Mask Off

so last week i was uh in a restaurant in north carolina and um we were sitting at the bar and uh the owner was sitting right there because they were about to close and my mother starts talking to her and somehow or other the owner just looks at me and she's like well what do you do and you know i wasn't about to tell her i'm a youtuber uh so i was like i'm a writer i mean i am technically um and she's like what do you do so i told her my name and she's like i'm gonna google you and i i was like okay but i'm super cancelled right now and she like laughed and clearly thought i was kidding or maybe didn't know what that meant or you know knew it in some like right wing way and then she like googled me and like started laughing because the first thing and you know like the questions people ask is why is lindsay ellis canceled and i mean why indeed but before i get into this i need to lay some groundwork ladies and boomers of the jury here you go canceling is a public shaming of a member of a community for some violation of that community standards by other members of that community but the term actually originated with a 1981 song called your love is cancelled by the band sheik the song was inspired by a bad date guitarist niall richards went on at the height of the band's success wherein his date behaved in a way that he felt was presumptuous and unacceptable which really turned him off so basically it was inspired by this idea any potential future we might have had any potential love that might have developed cancelled the song was not a hit at the time but it stuck around and over the decades the term as used in the song started appearing in other pieces of art and music including in songs by rappers like 50 cent and lil wayne until eventually gaining popularity in the vernacular of black twitter in this original vernacular use declaring someone or something cancelled was not really an attempt to like instigate a boycott or hold someone to account but more of a personal decision not unlike sheik's original song canceling them in the television of your mind so to cancel someone wasn't a call 2d platform it was more just saying you stepped out of line so i'm done with you like when the city of new york canceled mayor de blasio for eating pizza with fork and knife which to be fair is the only reason to criticize the man the connotation of this term with call-outs and de-platforming didn't happen until a few years ago as me too began and callouts did lead to some powerful people actually losing things according to washington post writer clyde mcgrady as call outs led to greater consequences some people became nervous about how social media had changed power dynamics in the court of public opinion cancel culture was the diagnosis and the term became a catch-all defense for those trying to evade public criticism of any kind but now cancel is just another word that white people have taken and run into the ground so like woke before it it has gone from aave vernacular to right-wing grievance buzzword which is more or less where we are today pretty quickly and we are now seeing woke-ism and diversity and inclusion this is just a cancel culture and i'll tell you the people at home should be scared because their ball game is next their business will be next if it continues it won't just be republicans who get canceled it won't just be the president of the united states the canceled culture will come for us all so i have a lot that i want to unpack here because i've had a bit of an ordeal that led to me realizing that i was bad for twitter and twitter was bad for me and so i deleted my account and for some dumb [ __ ] reason the fact that i deleted my twitter account not only made like actual news my name was trending for several days is this another video about canceling or worse the dreaded apology video like do these people not realize i'm not a real celebrity i'm the number 21 000 ish most subscribed channel on youtube and i've published all of one book that only reached number seven on the new york times list but it did hit the new york times list so we'll get into why in a minute but like i'm neither going to go fool andrew cuomo i'm being cancelled by multiple credible allegations you're never going to be president andy or full crying apology video though those do seem to be good for business and i just ask that you press pause for a moment and even just for 10 seconds just cover this in prayer because there is so much healing that needs to take place some of the time no sir i've decided to do the one thing americans should never do and vote third party it's been a long time since we've done a list hasn't it so here we go list part one twitter is garbage in the halcyon days of the early 2010s justine sacco was a pr executive who traveled often for work and not having many twitter followers herself often tweeted pity little nothings which on the morning of december 20th 2013 as she was boarding a flight at heathrow for a work trip included this tweet going to africa hope i don't get aids just kidding i'm white okay so on its face this is pretty inexcusable it didn't take long for the tweet to catch the eye of sam biddle then an editor at gawker media who signal boosted it with a comment and now a funny holiday joke from iac's new pr boss the flight from heathrow to cape town was 11 hours and in that 11 hours attention to this tweet spread like wildfire incredulity horror disgust and also very quickly glee excitement sacko had less than 200 followers and being on a plane with no internet didn't know that she was twitter's villain of the day nor that she was one of the top trends worldwide so there was a delicious irony to the fact that this woman had been cancelled and didn't even know it people had her flight number attracted obsessively we're just thrilled with this idea that she was going to land and realized she had been found out the hashtag has justine landed yet also began to trend someone even went to the cape town airport when she landed took a picture of her and shared it with the rest of the world a few months later upon being asked why it appealed to him sam biddle said of the incident the fact that she was a pr chief made it delicious it's satisfying to be able to say okay let's make a racist tweet by a senior iac employee count this time and it did i'd do it again but while people of course gleefully obsessed over the tweet no one seems interested in why she said it or what she meant by it no matter how you cut it it's a bad look it's a flagrant flaunting of privilege so it's funny that she got fired and i mean i'm not gonna she had it bad for a while and like i don't wanna speculate on exactly how ruined her life was but it would also be reasonable to assume that this is a joke about white privilege right that it was bad and insensitive and made light of a terrible affliction that still kills thousands of people every day but that she didn't mean it literally and at the time everyone involved seemed to think that of course she deserved to have her life ruined over it even if they understood it was a joke about white privilege justine sacco's family in south africa were african national congress supporters the party of nelson mandela they were long-time activists for racial equality so while i can't read her original intent perhaps she felt worldly enough and enough in the club and enough of an ally that she could comfortably make such a joke and that it would be understood white people do this a lot and i cannot say i am not guilty of this too a year later sako said to jon ronson author so you've been publicly shamed to me it was so insane of a comment for anyone to make i thought there was no way that anyone could possibly think it was literal living in america puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the third world i was making fun of that bubble while also conceding i had no business commenting on the epidemic in such a politically incorrect manner on such a public platform biddle got caught up in his own [ __ ] storm when he tweeted the following in 2014 and you'll never guess who was mad on the internet in 2014 ultimately gamergate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission then adding bring back bullying i was there man bold of you to provoke them like that well you can guess what happened there was a massive campaign against him some from obvious bad faith right-wing trolls but some who seemed to think that he literally was advocating for a return to the 1950s where dumping books of dorky middle schoolers was deregur biddle publicly apologized to sako on the anniversary of her well it wasn't called canceling yet a twitter wide dog pile let's call it writing twitter is a fast machine that almost begs for misunderstanding and misconstrued deliberate misreading is its lubricant the same flatness of affect that can make it such a weird and funny place also makes it a tricky and dangerous one jokes are complicated context is hard rage is easy by this point they had actually become friends and comparing their experiences he said structurally we had made the same sort of joke here is what a truly horrible person a person whose attitudes were entirely opposite from mine and those of the people who know me would say you could argue that hers was worse conjuring a real and pernicious attitude that had resulted in systemic historical oppression and mass death but the impulse was the same and so were the reactions so even though there's a disconnect between the intended interpretation and the actual interpretation there's also a disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment and this is not relegated to the early 2010s it happens now more than ever twitter always has a villain of the day before me it was shrimp bean dad i don't know something something milkshake got am i a milkshake duck i feel like i'm too old to be a milkshake duck i've been around too long to be a milkshake duck right to a certain extent the villain of the day almost follows a script especially now that we've all been losing our minds because we've all been inside for a year doing nothing but looking at our phones person says dumb thing it gets some attention person gets defensive the defensiveness spurns outrage people start coming out with receipts the op deletes their account and twitter is garbage because the user experience ux as they call it in the industry is designed to encourage this kind of behavior it's engagement fast and emotional and satisfying and easily forgotten communication through twitter often happens through shorthand micro interactions that fit a limited number of predetermined narratives and scripts because you're exposed to thousands of these per day which is why we have these twitter script phrases such as wow this blew up friendly reminder casual reminder mask off i don't know who needs to hear this but thank you for coming to my ted talk should have stayed in the drafts read the room i'm trying to see something i'll just leave this here asking for a friend send tweet the list goes on and the way it provokes rage and dog piles is baked into the way the very platform itself is designed twitter as a company has a really big problem where outside of its user base its reputation is quite bad and it hasn't really seen an increase in active users in years when a site hits its peak in terms of total active accounts there is still capitalist pressure to increase value and profit a shrinking pool of eyes plus a need to increase revenue equals a service that needs to squeeze more blood from the same stones so every ux decision is geared towards increasing time spent with eyes on the screen that's why they've developed non-chronological timelines tweets that get added to your feed by a virtue of other people liking them goddamn [ __ ] quote tweets and so on twitter is designed quite literally to be addictive they aren't getting new users so they have to keep the ones who are there from logging off twitter wants you to post and it wants you to boost and it wants you to engage so it will put as few barriers between the user and engagement action as possible so with all that in mind it's no wonder that among the many pre-written shorthand twitter scripts twitter's villain of the day is even a thing and that it's a common truism on twitter that the only goal is not to become the villain of the day the unspoken understanding that it can be anyone if they're not careful it'll happen to you no way man we're gonna keep on rocking forever forever forever forever forever engagement is often driven by outrage and so we have this combination of high emotionality with a desire to perform social media is designed to manipulate our desire for approval and a part of that these days is the desire to perform allyship white people in particular all want to be told they're one of the good ones which is why people like justine sacco gained such attention in the first place in a fundamentally unjust world it's satisfying to take a cosseted bigot down a peg so if we can only get one more wrong-headed bigoted head on a pike humiliate one more blackface stewart or one more appropriative food blogger we could heal this world and inevitably it was my turn because i cannot shut the [ __ ] up on twitter on friday march 26 2021 i was twitter's villain of the day so for those of you who haven't yet seen my offending tweet let's have it my justine sacko moment are you ready to see why mommy's canceled also watched raya and the last dragon and i think we need to come up with a name for this genre that is basically avatar the last airbender reduxes it's like half of all why a fantasy published in the last few years anyway that's it that's the tweet so i imagine some of you are very confused part two valid criticism so from what i can tell the whole thing