Who is Lindsay Ellis? Once upon a time, a long time ago, Doug "Nostalgia Critic" Walker, during the raising heyday of his Channel Awesome video sharing website, opened up a position at the website for a female video creator for essentially the same role of Nostalgia Critic, but to make videos about a more feminine category of movies and TV series that he himself hasn't watched nor followed. Many people sent audition videos, and Lindsay Ellis was chosen as the winner for that position. (Several other auditioners eventually also were chosen to the website on their own merits.) However, it turned out that Ellis was not actually the kind of video producer who's just a female version of the Nostalgia Critic, because her videos were pretty much nothing like those (her videos are way too "academic" and with very little quirky humor), but she got to stay anyway and became one of the "top" video producers of the site.
It turns out, however, that Lindsay Ellis was a radical far-leftist intersectional feminist, of the Anita Sarkeesian kind. And that's not just a spurious comparison. Evidence:
What makes this photo strong evidence? You have to understand what kind of person Sarkeesian was (and still is). At the time that photo was taken Sarkeesian was at the heyday of her anti-gamer anti-video-games crusade and was (and to this day still is) one of the most paranoid people in the world. The kind of paranoid self-victimizing feminist who thought that if a prominent critic of her was merely in the same conference room alongside hundreds of other people, she was so much in danger that she needed to immediately call security, while on stage and live in front of the audience and on the internet, and she wouldn't go anywhere without security guards (I'm not even kidding).
Sarkeesian would not let anybody even near her, much less talk to or offer an interview, or for a photo to be taken of them together, unless that someone was absolutely vetted and 100% on her side. If you ever see the above kind of photo from that time of Sarkeesian being buddies with someone else, you can be 100% certain that that someone is absolutely ideologically in full agreement with Sarkeesian.
And Lindsay Ellis was (and to my understanding still is) pretty much a Sarkeesian clone. She was notorious behind the scenes for being an insufferable far-leftist "progressive" feminist (as recounted by several members of the website). In fact, when the whole "change the channel" controversy happened, when all but two video producers left the site in protest and published a long document listing all of their grievances against the site, the grievance that Ellis had against the site owners and managers is that, and I kid you not, they didn't "denounce Gamergate". That's it. It's not like she listed a bunch of stuff, and that was just one point in the list. That was her only contribution to that document. Not that the site owners supported or talked positively about Gamergate. Merely that they didn't take a stance and didn't "denounce" it. Apparently, like Sarkeesian, she was a "victim" of "Gamergate" (no definition of "Gamergate" nor any proof necessary, of course), and she was mad that the Channel Awesome owners didn't publicly denounce it.
Astonishingly, though, her extreme feminism rarely made an appearance in her videos. Which, I suppose, if anything positive has to be said about her, that would be it. Not that her videos were very interesting (especially as more and more time passed, and especially after she left Channel Awesome).
Lindsay Ellis is one of those people who has the amazing ability of creating very lengthy video essays that sound very academic, profound, well researched and with very deep thought and criticism... but which actually say pretty much nothing. Many of her videos are very long (half hour minimum, over an hour typically) and stock full of densely packed deeply academic sounding profound analyses of a particular thing... yet when you actually dig deeper into what she's actually saying, when you actually try to understand what her core points are, they tend to be either lacking or very vacuous, trivial and meaningless. It's usually just a bunch of trivial vacuous points and arguments packaged in a boatload of academic-sounding rhetoric. Essentially sophistry of the highest caliber. Something designed to sound like it's saying something deep and meaningful, but which isn't really saying anything.
It's like most of her videos are doctoral essays on English Literature and Philosophy, or something like that. When it comes to analyzing a movie, then fine. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that. However, when she's analyzing what, for example, her critics are saying, it tends to be just empty sophistry with no substance. Loads and loads of it, with little actual content.
Regardless of this, she had a massive following. She was one of the biggest youtubers of her kind, with something like a million subscribers (which is just humongous when we are talking about this kind of content). She was quite big on other social media platforms as well, of course.
However, something like a half year or so ago, she was ferociously attacked and bullied online, to the point that she was essentially driven off of most social media platforms. These attacks were relentless and have continued all this time. In fact, to the point that she recently announced that she's completely quitting YouTube because she can't take it anymore.
Did right-wingers finally get to her? Did "Gamergate" finally team up and organize a joint virtual assault on her online, driving her crazy and off of all online platforms? Did a cabal of right-wing youtubers succeed in finally getting rid of her?
As you might suspect, the answer is no. It wasn't the "far-right extremists" or "gamergaters" who attacked and bullied her. It was the far left. In fact, it was her own followers.
That's right. For some reason I cannot comprehend (nor have I really tried to find out), some of her followers suddenly decided that she's now a persona non grata, and accused her of "racism" for some completely innocuous video or tweet, or whatever it was. The mindless horde of the far left blindly followed and started a relentless online bullying campaign against her, to have her "cancelled".
Very recently they doubled their effort and decided that some random tweet of her was "racist" and their relentless assault was reinvigorated. To the point that she announced that she was quitting YouTube completely.
What was the "racist" tweet that she had posted? This:
Note the date when it was posted: March of 2021. In other words, her own side dug up a tweet from over half a year ago, decided that it was "racist", and are now attacking her for it.
What's "racist" about that tweet? Your guess is as good as mine. I have no idea.
So, now that Ellis has been relentlessly attacked by her own side, using the very tactics, tools and ideologies that she herself espouses, has she perhaps learned anything? Maybe it has made her reconsider the ideology that she has been espousing and supporting for so many years?
Of course not.
Especially in her responses to the first wave of assaults months ago she did not, in fact, criticize the "cancel culture" tactics that her own fans were using against her. She didn't denounce them nor say that "cancel culture" is a bad thing. She only lamented that she was being wrongly targeted by it. She also seemed to be more worried about the rhetorical weapons that this would give the "right-wingers" than about whether these bullying tactics are acceptable or not.
She seems to be much more critical of her own side currently, in this second wave of online harassment against her, but still she isn't learning anything. She's angry at the people that are harassing her, but not because she thinks that their tactics are wrong, but because she thinks that they are using those tactics against the wrong person and that the "cis, straight, wealthy white men" are winning and getting away with their unfair dominant top positions in society because her own side is concentrating too much on her rather than them.
It seems to me that she is just completely blind to the destructive nature of her own ideology. She doesn't see the attacks and harassment she is receiving from her own side, her own followers, as a sign that the ideology they are espousing is wrong, evil and destructive. She's merely disappointed that they are aiming those tactics at the wrong target, rather than the evil "white men at the top". She seems to still completely support the tactics, they just need to be properly targeted.
In other words, at least as far as I can discern, she may be leaving the community she built, but she isn't leaving the ultra-radical leftist feminist ideology. She doesn't even seem to be reconsidering.
In other words, she hasn't been learning anything.
Comments
Post a Comment