Contrapoints How Online Politics Became Real Life Doomscroll

TITLE: ContraPoints: How Online Politics Became Real Life | Doomscroll CHANNEL: Joshua Citarella DATE: 2026-04-22 ---TRANSCRIPT--- The west has fallen. Why? Because of like degeneracy. And the evidence of that is often like suggest like look at modern architecture compared to a cathedral, right? You know, how did this happen? Western man, right?

Ridiculous meme post. We used to be a proper country. Like, and the po the image attached to that caption is a 7-Eleven ad from the 1970s. So, it’s like really? Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, look at this advertising image from three decades ago. Wouldn’t it be better if we were still like that? Welcome to Doomscroll. I’m your host, Joshua Citerella. My guest is Natalie Wyn, a video essaist and content creator. I have to talk at the EU Parliament later this month really about how the left can compete with the online right. What should I tell them? One reason I have difficult a difficult time answering this question is that a lot of the reasons why the online right has the reach it does are things we would not want to emulate. For example, a lot of online right commentators are frankly backed by money. Yep. Like not like crowdfunding money like institutional money. Yeah. Um and big money deep pockets. Yeah. Exactly. So so sometimes it’s like do we want that? Mhm. I think that sort a lot for a lot of people on the left, the idea of having like oligarchs backing you would be kind of defeat the purpose. Well, the NOS’s those liberal NGOs that’s true for for a couple years now people have been talking about like what if we had a leftist Joe Roen like wouldn’t like do we want a do we want a leftist Joe Rogan? I don’t know. I I mean I don’t but would it be useful to have one? Maybe. I’m sure I would hate it but So what I mean I think I think the reality you know like if I will I will lecture men for not wanting to be in a coalition with their mother. Well I also think I’m going to have to deal with being in a coalition with some kind of leftist manosphere. Right. And I’m prepared to just deal with that. Right. Right. Like I think that part of my like realistic electoralist idea about politics is accepting that I’m going to have to be in a coalition with a bunch of people I don’t like. Mhm. Because that’s at a national election in the United States means having the support of a very wide group of people. You’re telling me that 77 million people can’t belong to the same subculture. Yeah. 77 million people are probably not going to look into the camera and say, “I’m the same kind of communist you are.” Like, it’s never going to happen. Which means it means accepting like a a wide amount of of ideological diversity. Um, and I think that I mean I think the reason that Joe Rogan is so successful is there’s this kind of like front of like I’ll just talk to anyone and everyone is welcome. In practice that’s not really true because he doesn’t really have very much in the way of like I don’t think there’s ever been a trans person for example on Joe Rogan except maybe Blair White a conservative. Oh yeah, you know reactionary trans person. there’s an ideological strain to the particular type of guest that you say like libertarian to you know whatever kind of skeptic but I also think that like the right is so talented it kind of in a soft kind of way they they love bomb right I mean I’ve experienced it myself when like when in periods this has happened on a recurrent basis for 10 years every it’s every you know few months like some large faction of the online left decides that I am like the villain of the month, right? And it will just be a mass, you know, it doesn’t bother me that much anymore because it’s kind of become like well there’s only so many times it can happen before you start like take taking it less seriously. But I think that it used to really upset me as it upsets most people when it when it happens initially because it’s kind of not I mean the normal when you a bunch of people are are screaming at you and telling you you’re a horrible person. I mean, the ego’s instinct is to defend itself, right? Um, but when that when it’s often happened to me, I often am reached out to by people on the right who are like, “Hey, like I see what’s happening to you on Twitter.” And that’s like really horrible what they’re saying to you. Like, do you want to come on my podcast? Sometimes like that’s kind of their like recruitment method is like they reach out, they sort of exploit the divisiveness and the vitrial of leftist spaces to kind of like lure people out. So division. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and especially because like the there is like a a genuine kind of like tall poppy syndrome type thing on the left. I mean, we’ve sort of talked about this. Tall poppy syndrome. Okay. So tall poppy syndrome is a notion that like tall grass gets cut, let’s say. So like if you rise to a certain level of prominence, the left turns on you. Yeah. And I think part of that is the same hipster mindset that leads leftists to turn on a politician who gets elected. Right. Yeah. Is that it’s like well now you’re the establishment. There’s a little micro version of that that happens in influencer world where I mean early in my YouTube career, you know, a lot of people I think I probably have lost a large percentage of my earliest audience because a lot of people lied to me because they saw me as this kind of like, you know, a queer transgender underdog who was like like they related to and then I got too big and they don’t relate to me anymore and they resent me for getting too big. And like yeah, I think that that then like caused like a kind of extreme moral extremely like you know stringent moral purity that was expected of me and that I was not able to deliver on. Um the degree to which the audience can turn on the creator also is fanatical because it was their like favorite thing. It was that subcultural identity and now that they feel betrayed, it’s just kind of unload fanaticism into this new outlet of oh, I actually hate that person. I’ve hated their stuff the whole time. And that’s not and that’s not just a leftist thing. Like I do think that on the right I think it’s just everyone kind of hates each other, right? Too, right? like but they’re somehow able to like I think maybe it’s because they believe in loyalty on some level they when it when it when it counts like they come together to support daddy whereas the left doesn’t do this not really I see um so I don’t know it’s not it’s not that there’s no leftists online but I don’t also do I also think that like there’s a struggle to convey leftist ideas to like less radicalized people. So, I mean, I think that’s what Joe Rogan’s real utility is to the right to talk to normal. He said he seems like a normal guy, right? Or at least there was a time when he seemed like a normal guy. He is now kind of a little is Yeah. But he’s also backed off of the Trump stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s true. Um but I think big big audience has to include normal people who are not like political ideologues and it’s tough to do that on the left because if you have a guest who has said you know XYZ problematic thing there’ll be a bunch of leftists online screaming at you for being a for platforming fascist or whatever right so the temptation is to to maintain the boundaries of a cloister um I don’t know it’s hard to say like what the solution to that is I mean like you You’ve had the Democratic politicians like Gavin Newsome like do this where he’s like, “I’ll talk to anyone.” Like, “Yeah, I’ll talk to Ben Shapiro. Yeah, I’ll talk to, you know, but people don’t like that on the left. They don’t like it.” Yeah. Um or like I know trans people in particular feel super betrayed by Gavin Newsome like saying he’s willing to kind of back off on the on the trans stuff because it’s not popular. It’s not popular. Um well that’s so I’m I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here but just to kind of recap there’s um trying to diagnose this is actually it’s it’s a pretty big uh situation like famous media matters study I think 24 25 says that 90% of alt media is conservativeleaning right so the temptation is to look at that as a reflection of where the political sentiments of most people in the country are obviously social media is a very distorted mirror not 90% of the country is conservative obviously I didn’t I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. Yeah. I mean, there actually is a volume problem. There’s it’s it’s uh extraordinary. So, they’re doing a quantitative survey. There’s different ways to slice the numbers. They’re including like Trevor Noah is part of the left. So, we could dispute the way that they classify it, but I think obviously whether it’s 90% or 80%, it doesn’t matter. Alt media overwhelmingly conservative. And the reasons I’m just recapping some of the things that you said, so uh jump in if I’m I’m mischaracterizing, but asymmetry of resources. So, you got big donors. Um and then just like bait they can kind of sew division uh look at trend cycles whatever’s uh trending and um you know jump on sensational topics. And then the third is that some of the positions on the left are unpopular in a majoritarian democracy. So we can fix one and two. How do we deal with three? Well, I actually think Oh, people aren’t going to like this. I mean, I think there’s certain issues on the left that the most high-profile spokespeople are actually like warranted in avoiding. Like, I personally think that at this point, like the Democratic party should not talk about trans people. M um and I think that because I mean it’s frustrating for a lot of reasons, right? Because so much of what the general public thinks the Democratic thinks about trans people is completely information that they’ve gotten from right-wing propaganda because it’s over like the Democratic party already they h they hardly ever talk about trans people to begin with. Like I’ve seen so many people suggest for example that like oh Kla Harris like you know she pushed everyone away with all that trans ideology and I’m like what trans ideology? How many times on the campaign trail did Kla Harris even mentioned trans people? Not a lot of I heard a lot about black men’s crypto assets but not trans people. Yeah. Like I mean it’s it’s so I think that people have like really been convinced what the left talks about by right media and in part because like well I think rightwing media they’ve also kind of mastered rage bait right and that you can just like churn out this content that’s just designed to like irritate people. Look at what’s happening in your daughter’s sports. They’re letting grown men beat women beat girls up. Right. Okay. Is that true? doesn’t matter, makes people angry, gets attention, right? So, I think that you say that, you know, a lot of right-wing media says that and they say, “This is what the Democrats are doing.” And it’s like, how much are the Democrats talking about transports? Basically, not at all is the real answer to that question. But the right has really succeeded in convincing the public that that’s what the left talks about. Yeah. So, and they do it 90% louder. Loud. 90% louder. Yeah. As you as you say. Well, the question how to respond to that is it to publicly start arguing on the topic of transports. I don’t think so because I think that one is so losing that it’s like I mean I think deflection is kind of the answer is to say like what is deflection when they when they like I don’t know in a debate situation for example if they want to talk about if they want to go on and on about men and women’s sports observe that they are the one who keeps bringing this up we’re not talking about this this is not part of of our agenda you are obsessed with this right in other words platner does this a a little bit. Yeah. But to flip the obsession to to flip the obsession accusation. Oh, I see. Right. I see. Because it is like I mean I think I think back to like the sort of gay marriage debate in the Bush administration. I think one effective or or even like going back to like the 70s and the like what was going on in the 1970s with the origin of the gay rights movement with Anita Bryant who was a big anti-gay uh I mean she’d originally been like a musician and who became sort of an anti-gay celebrity spokeswoman. Her credibility, I think, was was destroyed in pop culture in part by characterizing her as this sort of prickish moralist who was obsessed with what other people are doing in bed, right? I mean, I think that so I think that the way here’s a more positive and likable way I can I can save my point. Like I think that one mistake that I genuinely think that trans people have made in our political messaging is that it’s always better to especially in America where the national character is kind of averse to being told what to do. Like there’s this kind of individual individualist cowboy thing where it’s like we do we resent the government saying how to live our lives. So I think that the posture of the trans activist should be don’t tell me what I can do. Don’t tell me what hormones I am allowed to take. Don’t tell me, you know, the mistake that goes the other direction is to lecture everyone about how they need to put pronouns in their email because now you’re not telling them not to tell you what to do. You’re telling them what to do. People don’t like being told what to do. So don’t tell them what to do. Don’t tell them what to say. Tell them to leave you alone. Right? And I think that’s the kind of more convincing line is that my my temptation is to kind of argue from the kind of triviality like really you’re you’re expending this much resources on preventing essentially 10 people from competing in professional athletics. Why is this a major part of your platform? Don’t you want to talk about the economy? Why? How about the price in gas? I noticed that’s have been increasing lately. Maybe that has something to do with the war that your party started. You know, I think that could be a pretty effective like what aboutism kind of retort to this transgender sports thing. It’s like why are you talking about transgender sports when the price of gas is is, you know, well, we’ll see how it is in a couple months, but I imagine you $5. Yeah. There’s um I picked this phrase up from you, but in your uh conspiracy video, Randolini’s law that um the amount of energy needed to refute [ __ ] in meaning conspiracy theories in that context is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. So, um, yeah, if you’re trying to argue a point that is maybe not winnable, it’s a useless expenditure of energy, you should be talking about. I think Graham Platner literally does this where someone was trying to bring up uh trans issues in Maine. And he is like, well, what about this healthcare thing that we’re not able to talk about? So, I I totally agree with this. Um, I’m not going to leave you hanging out on a limb by yourself, but I think that that is actually while it may be unpopular for people who have, you know, political sentiments or share the same ideas that we do. this is what we need to advance in a majoritarian democracy, which is a uncomfortable but necessary conversation. You mentioned uh the leftist Joe Rogan before. I’m going to take us down a little bit of a path here um because I want to hear your thoughts on this. This is maybe like the meat of what I’d like to discuss today. So, post 2016, there’s all of this right-wing content on YouTube. Yeah. Uh I think the premier example of this was the kill stream with Richard Spencer as a guest. This is like 2015 16. We’re going back here. I don’t fully remember the history. It’s uh at that time the most quantitatively or unprecedented uh amount of viewers on YouTube. They’re like, “Oh [ __ ] there’s a really big problem here.” And so the solution we came up with at that time was if the right is dominating alt media or social media platforms, the left needs to have a role in that. And I was one of the people who argued vigorously for this in the Guardian in mainstream publications. The thing that we came up with uh was the leftist video essay because our arguments were less mimedic. They needed to be explained in long form. Um and then you were one of the premier most celebrated creators in that. I have immense admiration for your work. Fast forward uh 8 years, 2024, the podcast election, so to speak. We’re talking about Joe Rogan and the Manosphere and the Neelk boys and who else? Uh all these other guys are named and thanked. uh in the inauguration uh or Trump’s victory speech uh by the campaign. So our solution now is to make left-wing podcasts, right? I think Adam Freeland is doing a great job at this. There’s many different examples to look at, but I see pretty much a direct analogy where this was the strategy before. Now the left needs to participate in social media, right? And uh the right is winning in the influence space and so now we need to participate. When do we get to the point where we admit that the platforms themselves are the problem? Well, that’s a good question because if the platforms are the problem, then what? I mean, yeah, I have a few ideas of then what? But I’ll I’ll first say that I agree I basically agree with the history of that you’ve drawn. Like I mean I think that I was also there in 2015 noticing the exact same thing happening. I had the same experience you just described of of like I was like telling everyone about I was like look look what’s look what’s happening with like the the right the internet is going fascist and everyone will be like well so what like that’s just the internet they’re just trolls like why don’t you ignore them like why do you care about that now they’re in charge of the government now they’re in charge of the government so big deal. So right I we we were right to take it seriously in other words. Now I think at the time I had a far over optimistic idea about how it I mean my solution and the one I tried to enact myself was to make counter content. Yes. Right. To make content that would sort of debunk or argue against or attempt to present like an attractive alternative, right? where because at the time what I what I diagnosed as a problem was that you had this kind of right-wing that seemed sort of fun in terms of like their edgy transgressive. Do you know how [ __ ] hard it has been to get people on the show to admit that that it was like attractive to people? Yeah. That it was like countercultural. It was edgy. It was punk. It was I mean it was it was completely intuitive to me at the time if you’re like a 14-year-old boy. Like that’s awesome. Especially Yeah. And because like so much of that content, well at the time it wasn’t called woke, it was called SJW, social justice warrior. And so much of the right-wing media on YouTube at the time was about dunking on that. Taking angry feminists, triggered feminists, and then dunking on them. Haha, you’re so stupid. You’re so logical. Yeah, exactly. That type of content. And so my idea was to counter that by creating a persona. Basically, a persona that’s not that far from my actual personality, which I’m also irritated by moralism basically, right? Like I find that I’m attracted to the transgressiveness, right? And so I thought like look, I can do this in like a nonprigish way and I I got somewhere with that. But the thing is like ultimately I think partly it is Brandolini’s law type stuff and partly it’s my own artistic ambition in a way that impeded the the ability of me to mass produce content in the way that the right-wingers do. Um it was also people in like our role is that we’re in media and journalists would say this too but indirectly they were saying that people like me are the answer that we can make better narratives and that was also allowing them upward mobility and opportunity. Um, but I that’s you’ve anticipated exactly where I’m bringing this Brandolini’s law. I recognized at a certain point that, you know, whatever kind of downward mobility, postneoliberalism, whatever we’re in now, this was producing more right-wingers than we could recruit and educate by using alternative media. Do you do you feel like the D-RD project was a success in that period or how do you look back on it now? I I don’t think I would say it was a success. No, not the dradicalization aspect of it. And that’s for a couple reasons. One is I just don’t think the video the leftist video essay is not a solution to the problem of overwhelming right-wing propaganda, right? Um it’s just too niche and it’s it’s too it require it appeals it has an audience that it appeals to certainly, right? Which why makes it a viable career, but is it is it a solution to right-wing radicalization? No. Right. I think part of the reason is that here’s here’s here’s a way I’ve really changed in how I do dradicalization. Okay. I don’t I actually don’t think anyone gets dradicalized on the internet. I think that the internet is where you get radicalized. Sure. I think what dradicalizes people is being offline. Um is having community is having meaningful work is having uh you know connections to other people. Not being socially atomized. Not being socially atomized. Yeah. That’s what dradicalizes people. Yeah. So, I think that everyone on social media tends to get radicalized. Um, a worry that I actually I have about the leftist podcasts as a solution to the right-wing podcast is that it also kind of becomes a new form of radicalization that I question the utility of. In other words, a lot of political podcasts in one way or another end up having a kind of like Fox News like function or like Rush Limbbo like function where like I I do think that in some ways the pod like the political podcast is kind of like Fox News for millennials where like okay you’re listen you’re listening to an angry man talk to you all day about what to be angry about. Yeah. That’s obviously I mean that has been a winning formula for decades um for media and I think that would I prefer them to be lifted listening to a leftist angry man? Absolutely. But I also think that I don’t know sometimes I just look at the state of it and it’s like okay well we went we’ve gone from like Fox News screaming about the Democrats all day to Marxist podcasters screaming about the Democrats all day. Um, you know, I I know that I’m regarded as a Democratic shill in many of these spaces, and I’m certainly not beating that allegation at the moment, but like the whole the reason that we view the right-wing media is so damaging is that it caused people to vote for Donald Trump, don’t we want people to not to vote for for more liberal candidates? Like, to me, that’s the goal. And I worry that the kind of left-wing radicalization, it lures the audience into a kind of impotent radical chic or something where it’s like, okay, subcultural. Yeah. Yeah. You’re you’re in you’re in an oppositional counterculture that views nonparticipation in politics as Yeah. the basically the pragmatic outcome of um you know because posting isn’t participation it doesn’t count. Can I give an example here just to to kind of like codify what we’re what we’re talking about? So the thing that I I think was missed in the Joe Rogan analogy is that it’s a mainstream podcast that’s not about politics. That’s why normal people like it because they’re talking about all sorts of stuff and it’s, you know, fun or light-hearted. politics is happening and so that’s the thing to comment on if you’re in like a weekly news cycle. Uh here’s what’s happening today is my take on it. That kind of naturally happens. But the the problem with the kind of political media first or like leftwing Joe Rogan or left his video essay thing was that the buyers of political media are not the median or modal voter in the US. And so if you look at these um quantitative analytics from subcultural communities, I’m going to give a weird example here, so bear with me. In the furry community, there’s a staggering statistic that 70% of the people who participate in that subculture have purchased an original piece of art, meaning they have like spent their money to