John Oliver Savagely Dunks on Second Grader
Last night John Oliver spent 22-minutes doing the difficult and thoroughly indispensable work of proving that Alex Jones is a screaming lunatic and a huckster of products and medicines of dubious utility by, um, airing footage of The Alex Jones Show. The low-hanging fruit tree has apparently been picked bare, leaving only a knee-high shrubbery that drops shrieking and growling InfoWars take-berries.
"Alex Jones plays a foaming blowhard trying to scare people into buying overpriced supplements and "preparedness" products from which he personally makes a healthy profit? Color me SHOCKED *and* APPALLED, John."
Did you miss the show? Fret not, because every single content-producing website on the internet has a piece on Oliver's VICIOUS DISMANTLING of Alex Jones. (Even me, as it turns out. Shit!) Did you know that Alex Jones has been seen wearing *at least three different* ROLEX watches? Oh, John, where would we be without you?! Selling a million dollar taint wipe is just SO outrageous, you rascal, you!
But me complaining about the John Oliver SmackDown Cottage Industry is about as fresh and meaningful as the two and a half minutes of BALLERS I accidentally endured last night. So why are we here?
Before unleashing the heretofore unthinkable "Alex Jones is bad" thunderclap on all of us, John gave us a recap of recent Trump news, including the transgender ban "policy" that Trump tweeted out last week. After playing a clip of a newscaster explaining Trump's announcement that transgender individuals would be banned from military service, Oliver said the following:
"Look, that is as hateful as it is pointless. But it means that we may already be entering the MadLibs portion of Trump's presidency, where he just persecutes groups at random. Transgender people banned from the military; Pacific Islanders can no longer use the Postal Service; and Jews can no longer high-five--sorry, Jews!"
The policy that Trump was attempting to overturn with his tweets was put in place in the long ago, settled-history epoch of June 30, 2016. The Obama administration only ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in September of 2011. When running for president in 2008, Barack Obama said: "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage." Obama didn't announce his "evolution" on gay marriage until May of 2012. Only 27% of Americans believed same-sex marriage should be legal in 1996. It wasn't until the 2000s that even half of Americans believed that same-sex sex between consenting adults should not be explicitly illegal. "Gay marriage" was so thoroughly a non-issue, not even a part of the conversation, for so long that it doesn't appear that anyone bothered to poll Americans on the issue until the 1990s.
The point is, it's difficult to overstate the degree to which American views on these social issues have shifted. Just in my relatively short lifetime, Americans have gone from being absolutely morally certain that "The Gays are Bad" to being absolutely morally certain that "The Gays are Fine, Actually."
(To be clear, because I have to be, I guess--I recognize the progress as progress.)
But Oliver is treating the transgender military ban as such "settled science," so mind-numbingly obviously morally unacceptable, that Trump might as well be throwing darts at a hate-by-numbers board, randomly and capriciously upending years of long-understood cultural norms. As noted in the first Times article above, the military didn't even take up the question of trans individuals in service until May of 2014, and the policy was not put in place until a little more than a year ago. Even if you believe that Trump was absolutely wrong in announcing the transgender ban, it is ridiculous to suggest that it's as unambiguously villainous as, say, putting WHITES and COLOREDS signs on water fountains throughout DC, or outlawing The Jews from celebratory hand-slaps. Not because there's some gradation of moral rightness or wrongness that ought to protect certain groups more than others, but because changes in the culture take time to take root, and aren't established by dictate, but by an ever-ongoing conversation.
There has been a thoroughly bonkers cultural shift in the last generation. (Again, to be clear, in case I have to be, I recognize the progress as progress.) The zeitgeist has changed to the point of being utterly unrecognizable to many, many millions of Americans--and that's fine, actually, and even Good, in a lot of ways! The world changes, people's views "evolve," and we beat on. Progress! But preaching from the smug moral high ground within the perfect bubble of Online Enlightened Liberaldom is no way to continue the project.
When you refuse to even nod in the direction of the rapid pace of change, when you dismiss the sincere concerns--to be clear (again again again) I think they're mostly wrong--of millions as absurd random nonsense, you only exacerbate the divide. You're not interested in conversation with these people, you believe them to be outside The Project. And then they go and elect a screaming lunatic and huckster as president of the United States, the shrieking and growling fruit of our rotten tree, just for the indignant satisfaction of having a flaming middle finger in your face all the time.
Instead of a 22-minute exploration of why Alex Jones is ascendant, and what his popularity might say about us and our world and our future, we get a sporadically funny rehashing of something Oliver's audience already unambiguously knows-- Alex Jones is Bad. But treating the people in Jones' sizable audience--or the tens of millions of Trump supporters--as actual human beings, capable of conversation and even "evolution" themselves, that would require reaching beyond the lowest-hanging fruit. And we're just making television, here, man.
