Month / June 2023

by Edward Champion

The Laughter in Light/Crutches and Spice/mdg650hawk TikTok Drama Explained

Two wildly popular “liberal” creators on TikTok went after a Black and disabled creator for speaking her mind against billionaires, falsely accusing her of doxxing. This ugly episode reveals the covert racism and ableism that motivates white neoliberals.

On June 21, 2023, the TikTok account @LaughterinLight posted a video in relation to the billionaires who recently died aboard the Titan submersible as they hoped to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The incident had resulted in a lot of dark comedy and edgy memes on TikTok. @LaughterinLight, who is a white, wealthy. and privileged immunologist who regularly cozies up to billionaires to fund her research, rightly gained traction on TikTok during the early days of the pandemic for her fiercely pro-science stance and her incredibly useful breakdown of emerging variants. It was believed by many progressive-minded people, myself included, that @LaughterinLight was a force for good. But in this video, @LaughterinLight sided with the affluent without a shred of nuance and without a kernel of comprehending catharsis. She said, “If you can find joy and Schaudenfreude and excitement from the death of people, no matter what their label or their group is, that makes you no better.”

Never mind that those who mocked these privileged Titan passengers, who paid a reported $250,000 a pop for the dubious honor of seeing the remains of poor people from more than a century ago, were simply reacting against income inequality and the ridiculous obscenity of such a narcissistic exercise that is beyond the price tag of most Americans. No, @LaughterinLight considered any joke against these billionaires to be inappropriate. (Has she even read Jonathan Swift, Helen DeWitt, Evelyn Waugh, Nathanael West, Jane Austen, Paul Beatty, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett or George Schuyler? I have meticulously read and studied them all. Satirists have been ridiculing the follies of the rich for decades. And if @LaughterinLight is this fragile and hypersensitive, then it’s clear that she wouldn’t last a minute during any set at an East Village comedy club.) Never mind that billionaires had profited handsomely during the pandemic. According to Oxfam, billionaires added $5 trillion to their vast fortunes during the pandemic. Essential workers had no choice but to risk and lose their lives during the pandemic. According to one California study, essential workers accounted for 87% of additional COVID deaths between March 2020 and December 2020. According to WHO, it is estimated that anywhere between 80,000 and 180,000 healthcare workers lost their lives between January 2020 and May 2021. Line cooks, who undoubtedly cooked many meals for privileged people such as @LaughterinLight, had the highest risk of mortality. None of these people received the kind of spectacle-driven coverage that the Titan passengers did. Unless you count the numerous pots and pans that were banged outside windows during the early part of the pandemic from the lucky bastards who didn’t have to toil in hospitals, restaurants, and grocery stores.

On June 22, 2023, the TikTok user @crutches_and_spice — who is Black and disabled and not living in affluence — posted a critical reply to @LaughterinLight. @crutches_and_spice was calm, cited numerous facts of billionaires profiting from the pandemic, and was in no way hostile. She said, “You’re an immunologist. So you know what happens next. They then turn around and use that wealth to undermine public health efforts. The air we breathe is toxic. People are becoming disabled every single day to COVID. It has not ended. Because they want their little worker bees back in the office.”

A perfectly reasonable response, right?

But, in a comment left on @crutches_and_spice’s video, @LaughterinLight doubled down on her privilege by suggesting that @crutches_and_spice had somehow missed the point (when she had, in fact, not):

This difference in opinion likely would have dissipated over the weekend. But that’s when @mdg650hawk7thaccount — or Hawk, as this affluent San Francisco lawyer is known as on TikTok — falsely accused @crutches_and_spice — without a shred of evidence — of doxxing @LaughterinLight. Hawk is one of the more popular “liberal” accounts, but his completely unfounded attack on a marginalized creator was a classic example of a big TikTok creator using his vast influence to shut down a perfectly reasonable critic. I understand the need to stick up for a friend. But as a lawyer, Hawk should know better than this. As a putative liberal, he should understand that racism and white privilege are alive and well in 2023. What he did was pernicious to critical thinking, harmful to democratic discourse, and utterly disruptive to vital and necessary dialogue. (Indeed, Hawk is so influential that, when I criticized him for his vulgar tone policing and his false and completely unpredicated attack on a Black creator, I lost dozens of followers — mostly white neoliberals and centrists — on my backup account.)

