No one commits to the bit like Nathan Fielder. In a 2015 episode of his series Nathan for You, Fielder responded to the discovery that his favorite outerwear brand had published a tribute to a Holocaust denier in one of its catalogs by launching his own brand called Summit Ice, a startup with two goals: producing quality jackets and raising awareness of the Holocaust. The idea, a sendup of the way corporations struggle to link their products to tenuously related causes in the hopes of seeming more altruistic, was outlandish enough. But Fielder wasn’t entirely joking: Summit Ice was a real company, and two years after the episode aired, Fielder told the CBC that they’d already reached $500,000 in sales, with all proceeds going to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Buy a fleece zip-up or a onesie emblazoned with the company’s slogan, “Deny Nothing,” and you too could help preserve the memory of the 6 million while stepping out in style.

Not everyone was in on the joke. As Fielder revealed in the latest episode of his series, The Rehearsal, the episode of Nathan for You about the launch of Summit Ice was removed from Paramount+ in late 2023 due to the streaming service’s stated discomfort with “anything that touches on anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Israel/Hamas attacks.” Given that the Nathan for You episode specifically sends up the tone-deaf way corporations navigate political causes, the fact that Paramount would delete a Jewish comedian’s satire of antisemitism due to purported but unspecified “sensitivities,” and do it without consulting or even informing him, is almost too on the nose. So in order to satirize the absurdity of the company’s response, of course Fielder had to take it further still.

In “Star Potential,” the second episode of The Rehearsal’s second season, Fielder is still using the tense atmosphere of an airplane cockpit to work through his personal difficulties with uncomfortable social interactions. Just as a first officer may struggle to challenge their pilot’s questionable decisions, Fielder flails when he tries to confront Paramount+ over the episode’s removal, filling his emails with insincere exclamation points and superfluous pleasantries. As he relives the moment with the help of the first season’s Fake Nathan (Alexander Leiss), Fielder finds that the messages that felt aggressive when he was writing them now seem almost pathetically tentative. So he decides to walk himself through the confrontation in person, using actors as stand-ins for Paramount’s real-life executives.

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Since the concern over the Nathan for You episode apparently emanated from Paramount’s German subsidiary, Fielder decides to start there. But since he has no idea what their offices actually look like, Fielder explains, he has to use his imagination, and what he imagines is a massive, empty hall with banners hanging from the windows and a blond executive with a clipped German accent sitting behind a solitary wooden desk—classic movie shorthand, in other words, for a Nazi command center, with the swastikas swapped out for the fluttering logo of Paramount+.

It’s a stunning, hilariously discomforting sequence—the graphic showing “the ideology of Paramount+ Germany” spreading across Europe like a dark cloud is an all-timer—especially when Fielder allows John Hans Tester, the actor playing the Aryan streaming executive, to turn the tables on him, accusing him of using his HBO series to craft an underhanded takedown of a rival network. (You can, for what it’s worth, stream the Nathan for You episode in question on Max.) But the point has been made either way: If shying away from “anything related to antisemitism” means preventing even critiques of it, then you’re edging dangerously close to erasing the Holocaust. Fielder pointedly shows that a search of Paramount+ for Nazi-related content turns up dozens of results, while a search for “Judaism” comes up blank.

The joke gets darker still when you venture over to Summit Ice’s website in light of the episode. Days earlier, the site, which was fully functional as of a few weeks ago, went dark, only to relaunch on Sunday afternoon touting a revamped product line called the Cypress Collection. Every brand needs the occasional refresh, right? But the site’s “About” page reveals a sinister, if presumably tongue-in-cheek, reason for the update.

For nearly a decade, we’ve made the mistake of putting our charitable goals ahead of the quality of our products—often slapping our logo onto down-market merchandise instead of taking the time to design real clothing from scratch. It’s a confession that’s not easy to make, but it’s true. And unfortunately, we feel our customers have taken notice. In October of 2023, our sales plummeted by nearly 90% and we couldn’t figure out why. After extensive market research, only one answer made sense: consumers had suddenly become more savvy about the quality of softshell jackets. Therefore, we believe the best way to achieve our goal of raising awareness is by shifting our primary brand focus from genocide to craftsmanship.

 

Welcome to a New Era of Summit Ice.

Summit Ice still promises that 100 percent of the proceeds will go to Holocaust education. But despite the fact that the Cypress Collection’s jackets cost twice what the old ones did, the next text admits that the proceeds might be “slightly less” than they were—all, of course, in the name of quality.

Oh, and remember “Deny Nothing”? Well, Summit Ice has a new slogan now: we “Stand for Everything.”

Summit Ice’s website, complete with a brand-new slogan. Photo illustration by Slate. Image via Summit Ice.

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In response to the Trump administration’s attack on institutional liberalism, American corporations that previously touted their progressive values have made a show of abandoning them. Anyone with half a brain, let alone someone who graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades, knows that corporate ideology shifts with the political winds. (On the same night the Rehearsal episode aired, 60 Minutes closed its episode with a tribute to executive producer Bill Owens, who resigned from the program after 26 years citing an inability to make “independent decisions” as CBS’s parent company, Paramount, pursues a merger that requires the Trump administration’s approval.) But the magnitude and the speed of the about-face has been startling, especially since, despite the administration’s radical changes in policy, polls show public opinion of Trump’s job performance is heading in the opposite direction.

So, what’s a tongue-in-cheek outerwear brand to do? Perhaps make a public show of abandoning its principles in favor of escalating profits, while drawing attention to all the companies that have done it for real. After all, as Fielder observes on The Rehearsal, “Sincerity is overrated.”

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