What To Know
- Michael McWhorter, known as TizzyEnt, is a filmmaker and social media justice advocate who uses his platform to identify and expose bullies.
- His new Discovery Channel show, How to Catch a Dirtbag, expands on that work.
In a chaotic world, Michael McWhorter is a voice of reason. The filmmaker and director of music videos and commercials, known as Tizzy, is a go-to justice seeker. McWhorter finds bullies — a young woman attacking an older woman selling fruit on the street, a woman spewing hate speech at neighbors, men harassing children — then asks his roughly 11 million social media followers, “Can you help me find this person?” Tizzy is the big brother everyone wants. He’s not starting fights; he ends them.
In his first interview for How to Catch a Dirtbag, premiering August 5 on Discovery Channel, McWhorter explains from his Florida home how his online presence naturally morphs into eight hourlong episodes featuring interviews with victims, law enforcement, witnesses and perpetrators.
How did you become an online sleuth?
Michael McWhorter: I started noticing awful people doing awful things in viral clips. I think we all see that and go like, “Who are these people? Why is this OK? Why do they think they could do this?” I was just a person who decided to see if I could answer that question myself. Then that led to people starting to send me videos going, “This happened to me. Can you help me find this person?”
Discovery Channel
Where did your sense of justice come from?
I’ve just always disliked bullies. I don’t like seeing people do harm to others, and I certainly don’t like seeing people get away with that.
What is the show’s format?
This show is an expansion of what I’d been doing in ways that I never even thought possible. The producers have been able to track down cases. They found the victims and talked to them, found the witnesses and interviewed them. In some cases, we go to the scene where these things happened and can be walked through, seeing the real impacts, talking to law enforcement, even in some cases talking to the perpetrators — I never got to do that. They never initially want to talk to me. With the show, we get to really do a deep dive into the process of what I do, the process of what law enforcement did, and the outcomes in those cases.
Given that, at times, you’re going after violent people, are you receiving death threats?
Death threats happen pretty regularly. Unfortunately, there are unwell people who will then sort of fixate.
Why are we seeing so much more obnoxious behavior?
I feel like the pandemic pushed us into a space where we felt very alone and alienated. If you feel like no one is on your side, and the only person who’s out there for you is you, it puts you in a very defensive position, and a lot of times it leads to people lashing out, out of loneliness and anger and frustration and confusion. That’s how we arrive at having videos like this. I’m glad that I can help people find the people who harm them. I’m glad that we can do a TV show that helps everybody feel like there’s hope. But in a perfect world, I would never again have to ask, “Who is this person behind me?” because people would stop behaving that way. But until that day happens, we’ll keep doing this.
How to Catch a Dirtbag, Series Premiere, Wednesday, August 5, Discovery Channel
