Rest In Piss, Charlie Kirk (With Denims And MikeFromPA)

Hello everybody and welcome to another installment of Aftermath Hours. the weekly podcast of aftermath.site, a worker-owned, reader-supported website about video games, the internet, and everything that comes after. We are largely reader-supported, and so you can subscribe at aftermath.site slash products if you can afford to do so.

You can always leave us a review on Spotify, Apple, wherever else you listen to podcasts. That would be much appreciated. I am Nathan Grayson, and today I am joined by Riley McLeod. Hello. And two special guests, Mike from PA. and denims. And today we are going to talk about a fraught and difficult subject because what a week it has been. If you somehow didn't know, yesterday, right wing political activist Charlie Kirk was shot.

in utah and died it seems like the person who did it is still on the loose and in the meantime many many many people have eulogized him and it's been kind of all anyone is talking about I thought that it would be good to bring on a couple of people from kind of the political social media sphere in Mike and Denim's to talk about kind of the way that the right wing media ecosystem shaped.

uh charlie kirk and kind of this whole moment and how i guess you know we loop back around to this issue of uh violent rhetoric inspiring violent actions

So I guess for both of you, like what was your first when did you first become aware of Charlie Kirk? Like how did he enter your sort of sphere of awareness, I guess? I think probably off of some Daily Wire stuff. Like, I don't know, maybe five years ago. Closer to like the first Trump attempt. So maybe closer to 2018. You know, I'm an old head, so I was aware of Charlie Kirk when it basically started. So I want to say it's around 10 years ago now or more when he was like.

Somebody who never went to college, who was telling everybody that college convinces people to be liberal or whatever, and it's all indoctrination into liberalism. And I saw him as just yet another example of the manufactured AstroTurf Tea Party movement. That's really where he came from, which is, you know, I think he had some sort of like...

80-year-old man that met him when he was 19 and then decided to start giving him millions of dollars to start this, his, you know, Turning Point USA. So he explains the complete difference between the left and the right as far as, you know... the grassroots and their media space yeah i mean like you know i i as i understand he got his start on like breitbart and places like that which you know

Even just that name alone, I think, is evidence of how much the, I guess, media ecosystem has changed. Like Breitbart doesn't really feel super relevant to me anymore, although it is where a lot of people got their start back in the day. PJ Media.

You know, like there's so many of these old right-wing sites that no longer exist that people don't even remember because they, you know, they get another billionaire to come in and start funding it. Now it's the Daily Wire, which is, is that dying out? i mean i honestly have no idea seems like it's gone strong yeah i'm not sure um so

How did he sort of establish himself over time? Because my understanding, especially listening to some people talk about him recently, is that at least for a little bit, you know, as you said, he had this money backing and like the people who knew about him weren't really actually that online. It was more. People were paying him to be somebody, but then like he found a second.

wind on sort of tick tock and like actually gained a young audience so like what was his progression i guess as a content creator how did he go from being this guy who had money behind him but not a ton else to being like actually relevant and actually influential i mean from my perspective it seems to me that he kind of had the traditional route of uh selling something to the donors that he didn't actually have first

And then they put so much money behind it. He's like inserting himself in the college campuses. Getting invited. It was very much integrated into the GOP machine. So like he was invited by young Republicans to college campuses for the purpose of like. of being a provocateur saying, you know, racist shit, saying, you know, transphobic stuff, homophobic stuff, and, you know, causing the organic opinion of students to come and like debate, you know, with him.

And eventually, you know, for years and years and years, it was almost kind of like a junior member of the Young Republicans Club was the Turning Point USA. And they just, you know, they kept selling this like college campus hates debate stuff to the enlightened centrist and right wing commentators in places like Fox News and Charlie Kirk kind of existed in that milieu. And I think with the Trump administration.

You know, from what I recall, he was originally an anti-Trump guy. But then later, when it was clear that it was like the grassroots, young populist right move to support Trump, he kind of jumped with both feet into Trump.

during that 2016 era and i think that's really where charlie kirk started to really get success was leaning into the like america first movement uh you know the trump memes and things like that in 2016 for me unless i'm misremembering you know i'm not a charlie kirk expert i just this is what i recall off the top of my head

No, that was my understanding as well, that he like flipped on the position of Trump, just like a lot of other people did, because it was the right thing to do. I mean, like even if you go and look at.

For example, Ben Shapiro, the way that he talks about Donald Trump, you can tell he doesn't like him. Ben Shapiro does not like Donald Trump. He doesn't like anything he stands for. But he understands that that's where the party is. That's where you have to go. So there's nothing you can do about it. And that's what Charlie Kirk saw. I mean, there's an opportunity. Trump isn't going to go anywhere. He's probably going to win this election. Okay, I can tag along for this mission.

At that point, if he had already been pumped as much as he had been, he understands the value of like clinging to the next biggest thing, being able to send his career to places that he otherwise couldn't have.

Yeah. I think the one thing I would say, if I could inject one more thing, is that Charlie Kirk is AstroTurf. This is very important that you understand this. That Charlie Kirk is, I think Turning Point makes like... Last I saw, it's like $75 million in donations they take in. And a lot of people will compare Charlie Kirk to like Hassan or something. And it's completely different.

Like Charlie Kirk is meeting with Donald Trump. Charlie Kirk is getting all the money from every right wing foundation. Charlie Kirk is being, you know, invited to co-host on fucking Fox News. Charlie Kirk is getting pumped up by. you know money they are buying ads to promote charlie kirk like charlie kirk is something that comes from the like right wing oligarchic milieu and he's pumped up with infinite support

And like he was manufactured by I think the guy looked him up. It's Bill Montgomery was the 80 year old, you know, retired marketer, whatever the fuck that means, who was giving him millions upon millions of dollars. Whereas those of us on the left, I can tell you the Democratic Party doesn't like us. You know, they kicked us on out of the DNC.

Well, also, I mean, even this week we had like fucking Andrew Cuomo in New York doing a whole like little fucking endorsement acceptance where he had posters of Hassan in the background. And like it was, you know, basically saying like. Hassan endorsed 9-11 and therefore you should not.

Zoran Momdani has made this huge mistake by associating with him. And like, yeah, I mean, it's like that. Or just Zoran is probably the better example of that, right? Is someone who is gently to the left of kind of the center. And the Democratic Party is pulling out all the stops to attempt to thwart him, even though he is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City.

I mean, he's not endorsed by his senators. He's not endorsed by, you know, a significant portion of the congressional Democrats in the city, even in districts where Zoran clearly won the primary like Hakeem Jeffries. There is a strong effort, just like there was with India. I'm not to get off of you. We're supposed to be talking about Charlie Kirk. The reason why we're going down this rabbit hole is just the Democratic Party hates their base.

And the Republican Party is trying to pump their base. Yeah. So the Republican Party is afraid of their base, which is a little different. Oh, yeah. No, that's the old the old organizers saying is the Democrats hate their base. Republicans fear their base. The way the Democrats orient themselves toward the base is how do we discipline them? How do we tell them what to believe? How do we shut them up?

How do we get them to ask for less? That's how the Democrats orient toward their voters. And the Republicans are like, how do we feed them red meat to pump them up? You know, and it can be totally contradictory. Like one year they're running on free trade is good for America because it's good for corporations and what's good for GM is good for you. And then the next year they are running on globalists.

are ruining America's racial stock or whatever the fuck they're saying now. And it's the same people voting for Mitt Romney are voting for Donald Trump. Whatever the base is saying in the moment is what the Republican Party will adopt, at least for the messaging. And they will go out and seek for anybody who has any juice with the base. That person has millions of dollars. With the Democrats, it's like.

We only give money to people who never spoke about Gaza. Are you objecting to Gaza right now? Well, then we have no money for you. You're kicked out. Right, right. I think that's again. An interesting thing we've seen as part of this is like, you know, the flags flying at half mast and the way that it kind of reads like something has happened to a politician. And I feel like I have to keep reminding myself, I'm like, right, he wasn't a politician, though. Like, he was just some dude, which...

I don't know if it speaks to how he got his hooks into... the current political regime or a way that you know trump and vance and co are trying to work their base through him or what but it's it's been really intriguing to me to see that the other thing is like I think Charlie Kirk had literally hundreds of employees. Like, he was...

He was at the top of an organization that was extremely large. I mean, they would have these Turning Point USA conferences that I would watch. And, you know, somebody who has run conferences before participated in them. There was a famous one we had in Pennsylvania called Keystone Progress, which was like a bunch of progressive groups would get together and have like a conference in the, you know, Harrisburg Convention Center or whatever.

They had pyrotechnics. They had major city conferences. They had stages with like... You know, the amount of money, we're talking about millions and millions of dollars for their Turning Point USA conference, right? They had politicians from, you know, they had the president there. That doesn't exist on the left. Right. Not even close.

yeah as you're saying the right very much likes to uplift these figures from you know relative obscurity and also like you know this can be seen too in the way that like conspiracy theories circulate like they'll find something on the internet

or like wherever that's gaining a little traction and then boost it all the way up to fox news and own in and other places like that um which again even the assassination or democrats rather hate doing sorry for talking too much i promise i'll be quiet for a while but even the assassination of charlie kirk They're pushing a conspiracy theory that it's a leftist with basically no evidence. Now...

