Nick Fuentes is the latest victim of YouTube's ongoing campaign of de-platforming, and we discuss why this is a problem, and what it means for the future of the incel movement. We also discuss modern heresy and modern deplatforming.
00:02:33.720And that inconsistency is a kind of feature, not a bug, of the system.
00:02:38.620When we don't, you know, if they would just simply ban everyone to the right of Jeb Bush, we could then know what the rules were and go on to another platform.
00:02:48.480But this inconsistency, ambiguity, it creates an overall chilling effect where, you know, I can put up a video and say, oh, this is really good.
00:02:59.180I bet we're going to get, you know, 25,000 views.
00:03:03.460And also, I could think I'm going to upload the same video, and my whole channel is going to be taken down, and I'll lose all of this investment that I put into the platform.
00:03:14.500It is really psychologically damaging.
00:03:18.480So, anyway, let's talk first about the NIC situation, and then let's talk about the de-platforming issue on a more theoretical or policy basis.
00:04:28.740Because, to me, like, I kind of would have just expected that there was, like, dedicated Antifa flagging all these videos every day anyway.
00:04:36.020But, I mean, even if that was the case, that he got banned for that, I mean, you can look at someone like James Alsop.
00:04:55.760So, it is this, yeah, it is this problem of YouTube won't make clear what the guidelines are.
00:05:02.000But that's definitely intentional because it does lead to this kind of paranoia and self-policing and, you know, distance.
00:05:08.920Are they going to put work into building a channel and put work into making videos if they know that at any time they could be given the chop like that?
00:05:16.900But, you know, it's the year of an election and this isn't really an issue.
00:05:21.320And you kind of wonder, like, have, you know, has the right missed a trick in not bringing this front and centre?
00:05:27.480Because, I don't know, this could so easily be a central election issue.
00:05:31.840I mean, even if there was a candidate like Andrew Yang that kind of ran a sort of quixotic campaign on tech censorship,
00:05:39.460and much as Yang was focused on the issue of AI taking jobs, if someone was focused on the power these oligarchs have.
00:06:55.920I mean, anyone that has any pretense of believing in liberalism or liberal democracy.
00:07:01.000I mean, you know, liberalism, you read someone like Habermas and, you know, how important dialogue.
00:07:06.800And, like, in early liberalism, the coffee houses was where liberalism was birthed, if you believe, you know, the liberal genealogy of this.
00:07:15.440And it was these free speech places where people could go and buy their coffee and newspaper and discuss the issues of the day.
00:07:21.820And we don't really have a public space anymore.
00:08:15.640So, yeah, you're much, that's way older than, you know, the Zoomer crowd who are, you know, 16, you know, living in a chat room, effectively.
00:08:25.340But I can remember all these things in the sense that I worked for a brick-and-mortar publication for a time after I left graduate school in 2007.
00:08:37.360I worked for the American Conservative, and I went to work at 9 a.m. and left at 5, and we produced a real publication, et cetera.
00:08:44.320But basically, everything that I have done since then has been digital.
00:09:56.500And so Silicon Valley was unquestionably helping dissonant movements, the alt-right, up until 2016-ish when, I mean, I got banned from Twitter in 2016, and then I was allowed back on.
00:10:15.000They basically said, you can just have this one.
00:10:16.900And in 2017, basically, you know, a ton of bricks were falling down on us in the sense of mostly getting banned from payment platforms, getting kicked off bank accounts.
00:10:30.520I've been kicked off a dozen bank accounts of large and small banks.
00:10:36.260And they just put us in this digital gulag, and, you know, we benefited from it.
00:10:47.100We went into this digital prison, and we're like, oh, look how fun it is.
00:12:03.900But I really get, I do have some sympathy for him.
00:12:09.640And I really, we're all in that same exact situation that he is in.
00:12:15.080And I think we need to kind of have a, you know, have a little bit of solidarity on this issue and make this the one issue that we can actually all agree on.
00:12:24.640Whether we want to go, I mean, I don't believe in this, you know, liberal notions of free speech, but just in terms of our very survival, we need to demand our ability to exist on these platforms.
00:12:40.820I mean, I did notice a problem as well, like, when RedEyes got shut down.
00:12:45.720I mean, you know, RedEyes had over 300,000 subscribers, which is four or five times bigger than Fuentes' audience.
00:12:52.300But there wasn't really a huge backlash because it's gotten to the stage, and this isn't right, that when someone like RedEyes gets shut down, people kind of go, well, we saw that coming.
00:13:01.080And they might make noise about it for a day, but then they move on.