consume something from that subculture. If you’re publishing um let’s say like a substack that’s about tennis or whatever kind of mainstream thing you could expect to monetize about 7% of your following. So if you look at the fringes or subcultural interests that are not mainstream there’s an order of magnitude increase in people’s willingness to pay and contribute towards that. And when you lead with the politics kind of just as we described before the asymmetry of resources, the distortion of the attention economy, all of these things that is an additional multiplier on how distorted the landscape is of people’s actual sentiments. So it becomes really really difficult to um yeah advance the necessary broad coalition of 77 million people that are all going to make a shared decision and have a coherent narrative if we’re starting from the like vanguard political leftist position, right? which is not going to attract 77 million people which is not it’s it’s not no it’s it is necessarily a vanguard it is not the popular right right yeah well I do think that some of the I mean even the end of the video essay peak left video essay era like a lot of the people who were doing that most effectively were help build an audience in part also by talking about some other thing video games movies yes right yes and then uh politics was video games are fascist ways yeah yeah well video I mean video game Steve Bannon figured this out in 2014. Like the way that you know he noticed that online gaming spaces were basically a huge resource of frustrated young men without much political direction and he just saw that this was exploitable. Um and so that they are however in functioning economic uh socialist models like the internal guild organization is a workers co-op. So there’s there is an incredible irony here. But I feel like that has not been effectively as effectively used by the left as it has by the right. Yes. Uh before we get u too sidetracked on the side quest of video games, I want to I want to refocus us on um how do we make online discourse work? Um there’s I think it’s in the conspiracy video, but you talk about we need good conversations to do democracy. I’m kind of I’m paraphrasing here, but what are the kind of preconditions for this Hobasian uh public square? How do we have good conversations for deliberative democracy? It’s harder than ever is my feeling. Like I I used to think this was possible. I mean I used to go on these like debates even with right so there was two problems with it with go with doing with debating right-wing people. One is that the right people don’t they’re not interested in participating in a habsi in public square. They’re interested in owning you for clicks. Right. Damn it. Yeah. The second and then the second problem is that your own leftist audience feels betrayed that you that you dared talk to someone on the right because they suggest that that maybe means you’re betraying them and you’re maybe thinking of going over to the right cuz why would you talk to someone on the right if you weren’t on the right, right? Um it’s very hard to overcome this guilt by association thing. Um, so you’re it’s like a pincer like you’re just you’re discouraged from doing it both by the way you’re treated by the right which has as an exploitable resource for them to create attention moments. Yeah. And you’re criticized on moral grounds by the left for associated with the enemy. Mhm. Um which kind of made it to me just not worth doing at all. Right. Uh now I’m sure some people so some people are able to do this like men have to do this. I’ll just say it. I can’t do that. Like debate. Yeah. Debate favors men. Yeah. Because it favors assertiveness, aggression, owning the enemy with facts and logic. Oh, even like it’s not that women can’t do that. They can. It’s just that when women do do it, it’s perceived as like unfeminine aggression. Did you ever see that movie? Town Bloody Hall. No. Germaine Greer and who was the I forget the name of the writer. Do you remember the writer? Norman Mailor, right? He writes this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s like he I’m not on his side of the argument, but like his basically being a dick to them was incredibly powerful versus these like very comprehensively and like well spoken arguments against him and he’s just like, “Yeah, that’s all bullshit.” Like, and it was it’s really strong in a debate format. Yeah. Trump just by pure force of intimidation and and like aggressive posturing is able to be perceived as winning. So I I agree that debate is in some cases necessary. Um and I don’t think just to be very clear in all these things like it’s good to have leftist video essays. It’s good to have leftist podcasts. We’re just saying that it is insufficient to win in the scale of a national election and if that’s the strategy that we’re trying to achieve, we need more on top of it. Um, what do you think about what about repealing section 230 for platforms that have algorithmic recommendation? I don’t know. I mean, I I algorithmic recommendation as opposed to what? Uh, as opposed to like Substack, Patreon, you voluntarily opt into a thing, it’s not recommended to you. And so that reduces proportionally the sensationalism and the advertising revenue engine. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it doesn’t necessarily eliminate extremism, but it means you have to like click in. Yeah. Yeah. You got to you got to opt in. It’s hard not to think that that would be good at this point for me. I think it’s I don’t know how fract how I don’t know. I think that’s going to be fought very intensely by the most powerful people in the country because that’s how they make a lot of money from it. So, not to I agree. Yeah. But we are watching with this takeover of Tik Tok. Yeah. Right. I’m just I’m trying to chip away at this because I agree this is these are the the libertarian like techno capitalist class is basically the most powerful people that have existed in human history. How are we going to like force a law against them? But they’re kind of doing it already with Tik Tok. Yeah. Like they may actually put parameters around political speech on social media anyway. Yeah. And so there does Tik Tok have like American I mean because I feel like with Tik Tok they’re able to sort of frame it as like foreign interference with American media whereas you know we have like our own domestic oligarchs who are going to defend Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube right but I do think that well I don’t know it’s I mean Twitter is kind of a sassy situation because I feel like Elon Musk took that thing over and basic they trust busted themselves basically right like they they they complet completely unforced like created all these other Twitters that you can join threads of blue sky you know I mean I don’t think those have the not yet not yet yeah I mean the other problem is that like the thing about that algorithm is it’s like they really are they’re selling us they’re selling us crack they really are like I’m hopelessly addicted to that thing like to be honest Twitter anyway okay and it’s partly because of the chaos and the I mean I find blue sky boring. It is boring. It’s boring. Yeah. Um I also don’t believe that if a platform is um predominantly leaning in one political direction that like we should just send all of the liberals and leftists over the blue sky. Like I think you actually need to have those voices in the right-wing dominated platform like Twitter. Um and I I picked this up from Roana actually. I wasn’t sure that this was an actual thing that people were going to move forward with, but it does seem like there’s legislation around it and I’m kind of, you know, I’ve put the now like eight years of my adult life into this kind of research and material and the Gen Z social media interviews I did. I think that we need to get upstream of this process and this is kind of the best thing that has come across my desk recently. Um, because I think it is basically Brandolini’s law. If we’re trying to fight the right, uh, what can we what can we actually do in this space? It’s clearly 90% dominated by them. We have to pull different levers. Yeah. Well, the idea of like regulating I mean, I think that some kind of increased regulation of social media probably would be massively beneficial if it were done by the right people. Mhm. I guess I I’m somewhat I’m always somewhat anxious about about anything that counts as sens like feels like censorship for fear of it. But I like I don’t know. They they’re already doing censorship. Like that’s the that’s the problem is they’re already Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t want this to happen under the Trump administration, but like advancing a proactive politics for the left, maybe that should be part of the 2028 platform, right? Jobs guarantee and repeal 230 for platforms. The trick will be to find a way to sell this to the public in a way that doesn’t seem like they can’t be so easily framed as like authoritarian leftist takeover, free speech. I got a suggestion. Yeah, you flip the trans thing. They’re coming for your kids. the platform. Yes. No, that’s that’s actually a good idea. That’s a good idea. Focus focus on like I don’t know. Did you see that uh the lawsuit where this what is it? This girl I should know the details of this if I’m bringing it up on the podcast. She was like 16 years old and they’re suing for anxiety and emotional damages the big platforms. Yeah. Yeah. And this is now setting a precedent where Real Real is the producer of this show, but he was telling me there’s now class action lawsuits opening up against the platforms. Well, that’s a that’s a smart way to start. Um, I mean, I think that I I like your suggestion of doing it as some kind of think of the children thing in terms of I don’t know. I just feel like it’s going to end up you being like gravitate towards banning pornography, which like I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea that like pornography should maybe be slightly more ghettoized on something like Twitter, right? Where as opposed to just like, oh, there it is in your feed all the time, right? Um, and certainly when you have like a significant portion of the website’s users are underage. Um, but then when it comes to like vaccine misinformation, I mean, this was tried during the pandemic, right? Where like Facebook and YouTube all kind of attempted to like instate misinformation. Yeah. Restrictions. And that was viewed by many people as tyrannical. Um, I don’t know. I don’t really have a solution to this honestly. I’m so I’m I’m asking you. I don’t have a solution for it either, but it’s it’s something to explore. Um the the last thing I want to touch on here for this topic of like uh counter messaging and and so on and so forth. Is there some is there some degree to which like bread tube and Peter Kotkin type politics from like 1892 was insufficient to scale to the crises of like 2020? Was that part of it too? I always thought it was crazy that we were talking about Kirk Hopkins so much. The term bread tube which derives from the conquest of bread. Uh I have I don’t I have no idea where that came from. Uh I always thought it was weird that it was applied to me. Yeah. I don’t talk about Kawin. Like I’m not an anarchist. Like I don’t know. But but yeah, I do think that like I don’t want to I don’t I don’t want to entirely disparage that the activity of reading theory, but I do think that like this kind of like priestly tendency of left of the left that that it like that there’s this I like it. Okay. Well, it’s interesting. Yeah, if you’re an intellectual, but like I think that is 19th century social and political theory like really the thing that we need to insist everyone be literate in? Mhm. I don’t think it should be. Um I mean I think it’s again useful for I suppose you can call it a vanguard. I don’t call myself a vanguard that a little too congratulator self- congratulatory. I mean I don’t think that I’m useless. I’m not trying to be overly self-d disparaging when I say that video essays are not the solution to the media environment. But I also like recognize that there’s like serious limitations to We wouldn’t be doing this if we thought it was useless, right? I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought it was useless, but it’s also, like you say, insufficient to watch part two of this episode. You can support the show on Patreon. I found the exact same thing which is that like when you switch from academia to social media, you know, you get rid of one problem which is the like hyper specificity of the like I mean the reason the moment I dropped out of my PhD program was the moment when I was having to transfer from getting a master’s degree which I was doing as part of the PhD um to like okay it’s time to write a dissertation and choose a specialty and it’s like do I want to spend the next do I want to spend the remainder of my 20s is Mhm. thinking about the same three paragraphs of hateful like no I don’t I don’t want to do that that is like a profound like way I know people who have been doing that for free yeah yeah yeah right some people will so it seemed I mean cuz like what I liked about philosophy like as an undergrad is like how is this like sweeping tour from like Plato to like fuko or whatever and it’s you know you’re doing like a different thing every week and it’s like really exciting to encounter all this new stuff and so I thought like you know social media might be a better place to do that but you end up having the opposite problem just is so superficial. No one no one’s there’s not very much depth. You can do research, but if you do a lot of research, it takes forever to make the video. Yeah. I’m not on about a one main channel video per year schedule, which is not consider I mean, it’s not certainly not sustainable for someone who’s trying to get big on social media. That will never get you there. Yeah. Yeah. I can do it cuz I’ve spent 10 years getting to the point they can get away with it. Yeah. You can take basically a research sbatical and then you produce the book or the video. That’s basically what I do. But yeah, that is not that is not going to make you a Tik Tok star. Like that’s not you know. Yeah. And I and I used to do much smaller you know lower ambition videos which is how I kind of built the following in the first place. Mhm. Yeah. But you have to kind of like mature in your creative practice and then also just the world changed a lot. It changed a lot in that time. Yeah, completely. Yeah. I had this like we’ve got um so in addition to the podcast I run a arts nonprofit and we have an educational wing for that and Tommy who runs the courses over there was saying that you know this whole syllabus like all this material is kind of like around the Mark Fischer slow cancellation of the future like capitalist realism and like that like we’re in the new world now like Trump broke neoliberalism like we actually know what comes after and it’s like something worse it’s multipolar But yeah, the way that transformed and your maturation in your creative career, you have to kind of like tackle this new thing in a different way. And I don’t think that there’s at least in my survey of the space, I haven’t seen someone who’s producing like short 20inut kind of interesting, useful commentary on it. It’s more like this long form almost documentary video essay format that you’re doing at the stage. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, that’s really true. I think a lot of a lot of the way that I feel feel like my content has changed over the last six years in particular has to do with well, I used to have a very like progressive like idea of the arc of history. Like, and I think that’s the product of, you know, my the first election I voted in was 2008. Okay. Obama winning that year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean now like Obama has like has lost so much reputation among people on the left that it’s like hard to explain how it felt in 2008. I remember that. Um but it was I mean it was like 15s zor on mani like they were partying in the street. They were partying in the street. Yeah. And it felt like I mean it might I think it probably I think of that like H Connor S. Thompson line about how it felt to be in the summer of you know 68 or whatever and there’s like this inevitable sense of like good triumphing over evil and that like you know well like race racism was over and now like we were just going to live that worked out great. Yeah. Yeah. And then 2016 happened and it was possible to sort it was, you know, I think I I had all kinds of hope for that and all kinds of explanations of why it wasn’t actually that bad and like well, you know, there’s all kinds of reasons I can imagine people voting for Donald Trump. Like maybe they just uniquely hated Hillary as many people. So they did. Maybe they just wanted to try something new and anti-establishment and like you know all this. But then when they reelected him last two years ago, that was something different. that kind of crushed my idea that things were going to get better and I now have a more like well so when you when you say a progressive arc to history you’re not talking about like a you know multiple centuries teological development or arc of you know feudalism capitalism socialism you’re talking about the recent social history of generally people are becoming more progressive and we’ll get Obama and then we’ll get someone else who’s like more socially progressive yeah I think that’s what I thinking, right? I assumed I assumed the same thing. I think that was a plausible, reasonable thing to think at that time. And it was kind of an unconscious assumption, I think, like I don’t think I would explicitly have stated, oh yeah, we’re definitely getting more progressive, you know, politics from here on out, but I think I felt it um that this like Trump thing was a was a kind of like bizarre aberration that was going to go away and it’s not. Um, so that has kind of forced me to reconsider things. I mean, it also reconsiders the content I kind of make. Like, I don’t really do a dradicalization so much anymore. I got a whole like page on this. Okay, we’re gonna we’re going to do Yeah. Okay. I’ve got I’ve got a good one to throw at you. So, uh we were talking about a general like kind of social progressivism that’s happening uh over the last few decades. And when we’re younger, Obama gets elected and we think it’s going to be this way forever on this kind of like constant arc of general social progress. Um Trump happens. That’s a big interruption. However, we have this very weird postmodern conservatism now where Christy Gnome’s husband is hyperconservative but also dabbling in some, shall we say, unusual habits and behaviors in private. Well, Republican crossdressing scandals are not like the most awful thing. Like I mean I don’t know in the Bush era I can remember like Larry Flint and like the wide stance in the bathroom like he was cruising airport bathrooms basically. Um, so that’s not necessarily a novelty. I mean, I think there is like somehow the absurdity of the cosmos seems to have like escalated like the the kind of the notion that this wasn’t just like a he wasn’t just cruising like that there’s like ridiculous details like balloon breasts and bimboification hypnosis and like god knows what we already know about. But like oh yeah, what don’t we know? Yeah, I’m sure there’s an ocean like an oceanic depth to the to like the I was thinking where would you hide a pair of fake tits that big in your house like she’s got to know about it. Maybe inflates them. Well, I think I mean I think Yeah, I mean I think that probably shouldn’t she probably knows. Like I think that if you’re married to someone for decades and they are habitual crossdresser, there are usually indications that that’s going on. Mhm. And so I’m a little skeptical, but it also like fascinatingly I mean the that scandal in particular kind of like fascinatingly makes you think on like the rights relationship to bimboification in general. A lot of people have observed that like well people call it Mara Lago face. Yeah. But there is a kind of fixation on this particular type of presentation of femininity of like a very like topiary approach to like female, you know, gender expression that I mean people always used to talk about this like Fox News bombshells or whatever. Sure. Sure. You know, I think how much work has Christy Nomad done and people comment this comment on this a lot this that she’s a grandma and she’s like kind of like turned herself into a Barbie. Mhm. Uh I’ve heard from people that one of the reasons why fascism is so uh fixated on aesthetics. Yeah. Like I think of that image of her with this $50,000 watch in front of this backdrop of like all of these prisoners. Um Yes. It’s a incredibly powerful image, right? And also these like giant breasts are a really striking image. Um, but fascism is so focused on aesthetics because that’s all that they have to offer. Like they don’t have a comprehensive like uh compelling offer for political economy, so they can just give you these like incredibly potent images. Well, they sort of don’t believe in I’m trying to say they almost don’t believe in reality. like they don’t like like believe in material reality but they also sort of think that like the problem I mean a lot of the right-wing or the fascists particularly diagnosis of what is wrong with the world is aesthetic right the west has fallen why because of like degeneracy and the evidence of that is often like suggest like look at modern architecture compared to a cathedral right you know how did this happen western man right but I do think that you know what they’re interested in is or you know there’s like these like famous you know ridiculous meme posts. We used to be a proper country like and the po the image attached to that caption is a 7-Eleven ad from the 1970s. So it’s like really yeah it’s like we used to be like look at this advertising image from three decades ago. Wouldn’t it be better if we were still like that? And it’s it is a very like again this is not like we’re not talking they’re not giving us data about like wages or about inequality or be a proper country wages and productivity were aligned. Right. Right. But but like but well I don’t know but you sometimes you sometimes see like people point to like oh before 1971 like you know inflation has increased so much and wages have not have not kept up. Like that’s like a that’s like a data point that sort of corresponds to something that is involved in reality. Whereas pointing to advertising from the past and being like it’s sad how commercialized Coca-Cola has become. Like what are you talking about? Like it’s just like a fantasy like that they’re engaged in, right? That like an ad agency dreamed up in on Madison Avenue that these people like posit as their vision of the utopian future. I mean, and the idea that fascism as the aestheticization of polit isn’t that like benyamine or someone like communists have been saying this since like the 30s. Uh speaking speaking of taste, okay, I’ll I’ll throw you a few. Um we’ll clear the trash mobs here. Uh let’s talk about your recent video. Um speaking of uh bad taste, you recently watched all 10 Saw videos and spent several hours writing about it, thinking about it. Why did you choose Saw? Well, I was procrastinating a few years ago on another video and I procrastinated by watching the Saw movies and it struck me as like really I was there’s ideas here that I have not really seen like been given like the philosophical escalation treatment and I think it was that combined with the fact that this movie had once traumatized me that I think interested me right is that well it’s very fidian idea a that like there’s something kind of sadistic or say inherently sat masochistic about like morality itself about the psychology of morality right I mean it’s something that really gets neglected in philosophical ethics where I guess this is kind of my beef with philosophy in general is that philos philosophical ethics tries to rationalize ethics morality and