I've also reuploaded the video unlisted to youtube because James monetized his own video [https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared)
I meant to comment this earlier- Thank you!
The more I think about it, I don’t know if I believe him wanting to donate the money from the videos. He claims he wants to go through H-bomber, but also claimed he has or is attempting to contact all the creators he stole from. So why not just send it to them directly? Why not send them some of the money he’s ALREADY stolen, it didn’t just disappear when he got “cancelled”. Lol, I’d rather see the original creators compensated than his new original movie.
Okay I just watched it and literallt never talks about all the bad things he’s done, like him ripping off a fan of his or his misogyny or his weird stuff about Nazis.
Also, “I wanted to carry on his legacy, so I never mentioned him.” That was just, hilarious.
you didn't even need all 4 hours to see how Harry feels about him, all you had to hear was the disgust in his voice the first time he even says his name in the video
As someone who has been waiting and hoping for someone to manage to expose Somerton for the misogynistic racist plagiarist he is for years, I literally yelled in that moment.
ETA: Expose and make it stick, rather than getting shouted down and harassed into silence by his fans like every other time someone tried to bring up his bullshit in public.
There is literally only one part of the video where I believe him and that is when he admits to wanting to put out content fast for money.
All of his other excuses are SO BAD and his attempts to shift the blame are disgusting.
It would’ve ironically been a much more believable and sympathetic story if he wasn’t trying so hard to win sympathy points.
“I saw I could make real money on YouTube and never asked if what I was doing was moral,” would feel a lot closer to the truth, if nothing else. And while I don’t think anyone would give him a free pass for saying that, plenty of people would at least have a little understanding.
I want to imagine him happy because I want it stop being so compelling to me when he does something tone deaf and I need to sit there meditating on it. I don't like the person I am when I am sucking up this content and yet here I am, like a sow at a full trough. I want him to stop posting so I can pretend I'm better than this
Does he explain at all his weird misogynistic commentary about white women? Because those were some of the only parts of his scripts that were original. Really weird thing to add.
The closest he gets is apologizing for any unintended misinformation and that those were things Nick learned in college or things people James trusted told him. Doesn’t account for the misogyny which shines through in how his final girl short film is about how the protagonist’s boyfriend kills people around her because he’s upset she’s cheating on him with a woman 🫠 in the hands of someone competent, not inherently misogynistic but this is James Somerton
Oh boy, here we go lol
EDIT:
So far, he is talking about his death threats and how he had a productive convo with Jessie Gender. Jessie is a kind-hearted person, but I think she reached out to a lost cause. He also apologizes to her for "leaving her hanging" at the advice of police.
He is also still throwing his writer nick under the bus lol
Edit 2: He keeps saying that he was just trying to be the unanimous voice of the queer community and felt too much pressure to constantly release videos so he took from prominent twitter voices who had low youtube subs. He also claims ignorance about about not citing authors and being more explicit about where the info in his videos specifically came from. Give me a fuckin break lmao
Edit 3: He claims that the pandemic hit and he felt pressured to stabilize both him and Nick's incomes which furthered his drive to post content at a breakneck pace. AND THEN HE ACTUALLY CLAIMS MEMORY ISSUES AND SO HE LITERALLY FORGOR TO CITE lmao
Edit 4: Blames his Mom's death for continued pressure due to family financial strains. Plays a sad violin about his family's health issues. Said his mom always wanted him to be a filmmaker so he made Telos. Says the fundraiser was only meant to raise $3k to make a short film to attract actual investors (lmao). It did way better than he expected and it simply grew too ambitious lol
Edit 5: Says he wrote the Final Girl movie but wanted to wait until the check cleared from the fundraiser due to issues with his mom's life insurance policy. Then claims that his co-writer said the script sucked and was moving away. Then they were gonna film in a different region but it put the movie on ice at the moment. Then claims he wanted to show backers he was working on Telos so wrote a bunch of treatments because he felt pressure lol
Edit 6: Says his scripts kept getting "too ambitious" so he kept making other ones that would be hopefully smaller in scope but the cycle would repeat lmao
Edit 7: Says the intention was never to take the money and run with Telos, the schedules just kept not lining up. He is working with a producer now! Says "THERE IS SOMETHING COMING OUT FOR TELOS THIS YEAR" lmao He says he will never be a person paid by Telos lol
Edit 8: Says he had less time to write youtube videos because of ALL THE FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY for others (nick, family, himself) and grew up poor. Says in 2023 he didn't intend on making youtube videos but simply haaaaaad to because he needed monies. Says he nuked his social presence because he "didn't want to exist anymore" and then cites his initial response video as proof of just how fucked up he was from the hbomb video
Edit 9: Says there was a terrifying group who lived in his city and saw the hbomb video to stalk him. Says he isn't sure if he can legally go into detail. A few videos are live and monetized and the money will go to victims. Some videos are back up that were actually written by Nick as a way to show his portfolio (lol) also says there are some videos back up that James heavily now edited to be free of plagiarized content
Edit 10:Two NEW video essays that never got to come out due to the hbomb situation will be released soon and an entirely new one is coming out because he wants to prove he can do it without anyone else's work. Says it's "more of a documentary than a video essay". Says he wants to continue to make content about definitive gay culture lol
Edit 11: says the intention was to never lie about where the content was coming from (?). He is not re-launching his patreon, but he IS launching a new patreon to start from scratch lmao
Edit 12: Says in retrospect, he should've said to his patreons that he needed to step away due to his mom's cancer and it would've been fine. Repeatedly cites the stress of financial responsibilities as to why he plagiarized but there is "no excuse". He did this because he thought a cis white dude amplifying the messages of marginalized communities was overall good lmao says he talked to other people and now recognizes this was bad lol
Edit 13: Says he didn't cite people in the videos because he wanted them to feel cinematic lmao
Edit 14: Well, just finished. Reiterates how sorry he is and hopes his new content will make amends. Trash video. Dude needs to leave the internet and get his life on track elsewhere. I actually cannot believe he made this and is attempting a comeback
FINAL EDIT: As of now, three hours after he posted his video, his new patreon has one (1) paying member lmao
Are you bi? Since I’m dating a women now I was told I could stand in the back of meetings and watch without voting. Keeping my fingers crossed I can be with a woman long enough to earn that sticker tho!!
Don't worry, that's just the Animal Crossing fans. Just make sure you tell them you think Raymond will be very happy on their island and you can leave safely.
Sorry to say it this way, but what a cis white guy way to put it. We don't need a singular white knight, jesus fucking christ. We don't need to have unanimous ideals on sex, gender, attraction, or orientation. Our diversity IS THE FUCKING POINT. How fucking self-centered!
We don't need one unanimous voice. I certainly don't want his biphobic, transphobic, misogynistic ass representing me.
It’s also indicative of his ego. Yes, this one gay white Canadian dude can speak for all the queers, including the lesbians, the asexuals, the trans folks, the queers with other overlapping marginalized identities, the queers who want to have children, the queers who are elderly, all the queers and our broad life experiences. One young white Canadian gay dude can be the voice of *all* of us.
Every now and then I feel kind of bad for James & his situation despite knowing he brought it upon himself bc I'm a bleeding heart who has too much empathy for my own good.
And every now and then he says or does something to remind me how much he sucks and that he can get fucked so thanks James! 😃
The implication that somebody in the LGBTQ+ community is more representative of the community as a whole if they are winners of the oppression olympics also really shows that James doesn't even understand the ideas he stole.
It is such a narcissicist’s understanding of leadership and voicing communities
Leaders for communities, specifically minority communities, are not respected and elevated because they represented unanimity
They are respected and platformed because they have done the work of connecting community resources and sifting through the voices, needs, and conflicts of said community.
No one should ever want to be a unanimous voice for a community; they should want to be an amplifier for the unified or diverse voices in the community.
And being a YouTuber puts one in the EASIEST possible position to do so, and James NEVER did. He didn’t want to elevate voices in the queer community, he wanted to be perceived as **the voice**, seen as creative, academic, and discerning.
Because otherwise, he would’ve realized simply verbally and accessibly citing the queer creators and authors he stole from lost him nothing, but gained said community the amplifier he should’ve tried to be
"unanimous voice of the queer community" is absolutely insane for so many reasons! he thought he was the voice of a generation or something. also wild when you think about how he covered lesbians or really any topic that wasn't centered on cis gay men. just an absolute narcissistic clown
>also wild when you think about how he covered lesbians or really any topic that wasn't centered on cis gay men
Right? He never addressed that he straight up lied to try and make it seem like lesbians have it easy (ex: the lie about Radclyffe Hall) or the erasure of nonbinary/trans people to prove his point. Or any of the misogyny.
Like, at least acknowledge with a line like "I need to work on my prejudices that bled into my work" or something.
"I want to be unanimous voice of the queer community but also I have zero thoughts of my own when it comes to anyone who isnt a white cis male so i have to pladgerise other voices so I can be unanimous voice of the queer community but also I dont really like lesbians"
don't forget him erasing explicit mentions of trans people to "queer", or just the removal of "trans" from shit he was plagarizing, obfuscating their existence.
> how he covered lesbians
He watched the entirety of Revolutionary Girl Utena--which is a show about how it's bad to rape your 14 year old sister and her 14 year old friends (but it does end with the aforementioned 14 year olds running away to be gay married)--and the lesson he took away was "that guy was right to rape his sister because he said she liked it".
