Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
11. Groyper Superchat Superhell
64 Plays10 days ago
In this tribute to Knowledge Fight, Sarah and Helen go through an episode of notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes's show, and find out he's locked in a Freudian cycle of abuse and disgust with his own fans.
Check out our patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
Recommended
Transcript
Tribute to Knowledge Fight
00:00:00
Speaker
This is an episode focusing on a current figure. It's something of a tribute to Knowledge Fight, where we go through an episode of the notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes' show. Fuentes relies on a fascinating parasocial relationship he's built with his audience, in which he abuses them relentlessly, hates interacting with them, and they come crawling back over and over for more.
00:00:20
Speaker
I think you'll enjoy this peek into the cycle of exploitation both he and his followers have locked themselves into. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:00:47
Speaker
Do it live! listen, you. I'll fuck you in your goddamn face. And you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:59
Speaker
some level of masochism.
Introduction of Odium Symposium and Patreon Support
00:01:04
Speaker
I'm Helen. I'm Sarah. This is Odium Symposium, a podcast about the production of bigotry. Yeah, so first things first today, we have several new Patreon subscribers to thank. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you to Julia, thank you to Kat Mara, thank you to Joseph, and thank you to Kitezva.
00:01:24
Speaker
got four new subscribers this time. That's really awesome. Yeah, these are all new Odium connoisseurs. Yeah, so you can subscribe on our Patreon, patreon.com slash odiumsymposium. For $5 a month, you can become an odium connoisseur. So far, mostly, it just helps us financially produce the show.
00:01:42
Speaker
You'll get early access to episodes. Yeah, we're really grateful to have your support. Thank you so much again.
Experimenting with Podcast Format
00:01:48
Speaker
Okay, Helen, if we're doing something a little bit different today. Okay. So we're continuing to experiment with the form. And also, since we've loosened the mandate a little bit to production of bigotry, this is actually a present day episode. I don't expect that to be like the norm going forward or necessarily even comment, but we can do it now, I guess. We talked a little bit about a sort of present day figure already when we did the Andrew Anglin episode. And i think I think we should be open to present day figures as long as it's not just whatever the discourse of the day is, right? That's really what we want to avoid doing. But I think present day is not disqualifying.
00:02:26
Speaker
It's just got to be relevant and beyond just, oh, it was in the news this week. Who are we learning about
Nick Fuentes' Notoriety as a White Nationalist
00:02:32
Speaker
today? Today, we're kind of doing a tribute to knowledge fight. When we started the podcast, Our format did not actually end up being very similar to knowledge fights, but nonetheless, something like I kind of modeled the structure on. And so actually gave you some homework to listen to an episode of knowledge fight. Did you do that?
00:02:50
Speaker
I completely forgot to do that. I'm so sorry. okay I'm going to write that down. Ellen did not listen to an episode of knowledge fights. Okay, that's going on your permanent record.
00:03:02
Speaker
Okay. It's an episode where two people listen to a far-right streamer, in that case, Alex Jones, and they just, like, break down an episode of his show.
00:03:13
Speaker
We're not doing that with Alex Jones. We're doing that with someone actually even worse. Ooh, okay. Good evening, everybody. You're watching America First. My name is Nicholas J. Fuentes. We have a great show for you tonight. Very excited to be back here with you tonight on Monday.
00:03:33
Speaker
Okay. Okay. So do you know who Nicholas J. Fuentes is? I... Okay. Here's like the extent of what I know about Nick Fuentes going into this, which is not very much.
00:03:44
Speaker
I know that he is a like hardcore white nationalist, and not in a way where you get a lot of people who are basically white nationalists, but trying to lie about it or trying to be cagey about it or trying to deny it in any way. Like he's pretty open about, yeah, America's for white people.
00:04:05
Speaker
I know that he is Gay, but not openly, maybe. There's some question about whether he openly admits to being gay, but he clearly is.
00:04:17
Speaker
I know that
Fuentes' Rise to Prominence
00:04:19
Speaker
he became famous... like he was one of these grifters out of college where he was sort of a campus, like conservative contrarian figure. And then he kind of got amplified by a lot of this liberal news cycle. But I don't really remember like, or I don't even think I ever knew the specific fight or culture war topics that he was focused on. I know that he...
00:04:49
Speaker
He was brought up a lot around the assassination of Charlie Kirk because people thought that his fans might have been responsible in some way because he is he did not like Charlie Kirk.
00:05:03
Speaker
That's basically all I know. Okay, so the first thing is you mentioned him being very straightforward about his white nationalist views. We're talking about a level of far right, where
Origins of the Groyper Movement
00:05:18
Speaker
when you get influencers at this point on the political spectrum,
00:05:22
Speaker
It's like examining life forms around like a geothermal vent at the bottom of the ocean. like Their minds can only exist with like certain super specialized adaptations and structures. And so everyone out there believes roughly the same things.
00:05:40
Speaker
There's not like a lot of diversity of opinion. They all think Hitler was great. They think the Holocaust didn't happen, but it was good. That kind of thing. And the main differentiator is just how overt they are. Nick isn't quite the most overt, but there's only a very small group of people more overt than he is. He's like very far out there.
00:06:01
Speaker
Oh, and his fans have a name. What's the... Yes. They're called the Groypers. The Groypers. That's right. There's so much lore, it's insane. It's difficult to know what to talk about and what just to like leave in the background. So the listeners might be familiar with the figure of Pepe the Frog, who is a cartoon frog that the far right hijacked back in about 2015 from an innocent cartoonist and made sort of their avatar in online discussions.
00:06:39
Speaker
Nick very much comes out of these hyper online white nationalist spaces, in particular like Chan style culture. Not so different from Andrew Englund, who we talked about in a previous episode. I definitely get the vibe from, i mean, even like the name Groyper, but like one of the dynamics here is that you pick this frog cartoon and then the point is that it's sort of adjacent to some of those techniques we talked about, like when we were discussing the Sartre antisemitism thing.
00:07:09
Speaker
When someone says, hey, this person is being racist or this person is, you know, is has these despicable views, know, You can kind of be like, oh, you're mad at a frog cartoon? Like, oh, you're saying that a frog cartoon is bad, right? And it's kind of a similar thing where you sound ridiculous saying Groypers, right? You sound insane if you're saying like, oh, we got to do something about these Groypers.
