Bad Stuff

Yesterday was a very unpleasant day. A little after sending out an announcement about the "new artists show" someone reached out to me about one of the artists saying he'd posted white power kind of stuff before. So I went and checked their page more closely but I didn't see anything like that. There were lots of edgy kind of memes but nothing that seemed to be close to that (of course I'm not too well versed in all the altright codes and shit). I mean, it was a lot of stuff that I found annoying but I didn't want to go just based on that. The other person said some more stuff that was more vague and secondhand, but I said I'd watch for it. At that point, I figured I could avoid this artist in the future, but I didn't have enough to boot them off a show that was already announced. Then the third party came back to me later in the day with some screenshots of a recent story post that was Antisemitic. I mean, the post itself was a bit ambiguous but the page it came from (and one the artist follows) was like woah, hardcore Antisemitic and white pride shit that was beyond the pale (and there were messages on the original post that put it all into a much uglier Holocaust-denying context). So I reached out to the artist with screenshots to ask them about it. The short of it was that it was all just dark humor in admittedly bad taste and nothing hateful was meant. And they only follow pages like that to get entertainment out of their ridiculousness. And a little bit of I'm really Jewish and really gay so it's all okay and I only have a problem with "my people" when they're pedophiles (the post I shared with him had nothing about that...there were some other posts on the white pride page that were pretty much Jews = pedophiles, but I hadn't even brought that up). I was as diplomatic as possible and let them know that I was replacing them on the show but if he ever matured and could show actual and positive change then I wouldn't be adverse to having him on something in the future (NOT holding my breath for that, I don't trust his specious-at-best justification was even genuine, but just in case thought it better to give an out for an actual reason to change). Later after I updated things I went back to their page and found a story about it, being kind of diplomatic in a way, but also basically boiling down the removal to "differing views on pedophilia". So, yeah. Okay, I blathered about all that crap more than I'd intended. It was a pretty sucky situation all around and I don't like booting people from shows and it's embarrassing to have to make a retraction announcement like that, but obviously can't tolerate bullshit like that.