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Notes -
I thought about making a similar post on Internet Historian (IH) here, but I thought it might be a bit too much like aping /r/drama, which would be this site's most obvious failure-mode. People seem fine with it though (which might be a bad sign, or I might be just reading too much into it), so I'll leave my thoughts.
The only thing to really fault IH for is insufficiently crediting the article in his original video. He did credit it, but should have been more explicit that the video was a dramatization. Even with this, though, there's leeway since copying is absolutely rampant on the internet. 95% of modern journalism articles are regurgitated from social media or copied from other journalists. Most prestige articles from things like Substack are using the main arguments from other people, repackaging them, and changing them only slightly. It's how humans work, and usually nobody bothers to cite sources. In many cases it would be very difficult to tell where one person's thoughts start and another's begin. HBomber seemed to think copying words was the obvious smoking gun, but apart from a few segments most of IH's video was so heavily paraphrased that this mostly falls flat.
The supposed "coverup" is just a maximally uncharitable way of looking at the situation. HBomber is trying to collect a scalp here so he's taking things out of context and manipulating the story to seem as damaging as possible.
Then the wider internet gets involved, and since IH tilts conservative the cancel-happy leftists see blood in the water and out come the Hitler analogies. By their own logic, anyone who's made a dead baby joke should be presumed to be a murderer.
Honestly given the amount of work it takes to make his particular style of video and the fact he's retelling historical fact, it's just silly to accuse him of plagiarism. At worst he wasn't sufficiently forthcoming with his sources.
Being a journalist, which is what IH is at core, is literally just retelling what others already told in a more entertaining or more accessible way. And if making intricate animation on top of historical fact that is inherently impossible to alter or copyright isn't transformative enough to prevent accusations of plagiarism, then nothing is.
Nobody believes this is anything but a political hit job.
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