The 2000s Are Back

One interesting thing about Tom Segura, whose sketch comedy series Bad Thoughts debuted on Netflix is this week, is that he’s a boring old ordinary homophobe. I’ve written before about his penchant for mocking trans people on the podcast he co-hosts with his wife Christina Pazsitzky, but it should not be overlooked that he routinely does the same to gay people whose only crime is posting videos of themselves on the internet. In a segment this week, titled “Gay Stuff” in the YouTube upload, they start with a man looking for love:

Man [in video]: If any of you know any single men who like to fish, hunt, or whatever and want to come hang out—

Pazsitzky: Great.

Segura: That's wild. I've never seen—

Pazsitzky: A Southern gay?

Segura: But this style. Like, "What's up, man? I'm gay."

Pazsitzky: It's too normal, and I'm waiting for the turn.

Segura: "I'm gay. I'm just trying to fucking fish and shit." Like, okay. All right. That's cool.

Pazsitzky: Where's it going, though?

Segura: I don't know. It doesn't really... It just ends there. I don't know.

Pazsitzky: That's it? Yeah.

And then they turn to a video of two women kissing at what appears to be some sort of ceremony: 

Pazsitzky: I think I sent this one. God, this is so troubling, right?

Segura: I don't know.

Pazsitzky: Well, I wanted to show Enny. It was specifically for Enny.

Segura: Oh, hey. What's up, Enny?

Pazsitzky: Gay stuff.

Enny Kravitz, producer: What's up?

Pazsitzky: I want to show him—

Kravitz: What are those.

Pazsitzky: Exactly. That's what I wanted to show you.

Segura: Is that a big lady on the right?

Kravitz: I don't know.

Pazsitzky: So I think it's a big white lady and then I'm not sure what the other—

Segura: What country is he from?

Pazsitzky: It's Nigeria.

Segura: There's no way he's a local.

Pazsitzky: This is 90 Day Fiancé.

Segura: He's just like, "Cool. Now I'm a citizen? I just have to fuck this animal?"

[…]

Pazsitzky: What do you think, Enny? They look thrilled.

Kravitz: Well, yeah. I don't know what they are, so I don't know if they have emotion.

To be clear, that’s Segura misgendering one woman and then calling the other an animal. Lest you think this is just a bit they’re doing for the cameras, the group goes on to make clear Segura is constantly sending his friends videos of gay people for the purposes of mocking them:

Pazsitzky: Do we have more gay videos for Enny?

Kravitz: I'm a little concerned.

Segura: Sure.

Pazsitzky: It's my favorite.

Segura: More gay stuff for Enny. It's in the "gay stuff for Enny" folder. Hold on.

Enny: Oh, cool. Are these the ones that you've sent me in my reels that I fucking refuse to respond to?

Segura: No.

Kravitz: Is that what this fucking shit is, bro? It's all fucking day with you, by the way. It's all fucking day, bro. I get more notifications from you than the girl, than friends. Tom Segura sent you another reel. Bro, I've disabled my fucking Instagram notifications because you're fucking ridiculous, man. It's all the goddamn time. How do you even have that many gay things to fucking send? You just got like a fucking gay account on Instagram?

Pazsitzky: I told you.

Kravitz: You just got gay Tom Segura or some shit? It's ridiculous.

Pazsitzky: I told you. It's cock thoughts all day every day.

Segura: Well...

Kravitz: It's crazy, bro. This is what's doing it.

Pazsitzky: Yeah, that's all he wants is dick stuff.

Kravitz: Yeah, I bet this is his whole motherfucking feed now.

Pazsitzky: Yeah, of course.

Kravitz: The whole feed.

Segura: Well, here's the thing. I had some cool gay ones, and I used to send them just to Chris DeStefano because he's always like, "Fuck yeah." But then I sent it to Enny. He was like, "I don't like this shit." I was like, "Ooh."

Kravitz: Of course. I should have just shut my mouth.

Pazsitzky: Let's see some highlights.

I remember a time not so long ago when I might make the argument that these comedians are bigots and get the response that it’s just comedy—they’re not truly hateful in their hearts. In the years since, as their audiences and bank accounts have grown and especially as Trump returned to power, they’ve become increasingly brazen about the fact that they are hateful in their hearts. This stuff isn’t just for laughs; they are ideological homophobes, transphobes, and racists. Consider a recent segment of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast in which Shane Gillis and Matt McCusker complain that the film Sinners is unfair to white people and ahistorical in its portrayal of other races: 

Gillis: I'm working on not getting triggered by race baiting, but the movie was good.

McCusker: It was a good movie?

Gillis: Yeah, it was good.

McCusker: But why were they fucking Irish vampires?

Gillis: The evil white vampires did kind of piss me off, and the only white people in the movie were evil, nasty fucks.

McCusker: Dang.

Gillis: Yeah.

McCusker: Do you think it's strategic at all? Because people make that argument a lot.

Gillis: Yes. Obviously it's strategic.

McCusker: Well, I'm saying right now—

Gillis: They shoehorned Native Americans and Asians into the good side.

McCusker: What?

