Yesterday, Twitch suspended an account that belonged to streamer and famous YouTuber Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt after he made racist comments about the death of Palestinians in Gaza. Now, the YouTuber has responded to the temporary ban with surprisingly clear-eyed assessment of the controversy and what led up to it.
“I don’t really want to mince words or, ‘oh I wasn’t justifying or promoting [the genocide],’” He said during a new 20-minute long video on the subject. “I said something about it that was disgusting.”
In a recent Twitch stream, Hoyt mentioned the war in Gaza and how he didn’t “give a fuck” about civilians killed by Israel, and added that Palestinians belonged to an “inferior culture in all ways.” The comments were clipped, widely circulated online, and roundly criticized by many viewers and other streamers. Twitch later banned Hoyt’s zackrawrr channel, one of his two main accounts on the Amazon-owned platform, reportedly for two weeks.
Hoyt walked the comments back in a response on X (formerly known as Twitter) that stopped short of a full apology. In his new YouTube video, however, he rebuked the remarks in much stronger terms. “I was making a criticism of religious extremism and I almost made an effort not to draw a distinction between the two things,” he said. “Whenever I categorize everybody in the area as this like group than I’m the asshole and I was the asshole.”
He also tried to situate the racist rant in a larger context of his career trajectory and toxic online streaming culture. “You know who reached out to me and they wanted to talk and have a conversation and see if I was okay?” he continued. “People who were Islamic and people who had fucking family in Palestine and how humiliating is that how absolutely humiliating is that and these ere the people I was trying to say were bad and I feel like such a fucking stupid asshole.”
The whole video is below:
