Dan Whitney, aka Larry the Cable Guy, a short biography

I have known of Dan Whitney, Larry the Cable Guy, longer than most people have. In the car on the way into work at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, we used to listen to one of the usual mostly-talk rock radio shows. Larry would quite regularly call in. His accent fascinated me. Probably because I’ve lived in so many places, I like to try to place accents. Larry the Cable Git's accent was vaguely southern, or was meant to be southern, but I couldn’t place it anywhere in particular in the South. In any case, he’d distorted it so much you could make out only half of what he was saying. 

What he was saying was mumbled, consciously transgressive hate. 

Later on, I discovered he was was born and grew up in Pawnee City Nebraska, until his preacher daddy hauled him down to Florida.

It’s a long story…

(1) Daddy issues

Daniel Lawrence Whitney, better known by his stage name and character Larry the Cable Guy, was born on February 17, 1963 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, to the Reverend Thomas Von Whitney. The Reverend had found Jesus in Korea. Like your car keys, you never find Jesus when you're looking for him, or anywhere obvious.  On the other hand, maybe it wasn't the real Jesus. Maybe it was a knock-off. Who can tell?

The Whitney ancestors has settled in Richardson County in 1857, in the southeast corner, or what I sometimes call the sweaty armpit of Nebraska. The county is best known as the location where Brandon Teena, a transgender man, was raped and murdered. So Richardson County became the setting for Boys don't cry, the movie made about the incident; an entirely unrelated series of gruesome sex torture-murders by an anti-semitic neo-Nazi cult, and an airplane disaster. Nasty sweaty armpit.

Thomas Jefferson Whitney arrived in Richardson County, as a homesteader, from Holt County Missouri; his father, also Thomas, was born in Tennessee. Ancestry.com seems to disprove the proud family claim that there is a Jefferson Davis Whitney in the family tree. But while the Whitneys left the South, the South didn't really leave the Whitneys.

Nebraska was of course a free state. But Richardson County and parts thereabouts were caught up in the border war between Missouri and bleeding Kansas, immediately to the south.

It is said they [the Whitneys] were Confederate supporters, offering a horse and a gun to anyone who would join the Confederacy. One day the Union troops rode into the yard, threw a rope over a tree limb, and threatened to hang the boys if they didn’t change their ways. It is assumed they did, because they weren’t hung.

Nonetheless, here is Dan Whitney celebrating his family heritage of helping defend slavery and making war on Nebraskans. 

Even for a preacher, Reverend Tom Whitney seems to have been an unlovable man. He had had time for everything under the stars, except his son. After he found Jesus in the Air Force in Korea, he became a preacher. He preached in two or three places every Sunday. He played guitar. He founded the National Organization of Christian Child Care. He was a school administrator. He worked as a guidance counselor in Wymore, and also ran a pig farm on the family homestead. And occasionally, very occasionally, Dan Whitney lets slip his resentment at his distant father.

He was gone all the time. I hardly ever saw him. He was a guidance counselor at Wymore from the late 1960s to the mid-'70s. He'd leave early every morning and wouldn't get home until late every night.

Whitneywas mostly raised by his maternal grandfather.

On the rare occasions when the Reverend did intrude upon his son's life, it was to disrupt it. In 1978, he got a job as principal of the elementary school division of the new Kings Academy, a hoity-toity Christian school in West Palm Beach, Florida. And he dragged his family down there. Dan, pulled out of his Nebraska school, was a fish out of water, the principal’s son. 

Dan attended Kings Academy High School for three years. But it rapidly became clear that the Reverend Thomas Von Whitney was not a good fit for King’s Academy. For a start, he wrote embarrassing letters to the Palm Beach Post, attacking the Theory of Evolution. 

He attended a class to teach illiterates to read. That amazed me. He had a Master’s degree in Education, for heaven’s sake. And a Christian preacher has to be able to read the Bible. But I realized that by then, the Bible was available from Books on Tape, and, as the article says, illiterates can fool amost anyone.

