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June 8, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:45
"The Making of a YouTube Radical" - The New York Times Rebutted!
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*Taphan Mullen* Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well.
So yes, a New York Times article has come out about people who criticize the left on YouTube.
And I was contacted by the reporter a while back ago.
But yeah, I mean, Reporters aren't your friends and they're not looking to clarify your position in general, so I didn't.
And it's interesting too, so there is a bunch of people here on this collage on the top of the article, right?
There's Alex Jones, Dave Rubin, Philip DeFranco, Lauren Southern, Carl Benjamin, and Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro.
And interestingly enough, so right here, see, the title is Caleb Kane with a college dropout looking for direction.
He turned to YouTube!
Now right under here, direction, that's Milton Friedman.
That's the economist Milton Friedman who won a Nobel Prize and is a great guy and Jewish if I remember rightly.
So he's included, right?
In people who radicalize there is this Economist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on on free markets.
So all right, so let's we're gonna just Go fairly quickly over the article.
I hate to sort of say it.
It's not really a philosophical point But even though I'm in the article quite a bit I kind of spaced out Reading it and we're gonna skip over the bit where he goes into great details about what might have happened to YouTube's algorithm Changes from years ago.
We're gonna skip all that stuff.
It's pretty dull Anyway, yeah, so the article is, it follows the standard template.
So the standard template is lost soul with no will, no agency, get sucked into this online blah blah blah, right?
So you've got to portray this guy as a complete victim, right?
So this guy starts out, like Caleb Cain was a college dropout, looking for direction.
He turned to YouTube, right?
Why is he turning to YouTube?
Why is he turning to... I mean, it's a big question, right?
Why would he be turning to YouTube?
Does he not have friends, family, a culture around him, no church or anything like that?
So anyway, it says, soon he was pulled into a far-right universe watching thousands of videos filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny, racism, right?
So you see, he was pulled into a far-right universe.
He didn't choose to watch, he didn't choose to click, he's just pulled into it.
He's like, it's like this windowless van of the alt-right rolled up, put him in a potato sack and drove him off with promises of free candy, Fallout Bay being sold in some subterranean Saudi Arabian slave market, right?
It's It's not a choice.
You didn't make a choice.
The click on things just pulled into, right?
So you got to look at this guy as a victim and I guess these nasty predators who make arguments and evidence online.
So then the next thing is I was brainwashed.
I was brainwashed.
Now listen.
Look, there are There's some very serious and very dangerous cults out there in the world that really prey on people, that take their life savings, that lock them up, that torture them, that rape them, that genuinely use powerful, destructive, horrible techniques of brainwashing.
And to include that in people who make arguments online, to include that term, not only is it offensive to anyone who's just making arguments online, but also it's genuinely offensive to prey upon real victims of brainwashing.
You know, people in North Korea, right?
Real victims of brainwashing, you really shouldn't.
You can't ethically use that as a way of opposing arguments you don't like online.
I mean, come on, this is a terrible, terrible thing to do.
Okay, so the article is called The Making of a YouTube Radical.
It's by Kevin Roos, published June 8, 2019, today.
So let's have a look through it because you see here now you see we have a YouTube radical.
A radical!
Now what is a radical?
Well for me you know when I go out and try and give speeches and people attack buses and and they attack people and you know I gave a speech in New York and and some Jewish guy was attacked by far-left activists and so on that's to me kind of radical so I'm sitting here thinking wow you know what what's this guy done what's so radical what's so radical all right And here he says, a sampling of the more than 12,000 videos that Caleb Cain watched going back to 2015, many but not all of which were from far-right commentators.
Again, can you define far-right?
Does it mean anything?
Is there any objective definition?
No, it's just become this pejorative that's attached to people in the hopes that you won't listen to actual arguments.
Okay, so the article starts, you know, I guess Tarantino-style.
Caleb Cain pulled a Glock pistol from his waistband, took out the magazine, and casually tossed both onto the kitchen counter.
I bought it the day after I got death threats, he said.
The threats, Mr. Cain explained, came from right-wing trolls in response to a video he had posted on YouTube a few days earlier.
In the video, he told the story of how, as a liberal college dropout struggling to find his place in the world, he had gotten sucked into the vortex of far-right politics on YouTube.
"I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole," he said in the video.
Again, he's passive.
He's a leaf in the wind.
He's a bubble on a stream.
Got sucked into, fell down to, got yanked into.
I mean, come on.
I mean, he chose to click on stuff.
Anyway, McCain26 recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it and has become a vocal critic of the movement.
He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a decentralized cult of far-right YouTube personalities.
Oh, come on.
I mean, people making arguments online, people putting shows online, that is, like, again, I've talked to people on my show who were genuinely the victims of cults, particularly when they were children and they were treated abominably and they were harmed and they were brutalized and they were... Oh, come on.
I mean, making arguments online, just putting the cult word in it, it's...
It's sad, and it's not an argument, of course.
And this is one of the reasons why some of the online shows are doing better than the mainstream media, right?
Because we're actually making arguments.
I have interviewed hundreds of experts.
I've got charts.
I've got data.
I've got sources.
And, you know, all of the stuff that reinforces what it is that I'm saying, so you don't have to rely on what I do.
I put my arguments out sometimes in syllogistical formats and so on.
So, yeah.
So just saying it's a decentralized cult I Don't even know I don't even know what to to set to say about that anyway, so who convinced him that West here This is the arguments he's got because this is the definition of some alt-right stuff, right?
Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists that innate IQ differences explained racial disparities and that feminism was a dangerous ideology and Okay, so could you make any arguments about that?
Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants.
Well, there are a lot of people who want less immigration as a whole.
In fact, it is the majority position in most Western countries that people want less immigration to give existing immigrants time to assimilate, time for the culture to absorb, and so on.
So, is it a far-right, decentralized, cult brainwashing thing to report on the data and the reasons why mass immigration is of concern to the majority of people in Western countries?
I mean, I don't even know what to say about that.
Innate IQ Differences Explained Racial Disparities.
This is an argument that goes back to, well, even prior to, but was encapsulated in a book called The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray and it is a very strong argument and you need to Rebut it!
You need to find some way to rebut this argument.
And I've had 18 world-class experts in the fields of human intelligence, including the former editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Intelligence, to make the case as to whether there's genetic components, whether there's environmental components and so on.
This is important information that we need to grapple with.
But of course, What do you say?
Well, you know, anyone who believes this is part of a decentralized cult.
Anybody who accepts science and reason and evidence and data and so on.
Feminism was a dangerous ideology?
See, but...
That's the thing, like, nobody that I really have listened to has just repeated, you know, 50 times, feminism is a dangerous ideology.
You make a case, you talk about the causes of it, and it's a small minority of women who call themselves feminists.
The vast majority of women are not feminists.
So again, they're taking the majority position and saying that it is somehow a form of extremism.
I mean, again, I guess maybe in this guy's world it is an extremist position to hold concerns or beliefs that the majority of people in the West hold or believe, but I don't know.
Again, there's no data.
There's no content here, no arguments, right?
And it's trying to evaluate someone's ideology by talking to someone who doesn't like it It's kind of weird, you know, like I did a whole master's thesis on the history of Western philosophy with Kant and with Hegel and with John Locke and so on.
Now I had to do a lot of reading, a lot of research, make a lot of really coherent and cogent arguments to support my thesis, which was basically that when you believe in a higher reality you often end up, or inevitably end up if you're consistent, arguing for dictatorship as the ideal political model.
I had to do a lot of work.
What I didn't do was I didn't say, I've heard of some guy who read a lot of Plato and now doesn't like Plato at all and I'm going to go and interview him about his feelings.
If I tried to submit that as any kind of intellectual exercise I would have been laughed out of the university and rightly so.
So he says, I just kept falling deeper and deeper into this and it appealed to me because it made me feel a sense of belonging, he said.
I was brainwashed.
Now, the first thing a competent reporter would do would be to say, okay, well, you know, what happened to your friends, your family, your environment, and so on, right?
And this idea that there's no threat from Marxism at all.
I mean, there are tens of thousands of outright Marxists.
In universities in the West, I would argue kind of indoctrinating the young, but you know, you may find that too harsh, but instructing the young, right?
That's a lot.
It's a lot of people who have a lot of influence over the young.
Leftists in general are in control of government education.
You can just see from the number of teachers who donate to the Democrats or the amount of money that goes from forced union dues into the Democrat or into other leftist parties.
So yeah, that's kind of a big thing.
You know, if the government, largely leftist government educational system, gets a hold of kids from the age of 5 to the age of 17, Well, that's a long time to imprint your ideas into young susceptible minds who are usually there because, well, they're certainly there because their parents generally are forced to pay for the system and are double-taxed in a sense if they try to go outside of it to private school.
So it's just kind of weird how, you know, that the left has a great deal of control over the government educational system all the way from basically daycare through postgraduate school So the idea that a couple internet videos are the big problem in terms of getting people to believe certain things?
Anyway, it's just kind of a strange thing, right?
Okay, so he says, over years of reporting on internet culture, I've heard countless versions of McCain's story.
An aimless young man, usually white, frequently interested in video games, visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction, and is seduced by a community of far-right creators.
Now, the question of radicalization is an interesting one.
The left is much more radical than the far right is at the moment.
I've made sort of the case for this before but you know all you have to do is be someone who criticizes the left and try and give a public speech and you'll find out very quickly how radical they are.
So I guess my question would be given that The far left like literally sets fires to university buildings when an anti-leftist provocateur and comedian comes to give a speech.
I don't know, arson, attacking people and so on.
That's pretty radical.
So where are the articles on how the far left gets radicalized?
Well, I haven't seen one.
