Let’s get the simple part out of the way: The YouTube channel ContraPoints is very good. Regardless of the viewer’s interest or lack thereof in internet culture wars, YouTube Nazis, or any of the other wide-ranging subjects covered in its videos, they’re funny, bizarre, erudite, and compelling.
By Jesse Singal
Like talk radio, YouTube hosts voices from across the political spectrum. But also like talk radio, most of the biggest and most successful ones are conservative — and not William Weld conservatives, but Steve Bannon conservatives. YouTube hosts petabytes of deeply reactionary content, and that quantity is growing by the minute. “[N]o [political] bloc is anywhere near as organized or as assertive as the YouTube right and its dozens of obdurate vloggers,” pointed out Herrman. “Nor is there a coherent group on the platform articulating any sort of direct answer to this budding form of reaction — which both validates this material in the eyes of its creators and gives it room to breathe, grow and assert itself beyond its immediate vicinity.”
That a video platform so beloved by adolescents is also so thoroughly dominated by a racist, extremist, reactionary right wing is a troubling thought, and one that hasn’t been directly confronted — partly, no doubt, because YouTube flies so far beneath the radar of most adults who follow politics. But how can we check the rise of the extreme right online — not just on YouTube, but on any of the many social platforms where it appears to flourish? Contra may not have all the answers, but she has one: Meet them on their turf and outdo them.
Contra, who recently changed her name from the one she was born with to Natalie Parrott (I’ll just call her Contra in this piece), got an early start on YouTube, making videos about atheism back in 2008 and 2009, when the online atheist scene was the locus of some of the web’s most passionate politics. She’d given it up during grad school — she was a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Northwestern University — but when she dropped out in 2015, driving an Uber and copyediting to make money while she wrote fiction, she found herself back on what felt like a very different YouTube. The site was now recommending her far-right vloggers making videos about how feminism is cancer or how Black Lives Matter is the most racist organization in American history. “I was like, That’s interesting,” she said. “What is going on with this?”
“I was looking at YouTube and seeing things really heat up again in terms of the popularity of talking about serious political or philosophical issues and almost no one doing leftist content that engaged with the other side in any way,” she explained. “I was like, I bet I can do this, so I gave it a shot, and it’s worked out better than I expected.” Much of Contra’s interest in this sort of debate stemmed from her belief that the left was bad at it, and had a tendency to adopt self-defeating rhetorical tactics.
In her video “Why I Quit Academia,” Contra lays out what could be seen as a mini-manifesto explaining her entire YouTube channel.
“Right-wing ding-dongs like to paint academia as some sort of leftist madrassa where Marxist-feminism is the only permissible worldview,” she explains. “This is an exaggeration, but it’s not that much of an exaggeration.” She tells a story about encountering Robert Nozick’s famous libertarian tract Anarchy, State, and Utopia in a seminar and finding herself unable to coherently argue against it. “We’d all cut our teeth dissecting these little squabbles between Rawls and Habermas, and we had no experience arguing against anything as far right as the political views that most Americans actually hold,” she says. “You have to go on YouTube for the real entertainment — and frankly, the real debate.”
To engage in debate, of course, you need an audience operating in good faith, making honest objections, and asking honest questions. On the internet, where disingenuous and manipulative trolls flourish, this premise might not always be warranted. A good YouTube commentator — especially one on the left, operating in essentially hostile territory — therefore has to pick her battles very carefully. At the same time, if your goal is to convince, you can’t give up on the idea of debate entirely. “In general, I do think having a debate is good,” said Contra. “But when you have very disingenuous opponents and when they are rhetorically skilled, to show up to that debate is potentially to lose a debate to a Nazi, which is very bad, so it’s something I’m afraid of.”
Contra’s fear of losing a debate to a Nazi, as it were — not because she’s wrong, but because Nazis don’t fight fairly — underpins a lot of her work. As a longtime YouTuber, she’s all too familiar with the endless and dishonest trashings of other people’s content that dominate the site. Contra writes and structures her videos in a very careful, deliberate way designed to fortify them against manipulative and bad-faith responses: “I’m not uploading stuff that I haven’t carefully controlled how each phrase is woven, which makes them hard to misinterpret,” she says. Background music makes it harder to chop up her videos in misleading or undermining ways, too, she explained, as does her constant humorous self-deprecation. All these tactics help her deploy funny, forceful, irony-laden arguments against lines of thinking that many left-of-center vloggers and commentators would consider not even worth debating, perhaps the best example being her video “Why Wh!te N@tionali$m Is Wrong.”
In that video and others, Contra explains what she means clearly and in plain language that can’t be easily caricatured. It’s at the core of what she does — even on very difficult, personal issues. The best example is probably her videos about gender identity, particularly “I Am Genderqueer (and What the #@%! That Means)” (as the title suggests, that video marked her coming out as genderqueer — she has since come out as a trans woman).
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