"This is awesome. We're killing Russians and not even sacrificing any real people (americans)."

"It's better than that. It's actually a huge MIC grift."

  • VILenin [he/him]M
    ·
    7 months ago

    Beau of the Child Trafficking Column and his adoring fans say what?

    • AFineWayToDie [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      Has he responded to that at all? Or is he just trying to pretend it never came up?

      • ReadFanon [any, any]
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        Yes, he responded to it.

        He claimed that he was smuggling women from Eastern Europe on temporary work visas without any guarantee of work despite charging exorbitant amounts, withholding their passports and pay, stuffing up to 20 of them into a single condo, and underpaying them for their labour but it was actually a humanitarian act because he was smuggling Jews from an undisclosed central European country because they were being persecuted.

        He wants people to believe that he did it for humanitarian reasons and that he has reformed.

        I often call out Beau's followers and they always say the same things:

        • He served his time

        • He has changed his ways/I believe in allowing people the opportunity to reform

        • His work is reparations for the crimes he committed in the past

        He served his time

        Nope.

        He had a sweetheart deal with a judge and the conditions under he achieved this deal have been sealed. He served months of a sentence that is customarily decades.

        He didn't serve his time.

        He has changed his ways/I believe in allowing people the opportunity to reform

        Has he even admitted to the crimes he actually committed? How can he reform if he actively lies about it and pretends that his actions were altruistic, humanitarian actions?

        Do you believe that the US prison system dispenses justice and rehabilitation or are you a prison abolitionist? Because you can't be both.

        How much of his now-sizeable income does he devote to victims of human trafficking? How much of his activism does he dedicate towards the prevention of human trafficking and supporting the victims of it?

        What restorative justice has he sought out for the victims of his crimes?

        His work is reparations for the crimes he committed in the past

        By amassing a large social media following and getting them sweet Patreon bucks?

        By, uh, doing some shit-tier journalism with a veneer of leftism?

        How have his victims gotten restorative justice from him becoming a YouTube personality exactly?

         

        Of course, they never manage to respond. Shocking, right?

          • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            7 months ago

            I think it's the algorithm. Lots of small creators are lovely, but the sort of people who get really big care more about fame, attention and power than they do about actually creating things for people to enjoy/learn from.

        • emizeko [they/them]
          ·
          7 months ago

          maybe that sweetheart deal was agreeing to work for the feds

          • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
            ·
            7 months ago

            It absolutely was, anyone who still thinks it was just some coincidence that he became an "activist" mere months after being given a get out of jail free pass for fucking human trafficking is a baby

          • ReadFanon [any, any]
            ·
            7 months ago

            This is exactly what my hunch is. I don't trust the guy one bit.

        • Great_Leader_Is_Dead
          ·
          7 months ago

          Someone should really make a bot where this gets posted every time his creeper ass is brought up

          • voight [he/him, any]
            ·
            edit-2
            7 months ago

            I agree. He's an excellent example to show people this really happens.

            https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-03-30/google-moonshot-redirect-far-right-online-extremism-anarchist

            And how many of our grifters have gotten half as obvious a pat on the back as this from the feds? Maybe Robert Evans / iwriteok ???

        • KarlBarqs [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          7 months ago

          He has changed his ways/I believe in allowing people the opportunity to reform

          I also believe in allowing people the opportunity to reform, but that's usually involving things like drug crimes, or thefts, or other similar crimes fueled by socioeconomic factors

          When someone goes and establishes a fairly complex human trafficking network though, it's a little different

          • ReadFanon [any, any]
            ·
            edit-2
            7 months ago

            I mean, I do believe that even someone convicted of human trafficking is capable of genuine rehabilitation and reintegrating into society but if he's not out there putting in hard work both into himself personally and in victim support/human trafficking prevention then I'm not willing to entertain the notion that he has reformed.

            He essentially robbed dozens upon dozens of women of their rights, their money, and part of their lives by throwing them into deplorable conditions. I have absolutely nothing to back this up with but my suspicion is that a non-insignificant percentage of the Eastern European women who were working in hotels for a pittance would have turned to sex work to supplement their income. It's hard to imagine that it wouldn't have been an explicit part of the operation, whether by design or by dovetailing the semi-above board side with a more shady parallel operation.

