The Washington Post has a thoughtful piece today about the shocking, terrifying moments of Monday Night Football, where Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collided with another player and collapsed on the field. Many people who watched the game live and saw the fateful sequence of actions feared for Hamlin’s life right then and there.
Some people, however, took it upon themselves to start spreading rumors about what could have caused Hamlin’s collapse, other than the body-to-body collision with another player. Conspiracy theorists immediately began a Twitter whisper campaign about how this was somehow the fault of COVID-19 vaccination. Some intimated that a truth would be revealed.
This is ghoulish, as many have pointed out. It’s also by design.
It’s the same thing these rumormongers did just as the news broke of Paul Pelosi’s attack. While Mr. Pelosi was on the operating room table, heartless QAnon types began tweeting absolutely bonkers “updates” and unfounded speculations. I’d never seen anything like it, and it truly anguished me as to what that type of twisting could do to the consumers of that depraved framing. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out that picture of men’s underwear overlaid by a hammer. A Halloween “joke.” Can’t we liberals get the joke?
Gaslighting? Yes. But consider that, to the people following DJT JR, his words signal to them that they should take it as funny. Literally, ha-ha, that guy got smashed in the head.
With Damar Hamlin, a sports figure whose “attack” (cardiac arrest is an attack, but not in the same category as attempted murder) occurred live in front of an audience of millions, the Q recruiters saw an opportunity, another avenue for CT-mongering. Make no mistake: Hamlin is just a lever, a tool for these extremists to draw more people over to their side. He’s a punchline.
The reason why they attached themselves so much to this big-ticket news item, this event, this experience that all of these fans went through and shared at that moment is still raw and greatly traumatic. This is the window, if ever there was one, to imprint upon your Tweet-reading audience any associations you may want to pair with that overwhelming emotional response.
I don’t know why else these people would be doing this particular type of rumormongering just after emotionally charged occurrences. If someone has another explanation, please share it with me, because what I see—at least twice now, which may indicate the beginning of a pattern—is that these people are saying things that are widely known to be situationally out-of-bounds: neither is it the right time, nor is it the right place. It’s just not done. It is such a breach of social etiquette that there must be something more substantial here, because otherwise the normal rounds of shaming would have influenced them to take another tack.
To these extremists, it is more important to lure people over to their side. They’ll take the side eye, the shade, even the outright lambasting by others. They mean to weather any criticism in order to interfere with how people are relating to this incident.
Last year I wrote a bit about conspiracy theories and how they may affect cognitive processes. One researcher, Włodzisław Duch of Poland, lent this insight:
A rather common situation is due to the rapid freezing of high neuroplasticity. Initial uncertainty of important information (there are rumors that something strange or dangerous has happened) leads to confusion and strong anxiety (perhaps the news are not true, who knows what has really happened). High emotions and stress leads to release of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators from the brain stem nuclei, through the ascending pathways, activating serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine systems. In this period of strong arousal increased brain plasticity allows for rapid learning. It is not yet clear what information is worth encoding, so all facts and gossips are memorized.
The Monday Night Football game itself already supplied a charged atmosphere for viewers, and the tragic events that unfolded left many fans bewildered and frightened. It is exactly that soup of emotion that the extremists desire, because in such a heightened state of uncertainty, a person will look for someone who is able to frame the situation more clearly for them. They will actively seek this information precisely to find what researchers call cognitive closure. Conservatives are particularly susceptible to this need for certainty.
The ‘trust agents’ to which these people turn mean to claim humor as a shield. This is a strange strategy to me (though ‘strategy’ might overly imply planning—it’s a mode of communication, a genre choice, a stance).
Richard Hofstadter famously described the radical right of the ‘50s and ‘60s as employing the paranoid style, and we surely see that in place today (Rep. Jamie Raskin just two weeks ago characterized MAGA as a “paranoid cult”). But the far-right has acquired this overlay of ironic humor (which, if you’re not RW, can come across as hypocrisy, depending on the context), and they’ve tried to add in edginess (as in edgelord humor). It’s beyond mere paranoia.
It’s a cauldron, a mess.
I think the followers reach for the use of humor to cope, as a defense mechanism. It is possible (is it possible?) that some of the QAnon and MAGA members feel some guilt when they see or hear their supposed thought leaders express such absolute depravity; and to suppress their own guilt and to continue to be able to go along with the movement as a whole they join in the group laughter.
They don’t see, though, that they are coarsening their own inner selves. That laughter is corrosive. Might as well have swallowed the bleach that their leader exhorted them to do some years ago.
I never would have noticed this strand of thought underlying the RW extremist position had I not come across a clip of Dave Rubin, a personality in the RW media silo. I don’t follow Rubin and would have continued along those lines were it not for a segment on Sam Seder’s Majority Report which highlighted Rubin extolling the usefulness of humor for the conservative cause. This was from November 1, just days after the hammer attack on Mr. Pelosi.
(Cued to 4:02)
This is not about Twitter minutiae [speaking of Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform]. But this is about, we can expose the nonsense through comedy and an even playing field. Right? We have not had an even playing field. We’ve had a dysregulated playing field, where we see things in reality but then the algorithmic depression, the bots, the trolls, all these things make it seem like what we’re seeing in front of our eyes is not real. That seems to be changing.
(My emphasis.)
I’ve been working up to an essay on MAGA nihilistic humor, to bring more of a technical angle to the enterprise of comedy and how that affects us socially. But it’s clear, even aside from what that analysis would show, that the nihilism and cynicism that permeates the MAGA movement and moves the QAnoners are what drives this new impetus on the right to laugh at someone else’s life-or-death situation.
What really is the difference between the above and this?
Carson Wolf said that to be funny.