The Joy of Hate (11 page)

It had to go. Quickly.

It was like a swastika, a Confederate flag, or a corpse nailed to the wall—offensive, smelly, and a threat to property values.

See, the Mrs. and I were selling our apartment, in New York, and it had occurred to all of us that there were more than a few things on the walls, coffee tables, and bookshelves that might upset a potential buyer. That newspaper was one, but there were other things, too.

Books, mainly. Books by Ann Coulter. Books by Mark Steyn. Books on unicorn dressage. A few books by me. (I keep them around as gifts, because I’m cheap.) Essentially, all of these things had to go, because they expressed one scary idea: a right-winger lives here. He sleeps on that bed, where he probably does horrible things. To kids, to puppies, to kids with puppies.

Yep. A conservative. Not a liberal. An evil, baby-eating fascist Bu$$$Hitler fanatic who probably is secretly gay while bullying gay teens on the way to school. Better fumigate this place before we sell it. It’s got KKKooties.

Although it’s an almost accurate description of me (minus the secretly-gay-bullying-gay-teen thing), this fact might hinder our goal of selling our Hell’s Kitchen pad and moving to some place quieter—a neighborhood not littered with people I propositioned at four a.m.

Normally, I don’t care if anyone sees what I read, or what I’ve written (which is a great benefit to me when I receive my royalty check). Over time, as I worked among libs for most of my life, my skin has become thicker than a high school yearbook.

But when you parade New Yorkers into your house, and you want them to shell out a pile of dough on a tiny plot of land in a grimy block surrounded by methadone-heads, you will do whatever it takes to close the deal. Even if that means removing every offending book, magazine, or three-headed vibrator with my name on it. God forbid one of these potential buyers, in their $800 Oliver Peoples glasses, should spy something that isn’t in lockstep with their worldview (which is why the vibrators stayed).

The hallucinating “street poet” on our corner who feels his nuclear spittle is universally accepted currency? No effect on property values. One issue of
Reason
on an end table? Could be a problem!

Now, since it is New York, it’s not that I expect people to know who I am. It’s not like I’m Rachel Maddow, the patron saint of the smirking left. But we couldn’t take that chance. Because it really isn’t “me” anyway that upsets people. It’s who I work for. Yep, I work at the Death Star, the fair and balanced joint that’s beating the crap out of its competitors. For a liberal, my network
symbolizes everything they hate, even if they couldn’t find it on their channel guide to save their life. It’s a handy reference point whenever they get angry but can’t think of anything to say. When flummoxed at a protest, they realize condemning the network will get them out of any jam, without ever having to say anything that might require actual intelligence.

My theory on why my employer has become the go-to device when griping about the right: it’s better than saying “my parents.” Because the network is wildly popular among their parents—your parents too—and even their parents (otherwise known as grandparents). I’ve noticed when someone rails on the network to me it takes about ten minutes before they confess, “It’s on all the time at my mom’s place.” One time I had asked a young dude to do my show, and he informed me, instantly, that he “fucking hates it.” A week later, a friendlier response dropped into my e-mail inbox. Turns out his “teabagging mom” loves what I do. And now he wanted in, because it made her so damn happy. But time had passed, and I was now trying to book a man who could juggle cats. Cats who play the piano. You ever see one of those videos? You think they’re real? That’s a really talented family!

So when you see someone who hates my place of work, bear in mind not to condemn his or her family. Chances are he really means he hates his mom and dad for something (they never let him win at KerPlunk), and that same mom and dad dig the “fair and balanced” way of things.

It’s really no wonder they hate the network. So much so, some want to shut the place down. Which is the beauty of modern tolerance. Freedom of expression and tolerating points of view are their expressed desires … unless you, um, disagree with them on something. Then it’s sooo over, you Nazi!

You remember the Fairness Doctrine? This harebrained notion
percolates up every now and then from the deeper reaches of the left’s fever swamps. The idea is to “balance” the right’s presence on talk radio with more radio networks from the left. Or something like that. Never mind that every liberal radio network that’s tried to compete in the open market has gone over like a Manson family reunion. So what does the tolerant left propose? What they always propose: legislation. Let’s force the country to listen to cloying liberal chat hosts in the name of “equal” time.