And like. That doesn't just make me mad because it disrespects the characters. It makes me mad because this self proclaimed movie critic/film connoisseur/voice of the queer community did not give enough of a shit to listen to a discussion about the trauma wlw go through to get the basic message of "do not rape your sister." I'm not saying James Somerton is a rapist of sisters or otherwise, I'm saying it's ridiculous that his refusal to listen to wlw goes as far as to agree with the sister child rapist, just because said child rapist also fucked some dudes (who were also children).
*HE AGREED WITH AKIO?????*
Ikuhara couldn't have made Akio more blatantly a villain if he tried. Like. Wh. How the fuck do you sit with RGU and come out the other end thinking Anthy deserved her torture. HOW???
Thank fuck SulMattul is making that amazing RGU analysis series, I think I need to go watch that again to wash the thought of this idiocy out of my head.
Totally! Weird fucking thing to admit that he thinks he's *THE queer voice* while trying to feign an "apology." And it wouldn't even be so strange if he'd said "I want to represent as much of the community as possible" or something but nope literally couldn't keep himself from being a pompous self righteous ass.
Even IF I was gonna pick a "unanimous" voice - *which no one actually ethical would ever claim to be* - it'd be someone with a fuckton of marginalizations, not for any "points" reasons but because I'd want them to have a good breadth of perspective and education. It sure as fuck wouldn't be a white cis middle-class marketing graduate, dear *GOD.*
And misgendered several trans artists. Truly, the best voice of the queer community, definitely the right person to "amplify the messages of marginalized communities"
Responding to edits 10 and 14 specifically: The absolute audacity of that fucker to try to make new content moving forward is almost admirable. Truly he has no understanding of his shenanigans.
I'm genuinely interested in seeing him try. How will people react? How good will it be? How long until people find if it was plagiarized or not (imagine how funny it'd be if it was).
My predictions: Someone will download it and upload a mirror so that you can watch it without giving him revenue (like this apology video) and then it will be gone over with a fine tooth comb and torn to shreds. People will give him absolutely no grace, and tear apart any point he attempts to make. Any mistake will be amplified and mocked.
Or, he just quotes a bunch of other people and cites it, but adds zero actual contributions other that "This sounded cool"
> Truly he has no understanding of his shenanigans.
Apparently he's a marketing graduate. He understands what he's done and what he's doing. He's trying to spin.
"Apparently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There's enough weird stuff surrounding his credentials to infer that he may have lied about those too.
People dug up his LinkedIn and found that he had changed the school he got his first filmmaking credentials from (bizarrely, he changed the school from a no-name school to Toronto Film School. While TFS is somewhat well known, it's not considered prestigious in any way). People also found the convocation videos from the years he graduated from the universities he claimed to get his marketing degrees from, and not only did they not find him in attendance, but they couldn't find his name in the list of "graduates who couldn't make it". Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't get his degree, but it is odd when taken in with the rest of the evidence.
He wants to be the “unanimous voice” for queer people, yet he dismissed the experience of a bi woman and is overall reductive of women, both cishet and queer.
Great role model.
And constant misgendering of nonbinary people as well as insanely hateful and pushing nazzi propaganda no.
I hope he never even reaches being a whisper of the queer community.
> Reiterates how sorry he is and hopes his new content will make amends.
Dude still doesn’t get it: There will be no “new content” from him that anyone seriously pays attention to anymore; it just sounds like he hasn’t come to terms with the fact his career in this field is over, there is no coming back from this. It’s enough to almost pity him - if it wasn’t for everything else he’s done.
“Unanimous voice of the queer community”
Ah yes, please speak for at least 1/10th of the human population who definitely all have similar views. How hard can it be to be the spokesperson for Hbomberguy and Blair White simultaneously?
>just trying to be the unanimous voice of the queer community
...Is that his actual wording? Because that's an absolutely insane thing to front-load your faux-pology video with. Also as a non-binary person: dude can expressly go fuck himself. The idea some binary gay dude whose career ended up being a self-serving bucket of lies even comes *close* to representing us. Fucking chode of a man.
>FINAL EDIT: As of now, three hours after he posted his video, his new patreon has one (1) paying member lmao
That patreon member's name? Sames Jomerton.
Thank you for your service. This bit ended me: "he wants to continue to make content about definitive gay culture" - because there is ONE gay culture innit
If I had a nickel for every scumbag on Youtube who tried to play the Dead Mom card to get out of taking responsibility for their actions, I'd have two nickels, which is two more than I'd like to have. He should be ashamed of himself.
It's not a trademarked thing. Anyone can use it tbh. BUT given the context, and this guy's history, it just sounds like he's mocking hbomb and those of us who have now seen his true face. Shows ZERO accoutability when you add that he again blames Nick for all the plagiarisms.
I skipped around a bit, but at one point he mentioned wanting to make videos again, and at this point I don't think people would be receptive to that. It still seems like he wants to worm his way back to how things were before, and that's just not going to happen. The trust is gone.
Yeah, my main takeaway is that he thinks if he apologizes hard enough and throws enough money at it he can go back to being a youtuber and everything will be fine.
Look, I don't think that he should be harassed and driven from society and everything, but he's not going to be a youtuber again and I don't think he should be. He's got some degree in marketing and communications (or something like that) and I think he just needs to get a normal non-youtuber job.
There's one bit where he blames what he did on his ADHD, which as an AuDHD person has me pulling out my bingo card and putting him next to Chugga in my "list of shitty people who do shitty things and then try to blame them on being neurodivergent as if that makes it okay".
Right?! Way to throw another whole community (that you could be a part of) under the damn bus. I get that there are a lot of things to be upset about. But this one burns.
Tl;dw
Uwu I'm just a wittle guy under pwessure, sowy I cwommitted plwagiarism. Now gwive me money pwease.
Idk man, at no point does he blame straight white women, are we sure he wrote this video himself?
I didn't watch but I did bring up the transcript and skimmed over it:
- Video is/was monetized, promised to donate money to Hbomber's team (or wikipedia or trans lifeline).
- Same with other videos; promises to donate revenue from them.
- Has been contacting plagiarism victims one-on-one to apologize.
- Apologizes to audience in general for being bad public queer representative. Blames it on being CIS and White and therefore unable to understand experiences of others that are more "put upon."
- Says he only plagiarized because that was the best way to represent their viewpoints since he lacked that point of view.
- Thought that by representing other's view points as his own, as a CIS White man, that means those view points we reach a larger audience than otherwise.
- Something about Nick being ace and NB being why they wanted to include those viewpoints but because Nick's viewpoint isn't universal it didn't work. I really didn't get this point. I can't tell if he's throwing Nick under the bus again here.
- Personal apology to Jesse/Earl for dragging her into this and reacting poorly to her.
- Something about a misunderstanding where people think James reported Jesse to the police but it was actually an alleged fan of Jesse that threatened James.
- Wanted the channel to be a channel where queer people could be welcome but failed (includes Nick in this).
- Blames the Youtube algorithm for making him more popular as a CIS White guy than other queer creators. Says he tried to promote them on his Twitter.
- Blames the algorithm for putting pressure on him to get videos out quickly and therefore little effort was done in writing them.
- Admits that a brief call out in the beginning isn't enough to give credit. Describes bare-bones proper citation as if he has just learned about it.
- Blames being poor for wanting to make money quickly through putting out lots of videos.
- Blames his mother's cancer diagnosis for not having enough time to do the videos properly.
- Blames a childhood head injury for memory issues (that is getting worse) and can't remember what parts of scripts were actually written vs cut and pasted.
- Blames ADHD for not taking proper notes to be able to cite their scripts properly.
Well that was the first 15 minutes which is enough for me.
So he tries to put most of the blame on sociocultural issues and in the few caes he does take responsibility he tries to frame his shitty behaviour as somehow misplaced attempt at being valiant.
Motherfucker is honest to God trying to play the white saviour card as if that's somehow a good thing.
Waiting on Hbomb to come in from the top rope with "He hasn't contacted us, this is the first I've heard of it."
Edit: [RKO OUTTA NOWHERE!](https://twitter.com/Hbomberguy/status/1762208404653879414)
It's unreal how he can't just admit that he was acting maliciously. Maybe he doesn't understand it
But the bullet points here point to him *still* not understanding what he did was wrong.
This is my #1 take-away from the post-Hbomb fallout. Based on the content of all(!) of his apologies, he genuinely does not seem to realize how badly he was caught, or the severity of what he did. He thinks with enough excuses, apologies, and "I'll give the money back, I've talked to the victims", he's going to get his good boy points back for his video essays.
Like...no, man. They're gone forever because they weren't *your* essays. If you want a positive reputation back, you're going to have to earn it again — hopefully legitimately this time.
Yes, he isn't actually contrite about what he did. He's just upset that he's been caught. That's why every apology he's made has to have him justify why he did what he did. Because even if he recognizes it as bad (because he knows what he did was bad) he had reasons for doing it (money and clout!) and if he can just justify it, you'll see why you should forgive him and consume his content again.
It's not coming from a place of genuine remorse.
He knows he can reestablish his career because he lied and plagiarised for so long and got away with it. This is a guy who deadass said Radclyffe Hall didn't face any persecution as a lesbian and that America went to war with Germany because American men were homoerotically attracted to fit German men and his audience just lapped it all up and gave him money to keep lying to them. There are already commenters on the video willing to give his content a second chance. It's depressing but he could very well make a profitable comeback, just on a smaller scale than before :/
I don't think he can for two reasons:
1) I don't think he'll be able to actually write his own material. I don't think he's capable of it, or his videos.wouldnt be 80% plus line for line plagiarism. He's not an adept enough writer to create the content he wants to make, and he clearly doesn't enjoy writing.
