Call Your Local Bigot a Dork
It's OK to bully the bad guys.
Growing up in America, you hear so much about how your schools and clubs and camps and whatever else you’re doing from ages of about 5 to 18 have a “zero tolerance bullying policy.” This is funny, you see, because their policies are usually pretty lenient on bullying. A lot of the people working in those institutions are bullies. Maybe they grew out of their most egregious and immature bully tendencies, but you’ll still see things pop up from time to time. You’re probably picturing at least one teacher or boss you had right now. At best, these people are pretty good at either ignoring bullying or somehow punishing the quiet kid who just had enough that day and fought back, despite what the school counselor told them to do.
So with so many authority figures saying that bullying is bad but not practicing what they preach, the logical takeaway is that there are exceptions to that rule.
“Bullying is always bad, but…”
It seems like every time some white supremacists or homophobes take to the internet or the street to projectile vomit their hate on innocent bystanders, and someone accurately calls them out on being shitty people or calls them a name, there’s always someone to say “Don’t stoop to their level,” or “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Call them names. Call every racist a bad name, because they deserve it. Call every homophobe something awful because they deserve that, too. That’s not bullying, that’s making someone feel uncomfortable for not keeping up with a society that has moved on without them, and for spending their days trying to hurt other people minding their own business. Oftentimes those people they’re hurting are already struggling with something. So, why shouldn’t you be allowed to say something to them?
Nowhere is this practice of stiff-arming these people more concisely perfect than comedian Jonah Ray Rodrigues’ Twitter. He’s has been responding to Trump and his associated band of right wing grifters, sycophants and weird Middle America reply guys on Twitter for years with a simple message:
“Dork.”
Sure, it’s not the lengthy, righteous monologue you’d get in an Aaron Sorkin show, where the Democrat president totally DESTROYS the conservative reporter/TV show host/dinner guest with logic and Bible verses. But brevity is the soul of wit n all that.
Here’s a taste:
There’s plenty more where that came from, and it’s funny literally every time. It’s a lot more entertaining than all of the liberal Trump Reply Guys who go off on how he “is not fit for the office of President!” or some other long-winded attempt at getting him to SEE REASON, SIR. You can tell those were the kids who were terrible at comebacks on the playground. Jonah’s method is much more effective.
You know why?
These people have absolutely no interest in seeing reason or fixing themselves as it is, let alone looking deeply inward because someone penned a very cutting response to their tweet about why they are actually right to strip LGBTQ people of their basic human rights or how police are justified in their actions of mercilessly killing people while they’re sleeping, or how a Christopher Columbus statue is necessary to preserve the positively dwindling Italian culture in the American Northeast. It is barely hanging on by a thread as it is!
That doesn’t work. You have to just call them dorks. Because schoolyard bullying is often the only language they speak. Because guess what? Bullies grow up and don’t always become sad failures and reflect on their mistakes like they do in movies. A lot of times they end up in Congress or as a police chief or as your high school history teacher or as the president.
It is 100 percent OK to say mean things to the people trying to ruin the world.
I don’t want to ascribe some nonexistent deep thinking to Jonah’s simple act of calling bad people dorks when they do bad things. But, to me, it kind of serves as a tiny and hilarious manifestation of the power we as a society have to simply and efficiently tell people what they’re doing is bad without having to write a long letter they’ll never see or go to a town hall meeting, or appear on a panel on CNN. In 2020, you can remind your elected officials and your local bigot that they are, in fact, dorks, and that the things they do are bad and we don’t like them from the comfort of the toilet. It’s instant. You can do that every day if you want.
Another great example is this wordsmith who spoke some truth to power in LA, or Hellboy actor Ron Perlman challenging guys to wrestling matches like Andy Kaufman.
Look, cyberbullying is a very, very real issue, and it needs to be taken seriously. But there is a Grand Canyon-sized divide between picking on an unassuming classmate to cope with someone’s own insecurities and calling Stephen Miller a dork on Twitter after he adds oxygen to a harmful and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Hell, you can call J.K. Rowling a dork for all of her transphobic nonsense she’s been spewing lately. Please do!
Guys like Ted Cruz or Matt Gaetz or some Q-following guy in Nebraska are the guys who prey on the nice unassuming kid. And if you think calling people whose mission is to make people miserable dorks is the same as real bullying, well, then you’re a dork.
By calling these people dorks (or whatever other word you prefer), you’re the classmate stepping in to help. Or maybe you’re the quiet kid who finally decided enough was enough, and that all of the things your teacher told you about peaceful conflict resolution and trying to reason with your bully won’t actually work. So you hit back. You hit back by calling them a dork or a shithead or an asshole or whatever you want.
And just like in our schools, with their convoluted bullying policies, someone might tell you that you’re just as bad for fighting back, and to take the high road blah blah blah. But sometimes it’s the only way.
Call racists dorks. Make them feel uneasy spreading their hate online and in real life. Tell your Senator whose platform is built on controlling women’s bodies that he’s a dork. Make sure the people trying to start a second Civil War/ruin Hawaiian shirts for everyone else understand that they are dorks. People trying to normalize transphobia or push xenophobic agendas are dorks. Let them know.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is (coincidentally) Bully.
Calling someone a dork is a fast anger trigger button they probably won't see that triggers less anger than a heavier insult. Mild venting which is practice disgustedly discarding people when you don't have the energy to find the decision makers who are actually changing things or when a gatekeeper doesn't listen and the full argument has been heard already. I get annoyed if we think this is the first step, but it's a pretty good last straw.