Last Wednesday, Stephen Colbert — in his persona as "Stephen Colbert," the rock-ribbed right-wing pundit of his Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report" — aired a segment satirizing the decision by Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, to set up a fig-leaf nonprofit foundation designed to "help address the challenges that plague the Native American community." His newly launched Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation has distributed winter coats and shoes to several tribes, purchased a backhoe for Nebraska's Omaha Tribe and claims to have over forty other projects in process to help build a brighter future for Native Americans.

For a franchise reportedly worth $1.8 billion with operating profits of over $100 million annually, handing out shoes and buying a $100,000 backhoe is a cheap price to pay to defray ongoing negative PR from the many Native Americans who have been pushing for the team to change its 77-year-old name — which many people see as a corrosive ethnic slur and a reminder of a centuries-long history of broken promises and genocide.

Colbert stepped into the fray by declaring that, inspired by Snyder, he was launching the "Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," a reference to a fatuously fake parody stereotype character, "Ching-Chong Ding-Dong," that he's adopted on air a few times to satirize knee-jerk mockery of Asian dialect (most recently in 2011, when Rush Limbaugh used a string of nonsense to mimic the speech of then-Chinese-president Hu Jintao).

When contacted, neither Comedy Central nor Colbert had any additional comment to offer on the segment.

This is when things got weird. And ugly. An unknown individual running "The Colbert Report's" social media feed decided to tweet just the "punchline" of the segment, without any of its buildup or context, making it seem like a random racialized anti-Asian attack. The tweet prompted a social media outcry, initiated by Suey Park (of #NotYourAsianSidekick fame), and the hashtag #CancelColbert rapidly became a trending topic on Twitter — and remained there for over 24 hours, fueled not just by the original angry reactions by Park and other Asian Americans, but by a strange brew of vile personal attacks on Park by Twitter's ever-lurking troll population, stunned responses from fans of Colbert wondering why the comedian was coming under such sudden and vitriolic attack — and more than a handful of plaintive tweets by Native American activists who'd just seen their own issue totally eclipsed by the high-volume collateral rage of Asian America's fast-fingered keyboard brigades.