Of Mice and Mens

By their intent shall you know them

Let me begin by noting I’m not a big fan of Alex Stein’s comedy. Often heralded as one of a new generation of “right-wing” humorists, Stein shot to fame seemingly out of nowhere, landing his own show, Prime Time with Alex Stein, on the Blaze network — which more and more seems to be a launching pad for “alt-right” personalities whose utility to the conservative movement is dubious: to some, he’s a brash, unapologetic social troll, a kind of right-leaning Andy Kaufman-lite, fearless in his attempts to take the piss out of self-satisfied pols and government functionaries; to others, he’s a self-promoting cultural irritant, no better than the woke scolds he often targets while himself hiding behind “populism” to justify his often strange personal predilections.

Yet Stein’s arrival, it happens, was not so sudden after all. In 2011, Stein began his media career doing food challenges on YouTube, then in 2012 moved on to reality television, appearing in ABC’s The Glass House. He followed this up in 2013 with an appearance on Worst Cooks in America. Clearly, Stein had gone looking for an audience, and he doesn’t appear to be especially discriminating about who that turned out to be.

It was during COVID-19, though, that Stein truly gained notice. Frustrated with local government in Dallas, to hear him tell it, Stein began disrupting government meetings, first in Dallas and Plano, then, as his comedic stunts gained a wider audience online, in places like Vegas and New York. Perhaps most famous is Stein’s “vaccine rap” at Dallas City Hall, which cleverly lampoons heavy-handed attempts by government and health care officials to secure near universal Covid mRNA vaccinations, albeit in a way that is more boisterous than outright funny. The venue is what helps the joke land. And Stein, to his credit, seemed to understand this, repeating the setup again and again until he eventually wore it out like David Hogg does a good school shooting.

Since 2020 or so, however, Stein’s comedy has largely faltered, in my opinion, even as his success has otherwise grown. An equal-opportunity troll, Stein famously shouted sexual taunts at Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and launched broadsides at Republican Rep Dan Crenshaw and Senator Ted Cruz. These days, in addition to his Blaze TV show and guest spots as a political commentator for Sky News Australia, Stein has done some opening work for people like Tucker Carlson and even a Trump event, most recently doing a comedy set to warm up a Texas crowd for Carlson’s musings on why it’s the most patriotic thing ever to platform a neo-Nazi historian with a soft spot — and a hard one, too, I’d bet — for a certain cuddly and misunderstood Christian Nationalist Fuhrer. Obviously.

And it was at the Carlson event on Tuesday that Stein performed a short set — one that caught the attention of local Fort Worth reporter Cody Copeland, who was less than amused by Stein’s material. In fact, so uncomfortable was Copeland — at least, that’s how he hopes we picture him, his face screwed up into a righteous scowl as he reluctantly, but with hardened resolve, ties on his Social Justice superhero cape — that he took to messaging certain local high-profile conservatives from the Fort Worth area who attended the show, requesting that they offer comment on Stein’s material.

One such message was sent to Bo French, chairman of the Tarant County Republican Party. Copeland wanted to get French on record with respect to some of the more racially-charged jokes in Stein’s set. Wrote Copeland:

Hey Bo, Hope you're doing well.

I'm writing to see what you thought of Tucker Carlson's show at Dickies Arena that last night. I see from your X account that you were there. The show was opened by comedian Alex Stein, who said a number of overtly racist jokes.

He said that he likes when he sees that the [Black] pilot of a plane he is about to board "because that means that you can smoke weed on this flight."

Using a histrionic Chinese accent, he said that Chinese buffets in Springfield, Ohio, are happy to have Haitian immigrants, because there is cat on the menu. He also said that Haitians will swerve through three lines of traffic to try and hit a dog.

He said that "transgenders" deserve to be in the military, because "they are the best at mass shootings."

He said that Mexicans change out their Chevy logos on their cars for Cadillac ones, and that they "will add anything to a car, except for proper license plates and registration stickers."

He said that dogs have races: chihuahuas are Mexican, he said, and quoted the old Taco Bell slogan; he said golden retrievers are white people "because they're the best behaved"; and that pit bulls are Black people because "pit bulls are 13% of the dog population but they commit 70%" of dog crime.

What did you think of Stein's act? Do the views he expressed reflect those of the Republican party?

My deadline is 2 pm today. I appreciate your prompt response.

Back in 2009, I wrote an essay — reprinted here last Thursday — that spoke directly to how we as conservatives should answer such a question, asked in obvious bad faith by a wan and lonely leftist activist with an ironic beard who’s busy masquerading as a journalist, in an attempt to tether a political party to the material put out by an individual who, the implication is, must somehow represent any and all of those who align with his politics. To paraphrase my essay’s conclusion, Alex Stein speaks for Alex Stein. Alex Stein in not head of the Tarant Republican Party, nor does he hold any office as a Republican representative. So why on earth would anyone else be asked to answer for what he said — especially in their capacity as a local party Chairman?

