It's cliché to point out hypocrisy
But I'm going to do it anyway
I’m looking over my notes in a frenzy. I’m checking Goodreads, I’m checking Letterboxd, I’m scrolling back through old Tweets and, yes, it looks to be the case: I didn’t consume any media this week.
That’s kind of a funny phrase because you know that can’t possibly be true. Both in the sense that media is a really wide term (the back of a shampoo bottle is a form of “media”), but also in the sense that media is omnipresent. There is no not consuming media now. Daily life is all mediated by media. Long live the new flesh, etc.
But no, I didn’t read any books and I didn’t watch any movies. The music I listened to was mostly just stuff I already have written about and don’t have anything new to say (Hey everyone should listen to Estorvo, Budang, and El Shirota).
We’ll see what I can pull together here. I promise to consume more media next week, so that I can regurgitate that media into nice written form for you to consume like a baby bird.
This is the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about everything I’ve been watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
I dropped a new episode of Fruitless! It’s a free one. Caleb, Kelli, and I discussed a 90s Australian kids adventure film that Caleb and I were obsessed with as kids: The Real Macaw. It’s about a parrot, voiced by John Goodman, helping a kid find some treasure. You can find that Fruitless episode here.
And that’s it. Officially, that is the only piece of media I have to write about. Well, let’s check the news. Hopefully there’s something there for me to write about.
Weird sex freaks
Yeah, alright, let’s do this. This is the morning of sex scandals.
The big one is Mark Robinson. If you haven’t read anything about this yet, I need to assure you that I’m not making it up and that this isn’t a joke, because it’s going to sound like I’m joking.
Yes, Republican gubernatorial candidate for North Carolina, Mark Robinson, was a frequent user of a porn forum called Nude Africa from 2008 to 2012, where he would go on strange rants about MLK Jr. being a communist, identify himself as a “black Nazi,” and come up with a racial insult for MLK that he would use if the KKK would let him join.
In particular, he had a strong affinity for trans porn, despite—yes, of course—him being rabid transphobe.
Once this account and it’s associated email address were linked to Robinson, we also got the revelation that he had an account on Ashley Madison, the dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouses that crashed into the spotlight after a huge data breach in 2015 outed a number of prominent celebrities and religious or political figures.
This is the most wild story. The others are a bit more predictable.
RFK Jr. had an alleged relationship with Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine while she was covering his campaign. She is now on leave. As I said, this one is just predictable. It’s frankly the most tame story about RFK Jr. to come out in the last few months. The fact that this story doesn’t have anything to do with an animal cadavar automatically prevents it from being the most absurd thing to come out of that campaign. This guy had a dead worm in his brain, if you remember.
This morning we were also met with new documents in a civil lawsuit against Matt Gaetz providing three eyewitness accounts of Gaetz partying with nude teenage girls. This is part of a larger, ongoing legal battle around allegations that Gaetz has been involved in sex trafficking.
On top of all this, Robinson’s connection to an Ashley Madison account lead journalist, Lauren Windsor, to finally verify that an email address revealed during the 2015 data breach belonged to Christopher Rufo, the chief architect of the Critical Race Theory panic a few years back. Hey, I wrote a piece making fun of him at the time.
He also pedaled much of the “groomer” panic against the LGBTQ community over the last few years, and you better believe he hopped on the Haitian migrants panic by sharing a video of some African men grilling a chicken to his Substack and insisting it was a cat.
Of course, Rufo is married to a Thai-American woman who entered the country illegally in the 1980s, according to a Facebook post from 2018 that he has tried to scrub from the internet. So the guy who is causing perpetual media hysteria around undocumented migrants and sexual degeneracy was likely cheating on his wife who was an undocument migrant.
Pointing out hypocrisy is cliché. More importantly, it’s a losing game. The amount of socially conservative figures who ended up embroiled in sex scandals throughout my lifetime is innumerable, and yet it doesn’t seem to stop people from supporting these figures and looking past their simple “mistakes.”
Whenever this comes up, I think about a Matt Walsh piece made in 2015, in light of the Josh Duggar scandal. This is tangentially related, as Josh was one of the big names in the Ashley Madison data breach, pouring fuel on the fire since he had also been accused of molesting his sisters around the same time.
Walsh came to Josh’s defense with a piece he has since disowned, entitled, “The Duggars Aren’t Hypocrites. Progressives Are.”
I think about this piece a lot, not simply because I like rubbing Walsh’s face in his own shit (but, let’s be clear, I love doing that). I think about it because it articulated a sentiment I’ve heard frequently from evangelical Christians whenever one of their guys is caught up in allegations of sexual misconduct, which inevitably lead to accusation of hypocrisy. Here’s that sentiment.
From the way liberals always react in these situations, you'd think that a Christian committing a sin somehow delegitimizes the faith itself, but that's not quite accurate.
They would indeed be correct in their assessment if the central tenet of the Christian faith was that all believers in Christ are without sin or blemish. But far from that being a doctrine of the religion, it is actually the precise opposite of what Christians believe. None of us -- not the Duggars, not anyone -- claim that a faith in Jesus bestows perfect holiness on the faithful. It is because of our sinful nature that we need Him. When we sin, we do not disprove that thesis; we underscore it.
