The True Meaning of the Adpocalypse

Half-Canadian homophobic white supremacist Nazi Steve Crowder

In the current and ongoing crisis that has been dubbed the “Vox Ad Apocalypse,” following immediately after milkshakegate, I think many are missing the key significance.

It means the left is in free fall. The right has won.

The violent urge to shout “shut up” comes when you realize you have lost the argument.

Recall the words attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you’ve won.”

It is not people holding “extremist” views—that is, uncommon views—who are being silenced. Nothing Crowder, or MacInnis, or Robinson, or Benjamin, or Yiannopoulos, say, would sound out of place in a pub. It would have been pretty much self-evident truth anywhere in North America as recently as a decade ago. When these views are put to a popular vote, as in the recent UK EU elections, or the election of Trump, they often turn out to represent a plurality or a majority of the public.

The demands to censor fall not on “extremists,” but on those more broadly on the “right” (which is to say, more accurately, not on the culturally Marxist left) who are scoring debating points most effectively against the leftist dogmas.

The silencing of Crowder is an example of this. The demands to deplatform came directly from Vox, and from the guy who made their videos, Carlos Maza, immediately after Crowder posted a devastating takedown of one video.

And Maza and Vox have still not calmed down. They are demanding more. They are, in a word, hysterical. They have lost the argument, and they know it.

YouTube, Facebook, and the rest, have been tragically foolish to go along with this public pressure so far. They probably just wanted to avoid any bad pr, and got caught in the crossfire. Neither human psychology nor jurisprudence are their forte. But it is now at a point where no matter what they do, someone is enraged. And specifically, nothing they do can ever satisfy the Mazas, who are hysterical. The silicon brigade ought to have realized this by now.

Meantime, as a result of such demands, it is their best and most popular content that is being targeted. YouTube has turned against both their suppliers, their content providers, and their customers. Which amounts to suicide for the platform. At the same time, they are drawing attention to their power, provoking anti-trust investigations.

As some economist once said, things that cannot go on forever, won’t.

Either YouTube, Google, Facebook, Patreon, Twitter, et al, are about to reverse themselves, and turn on the left, or they are going to die, and be replaced; not a difficult matter to accomplish in cyberspace. They could all easily be gone in six months.

As I have previously noticed, their odd apparent inability to foresee this suggests they may think they will all be gone in six months anyway, due to technological improvements. Tim Berners-Lee is about to give us a new Internet.

Either way, the left as we know it is going down in flames before our eyes. They have lost all moral legitimacy.

There may be some new left to replace them; perhaps the Greens and a program that sticks mostly to environmentalism.

But the identity politics left is a dead cisgender male walking.