I've not, I mean, I've had conversations with former Antifa members on my show to try and sort of figure out how they ended up in that situation.
But where are the articles exploring the roots of far-left radicalization?
Well, of course, there aren't.
There aren't.
Or religious fundamentalists.
Radicalization.
Well, there aren't, of course, which is why you know that this is not, it's not objective, in my opinion, at all.
Okay.
Some young men, says here, discover far-right videos by accident while others seek them out.
Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
Right?
So this is, this is the view from the left, that if you're not on the far- I don't know what this guy's politics are, although I can probably guess.
So they say, you know, anybody who's to the right of me is bigoted no matter what.
And so it's just degrees of, you know, do you want 5% neo-nazism, 10% or 50% or 100% neo-nazism?
All neo-nazism is just different levels of it, right?
And that's really a wild thing.
And it doesn't sort of point out the pathology of extremism, right?
So it's sensible to wash your hands on a regular basis, right?
After you handle food, after you go to the washroom, other times you wash your hands.
Now there's some people where they got OCD and Lady Macbeth style, they wash their hands 500 times a day.
So it's not like OCD is just further along the continuum of sensibly washing your hands, right?
But this is the way it goes.
It's like anyone to the right of me is some percentage of neo-Nazi.
And that's, I mean, that's not an argument, right?
Okay, so I also wanted to point out here as well So when I was an entrepreneur, a software executive and so on, I co-founded a software company, grew it and was involved in the sale, twice in fact, but I was talked to a lot about conflict of interest, which is important, right?
So if you're a business writer and you hold stock in a particular company and you're writing about that particular company, you need to tell your audience that There could be a potential conflict of interest.
If you write positively about a company while holding a lot of stock in that company and the stock price goes up, right, that may compromise your objectivity to some degree or another, right?
So with regards to the New York Times, All right.
Well, okay, the first thing is that in 2008, the richest guy in the world, Carlos Slim, bailed out the New York Times, effectively preventing it from sliding into bankruptcy and possibly non-existence.
Now, Carlos Slim makes a significant degree of his money by having tens of millions of people from Mexico come to live in the United States, I assume legally or illegally, and then having them send money from the U.S., which they either get through work or through welfare or some other method, sending money from the U.S.
back to their families in Mexico and then those families in Mexico then buy Carlos Slim's telecommunications and other products, right?
So Carlos Slim bailed out the New York Times and Carlos Slim makes his money to a large degree out of big immigration, open borders and a lack of enforcement of immigration controls.
Now the one thing that you can see that's quite in common with the people that the New York Times are criticizing here Is that they generally oppose open borders and are Speaking about the concerns held by many about mass immigration and its effects on the economy, its effects on the political system, it's how most immigrants will vote for the left, and so those of you who are not on the left are going to have a problem with the immigrants.
Not because you dislike immigration, but because you don't want a leftist government.
You don't want to end up like Venezuela.
So right, this is how these things work.
It's not, uh, I don't like people who come into the country.
It's like, I have challenges with people who vote for the left because the left can be very destructive economically and culturally and that's really the category that is it.
So for the New York Times to write an article that attacks people who are amplifying or reflecting the concerns of the majority of the population about non-enforcement of immigration laws and high immigration and so on, legal and illegal, For the New York Times to write an article criticizing people who are against open borders when their entire organization was probably saved by a guy who profits from open borders and lacks immigration.
It's a conflict of interest.
It's a conflict of interest.
And there's another one which I'll get to here.
Anyway, we get to this recommendation algorithm.
Right, so this is the externalization of the locus of control to some algorithm rather than people making choices, right?
So, I'm not going to... You can get into all of this.
Funny, you know, because the articles, I figure, I feature quite prominently in the article and it's not massively flattering, to put it mildly.
But I found myself having to kind of slow down and shake my head, have a shot of coffee and so on to make it through this because this analysis of the changes, potential changes, unconfirmed in many ways in YouTube's recommendation algorithm over the years, it's kind of dull, right?
Okay.
So, YouTube, whose rules prohibit free hate speech and harassment, took a more or less a fair approach to enforcement for years.
This past week, the company announced that it was updating its policy to ban videos espousing neo-Nazism, white supremacy and other bigoted views.
The company also said it was changing its recommendation to reduce the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Yeah, okay.
I mean, this is obviously before this guy's tenure, but the New York Times got a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting of Walter Durante, who was covering up The mass murders of Stalin.
So, not great as far as that goes.
They also didn't highly report on the Holocaust, to put it mildly.
And the New York Times was fairly instrumental in helping push one of the most disastrous choices in US policy or foreign policy in its entire history, which was the invasion of Iraq based upon these hallucinated weapons of mass destruction.
And so, yeah, misinformation and conspiracy theories New York Times has been pretty instrumental in pushing the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which has sharply divided America and set political camps in opposition to each other by basically repeating over and over again that Trump was somehow an illegitimate president because people
had hallucinated a bromance between Trump and Putin and so on and so yeah this um you know for the New York Times to say well you know misinformation and conspiracy theories uh they're bad and we're going to point them out over and over again listen I mean I can respect people who are going to start talking about that but if the New York Times is going to start talking about the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories They might also want to mention their own history with getting things wrong.