Most of the people harassing Charlie Kirk are literally Groypers from Nick Fuentes' followers. They've been doing the Groyper war on Charlie Kirk for years now. That's not even being entertained as a possibility. They're just running with the left did it. The left is violent. The president had a speech where he said that we're going to clamp down on these groups. And it's like, there's not even proof that they did it yet.

They're just assuming a leftist. And maybe a leftist did. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that they're running with this idea and spreading it as far and wide as they can before they have f***ing proof right i mean they're doing it because it's effective they did it for the uh the guy who attempted to assassinate trump and then meanwhile that guy was a registered republican and like absolutely not a leftist

because it's just effective messaging it's just see the left is the one that's filled with violence it's like dude this party is so neutered like oh come on right well it's also like there have been what a like slightly above double-digit number of... instances where like somebody on the left did violence and then meanwhile they're like 300 or 400 or something on the right i think it's like it's one of those things where it's like yeah it's like 90 right-wing violence in this country right

Do you think they believe this thing that they're saying or it's just like convenient? Because I think for a lot of us watching all of the rhetoric, at least for me, it's kind of like. come on like like are we not noticing you know this man who advocated violence and then And then these assumptions that like, to me, it's not surprising, but it's depressing to see these claims that are not proven coming from like the president on the highest echelons of our government.

There was a CNN segment I saw yesterday where they had brought on someone who was making the claim that the left does a disproportionate amount of the violence in this country. And they did not push back on that. They just let it. Sail right on through. And I was like, really? You are CNN. Holy shit. Come on. Right. Like, I mean, actually, it's the opposite. They're now starting to try to talk over.

Democrats and shit for saying stuff like, well, Trump is connected to Epstein. They're like, well, there's no evidence that Trump did anything illegal with Epstein's victims. It's like, wait, bro, we need to investigate. We're calling for an investigation. We're not saying he molested this kid at this date. Like, what the fuck? And I think we really are in an era where we're seeing some of the things leftists have been predicting for a while just happening and

Instead of a lot of the mainstream going like, OK, it looks like the left actually read us to filth. They're right. We are capitulating. We are collaborating. We are spreading misinformation. We are creating false neutrality. They're like. Well, because you pointed out that we do that, now we have to do it because you are so mean to us for so long that we have to capitulate to Trump. And actually, it was you objecting to calling Trump a Nazi that makes us support, you know.

alligator alcatraz or you know arresting green card holders because they protested uh gaza like that we are seeing this kind of like centrist corporate capitulation to fascism that many of us saw coming for a long time and why we called for a populist left movement as an alternative to somebody like Joe Biden. This is the situation that we're in. And overall, like Charlie Kirk is just part of that symptom, which is.

oligarchic seizure of our discourse. More and more control. I mean, Barry Weiss possibly being named co-editor-in-chief of CBS. Like, what's funny? I get that you guys are laughing, and I understand why you're laughing, because it's ridiculous on its face. No, no, no. I'm just laughing at... I'm laughing at Barry Weiss.

Because Barry Weiss to me is someone who, yes, is a deeply troubling individual who has amassed way too much power, but also like her entire thing just cracks me up. And so it's wild to hear that she's going to be a person who, yeah, might gain ridiculous power at CBS, depending. on how all of the merger stuff plays out. Because the systems are collapsing, so they have to grasp for sycophants of power.

So they can't trust that people of good conscience and meritocracy and competence will be able to push the narratives they want to push. So they're removing those people and installing plunkies. Yeah. Like you should be scared of that. That's a sign of incoming oppression. Yeah. Without a doubt.

But I think that also like Barry Weiss is very symptomatic of how this works in that she's someone who has spent years and years kind of laundering fascist viewpoints through like faux liberalism being like, you know.

i'm going to write about all of these things that are like just so happen to be kind of republican leaning stances but i'm going to be like well this is actually how the middle feels blah blah blah and then you look at like the all the coverage now of charlie kirk after his death and it's a very similar thing of being like oh yeah he was just this like you know guy that a lot of the kids liked and you know he he knew how to engage in civil debate he did it the right way

And then you look at his actual words and it's like, no, he didn't. He called for violence and death like all the time. But you have this whole middle class of people or like not the middle class, but a middle class of pundits. who like serves a barrier between regular people actually understanding what people like Charlie Kirk said and what they said, which was destructive and which like, you know.

I think it is not a stretch to say ultimately in Charlie Kirk's case, like led to him being killed. Like you preach violent rhetoric and eventually violence will find its way to you. I mean.

It's not just that he preached violent rhetoric or that Barry Wise preached violent rhetoric. It's that they're actually part of a dismantling of liberal democracy and the values that they argue for. You know, I know this is supposed to be young people hour, but I'm older, so I'm going to cite some older shit. It was there was a divide in the conservative movement between William F. Buckley and what were called the Birchers.

that Birchers were kind of the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, you know, America first, American Bund type of people, okay? Like, you know, Nazis, American fascists. And after World War II, Buckley, National Review... you know these kind of reaganite people they kind of purged the party of that right and and they moved more toward a like america you know is good because of our values of liberal democracy

And this kind of shit. I'm not saying these people are good. I'm just contrasting between the movement. Yeah. They may be like less extreme in that direction. Yeah. And I think of Trump as kind of an abandonment of that type of conservatism and a return to. You know, somebody that was, you know, Buchanan and his 92 primary of George H.W. Bush. And I think Trump has continued this kind of like festering kind of, you know, I would say crypto fascist.

or neo-fascist movement. And so we have this completely different version of politics. So that's what Charlie Kirk was about. Because if you look at what he actually did, like Turning Point USA was combating liberalism. You know, combating, drawing up lists of professors who were left wing. You know, it was professor watch and school board watch and targeting. You know, it's the it's the politics of.

Libs of TikTok. It is like we are going to find people that are left wing or liberal and then we're going to target them for harassment, for violence, for threats, for intimidation. That's the politics of Charlie Kirk. This is, you know, to quote Malcolm X, I'm not saying it's good. Violence is bad. I completely say that I don't support violence against political commentators. However...

Charlie Kirk is the guy who pushes this shit. He loves violence. He loves harassing people. He loves punching down. He loves lists. And you know, his debates were not debates. It was about trying to form. clips of individuals with no following who are 19 years old and naive and putting them in front of his right, virulent, vicious right wing fans.

They can be harassed. It's so interesting how like that form of quote unquote debate has become normalized. Like, I mean, you don't, that's not too far removed from like a fucking Jubilee video. It is odd that we like engage in this kind of display. and it feels to me like weirdly vicious in its ultimate goals and you can you know

probably draw a line between that and the kind of thing that Charlie Kirk were doing because the goal in that case is pretty vicious. It is to, as you're saying, just make someone look really bad and dumb and have the audience jeer at them. Yeah, and it's very Schmidian, like, you know, friend-enemy distinction. It's not, oh, this person's ideas are bad. It's more like, this person's cringe. This person is in the out group. This person is disregard.

Right. Disregard what they're saying because they're a blue haired liberal. It's not like. you know some sort of factual they're like this person is advocating for a norwegian style single-payer health care or multi-payer health care and that wouldn't work because you know like they're not making these arguments i mean even right they're not arguing on the basis of policy

I didn't make those arguments either. Like, it was posturing. It was gesturing toward a pseudo-intellectual talking point. Not even really... addressing arguments in a serious way or attempting to take the other side in good faith there was no like there was no moderator there was no like

you know fact check there were no stipulations there's no equal time it is very much like he had the power he was the one who makes who decided when the conversation stopped and started he was the one who edited the video he was the one who you know There was nothing about it that was debate. There was nothing about it that was about ideas. There was nothing about it that was about truth-seeking. It was marketing and propaganda from the beginning.

Yeah. Firepuff12 in chat says, I want to hear denims. I think a lot of people do. I've done talking, I promise. Yeah. You know, this being, I think, a substantial portion of like the political kind of realm on the Internet, you know, as someone who obviously talks about politics from the left, like, how do you sort of engage with?

guess anyone who's been trained to believe that this is the way that politics should be done and it's all about like establishing in groups and out groups and like then tearing people to pieces how do you even begin to be like well actually no we don't have to do it that way

Well, I think the question is like whether or not you're dealing with honest people. So like with someone like Charlie Kirk, who when he was doing his like debates with random fucking college students, there's no honesty there. There's like clipping, there's pulling people that you think.

won't be educated and then priming them and then pushing them into whatever conversation you want to. And when he did the debate at, was it Oxford? He did a debate with some people who were actually, you know, not. random 19 year olds that weren't capable of fighting back and didn't come prepared and didn't have moderators.

