I’m terribly sorry to interrupt another consecutive day of the national media flogging a story about an insult comic being…insulting at a Trump rally over the weekend, but there are other things going on in the world. Beyond just the President of the United States stomping all over that story line by calling his party’s opponents “garbage.” But on the subject they they wish they could have stayed on even longer, I am still curious about something: If Trump’s gathering in New York City was truly an orgy of fascist racism, akin to a Nazi convention, as we’ve been told on repeat, isn’t it odd that so much attention has been paid to a few bad jokes from a relatively obscure comedian? One might think the media would have their hands full covering the blizzard of racist, fascist, Nazi content — especially from the candidate himself — that proliferated at the event, so they’d presumably have little time to devote to piddling nonsense like problematic and unfunny jokes from a pre-show warm-up act. That their pearl-clutching ‘outrage’ and ‘offense’-taking has been so disproportionately focused on the bad jokes dude may suggest to a critical thinker that the rest of the hours-long rally lacked the sort of content that would support the grotesque narrative that has been portrayed.
Perhaps the ill-advised jokes of a professional insulter (which bombed in the hall, by the way) shouldn’t really be a five-alarm firestorm, or anything close to it? Trying to make it a thing, let alone the thing, has felt a little try-hard by journalists who appear to share the Harris campaign’s eleventh-hour desperation. And then the Biden ‘gaffe’ happened. Whether that desperation ends up being justified by voters’ decisions in six days is a separate question. But wall-to-wall, frantic, days-long coverage of a few bad jokes that were disowned by the Trump campaign and delivered hours before Donald Trump event took the stage felt…more than a little bit synthetic. It was barely news. It was not big news. It’s certainly not one of the biggest stories in the country. But boy, they tried to turn it into that. And again, then Biden dropped his rhetorical bomb. It was both disconcerting and hilarious. Meanwhile, there has been far, far, far, less coverage of this, from a national media that purports to be very concerned about incipient Nazism, or whatever: