Let’s Dive Right Into The Wall, Side Three
“It was a revolving door of human garbage there.”
— Jacob Chapman, on Channel Awesome
VIII. In the Flesh
We’ve finally come to The Wall’s climax, in which Pink is so blitzed out of his mind that when he marches onstage to perform, he imagines himself becoming a fascist demagogue and unleashing a wave of white supremacist terror upon a world he believes did him wrong. At this part of the review, Doug Walker comes out dressed as Fash Pink with a demented look on his face and, I kid you not, “person you hate” scrawled on his face in permanent marker, like he’s in a bad political cartoon. It is a sight to behold.
Doug claims that Fash Pink was a protest against Thatcher specifically, but still kept deliberately vague so we could project our own Hated Figure With A Cult Of Personality onto him.²⁵ This is dead wrong. Fash Pink specifically represents what happens when you let the worms eat into your brain: you become the thing that haunts your nightmares. He represents fascism incarnate, the thing that destroyed Britain during World War II, the thing that threatened to spread genocidal hysteria across the world, the thing that killed his own father. This is Pink becoming what he hates.
²⁵ This is, in part, an accusation that Waters Does Politics Bad, which, uh, lol. Although the album isn’t a political album and the songs aren’t political in the same way, say, the collected works of Woody Guthrie are political, Waters’ personal politics are relatively well-developed (albeit not unimpeachable; the man still supports Julian Assange) and they do heavily inform the story. A political reading of The Wall will invariably be very, very fruitful. The In The Flesh/Run Like Hell/Waiting For the Worms sequence, for instance, is actually a very pointed commentary about the nature of fascism and what being a fascist does to a person, and to reduce it to a vague criticism of Thatcher (who only became PM as The Wall was being recorded) is just fucking insulting. Anyone who’s seen the 1990 Berlin performance of The Trial knows that when it comes to politics, Roger Waters knows exactly what he’s doing.
Also: “Thatcher’s administration?” How American.
Couple things to pick at here. To start, in the late 70s, fascism was resurgent in pop culture in a way that wouldn’t be seen again until…now, basically. A lot of punks would go round wearing swastikas in order to shock the older WWII generation,²⁶ eventually coalescing into the skinheads and the Oi! subculture. Eric Clapton goes on a drunken racist tirade at a concert in Birmingham, demanding that Britain expel all its immigrants and people of color, declaring his support for Enoch Powell, and repeatedly shouting “Keep Britain White.” David Bowie, coked out of his mind in Stockholm, says that “Britain would benefit from a fascist leader,” and a few months later in London is caught outside Victoria Station gesturing to the crowd with what he swore was a simple handwave but in the pictures looked an awful lot like a Nazi salute. So having Pink, now cutting a stark, angular figure akin to the Thin White Duke,²⁷ go onstage and almost Claptonly demand to know if there are any queers in the theatre tonight would hit extra hard for an audience all too familiar with the noxious energies that were brewing in English music in 1979 and 1982.
²⁶ This is similar to how alt-right politics started off as trolling. Go figure.
²⁷ Worth mentioning here that when transforming into Fash Pink he shaved off his eyebrows, just like good old Syd Barrett; an indication of precisely how far out of his tree he was at this point.
In tandem with this, there’s a commentary here about the way we as a society idolize rock stars. We model our thoughts and actions on theirs. Roger Waters, as a famous person, goes up onstage, and the crowd cheers, just because it’s him. Through his sheer charisma, he can create an environment where you the audience are drained of all individuality and become one wild brainwashed horde; where chaos, violence, and lizard-brained sycophancy reigns supreme; where he can disdainfully spit on you and you will fucking love it. All of this is reinforced during Run Like Hell, where Pink turns his freshly radicalized audience loose on the world, conjuring up images eerily reminiscent of a Proud Boys rally, with skinheads tearing through the streets beating up marginalized people all because Pink told them to. He’s created an environment just as dehumanizing as the one he grew up in, but this time it’s a good thing, see, because he runs the show now.
In summary: no, Doug. You’ve got the point of this song completely backward. Surely you must recognize this on some level, as even in your review the people who are meant to hate you actually adore you. “Hate me,” you bellow, and your audience shouts back “Yes, Doug, I hate you!” with rapturous joy. It shouldn’t be “person you hate” on your face in magic marker, it should have been “person you love.” Specifically, the person you love warping your adoration of them for their own nefarious purposes.
Even more specifically, for cancellation.