And a school principal, back in the day, had a secretary who took dictation. 

Kings Academy, a school whose tuition was pretty high for the time and place, were probably aghast they’d recruited a principal from north of the Mason-Dixon, with what looked like a decent resumé, but he was still a rube and a crank.

The final straw was when the Reverend took exception to McCall’s, The Magazine for Suburban Women and for a while the third most popular magazine in the United States (after Reader’s Digest and TV Guide). Back in the day, one common way for kids to raise money for school activities was to sell magazine subscriptions. Companies, frequently parasitical, would send them cards with lists of dozens, even hundreds of magazines. The kids would try to get their parent’s friends to subscribe, or even go door to door, selling subscriptions. 

The kids at Kings Academy wanted to sell magazine subscriptions. The Reverend found out, and he was furious. The four magazines he particularly objected to were McCall's (!), Teenage Miss (!!), Apartment Living (!!!), and The New Republic. It’s not clear what the problem was with the first two, but Apartment Living had run a feature on hot tubs, which are definitely unbiblical. And New Republic, according to the Reverend, was ‘the most left-wing magazine in America’.

(Mass suicides at the editorial office of the Nation).

Of course, this was rubbish, like most everything else the Reverend had to say. The New Republic in 1980 endorsed moderate Republican John Anderson over Jimmy Carter. It supported Reagan’s anticommunist foreign policy. It went on to support Desert Storm and the Iraq War. Its editor, Michael Kinsley, was a moderator on right-wing icon William F Buckley’s TV program Firing Line. 

I suspect the real problem was that both Michael Kinsley, the editor at the time, and Marty Peretz, the previous editor, were Jews.

One suspects the Kings Academy realized that Tom Whitney wasn’t the socially respectable Christian school administrator they expected, and when the Reverend tried to strong-arm the school’s board of governors into nullifying their magazine contract, they fired him instead.

The Reverend's departure was not good for Dan, just starting his senior year in pricey King's Academy. One suspects that as the son of a principal, he was on a free ride or reduced tuition. In any case, he was pulled out of school, again, and sent to Berean Christian, whence he graduated in 1982. One suspects his grades were not good. On graduation he went on to the grandiosely misnamed  and unaccredited Baptist University of America in Decatur, Georgia, which warn’t no Baylor, and spent three years there, pitching for their Division III baseball team, before dropping out in his junior year. The ‘university’ itself folded in 1987, though author Gail Chord Schuler (who unlike Whitney, is funny) says Dan performed in their comedy theater and was ‘good’.

So what was the effect on Dan? Well, on the one hand, Tom Whitney was the Old Testament God: distant, often absent for long periods, intimidating. Dan Whitney has always professed biblical Christianity. And on the other, when he did figure in this son’s life, he was like a hydrogen bomb. He yanked him out of rural Pawnee City, and plonked him down in a rich-kids Christian school in Palm Beach Florida. And then he made a public ass of himself repeatedly, and he quit over a particularly rabid piece of right-wingedness, and his son was yanked out again and dumped among the Bereans

Later in his life, Whitney has shown a repeated pattern of genuflecting to authority — Christianity, science, government — while constantly sniping at it from the fringe.  Even his 'comedy' is constructed thus. His entire schtick has been to create a disavowable identity — Larry the Cable Guy, Mr Hyde to Dan's Dr. Jekyll — and use the Larry identity to say vile things from the foulness of Dan Whitney's heart, things Dan Dan the Christian man could not say. But as we'll see, lately Mr Hyde has been getting more an more insistent, and Dr. Jekyll seems to have left the building.

(2) The Freight Train of Comedy

Whitney claims to have attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and it’s become part of his identity, but I can find no record of his attendance. I can’t imagine that UNL accepted transfer credits from an unaccredited bible college in Georgia, and Whitney certainly never graduated from UNL. What we do know is that Whitney got a job as a bellhop in a swanky Palm Beach hotel, and tried his hand at walk-on stand-up comedy in local Palm Beach clubs. He dates his career, in fact, to October 31, 1985. Halloween night, shortly after he flunked out of the Baptist College. 

