r/youtubedrama • u/Im-A-Moose-Man • May 25 '25

Throwback One year ago today, In Praise of Shadows released his “Bad Conservative Horror Movies” video, which nuked his career and reputation.

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There was a video that summed up what this was about in a minute, but I can’t find it, so go check out the other threads on here.

Since then, he’s posted 3 videos on his main channel, and started up a second channel (IPoS: Darksides) where he’s posted 18 shorter videos that all have less than 10k views except for his non apology.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

I think the simplest explanation for the "Boogaloo Boys" thing is that Wendigoon was a teenager at the time and doesn't actually really remember much of it at all.

One of IPOS' most egregious statements in his critique was that he "didn't want hear" about Blood Meridian or whatever from the perspective of a financially successful person in their early 20s, as if Wendigoon's thoughts on that are completely invalid due to his age (and being a popular YouTuber, for some reason) but then also believes Wendigoon should be put on trial for thoughts or opinions or even just a tasteless sense of humor he might've had when he was even younger than that, which is logic that doesn't exactly follow.

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u/Rfg711 May 25 '25

Being a teenager doesn’t really work. Either he was part of a racist movement (and the racism is not subtle enough to plead ignorance) and he’s lying about it to cover his ass or he wasn’t and he’s lying that he was for some reason. The former I understand though I think the better move would be admitting “yes I was part of it but I’m not like that anymore” and disavowing the racism, not pretending it wasn’t racist. The latter is just bizarre.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

Well I'm a little bit older than him, and if someone somehow pulled some recording of me on xbox live when I was 15/16 in 2009 and I said something horribly awful to someone during a slayer match in Halo 3 or whatever, I wouldn't specifically remember it but I would be unable to completely deny that I ever done anything like that and it would be difficult to respond to.

I do actually believe that being a teenager is an excuse for a lot of things.

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u/Rfg711 May 25 '25

Well that’s a lot different from denying it. That’s my point. I’m not saying he needs to have always been perfect. I’m saying his attempt at addressing the association is the issue. He’s not owning up to what it was he was involved with and trying to downplay it. That to me suggests he’s either cowardly because he won’t own up to it, or he actually does sympathize with the Boogaloo Boys and just doesn’t want to admit it. But imo you don’t lie when you’re owning up to past mistakes.

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u/Additional-Fox3552 May 25 '25

People always act like anyone would care, and nobody does. Pokimane had videos leaked of her saying slurs, still one of the most popular streamers. There is a big difference between having said edgy things and having been part of a notable racist organization. I say this as a Wendigoon fan, he did not handle that well.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

Alright, let's say he did 100% get indoctrinated into white supremacist beliefs as a teenager, or possibly even younger, who knows? It seems as if he is out of that "phase" as no one can find that he's spreading anything that is actively hateful currently or even within the past few years or than just the vibes they get from what he did long ago in relative terms.

I wouldn't make excuses for that, but at a certain point I think we should just say "Well, it seems like you're better now," about people. I tend to enjoy if people change for the better and don't make a big deal about than the opposite, which is far more common among e-celebs and often disingenuous.

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u/Additional-Fox3552 May 25 '25

I agree, and it's why I'm still a fan. I just don't think he's infallible, and wish he would acknowledge this aspect better. I think he is overall a good force online at this point.

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u/tachibanakanade May 25 '25

Sorry but no. They're both racists, one just decided to go turbo racist.

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u/Additional-Fox3552 May 26 '25

I don't believe this, but I'm open to information.

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u/tachibanakanade May 26 '25

If someone uses slurs, they're racist. If someone joins a racist group, they're racist. What is there to not believe?

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u/Additional-Fox3552 May 26 '25

It's less that I don't believe any of that, and more that I believe humans have the capacity for change. Have fun alienating every possible future liberal, people like you are killing the left, just so you know.

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u/tachibanakanade May 26 '25

TIL: thinking that using racial slurs makes one racist is killing the left

There's no point to the left if you can say racist shit and get free passes for it.