originated when some southeast asian artists and animators read the tweet as being dismissive and reductive and implying all asian inspired things are the same genre and to me it was made even more frustrating by the fact that several of the people who started this hadn't even seen the movie in fact most people who were getting involved with this conversation hadn't even seen the dragon movie looks like no one saw the dragon movie but here's the thing i kind of had my own has justine landed yet experience by popping off the tweet reading a few responses who understood what i was getting at going to bed and it blew up while i was asleep has lindsay woken up yet and because by the time i woke up i'd already gotten a few like oh my god are you okay messages from friends before i even opened twitter by the time i looked at my timeline i saw very little that i would consider valid criticism so i feel like i need to establish that this whole thing stopped being about valid criticism very very quickly and i'll talk about that later in the video but by the time i woke up it had already blown way past this is a careless display of white privilege to this sort of thing as a contributing factor to the mass murder of asian women that just happened so this is what we call an overstatement of harm it had gone from possible insensitive microaggression from a c-list youtuber to contributing to hate crimes and that didn't feel like anything i would consider valid so it's you know early in the morning i just woke up and i responded with frustration because i was being ascribed in intentionality which was not there which well if anyone who spent any time on twitter can tell you getting defensive and doubling down is about the last thing anyone should do so that was an oopsy and i tried to give you know some credence to the valid criticism by saying like you know if you squint i can kind of see what you're saying and god damn it it was like it was early i would like it was like you shouldn't tweet in the morning no you shouldn't tweet at all you shouldn't tweet nobody should tweet so that very poorly worded frustration was met with even more outrage that i was not taking in to be valid critique of poc when i am too busy being bowled down by mountains of hyperbole and this word racist over and over and over which is bound to make anyone a little bit defensive so when all of these things are coming at you it's impossible to genuinely consider actually valid critique in a timely fashion because your defenses are at a hundred and when i'm being accused by hundreds of people of contributing to anti-asian american hate crimes by saying that the disney thing reminded me of the nickelodeon thing it's honestly kind of stunning to me that any reasonable person would expect someone in my position to take in all of these hundreds of tweets process them reasonably and within minutes be like hmm yes i see your point reasonable ones because i am able to parse you out from the people saying i'm responsible for hate crimes now before we go forward it must be acknowledged that being any person of color in the united states right now is just to be constantly worn down in a million tiny ways every day all the time by a society that is low-key shitty high key shitty it's shitty these critiques don't come from nothing and there are issues both in the film industry and the culture at large that is making people hyper vigilant i'm not going to follow that with a however i just want to lay that groundwork and acknowledge that part three white nonsense i know that's not the most pc way of saying that but i have many many white friends so i'm allowed to say that so in the case of this tweet i went to bed morning on the east coast and you know there was some discourse by people who you know had some ballot upset and the nations all lived together in harmony until the whites attacked because a common refrain of these valid criticisms were that i was ignoring poc voices and talking over poc voices but the vast vast majority of the avalanche of angry i was getting was from white people not all but definitely at least in terms of the extremely hyperbolic ones this is the majority white people come here come here we need to have a chat i think maybe we need to admit that those of us on the progressive side of the fence as it were are feeling kind of under pressure these days we are horrified by the racial injustice of the world especially in the us we feel the need to perform action but aren't really presented with very many opportunities to do so my friend and pbs co-host princess weeks remarked during another stupider twitter thing that happened a few weeks prior about fan fiction ethics actually it's about ethics and fan fiction it deeply amuses me when people treat shipping pro and anti with so much political importance when they literally apply that to nothing else and to remove all nuance in context to share fake quotes and facts to perpetuate harm in order to own people over the right for two white people to kiss when you marginalize really queer bipoc and marginalized people for what in other words often white progressives cite black voices when in service of your well in this case ship yeah it was hannibal oh my god this is so stupid you're interested in black voices when it's in the service of pwning another white person or white creator whoms to disagree with but show little interest for issues or advocacy that actually concern black voices in their community independent of said pwnage only to immediately be told you're not a real queer little girl you privileged little [ __ ] by a white lady about 15 minutes later to be clear this was this discussion was about fan fiction this was about pretend people kissing pretendly so i saw a lot of mealy mouthed smug nothing about do better and listen to poc always listen to poc why aren't you listening to poc elevate poc voices always okay hoopst hoops is the valid person of color oh allies of the jury because i did listen to a lot of poc both in public and in private and i gotta tell you there's a diversity of opinions almost like people of color aren't a monolith marginalized communities are not without diversity or conflict so treating it as such is totally reductive and ignoring other poc voices by centering the loudest or angriest as the most authoritative a problem only compounded by the way twitter is designed which i have already argued is bad as i was going back and forth over like the timeline and everything that had happened i found this private message from fellow youtuber who i have to disclose is half vietnamese because this is irrelevant and he said i'm trying not to say anything i'm going to regret here but i have very little respect for the people dog piling me and mine in the defense of a typically derivative corporate product from the biggest media company in the west because two of its seven writers and zero of its directors were asian this in private of course because you know he didn't want to get harassed so i find the listen to poc refrain because it's only trotted out in the service of white people pwning other white people very revealing because what they mean is listen to the poc we can use to pone someone else but the poc we don't agree with but note this hilarious exchange between two white people arguing over my riot tweet when pressed on what exactly it is i need to admit wrongdoing for this woman says again you're just another white woman talking over actual poc concerns i love this exchange because this person one of the [ __ ] billion white people mindlessly regurgitating this listen to poc shorthand the very same person who called princess a privileged [ __ ] you're not a real queer little girl princess's law in action there's this incredibly childish dichotomy with the way a lot of people discuss racism that there are the racists and the non-racists the two genders and the way to solve racism is to root out the racists and cast them onto racist island away from me and mine the non-racists one of the good ones they do this because they are insecure about their own internalized racism they cannot conceive that they have any that thought is terrifying to them because a racist is the worst thing you can be so instead of doing any introspection they remain hyper vigilant to root out the secret bad people so everyone else will know they're one of the good ones racism is a complex system upheld from all wings of our society from laws to hiring practices to generational wealth to community redlining to internal biases to individual actions we live in a white supremacist society when you live in a pig pen you're gonna get covered in [ __ ] and all of us have the stink on us and i don't just mean the whites all of you blocked blocked blocked none of you are free from sin but especially the whites and yet people still have this like alby the racist dragon attitude about how racism works why are you crying so i'm crying because all of those horrible villagers chase me into the scary cave i think it's because i'm so racist get your hand off my tail you'll make it dirty racism isn't a system perpetuated by many many things including actions but a character trait a disease that people try to hide from the world because they know if they're found out they'll get banished to racist island and suddenly he wasn't racist anymore while there are still of course racist hate crimes in the like most general displays of racism don't come out of grand like cross-burning style gestures but out of ignorance carelessness or negligence and for white people a lot of it is just the reality of benefiting from a system designed to privilege you so i'm not going to waste my breath on the i'm not a racist line of defense i'm a white woman from tennessee my family is mostly uneducated white trash i'm not gonna be like yeah i didn't internalize any of that i'm special i'll shot out of the womb unskated we all have the stink on us yes even you the reason i bring this up is because another thing that happened after that tweet was the sharing of the receipts thousands of people passing around screen caps of tweets and videos and blog entries and anecdotes from my personal life proving that this was not just a one-off oh no i have a long history it was high time i was banished to racist island and it's true i do have a long history of being on the internet longer than pretty much all of you statistically probably and there is a list of sins floating around twitter carefully and obsessively curated over a period of 13 years amazing is it because there's a pandemic where do you guys get all this free time so i've been accused of a lot of terrible things and remanded for never owning up to my mistakes well today is your day receipt keepers you guys have worked so so hard on this so i am going to give you what you asked for finally all that hard work meticulously combing through every word i've ever said is gonna pay off [Music] well that that's what you wanted wasn't it part four my list of sins you weren't prepared for this to turn into a drama channel were you yeah maybe you were i mean this is just what happens when they break your spirit utterly so a big part of my you know self-preservation strategy over the years is to explain myself as little as possible because you know if you do that it's already a losing game and rarely if ever talk about my personal life clearly a big mistake on my part well today we are turning the page we are spilling the tea the whiskey i mean i knew i was saving this for a special occasion i mean technically i'm whatever got my got my deceptive i haven't used this one in a while i just oh god yeah i really haven't used this in a while so take a shot every time lindsay ellis does a problematic so a common refrain during that weekend where i was trending was party a says lindsay did a racism and party b's like well what did she do party a would show the tweet and party b would be like i don't get it this doesn't seem like a big deal and then party a would be like ah no she has a long history of problematic and party b is like ah i get it now and then they skip off together into the sunset twitter user dragon lady celeste sparkle has conveniently collated my long storied history of all my other sins that explain why the raya thing was just a mask off moment and i deserve this actually a very good and normal thing to do with your finite minutes on this earth take down that youtuber take her down literally all day people have been replying to my tweet with more and more examples of truly harmful rhetoric that ellie has been pushing for a while and all i can say is how the [ __ ] has she not been called out on a mass scale before well dragon sparkle celeste she has she's just never deleted her twitter account before actually no that's not true last time i deleted my twitter account i didn't trend because i guess i wasn't you know number 21 000 on subscribed youtube channel by that point but the last time i deleted my account it was because of the uh you know white genocide crowd so i guess that's something you have in common i don't get why i'm like so hated by both sides of the political fence i don't i don't think i'm like interesting enough to like gather this much attention or emotion i drive a honda civic like jesus so thank you for compiling it in one convenient thread makes my job easier now the problem with this not at all creepy and obsessive list of every single one of my perceived transgressions over a period of 13 years is that it does not include the times when i have addressed them but you know i'm sure they just you know forgot to screen cap those tweets slash blog posts slash streams videos etc you know because this list is in such good faith nor does it incorporate any of my entire body of work which i don't know doesn't count