Posts Tagged ‘Falun Gong’

Bald, Bearded, Bespeckled British Bloke’s YouTube Empire

Sunday, March 26th, 2023

Looking for something to blog about on a lazy Sunday, I saw this American Thinker piece on Communist China’s continued repression Falun Gong.

I have rarely heard it mentioned in the mainstream media, but, according to reports, during the 1990s in communist China, thirty thousand members of Falun Gong were rounded up and executed. The founder of Falun Gong, Li Hongzhi, fled China and now lives in the U.S., while in China members of the order went underground. According to Freedom House, “Falun Gong practitioners across China have since [July 1999] been subjected to widespread surveillance, arbitrary detention, horrific torture, and extrajudicial killing — abuses which continue today.” Nonetheless, there are still some 100 million practitioners worldwide, and the movement continues to grow.

Information concerning the repression of Falun Gong is a Chinese state secret, with severe penalties for anyone attempting to obtain data. As the Falun Data Infocenter puts it: “The CCP has also used political and financial influence around the world to either keep journalists silent, or drive false narratives about Falun Gong.” With total control inside China and compliance by foreign journalists, the Chinese Communist Party has driven a false narrative that minimizes the number of Falun Gong practitioners and hides data on the number of those abducted, tortured, killed, and killed for their organs, thus totally obscuring the record.

Not exactly new, but worth mentioned that, yes, communists are still oppressive scumbags who murder people who essentially practice Tai Chi for their organs because they dared to object to being repressed.

So i went looking for a good, recent video on the subject, only to find him again.

Yes, it’s bald, bearded, bespeckled British bloke again. (Actually, his accent is a bit posh to be a proper “bloke,” but, you know, alliteration.) If you watch YouTube videos about technology, history, etc., pretty soon he’s going to show up. And it’s not like he has just one channel, he has multiple channels on different subjects.

Bald, bearded, bespeckled British bloke is Simon Whistler.

Media personality Simon Whistler was brought up in the south-east of England. After completing his university education (undergrad business BA, postgrad law diploma PGDL), he worked abroad for one year where he met his now wife and eventually ended up permanently moving to her home country, the Czech Republic.

After working as a freelance voice over artist and podcast host, at the age of 28 he started working on his first YouTube channel, a collaboration with the popular website TopTenz.net. From there he launched another channel in collaboration with another website TodayIFoundOut.com.

Soon enough both those channels had over a million subscribers, and Simon expanded his content to cover biographies on his Biographics channel and geography on his Geographics channel.

From there is was a move into comedic business content with Business Blaze and later to covering humanities greatest achievements with his channel Megaprojects.

Simon also runs a number of podcasts, merchandise lines, and has had his work featured on television and in print.

Oh, multiple channels with over a million subscribers. Nuthin to it.

That page lists seven channels Whistler has:

  • Business Blaze (which is now Brain Blaze) (posted three days ago)
  • Megaprojects (posted one day ago)
  • Today I Found Out (with over 3 million subscribers, this is his channel with the largest viewership) (posted three days ago)
  • Top Tenz (posted two days ago)
  • Biographics (posted three days ago)
  • Geographics (posted four days ago)
  • The Brain Food Show Podcast (with two posts and 16 subscribers, this seems like an embryonic spinoff of Today I Found Out)
  • But he has others:

  • Into the Shadows (posted three days ago)
  • Decoding the Unknown (posted one day ago)
  • Sideprojects (two hours ago)
  • Warographics (three hours ago)
  • Xplrd (posted one year ago, so maybe this one is moribund)
  • The Casual Criminalist (two days ago)
  • So that’s, what, twelve videos in four days? And I’m not sure I’ve found all his channels. There are also some sister channels to Today I Found Out (Higher Learning, Origins, Fact Quickie, etc.) where Whistler doesn’t seem to be in front of the camera but may still be involved in.

    This brings up a few questions:

  • When does this man sleep? Even assuming he has a staff of writers, editors, etc., that still seems like a grueling production schedule.
  • I’ve only clicked on a few of his videos before today, so why does he show up with such frequency in my feed? Why is he so beloved to the all-powerful algorithm?
  • How do we know that Simon Whistler isn’t, in fact, an AI host generated deep within the bowels of YouTube’s server farm?
  • Assuming he is but flesh and blood, I have to think he makes a somewhat handsome living from all this content. But in an era of rising interest rates, how long will the likes of Raid: Shadow Legends, Ridge wallets and Nord VPN continue to underwrite the YouTube economy?
  • None of this particularly sinister, but it is curious…