Josh Lee Kwai, the CEO and host of The Command Zone, went to YouTube today to issue a nearly hour-long apology to the MTG community and to the Commander Rules Committee for comments he made last week on the recent Commander bans.
In a video titled “Looking in the Mirror,” Josh Lee Kwai had a frank discussion with Brian Lewis, aka The Professor from Tolarian Community College, regarding how he handled discussion of the bans on his Commander channel, which has over 700,000 subscribers.
Watch the full discussion below:
Josh Lee Kwai opened the video by framing the discussion around the responsibility of content creators when covering community drama and “fanning the flames” when discussing controversial topics.
He goes on to make a formal apology, saying, “I’m not proud of that and I apologize to the rules committee, everybody out there… that’s not a thing you should be saying in the moment.”
The moment Josh is referring to happened in their video last week where he said he would have expected the kind of backlash and threats the Commander Rules Committee received for banning the cards they did in the way they did. Jimmy Wong, co-host of The Command Zone, also agreed with Josh in the video.
In that previous video, Josh went on to say, “how we got here, a lot of it, is fair to lay at the feet of the Rules Committee.”
Some of the community called out Josh and The Command Zone after those comments from the below video as “victim blaming”.
In response to both videos, the MTG community continues to be divided regarding the fallout in discussions of the Commander bans and the Commander Rules Committee.
Many are praising The Command Zone host for making an apology regarding victim blaming, while others believed Josh Lee Kwai’s commentary helped voice how many in the Commander community were feeling at the time. Even others have commented that the apology isn’t enough for them to return to watching The Command Zone.
The Professor and Josh Lee Kwai finished the video by agreeing that nobody should be threatening others, period. This is a sentiment the entire MTG community has been echoing after the Commander Rules Committee disclosed that they had received credible threats.
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