On Wednesday, Laura Ingraham said this on Twitter to Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg:
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY
- Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018
The reason Laura Ingraham said this is that she’s a fucking asshole. While acknowledging that feels necessary, it doesn’t tell the full story; because the fact is, Laura Ingraham is one of the most popular right-wing talk show hosts in America today not in spite of being a fucking asshole, but specifically because of it. Her job and career are built around being a fucking asshole, and doing so in a way that extends permission to her audience to be fucking assholes as well. Like so many on the right, she actually demands that everyone act like an asshole, and mocks anyone who doesn’t.
You’ll notice that I didn’t lead with whether she was right or wrong; that’s because it doesn’t much matter. Like the rest of the right wing opinion industry, she’s a bullshitter: truth can sometimes be useful, and falsehoods sometimes regrettable; but either way, it’s fundamentally incidental to what she says. Whether something is true or false is of purely instrumental rather than intrinsic value. What’s truly important — the bottom line — is being a fucking asshole.
Examining the substance of what she said is actually a useful way of illustrating this; because while it was partially false, it was actually mostly true. It’s apparently the case that David Hogg was rejected by multiple colleges, although Ingraham got the GPA slightly wrong (it was 4.2 rather than 4.1). Additionally, while Hogg wasn’t happy about this, her characterization of him as “whining,” while bad and stupid and gratuitously mean, is also clearly an opinion, as opposed to a lie.
But a much more important question is: so what? What possible difference does it make to anyone in the country other than high schooler David Hogg and his family that, like the majority of high schoolers applying to college, he was rejected by one or more universites, and that this did not thrill him? Does it have any bearing on the relative merit of the gun regulations Hogg supports? But then why did one of the most high-profile conservatives in America feel the need to publicize this?
The answer, naturally, is that it’s of no consequence whatsoever. Any truth in her bullshit tweet was incidental, and only there to provide a thin veneer of justification for her real purpose: being a fucking asshole. And if it wasn’t this, it’d be something else. Today she’s mocking a teenaged school shooting survivor because she disagrees with his politics; before that, she was performing Nazi salutes onstage at the 2016 Republican National Convention to trigger the libs; tomorrow she’ll do something else equal parts vicious and horrific*. But please rest assured that these three things are true, now and forever, unto the end of time: death, taxes, and Laura Ingraham finding some bullshit reason to be a fucking asshole.
It’s not just Laura Ingraham. For years now the constant droning buzz from the right has been of this same provenance: the old firm of people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, sure, but also Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson and God help us Tomi Lahren and the list goes on and on. To those still wondering why the Atlantic recently hired Kevin Williamson, let me posit that they hired him less for his trenchant analysis of class and gender politics than for his attitude and approach: that is to say, he’s a tremendous fucking asshole, all the time, and therefore “interesting.” And if you want to know why conservatives think that Donald Trump “tells it like it is,” I promise you that it’s not because not one of the most dishonest people in the country has suddenly started telling the truth, either occasionally or really ever. It’s because truth is of no real value to Trump’s audience; and what they’re really approving of is the fact that he’s a screeching, unrepentant, utterly remorseless fucking asshole.
So, sure: it’s absolutely correct that every decent human being should react to Ingraham’s tweet by observing that, I mean, wow: this person is a fucking asshole. But it’s also important not to forget that assholes like Ingraham — really all of these repellent ghouls on the right; these braying jackasses — have risen to prominence specifically because they never fail to tell their audience exactly what they want to hear: that, actually, being a fucking asshole is good. And so despite the fact that they dress up every day like pundits or analysts, this — providing their audience an excuse for being a fucking asshole — is their actual job. And if you want to understand this moment in American history, there are worse places to start than Ingraham’s tweet.
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* = Like I said. (Added 2018–08–17)
