Good Will Lacking

Or; The Character Assassination of Isaiah Nichols by the Coward Zane Whitener.

I have to admit it - I’ve been out of the loop a bit. Finding the time to write, let alone the motivation… it’s been a bit tricky. Nothing bad is going on, I’ve just got some big trips to get ready for… my laundry machine broke… I had to get my house cleansed and smudged and chase all the bad energy out… and, no, those two happenstances were not connected. At least, I don’t think that they were. Part of the reason I felt like I should get my house cleansed is because I can’t think of any other reason that my mojo, if you will, would be thrown off.

At some point, I think I consumed so much Schneider’s Bakery content that, in a state of Nickelodeon-induced delirium and probably after drinking more than a few glasses of wine, my vibrational frequencies were so low that some sort of parasitical spirit or entity slipped through my usually robust spiritual defenses and has since been antagonizing me. I figure that’s what I saw hovering over me when I woke up from a fitful sleep last week.

Or something like that.

Surely it’s not just me being lazy. Couldn’t be.

So, yeah - I haven’t been writing all that much. I’ve been pretty out of the know when it comes to internet drama, too, which I’m usually - and unfortunately - on the ups about. Fortunately, I know exactly how to remedy this.

No, no, no - we’re not watching fucking Keemstar. If I wanted to listen to a gnome talk about stupid bullshit I’d take some magic mushies and wander off into the woods outside of town. Of course, there would also be a not insignificant chance of running afoul of a creature of the fae of much less pleasant disposition than a friendly gnome who lives in a toadstool. Call me crazy but I don’t think running into a wendigo while tripping on psilocybin will do much to improve my motivation.

Or maybe it would? It probably would, actually.

Well, it doesn’t matter, because I don’t have mushrooms, I don’t trust that psychedelics aren’t some sort of mouse-trap for us upright apes to get snapped up by Not!Slaanesh no matter what all those hippy-dippy new-agers say, and even if I was inclined to take a random fungus to, like, open my third eye, or whatever, I wouldn’t know who to buy them from. With my luck, I’d find some dipshit high school kid who picked weedy little shrooms some he found growing on a dog-turd in his backyard. The kind that, if you eat them, they’ll be literally pouring your liquefied liver out of your asshole twenty-four hours after consumption.

Yeah - and you thought wendigos were the scariest critter lurking out in them there hills the weird old banjo-playin’ redneck at the gas station told you not to go messin’ in.

Nope.

Do you think a gnome or a perhaps a pixie could live in one of those? And, if they did, do you think they’d be very friendly? I don’t, but I suppose that’s up to interpretation.

I digress.

Enough talk about mushrooms and gnomes and wendigos. Let’s take a look and see who stepped in knee-deep, liquid shit on the Tubes today.

[Insert Borderline Racially Insensitive Bluegrass Pastiche.]

“Hola, amigos! How y’all doin’?”

“Now it’s time for Big Shots - the show all about online scandals, internet drama, and the idiots who make it!”

“Shucks howdy! And do we have a full fiesta for you today, cowpokes!”

“You said it, compadre! Here I thought Mr. Verbalase was gonna win this year’s award for most embarrassing cancellation, but it looks like he’s going to have some steep competition!”

“Competition? Honey, this hombre isn’t just eatin’ Verbalase’s lunch - he’s eatin’ his breakfast and dinner, too! This bad buckaroo’s name is Zane Whitener, better known by his YouTube channel name, In Praise Of Shadows.”

“Sounds spooky! But believe me when I say the only thing scary about this fella is just how badly he stepped in it this past week! Like, we’re talkin’ a full-on face-plant right into the internet cement!”

“Mi amigo’s gonna need facial reconstructive surgery to recover from this one! Too bad he’s one broke cowpoke.”

“And that’s no joke! Señor Whitener spent a lot of time on YouTube talking about monsters, but it turns out the one he should have been worried about was the green-eyed one in his own reflection!”

“He calls himself a leftist, but I think hombre should probably start calling himself a centrist!”

“What makes you say that?”

“Cuz nothin’ he said was right!”

“And now, he’s got nothin’ left!”¹

---

I’m not sure how old Zane Whitener is. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d probably assume he’s somewhere in his late twenties at the earliest, and in his mid-thirties, at the oldest. According to his incredibly scant Wikitubia article, he lives in Ashville, North Carolina, which does track with what he’s stated in his own videos about coming from a backwards and racially charged part of the country. I remember him stating something akin to that in a video he made previously. I know that because I actually watched Whitener’s videos. Most of them, at least.

Starting in 2018, Whitener began to upload video essays to YouTube under the channel name InPraiseOfShadows, primarily focused on critically analyzing and going into the history of long-running horror franchises and, at times, horror literature, and the people behind them. If he took his handle from the 1933 essay of the same name by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, I’m unsure, but it’s obliquely clear that, if nothing else, Whitener is quite the bibliophile, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran into the essay before and cribbed the title as his handle.

What made the drama we’re about to get into so disappointing is that, if you couldn’t tell already, I actually liked Whitener’s content. Despite their excessive run time - which, this probably won’t surprise you, but is not an issue to me - they are remarkably well-researched, thorough, and educational. I’d honestly say that if there’s a horror movie franchise that you’re more interested in hearing the history of, replete with all the fun facts about the creators, stars, behind-the-screen trials and tribulations, if Whitener made a video about it, it would be worth watching. From the beginning, his political affiliations were rather apparent based on comments sprinkled about here and there, but they were never enough to turn me off of his content entirely. It wasn’t all that often, not enough to turn me off of ever watching his videos, but my ears perked up when he started talking about colonialist parallels in his video on Disney’s nightmarish Oz sequel, Return To Oz.

And, was he wrong about there being themes of imperialism and colonialism in a kid’s movie made by Disney? Well… no? I think? That’s just one way to interpret the film, and, given that it’s a subjective interpretation, I can’t say that it’s an invalid reading of the movie. It… certainly feels like he’s really stretching the subtext, but, at the same time, it isn’t entirely off base. But if that was immediately where his mind went when he watched the movie, it says a lot about his world view.

The point is, the sensation of stumbling across a nugget of progressive ideology in his videos was kind of like when I spend time with a liberal-minded friend and they say, Healthcare in America is fucked - a statement that we can all agree on - and then give the worst possible take about how to unfuck it. Do I agree with them? Obviously not. But is that enough for me to not be friends with them? Also no. I’m not that bitterly partisan.