French, for his part, answered Copeland’s query, noting in response that he thought the bit was funny, going on to explain how both he and the audience — and up until quite recently, everyone else in the country — understood they were watching a comedy routine. To which Copeland — hardly able to contain his glee about publishing a piece that would attempt to paint an entire half of the population as the most racisty of all the racists — shot back, “You poor thing. Who's the victim now?”

Clearly, Copeland, a columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram who in his X profile boasts is dedicated to “holding power to account,” wasn’t looking for comment — at least, not for purposes of any clarification or illumination. Instead, he was looking to bury a local GOP leader, and he’d found a pretense to animate that cynical plan. As his taunt made quite clear.

Stein’s set, based on Copeland’s recounting, is largely toothless, relying on predictable and, in my opinion, mostly lazy setups and punchlines, though clearly it’s the kind of material that appeals to many people, if only because — and Stein obviously knows that this is the crux of its power — it “dares” make jokes based on stereotypes, which are themselves tied to patterns that, while not dispositive of anything, nevertheless can become cultural shorthand for ways we sometimes see others. That is, such comedic tropes align with the kind of quasi-edgy humor guys will often deploy against those in their friend group to “bust balls,” as my generation called it — ironically, in a way that has them all laughing at perceived differences rather than growing angry or suspicious at them and at each other. Nothing about the set was “racist,” as it took shots at divergent racial groups: at best, it was transgressive; at worst, it was too on the nose and not terribly original.

— the latter of which, from my perspective, was its greatest offense.

What is most useful here, though, is Copeland’s arrogance and transparency, which highlights how easy it is to remove texts from their direct context — in this case, a comedy set that has a legion of famous (and better executed) antecedents — in order to impute upon its audience a kind of malign corporate soul. All who heard Stein’s jokes, the indictment goes, need to explain how, by dint of purchasing tickets to hear Carlson speak, they managed to leave Dickies Arena in Fort Worth without becoming newly-minted soldiers in the Texas Klan army.

That is, all, save Copeland himself. For he, understand, has granted himself absolution, knowing that in his heart — and because he’s not a Republican — he cannot possibly himself be racist, playing the hero part in this contemporary Odyssey, a principled and morally righteous anti-racist scribe who braved the dank den of modern neo-Confederacy in order to record, for the edification of all who dared not go where he, with stoic resolve, feared not enter, the iniquity and unreconstructed racial horrors of a 15-minute stand up comedy set.

He didn’t get any of the icky on him. And that’s because — praise be to whatever crystal he prays to! — he was shielded by the slick, metro-sexual wizard’s cloak of the Social Justice warrior. And probably skinny jeans. All of which progressive totems conspire to thwart the magical power of words, which reach into one’s ears and instantly transform those who’ve listened to them into that which they’ve just heard. This, after all, is why people who watch slasher movies invariably become serial killers, and why people who favor rap music cannot attend a barbecue without slapping a bitch and making it rain dollar dollar bills.

Of course, all of this is nonsense. French needn’t have replied to Copeland’s disingenuous query, because French never cared about the answer. He cared only about the ability to use Stein’s set to ask the question — and in doing so, to color French and all those who attended the event with a patina of second-hand “racism.”

As I noted in my 2009 piece,

[…] even were Republicans to begin winning elections based on their newly found ability to negotiate a hostile media bent on misrepresenting them, they’d be compelled to maintain the practice of carefully parsing their words, which means they’d always be at the mercy of those looking to attack and discredit. And such has the effect both of chilling speech and of determining in what way a message must necessarily be delivered.

And when your opponents are making the rules, you are necessarily playing their game.

To put it more forcefully, it is a fact of language that once you surrender the grounds for meaning to those who would presume to determine your meaning for you, you are at their mercy. Nowhere is this more clear than with Britain’s new definition of racism, whereby racism is determined not by the actions of those purported to cause it, but rather by the feelings of the person who claims to be its victim. Frighteningly, such is a formulation Ms. Obama seems to share. And this is not a road we should be heading down, because at the end of that road lies meaning as determined by “interpretive communities,” which in political terms equates to particular interest groups. And that way lies totalitarianism […]

Copeland’s rather ham-fisted attempt to re-cast a comedy set as a religious revival and its audience as monkish neophytes drinking in the wisdom of the gospels as revealed by a high priest of the GOP, is as absurd as it is evil.

And it is evil, make no mistake. Because Copeland does not for a second believe that a GOP party leader must be made to answer for the jokes a comedian delivered in his presence — nor does he believe, I’d be willing to bet, that any of the people he’s attempting to put on blast are in any way racist themselves. But he knows that he has the power to create the inference and perhaps leave behind that stain — and his joy in doing so bespeaks a black heart and an authoritarian impulse that is not compatible with the ideals of a pluralist nation.

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