And not just kind of wrong, but disastrously helping to start a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people wrong.
Right?
That's kind of important.
And they've never returned the Pulitzer for the covering up of Stalin's unbelievable crimes.
All right.
So yeah, misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Anybody who's not... and they could say, listen, we've had our own issues, we promoted the Russiagate stuff, conspiracy theory of Trump's collusion with Russia to take the election, you know, we were wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and so on, so, you know, but we've put these procedures in place to make sure that never happens again, and, right, they don't, right?
They just, aha, accuse other people of what you yourself are doing, right?
Okay so yeah YouTube is outwardly liberal in its corporate politics and the CEO endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and President Trump and other conservatives have claimed that YouTube and other social media networks are biased against right-wing views and have used takedowns like those announced by YouTube on Wednesday as evidence for those claims.
Okay, so here, it is allowed... YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides.
Ah!
You see that?
On all sides.
So he's talking about hyper-partisanship on the left, right?
The far left, the extreme left, right?
The communists, the hardcore socialists and so on.
So, a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides.
So why are you only reporting... I mean, maybe there's another article coming out on left-wing.
Extremism or far-left extremism next week, although I doubt it.
But okay, so you're saying YouTube has accelerated partisanship on all sides of the political spectrum.
Okay, so why are you only talking about one relatively minor part of YouTube, right?
So anyway, okay, it's been a useful recruiting tool for far-right extremist groups blah blah blah.
Okay, so Yes, some people get their information from YouTube and Becca Lewis She did this data and society program.
I did a rebuttal to her six degrees of separation spiderweb Stuff I think it was last year that it came out.
I'll link to that below.
But anyway Okay, so this guy goes to visit.
Mr. Kane in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube videos denouncing the far-right We've spent hours discussing his radicalization.
To back up his recollections, he downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015.
Okay, so there's 12,000 videos in a couple of years.
That is... a lot.
That is... a lot.
All right, so then the right-wing content Mr. Kane viewed consisted of videos by Stefan Molyneux with titles like Social Justice Warriors Always Lie and the Global Warming Hoax.
Right.
Actually, well, and I guess this is the lack of research.
Social Justice Warriors Always Lie is a title of one of my videos, but it is actually a title of a book by Vox Dei.
So it's not, I mean, if I'm interviewing someone about their book, I may use the book title, but it's not my particular title.
Mr. Kane also watched many videos by members of the so-called intellectual dark web like the popular comedian Joe Rogan and the political commentator Dave Rubin.
Alright, during 2017, Mr. Kane began watching more videos from left-wing channels.
Right.
Okay, so is he now being radicalized by the left instead of being by the right?
No.
This guy is, of course, not going to say it, right?
Okay, so now we go back to his childhood.
He browsed 4chan, the lawless message board.
He devoured videos of intellectuals debating charged topics like the existence of God.
This is a smart young man, as a kid, right?
Smart young man.
The internet was escaped.
Mr. Kane grew up in post-industrial Appalachia, was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents.
He was smart but shy and socially awkward and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk.
He went to community college but dropped out after three semesters.
Now this, to me, is where the interesting stuff is going on with regards to this guy's history, okay?
He was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents.
Where are his parents?
That seems like a very... Did his parents die?
In some manner?
Was it a car accident?
Was it an opioid addiction?
Did they abandon him?
Where are his parents?
That, to me, is a much more interesting aspect of this fellow's personality than the YouTube videos he watched.
Because you want to get to the cause or the source of what's going on, right?
Why would he be raised by his grandparents?
And what effect did it have, not being raised by his own parents?
And why?
Where were they?
Were they around when he was young?
I mean, this is very, very important questions.
But, you know, they don't help the narrative, so... Okay, broken, depressed, he resolved to get his act together.
He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything, YouTube.
So one day in late 2014, YouTube recommended a self-help video by Stéphane Molyneux, a Canadian talk show host and self-styled philosopher.
Yeah, so self-styled philosopher.
They don't want to call me a philosopher, even though Aristotle said we are what we repeatedly do, right?
When I programmed computers for a living, I was a programmer.
Nobody said I'm a self-styled programmer.
If you make your living as a painter, do you say he's a self-styled painter?
He's a painter, right?
So anyway, okay, like Mr. Kane, Mr. Molyneux had a difficult childhood.
Now, how do we know Mr. McCain's difficult childhood?
Nothing's to be mentioned, right?
And he talked about overcoming hardships through self-improvement.
That's me, right?
He seemed smart and passionate.
And he wrestled with big questions like free will, along with practical advice on topics like dating and job interviews.
Mr. Molyneux, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, also had a political agenda.
Did I?
Did I really?
Or I'm just following reason and evidence wherever they lead?
