Youtube’s Vaush: Another Liberal With No Substance

Image by Ian Kochinski via Wikimedia Commons — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

A different perspective is hardly worth listening to if it doesn’t have any substance. As a lifelong learner and truth-seeker, I make sure to take time to listen to perspectives different from my own. Sometimes those perspectives are other conservatives: Matt Walsh for instance, has a number of beliefs I don’t agree with, but I listen to him anyway to try to understand why he thinks the way he does. I also personally think he’s hilarious (I would say liberals need to get a sense of humor, but admittedly, Matt Walsh’s style of humor is a bit of an acquired taste). I also try to listen to and understand the liberal perspective, but I find, far more often than conservatives, that liberals can’t explain their own positions, don’t have their facts straight, or just engage in personal attacks rather than actual discourse. This isn’t true of all liberals; Johnathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind) Dr. Debra Soh (author of The End of Gender), and Matthew Desmond (author of Poverty, by America) come to mind. I highly recommend checking these authors out if you haven’t already, not a paid plug, just a recommendation.

What I don’t understand is why liberal content creators with no substance are frequently so popular. I don’t really watch any liberal YouTubers, so I decided to give Vaush, one the most popular liberal YouTubers out there a watch. I wasn’t sure where to start, so I just clicked on the first relatively short video I saw. The title of this video is “Jordan Peterson is Just Sad Now,” and the video is about…um…Vaush making fun of Peterson’s weird suits, and uh…how red his face was in a recent video clip…and there were a few minutes of a swole, shirtless guy eating raw meat dipped in milk for some reason — and the video is only eight minutes long. The only meaningful thing Vaush said about Peterson was that nobody has been arrested due to the Canadian Bill 16, and Peterson (apparently) once said “Come on, break down my door and arrest me” in response to this bill which, I guess I can agree is a little dramatic, assuming it actually happened; Vaush didn’t provide a video clip or quoted text. I Googled the words “jordan peterson bill 16 come arrest me” and didn’t see anything in the first few links that came up. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen; perhaps it happened in a long video I wasn't willing to watch all the way through. Still, forgive me for being a little skeptical.

Why exactly is this guy so popular? Why does this 2-day-old video in particular have 92,000 views? Do his fans think he’s actually saying anything smart in it? I haven’t had much exposure to Jordan Peterson, so I don’t have a definite opinion on him yet, and this video hardly provided any guidance. If I wanted epic fashion fails, I would read Us Weekly.

Now this was one video, and I’m sure a prolific creator like Vaush probably has some better ones (though the bar is pretty low so far). However, I regularly watch a handful of conservative/libertarian YouTubers, and I have never seen one of them spend an entire video just making fun of an opponent’s physical appearance without refuting any of their points. I’ve also never seen any of them pad their run time with something irrelevant (see above, re: raw meat guy). So, I’m hazarding a guess that this type of content is not atypical for Vaush.

If you’re a fan of this type of content, you’re entitled to your opinion. But I do think it’s very strange, and if you have a coherent explanation for its appeal, by all means, share it with me. Maybe also broaden your horizons a bit.