Feb. 28, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
17:49
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So the recent Gas the Jokes hashtag campaign was remarkably successful. | |
| It had 13,000 supporters when we needed 500, with a combined social reach of almost 4 million people. | |
| This undoubtedly would have had tens of millions of views when it went live. | |
| But you wouldn't know it, because it didn't trend on the United States trends or the curated trends that Twitter provides. | |
| It also never auto-completed, at least not that I found, and this is another indication that this was being censored. | |
| According to hashtags.org, Gas the Jokes was their number one new trending hashtag, as you can see here. | |
| So let's have a look at the numbers on the hashtags that were trending when the Thunderclap went live. | |
| This is the hashtag LetIt Shine, which had about 3,000 usages per hour, which enabled it to get trending. | |
| This is the Europa League, which was also trending, which was getting around 2-300 at best, and that was apparently trending. | |
| Although I suspect that was probably a paid promotion. | |
| This is Ireland vs France, which I'm assuming is some sort of sports competition that I don't follow, that had 6,800, and this seems organic. | |
| Resist Capitalism had 13,900, which again is organic and full of idiotic snowflakes. | |
| And you also had one of those regular normie hashtags, Saturday Night Takeaway, that was trending with around 4,900 usages. | |
| Gas the Jokes apparently failed to trend with 28,800 usages. | |
| And that is directly comparable to the hot button political issue of the day, which was hashtag DNCChair, which had 28,900 uses. | |
| I think that this is evidence enough to conclude that Twitter had gotten wind of what we were doing and decided to shut it down before it even happened, to ensure that the hashtag didn't trend and it didn't auto-complete and that people didn't hear about it, except for the tens of millions who actually did hear about it, regardless of what Twitter's trending algorithm says. | |
| Hi there, Jack, how's it going? | |
| So this hashtag campaign was picked up by ex-Gorka property Gizmodo, covered by one of their quote-unquote reporters, Brian Menegus. | |
| And I think it's very decent of you that you don't refer to yourself as a journalist, Brian. | |
| I think that would be a rather disingenuous thing for you to say, wouldn't it? | |
| He wrote an article called Prominent YouTubers Find Great Anti-Semitic Hill to Die On. | |
| Why are you doing this to yourself, Brian? | |
| So he starts by dissecting this campaign. | |
| First of all, the campaign conflates all of media. | |
| Oh, I'm sorry, Brian. | |
| I didn't realise I'd have to explain to an internet culture reporter exactly how Twitter works. | |
| But you have 140 characters, and using Thunderclap, that's reduced to 113 because you include a link with it. | |
| So, it's kind of compressed for space. | |
| Couldn't get all that nuance in that I know you expect. | |
| You know, couldn't put as much context as I might have liked into it. | |
| You know, context is important, isn't it? | |
| Really important. | |
| You're hearing this, Ben Fritz? | |
| Then it argues, jokes are not evidence of bigotry. | |
| They are not. | |
| Let's see your rebuttal. | |
| Except the heart of the argument was never whether or not Felix himself was a bigot. | |
| Really? | |
| Really, Brian? | |
| Did you not see the articles being written that were basically saying exactly those words, except instead of bigot, they would say anti-Semite, like you've done on the title of your article. | |
| I mean, you've called it a great anti-Semitic hill, but nobody's saying that Schellberg himself is a bigot, you fucking disingenuous hack. | |
| How do you live with yourself doing this? | |
| You understand that you're lying about people, right? | |
| Like, not corporations, not faceless giant entities that have got billions of dollars behind them and control over mass media in various countries. | |
| You're talking about individuals who've built up a platform from nothing. | |
| And you're lying about them personally. | |
| And I'm not lying about you. | |
| I'm displaying exactly what you've said. | |
| But the argument is not that he is himself a bigot, merely that his content featured references and imagery that bigots seemed increasingly attracted to. | |
| I don't think they are. | |
| I don't think that literal neo-Nazis are happy when you mock Nazism. | |
| When you use being a Nazi as the butt of a joke, it tends to piss them off in the same way that merely making the joke pisses off the authoritarian PC thumb police. | |
| Finally, it ends on the odious hashtag, gas the jokes. | |
| Damn, Brian, that is some odious hashtagging that millions of people saw there. | |
| How tragic is that? | |
| A pretty bold reference to the mass killings of Jews and other marginalized groups at the hands of the Nazis. | |
| Yes, and once more, the mainstream media is playing the Nazis in this little scenario. | |
| The more you try to police people having fun at your expense, the more people will continue to have fun at your expense. | |
| People joking about things is not evidence of bigotry. | |
| Much in the same way that successful Jews in your country is not evidence of a giant Jewish conspiracy that requires you to get rid of them. | |
| You are trying to get rid of our jokes. | |
| The Nazis were trying to get rid of the Jews. | |
| Are you seeing the analogy here yet, Brian? | |
| Nazis find Jews problematic, and therefore they get rid of them. | |
| Progressives find jokes problematic, and therefore they get rid of them. | |
| Hi again, Jack. | |
| I know you're watching. | |
| He says the gambit is simple. | |