But you see, no.
Now you can mind-read people over the internet and discover their secret, hidden political agendas, right?
He was a men's rights advocate who said that feminism was a form of socialism and that progressive gender politics were holding young men back.
You know, it's always interesting when I see the arguments that I've made reflected from other people.
I'm like, uh... Okay, so feminism was a form of socialism.
So, I have made that case in a variety of different ways.
So, just saying a conclusion without saying the reasoning is, to me, kind of lazy.
And it doesn't step people through the process of coming to a particular conclusion.
Okay.
And progressive gender politics, we're holding young men back.
I don't remember saying that, but, you know, I've done over 4,000 shows, so I don't remember saying anything in that particular run.
So, I'm an anarcho-capitalist, you see, but I'm also, what, somewhere around the far right, I have, and here you see, I'm conservative, I'm a conservative, right?
Conservative commentary on pop culture and current events.
I'm an anarcho-capitalist, which means I'm an advocate for a stateless society based upon property rights and the non-aggression principle, because that's... I mean, and it's not like I've just put that stamp on my head because that was the only thing left.
Stamp stores, like, that's what a consistent application of the non-aggression principle leads you to.
It leads you to being a free market advocate with the non-aggression principle as the foundation of your moral universe, right?
Of course, this guy doesn't talk about my biggest achievement, which is my theory of ethics, but of course, right, that's more complicated.
Okay, I explained why Disney's Frozen was an allegory about female vanity.
Or why the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer was proof of the dangers of rap culture.
No, that's not what I said, to my recollection.
So I think this is a reference to the Michael Brown shooting, where Michael Brown was like the gentle giant and so on, and I pointed out that he had some very violent rap lyrics.
So that's a way of pushing back against the narrative that he was a gentle giant.
I don't believe I ever said that the dangers of rap culture is proven by a fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
Again, you know, what people get out of what shows I do is very, very different.
McCain was a liberal who cared about social justice, worried about wealth inequality, and believed in climate change.
But he found Mr. Molyneux's diatribes fascinating, even when they disagreed.
See, they're just diatribes.
The fact that I've had pretty world-renowned experts on, say, climate, on to talk about skepticism towards particular aspects of global warming, the theory, that doesn't matter.
They're just diatribes.
It's just me ranting away, no facts, no data, no charts, no evidence, no science, no experts, no interviews, nothing.
It's just a diatribe.
He was willing to address young men's issues directly in a way I'd never heard before, Mr. Kane said.
Okay, so I thank you and I'm glad that they were helpful.
In 2015 and 2016, he dived deeper into his YouTube recommendations, an entire universe of right-wing creators.
It's like discovered an entire universe.
There's no secret portal, dude.
You just have to... Anyway, okay.
48 hour snapshot of what McCain watched in 2015.
Okay, so there's me.
And what else do we have here?
How steeped he was in far-right commentary from creators like Stefan Molyneux and Paul Joseph Watson.
So you see, I'm far-right, I'm conservative, and I'm an anarcho-capitalist.
And nobody ever has to try and square these circles, right?
What else?
He also viewed conspiracy theories and graphic violence, including a clip of a politician's 1987 suicide.
What else do we have?
Janice Fiamengo.
Feminism is a recurring theme.
An English professor argued that feminism limited basic liberties.
Some of these are unavailable because they've been deleted or they're gone or whatever.
By the end of the binge he had watched some explicitly racist videos, including some from channels that have since been banned?
I guess my question is then, so, I don't know, I mean, if the channels have been banned, how does he know the content of the videos?
I mean, did YouTube provide him with a copy?
I don't know.
All right.
And so let's see here.
Let's go back down here.
All right.
He watched dozens of clips by Stephen Crowder, a conservative comedian, Paul Joseph Watson, prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist who was bought by Facebook this year.
He became entranced by Lauren Southern, a far-right Canadian activist whom he started referring to as his fashy bae or fascist crush.
Now, come on.
I mean, come on.
This guy, this young man, the idea that you would Analyze the content of someone's philosophical or political arguments by the nickname of Someone on the internet who has a crush on her.
Oh, come on.
I mean That's not an argument at all.
She's not far, right?
Anyway, so anyway, this is just a Okay, so I'm gonna just write I'm gonna spend all day on this kind of stuff Oh, yeah, I do like this in a weird kind of way, right?
Okay, few of them had overt ties to establishment conservative groups and there was little talk about tax cuts or trade policy on their channels.
Well, I don't know about other people in particular, but I've talked a lot about tax cuts, trade policy, I do regular interviews with economists and people like Peter Schiff who really know their way around the Fed and so on, so yeah.
Instead, they rallied around issues like free speech and anti-feminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless social justice warriors.
Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera with a constant stream of new heroes and villains.
Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera with a constant stream of new heroes and villains.
I don't even know where we are in the article, because it feels like a pretty long walk through a pretty thin desert, but we haven't actually analyzed any data, any arguments, any facts.