Gillis: So it was everybody against the honks, dude. The honks were outside going—

McCusker: So the 1800s Asians were like, "Hey, my Black brother"?

Gillis: Yeah.

McCusker: They still don't do that, dude. It's 2025. It's 2025. What happened to that communities where they fell apart?

Gillis: I don't know. But I guess—

McCusker: They had it figured out back then.

Gillis: It's a thing in the Delta, I guess, Mississippi, where Asians did go there and due to Jim Crow laws opened bodegas and shit.

McCusker: Yeah.

Gillis: To be like, you guys can fucking shop here—

McCusker: They're a middleman minority, that's their whole thing.

Gillis: And they did that I guess back then. I don't know how prevalent it was that it needed to be in the movie. I don't know how many fucking Choctaw Indians were running around in 1930, but fuck it. There were vampires.

McCusker: What was the vibe in the—

Gillis: The vibe in the theater?

McCusker: No. The vibe. You went to the theater and watched?

Gillis: I saw it last night.

McCusker: Oh shit.

Gillis: Yep. I was one of the few honks.

McCusker: You're talking about in the bodega.

Gillis: And whenever they'd make a point in the movie, I'd hear a lot of, "mm-hmm". And it didn't piss me off until I got on—

McCusker: Did you get any "Well, actually—"?

Gillis: I almost was standing up going, "If you look into the actual history, I don't know." I don't know. What do I know?

McCusker: You've never been there.

Gillis: The only thing that bothers me, it's not that movie, it's just that that's how people get their history. That's what they think was real. Always. No, not the Irish Vampire. But I got on Twitter and someone was like, "That's why Black people don't have welcome mats. To let vampires in. That's just old Mississippi voodoo." You go, yep, for sure. Every single thing that we do today was from that.

I’ve written before about Gillis and McCusker that their racism isn’t performative or ironic but the product of a deep, abiding obsession. You need only listen to their podcast to learn that they are preoccupied with racial hierarchies to an almost intellectual degree. It consumes them, it informs everything they do. They read Black conservative writers like Thomas Sowell and neoconservative thinkers like Douglas Murray; to this day they still listen to Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. To the extent that their stage personas are performative, the performance is that they are somehow apolitical, centrist, disaffected, or otherwise above it all.

Which isn’t news to any of you, but maybe it is interesting how quickly the pretenses are falling away. Just today Theo Von opened for Donald Trump at a rally for American and Qatari service members in at a Qatar military base. Per the Associated Press: 

Wearing a black T-shirt and backward baseball cap, the podcast host regaled the uniformed troops with jokes about drugs, developmental disabilities, homosexuality and their Qatari hosts.

He talked about snorting cocaine off a baby’s back but said it was “a mixed baby” so the white powder was visible on the baby’s skin.

Von acted out various disabilities, including Down syndrome, and he insulted the U.S. Navy as “gay.” He also had a punchline about terrorism attacks, asking, “Where do you think the next 9/11 should happen?”

He joked about the lack of crime in Qatar, where he said it would be impossible to identify a perpetrator because everyone is named Mohammed and dresses in the same white robes. They were like a “Ku Klux Sandsman,” Von said.

He later pointed to the Qatari troops in the audience and said “they don’t like me.”

Meanwhile, here’s Von on his podcast last week, calling Asian people tricksters and “bok choy David Blaines”: 

Von: I went to the massage place over here. And I go to the Chinese shop over there, that chop shop. It say right on the sign, "chop shop." And they selling fucking rice right out the back of that bitch, boy. They will remodel your, they'll remodel your spinal column. They'll fucking un-jenga that bitch and then hit you with that damn two grams of rice when you roll out the door. They got that shit in there. 

And whenever I go get that massage at the Chinese place, I get, I ask for the big guy. "I want big guy." When I call him on the phone, he knows me. My buddy Yang over there, I call him on the phone. He said "you coming?" I said, "big guy. You got big guy?" Sometimes he got him, sometimes he don't. Necause I've had the second string. They said, "big guy, big guy gon, big guy gon." That's what he said. I don't know what he meant, but I think he was trying to say "big guy gone." Right. And I spot him a letter. If he ain't got it all bro, he from another country. That's kind of guy, I'm gonna fucking give you a vowel. "Big guy gon." Gone. I got you, I got you with that "e," twin. So yeah, he said "big guy gone." So I went in there and they had a second big guy in that bitch, bro. The second—and he ain't that big, bro.

He trying to make his neck long, just trying to look big or something. He put on mittens and shit. Because Asians, they try to trick you when you're looking at them. They trick you, visual—they're the fucking, they're the bok choy David Blaines, baby. Them bitches will fucking, they trick you bro. They'll put a piece of rice over each eye and tell you they sleeping. That's who they are. They tricksters like that. But I said, "big guy," he said, "big guy gone," but I showed up anyway. I took that second, that fucking other big guy bro. And he wasn't shit. This little motherfucker, this little fucking woodpecker, he couldn't do shit. He would fucking hammer. Just trying to hammer on me bro.

