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Will YouTube Ban The Nerd Reich Podcast?

NO REQ FOR STRIKES TO BE CREDIBLE

2,380 views Aug 13, 2026 The Nerd Reich with Gil Duran

YouTube is threatening to ban the Nerd Reich podcast and we'll probably be gone by the end of the week. Why? We're being flooded with a campaign of false complaints—one week before my book is published. We've been on YouTube for 1.5 years with no problems. Suddenly, we're getting multiple fake "copyright strike" complaints every day. This is clearly a coordinated effort—and it's working. YouTube's policy is "guilty until proven innocent." So the company is deleting our videos about Jeffrey Epstein's connection to Bitcoin and JD Vance's connection to Curtis Yarvin—and threatening to deplatform our entire podcast. YouTube's ridiculous bureaucracy refuses to listen to reason.

Here's how you can help: 1. Subscribe to The Nerd Reich Newsletter to keep in touch as we navigate this situation. We'll probably need to find a video platform that won't censor us for speaking out against tech fascism, and it won't be YouTube. http://www.thenerdreich.com 2. Send an email to YouTube. The company only responds to public and media pressure, so send an email to press@google.com 3. Pre-order "The Nerd Reich" book, which will be released next week. This effort to erase our channel is clearly timed for the publication of my book, which exposes the roots of Silicon Valley extremism. Available for pre-order wherever you get your books. Use this Bookshop link to support independent bookstores and this podcast: https://bookshop.org/a/109206/9781668... THANK YOU to our 26,000 YouTube subscribers for your support over the past 1.5 years. I didn't want to start a video podcast because I didn't think we'd have much of an audience. But some of our episodes got over 150,000 views, and our audience grew with every episode.

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Molly Butler/Media Matters for America

Research/Study

Which right-leaning shows are on the rise on YouTube?

The Officer Tatum Show, The Quartering, The Colion Noir Podcast, Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels, The Tim Dillon Show, and Pints with Aquinas are all growing their audience

Written by Kayla Gogarty

Research contributions from Jack Winstanley

Published 10/29/26

Following a July 31 study from The New York Times that showed the audience of right-wing political content creators has declined, Media Matters reviewed its database of popular online shows and their audience sizes and assessed which right-leaning online shows have conversely seen their audiences on YouTube grow.

For this study, we compared YouTube subscriber growth and channel views across two five-month periods, collecting data in late October 2025, late March 2026, and the end of August 2026 to identify right-leaning online shows that had increased subscriber growth and more views on YouTube over this roughly 10-month time frame.

Like The New York Times, we found that the growth of most of the right-wing political creators has declined — both in subscriber growth and views. Chaotic Era's Kyle Tharp had similar findings, writing on October 1 that “the loudest partisan voices have struggled to grow their audiences” on YouTube in the third quarter of 2026.

However, Media Matters found several right-leaning online shows that cover news and politics but self-identify in cultural categories have seen growth on YouTube in recent months — reinforcing our previous findings that ​​right-wing content has seeped into supposedly nonpolitical spaces, including programs focused on society and culture, entertainment, comedy, and more. While these shows can be found on podcast platforms under these cultural categories, they contain extremist rhetoric, such as calling Islam “evil,” alleging a “Muslim takeover” and that someone is “a trans jihadi,” and claiming “MLK was a fraud.”

Key findings:

We found 6 right-leaning online shows that self-identify in cultural categories but cover news and politics have seen subscriber growth on YouTube in recent months: Brandon Tatum's The Officer Tatum Show, Jeremy Hambly's The Quartering, The Colion Noir Podcast, Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels, The Tim Dillon Show, and Matt Fradd's Pints with Aquinas. These shows often platform right-wing personalities and promote right-wing narratives and misinformation, with some hosts also having documented histories of extremism.

We identified 3 right-leaning news and politics shows that had an increase in viewership by tens of millions, even if their subscriber growth declined: The Glenn Beck Program, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.

We also identified 5 right-leaning online shows with hundreds of millions of views from March through August — a significant audience even though they saw their YouTube subscriber growth and viewership decline compared to the preceding months. These included the Shawn Ryan Show, Asmongold, and The Iced Coffee Hour, as well as 2 of the right-wing creators assessed in The New York Times’ study — Benny Johnson and Megyn Kelly.

The New York Times: Right-wing political content creators like Benny Johnson “have seen their viewerships decline,” including on YouTube

The New York Times’ Stuart Thompson assessed “the shifting power of the online influencers” and found that only a few of a dozen right-wing political content creators “saw their audiences grow” after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, “while many more have seen their viewerships decline.”

The shifts add to a growing body of evidence that suggests the audience for pro-Trump content has fallen from its heights and, for some creators, has reached new lows. Views are dropping for many of Mr. Trump’s greatest allies, while some figures on the right who have taken to criticizing Mr. Trump are showing uneven gains.

As explained by Thompson, Benny Johnson “was racking up tens of millions of views on YouTube” during Trump’s 2024 campaign, but “views for Mr. Johnson’s YouTube channel are down by millions from the heights of 2024.” Similarly, Dan Bongino “has seen his livestream views shrink by about half from their peak in 2024” and Kelly “has found moments of explosive growth, yet that attention has been hard to sustain,” while Candace Owens “drew new audiences by posting about a broader range of topics” and Nick Fuentes “saw notable gains in 2025 and early 2026 but is now trending down.”

Following the Times’ report, Chaotic Era's Kyle Tharp reported similar findings. Tharp found that “top political YouTube channels added roughly 67% fewer net new subscribers than they did in the same quarter a year ago (Q3 2025) — and about 20% fewer than just last quarter (Q2 2026).” He specifically noted the declines of Johnson, Owens, Carlson, and Kelly.

Which right-leaning cultural shows garnered more new subscribers and views on YouTube?

Here are 6 right-leaning online shows that self-identify in cultural categories on Apple Podcasts but cover news and politics and have been growing on YouTube, with more new subscribers and views from late March through the end of August compared to the preceding five-month period.

The Officer Tatum Show

The Officer Tatum Show is an online program hosted by Brandon Tatum, a former police officer who co-founded Turning Point USA’s “Blexit” campaign with Candace Owens, that covers news and politics but self-identifies as a society and culture show. Its main YouTube channel has at least 3.85 million subscribers.

The show's main channel added 120,000 new subscribers from March through August and earned over 209.9 million views — more than double the views for the preceding time period (89.8 million). From October through March, Tatum's channel actually lost 10,000 subscribers.

The show streams on YouTube, with titles including “SCOTUS BETRAYS America in DISASTROUS Birthright Decision”; “Democrat Party IS GONE FOREVER: COMMUNISTS Takeover Party!”; “Spencer Pratt DEFEATS Karen Bass in EPIC FACE-OFF”; and “Democrats FURIOUS After TSA Agents GET PAID BY TRUMP.” Clips and Shorts from the streams are also regularly posted on the show's additional channels. As shown by Social Blade, these other channels had similar gains as Tatum’s main channel.

