--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know how sometimes you download an app, but then you never update the app? Well, sometimes when you update the app, you realize, hey, this app has new features. That can be the experience you have when you update your Uber app. Uber has new features. You can learn more at uber.com slash moving forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello there. This episode of Today Explained contains more saucy language than usual, as well as some things you might not want your kids to hear. Thanks.
--:-- Aja Romano: A funny thing has been happening to funny people on the internet this week. They've been getting called out for jokes they made, in most cases, like 10 years ago. The comedian Sarah Silverman was one of them. Back in 2009, she tweeted, "Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move?" I'm going to need a quick answer on this.
--:-- Aja Romano: Then, yesterday, nine years and a few weeks later, she explained her joke. Some very odd people are saying I'm a pedo, re, a joke from a time not that long ago, when hard, absurd jokes by comedians were acknowledged for what they were. Jokes. Not a disingenuous national threat to people fake-clutching their pearls whilst ranting the country's 2PC.
--:-- Aja Romano: It doesn't look like Sarah Silverman is going to face any serious professional consequences because a joke she tweeted in July 2009 that some people found offensive resurfaced, but the director James Gunn wasn't so lucky. Some jokes he cracked years ago got him kicked out of the most profitable cinematic universe in the world late last week.
--:-- Aja Romano: Who are you? Star-Lord. Who? Well, Star-Lord, man. Legendary outlaw. Forget it. James Gunn made Disney a ton of money with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, like over a billion dollars.
--:-- Aja Romano: Asia Romano, you write about culture for Vox. Yes. How did Disney end up firing him?
--:-- Asia Romano: An alt-right brigade originating from 4chan, which you may or may not be aware, is sort of the ground zero for alt-right organization on the internet these days, essentially dug up a bunch of old tweets that James Gunn had made.
--:-- Asia Romano: So these 4chan forum dudes, I'm going to say dudes. Am I assuming dudes or are they all dudes? Yeah, you can assume dudes. Okay, so they go after James Gunn. Yes, they go after James Gunn. And they do this by digging up tweets that he had made.
--:-- Asia Romano: And to be fair, there are many of these tweets. There are like 15 of them, ranging from around the year 2008 to around the year 2012. And they all are essentially jokes about kids being abused. They're crass and they're not very funny. They were obviously made before his career really took off.
--:-- Asia Romano: How did James Gunn respond? He basically said on Twitter, "action are over." So why did they go after James Gunn specifically? The reason that James Gunn came under fire is a bit complicated, but it was because he had taken a side in another online debate where another director, Mark Duplass, had attempted to say conciliatory kind things about conservative editor Ben Shapiro.
--:-- Ben Shapiro: Thanks for being here. I think that Mark's a nice guy from what I can tell. He He came into our offices a couple of months ago because he was doing a project about guns and gun control, and he wanted kind of the right wing Second Amendment views. I told him at the time that any association with people on the right is not going to work out well.
--:-- Asia Romano: So James Gunn makes a joke supporting his friend Mark Duplass, who's another filmmaker, who was saying something sort of supportive about Ben Shapiro, who's a conservative commentator. And then this mob hits James Gunn.
--:-- Asia Romano: Yes. the alt-right then led by a man named Mike Cernovich if we had an honest media in America here is the kind of story they would write James Gunn said things that nobody who's ever around children should ever say or even think the person who found it was Mike Cernovich.
--:-- Asia Romano: Oh and we don't think he's a good person either they basically began a performative outrage cycle over these tweets and gun apologized but disney essentially stepped in and fired him and so they removed him from the guardians of the galaxy franchise that he's held for two films now so to be clear here disney fires James Gunn director writer of a billion-dollar franchise they have the gardens of galaxy over bad jokes he made on Twitter like a decade ago
--:-- Asia Romano: Yes, but also, this is Disney. This is the Walt Disney Company. This is the most family-friendly brand on the entire planet. It probably has an ingrained zero-tolerance policy when it comes to any type of jokes made about child abuse. Yeah. I mean, their statement on it was pretty clear. They said the offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James's Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio's values. And we have severed our business relationship with him.
