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NPR's advice to parents concerned their children may become incel murderers? Keep them away from jokes

Keir Starmer wasn’t sure if “Adolescence” was a documentary, but wants all secondary school students to see whatever it is

NPR, during a 23-minute piece about “What to Tell Your Kids About Online Extremism,” on learning “the signs of radicalization”:

It’s really important to know when your kid might be falling down the rabbit hole… [“Radicalization” consultant Christine] Saxman told me to really keep an eye out for the kinds of jokes your kids are reacting to and making. Be particularly aware if they are beginning to engage with humor that dehumanizes others, in particular gay, transphobic and sexist jokes. Disguised as humor, it gives people with racist agendas plausible deniability, because it's “just” a joke.

Originally published in 2022, the NPR story was just updated and pegged to news about the Netflix series Adolescence. It’s a spiffily-directed horror series starring the excellent Stephen Graham about an angelic British boy moved to savage knife crime by “violent misogyny” online. Adolescence is the 2020s version of The Day After, a scared-straight parable about the dangers of relaxed vigilance, though the enemy is Andrew Tate instead of Soviet bombers. A thrilled Keir Starmer not only launched an initiative to make the series free for every secondary school in the U.K., but put out a video endorsement that employs the signature one-shot technique of Adolescence as he brings the series creators on a tour through Downing Street. A spoof of the same technique using Martin Scorcese’s Copacabana scene and a Crystals soundtrack would have been much funnier (“Every time I come here, every time you two!” Starmer could have shouted at Morgan McSweeney and Rachel Reeves on the way in), but Starmer wouldn’t have seen the irony in the mafia-Downing street comp and was obviously more interested in a Fangrrling Adolescence tribute.

The basic math of “dehumanizing” comedy has been proven a billion times over by now, but somehow it still needs to be said. If such humor is allowed to spread, it is true: Don Rickles or a modern equivalent will occasionally guest star on television and may even influence a few people to think ethnic jokes are funny. If on the other hand such material is suppressed, Don Rickles gets elected to the White House. It’s comedy’s iron law, but you’d never know it, listening to NPR extol the virtues of Keir Starmertainment:

Adolescence is said to have amassed over 66 million views since it launched last month. It’s exceedingly well acted and choreographed, but the plot is a snuff film, in which you suffer the emotional torture of watching Parents Who Could Be You realize in slowest motion that their Beautiful Child Who Could Be Yours has ruined his own life and another’s, after being captured by online influence. The story moves like a thriller and the pace is electric, but there is no mystery to solve, nor is it pushing us toward emotional salvation in forgiveness or humility. The pain, and the avoidable nature of the crime, is the whole point. It’s inspired headlines about women being afraid to have kids, “especially boys,” along with numerous columns of the “As a Mum, Adolescence helped me see my son’s potential for knife murder” variety.

This could be you is the series message, one NPR embraced by retooling a story they’d naturally already run about moms being afraid of their white sons. Remember Ruth Whippman, the involuntary humorist and New York Times columnist who penned the book-length woke-Rosemary’s Baby tale Boymom, complete with passages like, “I was frightened [for] the tiny piece of patriarchy growing inside me”? Whippman told New York Times readers last summer “We Can Do Better Than ‘Positive Masculinity,’” challenging parents of boys to “ditch the masculinity rhetoric altogether.” I thought she was one of a kind, but it turns out “Only Vigilance Stops My White Sons From Becoming Monsters” has been done more than once in American media. NPR reporter Hardymon works in this vein, describing the fear inherent in being the mom of two white boys:

This is NPR’s LIFE KIT. I’m Barrie Hardymon… I am the parent of two kids, and there’s something that creeps into my consciousness every time I see another tragedy like the kind of racist shootings we’ve seen in El Paso, Christchurch, Buffalo. The criminal is almost always a young white man. I am raising two young white men. It’s a horror — right? — to think that your kid could be a victim. It's a whole different kind of fear to think that your kid could be — I almost don't want to say it out loud — a perpetrator, a racist, a sexist, a bigot, somebody who could even be susceptible to these ideas…