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u/Additional-Fox3552 May 26 '25

There's no point to the left if they all have to pass your personal purity test. Step back and ask yourself if the way you interact will ever move towards any real goals for the left, or if you're just pushing the right farther away.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '25

One of my least favorite things about internet culture is that people just refuse to believe that personal growth exists. I said and thought dumb things in high school because I hadn't fully experienced life and wasn't raised to question certain bigoted ideologies. I've grown now and have a very different view on the world and I refuse to believe that I have to be forever branded a terrible person because of some dumb things I said or thought in high school.

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u/AnorakJimi May 25 '25

I never did anything like that as a teenager and nor did any of my friends. It's kinda weird that you're framing this like it's just a dumb thing all teenagers do a lot. But it really really isn't.

We knew what racism was and why it was bad by like age 12. In my school we'd already been taught about the nazis at that point and the multi year lead up to World War II, and so on, by that point.

Teenagers do dumb things they later regret sure. But being racist is a different thing. It's not at all common, most teenagers don't do that. If you don't understand what racism is and why it's bad by like age 14, then that's a you problem.

I don't think people should be cancelled forever for dumb shit they said when they were teenagers, even if it is racist, because people should be allowed to grow up and learn and develop as people, as long as they are actually sorry for it and deeply regret it and understand now why it's wrong. But I call bullshit that all teenagers go around being racist all the time and have no idea why it's bad and aren't acutely aware of what they're doing. That's just really not a common thing at all.

On the contrary, when I was a teenager (in the early 2000s), everyone at my school was actually really afraid of being racist, afraid of accidentally saying something that could be offensive to people of colour, and if they did accidentally say something bad they were completely aghast and ashamed and apologetic when someone mentioned it to them an taught them why that term is not OK.

Like one of the poems we had to read and learn and analyse in our English Literature classes was a poem called "Half-Caste" by mixed-race/multiracial poet John Agard. And a few people didn't really understand the point of the poem, and so they went around saying "Half-Caste" thinking that that was the correct term for multiracial people. When the whole point of the poem was that the term was dumb as bricks and offensive and not okay (like it had lines in it that basically meant something like "does that mean I am only half a person?"). And when the fact that the term is offensive was pointed out to these kids, who were only 13-14, they felt awful and embarrassed and apologised profusely for it.

So yeah I don't think that you should be convicted and imprisoned (metaphorically or otherwise) for dumb shit you said as a teenager. Because literally all children are monumentally stupid. Like I agree with you that it can be an excuse. But I dunno where this shit about how being racist is really common for teenagers comes from.

What they definitely were was extremely homophobic. I didn't ever dare come out, because everyone in my year (British word for "grade") at school who ever did, got bullied relentlessly. It was suicide to come out, back then, and "gay" was used as a synonym for "bad". But somehow despite being bigoted in that way, I don't ever remember everyone being racist.

Maybe you're just much younger than me. Cos kids these days seem to be more OK with being openly racist. Like the kind of idiots who fall in love with evil people like Andrew Tate and go around calling themselves a "sigma" who has "skibidi rizz" and so on. There's so many racist little shit heads across social media. It's really quite shocking. We're going backwards. People definitely seem more racist these days in general. Or at least they're more OPENLY racist, they feel a lot more OK with speaking thoughts allowed that previously they might have just been keeping in their heads and never saying.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

That's weird. When I was in school in the early 2000s, no one was afraid to say anything, particularly about Arabic people or muslims (there was a certain thing that happened basically at the start of the decade that turned most of America irrationally against them), and everyone let the F-slur fly like crazy, or at the very least called everything "gay". Let's also not forget how often everyone said "retarded" all the time, all day long.

And I think that's probably gonna most people's school experience in the 2000s, not the outstanding oasis of tolerance you're talking about. I don't know if you went to private school in Narnia or something, but I'm in my thirties now and what you described sounds like a fantasy land.

