It’s genuinely amazing to me that a Mediocre White Man can spend 20 years creating shows and movies that treat bigotry as a joke, but because the motherfucker donated some money to LGBTQIA groups and stumped for Bernie, he’s hailed as a progressive.
Seth MacFarlane created shows that dealt heavily in anti-black racism, antisemitism, ableism, Ace Ventura-levels of transphobia, rampant and vicious misogyny, normalized rape culture, abuse as a joke, pedophilia as a joke, and violent Islamophobia. He actually fought really hard for a scene where Quagmire rapes Marge Simpson to be aired on live TV – FOUGHT FOR IT, TOOTH AND NAIL – and is still angry that FOX wouldn’t let him get away with it.
He taught generations of young white guys that this shit was okay to say and believe because it was “just a joke” – hell, I’ll bet there’s a good Venn diagram between Family Guy fans and Trump supporters – and anyone who criticized him was just some boring, humorless PC police asshole.
And now people want to call his poorly-written, aggressively bigoted shit “satire” and give him brownie points for *appearing* progressive instead of actually being progressive.
Like, please demand more from your progressive allies than some fucking rich, white jackass who screams “Bigotry is cool! (Kidding)” in all his work, and does the bare fucking minimum every few years to be progressive.
Also, fucking this goes double for the shitbricks Trey Stone and Matt Parker, whose work I think was one of the major foundations for the alt-right in its combination of reactioanry politics and surface-level irreverence, and I want people to start calling them on it, to their face.
Or at least punching them in the face.
And that’s not to mention how the larger world of comedy created the climate for reactionary forces to rise, by conflating left-wing activism and right-wing hate-mongering as all just being “offended,” and every fucking one of them should be called on what they’ve done…
“where did all this spite come from” they say on their massive piles of money earned from not just its normalization but from its commodification