“Blood Money Comedy” - 1 October 2025

Kia ora whānau,

Here’s the brutal truth every New Zealander needs to understand: Western comedians are being bought by the same Saudi regime that murdered journalists, oppresses women, and funded 9/11. This isn’t entertainment - it’s blood money sportswashing on a massive scale.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/574622/what-is-the-riyadh-comedy-festival-the-saudi-arabia-event-stirring-controversy-in-hollywood

The Riyadh Comedy Festival represents the most brazen attempt yet by Saudi Arabia’s murderous regime to buy Western legitimacy through entertainment. While Māori communities continue fighting for basic justice and recognition, wealthy comedians are cashing million-dollar cheques from the same Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who ordered the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi just seven years ago.

Saudi Arabia’s Comedy Funding Pipeline: How Oil Money Flows to Western Comedians

Background: The Saudi Sportswashing Machine

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 programme, launched in 2016, represents a calculated strategy to use entertainment and sports to rehabilitate the kingdom’s blood-soaked international reputation. This isn’t about cultural exchange or economic diversification - it’s about using massive oil wealth to make the world forget about systematic human rights abuses, the murder of dissidents, and the continued oppression of women and minorities.

The Public Investment Fund, worth $925 billion, has become the primary vehicle for this reputation-laundering operation. From golf’s LIV tour to Formula 1 racing, from gaming companies to now comedy festivals, the Saudis are systematically buying their way into Western popular culture.

Timeline of Saudi Sportswashing: From Murder to Comedy Festival

The timing is no coincidence. The Riyadh Comedy Festival runs from September 26 to October 9, 2025 - deliberately coinciding with the seventh anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder. This represents the ultimate insult: using laughter to drown out the screams of the regime’s victims.

Comedians Sell Their Souls for Saudi Gold

The scale of Saudi payments to Western comedians is staggering and reveals the true desperation of the regime to buy legitimacy. Tim Dillon revealed he was offered $375,000 for a single performance, while some performers reportedly received up to $1.6 million.

The Price of Saudi Silence: Comedian Payment Amounts Revealed

But this money comes with strings attached. Comedians must agree to strict censorship rules that prohibit any material that could “degrade” or “defame” Saudi Arabia, its leaders, the royal family, or religion. These are the same “free speech warriors” who claim to defend comedy’s right to challenge power - yet they willingly submit to authoritarian censorship for cash.

The lineup reads like a who’s who of comedic sellouts: Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Bill Burr, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari, and dozens more. Many of these performers have built careers criticising American power structures while simultaneously taking millions from one of the world’s most oppressive regimes.

The Manosphere-Saudi Connection: Shared Values of Oppression

What makes this particularly insidious is how Saudi funding aligns with the manosphere ideology that many of these comedians already promote. The connection between Joe Rogan’s podcast empire and Saudi entertainment investments reveals a deeper network of mutual support between Western misogyny and Middle Eastern authoritarianism.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 specifically targets male-dominated entertainment sectors including gaming, combat sports, and comedy. This isn’t coincidental - it reflects shared values between Saudi patriarchy and Western manosphere culture. Both systems depend on the subjugation of women, the silencing of dissent, and the elevation of masculine dominance over human rights.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund’s recent $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts, involving Jared Kushner’s investment firm, demonstrates how Saudi money flows through networks of white supremacist capitalism. These aren’t isolated investments - they’re part of a coordinated strategy to influence Western culture through entertainment that normalises authoritarianism and traditional patriarchal values.

Christian Nationalist Undertones: The Hidden Ideology

While Saudi Arabia presents itself as modernising, its entertainment investments strategically align with Christian nationalist movements in the West. The kingdom’s sportswashing strategy parallels white supremacist tactics of using cultural events to normalise authoritarian ideology.

The connection between Christian nationalism and violent extremism seen in events like January 6th shares ideological DNA with Saudi authoritarianism: both systems demand absolute submission to patriarchal authority, both suppress women’s rights, and both use violence to maintain power.

Saudi funding of Western entertainment creates a feedback loop where authoritarian values become normalised through popular culture. Comedians who accept Saudi money aren’t just taking individual payments - they’re participating in a global network that promotes anti-democratic, anti-feminist, and anti-Indigenous values.

