A hate update: two hours after Brent Bozell and I sent in our column to Creators Syndicate about The Washington Post ignoring Georgetown professor Christine Fair's crazy tweet about killing and defiling Sen. Lindsey Graham and other white Republican males, reporter Avi Selk promoted Fair's version of events on the paper's website. It was an experiment to tease the Real Haters:
C. Christine Fair would later call the tweet an “experiment.” Not a performance, exactly. Not a trap, really. Certainly not a genocidal death threat, whatever it looked like at first glance. [Selk quotes it.]
“Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men,” the Georgetown University associate professor wrote Saturday afternoon, meaning the Republican senators who were defending Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh from sexual assault allegations. “All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” she wrote. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
...An experiment, she insisted. A little bait tossed into the wilds of the Internet, to see what species of hate it would attract.
“Maybe this was not my most eloquent attempt,” Fair told The Washington Post this week, after her Twitter account had been suspended, her villainy declared across the conservative media, and her school was fielding questions from reporters. “And I will certainly concede I was attempting to make people feel uncomfortable.”
So when the inaccurately-surnamed Fair tweets about laughing at dead Republicans, she's.....kidding. She's not hating. She's drawing out haters. Anyone who checks Fair's Huffington Post page (and that's where the meme below is posted) can smell the Rage Machine in overdrive. But Avi Selk and the Post are her sounding board:
Here’s what happened, as she explains it.
“The idea you can effect change by using the normative language expected of someone with a PhD is false,” Fair said.
At least, not when you’re female.
Fair would appear on C-SPAN and get marriage proposals in her inbox, she said. She once wrote an op-ed on Pakistani policy and received in the mail a “seven-by-five array of clitoris cupcakes, all racially distinct.” Misogyny followed her around like a cloud. Anger and frustration built up inside her, exacerbated by what she said was years-long sex abuse as a child.
And one day she thought “Damn it, I’m done,” she said, and decided to let everyone hear what rage sounds like.
“The idea I am expected to respond to systematic rape culture using florid prose is preposterous,” she said. “It’s another way to discipline women’s bodies, by asking us to discipline our rage.”
And so “Tenacious Hellpussy” was born. Her Twitter mug shot became an image of Vladimir Putin riding a naked, half-pig Donald Trump. Between lectures on international affairs, Fair got the white nationalist Richard Spencer kicked out of his gym and traded accusations of defamation with airport police in Germany after they confiscated her deodorant.
She provoked confrontations, and wrote hundreds or thousands of words about each one, and a fair percentage of those words were obscene.
“I aim to create language that creates as much discomfort as I am forced to feel in this regime,” Fair said, turning back to last week’s Kavanaugh hearings. “I cannot tell you the rage and hurt it feels as all of those men on that Judiciary Committee kicked sexual assault survivors in the gut.”
Selk and the Post finally publicized this because (a) Georgetown, as usual, took no action whatsoever, but (b) Fair proclaimed some kind of victory when Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson denounced her tweet on air on Monday night as a call for "white genocide," and the Left's "hate police" denounced him, and not her:
“This is Orwellian,” Carlson wrote in a statement after the Southern Poverty Law Center flagged him on its “Hatewatch” list. “A Georgetown professor publicly calls for killing people based on their race, and then suggests ‘we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine.’ I criticize this and wind up on a ‘hate watch’ list?”
Fair, rightly or wrongly, says her rhetoric is designed to cause discomfort, not effect anything as naive as positive change in the world. Discomfort accomplished.