apparently because you know the list of sins is the real me and the other stuff i do is for profit or something so there's like a jillion of these grievances and you know this video is already like 12 eternities long so believe it or not what i am about to address is non-comprehensive because there are a lot of people who were really really dedicated to you know mask off and credit to where it's due this was spearheaded by the you know leftist twitter but again a lot of these receipts originated with the right wing i don't even i don't even want to call them alt-right you know because they're not that principled you know like more like you know gamergate refugees the 4chan for the lulls crowd diet nazis let's call them so some of this is as many of you have noted extremely bad faith interpretations of statements which only make sense if you are working backwards from a foregone conclusion that said i don't want this to be taken as me saying that i have never done anything wrong unambiguously i have we all make mistakes so where i feel like an amendment or an apology is warranted i will do so but where i feel like the criticism is being made in bad faith is unreasonable or is flat out untrue i shan't bend the knee because we here at lindsay ellis industries are not in the business of serving [ __ ] so i got my bell of shame here and as the black eyed peas would say let's get it started 2020 harriet tubman fan fake this one is like really popular so the narrative here is that because of this tweet i ship harriet tubman with her enslaver and i want there to be fanfic of it i'm just saying you have to be giving this a very weird read in order to think that's what i meant but i'm also gonna go out on a limb and assume that most of the people mad about this have not seen the harriet tubman movie or if they have are not familiar with her real history so the central conflict of the film revolves around harriet's relationship to her enslaver a twinkie blonde guy named gideon played by taylor swift's then boyfriend they're around the same age they basically grow up together and early in the film he's framed somewhat sympathetically until he propositions her demands her submission and failty which of course she refuses and then when she escapes he becomes obsessed with recapturing her and he is the central antagonist of the entire film but here's the thing about gideon he never existed he was completely made up for the film harriet tubman's irl enslaver at the time of her escape was a woman but instead of having the film center more around harriet's journey after she got away from the brodas family it instead creates this character in the form of taylor swift's boyfriend as the antagonist a man who and i cannot express this enough did not exist in real life so basically the film creates an oc that is like super obsessed with recapturing her in a movie where harriet tubman also has superpowers it just it just felt a little fanficky to me and so one day i was on an airplane and the person next to me was watching it and i just kind of started wondering why the filmmakers decided to go that route with the film creatively because again it just kind of felt weird to me like and you know the final showdown in the film is between harriet and gideon in a forest that to me was somewhat evocative of the last showdown in the force awakens and this was also kind of like at the height of this sort of thing this tendency to fanficify historical figures that was partially enabled by hamilton so i just kind of idly have this thought like oh man i wonder if this movie spurned thick of these two characters oh god actually i'm not going to check because i don't want to know usually i don't really check my mentions so i didn't see any anger when i tweeted that only a few days later when screencaps started circling and then i got some white women in my dms demanding i that i do better and apologize specifically not to them but to all of my black fans that i hurt so like an hour after i tweeted it i was like i better take this down because this is the sort of thing that someone could take out of context and bad faith well so the reason i never addressed this is because like the read of that tweet in itself of me being thirsty for harriet gideon fanfic was just so absurd i didn't know what to say now to be clear no i should not have tweeted that at all i was thinking in terms of the creative decision to create gideon being kind of tone deaf but the pithy way that i tweeted it still ostensibly glosses over the reality of white owners sexually abusing their slaves being the historical norm and that is in itself disrespectful so while i definitely did not mean what people seem to think i meant i definitely should not have said that i was as the kids say showing my ass next 2009 autistic temper tantrum boy i had to go way back for this one people wonder why i privated all of my old videos so i was in film school at the time and my class was 80 male and you know some of them had a friday sense of humor and while i was talking about this movie beauty and the beast the enchanted christmas one of them made this remark about how the beast uh and i just kind of mindlessly regurgitated it b-shape i'm gonna throw an autistic temper tantrum because i was with an edgy boy website at the time and i wanted to demonstrate that i wasn't like the other girls i was a cool edgy boy it was insensitive and careless i definitely should not have said that next 2013 the prince of egypt anti-semitism oh god i just i can't i can't believe somebody kept this for seoul i'm just i'm sorry this is just this took so much dedication so the qualm here is that i did an anti-semitism because i don't like the way the prince of egypt you know functionally excuses the mass slaughter of innocent children in the narrative you know because the book of exodus frames it as a necessary evil and yeah i just i don't really care for the prince of egypt and i just don't think the book of exodus works as a kid's movie because it's a kid's movie it has to frame the protagonists as understandable and relatable to modern family audiences and frame what happens in the book of exodus as you know all fine and good in the framework of the movie even when the good guys do some light you know mass slaughter that tenth plague man it's a doozy i remember when we got to exodus in sunday school and you know when it got to the part of the wailing and lamentations of the egyptian women you know when they woke up and there's no dead children like even at the age of five i was like this is pretty [ __ ] up so my thought process here is that we take for granted the morality of narratives of biblical texts because we grew up with them and they just kind of have so much informed our cultural framework when if a story like this existed independent of the bible it would probably be considered pretty messed up especially considering how the movie frames it as all pharaoh's fault because he's such a stubborn jerk [Music] [Applause] [Music] ramesses you bring this upon yourself at least in the bible god keeps hardening his heart and the other thing is like in the way that the film progresses it's really funny to me when you're like mass slaughter of children happens pharaoh ray finds is weeping over the corpse of his only son and then val kill moses morosey pieces out and then bam miracles [Music] i mean i guess in a matter of speaking the tenth plague is a miracle and this is not to say you can't make a modern movie about the bible i actually really liked noah it's easily my favorite darren aronofsky movie because it leans in hard on how [ __ ] up and traumatic it would be to have to sit back and you know watch and listen while every other human on earth dies you know because god said so they're just people there is room there is no room for that but this is also an example of me using twitter to feel out other people's opinions before i do video content a thing i will never do again a lot of people were like yeah but you know this movie means a lot to me and you know a lot of that is because of like my religion or my culture and that was when i decided i was not ever going to touch this movie as a topic for a video and in the context of this thread i shouldn't have used the word genocide considering it's a film about jewish characters and for that i do apologize like i don't think i'd be making the world a better place by talking about why i don't think the prince of egypt works because i don't feel that strongly about it it's not a big deal i'm i'm not really here for thing you like is bad actually content for its own sake although i love how every tweet this thread has trigger warnings trigger warning she didn't like the prince of egypt next 2013 charlie's angels nicob this is another one i've addressed a few times most recently on a livestream a few years ago where we re-watched it and had a high old time laughing about what a comical example of early 2010's white feminism this was you know what guys i'm sorry i'm calling it like feminism is over i'm sorry i tried we did our best but it's our feminism too it just can't end up for everyone i'm not sick of the go make me a sandwich joke i'm not lover yeah so not gonna lie this one's pretty bad this whole thing came about when i was on twitter one day talking about doing a video on charlie's angels and trying to think of like how visually to dress myself that was like the opposite of charlie's angels and someone on twitter was like hey you should do it in a burqa with like pigtails poking out and i thought that idea was funny is too confusing we don't know what we want it is apparently way too much to ask that women like either have a certain body type or dress a certain way without being judged for it so two options burka or [ __ ] that's not burka and that's a false dichotomy and even at the time several of my muslim followers were like please do not do this this is a bad idea and okay so this is not excusing it but here is some context so at the time my next-door neighbor was an egyptian expat named hajjar and she was slash is a full nikabi meaning whenever she goes outside she dresses in like the full you know well basically what i was wearing minus the pigtails sticking out and basically huddard was like the only next-door neighbor i've ever been friends with and it's another one of those weird problems of considering culture is a monolith like uh one would assume or at least i assumed that like she would have zero interest in talking to me and we would have nothing in common considering she's like super super religious and yes some women do it voluntarily but that's its own thing i'm not gonna get into it but basically one day we started talking when i was watching the hunchback of notre dame too loud really and she was like she caught me on the landing like so hunchback of notre dame huh so anyway i mentioned this thing to her and she was like yeah whatever that's hilarious lol and so this is not excusing it but i kind of took that as well my friend i know personally said it's fine so i'm going to you know take that opinion over these strangers but again even at the time i had people on twitter saying do not do this thing and i ignored them and either way i wasn't making content for egyptian expats which i'm pretty sure she's never even seen one of my videos and either way it was also completely unnecessary to the point of the video like i could have made the exact same point with like a potato sack with pigtails sticking out and it probably would have been funnier this one was bad and wrong for a lot of reasons and i do regret that next 2018 stephanie meyer apologia so the dear stephanie meyer video was about me reflecting on how carelessly i had participated in the casual misogyny surrounding the early twilight backlash around the time that the first movie came out you know late 2000s and so the general objection here is that the video is racist because i neither mentioned nor condemned stephanie meyer's depiction of the quillu people so i'm not going to lie and say i didn't consider addressing it and i did have some conversations on twitter with indigenous people that were actually productive see twitter's not always bad just you know mostly but there were two main reasons i decided not to discuss it in that video you know besides the fact that that was back when i was trying to keep videos around like the 20 minute mark one was the fact that during the backlash of the late 2010s twilight's appropriation of the quillute was not a common criticism and certainly was not weaponized against stephanie meyer it is now but that just was not a substantial proportion of the backlash at that time the second one is once again we come to this question of the voices of a group being considered a monolith i definitely talked to some indigenous people that condemned it but i also saw some that were like yeah actually i mean like i mean no it's not the best but i liked it it was something new it was like a representation we hadn't seen before it was refreshing to have jacob as this character who isn't like a noble savage stereotype and isn't like magically in tune with nature and doesn't have like a sad broken family he's just like a nice normal kid who lives on the rez and vibes you know at least in the first book again this video was addressing a point in time before breaking dawn came out so i just wasn't really comfortable making a value judgment on which of those was the correct opinion especially because it didn't really feel relevant to the central thesis and it's also a complicated issue that just didn't feel at home in that video like for instance on the one hand the way the quilliot are depicted in twilight puts the onus on the real cool you to educate people that they're not werewolves and then the elders they