It's for paid subscribers and so obviously I'm not going to quote from deep cut paragraphs as I am not subscribed but ... what's available even to non-subscribers has a point I couldn't help but consider:
... supporters of trans rights have to do something that John Oliver trains them not to do: actually engage, argue, persuade, act in general as if there’s work to be done and that we can’t simply sit around feeling superior, chuckling to ourselves on our $15/month premium cable channel. ... You can’t have it both ways: if this is a crisis, you have to hustle and fight like it’s a crisis. You can’t expect to joke your way out of it.
and yet a few paragraphs earlier deBoer did write "... I sometimes wonder if his show is a brilliant op pulled off by the Heritage Foundation." There's no tension between talking about crises and joking your way through them. It's a simple distinction.
Not that I have any reason to tune into John Oliver as such, and I get that deBoer finds Oliver symptomatic of a vice of our times. There are people whose business model depends upon smug condescension about how stupid all "those people" are in contrast to my enlightened self and my coterie of self-selecting fans. But Oliver is hardly alone in the era of partisan agitprop infotainment.
It's not like the Moscow Mood isn't a combination of endless jokes in which Doug is practically operantly signaling his fans to laugh while he has perorations on the crises of our era. The strange mixture of smug triumphalism with admonitions to utter dismay at "what we've come to" is so much the water we fish swim in I get deBoer having a singular disdain for John Oliver but as the saying goes no one snowflake feels responsible for being part of the storm.
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John Oliver does nuanced and well-researched video essays sprinkled with jokes. Maybe the jokes aren't to everyone's taste, but the research is solid, and while Oliver is certainly in favor of trans rights, he presents his opponents' ideas with more respect than you would think. His ire is mostly directed at ignorance, hypocrisy and willful deception, not at conservatism per se. I learn a lot from him about subjects that are too unglamorous for regular news to carry in any kind of depth. His recent episode about the complexities of school lunch funding is a case in point. Is this harming anyone? I sincerely doubt it.
A friend put it to me this way, Oliver bothers to get the receipts before he makes his point. My gut has been telling me that deBoer is venting about the kind of smug infotainment gotchas that I've seen Rush Limbaugh and others doing since basically the end of the Cold War.
At this stage in his life I wonder if deBoer could even stomach five paragraphs of Doug Wilson. I wouldn't blame him for not reading the guy. :) Wilson's too influential in the scenes I've been in for me to not think about what he's bloviating about lately.
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