Though this post is going to talk about two particular drama merchants, their example is just a recent one and this is really a commentary on the space as a whole. It continues to piss me off and I wanted to put something out about it.
In the food chain of YouTube, drama channels are the lowest form of life. Worse than reaction channels, worse than partisan political channels, worse than even AI slop channels. Their goal is to profit off of the suffering of others in the same way that tabloid rags do. They slither around, looking for something they can milk for views and clout and if they can't locate anything good, they'll find a controversy to start or even make up in some cases while hocking scummy and ethically dubious sponsors to their audiences that are almost always packed with young, impressionable viewers.
If you put a gun to my head and told me to say one positive thing about this kind of creator, I'd say that at least scumbags like Keemstar have the balls to admit what they are. He knows he's a drama merchant and owns that. Then there are the ones who try to mask what they do as "online investigative journalism" or some other nonsensically hubristic term, claiming to be fighting for the greater good. The truth and evidence to back it up are of secondary concern to all of them, as is any regard for the damage they do to others. They're in this for themselves and themselves alone.
Some of you may remember the controversy surrounding Jirard "The Completionist" Khalil. Oddly enough, that began only a couple of months after I started watching him. I liked his channel because it had a heavy focus on talking about indie games, while also trying to be upbeat and positive, not sinking to the depths of negativity that seem to drive the YouTube algorithm, even though it was making his growth slower.
His career quickly crumbled after an "investigation" by Karl Jobst and Mutahar "SomeOrdinaryGamers" Anas, in which a charity he founded and ran with his family after his Mother's death from a form of dimentia, was accused of sitting on money that it raised instead of donating it and ultimately, of embezzlement and chairty fraud. After watching the accusations, I thought they didn't pass the smell test and that there was a reasonable explanation for things.
Khalil attempted to provide this in a video response that I think was poorly executed, didn't provide solid answers and tried to focus on minor inconsistencies to discredit the entire narrative. He also resigned from the charity's board, not something you'd do if you believed yourself wholly innocent. He tried going back to releasing regular videos but the dramasphere refused to let the issue go and levied downvotes and harassment against him and his staff until he just disappeared from the Internet, leaving his entire career behind. No one has heard from him since. Many thought he got what he deserved but to this day, I don't agree.
While his response wasn't good--especially the indirect threat of a defamation lawsuit which the dramasphere never likes--I still think he didn't deserve to have his career destroyed. The money was donated in the end and he separated himself from the charity, which is surprisingly still operating and raising money to this day. It came across to me not as someone who was deliberately commiting fraud, but as someone who started a charity when he wasn't qualified, got in over his head and rather than just admit it, get help and promise to do better, took the Pirate Software approach of doubling down to save face and had the opposite happen. This was reinforced to me because not only was the charity just sitting on the money rather than spending it, but the amount they had was not that significant, especially in the scope of a successful YouTuber with diversified business interests. This was something that Jobst and Anas never addressed, purposefully I suspect. These were not the actions of a fraudster, just someone who was naive, perhaps arrogant and didn't know when to admit fault. It just didn't add up, but it had the intended effect of driving Khalil offline, even though it didn't kill the charity.
Well, to the shock of many but not to me, a new expose has come out from a certified non-profit accountant that shows how Jobst and Anas' evidence was full of holes, inconsistencies and basically showed that they didn't understand what they were using as the foundation of their accusations because wait for it: They aren't accountants!
This is very long and pretty dry, but if you care about understanding why you shouldn't trust Karl Jobst and Mutahar Anas, make the time to watch it through.
Jobst and Anas have large audiences and will seemingly take sponsorships from just about anyone. Make no mistake, they are both independently wealthy people--well one isn't anymore, but more on that later--and if exposing irrefutable truth (i.e. real investigative journalism) was their goal, they could have easily paid a forensic accountant to take the evidence they collected and provide a professionally qualified validation of it. They didn't because as I said before, the truth isn't their goal.
