YouTube Deplatforms Way of the World

For the last four years, an anonymous commentator with a YouTube channel called “Way of the World” offered his perspective on what was happening to Western Culture because of globalism. Last week YouTube obliterated his channel. He had already been thrown off Facebook and Patreon.

Featured in an analysis of the so-called intellectual dark web written in September 2019, by then Way of the World had already accumulated over 90,000 subscribers and over 5 million views. As described back then:

“The narrator, who is never shown, speaks softly and somewhat mournfully with a British accent. He reads frequently from poets and philosophers, and when he isn’t depicting text or video clips, the screen is backdropped with a slowly spinning image of planet earth. Like Black Pigeon, and many other right-of-center content creators on the IDW, he believes Western Civilization faces possible extinction.”

It would be disingenuous to suggest that the topics Way of the World discussed were not controversial. But his style, his tone, his logic, and his facts were impeccable. For these reasons, when YouTube banned his channel back in early 2020, it was reinstated after an appeal.

Since reinstatement, Way of the World did not change its style, tone, logic or respect for facts. But YouTube changed. The relentless expansion of content deemed ineligible for YouTube’s “commitment to openness” has finally, and permanently, caught Way of the World in its net. His appeal this time is unlikely to be granted.

The problem, as always, with banning Way of the World, and channels like it, isn’t merely that it violates the reason monopolistic platforms like YouTube enjoy Section 230 protections against liability, i.e., they cannot remove material based on their own editorial bias. That would be, and is, bad enough. But YouTube goes further.

When big tech monopolies ban reasoned, factual sources of information and commentary that oppose mass immigration into Western nations, they help confirm the more extreme assertions of the anti-globalist movement.

Big tech clearly favors mass immigration into Western Nations, which is something Way of the World clearly opposed. That is why he was banned, and that is not reason enough. In a culture that now indulges in white shaming in literally every possible venue of mass communication, either contrary points of view must be allowed, or the perception that there truly is a conspiratorial hidden agenda behind globalism will be encouraged.

The style, tone, logic and facts of the mass immigration zealots, the “anti-racists,” and the white guilt industry, are typically mediocre, contrived, divisive, presumptuous and polarizing. They could learn a lot from the example of decorum set by Way of the World. Perhaps that’s what made him such a threat.

Unfortunately, if Way of the World succumbs to the anger that has justifiably possessed his predecessors who have been driven onto fringe platforms, losing years of work in earlier purges, his commentary may take on a darker tone. That is tragic, and the arrogance of the people running the big tech communications monopolies is exclusively to blame.

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