Don’t agree with someone’s opinion? Insult them. Tease them.
Don’t agree with someone’s opinion? Riot and attack a college campus, forcing a speaker to flee from their own event.
Don’t agree with someone’s opinion? Stick your middle finger into the air and tell them to fuck off.
This is the world we’re living in at present. This is modern day politics.
Jim Jefferies had two options when he appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher alongside Piers Morgan.
He could have actually listened to what Piers Morgan had to say.
He could have heard his points that obviously he held such contempt for.
Then, he could have actually engaged with Morgan.
He could have debated him.
He could have picked his points apart – offered a counter argument and, more importantly, tried to persuade the people watching of a different way of thinking.
Or, or… he could have just roared ‘fuck off’ twice, sat back and took a victory sip, revelling in the applause.
Video via Real Time with Bill Maher
That was Jefferies’ best swing at a response. That was the best way Jefferies could articulate his resistance. That was the best way for any reasonable person to behave in that situation.
Was. It. Balls.
He was pandering to the gallery, playing to the crowd, and they cheered and laughed and banged their hands together without realising that the thing they’re applauding is exactly the problem.
This is why the left are losing the debate, because somewhere along the way the left has lost the art of argument, or at least lost the patience to do it properly.
We’re living through a time when everything is turned up to 11, so you have to be loud to be heard, you have to be aggressive to be seen, but the loudest voices are not always the most reasoned.
We’ve become so incensed with these people that we don’t even bother to engage anymore. We’re so offended by opposing viewpoints that we brand anyone that disagrees with us as ‘right wing’ and dismiss them as radical and irrational.
We’ve become so desperate that JK Rowling says that Jim Jefferies’ two-word surrender was Piers Morgan being called out for his bullshit on live TV. Is that really the best we can do?
The way the narrative followed on Saturday talked about Morgan being ‘owned’, you’d swear that they had actually achieved something when the truth is that nobody they needed to listen to them gave a toss.
Nobody really bothered to take Piers on when he said it wasn’t a Muslim ban, when Trump himself said it was a Muslim ban. The idea was flirted with but then fuck off was preferred.
Jefferies or anyone on that panel could’ve just quoted some statistics on how guns are a bigger threat to civilians in the United States in recent times than Islamic terror and how the lack of change by the last administration – and now this administration – on gun laws is worrying. Morgan would’ve agreed.
Instead, all we got was some disgraceful comparison between the new president and Adolf Hitler, the same man who plotted and executed the most brutal systematic mass murder that this world has ever and will ever see.
All we get is overreactions nowadays and no one actually stops to ask why Donald Trump – Donald bloody Trump – won a fair and free democratic election. No one asks why this keeps happening.
Why is there a Tory-majority government in the United Kingdom? How on earth did Brexit even come close to happening?
We’ve become so disillusioned that we are now the intolerant ones screaming insults at anyone on another side of the fence. It’s almost a race to call someone evil or racist when they express a nationalist or a conservative way of looking at things.
Donald Trump is merely following through on the same promises that got him elected. A lot of Americans are happy about what he’s doing – in both his immigration policy and his attitude to the economy – whether you like it or not and whether you’re offended or not. That’s something we have to deal with.
He won because people voted for him and, so far, the most audible response coming from the left is hysteria, protests, and even riots.
Then, of course, you have people talking about how many votes he won compared to Hillary Clinton. As if there are different levels of being president: Yeah, he won but if he won by that amount then he really would be president. As if all this hasn’t been defined and respected in the constitution. As if all this even matters anymore.
Through all these unhelpful and undignified retorts, we’re just pushing more and more people away. Young folk see talks getting shut down and they ask why. They see apathy and broken promises. They see someone like Piers Morgan getting shouted and applauded over the top of and they do not like the way culture is changing. The way it’s suddenly okay to bark and howl at someone in a political debate – as long as you’re on the right side of that debate.
They see the race to be offended, the mass overreactions, the labels and then they find themselves suppressed into silence, afraid to even offer a reason why someone might be thinking like they are.
They feel like they can’t talk about these things anymore and, worse than that, they’re not being given the platform to talk anymore because now, more often than not, when we’re confronted with someone with right wing views, we just call them something or tell them to fuck off.
We never just listen to their thoughts. We don’t talk to them and convince them otherwise. We shut them down. We ignore them and we laugh at them.
So they wait for the ballot boxes. Then they have their say. Then they fight back.
Then they win.
And it’s all our faults.