00:07:31
Speaker
And I don't know how much of that is like on purpose and how much of that is a plan and how much is it just... But it does always feel so ridiculous when you're talking about these guys because there is so much lore and so much of the lore just sounds ridiculous.
00:07:45
Speaker
I mean, okay, so the Gruyper thing is the Pepe thing, just to connect it back to the Pepe thing, but more ridiculous. The Pepe thing became both too well-known in quote-unquote normie spheres and also too diluted through use by quote-unquote normies. And so they adopted another frog figure that had kind of like grown up in the memeing around Pepe. And this one is...
00:08:12
Speaker
much fatter more grotesque okay i didn't know typically depicted in an even more explicitly racist way and that frog is named griper and that's why they are the gripers because they adopted this like more grotesque version of pepe i did not know that that's that's wild Oh man, this is going to blow your fucking mind, Helen.
00:08:38
Speaker
Just this whole this whole episode. i so excited. I'm ready to have my mind destroyed. Second thing, you talked about him coming ah out of this like college far right space.
00:08:50
Speaker
And it's true that he started the show that we're going to listen to today. Like the first version of it, America First, during his freshman year at Boston University.
00:09:02
Speaker
He actually dropped out to make the show full time. However, he actually started
Monetizing Parasocial Relationships
00:09:08
Speaker
streaming four years earlier when he was 15. And wow he has been on air pretty much continuously ever since. He is now 27.
00:09:18
Speaker
wow He started out presenting himself as a libertarian, but like within a few years, he was like pretty clearly a Nazi. And I'm not aware of like any significant evolution in his political views since then. In a way, like that kind of reminds me of the Sartre bit about one of the purposes of bigotry is just to kind of make yourself someone who doesn't have to adapt to the world, who doesn't have to be anything but a stone.
00:09:47
Speaker
I think there's a little bit of an element with of that with him. He's just kind of been the same guy since he was not long after 15 years old.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's tempting to try to do... It's tempting to reach for that, like, okay, a 15-year-old who's doing this, clearly there's some... underlying problems, right? we if If this person's, you know, if this this guy started doing this as a minor or whatever, like, that doesn't just happen, right? It's, like, tempting to try to, like, do that kind of psychologized reading of, like, what was going on in his childhood that led to this guy being a freak. But then at the same time,
00:10:26
Speaker
God, I shouldn't say a freak there because, don't know. i I actually catch myself doing this a lot and i I've managed mostly to stop, but I don't like using a lot of the language of like, oh, that's an insane thing to say. Or it was like, yeah, this isn't like mental illness, right? I don't want to be stigmatizing mental illness. It is just a wild thing to do. But it is wild that a 15 year old would, I don't know, 27 is also so young. like To be this like famous streamer and who's got all this experience and all of this like cultural capital.
00:10:52
Speaker
Speaking of the cultural capital, so there were two reasons particularly that I wanted to talk about this guy.
Fuentes' Influence on Republican Politics
00:10:59
Speaker
First is that cultural capital and to be honest, political capital. He is unfortunately a really big deal in our current politics.
00:11:09
Speaker
Most famously, he had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. But probably more significantly, the Groypers absolutely saturate Republican infrastructure. So all the young Republican types who become aides, staffers, assistant deputy whatever's in the White House, these people are largely huge Nick Fuentes fans.
00:11:33
Speaker
The second reason to talk about him is that there's something I've never quite seen in any other context, that I see about this guy's production of bigotry. We didn't go into this aspect much. There was a lot to cover, but Sartre talks about how a bigot finds membership in a community of mediocrity through bigotry.
00:11:53
Speaker
and they obtain a sense of ownership and control over their social lives. Similarly, there's a famous Adam Serber essay about how the inflicting of suffering can build community among white supremacists.
00:12:07
Speaker
And one of his key examples is photographs of people smiling at picnics, at lynchings. So there can be a community building or social element to being part of the production of bigotry.
00:12:24
Speaker
And there's some of that with Fuentes. The gropers network with each other. They communicate covertly. There's little joke he does on the podcast sometimes where he imagines like two of his fans talking to each other and one of them to the other is like, hey, do you grope?
00:12:39
Speaker
But what really strikes you when you see a little bit more of Fuentes than just like the clips of him being outrageous that go around on social media is that there's a strong parasocial element to his production of bigotry as opposed to just a social element.
Oaths of Allegiance from Fans
00:12:55
Speaker
This is a guy whose shooters on social media often just use a picture of his face as their profile pic. And he has his audience swear oaths of allegiance to him personally. We're not going to see that in this episode, but this is like a reoccurring thing.
00:13:10
Speaker
That's interesting. Definitely the way that that kind of influencer parasocial relationship has become so central to like a lot of different...
00:13:22
Speaker
spheres, I guess. Like, this is something that people talk about in all all sorts of different contexts that, and it's, you know, a longer term thing than just social media, but especially with social media, people talk about this notion of, like, the celebrity that is just kind of famous for being a celebrity, and that this is something that's really grown in the 21st century and is enabled by social media, and it's, like, interesting to see the way that, of course, this is also going to affect the production of bigotry, right? It's like, I'm burying lead a little bit here about sort of the nature of the relationship he has with his audience because I want it to like leap out at you as we go through the clips and I'm excited for you to find out about it okay I played you the first few seconds of the show him just introducing this is Nicholas J. Fuentes is America first show the show is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. EST each night it's quite rigorous um guess what time that clip is from
00:14:16
Speaker
I'm gonna guess nine because that's the obvious guess but I feel like it's gonna be wildly different than that. It's 1121. This is really typical. He never manages to start the show on time. In fact it's typically like at least two hours late often three hours late.
00:14:34
Speaker
Wait so also hes streams so it's not like a television show like he streams on Rumble right? Yeah, he streams on Rumble. He's got like a studio backdrop. He built it on, I think, the second floor of his apartment in Chicago. higher Typically, it's just him talking into a camera.
