I actually enjoyed a lot of Rudyard's video essay content, even if it was flawed and imperfect. It seemed like he cared a lot about the subjects he talked about on his channel and saw it as a way of helping people parse through the world in the same way he did. There's a timeline where Rudyard was able to do more in-depth dives into subjects, propose genuine solutions to problems he saw, improve his video-making skills through better editing and research, and genuinely be a positive force in the world.
Like, I would have loved to see him visit rural PA and do a video discussing its history and downfall and what we could learn from that. I would like for him to go in depth into weird declassified CIA documents and talk about the interesting contents within and his opinions on them. Maybe take that money he supposedly has from doing YouTube and fund a couple non-profits centered on helping young men get jobs or start businesses. Just something more in-depth that could have helped end the problems he's describing (or at least alleviate the pain) or give us insight into the way he thinks and why.
This unfortunately did not happen, instead we got a schizo meltdown and his videos slowly converging into being the same seething at modernity. He stagnated then exploded. I think his two main flaws as a person are his sensitive ego and his drug abuse.
I think the most obvious view of his ego is his Twitter. Personally, I only discovered this when he was sparing with the groypers on twitter over the retarded wife wojak drama.
The incessant need to defend his "honor" from a bunch of internet weridos makes me want to spit on him because of how gay it is.
Him getting really butthurt online over that one cringe image of him being tossed around just makes him an easy target too.
Not to mention that he's tweeted 13.3k times as of writing on an account that's only 4 years old (see the top):
https://archive.ph/6JjTs
That's a little over 9 posts on twitter per day, which makes me think that he spent a lot of time on the platform instead of interfacing with the world as its lived. That's time he could have spent learning to edit to make better content or researching first hand sources online. He could have improved his content but instead just farted out nonsense tweets posturing about the world instead of doing anything. Maybe this is more of a general complaint about these internet "western world saviors", but Rudyard's delusions of being a prophet make this so much worse.
Speaking of the schizo-meltdown, Rudyard's drug abuse was telegraphed back in 2022 in his "10 Taboo Questions About History and Society":
Here, he discussed his use of Kratom to deal with stress and his interest in psychedelics for their spiritual utility. Even before this, he was
dabbling in shamanism and talking about a version of Christianity which merges with the hippie pro-psychedelic movements
(Tweet 1) (Tweet 2) (Tweet 3).
Many people here suspect Rudyard has Autism as well. If he does, that would further play into his use of drugs as Autistic people have trouble with the production of GABA (
Ctrl+F GABA to read a summary) (
another primary source), the chemical in the central nervous system responsible for calming the nervous system down. Still, this is unconfirmed as Rudyard isn't diagnosed with Autism (to our knowledge). Also, the research I'm citing is a layman's interpretation of scientific research into a poorly understood disease, and may be total BS.
Still, the seed for this breakdown was set a long time ago and given his
self-admitted diagnosis of PTSD,
along side knowledge of PTSD's treatment and use of drugs, particularly more obscure drugs, as crutch to deal with his problems.
My personal theory on Rudyard is that he was just a cringe history buff with a bit of an ego and an interest in obscure and esoteric ideas. However, his ego exacerbated as he fell more into drugs as a coping mechanism to deal with his life stresses, primarily his PTSD. The drugs aligned with his interests in history, religion, and esoteric thought and naturally he got into psychedelics because of that. From there, he spiraled further into insanity, which leads us to the meltdown. Maybe that was caused by schizophrenia being accelerated by the drugs or maybe was just a nerdy white boy getting one-shotted by Ayahuasca. I don't know.
Either way, I think that the only appropriate tone for talking about Rudyard is one of pity and a desire for him to get better. At his core, he's a goofball history buff who spends too much time online making videos about society's downfall that speak to enough people for him to have an audience. He doesn't seem to be malicious or evil like many people documented on this site are, just a little too far up his own ass, and way too far into drugs as a coping mechanism.
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