They had let me go down again. The piece of cheese was too big and that I didn’t even come close to that cheese the previous times, I had already forgotten. ‘1 Progressive vs. 20 FAR-Right Conservatives’ was the title of the video. Click. An hour and a half of the debatefood food, an hour and a half verbal violence as empty calories. No worldview changed, no mood improved.
Jubilee It is called the YouTube channel that has elevated worse porn to art. Millions of people already watched earlier videos in their ‘surrounded’ series: “1 Conservative vs. 20 Feminists ‘,’ 1 LGBTQ Activist vs. 25 Conservatives ‘,’ 1 Atheist vs. 25 Christians ‘,’ Doctor Mike vs. 20 Antivaxxers’. One person surrounded by opponents, usually a person with some fame, against twenty products from the online scream generation. The goal, according to Jubilee, is to initiate conversations that matter and bring people together through shared humanity.
Beautiful ambition, terrible elaboration, debatable result. In the latest episode, one progression, the left-wing political commentator Mehdi Hasan (Brit of Indian descent, Nationalized American), the debate with twenty conservative-right people, who do not turn out to be ‘people’ have ties with extreme right-wing figures. And also not ‘just a bit right’ – one man calls himself a roaring fascist, to the great applause from the others, and wishes another while he walks back from the Debate table, Hasan back to his own country. Ah yes, that shared humanity!
He had no idea that Jubilee had invited these kinds of people, Hasan said, who at least could have investigated the reputation of the YouTube channel a bit. Otherwise he might not have come. Then the question is what he did, why people like him want to be ‘one’ in this hostile concept. A certain vanity must be involved: it is not that you think he is just the one who brings people to different ideas, or that you are the one who will not change under the table. The result is the same void.
For every glimpse of hope, every small beacon of-relative-reasonableness to that jubilee table, there are ten tensen crooked collars, which take care of nothing more than views. The internet on its internet. Everything depends on that utopia that all the problems of the world can be solved if we find the Golden Middenweg in every area. Jubilee has also a series that ‘Middle Ground’ Hot, where supporters and opponents of an issue try to find each other, now in equal numbers. A little less doomed to fail, but again based on that illusion that if you open up enough, but do enough water to the wine, you can think the same about something.
But I don’t want to open myself to every opinion. Not if that opinion affects who I am, how I live or my image of humanity. As a gay person, I am not going to surround the clicks with twenty people who think that I do not earn the same respect and the same rights as they do. I am not looking for a rapprochement with people who play down the genocide in Gaza. I don’t have to be convinced by people for whom science is a suggestion and climate change a hoax. Inspection is also a form of resistance.
But still I looked again. And probably next time. Because at Jubilee, despite all the pretensions, she tickles the same place in your brain as Ex on the Beach; That you can shout very hard at your screen: “But how can people be like that?”
Frank Huiskamp Replaces Frits Abrahams.