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From The Officer Tatum Show on YouTube, captured on October 4, 2026

The Quartering

The Quartering is an online show that covers news and politics but self-identifies as a technology show and is hosted by Jeremy Hambly, who has been reported as “an online personality with a history of antisemitic remarks and jokes about Adolf Hitler.” The show streams on Rumble and clips — with titles including “GOT WOKE, PEOPLE DIED,” “WOKE RIOTERS FIND OUT,” “WOMEN ARE BROKEN,” and “Ilhan Omar Is Done!” — are posted on YouTube, where the show has at least 2.19 million subscribers.

The show's YouTube channel added 190,000 new subscribers from March through August and earned nearly 96.3 million views, nearly double the views for the preceding time period (55.4 million) and more new subscribers (110,000). As shown by Social Blade, a second channel where Hambly has livestreamed had similar gains.

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From TheQuartering on YouTube, captured October 4, 2026

The Colion Noir Podcast

The Colion Noir Podcast is an online show hosted by Collins Idehen Jr., a former host on the National Rifle Association’s defunct NRATV outlet, that covers news and politics but self-identifies as a society and culture show and has at least 3.39 million subscribers on its main YouTube channel.

The channel added 100,000 new subscribers March through August and earned over 86 million views — more than the views for the preceding time period (59.7 million) and more new subscribers (90,000).

Full episodes of the show are on YouTube, along with other recurring video series — “2A News,” “Debunking Gun Control,” “Defensive Gun Use,” gun reviews, “2A History,” and “#thepewpewlife.” Episodes and videos on the channel have titles including “Portland Police Just Told Citizens They’re On Their Own”; “Why Texas Won’t Let Trained Veterans Carry Rifles To Protect Schools”; “The ATF Director Just Said What Gun Owners Have Been Waiting To Hear”; and “She Got Detained In Vietnam And Accidentally Made The Best Case For Owning A Gun.”

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From Colion Noir on YouTube, captured October 6, 2026

Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels

Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels is an online show hosted by fitness trainer Jillian Michaels that covers news and politics but self-identifies as a society and culture show. The New York Times has described Michaels as “America’s toughest trainer” who “was a proud Hollywood liberal. Now, she’s become a defining voice of the MAHA era.” Episodes and clips of the show are regularly posted on YouTube, where the show has at least 798,000 subscribers.

The show's main YouTube channel added 135,000 new subscribers from March through August and earned over 34.2 million views — nearly four times the views (9.2 million) and more new subscribers (60,000) than the preceding five months.

Episodes from the show have included interviews with Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), former GOP House nominee Nick Freitas, conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson, and right-wing podcaster Dave Rubin, and discussions about the “terrifying truth behind radical new trans law,” “the truth about the woke agenda they won’t tell you,” and “the Fauci Files: what they didn't want you to know.”

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From Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels on YouTube, captured October 6, 2026

Michaels’ other show, Actual Friends, has followed a similar trend. The main YouTube channel for Actual Friends, which Michaels co-hosts with Rubin, former ESPN host Sage Steele, and radio personality Dr. Drew Pinsky, has more than 102,000 subscribers. While the channel had similar growth, with around 35,000 new subscribers during each five-month period, the channel's views increased from 10.2 million to nearly 12.6 million.

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From Actual Friends on YouTube, captured October 6, 2026

The Tim Dillon Show

The Tim Dillon Show is an online show hosted by comedian Tim Dillon that covers news and politics but self-identifies as a comedy show and has at least 1.29 million subscribers on its main YouTube channel.

The channel added 170,000 new subscribers March through August and nearly 34.8 million views — more than its views for the preceding time period (31.4 million) and more new subscribers (155,000).

Episodes of the show are on YouTube, with titles including “Perez Hilton, Trump’s Lies, & Data Center Detonation”; “Lindsey Graham, Invading Iran & The Summer of Sh*t”; and “Thomas Massie, Kevin O'Leary, & The American Psyop.” This content is consistent with Dillon’s recent criticism of Trump and his administration.

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From The Tim Dillon Show on YouTube, captured October 11, 2026

Pints with Aquinas

Pints with Aquinas is an online show which recently joined Ben Shapiro's The Daily Wire. It covers news and politics but self-identifies as a Christianity show and is hosted by Catholic influencer Matt Fradd. Episodes and clips of the show are regularly posted on YouTube, where the show has at least 881,000 subscribers.

The channel added 66,000 new subscribers March through August and over 26.6 million views — almost 10 million more views than the preceding time period (16.4 million) and more new subscribers (33,000).

Episodes include interviews with conservative media figures Russell Brand and Eric Metaxas and discussions about “End Times,” “the Antichrist's arrival,” and “the collapse of Islam.”

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From Pints with Aquinas on YouTube, captured October 11, 2026

Which right-leaning news and politics shows garnered more views on YouTube, even if their subscriber growth declined?

Here are 3 right-leaning online shows that self-identify as news and politics shows and have been growing on YouTube, with tens of millions more views garnered from March through August compared to the preceding five-month period.

The Glenn Beck Program

The Glenn Beck Program is an online show hosted by Blaze Media founder and former Fox News personality Glenn Beck that self-identifies as a news and politics show and has at least 1.8 million subscribers on its main YouTube channel.

The channel earned nearly 83.9 million views from March through August, which is up from 65.7 million from October through March. But the channel's subscriber growth has declined, adding 80,000 from March through August — which is down from subscribers added during the preceding time frame (100,000).

Clips of the show are streamed and posted on the channel, with guests including OutKick founder Clay Travis, former Fox host Bill O'Reilly, Trump DOJ official Harmeet Dhillon, and Shark Tank co-host Kevin O'Leary, and titles including “Trump Is Trying To Stop The New World Order”; “Glenn Is DONE With Weak GOP Leadership Refusing To Pass The SAVE America Act”; “Trump Has A Plan To FIX The System, And Its GENIUS”; and “Clay Travis Calls Out The WNBA's INSANITY In The Best Way Possible.”

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From TheBlaze's The Glenn Beck Program on YouTube, captured on October 11, 2026

The Tucker Carlson Show

The Tucker Carlson Show is an online show hosted by Tucker Carlson, who has been attempting to rebuild his influence within conservative politics and media in the years since being fired by Fox News, increasingly pandering to far-right Christian and antisemitic corners. Carlson’s show, which self-identifies as a news and politics show on Apple Podcasts, has at least 5.77 million subscribers on YouTube and was included in The New York Times’ July 31 study.

The channel earned over 347.8 million views from March through August, more than the nearly 325.1 million views the channel garnered from last October through March. But the channel's subscriber growth has declined, adding 260,000 from March through August — which is roughly a third of the subscribers added during the preceding time frame (620,000).