--:-- Asia Romano: OK, so James Gunn is no longer in the Disney universe. Who's targeted next? The next one is a comedian, Michael Ian Black. Let's talk about Michael Ian Black real quick and we can do it again the next break.
--:-- Asia Romano: But things don't necessarily go as well for the alt-right when they target him because he's a comedian, he's sort of independent, and there's nobody to fire him. So he just sort of was like, there, you're all hypocrites. Bye.
--:-- Asia Romano: And did he punch back? He wrote a thread, actually, in response and pointed out in this thread that Mike Sanovich himself had been charged with rape in 2003 and had supported Roy Moore when Roy Moore was being accused of abusing underage girls.
--:-- Asia Romano: So he basically was like, you are a hypocrite and this attack is all just show. So it's a pretty compelling comeback, honestly. No doubt.
--:-- Asia Romano: So then we get to Dan Harmon. Then we get to Dan Harmon, probably most well-known as the creator and showrunner of Community, NBC's Community. And more recently, he is the co-creator of Rick and Morty, which is an Adult Swim cartoon. It's very popular.
--:-- Asia Romano: And what do they find of his? So basically in 2009, Dan Harmon was a part of this long-running sort of semi-underground Los Angeles-based comedy sketch and short film festival called Channel 101. And he had created a short film called Daryl, which was meant to be a parody of Dexter.
--:-- Asia Romano: Dexter was a Showtime show about a serial killer who was also a cop. He was a serial killer, but he had a moral code, which meant that he appeased his bloodlust by killing only other serial killers. Dan Hartman's sketch, Daryl, was basically trying to highlight the moral absurdity of this concept by applying it to something else.
--:-- Asia Romano: So he basically attempted to do this sketch in which Daryl was a pedophile, so he was going to fight pedophilia by acting out pedophilia. Did he stand by this work since making it? No. At some point after it was released, he took it off of Channel 101. Okay. He was like, no, this is bad. It's done.
--:-- Asia Romano: But it resurfaced this week? It did resurface this week. It was basically aired on 4chan, and then it was picked up by the alt-right and made much of.
--:-- Asia Romano: Did Dan Harmon lose his job? Dan Harmon did not lose his job. Adult Swim basically said that while they felt the content was inappropriate and unfunny, they understood that Harmon had deleted it years ago and apologized, and they basically weren't going to feed the trolls by firing him or disciplining him beyond that.
--:-- Asia Romano: So Adult Swim doesn't fire him. How does Dan Harmon respond to this cartoon he made back in 2009 resurfacing in this context? Well, he apologized generally. He said something about, oh, you shouldn't have had to see that, basically. And he also completely deleted his Twitter account, which is interesting.
--:-- Asia Romano: Do you have any idea why he might have done that? It's 2018, man. You know, if you wanted a good excuse to leave Twitter, there you go. I mean, what is he facing? Harassment, you know, just constant onslaught of people, you know, just being assholes in his mentions.
--:-- Asia Romano: And also threat that they're going to get him fired from his job, that they're going to find something else on him. The usual. I mean, things that women have to endure every day of their lives that now men who are prominent and, you know, seen as progressive or at least seen as non-racist are now putting up with.
--:-- Asia Romano: Who was coming after Dan Harmon? Was it the same people who went after Michael Ian Black and James Gunn? Yes, basically Mike Cernovich again and his supporters and followers.
--:-- Asia Romano: Now, Mike Cernovich is a name people have heard before. What do we know him from? The Southern Poverty Law Center says that he rose to power as a male supremacist. Fuck these bitches. You know, if they fucking say something stupid, I'm just going to blow the bitch out and fucking hurt her feelings.
--:-- Asia Romano: Some girl was shit talking to me. So I found out her age and I said, look at you, you're 32 and you probably came out to L.A. with big dreams and you were excited about life and now you're single and you got nothing going on. Yeah, because fuck you.
--:-- Asia Romano: So he was known for being really, really, really, really misogynist. And then he joined with the alt-right's white supremacist rhetoric and became a superstar and is known for propagating conspiracies, specifically Pizzagate.
