Note that he doesn't say the idea of "Jews controlling the world" is wrong or inaccurate, but that he thinks the "real alt-right" is too obsessed with the supposed issue. He certainly doesn't seem to have seen any issues with the movement prior to that (
https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/sta...84590489456640). On November 16th he declines an interview with VICE about the alt-right, adding a few minutes later that he's "not even alt-right" and just makes YouTube videos, although he had stated earlier the reason he didn't want to be interviewed was that he feared misleading editing. On November 20th/21st, the video of Richard Spencer and his followers shouting "Hail Trump" goes live (
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ch-npi/508379/), which seemingly triggers the change. Watson makes a formal distinction between the "New Right" and the "Alt-Right" on November 22nd, at least several of his followers don't seem to like it (
https://archive.fo/GxIS3) This negative response by his audience might explain his following action: on November 26 2016 he releases a video (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWEeMYVVeBc) with Mike Cernovich about the Spencer video. In it Watson and Cernovich both distance themselves from the outright Nazis, but his argument against the Spencerists is once again not so much that Nazism is bad, but that throwing Nazi salutes is "bad optics" (8:05-8:55; 11:57-12:15). He and Cernovich claim that the Spencer video is a deliberate ploy by the mainstream media to discredit the alt-right and people like himself and Stefan Molyneux, by associating them with obvious neo-Nazis. Watson even seems to suggest that he and Cernovich ought to have been declared the real "kings of the alt-right" (21:29-21:45) for their associated activities the months prior. Although Watson and Cernovich claim that Spencer is a nobody in their video, Watson himself admits to being aware that he was the one who coined the term "alt-right". (4:26-4:46) Nevertheless, they present him and the people at Spencer's conference as fringe extremists, apparently hoping to maintain some form of control of the alt-right label and to distance it from outright neo-Nazism. Watson's audience at the time seems once again not to have been too fond of that approach, or at least seems to have set off a very vocal minority of them: the like-dislike ratio of the video is way worse than that his other videos around the same time (although, admittedly, still in the positive) and the top comments on the video include gems like these: (
https://imgur.com/a/nxm35Kf) It seems a first split in what had up to then been an at least nominally united movement happened around that time, between those openly talking about "the Jewish Question" and those unwilling to do so (see
https://www.businessinsider.nl/alt-r...onal=true&r=US for an exponent some weeks later, as well as
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na...121-story.html), a split Watson hadn't seen coming beforehand (
https://publish.twitter.com/?query=h...2&widget=Tweet).
The negative feedback may well have convinced him that he could not continue to both tie himself to the "alt-right"-label and denounce the open neo-Nazism now attached to the term. Watson hence seems to have done a fairly swift about-face around this time to distance himself from the less publicly palatable parts of the movement he'd had associated himself with up until then. His claims on Twitter in the months that follow are basically that he left the alt-right after the Spencer video broke, that the movement had changed afterwards and that he can't be alt-right because Spencer and the real alt-right hate him. Sometime before February 23rd 2017 he deleted any previous tweets proclaiming support for the alt-right. Nevertheless, he still seems to be at least taking parts of his stories and comedy from neo-nazi sites like the Daily Stormer and taking out the references to Jews (for which they legitimately hate him xD -
https://dailystormer.name/paul-josep...ore-than-cock/ - Funnily enough the author claim he and several others suck because they tried to make the alt-right more marketable by leaving out "certain facts" the "real" alt-right supposedly presented, likely related to how Jews are supposedly the real issue), something which they accused him of all the way back in 2015 (
https://dailystormer.name/however-ma...-the-bulldogs/). For an example not from the words of a Nazi: see Watson's plagiarizing (
https://www.infowars.com/leftist-fre...-to-be-banned/) of this article by a neo-Nazi blog (
https://web.archive.org/web/20190213...ned-in-france/), instead of from the supposed source (
https://web.archive.org/web/20190112...eterosexualite), as expounded upon here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beA1A9BVYi8. Had the Spencer controversy not broken, Watson may well have continued to tie himself to the label, so long as he could mildly disavow any overt antisemitism it had attracted by that point without actively alienating any potential white supremacists. The Spencer affair made that impossible, so he chose the money and burned his bridges (a characterization that would seem to fit those given by interviewees here:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-j...crown?ref=home, not to mention that he sells (or used to sell)
ing "Brain Force" pills
-
https://twitter.com/ChrisCaesar/stat...46199011786752)