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Will Borat Lead Protest Vs Facebook Fascism? by Doniphan Blair
Sasha Baron Cohen, in a 'mankini,' shows off his ripped six-pack for all his fawning female fans—joke, JOKE!—in 'Borat' (2006), his big-grossing, in both meanings of the word, world-wide hit. photo: Courtesy S. B. Cohen
COMEDIANS ARE TAKING OVER INTER-
national politics—and not just by default, as in the US.
Unfortunately, their funny has been bombing for a while. Comedian Jimmy Morales was elected president of Guatemala in 2016, but few people are still laughing, according to my Guatemalan friends.
Comedian Giuseppe Piero Grillo was blocked from running for office, due to an involuntary manslaughter conviction from a car accident that killed three of his friends—hardly a laughing matter—but he headed Italy’s dominant Five Star Movement Party from 2009 to 2017.
Meanwhile, the best-trained of them all is Volodymyr Zelensky. As it happens, the Ukrainian comedian, actor and filmmaker is not only a trained lawyer, but his production company created “Servant of the People”. In that TV show, which ran from 2015 to 2019, he played for laughs the Ukrainian president, a post he tragically came to occupy in April, 2019, considering the ongoing war with Russia as well as his involvement in the American impeachment scandal.
And now, the obnoxious, always-in-character comedian known for Ali G, Borat, Bruno and, most recently, Israeli army colonel Erran Morad is shifting from silly to dead serious in an attempt to save us—across the globe but especially in the Bay Area—from standing around, drinking cappuccinos and arguing which electric car is better for the environment while Rome, or more precisely, the Reichstag, burns.
“Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities,” Sasha Baron Cohen said in a recent speech to the Anti-Defamation League in New York City (11/21/19, see it in full here). “Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream.”
It’s a strange day when the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College quotes a comedian as Arendt’s freshest, most insightful new spokesperson. Nevertheless, Cohen amplified on her brilliant analysis of propaganda by eviscerating social media, notably Facebook, for failing to monitor hate speech and misinformation—essentially for becoming the new media for the new Goebbels.
“It’s as if the Age of Reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending,” Cohen explained, in his mellifluous baritone, with only two or three joking asides, undoubtedly exercising the greatest restraint of his career.
“[N]ow knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.”
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” Hitler noted, in the garbled syntax that makes his “Mien Kampf” almost unreadable, “because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.”
“I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar,” Cohen openly admitted. In point of fact, however, Cohen’s use of highly-realistic fabrication in his movies and his Cambridge University thesis on civil rights, written in part using the Anti-Defamation League’s archives, does make him uniquely qualified to tear through our current culture's tissue of lies.
Cohen addresses the Anti-Defamation League's 'Never Again/Never Is Now' conference in New York, on Nov 21st, 2019. photo: Jennifer Liseo/ADL
Interestingly, a lot of my “hippest” friends didn’t get “Borat”, the 2006 film that brought Cohen international recognition, awards and box office success, through a deep spoof on a Kazakhstani journalist’s journey through America.
“Anti-Semitic,” “Sexist,” “Stupid” and “Not funny” were among the remarks I heard, but when I finally saw the film, with my mother, a Holocaust survivor, we were both soon in stitches.
I was on the edge of my seat from the opening credits, which were such a perfect parody of Soviet cinema, I knew I was in the hands of master craftsperson.
Then as the first scenes unspooled—Cohen’s Borat with a driving instructor, Borat with a massage therapist, whom he tries to hump—I was caught in the twilight zone between scripted and documentary. Since I was unfamiliar with "The Ali G Show” and hadn’t read about how Cohen and his crew were experts at setting up dramatic situations and then improvising the living shit out of them, I was confused.
My 81-year-old mother was even more at a loss, especially since she was unable to understand all the cutting remarks and contemporary jokes. But when Borat spent the night with the elderly Jewish couple, she got all the anti-Semitic references as well as that Cohen was joking, and laughed until she cried.
