For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio

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For the New Far Right, YouTube Has Become the New Talk Radio
By JOHN HERRMANAUG. 3, 2017


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From a video on Paul Joseph Watson’s Youtube channel YouTube
In June, Zack Exley, a political organizer and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, published a report on “Black Pigeon Speaks,” a political commentator on YouTube. In Exley’s judgment, B.P.S. is emblematic of a marginal but ascendant sort of YouTube figure — a type that is becoming a meaningful force in the practice of politics online. B.P.S. has, by any objective standard, a significant and engaged audience; at the moment, he has about 215,000 followers, and his uploads have been viewed more than 25 million times. In an introductory video, he describes himself as something like a pundit or an analyst: “I attempt to make sense out of the increasingly nonsensical world we all share,” he says of his channel. “I try and be only as offensive as I need to be.” His videos are unhurried, heavy on explanation and argument, regularly stretching over the 10-minute mark. And, as Exley notes, his politics skew right. Hard right:

He is a traditionalist in many ways, and is positive about Christianity as a cultural force and foundation of Western civilization, but he is not a Christian. He defies the postwar “fusion” of classical libertarianism and evangelical Christianity. B.P.S. believes in a global conspiracy of central bankers led by the Rothschilds who are driving immigration into predominantly white countries to increase the pool of “debt slaves” and to drive down wages; thinks that “cultural Marxism” is a Jewish conspiracy that is undermining Western civilization; and believes that women being allowed to do whatever they want, including choosing their own mates, is the deathblow to Western civilization.

Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or ***** (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right. This community takes the form of a loosely associated group of channels and personalities, connected mostly by shared political instincts and aesthetic sensibilities. They are monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the “mainstream media,” against which they are defined and empowered. They deplore “social justice warriors,” whom they credit with ruining popular culture, conspiring against the populace and helping to undermine “the West.” They are fixated on the subjects of immigration, Islam and political correctness. They seem at times more animated by President Trump’s opponents than by the man himself, with whom they share many priorities, if not a style. Some of their leading figures are associated with larger media companies, like Alex Jones’s Infowars or Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media. Others are independent operators who found their voices in the medium.

To the extent that these personalities challenge their viewers, it’s to commit even more deeply to what their intuitions already tell them is true — not despite those opinions’ rejection from mainstream liberal thought, but because of it. Theirs is a potent and time-tested strategy. Unpopular arguments can benefit from being portrayed as forbidden, and marginal ideas are more effectively sold as hidden ones. The zealous defense of ideas for which audiences believe they’re seen as stupid, cruel or racist is made possible with simple inversion: Actually, it’s everyone else who is stupid, cruel or racist, and theirconsensus” is a conspiracy intended to conceal the unspoken feelings of a silent majority. Trump has developed an intuition for this kind of audience cultivation; so have countless pundits, broadcasters, salespeople and politicians of different populist political stripes. But Exley, in his final analysis of B.P.S., points to an especially apt historical parallel: conservative talk radio. “Fixated as they are with Fox News,” he says, “liberals, scholars and pundits have failed to give talk radio — which is almost wholly conservative — its due, even though it’s now nearly three decades old and reaches millions each day. They now stand to miss a new platform that, so far, is also dominated by the right wing.”

The radio comparison is a useful one. Talk radio’s growth followed decades of deregulation and disruptive opportunity: the rise of FM radio during the late 1960s and ’70s, the abandonment by music stations of the low-fidelity AM band and the 1987 revocation of the Fairness Doctrine, a rule through which the Federal Communications Commission attempted to regulate a sort of balance into content produced by licensed broadcasters. The subsequent rise of conservative talk radio, typified by superstars like Rush Limbaugh, had enormous influence and continues to attract millions of listeners a day, well into the internet era. Its style, once novel, is now familiar. There’s the casual, knowing rapport with listeners; the baggy, multihour shows, which double as news digests; the moralizing monologues that transition seamlessly into jokey rants and asides. But something about the medium seems to favor the right. Repeated, strenuous attempts by liberal broadcasters to replicate conservative talk radio formats have not fared well. Air America, which was launched in 2004 and shuttered in 2010, helped propel talent into other venues — Rachel Maddow to television, Al Franken to the Senate — but failed as a sustainable answer to combative conservative talk radio. AM opened a space for reaction, but seemed to have no room for the counterreaction.

