All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
This was me with Ethan Klein/H3H3 over the past ~14ish months. Their podcast content used to be lighthearted Internet drama with funny soundbytes, but now the dude is having a major crashout about Gaza after rotting his brain with Israeli state ~~propaganda~~ media coverage. He's always been an out-of-touch rich asshole, but now he's so far out of pocket it's unbearable to watch.
h3 is an incredibly interesting part of internet fandom/history. my phones about to die but if anyone is into it, i’ve “personally been there” since the very early days of their channel and think i have a decent perspective on the entire dynamic here, i might do a little actual, extensive write up in an edit here when i get home later.
i find h3 is fun to discuss as throughout his history on the internet he’s unique in of that he has entirely abandoned his audience multiple times. on the outside he’s a hypocrite (which is definitely true don’t get me wrong), but i think “inside” it’s a more machievallian and sinister sort of thing. frankly ethan and hila not only do alt-right dogwhistling better than anyone else; they invented a whole new technique. idk what to call it. but their snake-y nature lets them subvert typical premonitions and community norms time and time again and infiltrate way further into communities any other alt-righter would get nowhere near as close into the spheres of.
I think h3 is kind of a hidden nexus of fringe->main stream internet culture throughout the last like 15 years. Every wave Ethan has ridden has never been the main thing, it's always right on the periphery of mainstream internet culture. That way he has cultivated a tiny amount of fans from every wave but never enough to get him into the public eye, and as a result everyone who knows him thinks they know someone "under ground" and he doesn't shy away from that branding.
I don't think it's Machiavellian. I think it's more just that Ethan has always held incoherent views (like everyone in the world) and his brand is to be unapologetically opinionated, so now that he's dug his heels in on Gaza there's no moving him until he has fully crashed and burned.
I mean he's Jewish and his wife is from Israel, they have family members or at least know people personally who are in Israel and have their whole life, so the propaganda they've been fed is ingrained in their family identity.
It's not an excuse, it's sad to see, but as you pointed out he's always declared himself a "capitalist" and has taken some pretty right wing positions. It's just to say it's not intentional, just a stupid dude who doesn't work to hard to form opinions about stuff. I wouldn't say this about every grifter, it's just that H3 started out much more innocently and I don't think they spent a decade keeping up a ruse like that I think it was genuine. I mean you really think he was doing Vape Nashe videos concocting how he was going to infiltrate internet culture to push right wing propaganda?
V sauce michael here
Yeah, his stuff started getting more and more infrequent, and he started shilling products.
Where are your fingers?
Is that guy that pointing the gun at the other one Jordan B Peterson?
"Hey George, like and comment on my videos again."
"Sure, Lenny, I'm gonna write a real nice comment on your latest video right now." *sniffle*
I find new channels around new hobbies constantly so they just kinda drift away.
Another algorithm casualty here, another out of touch rich guy there.
There but for the like and subscribe go I.
I very rarely manually subscribe or unsubscribe now, it just picks up on what I watch generally.
Now, I can only imagine a children's book about Of Mice and Men.