Last week on FOX’s The Five, Jesse Watters was waxing political about birth rates and fair political representation in the wake of SCOTUS’ gutting the Voting Rights Act and southern legislatures breaking their necks to eliminate democratic (aka Black, Brown, and Progressive) seats through redistricting. Watters squared to the camera, eyes twinkling, sly look-how-close-I-can-get-to-the-line wink and quipped “the Bhlllacks,” need to get busy making babies if they want a seat at the table, biting down on that “b’ and laying into that ‘l’ with some air behind it like it was his last meal. Three times at least (the rule in comedy). Like, dude, do us all a favor and say “n***er” and get it the fuck out of your system. I kinda wanted to reach through my phone screen and punch him in the neck.
The same week, Michael Phillips, a white attorney in Brazoria, Texas, was held in contempt for repeatedly using the slur during a child custody hearing in reference to Black female attorney Brenda Derouen. Outside the courtroom where the finding was held, he was faced down by a Black man Quanell X and Dr. Candice Matthews, a Black woman and promised that he would taste the ancestors if he felt so moved to say it then and there. Phillips looked foggy-eyed, like maybe he wanted to cry, but quietly asked the Quanell X’s name in that way the genteel do when the privilege of contempt is all they have left (You can just hear the unspoken ‘boy’ at the end). Phillips was sentenced to three days in jail and fined $500, the two penalties suspended on condition he submit a formal written apology by June 30.
It’s not just the casualness of this brand of cruelty, the thoroughgoing meanness of it. It’s the stubborn entitlement to it. Fair-to-middling, wholly unexceptional, there’s an unearned self-satisfaction to Jesse Watters, a smugness like that slow ask, “What’s your name?” that makes you just kinda wanna push him out an open window or into traffic. We’re supposed to be passed this shit, yet he leaks cis white male superiority and grievance with a shit-eating grin. He’s fancies himself some sort of humorist (his five rules for men include “just be funny, and don’t eat soup in public or drink through a straw”—your lips purse)—which really just means he backpedals a lot and says his comments were taken out of context: his 2016 Chinatown segment and subsequent non-apology comes to mind; likewise, his 2017 comment about Ivanka Trump’s way with a microphone, his obsession with Tim Walz’ masculinity vis a vis milkshakes and what would happen to Kamala Harris in a room full of generals. Just this past May 1st during King Charles and Queen Camilla’s state visit he had to be whisked away after observing of Washington D.C. to her Ladyship, “If the bees don’t get you, the guns will.” Or the time he let the air out of a woman’s tires “so she’d ask him for a ride.” She was his producer at the time, 14 years his junior and he was married. (They got hitched in 2019 a few months after his divorce) And there it is.
I don’t enjoy spending my energy on people like this, but the world is so f’ing rife with them. Jesse Watters is neither funny, nor particularly clever or observant. What he is is a mouth with a mic and cis white male grievance gussied up as plain talk. He mines not human failings for his so-called wit, but mean spiritedness and then falls back on plausible deniability: say the ugly thing, the cruel thing, then fumble about back in the studio mumbling it was just a joke or he didn’t know what he was thinking. He’s the kind of guy who in high school just wasn’t funny and never learned to shut up; the butt of the joke and the last to know.
He is a walking reenactment of “it didn’t happen to you, it didn’t happen.” And he is a feature, not a bug. Since 2017 we’ve seen statues knocked down, pussy hats in the streets, bell hooks as required reading, and yet Watters, Phillips and their ilk remain steadfastly, vehemently unchanged. Maybe it’s that the world he was fed and the world order he inherited that made him an apex predator at least on paper keeps getting blown apart and stitched back together by the same old inconvenient truths and he’s cranky from stopping up the dike with a finger. Rape is a thing. Abuse is a thing. Lynching is a thing. ICE killing US citizens is a thing. But for him it’s still 1998, greed is good and whoever dies with the most wins. The summer of 2020 completely passed him by—he was too blithely busy being mad at Anthony Fauci. He’s a throwback. A dinosaur. He is what the weaponized past looks like. And it isn’t pretty.
The thing of it is since Obama’s first term, despite Hegseth and that dumpster fire of a president trying to turn back the clock and erase difference, they can’t make you step off the sidewalk anymore without getting punched. Not only might you get issued a citation. You might actually get dropped, and many of us aren’t playing nice anymore, not waiting for change, or to win hearts and minds anymore. We tried it Martin’s way and they shot him. The United States has fallen over the precipice and while I adamantly do not wish these people harm, I personally will not shed a tear when they shuffle off this mortal coil. There are too many other fires burning to have to put up with this shit. The dinosaurs are on notice. And they may just get the war they’re so desperate for.