Politics

Recently Steven Crowder ran an investigative piece alleging a high ranking female executive at BlackRock was connected to a forum¹ used to exchange sexually explicit material involving minors². This allegation was based off of a single e-mail address, tied to the individual by means of several background check websites³. This investigation was horrifically sloppy, and had no concrete evidence of any criminal wrongdoing. Crowder’s team has done amazing investigation work during the most controversial election of our time. However, this investigation was abhorrently bad. It was followed by a serious of other questionable investigations where Crowder went after the porn industry, and a small local school. As the show seems to drift further away from the topics many American conservatives actually care about, he also is facing more accusations from former staff members about his conduct as their employer. As someone who has been a fan of his content for years, I find it disheartening to see the quality of his show in a sharp state of decline.

BlackRock and Illegal Forums

The woman in question was a BlackRock Managing Director by the name of Abigail Gold Geller. Her name even sounds like a common pseudonym. They only evidence Crowder showed were several background check websites claiming an e-mail address associated with the site, revealed in a data leak, were linked to her³. There were no e-mails. There were no phone calls. Anyone who’s ever bought their own background check data from one of these brokers knows that their rife with errors. I’ve seen information, associated with myself, for people that happen to share my name in states I’ve never lived in or visited. I’ve worked in Identity Management in public institutions, and much of the logic we used to connect peoples’ accounts was a little hacky. Our matching systems mostly worked, but we also had to write in a bunch of checks to flag matches that could be wrong. (e.g. people who reverse the month and day of their birthday, or mistype a social security number).

I’m not defending BlackRock. Their massive investment in house rental companies has led to an inflated the housing market, making it difficult for many people to purchase homes⁴. I think uncovering corruption within the financial industry is important. But these types of reports are low quality tabloid garbage at best. Crowder doesn’t seem to say anything defamatory. To his credit, he fully admits in the report how little information they have. Crowder always encourages his audience to verify the sources in the show notes, but for this particular episode, the notes do not contain links to any articles, information about how the data leak was obtained, or any other source information¹. It’s clear and transparent by watching the entire show, how sloppy their work was.

Porn

Crowder previously aired an investigation on the porn industry⁵. The clips were from a group called Sound Investigations. They looked like they were ripping off Project Veritas, using the same style of the interviews and title card displays. In the first “exclusive” aired by Crowder, a hidden camera captured a conversation from a frontend (Javascript/React) software engineer for MindGeek (owner of Pornhub, recently rebranded to Aylo). All of the questions posed were speculative, and the engineer admitted that he didn’t think there were consensuality checks or age checks in his domain experience with advertising. They showed the LinkedIn page of the employee. He was a “Senior Engineer.” Despite the word “Senior,” this is a fairly low-level position, and he didn’t have any involvement in compliance⁶.

Remember how I said Sound Investigations looked like it was ripping off Project Veritas? Crowder brought on Arden Young from the investigation unit, immediately after the piece aired. It turns out, Arden Young was formerly a member of Project Veritas staff. In fact, she was one of the staff members who signed a letter against the founder, James O’Keefe⁷. A few days after O’Keefe was removed from the company he founded, he released the full video of his conference with the remaining staff, explaining the quite bizarre and hostile takeover from the board⁸. He later went on to found the O’Keefe Media Group (OMG).

Another video released by Sound Investigations stepped up their game marginally by at least getting a product manager and script writer on hidden camera. They revealed information, such as minors can simply go to porn sites and click the “I am over 18,” banner, and mention states that are seeking to enact age verification laws⁹. It seems that Sound Investigations, and Louder with Crowder, both want to go after the porn industry. However, pushing for verification laws plays directly into the hands of legislators who want to remove anonymity from the Internet.

James O’Keefe often talked about the high standard of ethics to which he held all his investigative journalist. My theory is that Arden Young was getting push-back at Project Veritas because her investigations into the porn industry didn’t pass the bar for O’Keefe’s ethical standards. She was one of the people who turned against O’Keefe, and likely took the same case to the doorstep of Steven Crowder. Together, they are using shoddy investigative practices to come up with garbage stories.

Israel

Crowder has had no issue defending Israel. A number of evangelical Christians support Israel because they believe the Jews are God’s chosen people, and they also want to see the end of days. In early March, Israel open fired on civilians in Gaza who were trying to obtain food drops of humanitarian aid¹⁰¹¹. Crowder has preached Israel’s right to defend itself, even though serious questions have been raised about how a nation with such high security standards, and a dedicated border wall, could have such a catastrophic failure on October 7th, unless it was intentional¹². He’s also pushed the myth that Palestine isn’t a state, despite the fact that people in the region have thought of themselves as Palestinians prior to the 1900s¹³.

