It hasn't been a good week for Steven Crowder, and you have to wonder if his successful run on YouTube is drawing to a close.
Crowder has exploded in popularity since early 2017, and now has 1.5 million YouTube subscribers and a spot on CRTV (Cary Katz's conservative internet video network).
Like many YouTube conservatives, he's been battling since June 2017 with demonetization of his videos, which basically means that YouTube took away ads from most videos, thus depriving him from any income on them. This happened to many controversial YouTube personalities over the past 9 months, as it appears Google is running bots to overcorrect the problem of advertisers complaining that they don't like their ads running on controversial videos. However, it does seem that conservative channels have been targeted more by these bots than non-conservative controversial channels.
Despite this, Crowder has still been plugging along pretty well, getting lots of subscriptions to his "Mug Club" (basically his skin into the CRTV network, of which he gets a piece of the $69-$99 yearly subscription), and he even took the month of January off to move studios and expand his operation.
Presently, he claims to have 15 employees, though some are part time. He even has his parents in on the business, with his mom designing his costumes and his dad booking guests.
Crowder also has started a tour of various college campuses, and that seems to mostly be going well in the early stages.
But this past week has been a real mess.
First, a professor at University of Texas Arlington posted that Crowder was a neo-Nazi, and attempted to pressure nearby Southern Methodist University (SMU) from allowing Crowder to appear there on March 22. Apparently the neo-Nazi accusation was based upon some crude photoshops of Crowder's tweets done by some alt-right trolls, and the professor fell for it. However, the professor has not backed away from his comments.
Crowder then tried to contact Twitter and have them remove the photoshopped tweets, but oddly Twitter refused to do so, claiming it didn't violate their terms of service.
Last week, Crowder received more bad news. He was banned from South by Southwest (SxSW) because he invaded a Cenk Uygur panel there last year, and had to be escorted ot by security.
Admittedly, the above wasn't Crowder's best work, but anyway, he found out last week that he was banned.
He really wanted to screw around at SxSW again, so he sent two of his employees into a gender identity discussion. One of the employees, known on the show as "Sven Computer", is a young German man whose gimmick involves wearing a fake computer monitor on his head and pretending he's actually a computer.
The joke here was that Sven was going to go to the gender non-conformity panel and say that he identifies as a computer. Crowder had a secret microphone in Sven's ear and was basically telling him what to say, and had Sven progressively get more obnoxious.
At first, the people at the gender non-conformity panel were actually receptive to Sven identifying as a computer, and were seemed willing to accept it. (This shows how LOL the SJW left has really become!)
However, within a few minutes, as Crowder was having Sven pepper his routine with clearly veiled insults, they quickly realized they were being trolled, and the situation get very tense.
To Sven's credit, he had balls of steel, and despite an angry LGBT crowd looking ready to lynch him, he continued with his barrage of insults, even with an angry dude right in his face.
(NOTE: The below video keeps getting removed, so watch it quickly, and it may not work by the time you see this!)
This is when all of the shit hit the fan.
Crowder attempted to post this video on his YouTube channel, and it was removed within minutes. (It's not clear how YouTube got to it so quickly.)
Two hours later, he attempted to repost it, and again it was removed. I did manage to catch it in the short time it was up.
Twitter then suspended him, Sven, and another employee named Jared (Crowder's producer and co-host) for promoting the video.
Twitter then suspended anyone who had retweeted or posted a link to the video on YouTube, even if they weren't associated with Crowder.
Facebook then suspended people who had posted links to the video, and informed Crowder that he's on the verge of being banned from the site.
The video was then posted on CRTV, but that's behind a paywall for members only, so the general public can't access it. The video I posted above was reposted by a fan. but I imagine will be gone soon, too.
Crowder then did a quick 11-minute video on Wednesday with his attorney friend, who frequently appears on the show:
That video is still up.
However, on Thursday, Crowder did his usual show, which is always provided for free on YouTube. (His Monday-Wednesday episodes are usually behind the paywall.)
I watched about 2/3 of the 80-minute episode, and planned to finish it off this morning.
NOPE!
Gone already.
It is not clear why they killed the Thursday show, though it contained Crowder angrily complaining about the censorship. He didn't replay the Sven Computer video, but he did show one or two clips of it for a few seconds, with everyone's faces blurred out.
Crowder has not yet made a statement about the Thursday show disappearing, but I have to think that he's not too far from losing his channel entirely.
He is attempting to fight some of this through his attorney friend.
Twitter apparently screwed up because they claimed that one of the reasons he was suspended was for "inappropriate advertisements", yet they were unaware that they were the ones who designed his ads, and that he paid them to do it. So Twitter designed ads for him, approved them, ran them, and then suspended him because the ads were deemed "hate speech".
Gotta love it.
It does seem interesting that three major social media outlets (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) all clamped down upon him so hard and so quickly over this SxSW video. Keep in mind that Texas is a "one party consent" state regarding recording video, and that SxSW itself allows you to make videos there, so there doesn't seem to be any legal violation in what Sven did.
I do wonder if these platforms have finally had enough of him, and are deciding to effectively shut him down.