The rapper is being criticised for wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the face of a far-right comedian. Is this just a joke, a prank, a troll? Does it matter either way?
Few artists are less popular with their own fanbase than Doja Cat. The rapper has found herself in hot water once again, this time after posting an Instagram picture of herself wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the face of Sam Hyde – a comedian with links to the far-right and a long history of racism, antisemitism and misogyny, according to anti-extremist charity Hope Not Hate. She deleted it not long after, re-uploading a cropped version, but the damage had already been done by that point.
Hyde’s reputation as a controversial figure goes way beyond cracking a problematic joke from time to time. He began his career in 2013 with a series of racist and homophobic stand-up sets. After a Ted Talk parody he made went viral in 2015, his sketch group Million Dollar Extreme was given a show on Adult Swim. It was cancelled after one series – Hyde claimed this was due to his support for Donald Trump – but not before becoming a cultural touchstone among the alt-right, according to a Buzzfeed report. To give a taste of the content: one unaired sketch was titled Thank You White People, and was based on the premise that Black and Hispanic people should be grateful towards white people for creating civilisation. Sounds hilarious!
In the subsequent years, Hyde’s connections with the far-right became even more explicit. In 2017, he reportedly donated $5,000 towards the legal fund of Andrew Anglin, the founder of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, who was being sued by anti-extremist non-profit the Southern Poverty Law Centre for organising a ‘troll storm’ against a Jewish woman. Since then, Hyde has associated with a number of prominent extremists, including white nationalist Richard Spencer, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Nick Fuentes, one of Kanye West’s new friends and a man so homophobic he once argued that having straight sex is gay. While Hyde’s latest stand-up set was titled I’m Not A Nazi, he hasn’t tried to disguise his affinity with the far-right. So, it’s not altogether surprising that people are unhappy with Doja Cat for wearing his face on a t-shirt.
As for Doja herself, this isn’t the first time she’s been accused of endorsing the alt-right. Back in 2020, she was forced to deny “stripping for white supremacists” and using racial slurs in an internet chatroom. The controversy began when an old song of hers re-emerged online, recorded in 2015 and titled “Dindu Nuffin” – an alt-right term that is used to mock African Americans protesting their innocence in the face of police violence. In a subsequent apology video, Doja argued that she was satirising the phrase and that – contrary to rumours swirling around – the song had nothing to do with Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody – under deeply suspicious circumstances – at the time it was written. But that wasn’t all: footage also emerged of her participating in a chatroom and flirting with men who were allegedly members of the alt-right community. “I shouldn’t have been on some of those chat room sites, but I personally have never been involved in any racist conversations. I’m sorry to everyone I offended,” she said in an Instagram post responding to the controversy.
Doja Cat poses for a selfie wearing a shirt with neo Nazi Sam Hyde on it. pic.twitter.com/vVmfJxj4qn
— Rap Alert (@rapalert6) October 6, 2023
Does all of this suggest that Doja Cat herself is sympathetic to the alt-right? It could, but not necessarily. For a start, she has both Jewish and Black heritage, which is no guarantee of having good politics but does make her an unlikely neo-Nazi. She also just seems like someone who likes to shock, someone who takes pleasure in being transgressive (which is not always a bad quality for an artist to have). The rollout to her latest album, Scarlet, has been drenched with Satanic imagery, which seems precision-engineered to anger the right-wing, whether traditional Christians or Q-Anon conspiracy theorists. In the wake of both Lil Nas X and Sam Smith causing enormous uproars by dabbling in similar aesthetics, dressing up like the Devil now feels like a cheap, easy and obvious way of courting controversy, but you’d only do it if you wanted to rile up conservatives, just as Doja was probably aware that posting the Sam Hyde picture would piss off the left. The most consistent thing here is a tendency to be provocative.
But even if that is the case, is tacitly endorsing a white supremacist any better if you do it as a joke? That kind of ironic, transgressive-for-the-sake-of-it trolling has been a key strategy of the far-right for much of the last decade, ever since Pepe the Frog memes burst out of 4Chan and changed the course of American politics. On whether the alt-right were really bigots in a 2016 Breitbart article, Milo Yiannopoulos argued, “No more than death metal devotees in the 1980s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.” That view is harder to maintain today when a number of young men forged in these communities have carried out mass shootings against minority groups (some of them leaving behind manifestos laden with memes and in-jokes).
When fascism emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, its aesthetics were po-faced, earnest and humourless, but some people were nonetheless drawn towards it out of a superficial desire to shock. The English socialite Unity Mitford, for example, embraced the Nazis as a way of transgressing the tedium of upper-class life. One Mitford biographer described this as “the frivolity of evil”: over time, what started out as a little more than a jolly old lark morphed into a close friendship with Hitler and a sustained, serious commitment to the cause of antisemitism.
While this is an extreme example, we can see a similar dynamic playing out today. Bored with the supposed pieties of the left, some young people are looking for a sense of dynamism, vitality and transgression in far-right politics. The “New Right” scene has made intellectual heroes of figures like Curtis Yarvin (a “neo-Monarchist” who wants to “do away with democracy”) and Bronze Age Pervert, a semi-pseudonymous author and online personality who has described himself as a “fascist or something worse”. While these people are still a somewhat niche concern, they have admirers in the upper echelons of power. The culture as a whole is also drifting to the right, as we can see in the punitive legislation being enacted trans people, refugees and migrants. Flirting with far-right politics, even ironically, only serves to heighten the transgressive quality which for many is central to its appeal. But then, scolding someone like Doja Cat for an edgelord stunt arguably has the same effect – maybe the more compelling argument here is that it’s deeply corny and loser behaviour.
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