He like his performance was not great. It was it was pretty mediocre. It was pretty subpar. And I feel like in those instances, it's a great opportunity when you have media that isn't on the right wing side, that isn't going to frame everything in the right wing side. And you have like.

A third party that's that can actually record the entire conversation that can release the entire conversation that can show all the pros and cons. You should be as honest as possible in all of those instances. So like none of the people I think who debated him at Oxford were dishonest with him.

disingenuous with him. They were very direct because they knew that nothing could be clip chimp. They knew that nothing could be incorrectly misconstrued. They knew that they would have the time to respond the way that they wanted to respond. Oh, maybe it was Cambridge, actually. Someone in chat said that. Maybe that's right. I think in those cases, absolutely, you should engage.

As honestly as possible. But when you're fighting against the right wing, like talking point ecosystem, the news cycle, I don't think it's it makes any sense that if they lie about everyone on the left, that we should just. be as genuine and honest as possible back. It doesn't mean that we have to lie and it doesn't mean that we should lie. It can mean something as simple as instead of engaging with

you know, like one more disingenuous talking point about how like, oh, if a girl gets raped, she shouldn't be allowed to have an abortion. She should be forced to carry that child. Like, no, dude, just like pull up the slider where his face gets really small and really big again. Like, I think shame is... a great motivator. I think making fun of people is a great motivator. I think that that's more than enough. Because people are clowns. We shouldn't even take them seriously.

And again, in instances with like the Cambridge discussion, yes, we shine. The left collectively shines when we're capable of fighting them on their points and being able to beat them on their points that our conversations are better than their conversations because facts have a left.

But when we're not engaging in a place that's like neutral, when you're engaging in any Jubilee-esque zone where you don't know what's going to get uploaded, you don't know what will and won't, then I don't think that it makes sense to be as... kind as we can be conversationally, if that makes sense. Yeah. Or to like try to combat what is going to be like, you know, again, clear snark and mean spiritedness with like earnestness.

Exactly. I mean, that's why I think like the weird campaign from Walls was like the best thing that Kamala Harris campaign put together. Like that was so good. That was so amazing. And they just like they decided, no, it's working too well. We have to stop.

Right. My question on that front, though, because you're talking about the idea of like shaming people and stuff of that nature. And I think that online especially and like. really on platforms like twitter you know you see like a lot of dunking a lot of like taking somebody who said a dumb thing and like taking a clip and being like look at how dumb this is

But you also have the issue where, you know, if you do that enough to somebody, even if they have a smaller audience or whatever, they'll gain a lot of exposure. They'll reach new audiences. And so where do you draw the line between the usefulness of like shaming people versus.

realizing, oh, no, like we're actually elevating them. We're actually like ultimately helping them if we engage in this too much. I mean, I think that's like the question about engaging at all with like, for example, Nick Fuentes, where I think I think if someone is like banned off of most social media.

And they're mostly irrelevant. We should try to not talk about them like Milo Yiannopoulos. Like maybe once a year we can all make fun of him and then be like, it's an annual holiday. It's make fun of Milo. But when people are like, like Charlie Kirk was talking to President Trump how often? I don't know the exact number. I don't have like a calendar of all the times they've ever met, but often enough to at least.

push the goals of the Heritage Foundation, push the goals of Turning Point USA, right? When someone has that much reach to direct power, I think we can criticize them, make fun of them, dunk on them on the internet, make jokes about them, whatever. I mean, I guess like the appropriate size would be whether or not they are and have ever been talked about or talk to actual politicians. Yeah. Yeah. If they're in the sphere of influence and they're like meeting with Donald Trump Jr. or whatever.

Yeah, that feels... fair to me well i mean the problem with like i agree with you i don't know if that there's ever clearly a clear platforming line that we can draw because it's it's so hard to say because like you know nick fuentes met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, right? And the truth is that the American fascist right is growing because of the constituents issues of the United States, the material realities of a declining...

conditions for people like us having delayed home ownership, more student debt, more, you know, worse jobs. You know, we're working shitty jobs. We're working as independent contractors. You know, our lives are worse. Every measurable way of like judging people's progress in life, the younger generations are falling back. Right. Like life expectancy is going down.

Like for our generation, you know, like that's the key driver of like a drop in life expectancy is people that are Jed X and millennials dying, like at a higher rate at, you know, in 40 and 50. So.

I don't know that we could put out the fire by trying to shut up individual commentators because they're going to keep popping up like weeds until we actually have a politics that people can believe in. Right. They could actually. is affecting their lives for the better, where they can recommit themselves to faith in institutions. And I don't think the institutions we have are fit for purpose and we ultimately have to be reconstructed from scratch.

But, you know, I don't know. I think of Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk as a sign of the profound sickness at the heart of our society. And I don't know that these platforms are ever going to be able to contain it. yeah nor would they want to i mean the incentive structure for these platforms is to drive you know like engagement and viewership and those people get engagement and viewership

And like, yeah, Nick Fuentes, I guess they would consider over the line in a lot of cases. But people like Charlie Kirk figured out how to walk right on that line and always stay on it such that they didn't get banned or whatever for being too extreme. But they're still laundering the same ideas and talking.

points. They still knew, you know, Charlie Kirk in particular knew which groups to go after and talk about and how to talk about them such that he wouldn't just get booted forever, which I think is what a lot of these people do is they find that line and they just stick to it.

But again, we're seeing that even the folks who are like not the most extreme, like Charlie Kirk, like there's still violence to their rhetoric that produces results in the real world. Speaking of that, actually, I was really curious.

Because I've seen a couple of people who are like, you know, leftist kind of like, I would say influencers, journalists in that realm who like, you know, in the wake of Charlie Kirk being killed, you know, they said like even some things that were, again, not that over the top.

just talking about you know the kind of nature of violence as it unfolds in this way um and like they've been added to you know like lists and stuff they've been uh receiving like a bunch of death threats and things like that

And of course, there's been rhetoric on the right of like, you know, they've got to seek vengeance against the left. I saw a lot of that on the news yesterday. Have y'all experienced kind of an upswing and, you know, targeted hate, harassment, death threats, et cetera, in the past 24 hours? It's hard for me to comment because I haven't streamed yet. So I'm going to stream tomorrow. Then I'll have a better idea of it. But I would say honestly, no, not for me yet. As far as I can tell, Mike.

Well, you're going to be in for a treat because I can tell you that, I mean, listen, as a prominent leftist commentator, The problem with me as a person to ask is that I am frequently in a conflict with large right-wing content creators, you know? So for me, I have a kind of like background radiation of death threats. But I would say that today...

There were, it was higher than normal, higher than normal. I had, you know, specific death threats, you know, nothing. I didn't see anything that was like highly credible where I was like super worried, but I do feel like. There was an intentional effort to spread the idea that the left killed Charlie Kirk, and therefore we need to get revenge for Charlie by yelling at left-wiggers that they're responsible. You know, for example, with me

Right-wing commentator Ethan Klein said that I was responsible. And I was like, what? How did he kind of connect those dots? That's a pretty amazing... Well, because apparently Twitch promotes violent rhetoric because he says that I have promote... Now, he doesn't really have any examples of that, but, you know, he just says that we do it, so therefore that's all you need. What are you going to do? Believe him or your lying eyes, right?

Yeah, I would say overall there's been a slight uptick. And, you know, I think the person that is the most vulnerable right now is probably Hassan. Yeah, I heard him talking about that on StreamSum yesterday. I even saw that shit in YouTube comments of random videos. I've been seeing people screenshotting the comments and it's like, we need to get us on for this. It's like, oh, okay.

A video about talking about how political violence is super bad and you shouldn't ever go after your political enemies. And then the comments are filled with that exact sentiment. Right, right.

It seems to me like so much of the response is motivated by fear of... backlash. I mean, I'm just some guy, but as a trans person, I'm very aware of what I say about it on the internet. I think a lot of what's motivating the conversation on the left about it is not making... the right angry and the irony is sort of not lost on me i think yeah do you mean like out of a out of a sense of fear like that you know

Yeah, right. I think that everyone, you know, obviously people who are in the public spotlight, like Hassan and y'all are like facing more scrutiny than regular people. But I've also seen like, I don't know who they were, who started some kind of website of like randos who'd said stuff.

And there was some politician who was like banning everyone who said something bad about him from the internet or some, you know, ridiculous idea. So like, I think that, you know, you definitely have to sort of watch your... step, which is ironic coming from people who are mad about political violence and the threat of violence. Right.

You saw a lot of this even yesterday. I remember like Asmongold had two tweets like back to back within an hour where one was like, you know, we can't keep encouraging violence. We've got to like stop this. And then in response to like somebody.

uh who didn't even like tweet in favor of violence he was like you know this is going to come back to you watch out blah blah blah basically like implicitly threatening violence and it's like what like how can you hold these two thoughts in your head and just in general like Because, you know, it's so I guess it's really frustrating to watch people on the right do this trick all the time.