They don't care about whether donors got ripped off or the impact this scandal has on trust in charities as a whole. Hell, neither of them have ever used their platforms to raise any money for charity as far as I can tell, though Jobst did crowdfund his own legal fees, again more on that soon. They didn't even care about whether Jirard Khalil personally was a man of integrity or not, and they certainly didn't care about what impact their actions would have on his life or those in his orbit. Their only goal was creating drama to profit from, while providing evidence that sounded just solid enough that their audience of uncritical and frequently ignorant viewers would go "Yeah, that seems legit."
This isn't how either of these guys got their start. Jobst started making often interesting videos about speedrunning and Anas started making let's play content. As many amoral creators often do though, they eventually realized that people love watching others get torn down and that YouTube and social platforms boost negativity, so they quietly pivoted to drama and quickly grew from there. How someone with the horrible production values and grating voice of Mutahar ever got to over 3 million subs is beyond me and in the case of Karl Jobst, while his early content was interesting, his commentary still sounds like it's coming from a Star Wars droid. Taste is subjective, but I still get annoyed seeing people like this succeed when so many others that put in more effort and make better content continue to flounder.
Funny enough though, while the revelations about their poor investigation certainly didn't help, their careers both took a broadside even before that. Karl Jobst was sued by legendary cheater, con man and general scumbag Billy Mitchell because he called him exactly that. He was right by the way and I actually applaud him for calling Mitchell and his co-conspirators out publicly. Seriously, fuck you Billy.
However, because he was unable to keep his monotone mouth shut even as the lawsuit progressed--you know, the first thing a lawyer will tell you to do--he added on by also accusing Mitchell's litigious tendencies of contributing to the suicide of another YouTuber, something with no basis in evidence whatsoever. This resulted in him taking what should have been a slam dunk victory--even by the notoriously high evidentury standards for defamation--and turning it into a huge loss where he not only got a verbal, on the record beatdown from the judge, but had to pay a notorious con man almost $400,000AUD, which has caused him to file for personal bankruptcy, though it hasn't stopped him continuing to post videos which still get a baffling number of views. Oh, he also wrote a pickup artist book and offered coaching and tried his hand at right-wing political grifting before getting into speedrunning content. Yeah, he's a real mensch.
In Mutahar's case, he's recently been revealed to have been lying about pretty much every qualification he's used to justify his self-proclaimed intelligence and success in life, including that he's been a Computer Engineer, Computer Scientist, Video Engineer (seriously, with those production values?), Day Trader, Real Estate Investor and more. None of these were needed for his content to succeed, but he was desperate to not only make money from YouTube, but to appear like some kind of genius who was just doing it as a side hustle. It was probably the only success he had, yet he needed to appear like it was somehow beneath him. Whether that's based in arrogance, insecurity or something else I don't know, but even as his own channel continues to chug along, many now see him as the lying joke of a person he is.
Is writing this a good fistful of schadenfreude for me? You're damn right it is. I unapologetically enjoy seeing bad people get their comeuppance and make no mistake, these are bad people. There are certainly worse, but that doesn't make them any better. I'm by no means perfect, but I don't go ruining the lives of others with flimsy evidence to enrich myself either.
Every one of these type of drama merchants either has or will one day get theirs. Some may take longer than others, but it will happen to every single one. It's not karma, it's simply that you don't get to be successful doing this kind of thing without lacking morals and ethics of your own and those will always cause you to slip up eventually, especially if you get so arrugant like these two, that you think yourselves untouchable.
Of course, this doesn't address the bigger issues of YouTube and social media incentivizing drama content by boosting it or that we have a society with such rapidly depleting attention spans and critical thinking skills that millions don't even pause and think "Is this stuff accurate and are they just trying to be virtuous by making it?" I honestly think nothing short of government regulation is going to do that and I'm not sure that's a direction anyone wants it to go. I don't consider myself smarter than everyone else for seeing through Jobst and Anas' grift because I don't think you need to be all that smart to see it, yet so many got duped by it, as they do by so many other grifters on YouTube and elsewhere. Hell, half the US voted for one, who is presently destabilizing the entire world for his own enrichment!
All I can say is what seems obvious, but isn't to so many: Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, especially when someone's profiting from saying it. Because when they get caught and exposed, they're not the only ones who get egg on their faces.