| If the mainstream media crows at a hashtag that mockingly references genocide, it's evidence it's run by oversensitive snowflakes who can't take a brackets deeply anti-Semitic joke. | |
| What a perfect way to distance YouTubers from allegations of anti-Semitism. | |
| It is, actually. | |
| No one actually thinks PewDiePie is an anti-Semite, Brian. | |
| So you going on about it is you talking about a fiction you have made up that is not connected to reality. | |
| And then you going on about us being anti-Semitic by making another joke is further evidence of you not following the actual train of thought that most people in reality are following. | |
| Of course, it wasn't just Sargon with his half million subscribers getting in on the action. | |
| Boogie2988, a prominent anti-Semite with an audience of over 3 million subscribers, was probably the highest profile to be seen on the bandwagon. | |
| Sorry, you didn't call him an anti-Semite, you just implied it, didn't you? | |
| You've said, oh, this is a deeply anti-Semitic joke, so anyone making an anti-Semitic joke must hate the Jews. | |
| I particularly love this bit. | |
| Daniel Keem, the personality behind Drama Alert, a sort of TMZ channel for YouTube gossip, also sent the link out to his 1.3 million Twitter followers. | |
| He spent the other week trying to get PewDiePie defenders to pressure the Wall Street journalist advertisers into pulling their support, a tactic he no doubt crib from Gamergate. | |
| Uh excuse me, I think you may well find he cribbed that tactic from the Wall Street Journal, who did it to PewDiePie first. | |
| You fucking hack. | |
| I don't want to insult you, Brian. | |
| I'm sure you're a lovely man when you're not spreading lies and propaganda all over the internet. | |
| But it's this kind of blatant partisan hackery that I just can't stand. | |
| But no, no, no. | |
| He obviously got it from Gamergate because Keemstar probably knows loads about Gamergate. | |
| You know, I mean, obviously. | |
| It wasn't obviously a direct response to the actions that the Wall Street Journal had taken towards one of their apparent rivals, although I don't think PewDiePie would have ever imagined that he would be a rival of the Wall Street Journal. | |
| While Schellberg did not promote the campaign, one of his recent videos linked to Benjamin's channel. | |
| Benjamin's own video on the backlash repeatedly likens PewDiePie to Donald Trump. | |
| Seemingly in an attempt to mobilize that base of online supports to a new cause. | |
| And to Benjamin's credit, he guessed right. | |
| The Thunderclap link garnered nearly a thousand upvotes on the Trump Reddit The Donald. | |
| Yes, because a lot of people supporting PewDiePie and Donald Trump are grassroots insurrectionists against a biased and bigoted media that you are part of, Brian. | |
| I know you don't want to hear it. | |
| I know you don't want to hear that you have lied about too many people over the years. | |
| Not just you, but the media in general. | |
| And this isn't just the left-wing media, Brian. | |
| For you go, well, you never criticized Fox News. | |
| Fox News are just as cancerous and they always have been. | |
| Why you're following their example is anyone's guess. | |
| But this is my absolute favourite piece of the entire article. | |
| The purpose of the campaign was, according to Benjamin's own video on it, to force the media's hand and make them talk to us. | |
| Over Twitter DM, Benjamin refused to give comment to Gizmodo. | |
| Yes, you came to talk to me. | |
| I told you to get stuffed because you're a fucking liar, Brian. | |
| You're a brazen liar. | |
| And I'm going to show everyone why you're lying. | |
| I'm going to show them exactly how you're lying. | |
| So I refused to give comment to Gizmodo, claiming that they'd wrongly associated him with the so-called alt-right in a previous article. | |
| And there was a little bit more than that, wasn't there, Brian? | |
| But I'm not surprised you'd leave that out. | |
| I won't, though. | |
| So Brian's original hit piece originated over the hashtag BLM kidnapping debacle, where four black people decided to kidnap an autistic or mentally disabled white person and torture them while live streaming it over Facebook. | |
| The hashtag BLM kidnapping was used, although I stated directly in a live stream I did on the day of it that there's no evidence that it's connected to Black Lives Matter. | |
| And my contention with this was based on the fact that this is the same thing that happened to Gamergate. | |
| And here's the proof. | |
| It's using a fucking app. | |
| Okay, we're live now. | |
| So we're going to be talking about the BLM kidnapping. | |
| So as I am aware, what we know so far is that, was it four 18-year-old black kids, two men, two women, kidnapped a mentally handicapped or some sort of special needs kid on the basis that he's white, tortured him for about half an hour while live streaming on Facebook, shouting things like, fuck Donald Trump, fuck white people. | |
| And they were basically using him as the scapegoat for this political sort of position. | |
| People are using the hashtag BLM kidnapping, even though there's no evidence to tie them specifically to Black Lives Matter. | |
| So I think that's important to state from the outset. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I have to say I'm quite annoyed. | |
| And Robin, I'm sure you'll be annoyed at the same sort of thing with people tying this directly to Black Lives Matter in the same way that, you know, anytime you need Sarkeesian got a nasty message on Twitter, people gave it a matter. | |
| Oh, of course. | |
| Literally the first thing we said in that live stream to 150,000 people was that this was not connected to Black Lives Matter. | |