As my friend put it when I sent her that AP article, “The 2000s are back as fuck”—except this time there’s hardly any resistance from mainstream culture to what would then be called politically incorrect humor, but which I think we can reasonably now call hate speech. This time around, these guys don’t even try to present themselves as counterculture; they’re literally opening for the president and caping for his fascist allies. Here’s Andrew Schulz last week making the case for benevolent authoritarianism in a discussion about El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele: 

Schulz: So I think about this all the time with Bukele. I would love to have the El Salvadorian [sic] president on it because it's like...

Alexx Media: Did you see the, I think it's him, but he just got caught selling a bunch of coke?

Schulz: Bukele?

Media: I'm pretty sure.

Mark Gagnon: What?

Schulz: I would look that up.

Media: Yeah, look it up.

Schulz: Before I congratulate him.

Media: He owns some coffee business in Miami and it was a huge bust of 30 million worth of cocaine that was supposed to be shipped to Germany. These motherfuckers are crazy. Just double check, but I'm pretty sure that was... Western media isn't covering it. Only Latin American news is covering it, and they're trying to keep it super hush-hush.

Schulz: And so he's doing what the CIA did to his country here. But I wonder if on some level—let's remove this [screenshot of an article] because I don't know what the truth is here—okay, you've taken your country from the most dangerous country in the Western hemisphere to the safest. Okay? You have 85% approval from your people. Okay? We'll look into it one second, but leave that up. You have, I imagine it's a democracy, so there are term limits, maybe. Let's say there are. You know the next people that are going for election. You know them. You know them well. What if you see them and you're like, "Yo, they can't do it. This guy's kind of corrupt. I've been looking the other way about it, but I know he's easily influenced. This guy's a fucking idiot, but the people like him, but they don't realize that he just doesn't have what it takes to do this shit"?

I understand the impulse to tyranny, even if it's benevolent. Now, I'm sure there's bad people that look at that same situation and they just go, "I just want to keep my power. These people can't do it," but really, you just want to keep your power. But is there ever a situation where you're like, "I'm good. I don't think these guys can fucking do it. Do I let it go because that is what upholds democracy, or do I create a tyrannical state because that's what upholds the society that is benefiting everyone?"

In addition to the obvious insanity of what he’s saying, let me just draw your attention to the way he instructs his producer to stop displaying an article about the alleged drug bust. In a vacuum, this is a totally reasonable move; the news indeed does not seem to be credible. But this is a level of courtesy Schulz hardly ever extends any other subject of his podcast, a gossip show with no identifiable ethical standards. It’s the powerful who earn his graciousness and their critics who earn his skepticism. 

Speaking of obvious insanity, here’s Tim Dillon—fresh off hosting Candace Owens to dig into some transphobic conspiracy theories and defend Harvey Weinstein—complaining that Trump isn’t delivering on his promise for mass deportations:

Dillon: By the way, all these mass deportations that a lot of people wanted aren't happening. They're just not happening. So if you elected Trump to get rid of the 10 million people that came, that Biden let in, you're not getting it. You're just not getting—a lot of people are not happy about that. You're not getting it. What you are getting is these very politicized deportations of certain bad elements, debatably, but a lot of deportations of criminals that are people in the country, people selling fentanyl or whatever, murderers, to an El Salvadoran jail, which is probably not long-term the best thing. What if a Democrat wins the next time and wants to send Joe Rogan to a jail in El Salvador? What about that? Did you ever think about that? Did you ever think of how Theo Von would fare in an El Salvadoran prison?

And here’s Joe Rogan casually telling Tom Segura, in a conversation about Kanye West’s new song “Heil Hitler,” that Jewish people control diamonds:

Rogan: But guess he's like, "I'll do whatever the fuck I want. I'll do whatever the fuck I want."  So I'm going to do the one thing that you're never, ever, ever supposed to do. I'm going to make a catchy song that's "Heil Hitler." It's just like, whoa.

Segura: That is the ultimate, like, I'll do whatever the fuck I want.

Rogan: Yeah. And he had to say, in the casting, there's a description of all the stuff. If you want to be a part of this production, you have to be comfortable with swastika.

Segura: That was in the—

Rogan: Yeah. He's got a diamond-encrusted swastika, he wears it—

Segura: That's also insane.

Rogan: Dude, by the way, you know a Jew sold him that.

Segura: Probably, or at least supplied the diamonds. That's insane.

Rogan: Where'd the diamonds come from? The Jewish people have been controlling diamonds for a long time.

Segura: It's insane.

Rogan: They're very smart about the diamonds, because the diamonds aren't even really that valuable anymore.

Segura: You know what's fucking crazy in jewelry? Because this is one of the things that I don't trust about—there's certain businesses where you're like, I don't know what I'm looking at. So a car, for instance, you have the reference to go, how much should this cost? So it gives you some personal—

Rogan: Right, you see a Lamborghini, you know that's like a $300,000 car.

In summary: pretty much everything that happens in a particular school of comedy these days is something that five or so years ago would have been a career-shaking scandal—but now there’s so much of it that none of it makes a dent, and the tenor is accelerating rapidly toward unmitigated cruelty. Today we’re in the 2000s; soon enough we’ll be back in the 1930s.