William F. Buckley famously drove the anti-Semites out of the leadership of the conservative movement, banning them from National Review as well as denouncing them from its pages. Of course he also denounced some (ethnic) Jews, like “radical for capitalism” Ayn Rand, if he did not like their vision of American politics.
Political parties police their insurgent and dissident supporters. Since the 1980s there has been a split, that still exist today in various forms, between a consultant class of Beltway libertarians who often brown nose the liberal establishment, and wilder and more populist (and often less sophisticated) libertarians who do not. Republicans have developed their own version of this split, between the RINO consultant class and the Trumpian populists. (Democrats are overdue for the same civil war, though the massive capital assets of the Democratic establishment - almost all media, the intelligence agencies and other government bureaucracies, lawfare, academia, billionaire donors, political consultants - ensure that Bernie or other internal dissidents and decentralists will never take power, and will end up having to defect to other parties.)
Recently conservative women, led by the liveliest of their writers, Peachy Keenan, policed a not-so-well thought out venture, a conservative cheesecake calendar featuring a number of young conservative stars, including the heroic Riley Gaines. Those involved were convicted in the court of conservative opinion as having had bad judgment, though no real decision was reached on the severity of the crime.
Now another somewhat similar crime is being committed. The comic Alex Stein, on his Blaze show Prime Time with Alex Stein, hosted a segment where he fed a banana to a largely unclothed black man.
Conservatives (Keenan, Erick Erickson, and others) wasted no time in decrying the prurient nature of this segment as something with which no conservative should be associated. (Keenan, much more pop culturally literate than most of the right, referenced the brilliant filthy joke The Aristocrats, which is MUCH funnier than Alex Stein’s work, but is equally inappropriate for forums that think they are promoting family values.)
Most people will think Stein’s bit is homophobic and a few may realize that he seems to be trying to copy the persistent homosexual innuendo of uber-successful Greg Gutfeld and his late night FOX show that now dominates all other late night comedy shows in the ratings. Gutfeld’s continual gay banter is a form of self-degradation, much like the comedy of Minnie Pearl, Phyllis Diller, or Joan Rivers, who neutralized any criticism of their looks by talking about how unattractive they were before anyone else could, and thereby dominated the audience. Gutfeld, who is probably 5’8”, not conventionally good looking, and, the one time I met him at a reason magazine event was wearing a lavender cashmere sweater, neutralizes any criticism that he isn’t manly enough by just making gay jokes about himself. (In real life married to a woman, I have no idea if he is actually bisexual.) This isn’t new stuff. Milton Berle used to dress as a woman for his act while simultaneously bedding Hollywood’s leading actresses right and left, some of whom may have been curious about his famously enormous cock.
A strange element of the Alex Stein video, of which Peachy Keenan and the others may be innocent is the “race play.” If one plows through a lot of Grindr type gay “dating” ads on apps like Manhunt or Adam4Adam you will find ads by black men who want to pretend to be slaves being raped by a white Plantation master. Shocking in a way since the same apps and websites are heavy with ads telling conservatives, Republicans, Trump supporters etc. not to reply to the advertiser, or ads by “progressive” white men writing that they will only date men of color. It’s a kind of rape fantasy, not a 50 shades of gray but a 50 shades of black and white. Curiously I have never seen an ad by a gay Jewish man (or Armenian or native American etc.) asking for race play with someone dressed as Hitler.
I actually think many of Alex Stein’s public stunts - for example confronting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - are amusing. But from the little clip of this fruit fellatio on twitter, unless it has some more interesting context, this is not one of them.
A shorter version of this was published this week at SpliceToday.