IX. Waiting for the Worms
I am going to come right out and say it. Doug’s Waiting for the Worms pastiche is the single most gobsmackingly offensive part of this review. Granted, his point is the usual boomer crap about how social media is sucking all nuance from the Discourse and is turning the Discourse itself into a fiery ragefest, where anyone and everyone can be cancelled just because people with zillions of followers (“person you hate”) arbitrarily decide they’re the hate sink of the week. You know, “bwaaahhhhh cancel culture bad.”²⁸ That’s nothing uniquely offensive in a vacuum. Problem is, it’s Doug Walker holding forth here, and when Doug Walker specifically is complaining about cancel culture, quite a lot of subtext erupts to the surface that needs to be engaged with.
²⁸ To head something off at the pass: when we talk about cancel culture, we’re not talking about, say, when a random queer kid publishes intentionally disturbing fanfic as a form of trauma processing and is run off the internet for their trouble. We’re talking about when someone faces material consequences for being actively abusive or bigoted.
It’s 2014, and Blip’s days are numbered. As quite a few people pointed out even at the time, Blip’s life followed the general trajectory of most internet services: founded in somebody’s garage, gets huge but nevertheless remains unprofitable, goes through crippling growing pains from its newfound popularity, gets bought out by some enormous company, original founders retire to a tropical island made of money, company runs internet service into the ground, internet service quietly shuts down. The year before, Blip was bought by Maker Studios, whose parent company was Disney.²⁹ And then Maker starts whittling down what was once a generous ad revenue program. And then the ad revenue checks stop coming in regularly.
²⁹ This is tangential to this part of the story, but like any new owner, Maker promptly starts implementing some executive decisions whose primary function appears to be throwing their weight around so everyone knows who the new boss is. The one I remember was their jimmying with the terms of service such that people who upload to their site pretty much have to be professional filmmakers; which I was pretty sore about because it meant if I ever made a video review show of my own I wouldn’t be able to upload it there. I went on a tear about this on Tumblr, calling out the producers who thought that was a good idea at the time, because I was that butthurt.
This forces a lot of Channel Awesome producers to insert midroll advertisements into their videos, because by this point the ad revenue coming in from Blip is barely paying the bills. The producers explain their financial situation to us and why they have the midrolls, we the fandom understand and sympathize, and those of us who have Adblock make an exception for Blip so they can make some ad revenue money. This is regarded as a perfectly equitable exchange. No reasonable human is complaining about this.
So Michaud, a decidedly unreasonable human, takes it upon himself to corner Obscurus Lupa while she’s up at the studio and verbally blast her about midrolls so severely³⁰ she’s left crying in a bathroom. Soon after there’s a call where Michaud and Doug start micromanaging Lupa’s use of midrolls, during which Doug butts in and makes things worse by suggesting she just pump out more videos like he does because, he said, that’s just his work ethic. You see how condescending that is.
³⁰ Despite everything I outline up there, Michaud swears up and down the midrolls are what’s making people turn on Adblock, and no, he doesn’t care that they’re necessary for her to scrape by, she needs to cut it out. I betcha Michaud is secretly one of the guys who always gave the TGWTGsecrets people ulcers back in the day.
Patreon comes along, allowing dedicated fans to give directly to the creators to keep their shows running. It looks like a great way to break the ad revenue double bind Lupa and many other producers are stuck in. Here, though, is the problem: having an alternate source of income means they will be less dependent on money coming in from midroll ads, and thus from the casual views that an aggregator like Channel Awesome could provide. Consequently, any disciplinary action Michaud explosively threatens anyone with carries less weight, because a producer now has the leverage to tell him to fuck off, they don’t need him, they and their dedicated audience will go elsewhere. This means that Channel Awesome has a vested interest in keeping their producers off sites like Patreon, to the point where they blocked Suede’s completely neutral video on the service because it simply made others aware it was an option.
So when Lupa approaches Rob Walker about her own Patreon, he retorts that it’s a “slap in the face,” and Channel Awesome will not promote it. But it’s like a Kickstarter or Indiegogo! “Not them either, we don’t do e-begging.” But what about your Indiegogo? “That’s different. Executive authority.” Channel Awesome management would continue to drag their feet over Patreon for months. They would eventually allow producers to promote their own Patreons in their videos, albeit with strict guidelines introduced after many of the promotion bumpers were already filmed, but boosting on the website itself was apparently still verboten.
