UPDATE (29/9/21): I was fixing up old blog posts and Molyneux’s channel was completely removed later in 2020.
Back in 2013 when YouTube’s name still reflected it’s content, I watched this video by Stefan Molyneux on the death of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. This introduced me to his channel (which is still very good), and also opened my and I believe many people’s eyes to the reality of the corporate media. This along with the death of Michael Brown the following year brought changes that are still reverberating today and when the history is written, not only these events but the responses to these events will be seen as significant in the twilight of our society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF-Ax5E8EJc
To get a visual clue of just how much things have changed, consider what I had to go through to find the video in the first place using what was YouTube’s originally excellent search bar.
This is how many results appear before I typed ‘y’.
After I type ‘y’.
When I type the full search and press enter.
I was originally planning simply to mention this incident with a link to the video but merely going to find the video in the first place presented difficulty. If you search, “Trayvon Martin” on YouTube, the first page of results (and maybe more), are all videos from mainstream news organisations. The examples you can see in the image immediately above all have far less views than the one I was searching for and none of them have the word “truth” in the title or descriptions you can see. This means that the algorithm is manipulated to favour these results over the ones it knows you are looking for.
The video does not show up in the general search until you enter the full title with the name “Stefan Molyneux”. Which I found out after I went directly to his channel and searched for the video there to get the exact title. The same is true when you search “the truth about george zimmerman” too.
It is hardly a secret that sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter manipulate their search algorithms as they started doing this around the same time and it only accelerated after Trump was elected as trying to search for this video also demonstrates. They now openly admit they do this and have become even more brazen to the point where whole channels are completely deleted without having broken any of their terms at all. I have a growing collection of channels I am subscribed to that have been deleted.
Even non-political channels have suffered immensely with corporate content slowly but surely replacing the people that made the platform what it is. At one level, I understand completely. YouTube operates at a massive loss and can’t possibly sustain allowing anyone to upload anything for a variety of reasons outside of financial considerations. Still, they could have made many of these changes without destroying what made the site so popular.
The Strange Case of George and Trayvon certainly had a hand in this change.
More recently we have a similar incident which happened in February but made headlines months later of a shooting of a black man named Ahmaud Arbery. Now have I done in-depth research and come to a reasonable conclusion about whether this killing was lawful self-defence? No. I don’t know the law in Georgia, I don’t know the exact details of the case and I certainly didn’t witness it. This is true of most people having an opinion on it though so I am at least as qualified as you’re average mainstream journalist to share mine.
What is clear to me is that as with Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, you have a young black man with a history of criminal activity ending up dead. High School yearbook photographs of their smiling and more youthful selves don’t change this.
Quite a number of prominent conservative journalists (do we even call them that anymore?) have come out on side with the left on this and even believed some of the more absurd early claims that are becoming more doubtful with every new piece of information found about the victim.
What was particularly absurd was this exchange I noticed on Twitter and indeed this is what inspired this post.
Andrew Klaven and Matt Walsh both work for Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire website. They are fairly typical of the average mainstream conservatives though Matt Walsh has more of a spine when it comes to issues around sexual morality and the sanctity of life but is otherwise pretty cucky.
The context is the fact that Arbery was trespassing on the construction site of a new home and they both claim that this is a normal thing to do. This exchange was mocked by quite a few people including Scott Greer which I have posted below.
The interpretation many seem to have is that these effete urban men are very conscious of being effete urban men. I’m not judging here — I would leave my home only for Mass and exercise if I could have things my way but I’m not inclined to pretend I’m something I’m not. Public figures are far more likely to be conscious of how they appear to others. Especially public figures with professional photographs of them looking the very opposite of how they seem to be trying to appear here.
So there is a question to be answered. Is it normal for “guys” to go on construction sites?
For all of last year there was a large construction site right next to my place of work. If I tried to go there or even walked in the wrong place at certain times, I would have about five men calling out for me to move, stop or get out of the way. Quite reasonably too as construction sites can be very dangerous and at least one of those times, they were lifting something extremely heavy right above where I was trying to walk. To go on a large construction site, you need to be wearing high-visibility clothing, safety-wear and also have a good reason for being there.
This was just a house being built though so it is nowhere near as dangerous and there was no construction going on at the time. Is that normal? I have been on housing construction sites on a number of occasions. When I was a young I sometimes did so without permission and would have been in trouble if I’d been caught though I can’t recall if I was. I have also been on construction sites after being invited by people I know who wanted to show me the progress on their house. I have also been on them when there was a public opening for new housing projects. I will assume that both Klavan and Walsh were thinking of these examples when this exchange occurred.
This is not really what Arbery did though and I don’t believe for a minute that Klavan or Walsh have ever walked on to a construction site owned by a person they didn’t know. Arbery didn’t know these people though he was known to them and the situation was more like the few private excursions I had when I was younger. Construction sites are obvious and notorious targets for thieves. They often have expensive tools, spools of copper wire and other equipment inside and often without any pesky locks or security systems. Blokes like Walsh and Klavan surely know this from conversations they had over a beer with their sleeves rolled up on their flannelette shirts. Do us “guys” say what type of shirt it is we wear when doing guy things? I’m not the guyest guy but I know this.
The most obvious conclusion and the one that is indicated by surveillance footage was that Arbery was up to no good. This is something most people would have assumed until the incident I began this post with in 2013.
This might have been an odd direction to have taken the topic but it does demonstrate how desperately people will grasp at straws to maintain the position they’ve chosen instead of simply admitting they had a bad take. This is also true of people claiming he was jogging though a positive that could come out of this could be blacks getting described with a different “gg” word from now on.
There has been nothing that has come since that indicates this was anything other than another robbery gone bad for the robber. This is much better than it going wrong for a victim and based on what can be established about the incident so far, I don’t have any reason to think otherwise.