God, The Internet, and Jordan
We, as humans, are not inherently evil. What we are, however, is very good at deluding ourselves on what is good. There are, of course, numerous, horrible examples I could give here, but to focus on a relatively lighter note: bullying. When a child bullies someone else, it’s not because they simply want to be hurtful. In their heads, somehow, the victim deserves it: maybe because they’re weird, maybe they’re ugly, or they’re just different in some form the bully can’t let stand unpunished. Any which way, we rationalize our violence by turning to justice, the intersection of violence and good. They committed some crime, and for that they will pay.
I’ve perpetrated that same violence in the past. Never physically, but with words. I’d insult and mock anyone I thought deserved it in some way. I punched up, I punched down, my friends, my own bullies, random strangers; and I was, sad to say, good at it: it ended up being one of my larger creative outlets as a child. It’s the sad origin story of my modern sense of humor; I’m like the Volkswagen of comedy. Or the Mercedes-Benz of comedy. Or the Porsche of- jesus.
This fascination intersected with the wave of Cringe Culture on the internet: a new industry of online content based on making fun of people, giving them a new, terrible 15 minutes of fame. But one of those people still stick with me for some reason. I don’t hate him. In fact. I wonder why I ever did. What crime did he commit that made him worthy of ridicule, by me and countless others?
My first impression of Jordan was that he was incredibly auspicious. Blue jeans and a red T-shirt with the logo of a gas station on it. A haircut that one can only describe as just that- cut hair- and a burgeoning, uneven beard. Jordan’s appearance is, more than anything, quite normal; and it’s not far off to say he is. Jordan is a computer science graduate in his early 30’s, currently in between tech internships and working at his family’s business on the side. He became an uncle a few months ago, and he lives with his parents in a mountain town in north Georgia.
On the side, Jordan is the head of “dpw Creative” (sic), a family-owned business run by Jordan and his parents. According to their about page, Jordan handles the technical side of the company, while his father, David Sr., handles the business side. Patti, Jordan’s mother, has a section on the about page as well, though it is oddly lacking in terms of her role within the company, instead covering her history as a nurse and her hobbies. The company specializes in digitizing video tapes, though it suffers from the typical aimlessness of these kinds of small businesses; additionally offering web design services and even selling paintings.
However, I didn’t want to talk to him because of his business. For a few years around 2012, Jordan had a YouTube channel by the name of “Alternatekennesaw”. On that YouTube channel, Jordan posted a series of videos related to the children’s television show “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic”. He was part of an enigmatic cultural group known as Bronies.
Bronies are a difficult thing to describe to those who weren’t there when they first started happening. They’re a group of adult men, bonded by their love of a children’s TV show directed at young girls. To some, the idea seems unreal. Others assume that everyone on the internet is like that. While they may not consist of the entire internet, the group is quite large. Dozens of giant sold out conventions, thriving and well-maintained fan websites; some artists were carried to celebrity status by catering exclusively to the Brony fandom (a phenomenon known as becoming “Horse Famous”). A large part of this group is neurodivergent, like Jordan, and this led to an unfortunate number of embarrassing events and bits of media related to the fandom. Song parodies, worrying art, the fucking cum jar; Jordan made many contributions to the pile on his YouTube account, but one stands above the others, and it’s the reason I know about him in the first place.
My first- and for the longest time, only- exposure to Jordan was a YouTube video shoved into my face on the modest screen of an iPod touch. It's a shaky video, filmed by Jordan in his local McDonalds. He struggles to hold the camera steady as he opens two happy meals, diving past the food to pull out the My Little Pony toys inside. The first is an unnamed pony, outside of the main characters of the show. The second is, to his dismay, the exact same pony.
This is the worst part: he then gets up from the table and walks up to the counter, a still-rolling camera in one hand and two bagged pony toys in the other. He complains to a young woman behind the register about receiving duplicates and asks for “Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash”. She takes the toys into the back, and as she and her manager dig through the toy bins, he realizes that they might not know the two characters from a children’s show by name. After thorough searching, she returns with only one of the unnamed ponies replaced with Applejack, who is neither Pinkie Pie nor Rainbow dash (Are you following?). He graciously accepts the toys, admitting that “at least I can pretend that one is Pinkie Pie and the other is Rainbow Dash”. He then spends the next ten minutes acting out a scene with the two ponies: still in the McDonalds. It is unknown whether he ate the food.
