Laughter From the Ninth Circle of Hell

Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx, That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work For Them

It’s become a doctrine among American progressives that conservatives just aren’t funny. The Left has SNL, Jon Stewart, and the whole late-night crew. What does the Right have? [Insert list of failed right-wing comedy franchises here.] This conviction, though, crumbles on one important fact: Greg Gutfeld, Fox News’ late-night anchor star, regularly outscores leftist network programming in ratings. Leftists don’t find conservative comedy funny, but it definitely exists.

Media studies professors Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx admit they aren’t funny. Their purpose isn’t to entertain, but to lead a Left-minded audience through the frequently labyrinthine conservative entertainment industry. They describe it as “the Right-Wing Comedy Complex,” and compare it to a shopping mall. There’s the big-box store for mainstream buyers, the cigar shop for men looking for hetero chest-thumping, and a basement full of terrifying, violent wares.

Leftists frequently describe Fox News stalwarts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters as unfunny, and Watters particularly as often racist. But they’re secure ratings winners; by 2021, Gutfeld had more viewers than Stephen Colbert. In our authors’ telling, their comedy appears to be an out-and-out satire of TV comedy itself. (I seldom watch the idiot box anymore, so I trust the authors’ narrative.) This satire invites viewers to consider themselves “in on” the joke.

Where Gutfeld makes an explicit point, even if Leftists don’t get it, more conventional right-wing comics just exist. Dennis Miller and Tim Allen appeal to conservative audiences, our authors claim, because they basically haven’t changed much in twenty-five years. These comics create a familiar atmosphere that consumers can snuggle under like a weighted blanket. Allen does this explicitly, structuring his current TV persona around nostalgia for bygone social roles.

From this mainstream, highly visible perch, Sienkiewicz and Marx descend into a more self-contained, and sometimes ugly, lower depth. One can question Ben Shapiro’s or Stephen Crowder’s comedy bona fides, for instance, but they use humor to convey messages— although those messages are sometimes freighted with old-school racism. And while not everyone likes The Babylon Bee, its writers have mastered social media manipulation for vast, lucrative clicks.

Matt Sienkiewicz (left) and Nick Marx

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Conservative and right-libertarian podcasters corral young, mostly White audiences into networks where they can disguise sometimes repellent opinions as “just a joke.” As our authors write, analysis and nuance aren’t very profitable at this level; inflammatory or hateful sayings sell. Professional trolls like Michael Malice and Gavin McInnes don’t even pretend to express convictions; they only want to make po-faced progressives lose their composure in public.

Spectators like me wouldn’t find this “comedy” funny. But they come together, Voltron-like, to create a media landscape which holds its audience, provides its content creators with a successful living, and gives the conservative political movement an identity. After all, Evangelical Christians, conventional libertarians, and White nationalists don’t have much in common; but they can laugh at similar jokes, and that’s almost like being unified.

Much as I appreciated our authors’ analysis, I found something missing: the audience. Who consumes conservative comedy? Only fleetingly, in one anecdote in the conclusion, do they describe an audience. Gutfeld and Tim Allen are supported by advertisers, but many of these subjects rely on direct subscribers and Patreon backers, especially the podcasters they exhaustively dissect. What’s their relationship with the product? I still couldn’t quite say.

They also briefly, in the introduction, touch on something they never quite return to: the American media landscape has changed rapidly. Twenty years ago, someone like Jon Stewart could command massive audiences nightly just by showing up, because there were considerably fewer media outlets. The rise of à la carte media changed not only how audiences consume, but also how creators make, their platforms. This seems relevant.

Our authors’ willingness to subject themselves to media products that their chosen audience would find repellent matters. Most readers couldn’t spare the time necessary to consume this many TV episodes, streaming videos, and podcasts. They consider a broad cross-section of conservative comedy, and analyze it for a mainly progressive audience. This lets us understand the right-wing comedic viewpoint, without having to get lost in it. Thanks.

Perhaps my greatest takeaway from this book is that comedy isn’t unitary. My dad doesn’t appreciate Monty Python, and never will. Likewise, I’ll never find Ryan Long or the Legion of Skanks podcast, two conservative “comedy” sources detailed herein, funny. But that doesn’t mean, as long-faced progressive scolds claim, that their content isn’t funny. It means we need to take opposing positions seriously, even when we don’t enjoy them.