There are many crazy things about this introduction, beginning with the premise that “the criminal is almost always a young white man.” That’s true if you’re describing that set of mass killings, meaning the type covered heavily in places like NPR. It should be a basic tenet of media that browsing choices (and strategies of algorithms designed to bullseye your fear centers) impact your perception of the frequency of social phenomena. It’s particularly weird for reporters to miss this given how much attention NPR has always paid to, say, “news media over-reporting violent crime.” Mass shooters are indeed almost exclusively male but not particularly distinguished by race, a bummer overall but reassuring if you believe people are pretty much the same across ethnicities. Some parents don’t seem anxious to be reassured on that front, however.

Selecting media stories likely to upset you and then making political cause of your (predictably horrified) reaction isn’t limited to scared mothers. Starmer decided to proselytize the Adolescence message about the dangers of “Andrew Tate shite” across Albion while clearly conscious he was marketing drama as documentary. The PM would be a terrible poker player: he doubles and triples his umms and uhhs whenever he’s about to aggressively bullshit audiences. He twice broke out in tics and tells before saying things about Adolescence like “it’s a very very good uh uh documentary to watch, or drama,” or “the documentary, the drama umm umm”:

He also talked about how boys are the culprit in “this particular instance,” as if it were a real story, adding, “This violence carried out by young men who are influenced by what they see online is a real problem, it’s abhorrent,” and “a matter of culture.” That last line is where he went off the rails. By culture, Starmer means the incel “shite” only. This is odd because no one should know better than American, French, and British citizens that violence carried out by “young men who are influenced by what they see online” is a universal problem, though this of course is a big reason Adolescence has become so controversial.

When Islamists in 2015 shot up an office full of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and journalists, Western intellectuals quickly bailed on Western speech values and turned to a “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie” campaign, condemning French satirists for bringing the crime on themselves. The violence of those 17 murders too was “a matter of culture,” but neoliberal pols decided the guilty culture there was their own, and began moving toward anti-blasphemy laws of the type seen in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh. Denmark banned desecration of the Koran in 2023, and Starmer two years ago supported a similar anti-blasphemy law in the runup to Britain’s Islamophobia Awareness Month.

I don’t believe the state needs to intercede in the other direction, but the EU parliament long ago said Britain had the “greatest problem” with Islamist honor attacks and killings, with British police statistics showing the number of honor offenses has risen 81% since 2016. It’s still not clear what the motivation was of Southport attacker Axel Rudakubana, convicted of murdering three young girls with a knife last year, in assaults that started riots. It’s not hard to see why there might be an uproar about a Prime Minister suggesting a Netflix horror series about a fictional Tate-inspired crime spoke to the “real problem,” while other British officials cry out for more “guardrails” to protect their youth. It’s fully in character with a country that innovated the modern moral panic with the lunatic mod-rocker scare of the sixties.

None of this is as idiotic as the American tendency to focus on humor as the gateway drug to violence, as exemplified by NPR. American liberalism was once adamant about the folly of blaming culture for crime. Republicans were ridiculed for pointing a finger at Marilyn Manson after the 1999 Columbine massacre. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine interview of a Lockheed exec standing before a giant missile and saying “I don’t see that connection” when asked if a weapons-building culture might move kids toward violence more than a rock star in glam makeup, was typical of how the left once viewed the issue. The Harold and Kumar movies commemorated the eternal truth that nothing made you want to get high more than “gateway drug” commercials:

This was the standard attitude among Boomer Dems for decades, but something around 2016 caused a mass permissiveness-pucker. In the NPR piece, Hardymon engages with Christine Saxman, who is introduced via the dulcet tones of an NPR saxophone riff as someone who’s been doing “social justice facilitation” for about 20 years, and will walk us through an episode about “preventing radicalization of white children.” Hoping the guest will agree, Hardymon tells Saxman “I’ve covered some extremism, and so I know that, like, humor is often a way that people are sort of sucked in.” Saxman concurs: yes, “honestly, some of the intro points are the joking around LGBT issues.”