uh you know said hey miss and you gotta get out there and educate people that were really not werewolves but on the other hand the attention twilight has brought to the tribe has helped them tremendously not just through tourism but actually helped them get land back from the feds it's opened the way for our tribe economically and then the media it helped us a lot you know our our ancestors and our past council members have been fighting for over 50 years for our northern boundary dispute to actually have that day and and have the president obama sign you know a document saying that you know this land is yours it was like wow but on the other other hand stephanie meyer is a multi-millionaire many times over it is kind of weird that she has given none of that wealth as far as i know back to a people whose culture she appropriated you know for supernatural love triangles and while we're on this topic amanda the jedi has been doing a twilight retrospective and she brought to my attention a fundraiser that the quillude had been running for a few years to help move some of their village to higher ground to you know protect them from all the tsunamis and you know the climate change and whatnot so that is linked below if i did the video again especially now that my videos are like eight hours long i'd probably add a little bit mentioning that this conversation became prominent later but this criticism does kind of always give me weird vibes because it usually comes with this subtext of and this is why stephanie meyer did and still does deserve the harassment she got one that is not why people were hassling her in 2008 so i could not fold that into the valid common criticisms folder and two no one deserves that next 2018 transphobia via tarzan i genuinely honestly really do regret this one and i have said so a few times why do they never screen cap the retractions weird when it was announced that lefou would become the first out gay character in a disney movie the l's the g's the bees the t's and of course all you filthy filthy cute i think it was like 15 minutes after this video went live that i was like oh god why did i do that let's because i was thinking about the optics so much as it wasn't a good joke like i should have used mulan god damn my eyes i thought this idea of a fab turk being angry about wearing a dress was funny but in hindsight i really should have considered that it wasn't just any disney character it was a gorilla an animal that trans women are sometimes compared to and it was extremely careless and it's a shame because i otherwise really do like that video next 2020 trans men don't experience oppression actually i didn't say that i said that anecdotally i had heard from a few trans men over my 80-odd years of existence that they felt that they didn't experience the same level of scrutiny or harassment that they had before they transitioned because of misogyny that said this was also before elliot page came out and i've seen so many people be beastly to him so you know that is a strong counter example and i could say that i can't speak for all trans men's experiences but i didn't claim to and i'm not sure how you could read that into my statement i was just repeating anecdotes i had heard so some of the hate mail i've been getting is calling me a turf because of this which i think is really funny called a turf for saying trans men are all right next 2017 zack snyder hates his mother once again tweet clipped out of context and another one the gamergate refugees were really obsessed with not that you guys have anything in common but so these tweets are all long deleted but this was a conversation between me and another film critic i forget who talking about how difficult it is to meaningfully discuss zack snyder's films especially at the time because his fans are a little touchy and one snyder fan said you know i don't mind when critics talk about his movies i just don't like it when they say stuff like zack snyder hates his mother and this was just absurd to me because i have never ever heard a real critic say that so i responded with what i considered obvious sarcasm well i actually have it on good authority that zack snyder hates his mother so this was really bad timing because i made this joke literally the night before the news broke that autumn snyder had killed herself the very night before and so i wake up to just this flood of outrage in my mentions and like i am so deeply confused before i even realize what's going on and it was just like oh my god so i don't like zack snyder's movies for a lot of reasons but he does seem like the rare decent powerful man in hollywood and i can't imagine how awful it was to go through what he did especially during such a huge production and i'm impressed and appreciate that the snyders have been doing such broad advocacy for suicide prevention now but like harassing me in the name of like suicide prevention advocacy is like come on now this is by no means zack snyder's fault and i do not mean to imply that it is again from all i've heard through my hollywood grapevine he seems like a decent person and he can't control what his fans do and even though i wish he had done it sooner he has finally disavowed the really bad ones and i also can kind of appreciate that he probably didn't really have the emotional bandwidth to pay attention to that sort of thing for a long time let alone you know address it but i'm also sure that the many many snyder fans who have told me to kill myself in the last four years because of this tweet just didn't know about my own history either way i'm sure it's an issue they all care deeply deeply about all over a few martha jokes jesus next 2020 did a misgender this was a misunderstanding john mullaney did an snl monologue that i didn't love i said something about it curio responded to that i said yeah i know thanks john addressing john uh we talked it out over twitter i apologized those tweets are still up next 2012 defending the yellow facing cloud atlas i'm surprised there are no screen caps for this probably because the diet nazis didn't find that worthy of preservation but this is true there was a lot of criticism of cloud atlas at the time and i said something to the effect of i didn't think it mattered as much as like you know the conversations around blackface because they had a different history and i don't i don't know why i said that i don't know what the hell i was thinking like for one thing i was definitely revealing my ignorance because like yellowface is just you know a topic i had never really studied i'd done plenty on blackface nothing on yellowface imagine falling on your sword for cloud atlas of all things my podcast partner is going to be so disappointed i'm sorry copy so yeah i still like cloud atlas but the creative decision to use yellowface in the way that they did is pretty inexcusable and honestly it does kind of make me uncomfortable to watch now my bad next 2015 bisexual erasure [Music] so again another post clipped out of context and it is quite literally the only time i have ever written about my sexuality and stuff like this is the reason why i was like wow never talking about that again it is from my now deleted blog but i linked the archive page below and in effect it was basically me kind of working out my feelings on feeling like bisexual erasure was almost a form of privilege and i still kind of think that's true and the thing about sexuality is it's just like such a personal thing and that's why this like conflation of like the political and the personal while necessary often makes me really uncomfortable because it was like such a painful process for me and one i never really figured out how to reconcile so i just never did so i've never really had a coming out or embracing my truth more just like slow quiet begrudging acceptance like i just have these laundry lists of experiences like for being in college and going to gay clubs and having lesbians suddenly turn cold when they find out you're bisexual to the popular axiom at the time of by now gay later or highway to homo or gay until may to dan savage way up into the 2010s saying that bisexual men don't exist it's all a phase or all the way to former respected person glenn greenwald saying that the bisexuals are transing the lesbians out of existence as recently as last month so i can't help but feel a sort of imposter syndrome every time i do anything even tangentially pride related i feel tolerated but not accepted and why do i want to go to that parade like oh you're here fine i guess we're contractually obligated to let you in so i think for a lot of bisexuals especially women we do kind of live in this liminal space of both privilege and erasure it is painful to feel ostracized from the community when accepting your identity has caused you so much pain in the first place but at the same time you can opt out you can in effect pass a straight like if i had a dollar for every time someone called me a straight white woman in the last few weeks although that would take care of my patreon for at least a month and to answer very good faith actors like glenn glenn greenwald glenn what was his mother thinking so to answer very good faith actors like as to why proportionally bisexual people tend to end up in heterosexual relationships 75 25 rather than the 50 50 it allegedly should be hmm i wonder why that could be you know just besides the fact that as a proportion of humanity there are more straight people to choose from well here i am making a thing out of it am i in the club now [Music] next 2014 did a bisexual gatekeeping against maura wilson ah so we have reached the speculations on my private life portion of the game show is now a good time to bring up the fact that lindsay ellis was super shitty and biphobic tomorrow wilson when she came out as bi or are we giving people of color a moment to drag her for filth before we bring up other [ __ ] be honest i guess we're doing this you may know mara wilson from her work as a trial star in films like matilda and mrs doubtfire in the last odd decade or so she's worked as a non-fiction author a voice actor a twitter person who makes approximately 680 retweets per day and also occasionally writer of op-eds for outlets like the new york times in 2016 when she gave an interview about coming out as bisexual it included this quote i remember being with bisexual friends i said i think i might be bisexual and a friend of mine who's not a friend anymore said no you're not she was a gay keeper okay that gay keep that's good i'm gonna use that so i'm not sure how this random twitter user decided that she was talking about me as the gay keeper in this interview from 2016 but someone decided she must have been talking about me based on no evidence whatsoever and the accusation stuck mostly because mara liked that tweet and then about 50 other tweets of people having a high old time with me as twitter's villain of the day and i really don't know where this random user's supposition came from because i have been very very careful never to say anything about her publicly either by reference or implication despite the many times she has talked about this awful former friend she used to have either you know in interviews podcasts and you know subtweets in print it was me [Music] i was wondering what that turkey was doing there and to my knowledge she's never indicated that i was the gatekeeper until the liking of this tweet there by validating these suppositions cool cool cool cool okay all i'm about to blow some minds but first i need to provide some context mara and i were at a point in history friends and literal neighbors you know we were both in our mid-20s we lived like two blocks from each other we were both recent nyu grads and we were both aspiring writers and many people who've been following us for a long long time have observed hmm you two used to be really good friends and then suddenly you were not and that is true but here's the thing the anecdote about the gatekeeping bisexual former friend is also true i do remember the conversation she is talking about and while the wording she uses isn't how i remember it the basic gist of the conversation is true she told me she thought she might be bisexual and i kind of casually dismissed it on the grounds of her dating style reminding me of a former roommate who prided herself on being straight it was a fairly short conversation it happened one time seven years ago yeah and we never spoke out of it again so this conversation happened at least a year before we stopped speaking which was over five years ago and the reason why was a series of compounding factors this was not one of them at least to my knowledge and the truth is i don't know why i said what i said or reacted the way i did if that had happened now i would not have reacted that way but even then i don't know why i was so dismissive offhand about something that i know from my own experience can cause a lot of pain and isolation and it only came up the one time was immediately dropped and we never spoke of it again and for that reason i never thought much of it i didn't consider that she wasn't just kind of saying something off the cuff but was actually admitting something that she had been considering for a while to someone that she thought would understand and that person dismissed her and i didn't even begin to know that this caused any hurt until almost two years after that conversation even happened because she didn't come out until a few months after between the two of us and i cannot express this enough had nothing to do with this like this is something i feel like i need to press on the so and so as a secret bigot crusaders does it occur to you that you can dislike someone without some irreconcilable ideological differences this is a personal