This YouTube Channel Has Cracked the Code to Virality. But at What Cost?

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About 26 minutes into the “debate” video, a guy named Connor leans into the mic and, with a shruggy grin, concedes that he is in fact a fascist. Applause breaks out. Mehdi Hasan, the lone progressive onstage, looks around, bewildered, registering that he is surrounded by fascists. The video is billed as “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives,” and off-the-rails moments like this are the point. It’s one pundit alone against 20.

What the episode fails to prepare you for is that many of Hasan’s opponents seem to be there only to insult him: A little after Connor cops to his fascism, another “debater” takes center stage to tell Hasan to “get the hell out” of the country, as if the naturalized Muslim American journalist is trespassing. Another insists that as a white person, he is Native American. Hasan rolls his eyes, offers a serious rebuttal when he can, and continues on. He’s literally surrounded. There’s no way out.

The video is from Surrounded, a show produced by Jubilee Media, a L.A.-based YouTube content company with the stated goal to “provoke understanding” via social experiment–styled discussions and debates. And it has gone more than viral, getting 8.9 million views in one week alone.

Surrounded, one of many shows on the channel, is Jubilee’s version of a political gladiator arena, and the conceit is straightforward: Drop a recognizable pundit in the middle, encircle them with a roulette wheel of antagonists, profit. It’s peak YouTube. And by clipping the most combustible moments, it’s taken over every corner of the internet.
Top hits include Charlie Kirk vs. “25 Liberal College Students”; “Can 1 Pro-Lifer Survive 25 Pro-Abortion Activists?”; and Ben Shapiro vs. “25 Kamala Harris voters.”

And it’s profitable: The channel sits at over 10 million subscribers and just under 3 billion lifetime views. Not bad for a channel created just 15 years ago. It enjoyed a sharp spike in traffic the week Hasan’s episode dropped; this translates to a substantial boost in revenue, which is estimated to earn Jubilee around $1.8 million a year. Its founder says the goal is the “Disney of empathy,” though it’s also been called “Gen Z’s Jerry Springer Show.”

But something about the Hasan episode feels different. The thumbnail alone telegraphs it: a brown, famously Muslim journalist against far‑right conservatives, the crowd that cheered the Muslim ban, insists that Islam is incompatible with the West, and is enjoying the massive national deportation campaign.

If you bring in 20 folks whose position is essentially “You don’t belong,” is that still a “debate”? On an internet that turns identity into a sport that pays out when the “other side” gets cruel, is Jubilee the disease or a symptom? If it’s simply serving what the audience (and the algorithm) rewards and, in the process, surrounds a Muslim immigrant with 20 racists, what does that say about the audience? What does it say about me that I couldn’t resist watching?

When the video was first announced, I was hyped. My introduction to Hasan was 12 years ago, seeing a video of him at the Oxford Union arguing that “Islam is a religion of peace” with rapid‑fire charm. I watched him sharpen that blade on MSNBC and now as the editor of Zeteo, an independent news and digital media company he founded in 2024. His book Win Every Argument, with chapters like “Judo Moves” and “The Art of the Zinger,” is as fun to read as it is intriguing. When Jubilee teased this matchup, I thirsted for a bloodbath. Hasan is like an apex predator when it comes to shredding bad‑faith, racist arguments.

And Hasan delivers. He forces a panelist to admit she thinks immigrants are not Americans, then recites the 14^th Amendment verbatim. When she claims she knew it, he snaps back: “You didn’t seem aware of it.” Brilliant. Chef’s kiss. He grills a guy he later called a “Batman villain” who labeled Palestinian kids killed by the Israel Defense Forces “so‑called innocent civilians,” pressing him on snipers shooting children. “This is bad for you,” Hasan warns. It’s emancipating to watch. Cathartic. No notes.

But many of his challengers on Surrounded weren’t content just to spar about ideas. When cornered, they openly advocated fascism, floated exclusionary immigration policies to reverse a supposed “white genocide,” or attacked Hasan’s right to remain in the country where he’s raising his family as a citizen. Hasan couldn’t have performed any better. He held up a mirror and showed how toxic their positions are for a pluralistic society. No one seemed convinced. Several basically said they didn’t need to win the argument. This is just what they believe.

