By now, you probably know that YouTube is pure evil. Or maybe just dumber than a box of rocks. Either way, get ready for major political and regulatory action against Google, which has owned the video platform since 2006, and is now the target of a Department of Justice antitrust investigation and a congressional investigation along the same lines. Earlier today in an interview with CNBC, President Donald Trump praised the more-than-$9-billion in fines levied against the internet giant by the European Union since 2017 and declared, "Obviously, there's something going on in terms of monopoly."

These days, whether you're a right-wing free-marketer or a left-wing democratic socialist, whether you're Tucker Carlson or Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), you probably worry more about Big Tech than Islamic terrorism and agree that all or most of the so-called FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) need to be broken up, hemmed in, or regulated as public utilities. Hell, even the leaders of those companies are calling for regulation. A month ago, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times to plead with Congress to pass "comprehensive privacy legislation" similar to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that would cover all online businesses. Ironically—or maybe strategically—Pichai didn't mention that a year after the GDPR's implementation, Google's marketshare had grown.

Last week, in a truly inspired set of self-owns, YouTube managed to piss off conservatives—by apparently demonetizing the videos of right-wing comedian Steven Crowder—and to enrage progressives by not actually banning him for jokes directed at a gay Vox reporter.

When YouTube's not using its supposedly all-powerful, super-spooky algorithm to recommend videos that will turn you into a pedophile or a marathon runner, it's turning decent, red-blooded, red-state American boys into alt-right monsters. The theory here is that, in a bid to extend the amount of time viewers stay on the site, YouTube keeps recommending slightly more extreme, provocative videos of the sort you just watched. You go from watching old Milton Friedman clips to Ben Shapiro disquisitions to Stefan Molyneux rants on "race realism" and, well, it was nice knowing you. It goes without saying that viewers are largely unable to exercise any meaningful volition when faced with such modern-day magic. Back in the 1990s, it was supposedly ultra-violent and hyper-sexual cable TV that was programming us into slobbering fools. Today, it's PewDiePie, Logan Paul, et al.

"Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube," reads the ominous subtitle to a widely read New York Times about a 26-year-old West Virginia resident who started watching a bunch of alt-right videos and came to identify with that movement of Trump-friendly, quasi-racists, traditionalists, and nativists. Until, that is, he watched yet more YouTube videos and changed his mind:

Nearly four years after Mr. Cain had begun watching right-wing YouTube videos, a new kind of video began appearing in his recommendations.