Ed Piskor (1982-2024)
Time to Stand Up, Part One of Two.
Ed Piskor, comics artist behind Hip Hop Family Tree and a contributor to American Splendor as well as other respected titles, killed himself this week over social media-amplified allegations of sexual impropriety that he denied in his suicide note.
No public statements would do. Nobody against me would be convinced. Maybe this drastic move will convince a few? Maybe it will get a couple more people to consider not joining online lynch mobs over gossip? Doubt it will have much of a blip. I’m not doing this out of guilt though, once again, it was super dumb chatting with Molly D. My intentions were never nefarious with her or anybody. Im doing it out of intense shame. We’re not built to have hundreds (maybe a few thousand?) people judging and/or harassing us at once. A private and solitary mind can’t take it.
There were so many out there waiting in the wings for something like this to emerge. Daryl Ayo Braithwait called it a kill shot. You all got your wish. You were waiting for something to blow out of proportion and it got served to you on a silver platter. Ramon Villalobos, Cam Del Rosario, JB Roe, Molly Wright, congratulations. You got your pound of flesh. Evan Dorkin, I hope skeletons from your closet get revealed someday. Alex DeCampi, may you continue to have zero success no matter how hard you continuously leverage other people’s business from your bully pulpit.
Later:
Once again, I’m guilty of being stupid. No doubt. But, that’s all. I never thought in a million years that I’d take this step but I also never in a million years thought that something so Orwellian would ever happen to me. Ya never know in this life.
I was murdered by Internet bullies. Massive amounts of them. Some of you out there absolutely contributed to my death as you were entertaining yourself with gossip. I wasn’t AI. I was a real human being. You chipped little bits of my self esteem away all week until I was vaporized. Maybe I’ll be able to haunt you dorks as a ghost. I come from Gypsy heritage and I’m definitely cursing a lot of you.
Piskor’s death recalls that of Richard Bilkszto, who similarly ended his life last year after a shaming campaign by a social justice mob, though in his case the mob was the educational bureaucracy of Ontario.
My chief reasons for noting Piskor’s suicide are to mourn one of our better comics talents and reiterate the need to cancel cancel culture. Besides that, his case explains why I sometimes write things like this week’s April Fool’s post in defiance of the Jew-hating, aesthetically purblind curs at Hyperallergic, and their intellectual and moral peers throughout the art system.
As they’re fond of saying at the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, bad guys aren’t looking for a fight, they’re looking for victims.1 While it’s important to remember that even the worst among us contain a spark of God’s light, there are nevertheless a lot of people whose only moral compass is what they think they can get away with. Their sense of justification is total, even when they’re committing atrocities. It is necessary to deliver to such people regular dosages of consequences. They understand nothing else. In most cases, the dosages need not be fatal. But as the USCCA will remind you, sometimes they must be. I wish the world wasn’t like that, but here we are.
It would have been reasonable to ignore Hyperallergic as they made jokes, or tried to, based on the premises that Israel is unreasonably aggressive and her supporters are trying to silence her critics. (In fact, Hamas still has 134 Israeli hostages from an October assault that disqualifies the attackers from mercy, and Hamas’s supporters only started worrying about free expression when they wanted to get away with calls for worldwide violence against Jews.) Most did. Hyperallergic should be ignored generally, for running low-effort content, even when it’s not bigoted.2 And after all, the first rule of the internet is “don’t feed the trolls.”
But silence in the face of evil instigates a game of musical chairs to find out who will finally pay, with their lives, for the increasingly immiserated world. From Piskor’s note: “I have no friends in this life any longer.” As the Free Press reported on Bilkszto:
No one came to Bilkszto’s defense.
“I think there was some back-channel texting while it was going on, where they acknowledged this was wrong,” Anthony Furey told me, alluding to other people in the DEI training session…. “But the problem is nobody had the balls or leadership to stand up and say this is wrong.”
On May 4, 2021, the day after the third session, Bilkszto filed for sick leave. He missed the fourth and final session, the next Monday, and filed a complaint with school officials saying that he’d been harassed.
Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board looked into the matter. In August 2021, the board released its findings, stating that Thompson’s behavior was “abusive” and amounted to “workplace harassment.” Bilkszto was awarded seven weeks of lost pay.
But by then, Bilkszto was tainted goods.
Mike Ramsay, a friend of Bilkszto, told us: “His contracts were freezing up—and not a word from his former supervisors and colleagues. While he said some people were nice to him, for many others, he was not politically popular to be seen or be around.”
What was done to Piskor and Bilkszto can be done to whole cultures, and is. The Jews, first of all, but beyond us, the whole liberal order of tolerance, equality, individual rights, and market economics that has granted you freedoms and comforts never seen before in human history. We’re just the first stop on the way to something even darker.
Stand up and say this is wrong. The bad guys are looking for victims, and it’s time for you to fight.
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One of the lessons I learned in grad school was that some people are so captivated by their nonsense that you cannot even depend on them to act in self-interest. In 2022, a gay Palestinian man living in asylum in Israel was found beheaded in Hebron. The penalty for male homosexuality in Gaza is a decade in prison. You would think that would temper the feelings about Israel of the husband-and-husband team running Hyperallergic, but apparently not. Such is the state of their associated politics, which will be the topic of Part Two.
Wow. That was EXCELLENT. The destruction wrought by SJW's is deep and immense, and these people seem to have no limits, being encouraged and enabled by their sympathizers in the mainstream media who regularly give them megaphones. John Cleese noted that if society is designed around the sensitivities of its most neurotic members, society itself becomes neurotic and lost - and that's not good for anybody.
And what do the actively responsible parties think of these suicides? Collateral damage. The ends justify the means. Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet. You get the idea. Beyond appalling.