It's Like I Don't Even Care About Unifying in Opposition to Donald Trump

During the election, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon famously tousled then-candidate Donald Trump's hair, after which his ratings plummeted, because lots of people don't find it entertaining to watch a grown man giggling while playing with the hair of an aspiring dictator.

In May, the New York Times published a gross White Man Redemption Story, starring Fallon, who whined about how bad all the criticism had made him feel. He had the opportunity to apologize, but instead went for righteous defense: "I don't want to be bullied into not being me, and not doing what I think is funny. Just because some people bash me on Twitter, it's not going to change my humor or my show."

That's taking a position on the wisdom and decency of normalizing a man known to be an aggressive bigot as he was seeking to lead the nation. Indeed, it is a political position (despite the incessant claims that Fallon isn't political). It's a political position with which I happen to firmly disagree.

Last night, Fallon took two minutes at the top of his show "to address the events in Charlottesville." His first words were: "Even though the Tonight Show isn't a political show..." Oh, but it is.

Fallon condemned the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. What he did not do, again, is apologize for his own role in Trump's ascendancy — for using the highly visible platform of the Tonight Show, which is indeed regarded (wrongly) by millions of viewers as "apolitical," to normalize the very man who has leveraged the United States presidency to empower the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, and elsewhere.

That failure made Fallon's statement incomplete, at best.

Hey, remember that time you ruffled Trump's hair, long after we already knew he was a white supremacist chauvinist bigot? https://t.co/y66hZTjDbz

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) August 15, 2017

If you guessed that the response to this tweet was my being resoundingly lectured for being part of the problem for having "purity tests" and not welcoming Fallon "with open arms," give yourself a million gold stars.

You see, the problem isn't that Jimmy Fallon used the veneer of apoliticism that upholding the oppressive status quo confers upon his show to bestow mainstream credentials on the extremist Trump, earning millions of dollars and risking absolutely nothing to wait to say something until after a white woman has been killed by white supremacists empowered by the extremist he helped normalize, and even then failing to make himself trustworthy by acknowledging his mistake, while people with much smaller platforms and much more to lose took enormous risks speaking out against and sounding alarms about Trump every day, a job that was made exponentially more difficult by Fallon's "apolitical" hair-tousling routine.

The problem is that I'm a bitch.

Isn't it always?

Please make sure my headstone reads:

Here lies Melissa McEwan;
She was mean to Jimmy Fallon.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) August 15, 2017