Where they're like, we don't endorse violence. We don't believe in violence. Violence is wrong. However, all of our followers are going to send people death threats. And we are going to basically advocate violence just against our political rivals and against people in other countries or people who are. trans or whatever like i have one thing to say about asma gold in particular which is that he has called for the genocide of palestinians because he said they had an inferior culture recently

But he's always been connected to celebrating political violence. Like, for example, this was a story that was reported years ago, but I think it's apropos of what's going on now, which is he... had a WoW character named Anders Nordic, which is the same character that Anders Brevik. The notorious Nazi mass shooter who targeted socialists in a socialist youth camp and went out, a rampage, had a bomb in Oslo go off.

and was one of the most notorious mass shooters to ever live, Azmigold named his WoW character after his WoW character. Mm-hmm. So this is a guy who has celebrated and at least referenced right-wing political violence himself for years and years and years and years. And now he's advocating for, as I said before, genocide. He's always been comfortable with the violence being perpetrated against protesters, violence being perpetrated against.

immigrants violence being perpetuated basically again i think he's he's argued that if a protester blocks a street you should be able to run them over yeah yeah right so this is a guy who has called for violence himself both domestically and abroad he said that lawful permanent residents of the u.s don't have constitutional rights like this is a guy who you know

To say that he is against political violence would be laughably false. He's just not punished for it because he's right wing. Yeah. Well, this is what I keep coming back to is that, you know, these people talk as though.

they or they they claim to not advocate for violence but they do it constantly and it still feels like there is someone out there who either they are trying to reach with that or that believes them and it's like but how can you the contradiction is so apparent it's staring you in the face it is there every single day and so like

You know, is that what it comes down to simply that they get a pass because the right wing and this is a very right wing country? Is that like pretty much it? I think it's not that they get a pass. It's that. They're just very dishonest people, like the entirety of the right wing movement and the entirety of the conservative movement is being as dishonest as you can be. And then do what you say your political enemies can never do.

just over and over again. And there isn't really like a way to combat it besides pointing it out. Do you think there's like an intractability between some of the views they espouse and... violence like it's it's hard to separate like immigrants aren't people from an idea of violence in a way that you could separate like i have opinions about you know tax brackets right well like i'll give you an example what i'm talking about like if

You are saying that people who have lived in this country for 10 plus years as law abiding citizens who have worked, paid taxes, they have American citizen children. but they don't have the requisite paperwork, should be forcibly removed, taken from their family and deported to a country they no longer have any connections to, rather than passing a law to give those people a pathway to permanent residence.

after they've demonstrated their value to our society for a decade, who have followed all the rules except one, which is the civil infraction of crossing the border, and who have been hired by Americans for decades. technically are criminals too. None of these right wingers are out there saying arrest every single white person who hired an illegal immigrant who worked as a gardener or a nanny.

or a dishwasher or a agricultural worker oh did you eat strawberries you know well that was picked by an illegal immigrant farm worker so you should go to prison like none of the punishment ever goes to the people that most directly benefit right and so obviously it's it's nothing to do with like law and order or breaking the law it is a racial

Domination thing. It is a sadism. I'm reminded of a quote that I frequently reference and everybody who hears me talk gets tired of it. But Sartre talked about, he was speaking about antisemitism, but I think it's largely just. talking about fascism in general, which is they don't have these conversations to like have truth come out. They have it to play. And just having a conversation with them is discredits you. Because you have to take words responsibly.

They're there to play. They're there to have fun. And the moment you get them and expose them as a hypocrite or disprove their point, they'll just laugh, sit back and go, ah, the time for debate is over. Now's the time to act. And so it's not about, you know, or as the Bush administration frequently said that, like, you talk about history, we make reality.

Right. And so that's they see themselves as like not really responsible for being logically consistent. They actually think an attempt to be logically consistent is a sign you're a dummy. They think that you having a morality or a belief system.

means you're stupid, that this is a game of social domination and they're at the top and you're at the bottom and whatever it takes to maintain that is okay because might makes right. It's very straightforward. And so that's why they object so strenuously to violence coming back in their direction that's why they they they overplay how important it is and how dangerous it is because they understand that they do it 90 of the time and it's scary when it comes back in their direction right

Well, yeah, with that in mind, a kind of like minor, I guess, element of all this news is, you know, people have obviously been talking a lot about how Hassan was set to debate Charlie Kirk in a couple weeks. And with what you said in mind, the fact that like in a lot of these cases, conversation is just about play in the space of social domination. What is the utility of that kind of a debate?

What is the usefulness of somebody like Hassan, I guess, lending some degree of credibility to a person like Charlie Kirk by engaging with his ideas? Okay, I actually disagree with that entire framing. I think the platforming is Charlie Kirk platforming Hassan. I think that Charlie Kirk has $100 million behind him, and he's meeting with the president. He's the far more influential guy. I think that Hassan debating him is actually promoting Hassan in our view.

I think I've seen Hassan describe it this way, but like 80%, 85% of the people watching a debate cannot have their mind changed. Right. But 15% can. And so when you do these debates, it's about talking to that 15%. And it's also about taking advantage of these platforming opportunities to present perspectives that are just shut out by the typical Overton window.

So I think for me, like I would debate Charlie Kirk and I would debate all these right wingers who have all this money behind them because they don't really know what left wing arguments are. Right. Well, so they hear like a bunch of boogeymen every day or like they get shown a bunch of boogeymen, like the most extreme examples of somebody on the left being, you know, over the top or obnoxious and or they just hear like the word Marxism without any understanding of what it means.

As an old school, you know, leftist organizer, I could tell you that, you know, I would say 65% of people have kind of this latent class. consciousness or suspicion that you could talk to and be like how the system is rigged against them, how it serves the rich, how it serves the powerful, how they get fucked over. They experience car insurance, life insurance, health insurance, their landlord.

their boss, they get it. You know, it's not, you know, their everyday life is in alignment with what you're saying. And so, you know, I think that these debates are opportunities for people to be exposed to like views that are heavily suppressed by.

our mainstream media. So for those of us who are completely one man show, no, no democratic daughter is pounding down my door to give me a million bucks. Right. So taking any cores money. Yeah. I mean, Don't even get me started with that. Honestly, it's related. It's related. Chorus and Charlie Kirk are part of the same group of donors. It's that straightforwardly. They're attempting to...

Head off a left wing turn of the Democratic Party. They're trying to discipline Democratic Party voters away from ideas and toward tactical decision making. Right. Like they want you to be primed with the idea that only Gavin Newsom can beat the Republican.

And if you demand anything, well, then you're and Gavin Newsom has to tell you no. Well, then that makes Gavin Newsom look like an asshole, therefore making the Republican more likely to win. So they're trying to like program people that have progressive values. that they need to sacrifice those progressive values for the good of the country which almost is designed it almost sounds noble in a way right but it's all

Right. It's all in service of the status quo. It actually makes us less desirable. People want change. Yep. So they're kind of like, that's what chorus is for. It's to trick people who are Democrats to not vote for a progressive in a primary. Right. Yep. I mean, yeah, back to the topic earlier. Yeah, I think it's really funny the people that are saying that like Hassan brought on this political violence. It's like...

Why would he ever want to live in a universe where people are assassinating political pundits when he is the largest political pundit on the left? And also, what gain does he have to do this right before? One of the biggest debates that we would have seen in the past, I don't even know how many years, between two online creators and or like political influencers or whatever.

If this had happened after the debate, I could almost maybe understand that position. I could almost maybe begin to understand, like, okay, I guess. But it makes no sense. It's just like... Charlie Kirk, relative to the Republican Party, has had way more sway than Hassan could ever have with the Democratic Party. I mean, they kicked him out of the DNC. Like that's not someone who has the ear of any.

maybe like no i don't even think he has like really any poll in the dnc no so no right he can influence i think like some local elections uh pretty reasonably so depending on the city depending on the size of the city the population whatever but yeah it It's so ridiculous. It's just so. Yeah. Yeah. That entire notion is definitely really goofy. And yeah, I think to bring it back to the idea of debates in particular, I think that.

Yeah, the utility of what you're describing of like debating somebody like Charlie Kirk, who had all this pool with the party. and generally was very prominent is different from like you know somebody like destiny debating some rando about a bunch of things that are beyond the pale and therefore normalizing those things to his very large audience like

one of these debates can actually accomplish something. The other one is that kind of play that you were talking about. What you're allowed to do if a nuke is about to go off. Yeah, yeah. Or it's just like... You know, who is this for beyond this like weird bloodthirsty audience of people who love debates for debate's sake, even though it's often about, you know, the worst possible things human beings could do. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know.