Hasan sums it up at the end of the video. “Multiple people here said I should be deported,” he said. “One person said, as he walked off, ‘You’ll be the first to go,’ which is ominous and racist. … Free speech doesn’t mean you need to give credibility or oxygen or a platform to people who don’t agree on human equality. The people here were way beyond conservatives. This is open authoritarianism.”

That’s when the thrill curdled for me. I realized I’d watched what amounted to a right‑wing carnival dunk tank—with Hasan as the prop.

My colleague Nadira Goffe called it “musical chairs for verbal assault.” On X, someone wrote, “Cruel of Jubilee to make a game show where Mehdi spends 100+ minutes not screaming, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ALL OF YOU?!’ ” Another pitched, “1 Fascist vs 20 WWII veterans—with guns.” Those jokes clock the format correctly: spectacle first, discourse optional.

Here’s the core problem. Using a person to bait actual fascists into being cruel on camera for clicks is clearly not discourse. It’s content. Hasan’s skill makes it watchable, fun even, but the premise is still rotten. Cast one Muslim born in London and surround him with people who hate Muslims and immigrants, and you’re not adjudicating ideas; you’re asking one man to defend not only themself but an entire population’s existence—one I also identify with—to a group of folks who believe in Christian white supremacy. It’s well lit. It’s also quite ugly.

Afterward, I realized I’d been a split‑screen viewer. Half of me exhaled every time Hasan reverse engineered a bad premise into dust. The other half braced, because I know firsthand how the post–9/11 applause lines get recycled as “proof” for bigotry against people like Hasan and me. They’re just better dressed when delivered by lawmakers and presidents.

His composure is practiced because these ideas aren’t fringe, as Hasan later reflected in a Zeteo town hall. “One of the useful things that comes out of this debate is, you can see for yourself what is out there now. We’re not making this stuff up. In Trump’s America, people are emboldened to say stuff they would never dare say in public five or ten years ago,” he says. “I didn’t expect this much open abuse, racist abuse, to my face.”

People seemed shocked he kept his cool. What else was he going to do? Poise is a practice survival tactic. It’s a safety protocol. One stumble, and it isn’t “Mehdi could’ve done better”; it’s “See, they’re all like that.” He was the one encircled, but all of us nonwhite Americans were in that chair with him.

So is it wrong to format a “debate” this way? For obvious reasons, yes. Elevating fascists as a legitimate side opposite progressivism only launders their racism. Because the show frames the debate as a negotiation in which losing would mean conceding that he and those like him aren’t real Americans, can Hasan even “win”?

I personally couldn’t wait for the episode to drop. I craved the dunks. I’ve watched him do it mercilessly to racists ever since he dropped the hammer at the Oxford Union. It felt healing to see far‑right arguments filleted with agility and composure. But my view is a vote for the premise. I’m training the algorithm to serve me more OWN/DESTROY/TOTALLY DISEMBOWEL!!! content. (I exaggerated that last one, but you get the point.)

The only potential winners are the microinfluencers cast against Hasan, for whom this was a launchpad. For Connor the fascist, for example, good lighting and a lav mic turned a Telegram troll into a “far‑right voice.” He allegedly lost his job after the episode came out, and he promptly took to the internet to monetize his martyrdom. His crowdfunding, framed as punishment for “heterosexual, Christian, moral beliefs,” has surpassed $40,000. If there’s a winner here, it isn’t Hasan. It’s Connor, still smirking, counting his money.

Monetizing that bargain is obviously wrong, but Jubilee is not “the problem.” The answer is far more complicated than that. The media company is eerily good at mirroring our country’s appetite for watching someone’s identity be stress tested. For Gen Z and beyond, that’s just great entertainment for a Tuesday afternoon. Jubilee didn’t create the hunger. It just happens to run one of the most ruthlessly efficient kitchens in town.

I don’t think the answer is “Never go on Jubilee.” I still rewatch Hasan doing what he does best, and I admire him—because in that chair I’d probably flounder and set our people back a decade. Still, the fact that this is already one of Jubilee’s top videos says plenty. Hasan held up a mirror to the fascists; Jubilee is holding one to us—our appetite for identity cage matches. This isn’t making humanity worse; it’s showing us who we are. It just so happened that after this particular video, we made a fascist rich.

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