Here’s a quick activity that you can follow along with at home: Look at your shirt. Does it feature a picture of someone who helped fund the legal defense of a neo-Nazi website founder? If it does, change your shirt. This fun, easy game can — and should! — be part of your morning routine.
That’s the baseline behavior that fans kind of expected from Doja Cat — the sort of unspoken presupposition that the parasocial relationship fosters in devotees, and which seems to inevitably lead to some hard lessons and disappointment.
On October 6, Doja Cat — already in hot water with fans thanks to her recent relationship with wildly problematic internet personality Jeffrey “J” Cyrus — posted a selfie to her Instagram account in which she sported a shirt featuring a photo of Sam Hyde, co-founder of the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme, brandishing a rifle.
The photo in question is the sort of thing that your most annoying friend would love to explain to you: A picture that’s been repurposed in internet trolling circles as a bleak running joke any time a tragic mass shooting hits the news. Comedy edge lords invariably submit one of several photos of Hyde with a gun to the news or local authorities and claim that he was the shooter. It’s the natural progression of the “let’s give the substitute teacher the wrong names” prank, as carried out by people whose senses of humor festered at a fourth-grade level.
What complicates matters is the string of terrible personal choices that Hyde has made over the years. Already under the microscope for a career’s worth of comedy routines featuring racist, ableist, and homophobic stereotypes, the comic really hammered home his reputation in 2017, when he contributed $5000 to the legal defense fund of fugitive neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin. The founder of the extreme alt-right website The Daily Stormer – a site which, no kidding, even other Nazi websites have singled out as being a bit much – isn’t the sort of guy that’s easy to defend. Hyde’s explanation to reporters for why he contributed: Don’t worry about it.
Needless to say, Hyde has become a lightning rod, and wearing a picture of him on your chest is widely considered to be a bad look for world-famous musicians of any stripe. Doja Cat, who replaced the offending selfie with a less shirt-focused one while leaving the original image as an Instagram story, received pretty immediate backlash, losing an estimated quarter of a million followers after the incident.
Less-than-helpfully, this isn’t the first time that Doja Cat — real name Amalaratna Dlamini — has been spotted in a suspiciously Nazi-adjacent situation. In 2020, the award-winning artist met with significant backlash after footage of her taking part in allegedly white-supremacist-heavy chat rooms surfaced, including her use of a hard-R racial slur directed at a fellow participant. “I shouldn’t have been on some of those chat room sites, but I personally have never been involved in any racist conversations,” she wrote to her followers in a since-deleted Instagram post by way of explanation.