I made a Star Wars video recently. It did alright, I guess. Bit of a mixed response.
A few mean comments, but a lot of really nice ones, too. I ve since moved on, got back on
the grind, and put together some more videos, but then I got this comment yesterday, telling
me that an alt-right YouTuber, Smudboy, had used that video in its entirety for his channel.
As you can imagine, that piqued my interest. Let s get to know Smudboy. According to his
channel s about page , Smudboy uses objective observation and analytical editor style methods
, and What seems pedantic or nitpicky to some, Smudboy merely considers "being a good editor."
Smudboy s channel is a bigger one than mine, but he didn t feel the need to ask permission
to reuse my content, or even to let me know, as a courtesy. In fact, the only time I d
seen Smudboy s name was in the comments section of my video, where in lieu of letting me know
about his little project, he threw a bunch of hopelessly vague criticisms my way, dressed
up in fancy words, and then straight dipped after I pointed out the fact that he d just
misrepresented one of the things I d said. But yeah. It turns out this guy s got a YouTube
channel, and on this channel, he runs a so-called chudcast . Sorry, Smudcast , which seems to
be yet another Every Frame A Pause clone. So think discount MauLer, except this channel
seems to have an even higher ceiling for just how insensitive and stupid things are allowed
to get. And, wouldn t you know it there s my content! This video s not going to be some
point-by-point rebuttal of the whole thing, because A: I don t have time to sit through
all Jesus, five hours, of this content , and B: doing some big systematic response would,
I think legitimise what Smudboy and friends are doing here, this harmful, hateful, low-effort
bile disguised as media criticism. But I am going to give some quick rebuttals
to the stuff I did catch, from the first chunk of the video I actually managed to sit through,
because I know for a fact that some viewers have come to my channel via Smudboy, so I
d like to spend just a bit of time setting the record straight.
In the first of many efforts to argue against the title of my video rather than the video
itself, this is how Smudboy s video starts: And here s the thing. This might come as a
shock to some of you, but Star Wars isn t real. Star Wars is fiction. It s a cultural
product, developed and produced over the last 40 years or so in America, which happens to
be on Earth. The various pieces of media which make up Star Wars are all written, directed,
designed, acted, and so forth by real, human, people. And it s watched by real human people.
Sometimes, anyway. Smudboy doesn t seem to understand this. In
his mind, Star Wars does not and cannot intersect with the social issues of our world, with
the social issues of the society that created and received it because it isn t set in our
world. It s set in space! This is a point Smudboy doubles down on, repeatedly. But Star
Wars doesn t exist on some abstract plane, or even in a galaxy far far away. Star Wars
exists as a collection of Earth-bound works which influence and are influenced by society
in countless ways, and which are tied inseparably to the material conditions of their production,
release, and reception. When people talk about things like racism in Star Wars, this is what
they re talking about. Not, fucking Twi leks. Of course, fictional races and the way they
re positioned by and treated in these stories is a part of this. But even stuff like this
is indisputably a mediation of real-world attitudes and ideas about race, alienation,
orientalism, and so on. After this, the next ten minutes or so are
spent, again, arguing against the title of my video, instead of the contents, as well
as misunderstanding what a mole is, and hating on Ewan McGregor, because, I guess that s
what Star Wars fans do now? They return to my video, or, should I say,
they start with my video, at around the 11-minute mark. This is how my video opens. This is
how the fine fellows over at the Smudcast respond.
The function this section plays within their larger project here is fairly obvious. It
s a fun little ad hominem attack, to paint me as some out-of-touch LIBERAL ELITE, and
their doing this near the start of the chudcast allows the remaining, again, 5 hours of content
to proceed with this supposition tacitly operating throughout. It s so transparent and, just
dumb, that it s not worth engaging with. But I m gonna engage with it anyway. Rich kid
city boy, right? Hashtag it, #LatteGate. This is the view out of my window. If you
could tell me which city this is, that d be lovely. And you can reverse image search this
if you want, but you won t get any hits, because I took it, like 5 minutes ago. And I know
I m taking a slight risk putting this image in here, given how doxx-happy reactionary
YouTubers and their fans are, but to be honest, you d have to be, like, GeoWizard to figure
out my address from this. So if you manage to figure out my address from this image fair
play. Second, I m a full-time YouTuber with fewer than 20,000 subscribers, and I m one
who, so far, hasn t managed to secure any sponsorships. So I wouldn t have thought it
would need saying outright, but I don t have a lot of money. But the day I made that video,
after a morning spent working on another video, I thought, you know what, Pillar of Garbage
is allowed a pastry and a cup of coffee every now and then as a treat. The reason I even
mentioned that in the video was that, to begin with, I was writing it as more of a stream-of-consciousness
thing. I literally saw the meme and opened my laptop, that s how shooketh it got me.