Conservatives are not united on the nation of Israel, the future of Palestine, or the involvement of the United States and European nations in their affairs. Crowder’s unapologetic defense of Israel shows, not only his unwavering evangelical bias, but his disconnection with his conservative audience. It represents his inability to research ideas, facts and narratives that challenge his religious predispositions.

Kari Lake

In January of this year, Kari Lake produced a secret recording of Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jeff DeWit, in which DeWit asked her to name a price to keep her out of politics¹⁴. The No Agenda Podcast had the following analysis of the story:

“…that sounds very disingenuous of her to say ‘…I just sat down with some close friends and like, you know, let me listen to that tape again … that’s phony. This is a vice presidential bid, in my opinion. This is like, ‘Look Trump. I protected you. I’m pro-America. I’m pro-Trump. I can’t be bribed. I can’t be bought, and the swamp … is everywhere including the republican party…‘“ -Adam Curry, No Agenda Podcast¹⁵

Meanwhile on Louder With Crowder, Kari was a guest on the show¹⁶. They didn’t ask her any hard questions, or challenge her in any way. I do think Kari Lake lost her governotorial election due to corruption and interference, but I also appreciate how the No Agenda Podcast challenged her version of this particular story. No Agenda provided analysis that would be impossible for Louder with Crowder to consider, due to the show’s inability to look past their implicit bias.

School Shooting Pre-crime

One of the most bizarre stories I’ve seen on Louder with Crowder was their “exclusive” about a student at Chippewa Falls. In the episode, Crowder claims to have received information involving a student looking up information on weapons and shootings on a school issued student laptop¹⁷. Police were brought in to investigate, and Crowder read several pages from the police report on air¹⁸.

Police ended up searching the student’s room and talking with the parents. Crowder’s complaint was over the amount of time that passed while the student was still allowed to attend school before being suspended and expelled. They cited a previous incident of a gun threat, at the same school, that was found “not credible.” Yet, that threat still resulted in parents being alerted to the incident¹⁹.

The trouble with this analysis, is that the police and parents were involved early on when the threat became realized. The police report makes it seem like all parties took the incident seriously²⁰. Crowder is upset that other parents weren’t notified about this particular student, even though they were informed about a previous threat that was considered “not credible.” My issue with this line of reasoning is that it’s very easy for a school district to issue an alert to parents about a bogus threat, in order to show due diligence. It’s much more difficult to talk about a real incident with a student, which has much more complicated privacy implications. Remember, this student hadn’t yet committed a crime. Should the school district have alerted parents to potential pre-crime? Aren’t people innocent until they commit a crime?

The school didn’t do itself any favors when it released a statement to parents, referring to Crowder’s staff as “quasi-media personalities,” and “manipulative beyond measure²¹.” These are common weasel words and discrediting tactics of a school running damage control. However, the statement does make a good factual case for the law not allowing them to provide more information, although they defend it with a claim about not wanting to frighten parents²².

The police report indicated the student was receiving mental health via a program called “Trevor,” geared towards the LGBTQ community²⁰. Crowder posed questions, theorizing if the school didn’t inform parents due to the student’s LGBTQ status. However, they did admit they had no information on if the student was gay or trans²².

I’m not sure where I stand on this particular story. No crime had been committed yet. Crowder brought up how the police report mentioned the student’s father did have some firearms that were unsecured²⁰. The show mentioned an incident where parents were charged with manslaughter for having unsecured firearms that were used in a shooting. I assume they were referring to the Crumbley case. It’s a particular bizarre case where the parents in question were irresponsible, unlikable, uncooperative with law enforcement, attempted to avoid capture, blamed each other, took no responsibility for themselves, and had even left their son at home alone so they could get drunk at a local bar²³. It’s a particularly egregious case, and likely very different from the situation at hand.

This is a very odd story, with a lot of missing information. The phone calls that Crowder’s staff made to the school should have been typical requests for comments, but came off feeling pushy and cringy on the show. Crowder is normally a Second Amendment advocate, yet he drew attention to the unsecured firearms of a parent and then drew parallels to an entirely different case. He barely mentioned what should have been the real story: the school issued Chromebook sent all of the students’ searches through a program that generated “Aristotle alerts.” This school district, and likely many others around the country, domestically spy on students via state issued computer equipment.