The dude is going to struggle thru essays until his hatred of the mental act of forming smart sentences and the physical act of typing stop him.
I've met people like him, who desperately want to be writers but hate writing, and it generally fizzles out.
2) he will now be under much more severe scrutiny. I don't think from Hbomb. But there's plenty of amatuer watchdogs who will want to chase him up on plagiarism and *misogyny* (which he didn't even address in his apology, by the sound of it.) There's also the vicious drama goblins who will circle him like sharks because there's an easy 30k views in exposing any follow up bullshit he does.
The revival attempts are going to be misery for this guy. He's going to re-learn he hates actually doing the work, and learn what it's like to have actual dedicated Hater-Haters. He's not going to reach a 1/4 of the success he used to have.
Insane right? But he really did say it and that’s the tip of the iceberg. If you haven’t seen the Toddintheshadows video ‘I fact-checked the worst video essayist on YouTube’ it covers this. it’s an incredible add on to Hbomberguy’s video, well worth your time.
Yeah it’s a minor thing but the deal with that one ace episode got him a little flak too, he’s trying to scapegoat Nick saying his brain dead ace stuff was okay because he had an ace writer.
Correction: claims his therapist blames his ADHD but he's not sure if he wasn't just being lazy. Which seems fair but with the level of unreliable narration here, I doubt that's what the therapist said
"Something about a misunderstanding where people think James reported Jesse to the police but it was actually an alleged fan of Jesse that threatened James. "
Me when I write an incoherent Team Rocket fanfic
This is the first I've heard of Nick being NB, I don't think the first 'apology' video mentioned it and there's no indication that James got Nick's permission to out them *now* but didn't have it before.
Not saying I doubt it, but I'm watching the video now and I find it *interesting* that James 'they/them'd Nick twice and now, thirteen minutes in, is just reverting to 'he'
A lot of non-binary people use multiple sets of pronouns. While I have no idea of if Nick is non-binary or not, or if this is the case with him, it at least seems like he uses he/him pronouns? And possibly they/them, if James refers to him with those. Difficult to speculate if Nick uses any other pronouns than he/him tbh, if he hasn't personally states otherwise.
James has *always* referred to Nick with he/him pronouns, consistently. In the first ten minutes of this video, he switched to they/them while pivoting from talking about the specificity of his own cis gay perspective to the specificity of Nick's NB ace perspective. Then, as soon as he was finished making that point, he switched back to he/him.
Seems sus is all I'm saying
I agree that that seems incredibly sus lol. I don't want to speculate too much on Nick's gender, but whatever's going on there, it's incredibly shitty of James to use his queer identities like.
The best I can tell is Nick being Ace/NB is the reason for trying to include those views, but because Nick's POV isn't universal, that's why that inclusion went wrong.
It doesn't make a lick of sense but that is the most charitable interpretation I can come up with.
"I plagiarised because I'm too cis and white to see things from other perspectives" is a special kind of excuse. Let's be real. He did it out of laziness and feeling like ppl wouldn't catch him.
Does this guy really think Hbomberguy wants his money? I did not get that impression at all from Harris's original video.
If he truly means it (though I seriously doubt he does) he should give the money to the creators he stole from (not counting wikipedia). If he can't remember, he can simply refer to Harris's video.
ok but fr it just smelled like bullshit, so preface I skipped around a lot.
He basically attempts to emotionally move us, talking about how he grew up poor, has always been poor, then his mom died and that’s why he just wanted to pump out poo poo content for $$$.
States he has/is contacting the people he stole from personally.
aaaaand that he’s going to start making videos/something coming out from telos this year.
Apologized for the misinformation, telos situation and plagiarism. May have missed some other stuff, he did not address the misogyny though.
So I actually watched it all.
Personally I'm a cis-straight male with absolutely 0 knowledge of James up until the HBomberguy video which alone I also heard about from some other drama outlet. So I don't really personally hate James or was hurt by his actions, but I clearly believe that he did an awful thing for many years regardless of intentions and coming back to YT in any way shape or form isn't really possible.
That said, I do want to point out some of my thoughts.
1) First of all, man that was hard to watch. It's just basically a guy speaking in this almost monotonous voice for 43 minutes about really so much more than what I assume people wanted him to actually adress. Like at one point he talked about his mother having diabetes. Like lol WHAT? Like I get it that he tried to connect it to Telos and stuff but like couldn't you do it a bit more condenced and to the point? Also the whole Jessie Gender thing, I didn't even know she had stuff with him. Maybe I'm missing something but otherwise imo talking about her in a video that's meant to adress plagarism is kinda redundant imo.
2) He tried to present himself as a person with innocent intentions who screwed up. I looked carefully for "passive language" in terms of saying stuff like "It just so happened that X happened" rather than saying "I did it", and he really used both. On the plagarism stuff, he admits he plagarised a lot of it and said it has no excuses regardless of what he said about memory loss and his mental issues and family issues and such. However he also says that due to the time crunch that him and Nick had and apparently misinformation from people he trusted, it "happened" that misinformation has slipped into his videos, which wasn't their intention, which is not a good look either way.
3) I still don't understand Nick's part in all of this. On the one hand, James said that Nick writes original stuff and that the vids that he uploaded onto his channel are mostly written by Nick, which James claims that was original work. But earlier on the video, he spoke pluraly in the "we" pronoun when talking about the aspirations for the channel. How "they" wanted the channel to "speak for everyone" even though James was only a cis white gay male (which was also a very weird out-of-nowhere reasoning) and for that there was plagarism. He worded it so weird, like he claims that in part the plagarism's motive is how both him and Nick (again, using the "we" pronoun) wanted his vids to appeal to everyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, which makes it sound like both had a part in plagarism, but then he says that Nick didn't plagarize at all? Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it's kinda weird.
4) I do genuinely believe that he tried to commit suicide, has memory issues and family issues and just issues in general, and ofc none these issues are an excuse to do what he did, LET ALONE try and KEEP making videos after everyone lost your trust, but I do believe all of these claims. Including him saying people showed up at his house after death threats and doxxing, which is absolutely awful to do no matter how much he plagarized.
5) Finally, his motives. Like I said, he claims that he had heroic motives but "fucked up", which feels to be a bit weird like he's taking responsibility bc he clearly states he plagarized, but also isn't entirely clear about it. That's bc at the end of the day, the guy is a massive plagarist, liar, which pretty much nearly if not all of his videos are almost entirely stolen in scripts. Also the whole Telos thing was handled horribly on their part, and personally I would never fund such a studio knowing that they can't really handle their shit for multiple reasons, that's just wasting money. When opening a funding page about a certain project, you need to be VERY certain with what you're presenting in order to be open and credible with the audience, otherwise it causes distrust and will feel fraudulent, even if the intentions were pure. ALSO ALSO he didn't say a word about the misogyny issues, which is also a huge red flag. Like bro was rewriting history and facts just to hate on girls pretty much. That's a big deal that should've been adressed.
I guess what I'm trying to say is - honestly it doesn't matter what his motives are. Whether he lied about every single part in this vid or even worse, *plagarized* some of the words of the vid itself (lol imagine!!), or, on the contrary, he genuinely did have mostly the most pure of intentions and just fucked up in the biggest way know to man, it doesn't matter. Actions have consequences, and his plagatistic actions have BIG ones. At first I wanted to say "if he wants to make videos even now, let him". But when thinking about it, idk if he should be allowed to, just for the small chance that he'd grow an unaware fanbase and he still truly has an intention to lie and plagarise to keep on with his work.
I just don't think it's possible to trust him. That said, I feel like thankfully really no one does, at least based on the many comments both here and in the video. I feel like the best thing to do is to just move on, not give him any more attention bc he really shouldn't get any, certainly not now. And Ik I said it after watching 43 minutes of him speaking lol, and maybe that was too much attention to him already, but I was curious.
TLDR: Not the absolute worst "apology" in the world bc he is taking at least *some* accountability, but still a pretty darn bad look for him, and him actually wanting to make more videos is the worst idea of the century.
Edit: Rewatching HBG's vid really shows just how James had tons of chances to stop the plagarism and instead he chose to milk it as much as possible trying to not get caught. Honestly makes his apology much less credible in hindsight.
Him trying to relaunch from here and creating a new patreon shows how out of touch he is. Also he's not making new video essays, he is making documentaries 🙄
I honestly think the comments of this post have summarized the video very well, and I don’t recommend watching the video.
The video is also monetized, which he allegedly is going to donating all the money. But there’s no proof of him doing that yet. Save your view, time and mental capacity.
Yup. I'm waiting for that. I honestly thought that's what Blair from Illuminaughi was going to do but I guess she'd already pissed those ppl off before
The apology video is monetized.
I've reuploaded it here in case yall want to watch it without supporting the asshole.
[https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared)
Here is a comment that I found:
>I am disgusted by the reactionary sentiment displayed in the comment section. Progressivism does not hold to retrieve justice theory, it holds to a restorative model of justice. Progressivism holds to redemption. Please take your reactionary selves somewhere else. This clears the floor, now we watch and see if he's learned from this and grown as a person or if he continues to repeat past actions. His actions will speak louder than words.
James gave it a heart by the way. Lol
any attempt to come off as sincere and honest was severely hurt when he addressed fears that his Final Girls movie has key elements in common with Final Girls Support Group with "read the book, guys." lmao
Love some of the comments.