Exposing the Networks: Money Flows and Hidden Connections

The money trail reveals disturbing connections between Saudi investment and far-right Western networks. PIF’s entertainment investments include partnerships with the same investment firms that fund white supremacist media platforms and Christian nationalist organisations.

Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of 54% of MBC Group and massive investments in gaming, podcasting, and comedy create a media ecosystem that promotes authoritarian values while silencing criticism. The kingdom has invested at least $15.3 billion in carefully selected media assets this year alone.

These investments aren’t random - they target platforms and personalities that already promote misogynistic, nationalist, and anti-progressive content. By funding these networks, Saudi Arabia amplifies voices that attack Indigenous rights, women’s liberation, and democratic values globally.

The Māori Perspective: Recognizing Colonial Patterns

The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

From a Māori worldview, the Saudi sportswashing strategy represents a familiar colonial pattern: using wealth extracted through violence to buy legitimacy and silence criticism. The same way colonial powers used stolen Māori resources to fund their “civilising” missions, Saudi Arabia uses oil wealth built on oppression to purchase Western approval.

The principle of manaakitanga - showing respect and care for others - stands in direct opposition to the Saudi regime’s systematic abuse of human rights. When comedians accept Saudi money, they violate this fundamental value by enabling continued oppression of women, journalists, and dissidents.

Whakatōhea teaches us that all actions have consequences that ripple through communities. The normalisation of authoritarian money in Western entertainment doesn’t just affect comedy - it makes authoritarianism more acceptable globally, including in New Zealand where we face our own struggles against colonial power structures.

The principle of tino rangatiratanga - self-determination and sovereignty - demands that we reject any system that uses wealth to silence truth-telling. Saudi Arabia’s comedy festival represents the antithesis of this value: it uses money to prevent comedians from speaking truth to power.

Implications: The Death of Comedy as Truth-Telling

The Saudi comedy festival marks a fundamental shift in entertainment from truth-telling to propaganda. When comedians accept authoritarian money with censorship conditions, they transform from truth-tellers into propagandists for oppression.

This has broader implications for democratic discourse. If entertainers can be bought to whitewash murder and authoritarianism, what other atrocities will be normalised through popular culture? The precedent set by the Riyadh Comedy Festival opens the door for other authoritarian regimes to buy Western legitimacy through entertainment.

For Māori communities, this represents a particular threat. The same networks that promote Saudi authoritarianism also work to silence Indigenous voices and rights globally. When Western entertainers validate authoritarian money, they make it easier for colonial powers to suppress Indigenous resistance.

The economic model also reveals how neoliberal capitalism enables authoritarianism. The same market logic that justifies comedians taking Saudi money is used to justify mining on Māori land or selling Indigenous resources to foreign corporations.

Rejecting Blood Money Comedy

The Riyadh Comedy Festival exposes the moral bankruptcy of Western entertainment when confronted with authoritarian money. While Māori communities fight for basic justice with limited resources, wealthy comedians sell their integrity for millions from murderous regimes.

True comedy challenges power and speaks truth to authority. The comedians performing in Saudi Arabia have chosen money over truth, comfort over justice, and personal wealth over human rights. They represent everything wrong with neoliberal entertainment culture that treats art as commodity rather than truth-telling.

The solution requires collective action. We must boycott these sellout comedians, expose their Saudi connections, and support independent artists who refuse authoritarian money. We must also recognise how Saudi sportswashing connects to broader patterns of colonial oppression that affect Indigenous communities globally.

The Māori principle of aroha - love and compassion - demands that we stand with the victims of Saudi oppression, not the comedians who take their money. We must choose truth over entertainment, justice over profit, and collective liberation over individual wealth.

This isn’t just about comedy - it’s about whether we’ll allow authoritarian money to purchase our culture and silence our truth-tellers. The choice is clear: stand with the oppressed or enable the oppressors.

Ko au koe, koe au - we are all connected. The struggle against Saudi authoritarianism is connected to our struggle against colonial oppression in Aotearoa. We must reject all forms of blood money, whether it comes from Riyadh or Wellington.

For those who find value in exposing these connections between entertainment, money, and oppression, please consider supporting this work with a koha to HTDM: 03-1546-0415173-000. The MGL understands these tough economic times for whānau, so please only contribute if you have capacity and wish to do so.

Kia kaha,
Ivor (The Māori Green Lantern)