>>104105Just going to drop this here since it fits the broader theme of the thread-hypocritical grifters weaponizing politics for personal gain while their audiences eat it up.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-XAmKX0Iuso [Embed]There's a new video making rounds (YT link above) that absolutely eviscerates the streamer Jesus AVGN (Alexey Gubanov), a Russian Twitch personality who fled to the US after the war started and has been cosplaying as some kind of moral crusader ever since. The guy built his entire post-2022 brand on being the ultimate anti-Russian, pro-Ukraine voice, constantly attacking anyone who doesn't fall in line with his political narrative. But as the video demonstrates, underneath that "noble" veneer is just another grifter who's been scamming his own audience for years.
The timeline here is hilarious in a tragic way. This guy was running casino streams back in 2020, promoting gambling to a largely teenage audience, while simultaneously lecturing his viewers about how other streamers were corrupt for doing the same thing. Then there's the crypto scam with his buddy Shevtsov - they launched a memecoin, gave themselves early access to dump it at peak price, and left regular investors holding worthless bags. When confronted about the 6% of funds that were scooped up before public listing, Jesus literally said "what's the problem?" as if $40,000 evaporating from his audience's pockets was nothing. He did this twice with different coins. But apparently marking your ads with an RKN token is where he draws the line on moral compromises.
The "Alabuga Polytech" crusade is where it gets especially relevant to this thread. He started a mass-reporting campaign against any streamer who took sponsorship from this Russian drone-manufacturing college, using his audience to flood Twitch with complaints. It worked - some channels got banned temporarily. But here's the irony: he's now living in New York, literally filming his own video logs where he got robbed by a homeless guy on the street, and he's telling his Ukrainian viewers that they should stay and fight while he himself admits he'd "swim across the Tisza" to avoid conscription. The same guy demanding others die in trenches is sitting comfortably in America collecting donations.
The underlying tragedy is that his audience - largely Ukrainians and liberal Russians - actually believe this guy cares about them. He doesn't. He cares about the ad revenue, the donation money, and the social clout that comes from being seen as the "good guy" in a war where everyone else is supposedly evil. He called for the destruction of the Russian state while his own disabled father and brother still live in Russia, completely unconcerned about the consequences to his own family. It's the same "let them bleed" mentality from the OP, just dressed up in pro-Ukrainian packaging instead of doomer nihilism.
Ultimately this just confirms what the thread's OP was getting at - there's no real principled position to be found in this conflict, just narcissists using dead bodies as props for their personal brands. Whether you're a Russian nationalist fighting for Ukraine or a Russian streamer pretending to be a Ukrainian savior while scamming his own supporters, the common denominator is self-interest. The video's creator makes a good point: "Good people don't have this much shit stick to them." When you've been caught scamming, doxing, reporting, manipulating, and playing both sides, maybe the problem isn't everyone else - it's you.