falling out between two people that has nothing to do with the content we produce i produce and i just want to dispel this narrative that like someone has to be like the secret bigot or you know mask off or there's always the wronged one and the abuser in one of these falling outs when it's just like sometimes people just don't get along kids i would love to know why andrew lloyd webber and tim rice fell out but it is at the end of the day none of my business and they have made it known and they have kept the y under wraps for almost 40 years and honestly good for them life goals and though do trust that this bridge is well and truly forever burned i do sincerely regret that i reacted the way i did i think i was probably projecting my own experience with rejection and paying it forward and i am sorry for that and no i shan't be airing any more dirty laundry on this topic fascinating though it may be next 2009 the rape rap someone made a rape joke oh my god someone call the rape joke brigade officer i have an infraction i need to report to the ministry of rape jokes look honestly i'm shocked that lindsay ellis has not been cancelled forever by the rape rap the zoomers that are cancelling her haven't even discovered the old rape rap she made yet law very thoughtful that she finally released a mandarin and japanese version of the original rape rap well this has been a long time coming hasn't it there is this semi-infamous video i did back in 2009 which is called rape wrap which is exactly what it sounds like the joke is that my friend brian playing a rapping sexual predator says horrible things to me online because woman and i try to get him not to say these things and honestly i kind of want to give a slow clap to the diet nazis because this is a fetch they have been trying to make happen for years and i'm honestly kind of happy for them you know like they have used this to hurt me and humiliate me and they sent it to like pbs affiliate pbs corporate trying to get me fired and they've uploaded like 800 mirrors to youtube they've sent it to my colleagues they've spammed me with it for over a decade and it just never spread beyond the diet nazi sphere and it's finally finally into the mainstream wokes gold twitter you know i'm i'm happy for them they worked so hard for this so i know the people adding this to my list of sins are very very concerned about rape victims and that's why you're upset by this so i know you would want to know the context for this you weren't just thoughtlessly adding this to my ledger to help assuage people's moments of doubt that the harassment against me was in fact justified you care about context and here's your content warning so if you don't want to hear this skip to this time code we're bringing out the tequila for this one this isn't even fake tequila so when i was a sophomore in college my very first sexual experience with another human being was a big reason why i was vulnerable to this person was so he took me back to his studio apartment and [Music] and when i woke up and realized what had happened i started freaking out and like i just i remember like there being the smell and like so basically he just like pushed me out of his apartment he gave me a 20 billion just like slam the door in my face and i i mean what are you gonna do so i just like the 20 bill was enough money exactly to like for the cab ride home and then i got a nesquik you know like the chocolate milk and a bagel and then i go upstairs to my dorm room and i like just hork it all up and then i like take off my clothes and i just like burn the evidence on our gas stove like i just like you know it was a clothes fault i just uh my roommate was out of town at the time so there was nobody so i just like burned the clothes and burned the evidence and i didn't tell anyone that this happened um so nobody knew so about one year later i was at a dresden dolls concert um of all things um and you know i think this was yeah this was 2005. and um i was there with my roommate and um uh we lived uh in the west village and the concert was at webster hall and webster hall as it was about a 15 20 minute walk from our uh apartment in the west village and um i uh we got separated on the way home you know because you know concert and partying but you know and normally that's like no big deal because like it's no big deal to get separated from your college roommate for you know 10 minutes but when i get back to our apartment i find her on the stairwell um covered in because uh by our neighbors so like like are literally across the hallway neighbor so i just like see white i just like fly into this animal rage and [Music] i don't think it was like it couldn't have been more than like five or ten minutes before the police showed up and i was like still in full hulk mode and unfortunately the ambulance showed up before they could take us to jail as they do so um we went to the hospital and she got a rape kit done and so now i'm involved with that case um cool cool cool all this while like this whole time i had not told anybody um what had happened to me like i wouldn't actually tell anybody what happened to me for like another uh i think it was like another year or two i think yeah it was probably like yeah it was like two years later um and of course i didn't do it in a healthy way i think it was probably yeah it was something like this you know like is this healthy but here's the thing when like uh something like this happens you know and like you know there's police involved and police reports and hospitalizations you know and besides the d.a pressuring you out of pressing charges which is what they did to my roommate um and you know i didn't realize that was because you know they want to deflate the crime stats in their districts until about 15 years later when reply all did a did an episode on that um but the thing is like there's a lot of paperwork and like no this is relevant so basically like um she and i shared this like hanging file like for all of our paperwork that we had for like various things that were just like you know financial aid um you know essays college stuff rape for the first like few days um it was just this like untouchable horrible thing that like happened and had to be endured and was just like this paul over both of us and you know and this was before the da pressured her out of pressing charges and um so we had this folder and so like we just somehow like i asked her like well what's in that folder and she's like rape and we kind of like embellished the folder like with the musical so it was just like rape and like you know horror font the musical and i'm not gonna lie and say this like began the process of healing categorically it didn't but you know it did make the reality of the situation like accessible you know joking about it brings it down to earth it's no longer this like unspeakable horror and like you know if cora's life is based on mine in any way it is this um nyu's tas were having a strike that semester um meaning that the undergrads were allowed to drop classes basically up until finals without penalty or a failing grade and what happened uh was that like that was the only semester where that was an option and it weren't for that technicality where i could drop classes up till finals i would have failed out of school i mean the failing out part is taken from my experience not the right part i didn't i didn't give cora that tragic backstory so being just like this one two punch of horrible things like i just like i was honestly terrible like i like in so many ways i went catatonic i wasn't supportive um and i just don't remember like just big chunks of 2005 and 2006 and that sucks because like i really you know treasure a lot of my time in education at nyu there are just like huge blocks of it that i don't remember um but i do remember this uh not long after i graduated a couple years later rape the musical came up in like a different context and my friends brian and pat both to this day are you know still two of my dearest friends um brian even officiated my wedding so brian had this jacket which he joked made him look like a flasher um and like somehow he was like freestyling these wraps to me and pat and i at the time found them just like hilarious and cathartic and i was like you know keep going and so we like started workshopping and we're like oh let's make a sketch out of this and i just remember these like lame freestyles while pat just sat there with this like dead serious expression not paying attention and just me like dying laughing and like finding it honestly really helpful and i don't think like at the time i don't even think they knew i think they were just like humoring me uh so this was a way of tying in all of this like horrible nonsense that happened to me my roommate in college with some of the misogynist garbage i was getting as a baby woman on the internet in 2009. so it was as the kids say a cope now with regard to this jokey joke little sketch that makes such light of rape i know what you're thinking this must be so hard for you that's so sad for you that must have been super [ __ ] hard for you but if this was indeed a copycope jokey joke between friends should it not have remained private yes you observant good faith person you it should have but this was uploaded without my knowledge or permission without my consent you might say i even blogged about it because at the time i was of course getting calls for apologies and i was like absolutely not this happened without my permission and there's an archived link to that blog entry in the description if you vultures want proof so the way that this happened at all was at the time channel awesome um controlled all of our individual channels and we didn't upload them ourselves we uploaded them to an ftp and scheduled them and then someone else uploaded it for us so when i finished this video i did still think it was funny but i also realized that this should never see the light of day this can be just like a practice run for other sketchy things that we do and should stay a private joke between friends all the while forgetting that my export folder automatically uploaded directly to this ftp so months pass i forgot it was even there and then one day the guy who ran the schedule i guess got annoyed that i kept blowing my deadlines and he was like fine i'll just upload whatever's in that ftp folder but like i i started getting these phone calls asking why i scheduled that and i'm like i didn't take it down but it was too late and now here we are so the diet nazis love this video because you know they think i'm like this high-minded liberal who is like so holier than now and therefore that this exposes my hypocrisy and so we can use this to just like torment me and humiliate me and just like constantly like upload it and like i'll just see it like in my mentions and sometimes they'll send it to like my colleagues or my publisher just to like try to get them to get a reaction and so now woke school twitter has discovered it and just mindlessly adds it to my ledger of sins and so now here we are and i'm having to relive one of the worst times of my life just to get you people to back the [ __ ] off she tried to pretend this and the rape rapper lindsay ellis doesn't want you to remember this raise the rape rap one more time for the homie almost as tragic as a rape imagine getting canceled over this and not the reigns you didn't make rape raps so she's fine with edgy jokes i always thought that lindsay ellis would get cancelled when her rape rap would bring up to these woke people for years did you think they wouldn't eventually come for you just wait till the discovery of the ring i remind everyone of the rape rap that track was fired so like all of you just these these people who have been trying to get to me with it and think that like me staying silent is an admission of guilt rather than it being none of your [ __ ] business even considering that this was not supposed to be made public and now these woes goldage is adding it to like my ledger and trying to use it to discredit me all of you are just loathsome loathsome people and i hope you all and as i mentioned earlier this list is non-comprehensive but and to everyone out there who is like you know oh yeah but why are you making this all about you i didn't make this about me you did part five the tweet so if this tweet were a video essay that had been researched for months instead of a tweet popped off in a minute which i never will make i will never talk about either of these properties again it would probably be structured something like this avatar the last airbender was a game changer in a lot of ways here are some of the things that influenced it shown in anime asian folklore there's a new generation of american writers many of them people of color who were influenced by it anime and young adult literature have changed a lot because of this direct and indirect influence and honestly i think that's cool i think that shows and books are honestly much more interesting for it than that which came before so with regard to the similarity between these two texts two big things stuck out to me one is the element-based co-lead being woken up by katara after hundreds of years of sleep as the last whatever now you know come on in we have to go from nation to nation and in each nation you will acquire a skill until we face down the ding dang dong fire nation what started this whole mess and heal the world but the thing that stuck out most in my mind as a trend that i've been seeing a lot in animation and why a literature and it's not a bad thing jesus it's what i'm going to call for lack of originality the zuko the princeling of the rival nation who has a lot to prove to their family and who serves as the principal antagonist for