It’s January 2015. Lupa notices that, despite management’s continued obstinance over crowdfunding, Brad Jones’ Patreon is getting promoted.³¹ She confronts Michaud about this over Skype, calls him out for his hypocrisy and consistent lack of communication — nobody told anyone this was apparently okay now — and an argument ensues. A little later, Michaud asks to pull Lupa aside for a sidebar (“sidebar” in the same way getting mugged and beaten is a “philosophical discussion”). She says no, and leaves the computer for a few hours to go film.
³¹ This would, in hindsight, be an early indication that ya boi was bought and paid for.
While she is away, Michaud reappears with Doug in tow, and asks to call again. No response. After waiting all of fifteen minutes, the man who’s notorious for not getting back to people for weeks on end fires Lupa and, within hours, takes all her content off the site. She would describe this in the Google Doc as “the quickest they’d ever updated anything.” Phelous, who had already been seriously considering leaving the site for some time, quits in protest immediately afterward.
Lupa’s firing and Phelous’ resignation is concurrent with the departures of Lindsay Ellis, Kyle Kallgren, and Andrew Dickman, all for unrelated reasons.³² This is the single biggest exodus of talent the site has faced so far in its history, and as such makes abundantly clear to the fandom three things. First, for whatever joy Channel Awesome brought us over the years, it is not a nice place to work. Second, the site is in terminal decline. Third, these two things are related.
³² Lindsay’s departure also involved a Michaud ream session; this time because the volcanic dipshit got suckered into a smear campaign painting Dan Olson as a child pornographer. This sprung up because Olson did some digging about 8chan’s symbiotic relationship with child pornographers and posted a big article on Medium about it. Says something about Michaud that instead of screaming at Olson himself, he chose instead to scream at the woman who vouched for him.
For me, this was around when I stopped thinking of myself a fan of Channel Awesome and started thinking of myself as a fan of internet reviewers in general, some of whom happened to be affiliated with Channel Awesome. In my case, this was helped along because I was really getting into screamy Let’s Players³³ and video reviewers who were never associated with CA,³⁴ meaning that Channel Awesome stuff was no longer most of what I watched online. In addition, it had become my habit to watch their shows directly on Blip, bypassing the CA website entirely. Speaking of which…
³³ That’s a portion of my life that I suspect will warrant a reckoning of its own someday. For now, though, I’ll just say that Slowbeef’s extended roast of Tobuscus is always extremely cathartic.
³⁴ Including, to my retroactive embarrassment, Jared Knabenbauer.
It’s August 2015. After months of being on life support, Blip finally shuts down. This has two immediate effects. First: the job of anyone trying to chronicle Channel Awesome’s history — and the history of internet reviews in general — just got a lot harder. While the producers originally had solid plans to move everything back over to YouTube and other video hosting platforms, in practice most people’s video archives currently have giant holes blown in them,³⁵ and broad swathes of Channel Awesome’s collective output, especially videos from less prominent producers, are now most likely lost. Second: as most reviewers move back to YouTube, they return to a platform where, regardless of any other bullshit they might deal with, it’s comparatively easy to find new people to watch. This, in addition to most producers’ reliance on Patreon, means their income no longer depends on people wandering over after watching this week’s Nostalgia Critic, completely undercutting the reason for Channel Awesome’s existence in the first place. The instant Blip dies, Channel Awesome’s relevance as an aggregator dies along with it.
³⁵ This is due to several related factors, each weighted differently for each producer. First: Blip’s more lax approach to copyright enforcement means that certain videos that were OK there were at risk of being taken down on YouTube. Those questionable videos were generally moved over to a lesser-known service like Screenwave, DailyMotion, or Vimeo that may or may not shut down later. Second: neglect. As Channel Awesome declines and the community disintegrates, some producers lose interest in making reviews altogether and move on to other pursuits, letting their archives rot. Third, and last: embarrassment. The old videos aren’t up because the producer doesn’t want them back up. That, from what I understand, is why most of Lindsay Ellis’ Channel Awesome videos aren’t easily accessible online.
Channel Awesome limps along at half strength for a few years after that. Once every so often a well-known contributor still on the website leaves, either because they got sick of the bullshit or because they got sacked; Leon Thomas bails in April 2016, ChaosD1 in May 2017, and MarzGurl in September 2017. I sever many of the remaining ties I have with the fandom when I delete my Tumblr in the middle of a depressive episode brought on by Trump’s election…although, it should be noted, by then almost everyone I knew from the fandom had well and truly moved on themselves. After that, I watch the people I like, whether they’re CA people or not, and generally try not to think about the site at all.