YouTube’s political context is similar in some notable ways: the value it places on personalities; its reliance on monologue and repetition; its isolation and immunity from direct challenge; its promise to let listeners in on the real, secret story. Both are obsessed with persuasion and conversion, combined with a giddy disbelief at the sheer stupidity of liberals, who — and this is part of the fun — aren’t listening. Comparing YouTube to talk radio is also a useful reminder of how potent a medium can become while still appearing marginal to those who don’t care for it or know much about it. For listeners of conservative talk radio — where right-wing populist rhetoric has flourished for decades, and where hosts can get away with authoritarian flirtations and xenophobic rhetoric that mainstream politicians can’t — the rise of Donald Trump was somewhat less of a surprise than it was for many others.

The YouTube right may be comparatively marginal and ragtag, but it’s also comparatively young. If talk radio primed listeners for Trump’s style and anticipated the American right’s current obsessions, the YouTube right is acquainting viewers with a more international message, attuned to a global revival of explicitly race-and-religion-based, blood-and-soil nationalism. Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars, 35, is perhaps the archetypal YouTube-right vlogger; he has nearly a million followers, and his videos have been viewed more than 215 million times. He has in the last month published videos with titles including “Staged Video Shows ‘Refugee’ Fake Drowning,” “Finsbury Mosque Terror: What They’re NOT Telling You,” “The Truth about Refugees” and “Why Leftists Submit to Terror.” The scripts for these videos are straightforward nativist polemics, with a particular focus on Europe — Watson is from Northern England — delivered in a relentlessly insistent tone, and quite close to the camera. Watson posts extended “roasts” of his political villains, as well as rants that betray a peculiar blend of self-taught reaction: against pop culture, broadly, but also against “modern architecture” and “modern art.” If one video sums up what a receptive viewer might take from subscribing to his channel, it’s “Some Cultures are Better than Others.”
 

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PART 2:

Watson frequently suggests that ideologies like his represent a sort of new counterculture and boasts about the right wing’s dominance on the YouTube platform. “Twitter is a tiny echo chamber,” he tweeted earlier this year. “I’m not sure the left understand the monumental ass-whupping being dished out to them on YouTube.” And in terms of sheer numbers and visibility on the platform, the YouTube right is substantial. Among the wide range of pundits, ideologues and highly YouTube-specific personalities, a few archetypal examples appear.

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From a 2017 video on Lauren Southern’s YouTube channel. YouTube
There’s Stefan Molyneux (around 644,000 subscribers, with videos totaling around 118 million views), an Irish-Canadian who, like Watson, has civilizational, apocalyptic fixations — “The Truth About The Paris Terrorist Attack,” “The Death of Germany,” “What Pisses Me Off About Fake News” — but tends to linger on purported sins of rhetoric, fallacy and logic. He is especially fond of the phrase “Not an argument!” and has pinned a video at the top of his channel titled “Take The Red Pill,” a reference to a scene in the science-fiction film “The Matrix,” in which the protagonist is asked to make a choice between remaining ensconced in a comfortable illusion and being exposed to a harsher reality. (The term was adopted by men’s rights activists to describe their awakening to what they call an antimale bias in society, but it has become a versatile metaphor for reactionary political activation: against feminism, against immigration, against social justice, against the media.)

Lauren Southern (310,000 subscribers), who previously worked with Rebel Media, a right-wing Canadian media company, is something of a roving correspondent, making recent stops in France (“Paris Train Station Overwhelmed With Migrants”), Germany (“Getting Stalked at #G20”) and California (“BATTLE OF BERKELEY”). According to recent videos, she is preparing to join and document the #DefendEurope campaign, a civilian “identitarian humanitarian” effort to intercept refugee boats in the Mediterranean and “make sure that they will be brought back to Africa.”