            (It's not like the victims would have been eager to come forward about it if they were forced or coerced into sex work. But if you take young women to a foreign country and put them into conditions that are borderline destitution while they work for less than scrupulous hotels and... I mean, the likely outcome is going to be that a large number of them end up in sex work and nobody is going to convince me otherwise - I'm not that naive.)

            From what I can tell he was sorta like a middle-man in the whole operation but if you steal years from dozens of people's lives while you directly profit from it then you need to be paying back that debt to society for the rest of your life as far as I'm concerned. At least, if you want to stake a claim to having reformed anyway.

  • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I tend to not buy into the idea that every single dipshit "leftist" on youtube is an op. They're mostly just idiots and/or grifters imo.

    This "Beau" guy on the other hand, is 100% a fucking op.

    • Raebxeh
      ·
      7 months ago

      Beau got popular without much ramp up or production value because some anonymous third party paid to have his videos played before fascist content. His whole schtick was deradicalizing the sort of people who are into prepping and survivalism. His output level has always been staggering. Before all this, he got got for human trafficking. Perfect candidate to become an asset. For a while he pushed narratives about how leftists need to react to austerity by making up for it with mutual aid. But since Ukraine hit, his takes have been the state department line all the way. That and sheepdogging for the Dems. Real lib shit.

      • mayo_cider [he/him]
        ·
        7 months ago

        I always thought he seemed alright based on his video titles and couple of the first minutes of the videos (the few videos I got through seemed reasonable enough, but they were always about pretty black and white issues), I guess the low production values and boring delivery saved me some time

        Now that I think about it, it's pretty scary if Beau is actually fed, they have unlocked leftist production

        • Raebxeh
          ·
          7 months ago

          His videos are very well done for what they are. I’d guess he’s a true believer in most of what he says. He clearly has a lot of experience organizing and it’s unfortunate that the left doesn’t have more practical content about doing that. I just lost a lot of faith in him after the invasion and after I found out about his trafficking conviction. Absolute best case scenario was he meant well and massively mismanaged hundreds of people’s livelihoods and material well-being. But that’s a very generous reading of the situation. Dude has also talked at anarchist conferences about anarchist unity and how a post-collapse economy will be mixed either way so there’s no point in the ancoms fighting the agorists and whatnot.

          • mayo_cider [he/him]
            ·
            7 months ago

            Yeah, he doesn't really smell like Eglin Air Force Base to me

            The fact that he's convicted of human trafficking is pretty fucking damning when it comes to ideology, I'd hope any principled person would be hyper aware of even any appereance of human trafficking let alone do it badly enough to warrant an investigation and conviction

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    destroy Russia's ability to wage war

    How's the EU's 155mm shell stockpile looking right now? Overflowing, I'm guessing.

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I'm just going to assume poster #2 is 30 years old. Just for the sake of argument. Old enough to remember the invasion of Iraq even if they didn't really understand it at the time.

    Imagine 20 years later, full of the knowledge of what a disaster it was. A waste of lives and resources (resources that could have, in turn, benefited or saved lives). But somehow it's good this time. I can understand being ignorant of this whole imperial charade if you didn't live through it. I'm not expecting some gen Z kid to have a thorough understanding of the conflict in Vietnam or to point out the border the Ho Chi Minh Trail ran along.

    But fuck, you lived through the last one. You are still living through the consequences of last time. Fucking ghoul.

    • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]
      ·
      7 months ago

      It gets printed out of thin air. It's as opposed to having a gold standard where the government demands you fork over gold for a war effort or something. They would correctly presume that it turns into greater inflation and the people closer to the clique that's in office gets more of the new money than the have-nots.

      At the core of it is the philosophical debacle that we're not immune to where one asks to what extent should you have positive duty to society. That's the framing that gets someone to call communism authoritarian as if we're the ones who make people wear a funny uniform for 40+ hours and like the NSA. Also, because of course after you do a communism, you get this blank slate where the tankie plays rock paper scissors with the anarchist. Should I have to give a fuck about climate change? Who's going to plant the trees and clean the oceans? What if not enough people volunteer? What if the government is doing the job in a bullshit way? No fuck that, they always do it in a bullshit way and you want more government!

  • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]
    ·
    7 months ago

    Um....crazy thought, but how about our country renounce war? Maybe try living at peace with the world and chilling; the MIC blood and money furnace doesn't have to be fed; maybe put it on a heavy diet for now.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    saw Jeb Lund repost similar pro-war bullshit on bluesky. sad