Whitney Cummings Goes Off the Deep End

I must confess I have been morbidly fascinated by Whitney Cummings’ public descent into conspiracism, manifesting most recently in a bizarre appearance during CNN’s New Year’s Eve special last week. At the end of her “roast of 2024,” a mostly hackish and misogynistic rehash of the last year (“Gypsy Rose became our favorite celebrity because murdering your mom is so brat,” “Things got so bleak we started watching the WNBA!”) that she concluded in typical Heterodox Comedian fashion by listing things “the establishment media” refuses to cover. The clip is worth watching, I think, but here’s the tail end:

2024 Election fried our brains. The Democrats couldn't hold a primary 'cause they were too busy holding a body upright. Are we still rolling? Am I off? It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn't give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate. Kamala was forced on us so hard, you'd think she was patented by Pfizer or Moderna, whichever one's—oh god, Andy just gave me a very scary look. 

Let me be clear, though. 2024 was not only negative, the media wants us to believe this country is so divided, but we actually came together a lot this year. Like as a nation, we unanimously agreed that we would rather see J-Lo in a toxic relationship than in concert. We all agree the government totally knows what drones are and are telling us. The drones are still up there and we have no idea what's behind them. No idea. I mean, they're still up in the sky. So I guess we can rule out that they were made by Boeing. 

The point is, I think we all agree on a lot of things. And since I only have a minute left live on establishment media, why don't we just say a bunch of things that we know that they'll never cover. Okay, ready, go. Trump shooter didn't have any silverware in his house. No one thought that was weird. Are we still rolling? Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia put money into Disney, so just know there won't be any girl characters in the next Cars movie.

Can I, are we still rolling? This is wild. Why have so many presidents' chefs died? Weird. And Boy Scout of America, they renamed itself Scouting America. You know who else changed their name? Sean Combs. Just saying, let's learn something in 2025. I can't believe you guys are still letting me go. This is amazing. I love CNN. Please stop me, Andy. 'Cause I will just keep going. Am I still streaming? 

I think the clip is worth watching because you need to see it to believe that Cummings does not seem to be putting on an act with all those asides—instead, she seems genuinely nervous that she might get cut off for saying the unsayable on “establishment media.” Indeed, she explained on Twitter the next day that she was scared during her segment; given her long history of complaining about censorship, I’m inclined to believe her. 

When she wasn’t spending hours searching Twitter for her name and replying to seemingly everyone who commented on her appearance, Cummings shared other jokes she wanted to tell and complained about media coverage describing her as a conspiracy theorist: 

(That last one is a bizarre reference to Obama’s characterization of Tony Hinchcliffe as a “speaker” at the Madison Square Trump rally, in case there’s any doubt about how Cummings envisions her social role here.)

And when she wasn’t complaining about being described as a conspiracy theorist, she explained that she drew her material from gigs around the country where she asked audiences what conspiracies they’re into. (In the days before the appearance, she also asked her Twitter followers for their input on stories the media won’t cover.) 

This all fascinates me because it seems to be a very stark illustration of the transformation many comedians have gone through over the last five years, from relatively centrist—or in some cases, proudly apolitical—figures to earnest proponents of conspiracy theories and other hallmarks of right-wing thought. In Cummings’ case, this transformation is all the more striking because she has been a popular, highly successful mainstream comedian for many years. This is not someone who exists primarily in the walled-off world of “edgy” podcasters, nor someone who has had to curry the favor of Joe Rogan and his ilk to build audiences and sell tickets. 

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But it does show the pull of that world, especially in the wake of a pandemic whose very temporary impacts on live comedy turned hordes of comedians—including many who could comfortably take a year off—into flat-out opponents of the basic principles of public health. (Note Cummings’ mentions of the Covid vaccines and fluoride; now remember her episode with RFK Jr., which she’s since made private on her YouTube channel.) While it may be tempting to conclude that Cummings is making a conscious pivot to the right because she thinks that’s where the money is, I don’t think this is correct. Her extensive proclamations about the countercultural role of comedians aside, she seems to have found a genuine social and intellectual sanctuary on the right in recent years. As she discusses on her podcast, she’s lately become friends with Intellectual Dark Web luminary Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Thiel Capital; she even had him over for a dinner party last year, alongside Tim Dillon, Bert Kreischer, and the popular pseudoscientist Andrew Huberman (who also guested on Cummings’ podcast last week). Just yesterday, Cummings appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show to discuss her CNN appearance, describing how she recently started “doing my own research”:

I started doing this thing of like doing my own research. And I was like, literally at the point where I, when I was in New York, I was feeding the pigeons. So I was like, "Drone or not drone?" If they're eating, they're probably real. Feed all the birds around you to see if they’re cameras, that's how you do your own research. 