It’s easy enough to find his footprint in local Florida newspapers. He was usually a second act, and his videos from that period are so unfunny they are simply painful to watch. He billed himself ‘The Freight Train of Comedy’ — a freight train racing forwards, with humor stretched out on the rails ahead, waiting to be crushed. But he worked his way into the local comedy scene. I've reproduced Whitney's lines in his very own khaki color. (Whitney never served in the military, of course. It's more phoniness).

(On Gay Pride) 

I got friends who like sheep, but they don’t have a parade every Friday.

‘Larry the Cable Guy’ was initially just a small segment of his act, but his combination of an almost unintelligible accent (which Whitney, in Florida, once claimed was Nebraskan!), with a constant string of crude racist, sexist, scatological and homophobic jokes, made him popular.

I disappeared faster than a pair of rims at a Puff Daddy concert.

Whitney started calling in to local Florida radio stations as ‘Larry’, and became notorious enough that a Tampa station made the Larry character the focus of a mock presidential run in 1992. Eventually, Whitney dropped the rest of his act, and the Freight Train monicker (ouch), and became Larry the Cable Guy. He tried the ‘presidential run’ schtick again in 1996, but it had been done before and it didn’t catch on. Even as late as 1995, with the growing popularity of the deplorable Larry the Cable Git (as I call him), he was still being described as a good ‘middle act’. 

But nonetheless, he persisted, and he eventually achieved national fame, or notoriety, on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. In Nebraska he paired up with bigoted comic Chris Baker, recently banned from his talk show gig at an Omaha station for tweeting a racist video after the verdict convicting the killer of George Floyd.  Curiously, in 1998-1999, Whitney was more or less hiding his Nebraska roots, and was billing himself as a comic from Orlando or West Palm Beach, Florida.  Reasonably enough…by then he’d spent more than half his life there.

(3) The Cable Git

The Cable Git's ‘comedy’ seemed to be ⅓ scat and fart jokes  ⅓ racism, and ⅓ homophobia. Fart jokes, well, good on ya mate, except there are only about 3 good fart jokes in the entire world. Not much of a basis for a career. And racism and homophobia aren’t quite as popular as they once were.

Even his fellow comics started to rip Whitney for the foulness of his act.

(On the Abu Ghraib torture)

Let me ask some of these commie rag head carpet flying wicker basket on the head balancing scumbags something!

No, that’s not in the least funny, sorry. It’s just nasty and stupid.

Ya wanna pray to allah then drag yer flea infested 9 over to where they pray to allah at!

SMFH.  And the homophobia.

Madder than a queer with lock jaw on Valentines Day.

That line is funny for 0.5 seconds, until you realized oral sex may be the single most universal voluntary human activity, for gays and straights, men and women, alike. Interesting, though, that gay jokes used to be all about anal sex. I guess that’s progress of a sort.

David Cross, in An open letter to Dan Whitney, describes Whitney's audience, and eerily presages the rise of Donald Trump.

I do know your audience, and they suck. And they're simple. And please don't mistake this as coming from a place of bitterness because I didn't "make it" there or, I'm not as successful as you because that's not it at all. Since I was a kid I've always been a little over sensitive to the glorification and rewarding of dumb. The "salt of the earth, regular, every day folk" (or lowest common denominator) who see the world, and the people like me in it, as on some sort of secular mission to take away their flag lapels and plaster-of-paris jesus television adornments strike me as childishly paranoid.perhaps best captured Whitney's audience.

He's good at what he does. It's a lot of anti-gay, racist humor -- which people like in America - all couched in 'I'm telling it like it is.' He's in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck, I'm-just-a-straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel, selling-ring tones-act. That's where we are as a nation now. We're in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride. 