(Conflict of interest disclaimer: Hawk and I were mutuals before my main TikTok account was falsely banned (I had not earned any additional strikes) by corrupt moderators in Tennessee, but we were never friends. We were acquaintances at best. He once asked me to email him some of my research notes. I did so and I never received a thank you or an acknowledgment from him.)

It is abundantly clear that Hawk and @LaughterinLight are not friends of the Left. They have used their sizable TikTok influence to punch down at a Black and disabled creator. They do not care about their followers. They only care about their clout. And this is a case of bigger accounts using everything in their larder to punch down at their critics. This is a case of two white, affluent, and influential TikTok creators being completely incognizant of their own privilege. And, with their completely needless bullying and persecution of @crutches_and_spice, I would also argue that this is a clear act of racism — the social media equivalent to Emmett Till being falsely accused and lynched for a perceived slight against a white woman.

Nobody who purports to stand for progressive values should follow either Hawk or @LaughterinLight. It is clear that these two accounts are acting in bad faith and that they both know who butters their bread. And it sure as hell ain’t working stiffs like you and me. Indeed, only a day before her pro-billionaire TikTok, @LaughterinLight had no problem ridiculing an overweight 52-year-old smoker who had died:

The message from Hawk and @LaughterinLight couldn’t be clearer: rules for thee and not for me. These two creators are no different from any privileged scumbag within the Republican and Democratic Parties. They have both refused to apologize in any way for their tone policing and their false accusations and have thus revealed their cruel and opportunistic colors, which is far worse than any joke directed at a billionaire.

by Edward Champion

Welcome to Isosceles Triangle Coffee!

In the interest of saving lives, I am publishing the full text of a marketing brochure from an Ohio coffee business. Warning to sensitive readers: the material here is very disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

[JULY 6, 2023 UPDATE: Not merely content to use his influence to get my account banned, harasser Daniel McLaughlin put together a libelous and defamatory six minute video falsely claiming to be a stalker and a harasser. This pathetic accordion player cannot get enough of me, it seems. His campaign resulted in doxing and death threats against me. I have been forced to produce a four-part documentary response called The Softpourn Chronicles, which thoroughly debunks his untrue claims:

Part 1: The Kuleshov Effect
Part 2: The Book of Daniel
Part 3: Stacking the Deck
Part 4: Leave Me Alone]

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This morning, I received some alarming promotional material in the mail from a strange coffee business based in Ohio. The brochure informed me that the proprietor of this business has one million followers on TikTok and the company was hoping that I would “spread the word” on my website about it. But frankly I’m very disturbed by this business’s operating protocol. I have filed complaints with the Cleveland Police Department and the Ohio Secretary of State, but they have refused to investigate Daniel “Danny Boy” McLaughlin, who has apparently sent payola to every known authority to inflate his market dominance and influence. I am publishing this material at considerable personal risk. Because I also received a text claiming that I would be “rubbed out” if I spoke ill of Danny Boy McLaughlin, but I am hoping that the publication will prevent innocent customers from being hurt or murdered. Hopefully, the federal authorities will step in and put a stop to this psychotic’s business practices.]

Here at Isosceles Triangle Coffee, we are determined to offer our customers the most insufferably smug caffeine options known to humankind. (And that’s saying something, given how we operate out of a desolate strip mall in Wickliffe, Ohio!) For one thing, if you walk into our office and you don’t know what a brewing ratio is, our volunteer team of muscleheads will take you out into the back, steal your wallet, and beat the ever-living shit out of you. If you do know what a brewing ratio is, and your answer isn’t somewhere between 1:15 to 1:18, then we will deliver your corpse to your next of kin (shipping and handling fees apply). Because frankly you have no reason to exist on this planet.

