Silicon Valley stars Kumail Nanjiani and Thomas Middleditch are, presumably, no strangers to people harassing them online. (Even if their show wasn’t about technology, their mere existence as famous people on the internet would more or less guarantee it.) Today, though, both comics shared a story of getting harassed in the actual, physical world last night, jumping on Twitter to relate an altercation in which a couple of Trump supporters loudly declared them “cucks” at a Los Angeles bar, before attempting to initiate a physical fight.
Btw, “cuck” is an Alt Right term. Look it up, it’s not positive.
— Thomas Middleditch (@Middleditch) November 12, 2016
He starts getting in my face. Thomas puts his hand on the dude’s chest to stop him. “Don’t touch me you cuck. Wanna go outside?”
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) November 12, 2016
Nanjiani then notes that the harassers were swiftly kicked out of the bar by its bouncers. The two actors’ story—and Nanjiani’s later statement that “We can’t let hate/racism/bigotry/sexism be normalized. If something happens, be safe, but let it be known we won’t stand for this”—was met with the now-standard mix of support from like-minded people, and angry denunciations from those who thought it was either a lie, an over-exaggeration, or simply a pretext to bring up their own blood-angering cause of choice. But only fellow stand-up comic Moshe Kasher had the strength to ask the tough questions about this latest example of the increasingly worrying intrusion of online incivility into the physical world: