An old South Park The voiceover actor and writer turned online activist who has purchased the web domain names of mostly Republican politicians and action groups, is sharing news of his latest project after making a prescient move in grabbing two Trump Kennedy Center domains months before the president’s renaming of the national arts institution.
Toby Morton’s career in satirical comedy began when he lent his voice to the long-running hit series in the early ’90s as Eric Cartman’s redheaded foil Scott Tenorman; as Morton says The Hollywood Reporterthis led to consulting work on the series and he then moved between a series of projects, script rewrites, punch-ups and development work on different productions. He also found a more politically motivated way to spend his time around 2019, when he began buying political domains as a way to dabble in right-wing politics. The first ones he bought were related to Devin Nunes and Lauren Boebert, he recalls; the latter poses the biggest legal threat so far, but there’s little that can be done in a battle against well-established “fair use.”
“It started as a kind of absurd experiment: What happens if you take the image of powerful or loud political figures and just tell the truth through that?” he applied. [The intent] is to use humor and discomfort to comment on the ease with which institutions and names can be co-opted for spectacle.
Earlier this year, Morton had a clear understanding of what was going to happen when President Trump began eyeing the problem.
“As soon as Trump started gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year, I was like, ‘Yes, that name is on the building,'” Morton told the Washington Post, which was first to report on Morton’s domain play earlier this week. “The rest followed on schedule.”
On December 18, Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center board voted to change the name of the Washington arts institution to the Trump-Kennedy Center. It later emerged that Rep. Joyce Beatty, who serves ex officio on the Kennedy Center board, had her phone line disconnected during the meeting. The next day, Trump’s name was added to the building’s facade, the latest in the president’s efforts to leave a permanent or at least lasting mark on the nation’s capital and its institutions. But if Morton has his way, it won’t be done so easily online.
Morton’s bio on Substack outlines precisely what he does, as it states that he “purchases fascist domain names and creates anti-fascist websites.” He makes his intentions clear here as well, declaring that he is the “founder of the first church of petty digital revenge.” Clearly, he knows how to weaponize satire for political ends. He has also been working in this field for six years, and during this time he has not only had fun satirizing politicians, but he has also initiated real political change.
“The one that had the biggest impact in the real world was MomsForLiberties.com,” he explains. THR. This site has completely risen above the noise. This not only attracted attention; it helped raise public awareness during the 2023 school board elections and, in many places, helped keep extremist candidates out of local power. That’s when it became clear that this wasn’t just satire anymore; it was actually doing something.
Moms for Liberty, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a “far-right organization” engaging in “anti-student inclusion activities” that identifies as part of the modern parental rights movement. The group grew out of opposition to public health regulations for COVID-19, opposes LGBTQ+ and racially inclusive school curricula, and has advocated for banning the books, the SPLC says.
On Morton’s website, the homepage introduction says: “We are an extremist organization that prides itself on ensuring that freedom of speech and choice only applies to those who believe gays are evil, Hitler actually wasn’t that bad so Jews should stop overreacting, all transgender people are considered trash and should be eliminated, the current teachers in this society should be under the control of fascists who know better, and any teacher who disobeys deserves to be dealt with by any means necessary and that includes physical control.
So what does the Trump-Kennedy Center have in store for the two websites Morton has parked with GoDaddy? Morton says it will be part of an ongoing satirical project “examining political branding and how power repackages itself.” Trump and the Republican Party should not take these steps personally and should exercise caution before labeling Morton as another left-wing activist who got in their way; he says his politics are neither left nor right – just as the reaction so far to his “fair use” measures to capture these domains and bend names to his will, has been “loud, swift and split down the middle.”
“I’m not really on either side,” Morton says. “I don’t trust politicians as a social class, and I don’t think any party has a monopoly on truth or integrity. My views have evolved into a kind of healthy skepticism; if you’re in power, you’re a fair target. That’s why I don’t view what I do as partisan rather than corrective. Everyone is ripe for a website.”