The Pale, White Truth About Injustice

The 2021/2022 Supreme Court (official photo)

Within minutes of last week’s Dobbs ruling, I wrote the words which have haunted me for days since: “There is nothing ‘Christian’ about giving the government the authority to look up a woman's cooter and make decisions about her medical treatment.” I meant this statement to argue against the religious justifications for overturning fifty years of American abortion protections. I thought this was a statement of complete and utter fair-mindedness.

Almost immediately, good friends reminded me that America has been looking up women’s dresses for years. We subject poor, disabled, Black, and Brown women to “welfare checks” and have massive carve-outs for their medical privacy whenever they get pregnant. We pester women constantly for their prenatal medical decisions, both officially and unofficially (many women recall having waiters and baristas self-righteously deny them coffee). Micromanaging pregnant women’s choices isn’t new.

What’s new is subjecting White women to these standards. Women who share my skin melanin levels will, for the first time, find their privacy constantly invaded, their gynecological records scrutinized by bureaucrats, their diaries and period tracker apps made public record. These actions always have moral, frequently “Christian,” justifications. The situation isn’t new for millions of American women; we’re just forcing White women to endure this treatment now.

(Aside: I’m using the word “woman” very loosely. Broadening gender definitions, difficult cultural gaps, and a long history of state medical malpractice against Black and Indigenous women make this word loaded. Please accept this nuance as written; I’m trying to stay concise.)

There is nothing "Christian" about giving the government the authority to look up a woman's cooter and make decisions about her medical treatment.

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) June 24, 2022

The rulings trickling from this session’s heavily conservative Supreme Court have followed this pattern. The very fact that Miranda rights are named for Ernesto Miranda recall how heavily racialized American criminal justice is, but this court made such rights virtually unenforceable. But they’ve always been unenforceable anyway, unless one could afford a competent civil rights attorney, which those targeted by law enforcement generally can’t.

Likewise, the ruling making it difficult to sue federal agents simply puts White Americans on equal footing with Black and Brown Americans who’ve watched those who target their communities go unrestrained for years. Nobody’s ever been held responsible for the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, or Michael Brown. Now, nobody will be held accountable when federal sweeps catch White people in traps long set for Black and Brown people.

One could continue down the line. Though these rulings are nominally colorblind and apply to all Americans equally, they simply codify treatments the government has applied to poor, disabled, and BIPOC Americans for decades. The only difference is that the state no longer needs flimsy euphemistic work-arounds, and therefore can start applying them to everybody, ahem, equally. The Court simply invalidated the euphemisms which law enforcement no longer needs.

The U.S. Supreme Court Building

Justice Clarence Thomas caught heat for his concurrence in Dobbs, stating that the Court should now reconsider precedent in Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. That is, he disagrees with the 14th-Amendment reasoning that the state can’t place limits on contraception access, gay or extramarital sex, and same-sex marriage. But again, that isn’t new to Black or Brown Americans, who have their sexual choices strutinized, officially or unofficially, all the time.

Following Dobbs, Texas Senator John Cornyn posted a tweet which ambiguously appeared to challenge desegregation. Cornyn’s defenders hastily utilized that ambiguity to defend him against charges of racism. Because of course they did. That ambiguity, and the defense it justifies, are the very definition of dog-whistle politics: say the thing without saying it, so you can deny it later. It’s good to know that at least one euphemism remains necessary.

Progressives complain that this week’s rulings signify disappearing standards, unwritten rules that have circumscribed governance for generations. Maybe. But the longer I watch, the more I realize the largest standard disappearing: the standard of invading people’s privacy under standards of “welfare” and “public safety.” Six years ago, bureaucrats needed to formulate justifications to invade private space. The Court has signaled that such dissembling is no longer necessary.

Under these rulings, the federal government can invade White Americans’ homes, invalidate our 4th- and 5th-Amendment rights, and overrule our medical decisions, all with impunity. Just as the government has done to BIPOC Americans since before I was born. The only difference now is that, with the veil of euphemism lifted, White people have to see it for the first time— and, just as importantly, have to live with it.

We can’t legislate ourselves out of this. We Whites can only pause our egos, give BIPOC communities the lead, and simply listen.

What Even Is “Plagiarism”?

Kevin M. Kruse

My first hands-on experience with plagiarism happened in 2004. I’d recently reviewed T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain glowingly on Amazon. A complete stranger emailed, offering me $40 cash to write his five-paragraph essay on that novel. A quick-n-dirty Google search discovered that this writer was a Southern California honors student with multiple STEM awards. I emailed his high school, notifying them of this attempted academic dishonesty, and never heard back.