I practically say it in my sleep these days: For decades the left owned the playing field, the ball, the audience, and the refs. They owned the game we call media. All major networks. All entertainment options came saddled with their approved assumptions: Movies, theater, the art world, magazine publishing, newspapers, comedians, poetry readings in coffeehouses, hopscotch tournaments, the world knitting conference, the Pencak Silat World Invitational (which I won last year)—you name it—they all uniformly turn left as if they’re participating in an ideological NASCAR event. The media was the big boys; we were just incidental characters, satiated by cheese puffs and fluffernutters. Until one monster entered the picture, like the Creature emerging from the Black Lagoon. Yep, just one single company refused to go lockstep with them—an unafraid horde with its chin out and every bit as much intellectual heft as its adversaries, and they couldn’t take it. Even the president can’t resist griping about it. It’s just not as “real” as those
Entourage
reruns he loves to DVR.

Back to my inane sports metaphor: When this new media entity showed up, the left wanted to take their ball and go home. Tolerance for others stopped at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, where this weirdo whose book you’re currently reading abides and steals its toilet paper.

So what is the argument for not tolerating another voice? Well,
it’s all in the spirit of tolerance. See, because the left identifies me as evil (or rather, different), it’s okay not to tolerate me. Tolerating me would be like tolerating murder, bestiality, or soft jazz—but worse, because, you know, I’m a right-winger. Which again is really shorthand for “Daddy, who never gave me the hug or an adult allowance.”

But if you watch any one of my shows for even ten minutes, you realize they have loads of lefties on. We tolerate the left because it’s part of our mission—to be fair and balanced. I know the left snickers at that, but realize that it would be idiotic not to present both left and right opinions. Fact is, because I don’t reflexively reflect the shared opinions of contemporary progressive thought, I have a target on my back. Which means I have to be that much more charitable. Because I am confident in my mission, presenting liberal perspectives should only make whatever else that much stronger. Seriously, put a leftist on any show and you see how much more sensible the right is. You have me sitting there sounding reasonable and anyone to my left morphs into one of those LSD experiments from the fifties, even if I’m not wearing pants.

In the kiddie pool that is tolerance, my side wins hands down over MSNBC, CNN, and every other media entity you can mention. But it doesn’t matter—the left will only deny it, justifying their own bitter attacks against this big fat meanie. And boy do they hate that meanie, so much so that they cannot watch it (which is another point: ask a critic what show they can’t stand and why, and you realize they never watch it—they just assume it’s evil). They assume the whole channel is evil. It’s like the world’s biggest factory for child slavery.

Which leads me to this morning (it’s October 30, 2011, for you people totally into dates and numbers). It’s an odd Sunday
morning. I’m going to lay it out for you from the beginning, so you can see why it’s important. And because this is a story about Twitter, it will involve tweets. But I hate reading stories where the tweets interrupt the flow, so I will be paraphrasing a lot of this to save time and keep your attention from straying to other things (like my nude Pilates videos).

I currently wrote about this on my website, the Daily Gut, but in case you missed it: Last night (a wintry Saturday), some weird dude tweets me—in CAPS. I don’t know why crazy people don’t see that typing in CAPS reveals their seething instability, but I guess that’s a circular argument one can never escape from. If you ask them if they’re crazy, they respond, I’M NOT CRAZY!!! I’M NOT CRAZY!!! Anyhoo, he calls me a wannabe “f*ckface.” No big deal. I retweet it with a comment, “Mom, we’ve had this discussion.”

I continue drinking into the stormy night at a local steakhouse. I go to bed. While I’m asleep, some dude (dudette?) on Twitter, pretending to be me, with a fake account, tweets to the creepy all-CAPS dude—calling him a “faggot.”

The Twitter account is obviously fake, but sensing a glorious opportunity to destroy me, the all-CAPS dude vows he’s going to ruin my life by spreading that tweet everywhere.

And he sets out to do so, with great zest. Sunday morning, I wake up and look at my laptop. There are three “Google alerts,” telling me something. I hate Google alerts, but I also love them. In a way, they’re like children who jump on your bed demanding to go to the zoo. Except this zoo is filled with bad news instead of bad gnus. (Note to reader: I should turn off my laptop and simply retire. I will never write a line greater than that.)