It’s important to note that “brewing ratio” was a mythical term concocted by our head roaster and self-appointed deity Danny Boy McLaughlin. He may be lactose intolerant and he may not know how to pour beans into a container without spilling them, but “Shooting Blanks Dan” (as the locals like to call him) is our overlord! And if you don’t refer to our king as “Lord McLaughlin,” he will also snap his fingers and order our thugs to beat you within an inch of your life. Our on-site medic will, of course, attend to your wounds, but only after you buy at least three pounds of our coffee. Frankly, if you can’t imbibe a cappuccino while undergoing a brain hemorrhage, you have no business stepping into our office. To quote from one of our favorite David Mamet movies, coffee is for closers.

If you are not using “brewing ratio” in your everyday vernacular, then nobody in our office will ever talk with you and your money will never be accepted here. Not even for the Leukemia Fund we have set up for the kids.

We use the term “grind size” to refer to Lord McLaughlin’s propensity to use Grindr to let off some steam every now and then. (While it is true that Lord McLaughlin’s appendage is diminutive, any customer who describes it as less than six inches will be shot on sight.) But “grind size” also refers to what we call the “backbone” (and sometimes the “backboner”) of a good cup of coffee. Oh sure, you may think that coffee doesn’t possess a skeletal structure. But you haven’t had our coffee, which has been described by one connoisseur as “delightfully bony, with copious amounts of jizz and a bit of crunch.”

To properly store your coffee, it is important to remember that we gave you a bag. Any Golden Triangle customer caught storing coffee beans outside the bag will be immediately identified as a plebeian and banned from our store for life. But in order to properly preserve coffee flavor, you will need to slap yourself in the face while listening to one of Lord McLaughlin’s six hour motivational videos (at the cost of $99/hour).

You may be faced with the difficult choice of choosing between light, medium, and dark. While most coffee roasters will try to sell you on dark roast, Isosceles Triangle offers the outlier boutique approach of demanding that you order light coffee. Despite light coffee’s dry and dull sheen, it’s the closest roast that aligns with Lord McLaughlin’s pasty white flesh. And since Lord McLaughlin has reminded the staff every day about the importance of keeping white supremacy alive in Ohio coffee joints, we believe that the stronger acidity of light coffee will make you less nervous about wearing a hood and setting a large cross on fire.

The choice is yours. Do you need a grinder? Well, only if you grind your coffee in your kitchen naked, keeping your window blinds open, and telling us the time of your grinding so that Lord McLaughlin can park outside your house and keep his binoculars locked on your naked grinding form as he wanks himself silly in his car. Your coffee will taste better if Lord McLaughlin watches you while masturbating. So we would encourage all of our customers to have a good coffee grinder because Lord McLaughlin often has difficulty landing dates (even when holding a gun to a woman’s forehead, they still say no!). Don’t bother wasting money on a bladed grinder because Lord McLaughlin always has a set of knives in his backpack to take revenge on customers who refuse to follow our exacting protocol.

by Edward Champion

How a Pathetic Cleveland Hipster Named Dan McLaughlin Got Me Banned on TikTok

On Monday night, my TikTok account was permanently suspended. And in examining the causes of this ridiculous contretemps, I realized that I really don’t need TikTok. Which is something that my mortal coffee snob enemy from Cleveland will certainly never understand.

