Social media is the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli and must be fed a constant stream of human sacrifices. How would we even know if we were alive if we didn’t see arterial blood spurting across our screens? Today’s heart was ripped out of the chest of a certain MrBeast (although he’ll probably survive). Born Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast is a crazy popular YouTuber with 131 million subscribers who feeds them a steady stream of stunts and nonsense (one video had him counting to 100,000—I’m not kidding—and it’s weirdly mesmerizing).
As he’s gotten more popular, his stunts have often focused on giving money to folks, out of kindness and clicks. This generosity had to be punished.
Enter BuzzFeed with an article outlining the “controversy” over MrBeast’s latest stunt: helping blind people not be blind. The fiend!
The young monster (Donaldson is 24) discovered that a lot of blindness can be fixed with a simple operation. MrBeast decided to give 1,000 people the gift of vision, and then put the video up on YouTube: “1,000 Blind People See For The First Time.” To nobody’s surprise, the reactions are joyful. “Oh man! No cloudiness, no blurriness!” “Oh it’s perfect! I can see everything!”
“On Twitter, there were a number of negative responses.” Of course, there were. Well played BuzzFeed, you’ve succeeded in making curing the blind a sin. Jesus is lucky you weren’t around when he was healing lepers. “Water to wine, Jesus? Sounds like you’re enabling alcoholics!”
BuzzFeed even found someone who thought it smelled of Satan.
Others said he was doing charity porn. (This is a much-needed channel that YouPorn should consider. “Yeah baby, helping the homeless drives me crazy!”)
It’s also making MrBeast money! Heaven forbid a guy profits from advertising his good works. He’s supposed to earn his rent money questioning privilege or selling patriotic pillows.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of MrBeast to varying degrees. The New York Times reported that he has berated his employees. He made anti-gay jokes on Twitter as recently as 2017, and he’s a young and powerful business owner who idolizes Elon Musk. And, of course, there’s the question of his intentions when creating stunt philanthropy content.
So he’s a boss who has yelled at his staff? A fascist! He likes Elon Musk? A Nazi!
And anti-gay jokes “as recently as 2017”! You can hear the collective gasp of prudish horror from the BuzzFeed staff. 2017? Why that was only SIX YEARS AGO! When MrBeast was, um, eighteen years old.
Blaming an 18-year-old for awful jokes is pretty sad but let’s see what BuzzFeed dug up. (It’s always good to find the actual words targeted in one of these digital witch hunts.) Ah, it’s a link to a 2018 Atlantic article by Taylor Lorenz,1 “‘YouTube's Biggest Philanthropist’ Has a History of Homophobic Comments.” Like? “Windows is gay” (2015). “I don’t have a printer, fag” (2016). And “STFU fag” (2017).
That a teenager used slurs in a way that was common to teenagers (and not necessarily meant homophobically) is unfortunate but not surprising. Teenagers like to shock. To hold up six-year-old tweets as proof that MrBeast is a homophobe is playing pretty damn dirty pool.
Ok, maybe you still aren’t convinced that MrBeast is Beelzebub’s younger brother. What do you say to GENOCIDE?!?
That’s right. MrBeast wants to eliminate blind people.
Another huge problem: MrBeast's video seems to regard disability as something that needs to be solved. He doesn't say in the video or in any of his subsequent public statements whether he consulted with the video's subjects about how they felt to have their disability treated as a problem.
“Huge” problem. Huge. Like the Black Plague, Attila the Hun, or gas stoves. And BuzzFeed thinks the problem isn’t that people are blind, but that MrBeast thinks people being blind is bad. How dare he problematize blindness!
Exactly. By helping people to see he’s eradicated them. Makes massive sense. Note the 10 “likes.” BuzzFeed had to dig deep to find this level of nonsense.
Do we as a society see disabilities as problems that need to be solved?
Yes, because they are! If we can help the blind to see and the lame to walk, that’s a good thing! Believing otherwise is madness. BuzzFeed thinking any of this dreck was worth writing is the real problem that needs to be solved.
Should videos like this not exist, or should they not have to exist?
I don’t know, but I hate it here.
I think here is generally pretty nice.2
It’s better than the alternative. BuzzFeed, however, I might learn to hate.
2 Except for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which actually are demonic.
This is what I was talking about a while ago. Disability Studies fetishizes conceptualizes conditions such as blindness, not as potentially treatable medical conditions, but as identities. It’s not “I’m blind” as a simple matter of medical fact, but “I identify as blind.”
“More recently, we've seen the rise of Critical Studies of Ableism and Fat Studies. These draw to a great extent on Queer Theory. They ask themselves why we think it is better for body parts to work and for people not to be morbidly obese. They answer themselves that it's because science, that false authority that seeks to police and oppress people, has declared it to be so due to an underlying hatred of disabled and fat people. They advocate a different form of knowledge, one that relies on the lived experience of disabled and fat people. Unless they prefer not to be disabled or fat, in which case they've internalized this medicalised oppression, and they need to be reprimanded and ignored.”
-- Helen Pluckrose, “The Rise and Whys of Grievance Studies”
That is, Disability Studies sees phenomena such as blindness, deafness, and inhibited or absent mobility not as medical conditions but identities, and that medical intervention as a form of bigotry...
... while Queer Theory sees puberty, being gay, or gender-nonconforming as medical conditions, and that not medicalizing them with blockers, hormones and cosmetic surgeries as a form of bigotry.
