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My Year with James
🕑 Added 2023-12-06 07:08:17 +0000 UTCFirst off, guys, before I say anything, I need you to do to something for me. I need you to go to the Song vs. Song Patreon and go vote on our Christmas episode, where we’re doing “Santa Tell Me” vs. “Underneath the Tree.” Thank you. https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-santa-93464774
Anyway. So you guys may or may not know by now, but I just released my most successful video ever. I hadn't yet put it up in here, because it’s so out of my wheelhouse. (I am working on the worst list, for the record.) You guys have been pretty understanding in general, and I did a lot of work on that video so I’m going to go ahead and charge for it. I didn’t give you guys 24 hours exclusive access like I do for my normal episodes, so if you guys think that’s out of line or you don’t feel like a video like this is something you want to pay for, I understand – please message me, and I’ll make sure you don’t get charged. To give you guys something worth your buck, though, I thought I’d share some thoughts about where my head has been at these past 12 months. I’m not sure where to start with this one, so I may as well bring it around back to where it all started: Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker doesn’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Also, he is haunted by the kiss that you should never have given him. His heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in his very soul, tormenting him. I have watched these scenes over and over and just laughed and laughed my ass off, but I feel like this is mostly the fault of George Lucas, an infamously bad writer of dialogue and director of actors. I don’t blame Hayden Christensen, who I think is a good actor who got ruined by Lucas and never got his real shot. I know he’s a good actor because he gave one of my favorite performances ever, as the sniveling fraud in 2003’s Shattered Glass.
I don’t think Shattered Glass was what made me want to be a reporter. I got into journalism because I had to major in something, and that was the only real path for someone who could write, but couldn’t write fiction. I can say, though, that Shattered Glass left a huge mark on my psyche. I loved that movie. I’ve watched it many times over the course of my life, including the past couple weeks. In college, and afterwards, I ended up reading all I could about Stephen Glass, the real guy it’s about, and I did my senior thesis about him. It’s one of my favorite movies – favorite stories – ever.
If you don’t know, Stephen Glass was a star reporter in the late ‘90s for venerable political mag The New Republic. (In my journalism classes I learned to write phrases like “venerable political mag.”) Glass wrote wild, offbeat articles, about topics like political novelty conventions that sold Monica Lewinsky condoms, or Wall Street workers who revered Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan like he was Springsteen. It turns out that these stories were all fake; he invented them, completely. Adam Penenberg, a writer for Forbes's online magazine, pulled the thread on just a single story of his and it all came crashing down.
Anyway, they made a movie about it, and it’s fantastic (if you like dry films about serious people talking seriously in office buildings, at least). For some reason it inspired me more than All the President’s Men or, later, Spotlight, movies where our heroic newspapermen uncover great horrible crimes. I guess you could call Shattered Glass an underdog story – the highly respected institution The New Republic, “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” KO’d by an Internet reporter back when online news was a joke – but embarrassing a snobby periodical is hardly toppling governments or changing the world. Penenberg himself largely disappears from the movie around the halfway point. And yet, there was something to it, something primal – not a story of reporter vs. power, but reporter vs. reporter. Mirror match, Link vs. Dark Link. The good journalist vs. the bad journalist. Truth vs. lies. Why, this was a story about the importance of journalism itself. At one point Penenberg exhaustively lists all the sources he researched trying to get to the truth, and it made me proud to be a reporter. This was a real job; this was hard, honest work I was doing.
Eventually I realized that reporting pays dick, and I wound up making jokes about Justin Bieber’s haircut on the Internet for a living instead (for a lot more money than I did when I was serving the public interest). I’m a successful critic but I’ve never considered myself a very good one – it’s never come easy to me, it’s just a job I fell into. As I write this, I’ve been trying to finish this one Nickelback episode for three months and I can’t seem to get it done (addendum: I finally finished it a couple weeks ago and I think it came out well). Focusing on work just seems harder and harder these days, and it doesn’t help that around this time last year, I had less time to focus on work, because I met someone. His name was James.