Last week, Princeton historian and minor Twitter celebrity Kevin M. Kruse was accused, with some credibility, of plagiarism. Several passages from Kruse’s 2000 doctoral dissertation too closely resemble books by Ronald H. Bayor and Thomas Sugrue. Kruse’s public positions are broadly Leftist; his accuser, Phillip W. Magness, has right-wing think-tank ties and frequently publishes in conservative magazines like National Review. The accusation appears in the right-Libertarian magazine Reason.

Not surprisingly, the cross-talk surrounding this accusation breaks along partisan lines. Left-liberal defenders claim the accusations are overinflated. Right-wing accusers claim this evidence not only undermines Kruse, but higher education overall. Both sides assign intent, not only to Kruse himself, but to the other side of the argument. Within minutes, every argument comes unmoored from Kruse’s work, and becomes about wider moral concerns in educated society.

Five years after being solicited to write somebody’s five-paragraph essay, I was working as a graduate teaching assistant. Two students turned in “annotated bibliography” assignments that were virtually identical. Google revealed both students copied their one-page assignments, with minor amendments, directly from the New York Times. Admittedly, I didn’t handle it well; I commenced a high-handed rant about the morality of originality, and the evils of plagiarism.

T.C. Boyle

One thing appears clear: Kruse definitely plagiarized. The sentences from Bayor and Sugrue which Magness finds in Kruse’s dissertation are too numerous, too close together, and too verbatim to be coincidental. Kruse’s most prominent defender, L.D. Burnett, tries to construct a viewpoint wherein Kruse’s copying might be merely coincidental. But actually placing Kruse’s words and his sources side-by-side, as Magness does, makes this defense look anemic.

Understand, Magness never challenges Kruse’s conclusions, only his prose. And the sentences Kruse plagiarized, if removed from his books, wouldn’t change his overall message. Magness only challenges Kruse’s academic rigor, a standard Kruse himself has used to undermine others. He catches Kruse committing the kind of errors he regularly denounces in others, knowing Kruse’s Left-liberal audience prizes consistency as part of their definition of fairness.

The more I encountered plagiarism in student work, the more forgiving I became. When students filched from Wikipedia, Reddit, and other ubiquitous sources, I realized they weren’t malicious. They were busy. I expected them to reach unique conclusions, and arrange entirely new sentences, around topics they knew little about, and cared even less. Plagiarism became a classic teachable moment, not a crime; I started clamping down only on habitual offenders.

Watching the Kruse controversy unfold, I’m reminded of Jonah Lehrer's public collapse. Rather than plagiarism, Lehrer fabricated evidence. Like Kruse, he told an eager audience what it already wanted to know, and the publishing world rewarded him richly. Like Kruse, Lehrer’s fabrications didn’t contradict the evidence, and Lehrer’s scholarship largely holds up. But, like Kruse, Lehrer’s disregard for industry standards sidelined his career at the peak of his popularity.

Jonah Lehrer

Since leaving academia and becoming a professional technical writer, I’ve spent countless hours hunched over my computer, repurposing my own and others’ words for new uses. Complete originality is important for authors and academics, who need to own their writings to get paid. But other kinds of writers—technical writers like me, ad copywriters, attorneys drafting legal briefs—regularly recycle words and sentences, in ways I once reprimanded students for.

I gave Kruse’s 2015 book One Nation Under God a glowing review, and I wasn’t alone. But like my students, Kruse is busy. As Jerry Z. Muller writes, lucrative rankings from US News and Princeton Review tally faculty members’ publications as part of their algorithms. Thus scholars like Kruse must publish prolifically, not only to receive tenure, but to keep top-tier students coming through the doors. Quantity beats quality.

This isn’t to forgive Kruse. He got caught committing the very transgression he’s spent two decades excoriating conservatives for, as Magness writes. He’ll need to spend time outside the limelight, and muster some persuasive apology, at minimum. (Kruse’s Twitter feed has been silent since Magness’s story dropped.) But maybe it’s time for academia to find some yardstick other than originality. In today’s media-saturated world, original words are hard to find.