Nothing.
Nothing.
It's all just a bunch of word salad gossipy stuff.
All right.
Okay, so you can read this algorithm stuff if you want, but there's these big complaints about the algorithm and All this stuff that changed with regards to the algorithm and all of that.
There's me again.
The Star Wars video is a prime example of how Mr. Molyneux is adept at drawing in new viewers by making political points out of pop culture.
Well, I mean, I don't know what to say.
I'm very interested in art.
I started off as an actor and a playwright and a novelist and a poet and so I I really find art fascinating and so I talk about art.
I mean, this idea that it's some sinister conspiracy theory for me to talk about art, which I'm very interested in and always have been, it's just kind of weird.
Anyway.
And combat misinformation and extreme content.
You know, and again, for me misinformation is something like weapons of mass destruction, something like the conspiracy theory regarding the Trump-Russia steal the election collusion conspiracy theory.
I mean, that's kind of a big deal, but That's not what they're talking about, of course, because there's this thing about mainstream thing, right?
Okay, so that year Mr. McCain's YouTube consumption had skyrocketed.
He got a job packing boxes at a furniture warehouse where he would listen to podcasts and watch videos by his favorite YouTube creators all day.
So he watched nearly 4,000 YouTube videos in 2016, more than double the number he had watched the previous year.
Now that's more than 10 a day, and that is a huge amount of consumption.
You know, this guy, you know, he's a smart guy, a curious guy, and so on.
You know, if he was a friend of mine, I'd be like, dude, you know, like, gotta pull back a little bit on this stuff, because, you know, that's kind of an overconsumption.
So the idea that this is somehow typical...
And certainly it's not my content because I produce very long-form content.
You couldn't possibly watch 4,000 videos of mine in a year, so it must be shorter stuff.
So he sought out videos including cars, music, cryptocurrency, trading, and so on.
And then he went real dark according to this, right?
More radical group of creators, a channel run by Jared Taylor, posted videos, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so, yeah, I've had Jared Taylor on my show.
and we had a long discussion about his views on race.
I've also had Noam Chomsky on my show, in fact twice, where he's put forward his arguments for racial discrimination by the police against blacks and so on and other topics.
So it's funny how I have Jared Taylor on my show, and this immediately, what, puts me into this particular camp.
But if I have Noam Chomsky on my show twice, well, that doesn't put me... I mean, he's on the left, right?
So, and there's things I would disagree with with Jared Taylor, just as I have things I would disagree with with Noam Chomsky.
But you see, if I have Jared Taylor on, then I'm on the right.
But if I have Noam Chomsky on twice, I'm not on the left.
This is the way that it all works, right?
Okay, so here we go.
Far-right ideology bled into his daily life, right?
So this is, again, this is the making of a radical.
He's being radicalized.
Now, in Islamic circles that means something pretty particular.
To me, on the left, that means that you're willing to go hit people with bike locks rather than prevent them speak.
That's radical!
So what's this guy doing that's so radical?
He began referring to himself as a trad con, a traditional conservative committed to old-fashioned gender norms.
He dated an evangelical Christian woman and he fought with his liberal friends.
Oh, come on.
Come on.
So, this radicalization.
So, he was raised by traditionally conservative grandparents.
He then stays or returns to traditional conservatism.
And he dates an evangelical Christian woman and he disagrees with his liberal friends.
That's his radicalization.
Now, quick question.
Do you think that being raised by traditionally conservative Christian grandparents has more of an effect on YouTube videos, right?
Maybe, maybe he was indoctrinated into leftist views in government schools and in his community college and he was deprogrammed from that kind of It's a little bit more insistent than a YouTube video because you're kind of there paying for it.
But let's say that he started off sort of conservative and religious and then he was entranced or overtaken by left-wing views and maybe, just maybe, the people on the internet he was listening to was a way of deprogramming him from all that kind of stuff.
You could certainly make that case and it would be a perfectly rational case.
It's not a case that's going to be made here.
So what's his radicalization here?
What?
Is it that radical to be a traditional conservative?
That's half the population in America.
Is it that radical to date a Christian woman?
What kind of world is this reporter living in where that's radical?
Come on!
Oh, this Zelda.
So Zelda, a friend of McCain's from high school said, it was kind of sad.
I was just like, wow, what happened?
How did you get this way?
Is this a rebuttal?
Is this an analysis of the falsehoods of the positions?
Because he keeps talking about misinformation.
So where is all this misinformation?
There should be enough of it.
You could just, you could just give, you know, five, ten bullet points.
Oh, this was thing.
This is false.
This is false.
This was worse.
Where is it all?
Instead, some friend of his, who's a liberal, says, it was kind of sad.
That's it.
That's the rebuttal.
Like, that's odd.
That's just strange to me.
Okay.
All right, so Mr. Molyneux in particular seemed to be veering further to the right.
He fixated on race realism, a favorite topic of white nationalists, and went on an InfoWars show to discuss his opposition to multiculturalism with Mr. Jones.
