In case you don’t remember Carlos Maza, he’s the host of a YouTube show for Vox.  who attempted to get Steven Crowder removed from the platform. Last night the NY Post reported that Maza was on his way out at Vox.

Initially, sources said, Vox executives had supported him in his battle with Crowder. But as Maza wanted to escalate the all-out war, their support seemed to wane.

Attempts to reach Maza via email were unsuccessful, although he posted on Twitter, “hello from the ~shakiest~ few weeks of my life” on Aug. 11…

Vox Media did not return calls seeking comment. But one source said Maza is negotiating a severance package.

This hasn’t been confirmed by anyone yet, so we’ll have to wait and see. One thing that does seem clear is that Maza hasn’t moved on from his public fight with Crowder and YouTube which started in May:

https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1134264395717103617

Eventually, YouTube decided to demonetize some of Crowder’s videos but chose not to remove him from the platform. That conclusion to the episode is still the pinned tweet on Maza’s feed:

https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1136056663927087105

Maza posted this tweet about dealing with trauma yesterday:

THERAPIST: You realize you’re dealing with trauma, right? That you can’t just joke about this forever?

ME: https://t.co/AiMiXMyHV0

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) August 13, 2019

As I wrote at the time, I can see why Maza didn’t find Crowder’s jokes about his sexuality funny (‘He’s gay’ isn’t a great punchline given that this is an immutable personal characteristic). But ultimately Maza was trying to silence Crowder based on what was clearly intended as biting humor. Also, the jabs at Maza only represented a small portion of Crowder’s content. Far more of Crowder’s time in his response videos was spent critiquing the actual content Maza was offering. No doubt Maza didn’t like having a personal gadfly critiquing everything he produced but that’s how free speech works. That’s apparently how YouTube viewed it as well. From Gizmodo:

In videos flagged to YouTube, Crowder has not instructed his viewers to harass Maza on YouTube or any other platform and the main point of these videos was not to harass or threaten, but rather to respond to the opinion.

So where does Maza go next? He’s made enough of a name for himself at this point that I doubt he’ll be returning to Media Matters. There are plenty of left-leaning outlets who would probably be happy to have someone who produces the kind of video content he does. But maybe he’s had enough of YouTube. We’ll have to wait and see where he lands.