrage-wise, I’ve been to Barney Frank and MSNBC. But I’ve never been to me.

  Let’s once more compare the Tea Party and the Occupiers. I count as friends people involved in both groups. I favor one over the other. I admit to mocking the Occupiers in a simplistic fashion, but the mockery comes from real concerns I have about their methods. I can also admit that the way people ridicule the Tea Party over being old and racist, I label the Occupiers as dirty and naive. No doubt, philosophically, I have more in common with the Tea Party. I’m a small-government kinda guy. And I admire and love many of these newbies, and it took a lot to get them out of that Barcalounger.

  Their adversaries conclude that the Tea Party’s anger is racist in origin. This, in my opinion, is a vicious smear. The origin of their anger is, well, anger! People get “fed up” when they feel cheated, or their future threatened. But calling them racist is what you’d do if you just can’t stand them, period. It’s shorthand for “I don’t need to talk to you.”

  For the left and the mainstream media, these people protesting at the health care town halls were idiots. For those on the right, they were legitimately speaking truth to power. For me? I hate confrontation. I hate shouting. I get uncomfortable around this sort of thing. It’s why I can’t go to the DMV. And so I have two cars and no driver’s license. (I’m not kidding.)

  But when I saw the liberal media ripping these people, I sensed unfairness. The Tea Partiers are older. And unhip. These were polyester protesters and getting mocked because of that. That’s funny for the first ten minutes, but lazy and boring for the rest.

  This kind of ageism (and I hate myself already for using that term) blanketed the criticism against the Tea Party movement. The fact that their events were clean and well behaved made them corny and dorky. What do you expect from people with AARP cards in their wallets and Winnebagos in their driveway?

  But these were the “benign” insults. The stuff got way worse as the movements spread across the country. That’s when the accusation of bigotry became as common as a Keith Olbermann meltdown.

  Because of this, I aggressively defended the Tea Partiers on my show. I pointed out how little evidence of bad behavior there was. No doubt there are white people who hate Obama, but it’s entirely possible they just hate what he stands for, not his color. Remember, as the movement kicked off, TEA stood for “taxed enough already.” That’s a coherent, defensible message. What’s wrong with starting there, instead of, you know … racism claims?

  I have a lot of friends who are Tea Partiers, so I took the racist thing seriously. It would “offend” me, to the extent that these critics were smearing people I knew. I didn’t like that. One of my closest friends ran two bars in New York. She never engaged in any political activity in her life. She was too busy making a living, providing jobs for blacks, gays, Hispanics, even little people. (On St. Patrick’s Day, she hired a leprechaun. The green tights gave me a rash.) So now that she became part of the Tea Party, she’s racist? If worrying about the future of our country is racist, then we’re all wearing white sheets.

  But I also found the charge lazy and dirty. If you call someone racist, you shut down the debate before it ever starts.

  A similar thing should happen with the Occupiers. As a protester there, you’d end up spending more time on blogs trying to quell stories of rape, overdoses, and fecal warfare than extolling the movement’s attack on corporate greed. That was their racism equivalent. But the criticism was never as bad for the OWSers. The media rarely focused on their scary stuff. A racist sign at a Tea Party meant so much more than murder at an occupation.

  Occupy Wall Street is clearly the antithesis to the Tea Partiers. These people are younger, messier, more disorganized, and well, let’s face it, cuter, if you like the flea-bitten type. If you brought your “people I would have sex with” geiger counter, you might get more beeps in the beginning of the occupation than at the Tea Party events. Well, unless you’re into elegant grannies, which I am. The geiger counter would stop working, however, as the OWS movement went on and on—and the cuties were replaced with transients, junkies, and worse: whiny beta males.

