It takes a lot to shock us or even get our attention these days. Inundated with seemingly nonstop images of death and mayhem on the news, and equally bombarded by millions of viral video segments, we click, click, click and seldom stop on anything anymore.
So, for a YouTube channel to garner 8.53 million subscribers, like Greg Chism’s Toy Freaks channel did, you can be pretty sure it wasn’t about baking cakes or how to fix your computer. It was one of the top 100 most-viewed YT channels ever until its recent demise. It’s reported that Chism may have earned as much as $13 million in annual revenues from the wildly popular channel.
But the social media video giant has now shut down the former Illinois landscaper’s channel, amid increasing concerns that he was misusing his two very young daughters, Annabelle and Victoria, and showing content that would truly only appeal to the not-quite-right among us.
While it’s not clear that Chism actually violated any specific YouTube policy, the online operator said, in shutting down the channel, that “… we take child safety extremely seriously and have clear policies against child endangerment. We recently tightened the enforcement of these policies to tackle content featuring minors where we receive signals that cause concern.”
The move came after YouTube received numerous complaints that Chism was exploiting, and even endangering, his kids in the videos and that his content, some of which was completely nonsensical, would only appeal to kinky and dangerous types, and possibly even pedophiliacs.
In one, which shows the elementary school-age girls both wearing baby onesies and sucking on pacifiers while speaking largely incomprehensible baby talk, we see a menacing man (presumably Chism himself) wearing a disturbing Night King mask and peering into the glass door to the living room.
The older girl keeps sending her younger sister, who’s in pigtails, down the stairs with a woven basket to bring fruit items back upstairs, a plot line that, in and of itself, makes no sense to anyone normal. More disturbing, and one can assume at their father’s direction, each time either of the girls goes downstairs, they thump down the carpeted stairs on either their backs or their stomachs, which had to cause some bruising, at the very minimum.
After they gather fruit, the creepy and menacing man at the door silently opens the side door and reaches in to grab some of the fruit, which creates confusion when little sister returns with less than she put in her basket.
Finally, the man takes all of his fruit plunder and crushes it outside with a lawn mower, pulverizing it. As if to somehow redeem the creepy factor, the final scene shows the older sister tossing a large tomato at the masked man’s head, which knocks him to the ground in a rather inexplicable moment, as the two sisters giggle and high-five each other.
After watching it, we felt like we needed a shower and some de-slimmer. Good move taking this channel down, YouTube. Hopefully, Chism has set aside some of his multimillion fortunes for the inevitable lawsuits from his daughters when they are older.
There is no word on whether they were paid, or had any kind of trust funds set up for them, as would have been mandated by show business union rules surrounding child performers, from their participation in the gross video series.
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