From the point-of-view of an objective observer with my own political convictions set aside, I actually found Whitener’s commentary on primarily leftist talking points on various cultural topics in the world of horror literature to be quite elucidating. Did I agree with them? No. Not at all, usually. But it did shed light on certain arguments I’ve long heard about various topics in social media pertaining to race, gender, colonialism, sexuality, so on and so forth. Again, did I agree with them? Most of them, no. Most of them seemed like extreme leaps in logic or really, really stretching the interpretation of the text and/or film content… something that Whitener really likes to do, as we’ll soon see. But, most importantly is that he was thorough enough in presenting these arguments that I could see the logic behind them. It was flawed logic, yes, deeply so, but there was a logic to it, and often of a sort that was so twisted and warped that I never would have been able to draw the throughline from Point A to Point B myself.

I’d say that, yes, this painted his videos with a certain political bias, but I don’t think that diminished the overall educational value of his videos pertaining to the history of horror literature and cinema. The only exception that I can think of - at least, when it comes to all of the videos of his that I watched, which I’ll admit was not all of them - is his video on Lovecraft, in which he spends a not-insignificant portion of its runtime discussing his own personal conflict as a good, card-carrying progressive and his relationship to the author and his works.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, as anyone with even a passing familiarity with him and his writings, is a divisive character. Even for the time and place he occupied, when flagrant racial prejudice was not uncommon and Irish people were only just beginning to be accepted as White, Lovecraft was particularly (and infamously) staunch in his beliefs that Anglo-Saxons, and Anglo-Saxons alone, were the paragon of humanity and that every other race on planet earth were either inherently evil, scheming, duplicitous heathens (i.e. Eastern Europeans, Jews, Chinese) or out-and-out animals (i.e. Africans, Mexicans, Italians).

For example, here are some of Lovecraft’s spiciest takes that can be found with nothing more than a simple Google search, all of which would get him perma-banned from every single social media platform extant today -

It is difficult to be patient with the political idiots who advocate the relinquishment of [the Phillipines] by the United States, either now or at any future time. The mongrel natives, in whose blood the Malay strain predominates, are not and will never be racially capable of maintaining a civilised condition by themselves.

- Taken from an article written in the United Amateur, June of 1916

It is a mistake to allow Jews to mingle with Aryans as social equals. I have never been forced to do this, & at high school I drew the colour line at Jews as well as negroes, though of course there is no racial comparison between the two classes of undesirables

- Taken from a letter penned in November 1915. It’s worth noting that despite his apparent distaste for Jews, he did go on to marry a Jewish woman.

I certainly hope to see promiscuous immigration permanently curtailed soon — Heaven knows enough harm has already been done by the admission of limitless hordes of the ignorant, superstitious, & biologically inferior scum of Southern Europe & Western Asia.

- Taken from a letter penned in December of 1925.

While there is evidence that Lovecraft’s views on race mellowed as he aged, there is no denying that the man, even for his time, was vehemently prejudiced. The more one studies the life of Lovecraft, the more on begins to discover that he was a deeply and fundamentally unwell man² in many ways. The line between a genius and a madman, as they say, is thin, indeed.

The guy had a mental breakdown in New York City because he saw too many Italians, which, to me, is just kind of funny. I imagine the guy would be cowering in a corner, shaking and sobbing and throwing up all over himself in sheer animal panic if I turned on The Sopranos in front of him.

To play devil’s advocate for Lovecraft, I will say that we, in the present, would do well to remember that the man was watching a fundamental shift in American society that had hitherto been unseen, unfolding in real time, and watching literal hordes of Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and other immigrants - some more swarthy than what he was accustomed to - pouring into New York City must have been tantamount to us in 2024 watching entire caravans cross the Southern border. In a very real sense, Lovecraft was watching the collapse of the old America and the birth of something entirely new, different, and alien to the Anglo-Saxon dominated New England he had known. As a man predisposed to melodrama and hyperbole, it makes sense that he would see this as apocalyptic, and write about it like he’s penning the next Book of Revelation.

Yet, even if Lovecraft was only saying what everyone else at the time was thinking - and perhaps he was, to some extent - the difference between Lovecraft and any other Joe Schmoe in the 1920’s was that he was, I’d argue, one of if not the most influential horror author of all time. It is almost impossible to divorce Lovecraft from the horror genre entirely. This presents a conundrum for leftist horrorphiles like Whitener. However, in his video on Lovecraft, he is able to reach the ultimate conclusion that the author’s personal racial biases and other shortcomings as a person do not make his writings any less valid, important, or good. Lovecraft was who he was, believed what he believed, and, in Whitener’s opinion, it’s important to keep that in mind when reading his works, but they aren’t the be-all-end-all of the discussion surrounding the author. Given that many of his contemporaries routinely call from Lovecraft’s name to be stripped from his works and instead pretend that Cthulu and his eldritch cohorts just kind of materialized in the cultural psyche like actual horrors from beyond the stars, I think that Whitener’s take is actually rather level-headed, if not exactly the right way to separate the art from the artist. No one has to like Lovecraft as an individual, but to diminish his contributions to the genre of horror, if not literature as a whole, would be academically and factually disingenuous.

Last year, Whitener made another video about the YouTube analog horror series, Marble Hornets, as well as the larger Slenderman phenomenon as a whole. It was, I believe, his most well-received video. It was thorough. Comprehensive. Extremely detail oriented. It was, in my opinion, a truly great piece of essay content. And, to be totally honest with you, I also made a piece about Slenderman last year.

And it’s no coincidence it came out shortly after Whitener’s video. This isn’t to say that I regurgitated the information from his video for Substack - believe me, he goes much more in depth into the legal conundrum surrounding Slenderman and the artistic merits of Marble Hornets, while I more or less gloss over them to focus more on the potentially paranormal aspect of the Slenderman phenomenon. But, after watching Whitener’s video, I was thinking about Slenderman. A lot. And it was very convenient that I had just begun a retrospect series on creepypasta. Though I was always intending to write about Slenderman, Whitener’s video is the reason I wrote about Slenderman, and I still haven’t actually written about the Creepypasta Narration community and their dirty dealings, which was actually the impetus for me to write a creepypasta series to begin with.

I do have the SCP Foundation article finished up, though.

It only took a year to finish.

Anyways, I wasn’t the only person who thought that Whitener’s Slenderman tell-all was good. Recently, it caught the eye of a rather large and notable content creator on YouTube. According to this content creator, he watched the video. He was impressed by the quality. So, when Whitener’s twitter page came up as recommended on this creator’s feed, he followed him.

What would be the worst that happened?

Well, apparently, fucking everything.

You see, this content creator just so happened to follow Whitener while Whitener was experiencing something of a bad time on Twitter. At the moment, he was weathering a barrage of negativity and troll comments that were calling him things like soyboy, beta cuck, and other ad hominems that you’re likely to be called by a thirteen year old on Fortnite. Whitener took particular umbrage with being called one word in particular. For the sake of keeping this publication squeaky clean for when Substack is inevitably bought by some big Tech outfit who floods the site the AI-powered Hunter-Killer Auto-Mods that will insta-ban any publication that ever published a slur more spicy than doo-doo head, I shan’t repeat it here, but, um…

Well, I’ll give you a hint to what that word is.

