Another Helping Of Right-Wing Cool, Served To You By...Will Stancil

The vice principals have chosen their next right-winger to make popular. This one’s a Hitler fan.

Quick:

List three things cooler, in theory, than an independent, possibly-illegal, guerrilla cartoon, produced on a budget of a few hundred dollars per episode, that gets more play than The Simpsons.

I can do two. Maybe.

Snoop Dogg, I guess. He’s still considered cool, right? Also, I don’t know, high top sneakers? Did those stay cool?

I’m maybe not the guy you want running this exercise. I wear leopard-rimmed glasses, and cuffed blue jeans. I drive an Isuzu.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled Sydney Sweeney And The Unprecedented Rise Of Right Wing Coolness, in which I discussed the fawning reaction to the actor’s having declined to swallow some obvious race-bait from a left wing journalist.

I suggested the following:

I’m not sure we aren’t seeing the formation of a new archetype here. The manifestation of a phenomenon that is entirely foreign to us, because no one alive has ever seen it: the right becoming cool.

I suspected at the time I published that Sweeney would soon be joined by other, high-profile figures. It’s looking like I was correct about that. I was not prepared though, for my prediction to come true so…what’s the word…extremely.

The Will Stancil Show

There’s presently an online, AI-produced cartoon circulating called The Will Stancil Show.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, you probably will soon. It just got a mostly negative write-up in The Atlantic, which means it’s on the radar of the hall monitor class, and is thus sure to become exponentially more popular. It should trend hard, if it isn’t already.

If you don’t know who Will Stancil is, first of all, I hope the grass you’re touching feels good. He’s kind of a hard guy to explain. I think I’ve had two interactions with him myself:

One was pleasant enough - I asked how his (ultimately unsuccessful) run for the Minnesota State House was going, and he answered politely. The other was more on-brand for him. I responded critically to something he’d posted, and he retweeted it as an object of mockery.

This was in reference to that time Special Counsel Robert Hur, in explaining his decision not to charge Joe Biden for mishandling of classified information, referred to the then-president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Democrats, you’ll remember, pooed the bed.

You can check out the whole exchange by following the link above if you’re interested. I thought Hur was being as fair as he could be. Stancil felt I was being a useful idiot. His fans agreed.

I’ve highlighted the likes here because, while not exactly a viral dragging, I’m not super active on X. That’s about twice my total follower count. My personal tangoes with Stancil and his minions are a digression though. The real story here is that again, an overreaction from the elite, left-leaning media class is elevating to rebel stardom a figure of swelling acclaim on the right.

Except this time, it’s not just an unapologetic actor. It’s a self-described pro-white, Hitler-loving national socialist.

The Atlantic Strikes Again

Tyler Austin Harper is a usually heterodox writer who shot to prominence after dragging Substacker Richard Hanania in a scathing review of his book The Origins of Woke. That was about eight layers of onlinism just there, so all you really need to know is that Harper got big for being woke-critical, but only to a point. That made him a perfect fit for the Atlantic, who picked him up as a staff writer, and for whom he just published this piece: The Racist, Ai-Generated Future of Entertainment.

It’s been a big hit, though a controversial one. Harper is taking blows from left and right alike over it. The purported thesis is that Ai art is now accessible enough, and sometimes viral enough, to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of entertainment:

Until now, however, the right has generally had a harder time producing narrative television shows and films. These are more expensive to make than a radio or streaming talk show and thus have needed support from mainstream (read: liberal) gatekeepers. The Will Stancil Show reveals what can happen once narrative TV becomes cheap enough to make without buy-in from major studios.

It’s an interesting enough take. I say “purported” thesis though, because reviewing The Will Stancil Show is not the true function of Harper’s piece, nor is it exploring the democratization of art.

The article’s real purpose is to assure The Atlantic’s graying readership that the boundaries of acceptable content are just exactly where they think they ought to be, and that they don’t have to worry about one little thing, or adjust one little inch to any cultural vibe-shifting.

Of the article’s 1,905 words, seven of them are “racist,” not including the one in the title. Just ten are “cartoon.” The national socialist politics of the show’s creator, Emily Youcis, are detailed extensively in the third paragraph, but the show itself isn’t described until the sixth paragraph, which begins, “The show is racist and offensive.”

Writer Jesse Singal did a great job of explaining this phenomenon in his Singal Minded newsletter a few years ago:

One of the silliest ideas to infect mainstream journalism in recent years is the notion that when journalists produce work about a bad person, they must signpost that work, seemingly every moment, with explicit indicators that that person is bad. You need to hold readers’ hands tightly, because they are moral idiots, and the moment your grip slips, they’ll race off and return in a Klansman’s hood or something.