Episodes of the show are on YouTube, with guests including right-wing media figures Russell Brand, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos, former Trump administration official Joe Kent, and Father Chad Ripperger, who is an exorcist. Carlson’s episode titles include “Ex-CIA Agent Speaks Out: JFK, 9-11, UAPs, MLK, MKUltra & Everything Trump Is Hiding”; “BREAKING: Congress Moves to Commit Treason and Allow Israel to Forever Enslave America’s Military”; “Buying Pastors & Stalking Churchgoers: Israel’s Longtime Heist on the Christian Church Exposed”; and “The Secret History of Biblical Giants, Demons, and the Advanced Civilizations Before the Great Flood.”

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From Tucker Carlson Network's The Tucker Carlson Show on YouTube, captured October 4, 2026

The Matt Walsh Show

The Matt Walsh Show is an online show from The Daily Wire hosted by Matt Walsh. The show, self-identified as a news and politics show on Apple Podcasts, has at least 3.46 million subscribers on YouTube, and was included in The New York Times’ July 31 study.

The show's main channel, which includes episodes and clips, added 90,000 new subscribers March through August and earned nearly 96.6 million views — more than the views for the preceding time period (78.5 million) and triple the amount of new subscribers (30,000).

Episodes and clips of the show are on YouTube, with titles including “The Emmett Till Story You've Heard Your Whole Life Is A Lie”; “Gay Asian Left-Wing College Student Lights Cross On Fire To… Teach Republicans A Lesson?”; “‘TRASHY’ Woman Just Singlehandedly Took Out The Entire DEI Movement”; and “Men Used To Conquer The World. Now They Track Their Sleep.”

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From The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show on YouTube, captured October 4, 2026

Which right-leaning shows still earned significant views on YouTube, even though their growth and viewership declined?

Based on our study, we identified 5 shows with hundreds of millions of views on YouTube from March through August even though their subscriber growth and viewership declined.

These shows also included 2 of the right-wing creators assessed in The New York Times’ study — Benny Johnson and Megyn Kelly — who earned 284.4 million and 226.8 million views on YouTube, respectively, from March through August.

Here are the other 3 right-leaning online shows:

Shawn Ryan Show

The Shawn Ryan Show is an online show hosted by Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor, that covers news and politics but self-identifies as a society and culture show. It has at least 6.62 million subscribers on its main YouTube channel.

The channel earned nearly 729.4 million views from March through August, a decline from October through March (758.4 million).

Episodes and clips of the show are on YouTube, with guests including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley, and former Trump administration official Joe Kent, and titles such as “Father Ripperger - A Demon Told This Exorcist: ‘It's How I Took Your Government Out’”; “Are We Close to the End Times?”; and “Are We About to Go to War With China?”

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From the Shawn Ryan Show on YouTube, captured October 12, 2026

Asmongold

Video game streamer Zack Hoyt, better known online as Asmongold, has pivoted to politics, regularly streaming about news and current events and pushing extreme rhetoric about immigrants and ideological opponents. He has at least 4.71 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel, where he posts parts of his streams, and at least 1.87 million subscribers on a channel dedicated to clips.

From March through August, these channels earned nearly 540.5 million and 328.6 million views, respectively, which is down from 664.4 million and 417.6 million views from October through March.

On these channels, Asmongold posts clips with titles including “Nobody hates women more than women..”; “These fing people VOTE…”; “Who the fck fires a cop’s gun??”; and “Women have some explaining to do.”

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From the Asmongold TV YouTube channel, captured October 12, 2026

The Iced Coffee Hour

The Iced Coffee Hour is an online show hosted by real estate investor and YouTuber Graham Stephan and Jack Selby — “a former PayPal exec and longtime managing director to Peter Thiel’s family office, Thiel Capital” — that covers news and politics but self-identifies as an business show. The show's main YouTube channel has at least 1.66 million subscribers, and the show has at least 454,000 subscribers on a channel for clips.

From March through August, the show's two channels earned over 214.5 million and nearly 23.7 million views, respectively, which is down from 259.9 million and 30.3 million views from October through March.

Episodes and clips of the show are on the two channels, with guests including online influencer Clavicular (real name Braden Peters), YouTuber Logan Paul, Nelk Boys co-founder Kyle Forgeard, Shark Tank co-host Kevin O'Leary, and right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley, and titles including “Something Is Seriously WRONG With American Men”; “How POLITICIANS Are Ruining America”; “‘I Got Banned For Saying This!’ Steven Crowder Reveals Who’s REALLY Running The US Economy”; and “‘They’re Stealing From Us!’ Adam Carolla Exposes Who’s REALLY Destroying The Middle Class.”

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From The Iced Coffee Hour on YouTube, captured on October 12, 2026

Methodology...

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Study confirms what many suspected: the 2024 election was rigged

U.S. President Donald Trump places a hand over his heart during a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., November 11, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

:{Thom HartmannJuly 10, 2026

It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016, which Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency that time.

A peer-reviewed study released Thursday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.

Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.

Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:

“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”

The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.

Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice.

Making it even more astonishingly consequential, studies show that TikTok matters enormously to young people; roughly half of TikTok users under 30 say they use the app to keep up with politics and news, and that TikTok-engaged demographic shifted a mind-boggling full 10 percentage points toward Trump between 2020 and 2024 following this exposure.

Young men, for example, flipped from voting 56 percent Biden in 2020 to 56 percent choosing Trump in 2024, the kind of swing that decides battleground states.

Even more troubling, other research shows that TikTok isn’t an outlier. It’s one piece of a much larger algorithm-run social media ecosystem, and that system is now the main way a plurality of Americans engage with politics. Pew Research, for example, found that 42 percent of US social media users consider these platforms “important” for getting involved in political and social issues, and almost none of them have any idea how the top-secret social media algorithms decide what they see.

Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising it’s not a bigger news story.

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found a “structural break for Musk’s metrics around July 13th, 2024,” the exact day Elon Musk endorsed Trump. Overnight, algorithm-driven view counts on Musk’s own X posts jumped 138 percent and retweets exploded 237 percent, far above what any other major account experienced.

And it wasn’t just Musk’s own posts that got the boost; other pro-MAGA, pro-white supremacy, pro-GOP right-wing accounts across X were also systematically amplified. A separate peer-reviewed field experiment published this year in Nature randomly assigned active US users to either an algorithmic or chronological X feed for seven weeks. The result — what could only be called successful brainwashing of those being fed posts by the X algorithm — was astonishing.

The scientists noted that those on the algorithmic feed shifted “towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine.”

And once people are initially convinced of a worldview, changing their mind is a huge and usually unsuccessful undertaking, which is why rightwing billionaires were so eager to fund Charlie Kirk and other programs to indoctrinate schoolkids. Switching back to a chronological feed didn’t undo the damage.

This was on top of the roughly $277 million Musk personally spent electing Trump and Republicans, $239 million of it through his America PAC, making him by a wide margin the largest individual donor of the 2024 cycle.

Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg. After spending a decade telling Congress that Meta was politically neutral, Zuckerberg watched Trump win, metaphorically dropped to his knees, and immediately killed the fact-checking systems on Facebook and Instagram that kept identifying and calling out Trump’s and Republicans’ lies and misrepresentations.

Like a loyal puppy (or a terrified rabbit), Zuck called Trump’s reelection “a cultural tipping point,” wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s inaugural slush fund, replaced his head of global policy with longtime Bush-era Republican Joel Kaplan, and then announced he was moving Meta’s trust-and-safety operation from California to Texas. Meta’s institutional pivot toward Trump and MAGA wasn’t even subtle.

YouTube — also largely owned and run by right-wing billionaires — isn’t innocent either. A UC Davis audit using 100,000 sock-puppet accounts found that right-leaning users get systematically funneled into channels pushing rightwing extremism, conspiracy theories, and hard-right “otherwise problematic content,” while left-leaning users see nothing comparable.

A separate Brookings analysis found that YouTube’s algorithm tugs every user, regardless of where they start, “in a moderately conservative direction.”

I’ve been around digital media since the very beginning. My business partner Nigel Peacock and I were running forums on CompuServe back in the early 1980s, when “going online” meant a 300-baud modem screeching into your phone line and a connection bill that could put a small business under in a month.

The platforms were primitive, slow, and gloriously pluralistic; gatekeepers were a handful of sysops who worked with Nigel and me (CompuServe paid us) trying to keep the message boards clean and useful. Things were civil, the feed was chronological, and there was no anonymity; even political arguments were reasonable.

None of us back then imagined that one day a few billionaires would be able to flip a switch in Beijing, San Francisco, or Austin and successfully shift the political mood of an entire continent overnight. But that’s exactly where we are today, and it appears to have been the tipping point that brought us Trump and all the horrors that accompanied him.

The closest historical parallel is the era of William Randolph Hearst and the Yellow Press at the turn of the 20th century. Hearst’s chain of newspapers reached more readers than any information outlet in human history up to that point, and when he decided it would be in his interest for America to have a war with Spain in 1898, he largely manufactured one with wild, sensationalist coverage of an explosion in the boiler room of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, casting it as an attack against America.

He’s said to have cabled his illustrator in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” And, sure enough, within just a few months, America was at war.

The difference between Hearst and the men running today’s platforms isn’t moral; it’s mechanical. Hearst had to print on physical paper and ship it on physical trains. Musk, Zuckerberg, and the executives at TikTok and Google/YouTube can rewrite the political information environment in which hundreds of millions of people are marinating in real time, with no editor, no copy desk, and — unless things change — exactly zero public accountability.

So what do we do about these men effortlessly swinging our elections invisibly and without spending a penny of their own money? Three things are at the top of the list that Democrats in Congress and Democratic candidates need to make priorities.

First, Congress needs to require algorithmic transparency, as I suggested in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America. Senators Markey and Blumenthal have introduced excellent bills demanding that platforms disclose how their recommendation systems weight political content and forcing them to submit to fully independent audits. Given the political power these platforms and their billionaire owners command and how they’ll fight to hang onto it, none of these types of bills will pass without sustained public pressure.

Second, we need to repeal or substantially reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that algorithm-driven platforms are treated legally like the publishers they are, rather than like the telephone wires they used to travel over.

Third, the Justice Department’s antitrust division needs to be unleashed against the handful of companies that now control the political conversation in America. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. AT&T was broken up in 1984. There is nothing about Meta, X, or Google that makes them more sacred that these behemoths that preceded them.

Call your senators today through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you want algorithmic transparency legislation and Section 230 reform. Make sure your voter registration is current at vote.org, check on your state-level legislators at openstates.org, and start telling everyone you know that science has now proven that the 2024 election wasn’t a free and fair contest of ideas.

It was — based on this new research — a rigged information environment run by a handful of billionaires that put a corrupt, predatory fellow billionaire in the White House and helped install billionaire-friendly Republican lickspittles in Congress and state houses across the country.

We can fix this mess. But only if we stop scrolling and start demanding change.

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INTERCEPT YouTube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations

Emails The intercept

To: me · Wed, Nov 5, 2025 at 11:24 AM

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MMA

February 25, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House

ALI VELSHI (HOST): So, Angelo, America is not a country that requires citizens to carry their proof of citizenship with them. It's just the way it is. I think some countries do. Some of them are authoritarian, but some are not. I usually like to point out Estonia, where they've got a national ID. It's digital. You don't lose it. And if you lose it, it's easy to get a new one and you don't pay for it. That's not the case with a birth certificate. If you can't find your birth certificate or your naturalization certificate or your passport, it's super hard and expensive to replace them, and voting may not be the reason why people do that. You can do a national ID if you want. I don't think Americans would go for that sort of thing. But if you were to do it, at least the onus should be on the government to provide that at low or zero cost.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): That's right. I mean, and that's been mentioned already. There are lots of things we can do to make voting simpler. And it's also worth noting that voting is supposed to be done locally, right? The mere fact that Trump has managed to even hijack the narrative around this is rather extraordinary because it's not his job. It's not his job. So that should be the first tell that something's amiss here.

And there are other clues going on. I mean, you know, there are lots of ways that we can make this easier and simpler. But I should also note that on the flip side, instead of investing and thinking about that, they've done something even more dangerous and insidious, and there are clues. If you look at the State of the Union, who was there? Nick Shirley. This is one of these crops of investigative influencers that, you know, he was largely responsible for creating a target on Minnesota's back by producing viralized content that the administration said, well, see that? Look at all that. We have to go in there and crack down on this.

They're doing this with votes too. They're going to take that exact scenario that you set up. All of the basic administrative discrepancies, the gaps that exist, the real things that we could fix, and actual -- not fraud or malfeasance, just general day-to-day. People are busy. The economy is bad. You don't have time to get your document. You know? And they're going to take that that vulnerability, and they're going to scandalize it and sensationalize it.

We're going to deal with a drumbeat of people just like that being validated by the federal government and then reverberated and amplified through this massive, right-wing echo chamber to create an hysteria around voting, and around this idea of voter fraud when in fact, it's exactly what you just said. Basic, I don't have my document. I don't have my birth certificate. It actually just -- I lost it. It evaporated. It got wet. I mean, there's a million reasons for it. And that system, the fact that he was there is a clue to what we can expect going forward.

viral minnesota 12 25 islaMophobe // welfare queen?

intercept

the day after Christmas, far-right YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video claiming to have exposed fraud at Somali-owned day care centers in Minnesota. Portions of the 42-minute video — mostly scenes where Shirley is turned away at the day cares — went viral in conservative circles, catching the attention of the Trump administration, which was already at work targeting Minnesota’s Somali community amid its broader war on immigrants.

The, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube and millions more on other platforms, sparked a renewed crackdown in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security announcing on Monday it would visit 30 sites suspected of fraud across the city. A DHS official told CBS News Minnesota its agents would focus on a “little of everything,” when asked whether immigration enforcement would be a part of the crackdown. Threatening arrests, the agency posted a video to X in which agents enter a smoke shop and question an employee about a nearby day care center.

This isn’t the first time the conservative YouTuber has gotten the attention of the Trump administration. Shirley participated in President Donald Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa” in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. At age 23, his videos aren’t merely influencing his audiences — they’re also influencing government action.

This worries immigrant rights advocates, who fear that the fallout from Shirley’s video will only worsen the harm already being done to Minnesota’s immigrant communities at a time when Trump has taken to calling Somali people “garbage” at his rallies.

“The very real-world consequence is that it’s going to exacerbate the situation that we have in Minnesota right now where we have a lot of people, including U.S. citizens or people with lawful status being arrested and detained by ICE,” said Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School.

The video, she said, reinforces xenophobic tropes about the Somali community, specifically tying the community to fraud. Pottratz Acosta said she was worried the increase in DHS visits to day cares could be a pretext to simultaneously conduct immigration detentions.

“They’re doing these visits at day care sites under the auspices of conducting a fraud investigation, but if they happen to see anyone who fits a profile, they might be arrested,” Pottratz Acosta said.

[

Related

U.S. Citizens With Somali Roots Are Carrying Their Passports Amid Minnesota ICE Crackdown](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/06/trump-ice-minnesota-somali/)

Shirley’s video builds off of the growing interest in a nonprofit fraud scandal in Minnesota involving a pandemic-era program focused on child hunger, which has resulted in dozens of guilty pleas. The Trump administration claims Minnesota’s fraud issue is much larger, to the sum of $9 billion worth of government funds being fraudulently funneled from social services. Republicans have painted Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats up for reelection, as responsible for an alleged lack of oversight. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Somali American and Muslim, has also been the target of right-wing and xenophobic attacks. Among other racist stereotypes and false claims, Trump said, “We gotta get her the hell out” of the country at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month.

State regulators said Monday that inspectors had visited the day cares mentioned in the video in the past six months, according to theMinnesota Star Tribune, that there was no evidence of fraud at the sites during those unannounced visits, and some of the centers have already been closed or suspended. According to Minnesota Public Radio, state Republican lawmakers had steered Shirley toward the day care centers he visited in the video.

Shirley defended his video and said people have been silent about “Somalians committing this fraud” because “people are scared to be called Islamophobic, racist.”

“Fraud is fraud — it doesn’t matter if it’s a Black person, white person, Asian person, Mexican,” Shirley told Fox News. “And we work too hard simply just to be paying taxes and enabling fraud to be happening.”

Despite Shirley’s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread and beliefs theories. While Shirley’s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a taking. Combined with sensationalized headlines — “Exposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers” or “The UK’s Insane Migrant Invasion” — the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.

Shirley did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Nick Shirley speaks during a roundtable meeting with President Donald Trump on “antifa” in the State Dining Room at the White House, on Oct. 8, 2025, in Washington. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

In 2019, Shirley began to post prank videos with friends on YouTube while attending a public high school in Farmington, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. At first, his focus wasn’t especially political. He garnered a large number of his 1 million subscribers after sneaking into influencer Jake Paul’s wedding in Las Vegas.

But amid his comedic stunts, he documented the insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in 2021, where he interviewed far-right commentator and InfoWars founder Alex Jones and infamous rioter Richard Barnett. Shirley said he did not take part in the violence and filmed himself leaving without entering the building. Later that year, Shirley took a two-year hiatus from YouTube to go on a mission in Santiago, Chile, as part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In late 2023, after his return to the United States, Shirley shifted from prank videos to focus on political topics, such as immigration and crime. In May 2024, he orchestrated in which he paid day laborers $20 to jump into the back of a U-Haul van, drove them to the White House, and gave them signs demanding a meeting with Biden.

Shirley’s mother, Brooke — herself a right-wing influencer who goes by Brooker Tee Jones on TikTok, where she has more than 250,000 followers — occasionally joins her son in the videos. It was Brooke who pushed her son to start covering immigration at the southern border after his mission trip, according to an interview with Columbia Journalism Review. Early on, she’d feed him questions to ask and lines to say in the videos, she recalled. Her content has similarly focused on immigration in recent years, including other videos that accuse Somali residents in Minnesota of health care fraud without providing evidence.

Reached by The Intercept, Brooke did not answer questions about her work or the work of her son.

Shirley has made a habit of visiting cities and countries that are settings for right-wing, anti-immigrant conspiracies, such as Aurora, Colorado, amid the manufactured crisis around the Tren de Aragua gang.

During a visit to El Salvador in 2024, Shirley filmed a series of videos sympathetic to President Nayib Bukele’s violent anti-crime crackdown on his citizens, including a video from the notorious CECOT prison. It’s his most-viewed video to date, with 6.6 million views. In another video from El Salvador, Shirley recorded from the Centro Industrial prison, which has become a manufacturing hub where incarcerated men build school desks and vegetable market display racks, a form of forced labor. “It’s pretty amazing if you think about what Nayib Bukele has been able to do with this country — the streets are as safe as they’ve ever been, because all these guys are out,” Shirley said while inside a CECOT cell block, gesturing to the incarcerated men. At no point in the video does he mention the stories of torture and abuse within the country’s prison system.

Shirley was recently awarded a “citizen journalist of the year” prize by far-right media figure andProject Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, in large part because of his CECOT video.

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In other videos, Shirley himself has become a part of the story.

In September, Shirley and a small crew filmed a video in New York City’s Chinatown, referring to them as “Dangerous Migrant Scammers.” Vendors could be seen scrambling away while Shirley strolls down Canal Street. At one point, one man tells Shirley to leave and asks why he’s filming, leading to a physical with Shirley’s cameraman.

Several weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the street, detaining nine individuals. Shirley praised ICE for the raid that left the street “completely clean of illegal activity” and an individual who was detained as a “scammer [who] got ICED.”

Shirley has federal agents during immigration in Chicago, interviewing a detained man in the backseat of a federal vehicle. Since Trump’s election, media access at raids has largely been given only to outlets or individuals sympathetic to the administration’s mass deportation campaign.

[

Related

Meet the Riot Squad: Right-Wing Reporters Whose Viral Videos Are Used to Smear BLM](https://theintercept.com/2021/05/13/riot-squad-right-wing-video-journalists-black-lives-matter-antifa/)

Alongside other far-right influencers such as Andy Ngo and Cam Higby, Shirley landed an invite to participate in Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa,” a White House event where the administration advanced its campaignagainst antifascist activists. “People may wonder, ‘What’s the threat to us as Americans?’ You’ll be labeled as a fascist, you’ll be labeled a Nazi, and they’ll wish death upon you as they wished death upon me,” Shirley said of the decentralized protest group at the event.

