| Intro | American YouTube personality, author, and critic |
| Is |
Video blogger Internet personality YouTuber Author Political commentator |
| From | United States of America |
| Type |
Internet Literature Politics |
| Gender | male |
Thomas James Kirk III (born February 20, 1985), previously known by the pseudonym Terroja Lee Kincaid, is an American YouTube personality and podcast host. His channel, known as The Amazing Atheist, rose to prominence through Kirk’s criticism of religion. Kirk has since expanded his focus to other political and social issues.
Kirk has more than 1 million subscribers on his main channel, and more than 445 million views in total. From 2014 until 2017, he was one of the hosts of The Drunken Peasants, a YouTube news podcast focused on current events and interviews. He has been described as one of the “most controversial YouTubers” by WatchMojo.com.
Early life
Kirk was born in Pasadena, California, though he was primarily raised in Mandeville, Louisiana. His father was Thomas James Kirk Jr. (July 1, 1946 – January 3, 2008), who operated several fraudulent higher education organizations and served three years in U.S. federal prison following a plea deal. At the age of sixteen, Kirk dropped out of high school with aspirations of being an author.
Kirk began posting videos on YouTube in November 2006.
History
In 2007, Kirk posted a video which included a warning about the mental instability of 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who would later perpetrate the Jokela school shooting.
In 2012, Kirk was widely criticized for incendiary comments made on Reddit before he deleted his account. In their argument about trigger warnings, Kirk repeatedly stated that one of the participants, a self-described rape victim, should be raped again. Science blogger PZ Myers condemned these posts and went on to debate many of Kirk’s past claims about feminism, writing that “this kind of thing has always been part of his YouTube schtick.” After the incident, Kirk apologized to the Reddit user in a private message and later made a public apology. Kirk addressed the issue further in a 2014 video entitled, “Rape, Feminism, and The Amazing Atheist,” in which he again apologized for the incident and explained the context in which it happened: his remarks were meant to be satirical commentary on trigger warnings.
In 2013, Kirk was a guest on a CNN panel, where he discussed the rise of atheism in America with Christian theologian William Lane Craig.
Kirk interviewed Milo Yiannopoulos for The Drunken Peasants podcast in 2016. In 2017 Breitbart, CPAC and Simon & Schuster severed their ties with Yiannopoulos based on comments from the episode where Yiannopoulos spoke positively of sexual relationships between boys and adult men.
Kirk left The Drunken Peasants at the end of 2017 with co-hosts Scotty Kirk and Paul Parkey Jr. and together they started their own podcast in early 2018, known as DEEP FAT FRIED.