The Atlantic in particular (for which Singal has written) has a long track record of this behavior. In their bizarre, 2019 profile of Joe Rogan, here’s how the author described his insane system of studying Rogan’s shtick:

I experienced Joe Rogan, in some form or fashion, every day for six weeks. Let’s call it six weeks. I did it for as long as I could.

What? Why would you do that?

What kind of maniac consumer takes down a three hour podcast, by the same podcaster, every day for a month and half? Are you Morgan Spurlock?

I ate an extra large pizza with anchovies, every day for six weeks. Let’s call it six weeks. I did it for as long as I could, and will now neutrally review pizza with anchovies for The Atlantic.

Again, and of course, the real mission was not to provide readers with the appropriate context to understand Joe Rogan’s popularity. It was to guarantee them that their preconceptions about Rogan were on point, and that they needn’t undertake any curious investigation. The Atlantic - sort of, to the extent they could stomach it anyway - already had.

The (Real) Will Stancil Show

The Will Stancil Show’s meta-joke is that Stancil is, himself, something of a show. He’s a Minnesota housing lawyer and highly antagonistic turbo-lib tweeter. He calls people Nazis with the same frequency most of us breathe, and he’s notorious for getting into ugly scrapes with center and right-leaning accounts.

This is a dude who became the subject of an insane saga in which an earlier, buggier version of Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, was prompted to write a hideously graphic rape fantasy about breaking into Stancil’s home to assault him. The story culminated with Grok’s physical manifestation post-coitally placing a firework into Stancil’s “ravaged rectum,” and concluded with this actually unforgettable line:

“The Minneapolis skyline blurred as he ascended, a comet of gore streaking toward space, his screams lost to the void.”

Move over, William Faulkner.

Stancil went on to make the inexplicably tone-deaf decision to complain on about this on a newscast, and the even less explicable decision to do so while dressed like this:

So, is The Will Stancil Show actually racist?

I mean, yeah. It kind of is. At least, it’s racist in the way that Family Guy and South Park are racist. It’s racially irreverent. I doubt the show would be earning such so many of these charges though were it not for the well-known politics of its creator.

Will Stancil is an institution unto himself. More than anything, the show is a sendup of him, so if you don’t know much about him, it’s unlikely the comedy will really resonate. You might need to feel a genuine impulse to rip on the guy in order to get it, and while that impulse is very common in onliners, nobody who operates primarily in meatspace is going to feel in on the gag.

Most of the jokes skewer Stancil’s self-serious white saviourism. In the pilot, after Stancil and his deferential, already-memed sidekick Jamal approach a street fight, Stancil is warned, “Be careful, young man, they’re out of control.”

Stancil replies, “It’s okay, ma’am, I have a black studies degree.”

The episode ends as another street fight causes Minneapolis to burn, while a satisfied Stancil and Jamal trot off into the sunset.

So sure, you could award any number of racism points here. The street-fighters are black, as is Jamal, whose meme-friendly catch-phrase is “It do be like that, Mr. Stancil.” Later episodes feature a passed-out Stancil becoming reanimated by a Nazi Grok-bot and another animatron containing the reconstituted mind of Dr. Josef Mengele. They wake Stancil’s body and send it forth to do hate crimes in a Waffen SS longcoat.

The Simpsons…never did that yarn. Ultimately though, the cartoon - both in its animation and its irreverence - feels more reminiscent of Adult Swim than anything actually Hitlerian.

Here’s how Harper describes its politics:

It’s a provocation that [Youcis] seems to want everyone to hear—not just her fellow white nationalists, but also people in the political mainstream. In a recent interview on The Backlash, an ultra-reactionary podcast, Youcis said that the goal of her show, which she calls “my propaganda,” is to Trojan-horse far-right politics into the mainstream. “I’m memeing myself into power,” she said, “and I’m memeing national socialism into the public.

“Trojan-horse” - Harper’s description - seems an odd one here. The point of the Trojan Horse was that the citizens of Troy failed to recognize its danger until too late. Does that really feel like what’s happening with imagery like this?

Or this?

Clandestine and subtle are not the first words that spring to mind here.

If you’d rather not see for yourself, the thing to know about The Will Stancil Show is that it is not merely a hunk of swastika-banner-red meat for groypers. It’s artful, and liked across the political spectrum. The show isn’t popular for its political content (which is more screwball than pointed), it’s popular for its comedic content. This isn’t a case of barely-audible, Nazi dogwhistles hooking young men, it’s an actually quite funny creation.