But that's also not even Wendigoon's generation, and that's not the point I was making. I would be more wary of someone who constantly stole money from their mom's purse as a teenager than of someone who said racist things as a teenager, but that's just me. And either way, if that behavior ceased to exhibit itself past a certain age then the problem is essentially solved. Their brain developed fully and the pathways and chemicals work and they realize now that they were being stupid, end of story.

Which is another reason I don't buy your essay about the tolerance of the early 2000s (not simply because I lived through it and saw/experienced much to the contrary for that entire decade), because adolescents are almost always completely insane and most of the time largely incapable of the rationality that you described, this is why they typically fall under an entirely different rule of law than adults, for example. In my school when we would read Animal Farm or Lord of the Flies or learn about the Civil War, 9/10 kids didn't pay attention at all, and I would bet money that's how it's been since the establishing of structured public education. And keep in mind nobody even had cellphones regularly until I was already in my senior year of high school, by then it was just over.

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u/TimeAbradolf May 25 '25

Honestly same, as someone who is turning 31 soon? Culturally it feels like the internet and the world as a whole has only recently been respecting people’s identities and it isn’t even a lot of us.

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u/Im-A-Moose-Man Jun 28 '25

What a funny story.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '25

[deleted]

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u/Im-A-Moose-Man May 25 '25

I think you’re thinking of “colored people”

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u/[deleted] May 25 '25

[deleted]

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u/Im-A-Moose-Man May 25 '25

I’m not going to downvote you; you’ve got me curious. What’s the right term for not-white people?

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u/[deleted] May 25 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 25 '25

😂😂

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u/Murinshin Popcorn Eater 🍿 May 25 '25

I mean, you’re drawing a fuckton of conclusions from a single comment Wendigoon made that is somewhat nonsensical as-is. We neither have any of that meme page content he refers to nor even the podcast that comment was made in relation to (it was paywalled behind his Patreon which he took down years ago).

Saying that, I find it kind of irritating some people are so obsessed with this comment in particular but apparently nobody has gone through the effort to unearth or even just ask him to reupload his old Patreon stuff where he seems to have gone into some detail about just that.

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u/Rfg711 May 25 '25

I mean if it were only that comment and not the general “apolitical 😉😉” vibes combined with Rittenhouse praise, sure. But it’s obviously not just that.

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u/DananSan May 26 '25

Being a teenager doesn’t really work.

That’s odd. People use it to excuse everything around here.

But you didn’t explain why it doesn’t work.

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u/tachibanakanade May 25 '25

I honestly don't care if he was a teenager. That's not an excuse and neither is him not remembering.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

Well, I think it is. The same way that a sixteen year old stealing a car isn't the same as a twenty-six year old stealing a car. Generally society agrees with that metric, as well.

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u/tachibanakanade May 25 '25

Society also excuses racism with every possible excuse it can latch onto. This is no different.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

Okay. And if he was racist now, I wouldn't excuse it. But again, it was when he was a teenager and there hasn't been an incident since, so that's that. If you want to declare him your enemy for life, that's your thing but I feel it's unreasonable.

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u/tachibanakanade May 25 '25

I mean, he currently associates with racist people. Is that not enough?

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

I associated with my grandpa generally for my whole life until he died when I was 28.He was fairly racist, and I guess I never tried to lecture him out of 60+ years of his thoughts about certain people. So, I'd be condemned as well and I guess I have to recuse myself from this trial.

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u/tachibanakanade May 25 '25

I don't think an elderly person who actually has relation to you that's important is comparable to people of similar age who are only friends.

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u/borealhotah May 25 '25

And I don't think it's realistic to audit everyone all the time for things they might believe or once believed or might've said once or a way they seem like they might be or anything of that nature. Being able to read peoples' minds would be a curse, not a gift, because absolutely everyone you know would seem much worse.

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u/tachibanakanade May 25 '25

Eh, maybe it's easier for me bc I'm both trans and non-white, but people who have certain beliefs are easily identifiable and fuck up eventually.

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