And Stephen Crowder (830,000 subscribers) is a right-wing comedian and talk-show host whose act is built almost exclusively around saying things he imagines liberals won’t allow him to say, and formulating some of these things into “pranks.” In practice, this means videos with names like “#SJW Feminist Festival Crashed By Crowder ... In Underwear,” and “HIDDEN CAM: ‘Stealing’ Illegal Immigrant’s Jobs!” Crowder, whose chuckling, boyish presentation contrasts with his peers’ more pedantic affectations, nonetheless shares many of their causes. His YouTube profile concludes, proudly, “Hippies and Muslims hate me!”

There are countless other forms of political expression on YouTube, but no bloc is anywhere near as organized or as assertive as the YouTube right and its dozens of obdurate vloggers. Nor is there a coherent group on the platform articulating any sort of direct answer to this budding form of reaction — which both validates this material in the eyes of its creators and gives it room to breathe, grow and assert itself beyond its immediate vicinity.

Just ask YouTube itself. In mid-July, the company launched “YouTube Creators for Change,” which it described as “global initiative dedicated to amplifying and multiplying the voices of role models who are tackling difficult social issues with their channels.” Its roster included YouTube personalities from various subcultures — style bloggers, essayistic vloggers, comedians, musicians — and its stated intention was to drive “greater awareness and productive conversations around social issues.” It was an openly and moderately progressive project, in a familiar corporate tradition. It was also rolled out alongside a broader campaign on the site to counter “extremist” content. The ostensible target of that campaign was videos promoting terrorism. But a recent post from YouTube invokes Creators for Change in the service of somewhat broader goals, promising “tougher treatment to videos that aren’t illegal but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.”

The YouTube right has portrayed statements like this as a regulatory threat — a precursor to censorship, or perhaps as some latter-day, private analogue to the Fairness Doctrine. Its members believe that their videos and accounts are doomed to be banned, delisted or stripped of lucrative ads, effectively diminishing their presence on the platform. But for the moment, in Creators for Change, the right also saw a narrative opportunity. In response videos, YouTube and its owner, Google, were cast as an oppressive establishment forcing left-wing politics into users’ feeds. Black Pigeon Speaks published his own video, “#CreatorsForChange — YouTube Propaganda Gets REKT — Yet Again,” in which he quickly segued from the platform’s campaign to a brazen claim that “diversity always leads to fractured societies that always break down.” The comments on YouTube’s original video introducing the program were rapidly flooded with bile. “Meet the rainbow coalition of YouTubers who hate white people!” read one top-voted comment. “I never hated diversity until media began to forcefully push it down my throat,” read another.

It was, for the YouTube right, an expression of power — internal to YouTube, to be sure, but projected outward into the platform’s wider world in a visible and disconcerting way. Its members had, in their view, fended off an intrusion into a venue over which they feel a real and potentially lasting claim. Watson, who frequently portrays his political cohort as victims of censorship on YouTube and elsewhere, tallied the moment as a victory for his team. He captured a collage of negative comments and posted it on Twitter, alongside a laughing emoji. “Politically active YouTube users are so beyond red-pilled,” he wrote, “they’ve basically made it a right-wing safe space.”
 

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If you listen to Paul Joseph Watson and don't agree with him in MOST instances. . . Something is wrong with you. Dude is on point.
 

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How you gonna ROFL with a hollow back?
If you listen to Paul Joseph Watson and don't agree with him in MOST instances. . . Something is wrong with you. Dude is on point.
Dude is an angry white male, hates people of color, hates immigrants, hates women, hates everybody that he sees as attributing to the "discrimination" of the straight, white, male. He is a fukking piece of sh!t puzzy, that prolly never had a fight, got laid, or interacted with people of different cultures. That pure, unadulterated hate had to be triggered by something other than trying to monetize talking points, like Alex Jones.
 

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YouTube is owned by Google.

Google leans left.

Even still there is not a single group, political or otherwise, doesn't take to YouTube now.

Yes, republicans use YouTube too. Don't know how this is exactly news.
 
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