By Derek Hunter | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Colin E. Braley
Catchphrases used to be a big thing, the pathway to success in 1970s television, actually. “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis” and “Dyn-O-Mite!” still echo across reruns to this day. They have no meaning to audiences now, but the studio audiences at the time went absolutely crazy every time they were spoken, and antique shops and eBay are littered with Fonzie merchandise with “Aaayyyy!” written all over it. It’s nearly impossible to explain to my 6- and 5-year-olds why any of these phrases so excited people back then, I barely understand it myself. But the days of catchphrases are long gone, and each burned themselves out even while the concept was still hot because that’s what happens to things that are overused. It’s the lesson of “The boy who cried wolf,” and it’s finally happening with the left’s screaming “RACISM” about literally everything.
Racism still exists, of course – Democrats, who defended slavery, fought a war to protect it, then created segregation and Jim Crow laws to keep as much of the mindset of slavery in place as possible, then shifted to segregation as a good thing and cultural appropriation (my God, they’re awful people), are still around and still benefit from it. Democrats never changed their objective, they only changed their tactics.
And those tactics involved screaming racism every time someone disagreed with them and their policy objectives.
That screaming used to matter, it really did. People would pay attention when someone was accused of racism and the accused would vigorously defend themselves. Now, not so much.
It’s not a day that ends in “y” if some leftist isn’t crying about how something or other is racist. Working out, eating healthy, merit, sports, you name it and it’s been accused of being part of some weird, powerful white conspiracy to control everyone who isn’t white.
Of course, this is the fantasy world the left lives in and it is now being seen as such by the average person. The only people who care about cries of racism now are other people inclined to see racism everywhere; in other words, other leftists.
Outside of that insulated circle is the very definition of deaf ears.
This won’t change how the left operates, it’s all they have. But that circle will continue to shrink until it collapses on itself like a dying star.
Nowhere is this coming collapse more obvious than in the world of print. People will always watch TV news, so MSNBC will go on for a while – and the entire industry has managed to adjust to shrinking audiences by claiming that, while they’re dwindling, they are still better educated and have more money. Ad buyers pay more of MSNBC and CNN because they’re leftists too and declared their audiences to be more valuable. In print, that doesn’t apply.
Book publishers are overpaying for left-wing garbage because they reflect what’s happening on Twitter, but Twitter isn’t real life. Millions of dollars set on fire for lesbian fiction and biographies of people celebrated online who generate zero interest in real life. It couldn’t happen to better people.
News outlets are killing themselves in an attempt to be relevant to a shrinking audience. “Douchebagging harder” is not going to endear you to an audience leaving you because you’re a douchebag. Yet, that seems like the business model of so many outlets now.
Deadspin, which is supposed to be a sports blog, seems to have instructed their bloggers to find things to complain about politically. At some point, sports media was overrun by people who hate sports, who are now seeking to destroy it. Attacking a kid for supporting his favorite NFL team is now acceptable. How many editors had to sign off on that piece about Holden Armenta before it was published? Did none of them think to look for more pictures? Did none of them think it might not be a good idea to attack a kid? Did they entertain the idea that the only jackasses in this equation were them?
Nope. Nor did they consider that he could be Native American. They just saw an opportunity to cry racism. I hope the kid sues and ruins the website the way Gawker was killed.
The left is made up with people who bring a bag of chips to a potluck meal and won’t stop bitching about the food everyone else actually made. It can’t last forever, they will stop being invited.
No one is paying attention to these cries anymore because they’ve beaten the catchphrase into the ground. Soon, the whole thing will collapse on itself. But be ready, because before it finally dies, its death throes are going to be epic and violent. Get your popcorn ready.