The two joke-phobics go on to speculate on when is the right moment to jump in when conducting surveillance of your nascent killer-spawn. Saxman warns against something she calls “the underreaction”:

SAXMAN: I also don’t want to be like, if they’re starting to show overt hate, be like, “Boys will be boys. This is just them joking around, right?” That’s the underreaction.

HARDYMON: Let’s say you — on that scale, right? — you had noticed that your kid has come to a place where he does have some harmful beliefs… Even if it’s not all the way at the scale of violence, but you notice that he thinks Hitler mustaches are funny. He thinks, you know, that he’s expressing himself. You see him slipping down that rabbit hole. What do you do?

It’s universally acknowledged (there was a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution about this in 1947) that Hitler mustaches are funny. It may be the only mandatory joke in the world, especially for Jewish comedians. The clear sign you have a young man on the wrong path is when he doesn’t find Hitler’s mustache funny, which probably can only happen in rare situations, one of which has to include a mother watching him constantly for signs of improper levity. I made this reel and couldn’t get through the first cut without laughing:

Hardymon asks, “Is there a script I can give the kids that they can feel empowered to talk to [friends] about it? What are the actions we can help them take with their friends, with their peers?” Saxman initially answers, “I don’t think adults need to be policing every single problematic conversation that young people have,” which seems encouraging, but adds: “That’s part of being a young person, is learning how to do that yourself.” In other words, you can’t snitch out the bad influences in your child’s life, but with love and guidance, they’ll learn to do it themselves.

Hardymon explains how torn she is about certain questions (“I hear, you are making a terrible decision about your young men,” she says, “Why are you letting them play with Nerf guns?”), while discussing proper “daily anti-radicalization hygiene” and how to avoid “normalizing” humor that acts as a rhetorical “stepping stone,” the new “gateway drug.” Neither seem to have a clue that one of the fastest ways to radicalize kids is to exaggerate danger. The Harold and Kumar scene above underscores another core truth: young people know the material you’re most worried about far better than you. In the case of weed, they all smoked it and knew it makes you want to eat Ho-Hos and watch Star Trek, not reach for a gun locker. Meaning, they know when you’re lying. It’s why we watched Reefer Madness for fun:

Saxman tells Hardymon that off-color humor is sometimes successful because “it’s building up their sense of pride, their sense of, like, ‘I am a critical thinker. I am a good questioner.’” It never occurs to them that kids experience these feelings because parents have lied to them repeatedly on whole ranges of issues, from the dangers of marijuana to (more recently) a spate of wrong Covid dictates to platitudes about how “Trans women are women” (a theme that single-handedly birthed Dave Chappelle’s “beyond pussy” routines) and countless other dumb political saws. Comics become authorities to kids by telling them blunt truths their parents won’t.

You can’t make funny jokes unfunny through “engagement.” I’m sure NPR would denounce as misogynistic Gilbert Gottfried’s panegyric on Joan Rivers’ vagina (“How old is it? How dry is it? How many men died during its construction?”) and would consider calling 911 if they heard a pre-teen listening to any of Sam Kinison’s routines. But you can’t make this not funny:

On the other hand a lot of Kinison’s routines about gays from that era, like Eddie Murphy’s, come off as severely cringe-worthy. By raising our kids to love a good joke, we teach them to hear the difference. The riskiest, raunchiest humor was for decades at least allowed, and despite the fact that a generation of pre-teens grew up giggling to Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks or Kinison routines in defiance of their parents or listened to obscene punk or hip-hop with severely regressive themes, somehow that was the generation that pushed for gay marriage and affirmative action and prized tolerance above everything else.

Only recently were young people re-introduced to taboos, and how’s that working out, NPR fans? Well, would you say? Or badly?