00:14:54
Speaker
There's not like a lot of complicated stuff to set up. He just doesn't give a fuck. He shows up and he does his thing when he feels like it Okay. I mean that's relatable. yes Yeah. Helen and I hung out in person for the first time the other day and One of the things that became very clear is that Helen and I are both the kind of people who are late for everything. So like, I can't hate on Nick too much for that. Right. But I was like, was I 15, maybe 20 minutes late.
00:15:29
Speaker
I feel like that's us a level of being late. That's different than it is definitely different. A couple hours late. Like I've had friends who are the type of people who are late to everything. And by that, I mean like two hours late, like I'll make a plan to like meet someone and then they'll show up two hours after the scheduled time. Like that's anyway. So then he starts talking about like the merch and hawking his quarter zips.
00:15:53
Speaker
Remember to check out our merch store. Fuentes.store, get your USA quarter zips. It's so funny. Excuse me, Bert.
00:16:05
Speaker
Everybody's trying to get me to stop selling these quarter zips. I'm never going to back down on this. People are telling me, why is he doing this? Why are you selling the quarter zip?
00:16:18
Speaker
People are telling me to stop. i will never stop. Is there actually backlash on the quarter zips? i I was not able to find any evidence that there was backlash on the quarter zips.
00:16:29
Speaker
That's so naked with the like way in which the martyrdom complex is just a grip. ah Like they only know one way of selling things and it's, they are trying to silence me and you need to support me. Right. And it's like, people are telling me not to sell the quarter zip. Like a quarter zip is like the most like bland, agreeable. It's so generic. I can go outside and I can see dozens of people in quarter zips.
00:17:02
Speaker
Because that's just like a thing. I don't know. Like, it's such an easy slam dunk. Like, it's the laziest. Like, anyway.
00:17:11
Speaker
Comment if you would buy an Odium Symposium quarter zip. Because we actually do have some merch ideas. So... The person who does art for our show, Quinny, will leave a link to her profile in the episode description.
00:17:25
Speaker
She's like too good for a show with five viewers. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. We have more than five viewers. Let's not insult. We have more than five subscribers now. But that's true. That's pretty cool.
00:17:36
Speaker
Then he plugs another item.
Incel Culture and Sexuality Questions
00:17:39
Speaker
We also have for $100 a month, you get to be in a group chat with me where I'm just chopping it up all day, hanging out. I have no life.
00:17:48
Speaker
I have no social life, so I'm just in there hanging out with you people. And it's kind of a deal. You know, $100 a month to talk to me? you know, I'm a pretty famous guy. That's not a lot of money to be able to just hang out.
00:18:03
Speaker
Okay, a couple things. But I think just continuing on our little, like, Odeum Symposium... merchandising corner i also don't have a social life so if people would be willing to pay 100 bucks a month to hang out in a group chat with me like i'd be open to that so if you subscribe at the hundred dollar level which yeah i think you can just do like i think you could just give us a hundred dollars i'll make a group chat and i'll hang out with you on the group chat on patreon me chopping it up Sometimes he talks also about how he will occasionally leave like a half hour long voice message in the chat. And that's supposed to be like a big draw. He talks about how lucky people are to be able to experience that. So Helen, I don't know if you're willing to put in that level of effort, but that's what you should expect if you're paying $100 a month.
00:18:54
Speaker
Oh, I'm good at leaving the half hour long voice message. I'm immediately seeing contempt for the audience. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'll hang out with you people for only $100 a month. You get to listen to me. That's a big get. I have to hang out with you people like that. Yeah, let's listen to that again. Actually, I have no social life, so I'm just in there hanging out with you people.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah. And like, i mean, there's the self loathing as well of like, I have no social life. That's also I mean, yeah, there's this like, oh, I'm lame, but also like you're lame. And like, just give me a bunch of money. And I'll just like be in a group chat with you. I don't know. There's like, there's a certain amount of contempt there.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, that is the buried lead, and you are going to see it like so explicitly and so vociferously. He hates his fucking audience. That is the nature of the parasocial relationship. He loathes these people. That's so interesting.
00:19:58
Speaker
I know, right? It's so weird. Like you see a little bit of this with Trump sometimes. He'll talk about how he loves the poorly educated. Or I remember there was one really funny incident where he went to a Bitcoin conference and he was like,
00:20:12
Speaker
yeah, if I get elected, like, even you people are going to have a good time because you're going be able to play with your little toys. Yeah. Or something to that effect. But, like, he really blink brings it to another level. Yeah, there's, like, the Trump loathing for his base is, it's kind of there sometimes, but it's not the central thing that he's selling.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, it doesn't seem as central, whereas this, to me, this plug really just feels like It is designed around a sort of antagonistic self-loathing relationship to the audience. Anyway, it's definitely like a notable thing.
00:20:51
Speaker
Another thing. you So you mentioned the self-loathing. Nick comes out of an incel background.
Critiques of Pop Culture Performances
00:21:00
Speaker
Inseldom is kind of a wide and varied phenomenon, but there's sort of two main trunks, at least in my understanding. One is the more 4chan-inflected side that grew out of 4chan, and therefore the more closely white nationalist-aligned side. The other grew up on sites largely outside of 4chan, which is the looks-maxing stuff.
00:21:26
Speaker
that ended up with, if you've heard anything about like a guy named Clavicular who's been in the news lately, or bone smashing, or mewing, or mogging. All of that is like an aspect of incel culture that I don't know nearly as well.
00:21:42
Speaker
But Nick is very consciously part of that 4chan side of incel culture. It's an important part of where he comes from.
00:21:52
Speaker
That serves a few purposes for him. One of them is just that it's kind of a way around how fucking gay he is.
00:22:05
Speaker
If I were a journalist with journalistic responsibility, I don't think I would be willing to just flatly say Nick Fuentes is gay. But because I'm a human being on a podcast with eyes and ears, I can just say, like, the stuff I've seen, I think Nick Quintos is, like, pretty clearly gay.
00:22:27
Speaker
And his audience is a bunch of Nazis. And they loathe gay people. So how does he square that circle? Well, part of it is the parasocial aspect.
