Even if you’re not a fan of the video-streaming website Youtube, the name Shane Dawson is probably familiar to you. In 2008, when Youtube was not nearly the immensely popular site that it has come to be, Shane, at nineteen years old, began creating sketch-comedy videos and very quickly gained a massive amount of fans. So much thought, creativity and pure passion went into his early videos, full of original characters, dark humor, impersonations of celebrities and mocking of pop culture. He’s done a mix of things in recent years, like testing products, trying different foods, and eventually made his first conspiracy theory video in 2015. It quickly became his most popular series. In the past year, he has put out much less content, but what he does put out is TV-level quality and production. He and his videographer, Andrew Siwicki, put out content with hours of footage and break it up into series released on different dates. The Youtuber took a few months off, and fans waited eagerly for his comeback video, especially once it was announced that it would be about conspiracy theories.
On Dec. 8, 2018, Shane tweeted, “working on stuff for 2019” using the triangle emoji, hinting at the Illuminati, alluding to the idea that his next release would be more conspiracy theories. On Jan. 30, 2018, the almost two-hour long video was posted. Within 15 hours, the video reached over 8 million views, and fans, not surprisingly, were loving it. Shane brought up the Woolsey fires that raged in California, which burned almost 97,000 acres of land and lasted thirteen days. Three people lost their lives, thousands lost their homes, neighborhoods and memories, and over 300,000 people were evacuated. People compared it to the apocalypse. Shane had a lot of unanswered questions about the fire, and wanted to take a trip to Calabasas to see the fire damage in person to get the full effect. While the damage was heartbreaking and terrifying to see, something was off. As they walked down the street, whole houses and garages were burned to pieces with nothing left. But the surrounding trees on the property were fine, as well as houses next door. If it was a wildfire, like those of authority announced, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Theories were flowing on Twitter as soon as the fires started, the most popular theory being lasers. The fire is said to have started from a research site at a lab that had a partial nuclear meltdown in the ’50s. But pictures and footage show harsh lines that people claim are lasers coming from military aircrafts, the reasoning behind this being population control. The theory might sound a little far-fetched but when you see a house burned completely to the ground next to a house and trees that are not even touched a little bit, it’s hard to completely blame it on a simple wildfire. They ended the segment with exploring a burned playground, and an eerie “to be continued.” This theory is terrifying and elicits a lot of thought about what the government is hiding and what they might have to gain from something like this.
One other theory that was interesting to me was Shane’s discussion of an app called Deep Fake. It’s an extremely advanced iPhone software that resembles the face swapping filter on Snapchat. Most of the drama that has come from the app is that people are using it to morph celebrities heads onto adult entertainment videos. Young actresses like Selena Gomez and Emma Watson have had their faces morphed on top of pornography videos, making it seem as if the celebrities were the ones taking part. As of now, there are absolutely no laws prohibiting this sort of thing, which Shane, along with many experts, say could be extremely dangerous. Shane showed a clip of Barack Obama bad mouthing Donald Trump and calling him names, and revealed the clip to actually be Jordan Peele, showing just how easy it is for people to use the app. It absolutely looked like it was Barack Obama saying these things. This is dangerous for the world, as Shane used the example of someone being able to use this app, perhaps, to make it seem like Trump announced he has sent off a nuclear weapon. After the fake video release, it would become viral, and there would be an immediate response from other countries – a response that might be catastrophic for our country. This is a terrifying thought, as Shane made it clear that it is very easy to do, and could happen to anyone, celebrity or not.
These were just two of the theories he talked about. He also talked about a few different iPhone glitches and subliminal messages in childhood shows about suicide. The video has you on the edge of your seat for the entire hour and forty minutes and I highly encourage anyone to watch it, as it talks about serious things and events that are happening in our society.