Alt-Right comedian to appear at Hop Farm Brewing Company
Sam Hyde mocked Pittsburgh synagogue shooting victims days after attack
Editor’s note: Hop Farm Brewing Company has canceled this event. For more information see our new article here.
Alt-right comedian Sam Hyde will appear in Pittsburgh April 12 at the Hop Farm Brewing Company in Lawrenceville, according to an Eventbrite listing and the comedian’s website.
Hyde is best known for his work on the short-lived Adult Swim program “World Peace,” which aired on Cartoon Network and cultivated an alt-right and white supremacist audience. The show was canceled after less than four months, following the publication of a BuzzFeed article, “The Alt-right has its very own TV show on Adult Swim,” by writer Joseph Bernstein.
The comedian, who spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University, uses antisemitic, racist, anti-LGBTQ and anti-women tropes.
In a 2018 podcast on the YouTube Channel Porsalin, Hyde mocked the victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, just days after the attack occurred. He went on to bemoan “Jewy New York City blogger-type people” who called attention to Bernstein’s story and called the BuzzFeed writer a “Jewish media operative” who does what a “Jewish media operative does,” while bemoaning “white people” who “don’t have an immune system” and “the ability or desire to identify these enemy threats.”
During the podcast he also made racist and anti-women remarks, and belittled Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court Justice of Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault during his nomination hearing, calling her “beat” and laughing when the host termed her “unrapable.”
Asked about comments by Jewish comedian Brett Gelman, who called “World Peace” a “neo-Nazi sketch show with a neo-Nazi following,” Hyde said, “He’s probably accurate,” and “If you go by the subreddit, it seems like our fans are pretty dialed in.” The comedian went on to say, “I’m not going to wash my hands of it,” and “By having this fan base, if I have to get kicked off TV, etc., that’s fine. I’m not gonna complain about that.”
Julie Paris, StandWithUs Mid-Atlantic regional director, said Hyde’s “hateful rhetoric” is “unacceptable and warrants condemnation.”
“There is absolutely nothing humorous about language or narratives that promote antisemitism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, or any other form of hate,” she said. “Hyde’s documented history, including the use of antisemitic terms like ‘ZOG’ (a white supremacist acronym for Zionist Occupied Government), the performance of blackface, the dissemination of homophobic ‘research,’ and financial support for neo-Nazi platforms, reveals a consistent pattern of bigotry that cannot be excused or trivialized as mere ‘comedy.’”
Paris said she hoped Hop Farm Brewing will recognize the “profound harm” by providing a platform for individuals who traffic in such hateful ideologies, which normalize bigotry and contribute to a climate of hate.
Calls to Hop Farm Brewing Company were not returned before publication. PJC
David Rullo can be reached at drullo@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org
comments