 I've been clean for eight years after almost a decade of battling my drug addiction. Those of us in long-term recovery know that it's easier to get sober than it is to stay sober. When my life was an absolute mess, it was easy to realize that I needed to change, but many people come to find that the challenge is keeping that energy when life gets back to normal. After working at a drug and alcohol rehab center for years, I saw this pattern with many of my clients, and I teach them that this is something we need to do daily if we want our lives to get better. What many people don't realize is that this is the same thing we're seeing with influencers and the Black Lives Matter movement. While many of them were extremely vocal when hashtag BLM was trending and they thought they were making a difference with a black square on their Instagram feed, their energy is gone when we need it the most. During the George Floyd protests at the beginning of the summer, I saw a lot of people saying don't forget about BLM when it's no longer trending. Although a major part of me knew that they were right to say this, I wanted to be optimistic when it came to my fellow influencers on YouTube and other social media platforms. At the time of the protests, I saw many of them tweeting about it and posting pictures of them at protests. Some of them even made videos discussing their own privilege and how they were going to do better by the black community. As a half black man who hoped for the best, I'm extremely disappointed today by the silence of many influencers. Why today? Well, at the time of writing this script, it's September 23rd, 2020 and we just received an update about Breonna Taylor. Before the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a young black woman who had her whole future ahead of her, was gunned down by the police in her own home. For months, we've been waiting for justice and today it was announced that the punishment was going to be minimal. A young woman is dead and one of the three cops was indicted. Now he was not indicted for the murder of Breonna Taylor, but for the fact that some of the many bullets he fired went into a neighboring apartment. Unfortunately, many influencers are now silent and haven't mentioned BLM since it was trending on social media. I feel that it's important to call this out due to the fact that influencers are in an extremely privileged position and many are benefiting from the prestige of appearing like they care when their actions say otherwise. In an effort to let some of these influencers save face, I won't be naming names, but if you look through your memory, you'll know who falls into this category. Also, I want to make it very clear that I am not the ideal either, but it's our responsibility to be self-aware so we can improve. Right now it's very clear that many influencers talk their talk, but they aren't walking in. As mentioned in another video, slacktivism is a major issue. Slacktivism is the practice of supporting a political or social cause by means such as social media or online petitions characterized as involving very little effort or commitment. In his hilarious book, Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander makes fun of slacktivism by saying, an interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through awareness, meaning the process of making other people aware of problems and then magically someone else like the government will fix it. But on a more serious note, this is something all of us should take seriously. Entrepreneurs are profiting off of the selling of an idea that they care about social issues while putting in little to no effort when it comes to making change happen. When you look at their actions under a microscope, you can see that they only discuss social issues when it benefits them. It's a cloud-inducing sleight of hand making their audience think they care about something and doing absolutely nothing about it. At a recent point, there was more outrage over the Netflix movie Cuties than there is about the lack of justice for Breonna Taylor from People on YouTube. Why? Because talking about Cuties gets influencers thousands of views. And Breonna Taylor doesn't. Child exploitation is a major issue. But if it did not get views, I doubt you'd see so many influencers talking about it. We don't need to be an economist to know that humans are driven by incentives and influencers have much greater incentives to discuss what will get them the most clicks, views, and likes. Now that BLM is not trending, they're no longer incentivized. This isn't just about Breonna Taylor either. It's about the entire BLM movement and seeing influencers not live up to the show they put on during the George Floyd protest. When the protests were going on, influencers loved hopping on their platforms to discuss their privilege to raise awareness about what's been happening to Black people for years. Although these YouTubers admitted to some of their privilege, they seem to not fully grasp the privilege that they have. Privilege is being able to release one video a week and make more money than half of the people in the United States. Aside from privilege, many of these influencers who make more money than you and your parents would not be successful had they not been born when they were. I've recently been binge reading books on problems with the idea of meritocracy and it's extremely