Also, how many like more perfect union videos you've seen or like how many. Like of the interviews that they've done that you've seen, there's a lot of like Republicans. Now, to be clear, there's a large majority of Republicans and people who vote red that are full blown racists. And there's no saving those people. Like if you're voting for Trump because you're like, yes, I want.

my white ethno state like you're i know we're not saving you you're you know what you want it's not good for you either but whatever it doesn't matter but i think that they're also and i think more perfect union the work that they do they show a lot of that stuff people who voted for trump who are like, wait, why is my life worse now? Or even just like look at after the CEO of healthcare was killed, like Ben Shapiro tried.

Stephen Crowder tried. God knows who else tried to be like left wing violence is out of control. And their comment section is just filled with right wingers being like, no, health care is a joke in this country. Listen, I'm not for violence. I'm not going to cry for.

this CEO healthcare, and this is from right-wingers, right-wingers, people who voted for Trump are saying, why the fuck should we give a shit about this? So, like, the idea that we can't reach anyone is silly. And if you can debate one of the people that has some of the... biggest poll for like a political influencer online, you can convince some of these people that the methods that they're using, the methods that the Republicans are using are not going to make their lives better.

Something that I say a lot is that the main purpose of somebody like Charlie Kirk is to conceal from the Republican base what their policies actually are and to distract them with like culture war slop. Totally true. Because if you look at like positions for like single payer healthcare, you'll see 30% support, 25%, 35% support among Republicans for it. And it's like, wait, you support a minimum wage increase. You support Medicare for all you support.

Raising taxes on the rich. Why the fuck are you Republican? And it's like an understanding that politics is not about people looking at a list of policies and then picking them and going, I took a test online and it says I should support.

Bernie Sanders, I'm voting for him. No, it is a vibe. It is a social, political, cultural milieu. It is your material interests, whether you have... any class consciousness are you organized in a union and even then people who are in unions will vote against their union recommendation because of like concerns about guns or something right it is

That is the main project of these these like right wing debaters and the right wing entertainers is to kind of create an uncertainty and a cloud around the Republican Party where you fill in the blanks. About what you think the Republican Party is. And they have a few cultural touchstones that they will use. And they're all like abortion, guns, trans issues. You know, it's not.

Based on your life, your material interests. Anything that will improve your life, especially. Exactly. Yeah. And maybe it'll be like it'll cut your taxes because that sounds like real to people. Like we all pay taxes. So if somebody says, I'm going to cut your taxes, then you can, that feels real to you. But I'm going to like, you know, cut this program in the government.

you may not even know that that's actually something you rely on. That takes a certain extremely high level of political knowledge to get. And that is kind of what Charlie Kirk functions as, which is this just like... Covering everything up with a fart cloud. So nobody is paying attention to their wall getting picked. You know, like they're too busy pitching their nose. Right. Well, yeah. And in the absence of like Democrats.

talking about these issues or like gesturing toward the fact that a lot of systems are broken and at least ostensibly it is their job to fix them the republicans can then take on all this like pro working class messaging and not actually do anything about it

Because the Democrats also aren't doing anything, nor are they talking about it. And so one of these is always going to sound better than the other, even when they aren't doing shit. Yes, I would put it even more than that, which is like the Democratic Party is actively against.

expanding the government like they have a like the establishment democrats have a neoliberal ideology they want to actually strip it they want it to be even less expansive like they have a project that's in alignment with the republicans they just want to do it lower and slower You know, they like, for example, when Barack Obama was president, they never raised the minimum wage, even though he had a trifecta.

When Biden was president, they never raised the minimum wage. The last president to sign a minimum wage increase into law was George W. Bush in 2007. OK, so this.

Like the Democrats not only don't want to do anything, they actively are trying to make things worse. There was under Obama, they tried to cut Social Security. They had a grand bargain, but it ended up getting... blocked not by the left not by democrats but because the freedom caucus was like we don't want to give obama a win you're gonna vote for obama's bill no that's obama's bill

And so Medicare and Social Security were saved from Obama cuts. And I think a lot of Democrats and a lot of people in general kind of like, when I say stuff like this. They're very frustrated because it is true. And it's very unsatisfying that the people that you like, like Barack Obama, are the cause of the world that we're in, that they're actively bad politicians pursuing bad policies that led to this.

reactionary growth and that we can't just go back to normal or 2005 again or 2009 again we actually have to Build something that's going to correct the Democratic Party as it is and build something that will deliver immediately. And that's a much bigger climb than just voting for Democrats again. Right.

which I think everyone really wants to do. They want to live in a world where they just have to go vote. And then that's part of the reason, like, I mean, I like Zoran despite some of his waffling on Palestine recently, but.

I think that part of the fantasy of somebody like him is that you can just go vote. And if you vote hard enough, then, you know, the city will be saved and things can get back on track or like you can build from there into a. better nation that actually functions you know for normal people when that is just not the case the the systems that we currently have are not built for it yeah yeah i mean how do you fix congress Right. How do you fix the Supreme Court?

You can. What you do is you amend the Judiciary Act and you expand the number of seats in the Judiciary Act with a simple majority. And then you have the president sign the law and says there are now 19 Supreme Court justices and you appoint. You know, you seize power, you use it according to what the Constitution says you can do, and you do it.

Like, you know, or maybe even exceed what the Constitution says you could do a little bit. See what you could get away with. That's and I think for a lot of people that, you know, I'm not trying to be glib. I'm trying to give you a real answer, which is like.

Well, you have to have a political party that wants power. And I think a lot of the Democratic Party, like half of the Democratic Party doesn't want the Democratic Party to get too strong. Right. Like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, you know. They could have admitted D.C. as a state. Fuck it. Make D.C. a state. Have two more Democratic senators. Except if they do, that's 85% Democratic district. That means two blue Democrats who are probably to the left of the caucus, right?

And then Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are no longer relevant. So their relevance matters on having a Democratic Party that is weak. So a lot of the Democrats are like, ah, like they had H.R.1, right, which was the For the People Act.

that banned partisan gerrymandering that had a political uh donation match if your campaign didn't accept any checks larger than a thousand dollars you would get like a three to one match or six to one match i can't remember of your money to a congressional campaign

That was a bill that was sitting there. The Democrats had no interest in passing that because that would make the Democrats more powerful in Congress in the long run, therefore making the Democratic Party more left wing and therefore pissing off the donors.

So we have this little dance where Cetrist Democrats control the party and they... pretend to be interested in these progressive policies but they're also making sure to engineer this kind of fragile majority where they're barely in power and they just oh damn we can't do it joe manchin blocked me again

And there's a rotating villain. It's just this one senator. If only you had voted blue harder and we had won this seat, we would be able to pass the thing. But it never ends up actually happening. It never ends where you actually see like, wow, the Democrats really got us that thing. Yeah. This even actually goes back to the Charlie Kirk stuff in some ways. And that, you know.

We have this entire group of liberal pundits whose job is just to like tut tut anybody who's too far left and who like tries to amass power or like, you know, campus protesters, anything like that. Any like leftist movements that are attempting to. either gain power or criticize currently like dominant power structures. You know, the right does not have that feature. There is no like, there's not really a Barry Weiss of the right.

And these same people are now the ones who are eulogizing Charlie Kirk, who are like, yeah, he was a paragon of civil debate. Like all of this stuff is tied together in these very like subtle little ways. But you can see like.

why the machine works the way that it does and as you're saying it's because democrats the party do not want to become too powerful right they're against their base they hate their base i'll give you an example of what i'm talking about okay So the Republicans decided they're going to gerrymander Texas. Right. And, you know, this is an unprecedented mid decade redistricting that's perfectly done to rig elections so that Republicans get more Congress members.

Then everybody's like, oh, oh my God, this is so terrible. We should respond. California has fair districting commission. Why the fuck does California have a fair districting commission? They have a Democratic supermajority. Why are there any Republican congressmen? And the answer is because Democratic Party donors are really Republican donors and they have a bunch of centrist Democrats who are just Republicans.

who they buy out and they set up this regime that maximizes the number of seats the Republicans can get. OK, so Gavin Newsom comes and says, we're going to do a thing. We're going to gerrymander California because Texas is being gerrymandered. Right? They come out with a plan that does what?

Is it more seats than the Republicans have gerrymandered? No, it's five, too. It's the exact number of seats the Republicans are gained. They're just bringing you back to the status quo of, you know, the gain five. They didn't go for maximum gerrymandering like they should have. Right. They did a.

softer gerrymander and then on top of it all they're not doing it themselves they're making it a voting referendum you're going to go to the voters and say hey will you allow us to gerrymander why the fuck are you doing that Use your two thirds majority of the house that said it and just pass it.

Right. But they don't want to rock the boat. And they've also cultivated this whole idea of them being like the adults in the room. And of course, the adults wouldn't break the rules. They wouldn't make new rules. On top of that, though. They're now entering. They're adding a failure point because we know the Republicans are doing the Texas thing for sure. But they're they're giving this election, which gives billionaires the opportunity to.

carpet bomb California with $250 million plus saying, don't vote for the rigged Democrat maps. That's not fair. That's not, that's not good. And I think most people would see that and go, I don't know if I agree with gerrymandering. That seems pretty fucked up. They vote against it because that's fair play, right? But the Republicans don't care. They're just stopping gerrymandering in California while they viciously do it in Ohio, Florida, Texas.

