Shane Dawson, 9/11 Trutherism, and Cancel Culture | Deep Cut

hey everybody so we're doing something a bit different today around a year ago i started making little lower effort bonus videos for patreon and nebula saying i would maybe start to release a few of them publicly after a year and you know this is one of those videos i'm not sure how many of these boys i'll end up releasing i guess it depends on the response but i think it could be a nice change of pace an extra video every few months every so often though this month it's my only video because i failed to do my job at any rate this bonus episode was made the month i wrote my video about the garbage shane dawson makeup documentary which you can find on my youtube channel what you're about to see is a bit rambly and kinda dated feeling but also who cares if you like this video you can get way way more bonus boys most of which won't be made public by going to my patreon or signing up to nebula for like 15 bucks a year okay on with the show hey everybody so on at least three separate occasions across his videography shane dawson argues the position that 911 trutherism kinda makes sense that there is at least some reason to believe that 911 was an inside job and that the narrative we have been fed is a lie he says it's possible though a bit far-fetched that the planes that hit the towers were cgi first let's look at this clip of what people are calling ghost plane the plane appears to pass through steel columns and the steel and concrete floors like a ghost it doesn't twist bend slow down break or explode now this plane goes right through the building like a knife through butter says it seems likely that there were bombs in the world trade center that the planes did not single-handedly knock down the tower i don't know if i believe the theory that all the planes on the news were just cgi'd that seems a little farfetched but i definitely believe there were bombs i mean come on and he says that given the number of cartoons depicting planes hitting the twin towers 911 might be a case of predictive programming that is to say the government intentionally primed us to think 911 could happen so we'd be less surprised when it did now i know what you're thinking shane this isn't a theory yes it happened people were predicting 911 all over the place well the theory is that all of this the movies the ads the cartoons are all a part of something called predictive programming so here is the definition of predictive programming it's a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders if and when these changes are put through the public will already be familiarized with them and accept this in this video i will not be taking any of these arguments seriously for one thing the world of 911 trutherism the nature of its claims as well as its political motivations is extremely complicated far too complicated for a nebula plus video about shane dawson of all things but more importantly dawson's claims are just not worthy of the effort i think like look at that last thing he said there that cartoons depicting a plane hitting the twin towers may have been produced by government mandate so as to prime us for the real thing a this is a massive decades-long conspiracy with no evidence behind it like why aren't more people talking about the government asking them to show 911 in their cartoon b the events of 911 were not seen as normal to the american people it was unbelievably traumatic and emotion fueled nobody and i mean nobody was like welp i saw it in a children's show one time so i wasn't too surprised and c if 9 11 was an inside job why would they want it to be normal to the american people in the first place like what was even the point if everyone was just gonna be like it happens what i'm trying to say here is dawson clearly does not care about having a rigorous convo about 9 11 so i don't either at least not right now no the reason i bring all this up is to ask a simple question why is it that when you hear about shane dawson getting cancelled nobody ever talks about his crackpot 911 trutherism for kids that he didn't even think through for even a moment before he spouted about it online we could ask this exact same question about the topic of my last video right like shane dawson's jeffree star documentary is gross really gross it's eight straight hours of a multi-millionaire trying to manipulate his child and teenage audience into believing that them supporting him buying his makeup palette is some kind of beautiful important moment for them it has no substance it contributes nothing of value to speak of it is simply an exercise in nonsense mega capitalist apologia punctuated every three minutes by a plug for cosmetics so again i ask why is it that this documentary is never brought up when people cancel shane dawson and i think the answer here comes down to one thing cancel culture as it's come to be known is just not as simple as we might think it is it is not just the act of canceling someone enumerating the things they did that we disagree with and think are bad or harmful it is also and perhaps more crucially a genre of online storytelling a way of constructing narratives that is constrained by various tropes expected to follow certain patterns meant to entertain us in certain ways and to show you what i mean by that let's talk about d'angelo wallace's video where he cancels shane dawson the most iconic and comprehensive video about shane dawson ever made so in the video wallace goes through dawson's career with a fine-tooth comb enumerating for us in excruciating detail how the creator has been a deeply problematic figure for a long long time wallace talks about shane's racism his history of minstrelsy he talks about his pedophilia and zoophilia jokes and he bookends the piece talking about his cruel and callous reaction to toddy westbrook's claim that she is a survivor of sexual abuse the central claim of the video is that dawson has a history of believing awful things having awful attitudes and that now this aspect of his character has surfaced yet again now i'm not saying that he'll never work again or he won't keep making money or even that his views are going to go down i'm saying that his career as shane dawson the persona of shane dawson is over so if we asked how does this video work what are its major aesthetic aims i think we could give two kind of similar answers first it is about incongruence as wallace points out dawson's current brand is one fixated on his status as nice guy shane's an empath he has a tender spirit he wears his heart on his sleeve because of this branding it's on its face interesting to see where this persona is artificial dawson acts like he's such a good guy but also ran what amounts to an online minstrel show and constantly makes light of pedophilia these two traits do not get along and as such juxtaposing them makes for great content second the video is about unmasking even as wallace's video was made about one of the most famous youtubers on the platform it nonetheless feels like it is an act of exploration going back through an archive unearthing that which has been hidden revealing terrible secrets now looking at these two aesthetic aims we can start to understand why it wouldn't make sense for deangelo wallace to talk about shane dawson's 9 11 conspiracy theories those theories are not incongruous with anything they're a huge part of dawson's recent work his brand his identity to point it out as some enduring issue would be to go against the core engagement of the video the same could be said of dawson's recent makeup documentary every problem we might have with that series that it is manipulative trash that seeks only to reaffirm the notion that the rich getting astronomically richer is a just and beautiful process is right there at its surface there is no unveiling or unmasking no sense of exploration everything is just there it's obvious so again to talk about it would be to go against the very essence of wallace's video now i want to make it clear that all this is not meant as a d'angelo wallace call-out post or something like that i'm not talking about this video because it's bad it's not bad the video is well crafted well written intense funny worthwhile influential it is not some major flaw with it that wallace talked about certain aspects of dawson's career and not others that said i see this as a recurring pattern in the way cancel culture works across the internet its interest in finding hypocrisy and incongruence in unveiling hidden and unlikely messages and that pattern does worry me for one there's the obvious cancel culture is positioned as a form of justice in online spaces and it's important to understand that as much as it might be a form of justice it is also an aesthetic and a genre and the intersection between entertainment and law is always something we should think about critically i think but much more important to me i'm worried about the way that cancel culture is centered so exclusively around personal failings and character flaws when shane dawson put on blackface a million times a few years ago that's something we can point to and say that's awful he did a terrible stupid thing and he's not a good guy he is problematic and i mean that word here very earnestly but when he does his crackpot 911 conspiracy theories when he manipulates children into believing they're watching a documentary when all they're watching is a boring ad it's not problematic at least not on the face of it but it is a problem and a systemic one it speaks to the way that online media works what we think appropriate conduct looks like what values we think our culture ought to represent it's a problem and we should talk about it too so that's the end of this nebula plus video this one's really different from the first one in the sense that it's not funny but it is extremely rambly honestly i think there's a lot of ideas here that i'm going to try to explore in more full length videos this is kind of a fun first shot rant type thing i guess uh but i hope you liked it enough um have a great day i i i hope you like my videos on patreon and nebula and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 434,319

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Id: YIF0GT_O4WM

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/lamercie]

Love big Joel!! This was an interesting take. Kind of an addendum to D’Angelo Wallace’s video.