So another YouTube videogamer dude with a ludicrously enormous number of subscribers has started talking like a Nazi.
Jon “JonTron” Jafari built up his fanbase — he’s got more than 3 million subscribers on YouTube — with videos big on jokes and light on politics. But in recent months he’s started talking politics, and of course, this being 2017, it turns out that his politics are pretty terrible Trumpian/alt-right garbage.
OPPRESSION TEST: Can you drive to McDonalds not in hijab and get biggest Big Mac value meal? If yes: Not oppressed
— JonTron (@JonTronShow) January 24, 2017
Wow, how scandalous, Steve King doesn't want his country invaded by people who have contempt for his culture and people! NAZI!!!
— JonTron (@JonTronShow) March 12, 2017
If a nation cannot decide who to let in, or remove, it is not a nation at all
— JonTron (@JonTronShow) March 13, 2017
I wonder if they came back to life and saw a man marching on DC wearing a pink pussy on his head how fast they would eat cyanide pic.twitter.com/wMRcwNCfXh
— JonTron (@JonTronShow) January 24, 2017
Dude, take another look at the picture you just posted. The Founding Fathers wore leggings and powdered wigs. I don’t think a man wearing a pink hat would really faze them. But I digress.
Even some of his most devoted fans began to worry a little when, late in January, JonTron appeared on a 5-hour livestream with reactionary YouTube blabber Carl of Swindon Sargon of Akkad and basically came out as an alt-right fellow traveller.
This Sunday he managed to top even this with a surreal two-hour online debate with fellow YouTube videogamer dude Destiny. It did not go well for him, debate-wise, and over the course of the debate he revealed just how much of a racist idiot he really is.
In the JonTron subreddit, because of course there is such a thing, most of his fans seem to be a bit alarmed by his terrible opinions; he’s also lost more than 10,000 YouTube subscribers.
One industrious Redditor transcribed a number of JonTron’s more, well, colorful statements. Here are a few of them. (I haven’t gone back and checked these against the video because, well, life is short, but I believe these are mostly accurate.)
- “Wealthy blacks … commit more crime than poor whites, that’s a fact.”
- “What is so offensive about white people saying they’d like to preserve their demographic majority?”
- “It’s clear that whites are not allowed to speak up against their demographic um… oblivion.”
- “[Whites] are not being killed, they’re being displaced. You are the same guy who says that Europeans displaced the native Americans but apparently, when other people do it to white Americans, it’s okay because fuck white people.”
- “Why is it when the chinese were trying to colonise tibet, why was that a save tibet situation but when it’s white people… I’m using an analogy to try to give a parallel situation so you can see the hypocrisy.”
- “There is an absolute disproportionate of crime committed to whites by nonwhites. There’s no arguing that, that’s just FBI statistics. But white people are not allowed to address this because it’s called racist by people like you.”
- “I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything explicitly racist.”
- “Nobody wants to become a minority in their own country. Why is it bad if they (whites) remain a majority?”
- “Not all Mexicans are going to go on welfare but a lot of them are going to commit crimes. The El Salvadoreans are going to create the MS13 gangs.”
- “These days the confederate flag has been banned, they’re burning american flags in the streets. … And I think immigration policies that haven’t been the smartest are partially to blame for that.”
- “We’ve gotten rid of discrimination in our western countries. If you don’t think we’ve gotten rid of discrimination, you’re living in a fantasy land.”
- “This oppression in America, it doesn’t exist.”
Though JonTron likes to present himself as a champion of Truth and Reason, most of these are alleged truths are not in fact true, and most of his opinions are decidedly unreasonable. Adding to the surreality: the earnest defender of all things white is himself half Iranian.
I think this calls for the infinite facepalm.
If god forbid you want to listen to the whole damn debate, you can find it here, all 2 hours of it.
I tried to find a watchable video with some excerpts in it, to no avail; the only ones that did contain actual clips tended to be by pasty white dudes more or less defending JonTron.
This video doesn’t have any clips in it, but it summarizes the whole JonTron mess in a relatively non-annoying way, which is really the best you can hope for on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R02k1sQpc2k
@ Sinkable Jon & Axecalibur:
My bad; I’ve heard the term before and just repeated it.
I’ll use crank welfare from here on out.
@Raphael
At least boogie retracted his statement after /r gamerghazi called him out on it and apologized on twitter. TB is still the same unapologetic prick as ever.