And Whitney endlessly goes on about Elton John. Why WHY? Elton John may have the most boring personal life on the entire planet. He tried so hard to be straight, and it worked out badly for all concerned. Since he gave that up, he’s been with the same man for 18 years. He didn’t even support gay marriage, initially. And, as an activist, he’s been a tireless warrior against HIV. A thoroughly admirable, if somewhat conservative, human being.(I’m not a big fan of Sir Elton's music, but my good Catholic mother loved it.)

Sex jokes are funny...

right there, I don't care who you are

 ...whether you’re man or woman, gay or straight. Sex is a subject that makes most of us uncomfortable, and it often ends up being utterly ridiculous, so all the material for comedy is there. But not if your only subject is Elton John. 

My guess is Elton John's the only gay man his audience are more than dimly aware of.

Anyway, here’s my theory. Whitney’s comedy is nasty, It’s about as un-Christian as you can imagine. He plays lip service to Christianity by saying he doesn’t use four letter words or take the Lord’s name, but then he makes a travesty of the whole thing with the hate stuff. It’s quintessentially Whitney; pay obeisance to the authority, but subvert it from the wings, using the Cable Git persona, all the while preserving deniability. Fake, fake, fake. 

(4) Wifey

Christian Dan found himself a wife in the early 2000’s. Her name was Cara Gene West, originally from Sarona, Wisconsin. She spent a decade as a DJ on Las Vegas’s sleaziest FM radio station, KOMP 92.3 which was notorious for featuring neathage on its billboards. She was nonetheless a right wing nutjob. 

Cara has since written Unbridled Faith: 100 Devotions from the Horse Farm (2018; don’t all rush out and buy it; it’s ranked #28,490 on Amazon);  Unbridled Faith Devotions for Young Readers (May, 2020, dumb it down for the kiddies and turn the crank);  Fields of Grace: Sharing Faith from the Horse Farm (June, 2021, more horsey devotions) and Country Soul: Inspiring Stories of Heartache Turned into Hope (May 2022). 

One is tempted uncharitably to suspect that the former shock-DJ’s horse barn meditations are every bit as performative and insincere as her husband’s professions of  Christianity. In any case, it just goes to show that horse barns are still-reliable sources of horse-lucky. 

(5) Homecoming, and politics

So some time around 2011 Whitney decided to return to the state in which he had spent less than a third of his life. He bought a 180 acre property in Lancaster County, outside Lincoln, and claims to raise horses. How much of the year he actually spends there is debatable. And he launched his social media career. 

From the very beginning he was attacking Obama and pushing birther crap, smug xenophobia (no one speaks a language at brth, dope)

Whitney has been spreading nonsense about climate science since 2014. He's still at it. 

You see, Dan pretends to revere science. Except for actual, real, consensus science. Dan thinks climate change is not man-made. To argue against the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, he cites Judith Curry, a former climate researcher and luke-warmer who used to be at the University of Georgia. Except Curry thinks climate change is real and largely man-made. I doubt Whitney has ever read a paper she's written.

However, Curry, as it happens, has, much like Whitney, often tried to have it both ways, posting on denialist web sites, while claiming she is within the bounds of mainstream science. And she isn’t as stupid as Whitney. Still, it got her a very bad reputation in the scientific community, and she eventually quit.

But see that pattern? Science (authority, like Christianity) is good, but what almost all scientists think is wrong. Pay homage, then snipe from the fringe. 

(6) Anthony Fauci

Whitney’s obsession with Anthony Fauci is deep, lasting and disturbing. He’s attacked him 69 times on Twitter from May 5 2020 through today. 

Of course, this was a lie, like most of what Larry the Cable Git posts. On hydroxychloroquine:

No, actually, it didn't. A study, not authored by Fauci, was published in Virology Journal that claimed chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine, had antiviral effects on Sars-CoV1 (not SARS-CoV2), in a glass tube. 

No, he didn't. Another lie. On masks...

