Comedians Respond to Anti-Immigrant Violence by Getting Unbelievably Racist

Comedy’s brightest lights addressed recent anti-immigrant violence in the UK this week with characteristic racism. Tim Dillon, set to record a new Netflix special later this month, again cited white supremacist Steve Sailer in a meandering rant that suggested violence is an inevitable result of western countries’ failures to assimilate immigrant populations. Shane Gillis, meanwhile, welcomed his Holocaust denier friends for a conversation in which they explicitly pinned the violence on Muslims. In these segments, the extremely popular comedians aligned themselves with the same far-right forces using social media to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and inspire violence. 

A few words of background on the riots, in which extremists attacked hotels housing asylum seekers and mosques, leading to hundreds of arrests. Per Al Jazeera: 

Last week, during a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga workshop at a community centre in Southport, England, three young girls were stabbed to death by a 17-year-old suspect, Axel Rudakubana. He was born in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, reportedly to Christian Rwandan parents.

False information on social media claimed the suspect was a Muslim immigrant.

Those rioting are vocal about their hatred of immigrants. But there is also a sense of underlying xenophobia against minority communities in the UK, especially Muslims, said analysts.

Rosa Freedman, a professor at the University of Reading, told Al Jazeera that the riots were a result of the former Conservative government’s complicity with such “racist” far-right groups.

And per Reuters: 

There have since been riots in more than 20 places across Britain, from Sunderland in northeast England and Manchester in the northwest, to Plymouth in the southwest and Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Most of the protests have involved a few hundred people targeting migrants or Muslims, with police vehicles set alight and bricks, bottles and other missiles thrown at mosques and police officers. Shops, including Asian-owned businesses, have been vandalised or looted.

In Rotherham, in northern England, a hotel that held migrants was attacked, with windows smashed and a large garbage container set ablaze outside.

“I'm unclear as to why people are rioting over this,” said Tim Dillon in a Patreon-exclusive episode released yesterday, after a lengthy segment in which he basically outlined and endorsed all the reasons people are rioting. As his producer looked up the name of the stabbing’s alleged perpetrator, Dillon joked that the “Steve Sailer rule—and it’s actually maybe the Ann Coulter rule” seemed to be in effect: “the longer you take to know about who the shooter is, the less likely they’re white.” (In fact, the suspect’s name was initially withheld because UK law forbids the naming of suspects under 18; it was only disclosed in response to rapidly spreading misinformation.) From there he proceeded to exhort the dangers of immigration:

Listen, anybody can grab a knife and kill someone. It is starting to seem like a lot of these knife attacks are people that are guests or people that are being brought in. Is that a nice way to say it? Is that a nice way to say it? 

I don't know what to say anymore. I'm too fucking old man. I'm 39. [Unintelligible yawp], as Yannis Pappas, my friend, would say. I'm 39 years old. I don't know how to, when something seems so glaringly obvious to every thinking person and then yet the hoops that other people jump through to make you feel the thing they're feeling or see it the way they're seeing it. But they have to jump through so many hoops and there's so many logically incongruent statements that they have to make: "well, actually, maybe, well, think about this way. Well actually, if you look at it." 

I just can't, I don't get it. It seems to me that if you're not good at assimilating people, as a lot of countries in Europe are not—America's much better at it, and even we have trouble—if you're not good at assimilating people into your culture, and they are unwilling to assimilate, and they do not want to assimilate, you got a problem. 

If you like the culture that you have, I would imagine that you would want people to assimilate into that culture. Otherwise, the more and more people that come in that don't want to assimilate into that culture will have their own culture and eventually they will want that culture to be the primary culture. And if you don't fight for the one that you have, you will lose it. 

It seems very simple, but yet for that, I will be called every name in the book for making a logical statement that I think most, if not all, thinking people can agree—let's just forget even who's got which culture and what. It doesn't even matter in the general space of things. 

