Garbage Jokes, Free Speech, and Bad Faith Politics

Carlos Avila

October 31 2024

Days before the 2024 U.S. election, Republican nominee Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. One of his opening acts was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who himself recently sold-out multiple nights at the same venue with his popular YouTube show Kill Tony. Despite his popularity, many only heard of him for the first time thanks to the ongoing deluge of mainstream media articles decrying his “racist” set at Trump’s rally. (Surely Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Tim Walz is included in this group, shortly after he got together with his team and decided on “jackwad” as the appropriate insult to hurl at the comedian.) This charge of racism largely rests on one joke in which Hinchcliffe wondered whether the floating island of garbage that periodically makes the news cycle is indeed Puerto Rico, the diminutive U.S. Commonwealth in the Caribbean. I was born on the island, as were generations of my family before me. Naturally, a conversation developed (over a group text message) around the significance of this joke. A common position quickly emerged: the joke was disgusting, insulting, and a representation of how the Trump campaign really thinks about Puerto Ricans. I found myself alone in considering U.S.–Puerto Rico relations historically, and in thinking about what a commitment to free speech means and why it is important. If we analyze Hinchcliffe’s set from these angles, two points emerge: the outrage over the joke is farcical, and, although the Republicans appear to currently be the party of free speech, the backlash that has resulted from the comedian’s performance has shown the Trump camp to be mere opportunists.

We can say the history of U.S.–Puerto Rico relations is complex, but a snapshot is revealing enough. The U.S. took over the island in 1898 and since then Congress has held plenary power over the island’s affairs. A constitution was ratified in 1952, giving the local government some reserved powers, but this didn’t represent a significant change in the order of things. Prior to that, in 1917, people born in Puerto Rico were granted U.S. citizenship, and today there are nearly twice as many Puerto Ricans in the U.S. mainland than on the island. Laws allowing for special tax benefits to American companies operating in Puerto Rico have allowed it to be plundered of its labor, people, and wealth. That’s just one among an expanding list of insults the island has suffered. The history of U.S.–P.R. relations shows that which party happens to be in power matters very little. Again, the island’s history since 1898 is remarkably unvarying. Nevertheless, the Democrats have been the loudest voice in the refutation of Hinchcliffe’s joke. But history provides little hope that their victory in November will bring about changes to the island’s political situation. One recent example of such undemocratic affairs is the installation of the Financial Oversight and Management Board of Puerto Rico by the Obama administration in 2016, which took away what little remaining self-determination the 1952 Constitution had granted. The role of the FOMBPR is to ensure that the creditors of the government’s debt are paid, and they do so by revising and approving the island’s budget. The members of this board were appointed by the president himself. Of course, whenever it was needed to speak about the oversight board at all, the administration framed it as a move that upheld the best interests of, and would “restore opportunity” to, the people of Puerto Rico. They used the language of care in the act of taking away what little political power people had through their elected representatives.

There’s very little reason to believe a second Trump administration would be better than the first or than Obama’s where Puerto Rican self-determination is concerned. But outrage over the FOMBPR would be much more politically worthwhile than outrage over some comedian’s crass joke. When we hear the exasperated claim that we must save democracy from these racists who are blatantly telling us how they will treat us when they’re in power—like garbage—we should look past the emotional rhetoric and ask: what would being treated like garbage amount to, and how is it different than the last 126 years? Clearly, the political parties make their pitch on purely emotional grounds, and both play on fears of authoritarian tendencies. Without taking on a historical perspective, voting amounts to choosing which set of words make us feel better. This demonstration of the emptiness of the political position offered by both parties should be much more deflating for the Democrat.

It's (somehow still) common to hear the rejoinder that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for the lesser evil. But rarely is it made explicit that two different kinds of evil are implied. There’s the evil of the Democrats: they’re weak, slaves to inertia, their heart is in the right place, but their hand is forced by a corrupt system. Then there’s the evil of the Republicans: actual evil — hatred, greed, and other deadly sins. This is, of course, the so-called liberal bias in full display. But perhaps after a few examples of how, when it comes to policy, both parties are more alike than not, the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Democrat might say “yeah, but…the message matters, words have meaning,” and, crucially, confess that the reason we should care about these things is because of the stupidity of the electorate. The effective freedom of speech ends at a certain level of perceived intelligence. Perhaps the concern is that the norms of civility must be upheld for democracy to function. The freedom of speech ends at the degradation of one’s political opponents. These are essentially the same argument, as they boil down to determining who you can trust to hear certain types of speech without reacting in some deviant way. This is the ideology Hinchcliffe sees operating in the Democratic Party, and what he is reacting against.

Hinchcliffe is a comedian, one who’s been previously “cancelled,” and as such is concerned primarily with the issue of free speech. He sees the current Democratic Party as posing a danger to the freedom of self-expression. We should all share his concern. I’ve become more convinced, especially in the last 8 years, that the fundamental difference between a Left-wing and a Right-wing position is that the Left believes that humans act according to reason and can achieve the tasks they set before themselves, whereas the Right see in humanity masses that must be controlled and directed for their own good. The very possibility of the movement towards freedom begins with a commitment to the Leftist idea.

Hinchcliffe’s appearance at the rally, and his uncensored set, seemed to make an obvious point: no popular comedian could do their usual nightclub set at a Kamala Harris event in the way that Hinchcliffe did his at Trump’s. The Democrats would censor it to the point of unintelligibility. Hinchcliffe did the style of comedy he is known for, not straying away from controversial or taboo subjects, and twisting premises with unexpected punchlines just as likely to make an audience groan as laugh out loud (he received both these reactions to his set at Trump’s rally). The comedian hasn’t backed down in the face of what must be immense pressure, and in this act he is standing on the authority of his constitutional rights. Democratic Party members immediately moved to turn Hinchcliffe’s set into bloody chum in the political water that they simultaneously and feverishly gobbled up. This was to be expected, as is the near absolute lack of coverage of George Lopez’s joke at a Harris rally over the weekend in which he insinuated Mexicans are thieves. The hypocrisy runs deeper than words can express. What perhaps wasn’t as expected was how quickly the Trump campaign has distanced itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke, turning their back on the comedian and relinquishing the opportunity to defend the right to free speech. If we couldn’t see it before, this is evidence that Republicans have seized upon the language of free speech only because the Democrats have done away with it. Both moves are in bad faith, motivated by political expediency.

I’m confident that the disagreement that arose in my family text chat is more about differing analyses of the situation, which therefore inform different beliefs about what the appropriate strategy should be, rather than a disagreement about what generally needs to change about how our political and economic lives are organized. But there’s a lot of bad faith, Democratic Party-proliferated argumentation that has been adopted whole-cloth by those who see themselves as on the mainstream Left, and it must be dismantled. We can only do this through our various forms of communication, stand-up comedy included. Censorship is fickle. Perhaps today what’s taboo is making fun of someone’s nationality, and tomorrow it will be denouncing the major American political parties as hypocritical. This is precisely why freedom of speech is so important to uphold as an absolute value, and why we should defend Hinchcliffe’s right to tell his jokes, regardless of how they make us feel or what we think their repercussions might be.