On 27 August, in London’s O2 arena, the “comedian” Sam Hyde defeated the social media star Jake Thompson (AKA iamthmpsn) in a boxing match in front of a crowd of 20,000 people.
The fight featured on the latest “influencer boxing” event streamed by the sports platform DAZN. This trend is bringing some of the world’s best known social media figures into the ring, selling out arenas and making hundreds of thousands of pay-per-view sales in the process. The August event, headlined by the British YouTuber KSI, reportedly broke into DAZN’s top five most watched boxing events.
The event has greatly boosted Hyde’s profile, allowing him to showcase his bizarre antics, including a post-fight threat to kill the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. On the back of clips spread across social media and coverage in the mainstream press, Hyde has received a degree of attention he has not enjoyed since the cancellation of his sketch show from Cartoon Network in 2016.
Glossed over in the coverage, however, is Hyde’s extensive involvement in the alt-right, a loose white nationalist movement that mobilised around Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Whilst attempting to hide behind a thin veneer of “satire”, Hyde has a well-documented history of racism, antisemitism, homophobia and misogyny, as well as links to some of America’s most well-known white nationalists.
Below is a short history of Sam Hyde.
Hyde first gained the attention of the emerging alt-right in the mid-2010s for his homophobic and racist stand-up sets. For example, in 2013 Hyde delivered a slur-ridden, 15-minute homophobic diatribe packed with far-right talking points to a shocked audience.
During the rant, Hyde linked homosexuality to promiscuity, disease, paedophilia and mental illness, for example stating that “homosexuality is the manifestation of intense perversion and antisocial attitudes” and that some gay people were “crazy” because of their “faggot brain that’s all fucked up”.
In the same set, he claimed that the gay community’s public image was being “cleaned up” by:
“The ZOG media machine, the Zionist Occupation Government media machine destroying the family, destroying the building block of America […] I can’t help but notice that the primary figures behind all these social justice movements are all Jewish.”
ZOG is a neo-Nazi term for the alleged Jewish control of US government.
Hyde later said of the set: “I told some kid to get as many anti-gay hate facts as possible and I would just read them” because “I was trying to get those people the f— out of the room. Because I do not like Brooklyn hipsters”. He finished another set by stating:
“If there was one race, one bill paying, marriage staying together, raising nice attractive kids, race of people, if there was one job-having race of people that’s going to save humanity, what race would it be? […] Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the white race!”
Hyde became more widely known due to a 4chan meme that, since 2015, has intentionally misidentified him as the suspected gunman responsible for a variety of mass shootings, such as the Parkland, Las Vegas and Orlando shootings, and many more. In May 2022, the shooter who murdered 10 people in an anti-Black racist attack in Buffalo, New York included pictures of Hyde in his manifesto, labelling them “recent self pictures”.
As was common with the alt-right, Hyde uses a veneer of satire to create uncertainty around his actual beliefs, enabling recourse to the excuse “it’s just a joke”. This approach – i.e., confusing audiences enough that they wonder whether he is simply embodying a character in order to provoke liberals – gave Hyde a degree of cover, and in 2016, six episodes of his sketch show, Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace, aired on Cartoon Network.
The show quickly gained support from the alt-right due to its racist and sexist themes, including Hyde’s use of blackface and a direct reference to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. One unaired sketch, described by Hyde as his “most blatantly racist”, was titled “Thank You White People” and centred around the notion that black and Hispanic people are indebted to whites for creating modern civilisation. For example, during the the sketch a Hispanic man says:
“Thank you white people, thank you for creating a society where people don’t shit in the street, or beat their kids all day, and thank you for letting us use your pristine, clean emergency rooms. And thank you for all the free money”.
In the sketch, “the white man’s” supposed achievements are undermined by women obtaining the vote, with Jews portrayed as a subversive force.
The show was cancelled following pressure from BuzzFeed, which in turn boosted Hyde’s following among the alt-right. In October 2018, Hyde blamed the cancellation of his show on “a bunch of Jewy, New York City blogger type people”, continuing to say of BuzzFeed journalist Joseph Bernstein:
“white people don’t have the ability or desire to identify these enemy threats, and like deal with them properly […] Bernstein’s a fucking, he’s a Jewish media operative, and he does what you expect a Jewish media operative to do. And I’m not saying I hate Jews, I’m not saying I, you know, hate anyone, it’s just like, what do you expect from this guy. In his biography or whatever, on his “about me” page, he brags about being a “Nazi hunter”. Like, this is a guy who’s coming for your society.”
Especially concerning is Hyde’s links to the Daily Stormer, an extreme misogynistic and antisemitic Nazi website that became notorious for orchestrating brutal harassment campaigns against Jewish women. Following one campaign of terror against a Jewish woman and her family, site founder Andrew Anglin was sued by the Southern Poverty Law Centre and was eventually ordered to pay more than $14 million in damages.
In 2017, Sam Hyde donated $5,000 to the site’s legal fund. When contacted for comment by the Los Angeles Times, Hyde asked whether the reporter was Jewish. “Don’t worry so much about money. Worry about if people start deciding to kill reporters. That’s a quote,” Hyde told the paper.
Hyde has also been photographed saluting alongside the notorious neo-Nazi Andrew Auernheimer (AKA weev), then the Daily Stormer’s administrator. Auernheimer has called Hyde “an awesome dude. I have a lot of faith in him” and claimed that Hyde had offered to help him make videos. Auernheimer also promoted Million Dollar Extreme in his Nazi propaganda.
The Daily Stormer continues to support Hyde. Following the DAZN event, Anglin wrote that he considers Hyde “the funniest man alive”, and claimed that his recent victory in the ring was “a very good omen. Good things are coming. The world is turning around, the order of nature is reasserting itself.”
Following the cancellation of his show, Hyde continued to produce extremist content and to collaborate with the far right. For example, in a December 2019 video titled “Beating Women”, Hyde, filmed with a framed picture featuring the antisemitic Happy Merchant meme at his desk, called women pursuing careers in STEM “fucking retarded bitch dyke[s]”. He continued:
“you know what sweetie, you’re gonna be an astronaut, you’re gonna be the prettiest princess astronaut […] As soon as you grow a fucking brain, you dumb bitch. That’s my message to girls out there who are considering going into STEM”.
In the same video, he stated:
“Women have it rough in third world countries. Why, do we know why? […] could it be that you’re in a country surrounded by savages with the average IQ of fucking 75? […] it’s because they’re surrounded by retarded murderers. That’s how the rest of the world is.”
He had previously stated: “if I ever get a chance to legally beat on women, it’s going down, and it’s going down quickly”.
Hyde has continued to collaborate with far-right activists into the 2020s. For example, in August 2020 he appeared on Infowars, the show of Alex Jones, America’s most famous far-right conspiracy theorist.
Later that year he also featured on the election broadcast of Nick Fuentes, among the best-known white nationalists in the USA. Hyde replied that he had his “fingers crossed” after Fuentes speculated that the country could become “more racist” if Kamala Harris entered the White House.
Sam Hyde’s recent boxing bout is further cause for concern that far-right figures are using influencer culture to reach huge new audiences. For example, until recently the misogynist Andrew Tate was rumoured to fight Logan Paul, among the most famous YouTubers in the world, at a future event.
Through these boxing events, and influencer culture more broadly, the far right has spied a route back into the mainstream. It is notable that former UKIP leader Nigel Farage, the anti-Muslim extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) and even members of the highly antisemitic, fascist group Patriotic Alternative were present at the event.
Promotions like DAZN must take their responsibility seriously, and not lend their enormous platforms to hateful and divisive figures.
Read our briefing on Sam Hyde
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