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| Photo by Daniel James |
Citizen journalist and web drama enthusiast Ethan Ralph‘s popular #Killstream show has been banned from YouTube.
YouTuber Ethan Ralph accused The Wall Street Journal of sabotaging a fundraiser he held in September to benefit St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
On September 29, the host of the popular YouTube show #Killstream utilized a new YouTube feature called “Super Chat” to fundraise for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. The show, said to focus largely on free speech absolutism and “drama, news, and politics,” raised a total of $26,000 for the charity to support children battling cancer, according to Ralph.
I’m a long-time follower of Ralph’s who heard him planning the charity drive over multiple episodes of his show. This wasn’t a cynical attempt to own the libs. St. Jude is one of his favorite charities, and the #Healstream was legit. Yet the enemy’s hatred of dissent is such that they didn’t hesitate to bring the banhammer down on a man who raised nearly $30K for kids with cancer.
That’s life under the iron boot of an unaccountable tech cartel. Knowing that a hospital full of sick kids got a pile of money is some consolation, at least.
Oh, wait.
On Friday, Ralph reported that donors were receiving notification from YouTube that their donations from over a month prior had been refunded by St. Jude’s. Ralph asserted that the refunds were issued “due to pressure from The Wall Street Journal.” Though no article had yet been published, Ralph started the hashtag campaign #WSJKillsKids, noting the likely connection between the timing of article and refund of old donations.
YouTube originally responded to the reported comments by revoking Super Chat capabilities for Ralph’s channel and taking down individual episodes of the show, but later went further. The company confirmed Friday evening that they had permanently removed Ralph from the platform.
Koh’s original email to Ralph listed her deadline as 10 p.m. Thursday night, but the article was not published until late Friday evening. The published piece focused largely on Ralph and the events that unfolded after Koh contacted him, including returned donations and the removal of Ralph’s channel from YouTube. Koh reported that when she contacted St. Jude’s “earlier in the week,” she was informed that the organization “was aware of the chats and was making arrangements to reverse any donations.”
“We had no intention of receiving or accepting any of the funds associated with the live stream,” a St. Jude’s spokesperson told WSJ Friday.
In his Friday night live stream, which was hosted on an alternative website, Ralph said that he “didn’t believe” that St. Jude’s had plans to return the money before being contacted by WSJ.
“I think that we’ve been a thorn in the side of YouTube for quite some time,” Ralph told The Daily Caller. “Our show wasn’t really supposed to get as popular as it did, but we ended up regularly topping the live trending chart on the site even with all the obstacles they threw in our way.”
Ralph’s popularity certainly shook the YouTube hive. Can’t have any messages contrary to the Narrative gaining traction. Might upset the NPCs, you know.
Still, YouTube’s timing is suspect. They didn’t ban Ralph right after the #Healstream. Instead they waited for the backlash against St. Jude refunding donors’ SuperChat money.
What we may be seeing here is the enemy stepping up their tactics. The Right’s penchant for voting with their wallets, as in the Kellogg’s and Star Wars boycotts, combined with a tendency toward purity spirals, creates an opening a knowledgeable enemy can exploit.
In this case, #Killstream viewers looking to monetarily punish those responsible for Ralph’s ban find a children’s cancer charity in the lineup. It’s the closest I’ve seen the Left come to setting up a Xanatos gambit. If the Right withdraws support from all the implicated parties, kids with cancer pay a toll. If they limit their backlash to YouTube and the Wall Street Journal, they look inconsistent. If they do nothing, YouTube and the WSJ get away scot-free.
This could be a randomly emergent phenomenon–a blind squirrel finding a nut. Or the opposition could finally be taking a page from Sun Tzu. Pray it’s the former. The Left’s fear of leaving their bubble has been one of our biggest advantages.
Unfortunately something tells me its the latter. The Left has mever lacked for animal cunning. You don’t infiltrate and rot every beloved institution of the West by being an idiot – it takes a God Emperor’s wiles to putfox them, something which Ethan, for all the praise he deserves, is not
*outfox
Another commenter from Twitter agrees.
You're right that the SJWs never wanted for base cunning. But they're merely the foot soldiers. The Left's leadership are possessed of diabolical intelligence, as their near-total domination of the West shows. Only Trump's election prevented their final victory–a setback they deeply resent. The Left's true leaders may have decided that their foot soldiers have failed and have sent in more capable operators.
My hope is that after the midterms, Trump unleashes anti monopoly laws and drops his own ban hammer. I really want to see the broken up and tied up in court for decades
xavier
And as soon as he moved over to another streaming site certain members of a certain "skeptical" movement tried to get him taken down again.
What was that about "horseshoes", again?
Nevertheless, this is really disconcerting. Especially as only InfoWars, of all places, were the only ones to jump on this story to give it wider exposure. If this sinks away without action then the problem is worse than even I thought.
The problem is likely worse than we thought.
I was confident that Trump would follow through on his order to start antitrust proceedings against Big Tech. I'm not sure if he was playing chicken or if his cuck advisers convinced him it would be bad optics before the midterms, but he seems to have dropped the matter.
Now, it could be that Trump is banking on a midterm win tomorrow so he can rein in Big Tech legislatively. There's much to recommend that approach since an EO could be overturned by the next president. Even if Sessions were to file an antitrust suit now, it's unlikely the case would be decided within the next two years, and it would be abandoned if Trump were to lose in 2020.
Still, Big Tech thinks they called Trump's bluff, and they've been emboldened accordingly.
Independent creators to the right of Piers Morgan had better put any dreams of fame and fortune on hold. If you're not willing to embrace the Narrative, you're probably going to be poor into the near future. Then again, if you're already on record espousing badthink, it's too late to switch sides. All the more reason to keep fighting, because victory is the only way out.