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The Persecution of the Internet Historian
Internet Historian is a popular YouTuber whose best content is retelling interesting, fairly obscure stories with janky animation and luscious voice over. He’s an excellent storyteller and the videos are insanely easy to watch.
Left wing breadtuber Hbomberguy recently released an almost 4 hour video about plagiarism on YouTube. One of the subjects of the video was Internet Historian, and I think Hbomberguy credibly shows that IH was in the wrong. For his most watched video, Man in Hole, IH heavily copied the story and format of a Mental Floss article, as well as directly quoting entire paragraphs. IIRC, IH did cite the Mental Floss article in the original video, but it would be fairer to say that the entire video was an animated telling of the original article, and IH should have described it as such.
Furthermore, after Man in Hole was DMCAed, IH seemingly purposefully concealed what he had done, made excuses, and never fully acknowledged the extent to which he plagiarized, even after reuploading the video with heavy edits.
I think IH did a bad thing by committing plagiarism. Then he did another bad thing by trying to cover it up. I don’t think his life should be destroyed, but I think he deserves some score for this and my opinion of him has been lowered.
But if you ask some very online leftist people what’s wrong with IH, they won’t say plagiarism, they will say he is a literal Nazi - https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18dotzf/internet_historian_is_a_nazi/
That thread is by far the most popular ever on that subreddit, and lists evidence that IH is a Nazi. I’d summarize the evidence as “IH has a 4-chany sense of humor, has made some edgy jokes, and follows mainstream conservatives on Twitter.”
What I find most interesting about this affair is how difficult to convey to the breadtubey online leftists how vapid and dumb I think this evidence is. I think that’s because there’s actually a lot of cultural complexity here tied into some big gaps in moral intuition.
For instance, many of the evidence points are that IH has made jokes in his videos about Nazis and the KKK. In one video, he put 14/88 in the background, in another he uses a KKK caricature, and he has also sarcastically listed his birthday as 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday, though this might also just be a weed lmao thing). To the OP and most of the commenters, this is strong evidence that IH is a literal Nazi. Even if they acknowledge that these are edgy jokes, they can’t comprehend why someone would make light of something so awful unless they were secretly sympathetic to it. Or they just say that IH is straight up “dogwhistling” to align himself with all the Nazis watching his videos.
These arguments strike me as so divorced from reality that it’s difficult to bridge the gap. These jokes are not actually making light of Hitler, Nazis, and the KKK. They are making light of online lefties being pathologically obsessed with speech. Referencing Hitler isn’t funny; what’s funny is watching online lefties think that referencing Hitler indicates a deep seated hatred of Judaism and a real desire to exterminate non-whites. It’s the overreaction that’s funny. Or another way to put it – edgy Hitler jokes are shibboleths indicating that the speaker doesn’t buy into the predominant lefty internet culture. The speaker signals that he has such little concern for the culture that he considers stifling, censorious, and ridiculous, that he invokes the greatest taboo possible. IMO, this is the essence of edgy 4-chan humor.
Is this an accurate take? Or am I being too nice to IH?
I feel like Popehat's Rule of Goats applies. "Yea I made a bunch of Nazi references, but I wasn't doing it sincerely!" Ok, well you still made a bunch of Nazi references. I am somewhat sympathetic since I had my own edgy-4-chan-humor phase when I was younger, but I also did actually have a bunch of unironically racist opinions at the time.
I am confused. If this is what IH is doing then isn't getting threads like the ones you've linked the point? Those threads (the leftist overreaction) are the punchline to the joking references, right? The point of the jokes was to make leftists think he was a Nazi! Is it surprising or disturbing that he succeeded? So he spent a bunch of time and energy making references to try and convince certain people he was a Nazi, he succeeded, and now... those same people need to be convinced he's not a Nazi? Why spend all the time and energy in the first place convincing people you were a Nazi!
Mocking someone's beliefs or taboos does not mean you like the thing you are mocking, even though if it vanished that would remove the assumed context for your work. Making Postal 2 doesn't mean you want people to believe that violent videogames cause violence, rather the fact that they already believe that is part of the premise and context. Chris Ofili can make The Holy Virgin Mary and sell it for £2.9 million regardless of what his own views might be on taboos involving pornography, dung, or christianity.
I agree in general but it's not clear to me the IH references in question, as described, are mocking the things they're referring to.
I think the simple answer is, it's probably not so rational, precise, and conscious an effort as OP sells it. It's transgression as catharsis, nothing more, nothing less. "Vibes", all the way down. As stated:
The response is not at all surprising, it never is, but that's doesn't mean I don't understand the temptation to transgress.
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If he made the references out of indifference towards those who find those references taboo, then that is even less reason to believe "The point of the jokes was to make leftists think he was a Nazi!". Same thing if he made those references without knowing that some people would consider them proof of Nazism. My point was that, even if he deliberately transgressed the taboo because it was a taboo as a means to mock those who find it objectionable, that does not mean he 'wants to be viewed as a Nazi'. As tends to be the case with people engaging in deliberate transgression, he does not actually support the existence of the taboo he is transgressing. Like most 4channers, he would probably prefer the internet of 15 or so years ago when people made Nazi references and jokes all the time and nobody of relevance tried to harm them over it.
Incidentally this inspired me to look at the KYM page for Downfall memes. The meme dates back to 2006 and the first controversy mentioned was 2010:
The interesting thing is that if you look at the linked Huffington Post article from 2013, the most left-leaning source linked, there is absolutely no mention of the idea that sharing Hitler memes (as part of your job in the official newsletter for an investment bank!) is offensive or creates a hostile work environment for minorities or is dogwhisting by making light of Nazism or anything like that. In fact even the company's argument quoted in the Bloomberg article is just that it “insulted in a quite humiliating way a competitor and business partner”.
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