Mizzy the TikTok tormentor sums up the depravity of online culture
JAN MOIR: Mizzy the TikTok tormentor sums up the casual depravity of online culture
Mizzy is a new kind of urban hero for the stupids; an 18-year-old boy possessed of flinty entitlement, an amoral moron who has embraced the terrorisation of innocent bystanders as a means of entertainment.
Mizzy has made himself famous by posting videos on TikTok showing him entering uninvited into the houses of strangers, stealing an elderly lady’s dog in a park, making fun of Orthodox Jews and going up to young girls in late night train stations, stroking their hair and asking them if they want to die.
His defence is that he is actually asking them if they ‘want to dye’ and anyway; ‘I’m a black man doing these things and that is why there is such uproar on the internet.’
This is the level of idiocy we are dealing with; this is the sea of malicious delinquency into which we have sunk. Mizzy — real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro from Hackney, East London — won’t even acknowledge that his victims are vulnerable citizens being terrified by his actions.
Clearly, he has no idea of how, for example, young women feel; of their constant stranger-danger awareness, daily harassments and necessarily fragile trust in the world. And if he did, he wouldn’t care.
Mizzy — real name Bacari-Bronze O’Garro from Hackney, East London — won’t even acknowledge that his victims are vulnerable citizens being terrified by his actions
He and his teenage accomplices have the cocksure faith of those who know there will be little consequence for their actions in an adult world cowed into submission by politically-correct concerns and the perennial threat of being sent to woke jail.
Dear God, what has become of us? Everyone is so scared of this generation of cultural despots that the little horrors are being allowed to run riot.
Here we all are, taking great pains to respect their pronouns, examine our unconscious bias, worry about our inherited privileges while coddling their half-baked beliefs about oil or history or James Bond and protecting them from any thoughts, books, films, songs, cartoons, language, ideas or behaviours they might find triggering — and what do we get in return? Someone like Mizzy.
For O’Garro it’s all a huge joke, but his genuinely scared victims didn’t know that. In the moment, they don’t know if he and his gang are armed with iPhones or 9-in knives. If their intentions were noble, criminal or none of the above.
If anyone came up to me on a station platform late at night, touched my hair and asked me if I wanted to die, I think I actually would die — of sheer fright.
And note again that the victims he chooses are invariably the softest of soft targets; young girls, unworldly Jewish scholars, little old ladies sitting on park benches.
Dear God, what has become of us? Everyone is so scared of this generation of cultural despots that the little horrors are being allowed to run rio
I’d like to see him ask a bunch of scaffolders on a Bermondsey building site if they ‘want to die’.
I’d like to see him attempt to steal Knuckles Headlock’s pet dobermann from the car park of The Flying Bottle.
I’d like to see him walk uninvited into the home of the kind of person who’d give him a kick up the backside for his troubles, even if I am not the kind of person who condones violence.
In court on Wednesday, O’Garro was given a two-year Criminal Behaviour Order and had to pay £365 in fines and costs. Not much of a deterrent, as he acknowledged himself.
‘UK laws are weak, simple as,’ he said on the Piers Morgan show on TalkTV that evening, displaying as much repentance as a cat deep in a vat of double cream. And of course he wasted no time in complaining yet again that he was the victim of racial prejudice and accused the host of racism.
‘Why would I care what colour your skin is? I just think you’re an idiot,’ said Piers, and it was hard to argue.
I’d like to see him ask a bunch of scaffolders on a Bermondsey building site if they ‘want to die’
For there is something about Mizzy and his antics that is absolutely enraging, utterly infuriating — but it is not because, like Ali G, he ‘is black’.
It is more that his practical ‘jokes’ are so disrespectful to innocent people; so engineered to cause maximum alarm and distress — and all to engender clicks and laffs on social media.
Where is the decency, the respect for the boundaries of others, the humanity? Nowhere in sight. Yet while Mizzy feeds off the fear of the blameless, woe betide anyone who fails to respect him.
It would be nice to dismiss O’Garro as just another teenage dirtbag were it not for the fact that he represents something terrible about the casual depravity of online culture; a world in which the depersonalisation of others can lead to the aggrandisation of their tormentors.
How soon before Mizzy is in the reality show jungle, a panellist on 8 Out Of 10 Cats or making a guest appearance on the Billy Bragg stage at Glastonbury?
He also represents the kind of entitled, selfish, post-pandemic youngsters who seem to have no respect for their elders or anyone else.
It is more that his practical ‘jokes’ are so disrespectful to innocent people; so engineered to cause maximum alarm and distress — and all to engender clicks and laffs on social media
Where is the decency, the respect for the boundaries of others, the humanity? Nowhere in sight
Part of the blame for this surely must lie with an education system that has also been shaped by fashionable thinking and finds itself unable to exert any kind of meaningful discipline on its charges.
Instead of being reprimanded for bad behaviour, mollycoddled pupils today are merely told they made the wrong choices.
Teachers who do try to impose discipline and strictness have been dismissed as bullies for their trouble.
His mother apparently despairs, but couldn’t she have done more to control her son? It’s not the first time he has been in trouble with the police, after all.
And despite his lawyer’s claims in court that O’Garro is repentant and won’t repeat his offending, the TikTok pest is already boasting of making new films — and that the police can do nothing to stop him.
The terrible thing is, he has a point. If going around acting like an idiot and frightening people were crimes, then most of our recent intake of prime ministers would be in jail.
Anyway, this has all upset me more than it should. Not least because he seems like a bright but deluded kid who is just making a mess of his life, simple as.
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