NY Times: The Making of a YouTube Radical

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

New York Times:

“MARTINSBURG, W.VA. — Caleb Cain pulled a Glock pistol from his waistband, took out the magazine and casually tossed both onto the kitchen counter.

“I bought it the day after I got death threats,” he said.

The threats, Mr. Cain explained, came from right-wing trolls in response to a video he had posted on YouTube a few days earlier. In the video, he told the story of how, as a liberal college dropout struggling to find his place in the world, he had gotten sucked into a vortex of far-right politics on YouTube.

“I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole,” he said in the video.

Mr. Cain, 26, recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it, and has become a vocal critic of the movement. He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a “decentralized cult” of far-right YouTube personalities, who convinced him that Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists, that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities, and that feminism was a dangerous ideology. …”

This is likely the big think piece by a mainstream “journalist” which was the Sword of Damocles hanging over Google that prompted the recent wave of YouTube censorship that has roiled the internet. What are these people reading in The New York Times though? Could the content of The New York Times be more radicalizing than Stefan Molyneux videos?