turn it into like in like the contian tradition you turn it into reason or to derive all of ethics from laws of reason, right? And I think this is like very clever. It’s very smart. It’s very impressive. I could not have come up with it, but I also think it’s completely wrong. Like or at least it’s completely alien from the way actual ethical thinking happens in situations that matter. Okay? Right. Okay. Like I don’t think that any I don’t I mean the categorical imperative Kant’s like ethical maxim a fancy uh sort of a fancy golden rule for those who don’t study K like this is a this is a game. It’s like a game that’s being played by by this German intellectual who never left his hometown in the 18th century. Um that’s not how ethical reasoning works. Like I think I much I I what I think is much more close to Freud based on my observation of the way people actually engage with ethical questions. It’s about well it’s emotional right I mean and there’s there’s philosophers who have suggested that ethics is derived from emotions is called emotivism and it’s like you know a lot of like British empiricists said that for example but they don’t really those people don’t really have a lot of insight into emotion either whereas I think psychoanalysis kind of does. So like Freud and and civilizationist discontents for example talks about like guilt as this like modern neurosis that’s the product of kind of repressed aggression basically where aggression is turned inward. Um and when you sort of internalize the law it’s what is the law? It’s like a punishing sort of tyrannical father that’s inside your own head and super ego. So yeah super ego. So there’s a massochism or sadism to morality. I fel felt that saw really kind of in an exaggerated way sort of dramatizes that sadism right in that you know jigsaw sort of cartoonish fictional serial killer is putting people in traps torture scenarios basically that sort of ironically punish some crime. Right? So like the the maze of razor wire as punishment for for self harming with a razor, right? Like you have to cut yourself to I mean it’s kind of the same logic of self harm in the first place, right? Is that you have to cut yourself to sort of purge the guilt for your crime. Um, not all self harm is a complicated psychological topic, but I think there’s some version of self harm or some version of, for example, anorexia that involves a kind of sadistic super ego, I guess, in the sense that you’re sort of punishing yourself or or disciplining yourself for Yeah. Uh, I mean, in the case of anorexia, it’s sort of aesthetic an aesthetic sin. I’m thinking of bodybuilding. Yeah. Yeah. moral bodybuilding is exactly the same. Physical discipline physical discipline also restricting your food while cutting. I wanted to talk about saw because it’s I see it as sort of like a parody of this entire way of thinking but a parody that has the ability to sort of like illuminate like what’s actually going on in moral psychology a lot of the time and it sort of notices the aggression and sadism that I think sort of underlies a lot of moral judgment. There’s an interesting phrase I wasn’t familiar with before uh called contropaso. What is contropaso? Well, contropasso is an Italian word used by Dante in the inferno that refers to well literally in Italian I guess it means something like counter suffering. Um to suffer the opposite of the sin. So I guess it’s first introduced by a character who’s a politician who has divided a family, divided a son against his father and his punishment in hell is to carry his own severed head around. So he sort of metaphorically has decapitated a family and the punishment is literal decapitation. So there’s a kind of symmetry between crime and punishment and a lot of saw traps are like this. And I think it also speaks to something about feelings about justice, right? That a crime I mean we often feel a crime should be sort of punished proportionate in proportion to the harm caused to victims, right? Or we feel that in some way the punishment should if not be proportionate to sort of resemble the crime and it’s called poetic justice for this reason, right? There’s a rhyming quality to the ide the relation between crime and punishment. Well, uh death penalty for committing murder. The death penalty for committing murder, right? And I think a lot of people do have a kind of profound sense of it’s sort of unjust if someone is a serial killer, for example, and then they merely get life in prison, right? It’s like, well, the debt incurred by the crime has not been repaid because you cannot pay for jail with jail time for I mean, I would argue that like incarceration is fairly cruel. It’s a punishment already. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so there’s kind of like a fake humanitarian element I think to to like incarceration. Um and sort is frustrating both to the humanitarians and to the to the people who want symmetrical retribution, right? Because I think to the humanitarians incarceration is like sort of a bloodless punishment. Sure. That it’s nonviolent. is nonviolent sort of in the sense that like but I think it also like has a lot more to do with I mean you can look at the way that Americans administer the death penalty where the same kind of priorities the priority is not really reducing pain because the way that lethal injection is done is very painful a lot of the time or things like the electric chair like deeply painful ways to kind of torture someone to death but it’s actually I mean it’s worse than the guillotine except for maybe the psychology of the guillotine which is I think intimidating to the idea of being beheaded No, they want to see the person suffer. Right. Right. But I think that like the humanitarian like liberal humanist, whatever word I’m using for this, you know what I mean? Sensibility is like, well, there’s something barbaric or inhumane about public execution and especially about execution involving blood. And the anxiety, I think, seems to really center around the guilt of the executioner or the people witnessing the execution or the judge. Um, it’s not necessarily about being humane towards the victim, but I also think that at the same time it it frustrates the more like draconian wish for proportionate retribution. Yeah. Yeah. I I want to touch on this topic of laws, the foundation of society and these kind of like early liberal thinkers. Um, but a few particular examples that jumped out to me. Um, I believe it’s Saw six there’s, you’ll know this better than I do, but the um insurance executive has to choose between who lives and who dies. And that was I don’t know how many more years before Luigi, but like there’s a kind of clear allegory for uh what is going on now. Um, well, I I guess I’m a little off the topic of law, but to just dwell on the Luigi point, like I think that the popularity of Luigi is an expression of a kind of popular frustration with the law. Yeah. Um although I mean in this case the law is not going to punish a health insurance CEO, right? So I think there’s a wish for someone to someone else to do it. It even rewards them a lot of money. For sure. Yeah. So there’s a sense of like that injustice that sort of lingers over us all every day in society. That’s the appeal of the vigilante is that the vigilante like reclaims the ability to punish Yeah. from a legal system that has a monopoly on violent punishment. Yeah. Yeah. And I think in some ways it also comes from the lack of things like public executions where there’s popular sort of participation at least as spectators in this kind of people come together to attack a guilty person. I think it also social media kind of works this way too. Like I mean way too much has been said about cancel mobs or whatever on Twitter. I do think that it similar is a similar it’s an execution in the public square. Well, it’s kind of a public execution. Yeah. And drawn and quartered on social media. I think sometimes you could categorize this as justice. Sometimes it’s almost closer to like human sacrifice which uh it’s a French philosopher Reneard who talks about uh I’m familiar. Yeah. coding and as this like very central like facet of religious life or like most major religions in the ancient world practice either animal or human sacrifice and then over time that has kind of declined in part as religion internalizes that type of aggression right so in Christianity Jesus is a human sacrifice he is um it’s not you know an ongoing uh sacrifice of living people but that’s supposed to be a kind of substitute sacrifice. No, we reenact it every week. We reenact it every week. Yeah. Yeah. Um and that sort of all our sins or all the kind of maybe aggression we feel towards other people gets displaced onto the sacrificial lamb. Um and that theoretically would sort of reduce the need for well it’s supposed to do what human sacrifice used to do which is uh increase social cohesion by displacing inter intra community aggression and rivalry onto a scapegoat. Right. Is there also a part of it where it’s like the demonstration of the society’s values? Like why did they do like executions in the public square for example is because it had to be made visible to a bunch of people? Yeah, for sure. Like it’s um it is I think a clarification of a moral order. Ritual usually is some form of that, right? And I think public execution is a version of that. Um I mean I also think with public execution in the case of like a modern I mean like Fukova has a thing about this how like yeah like them like a you know the extremely disproportionate or asymmetrical execution of you know a reside for example in part is disproportionate in terms of like you know the guy tries to stab the king and he’s like drawn and quartered and his like body parts are burnt and hung up on the rafters or whatever like that’s a demonstration of almost sort of like godlike power of the king to to show like the show showcasing his power is by how disproportionate the retaliation is. Mhm. Your uh scapegoating narrative that was from um the conspiracy video. Is that correct? Yeah. You take these interesting like tangents where you’re doing a long form video essay and then you’ll spend like 20 minutes on a certain topic that’s kind of a side quest. Yeah. Yeah. Uh links back in an interesting way. In the most recent video about Saw, there’s a segment about Quinton Tarantino. um everyone’s favorite director and I think you say something like I’m paraphrasing here but um victimhood narratives allow us to enjoy violence and so looking at his films like Jango Unchained or what was uh Englor the Nazi movie um is there anything in the news right now that made you think of this theme or specific political positions Quinton Tarantino may have taken recently? Well, yes. I mean, I think that a lot I could point to a lot of different things, but I think that I mean, my first experience with this growing up very vividly was 911 where let’s ignore what caused 911 for a moment. I mean, we can come back to that, but I think for a lot of Americans, 911 was experienced as this like horrifying, humiliating trauma that like cried out for revenge. Um, yeah. Yeah. And then and so like like I think the war in Afghanistan was sort of inevitable as a result of that. But it turned out to be that the administration was not good at tracking down Osama bin Laden and even just tracking him down felt not adequate to the to the scope of damage that was being right uh avenged. So I think that in a lot of ways the the popular support for the war in Iraq was basically a displaced revenge for 911. People forget how [ __ ] popular that [ __ ] was. Yeah. It’s an impressive level of amnesia actually. Yeah. Michael being booed in Hollywood for his opposition to the war. It’s hard to imagine like that like liberals were basically also down with bullied in high school. Now that I think I have this repressed I got bullied in high school for being against the war. I wasn’t patriotic. I did too. I did too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You these people. We were right the whole time. Do you hate the troops? Like that’s what they say. Yeah. you hated the troops and they couldn’t conceive of a reason to be against the war that wasn’t just like you have contempt for American soldiers, right? So that I mean that was like kind of my political awakening. Now this I I mean I think the same thing happened well I won’t say the same thing because there’s obviously a lot of you know we go into specific differences but I to I saw a similar dynamic after October 7th when at least in the initial stages it seemed like fairly transparent that Israel was out for blood. I mean it was immediately obvious just from the tone that Netanyahu for example adopted. Yeah. Um, shamelessly on social media. I mean, I think that his tone was like I I don’t know I can think of a better word than genocidal. Mhm. The week after October 7th. I think anyone who was like anal like analyzed his rhetoric could see what was coming at that point. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I think I actually don’t know the details of Tarantino’s positions on this, but I think he’s I’m thinking of I think he posted from a bomb shelter in television. Yeah. more or less a supporter of was a huge supporter of of the uh well ethnic cleansing in Gaza and he I mean in your uh I’m kind of summarizing what you say in the video but there’s this kind of progression in his own work where towards the end of it he realizes that you can use this victimhood narrative to just enjoy the violence that if you look at his early stuff he was just enjoying that anyway. Yeah. and it seems like a kind of perfect fit for his uh real world politics right now. The kind of moral idea of what constitutes justified violence has shifted over time and I think uh how much time like are we talking World War II to now? Like a 100 years. 100 years. But good question. Uh um I should be specific. Well, I think that like I mean you see that you see people on the left do this of course, but you also see is is Israel doing this, right? Is it’s their sense of v victimhood that warrants that warrants the violence that makes the violence justified, right? And I think that I mean it’s not it’s really not just the left. It really is like the far right also does this like this kind of constant sense of we are the besieged agrieved victims. Yeah. And we are fighting back against some kind of oppressive thing, right? And that’s what makes violence good. Yeah. Um I think it seems to have taken Tarantino a while as a filmmaker to figure out how to use that to produce like violence as pleasure, right? The pleasure of violence in his movies, which has always been his main interest. Um but I guess in the video I talk about uh his his you know earliest I think his earliest film as a director Reservoir Dogs which is about criminality you know and criminal violence. Yeah. And that violence is also kind of presented as fun but in a more ambivalent way. Right. Where the famous scene where with Mr. blonde portraying a cop. There’s something fun about it in the way there’s something fun about the portrayal of sexual violence in A Clockwork Orange, right? It’s like this amplified sort of musical, ecstatic, joyous like uh sadism. Yeah. And that’s really uncomfortable, I think, for most viewers to watch. It’s uncomfortable for me to watch definitely because I don’t want to feel good about criminal sadism. But then I also feel that the kind of feel good the feel-good violence of a revenge movie or the feel-good violence of a kind of social justice revenge movie which is what I take Django and Chang and Glorious Bastards to be. I mean I think it shows that like this is how pe this is what it takes to make people feel uh feel that violence is is justified or to celebrate violence. Um, so I think that’s certainly like an important part of the mindset of the IDF and of kahanism or, you know, or whatever you want to call it in general. Uh, the idea of like, look, Jews have been victimized for 2,000 years. We’ll always be victimized. We’ll always be besieged. We’ll always be hated. And the only way for us to survive is to fight back. That’s how they think, right? And that’s why all this seems justified. Now, I have this other worry, and this is where I’ve caused myself to become an arch villain of the online left recently, is I also worry that there’ll be a backlash to that as well, which And backlash to what? Well, a backlash to the visible spectacle of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, which kind of I think has led many people to have an almost obsessive fixation on Israel and Zionism as like the great Satan, right? Um, which maybe I’m overactive in my anxiety about it, but maybe I’m not. I mean, I think that some people are going to see some people are going to want to retaliate for the hundreds of videos they’ve seen of children being blown up. That sort of worries me, not just for the victims of the retaliation, but for the continued like escalation of of violence that it implies. Mhm. I don’t have an answer. I don’t know what to do about it. That’s just a thing I’m watching like a train wreck. M in the same way that I think my you know on October 7th when that news came in of course I was horrified by the attack itself and the victims uh of the attack but also was overwhelmed by fear of what Israel was going to do next which would likely be worse as I felt and it has been Yeah. Yeah. My problem with doing this show is that the topics that interest me Yeah. are all of the most thorny topics that the online left gets um extremely aggravated by. Yeah. So, that is kind of the only thing that I want to talk about. And in that um post that you’re talking about, I think it was an Instagram story or whatever this um this thing that circulated on Reddit and other sites, you talk about the left embracing hopeless causes. And maybe we’ll talk about this behind the payw wall because I think this is actually incredibly incredibly important important insight. But uh if you are engaged in politics to assume a moral high ground but not to win material victories in the world, you intentionally choose topics by which you have no lever of power to change their outcome. And that has made it if you put together the psychological profile of the online leftist. this is kind of the perfect trap for them because there’s no lever they can pull in American politics either through strike, either through uh democratic inputs like they just they don’t have a hand in it. The most they could do is like lay in front of the tanks. Yes. Um I don’t see a lot of people doing that and people aren’t doing that. Some are but not a lot of people. But what is the thing that draws this online left audience to embrace causes that they cannot have a say in its outcome? I spent a lot of time thinking about exactly that question. Um because I think I think a lot of things go into it. I think one is a kind of people people’s identity becomes oppositional like when you identify yourself as a radical. You think of yourself as anti-establishment. That is who you are. That is the basis of all of your moral principles. which sort of also implies that you don’t want to be the establishment or you don’t want to even be associated with the establishment. So, one thing I get very frustrated with with with people self-styled radicals is that even when the left does have victories, the victories then immediately spun into some kind of disappointment. They don’t actually want to be in power. They don’t want to be in power. Yeah. Um, so like I mean you you’ve seen it also already with like well you we saw it with AOC and with Bernie Sanders where like I feel like those people were the sort of champions of the left eight years ago and now like oh my god like I saw like when when when your wonderful mayor Zoran Mani got elected like he posted some picture of him with Bernie Sanders and AOC and immediately like the the p the faction of the online left that I’m discussing here the reaction was like wow like I can’t believe Zoron mom Donnie would associate with these like genocidal Zionists right and it’s like well what did you expect him to do as an elected politician not ever talk to any other politician like that’s not how this works I mean and in some ways like what they are what they are horrified by is participation in politics itself because that means a kind of compromise of their virtue ethics and I find it so preposterous because a lot of these people also are claiming to be Marxists But like so you would think Marxism is like based on some kind of understanding of like you know material conditions but they’re virtue ethicists. They’re virtue ethicists slurp things Marxists. They’re not they’re not materialists by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah. And it’s it’s very frustrating. Yeah. If they um not to harp on this but like if they ever got into the position of power it would mean the death of that subcultural identity which is actually their primary drive. Yeah. So it’s a kind of political like hipsterism in the sense of like you like the band and tell it’s popular and then you can’t like it anymore because the popularity of it is incompatible with your self-image of someone who is on outside of the mainstream. Right. I like that quite a bit. Um on the topic of the uh left-wing mindset, there is quite a discussion in the Saw movie um or in your uh video essay on the Saw movies about uh a right-wing mindset that uses violence as retribution. Um, what is the connection between this right-wing mindset and um, visible violence as retribution? Well, I see the right-wing mindset and my influence here is uh a cognitive linguist George Leoff who wrote a book called moral politics where he argues that basically the understanding of the family and the role of parents is the microcosm of how people view politics as a macrocosm. In other words, that how a family uh how a family authority structure works is the basis for how diff people with different values see politics. So he I mean this book was from the ’90s um but it it I think it still works for like the father disciplinarian. Yeah. So the the right-wing politics is he calls it strict father morality and it’s the idea is yes of like a of a of a disciplinary father. It’s like daddy’s coming home and he’s eating his belt off. Right. And that that is I mean the way that people talk about Trump on the right is like you don’t have to be Freud to notice that because they just say it. They do call him daddy. Yeah. They post memes about it. They post memes about it. And and I think that he calls he refers to the liberal uh value system as nurturing parent morality. So the idea is that like the role of a parent or of a government is to nurture, to be compassionate, to provide, to uh you know the social democratic welfare state. Social democratic welfare state. Well, the social democratic welfare state is mommy politics. The nanny state. Yeah. It’s the nanny state, the mommy state in a way, right? Um and like Leov, you know, he wants to assist that. Of course, like men can be the the nurturer as well, but I think it’s I think it retains his gendered coding, right? Um, and I think I think a lot of the way that you see people respond very differently to the Democratic party as opposed to the Republican party has to do with the way that like the Republican party is kind of they’re they’re daddy. And so the expectations of how they act or how they’re supposed to act are sort of daddy expectations. Again, we’re assuming sort of somewhat traditional conservative family model. So, I think that like when Trump does authoritarian things or like cruel things or disciplinarian things, no one’s surprised. Um, many people aren’t even offended because it’s sort of like, well, that’s what he’s supposed to do. But I think the sort of moral bar is much higher for liberals because liberals are supposed to be mommy and if mommy is not taking care of me, right, she’s failing. Do you uh what’s your thought on this book? Do you agree with his thesis his thesis? I think I think it’s I think it’s for them I think for the most part I do agree with it. Okay. Yeah. I mean there’s like certain details I think I would question like he there’s this I think feels out of date to me. There’s a period where he analyzes the like Bill Clinton Monica Lewinsky scandal and you know he suggests that like the Republican like horror with which they regard this has to do with you know sexual morality being tightly controlled under daddy politics where you know uh I I’m not sure that’s true because of the way that Donald Trump’s like sexual libertanism is completely disregarded on the right and so I think there’s actually something like the define right of kings at play almost where like Trump is so high a daddy that like the law does not apply to him right in fact is partly his his ability to transgress the law that gives him his power right is that he makes the law but he does not follow the law um that’s real power yeah that’s real power I mean it’s like it’s like incest among the pharaohs or whatever right like uh the morality and the law does not apply to you above it might makes right most expedient Right. Let me ask you though the um so this framing of like the father as you know retribution the the punishing disciplinarian father that’s the kind of masculine interpretation of politics and then the nurturing mother which is the social democratic welfare state. This is my own hobby horse. Um but I cannot get past the idea that at the heyday of social democracy like men were you know predominant in the labor force. We had these masculine jobs where people worked in, you know, things that were heavy, you had to sell your muscle power. Yeah. So, how do we square this like philosophical interpretation that social democracy is feminine if like the back of labor on upon which it was built was like guys lifting heavy stuff on an assembly line? Yes. Well, I think that it has to do with the because because I think that the nurture and parent politics is not inherently feminine in and of itself. It’s it’s specifically has to do with the role of the state. Okay. Which is sort of feminine. Um, oh, I would have to think more about like the sort of like masculine connotations of labor movements and how that squares with mommy politics or sorry, nurturing parent morality. Um, I mean it’s an interesting question because I do think that there are people on the left who are doing some like different they’re doing some version of daddy politics. I think actually um who would those people be? There’s people who I feel have an implicit preference for a sort of strong masculine leader. I mean, you see this with like say like Stalinists. Um, I don’t know how many Stalinists we really have. I don’t know how big of a problem this is. I think it’s more of a problem than it used to be actually, but it’s more of a problem. I think that part of the appeal of I mean like okay, it’s like the uh this is such a fringe organization. I don’t know if I even want to give it the attention, but like I’ll bleep it. I’ll bleep it. I know. I knew who you’re going to bring up. Like these people are desperately trying to get on the show. That is I get every every week I get something from them. Yeah. I would consider that left daddy politics. Uh yeah. Is it left? Is it It’s something. Well, we could argue it’s not left, right? It’s populist, right? Populist is not the same as left. Yeah. It’s not It’s not the left that I want anything to do with, but they are I mean, I guess people call it like Red Brown Alliance or something. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think to be mommy politics, you also kind of have to admit at least some level of feminism, which I don’t think they do. Um, but I also think that like I don’t know, even like even more mainstream right political commentary, I feel like the audience is often men. Um, yes. Yeah. Overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly. Yeah. And I think that that there’s a gendered element to the kinds of well let’s take for example like what has become a a big part of political discourse on the left is this kind of constant tribal infighting of li libs versus leftists right or liberals versus leftists which okay you can define that in philosophical terms like where like li liberalism is in the tradition of John lock and John rolls and it believes in rights and this kind of stuff whereas leftism is in the tradition of Karl Marx and it believes in abolishing capitalism. Yes. Uh okay, we all know that. But like in practice, what it is what it is in online spaces is tribal affiliation. Yes. Right. Like I I guess I’ve recently been vocal about character characterizing myself as lib. Um more or less embracing like a thing that people have used as a slur for me for years. But I think part I I mean I think that when I say I’m a lib, I’m really talking about tribal affiliation. Meaning that I am passionate about voting for Democrats in presidential elections. That seems to be the main point of contention that I have with the more explicitly leftist not liberal tribe. um where and I guess I I I I find the leftist not liberal tribe is not exclusively male but I think it is sort of it does lean masculine and whereas the Democratic party is like I like women are kind of the backbone of the Democratic party and I think people sense that I think a lot of young I mean it’s especially difficult with young men because I think a lot of young men are horrified by the possibility of belonging to a coalition wide enough to include their there. Like I mean I I do think that’s part of it, right? Like it’s like a seen as like as like so like cringe and shooy or you know whatever word we’re using now. I don’t think I don’t think men ever said shooky but there’s like two years where Jenzi women said it and then the New York Times wrote an article about it and then that killed it. But um it’s not the the the whole like radical chic thing is like tarnished when your mom in her minivan shows up. Sure. You know, and I think that people like Hillary Clinton and Kla Harris sort of remind you of your mom and it’s just like I don’t want to I mean that that’s like the feeling I get from talking to a lot of like young men about scold. Yeah. Right. It’s seen as a scolding. Yeah. And it’s that’s the flip side of the mommy state is that Yeah. Right. is that the authoritar the authoritarian woman or the authoritative woman not even authoritarian woman in authority is seen as maternal and they’re author threatening to men who have not resolve that conflict with the the sort of looming figure of their mother. Um and so I think that a guy like Hassan is appealing because he’s like manly, you know, and he I think scratches an itch for a lot of young men. It’s a it’s not dissimilar to what the more right-wing sinister manosphere influencers. They want to be attractive and muscular and successful and they want a daddy to tell them how to be a man. Uh h uh so I think you know I don’t really participate in this but I’m an outsider to this but I do think there’s like a a little bit of a gender war that kind of underlies some of this like lib left dispute where again cuz like a lot of people who are passionate supporters of the Democratic party like their issues are things like abortion and things that I know no one talks about that anymore but you know yeah that disappeared it vanished along with the environment. Uh we’re we’re working our way up. We got boy few important things on the docket. But I do think that I don’t know. I I do get frustrated it frustrated by it. I admit I mean I realize I’m speaking before a hypothetical probably largely male audience here. Um probably like 80% male. Probably 80%. Yeah. Yeah. But like I don’t so I don’t disparage the idea that it’s important to communicate to men or that you know male loneliness for example is something important to consider or that the Democratic party even needs to consider how it how it attracts men um since it doesn’t seem to struggle with attracting women. But I admit that like for whatever it’s worth for the people listening I do think that I get frustrated sometimes by are women lonely? Like I don’t I don’t know. No one asked. No one cares. Like I I I find that the idea that like men are the people who matter to be sort of like this like underlying insult that gets sort of tedious. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, but I feel like it’s hard to voice that without making men feel threatened. Um since they already feel so intimidated by the kind of oppressive mommy Democratic party. This this is a little bit in the weeds, but I’m not going to recall the numbers off the top of my head. So, um, people can fact check me in the comments if I’m I’m wrong about this, but young men swing like 11 points towards the Republican party in 2024. That spurs this whole like media arc of talking about the political sentiments of young men, how to influence them, the podcast election, all of this other stuff. I’ve got a ton of questions about that we’ll get to in a moment. But if you look at the uh swing in the same age bracket, I forget exactly what it is, like 18 to 24 or something like that, young women swing like six or seven points. So it’s actually a pretty marginal difference. Yeah. And so my thought was that rather than constring um well one most importantly you have the working class that swung towards Republicans and then you have young people that are being proletarianized at a faster rate than people who are older than them. And so the actual narrative what the data indicates is that the working class is voting for the right-wing nationalist parties and then young people uh particularly men but also women are shifting incrementally in that direction. And so the media narrative around winning the hearts and minds of young men was a way to kind of like ignore the labor question which is actually the fundamental driver of this anomaly. Um that’s my own hobby horse to bring to this thing but I think um it’s a fair question to ask like are young women lonely as well? there may be some um statistics at which young men are more atomized uh if you look at like dating app statistics and things like this and uh 18 to 24 performing um less well in the labor market and this kind of stuff. Yeah. And I think for men like any losses are intensified by the kind of decadesl long sort of loss of gender power um their previous position. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So there’s there’s a sense of having fallen further and a sense of like having lost power and having lost you know well lost like women’s dependence on them I think adds an extra level of like sting I think to the kind of lowered economic status. Yeah. Um can I let me uh take us down this this path? I want to ask a few questions as we um um uh wrap up this discussion about your recent video. These are thematically related, but uh the rise of Trump, this kind of end of a broad arc of social progressivism, this right-wing mindset that you talk about in the video, one of the things that has come up on this show, uh conversations with different people is generally what percentage of society has this right-wing mindset? Um Kyle Kolinsky will tell me that 30% of society is fascist. What is your estimation? How many people in our society have this right-wing mindset? Well, I think that on the edges there’s a little bit of a kind of gradient. I would agree with 30% as like really maybe 25% are like dyed in the wool like unreachable levels of right-wing mindset. I’m like I’m like 10 to 15. Okay. But I think I’ve heard people say 50. I mean I think there’s a wider there’s maybe like 20 or 30% of people who kind of are swayable in one direction or the other because I mean so if we if we use my oversimplification of mommy politics and daddy politics well most people I think do believe in both to some extent right I mean even in right-wing daddy politics it’s not that there’s no room for a parent to be nurturing often that’s sort of disproportionately viewed as the woman’s role Right. Whereas the father’s role might be more disciplining and protecting. And then it’s not that left and it’s not that like mommy politics doesn’t think that protecting and disciplining have their place as well. So I think that to to suggest that this is a complete binary that people either believe one or the other. That’s wrong, right? But I think that the further right you go, the more you go into the idea of like the import like the main thing that they want out of a government is to project strength and power and discipline and um tough love, right? Let’s say um as opposed to no participation trophies. Yeah, no participation trophies. Whereas like I think the the issues that people tend to go to the left or to the Democratic party for are things like health care was Obama’s big issue. Um for example, which is it’s kind of a mommy issue in terms of it being like about protect nourish like nurturing and uh sort of a soft type of protecting. This is such an autistic response, but that that may be a political mistake. It should be about um cost savings and government efficiency. uh rather than nurturing. Um I I think that that may have been um an error on their part. But okay, let me ask you this. So let’s say like 30% of society is rightwing, 30% is leftwing, there’s 30% in the middle, right? Roughly thirds, right? And what that kind of means is that the people in that block, like say the MAGA fanatics for example, or the internet communists, they are unpersuadable. Like they can’t be reached by messaging. And so what we’re fighting over is this like one-third in the middle. I feel like debating the margins on that the question underneath um there’s a risk of naturalizing the political uh leanings and affiliations of people now um whereas compared to the heyday of social democracy in the 1970s should we also assume that 30% of people were fascist because there is like an arc of historical progression and development here right there was a kind of law rule-based order at one point in uh you know global history the um the end of history the kind of uh prevailing of liberal democracy at which people would be accountable to this international system of rules the subtext of what we’re talking about and um Trump’s divine right of kings like all of this stuff is like we are now in this period where might makes right like Israel is the most pronounced example of this there is nothing that holds people accountable right and so uh retribution and kind of the underlying theme of this video I think is also like lock and all the people you mentioned before like their philosophy is kind of unraveling under just like the brutal like um a kind of like Hobbesian application of uh strength and military might like rule by the sword, right? He has some kind of quote of like society society can only administer these rules such that it can enforce by the sword. And that’s what we’re that’s what we’re seeing like there are basically no more rules that govern this stuff. It is just uh yeah might makes right. And should we assume that the constituency that elected this guy um were they always in existence previously? Is this something that came into existence right in the 50-year arc of if we’re trying to get back to the 1970s political economy? Right? Were those people already fascist or were they made fascist by the development of neoliberalism? Well, I think that the kind of authoritarian might makes right. I mean, that has become almost like a caricature of itself at this point with, you know, Donald Trump insisting that we’re going to war to take their oil and so on. Like things that like, you know, far-left critics of the Bush administration would have said that that’s what he was doing. But no one in the Bush administration ever would have said we’re going to Iraq to take their oil, right? Like as if this is like piracy, like basically plundering. We were doing it for democracy. That’s what they had to say. They were these ideals. Yeah. Um I mean I think that I mean going back to the 70s I mean going back to the cold war when I think there what we got a new cold war. Well, yeah, but like the right at the time, I think did sort of have this kind of macho stance about the Soviet Union, but domestically they were still more I they were much less authoritarian domestically, right? or or there was still a sense of like I mean I think Lehoff even suggests that during the cold war you often got like there there’s this period where you had further right presidents and further left uh congress as if like almost like the president the executive was daddy and the legislative was mommy. Okay. And I just think that that that tendency of the need to like project constant like strength and power and discipline and menace I I feel that they used to be have a a more specific target that was outside the country. Um I mean it was you know in Vietnam or or in Russia or in you know uh so like that is not necessarily new right do we does is China a sufficient enemy to have now that that coalition could come back into existence China is certainly an enemy now but I do think that one reason for I I do think that one reason for the extent of like enemy within kind of fascist um scapegoating I think that probably is in some part the result of the of like the average person’s experience of sort of economic loss. Yeah. Um or there’s a strong sense of this being like sort of a zero sum and like my wealth has been taken from me by immigrants or for example is like is is a kind of suggestion that is being put forward to justify rounding up immigrants and putting them in alligator Alcatraz, right? Like so I do think that that aspect may well be the result of like Reagan and um because I think Reagan started the tendency that has metastasized into what it’s become. Yeah. That was that was the coup that transformed the world. I mean in some ways that was also some ways you could say that was a backlash to like 60s counterculture the majoral moral majority right um and sort of anxiety also about the collapse of order and the decay of social norms I think led a lot of I mean to a religious right revival for example um in the late ‘7s and in the 80s that I think is the kind of predecessor to this like the question is how has it become like so obscure and transgressive. Yeah, that’s that’s the new part for Trump, I think. Are online politics and real politics becoming the same thing? Yes. I mean, to a large extent. I mean, I’ve thought that for a long time. I’ve thought that since the 2010s. Uh I mean, I think there’s like some limits to it in that there is there there does remain like sections of online politics that are very online. Yeah. as we say, like I think that unfortunately a lot of leftist politics doesn’t seem to translate into like ballot behavior. Um, I know I’m always harping on this, but like I do think it matters. And if leftist politics becomes basically like a niche subculture of the internet, then I kind of do question the utility of that. Yeah. unless it’s so like entertaining or in or you know intellectually rewarding in its own right that it justifies it itself which maybe it sometimes does but if you think that you’re doing politics I think it should translate into political action right um but you I do think that it’s pretty hard to deny at this point that political commentary that happens online needs to be taken extremely seriously right I mean this does seem to the main way people get information. It’s a It’s a big deal. It’s not to just run like the kind of counterargument on the political history political hipsterdom of the left. Yeah. Speaking of hipsters, um I was thinking about MGMT, for example, of like a ban that basically got through in this early period of social media that was like hipster culture, but now it’s in like car commercials. I hear it in the grocery store. Is there some type of just to check our work here, is there some type of left-wing subculture that could be, you know, birthed in the gutter of the internet that actually does have a scalable narrative that could reach the 77 million people we need to convince in a national election? I think so. I think probably Yeah. I mean, I think the people who were there in the original scene would of course reject who it became, but so what, right? Like if we don’t need them anymore, we got everybody else. Correct. Right. And I mean I think that that that is what success would look like. I think people who have the hipster mindset are allergic to success. They don’t want it. But in spite of that, they could still be useful, right? If they’re able to generate ideas and discourses that are are infectious in that way, if people actually want them. Yeah. Uh on the on the topic of gaming that we touched on before, were you involved in like internet spaces? I think of the uh casual racism in World of Warcraft where like people would say offensive things in Baron’s chat for example. Uh did you see those things growing up? Were you familiar with those cultures and what set off the alarm bells versus what was like a dismissible part of uh the attention dynamics in a message board thread for example? Yeah. I mean I was never like a huge game. So all the stuff I kind of experienced in a very like peripheral way. I my brothers were big uh you know World of Warcraft players. So I saw it from that. I for me was like drawn into a lot of this by more of a curiosity. Like I said like that was the appeal of 4chan to me. I never enjoyed 4chan or felt like I wanted to be there, but I would go there because of like like I don’t know there’s that kind of dark voyerism that I I’ve always been attracted to of like look at what is going on here like the the like or like even the incel subculture has been like fascinating to me like I just want to spectate like the well the dysfunction of it and the cruelty of it is interesting and also just I just kind of love bizarre language like es especially the the the weird ways that like looks maxers talk for example I just like am entranced by this like the weird vocabularies is like poetry deranged deranged poetry so I feel like I like curate that negative can tilt this kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. negative, cancel, tilt, just the fixations. That’s like I just I just think I love that. I don’t love it. They they should stop, but while they’re doing it, I’m going to at least allow myself to like be entertained by it. Yeah. Dude, this is like I don’t know if this is like a personality flaw, but like my instinct with this stuff, like the looks maxing stuff is obviously like in the the media in the last few uh weeks and months, but the posture that I think is important to take on this stuff is like it’s trending for a reason. Trending for a reason because most people like it. So, I feel like it’s a it’s a failure on our part about messaging if we take this oppositional stance. Yeah. And so I’m kind of tempted to um credit to the horseshoe theory podcast. They did an episode about the black pill and looks maxing. But uh this guy Henry who was their intern gave an incredible performance on this episode was saying that uh this black pill looks maxing hyperfixation on like the degree of your canthal tilt and this kind of [ __ ] and your jaw and your masses muscles and everything else was men realizing what it’s like to be a woman for the first time that they become hyperconscious of their own appearance. And I felt like that’s actually a better posture than to be like, well, men shouldn’t try to be attractive. They shouldn’t try to exercise. Like, you should be ugly and out of shape. And actually, that’s the left-wing progressive position, right? Well, I do feel like some like kind of evil shot in Freuda a little bit as seeing like men impose what has been imposed on women, impose it on themselves for seemingly no reason. I don’t think it’s for no reason. I mean I think it’s the product of technology but I mean I think everyone’s the look looks maxing a woman we never come up with a term looks maxing but like that is what that is what women have have done for centuries right because it’s sort of what’s expected of women socially it has not been what’s expected of men but I think the fact that we all carry around phones with a camera in them and that digital culture