And since the production is a one-gal operation, its quality is down to one person.

Meet Emily Youcis, And Her Politics

Just as clandestine and subtle can’t be applied to The Will Stancil Show, they can’t be applied to its creator either. Emily Youcis is remorselessly antisemitic, and an open adherent to the politics of Adolf Hiter. The Atlantic is not making that up. They aren’t extrapolating from some throwaway interview, and they aren’t collapsing all right wing thought into being Nazi-adjacent. Youcis is pretty clear about who she is and what she believes.

This isn’t her first brush with celebrity. Youcis had a minor star turn as a vendor at Citizens Bank Park, the home of the Philadelphia Phillies. It was apolitical, save for her eventually donning of a red, Make The Phillies Great Again hat, though that could easily have been interpreted as ironic. I have a similar hat myself, bearing the name of my school - it was a gift from a former student who had them made as a lark when she was running for student council.

Youcis became known as “Pistachio Girl” for her boisterous salesmanship-by-song. It was actually, it has to be said, pretty darn adorable:

That all ended though, when Youcis was fired for her involvement with white nationalism. She was noticed recording gotcha interviews of protesters outside a National Policy Institute event, asking them things like “Do you hate white people?” One of them spray painted her hair, a fight broke out, her cameraman sustained a minor injury, somebody recognized Youcis, and that was that. No more “Pistachio Girl.”

Her origin story mirrors that of another white nationalist commentator, and even transpired along more or less the same timeframe. Nick Fuentes developed a public profile in his first year at Boston University, which was the same year as Youcis’s ordeal. Youcis is older than Fuentes, but both were at the beginning of their political journeys then, both were being drawn in by the rise of Donald Trump, and both got slammed hard as they tried leaning too far out of the Overton Window.

For Youcis, it was the NPI controversy, and for Fuentes, it was Ben Shapiro calling him an antisemite for his views on Israel. There’s something instructive in these stories.

In both cases, very young people were forced to claw their way back from social isolation and public shaming. Also in both cases, the right was on board with the cancellation - the organized left can take full credit for neither scalp. And for both personalities, once they did find their way back to the light, they were different animals entirely. Their experiences had changed them. Hardened them. They’d been given diamond hides that made them fearless commentators and the edgiest edgelords in the game.

Fuentes is an open admirer of both Stalin and Hiter (somehow), the latter figure being also beloved by Youcis. The political real estate occupied by these two is an unusual space, with rules that exist basically nowhere else. It is far beyond the sight of most political observers.

I write often about right wing politics, and that pursuit has required my developing a much higher tolerance for right wing commentators than I had in the days of my being all blue no matter who. Youcis and Fuentes though operate across bridges that I will not traverse. These guys make Charlie Kirk look like Mark Ruffalo.

Trying on my Matt Yglesias hat for a moment: Adolf Hitler was bad, actually! So were the Nazis. So was national socialism. So was the effect it had on Germany, and the world.

The good news is that very few Americans believe otherwise. The bad news is that praising the Führer serves a purpose beyond simply attracting others of his fans. It acts as a shibboleth. It signals to politically adrift observers that they have reached the doorstep of someone who does not give a fuck. Someone who will say anything. Who will not be controlled. And that can be a very welcoming destination.

There was once a man who walked this path. He took upon himself the same posture. He vexed his enemies on left and right, for none could cancel him. His name was Donald Trump.

And he ended up with a fairly important job, if I’m not mistaken.

The Right’s Coolness Soars Yet Higher…On The Wings Of Imperial Eagles

The point here is, do not snooze on these types. Do not assume that because The Atlantic said a cartoon was racist that people won’t want to watch it, or won’t insist on forming their own judgments about its creator.

We’re past that. These days, when a finger is wagged, expect public attention to turn to its target before its owner. And the patience for eschewing art made by problematic artists has, I think, drained for good.

On the whole, I’m happy that the electric fence around the canceled lost power. I never much liked it being there in the first place. But there were a lot of people in that pen, and at least a few of them are people I’d rather not see taking the oath of office.

In that piece from a few weeks ago about the right-wing, Sydney Sweeney fangirling, I argued that the left’s cultural scolding had allowed the right, for perhaps the first time ever, to seize the coolness mantle.

Stepping back for a wide shot here, if you’re my age or thereabouts, who was the bad guy in every movie you watched as a kid? The Man, right? The government, the boss, the principal. Richard Vernon. Ed Rooney.

How the hell did a generation (two generations, actually) grow up hissing at authority only to organize and transmogrify into The HR Department?

The short answer is: they didn’t know it was happening. They still don’t know it happened.