eye-opening. Many of us refuse to admit how lucky we are and influencers are often the prime example of the myth of meritocracy that we have here in the United States. If you're interested in this subject, I highly recommend the new book, The Tyranny of Merit by moral and political philosopher Michael Sandell as well as Success and Luck by Robert H. Frank and Fair Shot by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. One privileged YouTuber sticks out in my mind the most, while none of us can ever prove how much someone cares about an issue, based on the lack of action I'm confident in my argument. This YouTuber, who I'm leaving nameless, has been very vocal about not only equality but social justice in general. They have been a huge Bernie Sanders supporter and are very vocal about it. After a brief look at this YouTuber's social media, you can see that they grew up in an upper or upper middle class family and to this day they travel the world on expensive vacations. When the George Floyd protest happened, this YouTuber didn't upload for a couple weeks. While they said they didn't upload due to wanting to let black voices speak on these issues, it's hard to believe that this is true since prior to the protest, their uploads were inconsistent. In fact, after they returned, they still have extremely inconsistent uploads. Although this YouTuber has cultivated an audience who believes that they care about black lives and making change, the fact is we have not seen it. In their return video, they discussed how they really wanted to promote more black creators and talk more about the issues that African Americans face. The creator apologized in advance because they had to do some sponsored content but they promised to get back to these serious issues afterwards. Since then, they haven't. Not only have they not discussed these matters further, but they said they planned on promoting more black creators. In a collaboration video featuring about six people, they featured one person of color. Recently, they did a solitary collaboration video with a black creator. And this was only after the creator passed one million subscribers. Like I said, this is not the only creator who is guilty of this. Plenty of influencers are. They're profiting and living an extremely privileged life off the illusion that they care about social issues. As consumers, if we like their content and support it, that's one thing. But as a community, we should not give these influencers extra points for their slacktivism. Not only are they silent about Breonna Taylor, but millions of people are unemployed during the pandemic, don't have health insurance, and are facing eviction. Meanwhile, influencers are profiting as they send fake social signals. I'm not encouraging anyone to stop supporting an influencer, but I believe we should all be a little bit more skeptical when we see influencers social signaling to be seen as an activist when it's just convenient for them. All right, everybody. Yeah, I don't have much to say. I just saw that nobody is calling out this behavior. And, you know, I've been really trying to pay attention to this stuff. The new cycle moves so quick, so, so, so quick, and we forget what was happening even a month, two months ago and things like that. And this is something that I've really tried to pay attention to. And I'm noticing it more and more. And, you know, we just need to realize that some of our favorite influencers out there are slacktivists. And like I said, like, I know that I could do more. You could probably do more, too. We could all do more. But in the position that these influencers are in, the least they can do, the least they can do is hold up to their word and do the minimum, like not only talking about these issues, but promoting black creators. You know what I mean? I saw so many people, so many people say, Oh, I'm going to promote black creators, I'm going to promote black creators and all these other things. And like, none of them are. They come back and they say something and everybody says, Oh, you're such a good person and then they don't, they don't do anything about it. You know what I mean? But anyways, I just wanted to take a minute to let you know about this awesome thing going on on Twitter. It's called Defeat by Tweet and all the money goes towards black led organizations. But anyways, anyways, every time Trump tweets, money gets donated to these black led organizations, they've already raised like over two million dollars and it helps black people go out there and vote. It helps locally owned organizations. I'll link the website down below. But yeah, you can donate like pennies every time that Trump tweets and it'll help get them out of office in November. But anyways, we got to keep the energy like these, these issues that we're facing, they've been going on for decades and not even decades, centuries, you know, and we need to keep the same energy if we want change. Anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like it, give it a thumbs up. If you're new, subscribe, ring the notification bell and a huge thank you to everybody out there who supports the channel, whether it's on the Patreon or getting books from therewirestall.com or all the books that I recommend down in the description below. Those are affiliate links. I highly recommend those books that I mentioned in this video. All right. Anyways, I'll catch you guys next time.