  The parallels are obvious. First, there’s the age. For every old joke aimed at the Tea Party, you could retort with the naivete of the self-absorbed student. With age comes experience. And with aging, come fanny packs. Young people can happily spend thousands of dollars on electronics and clothes, then complain about economic unfairness. Old people know what it’s like when the bill comes. Which is why the young people always seem to have more fun. On the other hand, old folks have forgotten what it’s like to be idealistic, to really believe big changes are possible or even advisable. That’s wisdom.

  The easiest jab against the Occupiers is hygiene. The imagery was vivid: disgusting piles of trash, dirty tents, weird homeless men creeping around for prey. And that was just the press pen. If you didn’t see the YouTube video of the dude squatting for a poop in the middle of Occupy Boston, you haven’t lived. (Well, maybe you have, but your life is somewhat impoverished.) But I admit that the movement wasn’t all about soiling yourself and others—and that it’s too easy to dismiss the entire movement over bowel movements. And to their credit, the Occupier phenomenon forced me to read more books about the financial meltdowns. Thanks to all that reading, I now know less than ever, but I sound like I know more.

  But we cannot ignore the assaults, rapes, and assorted other criminal acts occurring within these occupations. This was the real serious charge against the Occupiers—and the media that coddled them. “Oh, it’s just a few bad apples” seemed to be the refrain.

  Perhaps the Occupiers initially embraced revolution, but the newer members seemed to embrace a more sordid, violent reality that accompanies said revolution.

  This stuff makes the “racist” charge against the Tea Partiers seem tame. For me, I can tolerate one racist among 10,000 old farts, but when a way larger percentage of a movement is made up of anarchists and criminals who want to upend society, there is cause for concern.

  This is where the self-examination matters. If the OWS movement admitted to the horrible stuff going on, then I would admire and respect them. But they haven’t, so I hate that they adore their ideology so much that they let their own supporters fall victim to assaults by more unsavory members. If I were sitting in a tent with an abuser, I wouldn’t just ask him to leave, I’d drag him to the cops by his oily dreads.

  The thing that gets me is this simple question: Why does the media prefer one group over the other? Why did the media find the Tea Party hilariously stupid but the Occupiers heroic? If you’re liberal, you’ll say, “Because the Occupiers are right.” But that’s not the issue. The issue is excusing mayhem. You can’t sit by while bad stuff happens.

  Actually, I think I have the answer: The Tea Parties represent your parents; the Occupiers represent sex. One is slow and cranky; the other is brash, young, and unpredictable. The bottom line: One is square, the other is fun. One is clean, the other delightfully dirty.

  And so this duopoly presents itself once again. It’s not left and right. It’s uncool and cool. It’s high school. The mainstream media loves the cool, even if we know the uncool end up paying the bills.

  For the apologists of the OWS movement, if they had an inspirational figure to look up to, it would have to be Walter Duranty, the creepy writer for the New York Times who won awards for whitewashing Soviet crimes. While people died by the millions, he wrote sunnily of the communist utopia, ignoring the multitude of horrors simply because it wo
uld destroy the story—the one that says capitalism is evil and socialism is lots better. And if that better way requires hiding the deaths of millions—well, that’s not the fault of the system. We’ll work out the kinks along the way, so let’s not make a big deal out of it, okay? Better to tolerate a little evil if the end result is really good. Besides, I’ll win a Pulitzer, and Uncle Josef will like me!

  Sound familiar? That’s the opinion of every person I talked to about Occupy Wall Street. They all kept accusing me of “cherry-picking” incidents to taint their fluffy, wonderful uprising. To them OWS was the Snuggles Bear, misunderstood. When really it was the Big Bad Wolf, with gastritis.

  Mind you, these are the same people who desperately tried to find just one example of a Tea Partier yelling the N-word, and when confronted with the demand to supply one, simply couldn’t. On my late-night show back in the fall of 2011, a liberal guest made the startling admission that he had been at a Tea Party and personally witnessed “hours” of racist behavior. I asked him for examples. He demurred. I gently asked again. Nope, he just wasn’t going to go there. I texted our ombudsman, who monitors the show for mistakes, and wrote, “Ask this guy again, I don’t believe him.” So during his segment later in the show, he politely asked this fellow (the author of a wildly successful humor book) for evidence. At this point, the guest looked a little unnerved. And again, the guest pleaded no contest. He wasn’t going to offer evidence.