Leading up to the Minnesota day care video, Shirley released a video about “the rise of Islam” in the U.S. and what he called “Minnesota’s Somali Takeover.” The July video makes a spectacle of the call to prayer and individuals praying inside a mosque and singles out Omar, as well as an Islamic center that converted from a Lutheran church to illustrate his point of the apparent takeover.

:{:{In October, Shirley published an hour-and-a-half sitdown interview with British far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, during which he repeated the false claim that there are “40,000 British Muslims” on the United Kingdom’s terror watchlist living in Britain.}: The figure is a misreading of a real list by British intelligence agency MI5, which does not include religious identifiers and contains the names of many people who have never traveled to the U.K. “At what point does this break out from a revolution to a civil war?” Shirley asked.

Shirley’s recent viral video in Minnesota was a continuation of this narrative.

In an attempt to lure people into gotcha situations, Shirley visited day care centers and health care facilities that he claims are operated by Somali Americans. Taking a page out of his prank days, he poses as a parent looking for child care for his fictitious son, “Joey.” Throughout the video, Shirley approaches individuals with dark skin or women wearing hijabs, peppering them with questions about supposed “missing” children and whether they were aware of fraud.

Police are called on Shirley and his team twice in the video, including while at one health care complex where a woman explains to a responding officer, “He’s trying to assume because they’re Somalian providers everyone here is fraudulent — he’s here with some kind of propaganda.” He claimed to be “checking rates” for health and child care. Police eventually out of the building.

The video’s claims of fraud rely heavily on a Minnesota resident and apparent whistleblower who is identified in the video as David. Toward the end of the video, David claims he was attacked by Somali men who he had confronted about the alleged fraud, describing the men as “very, very violent people.”

Since early December, federal agents have increased their presence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, profiling and detaining individuals who appear to be Somali, including individuals who are U.S. citizens. The crackdown has also led to the targeting of Latin American immigrant communities in search of undocumented residents. Trump and other right-wing figures have propped up their campaign by falsely depicting “Somalian gangs” who are “roving the streets” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, “looking for prey,” the president said on social media.

Even though Shirley’s video claims to have exposed new truths about fraud in Minnesota, the day care facilities highlighted in the video have previously been spotlighted as problematic by local ABC News affiliate, KSTP, as well as the state government, which earlier this year began to increase oversight of funding to day care facilities over similar fraud concerns.

The most effective way to combat fraud is increased oversight, said Pottraz Acosta. The recent crackdown in Minnesota, which has been exacerbated by Shirley’s video, she said, is not the kind of oversight that will prevent bad actors from exploiting public funds. The issue of anti-Somali sentiments is also a problem within Minnesota, she said, with residents facing demeaning stereotypes and unsubstantiated speculation that they are sending money to al-Shabab, the Somali militant group on the U.S foreign terror list.

This narrative, perpetuated locally and nationally, “feeds into larger narratives around certain immigrant communities,” Pottraz Acosta said. “There are bad actors in every community and just because certain people commit fraud, it doesn’t mean that every person who fits that same demographic profile is a bad actor.”

---

VID CANAL STR NICK SHIRLEY--> SAVANAH --> ICE?

Laura Ingraham claims that Democrats are "signaling very clear that it's war time" | Media Matters for America

gaza delete

YouTube Erased 700 Videos of Israeli Human Rights Violations

October 17, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube

BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): We are living in the f-aroundest of times and the find-outingest of times.

And, I personally believe that it is the most entertaining thing that has happened over the past nine months, that those communists who accused Donald Trump of crimes are guilty of the crimes in which they are accusing Donald Trump. It is the iron law of wokeism. It is actually part of Saul Alinsky's plan. It is actually part of the Communist Manifesto. Every Bolshevik that has ever lived practiced this. We're against the bourgeois because they're gonna genocide us, and then the Bolsheviks go on to genocide half the population. Right? Like, we're against the capitalists because they're here to kill you, and then the communist will go and kill half the population. Right? Mao Zedong kills 60 million people. They will accuse you of the crimes of which they are guilty. Now we found this out with Letitia James. Leticia James accused Donald Trump of real estate mortgage crimes, and it turns out that she has now been caught cold committing those exact same crimes, but far worse than Donald Trump ever committed them. She's been indicted for that. James Comey went after General Flynn, Donald Trump for lying to Congress, for lying under oath, for lying to the federal government and FBI. James Comey indicted for that exact same thing.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and John Brennan and James Clapper, they're in very hot water because of what they did launching the Russia collusion hoax, raiding Donald Trump's house and so on and so forth. It turns out that they've hoaxed themselves directly into some real legal trouble. And we hear that that's going to be heating up quite quickly. Interesting little birdies tell us this.

no lnx

Defamation, capitulation and phonies: Inside this week's wild and disgusting news

D. Earl StephensApril 27, 2025

Tuesday was a banner day in the news business as it continues its transition into authoritarian-controlled propaganda that is sold to the highest bidders, which in this case are our nation’s ever-increasing collection of hideous tech bros — otherwise known as Boosters of Trump (BOTs).

It was nothing if not a wild and disgusting day, and featured some heavy-hitters in the political, entertainment and journalism world, as well as reputable truth-tellers like Larry David, who was the only person proving capable of seeing though all the never-ending BS that has blanketed the United States of America.

Good ol’ Sarah Palin appeared out of the Alaska wilderness and into a courtroom in New York City Tuesday where she once again provided some much-needed, albeit brief comedic entertainment to a starving American public.

You’ll remember Palin, who with the help of John McCain and his slippery handlers was hurled downward into the Republicans’ glass floor 17 years ago, making it possible for literally anything or anybody to lower themselves and land with a thud in the basements of power in Washington.

Before there was Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, Marsha Blackburn or Lauren Boebert, there was Sarah Palin …

The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Russia-stalker, second-rate reality TV star, and Hall-of-Fame embarrassment lost in the retrial of her defamation case against The New York Times, because of course she did.

Defamation cases are almost impossible to prove, but you can’t blame her for trying, because as delicious as this loss was by one of America’s all-time fools, the real news here is how bad it made the supersonic losers at ABC-News look by comparison.

Just four months ago, that one-time reputable news outlet flew the white flag in their very public $16M surrender to the America-attacking Trump on similar charges.

This time George Stephanopoulos was the target of the beady-eyed Trump, who was incensed that he was incorrectly referred to as “a rapist” on the air during Stephanopoulos’ questioning of Mace about Trump’s veracity as a serious candidate given his talent for treating women like one of his sand wedges.

Turns out all Trump was technically found guilty of was being a lowly sexual-abuser. Before settling, ABC-News decided to conveniently forget the fact that the very judge who tried the case, said that most people would call what Trump did, and what the jury found him guilty of, was in fact, “rape.”

You say, “potatoes.” I say “rape.”