a while while our heroes bop from nation to nation and he chases them around but eventually starts to have a change of heart and a redemption arc now the reason i decided like half of why a fantasy again i did not mean literally half that that was hyperbole um well basically it was because that most of the yeah fantasy that i had read because those were you know the big names that you know i had to read to be hep to the jive that were released in the last few years have avatar as influences the most high profile of which being children of blood and bone by tomi adeyemi now i did enjoy this book and like raya it also made heavy use of the zuko and for that reason it was the first thing that popped into my head as being similar to raya and yes avatar the last airbender makes heavy use of asian and anime tropes but it was the piece of media that popularized a lot of these things in the us you didn't really see like redemption arcs over several seasons before that and now you see it all the time steven universe does it the new she-ra does it kippo kind of does it with the frog and the monkey okay i never said the zuko had to be sexy and now we have raya and the last dragon now if you did read into my tweet that i was dismissing this or saying it was a bad thing i guess i could understand that read because it wasn't very gracefully worded and it doesn't say anything positive but it doesn't say anything negative either it is an inherently neutral statement it is an observation it's not even a critique and so i was like this is not a dig you crazies and then the line is like oh you're calling poc crazy which is so disingenuous when the vast vast majority of people losing their [ __ ] at me my mentions were white people projecting their own insecurities at me like obviously yeah crazies was a joke but as a writer and a media critic it was just so frustrating for me to see people interpreting the comparison of these two things as a dig like i was insulting one by comparing it to the other what is this like cinemasins brain poisoning thing being similar to other thing not bad one of the funnest things as a writer you get to do when discussing your book or your media is discussing the influences because ostensibly they are something the author loves and is excited to talk about so i also saw like a bunch of these like weird low digs like oh axiom's end is so original oh axiom zinda's derivative like i know that i have marketed the damn thing on it being inspired by alien invasion movies and tv shows of the 90s and 2000s there's a reason why i made a bunch of content about those influences in the year leading up to its release do you want me to give you a list of them everything has influences and avatar the last airbender is one of the most successful and beloved children's shows of all time author tomi adeyemi said of children of blood and bone the book raya reminded me a lot of i have shadow shaper by daniel jose older and to the right of it there's an ember in the ashes by sabota here and above it is avatar the last airbender children of blood and bone is the baby of all three and even one of the screenwriters of raya has said that although avatar was not a direct inspiration we don't shy away from the comparison because it's a beautiful series no matter how many mental back bins i do even if you're tired of this take or feel like it's flattening everything inspired by the largest continent on earth i cannot begin to understand this causing hurt or anguish unless you are reading into it something that i did not say especially when i'm like the 800th person to make this very milk toast observation screen junkies had released an honest trailer several days earlier making the exact same comparison for the exact same reasons long ago the five lands lived together in harmony then everything changed when the drew nation attacked briatar the last air dragon the avatar the i mean raya and the last dragon and look at that dislike ratio i don't think there is a single video on my entire channel with a dislike ratio that low i wonder why they didn't get any backlash i wonder why it could be part six she deserved it if twitter had streets there would have been dancing in them when i deleted my account like justine sacco getting fired like everyone held accountable by an online mob before me this was taken as a victory by many many people and so the problem with making a big thing out of this tweet which at worst could be considered an unintentional microaggression made the outraged reaction to it kind of hard to justify which is why we need to establish a history of my offenses to bolster their case and this is where the list of sins comes in i'm trending on twitter for like two days there's all this discourse so of course people are going to have second thoughts like why are so many people talking about this maybe this has gotten out of hand maybe the backlash wasn't worth the original sin and here comes dragon celeste and hundreds like her like ah no don't worry this is accountability here is the long list of sins proving that this is just mask off she has a long history how has she not been called out before i know someone who's met her and they say she's a bad person so you don't need to feel bad about hounding her because she deserves it and my god just the joy people took in this like seeing me taken down a peg good [ __ ] riddance [ __ ] good riddance good [ __ ] riddance terrible human being dislikes asians too y'all getting lindsay ellis is beautiful don't know [ __ ] about her i can just look at a white person and know they're awful can't stand that human being glad i won't have to see her tweets her takes were so awful and embarrassing i wouldn't want to be anywhere near her [ __ ] lindsay ellis and her awful racism and for being a prominent phantom fan when it should be me but mostly the racism i hate her and jenny nicholson serene smiley faces lindsay ellis deleted people like lindsay ellis are finally facing consequences for being atrocious human beings lindsey ellis getting cancelled is good actually i will die on this [ __ ] hill what have i done to you are you are you rent fans so many times i've seen people show the damning evidence to others like see look at this only have the people they're showing it to be like i don't understand where you're getting this is there some context i'm missing here is a woman of color doing that very thing to cat black demanding that she answered for sometimes collaborating with such a racist and cat basically responded why the [ __ ] are you demanding that i answer for my white colleagues leave her the [ __ ] alone and this is just the switches oh oh the joy the diet nazis took in this god they love it when the left eats their own and why wouldn't they it's hilarious when your political enemies tear each other apart i mean to reiterate these people have been trying to take me down for years keep trying boys and part of that joy comes with this justification of what they perceive as someone with real power and wealth and privilege being taken down a peg it's like this bizarre delusion that i or any of my friends have any real power or influence outside of our very niche corner of the internet i am not a real celebrity i almost never get recognized in public i don't have a pr team or a manager or a stylist or a team of lawyers just one very anxious literary agent and one youtube agent who uh honestly he thinks this [ __ ] is hilarious i honestly kind of missed the diet nazis because like they at least knew what they were they weren't harassing me like it was some civil rights campaign that might make the world marginally more just they were just bullies plain and simple and they were proud of it and you know honestly in hindsight i kind of respect that at least my mentions being full of like pictures of razor blades and dead animals and clorox saying hey drink this you know at least that's honest i do appreciate that the people making good faith criticisms are not responsible for the people making bad faith criticism or for that matter threats or rejoicing in my downfall but it is beyond the scope of reasonable to expect me to take all this stimulus thousands of people screaming at me from reasonable to sadistic especially considering everything i've been through in my life and behave like the perfect victim if you just say the right thing we'll leave you alone if you just behave in the way we're asking we'll make it go away if you just apologize we just stop all she had to do was like listen she had a long history of problematic [ __ ] she never listened she should have done the work to make amends maybe next time don't call an entire marginalized group crazy she's a biphobic transphobic racist mess who deleted her account rather than apologize for being a piece of [ __ ] she couldn't take actual criticism for people who knew more than she did [ __ ] all you had to do was apologize for her white bread take and move on deleted her own account then just apologized nuked her count instead of apologized totally unraveled under the slightest scrutiny deleted her account instead of saying i [ __ ] up sorry why are you so emotional why are you so upset i'm not with the hundreds of people saying you're responsible for hate crimes and mass murder i'm not one of the people trotting out the obsessive documentation of every misstep you've ever made over the last 15 years i'm the reasonable one and i'm calm why aren't you calm why aren't you addressing this why hasn't she apologized when is she going to apologize when are you going to apologize never becky the answer is never at least not to you someone on my subreddit wrote a really thoughtful essay on the whole situation and here is a quote from that abuse should always be a part of our analysis and we should be aware every single second that we participate in these conversations that our actions have the potential to excuse or perpetuate abuse we should take responsibility for that take steps to mitigate it and hold ourselves accountable this is why i have such distrust for the position why should i have to talk about abuse i'm not personally abusing anyone you should have distrust for that position because that is exactly what they said to me during gamergate the exact same thing part seven you're next what follows in campaigns like this is the other isolation tactic targeting your colleagues friends and loved ones this comes in two flavors demanding that the colleagues of the accused answer for their crimes or trying to deplatform said colleagues because you're already riding high off the previous victory so who's next sarah's ed is next jenny nicholson is next contra points is next ginny and per [ __ ] ticular jenny is next jenny you're next jenny next jenny next jenny next both jenny nicholson and contour points were trending at certain points during the weekend because of me fake screenshots of a racist tweet that jenny never made spread like wildfire with the goal of getting her driven off of twitter because of me and a year and a half ago the shoe was on the other foot because a lot of the same crowd was attacking natalie it must needs be remarked that a huge contingent of the people who have it out for me right now hate me for sticking by natalie during the angel buck incident about 18 months ago and if you want to know more about that here's the thing and it's really only now that i can make sense of it that i got so many hate follows after that that people were so eager to screen cap anything and everything i said on twitter no matter how minor or petty to create this narrative of me as a secret horrible person just because i stood up for my friend and i don't regret doing it i would do it again but it is insane that i am paying such a high price for that now and now my other colleagues are being targeted for no other reason than the crime of being friends with me for not publicly denouncing me for not validating their anger and why jenny is one of the smartest most insightful people i know sarah always floors me with how much research and nuance and sensitivity she brings to her topics and she's only 22. natalie is well she's a [ __ ] but she's my [ __ ] these obsessive campaigns to try to push these narratives of my friends as bad people and secret turfs and secret racists are just baffling to me global fascism is on the rise on a level we haven't seen in more than a generation are there not enough out and proud racists that you feel you need to unmask the my little pony youtuber jenny next jenny next ginny next so do not give me this horseshit about accountability this is obviously just entertainment to you just [ __ ] own it obsessively chronicling every perceived misstep we've ever made that could be interpreted badly all while completely ignoring the rest of our entire bodies of work why are you wasting so much energy on this because you can't impact people who are actually doing your community harm you can't shame the shameless trump will never face justice brett kavanaugh is on the supreme court for life ben shapiro gets off on your outrage so you shame those who can be shamed and if you call one of us bigoted enough times people will start to believe it and then you can feel like you solved racism by spreading lies about a person you have never met and never will and was doing you and your community no harm well done shabbash good job [ __ ] every single one of you you do not deserve grace you do not deserve sympathy part eight the beast so obviously in my case the easy thing to do would be eat crow and move on i never would have gotten trending if i hadn't deleted my twitter account but i'm not here to say a bunch of [ __ ] i don't mean because pr [ __ ] pr you want your precious authenticity here it is there's a danger to normalizing the insincere apology and if we