  Perhaps because he had none.

  Unlike that guest on my show, I find it almost too easy to chronicle the hundreds of crimes, both big and little, committed by the Occupiers. It’s no longer cherry-picking when you’ve got a truckload of cherries, ready to tip the whole truck over. At Big Hollywood, the late Andrew Breitbart’s website, as well as a blog called Verum Serum, they catalogued a thousand of them. Here’s a sample of cherries:

  In Manhattan, cops picked up a twenty-six-year-old Crown Heights man after two women reported two separate sexual assaults. How was he able to commit two, when the first attack was already well known among the camp? Don’t ask—you’ll just smear the movement.

  In Hartford, Connecticut, the cops received a tip about a sexual assault at that camp. The victim was located, and told of a man aggressively groping and kissing her. The victim never called the cops. Why? Well, who wanted to draw negative attention to the movement? Tolerate, tolerate, tolerate.

  In Lawrence, Kansas, a sexual assault might have taken place, but Occupiers just aren’t sure if the suspect was a member of the group, of course.

  Oh yeah, there was a murder in Oakland, at Frank Ogawa Plaza, home to the grittiest of the protests. More crimes followed in Oakland—so many, in fact, it would require another book. Or another Oakland, which is something nobody wants.

  Also, in Oakland, activists trashed the outside of a Whole Foods (a tony supermarket catering to customers who embrace social justice). Men’s Wearhouse even closed their store in solidarity with the activists, but that didn’t stop protesters from smashing their windows (appeasers always get it in the end, history shows). That could explain why the Occupiers all seemed to be wearing really cheesy suits the next day.

  In Spokane, Washington, cops responded to a possible sexual assault. A woman had returned to her tent, only to find some dude running out of it. Inside, a woman was passed out, nude from below the waist.

  Back in New York, the Post reported a pervert assaulting a woman in her tent one early morning. Protesters chased him out of the park but never bothered to call the cops.

  And if you think Sharia law is just a scary thing employed by radical Muslims who eschew the laws of any given country, then you haven’t been to the Baltimore protests. There the activists distributed pamphlets telling protesters how to handle sexual assaults among themselves, rather than going to the cops. After this “security statement” was exposed, they revised it to list services victims can use, you know, after they’ve been victimized. How thoughtful. Repressive tolerance means never having to file a report. OWS was the best thing to happen to perverts since mirrored boots.

  That’s just a handful. But there are other examples—from your basic vandalism to arson amounting to millions of dollars in damages. Whether it’s assaults, rapes, fistfights, pooping, vandalism, or arson, OWS offered a prurient parade of pungent perversion.

  Now, you can still favor it over the Tea Party if you want, but since there weren’t any rapes, assaults, vandalism, pooping, fistfights, or arson, you’re going to look really stupid (as if that might actually stop Susan Sarandon anyway). Even more, consider how much larger the Tea Party gatherings were and you realize, simply by proportion, that the OWS protesters, pound for pound, had more problems, more perversity, more poop. Maybe the Tea Party events had one bad apple among tens of thousands. Among OWS, the places reeked of rotten cores.

  But no one cares—at least in the media. The violence at the protests was the most underreported aspect, even among women reporters. Where were the feminists? Why wasn’t anyone worried about the women in these parks? Had they put tolerance before safety?

  Or are people just scared? Could it be that if you raise a concern, you’re testing your tolerance bona fides? If it means the rich get less rich, the poor get free college tuition, and America becomes the utopia where everyone gets everything they want, minus the notion of hard work—go for it.

