Category / TikTok

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

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

Brady Pesola, @shh.adults.are.talking, and TikTok Misogyny

Brady Pesola was an unremarkable private investigator in the San Diego area. But his hatred of women helped him become a small-time star on TikTok.

This morning, I learned that my TikTok account was permanently banned. Why? Because I spoke out against the misogynistic TikTok user Brady Pesola, who goes by the handle @shh.adults.are.talking.

Pesola specializes in a type of repugnant hypermasculine sexism that has netted him nearly half a million followers. His ugly formula of speaking in a tenth-rate John Wayne swagger and casually demeaning women for their feelings and their thoughts has proven such an alluring draw that he has been able to parlay this into a sizable fan base. I had responded to one of Pesola’s slightly less sexist posts in which he boomed, “Stop being an insecure little bitch and grow up,” by pointing out, quite calmly, that being emotional was not a sign of insecurity. For this, Pesola singled me out as “unhinged,” prefacing his stitch by saying “This one’s extra spicy.”

I was then bombarded by numerous comments from Pesola’s followers and later had my account hit with false reports of bullying and harassment, after I proceeded to outline the full extent of Pesola’s misogyny in a series of videos. And I received a permanent ban. I have tried to appeal this ban, but I have heard nothing from TikTok. The message is clear. TikTok supports the misogyny of creators with huge followings rather than the small-time people who speak out against such vile strains. I also suspect that I was targeted by TikTok because a few of my anti-corporate and pro-union videos went viral. Since I cannot access my videos, this article represents a thorough effort to expose and document Pesola’s clear hatred of women, as well as TikTok’s willful advocacy of misogyny among its high-ranked creators, despite community guidelines declaring that hateful behavior directed towards a group is prohibited. A thorough review of Pesola’s TikTok feed reveals that he violated these rules multiple times and faced no consequences — aside from a 24 hour ban in December 2020 and a permanent ban for twenty minutes that was somehow removed this month. Apparently, if you have enough followers on TikTok, you can get away with saying anything. The rules don’t apply to those who have the clout.

Pesola, a former Marine based in the San Diego area (originally from Minnesota) who runs a dubious nonprofit operation known as the Gray Man Project with some shady emphasis on self-reliance (a public records search and a Guidestar dive reveals no record), published his first TikTok on October 11, 2020. He has claimed to be a private investigator. A search with the California Department of Affairs reveals that he is licensed (with a firearms permit) through October 31, 2022. Pesola’s license matches up with an operation called The People’s Detective, which claims to be “a full-service investigative agency with a 30-year track record of successful investigations, high profile cases, and newsworthy discoveries.” (The People’s Detective did not return my requests for comment.)

Pesola’s initial four videos detailed how a Sharpie, a flashlight, and a belt could be used to attack someone and his initial videos shortly after this quartet were carried out with a strain of tough-talking military bravado and alleged expertise. This was apparently enough for Pesola to earn the beginnings of a following, where his relationship to his audience would involve addressing douchebags (while mispronouncing Epictetus, whom he has frequently declared to be his favorite philosopher) and engaging in fairly unimaginative conservative talking points.

As Pesola acquired more of an audience, it took only days for Pesola to go off the deep end with an October 14, 2020 video in which he declared, “Toxic masculinity is a myth…Masculinity is a heightened state of being that all men should strive for.” By October 23, 2020, Pesola began honing the beginnings of his pugnacious TikTok formula, calling some of his audience “motherfuckers” and “miserable pricks.” But this was enough for Pesola to gain 11,000 followers in two weeks. Pesola then started stylizing his voice in a preposterously deep manner to woo more followers. At this point, the strains of misogyny and ugliness that were to become Pesola’s hallmarks still drifted somewhat in the background. But since this was his chief draw, it became more of his raison when publishing videos.

In an October 20, 2020 video, Pesola offered hotel advice, claiming that you didn’t want to get a hotel room on the second floor because there might be “some fucking crackhead breaking in the window and wanting to get in bed with you in the middle of the night. Unless you’re into that.” He called peaceful protesters “fucking retards.” By the end of October 2020, Pesola gradually strayed away from his tips on security and began embracing the beginning of his bullying, going after the “ignorant fucking retards.” He reveled in crude violence when offering “advice” to domestic violence survivors, suggesting that women “turn into the most vicious, fucking, violent psychopath you can imagine in your entire life.” While dispensing questionable wisdom to rape survivors, Pesola giddily declared, “Guys will fuck you with a potato sack and heels on.”