And sure, it s not exactly relevant to the rest of the video, but it takes up 6 seconds
of an 18 minute video. You wanna guess how long it takes Wish EFAP over here to discuss
this same opening trio of sentences? 3 whole minutes.
These are far from the only inaccurate observations or insults thrown my way during these videos.
They just open
the floodgates. UNSCRIPTED INTERLUDE I m not bringing these up to fish for sympathy,
though. I m doing so to make explicit the way that this whole schtick is underwritten
not by objective analysis , but by bad faith assumptions. It s not just directed at me,
either. There s a whole litany of toxic comments and outright slurs dropped by Smudboy and
friends, even in the first half an hour or so that I sat through. In-between claims that
Disney s the real one stoking the toxicity, that there s no such racism problem in Star
Wars, and that THEY RE the ones being gaslit, the chudcast are doing things like blatantly
lying about the contents of the hate messages Moses Ingram made public. This is the message
he s talking about, by the way. I ve censored the slur, but yeah it s the one you think
it is. What seems pedantic or nitpicky to some, Smudboy..
Apparently there s no racism whatsoever in this message. Gee, it s almost like Disney
isn t responsible for the fans being racist pricks after all!
But yeah, after a while of this, I pretty much stopped watching it, especially since
it had become obvious that they weren t even engaging with my video, not in any way that
counts. They were more playing it in 10 second increments, and then picking up on a word
or idea mentioned in those increments, and going on unhinged, loosely related rants,
to rile up their chat and keep the donations trickling in. And incidentally, the chat?
Yeesh. Unsurprisingly, it quickly devolved into a cesspool of open racism and victim
blaming.
I ve been talking about Smudboy throughout, and this IS the name of the channel, but it
s worth noting briefly that all the worst stuff in this video wasn t said by Smudboy
himself, but by his guests. Indeed, it seems like Smudboy is trying to position himself
in a more neutral space like a debate moderator, rather than a panelist, and he even makes
a point to opine near the start that I m not actually a complete fucking idiot, just mostly.
And, you know what? That s a nice gesture. But that s all it is a gesture. A reminder,
that comes mere minutes before stuff like this
The nice guy part, the little olive branch that s completely and utterly empty if it
s the prelude to a 5 hour podcast you ve set up in which a big group of angry bigots takes
turns shitting on me and my content. Despite this, the podcast probably just about
falls under fair use of my content in the legal sense, even though in my opinion there
s nothing really original or valuable being added here, and even though it permits a supremely
low-effort way that chuds can profit from my content. The silver lining here is that
at least this whole saga goes to show my channel s grown enough, and the content s hitting
sufficiently close to home, to have elevated my brand to that critical mass where it drives
7 weirdos to sit in a voice call for 5 hours well actually -ing my content.
As far as I m concerned, though, this video isn t me starting YouTube beef, or anything
it s me ending it. Because when the inevitable Smudboy comments and additional instances
of content re-use start to roll in, it d be pretty easy for me to carry on engaging, and
keep pointing out the massive Ls these clowns are taking, but honestly? There s nothing
I can say here that a quick scroll down Smudboy s Twitter feed can t say better.
And, you know, maybe there is some critical flaw in my worldview or my videos that Smudboy
uncovered in his 5-hour odyssey of self-fellatio, but if that IS the case, I ll never know.
So I m gonna wrap this video up and get back to making ACTUAL content. And if you re watching
this Smudboy, maybe you should give that a try sometime.
Before I go, though, a note on that Star Wars video. As I alluded to above, I wrote it pretty
quickly, and it s not perfect. Not for any of the reasons these bozos brought up, but
I didn t make some of my points as explicitly as I perhaps should have done for instance,
going into the specifics how the whole I don t hate black people, I just think she s written
badly movement fits into the larger racism problem.And also when I was working on that
video the situation was still very much developing. I got about 4/5 of the way through making
it before moses posted about the hate she d received. So yeah, it wasn t able to be
a totally holistic and all-encompassing analysis of the problem, because of how quickly the
narrative was still changing. Have no fear, though when Kenobi s wrapped
up I ll be returning to this topic, so if you want to see a more thorough and less rushed
overview of this whole mess, make sure you come back for that.
Thanks as always to all my Patrons onscreen now, particularly Kevin Douglas, Ian Fyfield,
and Thrawn7, and also big up Exile Studios for bringing this to my attention. And if
you want to see more right-wing grifters get dunked on, might I suggest this video here,
where we talk about the way Jordan Peterson doesn t understand the Bible.