A Christian failing to live up to his faith does not make him a hypocrite. It makes him cowardly, perhaps. It makes him selfish. It makes him flawed. It makes him sinful. It makes him any number of things, but not necessarily a hypocrite. A hypocrite is an insincere person who misrepresents his own beliefs. But saying that you believe something is wrong, only to turn around and do it, doesn't prove that you never held that belief. It just proves that you were too weak to stand by it.
I'm not diminishing Josh Duggar's infractions. As I said, he did something very bad. Horrendous. Disturbing. Evil. These were major sins. But Christians commit major sins sometimes, which is the whole reason why Jesus died on the cross.
This is a sentiment that a part of me still, gut-reaction, agrees with. Yes, the Christian faith says that everyone is a sinner and needs grace, so it’s actually not against the “Christian faith” to point to a Christian doing a bad thing. Sure.
Of course, the Christian faith is not what is under attack here, and that’s part of the sly game that people like Walsh play. They very intentionally blur the line between the Christian faith and the right wing political project. Of course, evangelicals don’t believe that liberals or leftists or people who support gay marriage can be Christians, so they don’t feel the need to clarify this.
Although, it is funny because there are numerous strains of conservative Christianity that absolutely do believe that “a faith in Jesus bestows perfect holiness on the faithful.” The Holiness movement in the 19th century played a huge role in producing the evangelical politics we see today,1 and Eastern Orthodoxy (which accounts for 11% of Christians worldwide) places heavy emphasis on the concept of theosis, while Roman Catholics (who account for 48% of Christians worldwide) have the concept of divinization.
Walsh is equating a Calvinist or Reformed notion of Christianity with all of Christianity, which is dishonest. But I tend to lean that way theologically, so I’ll grant him that no, belief in Christ doesn’t bestow perfect holiness. Nevertheless, the Bible does make it pretty clear that you know a tree by its fruit. It also makes it clear that teachers ought to be judged with greater strictness—if you’re putting yourself out there as a major Christian thought leader, I would consider you a “teacher” in this sense.
What is the function of this type of argument, really? Obviously, Walsh’s piece goes on to point to other examples of liberal figures who engaged in sexual misconduct and were treated pretty kindly by the press—an argument that falls kind of flat as soon as I go “yeah, they also should have gotten more scrutiny.” A lot of these stupid conservative arguments rely on assuming that I, as a leftist, see Bill Clinton or Lena Dunham as sacred figures, which I don’t.
So what exactly was he trying to say here? “Christians aren’t hypocrites if they sin because Christianity accounts for sin and human fallenness,” I suppose. But how far does this line of reasoning really go? Are we unable to criticize anyone, as long as they admitted they’re not perfect?
Let’s actually take a Calvinist perspective here and assume that there is genuine evil within human motivation. We are all sinners, totally depraved, etc.
Now, if someone with that corrupted motivation—say, someone who really wants to molest young girls—knew that there was an easy script provided by evangelical Christianity that lets them avoid any blame or accountability, what would stop them from doing it?
See, this is what I return to frequently. The way in which a specific articulation of the Christian faith is a perfect palate cleanser to push away any guilt or accountability. It’s an easily available dodge for predators to maintain their stance within the Christian community. This is the story behind a lot of church abuse scandals, and the excuses made to cover up those abuses.
In the realm of politics, though, there’s something even more insidious going on here. You have these figures like Josh Duggar, and (allegedly) Mark Robinson and Chris Rufo, who make a public brand out of calling out sexual degeneracy within society. Their politics is often a crusade against homosexuality and casual sex, as political issues.
This is the important aspect here: the role of these defensive arguments is to take the political and make it personal. This is the reverse of the leftist addage that the personal is political. Leftists politicize the personal by looking at the ways various political and societal structures mold our personal decisions and behavior. There is often an accusation that this does away with personal responsibility—everything is the fault of impersonal systems, not the fault of bad decisions—and that certainly happens. I met a number of people in college who excitedly latched onto such notions of the personal and political to vindicate their horrendous interpersonal behavior.
But the right wing formation here, of taking the political and making it personal, is just a different way of dodging guilt. Conservative evangelicals understand Christianity as an individual relationship between God and the believer, something far away from questions of the state and politics. This, of course, contradicts their investment in political questions like gay marriage, trans rights, or abortion, but that contradiction serves as a get-out-of-jail free card.
Champion against gay marriage gets caught having a number of anonymous homosexual relationships? This isn’t about politics—this is a personal failing between God and the believer in question. A vocal opponent of trans rights is a frequent consumer of trans porn? This is his personal folly, unrelated to his political preoccupations. Chris Rufo married an undocumented migrant and now spends his time pushing right wing conspiracy theories about undocumented migrants? Well, don’t bring his personal life into this!
By separating someone’s political preoccupations from their personal and moral behavior, you’re able to aim rabid moralism at the outside world while allowing yourself to be automatically freed from personal responsibility. It almost feels designed to shelter bad actors.
For more on this, see Fundamentalism and American Culture by George Marsden.