normalize acting like pr bots and dole out disingenuous apologies whenever they are demanded for any reason valid or invalid any harm real or imagined then this isn't discourse this is performance the reason campaigns like this gain traction is because they prey on communities that try to operate in good faith they take advantage of people's good will and they condition cynicism so inevitably people harden over they default to skepticism even this [ __ ] woman of color who harangued kat black demanding that she answer for collaborating with such a racist well guess what that person eventually fessed up to being a white man before deleting his account because you know listen to poc people are so obsessed with identity as a rhetorical trump card you can't even take it on good faith that people are who they say they are anymore and they take that desire to do right and exploit it because it makes them feel powerful this is the real mask off you're next jenny you're next sarah you're next natalie because running women off twitter is fun i mean accountability so militantly performing allyship by rooting out corruption like it's the [ __ ] red scare sharing doctored screenshots of tweets that don't exist and willfully misinterpreting things to prove that the my little pony youtuber is a secret racist deep down you know you're just doing it for clout right you should be sensitive to marginalized groups and you should be constantly advocating for a more just world and against racism because we all have the stink on us but that should be the goal in itself not performing on twitter so people can reassure you you're one of the good ones so you can get max retweets for an awesome dunk i am not innocent i have done this and as content creators or behavior online turns from due diligence into threat modeling and i'm not playing this game anymore trying to stay 18 steps ahead of the worst possible interpretation of my words or actions isn't taking accountability it's just self-defense it's just protecting the brand and i understand why there is this lingering culture of distrust especially among communities of color but it is the height of dishonesty to suggest that the kind of atmosphere where everything is taken in bad faith leads to a more just world i'm not furious because i'm uniquely wronged i will be fine i didn't actually lose anything i could have pretended nothing happened and probably be better off because nobody cares about the [ __ ] riot tweet i'm furious because this keeps happening and we have deluded ourselves into thinking that savaging each other for the smallest transgression and the most minor disagreement is helping right the wrongs of the world that there's this broad refusal to admit that our systems that operate on good faith are very often abused i was going to include a section about other people from more marginalized groups than me who are held to an even higher standard of purity who have lost way more than i have for equally minor perceived transgressions but you know you probably already know some and they probably don't want me using their names anyway but i feel like i need to impress that i didn't start getting noticeable harassment from the purity tester brigade until i stood up for a trans woman on twitter over and i cannot express this enough a situation that did not deserve anything approaching the level of outrage that it fostered and that backlash did not come from the alt-right or even the diet nazis but our own community our side this is why they win a friend of mine named it the beast the name for this fear that we all live under but don't acknowledge and over the last few years i have had so many of my colleagues all of them women people of color trans people queer people or some combination of the above voice to me the constant anxiety that they live with about maybe saying something wrong that will get them on the bad side of their own communities every thought is a hostage situation is this the tweet that's going to sink me so what do we call it what is the name for this unspoken unacknowledged culture of fear where we all know that one misstep can ruin our lives this social media culture where we participate in the public shaming one day and become chained to the pillory the next we can't even talk about it because the beast does not have a name if we admit that this is a problem then the right will just take it and run with it and use it to increase their own power same as they did with cancel same as they did with woke same as they did with fake news if it has a name then it has power so it is a discussion that cannot be had and so we do not have it we say cancel culture doesn't exist and ignore this disease pretend it isn't doing real harm not just to individuals who are targeted but to the state of discourse in general and especially to individuals in marginalized groups because they are always held to the highest standard of purity and they always have the most to lose it isn't even about saying something tone deaf or insensitive a mere difference in opinion might get you fired from your job if enough people raise a stink about it and just so we're clear i'm not really even talking about me i will be fine but living under the shadow of the beast makes it hard to just create at all a big factor in why it takes us so long to do a single video is threat modeling because god forbid you say something mildly positive about one of the bad ones that you did not know were bad so much of the work we do is getting ahead of any potential misstep by adding like 1800 caveats and acknowledgements and it's never enough angelina and i were collaborating with fellow author and sas jeanette ing on a video about the live action mulan that jeanette was co-writing and was going to co-host and we'd been working on it for months and right after this happened i was like we have to scrap this video but then after a few days i was like for what because a bunch of twitter teens are gonna call me a racist for criticizing a movie nobody likes y'all we're gonna do that either way believe me i know that this video is not going to change any minds it's going to make a lot of people very angry and i hope they get lots of engagement i hope they see i wish you all of the retweets but i can't stay ahead of it anymore i'm not going to do the performance of avoiding offense of staying 500 steps ahead of everything that might be misread or misinterpreted not because it's the right thing to do but just to protect my brand [ __ ] my brand i will do the due diligence but i'm done with threat modeling i just don't care anymore if you want to read bigoted dog whistles and everything i say go with god if you want to pass my list of sins to everyone who so much as mentions me in a positive way i hope it brings you peace if you want to speculate on my private life i hope it brings you much profit i hope you accrue much social capital i personally choose to take a page from the book of my political enemies you can't shame the shameless so i'm going to use the term cancel in its original vernacular meeting i am canceling shame and i will [ __ ] with shame no more forever so if anything thank you for liberating me from giving a [ __ ] part nine what now i want to acknowledge that i got dozens if not hundreds of messages of support in private through patreon instagram and email and while not all of them were 100 you did nothing wrong i would be remiss not to acknowledge that some of them genuinely made me cry with how kind they were even some of the ones who were critical of what i said were done with a sense of empathy and i'm sorry i didn't respond to most of you but just know i read all of your messages and friendly reminder i will be fine until my liver gives out this is like the 800th time something like this has happened to me but am i done with twitter basically yeah i honestly intended to be forever done with twitter but i was then reminded that i am contractually obligated to promote my books through social contractually obligated pre-order link for my second book in the description so i'll still use it for that sort of thing and i will continue using it to you know promote smaller creators and authors when i find something that i think deserve attention and also shameless nepotism these people calling me a nepotist how dare you say a thing that is true but my biggest mistake was using twitter in the way that a lot of my friends who had way fewer followers than me did like yeah i can be a little edgy i can make jokey jokes i can just be you know i can be like one of the boys and i should have stopped doing that a long time ago worse twitter is just a recipe for both addiction and misery they call it doom scrolling for a reason like even in the last couple weeks i feel like my brain is having to rewire just this impulse to constantly be checking twitter and it was making me a shittier person i was getting in fights with people more and more i was dunking on people more and more i was clapping back at followers more and more like one other person i own apology to is movie bob i told him on twitter to leave me alone because he was acting like a creep by being over familiar and continually signaling to the world that we're friends and he he was acting like a creep and we're not friends but i would have never done that if i had known that the diet nazis were gonna turn that into a meme like i don't like a lot of what he says on twitter either but please stop using my face to torture this man leave him alone so at its core this was a wake-up call and that is why i deleted my account part and it can happen to you i want to reaffirm that the roots of this do stem from a rise in anti-asian racism and that racism is very real as i was writing this video a friend of mine on facebook posted a screen cap of this truly heinous thing that mike huckabee said which not only regurgitates this inane conservative garbage about identity politics it completely dismisses the very real wave of hate that is happening in america right now and he posted it with this comment white people please pay attention every day a person of color has to look at something like this or worse every literal day try just try to imagine what that would do to your psyche and it hurt to read and honestly it hurts for me to even read out loud right now because it's true i literally only can imagine few of the people stoking anti-asian violence right now will suffer consequences and probably more racist attacks will occur and this is just another chapter in our country's long sad history of anti-asian racism and the reality is there's not a lot we as individuals can do about that we live in a fundamentally unjust world i do acknowledge that and at the beginning anyway a lot of the frustration at the original tweet did stem from that and i don't want to dismiss all public feedback as inevitably harassment i think it's important to retain this nuance lest we always frame the issue of harassment as a blanket condemnation of the public and public feedback but i also cannot stress enough how quickly this whole situation went from valid criticism rooted in real hurt to straight up abuse and not just of me of my friends my colleagues this disease that is twitter enacting the same passion play again and again and again even people who were sympathetic to me they still wanted to attribute the hate to one thing you know one slip of the tongue one bad take one wrong affiliation one wrong tone i took i've seen so many people try to rationalize it even when they think i did nothing wrong but the reality is what gets you on the radar of the mob is nothing a picture a joke a comment just existing as a woman a person of color a woman of color a queer person doing your job one unpopular opinion a poorly aged take being online for too long being associated with the wrong person saying something nice about the wrong person sometimes all it takes is being successful people want to rationalize your mistakes and list them and label them not because it has anything ultimately to do with you it doesn't but because they want to reassure themselves that it will never happen to them that it will never be them on the pillory so even if you don't think i did anything wrong if you can still pin this on a specific error then you can distance yourself and sleep well that you would know better than to make the same mistake and it would never happen to you and that's just not how it works part of what makes twitter so toxic is the sense of hopelessness it engenders you're exposed to this never-ending stream of bad news and constant examples of how [ __ ] the world is and reminders that you have the power to effect very little change that compounded with the fact that platforms like twitter rely mostly on shorthand and are constantly encouraging you to produce and encourage knee-jerk reactions with very little context means that hopelessness and powerlessness and aggression it's gotta go somewhere and on march 26 2021 it got funneled to me and i cannot in good faith say i have not done the same mindlessly joined in on a dog pile on someone who said something stupid or insensitive because it felt good and for a brief moment it gave me a sense of power but then that moment is gone and the world is still shitty and that person's life whatever their infraction was deserved or undeserved is marginally worse for my involvement in it and that is why i'm stepping away so for all of the people who used me as their outlet for their pain and aggression on that crisp spring mourn i understand that you feel hopeless and powerless in an increasingly shitty world and i understand that there is a reason to assume bad faith when so many other people have let you down and the only thing i can do for you is extend the same grace and compassion that you extended to me

