By David Futrelle
When rumors began to spread yesterday afternoon that the YouTube shooter was “a woman wearing a head scarf,” many on the right assumed that their gut instinct was right: the attack on YouTube, although it took no lives other than the shooter herself, was an act of Islamist terrorism. When the name of the shooter was released, and it turned out to be Nasim Aghdam, this was all the confirmation the Islamophobic right needed.
The truth, it quickly emerged, was far stranger than these fantasies. Aghdam wasn’t a Muslim terrorist, or even a Muslim, but Baha’i. She was also a vegan, an animal rights activist, and a prolific, if highly eccentric, YouTube creator who had posted an assortment of dance and exercise videos alongside political rants, in a strange retro style that either indicated deep graphical incompetence or a love of retro seapunk aesthetics.
But it wasn’t, apparently, her animal right activism that inspired her would-be murder spree at YouTube headquarters: it was her anger at the ways, she said, YouTube had “filtered” and “discriminated [against]” her videos, depriving her of the views (and ad revenues) she felt she deserved. YouTube, she charged, was actively working to “censor and oppress people” — like her — “who speak the truth.”
This was a message that turned out to be strangely popular amongst many of those not normally sympathetic to people from the Middle East and nearby environs. These days, many on the right are equally furious at YouTube “censorship,” complaining endlessly that videos from Alt-Rightists and other reactionary shitlords are being demonetized or deleted.
Many of these people — ranging from Trump-loving deplorables to outright Nazis — have taken up the hashtag #CensorshipKills on Twitter and other social media platforms, blaming YouTube for the carnage Aghdam inflicted upon it. Some are basically endorsing her “message” without quite endorsing her actions.
https://twitter.com/zemfirad1lrz/status/981549688167063560
#CensorshipKills#NasimAghdam pic.twitter.com/cQe3QsbA1h
— Visionary (@John407116161) April 4, 2018
But it doesn’t take long browsing the #CensorshipKills to notice that there are more than a few of her apologists who don’t see the wannabe mass-murderer as a (possibly misguided) “victim” of the evil YouTube. Some see her as a free speech “martyr” if not an outright heroine.
https://twitter.com/TheeCurrentYear/status/981400662088003585
https://twitter.com/YoutubeWaco/status/981438685483819008
The enthusiasm for was clear even if some wrapped their fandom in layers of faux-irony.
https://twitter.com/KimCrimsonKills/status/981568305357082624
https://twitter.com/bro_leaf/status/981467530844868608
https://twitter.com/ValhallNS/status/981493461424668672
But nowhere was the celebration of this newly christened “Patron Saint of Online Speech” more fervid than on 4chan’s /pol/ board, where countless anons have embraced “our girl” Nasim as free speech martyr, “goddess of retribution,” pinup girl, dream waifu, and worthy successor to mass murderer and incel hero Elliot Rodger.
“Saint Nasim’s” apotheosis began in earnest more or less as soon as /pol/ discovered that she wasn’t Muslim, that she hated YouTube “censorship” as much as /pol/ regulars do, and that she was, as one put it, both “odd looking [and] oddly attractive.”
The threads devoted to her were (and as of this writing, are) suffused with a mixture of male anger, anti-Semitic hate, hunger for violence, incel sadness and sexual yearning. Denuniciations of “JewTube” alternate with pics and videos of /pol/’s new it-girl designed to highlight her “true aryan beauty” and/or her “Iranian crazy vegan super tities!!!”
For a considerable number of anons, she was the whole package, as these screenshots from just one page of comments on /pol/ will make abundantly clear.
For a few, it was less about Nasim than it was about the alleged evil that is YouTube.
Did I say YouTube? I meant JEWTUBE.
But most were utterly smitten with their new, late queen:
For many anons, the horniness was tinged with sadness:
Lamenting her death, a few spun fantasies of what might have been!
But this horny anon managed to take her death in stride.
Most agreed that she would live on in memory:
For some, she was basically the second coming of Elliot Rodger.
Naturally, there were memes. Perhaps the most memorable was a reworking of a currently popular meme contrasting a poor incels with his nemesis Chad (click on the image for a larger version).