[…]

What happened here? What happens? What makes it, I think it's a total psychological breakdown and a psychotic break and—yeah, I don't know if he had anything to do with—I don't think it had anything to do with Islamic culture, but these riots are about a larger thing. Now, this is perhaps the wrong reason to have riots. I'm anti-riot. I'm consistent on that. I think people running around rioting is bad, but I think you've got bigger problems in these societies and people really want to admit, and a lot of them have to do with the inability of these places to successfully assimilate migrants and immigrants into the British state. 

Only then does Dillon play a series of news clips that eventually describe the barbarity unleashed by far-right rioters, which he says he doesn’t understand. Then he moves on to the news about Doug Emhoff’s affair during his first marriage. 

“These Are Muslim Protests”

Meanwhile on Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, Shane Gillis was joined by his friends Bill McCusker (Matt McCusker’s brother) and Andrew Pacella of the podcast War Mode. Let’s just get right into it:

McCusker: The UK bros are getting leveled right now. 

Gillis: How so?

McCusker: There are Muslim protests.

Gillis: Oh, really?

McCusker: The Muslims and the UK bros are rioting against each other because the Muslims stabbed and then raped three little girls and then they're only getting probation. And then they made it illegal to post far-right memes in the UK. So you go to jail for two years if you post some memes.

Gillis: I don't know. That can't be true. Is that actually true?

McCusker: It's true as fuck. It's literally happening right now. 

Gillis: God damn. Those are the wrong bros to get triggered. UK bros are vicious.

McCusker: That's what the one—there was one fucking Welsh lady screaming at the Muslims like, "Dude, we're tolerant. Wait until we're not tolerant. We do world wars." It's like, holy shit.

Gillis: They're literally the least tolerant. 

McCusker: Yeah.

Gillis: They've done nothing but commit atrocities throughout history. They're fucking with the wrong ones.

From there, like Dillon, they move on to discussing the US presidential race, including McCusker’s distaste for Tim Walz over his support of trans children. 

To Gillis’s credit, he’s right: what McCusker says is not actually true. The stabbing suspect (singular) is not Muslim, he’s not accused of rape, he’s not “only getting probation,” and the UK did not make it “illegal to post far right memes.” To Gillis’s discredit, however, he seems to buy McCusker’s insistence that these claims are true; at the very least, he allows them to sit unchallenged. 

"I Could Dehumanize That in Two Seconds"

I’ve written about McCusker and Pacella before, both in this newsletter and in a Daily Beast piece about the various conspiracy theories they believe: they are not only Holocaust deniers but Sandy Hook truthers, Pizzagate believers, anti-vaxxers, the list goes on. They are also rabid Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was stolen; they are also huge transphobes; they are also huge racists. Really the best way to understand them is as if Mac and Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia were real and had a podcast. Consider a segment from a War Mode episode released last week, one in which they repeatedly got incensed over the recent “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser:

Pacella: Did you watch any of it?

McCusker: Yes dude. It was fucking insane. They had one Black dude that was zesty, dude.

Pacella: So there was a dude that said that “it's so great we get a chance to do this, because usually when white guys get together, they're wearing pointed hats.”

McCusker: Or building countries.

Pacella: Do you know how fucking insane that is to say? Do you not know anything about the Roman Empire? And what they built. I'm sorry—what the Jews built. The Jews built the Coliseum. Apologies. And the pyramids. Never gonna believe that. Never gonna believe that—as a wrap in two years.

McCusker: Not in a trillion years.

Pacella: "Yo, built the Coliseum in two years." Right, guys.

McCusker: Yeah. I mean I'm with you on Nephilim. Those things, it makes complete sense if you have these huge pillars and it's just like a Nephilim kicking the bottom of the stone pillar with his foot. Like, yeah, I think it's plum.

Pacella: There's no, there's no way you are gonna sit there and go. "Usually when white guys get together, there's pointy hats." Skyscraper. 

McCusker: They're obsessed with racism.

Pacella: Yeah. Skyscraper. Like, go to a construction site, dude.