Jared

Jared Monroe is a former staff member for Louder with Crowder who left the show in 2018. In March, he released a video claiming that Crowder coerced him into signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) when he announced he was leaving the show. He elaborated on the stressful working conditions, how Crowder’s legal team insisted part of his original agreement contained a non-compete clause, and claimed that Crowder used “legal abuse;” using legal processes to harass him, when he tried to move on from his time with the show²⁴.

The timing of this video is a little odd, considering Jared had left years prior. Crowder is currently in the middle of a divorce. Last year a video surfaced of Crowder and his wife arguing, giving a short three minute view of long standing conflict within their marriage. In the video, Crowder’s wife used the term “abuse.” Perl Davis recently analyzed this video, and raised concerns about the way feminist redefine abuse²⁵. Could Jared have gotten advice from legal council, on how to use the court of public opinion, by weaponizing the term “legal abuse?”

Crowder’s co-host Gerald spent an entire show addressing the video from Jared. During the segment, Gerald shared information and documents from Crowder’s ongoing divorce. He laid most of the blame on Crowder’s wife. He also claimed Jared never had to sign the NDA and could have simply walked away. However, he never addressed why Jared was even asked to sign an NDA on resignation. Gerald questioned why Jared was using his video for raising money for legal fees when there wasn’t a current ongoing lawsuit. Gerald also didn’t address Jared’s claim that he had spent a considerable amount of his personal money on lawyers, going into years of debt²⁶.

Even though Jared may not have been facing a lawsuit at the time of making his video, he is now. Louder with Crowder has filed a lawsuit against his wife Hilary and Jared for extortion²⁷. Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire has contributed $500 to Jared’s defense fund²⁸.

It could be true that Jared had decided to make his video in coordination with Crowder’s wife as a means to go after Crowder financially. However, it is also equally possible Jared is being truthful in his video about the large amount of legal debt he incurred while trying to leave Crowder’s company, and the difficulties he claimed to face trying to find a new employer. Perhaps he’s still facing the backlash from his time at Louder with Crowder years later, and saw this as an opportunity to strike back.

The Fall of Steven Crowder

Crowder professes belief in Christianity. The Bible states in Deuteronomy 19:15 that one witness is not enough to convict anyone accused of a crime; that you must have two or three. Deuteronomy 17:6 goes on to state this principal applies to even serious cases, such as murder and capitol offense. When Dave Landau had originally talked about Crowder in his interview with Michael Malice, I still gave Crowder the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Dave was actually late more often than he claimed, or embellished some of the details of his story. Although Jared’s motives may be up for debate, he’s still a second witness who’s corroborating Dave’s story of how bad conditions were while working with Steven Crowder.

I honestly wouldn’t care about Crowder’s personal and family issues, but they are indicative of his general attitude and the degrading quality of the show. Since leaving The Blaze and migrating to Rumble/Locals, his morning show is still consistently 10 to 20 minutes late everyday. The quality of his investigations has fallen through the floor. This is tragic, because Crowder’s staff has brought some amazing stories to light, such as the leak of pages from the Nashville shooters manifesto²⁹.

However, even if Louder with Crowder presents some hard hitting stories, they’re tainted by being juxtaposition to poorly sourced, and poorly researched pieces that aren’t even fit for tabloids. It’s not easy being the captain of a ship. A brave captain can sometimes lead a frightened crew to victory against insurmountable odds, like the HMS Broke and HMS Swift when they hunted down German torpedo boats³⁰. Yet, if the crew are afraid to speak up against a harsh and punishing captain, they could easily run into an avoidable sandbar, like the USS Missouri, captained by William D Brown in 1949³¹³².

I haven’t been watching Louder with Crowder over the past few weeks, mostly due to the declining quality of their news and comedy. I do want to keep up with the Christian perspective on current events, but even some of my Christian friends are turned away by Crowder’s use of profanity and his hypocritical crudeness. Much of the audience he’s accumulated in just the past few years are not religious Christians. Many of them are put-off by his zealous bias towards Israel, and commitment to classical conservative politics over more libertarian values.

It looks like Crowder needs to be in the spotlight, and doesn’t play well with others. It doesn’t seem like he can stand for people leaving his team, and might take a scorched earthed approach against people he believes have slighted him. He might be the exact archetype he claims to be fighting against. It’s sad because I’ve had a lot of respect for Crowder’s work in the past. However, with the recent publication of terrible investigative pieces, and the allegations coming from his former staff, his credibility seems to legitimately be in question. I may check in from time to time, but I cancelled my Mug Club membership several months ago.