00:22:39
Speaker
If they owe enough allegiance to him, they're willing to ignore it, or if they can't ignore it, they're willing to forgive it. Part of it is that just by being someone who kind of like brags about how he's never had sex with women and how women are not like a part of his life, he kind of skirts the whole question of sexuality. and Like, I don't know to what... So he just fully denies being gay or just doesn't come up on the stream? or what is his... really like oh he denies being gay.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. He moves on to his first topic, which is the Super Bowl halftime show. So the specific episode we're talking about is episode 1637, which released February this was...
00:23:25
Speaker
which was released on february ninth so this was Not long after the Super Bowl, this was a big topic of right wing media at the time.
00:23:35
Speaker
We have to talk about the halftime show. We can't talk about it without also discussing the um kid rock thing that was going on somewhere else.
00:23:50
Speaker
What the fuck was that? I mean, if that's the best we have to offer, honestly, I'm switching sides.
00:24:02
Speaker
If that's, seriously, they said, this is the all American halftime show, God, family, and co, it's like, okay, if that's, if that's the all American halftime show, i don't know, guys.
00:24:19
Speaker
We're losing them. You know, we got to come up with something better because that was a tough watch. If it is a requirement to pretend to like that, to be like a patriot, like I can't do it. Did you watch any of the All-American Halftime Show?
00:24:34
Speaker
I did not. I saw. I saw some of the like promo clips for it. Actually, I think I did see like a 30 second clip. It's like impossible to watch because Kid Rock is so bad.
00:24:48
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't had any exposure to Kid Rock's music that I can recall, except in like a few clips I saw of the All-American Halftime Show. And it was fucking brutal, man. That was some of the worst music I've ever heard. yeah And then you could see J.D. Vance and his wife like in the audience like trying so hard to be appearing to vibe to it. it was Yeah, that was hey that was the clip that I saw, I think. I'm remembering now. Yeah.
00:25:14
Speaker
it it just hadn't it's so empty of anything he was just like there on stage just making noise like it
00:25:26
Speaker
it's hard to convey to someone who hasn't seen it like what the experience of watching it is like because it's so bizarre and yeah you get jd vance and the audience has to pretend that it's good um i do note that he failed to bring up the, or maybe it's later in the clip. Is he going to bring up the alternate alternate halftime show? That was our stream.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's definitely going to come up. guys I didn't actually include it in the clip because it's just a half hour of him calling us trannies, but, but you know, yeah of course we didn't evade his notice. Yeah.
00:26:04
Speaker
I'm just telling you upfront, I'm going to be honest with you. Full disclosure. I can't do it. I think I'd rather kill myself than pretend to like that. So you're telling me we're at the Super Bowl party with the normies, with the hoes, with the chuds and the faggots.
00:26:22
Speaker
We're at the Super Bowl watch party. We're having our taquitos. We're having our wings, pizza, watching the big game. Everybody's having a good time. You're telling me we have to turn off the TV or we have to switch the input.
00:26:38
Speaker
We have to go to the Rumble app. and watch some AI ad about like alternative medicine. And then we have to watch kid rock and this like generic country music.
00:26:53
Speaker
And we have to pretend to like this. We have to all be like, this is really good. She's really good. I'm not doing that. I can't do it. I, um, it sucks.
00:27:06
Speaker
Interesting to be like anti-rumble in that clip and And anti the advertisers. He's on Rumble. I know. I downloaded this video off He's on Rumble. So it's like he's anti the platform he's on and he's anti the advertisers on the platform he's on. Like that is notable to me.
00:27:25
Speaker
The other notable thing about this clip and it's one of the reasons why the like the antagonistic parasociality is interesting. Something that people talk about a lot when we're talking about the appeal of these kind of far-right movements is that like the big appeal of this kind of politics is just enjoyment.
00:27:43
Speaker
There's this figure in the liberal imagination of the regretful Trump voter, of the person who like voted for Trump in 2024 because like of kitchen table issues, but they didn't support, you know, all these other things and now Trump is in And I think the thing that's missing is understanding of it is true that people are motivated by a certain kind of discontentment in their material situation, right? Groceries are getting expensive.
00:28:10
Speaker
a lot of liberals are saying, no, actually look at these markers. The economy is great. And it's like, okay, but for more and more people like going to the store, like they can't afford their groceries, they can't afford to live.
00:28:22
Speaker
But the solution Trump is offering and, had you know, and offered in the election wasn't, I mean, he was kind of saying, I'll fix those problems, but he wasn't really saying, I'll fix those problems. He was offering a kind of enjoyment that will punish the wrong kind of person. Right. And so There's something interesting here where he's saying, look, we can't be pretending to like this thing. Like the whole point of our politics is we're the guys who have fun, right? Like that's actually the only thing that they offer is having fun.
00:28:51
Speaker
So to some extent, that seems like it's it's an interesting part of his political analysis. And it also does contrast a little bit with this, like, come watch my show. I'm just going to like insult you all the time. Once he's talked a bit about...
00:29:04
Speaker
how much he hated the alternative halftime show. And I would say this is the main topic of the episode. He, oh God, he spends at least 40 minutes of this roughly two hour show just talking about how much he hated the alternative halftime show. And it's not in one contiguous bit either. Like something will like set him off and it'll just like return to the topic and rage about how much he hates like this fucking kid rock performance, that kind of thing. But he also talks a little bit about what he thought of the Bad Bunny performance.
00:29:38
Speaker
It's not explicitly political. It's implicitly political. It's not actually antagonistic. I didn't feel, and I say this as a right-wing white American, as really a far-right white nationalist, um whatever you want to say, i did not feel antagonized by the show. I didn't feel like the show was taunting me. i didn't feel like it was antagonizing me.
00:30:07
Speaker
i didn't feel that it was defiant. I didn't feel like it was militant or anti-American. I think that it was actually, and I say this from the point of view of of what it is propositionally, it's positive.
00:30:22
Speaker
And I don't mean by that that it's good. i mean that it was a positive message. And the message was the U.S. and Canada and all the countries of the Americas were celebrating all the people.
00:30:36
Speaker
And so whereas maybe different expressions of wokeism in the past were very negative, it was about saying, fuck white people, fuck America, and conservatives and Christians, and it was about giving them the middle finger and deliberately taunting them and antagonizing them and reveling in how antagonistic they were being, this, it was almost like the the mirror image of that,
00:31:07
Speaker
And rather, it was celebrating the diversity of the Latin Americans.