They can happily sit and watch The Breakfast Club with zero awareness that if they ever actually encountered a kid like John Bender, they’d insist he be expelled.

They’d record Ferris Bueller at the parade and send the video to his mom. They’d have John McClane working mall security.

The thing about organizing your life around the principle of resisting authority is that, if you work at it, you might win. Which is good. But if you win, and you keep pushing because you don’t know you’ve won, then you’re not the kids in Footloose anymore, you’re the grown-ups.

I don’t know how much more clearly I can explain this; there is nothing remotely cool about heaping judgement on a politically risqué internet cartoon. There is everything cool about that cartoon beating the fucking Simpsons in viewer stats while drawing head shakes from national news outlets.

If you cannot see how this dynamic works, then you are…well, you’re just not cool, man. And that’s too bad, because people like people who are cool. Sometimes, they want to make them president.

Youcis is on Twitter taking victory laps. Of course she is. She’s promoting her show’s upcoming episode, reveling in the serious boost in fame she was just given by The Atlantic, and drawing attention to that outlet’s own history of publishing racially provocative content:

All Just Jokes?

I can’t exactly recommend The Will Stancil Show to readers. I think it’s pretty funny (as does Tyler Austin Harper, by the way) but it’s so niche that you’d really have to be almost as online as I am to connect with it. You’d also need a pretty spicy sense of humor. If you’re not one to gorge on shows like Family Guy, South Park, or Rick and Morty, you can safely miss The Will Stancil Show.

Phineas and Ferb, it is not.

Still, you can see for yourself. Episodes here, here, here, and here. And they’re short, so it’s not much of a commitment.

The Atlantic’s piece is interesting in its exploration of generative AI’s capacity to bypass Hollywood’s funding hurdles, but it doesn’t exactly take a deep dive into that subject.

In leaning so hard on the racism angle, it misses a much richer opportunity to discuss what the actual implications are going to be now that a woman working in her basement can produce something that looks ready for Comedy Central. Is “it might be racist tho” really the most interesting thing they can come up with to say about this artistic revolution of which we are now on the brink?

And the salience of just calling things racist is simply not what it used to be. Emily Youcis belongs to a political tribe for which no higher praise exists than drawing a racism charge from elite media. She’s already been canceled. She knows she’s racist. She doesn’t care. Wittingly or not, The Atlantic just threw a million new eyes her way.

The real life Will Stancil doesn’t help this dynamic either. He’s got a perfectly valid beef with the show, of course. Not only is it using his name and likeness without his permission, it’s doing it against his expressed wishes (Youcis gets around this because the image of Stancil on which the show’s animation is based is her own creation).

If somebody with Emily Youcis’s roasting talent ever made The David Dennison Show, I’d want to curl into a ball and cry myself dead. But I also like to think I wouldn’t actually do that, and that I would try to be what Stancil is not being: a good sport.

I still kind of want people to think I’m cool, even though I drive an Isuzu. Nothing is less cool than crying about a joke someone told about you, and nothing makes the joker seem cooler than your haughty recriminations.

Conclusion

As I’ve argued before, the right having taken hold of the coolness mantle is such a new and exotic phenomenon, it’s going to be some time before anyone - on left or right - figures out how to deal with it. That includes knowing what to do when a Hitler-loving white nationalist produces something that’s actually…good.

A few years ago, a piece like Harper’s might have been enough to get The Will Stancil Show pulled down and dragged through the mud.

We’ve reverted to pre-wokescold patterns of entertainment consumption though, so it’s likely to have the exact opposite effect. Remember when our parents told us that watching an edgy cartoon risked turning us all into arsonists? Not only did we not stop watching that cartoon, we spent years pretending to like it. We even spent an inordinate amount of time imitating it, for an audience of basically just ourselves.

Have you watched Beavis and Butthead recently? Because it does not hold up. It was actually awful. Backlash is the only force strong enough to explain our enjoyment of that program, so much so that I’m not sure the entire moral panic wasn’t an op sanctioned by MTV to trick us all into tuning in.

Coolness is what power says it isn’t, and is defined by those who most fiercely oppose it.

…this is all a simple, predictable dynamic of power: consensus is boring, even when formed around a mostly good thing. When it hardens, it codes as more interesting to oppose it than to go with the flow.

The left may just have to accept that its ability to set standards for entertainment, and entertainers, has vanished. And I really hope they’ll stop pushing. I’ll watch basically anything that becomes regarded as problematic, so I wouldn’t want to end up having to binge The Bachelorette just because NPR called it racist or something.

Wait. Oh God. Oh God no.