Georgia, Wisconsin, wherever they, Pennsylvania, they had a severe gerrymandering, so the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw it out. Wisconsin, the same thing. The Democrats, I mean, this has been something they've been doing for 25 years. Republicans have pursued an aggressive gerrymandering program since 2000. Like, what are we doing here? This is not a surprise. This is not a new news. Like this is the whole Democratic Party. Why are you not?

playing this game and that's where like you know it starts to become clear that it's a washington generals versus you know harlem globetrotters game where the democrats are just there to make it look like there's a game being played

And to diffuse progressive energy whenever it boils up too strongly. Yeah, which again is why the party's in crisis over Zoran, who is, you know, promising things that would... i mean they'd still be very relatively moderate but you know they'd at least be moves in a leftward direction and he's gained a kind of foothold and now they are freaking out

Because that's slightly outside their general sphere of influence. They don't know what to do with it. All of that said, I think it might be time to move on to our mailbag segment where readers can ask us questions. If you would like to contribute to the mailbag, you can do so by subscribing.

to the site at aftermath.site slash products. For those who are new, we are a website. We just stream occasionally. But yeah, we're a website that covers video games and the internet. We write a bunch of fun stories about various things, including sometimes Twitch. So if you'd like to check it out, you can go to aftermath.

site. And if you want to subscribe, you can do that at aftermath.site slash products. She'll then get you access to our discord where you can ask questions from the mailbag. Anyway, there is one question in here that is more politically related. So I'm going to go with that one first from Joe Esposito.

The current performative we need to de-escalate rhetoric is already vanishing as the right... uh starts talking about a quote-unquote war on the left naturally reverting back into the standard combat stance of modern politics what would it actually take to stop all of this do we have to see a daycare center or school be blown up to force a sincere universal effort to go back

to the essence of compromise personally i feel like we're well past the point of coming back i think the only solution is ideological nation states let's be honest we stopped being the united states a while ago so why not just embrace it spicy I'll leave this to the electoral politics master. Oh, come on. I want to hear your take on this one. It's a question of people, too. I feel like I was thinking about this.

last night as I lay in bed being worried about, you know, the nation is so divided and what would it take to bring us back together? And I think there are, like we've been saying before, there are so many things about which I think like... there isn't compromise like i feel like i keep doing this but as a trans person like there are things that i just like there's no compromise between like i think i should be allowed to be alive and you're like i don't think so and like we can't

We can't find a middle ground there. And I worry that, you know, as more and more things become that polarized, like there is no meeting in the middle. But I also wonder like how many regular people. believe like like is it i think maybe like you were saying before like is it a minority of people who really believe these like we can't live with you kind of things and do most people just kind of want to like live their lives and do their thing and like

I don't know. I don't know if there is a, I feel like I would agree that maybe there isn't a compromise, but I also don't know that that means like, you know, the nation splits up. Like, I don't know. I want to believe it's a minority. but it's surely it's hard right because there are also a lot of people that i mean you know i can't speak personally on the issue but i can speak on people who i've talked to and they've said that like they've had unbelievably transphobic parents and it took

years of forcing their parents to accept them for them to finally stop being transphobic and then like one day it like clicks where they're like wow i've been like a real piece of shit like i've been a piece of shit parent and i've been a piece of shit person for having these transphobic ideas. But like, how much energy do we have on the left to sit here and give these people the time that they need to not have the stupidest fucking opinions?

i mean what sort of fascinates me about the way the way that that Trans issues have become part of the discourse is like, you know, I transitioned in 2003, which is a million years ago. And like mostly just nobody cared. Like the fact that people have opinions and they know what I'm doing and they care sort of like.

blows my mind where i'm like what like none of you nobody cares about this except like me and the people i know and now it's like like i feel like that's the problem to me a little bit is like they made it an issue yeah for sure i i think a lot of a lot of politics is shibboleths it's it's It's a signaling your status within the group of conservatism, which means you repeat. And the same thing happens among Democrats as well, right? Which is you state the kind of like positions.

that you have been told are the positions of people that you are like or you like right so the trans shit like yeah you're right like even even the gay stuff you know i as a as an elder millennial myself in 2002 Sodomy was still criminalized in eight states. We didn't decriminalize gay sex until 2003 with Lawrence v. Texas, and that was a 5-4 decision.

But where the culture was at that point was already way more accepting of the idea of gay people. And then now we have a very clear majority of gay marriage, although there's been some, you know, maybe among conservatives, a slight tick back. But, like, trans issues were kind of just the next...

you know, thing that they just manufactured and then use the same exact arguments they used against gay people. And it was more of like positioning yourself as a conservative and you do so by signaling your disapproval of transness in a way that you don't that. you used to do for being gay openly or gay marriage or you used to do before that between like interracial relationships.

That was the way they signaled their membership of a conservative status. And as far as fixing it, I get asked this question quite a lot. I am a far left wing person. This is just being very clear. And I believe in radical solutions for radical problems. I think the main problem of the United States is that we're unreconstructed. And there are certain elements of our society that are incompatible with modern society and need to be dismantled more aggressively. I'm talking about specific.

types of religious pseudo-religious scam behaviors that happen like uh that promote white supremacy i don't think white supremacy is should be a valid religion I don't think you should be able to have a, you know, government tax credit and be homophobic. I think that you should not be able to have these institutions be subsidized by society, tolerated by society in much the same way.

as you would as they removed the toleration for that from racial domination. Like, for example, the Mormon religion had a revelation, as the government said, you will lose your tax-exempt status if you promote white supremacists. Theology. And then suddenly the Mormon elders had a revelation that actually black people aren't the Mark of Cain. They are, they can also really, you know, they are just cursed by God. Right. What I'm trying to say is like, if you want the right to become more.

They have to be beaten so badly and sent so far into the wilderness that they have to retriangulate. Like they're not going to fix themselves while they hold complete power. You're not going to convince them through some utopian fucking string of words that they're wrong. For them, they hold the scepter. Like, as far as you're irrelevant to the right right now, you want the right to listen to you beat their fucking ass in the elections.

Right, right. This is like people saying like, oh, we should propose to the right a system where immigrants pay more taxes for a time when they first arrive. That's just collaboration. That's just surrendering. Yeah, it's not going to convince them that immigrants are. I want us to have a toe-to-toe fight on the issues. I want them, their positions to be revealed. I want our positions to be revealed. That's what it's about. I don't want to capitulate.

I don't want to compromise with the right. I think the big problem and the crisis that we've had is that basically, and I don't know, I mean, I don't want to do great man of history, but I think in the person of Barack Obama, we had somebody who... was exposed to extreme racism and the radicalization of the Republicans toward the fascist right and ultimately culminated in handing the keys to Donald Trump. And every step of the way, he was pre-compromising and pre-capitulating rhetorically.

policy-wise. He had 60 votes of the Senate, and he spent two years to pass the ACA, which was a watered-down Heritage Foundation plan. Why the fuck do you vote for Democrats if you're just going to get Republican policies? Like, this is the man, and I think this is kind of what... poison the Democrats is having Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as like the figureheads of the Democratic Party has instilled in the Democratic Party a kind of pseudo conservative.

capitulation that has made being a Democrat embarrassing. Yeah. Embarrassing and deeply disappointing. You don't believe in shit.

Yeah, it's hard to rally behind that. I think that's different from like a great man theory. That's more just like, you know, people want to feel inspired by things. They want to feel like they can actually back something and put part of their identity into it. And when there's just a void.

in that thing's place then of course people are not going to like line up behind it they're going to see it for what it is which is empty and there's a reason why zoran beat the out of cuomo and i was one of the few people like you know i I don't want to pat myself on the back too hard, but I think I've kind of seen a lot of this coming with a lot of my commentary over the last six years. The reason why Zoran won and why he registered so many more voters than like other candidates have.

is because he gave people something to believe in there was some sort of sense of a change whereas the democratic party since trump in the last 12 years has just been like We have to stop this bad thing. So give up everything you believe and bite the bullet, eat your broccoli. And then the fever will break and the good Republicans will reassert themselves because Trump has been beaten. It's like.

How many times, like you've been saying that since 2012, man, with the tea party. Like how many, like it's 13 years of the same drivel. Like at a certain point, like the fact that you keep supporting these people is your fault, not theirs. Mm hmm. Yeah. And after a certain amount of time, that's all that's left of the party. And that amount of time passed a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I thought 2016 would be a wake up call, but it wasn't.

No, the sickness was already far too advanced by then. So I hope we can find somebody to rally around in the coming years that will actually push for a robust... social democratic program that Americans can believe in and stand in contrast to the disgusting darkness of the right. But it may be too late, you know. So if balkanization happens, I'll be okay with it.

