Far-right troll Baked Alaska may just get his ass booted from YouTube

When we last checked in on shamed neo-Nazi hanger-on Baked Alaska, he had been kicked off Twitter and was livestreaming some sort of talk show from what certainly seemed to be his mom’s house in Alaska. This was just the latest in the troll’s long string of humiliations, which include possibly macing himself (see above), getting owned by a little kid, getting his phone shattered by a woman he was trying to hit on, and spending a long time creepily hitting on an 13-year-old girl. YouTube (and his mom’s house) had come to feel like a sort of final resting place for the onetime “alt-right” figurehead, a channel where he could cut out the filter and vomit edgelord provocation directly into the garbage bins of his viewers’ minds.

But now even that is looking precarious. The shitty corners of the internet—you know, the sorts of places that find his “gas-chamber memes” funny—are in an uproar, as “Baked” has landed a three-month ban from YouTube. As journalist Will Sommer reports in his essential Right Richter newsletter, Baked Alaska’s latest streaming format is a sort of “left vs. right” debate show, in which the ostensible left is presented by people like Gamergate pedant Sargon Of Akkad and the right is presented by actual fucking Nazis like Richard Spencer, with the infinitely even-handed Baked Alaska serving as moderator. As Sommer puts it, “These videos aren’t just trying to move the Overton Window—they’re blowing it up and shipping it to another continent.”

They are also, YouTube has determined, violating the platform’s ban on hate speech, particularly when the right is represented by Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin. After Anglin’s debate, Baked Alaska got hit with the ban, but not before he posted this crestfallen testimonial that you can watch if you want to waste 3 minutes of your life. Short version: He is sad.

You’ll recall that Anglin’s truly odious site has mostly been evicted from the visible internet, part of a larger trend forcing many on the far right to attempt to build a separate, shittier internet for themselves, using platforms like Gab (a Twitter alternative), Voat (a Reddit alternative), and GoyFundMe (a Kickstarter alternative), all of which suck and are broken. Baked Alaska is saying he’ll make similar moves in the wake of his most recent ban, but that’s sort of like getting your music taken off Spotify and then being like, “Whatever, we’ll just drop CD-Rs into a dumpster full of actual human shit. We’ll be fine.” It is not, strictly speaking, a solid business plan.

Baked Alaska’s ban also comes in the wake of similar action from YouTube against Alex Jones, a slab of barbecue ribs who wants to talk to you about chemtrails, whose own channel is on its second of the platform’s three-strikes-you’re-banned policy. Obviously, zero strikes would be a better threshold for someone who has accused Sandy Hook and now Parkland survivors of being “crisis actors,” and YouTube deserves all the criticism it gets for the way its algorithms have let videos from far-right quacks make it to the top of their streaming algorithm. But give credit where it’s due. If Baked Alaska and Alex Jones are sad, something must be going right.

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