WATCH: Trainwreck Interview Between Jesse Watters and r/AntiWork Moderator Leads Popular Subreddit to Go Temporarily Dark

Jesse Watters focused on the “antiwork” movement Tuesday evening by interviewing Doreen Ford, the moderator of the wildly popular r/Antiwork subreddit. Unfortunately for Ford, and for antiwork enthusiasts who subscribe to that particular section of the social news aggregator, the interview went so poorly that the subreddit went to “private” mode as a result of “brigading” from other Reddit users.

What is “brigading,” you say? Writing for Bloomberg, Lindsey Rupp and Claire Ballentine explain it as “users from another subreddit conducting a coordinated campaign to disrupt another group.” It turns out that Ford’s appearance in Watters’ World went so poorly that many in the Reddit community felt it embarrassed them into shaming the subreddit he moderates.

Confused? Well until yesterday, the Antiwork subreddit was among Reddit’s most active and engaged pages, seeing explosive growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. What felt like equal parts worker rights movement and ironically detached performance art, the Antiwork subreddit grew to 1.6 million subscribers over the past two years. Like many subreddits, many posts featured serious issues and support, while there were also a lot of smart and funny contributions as well. It’s … the internet. The subreddit went into private mode to “clean up” but is now open for all to see, and they are currently in riot.

So Watters asked Ford on to his show and the 30-year-old patsy dog walker did not seem ready for his close-up. Nor did he seem familiar with the classic cable news trope of inviting on an unaware subject with zero media training, the role of which Ford played all too well. For Watters’ part, he showed remarkable maturity and understanding given his many past on-air discretions, but that might be because Ford needed no help digging his own hole, arguing that laziness is a virtue and that 20-25 hour work weeks suffice.

So the Reddit community, which I’ve found to be a pretty smart and great section of the Internet (with notable exceptions), was none too pleased.

After the embarrassing appearance, many Redditors were so angry that he made the movement look bad and moderators began to censor posts criticizing him, banned users that were critical, and eventually made the entire subreddit private, effectively taking it down. The post on their inaccessible page stated, “We’re closed while we deal with the cleanup from ongoing brigading and will be back soon.” They are now back live again.

And thanks to the “Subreddit Drama” subreddit (now that’s meta!) you can see a screengrab of some of the internal bile that resulted from Ford’s interview gone haywire.

Jesse Watters Prime Time is the brand new 7 PM show on Fox News, and judging by both its very impressive ratings at launch and buzz-generating moments like this, it looks destined to be a hit.

Watch above via Fox News.