Discussion CondemnedByHistory / WebOriginal

Fair enough! Though I'll instead archive the code version... and edit this when I want to try to improve it, okay.

• James Somerton emerged in 2018 amongst the growing interest in detailed video essays, and quickly developed a fanbase for his focus on LGBT media analysis and history with a strong leftist bent. Somerton became known in leftist and queer circles for his detailed and often insightful focus on an undervalued part of media history, his broad array of topics, his editing style, and his comparatively frequent updating schedule that saw him uploading new essays at least once a month, with even high-profile US activists publicly discussing and recommending his work. However, all of this fell apart immediately in December 2023 when Harry Brewis released an extensive expose that revealed the vast majority of Somerton's writing had in fact been plagiarized from dozens of different sources, many of them little known queer writers, almost all of whom went unnamed and uncredited in Somerton's videos while he passed off their work as his own. This was quickly followed by a second expose by Todd Nathanson digging into Somerton's original content, which was filled with bad media analysis, misinformation seemingly made up out of whole cloth (and thrown into stark relief by the rest of it being plagiarized), and blatant research errors that, at best, uncritically parroted questionable sources and, at worst, actively contradicted the handful of sources he did cite to promote pseudo-history and outright conspiracy theories (most infamously when he claimed the Nazis were responsible for US fitness culture). Somerton would sometimes manufacture controversies out of thin air that painted fanbases of straight women as opposing proper representation for gay men, sometimes with thinly-veiled misogyny, to support a narrative of straight women as liking the idea of male homosexuality in the abstract but being repulsed by it in practice. To top it all off, at times when Somerton was called out for his theft he would weaponize his audience and identity by claiming he was being attacked for being a gay creator, knowing large segments of his emotionally vulnerable fanbase would be easily manipulated into defending him from all criticism. These exposes quickly became too widespread and detailed to ignore or defend against, and Somerton's standing online collapsed, with him deleting his social media accounts, Patreon, and eventually all his videos over the next few days. Bar one poorly received and quickly-deleted attempt at an apology video, Somerton has since vanished from the Internet completely, with his name now synonymous with online plagiarism and fraud, and his former fans are frequently disgusted that they so ardently followed him to begin with.