There were a few detractors, of course, including one who found it incomprehensible that /pol/ was falling in love with “a woman? And a brown woman, at that?” And there were those who insisted — damn the media reports to the contrary! — that she really was Muslim, a charge that inspired some energetic rebuttals. 
Some didn’t approve of her veganism, seeing it as a sign of SJWishness. But others didn’t mind.
Others saw her veganism as a sign of her Aryan purity.
And there was an ongoing debate whether she was “all woman” or a “100% transgender trap,” to use 4chan’s favorite transphobic slur, though many of her fans didn’t care either way.
4chan being what it is, it wasn’t long before a few anons dug up some enigmatic but apocalyptic comments posted before the rampage yesterday that seemed to predict it; most seemed to believe that their new queen had indeed paid them at least one brief visit before, er, martyring herself. Since all comments are anonymous, there’s no way to know if this is true — and indeed, similar claims are made after almost every shooting.
Regardless of whether or not Nasim Aghdam was literally a channer herself, her new fans on /pol/ are certainly convinced they’ve found their girl.
H/T to Rational Disconnect, whose tweets first alerted me to 4chan’s excitement over Aghdam
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2018-04-04/youtube-attacker-was-vegan-activist-who-accused-tech-firm-of-discrimination
Get a clue, 4channers. The shooter was a GODDESS OF MISANDRY.
PS: Still with the frog? You can’t come up with your own graphic? I’m pretty sure that makes you cucks. In fact, I’m positive: You’re all cucks.
Most iranians (LIKE ME) arent religious. Religion had nothing to do with this shooting
@Kat, ambassador of the feminist government in exile
That poor frog was forced to do propaganda for them until he finally died and now they turned his bloody corpse into a puppet its kinda grizzly when you think about it.
They fantasize about fucking a corpse but jews, muslims and liberals are degenerates. Got it.
(And I’ve got new glasses so I guess maybe I should update my gravatar.)
@ Buttercup
never takes them long to move on… they have the attention span of a three-year-old….
re: TERFs ‘n’ feminism
TERF never impressed me as feminists, even before intersectionality… they always seemed more like cis-women supremacists
I’d love for someone to analyse which factors trump which other factors in deciding what /pol/ decides to celebrate or despise. There is so much about her they’d usually hate and yet they’ve overlooked it all because… she attacked YouTube? Maybe I’m just looking for a coherence that isn’t there.
And I’ve forgotten everything I ever read about Kristeva, but I remember at the time thinking she was the shiznit.
Dear channers who got locked out of Twitter, YouTube, and wherever: NOBODY OWES YOU A PLATFORM. If what you’re saying is hateful, dogmatic, incomprehensible and militantly terrible, as I suspect this woman’s output was, it’s not truth…and you are unpopular for a reason. Nobody owes you a soapbox, much less money for spewing from it. Don’t blame anyone but yourselves.
And if you think “the joooooooos” are “censoring” you, and you almighty “Aryans” are really the great creators of all civilized things, why don’t you prove it by building your own damn platforms, instead of leeching around on existing ones and going “REEEEEEE” like a broken robot? Go on now, impress a lady. Live up to your so-called superior genes. Make something and stop being such whiny wankers!
Oh, and stay away from guns. That should go without saying…
Nothing more than a blatant display of tokenism. While she hardly qualifies as “Aryan” of course the Nazis are more than willing to promote her as such based on her actions and motives (which are still very unclear btw).
Does anyone know what her deleted political rants where about? With all the bombardment of information by the Right, claiming her as an anti-Semite for themselves, I’m taking everything with a grain of salt.
@Subtract Hominem
I don’t think I’ve said this before but I love that name! Bust out laughing first time I read it.
@Diego
Don’t know. Only heard about her animal rights rants.
Interesting article here, raises exactly your point about Nasim being a palimpsest for the commenters favored form of bigotry.