A multiculturalism or a massive government program to bring other cultures into one particular culture is a challenge and is a problem.
And the reason that I talk about that, which I've referred to many many times on my show, was an academic named Putman, P-U-T-M-A-N, Did a whole series of analyses of data about social cohesion and social trust and so on he sat on these Results because he found them so shocking for half a decade before publishing them showing how harmful multiculturalism is to particular neighborhoods.
So Again, you know just saying that I'm just coming up with this stuff out of nowhere.
It's like hey, don't shoot the messenger, man That's what the data shows.
So yes, there is a challenge, right?
He hosted far-right figures on his channel blah blah blah Jared Taylor, Brittany Pettibone and so on right so All right, so last year me and Lauren, Miss Southern, and you can't just refer to Miss Southern, you've got to refer to Miss, Mr. Kane's fashy bae, went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of non-white immigration.
And that is not a Really that's not the topic of our speeches at all at all.
Lauren's topic was criticisms of the media and my topic was talking about issues or dysfunctional issues within the aboriginal community within Australia and then my topic for New Zealand was going to be free speech but we were shut down by bomb threats.
So now when there was questions from the audience I would answer them honestly.
But the idea that this speech was founded, that this speaking tour was founded on these things... I don't know.
Okay, so then there's a terrible mass murderer in New Zealand and anyway, so...
Okay, so the day after my request, so yeah, neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms.
Southern replied to a request for comment.
The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters.
He denied promoting hatred of violence and said labeling him an extremist was, quote, just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.
Good thing this article proved me wrong, wouldn't you say?
Okay, as social media platforms have barred far-right activists for hate speech, harassment, and other harmful conduct, Mr. Molyneux and Ms.
Southern have become vocal free speech advocates who denounce what they call excessive censorship by social media companies.
If you ban or crush people's lawful speech, it's like a rattlesnake, Mr. Molyneux said in a video.
You cut off the rattle, but you don't cut off the head.
Yeah, look, there are really, really terrible ideas out there that are incredibly destructive, and we need to engage with those ideas.
We need to have conversations about those ideas because otherwise they go underground anyway.
So, of course, but he's reversing it like I'm sort of the snakes to some degree or whatever, right?
Okay.
Okay, so after he was watching right-wing YouTube videos, a new kind of video, left-wing creators, and so on, right?
So, this woman, Natalie Wynn, a former academic philosopher who makes left-wing YouTube videos, used humor shot in a style not unlike right-wing creators to get his attention.
Fantastic!
You know, good!
I think that's wonderful.
Good for her.
Good for her.
A debate about immigration with Lauren and Destiny and so on.
So great!
She wore elaborate costumes and did drag style performances in which she explained why Western culture wasn't under attack for immigrants or why race was a social construct.
Again, you know, good for her.
That's great.
We want as many voices in social discourse as as humanly possible, which is why I engage with people from the left and from the right.
Although, you know, people from the left don't often want to come on the show.
Unfortunately, because, you know, it's been characterized falsely as some right wingy thing.
It doesn't matter how many times I say I'm not right-wing and not a conservative, but anyway, all right.
So, the young man, he first saw these videos and her videos persuasively used research and citations to rebut the right-wing talking points he had absorbed.
Great!
You know, good!
You know, fantastic!
If research, citations, rationality, empiricism rebuts anyone's talking points, that's Wonderful.
Now, of course, I don't get the same consideration, right?
When this reporter is talking about my videos, the fact that I talk to subject matter experts, the fact that I have sources, generally academic or mainstream media sources and so on, that's not mentioned, that's not talked about, which is kind of sad.
But anyway, all right.
Okay, part of a new group of YouTubers trying to build a counterweight to YouTube's far right flank.
Ah, so are these far left?
Ah, you see, no, you see, they're just...
See, for the left, the left is factual, and the right is extremist.
Now, none of these are arguments, but that's, you know, if you want to understand it, that's the way it goes, right?
Okay, the group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin's 1892 book, The Conquest of Bread.
People like Oliver Thorne, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism, and Marxist economics.
Now, he's a philosopher.
I looked this guy up.
I couldn't find any of his education, but he did say on Twitter he was surprised to be called a philosopher, but pleased to be called a philosopher in this article.
So I guess he's somebody who does philosophy on YouTube.
He's a philosopher.
I actually have a master's degree in history, but my focus was on the history of philosophy.
So I'm a self-styled philosopher, you see, but he's just a philosopher.
I just, you know, it's important.
And, uh, yeah, he's a showman, right?
So I started watching one of his videos about Jordan Peterson and, you know, he's topless with a snake around his neck with a Satan mask on.
So it's a little creepy to me, but you know, he's a showman, so, you know, I guess more power to him.
Okay.
All right.
So, um, The right got a head start on finding ways to appeal to white men.
Now see, if you go back to the early picture, there are lots of black men and so on and so on, so.