00:31:13
Speaker
You also asked me to watch the halftime show, and I did watch, like, maybe combined two minutes of it. I have to confess. Oh, my God. Helen, Helen, I asked you to watch the halftime show so that I wouldn't have to. i didn't watch Oh, you didn't watch it Okay.
00:31:28
Speaker
It... No. It was fine. i still listen to pop music in general. I don't know It was very, like, nothing.
00:31:39
Speaker
And not in, like, a necessarily bad way, but, like, his assessment of what it was is, like, mostly correct. Like, it just it just was a musical performance, and there was some vague, like, yay, we're all, you know, there they had a bunch of audience, or they had a bunch of, like, random people involved. Like, they had people as bushes, like, running on. and Yeah, I remember...
00:32:03
Speaker
all these different attempts by a lot of liberal media to try to read it as this kind of defiant message. And actually the funniest one to me was people were speculating that one of the kids who was like involved in like the crowd that was involved in the, in the performance was like the kid that like ice had kidnapped and then used to like, yeah. Carlos Ramos. I, I saw a couple of those posts and I curious,
00:32:31
Speaker
Kind of stunned that people believed that. And people were like, the lawyers involved or someone related to him had to be like, no, he's not doing well because he got kidnapped by ICE and he's like, he's recovering. He's a traumatized child. We did not actually like bring him to the store put him up in front of people to perform in a musical performance. And so...
00:32:55
Speaker
Usually these guys make a big show of pretending that what they really want is things that are not political. And like having to reckon with like, oh, yeah, actually, it turns out that there's ways that like things are political that aren't just like directly talking about like, quote unquote, capital P politics, whatever.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think his analysis is proceeding from... the wrong presuppositions, let's yeah But yeah, the conclusion is like basically fine.
00:33:24
Speaker
So this was not the only episode of the show I
Discussion on 'Dark Woke' and 'Dirtbag Left'
00:33:26
Speaker
watched. In particular, I watched the one after this. And I didn't clip it, but he got enough shit for this that he kind of made a point in his next episode of describing the Bad Pony performance as being part of a Latino army staking its flag on American soil and just kind of playing into this right-wing oppositional description.
00:33:58
Speaker
Whenever he seems kind of like... Yeah, mean, think this in hand with that notion of like a politics primarily motivated by enjoyment.
00:34:10
Speaker
i think you should keep in mind that that's not actually true yeah i mean i think this goes in hand with that notion of like a politics primarily motivated by enjoyment It's part of what you were talking about earlier, too, with this that essay about you know how the cruelty is the point is actually about how cruelty is something which creates community.
00:34:30
Speaker
And again, it goes back to the Sartre thing, even. there's there's a There's no need to like be coherent because you're not actually giving a politics that's based on a political and analysi you know a material analysis that...
00:34:40
Speaker
that you're then proceeding from. You just want to feel cool in the moment. And so you can kind of just say whatever. And at times you're going to be saying stuff just based on whatever you feel like saying that is kind of reasonable. And then at times you're going to be saying just really out there stuff. And yeah, that's just how it goes when your politics is primarily motivated by this like libidinal urge. I think this particular take is in large part motivated by a desire to feel better than and portray oneself as better than the rest of the right-wing sphere. Yeah, I mean, especially if you just saw the Kid Rock show, that probably felt bad to watch. I mean, it felt bad for me to watch for reasons that were largely unconnected to politics. Like, of course, the politics of it were not my politics and politics that I find reprehensible, but...
00:35:30
Speaker
Watching it, it wasn't like, oh, I'm watching this kid rock thing and I'm getting triggered and he's he's making me feel bad on this like moral, ethical, political, but like, no, the the music was just cringe. It was bad. He's horrible. It was hard to watch. And so you...
00:35:47
Speaker
want to indulge that like oh yeah this guy kind of sucks and so what is the the kind of take after that is like oh well he sucked i'm switching sides if this is the best we can do and so to kind of continue on that train you then of course are going to land into and by the way the other show was fine and then of course you realize like oh i accident i accidentally said that the other show was fine now i need to make sure that i am appropriately racist because saying that the generic message of, oh we're all Americans is fine when me and my supporters are explicitly white nationalists, like, oh I need to actually make sure that I do a little white nationalism.
00:36:27
Speaker
Do you know who Shane Gillis is? No. ah Neither did I. So shane Gillis, it turns out, is sort of a Rogan orbiter. He's a comedian who presents himself with sort of like conservative, a bit Southern like aesthetics. And...
00:36:47
Speaker
yet also presents himself as someone who is like an equal opportunity offender of both sides who like sometimes he takes a left wing position but he's a chud Nick gets into this concept of like a shift in wokeness and he starts relating it to Shane Gillis And I think you're starting to see what I would call a post-woke leftism.
00:37:14
Speaker
And they have sort of synthesized the critiques of wokeism. And you see this in the rise of dark woke and the dirtbag left. And these guys like Comtown, where they're able to say racial slurs in an ironic way. And you got guys like Shane Gillis. I actually consider Shane Gillis to be like a post-woke left-wing comedian, where they can present as a chud. They can present as maybe culturally, racially insensitive, in reality, holding liberal politics.
00:37:50
Speaker
And maybe he's a bad example. Maybe he's not a Democrat. The part to me that's wild about that is, like, he got so did he get stuck in the time-washing machine? Like, is he back in 2015? Like, how are we talking about the rise of Cumbtown in 2026? Helen, I got online too late to even find out who the fuck Cumbtown is. Like, I've heard the name, but, like, you're gonna have to explain to me who these guys are.
00:38:19
Speaker
Okay. The extent of what I know about Comptown is really that they're a podcast in the dirtbag left. But again, this is not a movement that I think of as like, oh, it's post-woke.
00:38:31
Speaker
I mean, to some extent, they might describe themselves as post-woke or post-cancel culture or whatever. But it's not a movement that is... on the rise in 2026. It's really a 2017 at the latest is when their rise was.