It’s March 14, 2018. My best friend messages me on Discord, alerting me to what she describes as a “mile-long Twitter thread just about TGWTG stuff.” As it turns out, the day before Lupa got a question asking what she thought of Doug’s review of IT, and in response she made it clear precisely how she felt about him and his abuse and neglect and incompetence and shitty business practices. By the time it comes to my attention it’s mutated into an enormous round-table between former producers like Lupa, MarzGurl, and PushinUpRoses and [then-]current producers (!) like Linkara,³⁶ unloading about all the issues that plagued the site for all the years they were toiling there. This thread goes viral within the fandom, generating its own hashtag, Change the Channel, and destroying what little remained of Channel Awesome’s reputation.
³⁶ That Linkara was comfortable complaining about Channel Awesome despite still being on it, when Michaud would scream and yell and threaten to fire anyone who dared say anything even remotely critical about the site, says a lot about how little power management had to stop them at this point.
The Twitter thread is too big and unwieldy for most people to sift through, so on April 2 the Google Doc is released, a seventy-three page monster documenting all of Channel Awesome’s behind-the-scenes failings in minute detail. Some of the stuff we already knew about, like the account of Lupa’s firing. Some stuff we didn’t, which we’ll get to, oh god. But what’s shocking about the Google Doc is less the individual stories (although some of those are indeed extremely shocking), but the full effect. The experience of reading these stories is like a baptism. Before we only knew bits and pieces of what was going on and could believe Channel Awesome were only shitty to specific people. Now we have a complete understanding: these were not isolated incidents; Channel Awesome was shitty to everyone, all the time. These are people who walled themselves off from anyone who wasn’t part of Team Critic, and came to view all the other producers with unbridled contempt. In their isolation, they’ve come to arrogantly believe that their ramshackle operation is the only way to do things, taking an odd sort of pride in their ignorance even as everyone around them grew and matured, and how dare someone come up to them and tell them they’re doing anything wrong, whether it be their reviewing style or how their film shoots are organized or how they manage the producers or anything else…and that goes double when that someone is a woman.
That’s not even the worst of what’s been leveled at Channel Awesome management. They have also been accused of protecting a known sexual predator not once but twice. The first instance involves Mike Ellis, who sexually harassed Sean Fausz and Holly Brown, but remained in his position after management found out for over two years. When he finally was shit-canned, not for being a sex pest but for something completely unrelated, Channel Awesome had to put Holly up in a safe house because they were concerned Ellis would retaliate.
The second instance involves an unnamed prominent former producer who stands accused of sexually grooming several of his young female fans. The account in the Google Doc itself is from someone who was eighteen at the time, and that’s apparently representative of the demographics he targeted. The Google Doc also mentions two other women who’ve come forward, and when we were figuring out who the groomer was, a fourth woman comes forward on Reddit accusing him of straight-up sexually assaulting her.
Management was aware of the earliest of these accusations for a year and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. With that in mind, notice that the dates on the chat logs CA released on this issue (which we’ll get to) indicates that the fourth woman’s sexual assault happened maybe a month before the accused producer was fired. Meaning: Channel Awesome’s complete mishandling of this issue left a sex pest in a position of power, with easy access to more victims, leading to at least one more woman getting hurt.
So, in summary: Michaud is a thundering, volatile, erratic waste of carbon. Rob Walker is a piece of work himself. And Doug…we’ll get to Doug, but for right now, let’s just say he’s the beneficiary. Management is either ignorant, absent, or abusive. The site protected multiple sexual predators. Everything laid out in the Google Doc adds up to one single, inescapable truth: Channel Awesome has deliberately cultivated a working environment that destroys people.
The same day the Google Doc is published, Channel Awesome releases a statement. It is four short paragraphs of ass-covering PR bullshit overflowing with equivocations and weasel words, and is quite possibly one of the most astonishingly tone-deaf things I have ever had the misfortune to read. Some highlights:
- “We’re open to constructive criticism […] But criticism that isn’t a means to a productive end does little for either the party criticizing or those in the line of fire.” Translation: be nice to us or we’ll ignore you. Hell, if you are nice to us, we just might ignore you anyway.
- “When the need arose, we have distanced ourselves from people who were particularly callous…” They just called producers like Lupa, ChaosD1, and JesuOtaku³⁷ “callous” for pushing back on their bullshit. This would be proof enough that they weren’t sorry, except…
- “For the people who have spoken out about past instances they deemed hurtful…” Translation: “when you say we’ve hurt or abused you, you are lying.”