Now, I’m not exactly sure if the bulk of the people antagonizing Whitener were self-professed fans of this content creator who followed him. Given the rapid, fast-paced nature of the internet and Google’s failure to pull even the most tangentially relevant information from it, it’s hard to go back and find evidence to parse exactly what happened. But, whether there was any real connection between the mob of trolls calling Whitener a weenie on Twitter and the fanbase of this content creator who followed him doesn’t really matter. Whitener saw that this individual followed him on Twitter. And that was it. He took that as a veiled attack. He took that as a sign that it wasn’t just this content creator’s fans attacking him - this very public, very popular individual was aware of what was happening to Whitener. And he didn’t give a fuck. In fact, Whitener figured that this content creator had followed him for the sole purpose of letting him know that he was watching it unfold, no doubt cackling with demented glee as rude words for gay men flooded Whitener’s Twitter replies. Whitener, in his own words, described the "move” as a quiet and deniable intimidation tactic.

Remember how I said Whitener liked to really, really stretch his interpretations of text and film? Yeah, well, you can see that mental flexibility on full display here, because how the fuck he interpreted a simple, poorly timed Twitter follow by someone as a personal attack is beyond me. I’m not sure even he really believes it, so much as he was just looking for a casus belli to declare war, but, after witnessing the events that unfolded, I’m not entirely convinced he isn’t actually capable of performing such absurd mental gymnastics.

But I also think that Whitener had other motivations to extrapolate this interpretation of events. He was mad. He was resentful. Bitter. And quite possibly financially desperate. For a whatever reason, Whitener felt as though he should pick a fight with this content creator. Maybe he’d been waiting to do it for a long time. Given how much real-estate this content creator seems to take up in his head, it seems that he was well-aware - and very resentful - of this individual long before he did what he did.

Whatever the case, this innocuous follow on Twitter would prove to be the spark that lit Whitener’s powder keg.

And he was about to make what was likely the worst choice of his life.

Though his view-counts are up precipitously, he’s started to bleed over a thousand subscribers a day in the aftermath. Though he’s still sitting at a respectable subscriber count of 390,000 as of this writing, he’s six thousand short of where he was a month ago. I suspect the only reason his subscriber count hasn’t totally bottomed out is exclusively because there was so little overlap between the people he riled up and his own consistent viewerbase, which every statistic of his SocialBlade page shows is only a fraction of his total subscriber count. You can see on his YouTube’s SocialBlade statistics that the income generated from his dedicated viewers is rather paltry; losing even several thousand subscribers and, more importantly, garnering the reputation he’s probably going to be stuck with for the rest of his career - assuming he chooses to continue it - could prove to be disastrous in the long run.

This was because on May 24th, 2024, he uploaded a video by the title of Bad Conservative Horror Movies.

From the title alone, I knew that this video was not for me, and it was likely that my time as one of Whitener’s viewers was at an end. Not because I disagree that conservative-leaning content creators, especially those with a more mainstream cant, can put out heinous material. Recently, the right-wing sphere of the internet has been abuzz with commentary on just that topic after The Daily Wire debuted a new animated cartoon created by comedian Adam Carolla called Mr. Birchum.

It’s a self-described anti-woke program that is touted as being made specifically made to own the libs and offend snowflakes. I saw a clip where the punchline was basically, Ugh! These millennials and their pronouns! Amirite, fellas?

Carolla’s really pushing boundaries with this one, I gotta tell you. He’s saying what everyone except every single person above the age of sixty-five still on Facebook is just too afraid to say.

I probably don’t need to tell you that, outside of The Daily Wire’s core audience, most of who are neo-conservatives, zionists, boomers, most of whom are some combination of the three, this show was roundly despised, derided, and clowned on, even by many on the right. The only reason I’m aware of it is because of fellow Substack writers discussing it and the broader topic of Conservative entertainment. I plan on writing a more in-depth exploration on the phenomenon of Conservative-made entertainment and The Daily Wire later, but we’ll just say for the moment that, when the left says that the right can’t make good art, programs like Mr. Birchum are doing nothing to beat those allegations.

Still, I don’t have any interest in a three-hour screed of what I figured would be Whitener bashing conservative entertainment, mostly because I assumed that it would be baseless attacks that carried little in the way of actual critical analysis.

As it turns out, I was right about that. But he wasn’t attacking exactly who I thought he would be. In the thumbnail for the video, I noticed the conspicuous addition of a familiar face.

Remember how I said that this all seems to have been sparked by a popular content creator following Whitener on Twitter? Well - here’s the man himself.

Meet Isaiah Nichols, better known by his online handle, Wendigoon.

Nichols is a twenty-four year old content creator from Tennessee that began uploading in videos in 2019. Nichols experienced an unprecedented rise to YouTube stardom by creating long-form explorations of horror movies, online analog horror, conspiracy theories, and other horror-adjacent media, all of which routinely run over two hours in length. Since, he had branched out into doing various podcasts and even made his own horror film. Currently, he has over 3.6 million subscribers on YouTube. Part of Nichols’ appeal is his down-to-earth, easy-going demeanor, his humble and folksy charm, and his way of couching what would be controversial opinions about politics and religion with a glib sense of humor. This is what put him in the crosshairs of leftist content creators from the very beginning.

Nichols has never shied away from the fact that he’s a Christian. A devout one, too. He has not only covered seminal pieces of Christian literature, like Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy in great depth, but he runs a Christian podcast, and has stated before that he teaches Sunday school classes at his church, which makes me think that he is probably the coolest Sunday school teacher in existence. One of his greatest strengths is his ability to critically analyze and summarize seminal pieces of Christian literature like Dante’s The Divine Comedy or John Milton’s Paradise Lost with the language, sensibilities, and humor familiar to an audience of Zoomers and translate them in ways in which they are able to connect to the texts that no high school teacher could ever hope to impart. This, in turn, has endeared him to a very broad audience of younger individuals who, regardless of their political convictions, respect him deeply. If you want an example, I highly recommend that you watch - after you’re done here, of course - his analysis of Dante’s Purgatorio. Not only do I think Nichols did the younger generations a service by exploring this text because most people don’t even know that Dante wrote anything besides Inferno, but, near the end, Nichols begins to choke up on camera as he speaks about a particularly profound passage. Not only does it convey the strength in Dante’s words in a way that most would not be able to understand without it being explained to them, but the vulnerability and humility displayed by Nichols as he openly tears up really, really sells it all. In a world as choked and stifled with irony, divisiveness, for a generation that is almost pathologically afraid to be open, honest, and sincere, I believe that Nichols’ willingness to be all of those things, or at least convincingly pretend to be them, is exactly why he garners so much respect.

