Comedian and host of WTF With Marc Maron unleashed on his fellow podcasters Tuesday -- without naming names -- for "joking around" with "self-proclaimed white supremacists and fascists on their show."
Maron wrote in a note to his newsletter subscribers that other podcasters treat these figures like "they are just entertainers or even just politicians," because "all it does is humanize and normalize fascism."
Without calling out comics and podcasters like Joe Rogan, Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, who have all hosted Donald Trump in recent weeks and months, or the most talked-about comedy podcaster this week Tony Hinchcliffe, Maron skewered them for "facilitating anti-American sentiment and promoting violent autocracy." He also expressed his view that comedians hosting these figures on their platforms are normalizing extreme views and in a "shameless and proud" way, bringing "blatant racist fear mongering" to "the future."
Maron struck a slightly different tone when he expressed his views on political correctness and censorship in an interview with Daily Beast in 2015, the year he famously interviewed Barack Obama. "There is a timidity of younger people in terms of what they should or shouldn't be sensitive to," he said then. "There's a self-censorship that's based on a vague paranoia of not wanting to offend anybody." He added, "I don't really believe in censorship in any way, but I do believe it is appropriate to be sensitive."
But by 2023, younger comedians had indeed gotten over their fear of offending, leading to an emergence of what Maron has called "anti-woke" comedy. He specifically singled out embattled comedian Matt Rife, who joked he couldn't be canceled after he joked about domestic violence, as a "pseudo edge lord" and the "the new It Boy of shitty comedy."
Maron writes now that fascism is entering the mainstream through comedy under the guise of rejecting "wokeness" -- and he's calling it out.
"Even though I do not do a political show I have been very clear in my specials and on the podcast that I believe, and have believed for years, what is brewing in this country is an American fascist movement rooted half in grievance and half in Jesus and enabled by tech oligarchs and an inundation of propaganda from many sources," he wrote, calling on his fellow comedians to do better.
"The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers," he wrote. "Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant."
Lastly, he warned comics not to "become part of the media oligarchy under the new anti-democratic government."