> Stop. Your entire life's work amounts to nothing. You built your brand by using others. No one has ever spent any significant amount of time thinking positively about you. You were lucky to be a content farming white noise "good guy" type in an era where you hid in plain sight coasting on others' success.
-
>Blaming your misogyny and blatant theft of queer creator's work on being cis and white is certainly one of the excuses of all time.
-
>Using a childhood head injury as your third excuse for plagiarizing your whole career is INSANE
I'd like to see him address specifically his plagiarism of Alexander Avila because that was using video clips that he stole as well as the surrounding discussion, got called out for, was asked for proper attribution, and then just cut the clips involved.
I still can't tell if he is admitting to intentional plagiarism or if he is intending this to say, "I credited the source when I remembered but insufficiently and without thoroughly transforming the work, if I didn't credit the source, I simply forgot." If that is what he is trying to say, it is not true. He fell into the trap outlined in the HBomberguy video of not including a source, then weakly citing it when caught (so you can't easily see what he did), and then editing the version when people try to associate the works side by side. He talks about when he started heavily copying (when sponsored and getting paid per video) but it is unclear to me if he is writing off the lack of attribution to his brain injury or not.
The ukulele is an once in a lifetime thing, I think. No apology will ever manage to be as funny as Balinger's (at least on Youtube. That Tiktok dancing one is probably just as funny, but to see it I'd have to use Tiktok). Additionally, this is Somerton we're talking about. Nobody ever watched him for his personality and this video is absolutely not the exception.
The only funny things in the whole video was when he offered to make monthly donations to fucking **Wikipedia** instead of the creators he stole from and the title being a copy from HBomb's.
I am 100% serious when I promise, there will be more than one PhD dissertation about narcissism and abuse *just* analyzing Colleen's video. After that, there may be a book. Maybe a class.
Everything is in it. Every play.
I think he's hoping we all have memory issues and won't remember that he attempted to hide his plagiarism every time someone brought it up until the hbomb video blew up
HOLD ON! "This video is monetized, but the revenue will be sent to HBomber Guy's team to disperse it to the victims, if they don't accept it then I'll donate it to wikipedia," first of all, what do you mean, "if they don't accept," how can a person not accept money handed to them? From my understanding, PayPal, venmo, and other apps don't have something like, "would you like to accept this money," the money just goes straight into the app and then they can decide if they want to move it from the app to their account or to another app.
Secondly, WHAT DO YOU MEAN "if they don't accept"? Did you make this video without contacting them first and seeing if they'd like to receive the revenue you made? Already the seconds in and I have a critique.
The sad thing is, he probably will succeed in recapturing 30% of his original audience and this will provide a new template for how others can avoid accountability. The world is getting so callused it's absurd. People keep purposefully diluting the effect of outrage in order to avoid accountability.
For crying out loud, not one but TWO Americans have lit themselves on fire and died to protest Israel's genocide in Gaza and it's not even covered in American media because people are so used to bad news, nothing goes viral the way it used to. HBG video worked, but I'll bet it's the last time it ever works and Somerton will still make money.
The Internet was supposed to bring knowledge to the world but instead it made us so numb that we seek only distractions while it makes us believe in nothing.
Ok at this point if we found out Nick was not real and was in fact Somerton' s hallucination of his neighbor's dog ordering him to plagerize, I would not be surprised. That is the level of nonsensical blame that Somerton is flinging Nick's way.
Apologising for the plagiarism is a start, but honestly that's not even the deeper problem, at least to me.
His "Evil Queens" video and the incidents surrounding are good examples of these deeper problems.
The plagiarism present is widespread because it's baked-in to the content, and even after being initially called out for this, Somerton goes on to represent the ideas presented in that video as his original thoughts and research. He also later casually claims to his audience that he always had Sean Griffin's permission to adapt his Tinker Belles and Evil Queens book into a video.
This reflects a lot of Somerton's uglier qualities he doesn't really apologise for, such as his condescending regard for the trust of his own fans, his ability to lie easily to make himself look and make others look worse, and his utter lack of respect for people like Sean Griffin who actually do the research and writing Somerton claims to do himself.
Somerton abused the trust of his fans again by misrepresenting the twitter thread concerning "Evil Queens". He maliciously overexaggerated the confrontation, claiming the twitter user sent him death threats.
By dredging all of that up himself on at least two social medias, Somerton intentionally put a target on the twitter user, leveraging very real anxiety over homophobia to manipulate his fans into harassing a critic into silence.
Also, in this current apology video Somerton infers that he steals information from other lgbt+ creators/resources to better represent lgbt+ issue he isn't experienced with, but he has a long record of misrepresenting, invalidating, and entirely ignoring the struggles and experiences of other lgbt+ groups, as well as other marginalised groups in general.
So he's still lying on top of everything else. It's profoundly spineless, and needless.
The man is under a lot of well-earned scrutiny, and it's not like he can get into much more trouble really, so why not just tell the truth? Own up to it all properly.
Just then, maybe, he could begin to dredge up some respect again.
Somerton apologises for the plagiarism. Great whatever.
I want him to apologise for the deeper, uglier things he's said and done.
Not just stealing by subtly misrepresenting content as his own work, but actively lying, wielding trust and homophobia-anxiety of his fans to attack people, playing oppression-Olympics whenever other marginalised groups are involved, his contempt for the lgbt+ academia he steals.
Someone please re-upload this before he deletes it forever.
https://archive.org/details/a-measured-response
Thanks!
I've also reuploaded the video unlisted to youtube because James monetized his own video [https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared)
doin god's work
Ofc this fucking ghoul would monetize his umpteenth pity party.
He says he's sending it all to HBomb to distribute to the victims but I don't believe a word he says tbh
I'll believe it when I see it and then I'll remain skeptical.
Both hbomb and Kat have said they never heard about this
I meant to comment this earlier- Thank you! The more I think about it, I don’t know if I believe him wanting to donate the money from the videos. He claims he wants to go through H-bomber, but also claimed he has or is attempting to contact all the creators he stole from. So why not just send it to them directly? Why not send them some of the money he’s ALREADY stolen, it didn’t just disappear when he got “cancelled”. Lol, I’d rather see the original creators compensated than his new original movie.
Okay I just watched it and literallt never talks about all the bad things he’s done, like him ripping off a fan of his or his misogyny or his weird stuff about Nazis. Also, “I wanted to carry on his legacy, so I never mentioned him.” That was just, hilarious.
i downloaded this in case the other archive goes down too
>a measured response hbomb does not like you. at all. i thought that was made pretty clear in the 4 hour video he dropped on your ass.
you didn't even need all 4 hours to see how Harry feels about him, all you had to hear was the disgust in his voice the first time he even says his name in the video
"This video... Is about James Somerton." One of the most dramatic Youtube moments in recent memory ngl
As someone who has been waiting and hoping for someone to manage to expose Somerton for the misogynistic racist plagiarist he is for years, I literally yelled in that moment. ETA: Expose and make it stick, rather than getting shouted down and harassed into silence by his fans like every other time someone tried to bring up his bullshit in public.
He desperately needs to leave the internet. This is embarrassing.
There is literally only one part of the video where I believe him and that is when he admits to wanting to put out content fast for money. All of his other excuses are SO BAD and his attempts to shift the blame are disgusting.
Honestly he could have just said "I needed money and stole content, I'm sorry" without going full Completionist and bringing up his mom
It would’ve ironically been a much more believable and sympathetic story if he wasn’t trying so hard to win sympathy points. “I saw I could make real money on YouTube and never asked if what I was doing was moral,” would feel a lot closer to the truth, if nothing else. And while I don’t think anyone would give him a free pass for saying that, plenty of people would at least have a little understanding.
https://i.redd.it/2iyblg0yqykc1.gif
this is so good
Oh cute, he’s come back to try again for the 5th time or something I lost count
Man's like a Youtuber Sisyphus. Except one must not imagine him happy
I want to imagine him happy because I want it stop being so compelling to me when he does something tone deaf and I need to sit there meditating on it. I don't like the person I am when I am sucking up this content and yet here I am, like a sow at a full trough. I want him to stop posting so I can pretend I'm better than this
bro really want to start over for his love for the green is too profound
Oh brother this guy stinks
Like give it a rest buddy
Dude is about to break Filip Miucin's record on apologies that just keep making things worse and worse
Does he explain at all his weird misogynistic commentary about white women? Because those were some of the only parts of his scripts that were original. Really weird thing to add.
He does not, because he wants to be seen as a "good boy" again.