[JULY 6, 2023 UPDATE: Not merely content to use his influence to get my account banned, harasser Daniel McLaughlin put together a libelous and defamatory six minute video falsely claiming to be a stalker and a harasser. This pathetic accordion player cannot get enough of me, it seems. His campaign resulted in doxing and death threats against me. I have been forced to produce a four-part documentary response called The Softpourn Chronicles, which thoroughly debunks his untrue claims:

Part 1: The Kuleshov Effect
Part 2: The Book of Daniel
Part 3: Stacking the Deck
Part 4: Leave Me Alone]

Nine months ago, I wrote an essay documenting how TikTok has gone well out of its way to wage war against the left — specifically, any voice who gets through to people and who isn’t afraid to tell the truth. Well, since that time, Congress has needlessly grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew with such risible inquiries as whether or not TikTok accesses your home wi-fi network (spoiler alert: it does, just like any goddamned app you have open when 5G isn’t enough). And this has put TikTok in the hot seat. In addition to having to demonstrate that the copious data that they collect from a vast panoply of American users resides within the homeland, TikTok now has to assuage centrist Democrats that it is indeed a social media platform devoted to “sensible” thinking. Which now extends into the permanent silencing of any account that actually gets through to people on such underdiscussed matters as class warfare, the homeless crisis, the mental health crisis, and revealing the Democrats to be some of the most spineless capitulators seen in politics ever since Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler, irrespective of the horrific outcome.

Which is a roundabout way of reporting that some faceless moderator decided to play god tonight and permanently suspend my account. Even though I hadn’t accrued any additional strikes. So long, forty thousand plus followers! I loved you all. Truly I did! But, alas, TikTok has deemed a scabrous asshat with a highly punchable face far worthier than my middle-aged mug! Never trust anyone over forty! Amirite?

What happened?

Well, back on June 4th or thereabouts, I made a jocular video response to a humorless asshole in Cleveland named Dan McLaughlin, who goes by the groan-inducing handle @softpourn. Dan, you see, is a hopelessly pretentious loser (just look at the way this asshole “smokes” his pipe; you almost hope he’ll cultivate a real passion and grow some track lines just so nobody will ever need to photograph this detestable motherfucker again) who somehow accumulated one million followers with his insufferable masturbatory videos concerning the “proper” way of making caffeinated beverages. I know a grifter when I see one and I couldn’t stand the guy. And I was far from alone.

Dan is the kind of fauxbrow scumbag that you quietly hope will find himself on the other end of a fist should he ever live up to his natural Pollyannaish stupidity and deign to proselytize his horseshit in a dive bar. On a recent afternoon, a few weeks after all this happened and fearing that I was alone in my Dan doubt, I showed one of Dan’s TikToks to a highly accomplished Greenpoint barista who I am friendly with and she said, without any prompting from me, “Oh, that guy. Yeah, he’s full of shit. I can’t stand the fucker.” And the barista gave me some inside dirt on what really goes down when it comes to French presses. It turned out that Dan was very, very wrong.

So, yeah, Dan ain’t all that. But on TikTok, Dan is all that. And the last thing that a motherfucker hopped on his own hubris ever wants to hear is that he isn’t what he thinks he is.

Dan McLaughlin has carried on with his insufferable bullshit much in the same way that the avocado toast people first realized that they could bamboozle lazy twentysomethings into paying $12 for something that they could make at home for a hell of a lot less if they were only mindful and patient enough to let an avocado ripen for a few days. Which is to say that Dan McLaughlin is a scam artist.

And late one night, as I was completely unaware that this douchebag had one million followers, I decided to call him out. Much in the way that I have playfully called out many frauds and two-bit con men during my entire life. The gist of my reply — far more benevolent than other TikTokkers who hoped to draw blood — was “For fuck’s sake, eyeball it.”

Of course, this satirical reply didn’t sit so well with Dan — or “Daniel,” as his LinkedIn profile helpfully informs us. Because Dan, you see, is Oh So Fucking Serious about his fucking shitty coffee and his performative antics. On LinkedIn, Dan tells us that, since 2013, he’s “expanded [his] knowledge from standard barista skills to specialty craft roasting.” Which is probably the most pompous thing I’ve read in the last few years that hasn’t been written by Jonathan Franzen.