is so visual and it’s so based on image and avatar like I think that How many times in a year is an is a is like a 22 year old photographed these days compared to you know 20 years ago. I mean it has to be orders of magnitude. Like I think that it’s there’s kind of an unprecedented ability to create images of yourself. I think that I’ve kind of have my own sort of derangements that I’ve had to overcome a little bit from just the fact of being on camera all the time and like having to look at my own face all the time. It’s kind of weird and not normal to have like that much time. But I think that uh you know it’s been interesting to see men develop their own specific types of neurosis about this. Um to sometimes well and it’s gotten to the you know extreme point of like what is hard to believe is not parody in like case of like clicular and you know smashing your face with a hammer maxing or whatever it is they’re doing. Yeah. Yeah. Bone mashing. Yeah. Yeah. smashing, whatever it is. Phone smashing. Yeah, I’m I’m pretty sure that’s not real. Uh, on the topic of niche internet subcultures, uh, in your conspiracy video, which is one of my favorite uh, of your works, you talk briefly about Pizzagate. How are you feeling post uh, Epstein Files release? A lot of people ask me that. I’m uh I mean a lot of obviously a lot of people have confronted me with the suggestion that like my conspiracy video have been completely proven wrong by the release of the Epstein files. Okay, I really don’t agree with that at all. Um I think that well first of all a lot of Epstein files were already released and I was before I made that video. So, um, but I think that the fact that people see the Epstein files as a vindication of Pizzagate is like I feel that it illustrates things I was talking about in that video, such as the fact that like a real conspiracy or real scandals will be continuously and forever overlooked by conspiracy theorists because what drives them is the urge to discover the unknown or the hidden or the dis, you know, the secret. That’s why the fixation on secret societies. So, okay, what does what does it the Epstein files reveal? It reveals that a lot of very powerful men do in fact conspire with each other to participate in a kind of sex trafficking, right? Uh sometimes involving minors. That doesn’t surprise me at all actually. I mean, that that doesn’t that’s not even slightly surprising to me. I would I would say I’m a little surprised maybe by how coordinated it is. Like the fact that the fact that that that so many men from so many different like I I don’t I don’t know if I want to go into specifics, but like even like someone who was like I used to be in involved in like atheist and skeptic communities. Many of the most high-profile men, which feminists in those communities have been complaining about for well over a decade, turn out to have had personal correspondences with Jeffrey Epste, they’re asking for advice on how to manage these accusations of public sexual misconduct. Um, which is like it it is like a Jeffrey Epstein being a main character to a greater extent than I expected. I agree. I am a little I am uh somewhat surprised by like how omnipresent Jeffrey Epstein is in seemingly everyone’s emails. Um but I also think that pizza gate is wrong. Right. All of their central claims are wrong. Right. Pizza Gate is not the claim that some powerful people somewhere are doing are having sex with minors. There’s factually there’s no basement. There’s there’s no basement. There’s no uh as far as I can tell there’s no rituals even there’s no and and the fact that if you look at conspiracy spaces in the wake of the Epstein files being released they are still going through Epstein’s emails searching for the word pizza and it’s like guys like he’s just talking about sex trafficking in the email right there why is he need but they need they need it to be about pizza because because that’s this the code that’s the decoding activity conspiracy theories. A an obvious open conspiracy is not interesting because it’s not secret. Um, so and I discussed that in the video, right? I mean, I talked about like, you know, the Access Hollywood tape and how Trump had more or less publicly confessed to was sexually assaulting women and no one seemed to care that much. Yeah. Well, adult women. Yeah. Adult women. Yeah. Um, but I I don’t know, also his Miss Teen USA pageant where he talked about walking into the locker room. I mean, and I think also like there’s like a in the same way there’s cultural amnesia about the popularity of the Iraq war, I also think there’s cultural amnesia about how normal it used to be for adult men to be sexually attracted to teenagers. I mean, you know, the countdown to the Olsen twins being legal or em, you know, Emma Watson or Natalie Portman or it was very normal. Uh, I mean like in 2010 I think it it was like r/jailbait was voted like the subreddit of the year really 2008. It was early. But like I I feel like there was this time when and again everyone seems to forget like that around the time that Epstein was first uh convicted in 2008. like adult men dating underage women was kind of considered like kinky or whatever, but it was not seen like with a level of abhorance that it that it is now where seen as monstrous people career upward mobility to date a powerful older man. But I mean that was adult women for like you know Yeah. But even Jerry Seinfeld dated a 17-year-old and like um you know Kid Rock wrote songs about how he liked to do statutory raped. Ted Nent wrote a song about being attracted to a 13-year-old. Like this has kind of been like deleted from the cultural memory, but I remember it. I don’t know. And I’m not saying any of this to like excuse Jeffrey Epstein. It’s just that I’m not surprised by this. And I think that some of the function of this like satanic ritual eyes wide shut vision of what Epstein is has to do with a kind of distancing from what he was doing. Right. In other words, I feel like people the trafficking well the trafficking and also just like the the the fact of like an adult men interested in teenage girls Oh, yeah. is made into this like exotic satanic thing that is like unrecognizable from anything that could go on in our schools and churches and societies based on it. Yeah. When it’s actually it’s actually extremely widespread and it’s not just confined to to the elites, right? I mean the elites certainly have their version of it and their power enables them to prolifically engage in sexual abuse maybe in a way that would be more difficult for people who are not do not have that level of power and ability to like escape to islands and so on. Right. Right. But um and I think Epstein is you know probably fairly close to the top of the list of prolific sex abusers. Right. like in terms of the scope the scope of what he was doing um and the number of other people involved maybe like second to Caligular. Yeah, second to Yeah, it’s it’s I mean it’s like historic, right? But um on the latter for um this a little bit of a tangent, but do you remember in the atheist community in like this was probably 2011 or something, there was a precursor to Gamergate, Elevator Gate was what was it? Elevator key. Is that elevator key? Yeah, it’s was it Dawkins in an elevator with another woman who was speaking at the conference? It was um Rebecca Watson was the one. Okay. And she posted this vlog after an atheist conference in which she described having been approached by a man who Oh, she didn’t name made a No, she didn’t name him. Um who like made an advance, you know, in an elevator, I think. asked asked her to come into his room for coffee and she made a vlog where she said like guys don’t do that. Like it’s no woman wants to be sexually solicited by a stranger in an elevator. Um the backlash against that was extreme. Richard Dawkins wrote this like comment about how she was I think basically like mocking her for being for like the you know the ridiculous complaints of western feminists when there are are women suffering under the sexis sexism of Islamism which is the only thing feminists should be talking about according to Richard Dawkins right um but then there was you know there’s also other figures like Lawrence Krauss who had numerous allegations against him and uh Michael Shurmer, I think it was Lawrence Krauss, who turns out to have been emailing Jeffrey Epstein about Rebecca Watson. Wow. And about Wow. Um I knew there was some connection why I brought this. Okay. So the idea that like again this like sex scandal in the atheist community like that the men involved in this who were still who were seen as like you know they were they were widely admired in the atheist community and at the time it was largely the feminists who were viewed as like these unreasonable nags like ruining all the fun. Yeah. Uh but meanwhile these men were in court having correspondences with Jeffrey Epstein about how to damage control their sex sexual misconduct accusations. It’s the closest thing to like patriarchy being a conspiracy I’ve ever seen, right? Because in general, I discourage like a conspiratorial view of these things. Like patriarchy is is not a a boardroom of men who conspire against women. It’s like a system of structures, right? But there’s also a little bit of minor conspiracy. I mean, you’ve probably got an email thread of men coordinating against women in this case. Yeah. So, there’s a little bit of there’s a little bit of conspiring, right? Right. Right. There’s there’s not zero conspiring like to be clear. Do you do you similarly think of this as like the kind of early historical example of that libertarian to alt-right pipeline that later became uh that you know subject of so much conversation that the kind of atheist skeptic libertarian sphere was uh very close at one point? I do know I was very involved in this. I do know that’s what I’m trying to bring up. I I mean I was I was I was 20 years old so I was you know I was not a leader of this but I was a follower. Yeah. Um you would attend meetings and things like this. I I did I went to a few like atheists or skeptic meetups. Wow. Um what was the what was the feeling on the ground there? Um it well it was mixed like there was always these kind of underlying tensions where I I mean there there were people who were attracted to atheism for a lot of reasons. Like I think it retroactively got stereotyped as like fedora wearing Reddit incelss or something and yeah there was there was that but there was but it was a more diverse community than people remember. There were there were women there. There were people who had were ex-Muslim apostates who Kyle Kolinsky was part of it. He’s very left. Yeah. Right. I mean it was um but there was also often a an argument around feminism that is very similar to what later happened with Gamergate. So I think at the time like feminism was like strongly discouraged. Um in other and it kind of boiled over around 2010 2011 I guess is when elevator gator elevator gate happened. Um and then 2012 there were there was this basically schism atheist schism right where people divided based on there was a a faction that wanted to only focus on atheism and skepticism and hating religion and promoting science. And then there was a faction that also wanted to value progressive like social justice issues. Oh, interesting. And they were there was a conflict and that kind of basically dissolved the entire community. What was it what was the political leanings of people? Could you categorize them as mostly this or mostly that? Um, I mean I would say that it initially was a kind of like sort of like left libertarian. I would say it was like the kind of mainstream with the caveat that there was a very vocal anti-Islamism that kind of shaded into and sometimes fully tipped into outright Islamophobia but but more so anonymous than Ron Paul at that time. Yeah. So I I mean I would say that it was to the left of Ron Paul. Mhm. Um but then I think that that the div the division around I mean it basically ran parallel to Gamergate in terms of uh I mean one of the leading atheist YouTubers that I once followed by 2015 he was making most of his videos were about Anita Sarkeesian the games critic feminist games critic who racking up those views was so um well the target of so obsessive vitrial during Gamer Brigade, right? Um, so I think that and then and then this is where like Bannon and Miley and came in and and they realized this is a politically useful energy. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not going to get us in the Christopher pool. Uh, we’ll we’ll never get out of that rabbit hole. Um, okay. So, I wanted to explore this stuff a little bit because I see a pretty direct lineage from this like YouTube skeptic atheist libertarianishleaning movement to the constituency that is now this like right-wing populism. It’s the same group of people progressing over like 10, 15 years. There’s an arc. Um, yeah, you can call it a pipeline. You can like watch people move between these uh successive phases. How has the left changed within that time? We’ve been talking about this like let’s say 8year arc. How has the left changed since you started making content? In a lot of ways, this there continues to be a fairly devastating fracture that is downwind of the 2016 Democratic primary. Um, the long 2016 the long Yeah. And that I think that the effects of that are still felt. Um, I had hoped that it was possible for there to to be like a liberal left alliance. By 2024, it came to seem that it wasn’t possible. This I think to me is a very black pilling for me because it it seems like it’s less possible to make a coalition than it used than I used to because I because in 2017 there’s this had this moment of optimism, right? I had been full disclosure and I mean I’m sure that people already know this but I was like a Hillary Clinton supporter in

2016. Um, I mean, in part, not not that I didn’t like, not that I disliked Bernie, I did like him, right? But I thought at the time, you know, I had worked on Obama’s campaign in 2012, and so I remember just how like like I used to canvas. I used to do phone calls and just to get people to want I was like, we’re trying to give you healthcare. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was like pulling teeth to get people to be like blah blah but it’s socialism and he’s going to million death panels and it’s Islamic communism and it’s you know what I mean like just and we’re talking about the Affordable Care Act. Not at all a radical piece of legislation. Right. But like people have been so like like this like antisocialist strain of American paranoia was so strong that I felt that Bernie Sanders could not win. Then Hillary Clinton lost and that caused me to rethink things. I was like, well, okay, my intuition is maybe wrong because I would not have thought Donald Trump would win. Um, maybe I would maybe I was also wrong about Bernie Sanders. And so, I kind of moved a bit to the left then and felt like look, we can maybe have a kind of leftist Democratic party and then AOC like um emerged and that was very promising in 2018. Mhm. Um then in 2020, of course, Bernie really lost the primary. Um and I think that I felt like, okay, maybe this is not translating into electoral success so much. Um and then by 2024, I felt he he lost in a fair fight. He didn’t get, you know, swindled by the DNC. Yeah. I mean, I I also personally think the claims of him being swindled by this DNC are somewhat overstated. May maybe not swindled, but like at least the institutional power in the DNC was so uh sizable and and potent that the uh insurgent populist campaign couldn’t overcome how much uh hegemonic power it had. They could pull different levers and get people to show up in South Carolina and this kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely true to some extent. I mean, I think that’s I guess I get a little bit annoyed when people overstate that like it was raged against Bernie and that like while like Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote by more than three million votes. Like I mean, yes, Hillary Clinton has spent her career building institutional support in the Democratic party, Bernie Sanders just showed up that year basically. He’s an independent in Vermont, right? Um so you you as you were saying um your politics progressed after that uh that failure in then I kind of like lost I like got disillusioned with it especially when it came to 2024 and I felt that it was basically like desperately urgent to vote for Kla Harris and I was not getting a lot of I was getting a lot of aggressive push back on that idea from the left. Um, so I felt kind of politically isolated by the thing by feeling that it was important to vote over Kla Harris. I felt politically isolated in 2024 and now I kind of just don’t know what to do and have kind of just adopted this sort of stoic almost like submissive or defeist attitude towards politics which I hope you know I hope that things will improve though I don’t necessarily expect it. I think that there needs that what what I see is as the main problem on the left is there’s this gap between the online leftist podcast sphere and like the liberal middle-aged women who canvas for the Democratic party like the normy vote. Yeah, the normie vote. Um, but is there’s like no non-normivo almost on the You’re telling me that like people in uh middle America are not like Marxist Londonist Mauists? That yes, that is what I’m saying. Huh. I mean, they’re not they’re not Marxist. It’s news to me because I have a lot of discords. I would say I think that despite what you the impression that you get in certain online spaces, I think that like Marxist learnist ideology is probably offputting to most American tutors. Like again, maybe things have changed a lot since 2012, but a lot of people felt that the Affordable Care Act was too communist. So, uh I mean maybe that’s different now. I think I think it might be, but it’s also I mean Medicare for all is is kind of old news to people now. So, we’ll we’ll see what develops. Um, I wanted to uh bring this up though. I was referencing um in an interview with Riley Grace Rashong, you were talking about a Discord server that you used to run at some point where there was a big factional split that opened up where the conversation was about whether it was racist to be a Marxist Leninist Mauice and you were like, “Okay, I’m just turning this thing off.” So, what what portion of the kind of left-wing audience that you acquired within that time um kind of caused you to progress in your political views as well? Do you mean did the audience kind of lead me to when you see how your work is reflected by the actual audience and you think that actually this is not what I was trying to advance that changes your views and you have to kind of recalibrate. Well, I haven’t often surprised by how many people become like communists after watching my videos because I’m not and have never been a communist and I don’t think that I’m arguing for communism but and yet what kind of communist? Um, well, a variety of kinds, but but the thing is like I have never really considered myself to be on the radical left in terms of the fact I’m not a I mean, wait, what am I? I’m like a social democrat. Like I am too I’m on the left wing of the Democratic party. Let’s put it that way. Yeah. Right. So like I my favorite politicians are people like AOC like Manny. Like this is like this is where I my political allegiance is. Okay. I don’t really I mean I guess it’s very pragmatic too because I think that I one thing I think is an obstacle to me communicating with a lot of people on the far left is is many people on the far left have like strong ideological convictions about what they think is like the ideal type of society like and which to me seems almost like a kind of Plato’s republic activity that they’re engaging in because to me like like I’m a social democrat. Am I like a deep do I feel like a deep allegiance to capitalism? No. Like but I just live in a society where capitalism is deeply entrenched. So my pragmatic solution to that is like look, let’s make capitalism suck less somewhat, right? I think if I lived in a society where where socialism was deeply entrenched entrenched, I probably would not be advocating for capitalist revolution. I would be advocating for a less bad form of socialism than whatever that was. You know, maybe we can maybe we can have a few free markets as a treat, right? You know, like I I think is probably what what I would be doing. Like I I think that in on some level the kind of nonrevolutionary tendency is is like a personality thing more than it is an ideological thing for me. Like I think it’s it’s not that I don’t it’s not that I think abolishing capitalism is bad for ideological reasons. I just think it’s unlikely to occur in my lifetime in the United States. M um well I guess I I think of it as like it’s alcoholism 101. You have the serenity to accept the things you cannot change. You have courage to change what you can and you have the wisdom to know the difference. So I think we are we’re arguing about like you know the topic of abolishing capitalism is this a serenity problem? Is it a courage problem? Is it a wisdom problem? I think a lot of my critics on the left think it’s a courage problem, right? They think that I am a sort of like cowardly sellout libshit or whatever. Um whereas I think that they have a wisdom problem and that they are trying to or a serenity problem. I’m not sure which. like they’re trying to change a thing that’s not gonna change like not realistically in any kind of like mid like short or middle time frame. Um how do you how do you feel about so I’m I’m sympathetic sympathetic to this that there’s actually existing social democracy. There’s a Nordic model and those things are compelling because they work and they’re real and it’s not my fantasy utopia. Yeah. But what do you think about um you know clearly the aspirations of the people who achieve the Nordic model were pointing beyond that. So when is it useful for us to have like maybe less practical politics as a north star by which we can you know incrementally judge our progress towards the society we’d like to see. Well some of that is undoubtedly useful. Like I do think that people feel my temperamental like aversion to like utopian thinking is not you know is like probably not the majority viewpoint. I think a lot of people like the idea of like having a very like you know a north star to follow like something very hopeful and like beautiful to imagine as a future. Um the fact that I’m annoyed by it is like my problem maybe. But I think that so I think yeah I think you’re right that yes it can be helpful to have like an idea of what your ideal would be so that you can work you know what you’re working towards even if you don’t don’t ever get there. I guess where I where I object to the utopian strain as I see it is where I feel like it becomes an obstacle or it becomes a perfect becoming an enemy of the better. Right. It becomes an obstacle to progress when any actually achievable goal is seen as not good enough to even be worth bothering with. Right. Right. Which is again I think the the constant debate that I’ve been in about electoralism often centers on that these like you know deeply imperfect Democratic candidates. Many people feel that they would be just just too morally compromised if they voted for them. Yeah. And I’m like well look at like but there’s like it’s going to be one or the other. And it can always get worse. Yeah. And then I think people hate the like lesser of two evils thing because it’s not inspiring and it’s depressing and they see it as just a slippery slope that leads to an ever worsening society. Well, to be clear, like I don’t think that I do not think that we’re the lesser of two evils should be the Democratic Party messaging. Nor do I think that it is. Um but I think that it is how I think about it because I just don’t Well, cuz people keep I don’t know. I’m just frustrated with people who won’t vote assuring me that look, if the worst candidate wins, then that will be the catalyst for a revolution. It’s