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This last week, Saudi investors pulled their funding on LIV Golf, the competitor league to the PGA Tour, basically leaving the league in free-fall and their future uncertain (it’s probably dead in the water, tbh). 

Now, you might be thinking, Danielle…you’re…into golf? What is this even? And you would be right. I’ve never watched a single golf game (tournament? match?) in my life. But I do like nosey, gossipy documentary series, and Full Swing was just informative enough that now I have Many Opinions on professional golf gossip. 

First off, if you either care about golf or care about low-stakes gossip, you may know that there was a big HULLABALOO (the scientific term) over the creation of LIV Golf in the first place. The league formed in 2021 and began courting players off the PGA Tour in the following year. Chaos ensued because, you see, the PGA didn’t like that much, the idea of their players making more money somewhere else and being paid simply for showing up and not for their performance. There was a huge divide, and PGA really leaned hard on the fact that LIV was being invested by Saudis linked to things like, yknow, journalist murder, general terrorism against the US, etc. etc. to cast aspersions on these players’ reputations. They were taking blood money (and lots of it) and if it failed, they wouldn’t be allowed back (remains to be seen).

Now, foremost of my Many Opinions is that I generally have zero feel-bads for Very Rich People who try to engender sympathy from those of us who are decidedly NOT Very Rich. In this case, it was “I took the blood money because I must feed my family, you see, my poor, poor family,” they pleaded into the camera from their $6M-13k square footage-on the waterfront homes.¹ On the other hand, many people pointed out the well-documented hypocrisy and potential illegal operations² of the PGA tour as justification for these players bouncing out to perform for known terrorist groups.³ 

But the thing that bothered me most about the response from those players who defected to LIV (the only thing keeping them from the bread line, obviously) was the finger-pointing that reliably came next. You may also recognize this sentiment from those poor, struggling comedy artists and defenders of free speech who took their big fat checks from the Saudi Arabian government to stand up and tell jokes at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. The defense looks something like this:

“Okay yeah fine we took money from known terrorists but what about YOU GUYS WHO HAVE CRITIQUES HUH. Don’t you live in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, one of the leaders in GOVERNMENT-FUNDED GLOBAL TERRORISM. You criticize ME, but you LIVE there/pay taxes there/play for the PGA tour/engage in society, INTERESTING.”

The intellectual dishonesty would be a little more forgivable if the folks screaming this into the mics didn’t spend the rest of their lives trying to show us just how intellectual they are (more than us plebs, that’s for sure, they’re just ASKIN’ QUESTIONS HERE). No one is denying⁴ that the US has engaged in some pretty fucked-up global terrorism and manipulation over its lifetime. And also…you’re not performing for a US government-sponsored comedy festival⁵ or a US government-funded golf league. It’s simply not comparable to playing for or performing in private businesses; those businesses are not funneling half of their ticket sales to suicide bombers (and if they are…you should, like, not perform in those places). 

The most irritating thing about this line of defense is that it suggests that we cannot critique one thing without being On The Other Extreme Side or Defending The Other Thing. That is not just intellectually lazy, it’s like, have you met me? I have PLENTY of critique to go around. I contain multitudes. 

Very little in life is comparable to a sporting event where hating one team means cheering for the other. Even sporting events themselves aren’t like this, like if you’ve ever watched a Steelers/Vikings game or a Yankees/Astros game and crossed your fingers that the ground would open up and just swallow everyone whole. Life is not a pulley system where we must LOVE one thing simply because we HATE another, or even where we must full-throatedly support one thing just because we critique another. 

Candidly, I’m also not loving this new rebuttal method from Grown-Ass Men that amounts to, “YEAH BUT HE DID BAD STUFF FIRST,” or what I will forthwith call The Toddler Defense. It’s not that they’re wrong, exactly–hypocrisy is a sort of unavoidable resting state as a human being. AND ALSO: There are still varying degrees of “problematic” that we have to be honest about. The fact that we are, as citizens who exist, forced into making shitty decisions to feed our families⁶ or giving money to places or governments that do evil things⁷ does not mean that these comedians or golfers are somehow justified in their shitty choices. The hypocrisy of another person does not redeem your own decisions. Trying to redirect that attention just makes you the asshole who won’t acknowledge the difference between right and wrong because, at some point, your critics also Did Things That Weren’t Cool.

There is a difference between legitimately having choices and essentially being forced into something in order to stay housed or employed or fed. The difference is that the performers in Riyadh and the players with LIV were not actually faced with the choice of their children going hungry OR doing business with rich terrorists. They weren’t going to have their homes foreclosed on if they stayed where they were. Yes, some of them claimed they were making the move to LIV as a protest of PGA practices, or some comedians believed themselves to be, idk, peace-seeking ambassadors to the Saudis…but again, partnering with rich people who behead their critics and who own slaves isn’t, like, the move.

