Author: Patrick Simpson

  On April 24, 2018, a moderator of the subreddit r/chomsky (a discussion board for Noam Chomsky enthusiasts) created a new subreddit, one intended as a home for the rising tide of leftist video essays on YouTube [Alex Gekker, et al., “Slicing BreadTube” (Amsterdam: Digital Methods Summer School, Digital Methods Initiative, 2019), 10.] The subreddit was titled “BreadTube,” and the term “BreadTube” (or the less cryptic “LeftTube”) is still used to describe a loose network of YouTube channels that viewers perceive as sharing leftist political views alongside a common aesthetic and rhetorical style. The term has to some extent...