If you just want to see that part alone, it begins around the 55 minute mark.

Nichols also has a lot of guns - big, scary ones, at that - that he is very open about owning. He is very openly critical of the government. Recently, he uploaded deep dives into the Waco Standoff and Ruby Ridge, in which he was so vocally critical of the ATF that I’m surprised they haven’t raided his house yet.

This is literally the quote at the top of his Wikitubia page -

...and remember kids. The next time that somebody tells you, "The government wouldn't do that!" Oh yes they would.

Though Nichols stops short of ever proclaiming his political affiliations or beliefs, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to tell where he falls on most issues.

This, naturally, has embroiled him in controversy. Leftists have routinely tried to claim his scalp and cancel him, which has proven exceedingly difficult given his immense popularity and unshakeable convictions. Last year, drama kicked up around him for saying… something, I don’t remember what, but people on Twitter were saying that he was a White supremacist, religious fundamentalist, and jack-booted fascist thug for, er… being in a happy, monogamous relationship and teaching kids about the Bible.

The standards for being a religious extremist or fascist these days is rather low, I suppose.

Wendigoon’s response to these allegations was as succinct as it was masterful.

And that’s about the only response he could have possibly given that wouldn’t have blown up in his face. That is exactly how to respond to bad faith attacks and slander. He doesn’t acknowledge the aspersions being leveled at him. He doesn’t engage with it. He simply states, That’s not true, and walks away from it. And the thing is, anyone who actually watches the content he produces knows he’s none of those things, and any aspersions to the contrary are exactly what they are - libel. But we’ll come back to that.

This is all to say that when I saw Nichols’ face in Whitener’s thumbnail, I knew what that whatever he was going to say would most likely be the same bad faith attacks that against the man that I’d seen before.

And, to my unending surprise - they weren’t.

Whitener’s aspersions were even worse.

I won’t lie to you - I didn’t watch the entirety of Whitener’s video. I wasn’t going to watch it at all, but once the storm around it began in earnest, I reluctantly booted it up, knowing full well that I was about to hear a lot of stupid shit, but wanting to know exactly what kind of stupid shit was being said. Because I’m a glutton for punishment like that.

It was about all I could do to get through his juvenile rant about Nichols. It should go without saying that it was difficult to sit through. I know that he talks about Kevin Spacey and Ben Shapiro after he whines about Nichols - the former of which I do not believe is a conservative, and the latter of which I’m not sure has ever made horror content - but it doesn’t really matter since the part pertaining to Nichols is really where the larger discussion of the video begins and ends. The remainder of it is almost wholly negligible.

The reason I found the video so hard to stomach was not because I like Nichols, and sincerely believe he is probably the best content creator on YouTube at present. I’m not so much of a mindless sycophant or zealous fanboy that I can’t tolerate seeing someone talk smack about a creator I like. No - the reason it was so difficult to watch was because Whitener comes off as repulsively whiny, immensely petty, and just downright spiteful. In all my time on the internet, I’ve seen some pretty botched attempts at exposing popular online content creators, but I would be hard-pressed to name one that came across as petulant, childish, and mean-spirited as Whitener’s attempted hit on Nichols’ character.

You must forgive me for a lack of direct quotes from Whitener. To even right this, I was forced to pick through the scraps of the video I can find posted on commentary channels, most of which are hours long and feature some random YouTuber blabbering about how cringe and fail and this, that, and the third Whitener is. At present, the entirety of Whitener’s deleted video has yet to be uploaded, so I’m having to sift through bits and pieces wedged in between the rambling commentary of onlookers who all jumped into the fray to beat up on him.

First and foremost, Whitener states in his video the following -

So what - he’s a conservative. Is that a problem? The answer to that is… yes.

That in and of itself is a rather stunningly bold proclamation to make. But he then proceeds to list off a number of Nichols’ associates on YouTube, and how his ties to them make him guilty of their supposed crimes by association.

Firstly, he lists Brandon Buckingham, who he calls a gun YouTuber - again, using the mere quality of gun ownership as a pejorative. He also makes the claim that Buckingham has been accused of threatening sexual assault. Against who? Whitener doesn’t specify. The validity of this claim is unknown to me, but, for what it’s worth, basically everyone commentating on the situation with more knowledge of Buckingham than I has said that it’s untrue, or, at the very least, something he said that’s been taken out of context. Again - I don’t know for sure.

I know nothing about Brandon Buckingham, but I know that he’s associates with the infamous Sam Hyde, who’s something of a boogieman for the left-side of the political spectrum. Being associated with him, as Buckingham has been, is pretty much guaranteed to put a target on one’s back.

One of the most contentious elements of Whitener’s video is that, when he speaks about Buckingham, he uses a picture of him with his terminally ill grandfather that was taken shortly after the man suffered a debilitating stroke.

Classy.

He then name-drops Canadian YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers, who, unlike most of his compatriots, is better known by his actual, legal name, Mutahar Anas - an immensely successful and influential creator in his own right.

I watch Anas every now and then, and, by all accounts and everything I’ve ever seen, he is a political centrist with a distaste for censorship and political correctness. Despite being a member of Canada’s new Bharati elites and a practicing Muslim³, he is persona non grata on the left due to his opinions on radical freeze peach.

Recently, Anas has played a critical role in exposing another YouTuber, streamer, and Canadian by the name of Keffals. A self-described transgender activist, Keffals and their activities are, frankly, too much to get into now, but suffice to say that, apparently, if you have an issue with a thirty-plus year old individual talking sexually with minors in private discord services and teaching them how to make bootleg estrogen hormones in a fucking bathtub like moonshine corn liquor, then you’re transphobic.

And since Anas is transphobic for shedding light on Keffals obliquely illegal and criminal behavior, Nichols is as well, if only by association.

Whitener then cites Nichols’ friendship with Caleb Phelps, known as Oompaville on YouTube. Phelps is another creator I’ve never paid attention to, but, so far as I can tell, he mostly makes videos reacting to TikTok memes people send to him while he’s streaming. He hosts a podcast with Anas, as well as the infamous dumpster fire NikacadoAvocado - a former vegan who built his fame on gorging himself on junk food, gaining an unconscionable amount of weight, and generally being a pathologically histrionic lunatic who acts like a complete and utter fool for clicks.

Fittingly, their podcast is called The D-Fire Podcast. The D stands for exactly what you think it does.