00:38:49
Speaker
It was a response to, and it it is partly the thing he's saying, like, oh, we can say racial slurs and have fun with it, right? There is an element of that level of, okay, we're left-wing and we're, you know, leftist. We're going to have a left political analysis. We're Ranging from you know Democratic Socialist and just outright Communist and you know all these different variant right like there's some variety there's some diversity in like maybe the political analysis but they're basically unified by willingness to say slurs or this notion that like oh there is something censorious there is something of the killjoy in like leftist politics and
00:39:29
Speaker
And so we're gonna fight back against that and we're gonna be dirtbags. And so, I mean, that's why they're called Cumbtown is like, oh yeah, ha ha, like we can call ourselves Cumbtown. Like we're cool, we're not like, you know. And it to me, it always felt very like Hello Fellow Kids vibes. because it's like, I don't know, someone who is adopting the the name Cumbtown. It just doesn't appeal to me at all.
00:39:50
Speaker
But also I'm a little bit of a killjoy. I'll all cop to that. So maybe it's just not for me. Yeah, that podcast is not for Arch Linux users. I've been thinking about this ever since we, so, you know, we hung out in person. And of course, what did we do when we were hanging out in person? We watched the Andrei Tarkovsky movie, Stalker.
00:40:09
Speaker
which you pointed out is about two intellectuals who are so pretentious that they ruin the common man's ability to feel hope and that this is kind of what our podcast is and i've been kind of worried about that like is this what we're doing are we just ruining the common man's ability to feel hope right am i just like shitting all over cum town meanwhile like the common man is out there and they need cum town to like make it through yeah the common the common men yearn for their sure of cum town cum town and bread that's what they need Okay, so I don't know. I think you're kind of buying into Nick's premise here, actually, when you talk about how Cumbtown or whatever is what appeals to the common man. No, I know. Actually, Cumbtown appeals to basically nobody. That's why I don't know who the fuck they are. I was being very tongue-in-cheek there. I don't actually think that the common man needs Cumbtown, right? But that's...
00:40:58
Speaker
That's part of the Comptown pitch as well. Like if you go and you read about like the dirtbag left or whatever, this is how a lot of the figures in this sphere are pitching themselves. It's like, I mean, almost very tied into what I was saying before. Like we're leftists and we'll do a leftist political analysis, but we have fun and we'll give you the kind of enjoyment that these kinds of alt-right things are also offering. And so it's almost explicitly a like counter to...
00:41:26
Speaker
right-wing populism of that kind of enjoyment variety like but but on the left i wonder if they're on some level rogan adjacent because what's going to happen in this next clip is that he starts talking about this bilzerian and bilzerian is this rich influencer slash fail son slash poker player who certainly appears to work out a lot his main claim to fame is posting about having lost a lot of money on poker and appearing on joe rogan sometimes you really get the sense that nick's whole method of calibrating like the political temperature is kind of just listening to joe rogan
00:42:17
Speaker
But if a Democrat in the future, like a Ryan Grimm or a Max Blumenthal or a a Glenn Greenwald, that sort of person steps up and says, you know, I'm kind of like a libertarian on
Hypothetical Democrat Strategy
00:42:33
Speaker
guns and I'm kind of a libertarian on social issues. I think that's a culture war, but I'm left wing on economics. I want to I want to eat the rich and.
00:42:43
Speaker
and I'm a non-interventionist on foreign policy, and I'm Israel critical, and I don't hate white men, but I'm just sort of tolerant of the diversity in the country.
00:42:55
Speaker
A Democrat with that kind of program can win a guy like Dan Balzerian, can win a guy like Joe Rogan, can win a guy like, you know, maybe many of the people that were watching that halftime show.
00:43:10
Speaker
do you want to just respond to the concept of Glenn Greenwald winning winning over the body politic by adopting but adopting this new flavor of woke, dark woke?
00:43:22
Speaker
It seems totally disconnected from reality, but of course it's all part of this version of reality where the body politic is Joe Rogan and then these other people I haven't heard of. Like, oh, you should adopt this policy because then you're going to be able to win over a guy like Bilzerian. And it's like, okay, how many guys like Bilzerian are there? Yeah.
00:43:44
Speaker
And for that matter, like, okay, we all know Rogan. We all know Rogan's name. I'm not going to say, you know, you know, behind Odium, like he probably has the most successful podcast in the world. He's catching up. I'm not convinced that means Rogan's politics are the median politics, let alone this obsession the Democrats have had for several cycles that they have yet to process as a losing one, that the way to win is to find the median politics and then adopt that. I mean, that's also just not how politics works. So there's lots of different critiques you can make there. But yeah, what he's offering is just like not a political analysis, right? Which is quite in contrast, I think, to his pose of being on the outside of the outside and having a clear view of the entire system from above, as it were, because I mean, so far, what I'm getting a picture of is a guy who basically just watches Joe Rogan gets mad. And then when he feels like it logs on to a streaming platform that isn't Twitch because he can't.
00:44:46
Speaker
get on twitch because he's not within their terms of service and then he just goes on rants about whatever is bugging him yeah i think that's pretty and so the only thing is that as i'm thinking like that's who this guy is i'm like okay keep in mind everyone who works in the white house is a fan yeah this is this is what so much of our policy is actually being driven by is this guy this show yeah i can feel it hitting
00:45:19
Speaker
Okay, then he starts talking a bit about the enjoyment that he used to get from the movement. And it says something I think quite revealing about why he thinks Trump took off.
Admiration for Trump's Celebrity Status
00:45:29
Speaker
And the reason that Trump was able to electrify the movement is because he came from New York.
00:45:35
Speaker
Okay. He didn't come from the country music awards. No offense. He came from New York city and actual real respectable world-class city.
00:45:46
Speaker
And he came from Hollywood and he was famous and a billionaire. And he talked like a celebrity and he looked like a celebrity and he had aura like a celebrity.
00:45:58
Speaker
And for young people like myself and for young tech guys and young extremely online guys and trolls and libertarians, the reason that we were enamored with Trump is because he was progressive, forward thinking, sexy, exciting. Yes, there was sex appeal.
00:46:19
Speaker
Why? Because he has a supermodel wife, because he has a skyscraper with his name on it that's made out of gold, because he has a fucking plane with his name on it, because he has a TV show, because he's been in Hollywood movies, because he's famous.