In December 2022, two of my friends (Princess Weekes and Maggie Mae Fish), got into a minor argument on Twitter with someone over the hiring practices of our sponsor/platform Nebula. That person was James Somerton, a YouTuber who had been trying to join. Both of them were very angry about his baseless accusations; I was talking about it with them, and as I go through my texts now, I see that I wrote “oh is this the plagiarist guy.” So I must have already heard about him, and the fact that there were some free-floating plagiarism accusations against him; I don’t remember when or for what though, I didn’t know anything about him and I instinctively tune out YouTuber drama. Not my business.
Other people do care about YouTuber drama though. I think it was this little flare-up that brought Somerton, and his minor controversies, to the attention of Harry “HBomberguy” Brewis. I also don’t remember when or from who I heard that HBomberguy was planning to make them his next video (I’ve met and spoken to Harry a few times but we’re not close). But I do remember thinking it was a bad look, and not a good idea. My guiding principle is that drama is bad; I’ve seen so many people caught up in an Internet firestorm who were bombarded with harassment and trolls, and the thought made me ill, even when it happened to genuinely awful people. So I didn’t think exposing other YouTubers to that was a good idea, especially when it’s a giant like Harry vs. some loser I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t really my business.
But I’m skipping ahead (maybe). One event I can definitively place in the timeline happened in January, when I heard some murmurings on Twitter about Somerton again. Somerton, who had complained that Nebula had no queer content (extremely not true), had made a video called “Why Bad Gays Are Good” that was making people upset. Curiosity got the better of me, so for the first time I watched one of his videos. It was dogshit – incoherent, thesis-less rambling, just rancid stuff – but towards the end of the video he made a truly shocking argument: all the cool gays had died during the AIDS crisis, and the unfuckable losers who remained had led the gay rights movement towards sellout assimilationist goals like marriage and military service. This was both wildly offensive and completely historically inaccurate, and I was so shocked that I broke my usual no-drama reserve and subtweeted about it. I mean, this was the guy who was arguing that Nebula should hire him so that he could make “exclusively queer content” for them! Imagine the firestorm if Nebula had hyped up their “queer content” and then published this! But I got some pushback. In response to my tweet, some of his fans got on me, and they were clearly twisting what he had very clearly said to make it sound okay. What had he done to deserve this devotion? I got curious again.
I vaguely remembered hearing someone complain about one of his other videos, that it had lacked historical rigor or something like that. I found it and left it on in the background while I websurfed; it was called “The Gay Image Body Crisis.” I didn’t necessarily like it, I was only half-paying attention to it, but it was clearly a lot better written and structured, and it included some heartbreaking personal stuff about growing up a fat kid in a world (especially a gay world) that looked down on fat people. I could see now why he had an audience; he knew how to dress and light a set, he could structure an argument, most importantly he knew how to deliver lines into a mic in an authoritative tone. I did have some issues with it, like a rambling segment about the definition of fascism that seemed unnecessary, plus there was a lot of historical stuff that didn’t have citation or seem backed up by anything, especially a part about how Nazis had invented our current standards of body fitness. By this point, talk amongst my colleagues about Somerton’s plagiarism was starting to come up more frequently, and I was curious if this one had any allegations against it, so I did some Googling about what people had said about this one video. I found a single comment on Reddit that called the entire thing bad history, which backed up my suspicion that Somerton’s conclusions were a little stretched. But it didn’t strike me as outrageously so… not until I read the part about how, counter to the claims in the video, Ernst Rohm’s murder had nothing to do with him being fat. That troubled me. I’m not up on my Nazi history, I had never even heard of Ernst Rohm, but doing just some cursory reading, I realized there was no way that Rohm was killed for being fat. The rest of the video may have had “truthiness” vibes, yeah, some unsourced analysis, sure, but this… this was something else. It was even worse than his dumb claim about who died of AIDS, which was just a wrong conclusion extrapolated from a snarky Fran Lebowitz quote. Here, Somerton had shared a fun factoid that was completely fabricated. I went back and thought harder about what I’d just watched. Did he really say poor people got fat during the Great Depression? Did he say that the Soviets weren’t attractive because they were always wearing heavy coats? What? Come to think of it, his personal stories about his weight problems also seemed wildly exaggerated for sympathy; he claimed he couldn’t even buy XXXL button-up shirts. He didn’t at all look that fat. Who the hell was this guy?
