Ariana Grande and the Politics of Licking Other People’s Stuff

On Thursday, actress Susan Sarandon, most famous for citrusing her breasts in Atlantic City and driving off a cliff in Thelma and Louise, came out in support of pop brat doughnut-licker Ariana Grande.

Grande was caught on tape badmouthing America after spreading her saliva on doughnuts on display; she justified that action the next day, claiming she had to fight childhood obesity by surreptitiously tonguing the sugary products. Now, Sarandon has tweeted:

Today, lick a doughnut in solidarity with @ArianaGrande. A sweet, talented, true American.

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) July 9, 2015

Never mind the illogic of Grande’s contention that she secretly licked doughnuts to discourage others from eating them – if she truly wanted to discourage others, she could have stomped on them publicly, or called for a nationwide boycott of doughnuts, or cut a new version of “Problem” in which Iggy Azalea raps about moving beyond doughy joy. Focus instead on the nihilism of defacing someone else’s property without their knowledge. It takes a special kind of emptiness to do something like that.

But the left is fine with that sort of behavior so long as the target is someone who hasn’t bought into leftist thought. That’s undoubtedly why Grande wrote that her doughnut-licking represented a crusade against big, bad American fatties:

As an advocate for healthy eating, food is very important to me and I sometimes get upset by how freely we as Americans eat and consume things without giving any thought to the consequences that it has on our health and society as a whole. The fact that the United States has the highest child obesity rate in the world frustrates me.  We need to do more to educate ourselves and our children about the dangers of overeating and the poison that we put into our bodies.  We need to demand more from our food industry.

Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club of one of the tactics of his depressed band of terrorists: urinating in the soup of the upper class at a posh hotel. After the book came out, he admitted that he drew on real life for the incident:

I knew people who worked at the big hotels in downtown Portland, and yeah, they would tell stories like that. There was a kid in England—a very handsome, well-presented kid—who told me, “I work in an upscale restaurant in London, and we do things to celebrities’ food all the time.” I said, “Tell me one person.” He said, “I can’t because there are only two of these restaurants, and it’d be too easy to find me.” I wasn’t going to sign his book until he told me one person. So he sheepishly goes, “Margaret Thatcher has eaten my sperm.” I started laughing. As soon as I did, he got bold. He said, “At least five times.”

This is sociopathic behavior, but it takes on a charm for the left because of the target. Similarly, gay bully Dan Savage, who happily screams at Christian high schoolers when they disagree with his perverse view of the Bible, reported in 2000 that he licked doorknobs in the campaign offices of Gary Bauer after contracting the flu – all to give Bauer and his staffer the sickness:

I went from doorknob to doorknob. They were filthy, no doubt, but there wasn’t time to find a rag to spit on. My immune system wasn’t all it should be — I was in the grip of the worst flu I had ever had — but I was on a mission. If for some reason I didn’t manage to get a pen from my mouth to Gary’s hands, I wanted to seed his office with germs, get as many of his people sick as I could, and hopefully one of them would infect the candidate. So, much as it pains me to confirm a hateful stereotype of gay men — we will put anything in our mouths — I started licking doorknobs. The front door, office doors, even a bathroom door. When that was done, I started in on the staplers, phones and computer keyboards. Then I stood in the kitchen and licked the rims of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack.

This is a point of pride for Savage.

In reality, Grande’s act was probably just a juvenile act of narcissistic nastiness from a juvenile, narcissistic, nasty person. But she knew enough to know that if she cloaked her hijinks in the holiness of a leftist cause, she’d draw support. And so she shall. No act is too low for those seeking to harm dastardly Americans who disagree with the politically correct cause of the day — and no heaven is too high for these saints so far as the left is concerned.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.