And Dan sicced his loyal followers on me. There was even one hideous woman who claimed to be a social worker and who insisted that I was disturbed and that she could “help me.” She was swiftly blocked. I am often more self-aware than people realize. What unsettles people is that I simply don’t possess the constitution to play the game. I suppose this is what blasting KMFDM at deafening levels during your teenage years does to a grownass man.

What really pissed me off was Dan leaving a comment claiming that he “doesn’t punch down,” suggesting that this ego-driven charlatan was somehow superior to the 200 million Americans who drink coffee every day and how this fuckwit left this comment on my feed as if I was not a presence. In my time, I have witnessed men pull knives over such assholic solecisms. And while I am a nonviolent man who does not pull knives on people, I did leave a reply pointing out that Cleveland was one of the shittiest places in America and openly contemplating if this coward would have the cojones to say something like this to my face. You know, Internet talk. The opposite of pillow talk and the kind of brutal repartee you engage in to shut down a troll or a heckler.

But because Self-Important Dan had one million followers, my TikTok account went from being in good standing to being on thin ice. I racked up three or four community guidelines violations for defending myself with witty ripostes. I had never intended to harass Dan. I had only intended to outwit a sad little arrogant fuck who wanted to rumble with me. The Brooklyn way. The kind of thing that happens a thousand times every Saturday night in every bar in this borough. But here’s the thing. We still buy pints for each other after the spirited banter is finished. This is what Dan could not understand and may never understand.

Of course, Dan, being a Cleveland rube, doesn’t understand such social nuances. Few people who Always Live Online grasp that it’s really not this contentious! So Easily Triggered and Oh So Superior Dan sent his minions after me.

Since I possessed a modicum of maturity and really didn’t want to spend my life battling Cleveland lowlives, I blocked anyone who Dan sent my way.

Time passed. I lied low. I didn’t post anything political. I put up several installments of a silly satirical noir series involving “the Zebra lady.” I figured I could return to being myself once the strikes disappeared from my record. I still had my account, right?

Right?

Wrong.

Even though I had not accrued any additional community guidelines violations since the Dan melee, I learned on Monday night that my TikTok account had been banned. I tried appealing this, but my appeal was denied within seconds.

What I didn’t know was that Dan McLaughlin was humorless bully who apparently lived to shut down voices like mine.

And you know? Maybe it’s a good thing being insignificant again. Throughout my life, I have had a terrific knack for rising to a position of renown and influence through my wit and talent, only to somehow piss off the wrong person and fall hard. My commitment to being real is not quite on the level of Andy Dick and I am not as creepy as that pathetic asshole, but I do have a way of pissing people off despite the fact that I am a congenial fellow if you meet me in person.

Even so, I think that Dan McLaughlin — as much of a solipsistic bastard as he is — may have done me a favor. Now that I’m basically playing the suburban strip mall circuit of right-wing yahoos on YouTube Shorts rather than the Caroline’s or Comedy Cellar of TikTok, I’m now better able to understand that TikTok, for as much fun as it was, might have been very bad for me. There’s something to be said for commitment to authenticity rather than the venal lust for fame. And Dan McLaughlin, who so wants to matter will never know the true artistic freedom of being true to a voice that isn’t beholden to an audience. There will come a point in Dan McLaughlin’s sad little life in which he will learn how irrelevant he is and he won’t be able to cope. I certainly hope he emerges far more humble on the other side, but I have grave doubts. But me? I’ll be very happy and sitting pretty. Because I don’t need one million followers (much less 40,000 followers) in order to live. I’d rather let the right people know me for who I truly am. And that’s better than all the hollow genuflecting that a self-declared “marketing genius” like Dan could never conjure up in a million years.

Dan needs his legions of followers to verify his wildly dubious “expertise” in a way that I never will. There was a rather sad time in my life in which I felt that I needed an audience and it got in the way of being me. But I would rather sacrifice forty thousand followers rather than become some dancing corporate monkey (although I did enjoy dancing on TikTok, only because I enjoy dancing in real life). Dan McLaughlin will never understand this. And that is why I am laughing my ass off at a late hour. Only one of us is truly free.