--:-- Asia Romano: So there is a torture chamber. There is some kind of torture dungeon. This insane incident where a guy walked into a restaurant in D.C. with a gun looking for like Hillary Clinton's sex abuse lair? Yes. They do have sex cult meetings that Podesta invites his family to.
--:-- Asia Romano: That's Zinovich. Is he tied to any sort of organization or does he just do this stuff as a hobby or what? he does host a show on Infowars with Alex Jones but in general he just known for essentially being tied to alt conspiracies
--:-- Asia Romano: Does Mike Cernovich have the kind of following that like a Dan Harmon or a James Gunn or a Michael Ian Black has He doesn't have a following the size of James Gunn or Dan Harmon, but he does reach a lot of people. Like Michael Ian Black, for example, has like 2 million followers on Twitter. And Cernovich has like 450,000.
--:-- Asia Romano: Which is still a lot of people, though, if those people are individuals with very loud voices and a tendency to harass people on the Internet. Right. They're on the fringes, but they're very loud. And as we know, the fringe is more mainstream than ever these days.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up next on today, explain the age-old question. Do you avoid ever saying anything on the Internet and thus avoid the trolls completely? or do you walk right into the garbage fire?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Noam, you know how to beatbox, right? Yeah. Well, this is like the mid-show break. Let's go for it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Uber is moving forward. They've got new features designed to take the stress out of your pickup. One of them is called Pickup Notes. You can leave a note for your driver so they can know where to look for you when they come for you or how to spot you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can write stuff like, I'm the lady who speaks seven languages if you count pig Latin. Or I'm the magician you keep seeing on all your dating apps. Or I'm the person who invented the sticky stuff that goes on the back of post-it notes. Or I'm the guy holding a 24-pack of Mike's Hard Lemonade. It's for my friends. I only drink unfiltered IPAs. Or I am the little spoon. Or I am the Batman. Anyway, you get the point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can learn more at uber.com slash moving forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you practice this? Nah, I don't know. Yeah, you do. You practice.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Asia, a lot of people were making the argument that, you know, Disney owns ABC, which immediately fired Roseanne after her racist tweets back in May. James Gunn makes movies for Disney, therefore he should be fired. What's the difference between waking up in the morning and being racist on Twitter in 2018 and cracking some jokes about child abuse on Twitter in 2008?
--:-- Asia Romano: You know, the world has changed so much in the last decade. It has changed so much. Our conception of identity issues and our conception of what humor is even has changed so much in the last decade.
--:-- Asia Romano: When you choose to go back and dig up those old tweets and take them out of context, you're doing it for a political reason and a political agenda. And obviously, it probably wouldn't have mattered who the person was, whether it was James Gunn or whether they found some other individual to go after.
--:-- Asia Romano: Like I said, it didn't really matter that it's Dan Harmon. What matters is that he gave him the material. He gave him the ammo to stage this performative strike back.
--:-- Asia Romano: There's a vast difference, obviously, between jokes that you made 10 years ago and an actual racist statement that you made that morning, you know, especially in this current era.
