(Twitter / @SwordandScale)

Imagine you're at a party, discussing the latest happenings in the news when all of a sudden a stranger walks up to you and presents you with this hypothetical:

"You hear about a grisly murder on TV. What race do you want the victim to be?"

Twitter essentially lived this scenario last night when a tweet from true crime podcast Sword and Scale, hosted by Mike Boudet, posted a poll asking listeners what is their preferred race of murder victims.

(Twitter / @SwordAndScale)

The poll gobsmacked Twitter users who apparently had never thought of this question and thought it an odd thing to consider.


What could have prompted such a bizarre poll? In the ensuing thread, Sword and Scale said it had heard popular true crime podcasts had stopped covering stories with white victims. It is unclear what or who exactly they're talking about, but the true crime genre has been criticized for focusing on white women victims in the past, as white women make up a significant chunk of the genre's demographic.

As the tweet racked up a damning 4,800 quote-tweet to 280 retweet ratio, Sword and Scale tweeted confusion about how it could have triggered "woke" people, who supposedly want more POC representation in media.

Though Sword and Scale crowed about how woke Twitter users were outraged over the tweet, it's worth noting that it then hid every single one of the dozens of negative replies the poll received.

Sword and Scale is notably hosted by Mike Boudet, a figure who has also attracted controversy in the past. In 2018, the podcast was dropped by its network Wondery after Boudet posted misogynistic comments on his Instagram. Several other minor controversies have occurred in the years since. It's unclear if Boudet is behind the poll, but many commenters on Twitter assumed so.

At the time of writing, "White" is overwhelmingly winning the poll with 66 percent of the vote while "Black" and "Indigenous" have split the vote for second place.


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Comments 8 total

Sumarios

True crime is pretty creepy in general and is just modern penny-dreadful storytelling. That said, his response to peoples apparent distaste isn't entirely wrong. Wokescolds love to tout the "Everything is political" line and race is currently at the forefront of American politics. So they should have an opinion on who they would "prefer" the victim and/or the perpetrator to be. It's just the nonsense about punching up vs punching down taken to it's logical conclusion.

Normal people, of course, are right to be disgusted by that question.

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Venusgate

So he decided to pwn the "Wokescolds" at the expense of alienating himself from "normal" audiences? Fish on a bicycle.

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KoimanZX

How else did he think it would go? Asking which people should be murdered is never a good idea.

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Cickany1990

Its not even which people should be murdered, more like which people they prefer to see dead.

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winton overwat

Racism aside, this is what happens when a community fetishizes crime

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