The original video was deleted soon after, but it lives on through a dozen or so reuploads, each one sitting at around 150 thousand views. This was how I knew Jordan White. The guy who played with children's toys in a McDonalds. He said his name in the beginning of the video, but "Jordan White" wasn't what I, or anyone else called him. Not even close. On the internet, he didn't have a name; he had a title, one born from a twelve-minute video of an embarrassing visit to a fast food restaurant. He was the McDonalds Brony. On the internet, that's all he'll ever be.
Jordan was diagnosed with autism at a very young age, and it’s played a large role in his life ever since. Jordan struggled in school and college, especially whenever his teachers would deviate from their syllabus or lesson plan. “I had this insane habit of writing down every single word that the professor was saying.” Jordan even ended up failing a “Concepts of Programming” class twice due to poor accommodation.
his negative experience with school as a child drove him to create the accommodations he never had for the next generations. With the help of his father, Jordan set up a special needs ministry at his local church. “It wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for kids like me. When I was a little bitty kid, I was just running around . . . screaming in the hall . . . It was that first up-front experience [with autism] that hopefully they’ll take down to the next generation of kids who will hopefully have a more inclusive environment in the church… Give them the kind of chances I never really got.”
Jordan is incredibly committed to his faith. He volunteers at his local church, his Instagram posts are smattered with bible verses, and his new year’s resolution for 2025 is to read the entire Bible, a thing that I learned only one third of Christians ever do.
As for why he was a Christian, Jordan’s answer confused me: “because it was easy.” Jordan grew up in a Christian household; he was baptized and went to church every Sunday. “The pastor [would talk] about how great heaven was, I wanted to get excited for that, so I said, ‘This is what I believe. I’m gonna believe it.’” It seemed like the decision to be Christian was made without thought. It didn’t make sense to me, until Jordan told me about what truly cemented his faith.
“Sometimes, I wondered if I made the right decision; until one day, around my 10th birthday."
Jordan was talking about 9/11.
“I was looking at this footage . . . It looked like it was coming right out of a Godzilla movie.” Unfortunately, Jordan didn’t care to finish the thought, instead pivoting the conversation to talk about the Godzilla movies he had watched.
It seemed like this event was more important to his character than he let on. The moment that solidified his faith in God was not witnessing a miracle, nor a moment of kindness; it was tragedy, death. In that moment, it clicked: Jordan is Lot.
God rewarded Jordan’s faith by letting him live. Letting him experience 9/11 on a TV, safe and sound. The same way Lot was told to not look back, lest he turn into a pillar of salt, Jordan was told the same thing. Never look back. Never question your faith again.
And Jordan hasn’t looked back ever since. He didn’t entertain the idea of questioning his faith; I asked if he had ever felt shaken in his belief, and he ignored me. He was Christian; that was an ingrained fact of life. To ask him if he was Christian was like asking him if he had two eyes in his head or a heart in his chest: there was no “why”, it’s always been like that. His experiences with 9/11 encompassed less than 30 seconds because he didn’t want to look back; to reflect on what truly made him believe in God.
Jordan will openly admit he’s afraid of hell. “I was afraid of dying. I wanted to not go to hell; or these cartoonish depictions of hell that I was seeing on TV”. Fearing hell is natural, of course, but Jordan seems to believe that for him, doubting, “looking back,” is all it will take for him to be sent to hell. Throughout our conversation, he would reiterate his belief that he must always think positively. “[Negative thoughts] are where many of our problems start. If you think negatively, it can actually create fear. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” He was quoting Star Wars, but still: Negative thoughts lead to suffering. Doubt leads to hell. The connection was clear. Towards the interview, his reason for believing in God changed; it wasn’t because it was easy:
“I believed in God because that’s what I was supposed to do.”
