In December of 2017 I wrote a blog post where I lamented my disappointment that the popular youtuber who goes by the nickname Captain Disillusion, and who I was quite a fan of, turned out to apparently be a social justice warrior, because of a speech he gave at Skepticon Australia 2017 (and later reaffirmed by another speech he gave at the Blender Conference of 2018).
Or, more precisely, I lamented the fact that he seemed to have broken a life-long stance of neutrality, staying out of politics in his videos and only concentrating on what he's good at (ie. creating interesting videos about video hoaxes and modern urban legends). I don't really care what the political opinions of people are (regardless of which corner of the political spectrum they fall on), as long as they keep those opinions out of their non-political youtube channels. (Yes, even if someone holds political opinions I 100% agree with, I don't really want them marring videos and channels that are not related to politics in any way. Keep the political channels separate from the non-political ones. Political quarreling only creates a cesspool of toxicity, regardless of which side we are talking about.)
However, it appears that I was wrong: That Skepticon Australia speech video he published on his channel in late 2017 was not the first one where his social justice ideology stances crept in.
There is an earlier video which already shows signs of this, but somehow I didn't notice when I first saw it. I recently rewatched it and only now did I notice.
The video I'm referring to is named The Mandaellah Effekt, published in February 28, 2017.
At 0:43 in the video the female presenter says:
"The term comes from the fact that many, many, many white people clearly recall the South African revolutionary Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 80's instead of a free man in 2013."
When I rewatched the video that one word immediately caught my hypersensitive anti-SJW ear and triggered an alarm. "Wait... White people?" Where's that coming from? I have literally never, ever heard of this being somehow a phenomenon that's notoriously exclusive to white people. And even if it were, what does this have anything to do with anything? Why even bring it up? What for?
But ok, that was a bit strange but perhaps it could be passed as some kind of odd slip of the tongue or something. If that had been the only suspicious word in the video I would have dismissed it as inconsequential (and not written this blog post). However, my suspicions were confirmed later in the video, at 4:02, where she says:
"And of course there are the obligatory Shazam starring Simbad and Nelson Mandela's death date examples that are totally not racist."
while rolling her eyes. I think it's quite clear that she's being sarcastic here, ie. meaning the opposite. (Why else bring it up?)
That genuinely left me perplexed. How is misremembering a movie called "Shazam", or being mistaken about the death date of Nelson Mandela "racist"? I can't even begin to imagine what kind of mental gymnastics are needed to argue that those misconceptions are somehow "racism".
I suppose misremembering Monopoly Man having a monocle, or that Darth Vader said "Luke, I am your father" is not racist, but those things are? Because reasons, I suppose.
I don't know how I missed this in 2017 when I first watched the video, but now rewatching it it's so obvious that Captain Disillusion was already revealing his social justice stances even prior to that one speech in late 2017.
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