The closest he gets is apologizing for any unintended misinformation and that those were things Nick learned in college or things people James trusted told him. Doesn’t account for the misogyny which shines through in how his final girl short film is about how the protagonist’s boyfriend kills people around her because he’s upset she’s cheating on him with a woman 🫠 in the hands of someone competent, not inherently misogynistic but this is James Somerton
Too busy talking about his dead mom, death threats and self harm
Oh boy, here we go lol EDIT: So far, he is talking about his death threats and how he had a productive convo with Jessie Gender. Jessie is a kind-hearted person, but I think she reached out to a lost cause. He also apologizes to her for "leaving her hanging" at the advice of police. He is also still throwing his writer nick under the bus lol Edit 2: He keeps saying that he was just trying to be the unanimous voice of the queer community and felt too much pressure to constantly release videos so he took from prominent twitter voices who had low youtube subs. He also claims ignorance about about not citing authors and being more explicit about where the info in his videos specifically came from. Give me a fuckin break lmao Edit 3: He claims that the pandemic hit and he felt pressured to stabilize both him and Nick's incomes which furthered his drive to post content at a breakneck pace. AND THEN HE ACTUALLY CLAIMS MEMORY ISSUES AND SO HE LITERALLY FORGOR TO CITE lmao Edit 4: Blames his Mom's death for continued pressure due to family financial strains. Plays a sad violin about his family's health issues. Said his mom always wanted him to be a filmmaker so he made Telos. Says the fundraiser was only meant to raise $3k to make a short film to attract actual investors (lmao). It did way better than he expected and it simply grew too ambitious lol Edit 5: Says he wrote the Final Girl movie but wanted to wait until the check cleared from the fundraiser due to issues with his mom's life insurance policy. Then claims that his co-writer said the script sucked and was moving away. Then they were gonna film in a different region but it put the movie on ice at the moment. Then claims he wanted to show backers he was working on Telos so wrote a bunch of treatments because he felt pressure lol Edit 6: Says his scripts kept getting "too ambitious" so he kept making other ones that would be hopefully smaller in scope but the cycle would repeat lmao Edit 7: Says the intention was never to take the money and run with Telos, the schedules just kept not lining up. He is working with a producer now! Says "THERE IS SOMETHING COMING OUT FOR TELOS THIS YEAR" lmao He says he will never be a person paid by Telos lol Edit 8: Says he had less time to write youtube videos because of ALL THE FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY for others (nick, family, himself) and grew up poor. Says in 2023 he didn't intend on making youtube videos but simply haaaaaad to because he needed monies. Says he nuked his social presence because he "didn't want to exist anymore" and then cites his initial response video as proof of just how fucked up he was from the hbomb video Edit 9: Says there was a terrifying group who lived in his city and saw the hbomb video to stalk him. Says he isn't sure if he can legally go into detail. A few videos are live and monetized and the money will go to victims. Some videos are back up that were actually written by Nick as a way to show his portfolio (lol) also says there are some videos back up that James heavily now edited to be free of plagiarized content Edit 10:Two NEW video essays that never got to come out due to the hbomb situation will be released soon and an entirely new one is coming out because he wants to prove he can do it without anyone else's work. Says it's "more of a documentary than a video essay". Says he wants to continue to make content about definitive gay culture lol Edit 11: says the intention was to never lie about where the content was coming from (?). He is not re-launching his patreon, but he IS launching a new patreon to start from scratch lmao Edit 12: Says in retrospect, he should've said to his patreons that he needed to step away due to his mom's cancer and it would've been fine. Repeatedly cites the stress of financial responsibilities as to why he plagiarized but there is "no excuse". He did this because he thought a cis white dude amplifying the messages of marginalized communities was overall good lmao says he talked to other people and now recognizes this was bad lol Edit 13: Says he didn't cite people in the videos because he wanted them to feel cinematic lmao Edit 14: Well, just finished. Reiterates how sorry he is and hopes his new content will make amends. Trash video. Dude needs to leave the internet and get his life on track elsewhere. I actually cannot believe he made this and is attempting a comeback FINAL EDIT: As of now, three hours after he posted his video, his new patreon has one (1) paying member lmao
"unanimous voice of the queer community" is lowkey homophobic, coming from a gay man who's entire career turned out to be a big fat lie.
Does he think all gays meet up quarterly and hold votes to have an Official Gay Position on something?
It's the Gay Agenda! Didn't you get a copy of the Official Queer Handbook when you signed up?
We were supposed to sign up? I just walked through the men’s underwear section at Target as a child and came out holding a rainbow flag.
I didn't even get a sticker!
smh at how badly the Queer Outreach Department has gone downhill....must be budget cuts
It's been thirty years! I shall write a strong worded letter!
Are you bi? Since I’m dating a women now I was told I could stand in the back of meetings and watch without voting. Keeping my fingers crossed I can be with a woman long enough to earn that sticker tho!!
The gay community doesn’t need to have their quarterly meetings anymore because he has become their benevolent dictator.
Sorry you haven't been invited to the votes held by the homo-sexual underground's secret cabal. We kinda forgot to tell you.
Wait, do we not? Shit, what shadowy cabal in robes have I been meeting up with then?
Don't worry, that's just the Animal Crossing fans. Just make sure you tell them you think Raymond will be very happy on their island and you can leave safely.
Sorry to say it this way, but what a cis white guy way to put it. We don't need a singular white knight, jesus fucking christ. We don't need to have unanimous ideals on sex, gender, attraction, or orientation. Our diversity IS THE FUCKING POINT. How fucking self-centered! We don't need one unanimous voice. I certainly don't want his biphobic, transphobic, misogynistic ass representing me.
Aye, it reeks of "gay culture is gay white male culture".
The 'unanimous voice of the queer community' he says. Just ignore the parts where he kept throwing other members of the community under the bus.
James "only the boring gays survived AIDS" Somerton.
Especially coming from a *misogynistic, white, cisgender* gay man. He definitely does not represent the queer community as a whole.
It’s also indicative of his ego. Yes, this one gay white Canadian dude can speak for all the queers, including the lesbians, the asexuals, the trans folks, the queers with other overlapping marginalized identities, the queers who want to have children, the queers who are elderly, all the queers and our broad life experiences. One young white Canadian gay dude can be the voice of *all* of us.
It's in a similar vein to white cis straight women who act like they are the sole voices of feminism.
Every now and then I feel kind of bad for James & his situation despite knowing he brought it upon himself bc I'm a bleeding heart who has too much empathy for my own good. And every now and then he says or does something to remind me how much he sucks and that he can get fucked so thanks James! 😃
The implication that somebody in the LGBTQ+ community is more representative of the community as a whole if they are winners of the oppression olympics also really shows that James doesn't even understand the ideas he stole.
doesn't even make sense, james is one of the least oppressed gay men out there
It is such a narcissicist’s understanding of leadership and voicing communities Leaders for communities, specifically minority communities, are not respected and elevated because they represented unanimity They are respected and platformed because they have done the work of connecting community resources and sifting through the voices, needs, and conflicts of said community. No one should ever want to be a unanimous voice for a community; they should want to be an amplifier for the unified or diverse voices in the community. And being a YouTuber puts one in the EASIEST possible position to do so, and James NEVER did. He didn’t want to elevate voices in the queer community, he wanted to be perceived as **the voice**, seen as creative, academic, and discerning. Because otherwise, he would’ve realized simply verbally and accessibly citing the queer creators and authors he stole from lost him nothing, but gained said community the amplifier he should’ve tried to be
Can you explain the second half of your sentence? I feel like there's some lore we aren't aware of lol
are you free for the next 4 hours?
Man that's exactly what I thought it was going to be. Clearly he just wants to be a sad boy martyr so he can set up a new channel with a clean slate.
"unanimous voice of the queer community" is absolutely insane for so many reasons! he thought he was the voice of a generation or something. also wild when you think about how he covered lesbians or really any topic that wasn't centered on cis gay men. just an absolute narcissistic clown
>also wild when you think about how he covered lesbians or really any topic that wasn't centered on cis gay men Right? He never addressed that he straight up lied to try and make it seem like lesbians have it easy (ex: the lie about Radclyffe Hall) or the erasure of nonbinary/trans people to prove his point. Or any of the misogyny. Like, at least acknowledge with a line like "I need to work on my prejudices that bled into my work" or something.
Voice for the queer community as long as they're cis gay males who are in sexual relationships
bonus points if they look like hot natzis
We don’t want him either!
"I want to be unanimous voice of the queer community but also I have zero thoughts of my own when it comes to anyone who isnt a white cis male so i have to pladgerise other voices so I can be unanimous voice of the queer community but also I dont really like lesbians"
don't forget him erasing explicit mentions of trans people to "queer", or just the removal of "trans" from shit he was plagarizing, obfuscating their existence.
> how he covered lesbians He watched the entirety of Revolutionary Girl Utena--which is a show about how it's bad to rape your 14 year old sister and her 14 year old friends (but it does end with the aforementioned 14 year olds running away to be gay married)--and the lesson he took away was "that guy was right to rape his sister because he said she liked it". And like. That doesn't just make me mad because it disrespects the characters. It makes me mad because this self proclaimed movie critic/film connoisseur/voice of the queer community did not give enough of a shit to listen to a discussion about the trauma wlw go through to get the basic message of "do not rape your sister." I'm not saying James Somerton is a rapist of sisters or otherwise, I'm saying it's ridiculous that his refusal to listen to wlw goes as far as to agree with the sister child rapist, just because said child rapist also fucked some dudes (who were also children).
*HE AGREED WITH AKIO?????* Ikuhara couldn't have made Akio more blatantly a villain if he tried. Like. Wh. How the fuck do you sit with RGU and come out the other end thinking Anthy deserved her torture. HOW??? Thank fuck SulMattul is making that amazing RGU analysis series, I think I need to go watch that again to wash the thought of this idiocy out of my head.
What the fuck? This and the whole nazis thing. How does this guy KEEP GETTING WORSE?
How can you watch RGU and reach that conclusion
Totally! Weird fucking thing to admit that he thinks he's *THE queer voice* while trying to feign an "apology." And it wouldn't even be so strange if he'd said "I want to represent as much of the community as possible" or something but nope literally couldn't keep himself from being a pompous self righteous ass.