While it appears that Phelps and NikacadoAvocado have something of a symbiotic relationship, where the latter acts like an idiot and the former makes fun of him, and both ultimately profit off the attention they bring to one another, Whitener claims that Phelps is guilty of exploiting NikacadoAvocado’s descent into morbid obesity and madness. This is patently ridiculous, as not only do I think much of Mr. Avocado’s behavior exaggerated for the camera for the sole purpose of ramping up the shock value to attract viewers, but he has made it explicitly clear that he’s perfectly fine with being exploited… so long as he gets the monetary windfall that comes with it.

I’m also not sure exactly how Nichols association with Oompaville makes him a horrible person aside from Oompaville simply being not to Whitener’s taste, but, as we can see, it doesn’t take very much to get on Whitener’s shit-list.

It’s worth noting that Phelps and Anas also interviewed Andrew Tate, which, of course, is a big no-no for Mr. Whitener. Even talking to Tate is enough to make you complicit and in agreement with his beliefs by association, don’t you know? Just ignore the fact that both Phelps and Anas are openly, vocally, and unabashedly critical of Tate. But you can’t talk to someone who politically disagrees with you. Nope. That’s not how interviews work. If you instigate a conversation with someone, you are immediately guilty of agreeing with all their spicy takes. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two-hundred dollars. Straight to jail.

Oh, and, also, by this logic, if you’ve ever engaged with me in the comment section, you’re all now complicit in my contentious opinion… that pickles are fucking terrible. Yes - even if you like pickles, you are still beholden to this opinion because you spoke to me before.

I hope you’re ready for the Pro-Pickle Bloc. They’re a very dedicated bunch. Probably because all that vinegar has also pickled their brains.

Oh, and I forgot to mention - Phelps also likes gun.

That’s three strikes, Mr. Phelps… and you’re out!

There’s a few more big-name YouTubers who catch strays, like commentator TurkeyTom, who’s well known for being acerbic, irreverent, and using dirty no-no words in private chats. He’s not one to filter his opinions - like, at all - which lands him in hot water which, time after time, he continually walks out of, much to the chagrin of leftists who really, really want to claim his luscious head of scene-kid hair. Here’s a picture of Buckingham, Nichols, and Tom in a car together at a wedding, or something.

Tom the type of guy who wiggles his fingers and says, Don’t mind if I do! right before he takes a slice of pizza.

Oh - and Tom, like Mutahar, is also one of Keffals’ personal bugaboos, and has been quite vocal in his assertion that Keffals should be in jail for everything they’ve done⁴. The fact that Whitener and so many others in his camp take such great and personal offense to people like TurkeyTom and Mutahar blowing the whistle on Keffals’ questionable interactions with minors and use it to make blatant and blanket allegations of transphobia…

DonutOperator - a former cop who runs a channel where he commentates on police body camera footage - catches the worst of it, though. He is apparently a far-right extremist and pro-death of anyone who doesn’t agree with him, according to Whitener, which are just two of the many, many inflammatory accusations he levels towards DonutOperator. Whitener seems to take great offense that one of DonutOperator’s favorite genre of body-cam footage is cops taking down and roughing up, er… PDF-files, as people have taken to calling them. Personally, I, and I believe most sane people, take great pleasure when PDF-files are given their just desserts, whether it be a thorough drubbing by the proper authorities or delivered from the business end of a shotgun. It makes me clap my hands like a dandy little lad in a sailor suit recieving a comically oversized swirly lollipop when I see or hear about child predators getting, as we used to say back in the stone ages, epicly PWNED. But Whitener makes much ado about PDF-files being unfairly treated by the cops. In the spirit of being more gracious than he was with with Nichols, won’t say anything else on the matter. But let’s just say that I disagree. And it really raises some questions.

Whitener goes on to state that Nichols’, by virtue of coming from a wealthy family (a claim that is in dire need of a citation) and coming into wealth at the age of nineteen from his YouTube career, has no lived experience with which he can accurately interpret the text of the various books he’s reviewed. Apparently, being wealthy neuters your reading comprehension and invalidates your opinions. Who knew. He specifically cites Nichols’ analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and states something to the effect of, I have no interest in hearing five hours worth of a wealthy twenty-four year old’s interpretation of Blood Meridian.

This seems to be a rather commonly deployed tactic by the most staunch leftists - only the poor, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed are allowed to have opinions on just about anything, because of their lived experience. What constitutes as poor or disenfranchised or oppressed? Well, it depends on who you ask, the time of day, the month, and the position of Jupiter and the alignment of several constellations (which also change depending on the stage of the Dharmic cycle). Basically, it’s shorthand for, I don’t want to acknowledge what you have to say so it’s invalid because you’re [insert arbitrary personal quality here].

Whitener also accuses Nichols as being not just a member of, but the founder of the Boogaloo Boys. Now, what exactly the Boogaloo Boys are is, again, a matter of who you ask. Some would say that they’re right-wing extremists and white supremacists. I’ve heard it been said by some that they’re left-wing agitators. In my own experience, they’re more libertarian and with notes of anarchism than anything, but given how broad the term is and the vast and varied political beliefs held by the people who compromise it, pinning down an exact definition is difficult.

The term Boogaloo is a 4chan-ism that can be traced back to 2012, and is a rather vague euphemism that can refer to a second civil war, mass civilian insurrection, or just a general Shit Hits The Fan scenario, but most commonly refers to the first of them, as the phrase electroc boogaloo itself is popular short-hand for an unnecessary and often unwanted sequel⁵ - thusly, Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Again, they’re a rabbit hole unto themselves, and the movement, as disjointed, fractured, and often paradoxical as it is, is difficult to succinctly describe.

As briefly as I can put it, Boogaloo Boys made a name for themselves during the 2020 Summer of Love, in which they were common staples of protests and street-level violence, bedecked in tactical gear and their trademark Hawaiian shirts, which, more than anything, act as their most identifying and perhaps only unifying feature.

Some appeared at these scenes with the self-professed goal of protecting property from violent mobs. Others appeared to be there with the express purpose of antagonizing the mobs until they became violent, if they weren’t already, as part of an acceleration agenda to incite an event that, in their opinion, would serve as the Harper’s Ferry Raid of the modern age. I would be remiss to not mention that self-professed members of the Boogaloo Boys have been involved in various crimes, including a drive-by shooting in Oakland that resulted in the death of a security contractor and a police officer in 2020, various scuffles and stand-offs with the law, and frequent participation in violent incidents throughout the early 2020’s. Most notably, a group known as the Wolverine Watchmen were implicated in a plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer - the group is often conflated with the larger boogaloo movement, but there’s conflicting information about how involved or connected the two are or were.

