I’ve witnessed people I know get “cancelled” and we’ve all seen celebrities (strangers) get cancelled, but the case of @johnroderick is the first time it’s been someone I “know” (by way of 100s of hours of extremely personal podcasts). Something is very different about this.

John Roderick is the guy who, both comically and tragically, is now known to most of Twitter as “bean dad” after he posted a thread of a parenting story that made a lot of people extremely angry. Then someone went word-searching through old tweets and, well, there were tweets.

On the parenting story: If you have kids and you’re trying… you try things and you get some wrong. All kids are different and you literally cannot avoid getting things wrong. Knowing John’s storytelling, I didn’t find controversy in the can opener story, but I see why many did.

On the old tweets, let’s take them category-by-category:

First, he used the F-word, clearly playfully because John is bisexual. Of course this is an offensive word, but as a queer person himself, John is afforded some agency over its use.

Second, there were “Jews rule the world” tweets. Without context, these look really bad. But if you take 11 seconds to look into it, you find out that this is a bit to CALL OUT antisemitism. John has aped conspiracy theorists and their ultimately ubiquitous antisemitism forever.

Third, he used the N-word in one tweet. He says in the tweet that he’s making a point about the elastic power of words/slurs.

This was really bad and he should apologize for it, but it’s hard to argue he intended it maliciously. It was a bad and wrong attempt at the opposite.

Fourth, he made jokes about rape in the form of “I’ll rape you.” This is obviously super offensive and bad and he should apologize.

Lastly, he used the R-word and said ableist shit. He should apologize and so should a lot of us (we’ve barely scratched the surface on ableism).

Here I am, seven tweets into a thread and trying to provide context for a guy who is now so radioactively demonic that his trending story almost beat out a recorded phone call where Donald Trump literally tried to shake down Georgia’s election.

This is a big problem.

John Roderick may be the best (spoken word) storyteller I’ve ever heard. He may be the most passionate about human capacities for good and evil and how those have created our history. He may also be the most earnestly generous person with his own feelings and experience.

He’s also a drug addict sober 20+ years. He’s bipolar. He seems to be bad at romantic relationships. Extremely self-loathing, never feels good enough. He seems to spend most of his waking moments thinking about what’s wrong with the world and progressive ways of fixing it.

On one hand, John did this to himself, which is an assessment that’s (somewhat surprisingly) easy to make with those you are close to.

On the other hand, there’s the matter of his deserved punishment/backlash, which is a very easy judgment to make about 1-dimensional strangers.

John Roderick is not someone I know, but he definitely isn’t a stranger either.

The one thing that’s somehow clearer in this in-between scenario: He is a LOT more than “bean dad.”