The Joy of Hate
How to Triumph Over Whiners in the Age
of Phony Outrage
by Greg Gutfeld
Crown Forum
When Eli Manning and the Giants won the Super Bowl, did Giants fans spend the week calling Bill Belichick an a-hole, denouncing Tom Brady for cheating on his girlfriend and saying Rob Gronkowski is the new Herman Munster?
All of those things are true, but Big Blue’s fans pretty much just talked about how you can’t spell elite without Eli and how Mario Manningham had become one of the all-time Giants.
Yet after President Obama’s re-election, the left has seemed disturbingly angry (Guys, your side won. Let’s see some happy faces. Buy a Republican a drink.). And angry about really bizarre things.
“It’s weird that everyone that supports Romney is a Christian a-hole,” Tweeted someone called @Adam_ Marchetti. (Never mind that Obama is also Christian.) Tweeted @GoAskAlex, ‘So US Magazine asked Romney to submit a list of 25 things we don’t know about him but he declined. A–hole.” “If I had a dollar for every creepy a–hole who lifted his shirt to show me his dumb ugly tattoo after seeing mine I’d be Mitt f—ing Romney,” tweeted @laurenmcneil.
It’s almost as if the anger of the campaign season was the point, not an unfortunate byproduct, of politics. Or as Greg Gutfeld puts it in his tender, loving new book, “The Joy of Hate,” “You know what really pisses me off? People who are always pissed off. Or pretend to be pissed off . . . Right now we live in a world where if someone perceives you as ‘offensive,’ they win. Meanwhile, the real offenders get a walk. They can wield the weapon of ‘tolerance’ to protect real scummy behavior.”
Gutfeld knows whereof he speaks. The host of Fox News Channel’s “Red Eye,” and faithful supplier of 20% of discussion on “The Five,” he once conducted a very public thought experiment to challenge what he calls “the Tolerati.”
A couple of years ago, when Muslims proposed a building containing a mosque a couple hundred yards from Ground Zero, he proposed building a gay bar next to the mosque. Response? The “Mosqueteers,” as he calls them, said, “If you won’t consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you’re not going to build dialog.” (Gutfeld offered to name the proposed bar Dialog.)
Tolerati like Sandra Fluke, a longtime liberal activist who attended Georgetown University specifically to try to harass it, and other Catholic institutions, into providing free birth control, go looking for a fight. Then they pretend to be outraged when they find one and are forced to suffer the resulting indignity of lucrative speaking engagements and prime-time slots on national television.
Free birth control is a non-issue that stokes pretend anger. A month of birth-control pills costs about the same as a sandwich, yet if a politician stood up before the nation and vowed a free veal parmigiana sub for everyone, he’d rightly be laughed at. “What could have been a frank discussion about government overreach and entitlement shifted into a ‘War on Women,’ ” Gutfeld writes. “If you deny a birth-control pill to anyone, period, you are waging war on the fairer sex.”
Gutfeld has lots more examples of ersatz anger. He goes out for a smoke on the corner near his apartment, and two girls tell him, “Get lung cancer, man” and “You gonna die.”
A blogger named Harold Ambler who made fun of climate-change alarmism inspired a fellow blogger to suggest that Ambler’s house be burned down.
Last year, Gutfeld was handed a gift of the most visible (and smellable) fake outrage in recent memory: Occupy Wall Street. “They had no principles,” Gutfeld writes, “so they offered a poll to choose what to protest. In sum, they had no idea what they were protesting; they only knew that protesting would feel really good.”
Occupy had a big problem: The people in power gave them a thumbs up. “They weren’t actually going to speak truth to the man,” Gutfeld notes, “because, really, they were on the same side as the man.” They had another problem: Their proposed revolution was actually cute. “People reacted to the protesters not with anger but with curiosity,” writes Gutfeld. “People took pictures. They’re scragglier versions of the Naked Cowboy.”
Gutfeld hates conclusions, he says, because they’re so final. But how about this for a proposal: “Look, I can disagree with [Bill] Maher about his opinions on [Sarah] Palin, but I won’t get angry about it . . . Stop demanding that people shut up or get fired . . . Demanding that someone get fired because they hurt your feelings says more about you than them. You should not care. Generally, over time, creepy people end up creeping off into the sunset. See Olbermann.”