Jirard Khalil: A Disastrous Cancellation in Progress
I want to draw your attention to a cancellation currently in progress. I find this cancellation useful as a case study because it is politically neutral, and because without having any personal connection to the actors, we can actually make some headway into understanding the truth of the matter.
Jirard Khalil, a fairly well-known video game YouTuber, and his family are being accused of charity fraud. Khalil’s mother suffered a rare form of dementia, and after she died, his family started a charitable foundation to fund research into the disease, called the Open Hand Foundation. Khalil often raises money for this foundation through a yearly event he runs, called Indieland; the rest of the family, for their part, seem to mainly fundraise through yearly golf tournaments.
Our accuser is one Karl Jobst, another video game YouTuber. It bears mentioning that he often makes videos about cheaters who have been caught, because his videos about Khalil follow a similar format — except that in this case they’re based on his own investigation.
One month ago, Jobst posted a video making serious allegations about Khalil and the charity. His launching point was an anomaly he found in their financial statements: they had raised about $600 thousand in the ten years of their existence, but they hadn’t donated any of it; it was all still sitting there. Jobst also noticed these statements hadn’t been signed, which — he felt — was surely a sign of illegitimacy. He reached out to the foundation, and the reply was roughly as follows: we haven’t donated the money yet because we want to make sure it makes the biggest impact possible, and if you have any suggestions we would be glad to hear them. Jobst found this latter addendum strange and unprofessional. He also was able to speak to Khalil directly; the latter claimed he had only found out recently that the money hadn’t been donated, which he found “not cool”, and that he was taking steps to remedy it. Jobst noted that Khalil’s behaviour during his fundraising events had not changed, despite this.
As he delved deeper, Jobst found more irregularities. Seemingly missing money from the golf tournaments. YouTube revenue that was slated for the charity, unaccounted for. And through it all, Jirard Khalil kept saying that the foundation was a donor to organizations around the world, despite what the financial statements seemed to show. Jobst concluded that Khalil and the charity itself were likely guilty of charity fraud, and insinuated that the $600 thousand itself might have been absconded with behind the scenes. Two weeks later, he posted another video with further allegations.
I think I should mention that I have no prior skin in this game. I’ve watched Khalil’s videos from time to time, and he seems like a decent enough fellow. I’ve also watched Jobst’s, and while I’ve had reservations about the schadenfreude with which he exposes cheaters, I have found the content interesting.1 My goal from the start was to understand what’s really happening at the Open Hand Foundation, and what follows is what I believe to be the most plausible scenario.
(As a preamble: is the foundation competently run? I have no idea. Knowing nearly nothing about the Khalil family, and in the absence of compelling evidence either way, I have to assume they’re about average for any small charity.)
We can dispense immediately with the primary allegation, which concerned the $600 thousand. Because of the rarity of the relevant dementia, the Open Hand Foundation wants to make a restricted donation. This means their money can only be used in the way they specify — to study that form of dementia — whereas an unrestricted donation could be used for other kinds of research, as well as for administrative overhead. Why is this relevant? Because it typically makes sense for restricted donations to be quite large.
Say I want you, a charitable organization, to open a soup kitchen in my neighbourhood, but I only have $500 to donate. I could make that donation restricted, but $500 isn’t nearly enough to start up the kitchen. So unless you receive a lot of other similar donations, the soup kitchen is not going to happen, and you might as well return my money, because you can’t legally use it for anything else. But suppose instead I donated half a million. Now a soup kitchen is a real possibility, and if you’re in the business of soup kitchens, you might as well get to it.
Thus we can make sense of the $600 thousand seeming to just sit there: whether correctly or incorrectly, Khalil’s family had deemed their existing funds insufficient, or the available options lacking, to make the kind of impact they wanted to make — just as they said in their response to Jobst. More accurately, I suspect they were aiming to grow not just their gross assets but their yearly income, so that they could form a long-term partnership with a relevant facility; unfortunately, $60 thousand a year just doesn’t buy a lot of research.
The question of whether the $600 thousand had been embezzled was definitively answered this month when — under public pressure, no doubt — the Open Hand Foundation donated the entire amount to the AFTD. It really was just sitting there.
