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The LeftTube galaxy that we know today, however, was spawned by a few groundbreaking stars—two of the most prominent being pop-culture critic Lindsay Ellis and philosopher-entertainer Natalie Wynn. Ellis was already well-known on YouTube by 2008, as the Nostalgia Chick on the once-popular platform Channel Awesome. She left and started her eponymous channel in 2015, out of anger with workplace misogyny and Channel Awesome’s tepid response to Gamergate. The uncontested supremacy of the alt-right online inspired Wynn to create the channel ContraPoints in 2016, where she has eviscerated right-wing cruelty, centrist complacency, and leftist dogma. Her skits feature caricatures like the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) Abigail Cockbane (who assures us that she has written “many, many books”); the hard-drinking classical liberal Jackie Jackson (who thinks Nazis may have a point); and socialist catgirl Tabby (who quotes dead German philosophers and threatens to break skulls with her baseball bat).
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Amid this panoply, Wynn reigns supreme as the fan-anointed queen of LeftTube—almost every creator I interviewed described her as a stylistic influence, with Angie joking, “In terms of style, I’m looking to dethrone ContraPoints. I’m coming for you, lady!” Though Wynn chugs Red Bull and works the insomniac, harried schedule of a graduate student—beginning her filming around 10 o’clock at night, and going to bed as the world wakes up—her ContraPoints persona is the epitome of composure. Wynn uses absurdity, violence, and sex to great effect—she’s drowned baby dolls, beaten herself, run fake fingernails over a sequined shirt as ASMR, and described gay teenage boys on Instagram as “the only people with a coherent vision of contemporary womanhood.” People have adopted her use of campy lighting, and her makeup and wig styling have become iconic for the online left.
Wynn is also one of the few LeftTubers to receive acclaim from the mainstream establishment—she has been profiled by outlets like
The New Yorker, which described her as “one of the few leftists anywhere who can be nuanced without being boring.” In recent months, her channel has favored deep dives into gender theory, complemented by acidic humor. She’s often presented in the media as the sole hope of the hashtag-resistance in the internet’s right-wing badlands, but this is a popular narrative she rejects, telling me, “I feel relegated to being this non-playable character in a quest starring a young white racist!”
More than anything, most LeftTubers seemed to consider LeftTube to be a consumer demographic, defined by users rather than creators. As such, the moment will last only as long as they continue to share this base of support.
Despite their pessimism, the numbers tell a different story of expansion. As with most YouTube audiences, its viewers skew young. Around 80 percent of Wynn’s viewers and 75 percent of Ellis’s viewers are between the ages of 18 and 35. Audience size varies widely per creator and per video—while Roczniak’s niche videos tends to get around 45,000 clicks, Ellis’s recent video on
Aladdin received upwards of 4 million views. For the moment, LeftTube’s audience is only growing.
While LeftTube fame is a niche form of celebrity, the community’s superstars have also been able translate their online popularity into real-world impact, sometimes raising huge sums of money for liberal causes. One LeftTuber, Harry Brewis alias hbomberguy, raised $340,000 for Mermaids, a British trans and gender variant advocacy organization, just by live-streaming a 57-hour session of himself playing
Donkey Kong 64. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez even called in mid-session to talk politics and video games.
Still, though LeftTubers are helping lead the online left, they are far from representative of the offline left. Four of the five people most often identified as the heart of LeftTube—Wynn, Ellis, Brewis, and Olly Thorn—are white. (The fifth, Shaun, only uses voiceovers and features a skull for an avatar.) While these five are undeniably talented, many have observed that their supposedly woke audience favors white voices.
In her riveting and hilarious sketch, “Who are Black Leftists Supposed to Be?,” Angie satirized the portion of her audience that believes that discussions of class are outside her lane. “They would rather that I talked about cultural appropriation and how much Beyonce slays,” she said. “You have a black female leftist, but they don’t want me to be a leftist.” Between swigs of wine in her recent viral video “Why is ‘LeftTube’ So White?”, Kat Blaque observed that audiences tend to receive her research more favorably after it receives white LeftTubers’ approval.
Most creators also admitted to some anxiety linked to the left’s predilection for internecine conflict. None of these artists fit easily into ideological boxes, which makes them ripe targets for online mobs. Ellis, for example, refuses to discuss young adult literature, a particularly Balkanized arena of the online left, because she fears the potential fallout. Jack Saint described rereading tweets up to six times to make sure they passed muster. Ellis noted that there are portions of the trans community that loathe Wynn’s perspective on gender issues—and while she hasn’t backed down, it upsets her greatly.
When I asked Angie about fan feedback, she responded, “Grievance has now become a commodity in and of itself.” She said that direct messages, e-mails, or other private forms of outreach are more helpful than public shaming, while hurling vitriol earns more social clout.
The artists on LeftTube are smart and savvy, but they are not political leaders. They are motivated as much by the thrill of professional independence, intellectual satisfaction, and the creative process than a burning desire to start a revolution. Wynn referred to her work as entertainment, not political commentary, with an insistence that reminded me of Jon Stewart’s beleaguered pleas that he just wanted to be a comedian.
Still, Wynn understands why people want to place their hopes in LeftTube. “The thing about entertainment and art, it moves people and attracts people deeply,” she told me. “Being anti-Vietnam is just more exciting, if there’s also Jimi Hendrix.”
