Bean Dad Apologizes For Bean-related Crimes And Anti-semitism

Bean Dad, the name given to musician and podcaster John Roderick after he posted his controversial story about refusing to open a can of beans for his daughter, challenging her to figure out how to use a can opener herself, has apologized for his bean-related crimes and his slur-filled old tweets.

The Bean Dad saga, which remarkably was Sunday but feels like 5 years ago already, was the first major discourse bonanza of 2021, as Roderick's thread reminded people of abusive parenting and caused people to dig through his old tweets and find loads of ugly slurs against a wide variety of people. In one example, he tweeted, "The 4th has been perverted by activist (Jew) judges and mud-people apologists. The Founders intended the USA as a white homeland."

The entire saga led to the podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me to stop using Roderick's song "It's a Departure" as their theme song after ten years and Roderick to be pulled from the Maximum Fun network of podcasts.

On Tuesday, Roderick apologized for the entire saga.

"My story about my daughter and the can of beans was poorly told," he wrote. "I didn’t share how much laughing we were doing, how we had a bowl of pistachios between us all day as we worked on the problem, or that we’d both had a full breakfast together a few hours before… I framed the story with me as the asshole dad because that’s my comedic persona and my fans and friends know it’s 'a bit.'"

"What I didn’t understand when posting that story, was that a lot of the language I used reminded people very viscerally of abuse they’d experienced at the hand of a parent. The idea that I would withhold food from her, or force her to solve a puzzle while she cried, or bind her to the task for hours without a break all were images of child abuse that affected many people very deeply," he continued.

Roderick went on to claim that his slur-filled old tweets were intended ironically. "All of those tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic. I thought then that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry," he wrote. "I am humiliated by my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual banter. It was a lazy and damaging ideology, that I continued to believe long past the point I should’ve known better that because I was a hipster intellectual from a diverse community it was ok for me to joke and deploy slurs in that context."

The story of Bean Dad seems to have finally died down as the world moved on to more important things, but he will go down in history as a prime example of one of life's greatest lessons: never tweet.