The comparison of immigration to colonization is the latest right wing talking point that I fear is going mainstream. My normally liberal aunt trotted it out a couple of weeks ago. It’s a little scary.
I just hope that Minx doesn’t defend JonTron like she did with PewDiePie. 🙁 She’s one of my favorite YouTubers to watch but I can acknowledge that she has some extremely problematic views, which she thankfully doesn’t mention in her videos (I follow her on Twitter).
To be honest, I used to watch JonTrons videos a while back, before GG became a thing (just like I occasionally watched TotalBiscuit’s stuff), but I haven’t been on his channel in a long, long time. Never could stomach Pewds, though. His antics were always annoying to me, never funny.
I like “Wanker Welfare.” Fits the rhythm better.
@Ooglybogles Did he retract his latest video? I gotta see that. I mean, I think the reason why they are defending him is twofold:
1) We are geeks and geeks get picked on, so we have to stand up for ourselves (victimhood 101),
2) He is a fellow traveller so any criticism (not attack but criticism) is a criticism of us.
Technically pink was considered a masculine color for years as it was derivative of red so yeah, pink hats in those dude’s day would have been perfectly manly.
@weirwoodtrehugger: chief manatee
It shows a real fear that what they (or their ancestors) did to others will be done to them.
@raphael
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/5zftvx/boogie2988_on_the_internet_hate_machine_not_white/
https://twitter.com/Boogie2988/status/841850140302401536
Now if he made an apology video and does not side with those concern trolling repliers it would be more impactful and feel more sincere.
I never understood those geek social fallacies. Then again I never was really good at making friends so the concepts of loyalty are lost on me.
So this is quickly becoming my pet peeve, but have any of those oh-so-glorious representatives of the youtube gaming community talked about Horizon ZD ? This is one of the fever swamps where I don’t tread because ESL hearing comprehension isn’t all that great and these guys don’t exactly make the effort to be intelligible for foreign listeners, so I don’t really know.
Last I heard (from our very own Handsome Jack), the point seemed to be that evil SJWs ruined it, RUINED IT I SAY ! But that seemed to be more from your common garden variety gator than the big channels with lots of subscribers. Any news on that front ?
@Gaebolga
Easy mistake to make and you’re not the first one. There’s a lot of that in most of the language used to criticize those fucks (though it seems kinda self-defeating to me) so you end up internalizing it even though you wanna avoid it.
It’s tricky for me, to be fair, ’cause sometimes I can’t spot the references to mental illness because ESL. Like with anything that ends in “nut”, until I figured out what it meant. So yeah, not gonna throw that stone.
ETA : @SFHC
Ooh good find ! It just rolls off the tongue, I love it.
Me watching JonTron’s descent into Nazi-dom:
OT:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-richard-spencer-taxes-20170223-story.html
Thank you for the link. Will check it out.
Not sure about YouTube, but I’ve noticed plenty of whiny manbabies on various gaming message boards and reviews of Horizon Zero Dawn. Having just finished the game myself, I really enjoyed it and it was refreshing to see a game so full of varied ethnicities with both male and female important characters. The characters don’t see it as an issue. There even a minor quest where you help a male character mourning the death of a male partner with his grief.
Of course, the pearl clutching gamergater assholes and racist fucksticks don’t see it that way.
Ran across this article that does a pretty good job of pointing out what’s wrong with their arguments, though.
https://medium.com/total-nerd/horizon-zero-dawn-and-diversity-in-games-f548839ce099#.74pqriyeu
Huh, this is new. One of Rafael’s comments seems to be drifting up, not down. I’m not the only one seeing it, am I ?
@Sinkable
Yep his posts are floating up. Same on my phone and computer.
I’d suggest “right-wing welfare”, as referring purely to their politics without any discussion of their mental state.
Topic-adjacent: I played a role in getting someone banned from the alternatehistory.com forums over the weekend. He was spouting gator alternative-facts on “Massively Multiplayer: Gaming in the New Millennium” (the sequel to the SNES-CD timeline “Player Two Start”):
I naturally replied with a link to RationalWiki’s “List of Gamergate claims” (and specific links to where RW debunks “Gamergate isn’t misogynistic” and “Harassers don’t represent Gamergate”). OP, having apparently never learned the first rule of getting out of a hole, called for more shovels:
At which point the head mod dropped the million-pound banhammer on him. As I said on my tumblr, I didn’t ask for it, and I’m still not sure it’s what I wanted, but it’s probably what I needed. And how was your weekend?