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RELATED ARTICLE
Shock And Awe Becomes Shrug And Yawn
By Kurt Schlichter | Townhall.com
AP Photo/Robin Rayne
Have you noticed that the stupid things leftists do today just aren’t quite resonating as hard as they used to? We’ve got a lot of stupid things going on. Right now, society is a giant festival of stupidity, and yet the kind of indignant extreme stupidity by professional pinkos in culture, government, and academia that used to drive us to distraction lately just inspires yawns. The nonsense is not changing us. It’s not altering us. It’s just identifying its purveyors as freaking weirdos.
This means we are winning.
For instance, Vice, which is apparently still a thing despite bankruptcy, just put out an article titled “100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating For People of Color” This screed is one of those provocative things woke people say that we’re supposed to care about, but we can’t even start caring about it anymore. This stuff has gone from unexpected and edgy to merely tiresome. I am speaking as someone who continually frustrates people of color – just ask my Latinx wife – and there actually probably about 1000 things I could do to make life less frustrating for people of the whole rainbow of colors. But I’m not going to do any of them. And I’m not going to get outraged that a bunch of weirdo race hustlers demand that I do. The point is not even that Vice contends that the job of every person of power pallor is to somehow cater to the whims of sophomore malcontents. It’s that no one cares if there’s an article about it anymore. You can’t provoke someone you have put to sleep.
We’ve been there. We’ve done that. And it’s boring.
Another example is the current idiocy in Britain over Elagabalus. Elagabalus was a weirdo Roman emperor who tried to pretend he was a girl and also a boy and who pretty much had sex with anything that moved, so he was generally a pretty moderate San Francisco Democrat in a toga. Now some museum in Britain is insisting that Elagabalus, who has been dead even longer than Joe Biden has been alive, if that’s possible, should be referred to as trans and with female pronouns. At the threshold, I think it’s good that we’re referring to Roman emperors at all because thinking about Rome is cool, and it’s the mark of a normal male. But the idea that we should somehow refer to a dead dude as a chick a couple thousand years later is pretty transparently stupid and once would have spun us up into a tizzy. But instead, this would-be imbroglio is just stupid and we’re just going to ignore it, and literally no one other than a few weirdo pseudo-historians and some bad teeth backwater of England are going to lose sleep over his pronouns.
Speaking of Britain, which we shouldn’t bother doing because it’s becoming a completely ridiculous little fascist state, another historian just came out with the notion that the black plague primarily affected women of color. Of course, the color palette in Britain a few centuries ago ranged from butt-white to Romney Family Reunion. Whatever. This is another idiocy designed to spark our outrage, but it doesn’t work anymore. It only reaffirms our convictions regarding the absolute stupidity of the left.
Welcome to Yawnsville. Population: Them.
Look at other things are going on. The bizarre campaign to mutilate vulnerable children in the name of gender identity is losing support. We’re not shocked anymore that some dude pretends to be a lady and conquers. We’re fed up with it. The same is true of the book banning nonsense of the left. No one’s outraged that the left is lying about us wanting to ban books because we all know they are just distracting from their desire to serve pornography to kids. Instead, we are going to school board meetings, which makes us worse than Hamas.
We have gotten used to this kind of crap and instead of being wrapped up in outrage we’re taking steps to fight back. We are beyond being shocked. We are beyond being scandalized. We are tired of this, and that fact deprives them of one of their greatest weapons – the ability to rile us up. It is essential for them to be transgressive, to forcefully blast through our social conventions and blow our bourgeois minds. That’s what the edgy left has been trying to do for centuries. But it can’t anymore. We have outrage fatigue.
We’re not going to argue with them. We are not going to rend our garments about society going to hell – it’s already there. We’re just going to stop them. And we’re going to stop them at the ballot box. That’s one of the great things that’s happening now. Normal people of all races and genders and religions and ethnicities are coming together with a common realization that these Marxist nimrods are a bunch of freaks, and that we need to quit getting fixated on their antics and start fixating on breaking them so we can take back our country. And take it back we will. Give us time. We’re going to win, in large part, because these people are stupid and boring.