00:46:36
Speaker
Okay. And that is what was exciting. It was this idea that we were not dorky losers and How much of the show Sex and the City have you watched? Zero.
00:46:48
Speaker
However, I have listened to the worst idea of all time. And so I have heard Sex and the City 2 be reviewed. So Sex and the City 2 does not very prominently feature Big, who is Carrie's, at that point, husband.
00:47:05
Speaker
But okay Carrie meets Big in the first episode of Sex and the City. And then Big is this guy that's like in and out of her life, and then they end up together at the end, and a lot of fans didn't like this, and whatever. And then, very funny, he...
00:47:20
Speaker
dies in the first episode of In Just Like That, which a lot of people were happy about because they hated Big. Big was explicitly a Trump figure or understood to be a Trump figure at the beginning. He's like very wealthy. He's like a real estate mogul.
00:47:35
Speaker
I think now looking back, it's easy to be like, oh, this idea that Trump had sex appeal, that's wild. But
00:47:45
Speaker
That's kind of not entirely off. Yeah. And I mean, if you looked at like political cartoons from far right figures back then, even more than they do now.
00:47:58
Speaker
Depictions of Trump often had him as sort of like an Adonis figure, just incredibly built, the golden hair waving and flowing. And it's also easy to forget that he didn't used to be just like the mumbling Shagoff that he is now. He actually used to be like very...
00:48:20
Speaker
quick on the mic. he He used to have a lot of charisma. I mean, he's going through like mental deterioration with age, like and the stress of the job, whatever like the things are like he is not mentally where he used to be.
00:48:35
Speaker
Then he proceeds to his next topic, which is about the Epstein disclosures that were going on at the time.
Epstein Scandal Discussion
00:48:45
Speaker
This Epstein scandal, this is like bigger than Watergate. It really is.
00:48:51
Speaker
in terms of its significance, in terms of the actual crime that was committed, this is like a Watergate-level scandal that, mark my words, it's going to bring down the Trump government. It just is. This sank the Trump government in 2025.
00:49:08
Speaker
If there was any momentum, if there was any forward momentum in the first year of the administration, that memo alone grounded to a halt.
00:49:21
Speaker
He's talking about a memo there about he claims that the DOJ released a memo saying there were no further files to disclose, which is incorrect. He's misremembering. What they said was that there wasn't a client list per se.
00:49:39
Speaker
And now that we've gotten the files, this is something they're just not going to recover from. This is a mortal wound. because it raises so many questions, it shows that they are liars, and it destroys any confidence in what this government set out to do with its mandate, which is to drain the swamp and fight corruption and stand up for the forgotten men and women.
00:50:04
Speaker
And I hate to say it, but this Joel Ossoff in Georgia, he's he's coined the term, this is the Epstein class. The Howard Lutnicks, the Jared Kushners, the Ronald Lauders,
00:50:16
Speaker
the these are The Peter Thiel's, these are the Epstein class. Fitting, apropos, totally on the money. Huh. That kind of doesn't make any sense.
00:50:31
Speaker
First of all, it's funny that he's saying, like, that memo is the thing that ground the momentum to the halt, but then you had to pause it and be like, oh, this is the memo he's talking about, which he's also wrong about what it says. Again, he's just not really connected to what's going on in some way.
00:50:47
Speaker
I'm not under any illusion that he's being sincere or genuine in any way, but it's funny that he's taking the tack of saying,
00:50:58
Speaker
oh this proves that they're hypocritical that they're criminal in this way
00:51:08
Speaker
i don't know this just doesn't seem like the kind of principle that he really cares about i guess a couple things going on here so first is when he talks about the epstein class Please do not ignore that he mentioned a sequence of Jewish people. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was going to get to that. like He's... ah Yeah. He's usually not that dog-whistly. As in, he's usually... yeah He doesn't bother with the dog whistle. He just says it.
00:51:39
Speaker
But that's that's definitely part of what he's getting at. Second... You know, I can only show you so much, but there's plenty of discussion of the whole Epstein thing. And he does say that Trump has surrounded himself with these people who are potentially involved with Epstein's crimes, and that ought to undermine your trust in him.
00:52:02
Speaker
But he never talks about the possibility of Trump himself being implicated in these crimes. That is off the table. Huh. Remember, this is a guy who had dinner with Trump himself. And I think he views not criticizing Trump in such a direct way as preserving future access to power.
00:52:24
Speaker
Viable targets include his underlings, but not him. Right. But we've seen the extent to which he's been able to say like, oh, none of that shit matters. We win. Like what?
00:52:38
Speaker
There's a certain element where it's like, what are the accusations of against Epstein that he actually cares about, right? Like, I could see him in the next breath based on the stuff he said. And the fact that he's openly been like, yeah, I'm a white nationalist. I support the Christian white guys. Like, I could see him being like, yeah, I mean, it's it's totally cool. Like, this guy is like, he's got fucking sex appeal, right? He's got an island where he fucks kids. That's fucking sex appeal, right? Like, what...
00:53:07
Speaker
Where is this coming from? What is his objection to to Epstein? I mean, it's it's the Judaism, right? like Yeah, I think that's mostly it. It's literally just like, I can forgive child trafficking, but I draw the line at being Jewish.
00:53:22
Speaker
God, that's what it is, isn't it? Oh my God. Yeah, I think so. And the fact that he the fact that he forgives Trump for this implicitly, yeah I think really highlights it.
00:53:34
Speaker
Oh, Helen, you have a pained look on your face. Oh, I'm not doing good. It's okay. The show is going to improve from here. Actually, Fuentes is going to have an awakening. He's going to realize that white nationalism is bad and that he doesn't believe in hierarchy anymore.
00:53:49
Speaker
Just kidding. He's going to get into his super chats. So a super chat is when you pay the streamer money. And then they read your comment on the air. And if they feel like it, they respond to it. Actually, a robot reads the comments.
00:54:04
Speaker
Here's one of his first ones.
Meritocracy and Disdain for Poverty
00:54:06
Speaker
Minimum for a super chat is $20, by the way. 5% $20. about the halftime show, but you've really won me over with the idea of a white Latino, holy American empire. American empire.