By November 2020, Pesola’s feed had become a reliable hotbed of hideous misogynistic takes. He bemoaned the idea of men facing penalties for hitting a woman while adopting a phony position against domestic violence. (Pesola spent most of his time in this video siding with men who were simply “defending” themselves, concluding in a crude manner, “I don’t care how good the pussy is. Get away from that toxic shit.”) In a November 11, 2020 video viewed by 912,600 people, Pesola reached his first major viral nadir of casual misogyny, claiming that preventing rape was the responsibility of women and that it was a woman’s obligation to parent well: “I got an idea. Be better fucking mothers.” When, on November 28, 2020, a TikTok user named @gishaz called Pesola out on the misogyny of this post, Pesola smugly responded, “So you agree then that the world does need better mothers.”

It took six weeks for Pesola to hit 100,000 followers. And by early December 2020, the fame had swelled to Pesola’s head. He confidently announced, “Hello ladies. I know what makes you tick.” In a multipart series that began on December 6, 2020, Pesola giddily described how he manipulated an escort into almost having sex with him for free, later bragging about lying to this escort by claiming to be an escort, and offering further confabulations that he couldn’t enter into a meaningful relationship because of his false escort role. For Pesola, women are merely sexual vessels to be used — with counterfeit empathy as the tool.

By December 22, 2020, Pesola was referring to himself as a “famous TikTokker” and, with his colossal hubris confirmed by his growing follower base, he declared on Christmas Eve, “Frankly, I don’t give a fuck if I’m likable. Apparently, 160,000 followers is telling me [sic] that I’m doing something right.” And there was more sexism to come: Pesola remarked on the unfairness of men paying child support, offered tips on how to keylog a lover’s phone, claimed that there was no such thing as rape culture (“It’s illogical and just plain fucking stupid.”), reconfirmed his view that toxic masculinity was a myth, and took the side of a man in a marriage split without considering the woman’s perspective (“It sounds like his ex-wife is a righteous cunt.”). By the turn of the year, Pesola had become hopelessly resolute in his hatred of women. When not condemning Nelson Mandela, he claimed that a man giving his phone to his girlfriend was weak (“Oh boy! That’s a red flag towards an unhealthy and toxic relationship.”), demeaned women for not revolving their entire lives around men (“If she doesn’t value your time as her man, then she’s always going to be a waste of time as your woman.”), and condemned women for allowing men to be disrespected.

On November 19, 2020, Pesola risibly claimed that it was important to treat people with different perspectives and worldviews with respect. It was advice that he was not to follow months later when he started using his bully pulpit to crush any position that differed from his own. He started addressing his audience as “fuckfaces” in late January. He engaged in casual fat-shaming with a disturbing eugenics streak, demanded that women make more money as they aged (“Your looks depreciate as you get older.”), claimed that blowjobs were the male equivalent to a woman receiving flowers, claimed that anyone who was offended by behavior was a “stupid fuck,” and falsely claimed that the government was forcing people to get vaccinated.

Pesola did not reply to my questions. But the undeniable strain of misogyny in Pesola’s TikTok feed is clearly the very quality that the TikTok algorithm values the most. This allowed an unremarkable chowderhead in Carlsbad with a toxic strain of sexism to become a small-time TikTok star. Systemic misogyny appears to be permanently baked into the factors that cause TikTok videos to end up on the For You Page. And if you speak out against this nefarious truth, you get banned. In my case, I made hundreds of largely benign videos on TikTok. I offered empathy to people who looked like they were in trouble. I sang songs. I cracked jokes. But none of that matters. Because I dared to speak out against a garden variety thug like Pesola, all that I made is now inaccessible to me. I have no backup copies. Pesola, on the other hand, will be just fine. And it is because Pesola perceives women as little more than shallow little wretches to manipulate. Despite the significant advances of the #metoo movement, hating women is apparently still your hot ticket to social media fame.

5/28/21 UPDATE: Deputy Daniel “Duke” Trujillo is now dead of COVID. This Denver deputy did not have to die. He could have received his vaccination. But as the Twitter user @RacistProgramming reported, Trujillo was heavily influenced by one of Pesola’s anti-vaxx videos.

As of the morning of May 28, 2001, Pesola has also made his TikTok account private:

5/30/21 UPDATE: Faced with intense scrutiny from appalled users, Pesola has deleted all of his social media accounts, including TikTok and Twitter.

by Edward Champion

Marcus DiPaola is Not a Journalist

Marcus DiPaola claims to be a journalist, but his demagoguery and his carelessness with the facts suggests that he could be the Charles Coughlin of TikTok.