00:13:03.820And, yeah, I mean, if there was any kind of cohesion, I mean, if there was a sizable, you know, whatever amount of people there is in the distant right, surely there'd be a sizable enough number to pledge abstention from the 2020 election unless Trump did something about this.
00:13:19.180So I don't know what difference that would make, but, you know, it would be something.
00:13:22.120And maybe that's the space for a distant movement now is to sort of kind of quixotically try and meme single issues like that into the public sphere.
00:13:30.980The problem is people like Nick Fuentes, and to a far lesser degree, but kind of to a degree of RedEyes, are pushing against the notion of acting like that.
00:14:09.060I noticed a distinct trend of theirs of talking about demographics, which is the red herring, seemingly pragmatic, but ultimately red herring thing of just playing the optics game.
00:14:22.120They're a problematic newspaper because on the one hand, they want to be the newspaper that's the radical right newspaper that's rebellious against the leftist establishment and all this kind of thing.
00:14:31.480And they will go for that and they will they will do sensationalist articles that are about that, that are pro-Brexit or whatever, in an extreme way.
00:14:39.460But then on the other hand, some at some point, someone at the hierarchy says, oh, no, we better jump on this bandwagon of political correctness.
00:14:47.360Otherwise, we'll look bad and it might be bad for sales or whatever.
00:14:50.040And so then you can get the other extreme, almost like they're overcompensating for the perception that they're this right wing newspaper that you're not allowed to cite on Wikipedia or whatever.
00:14:58.120They overcompensate by being really, really woke on certain things.
00:15:01.120So they're a very schizophrenic newspaper in some way.
00:15:04.180Yeah. And again, I've not I don't really need to go on red ice at this point and I don't have anything against them.
00:15:10.720But I think it's somewhat telling that I am kind of persona non grata.
00:15:16.360I mean, whatever. I don't really care.
00:15:18.900I would add that people have been saying that they never got a strike.
00:16:39.440We are saying things that go against the grain.
00:16:43.140We aren't just normal, you know, in the worst sense of that word.
00:16:48.180And but we demand our existence online.
00:16:51.240And that's how we could play this game.
00:16:53.080I think it's very hard to play that game at this point.
00:16:55.500And with the movement such as it is, also, I mean, I think it's it's it's it's clearly a ever present danger to democracy.
00:17:04.380If if if certain extra governmental elements such as trade unions in the 60s and 70s in the UK, such as the multicultural lobby, whatever, become too powerful.
00:17:19.420That's why in England we have the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, because the attitude is that if a company becomes too too powerful, has too much of a monopoly on the market, it's a danger to a democratic free society.
00:17:30.580And so it has to be broken up for some reason in Finland.
00:17:33.300They don't seem to have a monopoly to Mergers Commission.
00:17:35.580And so a vast percentage of shops in this country are part of a duopoly of two groups, the S group and the K group.
00:18:00.160And so I think there is a very good case for anybody, whether you are left wing and you object to the capitalism, whatever element, or whether you are right wing and you're in favor of free speech.
00:18:10.100That these things should be broken up, or they should be compelled in America to comply to American law on free speech.
00:18:17.560I mean, YouTube banned YouTube banned the speech by Rand Paul.
00:18:21.340I don't know, was it today or yesterday that he met in Congress?
00:18:24.400It's like, this is just absolutely ridiculous.
00:18:26.520And the people like Elizabeth Warren and a couple others who have demonized Mark Zuckerberg in particular and talked about monopolistic practices and so on have been doing really the worst possible – they have the worst take on this.
00:18:42.520Which is that you're a monopoly, and we demand that you do more censoring.
00:18:50.480And I actually kind of get it in the sense of like outright fake news.
00:18:56.920It's just like there are people who, particularly in 2016, who were just putting out clearly incorrect news items and so on.
00:19:06.480You know, the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump.
00:19:10.420Or, you know, there's the Pizzagate thing.
00:19:13.780There are all these things that, you know, I kind of get where they're coming from.
00:19:18.080But their, again, their general impulse is you need to censor more people, you know, or else we're going to go after you as a monopoly.
00:19:26.560Whereas the only way for this to work for us is something like an opposite approach, which is basically saying you are not just some company.
00:19:38.180You are using the infrastructure of the government, which is the internet, period.
00:19:45.400And you are a more than just some company.
00:21:15.480Oscar Wilde wrote an essay against charity.
00:21:18.020You know, don't give to charity because then you're just, you're sustaining these people and it's the system that's putting them on the street.