“But one thing is pretty clear to me,” Cohen continued at the ADL, in all seriousness. “All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.”
The greatest propaganda machine in history—right down the peninsula in Menlo Park, where so many nice people, even some friends of mine, work?
It should be noted that Facebook workers protested the company’s acceptance of unfiltered political advertising as “a threat to what FB stands for,” in their late-October open letter (see it here) to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who claims he is simply an outspoken advocate of free speech.
Unfortunately, its unlikely anything will change at Facebook until there are protest marches of at least fifty thousand people at least two or three times.
“Think about it,” Cohen went on. “Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others” all headquartered in and around San Francisco, “they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged—stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear.”
“It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times!” My god, is Facebook going to get schooled by Borat?
For those unfamiliar, Jones popularized the “Sandy Hook” conspiracy, which claims the December 14th, 2012, massacre, which killed twenty children and six adults in the Connecticut town of that name, was actually a fictional film run as news by media moguls—by whom Jones means of course “The Jews.”
Jones is also an outspoken advocate of the “No Men on the Moon” and “US Government Did 9/11” conspiracies, which did as much for the Trump presidency—by making fake news real—as did the 78,000 Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania voters who handed Trump the electoral college.
“It’s why fake news outperforms real news,” according to Cohen, the actual reality-faker, albeit in pursuit of comic effect not ending civilization. “[S]tudies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history—the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, ‘Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.’”
Did I just hear super-Jew Cohen correctly? Did he just call self-hating-Jew Zuckerberg a proponent of the "Jews Run the World" conspiracy?
No, not exactly, but Cohen implied it. Indeed, the "Jews Did It" conspiracy is the big daddy of them all and obligatory for little conspiracies to work, which is why the "9/11" conspiracy was immediately amended to include the "No Jews Went to Work on 9/11" conspiracy (for more on this see cineSOURCE's expose, "Soros, Jewish Bankers and Interest Explained").
Of course, becoming "the greatest propaganda machine in history" was a predictable by-product of social media’s “disruption” of regular media. Indeed, America has lost an estimated 30,000 journalists in the last two decades, which almost destroyed the “real news” industry. Nevertheless, Google and Facebook, which are worth 852 and 630 billion respectively and control 60% of all digital advertising in the US, have made no effort to replace that all-important fact checking service with a modest facsimile of their own.
Which is why “when, thanks to social media, conspiracies take hold, it’s easier for hate groups to recruit, easier for foreign intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections, and easier for a country like Myanmar to commit genocide against the Rohingya.”
Whoa, Borat baby! Unless I miss my guess, that was an accusation of aiding and abetting mass murder.
Here’s another piece of PhD-comedy advice: If America’s greatest comics don’t soon switch to self-effacement, which is essential for all true, heart-felt humor (see Borat's anti-Semitism), they're going to create an immense sympathy for, and thereby lead to the re-election of, Trump.
It takes a visionary comic to understand the tragic complexity of the human identity, which is why Cohen is dead on and quite qualified to lead the charge.
“[I]f you pay them, Facebook will run any ‘political’ ad you want, even if it’s a lie,” Cohen patiently explained, in his new roll as propaganda analyst-in-chief.
“[T]hey’ll even help you micro-target those lies to their users for maximum effect. Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’”
Holy shit!
In other words, we in the Bay Area are sitting around, smoking legalized weed and jerking each other off—intellectually, by nodding affirmatively at each others’ politically-correct virtue signaling (c’mon, we’re not actually jerking each other off. Indeed, even our most famous comedians have to jerk themselves off, while forcing others to watch, for which they get banned from the airwaves by the likes of Facebook to make even more time for Jones’s conspiracies)—while twenty miles down the road is the headquarters for the Third Reich of cyberspace!
“[I]f we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses,” concludes the now totally-serious, world-famous comedian, “then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.”
To which I can only respond: Borat for President, or at least to lead the first "End the Lies" march on Facebook (contact me if you think cineSOURCE should attempt to organize this).
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .Posted on Nov 25, 2019 - 10:45 PM