Channel: Lindsay Ellis

Views: 1,506,022

Rating: 4.861258 out of 5

Keywords: lindsay ellis videos, lindsay ellis video essay, lindsay ellis review, lindsay ellis cancelled, lindsay ellis jkrowling, lindsay ellis rape rap, lindsay ellis harriet tubman, lindsay ellis mara wilson, lindsay ellis canceling, lindsay ellis contrapoints, nostalgia chick rape rap

Id: C7aWz8q_IM4

Length: 100min 31sec (6031 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/honest-miss]

She should never have had to dig up old pain in order to validate herself like this. I hate that this happens again and again.

[u/heisghost92]

The stuff around the hour mark and the hour and eleven mark, don't watch that part if you aren't in a safe space mentally, Also, she in fact seems actually upset that she had to share that with these people, who I'm sure will apologize to her now.

[u/MVRKHNTR]

Serious question, why is anyone mad about Jenny Nicholson and wanting her "canceled"? What did she ever do?

[u/togro20]

What have I done to you? Are you Rent fans?

I admit it. That’s it.

[u/Maysock]

Just finished watching. That was a lot of stuff.

The uh, the r*pe rap part was an interesting segment.

I searched and watched the video in question, and found it kind of stupid and not much worse than anything like a number of skits by Whitest Kids U Know or any of probably two dozen Family Guy skits... This is the horrible video they've been posting all these years?

I wonder, what portion of people who rehosted and reposted this "damning" video were once fans of WKUK or Smosh or Derrick Comedy or any other similarly snarky, irreverant mid-late 2000's internet comedy that did the exact same thing?

I'm not excusing the content, it sucks and I'm glad it's not socially acceptable any more to make that joke. I just wonder how many post gamergate internet leftists completely forgot about the shit they thought was funny growing up and stuffed it down because they're ashamed of it. You can see it reflected in just about any discussion of "our" history on twitter, at least a third, probably more like half of the people here were edgy libertarian shitlords in 2015.

[u/Cervantes3]

The Lindsay Ellis-Raya drama was probably the dumbest Twitter drama I've seen in a long, long time.

[u/Leftypunx]

As a black LE fan the only apology i will accept is a 5 hour long retrospective about the Sex and The City series, including the movies as well!

[u/Niqq33]

All I can say is thank god I took off Twitter during this also the section where she had to describe the context of the r*pe rap was hard to watch

[u/jestbre]

the weirdest thing is people are making these weird schadenfreude responses on twitter having not watched the video not knowing theyre really proving the things she's talking about