Big Man Tyrone claims that his YouTube channel as "the happiest channel on earth." And while his videos are filled with smiles and "long Tyrone laughs," some of his videos reflect the raw and dark corridors of the internet.

Big Man Tyrone is the online persona of Gordon Hurd, a Cameroonian-born family man who lives in the U.K. In addition to running several offlines businesses, Hurd makes custom video messages for a fee. Usually sitting at a desk next to a simple image on a computer monitor, most of Hurd's videos are inside jokes or silly messages.

Hurd is very well known within the message boards of onlines communities such as 4Chan or Reddit. A lot of the videos he makes come with language not understood to those "normies" outside of these online cultures. Hurd is not the only YouTuber who makes these video-grams and there are a handful of other entrepreneurs who will say cryptic lingo over the internet for a fistful of dollars.

What separates Hurd from the rest of the for-hire YouTube community is that Big Man Tyrone is the President of Kekistan: a fictional country made up on the internet to mock identity politics. Cooked up by a group of YouTubers lead by Carl Benjamin's online persona Sargon of Akkad, Kekistan comes complete with a religion, two-thousand year old history, flag, national anthem, and greeting; almost everything a person needs to claim an "ethnicity."

The "ethnic Kekistani" is usually a troll who wields the power of the meme to spread their message. They believe Pepe the Frog is a prophet who has been sent to earth to create chaos in the form of memes. Kekistanis claim they troll both the so-called social justice warriors on the left and the white nationalists on the right as equal opportunity haters. In reality, however, Kekistan has been adopted as the fictional home of alt-right trolls.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has called the religion of Kekistan "the semi-ironic 'religion' the white nationalist movement." The ironic tone and alternative political narratives pushed by the group could be considered a gateway to the more ideological groups of the alt-right. Richard Spencer has even tweeted that Sargon of Akkad is a "great entry point" to more extreme viewpoints.

As for Gordon Hurd, he's not an ideologue and doesn't try to keep up with the internet trolls. "Watch 10 videos on the internet about Kekistan, about the alt-right, about 4Chan, about all of these things. You don't leave wiser than you went in." For Hurd, this is a business, and a successful one at that. Hurd can churn out between 40-50 videos a day at a base price $35 a video. When the final proceeds are counted, it is no wonder Tyrone's laugh is so long.

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Meet Big Man Tyrone, the president of Kekistan (not a real country)

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