ABC-News’ capitulation, while weak and embarrassing, also only encouraged lowlifes like Trump, because … also on Tuesday … CBS-News signaled it was about to tell its once-rivals at ABC-News to hold their beer …

The venerable 60 Minutes, which has been one of the few news programs that has continued to righteously pound away on the America-attacking Trump will now be in search of a new leader. Executive Producer Bill Owens, announced his resignation Tuesday saying:

“Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”

Owens sudden departure is hinting loudly at yet another surrender by yet another billionaire to Trump.

This time Shari Redstone. The Chairwoman of the Board at Paramount which owns CBS, has been dutifully kissing any inappropriate ass she can find in the White House to ensure her sale of Paramount for gobs of billions to the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison goes through.

She can’t have Trump mad at her for telling the truth on air, so Owens had to sacrifice herself on the Mar-a-Lago altar first.

No surprise, Ellison is yet another slimy tech bro and the buddy of the sexual-abuser Trump, who some judges refer to as a rapist.

The sexual-abuser, who some judges refer to as a rapist, has sued CBS for $20 billion claiming the network aired two different versions of an answer Kamala Harris gave about Israel and Gaza on the network’s flagship news programs, Face the Nation as well as 60 Minutes.

As if the serial-lying Trump doesn't give 17 different answers to any question every hour ….

Well, rather than fight that one out and win going away, Redstone has apparently figured it is much easier to just hand the whole franchise over to Trump’s buddy, Ellison, and be done with the damn thing. And if and when that deal goes through, if you are wondering if you will ever be able to trust anything from the CBS-News division again, the answer is, no.

While insiders at 60 Minutes like correspondent Scott Pelley are saying, “This isn't something Bill (Owens) is doing of his own volition: There was no choice in any of this," I am saying I’d have a whole helluva lot more respect for him, if he stood in strong and made these grotesque sellouts fire him and drag him out of the building.

Resigning in advance is just weak, Bill. I’ve walked a mile in your shoes during my career, and take great comfort I didn’t cave to dishonest brokers who had it out for me and the truth. Ask me about it. I’d be glad to enlighten you ...

Finally, Larry David arrived on the scene to save Terrible Tuesday when he took to the editorial pages of The New York Times to politely skewer the smarmy, one-time comedian, turned Trump-propagandist, Bill Maher, with some deftly aimed satire in his short and sweet piece “My dinner with Adolph.”

David, the genius behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm never mentioned Maher by name preferring instead the roughly 257 million people across the world who will end up seeing or hearing about the piece connect the dots all on their own.

I’ll guess it’s behind a paywall for now, so I’ll treat you to the piece’s conclusion:

“Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night ...”

Maher of course accepted an invitation to dine with the America-attacking Trump recently, and through his 500-lb. smirk bragged to everybody that breaking bread with the racist, Lysol-guzzler was actually a very normal and wholesome experience. Hell everybody should try it, but of course they can’t because not everybody can be Bill Maher.

Here in part is how Maher described his dining experience, sandwiched around his usual overcooked, fatty condescending barf:

“Honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”

Oh we will, sport, no worries there.

Your foolish capitulation and normalization of a woman-abusing, America-attacking thug should finish you off for good. That you tipped him at the door after being played like Stephen Miller’s used violin was pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty pret-ty …pathetic.

You’ve been a damn fool for going on a long time now, Bill. Your once-clever condescension is now full-blown, look-at-me arrogance.

I know you will invariably ignore my advice to just shut up and go away for a period of about six years for some serious introspection, because I have come to understand that guys like you and Trump simply can’t help themselves.

You have the phonies in our billionaire-controlled media to do that for you …

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.

NO PIX

---}:

mma

YouTube content creators have earned more than 200 million views on videos of their visits to El Salvador’s CECOT prison

Both the Trump and Bukele administrations have also used social media as propaganda celebrating the megaprison

Written by Jack Winstanley (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/jack-winstanley)

Research contributions from Payton Armstrong (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/payton-armstrong)

Published 04/24/25

Since 2024, at least five YouTube content creators have been granted access to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, the megaprison to which the Trump administration began sending immigrants last month.

The resulting YouTube videos have been viewed over 200 million times, and at least one creator has appeared on Fox News four times to discuss what he saw while filming. He suggested during one appearance that “if the United States was smart, they would do something just like this as well.”

Both President Donald Trump’s administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s government have used social media to push propaganda films celebrating the megaprison as well, despite concerns of potential human rights abuses at the site, and right-wing media have also praised the facility.

The Trump administration is deporting immigrants to El Salvador's CECOT prison without due process}:

Bukele opened CECOT in 2023, earning praise from right-wing media figures

In early 2023, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele opened the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/el-salvador-opens-40000-person-prison-arrests-soar-gang-crackdown-2023-02-01/), as part of his campaign against criminal gangs operating within the country. Since then, experts (https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/g-s1-54206/el-salvador-mega-prison-cecot#::text=Cristosal%20and%20other%20advocates%20have%20accused%20authorities%20of%20human%20rights%20violations.) have raised concerns (https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/03/20/human-rights-watch-declaration-prison-conditions-el-salvador-jgg-v-trump-case) about the prison’s harsh conditions (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/04/la-cooperacion-represiva-entre-eeuu-y-el-salvador/#::text=In%20the%20light,Amnesty%20International%2C%20said%3A) and “massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty,” including the extreme levels of isolation (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/world/americas/bukele-abrego-garcia-elsalvador-prison.html#::text=Extreme%20isolation%2C%20and%20%E2%80%98a%20huge%20silence.%E2%80%99) experienced by the prisoners. One visiting filmmaker called it a “tropical gulag” and an expert described it as “the Salvadoran version of going to Siberia.”

But right-wing media figures have celebrated (https://www.mediamatters.org/candace-owens/activists-are-raising-alarm-about-new-mega-prison-el-salvador-american-right-wing) the facility and suggested that the United States should create similar infrastructure within the country, praising Bukele’s authoritarianism (“This is my kind of authority, baby”) and suggesting that a megaprison would help with America’s “serious crime problem.”

In March 2025, the Trump administration began deporting individuals to CECOT

During an official visit in February 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/04/g-s1-46352/rubio-el-salvador-deportees-americans) Bukele had offered to accept deportees from the U.S., including “dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentence in the United States even though they're U.S. citizens or legal residents.” The following month, President Donald Trump invoked (https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/14/politics/alien-enemies-act-1798-trump-cec/index.html) the Alien Enemies Act to send (https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/trump-administration-deportations-alien-enemies-act/index.html) hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador to be imprisoned at CECOT.

Despite ongoing (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/18/trump-deportations-alien-enemies-act-00299474) legal challenges to the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting individuals to El Salvador with little to no due process (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/supreme-court-trump-deportations#::text=What%20does%20habeas%20have%20to%20do%20with%20it%3F), Trump stated during a press briefing alongside Bukele that he is exploring (https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador) detaining U.S. citizens and imprisoning them in El Salvador as well.