In these moments, I have a STRONG preference for real honesty. It’s like all the people who still loved the Steelers while Ben Roethlisberger, alleged multiple-time rapist, was their quarterback. When I would ask them about how they felt about it (couldn’t be me staying a fan⁸, so I was curious), some people were honest: Yeah, he did what he did and he’s a fucking asshole, but they loved their team forever. Yeah, okay. I may not have made the same choice, but at least you owned it. Too many other people would try to dismiss or diminish what he did, or flat-out refuse that he did it, or blame the victims, all to make themselves NOT have to contend with the moral tension in the situation. Just like, say you hate the guy but you’re still a Steelers fan. Or just say that raping women isn’t a dealbreaker for you (be prepared for the effects here). Honesty is better than trying to pretend the choice you’re making isn’t a morally questionable one, that it’s unimpeachable.

The people who performed or played for the Saudis who just said, “hey, I like money and they gave me a lot of it,” were at least honest. I don’t like their choices. I wouldn’t have made the same ones. But at least they’re being up front about who they are and what they value, versus laying on the ground and rolling around in shit and then standing up and pointing the finger at everyone else to remind us that we, too, have been varying degrees of dirty in the past, so this is just natural and okay and nothing is weird or wrong or bad with it. 

This behavior stems from what I believe is society’s biggest problem: A pathological fear of being wrong. But we’re ALL wrong at some point…it’s literally the human condition, to err, to make mistakes, to fuck it up. So what the fuck is the big problem with it? And I don’t mean that in a “Being wrong is great, everyone does it so who cares,” which is the huge difference between what I’m saying and what Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr are spittled-ly standing behind. I mean, “Being wrong is who we are sometimes, AND we are also grown adults capable of understanding that we are wrong, wrestling with where we fucked up and trying to do better in the future.”

No, there ISN’T any ethical consumption under capitalism. Yes, we’ve ALL done A Bad. But we need to be honest that there are still varying degrees of bad, both morally and legally. Being human might mean making mistakes, but it doesn’t mean throwing up our hands and just not ever thinking about how our decisions affect others. Justifying one’s behavior with The Toddler Defense isn’t the intellectually fertile ground its purporters seem to believe it is, largely because that line of thought is so silly and immature that even small children regularly default to it to try to stay out of trouble. 

What can we do instead? Understand our hypocrisy. Challenge ourselves in it. Accept when others point it out. Don’t use “pointing it out” in someone else as a way to deflect from our own. Understand that our own hypocrisy SHOULD impact how hard we come for others on certain things we don’t like. But it’s also okay to be honest about the differences in degrees of bad. There are real differences between taking millions of dollars (when you already have millions of dollars) from terrorists vs simply living in a place where your tax dollars fund terrorism. None of these are easy or simple conversations; just because social media has dumbed down and condensed content to sound bites doesn’t mean the concepts are somehow simpler. We just need to reject these types of Toddler Defenses and instead retrain our brains to wrestle with these concepts again.

¹He apparently bought the home for $3.5M in 2022, potentially after his contract with LIV, so the house could have been funded by it. His previous home was purchased for $2.5M. His current home is worth somewhere between $6-7M

²Former PGA golfer-turned LIV defector Phil Mickelson, among others, is engaged currently in an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA, alleging that it is operating as an illegal monopoly. To be clear, we are allowed to hate everyone in this situation, including the PGA

³Saudi investors of LIV are linked to the government groups funding terrorism like the 9/11 attacks on US soil

⁴Or, like, they shouldn’t be denying this

⁵The closest thing that comes to this is something like the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, though I honestly don’t even know if the government pays for that or like, some journalists union. But even if you could point out a US-government-funded comedy festival (like the, uh, UFC match on the White House lawn or something?), we are all still protected here by the first amendment in the US Constitution. Performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival meant a very strict moratorium on a variety of topics, to include not being allowed to be critical of the Saudi government. For these comics who love to simultaneously believe themselves warriors, defenders, bastions of free speech, but also just silly widdle guys who tell silly jokes for money, this should have been more of, idk, an internal conflict?

^6like being forced to be on social media to market your services and pay your bills, or forced to use AI or some kind of company’s technology you morally disapprove of but your company is making you do that. there is a substantial difference between people making millions of dollars and people who cannot afford to morally protest the decisions of the people paying them because it means they won’t be able to afford their kids’ insulin

⁷I like to remind people that Meta knew and allowed their platform to be used to fund and implement a genocide in Myanmar, and all Zuckerberg thought was, “wow, look at how much power our platform has”

⁸It’s not me thinking I’m morally superior, I just have next to no attachment to these things, even if I love them inside and out. Like when the NFL continued to be a garbage organization to women and players/coaches of color, I just decided I couldn’t do it anymore. Even afterward, when Aaron Rodgers was a total shithead during COVID, I was like, yeah, fuck that guy I’ve loved for over a decade. If the Dodgers had retained Trevor Bauer, even if they’d been forced to by the courts, I probably would have abstained from baseball til he was gone. Like I said, that’s not me thinking I’m better…I just don’t care about walking away from shit that I’ve only loved because I enjoy it and it makes my life better, and when I start to have internal conflict, it just doesn’t feel worth it to me? Like why waste my time on shit that I have to wrestle with?

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