When A Joke Is Not A Joke
It’s not “just a joke.” It’s part of the strategy.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held in National Harbor, Maryland, last February, was by all accounts interesting. It ended with Donald Trump spending time (again) with literal Nazis, who were openly roaming around during the conference. And it began with a declaration by one of the speakers, Jack Posobiec, that CPAC was heralding the “end of democracy.”
More specifically, what he said was “Welcome to the end of democracy. We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it, and replace it with this, right here [he raises his right fist as he says this] . . . because all glory to God!” Posobiec is indicating, I guess, that there will be a dictatorship of so-called “Christians”, who will rule the country according to their interpretation of what “God” wants, and that they will crush any opposition to their rule with an iron fist.
Now Posobiec is not just another guy on the street. He’s long been a top-level conservative commentator and activist. In the past he worked for One America News Network and TurningPoint USA, both outlets of extreme conservative news and commentary. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he was a “special projects director” at Citizens for Trump, an organization not officially connected to the Trump campaign. He is currently a “senior editor” at Human Events, one of the oldest conservative news publications. Finally, Posobiec has 2.4 million followers on X/Twitter.
But mostly he has been a conspiracy theorist. He is most famous for pushing the Pizzagate conspiracy, which posited that Democrats were running a child-sex ring, and which resulted in a guy from North Carolina driving all the way to Washington, D.C., to shoot up a pizza restaurant that was . . . serving pizza. This is just one in a long line of ridiculous and idiotic, but still damaging, conspiracies that Posobiec has promoted through his “work.”
So when Posobiec makes a comment about “ending democracy” in America, and suggesting a Christian dictatorship to take its place, it’s not nothing. He’s someone who a lot of people take seriously. And he doesn’t exactly have a reputation for honesty, integrity, or moderation. Plenty of people who have taken him seriously in the past, and there’s no doubt that there are some out there who take what he said at CPAC very seriously.
But if you do take him seriously and are against ending democracy, well, apparently the joke’s on you. You just don’t get it. If you watch the video, and say “Hey, maybe this is going a little overboard”, there are plenty of conservatives out there to tell you that you’re just overreacting because it’s all “just a joke.” Along with multiple comments on Twitter/X about how easy it is to “troll the left”, there’s this piece from The Western Journal (another right-wing news site), telling us how “obvious” it is that Posobiec was joking. The author, C. Douglas Golden, claims that Posobiec made his comments “very clearly not in a serious tone” [emphasis in original]. He also quotes Charlie Brown saying, “Don’t you know sarcasm when you hear it?” Because it’s all so obvious. Posobiec doesn’t want to overturn democracy. He was just kidding!
Maybe he is. Here is one thing, though: nowhere have I found any comment from Posobiec indicating that he was joking. Nowhere does he say “Those stupid liberals don’t know what a joke looks like. I don’t want to overthrow democracy.” It would be simple enough and would further his main goal of trolling liberals as idiots. But, nothing.
So, why? What do we make of this?
Two Points about “joking” in politics:
First of all, jokes don’t come from nowhere; they aren’t just pure fantasies pulled out of the air; they come from some idea about something. Even the simplest puns are funny because they use the difference between meanings of words to evoke some response in the person hearing the pun. In comedy, whether stand-up or scripted shows and movies, many or most of the jokes are reflections on what’s happening around us. Finally, jokes are often made about things that cannot be said seriously: think about every time you’ve been in a situation where someone was asleep, say in a car or on a couch at a party, and someone else made a joking suggestion about jolting that person awake. Pretending to do it is a joke, while actually doing it might not be. We even have an entire day every year where we prank people by telling them something that would be terrible if it were true. “Hi Mom, I failed out of college. . . . Just kidding!” April Fool’s Day pranks are “just jokes”, and they’re jokes precisely because they are not true.
And this brings us back to Posobiec, and radical Trump-supporting conservatives in general: in April of 2021, NPR ran a story about how the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes uses irony as a way to express distasteful ideas while being able to pretend that they don’t really mean anything, not anything serious, at least. Helpfully, Fuentes was willing to state his goals openly and explicitly (bolding mine):
“Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views,” Fuentes said in a 2020 video. He specifically cited Holocaust denial — or what he termed Holocaust “revision” — as a topic that is too fraught to discuss earnestly, even on the far right.
Far-right extremist Nick Fuentes, seen here in a screenshot from his livestreamed show, has said he uses irony because it provides “plausible deniability” and cover for some of his most incendiary statements.
“When it comes to a lot of these issues, you need a little bit of maneuverability that irony gives you,” Fuentes said.
