Kathy Griffin learned a hard lesson in weaponized outrage, by John Podhoretz.
What a time we’ve had with Kathy Griffin. Let’s take a nostalgic look back — first to the image of Griffin holding up the president’s severed head. Then to her panicked apology. Then to CNN and Squatty Potty (don’t ask) severing its ties with her amid complaints from Trump family members. And finally to that gloriously deranged press conference in which a sobbing Griffin claimed she was being “censored” and that Donald Trump “broke me.” …
Total elapsed time from severed head to “he broke me”: Three. Whole. Days.
The old days:
Pre-internet, there was no such thing as a viral campaign because all such campaigns had to be hand-stitched and painstakingly mounted.
In 1989, a housewife named Terry Rakolta was so appalled by the raunchy sitcom “Married . . .with Children” that she went and contacted 42 advertisers to ask why they were providing commercial support to a show she considered horribly offensive.
Rakolta got results; a few advertisers suspended their ad buys on the show. But these responses took weeks and months to accumulate and time has a way of cooling off controversies. And a year later, Entertainment Weekly was reporting that the boycott’s effects had petered out. “Free speech,” EW intoned, “is safe from Terry Rakolta.”
Rakolta’s campaign took an immense amount of labor. Today, efforts to destroy careers or force people to kowtow to heated opinion require nothing of those who engage in them but 140 characters or a retweet or an endlessly shared Facebook post. …
Now, outrage has been weaponized:
Anyone can join any crusade at literally no cost mentally, emotionally, logistically, or financially. … One false move and your career is dead.
And in three months, half the people who carried virtual pitchforks in the social-media lynch mob won’t even be able to remember what had so angered them in the first place. After all, there are new outrages every day, and new scalps to claim.
The right has to copy the left’s behavior on this, or the left will never learn.
ISIS condemns Kathy Griffin for cultural appropriation, by SaltySam.
The self-proclaimed Islamic State has issued a statement condemning self-proclaimed comedian Kathy Griffin, accusing her of “cultural appropriation” after she posed for a photograph with a mock severed head of President Donald Trump.
The group, which has been protective of its brand ever since taking over vast swaths of Iraq and Syria and establishing itself as the premier beheading agency in the Middle East, said it was deeply disturbed by Griffin’s “ignorant and offensive” use of a “sacred Islamic State tradition.”
Kathy Griffin Thinks Comedy Should Go All Out on ‘President Piece of Shit’ Donald Trump, by Sara Levine. Kathy Griffin in December 2016: “You know a lot of comics are going to go hard for Donald, my edge is that I’ll go direct for Barron. I’m going to get in ahead of the game.”
