Oh, Brother…
A lot of people have decided what I believe without ever checking. This video is me laying out what I actually think, where those views came from, and why no amount of clarifying will change anything for a certain group of people.
This started with the Rippaverse being banned from the biggest comic book forum on Reddit under a rule about hate groups. But the bigger conversation coming out of that is the one worth having, because the real issue was never one subreddit. It’s that our work doesn’t get judged on its merits. It gets filtered through a political lens first, and then people reason backwards from whatever that lens told them.
In this one I go through:
Why my politics predate the culture war by roughly a decade. I was a full libertarian by 2010, coming up through Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams into Austrian economics and Rothbard. I knew then that being open about it would make any career in the arts an uphill fight, and I went ahead anyway.
What political amateurism actually is. The so-called right isn’t a group. National conservatives who want tariffs, libertarians who think that’s a disaster, religious traditionalists, secular liberals who got pushed out of their institutions, populists who want to break up big companies. These people agree on almost nothing. I’m an anarcho-capitalist, which puts me further from mainstream conservatism than most liberals are on plenty of questions. None of that survives a one-axis worldview.
Why I opposed Black Lives Matter as both an organization and a slogan, what’s happened to that organization’s finances since, and why tying blackness itself to a political program creates a system where nothing else can ever be questioned.
The double bind. We bring on a writer who leans left and we’re woke sellouts. We bring on Chuck Dixon and we’re an alt-right chud factory. There is no hire that passes, which tells you the standard was never about who works here.
Why I’m not denouncing anybody, and what the actual standard in this industry looks like when you apply it evenly in both directions.
And what this company has said since the very first video we put out: I don’t care about your politics or your background. Be a fan here, work here, just leave all of it at the door. This is about fun. That’s the whole thing.
I’m not delusional about any of this. I knew from day one that some people would never give us a shot. But there are a lot more of you than they want to admit, and the door has been open the entire time.
Young Isom, with Caanan White, is out now.