All right.
Yeah, so now, then of course what happens is, so after he video, he uploaded his video, he began receiving threats from alt-right trolls on 4chan.
And, you know, I hate these threats.
I mean, I wish everybody would just stop with these threats.
But, of course, the idea that only people who oppose the right get threats is not true.
It's just not true at all.
But, of course, he wouldn't write about that because, again, there's a particular narrative here, right?
Okay, Simulant feels he still watches videos, dozens of YouTube videos every day, hangs on to the words of his favorite creators.
It's still difficult at times to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.
So it's interesting how it's in the narrative that I get out of this It's like, well, he was into this right-wing stuff and now he's being cured by this left-wing stuff and he's better.
And it's like, well, why isn't it that, like, if he'd started with the left and ended up on the right, because he started on the left, right?
He was a liberal.
And then he ended up, I don't know, wherever this characterization puts it, this writer would put it, I think, on the right.
And so at the beginning he was on the left and then he was on the right.
Then he's gone back to the left.
Now, I guess originally, very originally, he would be conservative because of his grandparents, I would assume, right?
So he started on the right, went to the left, went to the right, now he's back on the left.
But you see, every time he goes to the right, it's radicalization.
Every time he comes on the left, he's cured, right?
Again, this is not too shocking if you understand how this mindset works, so to speak, right?
Now, near the end of my interview I told I found it odd he'd successfully climbed out of a right-wing YouTube rabbit hole only to jump into a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole.
And yeah, cut back on video intake altogether, rebuild some of our offline relationships, and that's... I think that's great.
But yeah, so now he's talking about a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole.
So is he now going to be radicalized by the left?
Well, that's not a question that's really going to be asked.
So I've learned you can't go to YouTube and think that you're getting some kind of education because you're not.
Well, no, that's not true at all.
There are tons of actual university lectures that are uploaded to YouTube that you can get a hold of.
There are people who have videos with graphs and charts and citations.
Yes, you can.
So here is a very important aspect of the article and something where I think it would be Maybe you're slightly more honest to put a sidebar up about this conflict of interest.
So here, the writer for the New York Times says, YouTube's recommendation system is not set in stone.
The company makes many small changes every year and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from, quote, authoritative sources, end quote, over conspiracy theories and partisan content.
This past week the company announced that it would expand that approach so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged towards videos from more authoritative news sources.
Okay, so authoritative sources.
So the translation of that is that YouTube is aiming to switch people more to mainstream news outlets.
Like who?
That's right, like the New York Times.
Right?
So here's the conflict of interest.
The New York Times is taking direct aim at a competitor.
Right?
Because if the New York Times can smear Small person, entrepreneurial commentators on current events or whatever, right?
If they can smear those people, then it's more likely that YouTube can be convinced to switch the algorithm to promote people kind of like the New York Times, which gives the New York Times more ad revenue, more income, more views, more eyeballs, a bigger stock value, and so on, right?
So that's Very much a conflict of interest, right?
And again, it doesn't mean that they can't write about this stuff, of course, right?
I mean, but I think they should point out that if this article is accepted as gospel, then the likelihood is that the value of the New York Times as competitors will go down and the value of the New York Times will go up.
And, you know, the cynical part of me says, well, maybe that's the entire reason behind The article or maybe there's something else.
So yeah, that's I just wanted to sort of mention all of this stuff.
I normally don't respond to this kind of stuff, but this seemed kind of like a I don't know somewhat somewhat important a deal and it does encapsulate a lot of things.
So yeah, I'm not a white nationalist.
I have skepticism towards a giant Massive indebted government program called mass immigration because there's no money in the kitty for Western countries and mass immigration to me is incredibly cruel because it brings people into an unsustainable economy and it's bad for in particular the poor and minorities in the West because it drives down wages and so on.
And if you want to help refugees in the Middle East, you can help 12 refugees in the Middle East for every one person you bring to America.
So there's cases to be made.
There's reasonable arguments and discussions to be had about a variety of these topics.
And just trying to say, you know, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, far right, far right, far right, to me, it's a terrible disservice to civilization, civilization, Civilization you see of course is where we we sit down and we agree to reason with each other.
We agree to say we're not going to smear, we're not going to attack, we're not going to just try and destroy people's reputations or get them deplatformed.
What we're going to do is going to sit down and have a debate about the facts, about reason, about evidence.
If we do that We get to keep this wonderful thing called civilization.
If we don't do that, if we start shutting people down and insulting and smearing them out of public discourse, we don't get to keep that civilization.
And by the time it all falls apart, If it does, and I'm working very, very hard, my very, very heart is to ensure that we keep the dialogue and the conversation going about these essential issues.
If we fail at that, if we surrender to sophistry and insults and sneers and we don't engage in intellectual content and we don't submit and subject our beliefs and perspectives and opinions to the twin dictatorship of reason and evidence, if we don't do that, When it falls apart, it's too late to go back and fix it.
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