Something terrible happened to Piers Morgan yesterday. Triggered by a small piece of logic uttered by his guest, Natasha Hausdorff, Morgan completely lost his bearings.
That’s not the terrible thing that happened to Piers, though. The terrible thing that happened was a lot of people who viewed Morgan’s spectacular public meltdown commented that Morgan was behaving inappropriately and that he should grow up. Morgan was aghast at this “concerted effort to silence me.” Poor Piers.
Of all the bandwagoners capitalizing on the monetary value of yelling at Jews on TV, Piers at least occasionally abuses anti-Semites on his show, too. He’s the host of a Yelling Show, and that’s what Yelling Show hosts do. Piers Morgan understands the assignment, even if that’s the only thing he understands.
He doesn’t, for example, understand what “concerted” means nor does he know what it is to be “silenced.” According to Social Blade, Piers has averaged a gain of several thousand YouTube subscribers a day over the past month, a healthy rate of addition for someone who already gets millions of eyeballs on his content. And yet, he tells his 8 million X followers that no one can hear him scream.
The beauty of free speech is that Piers Morgan has every right to banshee at Jewish women and the rest of us have every right to say “boy, that was weird.” What Piers wants you to believe is that Mossad agents are hiding under his bed and stealing one sock out of every pair he puts in the laundry.
This tends to be the stock response from a corner of the internet known as the “Manosphere.” I wrote about these fellows in the May issue of COMMENTARY. They are united in their possession of an inferiority complex: some because they feel they’ve been mistreated by women, some because they are not yet the top dog at their gym, and some because the Jews are God’s chosen and this makes them feel like the unfavored child. Whatever the specifics, these influencers blame the Jews and have become compulsive anti-Semites.
One of those who has well earned his inferiority complex is Dave Smith. Smith’s highest aspiration is to forever be a sidekick to cleverer podcasters, so he can often be seen metaphorically shining the shoes of Piers Morgan or Joe Rogan while they interview scary Israel-defenders whom they are afraid to be alone with, such as Natasha Hausdorff or Douglas Murray. Smith will take to Twitter to echo the victimhood of whichever manchild he’s following around that day; naturally, he laments “what’s happening with” Piers Morgan, specifically that he is being “viciously smeared for the crime of speaking out against something unconscionably wrong.” Good boy, Dave.
Smith has also seen his popularity rise, not fall, since he adopted his current obsession with Jews. That’s the joke here: Hating on Jews is a lucrative business, which makes the whining about “silencing” difficult to stomach.
Recently the anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist Glenn Greenwald had his privacy violated with the leaking of a private video. Manospherian Ian Carroll declared his own paranoia justified: “The Glen Greenwald scandal just proves the point. Israels modern image is built on blackmail.” (Carroll’s understanding of the concept of “blackmail” leaves something to be desired.)
The one kernel of truth at the heart of these dark fantasies of being undermined by Jews is that we defenders of Jewish rights are often mean to our antagonists. We lose patience with ignorant people who act only in bad faith. We refuse to pretend that these posers have even the occasional intelligent thought. I cannot promise that we will be nicer to the intellectual benchwarmers of the tinfoil brigade. But nobody is silencing them. Get a life.