It’s important to keep in mind that, so far as I’m aware, there is no central leadership, no guiding ideology, and no official membership, and, for the most part, it seems that if you wear a Hawaiian shirt and show up to some sort of protest or site of civil unrest, that’s enough to qualify as a Boogaloo Boy. Given that the movement - if it can really be called as such - consists of so many incongruous groups that only tangentially overlap in ideology and actions, it seems like a bit of an overstatement to claim that they are a single, united, and cohesive entity or organization. Personally, I would call it a sort of spirit or aesthetic than a concrete ideology or party. To me, the only real uniting factor between the disparate parties and factions that make up the greater boogaloo umbrella is that they all post stuff like this on their social media and think it’s the pinnacle of comedy.

Hilarious, I know. I’ll give you a second to catch your breath.

But, again, that’s just from what I can extrapolate from research; I’ve been aware of the general Boogaloo spirit since 2020, but, for obvious reasons, never really understood it, nor did I pay it much attention.

It’s especially foolish - and, again, disingenuous - to accuse Nichols of starting the entire movement (again, if it can be called such), which, by all accounts, arose organically on both 4chan and Reddit political discussion forums before manifesting into its current, identifiable form. Nichols has stated that, previously, he did maintain an internet presence under the pseudonym Boogalooboi in the mid-2010’s, but dropped it and distanced himself from the entire deal once it became something other than just 4chan parlance for general right-leaning libertarian sentiments and memes. Three years ago, Nichols addressed his previous association with the term on Reddit. I’ll let you read his apologia for yourself.

Whitener makes the claim that, because Nichols still frequently wears Hawaiian shirts in his videos, that he is still sympathetic to the movement, if not covertly associated with it. By that logic, I, too, must be a Boogaloo Boy, since I also have an affinity for bright, colorful shirts with floral patterns. I have for a long time. What can I say? The tropical drip is immaculate. I think Hawaiian shirts really compliment the dark bags of sleeplessness and stress under my eyes and the general air of malaise that follows me like a dark cloud - that, a cigarette, and a tiki glass full of Mai-Tai really says, I’d love to be having a good time right now, but circumstances have made that impossible.

Literally me.

It’s worth noting that, throughout the video, Whitener wears a Hawaiian shirt himself, no doubt as another subtle jab at Nichols’ penchant for the style.

Whitener makes several more audacious and, frankly, dubious claims against Nichols’ character that we could dissect in greater detail, but we’d be here for hours if I did. The last aspersion that Whitener makes against that I want to make note of is that everything Nichols does and says is, by virtue of him being a white southerner, suspect. I desperately wish I could find the exact quote, but Whitener says something to the effect that anyone white (and especially male) from that part of the country is more or less inherently racist and predisposed to bigoted beliefs, which is just…

Wow. That is… that is one bold fucking statement to make, right there. Isn’t there… oh, well, call me crazy, but isn’t there word for someone who immediately subscribes to prejudice based on an individual’s skin color and/or heritage? I feel like there is, but it’s eluding me at the moment. God, it’s right at the tip of my tongue. What is it again? I know I’ve heard it before.

It’ll come to me, probably right after I publish this piece.

What makes this claim almost comedically hypocritical is that Whitener himself is also white. He’s also a male. And, uh… where is he from, again?

Oh, yeah. Only a fucking hour away from Nichols’ native Tennessee.

But, y’know, maybe I’m off base. Maybe Whitener is one of the the good ones - the enlightened Brahman of the backwards and intolerant South that managed to achieve racial enlightenment and has come to his home state to bring the light of progress and civilization to the destitute backwater barbarians of Appalachia.

Who’s to say.

I’m genuinely not entirely sure what Whitener set out to accomplish by making this video. I really do not understand what he thought was going to happen. Throughout the video, he makes a series of allegations against Nichols and many other popular creators that range from questionable to fallacious to out-right bold-faced lies that can be disproved with even a modicum of research. Worse still, it doesn’t come off as anything other than baseless, spiteful, and envious whinging. Throughout the video, he consistently refers to Nichols’ age, success, and monetary profit from his videos, all the while maligning the fact that he, in turn, can barely afford to pay rent and is in constant danger of having to abandon his YouTube channel because it isn’t making enough money.

Clearly, he is jealous. That is undeniable. The video reeks of envy like a decomposing deer corpse rotting in a remote Tennessee holler in the dead of July. You can practically feel the resentment Whitener harbors for Nichols bleeding through the screen. While the criticism of Nichols is couched in political parlance, it is undeniable that Whitener harbors a deep and very personal resentment to him as a person that extends beyond their differing political ideologies.

It is unflattering, and it is exceedingly difficult to watch and stomach. I cannot imagine the world Whitener must live in if he expected to receive some deluge of sympathy, or somehow believe that an hour of whinging on camera would turn public opinion against Nichols. The only conclusion that I can draw is that he was laboring under a delusion engendered from sheer envy, anger, and resentment that led him to make a very bad, very impulsive act.

In my opinion, Whitener should have taken the L on the chin and moved on. In a perfect world, the two would have arranged a sit down - they do live awful close to one another - and had a rational, mature discussion, cleared the air, shaken hands, and made nice. At the very least, Whitener would have been well served to simply ignore the cavalcade of criticism and soldier on. Pig-headed and wrong as he is in his claims, there’s a virtue to sticking by your assertions.

However, Whitener instead - perhaps unsurprisingly - took the worst route available to him and gave a public statement on his Twitter page. Again, here it is in its entirety.

This, my friends, is exactly what you shouldn’t do.

If you mean to apologize, apologize. If you believe you did nothing wrong, state as much and leave it be, just as Nichols did when he put down the first wave of aspersions cast against him with the simple statement of, The only thing I believe in is loving God and my wife. Literally nothing else on the matter needed to be said, and by refusing to engage with it, he sucked all the oxygen out of the room and smothered the ember before it could start a fire.

But Whitener didn’t apologize. He offered a mealy-mouthed non-apology that basically reads as, I’m not sorry, but everyone wants me to be sorry, so I guess I have to say something. In the above statements, only succeeded in dousing his own fire with gasoline, which only looks all the more petulant when measured against the one reply Nichols’ deigned to give him, right in the comments section of the video.

Here’s another statement that he made to a third-party who later posted it on Twitter.

While I can’t say that it’s exactly a master class in what to do, it is better than Whitener’s response. It’s tactful. Respectful. Humble. Though my inner cynic believes that he likely has thoughts publicly on the matter he would be remiss to express, outwardly, he offers nothing but grace towards Whitener, and, regardless on how he may feel internally, comes away looking like the bigger, more respectful, and infinitely more mature adult between the two.

This brings us to the salient point of this article, and the real reason I wrote it. I didn’t go into the nitty-gritty of the majority of the attacks leveled against Nichols because, to me, they’re tertiary to the real issue at the heart of the matter.