(Apologies if this double-posts… comment appeared to get eaten by WordPress)
So I was listening to a podcast on the way in to work yesterday and it featured an interview with a writer who had just written an apropos article:
https://splinternews.com/the-market-cant-solve-a-massacre-1823745509
In addition to echoing the gamification of body counts that I noted in the previous thread, it also points out that the neoliberal language that surrounds the conversation has a “responsibilizing” effect that shifts the burden away from society and industry an on to individuals. Students are now responsible for screening potential shooters. Teachers, already saddled with educating, job market prep, trauma counselors(!) and in some cases, acting as a surrogate parent, now have to be ready to sacrifice their lives or worse, kill one of their own pupils.
Hell, you see it with every “it’s your fault Trump won” slogan.
Note that these 4chan goons do the same thing with their idiotic “Censorship kills” hashtag. It’s not easy access to firearms that resulted in this. It’s not a society that validates aggression that resulted in this. It’s not even the fault of the individual. It’s YouTube’s fault for not permitting this woman to make money off hate speech.
I highly recommend the whole article, but I’m going to cite a sentence from the last paragraph:
It may not look it at first, but it really is a radical notion. Because keep in mind, a lot of the language revolves around where gun violence should happen and who it should and shouldn’t be happening to. “6-year-olds shouldn’t be gunned down in school!” Okay, so who should be gunned down and where? Nobody. I don’t care how innocent or guilty a person is. A mass murderer doesn’t deserve to be shot any more than a 6-year-old. It shouldn’t happen in a school and it shouldn’t happen in an inner city slum. If human life matters, it shouldn’t have exceptions once you leave the womb. That’s why I’m against the death penalty and find it barbaric that dozens of US states still have it.
Just as another example that’s been floating around my mind, I’ve been watching the show Forensic Files on Netflix (because I like science and mystery stories) and that show is rife with this same language. Grieving loved ones tell an interviewer “Why did it have to happen to my son/daughter/father/mother? They were the nicest people you could know! They didn’t deserve this!” Now I realize they’re just trying to articulate their grief of a life cut short under tragic circumstances, but not only is it often relayed in the neoliberal language of “potential” (particularly with child victims) there’s a subtext that other people do deserve to be victims of these grisly crimes. Look no further than the end of the show, where we get the final word from the cops or prosecutors or family members and with many of these capital murder convictions involving death sentences and it’s always something along the lines of “Evil J. Badguy is right where he deserves to be. He’s got what’s coming to him.” Not a whit of self-awareness of how terrible that really sounds.
It doesn’t help when the guy saying that is Trey Gowdy. You know he always had that hair?
Ick. I think we need some baby bat burritos to balance that out.
Yeah, that’s better.
Aww, baby bat burritos!
I do hate the implication that some people deserve death. Even worse is when a young person dies and you hear a lot of “only the good die young” and a) sometimes terrible people die young (though they don’t deserve it either!) And b) some of the loveliest people in the world die old. Besides good/bad isn’t a binary. We’re all both.
A lot of female victims in particular are divided into the Madonna/whore categories. My mom and I have a running joke about how the female victims profiled on the Investigation Discovery network are always described as ‘bubbly.’ It seems really important that everyone know how friendly and sweet they are. Kind of makes me wonder how they’d describe me if I were a murder victim. Bubbly is about the last word anyone would use to describe me.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
About the uneven demonetisation. When they introduced the new regulations I was miffed and my thoughts ran along the lines of ‘they’re just doing this because they can’t be arsed to spend money/staff-hours regulating the content of small contributors who don’t make them enough money!!!’ then I realised ‘okay, that’s.. well that’s kinda fair’
Sometimes my mind drifts back to 2002, when having something you made on the internet was the reward in itself for a lot of people. Now we don’t really want to (or can’t, because the market is saturated and quality takes time and time is money) do it unless we’re getting paid. It is interesting. Our rights have changed in respect to getting our voices heard and with consumer and contributor interaction being what it is, we seem to be demanding more from the companies that profit from us.
@WWTH
Ohhh yeah. There was one Forensic Files episode where that dichotomy was quite literal: the victim was college grad student who was studying sex work for her thesis and unbeknownst to her family had quit her waitressing job and taken up sex work in secret to pay her tuition and she was killed by one of her clients.