This was all concerning, but it wasn’t half as concerning as the next thing I discovered. I mentioned this story to a friend, and she told me she had spotted a different fact in one of his videos that seemed made up. In his video about the history of gay adult film, Somerton claimed that gay porn studio BelAmi had invented Skype. I thought I was hearing things. Surely, he just meant that pornography in general had influenced streaming technology in general, or maybe that’s what he had meant to say and misremembered it or fudged a detail or something. But no, it wasn’t a misspeak. He was very clear and detailed about this: He had a whole full segment that porn – specifically gay porn – had literally invented dozens of web innovations, climaxing with how this specific porn studio had created this specific branded technology. “What a weird thing to say!” I texted back. “What an incredibly weird thing to say!!!” Who just says something like that??
At that point I was off to the races. Something about the sheer inanity of “Gay porn invented Skype” set something off in my brain. I wanted to watch everything he had ever made. In February, I watched another video, and he claimed that England had had a homophobic propaganda campaign against Italian tourism. What? When?? I clicked another random video and he said China was faking its box office and announcing it only in English to taunt the West. What? What?? (I was saying “What?” a lot at this point.) I wouldn’t have caught either of these shady claims if I wasn’t looking for them (in both cases, my brain didn’t flag them until long after I’d finished watching). Where were these supposed facts coming from?? My brain went into “Gotta catch ‘em all” mode with his weird facts; I had to get 100% completion. This wasn’t me being offended, or crusading for truth or anything; it was me laughing about what a bald-faced liar he was. What insane thing might he say next???
My amusement with the situation didn’t override my objections to attacking another YouTuber, though, and the other YouTubers I talked to about it can attest that I was pretty conflicted about what Harry was planning to do – and for that matter, conflicted about what I was doing, hate-watching all his videos. Sure, I was beyond amused by the buckwild things this guy would say, but I didn’t enjoy how much I enjoyed it, it felt trollish. He was just some YouTuber, a nobody, not a real writer or anything. Even though at this point all I was doing was laughing at him in private, I felt mean-spirited, like I was a bully punching down on him (never mind that he made more than me on Patreon and he had 300,000 subscribers, a lot more than some of my friends). On the other hand, this certainly wasn’t wasted time; I was learning so much, both from the stuff he had stolen and stuff I had researched just to debunk him. I can legitimately say that my understanding of homosexuality and culture was expanded and deepened by watching James Somerton’s videos, even though by this point I was aware that he had plagiarized much more than I’d realized. After a point you began to spot it very easily. You could Google random phrases you liked and they’d come up. If he ever quoted anybody, that was a good sign that that segment was plagiarized -- he was too lazy to find his own quotes, he just stole from people who had found quotes. As I recall, the initial accusation against him was that he’d plagiarized the documentary The Celluloid Closet, but he’d deleted that one, and then, while I was browsing his back catalog, he released a new version of it that promised to be longer and more detailed. I found a copy of the original book version of The Celluloid Closet online, and boy oh boy, in the twist of the fucking century, he had just read the first forty pages or so into the camera and passed it off as his own. It was garbage.
But I wasn’t really looking for plagiarism, which honestly I didn’t really care about, certainly not to the extent that Harry did. Harry’s personal bugbear was plagiarism; mine was misinformation. I quietly started asking people on Reddit how the Chinese box office worked and if there could be any fraud involved. I kept looking for more bullshit. Not all his videos turned up anything and I wasn’t expecting much when I clicked on a video about the Scarlet Witch’s children, which I assumed would be just a dull comic book recap. I had become able to pick out Somerton Originals very easily by that point, and oh, how I perked the fuck up when I saw him spin a very dubious story about Marvel writer Allan Heinberg doing a PR campaign against his bosses because they wouldn’t let him write gay characters. I eventually amassed a bulletproof case debunking it, a process that took me weeks. By this point, my amusement at his bullshit had started to turn back into genuine offense and anger. He was actively defaming people at this point, and it thrilled me to find proof that he was lying. I had found my Stephen Glass. And yet, I was still resistant to thinking about this guy as fair game. So then what was I going to do with all this information I was acquiring?