Almost four months previous, actually, as soon as the CDC recommended them, on April 3, 2020. But this is closer than usual, for Larry. And then it's back to the hate...

Of course you don't get it, Cable Git. It's called Dunning Kruger syndrome.

(As you probably know, Fauci is not 'National Health Director'. There's no such thing). 

But let's heap on more abuse. A clown and a Lord? Impressive!

It's completely natural Larry the Cable Git would hate Anthony Fauci, a man who represents medical authority, and perhaps the most eminent infectious disease specialist on the planet. And tellingly, a man who has been described as the nation's father-figure. In Whitney's mind, Fauci is the Reverend!

(7) Denialism, denialism, denialism

Whitney has gone after other scientists and doctors, or course, notably Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska School of Public Health. Whitney attacked Khan (falsely) for organizing a pro-mask demonstration in Omaha. Khan, a person of color, actually organized a BLM demostration, outdoors, right after the George Floyd shooting. Of course, Whitney hates BLM. Whitney also attacked Khan (again, falsely) for comparing the Republicans with the KKK. 

Khan, of course, represents not only Public Health but is (in Whitney’s bigoted mind) one of those commie rag head carpet flying wicker basket on the head balancing scumbags. 

Whitney has also attacked (name, name). 

As with Curry and climate change, with COVID Whitney has latched onto another fringe figure, John Ioannides from Stanford. It’s fair to say that with his nutty pronouncements about COVID, Ioannides has trashed what reputation he had beforte the epidemic.

Full disclosure: I always thought him a charlatan. 

Whitney claims to agree with Ioannides. Except, farcically, he can’t spell Ioannides’ name, which he thinks begins with an L. 

He has variously called the Stanford maverick epidemiologist Dr Loanidis 

Or maybe that was 'Leonidis from Stanford'?

Or could it be 'Leonnidis from Stanford'  

Certainly he must have a doctorate. So is it Dr Loannidis?

Whitney claims to read his work, But it's unlikely he can even find him on a Google search, because he can’t get the first letter of his name right.

Whitney has also embraced ‘mathematician’ and pompous charlatan David Belinski.  He blocked me for saying that David Berlinski, a philosophy PhD who attacks the theory of evolution, and, typicslly, a Whitney hero, is an unqualified charlatan.  

Berlinksi’s hatred of science seems to parallel Whitney’s (though Berlinski is of course far less stupid) 

But mostly Berlinski just talks drivel, as Jerry Coyne ably exposes here. 

Whitney also loves hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and xxx. He hates masks, vaccines, and Lincoln’s mayor.

And he lies and lies and lies.

(8) The Mayor.

Whitney hates Leirion Gaylor Baird with a passion.

Whitney's tantrums against Leirion Taylor-Baird -- Lincoln’s Mayor -- is almost as bad as his hatred for Fauci. Whitney does not live in Lincoln, and so she's not his mayor, but his daughter takes dance classes there, and Whitney was upset Leirion Gaylor-Baird’s directed health measures shut them down. Worse was when he found out Gaylor-Baird’s daughter was still playing tennis, because tennis was one of the sports the state (not Gaylor-Baird) exempted. 

Whitney went so far as to help fundraise for and support the ludicrous, extreme right wing campaign to have Gaylor Baird recalled, holding a fundraiser for the effort. He lied about that too.

The recall crashed and burned when the bowling alley operator Madsen and the virus-denialist racist ex fireman. 'Shirtless' Robert Borer couldn't collect enough signtures. But he still hates Gaylor-Baird.

(9) Summary

So, to summarize. Dan Whitney is a  warped human being, a phony Lincolnite, a right-wing bigot who has viciously attacked African Americans, gays, and people from the middle-east. He has very publicly attacked the sciences of climate change and evolution, COVID public health measures, and the scientists and doctors who study and execute them. He is openly racist, misogynist and homophobic.

So why is the Lied giving this man a public forum to dispense such crudity, misinformation, and hatefulness?