The right-wing conservative snowflakes have come for Kathy Griffin — again. We deserve better than this

You don't have to condone what Griffin said to realize that this kind of bad-faith posturing doesn't do our political discourse any good at all

Kathy Griffin on 1 November 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Randy Shropshire/Getty Images for PEN America)

Kathy Griffin has done it again. Done what, you ask? Outraged a number of conservatives by making a joke about President Donald Trump, of course.

It all began when Trump, while announcing a deal that would reduce the price of insulin for many Medicare recipients, publicly pondered whether he should be taking insulin despite having no known history of diabetes. (In case you’re wondering: No, you absolutely should not take insulin if you do not need it.) Griffin, in turn, tweeted that a “syringe with nothing but air inside it would do the trick”. In case the message was unclear, she then added: “F*** TRUMP.”

And thus the outrage cycle began. Donald Trump Jr was quick to highlight this perceived injustice: How come Griffin, a comedian, is free to tweet jokes about his father potentially being injected with a syringe full of air (which, if done in real life, would likely result in an air embolism, a “rare but potentially fatal event”), when conservatives (allegedly) get kicked off the platform for saying outrageous things?

Here are Trump Jr’s exact words, which we will unpack in a short moment: “I don’t think past-their-prime comedians who tweet stupid things should be banned on here, but next time @twitter @jack bans a conservative for saying something not PC, just remember they have no problem with Dems making death threats against @realDonaldTrump on their platform.”

It is false to suggest that conservatives get banned from Twitter for saying “something not PC”. People can get banned from Twitter for several reasons, including for engaging in what the platform views as abusive behavior, which includes sending threats. Getting someone suspended for those reasons is difficult (take it from someone who’s been on the receiving end of such conduct more than once on the platform lovingly known to many users as “this hell site"), and even when a suspension does happen, it’s usually temporary.

But Trump Jr doesn’t seem to care about negligible details such as accuracy, especially when it would get in the way of making martyrs out of the president and his supporters. This isn’t actually about Griffin and her purported “death threat”. No one reading Griffin’s tweet could reasonably conclude that she has real plans to attempt to inject anyone with a syringe full of air, however much her joke may be in bad taste. This is about outrage, and conservatives’ attempts to leverage it against liberals by painting them both as overly sensitive snowflakes and as bullies at the same time.

The problem with this strategy, of course, is that conservatives end up resorting to the same kind of pearl-clutching they are so prompt to denounce when they feel it’s coming from their more liberal-minded peers.

Insulingate, it’s worth nothing, is happening at the same time as the president is using his Twitter account to falsely accuse a TV host of murder. Some people thought that baseless murder claims were, well, a bit much, and pushed for Twitter to remove Trump’s tweets on the matter. In fact, the husband of the woman who died (of an undiagnosed heart condition) wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, eloquently asking for the president’s tweets to be taken down. Twitter has not done so. Around the same time, though, Twitter started displaying a fact-checking link next to some of the president’s tweets, in which he made false claims about mail-in ballots.

These two incidents have led to outcry on the part of Republicans, who feel that the president is being unfairly censored. This is false on multiple levels: Fact-checking, of course, isn’t censorship, and making baseless murder claims isn’t a protected right, but rather something that can get you into serious trouble if you’re a regular citizen, as opposed to the president of the United States. Those tweets haven’t even been deleted, but even if they were, none of this would amount to censorship. Fact-checking is a common, necessary practice where public figures — especially powerful politicians — are concerned, and unjust murder accusations are simply one of those things that we, as a society, have decided are frowned upon because they keep us from living in harmony with one another.

This is all extremely ironic, of course, coming from people whose favorite pastime is to “own the Dems” or “trigger the libs” by purposefully acting against their perceived insensitivity.

And no, I don’t think comedy is a blanket excuse to say whatever you want. I have railed and will continue to rail against comedians who go after vulnerable people and/or single out oppressed communities for cheap laughs. This is, of course, not what Griffin was doing here: She was expressing her strong distaste for the man currently in charge of running the country, as is her right under the First Amendment. Whether or not you agree with the unsavory way in which she expressed herself, she was very much "punching up". Joking about violence against politicians is never that big or clever, and I don't condone the joke that Griffin made — but I also won't for a second entertain the ridiculous notion that she is a potential murderer because she fired out a stupid tweet about a syringe during a debate about insulin.

There is a well-documented history between Griffin and the Trump family. Back in 2017, Griffin posed for a photo while holding a bloodied mask made to look like Donald Trump’s freshly decapitated head. The blowback was such that you’d be forgiven for thinking she had actually beheaded a head of state. Griffin’s shows were cancelled, she lost her annual CNN gig co-hosting the network’s New Year’s Eve special, and she even claimed she'd become the subject of a federal investigation.

Griffin initially apologised for the image, then rescinded said apology. The comedian, whose Twitter bio identifies her as the “mayor of Zero F**ksville”, has adopted a similar stance this time around: When the Washington Examiner, a conservative-leaning news website, tweeted that “@KathyGriffin advocates for someone to stab @realDonaldTrump with syringe full of air”, Griffin shared the message, adding: “I SURE DID, F***ER.” Again, considering Griffin is a comedian, we can safely assume that is a joke.

Outrage is a powerful force. It’s how you enact change, how you alert others to those parts of society that simply cannot stand any longer. Weaponizing it for political gain isn’t only grotesque – it blurs the line of our public discourse in a profoundly harmful way. We all deserve much, much better than this kind of posturing.

And by the way, in the time it took me to write this column, Griffin’s tweet about that syringe of air went from being visible on Twitter to having been apparently taken down because it "violated the Twitter rules”. Who’s being censored now?