With the initiating incident dispensed with, a lot of the further “evidence” presented by Jobst begins to look like mere irregularities, and Khalil has addressed some of them, pointing to e.g. operating costs for the fundraising events to explain revenue that seemed to be missing. That much is at least plausible; and an IRS audit of the foundation is likely given this scandal, so I suppose we’ll know for sure sooner or later. But my point is that once the big “smoking gun” has been understood for what it is, none of the littler things are particularly suspicious. They took on the tinge of suspicion only in connection with Jobst’s bigger allegations, and when the latter have been shown to be unfounded, the former should therefore be immediately discounted as well.
The remaining question is Khalil’s personal culpability for the way he described the foundation and its activities during his fundraising events. I think a case could be made that he lied or at least stretched the truth, and for the sake of argument I’m going to suppose he did, although the law could see it otherwise; but here as in law, I don’t think it’s enough to establish commission of wrongdoing. We need to also understand intent.
It is significant that, often, Khalil has not said the foundation gives to charities, but that it works with such-and-such charities. That much is quite plausible. When you’re making a large, restricted donation, you typically want to make sure your money is going to be put to good use. Potential recipients of your donation might submit proposals for exactly how they’ll spend the money; you might submit proposals in turn. Budget meetings will be held. Lawyers might get involved. All of this is work, costing real money and man-hours, and it all happens before a single penny is donated.
I don’t think Khalil set out with selfish or malicious intent. From every time he’s talked about it in the past, it’s clear that his mother’s dementia and eventual death were some of the most impactful episodes in his life, and that he cares deeply about the Open Hand Foundation and its mission. But when a charity is still taking its first baby steps, how do you convince bigger donors to step up? Maybe you fudge it a little, “fake it ‘til you make it”. Maybe it’s easy, when you’re broadcasting live to tens of thousands of people, to half-consciously slip from “works with” to “gives to”. After all, even if the foundation isn’t quite there yet, that’s certainly its mission statement, isn’t it? And maybe once you’ve done it, it’s quite hard to backpedal from “gives to” to “works with”.
All of that is speculation, of course. Perhaps Khalil deserves some form of punishment or accountability. He’s already stepped down from the board of the foundation, which can’t have been easy for him. Our better sensibilities require that we fit the severity of the crime and intention. But that’s not what I’m seeing. This isn’t a fair trial, remember, but a cancellation in progress, and it’s appalling to witness.
YouTubers feed on attention, and scandal generates a lot of it. Karl Jobst’s own channel is halfway defined by the cheating scandals he covers. As for the present scandal, in addition to whatever ad revenue he’s made, he also managed to find official sponsors, with midroll ad reads, for his second and third videos about Khalil. And of course, the scandal fuels subscribership and viewership on his channel as a whole.
When Jobst broke the story, other channels were quick to jump into the action, with similar incentives. Perversely, this most commonly takes the form of reaction videos, in which YouTubers record themselves watching the initial video, ostensibly for the first time, and giving their immediate, unfiltered thoughts on what they see. Such videos are incredibly quick and easy to make, as they require little editing or any significant mental effort, and they’re also quite popular with viewers. So they tend to beat out anyone who wants to actually think for a few days and then give a measured, informed opinion.
Every single one of the videos I’ve seen expresses simple cow-eyed agreement with whatever Jobst says.
YouTube comments have also been disturbingly uniform in their outlook. I encourage the reader to go see them for yourself. The second-best place to start is the comment section of Khalil’s own response video, released on December 9. The best place is Karl Jobst's rejoinder to Khalil, because if you then return to the response video, you will notice how many of the comments are merely parroting Jobst’s talking points. For all that they are legion, Jobst is the clear ringleader of this particular hive mind.
Khalil is placed in a no-win situation, where anything he says is taken as further evidence of guilt. He speaks of his mother, her disease, her death. This is “manipulation” — he’s trying to play on emotions to deflect from his guilt. How do we know? Well, because he’s a sociopath and a manipulator, as previously established. Commenters find particular glee in the inexplicable fact that he provided his mother’s autopsy report — apparently demonstrating that they either can’t remember, or didn’t even watch, Jobst’s initial video. The autopsy report is in fact a direct response to a concern Jobst raised, over Open Hand’s claim that they had donated body parts to science before becoming a public foundation. The body parts in question were, of course, those of Khalil’s mother, as anyone with a shred of compassion could have guessed if they’d taken a moment to think — and as Jobst apparently didn’t.
Lost in all the fury is the fact that if Khalil is innocent, or at least not a sociopath, he can be predicted to produce essentially an identical response.
