Political parties police their insurgent and dissident supporters. Since the 1980s there’s been a split, that still exist today in various forms, between a consultant class of Beltway libertarians who often brown nose the liberal establishment, and wilder and more populist (and often less sophisticated) libertarians who don’t. Republicans have developed their own version of this split, between the RINO consultant class and the Trump populists. Democrats are overdue for the same civil war, though the massive capital assets of the Democratic establishment—almost all media, the intelligence agencies and other government bureaucracies, lawfare, academia, billionaire donors, political consultants—ensure that Bernie or other internal dissidents and decentralists will never take power, and will end up defecting to other parties.
Recently conservative women, led by the liveliest of their writers, Peachy Keenan, policed a not-so-well-thought-out venture, a conservative cheesecake calendar featuring a number of young conservative stars, including the heroic Riley Gaines. Those involved were convicted in the court of conservative opinion as having bad judgment, though no real decision was reached on the severity of the crime.
Now another somewhat similar crime is being committed. The comic Alex Stein, on some part of Glenn Beck’s Blaze media platform, hosted a segment where he fed a banana to a largely unclothed black man. Conservatives (Keenan, Erick Erickson, and others) wasted no time in decrying the prurient nature of this segment as something with which no conservative should be associated. (Keenan, much more pop culturally literate than most of the right, referenced the brilliant filthy joke The Aristocrats, which is much funnier than Alex Stein’s work, but is equally inappropriate for forums that think they are promoting family values.)
Most people will think Stein’s bit is homophobic and a few may realize that he seems to be trying to copy the persistent homosexual innuendo of uber-successful Greg Gutfeld and his late night Fox show that now dominates all other late night comedy shows in the ratings. Gutfeld’s continual gay banter is a form of self-degradation, much like the comedy of Minnie Pearl, Phyllis Diller, or Joan Rivers, who neutralized any criticism of their looks by talking about how unattractive they were before anyone else could, and thereby also dominated the audience.
Gutfeld, who’s probably 5’8”, not conventionally good-looking, and, the one time I met him at a Reason magazine event was wearing a lavender cashmere sweater, neutralizes any criticism that he isn’t manly enough by just making gay jokes about himself. (He’s married to a woman, I’ve no idea if he’s bisexual.) This isn’t new stuff. Milton Berle used to dress as a woman for his act while simultaneously bedding Hollywood’s leading actresses right and left, some of whom were curious about his famously enormous cock.
A strange element of the Stein video, of which Keenan and the others may be innocent is the “race play.” If one plows through a lot of Grindr type gay “dating” ads on apps like Manhunt or Adam4Adam you will find ads by black men who want to pretend to be slaves being raped by a white Plantation master. Shocking in a way since the same apps and websites are heavy with ads telling conservatives, Republicans, Trump supporters etc. not to reply to the advertiser, or ads by “progressive” white men writing that they will only date men of color. It’s a kind of rape fantasy, not a 50 shades of gray but a 50 shades of black and white. Curiously, I’ve never seen an ad by a gay Jewish man (or Armenian or native American etc.) asking for race play with someone dressed as Hitler.
I think many of Alex Stein’s public stunts—for example confronting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—are amusing. But from the little clip of this fruit fellatio on Twitter, unless it has some more interesting context, this isn’t one of them.