The Dark Kentucky Horror That Almost Was

Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills

In the deep dark hills of eastern Kentucky, a military dropship has just landed. Weird, since the Federals have ignored the countryside since the war. Marcia (no last name), war veteran, county agent, and the closest her area has to a government, doesn’t want these soldiers infiltrating her genetically engineered, overmanaged hills; she’s built an uneasy peace here, thanks. But apparently an unfinished battle from the war remains in the countryside.

This novella postulates a world transformed by violent technology, where the dead don’t stay buried, because they’re never really dead. Author Christopher Rowe, a highly esteemed but little-known short story specialist always on the cusp of a mainstream breakthrough, has crafted a masterpiece of dark foreboding and grim atmospherics. Unfortunately, in the final pages, it appears he’s written checks he doesn’t quite know how to cash.

The nameless Federal captain conscripts Marcia for a rescue mission into the hills. Problem is, the hills are lifeless and desolate, following the war’s nanoware devastation, and the government’s ill-considered attempts to reseed with genetically engineered sludge. But there are lives at stake, and possible unexploded ordnance in vital areas. So Marcia walks with them into the mouth of the holler, knowing they’ll never leave the hills alive.

Much of Rowe’s storytelling will feel familiar to veteran genre audiences, though with a twist. The invasive mosses, the vast deathless enemies, even the culminating cosmic horror of communion with an amoral higher intelligence, all mirror patterns HP Lovecraft perfected nearly a century ago. Human pride, which in this case means military precision, must ultimately bow before a meaningless, uncaring universe.

In Rowe’s telling, however, these horrors don’t arise from the primordial sludge; they’re the aftereffects of a high-tech war between a government with no conscience, and the artificial intelligence they couldn’t control. For Rowe, the horror arises, not from humanity’s meaningless place in the universe, but from our tendency to create systems intended to serve us, but which we ultimately wind up having to serve. Lovecraft as Marxism, perhaps.

Christopher Rowe

As Marcia leads the military through a rural landscape transformed by war’s aftereffects, her viewpoint alternates with the war. Flashbacks to forced marches through similar hills, formerly beautiful landscapes forever blighted with bombs and nanoware pollution. We witness Marcia fighting the old war as a young woman, and revisiting its scars in her age. The war exerts an eternal pull on her consciousness, and Marcia knows what she’ll do to survive.

One suspects, reading this novella, that Rowe wanted to write something longer. He introduces a grand sweep of social forces which drive nations into violence, and the different narratives people use to justify taking sides during war. But Rowe never delves deeply into anything. Like William Goldman, who used an intrusive narrator to scrub the parts he didn’t feel like telling in The Princess Bride, Rowe uses nonsequential storytelling to minimize backstory and exposition.

Worse, though he introduces darkly complex atmospherics, he does almost nothing with them. He introduces nanoware-driven invasive foliage, for instance, that human soldiers must constantly expunge, lest they take over everything; or airborne nanoware that causes hallucinations and permanent psychological trauma. But, having mentioned them, he walks away again, never expanding on the consequences for his characters. Once introduced, he loses interest.

Then, in the final scenes, Rowe drops the ball entirely. Rowe spends so much time describing massive, almost indestructible, Cthulhu-like technological terrors, that when we finally see one, it isn’t as shocking for us as it is for the characters. We know Marcia will have a moment of transcendent communion with the cosmic monstrosity that’s haunted her dreams for thirty years. But Rowe does nothing with it; the story just ends.

Rowe clearly wants to retell a Lovecraft-like story, but for our modern era. Like Cthulhu, Rowe’s cosmic terror lies buried, awaiting human intervention to be reborn. Where Lovecraft’s monsters were sweaty, fish-like, and organic, Rowe’s stainless-steel monster emerges from technology so vast and powerful that it consumes its builders. But fundamentally, both monsters emerge from the same primal fear that, deep down, nothing humans do can ever matter.

Unfortunately, one gets the feeling that Rowe hasn’t finished thinking through his monster. Instead of primal cosmic horror, Rowe offers us the first shreds of discomfort, then flinches. I wanted a deeper taste of whatever bitter brew his characters are drinking. I got fleeting whiffs of something profound and unsettling, but never enough to truly feel much. This should’ve been longer, slower, more detailed than the abridgement we got.

(Acknowledgements to Darrell Scott)

Life at the End of the Petroleum Age

It’s become a staple of office banter in America and internationally: “Holy moley, I had to deplete my retirement fund for a tank of gas!” Stickers on American gas pumps showing a pointing Joe Biden and the caption “I Did That!” have become so ubiquitous, we no longer see them, even though gas prices remain up worldwide. Politically diverse groups join together in the shared commitment that high gasoline (petrol) prices suck.

