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The original was posted on /r/youtubedrama by /u/Just_Want_To_Write on 2024-04-08 20:35:25.
So, you may or may not have heard of a channel called After Skool (here’s the link). I first came into contact when a family member began sending videos of theirs to me, and I got a feeling that something was amiss. They’re startling popular, with 3.14 million subscribers and counting, as well as almost 200 videos under their belt. They bill themselves, per their channel description, as a channel that strives to “empower the individual and deliver profound ideas through art.” In other words, they’ve marketed themselves as a new philosophy channel, and they have the same bright, cheery, whiteboard-animation style of AsapSCIENCE to hook in viewers of all ages.
At first blush, the channel may seem harmless. Videos like “The Profound Meaning of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave” and “The Power of Radical Honesty” don’t look like misinformation at all—they actually seem interesting. And a spat of fairly reputable guests—Dr. Anna Lembke and Dr. Robert Waldinger, for example, of which I could find only credibility in their fields—cloaks the channel in an air of authority. By now, the reputation curated by After Skool is one of content that is passionately spoken but credibly delivered—think AsapSCIENCE meets Big Think.
But the truth? After Skool is a toxic swamp of nightmarish propaganda.
Let me explain.
1. The Brand
The first whiffs of danger arise when visiting their website, afterskool.net. The first thing you see as the page loads is a shoved-in-your-face banner, emblazoned with the catchphrases “Skool > School” and “Don’t Let School Get in the Way of Your Education.” This could go either way—propaganda trying to repel a leftist invasion of our institutions, or a program designed to genuinely supplement learning with philosophical ideas. But this cryptic clue isn’t cryptic for much longer, because a little ways underneath this is the conspiracy-laden headline “The ideas spread by the mainstream media are toxic and they are aimed to keep us divided. Divide and conquer.” Oh no . . .
As for the staff behind this operation, there are three “collaborators” listed on their about page, in addition to the numerous “contributors” whose ideas or lessons were included in videos (we’ll get to the videos later). We have Mark W. the animator, Martina M. as a “consultant,” and Mike S. running social media. However, the latter two team members have been cycled through multiple times, so for all intents and purposes, Mark W. is the “mastermind,” if you will, behind this operation.
Already, what has been made to seem as a team of creative minds pumping out invigorating philosophical content has devolved into one man stringing together ideas from other people into videos twisted to his own propagandistic messaging.
And speaking of the videos . . . it’s time to peek into what’s going on After Skool.
2. The Videos
The channel has almost 200 videos, so it’s impossible to cover them all—especially since After Skool has done an excellent job of smoking and mirroring their misinformation behind some true philosophical ideas and videos. But let’s get a taste of After Skool’s bitter cuisine nonetheless to see just how topsy turvy their world really is.
Before even clicking on a single video, a pattern emerges between their titles and thumbnails; most of them show people, always drawn tired and overweight, locked (sometimes physically) onto their phones as swarms of social media assault their minds, while other people—the “enlightened,” as After Skool thinks—look on the world with vigor and newfound appreciation, broken from the shackles of the modern-day Matrix (one of their thumbnails says to break free from the Matrix) and living in real reality, not a manufactured one. This is a mindset very common amongst propagandists.
Their most recent video (as of now, April 8) is from 5 days ago, and has the this-can’t-be-anything-but-a-conspiracy-theory title “TIMELINE SPLIT - Humans Are Splitting into Different Dimensions.” This is already delusional material, but it gets even worse. The actual video describes a split between the third dimension—the Matrix, essentially—and the fifth dimension of the enlightened, and this split has resulted in multiple timelines and dimensions and consciousnesses. It’s hard to summarize coherently, because the concept itself is incoherent. But the pinned comment is from the “collaborator”—for each video on this channel, the collaborator is the one who provides the ideas and likely co-writes the video—called The Alchemist. Visiting her YouTube channel unleashes even worse conspiracy content, from “This is How Archons Create the Illusion of Consent (The Forces of Involution)” to “This is How You SHIFT to The NEW EARTH (Crystallization),” produced by Sarah Elkhaldy, a so-called “claircognizant”. After Skool is peppered with these kinds of new-age, hippy-dippy, unlocking-the-spiritual-dimension videos (think the Love Has Won cult).
But heading back to the far-right propaganda field, it gets even worse. Right off the bat, one of their top contributors is the one and only Jordan Peterson. That’s right, the Jordan Peterson. The one who said that “women’s studies should be defunded” and that he won’t use “made-up words [pronouns other than he or she] of postmodern Neo-Marxists.” His videos on After Skool are about as ridiculous as one would expect from him, from “It’s NOT OK to be WEAK - Jordan Peterson Motivation” (which shows Peterson proclaiming “It’s not ok to be a weak loser” next to a drawing of an overweight man playing video games—of course wildly stereotypical) to “A Harmless Man is NOT a Good Man” (in which After Skool, in a pinned comment, responds to criticism of him featuring Jordan Peterson by saying “Believe it or not the world does not revolve around you. I make these videos for my own personal growth, to help me on my own selfish journey,” which of course serves so many Matt Rife vibes).
But believe it or not, it gets worse than Jordan Peterson. A video from December 2023, titled “ChatGPT: The Soul Eater,” which takes a sensitive and interesting topic—the role of artistic expression in a world of AI-generated content—and turns it into a Biblical parable about how the effort God put into creating the world isn’t present in ChatGPT, making it a soul-crushing, world-devouring presence that rejects human spirit. (And of course, the video wouldn’t be complete without After Skool’s trademarked stereotypical portraits of “unenlightened” people, illustrating them yet again as tired, greasy, ungroomed, overweight, and physically imprisoned in Kafkaesque technological machinations.)
A video from January 2023 is even worse. The title is horrifying enough: “Exposing Scientific Dogmas - Banned TED Talk.” The video begins with a startlingly conservative illustration: a group of people—presumably brainwashed liberals—chanting “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science!” next to a supposed definition of “science delusion.” If this wasn’t shocking enough, the video goes on to question basic scientific principles like conservation of matter and biological heredity as “scientific dogma.” But here’s the kicker: the author of the video is Rupert Sheldrake. Per his Wikipedia page, he is a “parapsychology researcher” and “New Age author” who “proposed the concept of morphic resonance [another New Age type of idea], a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience.”
In the same conservative vein, a video posted in February of 2023, titled “Equity: The Thief of Human Potential,” postulates without evidence a grotesque claim that equity won’t give everybody equal opportunity against systemic barriers, but rather lower the standards of society to accommodate degenerates. The author of this video is Thomas Sowell, who, according to Wikipedia, has said that Joe Biden winning in 2020 would be “akin to the fall of the Roman Empire."
The videos only get stranger. One is from Heather Heying, who herself said that she, her husband, and their kids are all on ivermectin, so her scientific credibility is as bottom of the barrel as her husband’s. And yet, the channel uploaded a video in 2023 from Heying, one of the most blatantly conservative videos yet: “Sex & Gender: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Oh no. Early in the video is the disturbing claim that giving men and women equal opportunities is “a different kind of sexism” because men and women are inherently different and should be allowed...
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