I know I haven’t touched this thing but in a long while, but thanks to the cowardice of the YouTube algorithm I’ve been stuck with content that gets immediately deleted when posted in the intended place.
Incidentally I’m also in Facebook jail for 7 days right now because calling a racist “trash” and saying “men suck” in a thread about guys who gaslight sexual assault victims are apparently examples of me “bullying”. So I’m quite the popular villain at the moment.
I composed this comment in the comments section of Jenna Marbles’ farewell video to YouTube, in which she breaks down in tears over the laundry list of “problematic” things she has done over the years as compiled by a gaggle of Karens seeking their latest fix of vindictive celebrity takedown.
Tell me cancel culture isn’t real or harmful now, you toxic animals. You enforce this theatre of outrage and tokenisms, farming righteous anger to feed a starving Id, and all of it so tastelessly synthetic. Raking people over coals eternally for finite, distant mistakes like some deranged biblical deity, dehumanising and deplatforming people to scratch a perverse itch for this week’s “problematic people” gossip and throwing them away like they never mattered.
This is what you do. Your extremism, your tribalism, your uncritically critical nature in service to the same dark drives which causes the very things you find problematic. When you tear people down not so that they can learn, but for the sadistic joy of it. Accusing everyone of such sparsely defined bigotry that you remove the weight of bigotry itself and thus empower the bigoted, while the innocent and well meaning fall apart in tears thinking they are the monster. This is what you do.
Every time one of you mounted the latest bandwagon, sent vitriol to whoever Twitter trends told you to hate. Every time you mindlessly followed the herd and accepted accusations without proof, rejected apologies as insincere, and tried to conflate anyone who transgressed the smallest threads you had spun into your labyrinthine webs with the most hateful of people, this is the culture you built.
You wanted to be judge, jury and executioner. You wanted to all be the dictator of wokeness despite the myriad paradoxes that entails. You wanted to be thought police. You don’t get to complain when your disgusting, ignorant, elitist, self aggrandising hatefulness brings down someone you actually like.
You don’t get to mourn her. You don’t get to feel sad that your favourite YouTube personality is gone. She’s the one traumatised. She’s the one trying to reconcile her desire to be a good person with the toxic bullying culture you created that has suffocated her mind with beliefs that she’s a terrible person because she couldn’t live up to an impossible and ever-shifting standard which is never defined.
You don’t get to feel bad because the regime of vicious, unsympathetic harassment of the “problematic” cast a shadow so broad it finally touched someone you love. If you were really decent people, you wouldn’t wait until it affects you to start caring. You would feel bad for the masses of broken-hearted, deeply hurt people your campaign accepted as collateral damage in your self righteous purging of the wrongthink.
You took genuine, important parts of the social mechanisms of progress... empathy for the downtrodden, advocacy for the powerless, trigger warnings for the scarred, and you weaponised them. You twisted humanitarianism into a thunderdome in which you could send an endless stream of branded bad guys to the lions in the name of making the world better, and all you succeeded in doing was creating more hate and more hurt.
The world needs awareness of minority prejudice. The world needs to know that Black Lives Matter, not pretending that dressing up as a celebrity is the same thing as a fucking minstrel show. The world needs less animal cruelty, not picking people apart for every time they have been less than 100% perfect as an animal parent. The world needs less hurtful language, not more language branded hurtful and then used to indict regardless of context.
You take situations without harm and invent it in order to give yourselves the excuse to be harmful, and THIS IS THE FUCKING RESULT. You are not the warriors of social justice, you’re just soldiers. And like so many soldiers throughout history, you don’t even care what cause you’re fighting for or if it is just. You just want an excuse to persecute. And none works better than claiming the persecution for yourself.
That’s why you’re no better than your targets. Your hate isn’t any more noble than theirs. Your hunger to hurt others comes from exactly the same place, you’ve just found a more insidious outlet. So don’t you fucking complain when someone you love gets sent to the gulags. You fucking built them, and you knew *exactly* what you were doing when you did it.