I don’t know why I did this much worrying. In Shattered Glass (which I revisited about two or three more times over the course of last year), Penenberg doesn’t worry about the ugliness of calling out a fellow reporter. He doesn’t fret with guilt over the harm he’ll do Glass’s career; it’s not like Glass is owed his job, especially after ethical lapses this severe. Penenberg isn’t even outraged at Glass’s crimes against The Truth™; he just found a juicy story and he was excited to share it. So why should I be worried about Somerton’s well-being? Besides, I didn’t have any control over Harry, who was going to be doing all the heavy lifting here anyway, not me. By that point, a lot of people knew about Harry’s impending video and behind-the-scenes chatter about Somerton was starting to really simmer. In April, Somerton started crying on a livestream that his Patreon income had suddenly plummeted to about half of his usual and he might have to quit making videos; my colleague Dan Olson publicly accused him of lying (and privately, so did I – I know how Patreon works, there’s no way this could be true). Over the course of the next year, I would find out that many YouTubers, including some I didn’t even know, had beef with him. If nothing else, Somerton was a way into being part of the YouTube community again; I had stopped feeling like a part of it a long time ago.
Around May or June, I decided that I would probably say something when Harry released his video, in a Twitter thread, or something. The Marvel thing was keeping me up at night, and I knew that Harry was probably not going to cover it, and I figured someone had to tell everyone it wasn't true. And honestly, I had to write something about it, for the simple reason that I was burnt out as hell. In 2022 I had made some of my finest work (if I may say so), and I felt like I’d peaked. I found it harder and harder to keep up the pace, and I felt hemmed in by talking about just music for as long as I have. In between episodes, most of my productive energy was spent researching Somerton, not music. I wanted to try something new. I’m making enough money now that I can follow my fancies where they take me, and I needed inspiration; if I had enthusiasm for something, I had to follow it. (This also led me to compile a playlist of songs that “Stop” on the word stop to listen to on a roadtrip later that summer. I got so engrossed in it that I drove for 14 hours one day, and when I got home I spent the next week compiling it into a half-hour long supercut. I had to follow my muse. I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Trainwreckord " But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.)
Eventually, I just decided to fight past my aversion to drama. I wanted to cover this if Harry wasn't going to. I asked HBomberguy if if he was going to cover Somerton’s… imaginative inventions (and, honestly, to see if he objected to me horning in on his idea – who’s the real plagiarist here, Todd?) He seemed okay with it (though part of me still fears that I ripped him off). I started speed-racing through Somerton’s episodes, trying to watch them all before Harry released his video in July (which is what I had been told was the target date – lol). By the end of July I realized that I had way more information than would fit in a Twitter thread, and I started considering releasing it as a podcast or something. Maybe even a video. In August, I sat down, wrote out everything I had found, recorded it. I spent two and editing it, and then I put it up privately on my YouTube. And then I saw Taylor Swift at Sofi Stadium that night. Then I went on summer vacation the next day. The video would sit there unseen for the next six months. I wasn’t sure I was going to publish it, but I figured that once Harry finished his video (which I believed would probably be within the next couple weeks or so – again, lol), I could see what he had made and decide if I wanted to show mine.
