General Discussion

Growing up in California, Orwoll says he had two black friends, as well as acquaintances from Orange County’s Philippine community, relationships that he cannot quite bring himself to condemn. He is more comfortable attacking the city’s overall demographic shifts.

After leaving high school, Orwoll moved to upstate New York to attend a music college and following graduation was hired to play the French horn in the Shen Yun orchestra, a Chinese travelling troupe associated with Falun Gong, a New York-based cult whose messianic leader, Li Hongzhi, opposes interracial relationships and thinks extraterrestrials walk the earth.

Orwoll’s most popular video on YouTube remains a rambling 20-minute history of Falun Gong, describing how he lost faith in his shufu or master, Li, whom he describes as a “brilliant extemporaneous speaker”. “I don’t have a problem with it,” he says of Falun Gong in the video. “Unless you’re a kid being brought up into it. In which case, somebody should intervene a little bit.”

Around this period in Orwoll’s life — before his conversion to Christianity — he began streaming sex videos with his ex-wife, Caitlin Smith, on a porn website called Chaturbate. “It was something I was very ashamed of. I was a nihilist at the time. I was not Christian, didn’t really believe in traditional values or any values at all,” he says, explaining his interest in the forthright debating style of the New Atheists — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, the “four horsemen” who were popular with young men on YouTube about a decade ago. Was it Orwoll’s idea to start streaming porn for paid subscribers or Smith’s? “I don’t want to get into exactly how it all started,” he says.