Some solutions are arising, though not everyone will like them. While several auto manufacturers have pledged to discontinue gas-burning cars by the year 2035, they only make such pledges in “leading markets.” Meanwhile, an increasing number of large-market cities are banning new gas station construction, citing declining demand and long-term environmental costs. Clearly the days of cars burning gasoline- and diesel-burning cars are rapidly coming to an end.

Sounds great, right? But I have my doubts.

This commitment to discontinuing petroleum sounds wonderful in theory. But our economy remains committed to a vehicle-dependent structure. American cities, with their single-use land development practices, are so huge and difficult to navigate, you need military-grade satellite technology to visit most neighborhoods. This while we continue underfunding public transit. If you lack car access in most American suburbs, you’re truly trapped.

It’s even worse in America’s rural areas. Most farmers rely on diesel-burning tractors and combine harvesters to work increasingly vast patches of land, then require diesel-burning trucks to haul their crops to market. Their daily lives are no better. Despite the diverse crops on Old MacDonald’s storied farm (E-I-E-I-O), most American farmers practice monocropping, and therefore don’t grow their own food. They’re frequently twenty miles from the nearest decent grocery store.

This rural-urban divide matters. Many commentators have recently observed that the Democratic Party has essentially cut rural America loose, leaving the rural electorate that once powered FDR’s New Deal coalition to Republican domination. Anti-environmentalism has been a staple of Republican policy since Newt Gingrich made it a shibboleth of his 1994 “Republican Revolution.” For many rural Republicans, disdain for the environment has become part of their personalities.

While many cities (reluctantly) build electric car infrastructure, designed to preserve the car-centric model we’ve built since World War II, rural areas just aren’t. Where I live, some private homes might have electric car plug-ins, but for working-class people and renters, the only car charging station is outside a grocery store at the edge of town. If gas cars are discontinued in 2035, rural poor will continue driving increasingly aged, inefficient beaters, because they have to.

Oil prices today: $115.83 a barrel
Gas prices today: $5.01 a gallon

Oil prices in April of 2008: $116.50
Gas prices in April of 2008: $3.51 a gallon

Gas prices are $1.50 a gallon higher than they should be because of the greed of big oil. It's time for a windfall profits tax.

— Warren Gunnels (@GunnelsWarren) June 15, 2022

That’s to say nothing of global industry. We proletarians might stop driving gas-hogs, someday, but we continue depending on shipping and distribution networks that consume vast quantities of petroleum. Most of the electronics that make American middle-class life possible are manufactured in China, and transported in massive diesel-burning container ships. Most of the globe’s medical PPE comes from a small number of factories, as we learned with grief in 2020.

Transferring to electric-powered cars will only serve to defend, even expand, class-based divisions. Those who can afford the rapid transition, not only to a new car, but the electric plug-in necessary to power it, will do so promptly. Urban poor, and rural-dwellers on the periphery of the distribution network, will wait indefinitely. And large corporations, which don’t use the pumps us groundlings use, will keep burning Texas Tea.

Because fundamentally, the problem isn’t cars, or even petroleum. The problem is that modern, technological society is founded on presumptions that no longer hold, if they ever did. American economic expansion has been grounded on cheap land (once we chase the Indigenous population off), cheap energy, and cheap labor. All of these are running out in real time, and when depleted, won’t come back soon.

Switching to electric cars only tinkers around the edges of a fundamentally decrepit system. Another Prius or Tesla might make individual buyers feel personally virtuous, but the problem isn’t personal, it’s structural. The problem is resource-hoarding billionaires who devalue land and labor, in order to keep their stock returns high. They don’t care what costs the rest of us must shoulder, because they don’t have to care.

Cars, and their related technology, have contributed to fat guts, heating climates, and cities that are massively unpleasant to live in. But they’re a symptom, not a cause. Our entire economy is premised on the idea that our world and its resources are, in some way, infinite. We’re living through the proof that this just isn’t so.

Edit: in the hours after I wrote this essay, President Biden floated the idea of a summer-long hiatus of all federal gas and fuel taxes. This is, of course, a bandage, not a solution. The poorly planned cities, sweltering-hot highways, and unsustainable globalized industry will still be there when the temporary reprieve ends.