In the final video you see above, I say that I had it 95% done in August, but that’s not really true. As Harry continued to not put out his video for the next five months (look, I get it, the man’s a perfectionist), I continued to make rewrites, tweaks, edits. I asked a historian about pirates and rewrote that section based on what he told me, I consulted with actual lawyers to confirm some things, I made my line deliveries stronger. I still didn’t feel good about releasing it until I thought about it harder and wrote what I thought was a really strong conclusion. In hindsight, I could have made it less dry, or done it on camera, if I’d known I had plenty of time, but in truth, I wanted to be Mr. Just the Facts on this. It made me feel better about doing a callout, which I still had misgivings about – even though by that point, having watched all Somerton’s videos, I had really started to loathe the man.
James Somerton wasn’t just a thief and a liar; he was a fucking idiot. He’d make screamingly insulting arguments, like how the current gay leadership were a bunch of complacent pussies and that’s why homophobia and transphobia were on the rise – never mind that it was actually a backlash to the growing visibility and power of trans people, what an insulting thing to say to anyone brave enough to be trans right now. He was a truly terrible media analyst: He thought the emcee in Cabaret was a Nazi (he’s not), he thought Glass Onion was “camp” (it isn’t – and don’t fucking argue with me on this), he disliked Forrest Gump because of its “seeming refusal to acknowledge how much luck Forrest has for being in the right place in the right time” (what the fuck do you think the movie is about, you dipshit? The central metaphor is a feather floating in the wind. The most famous quote is that life is a box of chocolates because you never what you’re gonna get. You fucking shit-for-brains.) He had a whole thing (in more than one video) about how Janelle Monae came out of the closet because everyone was too stupid to know that “Pynk” was a queer anthem and Janelle felt compelled to clarify it for the dumb straights. Bullshit, there was tons of coverage about how gay it was, and Janelle had rumors about her sexuality as early as her first album – her coming-out article mentioned those rumors explicitly, and certainly didn’t mention anything about dense heteros not getting it. He argued that Dua Lipa had stolen credit for the disco revival from Janelle, as if the two of them sound anything alike or that disco hadn’t already been an ever-present undercurrent in music long before Janelle. I decided against including these in my video, since misinterpreting media is not a crime (although the Janelle thing was bad enough that I eventually re-added it). But it sure made me despise him.
Worst of all was that while I was fact-checking him, I’d find comments from people just straightforwardly repeating his fictions as facts. That did a lot to get me past my instinctual fear of drama. How dare you. How fucking dare you. You lied to your fans and now they’re repeating you. Look what you did, you little jerk. In October, I had a nagging feeling I’d missed something big in the whole Nazis-invented-abs claim so I did another search, and I found his bullshit claims being repeated on Deray McKesson’s fucking podcast just the previous week. I hit the roof. This dumbass was Inception-ing his stupid terrible ideas into the world, using the credibility he got by stealing the work of honest writers. I rewrote the entire intro of my video to include it. I also continued to hate-watch his videos as he released them and add new bullshit. Literally the day before it went live, my friend and resident vampire expert Elisa got back to me that she finally had time to watch that vampire video he'd just made, and I was just stunned at how much she found that I'd missed; I added one last entry at the last second. Those newer segments, the ones I wrote and recorded after August, sound much more agitated and angry than the ones I wrote before.
Still, I knew the consequences for him would probably be dire. His channel would die. He would effectively lose his job, not an easy thing to do to a person. Plus, there was a strong undercurrent of loneliness and sadness in his videos – sometimes outright text rather than subtext – and I couldn’t help but feel for him. I myself am also a weird loner isolated by this terrible career, so I sympathized. I started to get nervous again. I had mentioned my little side (?) project to everyone I knew on the East Coast while I was on vacation; many of them were surprised that I’d want to wade into drama, which isn’t like me.