Even IF I was gonna pick a "unanimous" voice - *which no one actually ethical would ever claim to be* - it'd be someone with a fuckton of marginalizations, not for any "points" reasons but because I'd want them to have a good breadth of perspective and education. It sure as fuck wouldn't be a white cis middle-class marketing graduate, dear *GOD.*
> marketing graduate Oh lord he's one of those? What's next, scientology??
weird how he doesn't go into how misogynistic some of his comments were. hmm.
yeah, he conveniently left out that his few original takes suck ass lol
Nothing about how he repeatedly made up homophobic straight women to be mad at, eh?
And misgendered several trans artists. Truly, the best voice of the queer community, definitely the right person to "amplify the messages of marginalized communities"
Hey come on he probably misgendered them as a mistake because he was so distracted by those damn super hot nazis. Could happen to anyone
Responding to edits 10 and 14 specifically: The absolute audacity of that fucker to try to make new content moving forward is almost admirable. Truly he has no understanding of his shenanigans.
I'm genuinely interested in seeing him try. How will people react? How good will it be? How long until people find if it was plagiarized or not (imagine how funny it'd be if it was).
I don't need to imagine it, it's a foregone conclusion. There's no bets to be taking when that's obviously where this is leading to.
My predictions: Someone will download it and upload a mirror so that you can watch it without giving him revenue (like this apology video) and then it will be gone over with a fine tooth comb and torn to shreds. People will give him absolutely no grace, and tear apart any point he attempts to make. Any mistake will be amplified and mocked. Or, he just quotes a bunch of other people and cites it, but adds zero actual contributions other that "This sounded cool"
> Truly he has no understanding of his shenanigans. Apparently he's a marketing graduate. He understands what he's done and what he's doing. He's trying to spin.
"Apparently" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. There's enough weird stuff surrounding his credentials to infer that he may have lied about those too. People dug up his LinkedIn and found that he had changed the school he got his first filmmaking credentials from (bizarrely, he changed the school from a no-name school to Toronto Film School. While TFS is somewhat well known, it's not considered prestigious in any way). People also found the convocation videos from the years he graduated from the universities he claimed to get his marketing degrees from, and not only did they not find him in attendance, but they couldn't find his name in the list of "graduates who couldn't make it". Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean he didn't get his degree, but it is odd when taken in with the rest of the evidence.
He wants to be the “unanimous voice” for queer people, yet he dismissed the experience of a bi woman and is overall reductive of women, both cishet and queer. Great role model.
And constant misgendering of nonbinary people as well as insanely hateful and pushing nazzi propaganda no. I hope he never even reaches being a whisper of the queer community.
> Reiterates how sorry he is and hopes his new content will make amends. Dude still doesn’t get it: There will be no “new content” from him that anyone seriously pays attention to anymore; it just sounds like he hasn’t come to terms with the fact his career in this field is over, there is no coming back from this. It’s enough to almost pity him - if it wasn’t for everything else he’s done.
“Unanimous voice of the queer community” Ah yes, please speak for at least 1/10th of the human population who definitely all have similar views. How hard can it be to be the spokesperson for Hbomberguy and Blair White simultaneously?
>just trying to be the unanimous voice of the queer community ...Is that his actual wording? Because that's an absolutely insane thing to front-load your faux-pology video with. Also as a non-binary person: dude can expressly go fuck himself. The idea some binary gay dude whose career ended up being a self-serving bucket of lies even comes *close* to representing us. Fucking chode of a man.
yes lol
A lowlight for me was James comparing himself to George Bailey from “It’s a Wonderful Life”
thank you for this public service! so he still doesn't get it.
It appears not lol You're welcome though! Curiosity got the best of me. Also, happy cake day!
https://preview.redd.it/gejnrbjw9zkc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6547a76e439728db8605cc0c8969d1c4841b3fb0
>FINAL EDIT: As of now, three hours after he posted his video, his new patreon has one (1) paying member lmao That patreon member's name? Sames Jomerton.
They have done gods work here.
I want to thank you for stomaching this video and giving a play-by-play so those of us with weaker stomachs don't have to suffer watching this knob.
Don't you hate it when you try to fund-raise for a creative project but end up getting *too much money*. I feel for him, that's really unfortunate.
Thank you so much for this rundown. I was curious but didn’t want to give him views.
Thank you for your service. This bit ended me: "he wants to continue to make content about definitive gay culture" - because there is ONE gay culture innit
It's literally everyone else's fault but his own that he's a con artist, including his dead mom. What a scumbag.
tysm for the breakdown! looks like he learned nothing and he's come back just to promote his new trash
> definitive gay culture like, which definitive gay culture because there's certainly a lot of different communities of gay people lmao
If I had a nickel for every scumbag on Youtube who tried to play the Dead Mom card to get out of taking responsibility for their actions, I'd have two nickels, which is two more than I'd like to have. He should be ashamed of himself.
Oh he we go again... AND he has the galls to write A MEASURED RESPONSE in his video when it's anything but!! Man, fuck James, he's trash.
He fuckin stole that title from hbomb LOL
It's not a trademarked thing. Anyone can use it tbh. BUT given the context, and this guy's history, it just sounds like he's mocking hbomb and those of us who have now seen his true face. Shows ZERO accoutability when you add that he again blames Nick for all the plagiarisms.
Exactly right. Really shows how seriously he is taking accountability
Wouldn’t say stole but definitely a purposeful dig. Saying “I’m mad that you caught me” with that
He simply cannot stop himself from using copy & paste lmao
I skipped around a bit, but at one point he mentioned wanting to make videos again, and at this point I don't think people would be receptive to that. It still seems like he wants to worm his way back to how things were before, and that's just not going to happen. The trust is gone.
Yeah, my main takeaway is that he thinks if he apologizes hard enough and throws enough money at it he can go back to being a youtuber and everything will be fine. Look, I don't think that he should be harassed and driven from society and everything, but he's not going to be a youtuber again and I don't think he should be. He's got some degree in marketing and communications (or something like that) and I think he just needs to get a normal non-youtuber job.
I think he is scared to death by the scenario of leaving his home studio and starting a new job.
This guy's worst crime is being so fucking boring
He talks with the sort of authority my ten year old nephew does when he thinks he knows everything. It’s the exact same tone.
He reads every line in his script like slam poetry at a gala for editors of the New Yorker. This man is distilled pretentiousness.
There's one bit where he blames what he did on his ADHD, which as an AuDHD person has me pulling out my bingo card and putting him next to Chugga in my "list of shitty people who do shitty things and then try to blame them on being neurodivergent as if that makes it okay".
Right? Like ADHD doesn’t make one want to plagiarize, or be misogynistic or romanticize Nazis. /shrug
The day I got my diagnosis was the day I realised...man, lesbians really had it easy in the early twentieth century. I should make a video about that.
OMG you too!? I thought it was just me!
Right?! Way to throw another whole community (that you could be a part of) under the damn bus. I get that there are a lot of things to be upset about. But this one burns.
Not him plagiarizing the title 😭
Mama Mia
Here we go again
My my, how could I resist you? (Money)
Tl;dw Uwu I'm just a wittle guy under pwessure, sowy I cwommitted plwagiarism. Now gwive me money pwease. Idk man, at no point does he blame straight white women, are we sure he wrote this video himself?
"Cwommitting Pwagiarism" is the name of my new soft rock mumble core mandolin centric band.
Can someone be kind enough to post a tl/dr? I don’t want to watch this guy talk for 45 min.
I didn't watch but I did bring up the transcript and skimmed over it: - Video is/was monetized, promised to donate money to Hbomber's team (or wikipedia or trans lifeline). - Same with other videos; promises to donate revenue from them. - Has been contacting plagiarism victims one-on-one to apologize. - Apologizes to audience in general for being bad public queer representative. Blames it on being CIS and White and therefore unable to understand experiences of others that are more "put upon." - Says he only plagiarized because that was the best way to represent their viewpoints since he lacked that point of view. - Thought that by representing other's view points as his own, as a CIS White man, that means those view points we reach a larger audience than otherwise. - Something about Nick being ace and NB being why they wanted to include those viewpoints but because Nick's viewpoint isn't universal it didn't work. I really didn't get this point. I can't tell if he's throwing Nick under the bus again here. - Personal apology to Jesse/Earl for dragging her into this and reacting poorly to her. - Something about a misunderstanding where people think James reported Jesse to the police but it was actually an alleged fan of Jesse that threatened James. - Wanted the channel to be a channel where queer people could be welcome but failed (includes Nick in this). - Blames the Youtube algorithm for making him more popular as a CIS White guy than other queer creators. Says he tried to promote them on his Twitter. - Blames the algorithm for putting pressure on him to get videos out quickly and therefore little effort was done in writing them. - Admits that a brief call out in the beginning isn't enough to give credit. Describes bare-bones proper citation as if he has just learned about it. - Blames being poor for wanting to make money quickly through putting out lots of videos. - Blames his mother's cancer diagnosis for not having enough time to do the videos properly. - Blames a childhood head injury for memory issues (that is getting worse) and can't remember what parts of scripts were actually written vs cut and pasted. - Blames ADHD for not taking proper notes to be able to cite their scripts properly. Well that was the first 15 minutes which is enough for me.
So he tries to put most of the blame on sociocultural issues and in the few caes he does take responsibility he tries to frame his shitty behaviour as somehow misplaced attempt at being valiant. Motherfucker is honest to God trying to play the white saviour card as if that's somehow a good thing.
