Cooties as Rhetoric

Remember cooties? If you were declared to have the condition, associating with you became risky. Anyone known or rumored to hang around you would get it too. Was it a general ickiness? An unspecified malaise? An unsavoriness of character? This was generally left open to the imagination. It was bad. That was all you needed to know.

Recesses are being shortened or eliminated entirely at schools. Free, unstructured play — in which games of tag and Capture the Flag spontaneously erupt, forts get built, adventures planned, and authority figures ditched — is ever more distant. In this era in which play is being removed from children’s lives, the enduring childhood meme of cooties is erupting in the adult world.

Passing for logic, we now hear claims like: “X went on Y’s show, and we know that Y is bad, so X must be, too.” Sometimes it devolves further, into: “X was seen with Y, so X must agree with horrible thing that Y said.”

It is true, for instance, that Jordan Peterson produced content with Dennis Prager, James Damore sat down for an interview with Stefan Molyneux, and Bret Weinstein went on Tucker Carlson. And now they all have cooties.

Putting aside the gross over-simplifications and, in some cases, outright lies about what these media outlets stand for, is it not in fact possible that speaking to people, and the audiences of people…