D-day approached. Kat (Harry’s producer) told me the video was almost done. In the late morning hours of December 3, 2023, they sent me a link; I was only halfway through it when it went live. I saw why Harry had taken so long. I think that he too was worried about the optics of a beatdown by someone of his stature, so he had covered all his bases proving that Somerton was truly one of the lowest of the low, one of the scummiest and worst YouTubers who had ever existed on the platform. I am probably the second-foremost expert on James Somerton at this point, but there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know about James preparing to throw his cowriter under the bus. The plagiarism was genuinely so much worse than I had realized (and I had realized quite a lot). I didn’t know that shit about his beef with the “Love, Simon” writer. I’d been worried about this guy’s well-being? I couldn’t wait for this motherfucker to be destroyed, and from what I could tell watching Harry’s video, he absolutely would be. This was a fucking homicide. Somerton’s career would be laid waste by the end of the day. He also mentioned a Discord server, which I actually had known about but not used as a resource for my video – I was curious about the fallout of Harry's video so I snuck in there to observe; but I also started digging around in the backlogs and I found the part where Nick admitted the fat Nazis claim was based on “raw observation.” I’ve never been angrier. I had read so much trying to be sure that I wasn’t wrong about it, trying to be sure that I wasn’t falsely accusing them, and this motherfucker was just straight up admitting that he had made it up. No, I’m sorry, he had “observed” it as if you can just look at changing beauty standards and decide that the Nazis must have done it. My fucking God, fuck you.
Harry and Kat had asked me to wait a couple days before I published my video; they were concerned it would look like I had set this up with him, or that we were teaming up to bully him. After 24 hours, I asked them again how long it would be before they were comfortable and I wasn’t stepping on his toes; Harry and Kat said you know what, go for it. I dropped the second nuke.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t gloat about this, that I would remain professional so as not to feel scummy. I did not keep that promise. This was the funniest goddamn thing that had ever happened. HBomb’s video had so thoroughly destroyed Somerton’s reputation overnight that there was now a massive market for James Somerton content, and the views for my video skyrocketed. This was the biggest video I had ever made in my life. It’s a shame I don’t do drama content, because it turns out I’m very good at it. My video isn’t as slick or as sharp as Harry’s but I did do more work than it might seem. I deliberately started with “Gay porn invented Skype” to start off with something fucking ridiculous, and I dropped his most offensive lie – that the SS was dominated by gay men – early, around twenty minutes in. It’s like a roller coaster; you start with the biggest drop early so that the momentum carries you through the rest of the ride (with more drops later, like a lie that the Nazis invented abs, to keep the thrills coming). It clearly worked; for the next three hours, my mentions were flooded with the same three jokes: "Todd with the steel chair!!," "A second video essay has hit the James Somerton," and "Stop Stop He's Already Dead!!" The most anit-callout friend I have texted me to tell me that I had done a good and necessary job, which put my mind at ease a lot. Obviously this wouldn't have happened if Harry hadn't opened this lane for me to walk through, but I had been convinced that my basic, barebones video would pale compare to Harry’s. I joked with a friend that it would get maybe ten views. As I write this, it just hit a million.
And that brings me to right now, typing this to you. What happens now? I guess I go back to working on the worst list. I’ve been able to be successful for as long as I have been on YouTube by staying in my lane – not for the audience’s sake, but for my own sake. Structure helps me focus. Will I ever do a video about this again? Almost certainly not. For one thing, I still can’t help but feel guilty; Somerton as a person is too pitiful to feel good about his downfall, and even though I regard Nick as a willful dolt and a pathetic Renfield of a human being, I worry that I was too harsh on him. I do believe James probably did more of the lying than Nick. I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people who were shocked that I did this, since I’m so averse to drama. (I am in fact so averse to drama that it bothers me that people know my business well enough to know that I am averse to drama.)
But also, here’s the thing: Where on Earth are you gonna find another James Somerton? He fell in my lap, Harry found him first, and there is almost no one who is going to either 1) plagiarize that fucking much or 2) present such insane whoppers as facts. Here’s the thing about Somerton; he’s wildly entertaining. What gets me is that there are probably dozens or hundreds more guys like him, who are systematic plagiarists but not so much so that it would be worth the effort of exposing them, or people who spread as much or (most likely) more misinformation but not misinformation so wildly, hilariously afield from reality – in other words, people you wouldn’t watch a four-hour video about.