The first one is from a website, Back2Stonewall, claiming I
tweeted something homophobic. I click to the next alert, and this one scares me. It’s The Raw Story, a major left-wing site, also reporting that I tweeted something homophobic. They were more charitable, though, unlike the Stonewall folks, who referred to me as a homophobic shit-weasel. I am not sure what a shit-weasel is, but I’m thinking it’s not a compliment.

I head over to Twitter. There, Back2Stonewall has tweeted this slur not once, but four times. Apparently lost in the glee of capturing a conservative in full homophobic glory, he neglects to e-mail or call anyone for verification (which is the first thing you learn in any journo course), or click over to the fraudulent Twitter account, to see that it’s false.

And believe me, even my mom could see it was fake. The guy took advantage of a typography flaw in Twitter, where an upper-case
I
looks like a lower-case
L
. So he spelled “gutfeld,” as “gutfeld.” And if you look to the right, you’ll see he isn’t verified and doesn’t have a long history of tweeting. Or followers. He has a handful of followers and a handful of tweets—all of them nonsense (or more nonsensical than mine). It was obviously a dummy account.

Anyway, that didn’t concern Back2Stonewall. He boasted that he had screen grabs of my offensive tweet, which he claims had been taken down by me; but oddly he left out the entire screen grab, which would have shown the very low tweet/follower numbers.

Why did he do that? I don’t know. Maybe, in haste, he didn’t see the whole screen. Or maybe, because the story was just too good to be true, it didn’t matter if it wasn’t.

I contacted a lawyer, a high-powered gentleman with an office near the perfume counter at Macy’s. Then I contacted the Back2Stonewall guy and the dude at Raw Story. The blogger at Raw
Story acted fast, and fixed it, and thanked me. The Back2Stonewall website never responded to me. So I hit him up on Twitter.

He reacted differently from the Raw Story guy—saying he wasn’t sure if my story was true, and besides, evil right-wingers don’t verify stuff either (if only that were true, my life would be a lot simpler). It infuriated me. Instead of looking at the facts, he adopted a stereotypical, ideological stance, basically saying, “Yeah, it’s not true, but since I don’t like you, I don’t care.”

I tweeted to everyone that this was a hoax, and also engaged the Stonewall fellow, asking him to put aside ideology and do the right thing. I sent him the facts. I posted the screen grabs of the fake account. But I could tell it was hard for him—he wanted so badly for me to be a right-wing homophobe, so much so that he couldn’t let go of the lie. It was like trying to deprogram a Raëlian who tweets.

His jab at my network revealed something else: That a lie is permissible if it serves a greater good. Because I work for “the enemy,” it doesn’t matter if I really didn’t post that offensive tweet, because I’m evil anyway. I’m sure lefties think that I probably agree with the sentiment of that tweet, even if I didn’t write it. Despite the fact that I’ve been called that very epithet. By the left, on Twitter.

I filed a complaint with Twitter, and monitored Twitter and Google to see where the story was going. After some time, Back2Stonewall retracted the story, saying also that they sincerely regretted publishing it. But embroidered in the apology was a nonapology—that while B2S was embarrassed by being fooled, I should be embarrassed by my followers. B2S also tweeted, sarcastically, what a “great f*cking day” it had been—as if he were the victim in all this.

Fact is, it is sad that I have to feel grateful Raw Story and Stonewall retracted the phony story. I should feel outrage that they ran with it to begin with. I mean, how hard is it to contact me? Google my name, and you end up at my website, the Daily Gut. I’m on Twitter! I respond. I am that lonely.

Perhaps they chose not to contact me because they didn’t think they needed to—clearly, someone like me would say something that bigoted on Twitter, so why bother verifying? Also, if I denied it, there goes the story. And besides, if I wasn’t guilty of this, so what? I’m guilty of so much else. I’ve got it coming, you know (which I do, but for reasons more related to a spring break in the 1990s than for what these knuckleheads contend).

Like I said, the blind acceptance of the story is worse than the fraudulent tweet. And, really, that’s why I’m writing this now—to explain to a few of you why this is a big deal. If I hadn’t jumped on this accusation first thing, I would have been destroyed, outnumbered by every left-wing website feeding off a prior link to that original website, building a tower of proof that I am a homophobe who should be fired. I feared that the fake account would disappear and then I would really be screwed.