In the face of our rampant cancel-crazed culture, recently deceased YouTube sensation Kevin Samuels carved out a place in the media landscape by fearlessly speaking his mind in his observations on modern men and women — even when those observations scraped against our society’s hyper-feminist grain.
Samuels was a salary man turned cultural critic who took the internet by storm, particularly American black audiences. Samuels’ YouTube and Instagram following is more than 1 million, thanks to his decision to address the plight of romantic relationships in the West. Samuels primarily focused on issues with the black family, but even a cursory glance at his videos shows a man well aware of the way liberal polity influences every aspect of our lives.
Samuels often discussed many talking points that conservatives would be familiar with in regards to the breakdown of the black family structure, and now the structure of American families in general. He highlighted in particular the reality that black Americans had been more likely to be married than white Americans until the 1960s.
Bearing out these statistics has led many, including Samuels, to emphasize how deleterious left-wing social policies have been to the fabric of the black community. Another of Samuels’ favorite statistics to banty was the large number of black men who are both single and childless while earning a middle-class salary.
One must consider Samuels’ journey a real study in the power of internet algorithms. Samuels was a part of the corner of YouTube known as the “manosphere.” The manosphere serves as a catch-all category for content geared specifically towards addressing male issues.
YouTube corners suffer the same woes as any other kind of labeling or genre tags. Some might even include Joe Rogan in the manosphere because he’s a dude who primarily talks to other dudes, but let’s reserve the label for those who would claim it — and Samuels was one of its early adopters.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll explain the manosphere based on my experience with it as a millennial male. Reddit now serves as the punching bag for most countercultural content, but it hasn’t always been this way. A once-popular, now-deleted subreddit was called the Red Pill.
Inspired by the Matrix film series, the subreddit existed to teach men how to protect themselves while dating modern women. Inspired by people like the late comedian Patrice O’Neal and an old pick-up artist named Rollo Tomassi, the forum had several hundred thousand subscribers. This about sums up what has spiraled into what many consider YouTube’s “misogyny zone.”
Samuels, like all the other members of misogynist YouTube, started by gearing his content toward young men. I can remember a Samuels video that came up in my feed years ago while I was watching old clips of Patrice O’Neal; it was an innocuous video about cologne.
At the time, I could never imagine that in just a few short years during the Covid pandemic in 2020, this random black guy I remembered for some kitschy videos about what blazer to wear would become a viral sensation by telling a black woman she was “average at best” in this video that catapulted Samuels to stardom.
He quickly became perhaps the most polarizing figure in the black internet world. And his audience didn’t just stop at black people; as his show grew he began to field calls from men and women all over the world.
When he decided to speak to women, Samuels became the manosphere’s largest figure. This was his innovation, and it worked because of his unique vantage point as a black Gen X male subjecting primarily black women to the pro-patriarchal social views that he believed were the foundation of marriages and communities.
Samuels’ detractors came with all the vitriol one would expect, but he carried himself well through it all. Agree or disagree with his points, Samuels was a brave thinker and his content leaves an excellent legacy of one very interesting American.