| And of course, alt-right trolls use Chicago kidnapping to spread lies about Black Lives Matter following the lead of Mike Cernovich, the likes of InfoWars Paul Joseph Watson and YouTuber Sargon of a CAD. | |
| Well, that's a lie. | |
| You are a liar, Brian. | |
| This is not true. | |
| Not only is it not true that I said that this was connected to Black Lives Matter, but I also am not part of the alt-right. | |
| If you ask them, they will tell you they don't like me because I don't agree with their political opinions. | |
| But you don't care. | |
| In fact, you will actively resist being corrected, as you can see from this public tweet I sent you, but also from our Twitter DM conversation that led up to this article. | |
| Carl, you still haven't told me what this supposed mistake is or what correction you feel will amend it. | |
| Yes, I have, Brian. | |
| I've already shown the tweet in which I did that. | |
| So I'd said, well, that's not true. | |
| Because that isn't true. | |
| Then just tell me. | |
| Not sure what you stand to gain by being evasive in this instance. | |
| So I said, I explained clearly that I'm not a member of the alt-right, and I said explicitly that it was unfair to ascribe this racial hate crime to Black Lives Matter, and that was based primarily on my experiences of media ascribing every nasty tweet to Gamergate. | |
| Let me know you have updated. | |
| Which I'm never gonna fucking expect, Brian. | |
| And I'm not gonna expect it now when I have done the legwork for you, you lazy, disingenuous hack. | |
| But the thing is, being in direct opposition to the truth isn't good enough for Brian. | |
| What he needs to do now is try and smear me. | |
| Because believe it or not, in this exchange, he believes that I am the person with low moral character. | |
| Benjamin may not identify with the nebulous alt-right or neo-Nazis. | |
| Oh, thanks. | |
| Good of you to say. | |
| But he was once referenced by Daily Stormer owner Andrew Anglin as someone whose videos were leading people in our direction. | |
| I don't care what Andrew Anglin thinks, Brian. | |
| Because the Daily Stormer is a joke. | |
| That's how people see it. | |
| Only the hardcore neo-Nazis who are a big fan of that kind of thing think it's in any way reputable. | |
| Everyone else can see by the fact that they have the Jewish problem and race war as categories on their site that these are people you should not take seriously. | |
| That's why I don't. | |
| But more importantly, Brian, I don't define what I think and do based on what bigots think and do. | |
| The bigots are the ones in the wrong. | |
| I do not have to change my behavior because of them. | |
| And the thing is, Brian, I know that you're not stupid. | |
| I know that you're just being mendacious. | |
| You're just trying to cast aspersions on my character based on what someone else does. | |
| So I'm sure that we can all look forward in joining Brian in congratulation for the condemnation of JK Rowling and the Wall Street Journal as the Daily Stormer are particularly big fans of them at the moment. | |
| Among the standard gas the jokes tweets were those of the like above, which referenced the white supremacist 14 words or called transgender Americans mentally ill. | |
| What the 14 words is it, Brian? | |
| That means they must be serious. | |
| They can't be a trigger phrase for you. | |
| They can't be something that something a troll would put out specifically because they know that you'd pick up on it. | |
| I mean, it can only be said by people who are super serious about white supremacy, right? | |
| We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. | |
| Quite right. | |
| It's a matter. | |
| Oh shit, Brian, I've got your latest scoop. | |
| Turns out Sky Williams, a black YouTuber, is actually a white supremacist. | |
| He said the 14 words too! | |
| My God, what are you going to do? | |
| This is a scoop, Brian. | |
| I mean, only third of a million people have seen this live stream, and it's not like this is totally obscure and nobody knows about it. | |
| So quickly, Brian, get on it. | |
| This is your chance to shine. | |
| You could be at the Wall Street Journal. | |
| Sky Williams, notorious white supremacist, is now a writer for the Daily Stormer. | |
| You can make up any shit you like. | |
| I even had a look at your comment section, and it seems that you may have been blown the fuck out a little bit there. | |
| So, it's possible to make offensive jokes, and for them to be okay, but the sensitivity of the subject matter should be balanced by the joke being, you know, actually funny. | |
| Otherwise, you're just an ass. | |
| And someone's like this. | |
| Oh, but there's a dissenter. | |
| Who defines balanced? | |
| The audience does that. | |
| Oh, if that's the case, and the audience are the ones who are defining what's funny and what's balanced and whether something's acceptable or not, then PewDiePie's audience has decided that this is acceptable, that these are just jokes, they're not anti-Semites. | |
| Believe it or not, I doubt there is much crossover between people who read The Daily Stormer and people who watch PewDiePie on YouTube. | |
| And you don't have to worry about it. | |
| But most importantly, Brian, Gizmodo, and any other media outlet, stop lying. | |
| Stop this bullshit. | |
| It's killing you. | |
| Do you understand? | |
| We don't want a dishonest press. | |
| We want a press that is going to report things fairly and accurately, giving equal amounts of charity to either side, instead of simply pushing a bullshit agenda that is remarkably similar to the bullshit agenda that the right-wing conservative Christians had back in the 80s and 90s. | |
| You are just the new modern censors. |
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