What is a "bad guy"?
Gruesome Details
As a standup, one of my biggest frustrations moving out of Chicago was the way the idea of opportunity made us avoid plain talking. As someone who has literally always said what she thinks (for good and for bad), New York and LA was a hard transition in many ways.
In Chicago, standups generally said how they felt. If you hated a guy, you’d say so (or, at least, I would). Worst case scenario, you might not get booked at a bar show hosted by your enemy’s friend. The stakes were low. When I moved to NYC, the stakes felt higher, whether or not they actually were. Everyone in NYC, I couldn’t help but note, called other standups “geniuses” whether or not they were actually geniuses. In LA, you have to be careful about announcing a TV shows sucks because the creator of that TV show might be in the same room with you.
The internet has blown out this phenomenon. Everything you say could get back to the person you are saying it about. The internet has led people to qualify their statements, packing them in an endless stream of caveats.
We are now unwilling or unable to call someone a bad guy.
Comedy has created an industry of men who podcast. This means there is a further cottage industry, just outside that, of men who listen to podcasts. There are several YouTube channels that only serve to tell you what America’s greatest hatemongers/standups said on their nineteen hours of podcasting this week. Recently, I’ve been watching all of them to figure out how these people feel about the podcasts they listen to.
And, frankly, it is hard to tell. I’m not sure these podcast listeners know how they feel about the podcasts. I’m not sure if they know how they feel about anything.
Earlier this week, I watched a video called “Theo Von is Not Who You Think.” The maker of the video noted several things about Theo: he was neighbors (and friends) with notorious Ku Klux Klan kingpin David Duke, he’s said more than once he doesn’t support interracial dating, and he will abandon anyone who he thinks may bring down his podcasting empire. At minute 11 of an 11-minute video, the creator says, “And, in my opinion, that doesn’t make him a bad guy, it just makes him way less transparent than he appears to be.”
In a different video, by an ostensibly smarter person, that I watched today called “The Manosphere’s Final Form is Worse Than You Think,” the creator, talking about these same comedians, said at minute 21 of a 26-minute video: “I’m not trying to say that Theo Von or Adin Ross or even the Nelk Boys are bad people…”
In all cases, I am willing to say: they are bad people.
If someone isn’t a “bad guy,” despite platforming racists, launching Trump to power, and being wildly transphobic/homophobic/racist/misogynistic on the way, what does a bad guy look like?
I understand why these YouTube creators say “I don’t think they’re bad guys” about the bad guys of whom they speak. They want to bring fans of those things inside, rather than pushing them out. They don’t want to get yelled at in the comments. They don’t want to be accused of thinking they are “better” than those who love the fascist podcasters.
But this is the fertile ground in which fascism takes root. If we can’t call bad men bad, if we can’t say “this is immoral” without caveats, we cede ground immediately to those who wish to tear apart our world.
It is time to stop equivocating, and stop with the caveats. These are bad guys. Full stop.