One of the bigger sociopolitical commentators on YouTube, who goes by the nickname hbomberguy, recently published a video about egregious blatant plagiarism by other big popular YouTube creators, named "Plagiarism and You(Tube)". The video quickly exploded in popularity, garnering millions of views in less than a week. As of writing this, the video has over 11 million views, making it one of the hottest topics on YouTube in the past weeks.
The video talks about, and provides clear evidence of, how several big-name YouTubers have sometimes and in some cases even routinely blatantly plagiarized other people's content (usually from online articles) in a manner that makes it look like it's their own original material, without giving proper (or sometimes any) credit to the original authors. Many wildly popular videos on YouTube, with millions of views, are such examples of blatant plagiarism. Many of these plagiarists are extremely popular and very liked among their audience, so it's oftentimes surprising that not only is their material not original, but the fact that they went to lengths to hide the true origin of the material and make it look like it's their original work (even though oftentimes they are just reading out loud verbatim other people's articles, without proper attribution.)
The subject matter in question is quite interesting, and something that most certainly deserves public discussion (and public shaming of people who engage in this kind of practice). Plagiarism is a rampant problem in YouTube, and it's shocking that sometimes even really big authors are engaging in it, and doing so really egregiously and blatantly, outright stealing other people's work without any proper attribution.
There is, however, one small thing marring the quality of that video.
And that's that hbomberguy is a notorious far-leftist activist. Which, rather obviously, means that he just had to inject unrelated politics into the video in question (even though the question of plagiarism is not related to modern left-wing or right-wing politics). He just had to pepper the video with political jabs at the "conservatives" and "the far right", even though all of those remarks come completely out of the blue, are largely off-topic and have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the video.
I like to metaphorically describe a good-quality video marred by occasional off-topic political rhetoric as if eating a bag of quite good candy which, however, occasionally has some bird droppings in it. Most of the contents is really good, but then occasionally you have to gag because you get a nasty bird dropping in your mouth, souring the entire experience.
(And no, this is not because he's a far-leftist and is taking jabs at conservatives. I would be making the same complaint if it were the other way around. I strongly believe politics should not be shoved into videos that have nothing to do with them.)
So why am I calling the video "serendipitously ingenious"?
Because, perhaps serendipitously, hbomberguy might be one of the best people on YouTube to make this exact video, precisely because of the current political landscape.
This is because one of the biggest offenders that he features in the video is himself a huge far-leftist homosexual activist. This, of course, might pose a problem in the current political zeitgeist: A prominent very popular and liked gay youtuber being attacked in a video? That's problematic!
Except that in this case he's being attacked by another very popular "queer" (as he himself describes it) far-leftist activist. Thus hbomberguy is himself pretty much protected from ad hominem arguments because he, too, is on the far-leftist side. Thus the far-leftists he is criticizing in the video cannot resort to playing the victim card.
Which is why, in this modern world, hbomberguy might be the perfect person to make such a video. It shuts up the victimhood defense.
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