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On September 28, 1.1 million Americans tuned in for the 37th season premiere of the groundbreaking animated sitcom The Simpsons<\/em>. A little more than a week later, another groundbreaking animated sitcom had its season premiere: The Will Stancil Show<\/em> debuted on X, where it accumulated 1.7 million views. Since then, three more episodes have been released, piling up more than 3.5 million additional views and generating seemingly as many memes. The show, which was created by a provocateur-cartoonist named Emily Youcis, is notable for at least two reasons. It appears to be one of the first popular online television series made with the assistance of artificial intelligence\u2014Youcis drew the cartoon and wrote the script, then used OpenAI\u2019s Sora to bring the animation to life. And also, The Will Stancil Show<\/em> is neo-Nazi propaganda.<\/p>\n The Will Stancil Show<\/em> is all but impossible to explain to someone who is not addicted to The Website Formerly Known as Twitter, but I\u2019ll do my best. The real-world Will Stancil<\/a> is a 40-year-old Minneapolis lawyer and minor social-media celebrity who once ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives (and has written<\/a> for The Atlantic<\/em>). He has become a favorite target of the far right for being something like the Platonic pure form of the Trump-era liberal wonk. He is enthusiastic about policy minutiae, perpetually irate at various MAGA-world characters, and prone to brawling with racists online, and he has a lot of graduate degrees.<\/p>\n Youcis is a self-declared national socialist\u2014a political philosophy more widely known by its contraction, Nazism<\/em>, though she said that was not the most accurate way to describe her. \u201c\u2018Commie\u2019 is also short for communist,\u201d she told me in an email, \u201cbut you wouldn\u2019t report Xi Jinping as being chairman of the Chinese Commie Party, would you?\u201d (She detailed her political views to me as follows: \u201cI am a Nationalist, Pro-White, against predatory finance Capitalism, and critical of Jewish and Israeli foreign influence over the United States.\u201d) Youcis attracted a cult following in the 2000s for a series of pitch-black comics she wrote for the website Newgrounds<\/a>. These were mostly focused on a character named Alfred Alfer, a dog with multiple personalities struggling to process childhood sexual abuse. The series\u2019 style was transgressive, low-fi, and intentionally janky. Youcis was also a longtime concessions vendor at Philadelphia Phillies games until she was fired in 2016<\/a> because of her stated interest in the \u201cwhite-identity movement.\u201d<\/p>\n She now posts under the name \u201cLinda\u201d on X, where she discusses such varied topics as \u201cthe Jews\u201d (the party responsible for \u201cflooding the country with non-whites\u201d), Hitler (\u201cthe most slandered man in history\u201d), and, of course, \u201cthe blacks\u201d (who are to be sent \u201cback to Africa\u201d to \u201cstart the Fourth Reich\u201d). The Will Stancil Show<\/em> appears to be her first foray into animation in some time. Among its many shocking qualities is the fact that Youcis uses Stancil\u2019s name and likeness without his permission, and that she is profiting, however modestly, from what amounts to an online harassment campaign.<\/p>\n When I spoke with the real Stancil about the show, he told me that it was \u201cextremely surreal to become a main character of the online Nazi phantasmagoria.\u201d Still, he said, \u201cI\u2019m mostly mad at the institutional failures, the commercial failures that have made this possible.\u201d X once had policies that could have prevented The Will Stancil Show <\/em>from being distributed on the platform. Since buying the company in 2022, however, Elon Musk has removed most of its content-moderation guidelines and infrastructure. \u201cWe had structures in place to forbid people like Emily Youcis from forming an enormous fan base and audience,\u201d Stancil said. He continued, \u201cThose structures were important, in my opinion. And those structures have been dissolved.\u201d<\/p>\n The show is racist and offensive. Episodes range from four to eight minutes each, and feature cruel gags about Black people in Minneapolis and Cartoon Stancil\u2019s bumbling attempts to help them; extended jokes about a chatbot raping Stancil, based on a real incident<\/a> in which Grok, X\u2019s in-house AI, provided a user with instructions for sexually assaulting Stancil; and, in one, a scene in which Tel Aviv gets nuked. Unlike other AI-generated content disseminated by the right, however, it is not slop<\/a>. The episodes have clear narrative arcs, and the animation, though at times clunky, is decent. The Will Stancil Show<\/em>\u2019s racism, combined with its relatively high production quality, makes it a concerning sign of what might be ahead. Youcis has demonstrated that far-right creators can use AI to make good-enough entertainment, without needing to go through any gatekeeping institutions. And she\u2019s proved that even people who don\u2019t see themselves as bigots will watch this content\u2014and in some cases laugh along.<\/p>\n The American right has a long history of taking advantage of new technologies. Conservatives are \u201cmore inclined to be early adopters,\u201d A. J. Bauer, a University of Alabama media-studies professor, told me, because they have \u201cfelt marginalized by the media.\u201d Examples of this phenomenon include Rush Limbaugh\u2019s pioneering talk-radio show and Tucker Carlson, who began streaming from his own platform after being <\/a>exiled<\/a> from Fox News in 2023.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> reveals what can happen once narrative TV becomes cheap enough to make without buy-in from major studios. Compare The Will Stancil Show<\/em>, for instance, with a sketch-comedy show that once ran during the Cartoon Network\u2019s Adult Swim block, called Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace<\/em>. MDE<\/em>, as fans call it, is deliberately slapdash; assessing the actual talent of its creators, or saying with confidence whether what you\u2019re watching is good-bad or bad-bad, ironically racist or racist-racist, is difficult. (This same sort of plausible deniability is a defining characteristic of Trump\u2019s political style.) That ambiguity in turn becomes part of the bit. The show was canceled<\/a> in 2016, after one season, when BuzzFeed<\/em><\/a> revealed<\/a> that the creator, Sam Hyde, had voiced support for conservative conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, and that the show\u2019s racist jokes were less ironic than they had initially seemed. MDE<\/em> returned to production this year, with help from funding by a private donor.<\/p>\n
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