- “…we sincerely regret you felt that way.” Channel Awesome protected sexual predators. Fuck off.
³⁷ One interesting thing about the Google Doc is that we learn Jake Chapman had Michaud figured out. When Michaud threatened to fire him for publicly criticizing Channel Awesome, Chapman threatened to publish all the dirt he had on them and burn their reputation to the fucking ground. According to the Google Doc, Michaud “crumpled like wet cardboard,” and Chapman would leave on his own terms.
This prompts further outcry and another attempt at PR spin a few days later that somehow manages to be even more catastrophic than the first one. In the meantime, from the day the Twitter thread goes viral, longtime Channel Awesome producers abandon the website like rats from a sinking ship. Todd leaves March 22. Suede and Linkara leave March 24. Mike Jeavons and Diamanda Hagan leave March 25. Film Brain leaves April 3. Nash, Tony Goldmark, and Last Angry Geek leave April 7. Angry Joe leaves April 12. When the dust settles, there are exactly two non-Team-Critic producers on Channel Awesome: Guru Larry, who only sticks around out of spite that management never promoted him, and Brad Jones. Let’s talk about Brad Jones.
It’s July 2017, the Before Time. I’m at PopCon in Indianapolis with my best friend. Brad Jones shows up at our booth. He is extremely nice and engages with us polysyllabically, asking us lots of questions about my best friend’s art and what we get up to, that sort of thing.³⁸ The next day, we head over to the Stoned Gremlin booth. Brad and Lupa are there. They are both lovely. We present them with some fanart, my best friend buys some DVDs, everyone walks away happy. There is no indication that things would explode the way they did.
³⁸ For extra cringe, I was cosplaying as ProJared’s Asagao Academy character that day. So much of PopCon 2017 has aged poorly that it sometimes feels like the one nice thing about that whole weekend was getting to meet my best friend in person for the first time.
It’s July 2018. It’s been three months since the worst of Change the Channel and things have cooled down somewhat. Brad Jones does an interview with the Double Toasted podcast, where he makes his first public statement about the controversy. He accuses the Change the Channel people of deliberately taking events out of context to suit their own agenda (this when Brad wouldn’t have been privy to a lot of the stuff that came out) and laughs off a lot of the controversy because, hey, Logan Paul filmed an actual dead body and he’s still doing okay! This precipitates a falling out between Brad and Lupa which would only get nastier, culminating with Brad accusing the Change the Channel people (with Lupa as their diabolical mastermind or something) of harassing his family to the point where he was forced to move house, with Lupa, in turn, accusing Brad of being a compulsive liar (with DM conversations to back this up) and throwing his colleagues under the bus. It should be clear by this point, based on whose story tracks better with the stories of everyone else on the site, who I believe here.
Brad did not say a whole lot that was explicitly foot-in-mouth, largely working in hints and implications, but the sum total of his Double Toasted comments, particularly the crack about Logan Paul, reveals something extremely troubling: Brad only engaged with Change the Channel in terms of how it affected his bottom line and Channel Awesome’s bottom line. This is just PR for him. That’s something you only do when you don’t believe you’ve done anything wrong. Given that the Walkers have not made any public statements about the controversy beyond those two in April, and after this went down Brad is still tightly connected with the Walkers (later showing up in a review of a certain Pink Floyd movie), it’s reasonable to assume that’s how Channel Awesome’s management feels as well.³⁹
Channel Awesome believe themselves to be innocent of all charges. Channel Awesome protected sexual predators. Speaking of which…
³⁹ The other people on Team Critic like Malcolm and Tamara have said similar things as well, gushing over how wonderful a work environment the studio is. That may be, but that doesn’t cancel out the hell that everyone else went through. Brad Jones may have been nice to me personally, but that doesn’t mean his response to Change the Channel hasn’t been extremely callous and dismissive at best and actively malicious at worst. (“They’re lying! They’re all salty because they didn’t go to Applebees!”)
It’s April 11, 2018. Channel Awesome publishes their second statement, attempting to respond to some of the specific accusations leveled against them, one of which involved the unnamed groomer. They publish some chat logs meant to exonerate them, but they screw up blanking out the predator’s name, and the very next day we learn who the guilty party is.
Justin “JewWario” Carmical was an import video game reviewer who was known as one of the nicest, most caring people associated with Channel Awesome, to the point where even after he left he was known as the site’s Mr Rogers. This most famously comes through in a speech he gave in a 2013 livestream, the “you are not stupid” speech, which a lot of us thought was positively inspirational. He also, from what I understood, gave some fantastic bear hugs. He committed suicide in January 2014, and the entire site puts up tribute videos in a mass act of mourning. His death came as a shock to me at the time, because he was only 42, the oldest person on Channel Awesome, maybe, but still too goddamn young.
