Prominent YouTubers Clash with Bao, Jose “Chille” DeCastro and SeanPaul “Long island Audit” Reyes livestreamed from anti-ICE protests across the country on Friday to the similar degrees of criticism as fans noted that the YouTubers saw no controversy at the protests.
Starting with Clash with Bao, the currently Texas based YouTuber said he drove for two days from Texas to make it to the on-going anti-ICE demonstrations in Minneapolis, Minnesota and was not at all prepared for the extreme cold of a Minnesota winter.
While keeping moving with the crowd, Bao would complain about the cold and would ultimately need to take donations from his followers to buy proper footwear and more “layers” of clothing to protect him from the cold.
Unlike the other YouTubers, Bao’s coverage drew a scant 90 people as he casually wandered through the protests in downtown Minneapolis on Friday taking a more humorous approach to his surroundings.
His chant of “Don’t let the immigrants fester” drew puzzled looks from some observers, who would stop and question what exactly he was saying with his chant. Bao made fun of himself and his own coverage, asking where the single women were as Friday’s official march ended.
More serious was the presentation of SeanPaul “Long Island Audit” Reyes, who was also live from downtown Minneapolis.
Reyes was actually marching with protestors while not officially participating in the march. The King of all First Amendment YouTubers spent most of his two hours walking with the crowd with his eyes mainly on his chat, where he engaged with those trolling him on both sides of the issue.
The YouTuber seemed disinterested in the events around him and seemed to be there to negatively engage with his chat, though every so often he’d stop to ask those around him if they were being paid to be there.
In one instance, a woman answered that she was indeed being paid. She said she came from California and her boss was paying her for her time off as she went to the protest. Reyes briefly marveled at her statement before going back to negatively engaging with his chat.
Reyes’ message during the march was that his haters were unneeded and that while he may lose some subscribers in the end, those with negative views of him or his presence at the march were unnecessary and his channel would flourish without them.
He repeatedly told his fans that his chat was not an airport, there was no need to announce their departure through unsubscribing they could go without saying a word.
Once his activities in downtown Minneapolis concluded, Reyes would again livestream Friday night, this time from an ICE detention center in Minneapolis.
Reyes spent about 40 minutes outside of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building Friday night. The building itself was heavily fortified with a series of gates and fences keeping the protestors away from the building.
The YouTuber spent his entire stream in the outermost section of the fencing, where protestors had set up a table offering grilled cheese sandwiches and handwarmers.
Reyes returned to negatively engaging with his chat, this time chastising those who thought that “billionaires” care for anyone other than themselves and calling out what he said were bots who had invaded his chat in order to troll the King of auditing.
Putting his opinions on the line, the YouTuber told his chat that he didn’t care who was being deported as long as the deportations followed the rules set out in the constitution. He continued to refuse to take a “side” while lashing out at both sides of the issue.
Reyes would cut short his broadcast at the Federal building after forty minutes due to extreme cold.
Finally, Jose “Chille” DeCastro went live multiple times Friday night from the relatively pleasant confines of Los Angeles. The diminutive YouTuber said that he had seen coverage of “riots” in downtown L.A. that evening and had left his home to see if the reports were true.
DeCastro returned to the same area where he had a confrontation with a group of teenage girls on Martin Luther King Day, claiming it was the epicenter of the protests in the city. When he approached the spot where he was “assaulted by two men” and not mentioning the teenaged girls, he stayed on the far side of the road and walked past the spot quickly.
The YouTuber complained that he had been streaming in horizontal format on his main channel and in vertical format on his DLZ Clips channel, yet YouTube was only promoting the vertical stream as the numbers of viewers between the channels greatly favored the vertical stream.
Ultimately, DeCastro would stop his horizontal stream on his main channel and restart it in vertical stream, ending the only real drama for the night.
Casual observers wondered about DeCastro’s choice of outfits for the night. He faced the January heat of L.A. in a heavy black sweatshirt with “press” written in yellow block lettering along with a grey bicycle helmet in an apparent attempt to emulate traditional war reporters.
The unsightly combination made DeCastro stand out from the crowd, though DeCastro would eventually overheat from his insistence on doing wind sprints between locations and would have to take off his “press” gear.
Unironically, DeCastro would spend several minutes complaining about YouTuber “Matt Morressey” who DeCastro said was restreaming video of the riots and taking in hundreds of dollars in super chats without sharing links to the original footage.
He also spent a good deal of time claiming that when he was Governor, he would solve the homeless crisis by making it illegal to camp out on the streets of L.A. Instead, DeCastro would assign tiny homes to each homeless individual to keep them off the streets.
The YouTuber offered no plans on how he’d fund his project but would later add that he would also increase the size of garbage cans in the city as he complained that every garbage can along the march route was overflowing with garbage.
Once his marching finished, DeCastro would return to his studio and later hold another livestream with the YouTuber known as Travel Jack. DeCastro is in the process of renaming Travel Jack to “The Fifth Amendment Auditor.”
Jack’s plans to go through another DUI checkpoint on camera while invoking his fifth amendment rights were apparently thwarted by a lost internet connection. DeCastro ended his livestream and brought the night to an end soon after that.
DeCastro was expected to go live later on Saturday.
