So here's the thing: He did a ukulele cover of Kanye West's new song "Heil Hitler." It went viral. Got 18 million views or something. People were offended. People doxed him. They found his employer. They raised a stink and got him fired. Tower Gang Toad is calling his former employer a bunch of "woke pussies" for canning him for pulling shit on the Internet and getting it on them and wants to sue them and drag Elon Musk into it and turn it into a giant federal case.
Guess what? I'd have fired his ass too. Not for being offensive. I think the song is too puerile to be offensive. It's like when three-year-olds find out they can get attention by saying cuss words. There's no deeper meaning. It's just empty attention whoring. Fine. There's no law against it. Knock yourself out. I wouldn't fire him for being offensive or puerile. I'd fire him for being a retarded idiot. Because it's retardedly idiotic to do this shit with any kind of platform.
The only reason this otherwise very forgettable song gets any attention is that it thumbs its nose at monstrously huge taboos and crosses big, thick lines of cultural decorum. There is nothing odd or strange about not wanting to associate with people who do this in the name of puerile attention whoring. Hardly a new concept. People and organizations have been doing it since the beginning of recorded history. But Kanye West can get away with it for two reasons:
1) Kanye West has already burned any and every significant commercial bridge that exists for him. Anyone and everyone who could possibly fire him has already fired him. There's no employment or collaboration downside here.
2) Kanye West is a billionaire. He has what we call "fuck you money." He's perfectly happy with everyone firing him. He'll continue to be stupidly rich regardless.
For these two reasons, Kanye West can go around singing songs like "Heil Hitler' in front of the world without consequences that are meaningful to him.
But these reasons do not apply to 99.999999% of the world's population. They sure as hell don't apply to some guy named Tower Gang Toad. If you work for somebody and you suddenly get your 15 minute of Internet fame for singing a stupid song called "Heil Hitler," they will not appreciate you smearing your stupid shit from your personal life all over them. This. Is. Normal. And it's well within the libertarian principle of "freedom of association." Yes, Tower Gang Toad has freedom of speech. But that only means he doesn't go to jail. It doesn't mean other people have to like him or associate with him or employ him or suffer the fallout for his poorly-conceived, puerile attention whoring. This isn't saying mean things about Joe Biden or not using pronouns or even making a racist joke. This is, whether seriously or not, kissing up to the Third Reich, one of the most evil institutions in human history. And there's no deeper meaning to it. It's not clever or funny. It's just being an ass for attention. "Look at me! I said a bad thing!"
For the rest of us, including Tower Gang Toad's employer, it's perfectly fine to set reasonable standards of decorum and thresholds for idiocy with people we deal with. When people fail to adhere to those standards, there's nothing wrong or even weird about dumping them. I would certainly agree that some people are far too sensitive about things, but they have the right to be. I try to avoid people like that because I have a very dark sense of humor that some don't appreciate. But even I have limits. And I don't want employees that shit on the hard work I do building and running a business so that they can be very briefly Internet famous with no point to it. If it was some awesome combination of brave and insightful I might stand beside them. But it's a stupid song called "Heil Hitler." Fuck Hitler, and fuck the people who sing songs that Heil him. Mel Brooks' song "Springtime for Hitler" from his musical "The Producers" is clever and funny in context. "Heil Hitler" is not. It's just mental illness, at best.
Honestly, I think the liberty movement has too many people like Toad that go around being offensive asshats without any payoff. Not a huge number, but anything non-zero is too many. The New Hampshire crowd seems to be full of them. The sooner they all go crawl back under the rocks they slimed out from, the better.
At least my joke about it below is (darkly) funny.
You can click through for Tower Gang Toad's video explaining his side of the story. Feel free to sympathize with him. I just can't bring myself to.
Don’t worry!
His “very smart people” are totally right about things this time when it comes to trade.
There is zero - I repeat, zero - moral difference between the people who pushed for "experimenting" with lockdowns because "we have to do something!" and the people who push for "experimenting" with trade wars because "we have to do something!"
Musk is out.
Musk put himself in a corner where he can't rip into Trump and he has to play nice probably at least through the midterms, but just look at the guy's face and watch him refuse to give a straight answer here. He put a lot on the line with endorsing Trump and starting DOGE, and Trump absolutely stabbed him in the back. Trump's supporters will blame congress, but Trump has very openly and loudly endorsed all of the DOGE-defying moves that congress has made, and has viciously attacked the one congressman (Thomas Massie) who has stood against it.
The reason is simple: Trump cares about trophies. Cutting the budget is not a trophy. DOGE trying to take a chainsaw to government was a trophy, but as soon as DOGE became more of Musk's than Trump's trophy, Trump stopped caring about it because congress offered him a Big, Beautiful Bill as a trophy instead. Just like the FBI offered the opportunity to build a Big, Beautiful new headquarters building for them (Trump loves buildings!). ...
As comedy slowly slides into unfunny wokeness hell, the last comedian standing (assuming he doesn't drop dead first, I mean just look at the guy; he's a trainwreck) will be Doug Stanhope. He closed out his recent special "The Dying of the Last Breed" with this bit on how important it is that we be able to make fun of anything. Because making fun.
Language warning, duh.
Preliminary Q2 numbers for Argentina are in. This is still subject to adjustment but so far their preliminaries have been pretty accurate under the Milei administration.
Slashing spending works. Trump and Bessent are very optimistically projecting economic growth of 3% doing the opposite of what Milei is doing to deliver 7.6% - and climbing!