Matt McCusker Co-Signs a Somehow Even More Racist Version of Great Replacement Theory
The latest comedian to hop on the Great Replacement train is none other than Matt McCusker, who somehow managed to give the white supremacist conspiracy theory a spin that made it even more racist than it already is. In short: McCusker, solo hosting a Patreon-exclusive episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, described a Black conservative influencer’s argument that the Democratic party is bringing in immigrants from Latin America in order to replace Black voters, whom its losing to the GOP. Agreeing that Democrats are “definitely bussing these guys in” and possibly lavishing them with welfare money, McCusker argues that the plan is doomed to fail, because immigrants are too hard-working to stay on welfare and too culturally conservative (“mucho Catholico,” as McCusker puts it) to fall in line with progressive politics. Along the way, he laments that immigrants are definitely coming for Black people’s jobs, like delivering food for Uber Eats.
It’s hardly surprising to hear this from McCusker, who may be one of the luckiest guys in comedy: the man is even more racist (and shameless about it) than his cohost, whose 2019 scandal and subsequent ascent to stardom has functionally shielded McCusker from critique. An anti-vaxxer who uses “trans” as a verb, praises Alex Jones, claimed early in the pandemic that Covid-19 is a “biological weapon” that he “killed” by taking a hot bath, and has said that gangster rap glorifies a "lifestyle that results in the systematic constant killings of black people,” McCusker is the consummate pseudo-intellectual—the kind of guy who will cite Thomas Sowell in one episode and spend two hours interviewing a self-professed penis enlargement expert in another. His fans call him “the Shaman.”
In the Patreon episode released yesterday, McCusker reluctantly discusses the Trump assassination attempt, predicting that it will improve Trump's standing among Black voters: “If you survive a shooting, you get more Black people voting for you. At least Black men. I don't know. I don't think Black women get as stoked on it.” A few minutes later, he brings up the influencer Umar Johnson, whom he describes as a “slightly extremist Black spiritual leader.” (In fact, Johnson is an explicit homophobe and conspiracy theorist, among other things.) In a recent video, McCusker recalls, Johnson articulated his own version of replacement theory:
MCCUSKER: One of the biggest things right now he's saying is that the Democrats are allowing, he's saying the brown, he's saying, “They're washing out the Black with the brown.” They're taking these Guatemalan and Honduran immigrants in from, you know, obviously their home countries, their motherlands, and then import—and putting them into traditionally Black cities like Chicago, New York, soon to be Philadelphia, all that stuff.
And he claims that the Democrats know they're losing the Black vote. And then for that reason, they're gonna start trying to bus in the lads, for lack of a better term. Guatemalans, Hondurans, Mexicans. And they're like, “If we put these guys up”—I guess the theory is they can keep them on the dole and then that way they'll be kind of voting Democrat to always make sure like, you know, high taxes means more programs for you. And this guy is spazzing about it. "They're washing out the Black with the brown. They're washing out the Black with the brown."
It's like, bro, I've said this before and I'll say it again. That's not going to work. There's no way—you’re not gonna keep Guatemalan immigrants on welfare, first of all, bro. Those dudes get here, and every time I've like worked with one of those guys, I'll be like, yo, how long you been here for? It's like two weeks, they have three jobs. All those dudes need is a mountain bike, and they'd be off welfare within 48 hours. Those dudes hop on a Huffy and are gone. So there's no way those dudes are gonna sit here for—to say like, "Oh, this is a real threat, the Democrats." I mean, they're definitely bussing these guys in. Yeah, maybe if, you know, if you give them the hookup, especially right around election time, I could see it being like, "yo, bro, don't even sweat it. Here's $1500 a month. Get on your feet." I could see it. But then as soon as like, if you hit these guys with drag story time, they're out. They're fucking gone. Abortion, they're out. These guys are mucho Catholico. They're not gonna go for, you know, Dem party line politics.