And, in fact, after Fuentes questioned the death toll from the Holocaust in one rant, he later claimed to The Washington Post that it was just a “lampoon.”
What Fuentes describes here is exactly what Posobiec was doing at CPAC. Posobiec was using irony to make a statement about his desire to destroy democracy; by phrasing it as a joke, he was giving himself what Fuentes refers to as “plausible deniability”, which is a phrase used in political circles generally to mean an excuse that you can give to blunt criticism over something you have been accused of doing or saying. In the best cases, plausible deniability is something that can’t be refuted. Saying “it was just a joke” is a way to force critics to back off. “How can you be serious. Of course I don’t actually think X. I was just making a joke.” How can someone respond to that? Claiming it was a joke blunts all criticism.
In the case of Posobiec, the plausible excuse is that this was his attempt to mock the progressives who regularly accuse Trump and his followers, including Posobiec, of working to destroy democracy in America. There’s a fair amount of evidence in favor of the critique, of course. I won’t go into all of it here, but the events of January 6, 2021, which Posobiec references in his “joke”, were a direct attempt to stop the counting of Electoral College votes that would make Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The crowd, believing without evidence that the election had somehow been “stolen” was trying to make sure that those votes, reflecting the votes of millions of Americans, would not be counted. It was quite specifically an attempt, as Posobiec stated, to “overthrow” democracy.
Here, I think, is an important consideration: I have done a number of searches, explored a number of different corners of the Internet, and nowhere do I find any statement from Posobiec himself that he was “just joking.” Maybe he’s just not dignifying such speculation. That would be within his rights, of course: he doesn’t have to comment at all. People can take it or leave it.
But, and this is the second point I want to make regarding “it’s just a joke”: it’s not a joke if the joke doesn’t work both ways. Going back to Fuentes for a moment, the NPR story begins with him advising a man who calls into his show asking for advice on how to punish his wife for “getting out of line.” Fuentes responds by saying “‘Why don’t you smack her across the face?’”, which anybody can see is a) “just a joke”, and b) is HILARIOUS!! (insert my own sarcasm here). But does the “joke” work the other way? Would it be funny for a woman to joke about beating her husband? Of course not. Why? Because she couldn’t or wouldn’t. It’s funny to Fuentes and his audience precisely because it’s something that the man could do to the woman that she would not or could not do back to him. To paraphrase a line we’ve heard so often recently, the cruelty is the point of this “joke.”
So, too, with Posobiec’s comment. Consider what would happen in a similar situation, but coming from the other side of the political spectrum. Consider what Fox News would be saying if someone got up at any meeting of Democrats, or liberals, or progressives, or anywhere, really, and made a joke about turning the U.S. into a “Soviet-style” republic. Imagine if any member of the so-called “squad” even hinted that they were going to implement any of their favored policies whether Americans “liked it or not.” Or even suggested something along those lines? Does anyone think that conservatives would just shrug their shoulders and laugh it off? Would they say “those liberals with their silly jokes”?
Of course not. Not only would they not laugh it off, they would then use it as an argument for why they need to be prepared to “protect America” from socialism (even if few of them know what that means; food safety rules seem to be “socialism” while the government loaning billions of dollars to large corporations and then completely forgiving those loans somehow isn’t). Some of their supporters would hint (maybe even “joke”!) about the need to kill liberals to protect America. Jesse Watters of Fox News would be on it! It’s fair to say that it would not be lightly dismissed. They would use it to further crack down on speech that they don’t like, and, they would likely use it as an argument to deny some Americans the right to vote. That’s my theory, anyway. I hope it never gets tested.
So what does Posobiec’s “joke” mean in the larger scheme of things? Here’s what it means: it’s a test flight of an idea. As others have said, none of this is new. People always tell you what their plans are, even when they don’t specifically lay out what exactly they want to do. In the age of mass communication, people don’t have to specify precisely what they want to see happen. We saw this with the attempted insurrection of January 6th. Trump didn’t say, and didn’t need to say “Come to Washington, DC on January 6th to stop the count of the Electoral College votes so that we can illegally keep Joe Biden from being named President of the US.” After months of at first suggesting “Either I win or the election was stolen” and then lying about the results of the election, all Trump had to say was “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th . . . Be there, will be wild!" His followers knew exactly what he wanted: an insurrection, an attempt to overturn the democratic rule of law by stopping the counting of the Electoral College votes. Posobiec was doing the same thing at CPAC, though, with a longer-term view. He was telling everyone what he wants to see happen when the conditions are right. He wants to end democracy.
As David Frum said several years ago, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Posobiec’s “joke” shows that this is exactly the path they are on.