Whatever reasons Jordan has for believing, Christianity has helped him quite a lot within his life. In fact, Jordan points to his belief in God as one of the things that helped him the most in overcoming the negative comments he received in the past. “No person is too far away from God. God’s got this, and if God’s got this, then I really shouldn’t worry that hardcore about [it].” “I’m not going to be happy all the time, there’s going to be ups and downs and ups and downs . . . until I breathe my last.” He pulled his mouth into an odd smile. “And go to heaven. Be with Jesus.”
However, Jordan didn’t seem to need that much help in the first place. “I really don’t think I was that hardcore bullied. They couldn’t reach through the screen and start hurting me hardcore. They couldn't injure me through the screen, it’s just a screen. They can’t just reach through and start hurting me.” He faked punching himself repeatedly to demonstrate his point. “To tell you the truth, sometimes it was a little hard to hear, but sometimes people would give me compliments about it. I’m actually quite grateful for those compliments.”
“One person made me a drawing of Applejack that said, ‘I believe in you, sugar cube!’ which I really adored.”
While Jordan doesn’t feel any resentment towards his past as a Brony, he doesn’t partake anymore. He hasn’t watched an episode in a while, ever since the series finale.
On the day of the series finale, Jordan was in the parking lot of a coffee shop. He had been under a lot of stress recently and had wanted to grab a drink. Suddenly, he felt blocked in. He couldn’t get out of the parking lot. His stress was building. “I felt like someone was pursuing me, as if they were suspecting me to be a spy, or a terrorist, or something.”
He wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible. He couldn’t think straight. Jordan stepped on the gas and flew out into an oncoming car. He was T-boned, and lost control of the wheel. Jordan ended up careening into the glass front of a bakery.
As the finale was airing, Jordan was in the hospital. He’s never gone back to rewatch it.
According to Jordan, the internet “can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing.” Jordan does a lot of his work over the internet, so he certainly appreciates it, but “it can stir up some really dark ideas into my head.” He feels that the current news cycle is harmful, and there’s a lot of people out there that just want make him feel bad about himself.
“But the internet can show you these really great things that people have made; some kindness; there are these channels that show you bible verses.” The internet is a mixed bag, but Jordan seems to stand by it, not taking too many steps to distance himself from the internet.
In fact, Jordan is still quite active on YouTube. Under his dpw Creative channel, he posts about once a month, with things like interviews with people in the animation industry, podcast episodes, trailer reactions; he’s even made a few animated films of his own. His continued commitment speaks to a true passion; a desire to share his thoughts with the world that I can’t help but admire. He has no other motives; he doesn’t make money from his channel, and most of his videos get less than a thousand views. He just wants others to see what he’s passionate about, to hear him speak. As Jordan put it: “It’s real important that I want to say something.”
That’s all it ever was. Showing other people the toys he got from McDonalds. Sharing his passion with others. In that video, before he turned away from the young lady behind the counter, he talked to her about Bronies. “It’s this huge counterculture on the internet.” It wasn’t weird, or perverse, or wrong. It was just a group he was in, that he was passionate about. You can hear in his voice that he’s smiling when he talks about it.
Looking back, I see the video in a different light. I see why people hated him, what crime he committed that warranted his public humiliation. It wasn’t being rude, or weird. It was sharing something with people who didn’t care. The McDonalds worker- the internet as a whole- didn’t give a shit about the Ponies. Was Jordan deserving of the backlash, or was he a victim?
It pains me further to realize that Jordan is only one tree in a forest. He was swept up into the wave of “cringe culture-” people parading other’s embarrassing moments around for entertainment- and spit out into the glass storefront of a bakery. I swept up in this wave too: back in 2016, watching Jordan on an iPod touch. Who can we really blame for it all? What happened to Jordan, what happened to hundreds of other people? In the end, weren’t we all victims? Someone told us to laugh, we laughed, we told someone else to laugh. In the end, we all committed the same crime, Jordan, me, and everyone who watched his video. We showed a video of a guy playing with pony toys to people who didn’t care.
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