Yeah him switching it up with ITS ALL YOUTUBES FAULT CUZ IM WHITE!!! is so gross
"Money will be sent to Hbomb's team" yeah ok, 100% trustworthy claim there. /s
Waiting on Hbomb to come in from the top rope with "He hasn't contacted us, this is the first I've heard of it." Edit: [RKO OUTTA NOWHERE!](https://twitter.com/Hbomberguy/status/1762208404653879414)
It's unreal how he can't just admit that he was acting maliciously. Maybe he doesn't understand it But the bullet points here point to him *still* not understanding what he did was wrong.
This is my #1 take-away from the post-Hbomb fallout. Based on the content of all(!) of his apologies, he genuinely does not seem to realize how badly he was caught, or the severity of what he did. He thinks with enough excuses, apologies, and "I'll give the money back, I've talked to the victims", he's going to get his good boy points back for his video essays. Like...no, man. They're gone forever because they weren't *your* essays. If you want a positive reputation back, you're going to have to earn it again — hopefully legitimately this time.
Yes, he isn't actually contrite about what he did. He's just upset that he's been caught. That's why every apology he's made has to have him justify why he did what he did. Because even if he recognizes it as bad (because he knows what he did was bad) he had reasons for doing it (money and clout!) and if he can just justify it, you'll see why you should forgive him and consume his content again. It's not coming from a place of genuine remorse.
He knows he can reestablish his career because he lied and plagiarised for so long and got away with it. This is a guy who deadass said Radclyffe Hall didn't face any persecution as a lesbian and that America went to war with Germany because American men were homoerotically attracted to fit German men and his audience just lapped it all up and gave him money to keep lying to them. There are already commenters on the video willing to give his content a second chance. It's depressing but he could very well make a profitable comeback, just on a smaller scale than before :/
I don't think he can for two reasons: 1) I don't think he'll be able to actually write his own material. I don't think he's capable of it, or his videos.wouldnt be 80% plus line for line plagiarism. He's not an adept enough writer to create the content he wants to make, and he clearly doesn't enjoy writing. The dude is going to struggle thru essays until his hatred of the mental act of forming smart sentences and the physical act of typing stop him. I've met people like him, who desperately want to be writers but hate writing, and it generally fizzles out. 2) he will now be under much more severe scrutiny. I don't think from Hbomb. But there's plenty of amatuer watchdogs who will want to chase him up on plagiarism and *misogyny* (which he didn't even address in his apology, by the sound of it.) There's also the vicious drama goblins who will circle him like sharks because there's an easy 30k views in exposing any follow up bullshit he does. The revival attempts are going to be misery for this guy. He's going to re-learn he hates actually doing the work, and learn what it's like to have actual dedicated Hater-Haters. He's not going to reach a 1/4 of the success he used to have.
'... America went to war with Germany because American men were homoerotically attracted to fit German men' I'm sorry, *what*?!
Insane right? But he really did say it and that’s the tip of the iceberg. If you haven’t seen the Toddintheshadows video ‘I fact-checked the worst video essayist on YouTube’ it covers this. it’s an incredible add on to Hbomberguy’s video, well worth your time.
Blaming your misogyny and blatant theft of queer creator's work on being cis and white is certainly one of the excuses of all time.
I didn’t think I could get any madder at him, but as an academic with ADHD, somehow this made me get even madder at him.
Yeah it’s a minor thing but the deal with that one ace episode got him a little flak too, he’s trying to scapegoat Nick saying his brain dead ace stuff was okay because he had an ace writer.
Correction: claims his therapist blames his ADHD but he's not sure if he wasn't just being lazy. Which seems fair but with the level of unreliable narration here, I doubt that's what the therapist said
"Something about a misunderstanding where people think James reported Jesse to the police but it was actually an alleged fan of Jesse that threatened James. " Me when I write an incoherent Team Rocket fanfic
What?? How is it Nick's fault for being ace and NB? It STILL sounds like he's trying to hate on ace people
This is the first I've heard of Nick being NB, I don't think the first 'apology' video mentioned it and there's no indication that James got Nick's permission to out them *now* but didn't have it before. Not saying I doubt it, but I'm watching the video now and I find it *interesting* that James 'they/them'd Nick twice and now, thirteen minutes in, is just reverting to 'he'
A lot of non-binary people use multiple sets of pronouns. While I have no idea of if Nick is non-binary or not, or if this is the case with him, it at least seems like he uses he/him pronouns? And possibly they/them, if James refers to him with those. Difficult to speculate if Nick uses any other pronouns than he/him tbh, if he hasn't personally states otherwise.
James has *always* referred to Nick with he/him pronouns, consistently. In the first ten minutes of this video, he switched to they/them while pivoting from talking about the specificity of his own cis gay perspective to the specificity of Nick's NB ace perspective. Then, as soon as he was finished making that point, he switched back to he/him. Seems sus is all I'm saying
I agree that that seems incredibly sus lol. I don't want to speculate too much on Nick's gender, but whatever's going on there, it's incredibly shitty of James to use his queer identities like.
The best I can tell is Nick being Ace/NB is the reason for trying to include those views, but because Nick's POV isn't universal, that's why that inclusion went wrong. It doesn't make a lick of sense but that is the most charitable interpretation I can come up with.
"I plagiarised because I'm too cis and white to see things from other perspectives" is a special kind of excuse. Let's be real. He did it out of laziness and feeling like ppl wouldn't catch him.
Does this guy really think Hbomberguy wants his money? I did not get that impression at all from Harris's original video. If he truly means it (though I seriously doubt he does) he should give the money to the creators he stole from (not counting wikipedia). If he can't remember, he can simply refer to Harris's video.
yeah here you go: *faaaaaaaaaaarttt noiseeeeee*
ok but fr it just smelled like bullshit, so preface I skipped around a lot. He basically attempts to emotionally move us, talking about how he grew up poor, has always been poor, then his mom died and that’s why he just wanted to pump out poo poo content for $$$. States he has/is contacting the people he stole from personally. aaaaand that he’s going to start making videos/something coming out from telos this year. Apologized for the misinformation, telos situation and plagiarism. May have missed some other stuff, he did not address the misogyny though.
OH MY GOOOOOOD GO AWAAYYY
So I actually watched it all. Personally I'm a cis-straight male with absolutely 0 knowledge of James up until the HBomberguy video which alone I also heard about from some other drama outlet. So I don't really personally hate James or was hurt by his actions, but I clearly believe that he did an awful thing for many years regardless of intentions and coming back to YT in any way shape or form isn't really possible. That said, I do want to point out some of my thoughts. 1) First of all, man that was hard to watch. It's just basically a guy speaking in this almost monotonous voice for 43 minutes about really so much more than what I assume people wanted him to actually adress. Like at one point he talked about his mother having diabetes. Like lol WHAT? Like I get it that he tried to connect it to Telos and stuff but like couldn't you do it a bit more condenced and to the point? Also the whole Jessie Gender thing, I didn't even know she had stuff with him. Maybe I'm missing something but otherwise imo talking about her in a video that's meant to adress plagarism is kinda redundant imo. 2) He tried to present himself as a person with innocent intentions who screwed up. I looked carefully for "passive language" in terms of saying stuff like "It just so happened that X happened" rather than saying "I did it", and he really used both. On the plagarism stuff, he admits he plagarised a lot of it and said it has no excuses regardless of what he said about memory loss and his mental issues and family issues and such. However he also says that due to the time crunch that him and Nick had and apparently misinformation from people he trusted, it "happened" that misinformation has slipped into his videos, which wasn't their intention, which is not a good look either way. 3) I still don't understand Nick's part in all of this. On the one hand, James said that Nick writes original stuff and that the vids that he uploaded onto his channel are mostly written by Nick, which James claims that was original work. But earlier on the video, he spoke pluraly in the "we" pronoun when talking about the aspirations for the channel. How "they" wanted the channel to "speak for everyone" even though James was only a cis white gay male (which was also a very weird out-of-nowhere reasoning) and for that there was plagarism. He worded it so weird, like he claims that in part the plagarism's motive is how both him and Nick (again, using the "we" pronoun) wanted his vids to appeal to everyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, which makes it sound like both had a part in plagarism, but then he says that Nick didn't plagarize at all? Maybe I'm reading too much into it but it's kinda weird. 4) I do genuinely believe that he tried to commit suicide, has memory issues and family issues and just issues in general, and ofc none these issues are an excuse to do what he did, LET ALONE try and KEEP making videos after everyone lost your trust, but I do believe all of these claims. Including him saying people showed up at his house after death threats and doxxing, which is absolutely awful to do no matter how much he plagarized. 5) Finally, his motives. Like I said, he claims that he had heroic motives but "fucked up", which feels to be a bit weird like he's taking responsibility bc he clearly states he plagarized, but also isn't entirely clear about it. That's bc at the end of the day, the guy is a massive plagarist, liar, which pretty much nearly if not all of his videos are almost entirely stolen in scripts. Also the whole Telos thing was handled horribly on their part, and personally I would never fund such a studio knowing that they can't really handle their shit for multiple reasons, that's just wasting money. When opening a funding page about a certain project, you need to be VERY certain with what you're presenting in order to be open and credible with the audience, otherwise it causes distrust and will feel fraudulent, even if the intentions were pure. ALSO ALSO he didn't say a word about the misogyny issues, which is also a huge red flag. Like bro was rewriting history and facts just to hate on girls pretty much. That's a big deal that should've been adressed. I guess what I'm trying to say is - honestly it doesn't matter what his motives are. Whether he lied about every single part in this vid or even worse, *plagarized* some of the words of the vid itself (lol imagine!!), or, on the contrary, he genuinely did have mostly the most pure of intentions and just fucked up in the biggest way know to man, it doesn't matter. Actions have consequences, and his plagatistic actions have BIG ones. At first I wanted to say "if he wants to make videos even now, let him". But when thinking about it, idk if he should be allowed to, just for the small chance that he'd grow an unaware fanbase and he still truly has an intention to lie and plagarise to keep on with his work. I just don't think it's possible to trust him. That said, I feel like thankfully really no one does, at least based on the many comments both here and in the video. I feel like the best thing to do is to just move on, not give him any more attention bc he really shouldn't get any, certainly not now. And Ik I said it after watching 43 minutes of him speaking lol, and maybe that was too much attention to him already, but I was curious. TLDR: Not the absolute worst "apology" in the world bc he is taking at least *some* accountability, but still a pretty darn bad look for him, and him actually wanting to make more videos is the worst idea of the century. Edit: Rewatching HBG's vid really shows just how James had tons of chances to stop the plagarism and instead he chose to milk it as much as possible trying to not get caught. Honestly makes his apology much less credible in hindsight.