All right. See, I was going to ask, are you in favor or against the idea of breaking up the United States? I'll live in the good part. Don't worry. Okay, cool. Yeah, come live in New York. We're going to be the good part. I have a feeling. Yeah, it's going to be us. We're the greatest city in the world with the biggest rats. And we're finally going to depart from New York State. Yeah, yeah. We're going to take the city and push it somewhere else. Exactly. Can we remodel the subway?

Can we spend some money on that? A lot of people keep asking for it, but not enough for the MTA to actually be... Have you never been in the subway in the summer and it's 90 fucking degrees? And people's sweat is dripping off the wall? Come on.

trains have them i'm gonna say it's not the acing that's a problem it's like the stops where the stalactites are forming on the ceiling on the stove that's just that's just culture that's just yeah bacteria it's like an old fuck you i'm moving to china this is fuck you guys you could have your stalactites i feel like i'm this guy about like high speed rail like how long

It takes to take an Amtrak up and down the East Coast. I feel like I've become like a weirdo where I'm sitting on the train and I'm like, this is just unacceptable. It's so bad, dude. Makes me nuts. High-speed rail, for goodness sake. Yeah, we could do better on that front. Well... We'll work on it in 10 or 20 or 50 years.

OK, let's see. The remainder of questions are not as well. This one is kind of politically oriented from Drew. Recently, I watched the movie Network 1976, and it really resonated with the current world moment we find ourselves in. Are there any movies, shows?

whatever you'd recommend right now for cultural relevancy reasons. You probably misunderstood network is my first reaction to that. You probably misunderstood network, number one. My second thing is Andor. Yeah, Andor's a pretty good pick. I mean, I'm tempted to lean towards Superman because if you guys have seen it, you know.

It's pretty good. Yeah, I've heard it's good. I saw the discussion of people being like, oh, this part is about Palestine. And it's like, no, it's much more general than that. But people really wanted to graft their politics onto it in a way that. I understand why, but it also doesn't necessarily feel useful to do, given that it's a mass media product. I would say it's definitely trying to mimic the Israel-Palestine situation.

But I do think it's very funny that a lot of Israelis got really mad and they were like, this is an anti-Semitic. I can't believe you're not on the side of the tanks shaming at kids. Why did you see this movie and side with the bad guys? It sounds like you feel guilty if you watch a movie like that and come away.

feeling that way it's like hmm maybe you should interrogate your your feelings here a little bit more yeah if I could expand on Andor for a second I think the main crisis we have in art is that We have a don't look up type liberalism still in art, which is like the Republicans are dumb and bad and wrong. And I'm right. And I tried to convince people to be smart, but I failed because I went on network television and I did cable news hits.

And what I like about Andor is it's the opposite, which is instead of this kind of naval gazing superiority of smelling your own farts, like don't look up. It's like the process of revolution is exercised in.

self-sacrifice you know there's a darkness to it there is a a desire to destroy your enemy and recognize that you have to be willing to like dedicate your life to it it's one of the few revolutionary pieces of art that we've had in the mass media where people are take the idea of revolution seriously they take the idea of breaking the rules and committing violence for

a good cause against a system that is unjust. And the thing I like the most about Andor is it doesn't waste any time kissing journalists' ass. It shows journalists to be exactly what they mostly are, which is no offense, Nathan, but mouthpieces of power and spreading the narratives. Like every time you see it, they have these like cable news hosts.

in some of the episodes where they're reporting on some atrocity. And they're just giving the take of the empire. They're just giving the position of the empire. They're repeating back the propaganda. And I couldn't help but feel like this is what watching CNN is when they talk about Gaza. This is what watching CNN is when they talk about invading Afghanistan or Iraq. It is really just, it is power telling you what you're supposed to believe. Right. As opposed to, there's no gumshoes.

Nobody's confused. Nobody's like, I trust journalists. They're going to publish a story and that's going to result in some fucking thing happening. No, if you want something to happen, you happen. You do it. You rob the bank. Andor takes revolution seriously, which I think is something that is really interesting and different than most pieces of slop you get. Yeah. Also, sorry. Somebody in chat said aftermath mouthpiece of power. That's why we do it. That's the whole point.

Yeah, I know. I mean, it's the journalists that I like. I like because they take journalist ethics seriously and they actually do try to understand things.

educate their audiences and expose the problems for what they are, as opposed to just, you know, having an easy no-show job where you reprint a fucking press release. Right, right. All right. This is a fun one from Metroid. Uh, takes nature or nurture, i.e. Do you think the urge to have a take on every current event is created by the presence of social media? There is a part of human nature being amplified by it.

I'm normally a very big nurture purist. And I think that like almost everything is nurture and very little is nature. And the little that is can be overcome with nurture. On having takes on everything, I think the vast majority of people, that's a nurture situation. But I do think that there are some people that are uniquely talkative, annoying, opinionated. Yeah, yappers.

And they would be that way without social media. But I do think there are way more people that have an opinion on everything nowadays than there ever was. So nurture wins again. Yeah. I I'm inclined to agree with that. But like you, you, you know, back before the internet or for people who don't live on the internet, you know, God bless them. Like they still get together and they talk about what's going on. Like, like I wonder if the internet doesn't.

like change and amplify this sort of natural instinct to like make sense as a group about what's happening around you right like i think that it changes the nature of the take yeah and that i think the take naturally becomes much more incendiary and much more meant to kind of grab wider attention as opposed to just like communicate information with people in your little group or whatever um like the point of it becomes different

I think it also depends on the people that you talk to, because I have had friend groups of people who like, I don't know how, but we can spend an hour and no one says anything opinionated even a little bit. And I like those people a lot less. And I have friends that like, if we have five minutes. We're going to spend a full two hours talking about something. We're going to make room to find the time to talk about it. Caught.

I have an opinion on this, as you're probably surprised to hear. The first thing is I build my stream around the things that I have opinions on because that just seems logical. There's a lot of things that I just don't have an opinion on and I don't talk about it. But I do think that as far as the question about current events, people did this all the time. They always had. In fact, people used to get.

multiple editions of the newspaper. There would be a morning edition of the newspaper and there would be an evening edition of the newspaper. And people used to take that and they used to go to the union hall or the coffee shop or the hangout spot and everybody would be talking to each other. has changed is the nature of the conversations and what is incentivized and what is disincentivized and also

Is your ass being held accountable for what you said? If you go to the union hall and you said, I love Richard Nixon. That guy's going to get rid of the hippies. He's going to get rid of these fucking unions and they'd beat your fucking ass.

Right. Like you, there was a socially acceptable, like range of opinion, but also like the way you delivered it, you would treat each other with like civility, respect. And if you didn't, you'd get a nice little punch in the nose and you'd be like, okay, maybe I went too far. You know, I'm not saying that it's good. that people got beat up it was just more there was a natural social regulation it's talk shit get hit exactly talk shit get hit but now

You're incentivized the opposite, which is people are anonymous, so they get to test out extreme versions of takes that they may not even believe. And then...

That gets amplified by the algorithm because the algorithms are trying to give you to be on the site more and get more engagement. So a version of the take that's more extreme and more attention grabbing is going to be juiced in the algorithm because more people are going to reply, more people are going to read it, more people are going to...

interact with it. They're going to get hooked into the site harder. What social media has done is change the way we express opinions and what opinions get brought to us. So we're seeing more extreme opinions that are more annoying. And there is less accountability for being a liar, for being an asshole, for being a dick. So we're all just at a higher state of aggravation.

Right. About opinions and thoughts. That's what's changed. Yeah. And that dynamic creates and I think this word is overused, but like it creates echo chambers, right? Because you're exposed to an extreme thing. And so you also raise the temperature a little bit and it just raises the.

more and more and more it creates like these knock-on effects that I don't think are good for anyone but they're certainly the status quo in which we're operating I think a lot about like the way that you know you say shit on the internet and it's permanent and i think that you know you learn to

have good opinions i think sometimes by having bad ones and and working them out and i worry a lot about i think this makes me sound so old i think especially young people like you know you say something stupid at 19 and it lives forever on the internet and like how do you learn to like people need the opportunity like to be wrong and get a slap in the back of the head and like a the safe space that is being in person among people who

know you, right? Right, right. Who don't believe that, you know, you are... evil because you said something one time that was maybe like wrongheaded or like morally objectionable but also like you know as you're saying and that hypothetically you're a young person still figuring out the world like you gotta you gotta be able to push on the boundaries

to know where they are. Yeah, I couldn't agree more with this. And I actually think it's part of why there has been a slight retrenchment on Gen Z is because the best thing about my generation. the millennial generation, is that we were cringe. So true. We were cringe. And what I mean by that is...

We would just express ourselves and we would dance and we would, you know, try to find the people that vibed with us. Right. And then we would just authentically be ourselves. Whereas now I feel like Gen Z rightly so, lives under the cringe panopticon, where if you try something, like if you go up to bat, you know, and you strike out, that's going to be on the TikToks.