The big question all of you aspiring influencers have to ask yourselves is this: is the Faustian bargain truly worth it? And here’s a bold corollary: your self-worth sure as hell ain’t determined by some dumbass twentysomething hayseed moderator in Tennessee.

by Edward Champion

Pat Robertson, Evil and Hateful Demagogue, Finally Drops Dead

One of the most evil American fundamentalists has finally dropped dead.

Pat Robertson was a hateful and irredeemable monster, a white supremacist and a baleful stain upon society whose name will be forever synonymous with Rudolf Höss, Idi Amin, and Vlad the Impaler.

Robertson brayed and splayed into every corner of American life that his far from limber mind could find. He used his considerable influence to turn thousands of gullible rubes, easy marks who sent in their last savings to fund this hatemonger’s theocratic media empire, into a xenophobic voting bloc so absent of head and heart that they quickly turned into red cap-wearing mouth-breathers who pushed our nation ever closer to hate and fascism. Like all demagogues of his execrable ilk, Pat Robertson had little more than enmity to bestow upon the world. He hated much in the way that the rest of us get a good night’s sleep or cook a nice meal for friends.

This professed “Christian” was a dangerous homophobe, an insufferable Islamophobe, and an incorrigible misogynist who used every waking minute of his evil and unpardonable life to shit on the most marginalized members of our nation. In hindsight, it is truly remarkable that none of his numerous victims thought to beat this bastard’s brains in with a baseball bat because of all the bile he dispensed under the guise of a sham peaceloving religion. Pat Robertson was the rare man who was so widely detested that he inspired apotheotic levels of rage and vengeful fantasies within Quakers and pacifists.

So his death, which was regrettably not painful and which came at least two decades too late, is something to pop open the bubbly over. Pat Robertson’s death at 93 also represents inarguable evidence that God does not exist. For if that fictitious deity actually did care about empathy and human values, Robertson would have been struck down in life sometime in the 1970s, possibly in an ignoble and ironic manner, shortly before his sinister fundamentalism latched on like wildfire in a post-Nixon nation looking for anyone to hate.

Robertson was the kind of evil fuck who would exploit the 1994 Rwanada genocide for his own financial gain. When 9/11 happened, he sided with Jerry Falwell, blaming “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians” for the terrorist attacks. Christian morons couldn’t stop drooling and couldn’t stop believing in this sham demagogue even when he claimed that God had told him that Mitt Romney would win the 2012 election or that an asteroid strike would destroy earth sometime after the 2020 election. Indeed, Robertson was so broad and unimaginative that he conflated anal sex with bestiality and used his lack of sexual versatility as the cornerstone for his homophobia. And it says something truly troubling about America that so many people swallowed up this stupidity without a kernel of critical thinking.

Robertson had the kind of insufferable hubris in which he could never acknowledge what a half-witted asshat he truly was. He failed the bar exam in New York and claimed, much in the manner of Pee-Wee Herman declaring that he “meant to do that,” that he had never intended to be a lawyer. And his ego was so stung by his mediocre performance that he never took the bar exam again. He tried running for President in 1988 and somehow persuaded three million people to volunteer for his campaign. And while the chowderheads in Iowa lathered their naked lily-white bodies with ample spoonfuls from this walking and talking can of creamed corn, there was very little momentum beyond this and he was forced to drop out.

The reason why Pat Robertson should be remembered and roundly denounced is to prevent more Pat Robertsons from planting their ankles into prominent snow banks. America is now far more susceptible to hate, cruelty, and bigotry than it has been in many decades. Pat Robertson is an unsettling reminder that we should never hold our tongues in condemning the real villains who use their lives to destroy human possibilities. Let Pat Robertson’s grave be riddled with streams of piss and broken glass. He deserves neither accolades nor veneration.