If you mirror the priorities of the Left, then you can do whatever you want. As long as you’re not caught on camera, you’re fine. If you look at the disparate consequences for public figures ranging from people like Russell Brand to people like Howard Stern, the public consequences are quite disparate.
Russell Brand has been accused by four separate women of actions ranging from sexual assault to rape to sexual harassment. Whether the allegations are true or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know is that at this moment, they’re just allegations. There has been no actual criminal indictment brought against him. He’s certainly not been convicted of anything. But YouTube has suspended Brand from making any money on its platform only days after that report broke from Channel 4 and BBC, outlets that used to pay Brand while he was in the midst of his most flagrantly vile behavior.
So if there are serious allegations made against you of any sort, all of your videos immediately get demonetized. (Which is going to be very bad news for a significant number of actors and half the rappers on the block.) That’s a horrible standard. You’ve now created a massive incentive structure for people to make allegations against people, true or false, in order to destroy their careers.
I’m not saying the women who have made allegations about Brand are lying. I don’t know whether they are or not. I do know, at this point, I have no idea how YouTube could possibly uphold such a standard. Does it have something to do with the fact that Brand is a heterodox political thinker, somebody who says things YouTube doesn’t like very much?
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Then there’s Howard Stern. Stern has been making headlines the last couple of days by pushing very loudly to the Left. He spent virtually my entire life — from the time I was a teenager — being an absolute deviant and a degraded person beyond all measure. The kinds of behavior that Stern has regularly engaged in publicly throughout his career are nothing short of disgusting. They are disreputable. They are vile toward women; he had women in his studio sit on vibrators so he could record their reactions and blast them out to millions of people in his audience.
But now, Stern is apparently one of our moral exemplars. Over the last couple of days, he ripped into Lauren Boebert, who engaged in what I think is disgusting behavior; he referred to her in vile ways.
How is Howard Stern able to get away with all this? He gets away with it because he mirrors the political priorities of the Left. You be as gross as you want to be so long as you mirror the political priorities of the Left. Stern has discovered the magic elixir that wipes away all of your past and present sins, and that is to be far enough to the Left. He’s saying all the nostrums everybody on the Left really wants to hear, and that means it’s fine for him to do all this.
So why is this important?
Because when you have a class of people who are immunized by their association with certain Left-wing causes, it incentivizes bad behavior by those people. It also creates a massive double standard: If you are heterodox, you can expect to be targeted, but if you are orthodox in your practice of leftism, you can expect you’re going to be given an enormous amount of breathing room.