like, okay, well then where’s the revolution, right? Like where are you? You like you said you were a revolutionary before the election. Why are you not a revolutionary after the election? I don’t know. I think I think there’s a fantasy that they used to call it worseism. Now they call it accelerationism. But like as things get worse, that creates the conditions for revolution. And um yeah, that is like a very kind of comfortable subcultural identity where you don’t have to get involved in the messy stuff of politics and be in a coalition with somebody that you don’t personally want to hang out with. Um but the more kind of uh nitty-gritty in the weeds conversation around you know there are reasons why social democracy fell to neoliberalism in Europe and there are kind of global macroeconomic tendency of the rate of profit to fall like big kind of theoretical conversations that um you know it gets worse for a reason and I think that is understandable but it also has to do with like a lot of math you know and that’s not very sexy to be honest. Before I get us totally totally sidetracked, um we’ve been talking about transformations within the left. We’ve touched on this a bit before, but how has the right changed in the last let’s say like long 2016? Well, they’ve really changed. I think that there was initial resistance to Trump and the Republican party. I mean, so if you think back to like Mitt Romney as a Republican candidate, we the Republican party is an unrecognizable organization compared to what it was, right? Um, I mean, I think that like I do think that Trump kind of harnessed these energies that were always part of the the or at least for 50 plus years have been part of the right-wing uh, you know, just the kind of like liiginal drive of right-wing politics. They’ve been in there. Yeah, it’s been in there, but like there’s been decorum and and a kind of need to mitigate the like roughest edges of it. So, like I always think about this moment in like the 2008 presidential election where some woman at a rally, you know, stands up with a microphone, asks John McCain like, you know, isn’t Obama an Arab? Oh, I remember this. Yeah. Yeah. And McCain says, “No, ma’am. No, ma’am.” Like, he’s a good family man. Right. Right. which is a a bit of an awkward response, but you know, I think like I think I think his heart was sort in the right place. But um uh I I think that you know that woman now she can just say that you know you can just say that now in the Republican party but like like totally and so I think that part of why people on the right like Trump so much is that I see him as like his obscenity and his kind of vulgarity and sadism is experienced by his followers as liberation like it’s a liberation of like aggressive impulses that they are tired of having to repress in other words. So they they view like leftist or like they view like liberal politeness, political correctness as they see it, wokeness as this like basically like phony pretend thing that is this like tedious insincere form of like politeness that’s thrust upon them and that they resent. Yeah. Right. is nagging. It’s scolding. It’s like this and and they sort of don’t believe that anyone really believes it. And so Trump is saying what we’re all thinking and they that permission to just be openly sadistic is like a massive relief to them, I think. And I think that’s part of why they are so devoted to Trump. Um, and there’s an interesting paradox with the strict daddy thing because this is again where I think Leoff may maybe didn’t see this coming in the 90s is is Trump is of because of how obscene he is and how transgressive he is in terms of, you know, his own personal morality, which basically doesn’t exist as far as I can tell. Um, people see that as real because they see decorum and politeness and decency and trying not to be racist and things like that. They see all that as as fundamentally fake. Mhm. Because we’re all satists, right? And we all hate minorities according to They think it was never real. Yeah. It was never real. So Trump has just said said it like it is and given us all permission to finally say the things that we’ve been thinking. The unspeakable truth. Yeah. So I mean I think that Tennessee has snowballed into a right where they’re now basically I mean people call it like the based ritual or vice signaling where like pe people on the right are basically competing with each other to be as uh sadistic and offensive as possible to establish their like anti-politically correct cred. Yeah. So you’ll do this better than I will. I’m going to try and u set up a few things here. We have a lot of conversations online about socialism and revolution, all this stuff. Yeah, we are nowhere near [ __ ] socialism. Socialism we talk about now is social democracy. The thing that is in crisis is liberalism. Yeah, this is a contentious idea. I still believe in teiology that there’s this linear sequential progression. Um, liberalism is now uh it’s very canon is being threatened. You brought up lock before. Um there’s Rouso, there’s Hobbes, there’s kind of different arguments about how this whole thing works. And the new right uh what we used to call it before that was the dark enlightenment. Yeah. And the position that we find ourselves in now is that the online socialist movement has become so untethered to its roots and its philosophical argumentation that it is literally not able to refute these anti-enlightenment ideas. And so we come back to okay, just might is right. And that’s that’s all that there was. Yeah. The kind of deeper problem underneath it. So I’m kind of showing my cards here on the podcast. I do not have this figured out. But um in advance of sitting down with uh Francis Fukuyama, I went back I took that very seriously and I I reread all of his stuff. I reread Lock and H and Rouso. Um, and it does really seem like the degree to which we believed that enlightenment institutions could set up rules and norms by which people would have to abide that that was backed up by the monopoly on violence that was held by the state. Yes. And now those enlightenment institutions have become so corrupt that the legitimation of the public, they no longer believe in these institutions. And so you get someone to come along who’s just like, “All right, might makes right.” And it’s always been that way. So the question that is really uncomfortable for people on the left um is to what degree in that this kind of like Hobbes framing of justice is enforced by the public sword that to what degree do we need to have this kind of might to even enforce those enlightenment values under which we could have equality. Yeah. And that is so existentially [ __ ] uncomfortable that people would rather create a like fictional communist identity as like a cat character than engage in that conversation and have to deal with like the arc of global development and post 1989. So um how do we even begin to approach this and tackle these kind of dark enlightenment anti-enlightenment ideologies? What do we have in our toolkit to push back against these things? Well, the might makes right things that I definitely struggle with because I do think that I don’t think it’s more of a crisis for liberals even than it is for like the people who are on the like Marxist left because Marx has always been kind of there’s an element of my mics right in that too, right? Marxist Leninist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because they’re they’re completely against the like liberal morality which is hypocritical. Um and it is a little bit hypocritical. I mean inevitably because there is a level in which might does kind of well the this is the subtext a lot of your video. Might is like the grounds and possibility of right to say it in some like really convoluted like leftist sounding way but like you know I think that something like human rights are possible because the people who have monopol monopoly and violence insist on human rights because they have the nukes. Yeah. Exactly. Well, and the and the whole world order is upheld basically by a bunch of countries pointing nuclear weapons at each other. Um the whole political world map is drawn in blood, right? Like all like no one wants to think about this. I don’t want to think about it because it’s like it does like challenge your self-conception as someone who doesn’t believe in violence. I think I think you do have to realize that you sort of do believe in violence. You just But you have to decide what kind of violence you believe in. M um and I think that there’s forms of violence that reduce other forms of violence, right? So it’s about I think the honest view is to talk about what types of violence those are. I mean I think the existence of a state depends on some level of violence, right? Yes. Um so most most of us I would say believe in the existence of some kind of state. So we believe in some kind of violence that maintains that order. Um, what I like about democracy, there’s a lot of things to hate about democracy. I feel like I’ve been encountering a lot of those lately, but I still do like democracy. And one thing I like about it is that it provides a means to change society that doesn’t involve like a massive amount of bloodshed. It avoids violence. Yeah. And I mean even though it is still upheld by you know the order is maintained by police and the on the inside and the army on the outside. Sweden has police too. Yeah. Swed everyone everyone has police. like um I think that it’s the less violent way of conducting things, right? And for a time it was possible to change the direction of American government anyway or lot many many democratic liberal democratic governments without outright like civil war, right? And now it seems like maybe that’s going to get harder if things continue going the way they are. I dread that. Should the left abandon the enlightenment? No, I don’t. I think that would be a huge mistake. Um, in that I think human rights are a good idea in particular, right? I think that I mean I think that you can even be I mean a lot of western Marxists try to reconcile the two right like the idea is that in some ways Marxism is an extension of the enlightenment right like it’s it’s just a broadening of the enlightenment project to recognize this other type of exploitation that wasn’t seen as exploitation by the like classical liberal thinkers. Um, and there were socialist Marxist revolutions that cited the enlightenment and they were part of that. Yeah. Yeah. Or even like like didn’t like the like Vietnamese communists part of the American revolution. Yeah. Um I think that it is a mistake to discard the enlightenment for for a couple reasons. Like one is that I think human rights are a very good idea that we should hold on to. um that even a violent revolution ends with the establishment of a new state, right? Um and we want that state to maintain some of the enlightenment project. I I should hope, right? I like I like freedom of speech. I like I even like freedom of religion despite its many problems. Um cults for example, right? like like there’s a reason why a lot of why most societies do not have freedom of religion, right? But I I still like it. Um I could explain why if you ask, but you know, I’ll just leave it at that. Do you want Do you want to chase that rabbit hole a little bit? Because there there is a kind of parallel between the um often people will call like Marxist groups cults. Yeah. Like there’s these subcultural cults. Well, I think there’s a version of Marxism that is in in competition with religion um in terms of providing like a kind of massive meta narrative of what the root of human suffering is and what the solution to the suffering is, right? Like because I think that’s what what most religions do is they sort of uh diagnose the problem of human existence and they propose a kind of salvation. M so I think for some leftists Marxist analysis kind of fulfills that rule right they sort of maybe overly broadly attribute class conflict to be like the source of all human suffering and all injustice right and then they they propose like a revolutionary solution where it is kind of like esqueological um I I don’t I don’t think this is inherent to Marxism like I think you can be but I do think that when a communist society for example attempts to extrapate religion it is establishing a kind of state religion. Um and that’s the liberal in me is I don’t like that like I like as as problematic as it is I kind of do like this John Rolls idea of like you know you have liberal political subjects who also may have their private religious conviction. Um, I think I think there’s human needs that politics doesn’t meet. In other words, right, I think there’s forms of suffering that don’t originate from inequality or from oppression. There was a human soul before there was the extraction of surplus value. I do think that and I also think I mean I think that I think the best evidence for it is like behold the misery of rich people, right? I mean, I think some people would would some people would want to attribute that to like, well, that’s just the corruption of the nature of the alienation like like in a way like the capitalist also suffers from the like inhuman system that he’s benefiting from and certain and materially. I’ve heard people tell me that and there’s probably some truth to that, but I think there’s also just a kind of more baseline like dooka, so unsatisfactoriness like to use like a Buddhist terminology. What is that? I’m not familiar with that word. Um, it it just means it means unsatisfactoriness. the kind of sort of default like uh state of clinging and craving that’s just part of human psychology. I I think there’s a restlessness in the human soul that’s not necessarily political. Um so I I believe that religion will always exist to address that. Um and I think the attempt to substitute politics for some form of spirituality is a mistake. We’re talking about people’s belief systems changing. Yeah. Do you know creators? You don’t have to name people in particular, but do you know creators, content creators who have shifted towards the right in the last few years? I know of them. I’m not in touch, but not personally. Yeah, not personally. Well, I don’t I don’t How about maybe not content creators? Do you just know people in your personal life that have like drifted over to this other thing? Yeah. What was the what were the contributing factors if we can maybe look at them as an anonymous case study? What goes into that? I think that the coronairus pandemic like devastated a lot of people in multiple different ways economically and psychologically and socially. Yeah. And I think that a lot of people got I mean as if we didn’t already have enough like online political derangement there were barrels of gasoline that hadn’t yet been lit and the corona virus was there was a match and like I think that a lot of people suddenly became very angry and resentful and wanted someone to tell them what to be angry and resentful about and that’s what a lot of online political content basically does. Yeah, it tells you what to it gives you like a shape to your anchor. Um, and unfortunately a lot of what people come across as right when content of one form or another, right? Even people who really really really you would think would know better. There’s like surgeons who became antivaxers and stuff, you know. Yeah. Yeah. The internet plays a big role in like every every one of those instances. Absolutely. Yeah. Is there I don’t know if I have a great segue for this, so I’ll just ask the question. Is there some part of our current media ecosystem? So I used to do a different job before this, now I do this. And the mental health toll of like talking to this many people about these specific subjects like this [ __ ] is not normal. The human brain is not evolved to deal with hundreds thousands of people yelling things at you. Is there some part of this media ecosystem that is like making the storytellers, the narrative uh content creators themselves, the people that tell society stories and narratives, is the media ecosystem making them crazy, which is part of this distorting effect. Absolutely. I mean, I feel like I’ve seen a lot of people basically lose their mind because they got famous online. Yes. and the experience of being famous online to almost any extent. You don’t even have to be that famous for this to start setting in, right? Is that I mean the least bad is just is just like so many people who do this you just hear in conversations with them there. There’s as much as people like to insist they don’t care what other people think. The obsession with your haters like so it gets to people. It just does. It gets to everyone. Even people with like a thousand followers thousand followers, right? And their entire like channel is comment camera commentary on makeup or whatever. like the this her anime like the vitrial that she’ll get for doing anime, you know, commentary is like is it for being for being a white creator or what’s you made it? No, just for like having the wrong opinion about the fandom, you know, like it’s worse than the Marxist factional. It can be I mean like like there was this is a more like female part of the internet but in like shipping wars. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this relationship. Yeah. Yeah. So like fandom spaces there’s been like unbelievably vicious online feuds about like which characters you think should be romantically paired. Yeah. Right. And then like because people get so legitimately invested in this, they also like start to like attach political justifications to it. Like it is racist if you think these two characters should be together. Like if you ship Ry and what’s the guy’s name from Star Wars? Kylo Ren. Oh, how Rao is racist because there’s a there’s a perfectly good black man there and you’re not shipping them. Oh, that’s okay. You know what? Yikes. All right. Right. I mean, it also makes you, you know, I thought we were past this epic racism. This was kind of peaked in the late 2010s. Um, but like the point is that the level of vitrial involved may as well have been an argument about geopolitics. But yeah, like I mean well so like JK Rowling to take an example, right? Is someone who like is like smart on some level and is capable of being better than this. But she said something stupid on the internet, got extremely harshly criticized, doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down, quintupled down, based her entire personality around how she was surrounded by haters and losers. And then it’s just like this madness that be that it just it completely takes over your brain and like you become like a shell of what you once were because your entire personality is now like rewired around like this constant sense of threat from this criticism that you’re reading. Have you Clark uh who’s a producer on the show told me this, but they’re recasting the entire Harry Potter movies because none of the previous cast wants to work with this crazy woman. Yeah. So, they’re locking these like 12-year-olds into lifelong contracts that no matter what she says on Twitter, they have to play these characters in perpetuity for the rest of their lives. It’s incredible. And I mean, they’re spending I think $100 million on every episode uh to like Yeah. basically start the IP over cuz none of the previous cast wants to work with her. It’s [ __ ] extraordinary. Yeah, that is an astonishing waste of money. That’s Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Um, speaking of uh having a big platform, how do you consider the responsibilities that come with your platform? Um, do you have a sense of the age bracket of your viewership and gender breakdown some of the things we talked about before? Yeah, it’s well it’s difficult to transition from being the underdog to someone that people perceive as like an established big name. I think every creator who gets to the point where anyone thinks of them as an established big name struggles with that because in a lot of ways it gets I mean it’s you’re lucky you are but it also gets harder and people’s expectations really increase. Um so you know it takes a long time to get used to just like posting whatever your thoughts are today because that’s you’re just a person on the internet doing that to someone who people view as an influencer who has a platform and responsibility to use it. Um, I’ve been doing this long enough. I feel like I’ve adapted. And I as far as my audience, I’m very glad that my audience is mostly people who is it’s not teenagers. Mhm. Which I would not like if my audience was teenagers. I think I would feel much a much higher degree of like responsibility or like the need to like you know be a good influence and so on. Um, I prefer to communicate to an adult audience because I think it in a way I’m always trying to like lower the moral bar for myself a little bit because uh, well, high expectations are a burden. Uh, it’s less fun to need to, you know what I mean? But I think that I mean my what is my audience? It’s mostly like age 20. It’s mostly age 25 to 40. I think it’s like cuz it drifted upwards as you gotten a bit older as I have. Yeah. So, it’s people who learned about you early on and stayed with it. Yeah. Stayed with it. Um I mean I definitely do have like a significant you know younger audience as well. Um and then as far as you mentioned the gender split, I initially would had a much more male audience. Um I think it like initially was like 70% male. It’s now pretty close to 50. usually skewing slightly male. Oh wow. Um really? Yeah. That’s I’m sure you know this, but that’s like very anomalous for for political content. Yeah. Political content. But you’re also like talking about movies. So there’s maybe a genre bleed. I think there was one I think there was like one or two months where for the first time ever I had more female audience than male. It was because I I made a video about Twilight. Twilight. Yeah. Yeah. But like or it was a video about feminine sexuality really, but it was called Twilight. And I think it was a video that I made with a female audience in mind. Um, but yeah, I think that, you know, then I made a video about conspiracy theories and a video about horror movies. So the it’s it’s skewing male again. Um, I but yeah, I do I do I do I do think my audience I thought Did you do that on purpose? Also, you picked like the girl movie and the boy movie back toback a little bit. Exactly. Back a little bit. I do think that like well they’re both movies that were highly controversial in the 2000s and why they hated it and movies which at the time I both hate I hated both of them um and then like kind of like reassessed as an adult and was like was this was this really a good use of energy hating this thing right and like wanted to understand this thing that I used to hate right um and so I think that yeah I do think the saw video it it is in a way the kind of like evil brother of the Twilight Twilight Yeah. To watch part two of this episode, you can support the show on Patreon. So, we were we were talking before about um your experience in college and teaching and Vickenstein and all these things. Um what about some of your early experiences in getting into politics? What was like the on-ramp for you? Was there a particular book, documentary, a club in school or something like that? How did you get interested in this stuff? Well, as far as I mean, I I first got interested in politics in high school, I guess, in terms of being opposition to the Iraq war. That was my first like, you know, semi adult uh political issue that really grabbed me. Um, I would say as far as getting involved in like political philosophy, well, I sort of got into it when I was at music school. I was like 19 years old. Okay. and like getting into like new atheist YouTube kind of I don’t know at the time I was very like mesmerized by someone like Christopher Hitchens and his like verbal fluency and his like persuasiveness and they he somehow like made there’s something sort of like sexy about him and the way that he like would make literacy and political commentary into this I mean he certainly seemed