To anyone who takes an objective look, it’s clear that he isn’t threatening to rape her, in fact it’s the exact opposite. He’s joking that Jess Phillips is so unattractive that he wouldn’t ever want to rape her.
Rape jokes aren’t for everyone. To some people many subjects are taboo, to others nothing is off limits. After all, if you think that some jokes aren’t allowed, then by definition, you don’t believe in free speech.
When Carl was running for office in the European elections in 2019 he was interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire for the BBC.
Interview : UKIP candidate hears survivors’ reaction to rape comments (you made need to use a VPN if you are outside of the UK)
In the interview, Victoria reads out comments that have been sent into the show about how incredibly outraged people and organisations are with Carl’s comments, and about how much damage he has done to people by hurting their feelings.
The truth is, the reach of Carl’s initial tweet was small. The only people who would have seen it were his followers, the people following the hash tags used (which would be very few), and possibly Jess Phillips if she reads replies.
The reason so many people became aware of it (outside of the left’s twitter bubble), is the enormous signal boosting that took place by media organisations such as newspapers, television and radio programmes. If it weren’t for those, his message would have only been seen by 1000’s of likeminded people. But after the media got a hold of it, it would have been seen by millions.
The hypocrisy is that it is not Carl who offended so many people, it was the media who knew exactly what they were doing. They deliberately signal boosted his tweet to as many people as possible because they knew they would get a reaction out of it. They knew that vulnerable people would be offended by the tweet, but they signal boosted it anyway. They knew people would be hurt, and that was the point. They don’t care about people’s feelings, they care about ratings and justifying their own existence.
But surely people need to know about the character of the candidates up for election I hear you say? That may be true if Carl actually stood a chance of being elected, but he wasn’t even close. Carl was second on the list of UKIP candidates (EU election’s work on a proportional representation system), so UKIP would have needed to secure around 25% of the vote for Carl to be elected as a MEP. In the end, UKIP secured 3.24% of the vote, and this would have been clear from any polling that was done. Carl never stood a chance.
When making a decision it’s always good to do a cost benefit analysis. If the benefits outweigh the cost, then the decision is a good one to make. The “justification” these media organisations use for publicising the tweet was to make people aware of the candidate’s past, so they could make an informed choice and not elect him. The reality is that the odds of him being elected were extremely remote, but the odds of many vulnerable people being offended were far higher. If these media organisations actually cared about people, they would have shielded people by not publicising the tweet. But they don’t care about people, all whilst pretending they do.