--:-- Asia Romano: And with all of the awareness that we've gained over the years about what is and isn't problematic comedy and how to basically be decent people to each other. It sounds like a real work in progress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can say that, but also it's complicated because you have these bad actors, essentially, who are looking mainly to disrupt the status quo and to have these fights play out in public and to inflict collateral damage where they can, like James Gunn getting fired by Disney, all in order to ultimately advance white supremacy and advance a deeply misogynistic worldview.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's a comedian I love named Howard Kramer. You heard of him? I have not heard of him. He's an alt comedian from L.A. He's got a real dry sense of humor. He's got this great bit about summer. He calls it summer. And part of the bit goes, You gotta have a summer secret. Summer secret. Something you do in the summer you don't tell anybody about. Murder a neighbor. Kidnap a hobo. Frame an innocent child. That's your summer secret.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, it's funny to joke about the terrible things you would never do. And I hope no one ever comes after Howard Kramer for making a murder joke because it was absurdism. But I guess my question is, is there an alternate universe where Disney could have said, hey, James Gunn, he comes from comedy. In comedy, you laugh about terrible things you would never do. He made a dumb joke. He also made this great movie that millions of people loved, that revitalized a comic book series that no one even cared about. And we're going to stand by him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing about Disney is that it needs to be in control of the narrative. It's not that I don't think that that alternate universe exists, but I pretty sure Disney probably doesn't like being blindsided with a narrative outside of its control.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're not in control when the alt comes to them and points out that their Guardians of the Galaxy director made these tweets from 10 years ago And I think that that makes a difference.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there some sort of statute of limitations on things you've said if you were underage, if you were in your 20s and an asshole? Or can people now just dig up anything and shame you online? Of course they can. They can do whatever they want. It's digital and the internet is forever. How you deal with that is up to you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, and I would assume that as these things become more prominent, more sane reactions to them also become more common. For example, Gamergate. Violent depictions of women being beaten, raped, and run over by cars. It's not the movies, it's video games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now the women calling for change in this multi-billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including death threats. Gamergate initially was rather successful in getting advertisers of media outlets that Gamergate didn't like to basically stop advertising on those media outlets.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But as Gamergate became more well-known and people began to be aware of what it was doing and how disingenuous it was, that campaign to target advertisers stopped working as well as it did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if James Gunn gets fired and it's all over the national media, then that actually draws attention to the artifice behind what Sardovich and company are doing. And that actually hopefully will make more people able to see through it more rapidly and actually cause them to be less effective.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are the outlets, are the platforms doing anything to police, say, a verified entertainer versus a bunch of white supremacist trolls? What can the platforms themselves, be they Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, do that they aren't doing?
--:-- Asia Romano: Well, I think one thing that could be effective and useful is allowing people to mass delete or archive, private archive, their older tweets and their older posts on platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc.
--:-- Asia Romano: You could also argue that companies, not necessarily the social media outlets themselves, but corporations and so forth, could have ongoing working policies about how to deal with old social media that says we will not consider any type of social media content older than five years to impact your current career. That type of thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people Cernovich is targeting largely this week are comedians. Is there a risk that the threat of being attacked by the alt-right affects the kind of comedy that people make, the kind of art that people create, the kind of entertainment that we see?
--:-- Asia Romano: I don't think so. And I think that's just because pissing off the alt-right is just going to galvanize you to be even more outspoken and to do your thing even harder.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I also know that it's hard. I mean, you look at the number, the untold numbers of women who have been silenced and whose voices have been quashed by systemic harassment in their industry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's obviously not that easy. How about you, Asia? I mean, you brave the elements every day and go online and write about trolls and 4chan, dark corners of the internet. Are you ever afraid they'll come after you on social media?
--:-- Asia Romano: Sean, I have been in fandom since 1998. I have been doxxed, harassed. I was once fired from my job because fans reported me to my editor for writing fanfiction. I have been there and done it. And I'm just going to write it. It doesn't matter what they say about me. It doesn't matter what they do to me.
--:-- Asia Romano: I mean, your moral position in a moment of deep and troubling political and social people is not going to change just because you are or aren't harassed on the Internet on a daily basis. So I'm just going to do what I do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Asia Romano isn't going to take your shit online or anywhere else. She writes about the Internet for Vox.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. The show's executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Bridget McCarthy is our editor, but she produced this here episode. Noam Hassenfeld is our producer, but he engineered this here episode. Afim Shapiro is our engineer, but he's on vacation. And so is Luke Vanderplug, who usually produces too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yesterday was National Intern Day. Big ups to our national interns Bree Seeley and Catherine Wheeler. And thanks to Paige Flager for helping out this week. Good luck in Ohio, Paige.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The celebrated Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us. And Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, my name is Anna Sheffield. I live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My favorite episode of Today Explained is Golden State Killer Opens Pandora's Box. And don't forget to follow Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to Uber for supporting our show this week. Uber is one of the many ways you can travel around this weekend when you need to move from place to place. They have an app and it's got new features and you can learn more about those features at uber.com slash moving forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Good luck.
