Sunday morning, New Yorkers woke to a front page lead story of a young, dare I say ‘white’, fellow ‘radicalised’, ‘seduced’ and even ‘brainwashed’ by ‘far-right’ monologues watched on YouTube, and his resultant journey to near-extremism and back, complete with references to the Christchurch shootings.
The story reeks of make-believe. It’s a fake-news pile-on against conservative viewpoints and commenters. It takes till very late in the story for our young anti-hero to reveal his motivation: “He wants to show young men a way out of the far right before more white nationalist violence ensues.”
We are asked to believe that our man Caleb, from Appalachia, a region long the butt of New Yorker’s jokes, a former punk and “a liberal who cared about social justice, worried about wealth inequality and believed in climate change” was drawn to the dark side by evil, mind-controlling, conservatives.
Watching videos almost constantly “In all, he watched nearly 4,000 YouTube videos in 2016”, about eighty per-week, Caleb became ‘transformed’:
By the night of Nov. 8, 2016, Mr. Cain’s transformation was complete. He spent much of the night watching clips of Ms. Clinton’s supporters crying after the election was called in Mr. Trump’s favor. His YouTube viewing history shows that at 1:41 a.m., just before bed, he turned on a live stream hosted by Mr. Crowder, with the title “TRUMP WINS!”
“It felt like a punk-rock moment, almost like being in high school again,” Mr. Cain said.
NYTimes
If that’s not awful enough, worse was to come: “He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.” Oh, dear.
I think you’ll agree, our far-right radical friend had indeed descended to dreadful obnoxion listening to all the ‘extreme’ views of Messrs Petersen, Molyneaux et al; the labels and libels fly throughout the spittle-flecked piece in revolting repetition: ‘racist’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynist’, ‘hateful’, ‘far-right’.
Luckily our ‘radical’ is saved, Hallelujah, before venturing to anything more dangerous than watching ‘TRUMP WINS’ and dating a Christian lady.
His road back to the real anti-extremist world begins watching far more suitable content like “Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.”
Inspired purely by altruism, hoping to spread the word on ‘Marxist economics’ and other towering left achievements our former ‘radical’ right-winger starts his own channel, “After the New Zealand shooting, Mr. Cain decided to try to help” joining a cohort that refer to themselves as “Bread Tube”…”a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.”
Yes; that’s actually radical communist utopian ding-bat Peter Kropotkin’s mind-scratchings they’re talking about. Good grief.
So; there you have it. Our stereotypical Appalachian mountain white male half-wit first becomes a label-slapped ‘traditional conservative’ hater and loser, and is now a fully-fledged lover of the left, with no labels attached, and his channel suitably endorsed by the NYTimes.
While the Times found plenty of space for the pitfalls of right-wing thought, with slurs aplenty to denigrate them, they, curiously, could not find a single word to describe the utter horrors, the fears, the starvation, violence, murders, mass-incarcerations and forced-marches, all the products of ‘Marxist economics’, the most malevolent ideology to ever manifest itself in the last century and responsible for more deaths than all the wars of the last one hundred years combined. Not one teeny criticism.
I can only conclude that New Yorkers are still making white Appalachian men the butt of their humour. Surely the whole 3,500-word story is just one long, bad, joke.