Three guesses what the takeaway from investigators was. Was it “there’s something tragic when a waitressing job can’t pay college tuition and a grad student has to turn to sex work to make ends meet”? Nope. Was it “given the commodification of female bodies, there’s a toxic and abusive masculinity that must be addressed by society at large”? Uh uh. Was it “given the inherent dangers, sex workers should be afforded the same worker protections expected in any other industry”? Oh hell no.
Sorry, the correct answer is “Being a prostitute is scary dangerous! Don’t do it, ladies, or this might happen to youuuu!” Gee, thanks, local law enforcement, thanks for letting sex workers know that they should just naturally expect to be killed by their johns and if it happens, it’s partially their fault. Big help there.
@Katamount No kidding. 😛
Is it just me, or does it seem like 4 channers always want to label people “autistic”? It’s weird, right?
Starfury:
Thing is, it’s been said that 300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute. And that figure is probably out of date! If they had to manually screen all that content to decide whether it passes muster, it would require a huge (and growing) staff just to keep up (and constant churn of those staff, because moderation has a high burnout rate). That’s not cheap, and youtube already loses money. So, they turn to software. But, as smart as their developers are, the state of machine learning just isn’t up to the job of accurately judging the content of videos. Youtube deserve a lot of flak for their poor treatment of content providers, but it’s hard to see how they could solve the content classification problem. They’re a victim of their own success.
I’m not sure about that! There are still youtubers who do it for fun, or for the satisfaction of sharing and the kudos which comes with that. And, of course, on the wider Internet there’s an awful lot of non-video content which people provide for free.
Some of the youtubers I follow make good money from it, either via ads or Patreon. And I don’t have a problem with that, if it means that the quality (or just the quantity) of their work improves.
@moggie
I think maybe I have miscommunicated my point somehow because the first part of what you said is a reiteration of what I was trying to say. If you can help me see where I went wrong it would be appreciated because this happens to me irl too
For the second part, it is great that people do things for free and I appreciate a lot of people do, I just think that the default quality standard has risen over time which means people often have to put a lot more time (or money) into promoting themselves or making something competitively entertaining
Starfury, sorry, I’m the one who communicated badly, not you. I wasn’t disagreeing with your first point.
“Waifu” can be traced back to the Japanese 4-panel comic Azumanga Daioh and its 2002 anime adaptation. The comic is a slice-of-life story centered around a group of eccentric high-school girls and their slacker English teacher, and it’s legitimately good – and not at all fan-servicey, if that’s your concern. One of the side characters is Kimura-sensei, the creepy, off-putting Classical Japanese teacher who admits he became a teacher so he could watch high school girls. All the female students and much of the faculty hate him. One of the girls finds out that Kimura-sensei carries a photo of a beautiful woman and asks him who she is. Kimura-sensei answers in accented English: “Mai waifu” – my wife. The girls are all shocked that such a creepy person could have such a pretty wife! Later, the girls see how Kimura-sensei’s wife dotes on him and thinks he’s “cool,” which only confuses them further.
So that’s the fantasy of the waifu – or the male equivalent, the hasubando (“husband”): that no matter how off-putting or weird or anti-social you are, you’ll have a dream lover who thinks the world of you. No wonder this kind of fantasy is so appealing to manospherians.
It always amazed me that anyone could read or watch Azumanga Daioh and decide that, of all the characters, Kimura is the one they want to emulate.
@ Moggie
What bothers me is that at some level they may already BE Kimura, and seeing even a single fictional character who has those traits is taken as validation, rather than as a cautionary tale. So instead of saying, “Hey, Kimura’s a creep because he bothers other people,” they tell themselves and each other, “Hey, Kimura is One of Us!” And because they now feel like part of a group, they don’t see a reason to change. They have a society of their own and feel no responsibility to a larger society.
ETA: Speaking of responsibility…
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d35xw7/white-supremacist-stormfront-collapse-don-black-wife-paying-bills-vgtrn?utm_source=vicetwitterus
@Victorious Parasol
Raw Story ran with that too, and the headline they used is glorious.
So, he’s like Paul Elam or Roosh V. Interesting how internet famous bigots always seem to live off of women.