00:21:23.980Leave them to starve and then, you know, let the system's guilt sort of take care of it systematically.
00:22:14.600When I did these conferences at the Reagan building, which were really great but very expensive, they would give you the price and then they would tell you the tip.
00:22:25.280And then it's kind of like, what is that?
00:22:28.780So that 20% is just built in and it's non-voluntary.
00:23:10.320Probably even the telecom system should probably be privatised.
00:23:13.400And I think that it should be, when these kind of institutions have such a monopoly, they should be either compelled to abide by the laws of the society, i.e.
00:23:24.480you could only be chucked off YouTube if you have to make a police complaint.
00:23:28.460If you've been literally cited murder or engaged in what a court.
00:23:36.060However kind of edgy, I think he talked about a car accident with someone.
00:23:41.160I mean, however kind of distasteful it was, it is not something that would be illegal in a public space.
00:23:48.920So it is illegal in a public space for me to go up to someone and start just yelling at them and harassing them and telling them I'm going to kill them and whatever.
00:24:00.800If you do that on YouTube, if Nick or anyone does that on YouTube, they should be actually at the very least banned for a time or have that video removed.
00:24:10.300But what he did was simply not, did not rise to that level.
00:24:16.520It might have risen perhaps to a TOS level.
00:24:19.780But the fact is the terms of service are so, no one reads them.
00:24:31.500And just the simple solution is to say what you can legally do on a public sidewalk, you should be able to do on one.
00:24:40.420So I had this video, the first one, the first time I got a warning was I did a video that was a critique of this ludicrous book by Angela Saini, this book in theory, which all I did was start off by doing an impression of her, which I think is perfectly reasonable.
00:24:55.400Why the hell shouldn't I do an impression of her?
00:24:56.800I did an impression of her, and then I just went in detail, in tremendous detail about everything that was wrong with her book, and then I wrapped up in actually quite a nice way.
00:25:05.400But this groupie of hers called Jess Wade, who's a Jewish physicist or something at Imperial College London, and is really like a lover, really loves this Angela Saini woman, a real kind of worshipper of her, wears a T-shirt on her Twitter picture with the name of Saini's book on it.
00:25:24.300And she just got released, she tweeted, this is disgusting.
00:25:28.020When someone uses the word disgusting, you know there's something going on.
00:26:20.080And the bimbo that I was corresponding with, the person that worked with him, said, oh, the community guidelines rules are different from the monetization rules.
00:26:28.260And I was like, yes, but you're saying that under your rules, something can be okay for advertisers to want to advertise on it, but also be hate speech.
00:26:39.640I had a shitposting page on Facebook a few years ago that was shut down four different times and then reinstated four different times on appeals.
00:26:47.780So, like, it's a really Kafkaesque reality where you don't know who's making the decision.
00:26:53.220You don't know what the guidelines are.
00:26:55.160You don't know why it's been reinstated.
00:26:56.820You don't know if it's going to be gone again.
00:26:58.880And it's just this constant sort of paranoia and nervousness.
00:27:52.980I have not—I don't—this is apparently a lifetime ban.
00:27:59.200I mean, there's nothing you can really do to get back outside of pulling a full Christian Piccionili and, in Christian's case, you know, just lying and kissing ass and so on.
00:28:11.780Um, and just totally apologizing and going in the total reverse way.
00:28:17.120But I couldn't do a video—let's say I was a little bit tipsy or angry or whatever and I did something that was stupid.
00:28:25.620I would simply be banned for life for that one little instance, whereas you are not just removed from society if you steal a car or do drunk driving or whatever.
00:28:38.860You have to murder someone in cold blood in order to be removed from the world.
00:28:50.420It's a—you've got to think about it in a historical context.
00:28:53.020What we're dealing with is a replacement religion.
00:28:54.940What we're dealing with, to a certain extent, is Christianity, is the second religiousness that Spengler talks about, which is that it takes aspects of the first religiousness and sort of revives them in some mutated form.
00:29:08.980And the worst thing is that with this, it takes away the God.
00:29:12.020It takes away the moral God that's telling you to act in this moral way and not in this moral way.
00:29:17.080And it creates this kind of moral realism where you worship certain concepts and you're either in the group or you're not in the group.
00:29:23.360And you will know implicitly that something's hate speech or it's not.
00:29:26.640That's why they don't need to define what hate speech is, because if you are—it's a marker of group membership.
00:29:31.800A Christian—a Christian fundamentalist, Pentecostals will talk about, you know, I think the Holy Spirit is not with him.
00:29:38.660And it's just—it's a phrase I've heard used in my field work.