to enjoy the sound of his own voice but that was okay because so did I right but I think that then I kind of came to view that as embarrassing Um, when I got a little more educated, I I switched from music to psychology and philosophy. Um, I I I used to love um and still do actually love uh Slavojac’s especially his um was it Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. So good. I love that movie. And that is a that is a proto video essay is what that is. I mean, it was directed by uh Sophie Fines, I think. set design and everything too. Yeah. Yeah. But that is like that that’s an early video essay early leftist video essay in a way that that those movies are like red tube before red tube. I I made a video homage to that piece also. I [ __ ] absolutely love it. Used to show it in my class. That’s Yeah. Sojac was part of your onboarding. Yeah. Okay. Um and then I guess as far as video essays are concerned, it was like film tube that I feel like really kind of got me to come. movie reviews because that’s where like the best I would say skills of of video essays originated and commentary on uh I mean it must have been like 2010 or something. There was this viral review of the Star Wars prequels by a channel called Red Letter Media. Okay. And it was this review that was kind of it’s done in character as this like serial killer alcoholic who’s reviewing the Star Wars prequels. And it was like so much funnier and so much like better organized than like the vlog style of YouTubing I was used to at that time. It made an impression on me and I think was I think it made impression a lot of YouTubers my age who do video essays now. Very influential. Red Letter Media. Yeah. Was that the Scarlet Letter or what’s the reference in there? I actually don’t know. Does it sound kind of vaguely communist too? It does. They’re not communist though. They’re okay. Okay. They’re just a bunch of guys in the somewhere in the Midwest. I don’t even know if they’re progressive. They’re just they’re just film reviewers. I assume that all criticism is somehow progressive, but I realize that is not actually the case. I don’t think it’s actually the case. That’s like a hazard of going to like art school, I guess. Yeah. No, I don’t think I don’t think they’re especially progressive. In fact, um, in fact, they were sort of like edgy and transgressive in that like they’re a little older though. So, so it wasn’t like in a 4chan way. It was kind of in a some of the humor has like aged badly uh like there was like a running joke about him having like a a woman he had abducted locked in the basement. Um, okay. My like my steel man interpretation of this is that so what is the joke with that? I mean, is it misogynistic? Like, yeah. But also, I feel like the joke was kind of like, what is the kind of person that makes a 5h hour review of Star Wars prequels? Wow. The kind of person who has a woman change in his bas, right? So, okay. Well, um, fairly argued. What about um, following that? So, bring us from like 2010 to 2016. Were there other formative influences maybe in the field of psychology, philosophy, stuff like that? Well, when I was I mean I was as an undergraduate I was very I got very into critical theory. I got very into um you know I think I read most of the like major critical theory cannon. Um I when I was Is that Are we talking about Frankfurt school or Frankurt school but also the kind of like you know John Burgerer and um hell yeah uh Society of the Spectacle and uh Bodriard and you know like all that stuff and philosophy I mean I went to I was getting a PhD in Northwestern which is a it’s like a kind of continental leaning department that’s still sort of grounded ended in like Angloontianism, you know, if that means anything. Uh like I probably if I had stayed I probably would have ended up doing something on like aesthetics and like content heel or something. Uh I have no regrets about it not doing that. Mhm. Um but yeah, I think I mean the like I said the last the only course I taught as a full professor was this course on Vickenstein and Vickenstein to me is kind of an anti- philosopher of the late Vickenstein anyway like like in the philosophical investigations what he’s doing is kind of like teaching you like how to stop getting trapped in the like puzzle box of philosophy of language which is kind of a a waste of time and a misunderstanding of language which is he argues is like based on use. It’s not um uh you know there’s like this Platonic tradition in western philosophy that tries to understand like what is beauty really? What is justice really? He sees words as pointing to a concept and the concept as something that actually exists. And so China is trying to get you to not see language this way. Yeah. Um and see more. So it’s kind of anti- philosophy. Um which also kind of contributed to me not wanting to do philosophy, I think. That was Vickenstein’s gift to me. He saved me from a lifetime of having to do philosophy. Like you you peeled yourself in the process. Yeah. Yeah. Like I was cured. Man, this would be a great transition here for this next question, but I’m going to take a tangent. Um how do you feel about this kind of cannon or like let’s call it pokes postmarxist uh bodriard? Yeah. I don’t know, fuko. This kind of thing. the philosophy that is in vogue in uh the western academy that thing came into prominence at the same time when we saw left-wing intellectuals move into the academy and become like very disconnected from the workers movement stuff like this how do you now reflect on bojiard was very influential for me it was like I think that was one of my first serious like oh I like theory I think a lot of people have that experience I was always like board who artists oh yeah yeah of simulation simul but how do you reflect back on that canon now like maybe we can take them as separate topics like Bojiard and Fuko for example but like the uh academic elite has kind of like run wild with these things and I think applied them uh unproductively shall we say in different uh decades too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I’ve read a lot of Fuko. I’ve TAed a class on Fuko. I guess I kind of look back on him as cringe. I guess I guess because to me I just can’t Yeah. I can’t like get rid of the association with like very serious undergraduates. Yeah. Um I mean I like in the video about SA I talk about how like you know the reform of the justice system like all you know in some ways the humanitarian angle on that reform is a little bit of a euphemism for like in in some ways an increasing uh ability to be more dominating or more controlling right through incarceration through discipline through um I could have mentioned for co I kind of decided not to because I’m like oh do we really need another video essay that mentions discipline punish like it just feels a little bit video essay 101 to be you know not that it’s fine like it’s fine to be doing like I used to do that but I think sometimes you just get tired of I also just found that like oftenimes I can say the same thing more clearly without me mentioning fuko sure right and so basically this kind this there’s sort of no reason to bring it up except to like signal your elite education which I I see no value Well, I see I mean I see some I see no value in elite education. I see no value in like the signaling. It’s obnoxious. Yeah. Yeah. Uh okay. So, this would have been my segue and brilliant. Um but totally missed the opportunity. My window is gone. Did you ever pill yourself researching a right-wing topic and in the process changed your mind on the issue? Like did I ever go to like shift toward the rightwing position? For example, um Lee Phillips, author of the People’s Republic of Walmart, he is an advocate for nuclear power and he was originally u very green, you know, solar wind and in the process of researching it to quotequote debunk it, he then convinced himself that it was actually a much better idea. They say this for, you know, right-wing conspiracy researchers and think tanks that they like put them in the field for three to six months, but if they do it for too long, people there’s a hazard of them becoming like influenced by the material that they’re supposed to have critical distance from. Yeah, I’m trying to think of an example where that’s happened. I mean, I think there’s been cases where I sort of concluded that like the current most trendy leftist uh take on something is wrong. Yeah. Like I think I had this well I mean this is like a very sort of niche and probably to most people ludicrous and self-evidently so but like in the trans community in the late 2010s it’s been so mocked you hate to even mention it but like the notion of like dozens of genders right like there was a subset of people who Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. who wanted to entertain the idea of being dragon gender and they were like very stridently insistent that if you were not entertaining this seriously then you were a transphobic bigot just as bad as any Nazi or whatever and it just doesn’t make any sense right because what if you I mean I believe in I think I believe in non-binary gender identity but I think that what a lot of people were doing with the MOI stuff is they were they had overextended the concept of gender to basically include to basically use it as an expressive uh vocabulary for basically any facet of personality. Um so I think I quietly considered that was not serious. Um the kind of Angela Nagel uh criticism of that like emerging Tumblr community. Um, I think in 2020 I also felt that the kind of abolish the police thing, I we’ve already mentioned this like it we’re not going to abolish the police. Like that’s the theme of this podcast is we should not let people forget their recent mistakes because we have not yet learned from them. Well, I think that Yeah, I think that it’s tough when you’re in the moment to because the thing is like often times like arguing against the lunatic fringe of your own side does kind of become a prelude to some like right-wword trajectory. So, you will get a ton of backlash for even suggesting it. But, uh, but not not to interrupt you on this. Yeah. Yeah. And you can not respond to this also, but part of my theorizing this space has been one of the things that leads people down these different politicization pipelines or what have you is that there is no push back on the most extreme elements. And so what you need to kind of create is like basically a a buffer that there is some channel on the left that will push back against the activist fringe that’s not representative of the coalition we need to build. And if we don’t have that, we’re then in Brandolini’s law again where we’re basically seeding the people we need to convince to our opponents. Yes. So I think that like it is important to push back against the most extreme wing and I try to do so gently, but it does cause, you know, it’s hard and people get really really mad. Yeah. So I never push back on the abolish the police thing because I just I didn’t want to be like a white person doing it, right? I should have gently pushed back a little bit, but I would have gotten a lot of [ __ ] Yeah. Yeah. One of the questions that I hear uh all the time from journalists, and I’m sure that you get this too, is why are people more radical now? And are people more radical now? like compared to like the 1920s for example, the 2020s like do you see this as basically a uh a rising arc that is unprecedented or is it cyclical or how do you understand this phenomena? I see it as cyclical. I mean in the 70s like there were like far-left groups like bombing things and like kidnapping aises and robbing banks like I mean uh like like we don’t even have that now at least I don’t know there’s not many militant leftist groups in the US who are doing like not that I know of terrorism or bank robberies like I feel like this is not even a thing. So in some ways I feel like we’re maybe like less radical than than in the 1970s. Um, is it more radical than it was in the 2010s or the 2000s or the 90s? Yeah, definitely. Although in I mean the 90s had a ton of farright terrorism like you know Oklahoma City bombing had like Oh, right. Right. That’s where the militia groups really started. Yeah. We talked to Andrew Callahan. Um he told us about his theory of radicalization. Mhm. Um, do you have a particular theory of radicalization of all of these contributing factors that go into someone’s political transformation? I guess I I have an answer, but I’m like worried it’s a little bit too boring. Mhm. I I mean I I think that like the radicalization I see happening today is like a result of kind of like social disconnection, economic stagnation, and then just a media social media environment where like God, bro, people just tell you what to do. Those are literally my three things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean it’s I mean sometimes sometimes it’s just that’s why you know. Yeah. I was that was going to be all my follow-ups, too. Okay, let’s uh just to reiterate. So, yeah. uh economic decline. Yeah. Um social atomization and then the other part was uh media. Yeah. Yes. The availability of like alternative media. Um much of which is kind of radicalizing. Do we need more radical politics now under Trump 2 as compared to Trump one for example? Should we on the left in some way get more radical uh or active in some way? I mean, I think that being more radical ideologically, no, I don’t think we do need to be more radical ideologically. I think what we need to be do be is a little bit more focused on like like actions that can really be enacted like pragmatic. That’s what I’m mean. That’s kind of my continuous theme I’m harping on here. But like I think that becoming a more radical version of Mauism is like shining path. It’s not helpful. I don’t know. I’m not convinced it’s helpful anyway. Maybe you can make a counter argument. Maybe people in the comments will make a counter argument. But I don’t I see it as being basically kind of almost self-sabotaging to the point you’re where you’re sort of like radicalizing yourself into this space where you can’t talk to normal people and where your politics are disconnected from any achievable end. Um so I think like I know a lot so my personal thing is like I think we should be talking about building influence within the Democratic party and then electing those politicians. Some people don’t want to talk about that because they are they have an extremely strong aversion to the Democrats and they don’t understandably fine. Well, find something else to do. Like there’s other things to to do, right? Like I I am happy to acknowledge that like voting for Democrats is not the only way that you can be politically efficacious. Like I’m I’m aware um there’s other ways to organize. There’s other ways to protest. There’s other ways to uh you know unionize um strike. Well, then do those things. You have to kind of like log off, I guess, to actually do that. Like consuming media is not practice, I guess, is what I’m saying, right? I feel like I feel like there’s this kind of fandom tendency and on the online left where people feel that like by being a part of this online fandom, they are doing activism, but they’re basically just very passively consuming media. It’s like Spotify stands. It’s like let’s get the plays up and that means we win the lad. I know. I know. It’s exactly. Yeah. There is uh there are examples of like a call to action where you bring people to protest or canvas or something like that. Um but let’s let’s go into theory land here for a moment. So one of the things that I’m I’ve been thinking about uh over the last year in particular is that I am still attached to um the idea of a vanguard in some way. And I think that we have on the left internalized the laws of social media where everything needs to be made visible. Uh by social media I mean like web 2, open internet, everything needs to be accessible, transparent, um made visible. And I think that like as evidenced by the difficulty of some of these topics in any other left-wing organization in the past, you would have closed doors conversations that would not be visible to the public. And so we could talk about like with trans issues for example like inside the party we know what our values are and then outside of it maybe we don’t broadcast that to all of the normies because that’s they want to hear the breadandbut issues for example but inside the party like we know where we stand on this thing. And so part of the problem is trying to make all of our vanguard positions visible to the popular will who are necessarily not going to be on board because they’re not leading the movement. So I I feel like we basically like forgot 100 years of socialist education and like internalized the libertarian values of the people who build social media. Um how how do we have these private conversations in which um yeah you can have a more advanced position that maybe like you don’t talk about publicly. Well, I completely agree with that and I don’t I actually don’t think I would have thought to put it that way, but you’re right. That is a huge problem. Like there’s been a collapse of the distinction between like onstage and offstage discourse, right? Like but there’s no offstage now. Everything’s on stage and as a result like a lot of new nuances can’t be worked through. Um you almost can’t like think because you always are always performing. Mhm. Um and thinking means like considering wrong ideas and you know and it means experimenting with things that go too far and it means you know like so how to create those offstage spaces. I mean people do it like there’s discord servers and things where people have less public conversations. Um, but yeah, I agree that like social media cannot be the only forum where conversation is going on because that it’s it’s it’s way too public and so it just always will attract viewers that it’s not intended for and it will I mean it’s also like just not a good place to do thinking because everything is so like permanent and people can take screenshots of it and share it out of context and send it to Fox News and like you know like It’s it’s it’s very limiting. Mhm. That would normally be like grounds for being kicked out of the meeting if you tried to secretly record it. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But everything’s recorded all the time when you’re doing it on social media. Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like they built it intentionally to Well, yeah. Maybe. I mean, maybe. Um, you mentioned RWS before. Uh, who else is in your kind of like uh cannon of references that maybe people today should explore more? Oh jeez, let’s think. Um, well, I feel like this is a more recent development in my thinking, but in the last two years, I’ve gotten very into psychoanalysis. Um, I think as a result of like, well, here’s this is one area where I’ve like where I disagree with the enlightenment, right? is like the enlightened and and this is me getting to the enlightenment on new atheism but the new atheism was an enlightenment movement in a way in a lot of ways right like especially with the sort of I mean I want to call it like a fetish for reason the reason and logic right and I feel like there’s something about encountering the absurdity of people who claim to be like supremely rational just just demonstrabably not being so that caused me to think about like well to take an interest in sort of the the emotional internal aspect of politics which I is also I think sometime often kind of like neglected from the Marxist perspective or from the materialistonly perspective is that uh I mean something like the anal like that analysis of like mommy politics and daddy politics as being this like you know people’s feelings about politicians are sort of these like deep like transferences of feelings about parents are you talking about like a nation that wants revenge for an injury to the Germany after World War Yeah, that’s one example. Certainly. I mean, and then another is just like like the appeal of Trump there’s like some like libidinal thing this taps into. And I think that that to me is kind of where I’ve been drawn as I try to understand like what looks like a kind of madness to a lot of people. I mean, fascism always does. People, you know, everyone at the in the 30s people called Hitler madness, right? Germany’s national madness, right? Um, and I think that can be like a little bit of a nonexlanation. Mhm. So but but it points to something real which is like there’s like uh you know some kind of deep unconscious emotional force that is involved in a lot of politics and I think uh the attempt to psychoanalyze it is something I have found to be helpful and interesting and making sense of why things happen. So thus have been a newer uh I mean I guess I it’s in Jujac he’s he’s very like you know into depths of Lanian psychoanalysis. Are you lanian Freudian or do you have a preferred camp for these things? I like Freud best actually because I mean part of it has to do with like well I think I just agree on a personality level with Freud. He’s very like I mean he’s talking about irrationality in a very rational way. Um whereas like you know someone like Yung is a little a little bit of a crystal girl for my taste. It’s like I don’t know. I mean that can be fun. I don’t know. I have a lot of tarot ducks at home myself but like come on at a certain point like I I I just I I feel like Frey’s kind of cynicism about society is sort of based on aggression and sexuality. I agree with that. That’s how I see things. Um I think I love listening to people summarize lan at me. Um, Shijak is very interesting and he talks about Lhan. Yeah, I’ve never really und I’ve never been able to read Lan and have a good time. He’s impenetrable to me and I am pretty good at reading pretty impenetrable stuff, but I think that this is like sometimes I’m not sure if he’s saying anything. I don’t know. You like someone else’s version of it? I would like to someone else’s version. Yeah. I like I would like someone to translate it into a language I can understand. Yeah. On the topic of irrationality, um, this is some of the content in your conspiracy video, but to some degree, conspiracy is a contemporary form of elite resentment, particularly the internet type that we have now, but you seem skeptical about its ability to lead to class consciousness. Do you think there’s any pipeline, so to speak, that connects that connects those things? consider someone who could be a reformed conspiracy theorist and then is awakened to the you know Marxist economic structure or something like that. I think that does happen. But I think that conspiracism is conspiracist populism is so compelling to people because I think it’s very intuitive and because it speaks to like the kind of the interpersonal drama that is more intuitive to like most human thinking, right? scientific thinking is something you have to kind of be trained in whereas to understand like plots and intrigues and good versus evil like that’s like children can do that right um so I think that there’s something sort of emotionally satisfying about conspiracist interpretations of politics that a more scientific or structural or Marxist or or materialist uh explanation kind of like it it’s it’s I mean you don’t necessarily have to be super educated but it helps um and I think that you know you can be self-educated on it of course um or informally educated absolutely right but I think it’s it takes a little bit more cognitive effort to think that way than it does to think in terms of conspiracies so that’s why I see that’s why I’m kind of like skeptical about well pessimistic I guess when I see how prevalent conspiracism has gotten. Um, I think it in the same way that Trumpism is attractive, I think conspiracism is like it’s it’s it’s sort of easy for people. Yeah. There’s there’s a part of me that’s hopeful that like someone who sees maybe they voted for Trump, then they see the Epstein files and they’re like, “Oh, he’s in it. He’s part of the swamp or whatever.” And then they’re like, “Okay, so I’ll take the left-wing