On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” the host discusses The New York Times’ latest hit piece on “YouTube radicals” who are watching conservative content and forming their own opinions about it.
This New York Times article is the most dishonest tripe. I don’t know that there was an honest word in the article. It’s called “The Making of a YouTube Radical” by Kevin Roose, a fake journalist. I’m just going to pick it apart point by point. I can’t even give you just the broad overview. Every paragraph is a lie.
So, it starts out on the website, with lots of photos. It was all of these awful people, these radicals. You know who the radicals were? Ben Shapiro. Probably the most mainstream conservative voice in the country. And Dave Rubin, who is amiable to a fault. Dave Rubin’s whole show is he has people who have different points of view on and then they discuss them. Dave Rubin radically presenting both sides and taking the center of an argument. You know who else? Phil DeFranco. I don’t even think that guy is conservative.
This is my favorite one of all these pictures because they mixed them in with people who are maybe a little racist, maybe a little bigoted, maybe you’ve never heard of them, and who are really extreme. And then, in the middle of it, is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, probably the most famous economist of the 20th century. He’s just a guy who supports free markets and free economics. He’s like a grandfatherly figure who won a Nobel Prize.
How does it begin? You see “The Makings of a YouTube Radical.” The story begins with all these pictures you scroll through and it says “Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube.”
You scroll up. “Soon, he was pulled into a far-right universe watching thousands of videos filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny, and racism.” That’s how I would describe Milton Friedman: Conspiracy theories, misogyny, and racism. Because he talked about the color of the pencil, I guess that’s racist. Then the final, the final line, “I was brainwashed.” And here you see the point of the article.
From the very beginning, what The New York Times is trying to tell you, and what the whole Left is trying to tell you is that we don’t really have any choice. We don’t really have free will. We don’t really have the ability to watch whatever we want on the Internet. That’s what the Internet does, it lets you watch whatever you want. It’s not like the old mainstream media that keeps people out, they’re gatekeepers. No, on the Internet, you can see whatever you want. Their thesis is no you can’t. You really have no choice, and you’re just brainwashed, you’re brainwashed by yourself. You have brainwashed yourself with YouTube helping you along.
You’re reading this New York Times story and you think this guy doesn’t sound very radical at all. So far, this story is just about a guy who finds some right-wing videos on YouTube and he watches them. So, does it get any more radical than that? Are we going to actually get what The New York Times is promising? Well, this is what they write: “One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like ‘Refugee Invasion is European Suicide.'”
Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke. Mr. Cain never bought into the far right’s the most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate,” he said. “Still, far-right ideology bled into his daily life. He began referring to himself as a ‘trad-con’ — a traditional conservative committed to old fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman and he fought with his liberal friends.” By the way, that last part, that isn’t even true. He disagreed with his liberal friends; he didn’t fight with them.
What are they saying actually happened? They’re saying on the right-wing YouTube, there are people who are vicious, vile, racist, neo-Nazis. Caleb Cain never listened to any of them or really believed them at all — but they exist. Well, I thought the article was about the making of a radical. You said this was about the making of a YouTube radical and then you describe some views that actually are radical right before you say that the kid never believed any of them. The most radical thing that this kid did, according to The New York Times’ own reporting, is he referred to himself as a traditional conservative. That’s it, guys. That’s it.
When they use the term, the “alt-right” on the Left — when they use that term — they’re just talking about you and me. They’re just talking about anybody who believes that the genders are different. They said, “he started to believe in gender norms.” Oh, he believes that men and women are different? OK. And then, he disagreed with his liberal friends. Ok, the guy who has conservative viewpoints disagreed with people who have different viewpoints. And, this is the most shocking thing of all, he dated a Christian girl. That’s the radicalization, is that a guy in 2019 in America dated a Christian girl and called himself a conservative.