Technically, much of what Whitener said about Nichols is, on a very base level, true. While Nichols takes great pains to never explicitly delve into the depths of his political convictions, it is likely that he is right-leaning, or at the very least, sympathetic to right-wing political beliefs. He did have some tenuous connection to the larger boogaloo spirit. He is a devout Christian. He is obviously not fond of the federal government or the Alphabet Crews. He is friends with incendiary, outspoken public figures, many of whom are more open about their political beliefs and are not afraid to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows. As to how moral or upstanding they are, I can’t speak to that. I don’t watch Brandon Buckingham or Oompaville or DonutOperator. I don’t know what they’ve done. Maybe they are vile people that Nichols would be better off not associating with. I tend to doubt it, but I really can’t say.

None of this, however, is germane to Nichols’ video output. On the occasion that it is - namely his videos covering events like Ruby Ridge or the Waco Standoff - though his distaste for the ATF and the actions of the federal government are clear, you don’t have to be a right-winger to take issue with the way those tragedies were handled by the powers that be. Most of the time, his videos are strictly apolitical in nature. He’s never once to my knowledge told his audience that they must subscribe to an ideology, conservative or Christian or otherwise, to be good people. He’s never once to my knowledge alleged that anyone of a political persuasion is inherently evil or morally compromised. When you watch Nichols’ videos, he very often takes a politically neutral ground and simply reports the facts as they are, and, most importantly, he always affords the people in them with a modicum of grace. For instance, he goes to great lengths to paint David Koresh of Waco and Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge as the complicated figures they are and not the one-dimensional cartoon caricatures they so often are… but with the caveat that they were definitively not great people, and ultimately not blameless victims, either. Likewise, he says the same of the ATF agents in these situations. About the only person I recall him actually disparaging was then Attorney General Janet Reno, which, yeah - that’s fair, but that’s just my own opinion.

Even when it comes to Whitener, he casts no aspersions. He makes no insults, no ad hominems, and doesn’t make drastic, wild assumptions about his character - at least not outwardly. The only direct criticism he does make refers to Whitener using an accusation against Buckingham originally made by the entirely loathable internet personality, Sneako, who he rightfully says Whitener, under any other circumstances, would never openly agree with.

What’s funny is that Sneako is one of, if not the biggest cheerleader for Andrew Tate. Does that make Whitener, by proxy, aligned with Tate’s politics? No. By his own logic, it would. But it didn’t matter, because Whitener was looking for every single scrap of ammunition he could use to disparage Nichols and his associates.

And that’s at the heart of the matter. Whitener was not, in any capacity, acting in good faith. He wasn’t attempting to start a two-way dialogue between himself and Nichols. He wasn’t attempting to start a discussion or offer critique or even just analyze what he thought Nichols was saying in his videos. It’s a libelous hit piece, plain and simple, filled with mean-spirited and malicious attacks against Nichols, much of which is extrapolated through massive leaps and logic and twisted, out-of-context readings of Nichols’ words. He never gives Nichols the benefit of the doubt. He always ascribes malice and immorality to his actions. When speaking about his friendship with DonutOperator, Whitener says - and I’m quoting here - DonutOperator is one of the biggest bootlicking fascists on the internet, which means that I can only assume Wendigoon is also a bootlicking fascist.

Whitener, multiple times, states that he doesn’t have a problem with Nichols, or any personal animosity towards him, but that simply isn’t true. A bootlicking fascist is not something you call someone you don’t have a problem with. You don’t make an hour long screed about someone you don’t have a problem with. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a problem with Whitener and then wrote this whole article. I do. I think his actions are, in a single word, shameful.

I said that I don’t know what exactly Whitener was hoping to achieve with his video, but that isn’t entirely true. What I think Whitener was doing, out of financial desperation, a bid for attention, or just sheer, blind frustration, attempting to antagonize Nichols into making a public spectacle of himself. I think he wanted to bait Nichols into making his own three-plus hour long screed defending himself, justifying his decisions, and spinning apologia, which Whitener could then pick apart and dissect and continue to read in bad faith to cast further aspersions.

For example, if Nichols had replied by saying, I’m not a bootlicking fascist, he would have been asked how he’s not a bootlicking fascist. When he attempted to explain, his explanations would have only raised more questions - which would have been asked out of bad faith rather than genuine curiosity - which he would then have to address, which would in turn raise more questions, and create this spiraling effect where everything he said would only engender more suspicion, more hostility, and gradually wear him down in the public eye as he scrambled to answer the increasing heap of allegations leveled at him by an increasingly large number of bad faith actors, all looking to get their pound of flesh from a falling titan.

That’s the game I believe he was playing, and I think his ultimate goal was to work Nichols into a corner from which he could not escape, because Whitener and whoever else might have joined him to pile on Nichols’ sinking ship wouldn’t let him escape.Once a bad faith actor has their target pinned in a corner, they don’t let them out. They afford no mercy and give no quarter. It’s nothing but a non-stop onslaught of accusations and vitriol.

There is simply nothing that Nichols could have said in that situation that would have pleased Whitener or any of his prospective cohorts. They weren’t looking for an apology. They weren’t looking for a discussion.

Simply put, what I believe Whitener wanted was to subject Nichols to a public struggle session.

And you don’t talk your way out of a struggle session. You can’t debate your way out of it. You certainly don’t win one once you’re in one, either. All you can do is refuse to engage when one is initiated. The only victory condition that Whitener was looking for was to get Nichols to take the bait. Nichols only way to win was to simply not play the game.

By refusing to engage beyond offering a simple, succinct, and gracious apology, Nichols managed to avoid giving Whitener the one thing I believe he was hoping to get - a hand-wringing, defensive, and nervous reaction. The true irony of the situation is that Whitener fell victim to his own scheme; given that he called out so many large, popular, and visible content creators like Anas, Phelps, and Buckingham - all of whom are very outspoken individuals who do not take being disparaged lightly - he’s been backed into a corner as he attempts to spin apologia for himself as they, and what feels like the entirety of YouTube, have begun to pile on him. I really cannot stress just how many videos I’ve seen on this topic crop up over the past few days. Pretty much everyone Whitener called out except Nichols has responded with hour-plus long video responses where they pretty much tear Whitener a new asshole for the entire duration of the video. Brandon Buckingham. Oompaville. Mutahar. My favorite so far as been TurkeyTom’s, because I have the sense of humor of a twelve year old and hearing Tom open the video with, Calling all red-pilled alpha males - we are under attack, made me laugh.

The point is, if Whitener thought he was baiting Nichols into a bear trap, he ended up stepping in it himself. Everyone he thought he was owning with these pot-shots turned around and fucking zero’d in on his and fired back with howitzer rounds.

