BALTIMORE _ Recording in a row-house studio on a working-class street, Natalie Wynn, a trans woman with defiant opinions and platinum wigs, has emerged as a popular YouTube provocateur, taking on right-wing extremists, radical feminists, climate change deniers and notions of identity in our seething, selfie-obsessed, meme-driven age.
Wynn is known by her internet alias, ContraPoints. A public intellectual with a flair for costumes and camp, Wynn, who in videos has dressed as a eunuch and a crypto-fascist, is a progressive liberal who can flay her enemies even as she seeks to understand their beliefs. She is that rare presence in our clamorous times: an internet voice resonant not with rage but with satire, humor, nuance and an inviting if at times sardonic sense of persuasion.
She has criticized the euphemisms and coded hate speech of the alt-right and the moral failings of capitalism, describing the latter as a "repulsive juxtaposition of scarcity and abundance." In a 35-minute video, which drew nearly 2 million views, Wynn explored the internet subculture of "incels," young, mostly white men who can't find romantic relationships.
Or as she puts it, "men who have found an identity for not getting laid" and harbor a "searing resentment" of women.
Her videos are a testament to how the nation's divides play out across the web.
YouTube and other channels, not to mention Twitter and legions of chat rooms, are a Darwinian cyberspace where political and ideological battles swirl in countless storms. The key, especially on YouTube, is to masquerade message as entertainment, which Wynn did recently when she featured a $2,000 gold-flecked pizza to highlight the egregiousness of wealth.
"You have to hold the attention," she says. "You have to be constantly inviting people further in."
When she started posting as ContraPoints three years ago, Wynn, a former Uber driver and philosophy major, was out to dismantle right-wing extremist logic with its own trappings: "My videos were like fishhooks," she says. "They were almost barbed. I was like flickering in the light acting like I was going to be a feminist vlogger, but the video would be impossible to eviscerate because it would be loaded with all the same kinds of edgy jokes the right wing people were doing. I was arguing against them but playing their game. I was this weird aberration."