I think that Khalil’s response is mostly sincere — mostly, because of an important caveat: this scandal does not only affect Khalil himself. In addition to the people he employs to help him run his YouTube channel and other projects, he especially needs to think of the effects this may have on his family, and on their shared project in honour of his mother. For these reasons, he needs to measure his words with extra care. In a gut-wrenching audio clip leaked by Jobst today (and which he characterizes as a “guilt trip”) Khalil pleads with Jobst to consider these effects, and, while stumbling over his words, seems to stop just short of offering him money. A cynical eye could see this as yet further condemnatory evidence: he was trying to bribe his way out of trouble. But I think a more accurate reading of the recorded call — and you’ll hear it if you listen carefully — is this: Khalil wanted to bribe Jobst to only focus on him, if it were at all possible. “Take me if you will, but spare the others.” It’s a desperate, but a chillingly honourable sentiment.
It pains me to ask: what can we learn from this? because that’s not why I wrote this essay. I wrote it because the more I’ve seen of this debacle, the more it has affected me. I wrote it because I’m furious, and grief-stricken, and terrified to see people act this way. Other cancellations have happened at a distance from me, it felt like, but for whatever reason this one sprung up around me, and I find myself caught in it like a tidal current. I feel I need to reach out and grasp at any life raft I can find: I need to know that someone sees this the way I see it.
But I promised a case study, and a case study calls for some discussion.
In the first place, that schadenfreude of Jobst’s that I mentioned earlier doesn’t look so cute anymore; it appears to have crossed the line into actual malice. There’s an aphorism of Nietzsche: “Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” Unfortunately, if the public sentiment on display is any indication, that’s going to mean a whole lot of people.
Jobst may claim he’s simply doing a reporter’s work. The sheer frequency with which he covers cheating scandals, however, compared with most other game journalists, tells a different story. I don’t know whether he takes sadistic pleasure in causing misery; or whether he’s merely indifferent to suffering and is doing it because it sells; or whether he somehow believes he’s doing the world a good service — and on this I decline to speculate. The key question is whether he is unique or relatively common, and I find the latter both more probable and far more disturbing. It seems to me he’s of a kind with every muckraker, every tabloid journalist, every paparazzo who’s ever lived.
And his audience — how like is he to them? And how like they to him?
What of the contrary: what of the twisting in my gut as I see this unfold? What of the reflexive caution I applied from the very start, aiming to see the situation clearly before I passed judgment? How many! How many are capable of these in practice, and how many more at least in principle?
Can both impulses — the impulse to mercy and the impulse to punishment — exist to these extremes in the same breast? Or are we like two different species?
I take some grim solace in the handful of heartfelt but bitterly disappointed comments I’ve seen levied at Khalil. The people who idolized him, who related to him because of dementia in their own families, who saw him as a beacon of goodness in the world, and who now feel they’ve been misled all along. They, at least, must be capable of compassion. But can’t they see? Can’t they find it in themselves to recognize that Jobst might not have the whole story? That people can have flaws and still want to do good? These commenters are only further collateral damage of Jobst’s big scoop.
Speaking of collateral damage, I suspect, and rather hope, that Jobst may have overreached. If he had only gone after Khalil himself, he might have had an airtight little story. But all of this, recall, hinged on the $600 thousand the charity seemed to be holding. Effectively, he accused the foundation itself of embezzlement for engaging in behaviour that was fairly normal for a charity of its kind. Now, I am not a lawyer, and it is beyond my abilities to determine whether he made that accusation with sufficient emphasis to constitute defamation. But it is a real possibility.
Can we call that a silver lining? I don’t think so. An unsuccessful lawsuit would of course spell further calamity for the Open Hand. But I doubt a successful one would be much better. From all my life’s experience, and from the vehemence of this mob, I doubt many people would be convinced by a legal result who aren’t already on Khalil’s side or reserving their judgment. To a greater or lesser extent, Khalil and his family will still suffer the consequences of Jobst’s actions, both in their personal lives and in the legacy they were trying to create.
Can I really end this on a hopeful note? The only hope I can honestly express here is in Jirard. I hope that however this turns out, he can find the strength and the means to come back and keep doing what he’s always done. Or, failing that, I hope that whatever his life becomes, he can adjust to it and thrive in it, and find ways to do good in it. For now, though, he’s at the centre of a terrifying praeternatural disaster, and there’s no telling what will come of it.
A lot of you listen to true crime podcasts, so don’t judge me.