If you’re on TikTok, there’s a good chance that you’ve stumbled across Marcus DiPaola on your For You Page. He has 2.5 million followers and he doesn’t follow anybody back. With thick-framed glasses, poorly groomed stubble, and hair parted in the middle in a manner that suggests that he could be the love child of Alfalfa and a Williamsburg hipster, DiPaola reads the news in an intense and fearmongering style against an Olan Mills backdrop that is grossly at odds with his “I spend most of my time in a basement” aesthetic. Think of DiPaola as Awkward Family Photos enhanced with white male rage. Like many grifters who have made a name for themselves in an age in which facts, fairness, and the appearance of objectivity are increasingly devalued, DiPaola cloaks his inadequacies behind his mission statement: that he is, according to his own bio, using a writing style “designed to make it possible for middle schoolers with learning disabilities to understand the news.” But if this were truly the case, why then does DiPaola enunciate innocent words like “trains” with all the sinister timbre of Richard III chewing up the scenery just before hiring assassins to kill his older brother? If he is truly speaking to children, why then does his content have the feel of Walter Winchell with severe anger management issues? DiPaola reminds me of that Simpsons bit in which Christopher Walken read Goodnight Moon, only for the kids to scurry away in fear.

Up until recently, DiPaola’s bizarrely aggressive “reporting” style was largely tolerated as something you had to endure before scrolling onto a shirtless Russian man loving his bear in subzero temperatures. But on March 29th, DiPaola offered a preposterously inaccurate report that “LGBTQ residents of Philadelphia are getting attacked by criminals so often that, today, the person in charge of dealing with crime in Philadelphia created an advisory board to figure out how to deal with the problem.” It is certainly true that a transgender woman was attacked in Philadelphia on March 20th and that there was an uptick in transgender attacks last year. But DiPaola’s hysterical rhetoric suggested that Philly was something out of Frank Miller’s apocalyptic portrayals of Gotham. Last year, USA Today reported that Philadelphia was among the friendliest cities to LGBTQ people. The city was one of the first places in America to initiate a yearly Pride parade in 1972.

@marcus.dipaola

If you don’t recognize the real world is a scary place, it’s time to grow up.

♬ original sound – Marcus DiPaola

DiPaola faced rightful pushback for his histrionics, which felt more like the bilious white supremacy spewed by Tucker Carlson than a man who professes to “anchor the news” on his Twitter bio. He never once corrected his inaccuracies — the basic responsibility of even a soi-disant journalist. Instead, he doubled down on his demagogic fury with a video that was swiftly parodied and widely condemned:

Journalism exists to point out things going wrong so people can change them. It is never my job to cheerlead or to make people happy. It is my job to point out the scary and bad stuff happening in the world, to build up pressure on the people in power so they fix things. If you want to make a change in the world, this is the channel for you. If you’re scared of real life and want to pretend things are perfect, follow someone else.

As the user @jewishanarchist observed, this represented a case in which DiPaola refused to countenance the LGBTQ-friendly truth of living in Philadelphia. “You might not have the job to cheerlead,” said @jewishanarchist, who grew up in Philly and who noted the vibrant drag scene in the City of Brotherly Love, “but you have the job to represent the accurate facts. Because what you did? You made the people of Philly look bad. You didn’t make the government of Philly look bad. You made the people look bad. That’s bad reporting.”

Moreover, there’s something incredibly dodgy in DiPaola’s partisan approach here. It is a journalist’s job to present the facts fairly and accurately. If the reader (or, in this case, the viewer) decides that she wants to change things, then that’s on the audience, not the journalist. But these basic responsibilities are clearly beyond DiPaola’s wildly limited faculties. He often fails to cite his sources. And a cursory exhumation of his feed instantly reveals numerous inaccuracies or willful misreadings of other reports. Irrespective of who your audience is, this is a deeply irresponsible approach for anyone who claims to report the news.

DiPaola could be easily ignored if he didn’t have such a large platform to deliver his venomous spittle-flecked tirades. The fact of the matter is that, for some people who are hopelessly hooked on TikTok (it is incredibly addictive!), DiPaola could very well be the first place that they hear about a news story. And if they hear it from a man who is so careless and capricious with the facts, then DiPaola’s outsize influence is incredibly dangerous. Not unlike Father Coughlin in the 1930s, who used his vast radio audience to whip up widespread anti-Semitism and support for fascism. Even comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver have employed fact-checkers. Because they have known very well that millions of people are watching their shows and that they have a responsibility to convey the basic truth.

But DiPaola shows no such care or commitment. He cannot, by any standard, be called a journalist.