Pirate's Cove

The hardcore Statists at The New Republic have an issue with people being funny. And, let’s face it, a goodly chunk of those on the Left who are “comedians” are in it more for the applause rather than the laughs

The credo of “owning the libs” reads a lot like the traditional comedian’s defense of his right to insult and offend. https://t.co/if0JrHzVO8

— The New Republic (@newrepublic) February 10, 2021

It’s a hell of a graphic, you have to see the full size at the link, and it is a huge article about….comedy

In the dark recesses of the internet lurks a man who goes by ToxicCisWhiteMaleFat. He makes his home on onaforums.net, a community named after the shock jock duo Opie & Anthony—a safe space to say what cannot be said offline. He’s posted in threads like “N—-r hate thread #1,” “The K-ke Hate Thread,” “Juno comes out as a tranny,” and “OFFICIAL Post-Election Voter Fraud THREAD,” where he called Joe Biden “a pedophile retard who’s about to die in the oval office.” Elsewhere he’s derided the Covid-19 vaccine, which he calls “gook juice” and “chinky jew sauce.” Last year he revealed his Twitter account, @ApevonTarskin. The username matches a commenter on Thought Catalog, which ToxicCisWhiteMaleFat has said he trolled after it retracted a transphobic essay by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. His contributions there were more of the same. Under a 2015 post titled “When You Love ‘The Chase,’” he once commented, “There is not a more despicable human on this earth than a fat white n—-r fucker. Get an AIDS test. You have it.”

The internet can sometimes seem like one big rabbit hole, and if you make it down to the bottom, waiting for you is a person. At the bottom of mine was ToxicCisWhiteMaleFat.

I’ve spent the last five years writing about the comedy industry, the last three or so covering inequality and extremism within it. This work has periodically brought me in contact with some of the leading lights in the scene’s transgressive edge—the place where popular, mainstream comedy bleeds into the kind of right-wing politics that animated the Capitol riot last month. It’s a place hostile to prying eyes, and the blowback can be furious. I have been harassed and trolled on social media. I have been doxxed, as have members of my family. And eventually, I found my way to a message board where ToxicCisWhiteMaleFat—who I have reason to believe, though I cannot definitively prove, is a person at the heart of the New York City club comedy scene—and others participated in the Gamergate-style campaign that had been conducted against me.

This is all so bat shit insane, it’s hard to even know where to begin, rather than just looking at the insane ravings of a lunatic.

This online forum—just one node in a constellation of similar forums, subreddits, and Discord groups—is not some outlier in the industry. Before I take you down my particular rabbit hole, it’s worth establishing the many ways in which the worlds of comedy and the racist right overlap and reinforce each other.

The recent comedy boom is popularly understood as an era in which new forms of media, like podcasts and streaming video, created massive new audiences for comedy, which in turn created massive new revenue streams for comedians. At the same time, the artificial intimacy of these platforms allowed fans to feel a level of connection with their favorite performers—and with each other—that could verge on the cultish. This was not simply an era of glorious bounty, in which little-known comedians could land massive Netflix paydays or leapfrog from UCB Comedy to College Humor to lucrative sitcom writing gigs. It was also the era of walled-off subcultures, like onaforums.net, which could transform into real, violent political factions, especially at a time when comedy was increasingly pitted against the forces of political correctness—the very forces that also fueled the grievances of Donald Trump’s supporters and the revanchist right, whose credo of “owning the libs” reads a lot like the traditional comedian’s defense of his right to insult and offend.

The mobs that descended on Washington, D.C., last month have intellectual roots in many places, going back to the bloody beginnings of this country. But they also have roots in specific areas of modern culture, including Facebook, BuzzFeed, and the increasingly online world of comedy. All the forces that incubated the rioters are still there, unchanged, chugging along as normal. The rot goes much deeper than you might expect.

Let’s skip to the meaning: comedians engaged in Wrongthink need to be shut down. Cancelled. Not allowed their Constitutionally protected free speech. But, don’t you dare call lefties fascists.

It really is an insanely long piece. You know, if they don’t think it is funny, they can just tune out.