Best way to deal with Amos Yee is to consign him to irrelevance

Melissa Chen (Chen) who once actively advocated for infamous blogger Amos Yee (Yee) in his asylum proceedings in the United States (the US) has issued a heartfelt video expressing her regret at having ever helped Yee.

In her video, Chen distances herself from Yee and condemned his stance on seemingly justifying pedophilia. She even calls for him to be deported from the US and says that she would personally escort him out of the country. She further asserts that Yee is either A) Dumb B) Broken C) Ignorant  or D) Malicious as he’s a pedo himself and calls him a “waste of a life”.

While not being a big fan of Yee myself, I personally think that he may have severe mental and/or emotional issues. With that in mind, I think Yee needs help and not expulsion. At the end of the day, could we all have projected our own agendas onto Yee?

For the freedom of speech activists, he represented someone who was fighting for freedom of speech. For those firmly entrenched with the establishment, he represented an affront to the accepted way of doing things and had to be taken down at all costs.

But at the end of the day, is Yee any of these things? Perhaps, all he ever did was to be a petulant teen with the possibility of mental or emotional issues. He said what he said and did what he did for no other reason other than he felt like it and perhaps liked the attention. He was never fighting for any social issues nor was he on a crusade against the establishment.

However, because various factions within society had their own battles, he became a convenient vehicle to project all of our own agendas. If this was indeed the case, then Yee was always bound to disappoint. He can’t live up to being the symbol of free speech because he was never an advocate of the movement to begin with! Is it then fair to impose our own expectations on a kid who is perhaps mentally disturbed?

I don’t think that Yee stands for anything apart from wanting to gain attention and notoriety for himself. He likes the attention and he feeds off it. He aims to shock because he wants the limelight. He chose to seemingly endorse pedophilia because he knew it would shock and gain attention, not because he actually advocates or supports it. I am not justifying his stance but I think the best way to deal with him is to consign him to irrelevance. Not to attempt to silence him or even to deport him. Just ignore him. Stop feeding him the attention he so desperately craves.