Maybe I, too, am failing to afford Whitener any grace in this situation, but, frankly, everything about his actions suggest that he was acting out of malice, and nothing about his behavior leads me to believe he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

The simple fact of the matter is that Nichols demonstrated a master class in how to deal with bad faith actors. And everyone can learn a lesson from how he handled it. The simple fact is that, like any internet troll looking to get a rise out of someone, or goad them into acting like a fool or getting into an unwinnable argument, the best course of action is to ignore them entirely. The only winning move is not to play. Perhaps more apropos for the internet age, I recall the old adage that, supposedly, is an old Portuguese saying -

Arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter what you do, the pigeon will knock down the pieces, shit on the board, and still strut around like it won.

And, just for the record - this is not a phenomenon exclusive to the left. This kind of Gotcha! game of semantics, word-play, and verbal mine-laying is a commonly employed tactic of the YouTube community of ardent leftists often called BreadTube, of which Whitener appears to have been an aspiring junior member of that never quite made the cut, but you see it more and more as you push further into the more extreme reaches of the ride-side of the spectrum, as well. Again, I point back to

Librarian of Celaeno

’s evergreen piece on this kind of behavior exhibited by people on the extreme fringes of the right. This leads me to believe that this kind of behavior is common at the extremes of both ends of the spectrum, where ideological purity and towing the party line becomes of paramount importance. Unfortunately, I see a lot of it here on this site, too, especially with the advent of the Notes feature. You don’t have to scroll very far to see shit-flinging and name-calling that could all be mitigated if people just… didn’t engage.

And that’s kind of why I wanted to write this article, too. A lot of people came to Substack from Twitter. A lot of us left Twitter for a reason. We can all do our part to make sure that it doesn’t turn into the open-air lunatic holding pen that Twitter is, but, at the moment, things do not seem to be trending in that direction, and, sadly, I don’t see that changing. I suspect that this is the fate of all social media sites and more or less a fundamental facet of their nature, which is exactly why I think that the Notes feature was a net-negative for the site, as will be every attempt by the sites’ leadership to further alter Substack into a more mainstream social media platform. This is all to say that I didn’t write this as a personal attack on Whitener - it’s a refutation of his claims, yes, and obviously charged with humor at his expense, but I want this, more than anything, to serve as a cautionary tale. If there is a salient point here, ironic as it may sound after having said all that I’ve said about Whitener, I think it should be this; you’ll always be better served building up yourself than trying to tear down others.

And that’s really where things stand, at the moment.

As for Nichols, I doubt this is the last time someone will try to pick a fight with him. It wasn’t the first. Believe it or not, while combing Reddit, trying to find research material, I found a lot of comments in support of Whitener and derisive of Nichols. While even a lot of Whitener’s own audience, fans, and followers were critical of some of the arguments he employed - especially the comment about Appalachia being some energetic zone that just makes everyone present in it magically racist, which seemed to have rubbed even a lot of left-leaning people sympathetic to Whitener the wrong way - there were still a few that were still like, Yeah, Wendigoon is shitty and sucks. Like, that’s literally it. Either he’s shitty or he sucks. Why do they feel this way? Well, probably because they also believe he’s a legitimate fascist because he goes to church and owns guns.

But there were more than a few openly hoping that, if Whitener couldn’t do the job of finishing off Nichols, someone else will. Given that Nichols is a popular and successful creator, people would be gunning for his head regardless of his political affiliation. That’s just the nature of the internet, and, in a way, humanity as a whole. When one man builds a tower, another will seek to knock it down. When one man has, another seeks to take. We are fallen creatures in that way.

Envy is a cardinal sin for a reason, and, in my personal experience, the most destructive and miserable of them, as well. It combines the covetousness of greed, the resentment of wrath, and the narcissism of pride, all wrapped up into one neat, tidy, convenient toxic package. Much like radioactive waste, it must be managed carefully, diligently, or properly. Otherwise, it will absolutely kill you. And if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you want to be dead. There is little worse than to live spent perpetually coveting others. Ask me how I know.

That’s why, in a way, I have some mote of compassion for Whitener. His behavior was, in a word, reprehensible, but I’m hesitant to call him a truly bad person. I’m not sure if that’s my judgement to pass. If he was acting out of envious anger… well, I’ve been there. Done that. Got the shitty t-shirt, had it signed, and wallowed in misery afterwards. I’ve made terrible choices out of envy that ended up hurting myself and, more importantly, people I cared deeply about. Fortunately, I never did anything in such a spectacularly public fashion that torpedoed my reputation in front of the eyes of millions, but I am very well aware of how such a wretched emotion can cloud one’s judgement and lead them to do things that are completely antithetical to their general nature.

And Whitener? Well, he called down the thunder and got struck by ten-gajillion jigawatts of pure, seething anger from everyone but the one man he wanted to get it from. If he wanted attention, he certainly got it.

In the aftermath, Whitener edited the video to remove the segment pertaining to Nichols, reducing the video’s run-time by a full hour. Later, as I said, he deleted the video entirely. As more and more people on YouTube, Xitter, and other social medias are jumping in to poke fun at Whitener, forcing him to abscond from the public eye and retreat into the walled garden of his own private discord. Leaked discussions that have trickled out read close to what I imagine the dialogue within the last hours of the Führerbunker must have sounded like. They paint Whitener as a man in distress, asking his remaining supporters whether or not he can ever realistically return to making content on YouTube, and if there’s a future for him on the platform at all. He seems to be toying with the idea of abandoning his content creation enterprise entirely.

To be honest with you, I hope he does come back. That comes with the caveat that I hope he learns from this experience, takes a patented Mike’s Hard Look At Himself in the mirror, realizes the error of his ways, and uses it to better himself and hopefully abandon whatever behaviors and thoughts brought him to making this catastrophic decision. Like I said - before this, I enjoyed Whitener’s video output, for the most part. I don’t think I would ever give him any of my time again, but, despite what he’s said and done and the malicious, vindictive behavior he indulged in, like Nichols, I hope he finds peace and wish him no ill will.

That may sound crazy, but the thing is… I don’t really care what happens to him after this point. To maintain any ill feelings towards him would, in essence, be to continue to care about him, which I have no desire to. If he makes a successful comeback to YouTube after his self-imposed exile? Good for him. If he slinks into the shadows he praises and never resurfaces - so be it. I don’t care either way. Whatever the next chapters of his stories are, I won’t be a part of them, and I won’t read them.

1. This whole bit is not going to make any sense to anyone who hasn’t watched Cowboy Bebop before. But the thing is, you should have already seen Cowboy Bebop. And if you haven’t… well, here’s your sign.

2. Which, let’s be honest, should be obliquely apparent from his writings alone.

3. Some sources claim that Anas has since fallen out of the Muslim faith, but I could only find tweets in which he still claims to be practicing.

4. Which they should.

5. If you’re curious about how and why the word came to be, I’ve written about it in this article.