Um, no, you nincompoop, Europeans killed the living fuck out of the indigenous populations. Like, with guns and centuries of genocidal warfare.
Funny how you don’t care about the Lakota saying that, mate.
@Sinkable John
The Dipshit Dole?
@Kobun37
(sorry, saw your post too late and then edit window ran out on me)
That diversity as you describe it is becoming a pretty common thing in most modern games I’ve had my hands on in the last 2-3 years, but I think Horizon actually goes farther than that. It often makes a pretty strong point about several kinds of bigotry, usually through Aloy’s smart-mouth vs bigots (like, the side-quest you mention, when she calls the priest out on his “tantrum, [his] cry for attention” – incidentally, I’ve mentioned it here before).
In my opinion that’s how it goes above and beyond – it doesn’t stop at not being full of shit, it actually gets pretty political about it. Instead of going the “world-building without bigotry” route, they went with a world that has bigotry and made a point of the main character fighting it.
I’ma stop here ’cause I don’t wanna waltz into spoiler territory. But my point is, those “SJW quests” in Bioware games ? HZD feels to me like it’s entirely made up of those. Even the main storyline, considering that the people you’re going up against are basically fanatics who are super pissed about their religion and culture going “soft” and abolishing slavery and blood sacrifices.
Like, the main villains are literally just a bunch of reactionary assholes. That automatically earns all the points in my book.
(yes, I know it’s a bit more complicated, but I gotta avoid spoilers and to be fair while I didn’t give the whole picture, the parts I did give are absolutely accurate and correct)
(also I need to stop talking about that game at some point, and just get to writing it a love letter or something)
@Dali
You just taught me a new English word AND the perfect phrase in which to place it. I love it.
*walks off while mumbling “dipshit dole” and “wanker welfare” repeatedly*
@ Viscaria- I recently came across a similar dispute of racial prejudice on a quora response on the topic of feeling white privilege where a white man was pulled over by a friendly cop, and then later that evening witnessed a profound change in his demeanor when he was a passenger with his black and Mexican friends and they were pulled over by the exact same cop. The officer was aggressive and kept a hand on his gun, but visibly relaxed the instant he shined his flashlight in the car and saw his scared, confused white face. That had been his awakening when he remarked how that experience was so outside his norm and his friends just laughed. Then he realized that these seemingly unicorn bad cops he’d never met were the exact same ones he’d considered counter examples.
This other person replying said something to the effect of: “Well, of course a cop has reason to be suspicious if a minority strays outside their designated racial underclass zones to a nice white neighborhood. They might be there to steal! That doesn’t mean racism is a factor!”
Reasoning with people like that seems like a lost cause.
After this campaign my own family has become unrecognizable. My grandparents have been hitting the Fox news koolaid hard and drifting farther to the right these past 15 years. At a recent family gathering politics came up, and my mother remarked that it should be a concern for both parties that so many white supremacists support him, which she felt was a diplomatic statement everyone could safely agree on.
Her father turned to her and said, “So?What’s wrong with white supremacists?”
They used to be decent people, or at least so I thought. Maybe they were always that way. I don’t think I can consider them family anymore.
Oh, I like that one.
For non-ableist synonyms for “wingnut welfare”, I have a few suggestions:
Hater handouts
The media-idiot complex
I’ll second “dipshit dole”
The comparison of immigration to colonization would be valid, if immigrants came here with their armies and their foreign diseases and slaughtered us wholesale (which xenophobes already believe, now that I think about it).
*heavy sigh*
It’s a bad time to be a game LPer. Not that I’m a huge one, but shit.
Funny story: Jim Sterling got his site DDOSed for giving Breath of the Wild a 7/10, instead of a perfect score.
I came across a wild fanboi whining (at someone else asking that people respect Jim’s opinion on a game that he said he liked as a whole despite the specific things he didn’t. Repeatedly.) that Jim gave HZD (a game that this fanboi was whining about as being “bad” because something something “mediocrity”) a 9.5/10, and thus he had “no merit”.
I actually wasted my time typing up a long comment telling him how fucking silly that was and why.
Well, time’s turned over and your turn’s done
And all of your past bridges have been wrecked
Eventually your number of supporters will be none
No matter how many times you’ve ECHed.