Hasan Minhaj and the rise of the fabricated-trauma porn industry

Are Americans going out of their way to feel miserable? And if so, have they started a market for ways to fulfill that yearning?

Kat Rosenfield tackles that question today at the Free Press, and it’s a doozy. She centers the question on an award-winning comic named Hasan Minhaj, who recently got exposed as a serial fabricator of claims of victimization over his Muslim heritage. Christian Toto dug into the ramifications of the exposure of Minhaj’s malicious fabulism last weekend, a week after The New Yorker dug them up:

In Minhaj’s approach to comedy, he leans heavily on his own experience as an Asian American and Muslim American, telling harrowing stories of law-enforcement entrapment and personal threats. For many of his fans, he has become an avatar for the power of representation in entertainment. But, after many weeks of trying, I had been unable to confirm some of the stories that he had told onstage. When we met on a recent afternoon, at a comedy club in the West Village, Minhaj acknowledged, for the first time, that many of the anecdotes he related in his Netflix specials were untrue. Still, he said that he stood by his work. “Every story in my style is built around a seed of truth,” he said. “My comedy Arnold Palmer is seventy per cent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty per cent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.” …

Later in the special, Minhaj speaks about the fallout from “Patriot Act” segments on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism. The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ”

Does it matter that neither of those things really happened to Minhaj?

As it turns out, “emotional truth” is a term of art for “fabulism.” And it had real-world consequences, too, especially for the family of a high-school classmate who had the temerity to reject a prom invitation:

So Hasan Minhaj:

a. smeared an old friend as a racist
b. gave enough identifiable details that she got online hate
c. when told about, shrugged it off and kept doing the routine, and told her to scrub her social media pic.twitter.com/vPRRQvcEu2

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) September 15, 2023

Christian Toto isn’t terribly impressed by the “emotional truths” defense, either:

The headline calls them his “emotional truths,” and it’s hard not to recall Dan Rather’s “fake, but accurate” defense when his hit piece against President George W. Bush imploded weeks before a presidential election. …

Why would the comedian tell so many fake stories? Consider how many race hoaxes we’ve seen in recent years.

The goal is the same. To make America appear more racist than it actually is and support efforts to right fictional wrongs. It’s also a living, and apparently a very good one for Minhaj.

Well, Minhaj is hardly alone in that, and that’s not entirely a new phenomenon either. The proliferation of race-attack hoaxes may have reached their peak with Jussie Smollett, but clearly the demand has not abated for claims of personal racial injustices, and the reality-based claims supply line has never been strong enough to meet the demand. Minhaj commercialized his fabulism more spectacularly than others, but there are plenty of ways to monetize false grievances, and apparently no end of credulous media outlets to assist — including Netflix, apparently.

Rosenfield asks the right questions in her essay today. We’ve always had fabulists, from Jayson Blair to Janet Cooke to James Frey to Stephen Glass, who literally titled his post-disgrace novel “The Fabulist” in a stunning show of lack of real remorse. (They all used some form of the “emotional truth” defense at some point, too.) We used to apply severe economic punishment to such conduct, but for some reason Americans are turning it into a gold mine. And now, Rosenfield points out, the punishment gets meted out to those who actually perform due diligence:

It is what Jay Caspian Kang called “oppression fantasy,” writing that Minhaj’s fakery represents “another example of how oppression stories—in this case fabricated oppression porn—gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers.”

It is also a familiar dynamic to anyone who remembers the memoir hoaxes of 20 years ago; the type of audience who flocks to see Minhaj today is the same one that made James Frey a bestseller. There is nothing that white educated liberals love more than to slum it in a voyeuristic narrative of someone else’s suffering, all while congratulating themselves on being enlightened enough to appreciate it for the art it is. Inject a bit of racial guilt into the mix, and you’ll dine out for the rest of your life courtesy of the New Yorker tote bag class—at least until one of said magazine’s investigative reporters finds out you’re full of shit.

But today’s trauma merchants are ultimately better off than the hoax memoirists. The days in which audiences responded to lies like this with a sense of outrage and betrayal are over; if anything, the anger today is reserved for the person who interrupts a comfortable narrative with a bunch of pesky facts. Consider what happens, inevitably, whenever some bias-stroking outrage is exposed as a fraud—whether it’s Jussie Smollett, or kids identifying as cats, or a guy allegedly shrieking the N-word at a crowded sporting event. Instead of revising our prior beliefs, we look for ways in which being wrong only goes to show how right we were. So, this story wasn’t true? Ah, well: this country is so racist, or sexist, or full of sexually depraved weirdos who want to secretly turn every kid into a trans-cat, that it could have been true, and that’s just as bad.

Rosenfield also tackles the “emotional truth” argument:

But despite the fact that the prom story is emotionally resonant with many a teenage experience, there is still something weird—even, dare I say, appropriative—about claiming to have been a victim of something that didn’t happen, let alone making a living off it. On this front, Minhaj has less in common with the comedian who embellishes a wacky story for laughs, and more in common with the TikToker who scammed her followers out of thousands of dollars to treat a cancer she didn’t have.

It’s not just “weirdly appropriative” — it’s downright narcissistic. But for some reason, even while stories like these turn out to be complete lies, people still buy the next set without ever first engaging their discernment. Clearly the incentives here are as Rosenfield states — people are actively yearning for anecdotal evidence of injustice and outrage, no matter how untrue or ridiculous, and resent the hell out of people who expose the lies.

Why? One has to wonder whether this is a sign of cultural decline, or perhaps the end result of the educational rot from decades of emphasizing America’s failings in history without any thought of the overall context of the American experiment. In its way, it seems like the same impulse that climate-change activists have in declaring every hot day and every weather event the Unmistakable Outcome Of Global Warming Denialism. The constant thirst for doom and despair comes from the desire to destroy everything and rebuild it under an Enlightened Despotism of Sciencey Goodness, in which The Experts® will run everything and tell us how to live every aspect of our lives lest we anger the gods of Gaia or racial/ethnic determinism.

Stephen Glass was just ahead of his time.