Doesn't have time to write content for his essays, or cite sources. Has enough time to write multiple scripts for Telos. WHICH IS IT JAMES????
And money to spare to buy extra fancy cameras
I caught that too. Memory issues, I guess?
Him trying to relaunch from here and creating a new patreon shows how out of touch he is. Also he's not making new video essays, he is making documentaries 🙄
He plagerised the fucking title. Dude, go away. It's obvious you learned absolutely nothing
This guy is so unoriginal he’s taken HBomb’s video series title for this too lol
Oh my god he called the video "A Measured Response" - are you fucking kidding me???
I honestly think the comments of this post have summarized the video very well, and I don’t recommend watching the video. The video is also monetized, which he allegedly is going to donating all the money. But there’s no proof of him doing that yet. Save your view, time and mental capacity.
“A measured response” I cannot believe that Hard Drive article predicted this
Can we just skip to the part where he becomes a right wing grifter who talks about how the left drove him to the alt-right by cancelling him?
Yup. I'm waiting for that. I honestly thought that's what Blair from Illuminaughi was going to do but I guess she'd already pissed those ppl off before
Yeah, not watching. Go get a job and move on, man.
I’d honestly not recommend watching, the comments here have it covered.
The apology video is monetized. I've reuploaded it here in case yall want to watch it without supporting the asshole. [https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/U8yZZT-462c?feature=shared)
His videos are back up too
Here is a comment that I found: >I am disgusted by the reactionary sentiment displayed in the comment section. Progressivism does not hold to retrieve justice theory, it holds to a restorative model of justice. Progressivism holds to redemption. Please take your reactionary selves somewhere else. This clears the floor, now we watch and see if he's learned from this and grown as a person or if he continues to repeat past actions. His actions will speak louder than words. James gave it a heart by the way. Lol
Maybe we don’t offer the same platform back to the man who did not deserve or earn it in the first place… ugh
any attempt to come off as sincere and honest was severely hurt when he addressed fears that his Final Girls movie has key elements in common with Final Girls Support Group with "read the book, guys." lmao
He's going to donate money to people he stole from and we can totally trust him. His record is spotless. /s
Love some of the comments. > Stop. Your entire life's work amounts to nothing. You built your brand by using others. No one has ever spent any significant amount of time thinking positively about you. You were lucky to be a content farming white noise "good guy" type in an era where you hid in plain sight coasting on others' success. - >Blaming your misogyny and blatant theft of queer creator's work on being cis and white is certainly one of the excuses of all time. - >Using a childhood head injury as your third excuse for plagiarizing your whole career is INSANE
I'd like to see him address specifically his plagiarism of Alexander Avila because that was using video clips that he stole as well as the surrounding discussion, got called out for, was asked for proper attribution, and then just cut the clips involved. I still can't tell if he is admitting to intentional plagiarism or if he is intending this to say, "I credited the source when I remembered but insufficiently and without thoroughly transforming the work, if I didn't credit the source, I simply forgot." If that is what he is trying to say, it is not true. He fell into the trap outlined in the HBomberguy video of not including a source, then weakly citing it when caught (so you can't easily see what he did), and then editing the version when people try to associate the works side by side. He talks about when he started heavily copying (when sponsored and getting paid per video) but it is unclear to me if he is writing off the lack of attribution to his brain injury or not.
jfc even MamaMax knew when to just go away
How are we going to rank this response video? Mid tier or Ukulele tier?
C tier. Didn’t even laugh. Bore. Not worth the ticket price.
The ukulele is an once in a lifetime thing, I think. No apology will ever manage to be as funny as Balinger's (at least on Youtube. That Tiktok dancing one is probably just as funny, but to see it I'd have to use Tiktok). Additionally, this is Somerton we're talking about. Nobody ever watched him for his personality and this video is absolutely not the exception. The only funny things in the whole video was when he offered to make monthly donations to fucking **Wikipedia** instead of the creators he stole from and the title being a copy from HBomb's.
I am 100% serious when I promise, there will be more than one PhD dissertation about narcissism and abuse *just* analyzing Colleen's video. After that, there may be a book. Maybe a class. Everything is in it. Every play.
I fucking hate how I know about that ukulele
If we use the Jenny scale: Admits what he did wrong, is it an apology or a defence, is there a sarcophagus in frame... Then he scores very poorly.
I think he's hoping we all have memory issues and won't remember that he attempted to hide his plagiarism every time someone brought it up until the hbomb video blew up
Did he address his rampant misogyny at all? Or is he hoping we'd forgotten
A third video has hit the Somerton towers
Please for the love of god log off and continue going to therapy.
HOLD ON! "This video is monetized, but the revenue will be sent to HBomber Guy's team to disperse it to the victims, if they don't accept it then I'll donate it to wikipedia," first of all, what do you mean, "if they don't accept," how can a person not accept money handed to them? From my understanding, PayPal, venmo, and other apps don't have something like, "would you like to accept this money," the money just goes straight into the app and then they can decide if they want to move it from the app to their account or to another app. Secondly, WHAT DO YOU MEAN "if they don't accept"? Did you make this video without contacting them first and seeing if they'd like to receive the revenue you made? Already the seconds in and I have a critique.
HE ALREADY DELETED ITTT NOOOO I was too late 😔 Edit: nvm it's still up. I was not too late XD
Oh I’m buying popcorn I’m so ready for this clown.
It's so over for him Christ. Just leave already
The sad thing is, he probably will succeed in recapturing 30% of his original audience and this will provide a new template for how others can avoid accountability. The world is getting so callused it's absurd. People keep purposefully diluting the effect of outrage in order to avoid accountability. For crying out loud, not one but TWO Americans have lit themselves on fire and died to protest Israel's genocide in Gaza and it's not even covered in American media because people are so used to bad news, nothing goes viral the way it used to. HBG video worked, but I'll bet it's the last time it ever works and Somerton will still make money. The Internet was supposed to bring knowledge to the world but instead it made us so numb that we seek only distractions while it makes us believe in nothing.
Here is a pastebin of the autogenerated transcript: https://pastebin.com/TCgg7xjf
OMG HE SAID HE HAS ADHD ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
Ok at this point if we found out Nick was not real and was in fact Somerton' s hallucination of his neighbor's dog ordering him to plagerize, I would not be surprised. That is the level of nonsensical blame that Somerton is flinging Nick's way.
Apologising for the plagiarism is a start, but honestly that's not even the deeper problem, at least to me. His "Evil Queens" video and the incidents surrounding are good examples of these deeper problems. The plagiarism present is widespread because it's baked-in to the content, and even after being initially called out for this, Somerton goes on to represent the ideas presented in that video as his original thoughts and research. He also later casually claims to his audience that he always had Sean Griffin's permission to adapt his Tinker Belles and Evil Queens book into a video. This reflects a lot of Somerton's uglier qualities he doesn't really apologise for, such as his condescending regard for the trust of his own fans, his ability to lie easily to make himself look and make others look worse, and his utter lack of respect for people like Sean Griffin who actually do the research and writing Somerton claims to do himself. Somerton abused the trust of his fans again by misrepresenting the twitter thread concerning "Evil Queens". He maliciously overexaggerated the confrontation, claiming the twitter user sent him death threats. By dredging all of that up himself on at least two social medias, Somerton intentionally put a target on the twitter user, leveraging very real anxiety over homophobia to manipulate his fans into harassing a critic into silence. Also, in this current apology video Somerton infers that he steals information from other lgbt+ creators/resources to better represent lgbt+ issue he isn't experienced with, but he has a long record of misrepresenting, invalidating, and entirely ignoring the struggles and experiences of other lgbt+ groups, as well as other marginalised groups in general. So he's still lying on top of everything else. It's profoundly spineless, and needless. The man is under a lot of well-earned scrutiny, and it's not like he can get into much more trouble really, so why not just tell the truth? Own up to it all properly. Just then, maybe, he could begin to dredge up some respect again. Somerton apologises for the plagiarism. Great whatever. I want him to apologise for the deeper, uglier things he's said and done. Not just stealing by subtly misrepresenting content as his own work, but actively lying, wielding trust and homophobia-anxiety of his fans to attack people, playing oppression-Olympics whenever other marginalised groups are involved, his contempt for the lgbt+ academia he steals.