Comedy Is Hard and Totally Necessary in the Age of Trump

 

Todd Stiefel, mocking Jefferson Griffin
at the NC Supreme Court

Todd Stiefel bears watching -- and applauding. He's got the money to be a one-man satiric floorshow mocking the unsymmetric conservative personalities that have recently characterized the standard-bearers for the North Carolina Republican Party. Stiefel started his own political action committee (PAC) -- Americans for Prosparody -- and in the 2024 campaigns he uploaded a 14-fingered, AI-generated Mark Robinson to the social media and mass media airwaves, a somewhat unnerving simulacrum of Robinson speaking in a stilted mechanical voice some of the direct quotes that Mark Robinson was infamous for. The ad gave me the willies. 

Stiefel spent a reported $1 million on that project, which he could well afford because he's a millionaire.

His rather artless take-down of Robinson -- and the fact that Stiefel is a proud and pretty public atheist -- seems to have spooked Josh Stein, who was running against Robinson and who was probably going to beat Robinson anyway without the comedy stylings of Todd Stiefel, but Stein felt obliged to distance himself from the AI Robinson, afraid that the voters might think he approved of such fakery. Perish the thought! Stiefel's eleemosynary donations have been turned down by some non-profits in the Bible belt, so skittish are they to be associated with a crusading atheist (the last truly "untouchable" class among respectable do-gooders).

Stiefel scares some Democrats because Democrats are always prepared to be scared of something, anything, that threatens to jump the ruts and make new tracks through the mud. Stiefel as an independent voter might lean toward a more libertarian contempt for both sides in the "cesspool of American politics" (see the video below), but he was a major donor to both Stein and to the NC Democratic Party. He used to be a Republican but left the party when it went jihad on LGBTQ people. From a Chase Pellegrini de Paur profile of Stiefel published by IndyWeek:

"Stiefel says his family wasn’t strongly religious, but like many he went to college and started questioning the logic behind the faith. A Republican for his early adult life, he was surprised by what he saw as an outright disrespect toward atheists and an overall lack of compassion.

"For a decade, Stiefel has been especially focused on organizing and advocating for atheists. That work morphed into an education campaign against Christian nationalism, which found a perfect target in Robinson and his especially violent brand of political rhetoric."

Other Stiefel japes in 2024 included partnering "with a comedy team to ambush state superintendent candidate Michele Morrow [another favorite target of his] with printouts of her old tweets calling for Barack Obama to be executed." He hired a plane to fly a banner memorializing Morrow's "kill list" (Obama and other Democrats she wanted to execute on pay-for-view TV) over the state fair in Raleigh. While he was very recently trolling Jefferson Griffin outside the NC Supreme Court (photograph above), he hired a digital mobile billboard to cruise around the block with a photoshopped image of five Republican justices roasting marshmallows over burning boxes of ballots.

He's actually funniest when he's just being himself, as in his promotional video posted on the Americans for Prosparody website. He doesn't mince words, and who the hell doesn't love that!