Not long after some internet sleuthing teased out that the dates on the chat logs corresponded with when Carmical left Channel Awesome, and that the blanked-out area is perfectly sized for the name “Justin” and that first letter wasn’t fully redacted and looks an awful lot like a J, four different people formerly associated with the site (Holly, MarzGurl,⁴⁰ Jack Shen, Jacob Chapman) all independently confirm that he was the unnamed groomer mentioned in the Google Doc. I’ve managed to keep a relatively clear head throughout most of the Change the Channel stuff because a lot of this isn’t news to me, and the stuff that is news only reinforces my understanding of what was going on. However, the instant we learn that JewWario was a rapist, my stomach immediately falls through my shoes.
⁴⁰ …who, to be clear, only found out as the Google Doc was being prepared. Justin’s name was left out at the victim’s request.
About a year or two before his death, there were ripplings through the fandom that JewWario was a predator. I don’t know where they came from, nor do I remember how they percolated, all I know is that there were rumors. I do, however, remember that our response was of total disbelief. “What are you talking about?” we thought, “Justin’s a staggeringly nice guy, he would never do something like that!” We didn’t know Justin. We knew the public persona that Justin brought forward, but given the particular low-budget immediacy of internet video, we conflated that persona with how he was in real life. Turns out, the Justin we thought we knew was a creep. And we were warned. And we didn’t listen. In some small way, we too were complicit in perpetuating an environment in which Justin could hurt people.⁴¹ Just as Channel Awesome is unsalvageable, so too is the Channel Awesome fandom unsalvageable.
⁴¹ I want to emphasize that I do not hold the producers who knew him to the same level of accountability because I’ve seen absolutely no evidence they were approached about Justin the way we were.
I might still have some positive memories of the fandom, and CA might have pointed me towards stuff I still enjoy today, but between the revelations about Justin and our role in it and everything else we’ve since learned about that irredeemable trash fire of a company, I can safely say that the period of my life from 2010 to about 2016 was a big fat waste of my time. Burn it all to ashes, burn the ashes, and don’t look back.
An integral part of burning the fandom to the ground is burning the thing we were fans of to the ground, and this, finally, brings us back once again to Doug Walker, the eye of the storm. Of the three management guys in Channel Awesome, he is the one the Google Doc has the least amount of dirt on, but make no mistake: for as much as he feigns ignorance about his company’s problems, he, too, is complicit. Doug is perfectly happy to go along with much of the site’s bullshit, because he’s the channel’s golden boy. His was the deciding vote as to whether Holly would stay employed. He was present when Michaud fired Lupa for being AFK for fifteen minutes. This man is more involved in Channel Awesome’s inner workings than he lets on. Doug Walker looks at stuff like Rob and Michaud’s managerial decisions, how they communicate with their producers, how they enforce company policy, how they handled the situations with Mike Ellis and Justin Carmical and kept them in positions of power for years, and thinks that’s good business.⁴² Doug Walker is fucking evil.
⁴² That’s why I’m not harping on the whole Michaud-owns-the-Nostalgia-Critic’s-IP thing that much. While it’s true that he does, because the Walkers are morons who signed the rights away early, it easily invites this conspiracy theory where Doug is still with the company because Michaud is forcing him to stay, whereas much of the evidence suggests instead that Doug sticks with Channel Awesome not because he has to but because he wants to.
And now it’s September 2019, and this arrogant little shit’s just released a video on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, including a sequence parodying the animated marching Nazi hammers from the original, only instead of marching Nazi hammers it’s marching Nazi smartphones.⁴³ That’s meant to be a parody of cancel culture, and the way cancel culture supposedly goes after people at random. Meaning, Doug Walker, a man who has by now been cancelled multiple times over for damn good reason, believes he has been unfairly targeted by the frothing internet hate mobs. Meaning, Doug Walker, the face of Channel Awesome, does not believe he has done anything wrong.
⁴³ Lest we forget, the same review that has this parody sequence comparing cancel culture to literal Nazis criticized the film for (apparently) comparing the British school system to the Holocaust.
Channel Awesome believe themselves to be innocent of all charges. Channel Awesome created a working environment that destroyed people. Channel Awesome protected sexual predators. Channel Awesome can fucking rot.