A former South Park voice-over actor and writer turned online activist who has been purchasing the web domain names of mostly Republican politicians and action groups, is sharing news about his latest project after he made a prescient move in snatching up two Trump Kennedy Center domains months ahead of the president’s naming overhaul of the national arts institution.
Toby Morton’s career in satirical comedy started when he loaned his voice to the long-running hit series back in the early aughts as Eric Cartman’s red-headed foil, Scott Tenorman; as Morton tells The Hollywood Reporter, this led to some consulting work with the series and he then moved between a range of projects, script rewrites, punch-ups, and development work across different productions. He also found a more politically motivated way to spend his time around 2019, when he began buying political domains as a means of pre-meddling in the politics of the right. The first ones he bought were tied to Devin Nunes and Lauren Boebert, he recalls; the latter made the biggest legal threat, so far, but nothing much can come in a battle against settled “fair use.”
“It began as a kind of absurdist experiment: What happens if you take the branding of powerful or loud political figures and simply tell the truth through it?” he posited. [The intent] is to use humor and discomfort to comment on how easily institutions and names can be co-opted for spectacle.”
Earlier this year, it became crystal clear to Morton what was about to happen when President Trump began eyeing the
“As soon asTrump began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year, I thought, ‘Yep, that name’s going on the building,’” Morton told The Washington Post, which was first to report on Morton’s domain game earlier this week. “The rest followed on schedule.”
On Dec. 18, Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to change the name of the Washington arts institution to the Trump-Kennedy Center. It came out after the fact that Rep. Joyce Beatty, who serves in ex officio capacity on the Kennedy Center board, had her phone line muted during the meeting. The following day, Trump’s name was added to the building’s facade, the latest in the president’s efforts to make a permanent or at least long-lasting mark on the nation’s capital and its institutions. But if Morton has his way, this won’t come as easily online.
Morton’s Substack bio presents what he’s up to precisely, as he lists that he’s into “buying up fascists’ domain names and building anti-fascist websites.” He makes his intentions clear here, too, stating that he’s the “founder of the First Church of Petty Digital Revenge.” Clearly, he knows how to weaponize satire for political purposes. He’s also been at this for six years, and in that time has not only had fun satirizing politicians but also initiated real political change.
“The one that had the biggest real-world impact was MomsForLiberties.com,” he tells THR. That site absolutely broke through the noise. It didn’t just get attention; it helped shift public awareness during the 2023 school board races and, in many places, contributed to keeping extremist candidates out of local power. That’s when it became clear 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” that engages in “anti-student inclusion activities” that self-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 curriculum, and has advocated for book bans, the SPLC indicates.
On Morton’s website, the homepage introduction reads: “We are an extremist organization that prides itself on making sure that freedom of speech and choice only applies to those who believe gays are demonic, Hitler actually wasn’t that bad so Jews should stop overreacting, any transgender are considered trash and need to be disposed of, current teachers in this society should be under the control of fascists who know better, and that any teachers who disobey deserve to be handled by any means necessary and this includes physical control.”
So what does the Trump-Kennedy Center have in store for the two websites, which Morton has parked with GoDaddy? Morton says it will be part of an ongoing satirical project “examining political branding and the way power repackages itself.” Trump and the GOP should not take these moves personally and exercise caution before labeling Morton another leftist activist who has gotten in their way; he says his politics is neither on the left or the right — just like the reaction so far to his “fair use” moves to capture these domains and bend the names to his will, has been “loud, fast, and split right down the middle.”
“I’m not really on any side,” Morton says. “I don’t trust politicians as a 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 fair game. That’s why I don’t see what I do as partisan so much as corrective. Everyone’s ripe for a website.”