Look at how bad he swung that bat. Like, and who wants to do that? Who wants to dance? When, if you look... cringe it's going to be published and forever be there so everybody has to be nonchalant well also i think this is a big part of the reason why like uh gen z people disproportionately are

better dancers than i see from like other folks and i think part of it is because they're worried that if they're ever seen dancing like it's got to be good so they learn how well no it's self-selection it's like if you're a bad gen z dancer you never dance you never dance dance exactly that's fucking stupid that's hell that's awful and and so i think a lot of that like and and then also just like caring passionately about something being excited being you know doing that like that can

come across as cringe, as unattractive, as naive in a certain type of way. And I think that Gen Z is, that's why like Gen Z is so focused on their persona. They've got this like, constructed narcissism that social media has forced them into where they're constantly maintaining a persona a brand of them not themselves themselves is the brand that they maintain they don't even they don't even understand what i'm saying like the difference between the like

person in the simulacra or the or the representation of them that is social media Right? Right. And that is the brain poisoning that I think is really, really damaging. And I don't know how to fix that. Like for me, I just don't give a shit.

If you think I'm cringe, fuck you. I don't care. Then don't vibe with me. But for a lot of people, they're worried about that going viral, that moment of vulnerability, and then having that trauma constantly reintroduced to them. And I don't know how to fix it.

With social media as it is, how do we create a countercultural movement of like, be cringe, do crimes? I think some of that culture is already kind of being seeded, just in that I think a lot of people are getting tired of social media and they can feel it. They feel that they're like posting takes all the time is exhausting. Feeling like you're in this panopticon all the time is exhausting. And I think that.

Maybe over time people will, I think that like it's designed to be addictive. And so a lot of people are hooked into it in ways where they have trouble disconnecting. But I do think that there is room for a countercultural movement where people to say, fuck all this.

I'm out. I'm not going to participate in this anymore because it actively degrades my life and I can feel it. And I know the ways that it does. You know, I hope to see that. I think that would be good for a lot of people. You know, I think. One of the other things is everybody wants to be an influencer. Like, if you can make... I am one of the people that won the internet. I say that with humility.

is that I have gotten to the certain size where I am now a well-to-do person who has no boss, who's able to work the hours that I determine. I'm basically living the dream. And I don't say that, I hope you guys don't cast the evil eye on me for me saying that. I'm just saying that my perspective on the internet is like one where... I'm deriving a lot of good stuff out of it. And then I limit the internet to that space. And then I say, this is my private life.

I'm no longer chasing the thing where I'm like offering up more and more of myself to try to achieve a goal. I've, in my mind, achieved a lot of my goals already. And so I can then defend. my private sanctum and my, you know, my personal life and my, and my friendships and my, you know, the fun that I have off stream, that's for me and my intimates alone, not for the rest of people, where I think a lot of people are still chasing that desire.

of getting out of the rat race, getting out of insecurity and being a 1099, working gig jobs, getting laid off, working for a boss. Everyone wants to have that freedom. of having a successful internet career. And in order to get that...

The sites and the culture constantly dangles like, well, maybe if you do this, maybe if you do that, maybe if you offer this part of yourself, maybe if you do this type of content, you will be able to get that success. And so it draws us in more and more and more. It's like a... at quicksand and i feel i'm always telling people that you don't do that that's not the way to succeed that's not the way to succeed just find a niche

Treat it as a hobby. If it works, it works. But don't give more and more of yourself up to these fucking tech bros because they'll take it all. Yes, absolutely. I was going to say, I feel like people are.

being made a little bit more miserable by the internet but that's not like the internet's fault i think that's like everything else's fault like i have a very i love the internet and i've always loved the internet and i you can't make me hate the internet it's just like Bad algos taking advantage of people's like most primal desires, giving them the thing that will make them the most mad.

all the time and then you don't have any walkable cities you don't have any friends you don't have a social life you don't have money that you can spend to go out and like make these connections in the real world and like in my experience people will always pick real life connections over random nonsense on the internet. Doesn't mean that they won't want to spend some time on the internet, but there's not a single person that I've ever met in my life that is...

thought, you know what, I'd rather sit on my computer and write Twitter posts for 24 hours a day than go and hang out with friends. Like, I would obviously rather have friends that like me and like spending time with me and that I get to do that. It doesn't mean you can't open Twitter a little and shitpost. It just means you're not consumed by it. And like even creators, you'll see this with content creators that are too online. Like it's not unique to just like.

audiences or consumers or whatever it's like there are creators that are way too online and you can see it like reducing their quality of life it's like you are you should be living the dream you have millions of dollars you have You set your schedule. You have family. You have friends. You have pets. Why the fuck are you so miserable? Like, get off the internet. Get off. Just some of the time.

I completely agree with Denham's. I think the internet has so much good in it for all the bad. There's so much good. And the problem is real life experiences require risk. Emotional risk. Whereas the internet is comfy and safety is just one click away. You know, like if you go out, if you're like trying to make friends in real life with a person that's right in front of you and they reject you, that's rough.

But the scroll is easy. The swipe is easy. And I think the fear of pain and the fear of humiliation and things. has pushed us to take solace in screens more and more. And, you know, that's what I was talking about with the cultural thing. Like, I can handle the internet. You know, denims, you can handle the internet. We know how to make it work for us, but for a lot of other people, it is a replacement. It is a palliative.

You know what I mean? You know what I'm getting at? And I don't know. And we need to figure out ways of like breaking out of it. And I think it needs to be a serious cultural, unified communal effort. Like we need to like build this together with intent. Yeah. We can't see the idea of community to platforms.

Because the way that platforms build community is often at odds with the actual betterment of the people in those communities. It is a means of using those communities either to make money or to self-perpetuate.

Community, the real function of it is, yeah, to help the people who are part of it, to make sure that everyone's good and OK and having a good time. Yeah, we got to rebuild that in the real world and online, because I think we're not really doing either right now. And that's to our detriment.

We're trying. Yeah. Well, I mean, trying is something. Trying is what life's about. Yes. OK, one final question, which sort of ties into that. As you are both self-described Internet likers from I once was a cat. A hopefully lighter question from More Serious Pod. What have been some of your favorite trends slash memes you've seen online recently? Let me think. I've been trying to use TikTok more.

I'm a boomer, so I've been seeing what my algorithm is. Okay, can I answer that in the form of a person? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, my... The person who has gone viral in the last six months that I appreciate the most is a creator by the name of Vanilla Mace. Because she's almost like my cousin, if I could explain it. Which is like... She is a robust, full-figured, confident, funny, welcoming person. And she is not like...

She's not in these boxes that you usually get from mass media. She's like a human person. And she fucking rules. And just the vibes of like enjoying life, but also... We all engage in a little bit of consumerism, which she does as well, but she's also thoughtful and she's not consumed by it. She's a complete person.

You know, she's funny. She's down to earth. She will talk about things that like my, as I said, like my cousins or my aunts would talk to me about. And so it's so cool that somebody like that. could just like blow up on the internet. And they're not the type of person who would be promoted by like Hollywood. You know what I mean? Like, it's just this new type of influencer who is just like a real human person.

And that's what I've been appreciating lately is like seeing more people that are not like overproduced, over filtered, over, you know, over control. The opposite of like a Mr. Beast or whatever. The complete opposite of Mr. Beast. And, you know, she came to mind because I liked the post of hers from like yesterday where she was talking about Gaza and like a human person. And like she has a brand that she's putting at risk. And it's like, fuck, she's cool as hell.

All right. I will for sure check her out then. Besides agreeing with all of that, because I totally agree with that sentiment. I was going to go more degen with it, more internet degen on the meme front. I've been really enjoying the, you guys have heard of soy jacks or like woe jacks. I've been enjoying the joy jacks where they're.

I'll just post, I think, the origin of this. And I've been really enjoying seeing these edits. These have been bringing me so much joy. They are true joy, Jack. People appreciating shit. I love it. Which is honestly what soy jacks were. The soy jack is a couple of guys appreciating the meatless chicken nuggets. You can't trick me. That's just Northern Lion.

That's the picture of Northern land. So I've been, that's, that's one thing on the internet that I've been enjoying recently. Nice. Beautiful. All right. I think with all that said, it's time to wrap shit up. First of all, where can people find the two of you? Twitch.tv slash genoms. You can catch me on the very easy to remember and totally not cringe name central underscore committee on Twitch and TikTok.

And I am also, and this is how good I am at marketing, Mike from PA on Twitter. And, you know, there may be more projects coming, so stay tuned. I'll try to make them better named. So I have a third brand for you to keep track of. Excellent. And yeah, this has been Aftermath Hours, a weekly podcast of Aftermath.

If you liked what you heard, you can subscribe at aftermath.site slash products. Again, for those who are new, we have a whole website. We write a bunch of interesting stories about video games and the internet. You should read them. We record this show every week on Thursdays at 4 p.m. Eastern time. And we'll be back next week to do it all again. But until then, have a good one. Bye. Bye. Bye.