So, I don't know, dude. I think that is a—it is kind of fun, you know, for me at least, seeing Black dudes get real fucking like, "This is my goddamn country dude, get the hell outta here." And they've been like that for a while, by the way. People don't know that. There have been tensions for a while. That's been a thing going on. Like, you know, when Trump said, “He’s given up Black jobs, Biden gave up Black jobs.” It's obviously clunky to say that, but even Umar Johnson, Umar, even Umar was like, "Dude, stop being pussies, you know what he's talking about." It's not saying like, if you're Black, you have to do this. But if you look at like socioeconomic statistics, whatever—yeah dude, a lot of Black dudes are gonna be doing jobs that Mexican dudes are gonna be riding their Huffies toward and trying to snag.
They've already, dude, they crush Uber Eats. If you get Uber Eats in New York City, it is a lad on a bike coming to you with the quickness, dude. They hop on that thing. It’s fucking pretty nasty the way those guys get on mountain bikes and just get work, get the bag. And they're also, they got a real money mindset, dude. They're living in houses. And I've literally seen this firsthand. I'm not stereotyping, it's like 16 people in a house. And then it's like people are sleeping during the day, hitting the night shift, it's crazy, dude. They work so hard and they're all about the bag. It's nuts. They are not gonna stay on the Democratic voting payroll. If he wants to try to get this last one through, I get it. But like, bro, that, that is a move that will absolutely backfire.
This segment may be the platonic ideal encapsulation of the way extremism moves through comedy. As I’ve said again and again, a comedian’s performance of so-called ironic or joking or unserious bigotry is reliably an indicator of their actual beliefs, and if you look very hard, or not hard at all, you will eventually find them articulating those beliefs with a straight face, beliefs that are coincidentally not all that far off from the performance, which we can then recognize as the conscious use of an acceptable pretext in which to say unacceptable things. Except, look, how about that, suddenly they’re not so unacceptable anymore. Thanks to comedy’s forgiveness of Shane Gillis and acceptance of his fondness for slurs (like the one he used over and over again in a recent episode of Kill Tony), his 96,800 Patreon members have now been exposed to a torrent of utterly casual racism, expressed in plain speech by his cohost.
But of course, that’s why so many of them listen in the first place.
“The Deep State Set This Up”
Speaking of conspiracy theories, last week Tim Dillon had Alex Jones on his podcast to discuss the assassination attempt. Surprise surprise, Jones argued that it was a deep state conspiracy to kill Trump:
JONES: This was not a mistake. This was not a screw up. This was premeditated. But yes, I've been on air like a parrot saying they're going to kill Trump or try to kill him. And when they kill him or try to kill him, all hell's gonna break loose. So I wanna be 100% clear. Now, the deep state set this up, brought in the shooter, protected him, put him up there. That's all 100% fact. Don't be naive. People debate that stuff all day. The default is put people on rooftops within a half mile. This is 450 feet away. This is preposterous. This was the default set position. Like this is like putting salt water in your gas tanker, not putting gas in your car. You have a newborn baby, you throw it in the pool. It's not a mistake. It's done on purpose. The low-level Secret Service, it’s not their fault. They follow orders.
It gets worse from there. Jones pins the blame in part on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, describing her as “one of these diversity hires” and lamenting that the women in Trump’s security detail failed to protect him. (Oh, that reminds me: McCusker also spends a bit of the above-described episode saying women shouldn’t be in the Secret Service, we shouldn’t make women take bullets for the president, etc, in addition to criticizing the $1.5 billion judgment against Jones.) Later, Dillon asks if Jones thinks “they”—perhaps the Deep State, perhaps the Biden Administration—will start a race war to “destabilize the public” and prevent Trump from taking power. Jones, who describes himself as a “classical liberal,” says we’re on the verge of civilizational collapse:
JONES: I know how things work. This is what I do. And we are in World War III with the Russians. We have a crazy Joe Biden. They just tried to kill Trump. Come on, people. What do you think comes next? They're gonna power outage us. They're gonna do a cyber attack. They're gonna kill Trump. And I'll just say that. They're gonna kill Trump. I think he's dead. So I am physically, I—literally, I wasn’t trying to be dramatically, I was about to vomit… This is not a game, okay? People, thermonuclear war is not a game. Okay? What's going down—and the average person cannot gauge this. They think, oh, everything's fine, because you've lived in freedom so long. Folks, this isn't a game. And I am literally doing the shutdown process of preparing to die. I'm literally looking at my daughter and my wife and like preparing for nuclear war, because that's a probability, not a possibility.