[…] 

Science is fashion. Science gets debunked every like five or six years. Remember when soy milk was good for us? Now half of my girlfriends' tits got cut off and half my guy friends have tits. I mean, that was just a thing. But I also, I did on my podcast this thing where I volunteered to jump on the grenade and suck Bill Gates's dick and be his Lauren Sanchez so that he'll stop making diseases.

[…]

The time I really broke was a couple months ago. 'Cause I was like, let me stay out of politics. Jimmy does that. Kurt [Metzger, Dore’s cohost] does that. Bill Maher does it. It's not my—I don't—I just don't wanna speak on shit I’m not an expert on, but I am an expert on hypocrisy. So that's when I started being able to say something, is when I posted about Tim Walz and the fact that I found out that he had gone to China over 30 times. And I did a whole section on it, on my podcast, posted about it. I had to take it down. People were calling me racist. People were call—I did a, I was like, why—you know, he did go with boys. I can make that joke. 

Know what I mean? And he, first of all, how does a teacher even afford to go 30 times? Why did he get fired? Why can no one answer any of these questions? And why am I a monster if I just ask them? And it's weird. And even if it's, he should at least be able to say, "Yes, I went to China 30 times, so I am uniquely qualified to be able to fight our adversary China."

Why am I in trouble? I'm not the one that went to China 30 times. You know how hard it is to go to China 30 times?

And here’s that segment on Tim Walz:

Oh, Tim Walz, the Great Walz of China. It seems weird. I don't know what's going over the Democratic party that you didn't like, give your VP pick a Goog. Maybe Ask Jeeves about where your VP pick traveled 60 times. Ten times is weird. I went to China once, I was like, "I got it." And they're like, "Yeah, oh no, we just didn't notice that Tim Walz lived in Wuhan with a bunch of kids." Like, what are we doing? Walz has a very deep connection with China, I heard, 'cause his parents are actually dumplings. He's like, "I like taking in history and culture." His favorite part of the Chinese culture is suck-zedong.

The only thing weirder than hooking up with kids is hanging out with them. I'm confused. His best friend was a young boy at the time. Or did a young boy put Tim in the friend zone? Like, what's happening? Tim is like hanging out with these 14-year-old boys 'cause they are the only ones who would take part in his favorite hobby: walking down the railroad tracks looking for a dead body.

Okay, let’s observe a few things. One, that segment on Walz is extremely racist, and seems tonally of a piece with the opening of Andrew Schulz’s 2020 Netflix special. Again, it’s clear at this point that comedians took the pandemic as license to wholeheartedly embrace anti-Asian racism.

Two, Cummings’ obsession with pedophilia (and Bill Gates, for that matter) reflects the creeping influence of QAnon and other conspiracy movements in contemporary right-wing politics. This does not speak well of the media ecosystem she presumably spends time in. In a January 2024 episode of her podcast, she said she gets “conspiratorial” about vaccines because Big Pharma and Jeffrey Epstein have funded research; in February, she said she “actually skipped—hashtag RFK Jr.—the hepatitis vaccine when I gave birth, because you get it from gay sex or dirty needles.” (The CDC recommends the hepatitis B vaccine for all infants at birth.) To put it politely, she is not getting good information.

Three, this is all completely bonkers. I’m typically not one to say “it’s not even funny” about material like this, but in this case I really am struck by the gulf between the quality of Cummings’ jokes and her own perception of them: not only that they were funny enough to say on national television, but that they were so dangerous she might get persecuted for it. This stuff really does rot the brain. 

One last thing I want to say, or say again: it is trendy on the left to see entertainers go the direction Cummings is going and accuse them of being grifters out to make a buck. As I said earlier, I don’t think this is right. One thing I’ve learned listening to these people’s podcasts is that they are almost always true believers; frankly, most comedians in this milieu just aren’t smart or talented enough to put on an act. In my opinion, the real grifters are the ideological right-wingers who try to have it both ways, downplaying their politics to maintain their appeal among liberals. As a general rule, though, I think it's safe to say that things are what they look like.  

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