I asked a movie critic friend to review Shattered Glass some 15 years ago (the review, like so many things, is also gone from the Internet). My friend liked it a lot, but he said that to him the conflict in the movie wasn’t between truth and lies, but between journalism and entertainment. He thought journalism hadn’t done enough philosophically to confront the fact that journalism basically is entertainment, that so many of the things that make good news are the same as the things that make good advertising. If I found another guy like Somerton who wasn’t as funny, would it even be worth it to me to expose him? My critic friend also said that Shattered Glass was good but couldn’t quite be great, because Stephen Glass’s victims were all abstract concepts, not real people. His crimes were against The Truth – Glass made up a fake story about misbehaving Young Republicans, and he didn’t smear anybody because they weren’t real. He didn’t hurt the reputation of any young Republicans, but he did hurt the reputation of Young Republicanism, just like when he made up a fake story about a teenage hacker holding a software company’s data for ransom, no one’s reputation got hurt, except the Internet’s reputation for safety. That’s just hard to turn into a movie that really hits. It’s hard to get people to care about abstract concepts like The Truth being damaged. I did my best. Now I can move on my life. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Comments
Sarah Schumm
I couldn’t get through it, but I’m not asking for my dollar back because you also made “The Top 10 90’s Busses” it’s ok to do something different now and then.
Irfan
Cloutchase
Irfan
Ino
I care about the truth being damaged. I care a lot. I think people don't care unless they are taught to care though. Anyway, this was a great piece of writing, I 'm glad I joined this patreon (after being a fan for ~13 years, whoops!)
Alliterative Alias
I confess: I saw this video drop, I noticed it wasn't about music, I never heard of the guy getting fact checked, and I had no intention of watching it. But then I read Todd's introduction to the video here on Patreon and I was riveted. Not by the video, the video was a slog. 38 bull-shit statements that had to be called out one at a time. I got through it because Todd’s snark is just as entertaining when he’s tearing down a bad-faith queer essayist as it is when he’s tearing down dog whistles in country music hits. I got through it because this hitherto unknown-to-me James Somerton’s smug, smarmy voice grated on me and I had to hate-watch to completion. I got through it because journalism is flatlining when we need it more than ever. There’s a reason cape and tights super heroes always hang out with investigative journalists. Todd’s glee doing The Darkness on One Hit Wonderland was endearing. I want to see him review music he loves, or hates. If he wants to do a deep dive on some other topic that moves him, I’m here for it. How many YouTube channels does Simon Whistler fucking have? I see no reason why Todd can’t spin off a second channel if he doesn’t want to muddy the waters. Go for it, Todd. Get your Jon Stewart on. Or chase after a Pulitzer. Do something that makes you feel like it’s not just a schtick that’s burning you out.
The video was a banger, but I just want to put it out there that I'd watch Todd's videos on basically anything. Jenny Nicholson is another creator who follows her muse and does videos on random stuff I don't otherwise have strong interest in, but I'm always there watching a 2+ hour-long vid about Evermore because I think she tells the story in an interesting way. I love Todd's videos on music but I also love the ones about buses or shitty YouTubers. TL:DR, if music writing is wearing you out Todd, I'd happily watch you talk about weird movies or beanie babies or fads of the 70s or what have you, and I know I'm not alone.
Rebecca Richards
I have to be honest, I watched Harry's entire video like as soon as it dropped, which was wild for me because it was 3AM in my part of the world and when it was over the sun was coming up XD I was still in the haze of watching the Somerton implosion when I got the notification that you uploaded a new video. And then I realized "Damn, this guy must be a REAL shitweasel if Todd took him down too." You did incredible work and your video is a necessary one because its overall theme of how Somerton's misinformation had legs outside his fanbase speaks to how easy it is for people to learn bad info and never realize it. Having watched your work for over ten years now, I respected that you do exhaustive research on your content but this video highlighted to me how necessary it is and how much we overlook how much false information enters the public consciousness even without a deliberate misinformation goal. Somerton said those stupid takes usually to make his videos seem more outrageous and vital, he didn't do it because he had an underlying agenda beyond "make money".