DILLON: Alex, you know what? I agree with you, but I wanna remind you that there's a lot of people that care about you. You're incredibly talented. Your family loves you. And that's why I had you on, because we wanted to hear what you had to say. And you know, I've been listening to you since I'm 13. So if we can just send love to you and hope that you feel better, because you get involved in a lot of crazy shit, and read about it and process it and internalize it. But we're just sending love to you and your family. And I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this.
Again, this is all completely deranged. Again, none of this is all that surprising coming from Dillon, who’s spent the last five years steadily going down the rabbit hole. Despite his pretense at a sort of enlightened nihilism, I think it may be safe to say at this point that he’s solidly a GOP partisan. His friendship with The Free Press’s Bari Weiss has made him a fixture in conservative media circles, and his contributions to The Free Press’s RNC coverage last week made abundantly clear that—like many other comedians, including McCusker and Gillis—he is fully in the tank for Donald Trump. “I think he is the president now,” he said in a livestream with columnist Michael Moynihan:
DILLON: I don't think there should be an election. I think it's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. The Democrats have disgraced themselves to a point where they should literally just let him win. It would actually look good if they said, just take it. Now, by the way, not even wait till the inauguration. Just give it to him now. Yeah, I mean, it was presidential. It was, to a degree, funny. Not as funny as I've seen him be, but he looked incredibly presidential. But he looked incredibly presidential. He was above a lot of the type of bickering and stuff that people love when he does. But I mean, he's the winner. He's winning. What are they going to do? They got to get Michelle Obama. That's the only chance they got, is to have Michelle Obama come out on stage at the DNC and go, "Yes, I'm a man, and now I'm the president." Unless that happens, it's over.
[…]
Listen, he's one of the funniest people. He's one of the most American people. He maybe has the most uniquely American life of any other person. I think Caitlyn Jenner might be second, to be honest, in terms of unique American lives that you can't really replicate other places. He's the man of the moment. I mean, people can love him. They can hate him. They could say all kinds of things about him. They will, it doesn't really matter. He's the guy of the moment. The guy just got shot in the ear, he stood back up. He said, "Fight, fight, fight." It's inevitable. There's nothing to be done.
I mean, everything they've tried to do to get rid of this guy, indicting him, all this stuff, it's all been silly. It's made him more powerful. It's made him so powerful that he's beyond the scope of power that people even understood four years ago, and it's because everything the Democratic Party has tried to do, everything liberals have tried to do to get rid of this guy has been the absolute 100% worst move, wrong move. Everything they've done has been terrible. From the Russia stuff, right on down to indicting him for inflating the price of a fucking condo, as if anyone cares. They have no one to blame but themselves, and he seems, I think he's probably, a bullet whizzing by your head like that probably changes you a little bit, and I feel like he certainly seems to me ready for the job at this point.
I don’t have anything to tell you that I haven’t told you before: this whole Joe Rogan-led class of comedians is completely detached from reality, in thrall to disgraced conspiracists like Alex Jones, deeply susceptible to anti-democratic thought, quite straightforwardly bigoted, and somehow, totally mysteriously and unpredictably, getting worse on every front as their stars rise. (Dillon goes on yet another transphobic rant in the latest episode of his podcast, before suggesting that public schooling is obsolete and children should be returned to the workforce.) What gets me again and again is that virtually none of this impacts their standing in comedy. Dillon just headlined the Netflix Is A Joke Festival; McCusker is scheduled to perform at Town Hall in November as part of the New York Comedy Festival, co-sponsored by NYMag and Vulture. It should matter what people say and believe; there is no hope of building a diverse, safe, equitable industry so long as its spaces are dominated by unchecked extremists. I wonder if there’s any line left for for these guys to cross.
What Else?
-You gotta watch Conner O’Malley’s new short Coreys.
-If you are NYC-based, allow me to recommend the following: Sopranos: The Musical, Rachel Kaly: Hospital Hour, and Rachel Coster’s Show me to me Rachel at Union Hall; Chloe Radcliffe’s Cheat at UCB; and Carmen Christopher’s special screening at the Bell House.
-Speaking of the Bell House, I was dismayed to read of its sale to Live Nation.