McCusker: There's no pointy hats on that high beam when they were building the Empire State Building. You know that picture? That's just shit we're up to.

Pacella: Yeah. And that's like the shitty, like the Mudbloods, like that's the shitty ones. I saw the real ones. I saw some of them. They're majestic to behold dude. The tall whites.

McCusker: Is it like when fucking— like I went to Mexico, and I saw real Mexicans. I was like, holy fuck.

Pacella: It's probably like when your little dogs see a wolf, dude. I saw, I was like, holy shit.

McCusker: Yeah, they piss themselves. They drop on the floor and piss themselves. They act big and bad and literally in any minor inconvenience, drop on all fours and piss in your fur. It's all disgusting, dude. Yeah, like when I went to Mexico, I saw fucking Mexicans, like fucking legit ones. Not like the potato ones that come here. And I was like, whoa, these fuckers are huge.

Pacella: Well, they're Spanish. Yeah, they're Spanish. You're talking about the big ones? 

This is all completely straightforward white supremacist rhetoric, and it’s not even the worst in this episode—which, again, they released last week. When the UK riots come up elsewhere in the conversation, Pacella recalls an encounter he had during a recent trip to Italy. (He’s been using his hard-earned Patreon money to travel the world; in a visit to Germany, for instance, he visited the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat.) To wit: 

Pacella: But next year's Jubilee year, they're expecting over 30 million pilgrims [to Vatican City]. There's 30 million people that are planning a trip just to go visit St. Peter Square. So, hey dude, you want another crusade? Okay. You lost the last ones. Do it again. You wanna start doing race replacement theory is not real. Whites are a global minority. I saw refugees hitting—dude.

McCusker: They're stabbing the fuck outta people into UK right now.

Pacella: I was in Naples. I saw some fucked up refugee shit. I was in the airport in Egypt and I locked eyes with a skinny, like a Somali—.

McCusker: Like "I'm the captain now." 

Pacella: This motherfucker wanted to kill me. 

McCusker: "I'm the captain now" Somali?

Pacella: And it's like, bro, I could dehumanize that in two seconds.

McCusker: If you were a soldier.

Pacella: Yeah. It's, dude, this motherfucker, the hate in his eyes. I was like, "Oh yeah dude, you wanna fight? I'm three of you."

McCusker: Yeah. They're going hard as shit right now in the UK. Just stabbing the fuck outta—like they stabbed three little girls.

Pacella: Eventually. It's gonna come to a point.

McCusker: I think they want it to. Yeah, that's what like, Gaddafi was like, dude, what the fuck are you guys doing? Like you're pushing that on the UK. Like someone's trying to get some sort of—

Pacella: That Gaddafi shit makes way more sense to me now that I saw it. 'Cause It's like, it's that, it's Malta, and then it's Naples. So I was in Naples and then I saw that, I saw it that line, and when Valerie Jarrett called down, called off Benghazi for the airstrike. That would've been minutes. They could've saved those dudes in no time. You're right there. See I've never really like checked out maps or anything. But it's all right there. It's all the same fucking world. That's—whatever, yeah. Sorry if I'm, dude, I have extreme jet lag. I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense.

It’s not entirely clear what “that Gaddafi shit” is—these guys are so steeped in far-right lingo that they often plow through terms and memes that are unintelligible to outsiders—but I suspect it may be a reference to the late dictator’s 2010 warning that unless the EU pays Libya to slow immigration, “We don't know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans.” 

What can I say? This is all extremely dangerous rhetoric making its way into extremely popular comedy podcasts. More to the point, it is the very same rhetoric inspiring the violence targeting Muslim communities in the UK right now. I’ll leave you with the words of a Portugal-based researcher of online hate, Rita Guerra, as quoted in a New York Times feature about the links between social media and real-world violence in Porto and the UK: “What is said ultimately will shape what people will do,” she said. “That is why this is very concerning, not just for Portugal and Europe, but worldwide.”

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