populist candidate as a response to that.” But um that might be falling under the Brandolini’s law uh type of situation. I mean I think more optimistically I think we can expect some level of conversion. Mhm. Uh I think especially well I mean Trump he’s like broken he’s like violated every single thing that people said they wanted him to do, right? They wanted no wars. They wanted prices to go down and he’s systematically violated each of those things. They wanted the Epstein files to be released. he’s blocked it. Like it’s actually like you say impressive like almost systematic attempt to refute everything his followers said they wanted. I mean I think he has a core of supporters who will we’ve always been at war with East Asia this but I think that you know there’s that middle 30% of people who for reasons I truly don’t even really understand had this idea of Trump as like someone who would lower prices. And I mean, I think I think Trump benefited from kind of like pre like a nostalgia for the preandemic age where like even though the a lot of the worst of the pandemic happened under Trump’s presidency, I think they were able to kind of like retroactively like frame the pandemic as like a Biden thing. And yeah, that Biden forced people to get vaccinated even though Trump um but like they kind of like conspiracist fear of like the totalitarian enforcement of masks and vaccines like this was attributed to Biden and Fouchy and then Trump I think they did it with the infrastructure spending too that it was like Biden’s infrastructure spending not the COVID uh stimulus that caused like the inflationary effects it’s like amazing yeah and then they had this like you know Russian invasion of Ukraine and sanctions that resulting in gas prices going up right but like so I mean I certainly understand nostalgia for before the pandemic. I feel that. Um, but I think that it’s not going to work this time because that happened at the very end of Trump’s presidency. I don’t know. I think I think I think Trump is going to kind of lose the middle populists. I really think by the end of his term. Yeah, I think that’s happening. So, there’s there’s a a window here for a more left populist. I I agree. Yeah. Yeah. you say in that video, uh, I heard this sentiment, a student said it, um, when I I taught I taught last semester, um, as we were starting the show in, uh, uh, the fall of 2024, and they said that conspiracy used to be a left-wing thing before the internet. And you say something in that video like, I remember when conspiracies used to be kind of leftwing, like under Obama or something like that. Would you reconstitute what that culture was like? Because I think Gen Z kids, like if you’re 15 right now, you could never even imagine that that was ever the case. Well, I guess I I think saying that it was always a leftist thing is taking is overstating it because right when conspirism has I mean the John Burch society in the 50s and like all I mean this is a long anti-communist conspiracy theory. This is a long tradition in the US. But there was I mean I I think about even like in the ’ 60s ‘7s counterculture there was a kind of conspiracism around well I mean it was really kicked into overdrive by by Nixon and Watergate right there’s a sense that the that that you know the US government cannot be trusted the like revelations about MK Ultra about co-inttel pro like uh and then in the Bush era 911 so there were a lot of leftist 911 11 truthers in the 2000s. I mean, I think it was more of a leftist position at the time. I think that, you know, sort of environmentalist fear of corporations in Monsanto, like much of which is reasonable, right? also kind of over overlapped with a general fear of chemicals, chemtrails, uh you know what, you know, like I think that type of stuff is kind of continuous with antivaccination and even being antiaxed like was kind of like a California liberal like thing, you know, like it was like Jenny McCarthy and like uh I don’t know, it was these like Hollywood celebrities who were ants and like it was crunchy. Yeah. Um whereas now I mean How did it become so rightwing? Well, Obama, I guess, I think played some part in it in that like I mean, Alex Jones was like, you know, he hated Bush, but he really hated Obama. Yeah. And then I think the kind of general like largely like racist anti-Obama backlash that manifested as like Tea Party overlap with a lot of conspiracism about and like you know ancient tropes were resurrected about like the Federal Reserve having been founded by Rothschilds and they because they sunk the Titanic and all this kind of stuff like I remember that after the 2008 financial crisis like all that stuff was resurrected by you know there was a kind of I guess anarcho capitalist conspiracism about like they’re diluting our money supply. Yeah. Yeah. And the Fed like it’s because of Yeah. the Yeah. But um then Trump figured out how to use this. I guess he saw it as a productive energy. I mean he went on Alex Jones in 2015 like when no one running for president ever would have gone Alex Jones but he did and he noticed that this was like had a potential right. Um I I guess when conspiracism officially went far right was like pizza gate uh Q anon and that sort of became to dominate the online conspiracy culture more so than anything about Bush did 9/11 right um it was rightwing not just general anti-establishment. Yeah. I mean, there’s still conspiracy spaces on the internet where you legitimately can’t tell if someone might be more sympathetic to fism or communism based on their initial comment. And it takes a little bit of followup to see if the elites that what what is the nature of these elites that you’re rambling and ranting against, right? Like are they capitalist elites or are they like Judeo capitalist bank? You know what I mean? like like there’s this kind of strange strain of conspiracism like uh you know Gary Allen and uh where where like they they they they are anti-communist conspiracies but their description of communism is kind of capitalism like like it’s kind of like Davos like a global economic order like like yeah the international bank banking cabal right so there’s like the anti-semitic layer and then there’s like a sense in which it almost you read it and it seems like these are confused socialists of some kind who are like, “Aren’t you mad about capitalism?” But no, not really because they because they have this conspiracist idea about what capitalism is. And they often say they believe in free markets, but they think the you know, was it was interfering with a free market? Is this cabal of international bank libertarian Stalinism, red, yellow, Paul Mauism? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, are there chemicals in the water turning the frogs gay? Um, there might be. I mean I mean I’m I’m actually did some research on this a while ago, but I think actually I think that I think that the correct answer is that there’s chemicals in the water turning the frogs trans or at least like that there’s I think there’s Yeah, there’s intersects, right? Um yeah, there’s um there’s like actual concerns about environmental pollution. I mean, we’re all full of microplastics. Pro some of this is true. Like yeah, I think like what is it? I mean this is like the ultimate male neurosis confirmed but like isn’t it true isn’t it the case that like sperm count has declined or Yep. Okay. It’s true. So so like uh I don’t think this is a plot on the part of of uh some kind of you know Malthusian elitist uh cabal. I think it’s just the usual reasons why environmental pollution happens which is that corporations are making money and they don’t care. It’s cheap to make stuff with material to throw your trash in the river. Yeah. Like it’s the usual forms of laziness and selfishness. It’s not more complicated than that. Yeah. Uh I mean a little a little bit of a silly question, but that was that was one of these kind of uh nodes in the media ecosystem where if people couldn’t find an answer on that then they would be like wow this conspiracy theorist is saying a true thing and was a a whole kind of uh problem that evolved there. Um, I think the last thing I want to talk about today is your development as an artist and the direction that you’re taking your work. We’ve covered a lot of ground today. Um, I think you said before we sat down, you’ve been doing this now for 10 years. 10 years. Yeah. So, um, where is it that you understand yourself now in your creative practice? And do you have an idea of what you might do in the future? Well, I’ve gone through a lot of eras, I guess, of this. I mean, I initially started there was like the dradicalization era, I think is where is the beginning where I was making a lot of basically just response content to farright creators um trying to like leech off their audience basically and convert them to my to my thing. Um, and then I guess there was the kind of like confessional era where I was talking a lot about my own trans experience as a trans person, which uh, you know, I think was very interesting to me at a time and kind of fit into like the more like vloggy form of YouTube as like personal self expression. But I think I have gotten bored with that. I kind of know I’ve kind of got I kind of figured that part of myself out. It’s not interesting to me anymore. I mean, a lot of trans people, you know, when you when you transition, you feel like the most incredible, earthshattering thing has just been discovered because no one has ever changed genders before until you did it. Uh, and it is interesting, right? It’s like there’s a reason people gawk at it. But it gets boring after a while. It just becomes also not I I don’t know. I consider myself not actively transitioning. I just kind of am a trans woman. Sometimes I even forget about the trans part and it’s actually not really that earthshattering or that interesting. I don’t really feel compelled to talk about it at this point. U which I think is exciting because it frees me to talk about other things outside myself. Sure. Um which is I think what I prefer. Um so I guess I’ve been well it’s gotten harder in a way to talk about politics on YouTube in part because of everything. It’s like so restrictive like uh like uh toos or what? Yeah. I mean like I have like so many of my I mean I don’t really rely on ad revenue so it’s not that’s not a priority for me but a lot of my videos have been age restricted. Um I don’t know I I guess I don’t keep up with it. It used to be I mean it used to be that I would get videos age restricted or even banned because I was like saying I’m not afraid to say it the word for the National Socialist Party in Germany between 1933 and 1945. You would just say that word or you would show show us swastika and the video would get like flagged as like hate speech. Sure. Even if in the historical context even the video contextually anti-Nazi. Yeah. Yeah. I got I got uh suspended on Twitch for showing John Burgger’s ways of seeing when there was a nude in the thing. But it was just it was a painting. It was not not a photo. I censor paintings. Yeah. Oh, you do. It infuriates me. I I find it did you you don’t have um your video most recent one saw is not um monetized for ad revenue. It’s I think I watched it ad free. Is that right? So I just had monetization off. To my shock it got completely approved for ads for like 3 days. Oh wow. And then immediately a bunch of music publishers claimed it because there’s like 4 seconds of my heart will go on because I made a Titanic joke, you know. Okay. And so now I’m I have like revenue sharing on which which means I can turn mid roll ads off for four seconds. For four seconds. Okay. Yeah. They’re claiming the entire video. What do you What do you owe them? Like uh a penny or two if if this was a fair system instead of just handing thousands of dollars over to Sony Music Entertainment. Insane. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. But it’s like um I mean I should just not use music at all, I guess. like but that wasn’t a political decision to like evade um getting depprioritized in the algorithm or I do think there was a little bit so like why is my Twilight video about Twilight I think I had originally considered a a video that would be more straightforwardly engaging with like stomas sexual sat masochism and radical feminist debates about that I decided that that that it was too like 18 plus as a topic and was going to get age restricted So, I figured Twilight is a PG-13 way to have the same conversation. That’s why the video is about Twilight. And I also like this. There’s something I think like sort of doing like politics through media analysis. Well, there’s there’s a lot of reasons to do it. One I think is it’s like a little more comforting like especially when you’re talking about these nostalgic properties like SA or Twilight, like at least to the millennial mind, there’s some there’s something like something relaxing about like going back to the media of the 2000s and just listening to someone talk about this thing that you’ve you know saw two decades ago. Yeah. Yeah. But I also think that I mean it can work a little bit. I think like a Trojan horse, right? You can bring in an audience that doesn’t necessarily want to hear about politics, but you’re sort of engaging with politically laden ideas as you talk about culture. Um, so I think that I mean my content used to be much more directly political. Yeah. Like and then I I feel like I’m still talking about politics. I’m doing a little more indirectly. Yeah. This is Okay. So, um, the audience will be sick of hearing this, but I basically have a running monologue in my head where I try to work through these, um, media theory questions, but part of the problem with the left messaging is that the only people who watch it or will support it is that the buyers of political content are themselves uh, way more radical, like many standard deviations more radical than most people that we need to uh, convince, she talks to. Yeah. And the advantage of these comedy podcasts that then started talking about politics is that normal people, excuse my term normal, but they most people would listen to it, most people watch movies. And so I think um maybe to kind of summarize a lot of the discussion that we’ve been having that if you were to do an interpretation which is I guess essentially what you’re doing now a uh you know exploration of Twilight for example you can then inject political themes to an audience of people that might not be searching for my specific brand of narco syndicicalism from 1892. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You you’re it’s a way it’s a way of talking to normal people and having them care in a way that doesn’t involve frontloading a bunch of theory. Yeah. For example, right? You can mention the theory and come up, but you’re introducing it casually without necessarily and it enriches their enjoyment of the movie they without necessarily appealing to people who are already part of a reading group. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a small minority of people. Um any hint for what you might get up to next? Oh, let’s see. I have a couple ideas. Um, at some point I really would love to do a video about comedy because I actually do care deeply about comedy, but it’s like so like the state of it is so like I I mean you like endless anti- SJW essentially or just like the Rogan like the Rogan dominance of the comedy world. But I also think that like I get frustrated with with some some of the like liberal critique of comedy too because I feel that I think there is something kind of sadistic about comedy like and I think that the trans I think that there’s something to be said about the transgression and the like sort of willingness to like to use comedy and play to explore the edge of like what is like morally acceptable. Like I I believe that that has value and it I think that unfortunately the the debate about I don’t hear this as much as I did like six years ago, but like all these debates about, you know, joking about trans people or rape jokes or whatever, they tended to sort of like dichomize people in this way that I found frustrating because it’s on the one hand it’s like, oh, we don’t get offended like we you can joke about anything. And then their jokes like their their comedy routine is like a Nermberg rally, you know, like so it’s like Yeah. Okay. Um and and also they do. Yeah. They do get deeply offended by when when you know I mean look at the look at the right-wing reaction to like the the jokes about Charlie Kirk. Suddenly dark game [ __ ] money to them. Um but then on the other hand you had people who just like just insisted that like any kind of I’m really trying hard not to say the sentence like political correctionist has gone too far. I don’t want to say that sentence, but like like it is a little dodgy over there, isn’t like I don’t know. Like I mean it’s a big deal. It’s like every comedy special on Netflix, HBO, like all these streaming things, it’s like that’s their main material. Like it’s still like I hate to hammer I do this like you know every other episode of Doomscroll is like the left is too woke. Yeah, Greg makes fun of me for this, but like it is a big issue. It’s often discussed in pop culture is like we need to kind of deal with it and um yeah, we shouldn’t just like forget about the thing because we’ve been talking about it for a little while. We’re still talking about it because we’re trying to solve these problems which are still very present. Of course, I also think that like we all think that there’s too much wokeness, but then we all completely disagree on which wokeness is too much. Yeah. I had a a friend, this was a a white woman who was like very anti all the DEI stuff except when it came to women advancing in like literature and art and stuff like this, right? is that like I mean I whenever someone said whenever says someone says anything about like oh I’m on the left but I think wokeness has gone too far I always tense up a little bit cuz I’m like are you about to say there’s only two genders and it’s impossible to change genders and is that what you mean by wokeness is too far like or like I just don’t know what that means until you say what it means. Should we should we try to define what we mean by that? uh like I I will advance a definition that we’re talking about the allocation of resources in elite institutions based on identity markers. And so what people are talking about is in an environment of a declining middle class uh with increasing scarcity that the resources from the ivory tower are given to people for you know whatever kind of identity marker and not based on merit exclusively in the elite sphere. So, it’s not like Dunkin Donuts is diversifying the people who work at the cash register. It’s only in like the museum or the New York Times or the uh the boardroom of a CEO and whatever. I mean, hasn’t so that I would consider that like more DEI than I would wokeness. I don’t know. I mean, wokeness means almost nothing, but like that’s why to be specific. Don’t don’t you think that a lot of that DEI stuff has been like eviscerated by Trump at least? I don’t know. Yeah. One one of the things in talking about like the total like um pendulum swing and overreach. Um Nelly told me about this. I’ve mentioned this on other episodes, but there was a hedge fund that was going through all of its like pitch decks for investors and removing the words um diversity in reference to diversifying their portfolios. Okay, great. So yes, there’s like a catastrophic overreach of this anti stuff. Yeah. I mean, I guess I guess so. I think that I agree with some version of what you’re saying, which is that I do think there’s like I can’t remember who called it this. It’s like the Sailor Sarah Lawrence problem where like if you’re at school in the country. Yeah. Yeah. If you’re at like an elite liberal arts college, you your sense of like what the problems are and the priorities are get totally warped. So, you end up getting like Okay. Okay. So, like in queer discourses, there’s certain areas where like people insist the most pressing problem facing the LGBT community is like by erasure or like that we don’t acknowledge that asexuality is a spectrum. You have to you have to be so deep in the theology of this to even know what any of that means, right? It’s not right. It’s not housing. is is like the the sense of priorities get completely warped and you get completely detached from like what like normal people think because you’re having this like scholastic like Brahman debate about Brahman you know totally totally I mean I’m I’m thousand% um on the same page. Uh okay the last I’m sorry I’m going to refocus us. Um any hints about what you will get up to next uh in your video making and creative practice? Uh yeah, what are my other ideas? Well, I’m about to do a Patreon video on Eyes Wide Shut, which uh will be an opportunity for me to to revisit some of the conspiracy stuff and also just talk about the Epstein files because I want to talk about that and why in my opinion, Eyes Wide Shut is not a good framework for thinking about Epstein. Okay. Um so I will talk about why that is. Um and I also want to talk about like a dream analysis because that movie is about dreams, right? It’s based on a novel called Dream Story. Eyes wide shut. Eyes wide Shy. Okay. Um, I didn’t know that. And uh I I think that actually like a lot of conspiracy theories would probably like benefit from instead of being fact checked being dream analyzed. Like they would because because in conspira because because conspiracy theories often are compelling because they they contain all these like symbols and uh you know conflations that that speak to something like deeply emotionally true for people, right? Like why does why is like the eyes wide shut like ritual elite masked orgy so such like a compelling image to people? Well, it’s because it does capture something true, right? which is that like there are these people who are who have vast amounts of power. They do convene be in way places where we don’t see them and they do there is you know they do also like get away with crimes that the rest of us would be punished for. Right? So the the the sort of this kind of ritualistic symbolic version of this feeling is is dramatized in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. But I think it’s a mis but like I think both conspiracies and sometimes the debunkers such as myself we take it too literally. Um because I think also I guess what I say I think my conspiracy video is a little bit I was too a little too frustrated making it. Okay. And that I think I think I spent so much time online reading just the most inane conspiracy gibberish psycho [ __ ] for a year and I think it just made me I was just like angry and annoyed by the time I was actually recording the video. And I think as a result, it’s it’s sort of like inhibited my inhibit it inhibits my ability to like extend an empathy that we could argue about whether it’s deserved or not, but which in any case would probably be more persuasive because I think that I mean it’s hard to argue with just how compelling people find the like satanic ritual version of of Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. Yeah. Like it’s so prevalent and not just on the right is I see left people on the leftist like who are also kind of drawn into this sort of satanic panic idea of what Epstein Island is. Yeah, I do. Okay. I have I’ve got more to you know what I could podcast with you all day, but we’ll you know and have some of these conversations in private. Yeah. Natalie, I want to say on the record I have such incredible admiration for your work. I’ve been a longtime fan. Um, your work above all others was uh the most impactful on changing people’s mind in a time that is increasingly difficult to do that. So, I really do I think you are the best example. Uh, and I’m glad you’re still making work and I think it does really mean something. So, thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today. Very kind of you to say and I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. Thank you.