The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

NY Times Advocates Censorship by Reporting on ‘Far Right’ YouTube

Posted on | June 10, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Did I ever mention I can’t stand watching YouTube videos? As a means of communication, the written word is my preferred medium; it is more time-efficient, because I can read faster than anyone can talk. Even Ben Shapiro, who talks so fast I can barely keep up, talks slower than I can read. Give me the transcript of an hour-long YouTube video, and I’ll quickly skim through it, picking out whatever facts are most of interest to me, in a mere fraction of the time it would take to watch the video. So I almost never watch YouTube videos, and thus my intellectual diet is not impacted by the Left’s demonetizing and deplatforming crusades.

Neverthless, there are many millions of people — particularly young people — for whom YouTube is a habit, and the New York Times recently assigned reporter Kevin Roose to do an in-depth story on how 26-year-old Caleb Cain was “radicalized” by watching right-wing YouTube videos:

The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and 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.
Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.
One day in late 2014, YouTube recommended a self-help video by Stefan Molyneux, a Canadian talk show host and self-styled philosopher.
Like Mr. Cain, Mr. Molyneux had a difficult childhood, and he talked about overcoming hardships through self-improvement. 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. 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. He offered conservative commentary on pop culture and current events, explaining 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.”
Mr. Cain 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.
“He was willing to address young men’s issues directly, in a way I’d never heard before,” Mr. Cain said.
In 2015 and 2016, as Mr. Cain dived deeper into his YouTube recommendations, he discovered an entire universe of right-wing creators. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which is not-so-subtly advocating censorship of anyone in that “entire universe of right-wing creators” — in other words, anything on YouTube that might persuade you to vote Republican should be banned, according to the New York Times.

Just by the way, it is a fact — not merely an opinion espoused by Stefan Molyneux — that feminism is a form of socialism. Anyone who cares to research the origins of the modern feminist movement will discover that it arose from radical New Left of the 1960s. There are entire books, written by feminists themselves, documenting this history. Quite simply, feminists adapted Marxist theory (i.e., the class struggle between the industrial proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie) to claim that the real “class struggle” was between women and the patriarchal oppression of “male supremacy.” Nor is it controversial to say that “progressive gender politics” is harmful to the interests of young men. One thing feminists borrowed from Marxism is a zero-sum-game mentality which justifies anything harmful to men (i.e., the collective oppressors) as beneficial to the “empowerment” of women. This is why, for example, feminists whipped up the “campus rape epidemic” mob hysteria to deprive male college students of due process-rights, so that any male student could be automatically expelled from college on the basis of mere accusation of sexual misconduct. Deliberate falsehoods like the UVA gang-rape hoax were promoted as part of a feminist propaganda campaign to demonize male students as rapists. Given the abundant evidence that feminism is an anti-male hate movement, why does the New York Times portray Stefan Molyneaux’s critique of feminism as controversial? Perhaps because backlash against feminism helped defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016? Perhaps because reporters like Kevin Roose are Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and this whole article about “radicalization” is just an attempt to help Democrats silence their opponents? Douglas Murray points out that Caleb Cain’s “radicalization” was harmless:

He isn’t a school shooter. He isn’t a mosque or synagogue shooter. The NYT writes of how by November 2016 the subject’s ‘transformation was complete’ but this ‘transformation’ resulted in nothing, other than watching YouTube videos.
This isn’t news. It isn’t even fully informed or nuanced analysis. It is simply another demonstration of the double-standard, drive-by shootings that parts of the media are willing to perform in this inglorious stage of its history. A habit which, funnily enough, demonstrates why people might be becoming skeptical — and moving online — in the first place.

If the only result of watching right-wing YouTube videos is that you watch more right-wing YouTube videos, why is the New York Times devoting so much journalistic effort to this phenomenon? If you want to discuss a genuinely dangerous online problem, how about the way vulnerable teenagers are getting sucked into the transgender cult?

 

Oh, but the New York Times is pro-transgender, so if your 15-year-old daughter starts demanding you call her “Josh” and wants to inject herself with testosterone and get a mastectomy, it would be “right-wing” (and therefore bad) for you to disapprove. Also, there’s a pretty good chance your transgender child would vote Democrat, so the New York Times would never do anything to discourage them.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

Category: New York Times

Comments

One Response to “NY Times Advocates Censorship by Reporting on ‘Far Right’ YouTube”

  1. Daybook – Dark Brightness
    June 11th, 2019 @ 5:29 am

    […] Did I ever mention I can’t stand watching YouTube videos? As a means of communication, the written word is my preferred medium; it is more time-efficient, because I can read faster than anyone can talk. Even Ben Shapiro, who talks so fast I can barely keep up, talks slower than I can read. Give me the transcript of an hour-long YouTube video, and I’ll quickly skim through it, picking out whatever facts are most of interest to me, in a mere fraction of the time it would take to watch the video. So I almost never watch YouTube videos, and thus my intellectual diet is not impacted by the Left’s demonetizing and deplatforming crusades. Neverthless, there are many millions of people — particularly young people — for whom YouTube is a habit, […]