YouTubers have earned millions of views on content after visiting CECOT

02/07/24

Mexican YouTuber Luisito Comunica posted a tour of the facility, thanking Bukele’s press secretary for granting him access

In Mexican YouTuber Lusito Comunica’s video, which has been viewed over 56 million times, he says in Spanish that touring the facility “gives a certain feeling of empowerment to a simple citizen like me.” Comunica also spoke positively of the conditions within the facility, stating, “It is easy to suddenly be moved, to touch your heart, to say, 'Wow, what harsh abuse inside the prison.' But when you find out the inhumane atrocities they committed, it makes sense.” YouTube,\ (https://youtu.be/69qKUoGhoQo), accessed [4/23/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029515)]

07/26/24

Right-leaning American YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a tour of CECOT and appeared on Fox News at least 4 times to discuss his visit

Pro-Trump YouTuber Nick Shirley’s video, which features a tour of CECOT and Shirley interacting with a group of individuals imprisoned there, has earned over 5.7 million views. Prior to touring CECOT, Shirley had made videos criticizing the Biden administration’s immigration policy and focusing on illegal immigration into the U.S. YouTube,\ (https://youtu.be/I34FnQSXpw8&themeRefresh=1), accessed 4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029516);Reuters, [6/13/24 (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pro-trump-influencers-fire-up-fears-migrant-invasion-ahead-us-election-2024-06-13/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&fbclid=IwY2xjawJ04EFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFnNVdra3V2c1FUYzY2TjdJAR45czaz0JGaDIsgazJrb0mONAFckoJIZcqwGA_6waDl8owPil2H3NzNkVYnJA_aem_oc0gJpuaFtxY7BMzWEQqZA)]

The following week, Fox News’ Jesse Watters hosted Shirley to discuss his tour, introducing him as an “investigative journalist” and showing portions of the YouTube video. Shirley told Watters that “if the United States was smart, they would do something just like this as well, to make sure that no criminal gets treated like a normal person.” Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, [8/2/24 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029500)]

Following the Trump administration’s decision to deport individuals to El Salvador, Shirley appeared on Fox at least another three times. On Fox & Friends Weekend, Shirley stated that he worked “for months and months” to get permission to tour the facility, and he ended his appearance by cheering, “Let’s go, El Salvador.” Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, \2/7/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029498); Fox News, Fox & Friends Weekend, 3/29/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029499); Fox Deportes, Fox Noticias, [3/28/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029501)]

10/21/24

Greek UK-based YouTuber Timmy Karter posted his tour of CECOT, earning over 3.7 million views

While discussing concerns over human rights violations at CECOT, U.K.-based YouTuber Karter remarked that it “sounds a bit hypocrisy, because — let’s be honest — U.S.A. is running Guantanamo.” Karter also argued that foreign media outlets should “criticize your own prisons first” before judging CECOT. YouTube,\ (https://youtu.be/Pdvuyg5fCXo), accessed [4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029517)]

02/02/25

UAE-based YouTuber Joe Hattab posted a tour of CECOT, earning over 49 million views

United Arab Emirates-based YouTuber Joe Hattab said in his video that the Salvadoran government “invited media outlets to broadcast the scene \at CECOT] to the entire world, serving as a deterrent to anyone who dares break the law.” The description for Hattab’s video celebrates the prison, noting, “Thanks to this prison the country of El Salvador is the safest country in the western hemisphere.” YouTube,[ (https://youtu.be/0an7kovsPeQ), accessed [4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029518)]

02/09/25

Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Cenat also posted a video tour, earning over 95 million views

While approaching the facility, someone in the car with Turkish YouTuber Ruhi Cenat can be heard saying that they “have permission from the presidency” to visit the facility. YouTube,\ (https://youtu.be/H42zWaD4A4s); accessed [4/22/25 (https://www.mediamatters.org/media/4029519)]

The Trump and Bukele administrations have leveraged social media to promote CECOT

In March, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the megaprison and posted a video thanking Bukele

In the video (https://x.com/Sec_Noem/status/1905034256826408982/video/1), Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the facility “one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

While several (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/17/politicians-el-salvador-prison-cecot-visits-democrats-republicans-trump) GOP lawmakers have traveled to the megaprison, congressional Republicans and Salvadoran officials have denied (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/17/house-republicans-democrats-el-salvador-trips) requests from Democratic lawmakers to visit (https://www.axios.com/2025/04/16/house-democrats-el-salvador-deportation-trump) the facility.

Bukele’s government has also made ample use of social media to promote CECOT and its wider crackdown on criminal gangs

Dramatically shot videos (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/world/americas/deportation-videos-el-salvador.html) showing detainees being marched off planes by armed military and police units, having their heads shaved, and being hurried into cells have been posted (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/18/bukele-prison-system-human-rights-trump/) to Bukele’s social media accounts in an effort to promote his “no-tolerance policy on crime,” according to The Washington Post.

After then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) visited (https://x.com/mattgaetz/status/1815527485536452928) CECOT in July 2024, Bukele shared (https://x.com/nayibbukele/status/1859345333823648093/video/1) to social media a segment of Gaetz’s speech on the House floor in which he discussed (https://nacla.org/el-salvador-caucus-bukele-exception) his newly formed “El Salvador Caucus” and praised Bukele’s “visionary leadership.” Bukele’s account also shared (https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/matt-gaetz-nayib-bukele-state-violence-rcna180398) a video of Gaetz’s visit to the prison in which Gaetz praised “the good ideas in El Salvador” and noted that “there is a lot more discipline in this prison than we see in a lot of the prisons in the United States.”

Bukele’s government has used a team (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/el-salvador-politics-media/) of paid internet “trolls” and other allied social media accounts to push propaganda and attack dissent. One account, according to The Associated Press, has posted (https://apnews.com/article/bukele-tiktok-youtube-influencers-disinformation-el-salvador-5523937ba0e499af71e7f2ff7e72eeac#::text=One%20account%2C,live%20in%20fear.%E2%80%9D) videos of supposed gang members committing violent crimes, followed by pro-Bukele messaging.

//

1. ### Fox News attacked due process at least 77 times in just over five weeks (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/fox-news-made-least-77-claims-attacking-due-process-just-over-five-weeks)

:{04/17/25

2. ### Fox keeps calling migrants sent to El Salvador prison “criminals” and “terrorists” despite reporting that several deportees were likely falsely accused (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/fox-keeps-calling-migrants-sent-el-salvador-prison-criminals-and-terrorists-despite)

:{04/01/25

3. ### CBS News reporting on immigrants deported to foreign megaprison blows up Fox’s “worst of the worst” spin (https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/cbs-news-reporting-immigrants-deported-foreign-megaprison-blows-foxs-worst-worst-spin)

04/07/25