Anger with a Smile: The Steep Cost of Ad Hominem Satire

With geopolitical stability, global energy and financial security at risk from an Islamic fascist dictator who tortured and slaughtered without mercy, 43% of Democratic and 97% of Republican legislators approved a war. Depictions of Bush as an ape multiplied, while pacifists whitewashed the ethnonationalist maniac that the US military pursued. In the delusional world of the democratic party, white skin is a requirement to be labeled as an ethnonationalist. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party was verboten accuracy in speaking of Saddam Hussein. If brown, Asian, or non-Christian people are bringing hell to earth, violent ethnic pride is unremarkable.

Thus the leftwing sociopolitical opportunists fixate upon disorganized and anemic “white nationalism” while Latino, African, Asian, and Islamic Ummah ethnonationalism produces a global slaughter of Jacobin proportions. At my last count, Islamists were responsible for 54% of global terrorism victims since 1970, while socialists comprised 30%. They have slaughtered 91% of all terror victims in the EU since the year 2000.

There are even propagandists who point to the number of terror attacks in the US, in order to downplay Islamist lethality. That figure conflates the property crimes of eco-fascists with lethal massacres. White ethnonationalists of Christian heritage (but not Christian faith), have mountains of killing to do if they wanted to catch up to the global terrorism of brown, Asian, and non-Christian ethnonationalists. People might lie to themselves and others, but cold hard numbers interpreted correctly do not.

So why do tech companies, politicians, journalists, corporations, and entertainers amplify white nationalist violence while minimizing the rest? It has become so bad that the Democratic Party moved in lockstep to call recent Christian victims of Islamic terrorism “Easter worshippers.” Lame excuses for the language followed.

For those unfamiliar with political PR – a communique goes out to a trusted network, suggesting language, and the public figure chooses to heed or ignore the suggestion. If you think that all of these Democrats coincidentally dreamed up “Easter worshippers” to replace “Christians” in their language, please look at your ceiling right now because somebody wrote “gullible” on it!

The sociopolitical opportunists don’t dare speak the truth about such slaughter, lest they damage the fragile egos of their “minority” voters, colleagues, investors, and customers – who actually form an enormous demographic when combined. There is also a sizable demographic of self-loathing white people who resent their parents, families, and themselves subconsciously, and consequently enjoy participating in the rite of political self-flagellation.

They feel enlightened and superior, each time they validate imaginary ethnic victims. It’s a great way to expunge their guilt without having to do anything constructive. They carry their plastic swords into the basement and slay the white oppressor goblins, and then run outside to tell the neighborhood of their heroic play-time fiction.

Then there are those who profit from the "diversity/inclusion" myths. Those sociopolitical opportunists will stuff their dishonorable mouths with a 2% profit margin, a 2% annual bonus, or a 0.5% voter polling lead, while their enlarging Pinocchio noses cast shadows over the graveyards of the slaughtered. As it turns out, it’s the brown people, Asians, and non-Christians who usually suffer the most casualties from their own ethnonationalist violence. White people of Christian heritage contribute an infinitesimal portion of the global death toll.

But once the facts are twisted into the fiction, then the satire emerges from every corner of academia, social media, newspapers, entertainment, and civics. Instead of focusing upon concepts, facts, and logic that would feed valid criticism, they scrawl their caricatures of opposition like intoxicated hippies with a finger-paint surplus. Thus they draw Bush as a monkey, as depicted above. They draw soldiers as monkeys. They depict religious people as monkeys:

But the same people who create dehumanizing satire of soldiers fail to see how their sexual choices bring them closer to primitive animals than soldiers who struggle against tyranny. Dare to depict Beyoncé in ape garb for promiscuous dances of genital worship, and watch the accusations of racism mount. Dare to depict drunkards and drug addicts as dogs devouring chocolate, and become the teetotaling killjoy. Here are our rules for satire in the secular humanist, democratic socialist society:

1. White man bad, brown man good

2. Religious man stupid, godless man smart

3. Intoxicated man cool, drug-free man boring

4. Promiscuous man stud, chaste man loser

5. Soldiers and war primitive, hostile statecraft enlightened

6. Policeman oppressor, mercy for criminals enlightened

7. Businessman greedy, government bureaucrat charitable

8. Rich man indulgent sinner, poor man saintly victim

9. Females infallible, males culpable

10. Gun owner scary, unprotected citizen courageous

Violate these rules at your own risk. There are surely dozens of others emerging in conjunction with current sociopolitical agendas. To the amoral opportunist, it doesn’t matter what’s true, it only matters if they win power, wealth, and influence.

And they strike below the belt to win. Double standards, inverted values, and unjustifiable visions characterize ad hominem satire. Though the comedian activists hurl their invective with a smile, there is anger, anxiety, and self-loathing beneath their disingenuous joviality. A person who is genuinely confident and respects themselves does not choose the bottom four tiers of arguments:

But what if these mass psychology foibles are an accidental feature of our times? Dysfunctional argumentation is a side-effect of post-industrial societies with public education. Polarized sociopolitical cliques are just a side effect. With fewer manual labor jobs, and governments coercing everyone to spend 25-33% of their lives in fake education, those with below-median IQ are shepherded into intellectual endeavors, but are forever ill-equipped in them.

The popularity of invective and fallacious argumentation is a logical consequence of replacing manual activities with intellectual ones, en masse. We can't make a horse jockey into a seven-foot basketball player. We can't make a below-median IQ person into a thought-leader. Yet there they are, by the millions, parroting things they don't really understand as if their opinion carries equal weight with those of high intellect and knowledge.

To feel relevant and empowered in the intellectual climate, the below-median IQ citizen does not watch interviews with professors, which leaves them “bored,” confused, and unsatisfied. They tune into any of the dozen comedian activists, who seem clever, caricature everything, remain shallow, provide the illusion of relevance, and ridicule a scapegoat. In one package, the intellectually frustrated citizen of modernity gets to have fun, feel relevant, and release their frustration upon ridiculed scapegoats.

It’s Looney Tunes For Adults! Jon Stewart even tried to make a successful business man, Herman Cain, look like Elmer Fudd by incessantly calling him “The Pizza Guy.” But this circus of satirical ad hominem does not end when John Stewart’s mouth closes for the evening. The mob of viewers parrot the dysfunctional modes of thinking and behaviors in their communities and on social media.

These comedy pundits peddle anger with a smile. It's like a slow drip poison, eroding zeal, self-respect, trust, and humility with every chuckle. Once a person does not respect themselves, they combine with other people to fill their void, and the collectivist mob of spotted hyenas is born. Anger with a smile multiplies in groups.

There are too many priests of smiley anger to list, but the most promoted ones are Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Conan O’Brien, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Bill Maher, Alec Baldwin, David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers.

Comedy is a great experience, and so is satire. But the way in which satire is pursued makes all the difference. It’s valid to satirize groups of people who are participating in a trend that is justified by hard evidence. Ad hominem satire against specific people, or satire in which the punchline is not justified by hard evidence is destructive. There can be no privileged classes of people immune to satire. And when they use it to obscure dire struggles like warfare and ethnonationalist violence, they are willing to destroy any truth in order to advance their own influence and power.

The sociopolitical opportunist uses the four lowest tiers of the argument pyramid, and their passive aggressive anger with a smile allows them to deny animosity when they’re exposed. This kind of sociopathy should have no place in civics, and I look forward to a new age of virtuous culture that is resilient against such psychological and relational aggression.