  But historians know: What begins as a utopian vision, always—always—ends in bloodshed. Because you have to force a utopia on a free people. Free people want to pursue their own happiness, but a one-size-fits-all approach requires herding the free, against their will, into the state’s idea of what’s right. Then it’s not utopia. It’s Uganda. It’s 100 million dead.

  And it’s not like the folks behind the movement have hidden their intentions. Adbusters, the Canadian activist group, has made it clear: they don’t like capitalism, and want revolution. And they know how to foment it. YouTube clip by YouTube clip.

  Take the infamous pepper-spraying at UC Davis in November 2011. That was the movement’s desirable money shot—it had to happen. Sure, it made the cops look bad. That was the goal—to create a David vs. Goliath story. Even though pepper spray was created with the purpose of preventing physical contact that would put people in the hospital, it’s considered barbaric.

  But there’s no permanent damage, the discomfort fades fast, and it effectively de-escalates confrontation. That’s what it was invented for. Only the media could elevate pepper spray to a human rights violation. Which denigrates real human rights violations. When you see no distinction between pepper-spraying an unruly protester and Bashar al-Assad killing his fellow Syrians, we’re firmly in Walter Duranty territory.

  I will wager that most of the students who were sprayed wouldn’t have traded that moment for a million bucks. They got instant fame, superiority, sympathy from all the right places. For some majors, they would have earned 16 credits for the arrest. And in twenty years, they will still be bragging about that moment. I’m sure many will brag about being there when they weren’t (as seen with 1967’s Summer of Love; we would have needed a “half decade of love” to accommodate all who claimed to have been there. Most of them were undoubtedly on their parents’ sofa, reading the liner notes for Meet the Monkees). As for the actual cause they were protesting, that will be forgotten, for it is far less important than gaining the admiration of their anarchist peers. And later, a job in media or academia.

  After all, the actual cause really has no positive goal. It’s run by radicals, and radicalism isn’t about creating something new, but destroying the old.

  Consider: the Americans for Prosperity Conference that happened in D.C., in mid-November 2011. As far as I can tell from reading its press releases, the whole focus of the thing was to promote economic opportunity. These were people who got together to talk about becoming more successful, and helping others become more successful. You know, capitalism.

  So what happened? The D.C. protesters descended on the place
in an attempt to do … what? I’m not sure.

  What I did see in the Daily Caller video: hordes of angry left-wing protesters pressing up against the doors of the conference building, screaming at and intimidating innocent participants. This aggressive free-flowing tantrum resulted in two elderly women being injured, one of whom had traveled a dozen hours by bus. I’m sure she was simply a rich bitch capitalist oppressor. Because, you know, they always take the bus.

  And so the protesters’ assault revealed their true aims: attacking individuals who do, rather than demand. I mean, if you’ve never made anything in your life—except debt and poorly worded protest signs—I guess it makes sense to go after the doers. OWS became the takers wreaking havoc on the makers.

  And so I will cherry-pick once more, because I just can’t stop. At a San Diego protest, the activists took up real estate where street cart vendors once had been working. The vendors, in a gesture of goodwill, fed these protesters for free. But when they stopped (inevitably, as handouts must), the protesters became irate. These vendors are no better than the one percent!

  The protesters trashed the carts with, among other things, urine and blood. Which, among some Californians, is actually considered street food. This was Greece, in a nutshell. The incident was covered locally, but the mainstream media overlooked this stuff, because, like the protest organizers, they knew it would detract from the positive message. You won’t find that example or any of the others I just mentioned in those tony compendiums on the OWS movement. Instead, you’ll find inane essays on the importance of the movement written by hipster authors trying to score progressive points. It’s the blind writing about the stupid.

  Right now we’re experiencing the age of anti-bullying enlightenment. This can be a good thing. Bullies suck. But someone needs to explain to me how celebrities can focus on isolated incidents of bullying without condemning this other widespread intimidation. Shouldn’t Lady Gaga get out there with a bullhorn?