Evalion: Interviewing an Ex-Nazi in 2021.

this is february of 2021 and i find
myself unexpectedly having a series of really productive conversations with evalian who ex-nazi valiant and i feel that she and i happen to get in touch with each other and start talking at just the right time in her life because the truth is if you look at the arc of her career on youtube her very public political career shall we say it is not susceptible to the kind of simple treatment as a morally redeeming fable that we have seen on ted talks that we have seen on youtube that we have seen on the nightly news and even in the mainstream newspapers again and again and again does she like evalian chan i don't know what evalian chan is oh you don't know who evalion is well she's the original she was uh one of the furthest right girls uh uh way before i was this far right she was doing the um she was talking about hitler and the jews way before i was and i think she's a cutie pie and she's a good girl and she's got a good voice and i think she's a sweetie i wonder what this girl's parents are like i mean are they proud is this what they wanted do they even know that she has a youtube channel or had a youtube channel so two days ago i asked you guys to ask me questions for this q a video and i'm finally getting around to answering all of them well not all of them i'm trying to answer as much as possible i've gotten so many comments and tweets since then asking all sorts of stuff so i'll try to get through a lot of them let's begin but even after all that it gets worse she had an entire video on her channel about why hitler wasn't such a bad guy after all she could be a troll whether or not she's a troll she's clearly looking for attention she loves it when people make hate videos on her and i'm contributing to that which kind of bothers me a little bit but so many people wanted me to do a video on her and i do think that it's interesting you know just on a psychological level to see somebody like this you look into her eyes you look into her eyes there's just something that just isn't quite there john smith asks what's my boob size i actually don't wear bras i don't like [Music] my childhood started out pretty happy [Music] although my school life was never that good i was always kind of an outcast in school later on we started having more financial problems [Music] i wonder what this girl's parents are like i mean are they proud is this what they wanted and do they even know that she has a youtube channel or had a youtube channel i can remember a fundraiser being done for a young man who had neo-nazi tattoos on his face he wanted to collect donations to have the tattoos removed after he woke up one day and realized that all this neo-nazi propaganda is nonsense um there is a tale we tell ourselves again and again that takes the aggressive fearsome young man who joins a neo-nazi skinhead gang and instead portrays him as the passive victim of circumstance that he was just poor and ignorant and downtrodden and ended up with a bad group of friends or that presents the young white man from the american south who joins the kkk as the passive victim of his own grandparents racism that it's a hereditary racism it's a contextual racism and then we're all eager to present these stories that one day these young men happen to have a pleasant conversation with the black guy who works at the gas station or a jewish guy they meet in the airport and they stop and reflect that this ideology they've committed themselves to might just be nonsense after all we we love this moral fable because of course it affirms our own sense of smug superiority over those people right those people who would get pulled into far-right extreme ideology and i would note there's a very strange silence on the internet in dealing with anything similar for the far left i don't see any morally uplifting discourse about people who used to support joseph stalin who used to support mao zedong and how it was they lost their faith in those extreme ideologies there's a very very strange demi-man trying to deal with the ex-muslim movement people who used to be radical or mainstream muslims and who learn to reject that ideology that sort of beliefs so not all of these things can be dealt with in quite so cavalier way as the the neo-nazis of the united states of america and canada a valiant story doesn't lend itself to this sort of treatment as a morally uplifting fable phase one of her career she was just another nerd who spent too much time playing world of warcraft and had a youtube channel and you know tried to be famous and popular and adored you know and i think you can say again and again i have it written down here as phase four she tried to go back to the kind of silliness and innocence of her first flirtation with internet fame but you can never go back right she went back to trying to make videos criticizing onision or just talking about you know controversies in the internet in this way but phase two was when she rose to prominence as a semi-satirical nancy now in saying that her videos at that time were satirical i'm not making an excuse for them i'm contrasting this to phase three where she was a deadpan serious left-wing fascist what happened to her was instead of having this morally redeeming realization that racism is bad and evil and wrong she went from right-wing extremism to left-wing extremism and she actually retained almost every element of white nationalist white supremacy as she went from the far right to the far left and she began an overly earnest campaign to try to recruit her fellow neo-nazis to recognize that nazism really is just a very corrupt form of socialism she's in a position now where it's much much harder for her to dig herself out of the pit of public oblique and condemnation that she's in because she made that transition because there were several stages in a row here in between her smash hit as an over-the-top fictional pro-nazi character and the final phase that we're at now where she is actually willing to totally and utterly reject totalitarianism to realize that racism is bad and evil and wrong whether it's left-wing or right-wing when she's gained some detachment over the myriad ideologies that haunted her throughout her teenage years i've said before and in a recent video that neo-nazis are the most unsympathetic people in the world i can't ask you to sympathize with her and i'm not going to i can't even ask you to reign in or limit your condemnation for what it is she chose to do with her life but if you are burdened with an accurate memory of your own teenage years i think you might be able to imagine how the peculiar carrot and stick of internet fame might have tempted you at one stage to start playing games with radical politics with extreme ideologies just to get attention just to get fame just to get money even if for every one person that adores you there are 10 others or 100 others who hate and condemn you and then you might see how something that started off as satirical something that started off as a racist and offensive joke but a joke nevertheless could then turn into a deadly serious sense of political mission that is in short the way in which a valiant has up to this point ruined her own life and although i don't ask this question in the interview i think it is a good question for us to ask ourselves if you were in her position what would you do next what could you do with the rest of your life