00:54:15
Speaker
Northern Calgo is $400. All the poor people complaining about being broke. And instead of aspiring to be rich, they want everyone to be broke like them. True. Thank you for the huge super chat. I appreciate it.
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah, poor people, honestly, they just need to get the right attitude. Maybe maybe if they had the right attitude, they wouldn't be so poor. Poor people are always blaming everybody else for their own problems, crying about not having money.
00:54:42
Speaker
Did poor people ever stop and think that if they spent half as much time working hard as they did crying about being poor, maybe they'd be rich? Of course they didn't think about that because they're stupid too.
00:54:56
Speaker
cause they're also, yeah, you got to keep in mind, they're also very low IQ. So no, they didn't even think of that. Thank you for the huge super chat. We love the rich. We love the rich on the show. Thank you for the massive super chat. It's so true. All poor people do is talk about being poor. I'm like, shut the fuck up.
00:55:14
Speaker
Don't you ever talk about anything cool? Is this all you people do is sit around and talk about how poor you are? Talk about a buzzkill. So negative all the time.
00:55:27
Speaker
All they do is sit around and talk about how broke they are, all their problems. I don't know, have money. i don't know, try getting a job or something.
00:55:38
Speaker
So yeah, don't know. I couldn't relate. I can't relate to that mindset. But thank you for the huge super chat. I appreciate it. You know, i was kind of on board until he got to the whole like get a job thing. I was like, yeah, we have the wrong attitude, right? If you think about it, I think it only costs like $400 to get the materials to build a guillotine at Home Depot. Like if we think about it, if we put our minds to it and we had the right attitude, I think we could really turn things around.
00:56:06
Speaker
See, it was like a it was like a garden path sentence, Helen. You really thought it was going one way, but... ah Yeah, I mean, he was talking about the right attitude, and I was thinking revolutionary class consciousness. And then he started talking about getting a job, and I was like, I don't know what he's talking about. Just to belabor the obvious, he's never had a fucking job. No, he doesn't even he can't even show up on time for his work as a fucking chudge.
00:56:31
Speaker
He showed up two and a half hours late to his job where he does nothing. like Helen, I'm going to play you some of... Okay, so there's like a video loop that plays from 9pm until whenever the show starts.
00:56:50
Speaker
And I'm just going to play you a little bit of the video loop, okay?
00:57:09
Speaker
No one's allowed to say that the blood is quintessential part of this, that the blood of our people is something that is essential, that we are different, that America was different because we are different.
00:57:38
Speaker
Palantir is an AI data analytics company. It's two and a half hours of this shit. People are sitting there watching this fucking video play for two and a half hours waiting for the chance to throw their fucking money at him so it can be like, I fucking hate poor people. Now I understand why hate you losers why he shows up late. That's white nationalist hypno.
00:58:01
Speaker
like People are sitting there, right? He's just got the droning like... America is different because we were different. Our blood is special. Your blood is special, right? Just like on loop.
00:58:14
Speaker
Yeah. This is like a kink community. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Oh my God. And a lot of these clips and a lot of these clips, he's, given these sound effects as if he's like speaking to a huge audience at like a Hitler rally or something. And you can hear like little cheers in the backgrounds. ah Yeah. So that's the content you get to enjoy if you show up for the Nick Fuentes show on time. Okay. Do you want to hear some more super chat?
00:58:41
Speaker
I mean, no, but if that's the next thing on the, on the doc, like, yeah. Oh yeah. It's pretty much all super chat from here on out. Someone sets them off again about the alternative halftime and the bad bunny thing again.
00:58:55
Speaker
I mean, are half the people complaining about the halftime show aren't even white nationalists. They don't even know what the fuck they are. They just have these grievances.
00:59:06
Speaker
They don't care if America, do you think Megyn Kelly gives a shit if America's white or not? Megyn Kelly is bitching about it. Like you think Megyn Kelly is based? Megyn Kelly screaming, the Super Bowl should be unifying. It should be in English. You think Megyn Kelly's a white nationalist? She isn't.
00:59:24
Speaker
She is. She's just pandering to like, I don't know, this like really bitter, like white resentment politics. And um i've I've always said this. I want to imagine a better future.
00:59:41
Speaker
I'm actually a progressive. And this kind of like Oliver Anthony, Matt Walsh, like knuckle dragging, like bitter ass ass face thing. We're all going to be grumpy and mad.
00:59:55
Speaker
I've never been on board with that. He's using white nationalist the way
01:00:07
Speaker
Like the way we talk about feminists, like he's trying to gatekeep white nationalists, right? Like we have frequently had to make a distinction in our shows episodes. We talk about like a feminist figure, especially when we go to pre 19th century, like before we had.
01:00:28
Speaker
movements that were explicitly calling themselves feminists, you were trying to say like, okay, like, do we want to, how do we want to handle like that there are movements of people who identify themselves as feminists, that but that we wouldn't consider to be really feminists versus like people who don't use the term feminist, but that we would think of as proto-feminist movements, right?
01:00:45
Speaker
He's doing the same thing with white nationalists because that's really his ideology. And so he's like, she's not a white nationalist. Meanwhile, we're like, yeah, she definitely is. But I mean, she doesn't call herself a white nationalist, I think.
01:00:56
Speaker
So yeah, you know, it's funny. Like there's there's all these ah there's all these boundaries of these ideologies. Yeah, I was thinking about this a lot before the episode, actually. And I declined to respect his definition. Oh, absolutely.
01:01:13
Speaker
Not because I think his description is based on faulty factual premises, because I don't think it's really based on factual premises at all. I think he's just trying to keep white nationalism gatekept not so much as an ideology, but as kind of like a social group. He views being exclusionary she as part of what he does. It's not functioning the same because we're saying, right, when we' we're trying to say, like, oh, you know, is this person a feminist? Like, we're trying to do some kind of ideological analysis. Whereas, I mean, we've seen the extent to which he needs to be an outsider, right? He needs to sell the idea that he is being persecuted for the quarter zips. And you need to buy a USA quarter zip because they are trying to stop you from getting a USA quarter zip, right? Like...
01:02:02
Speaker
But he's never going to give up on trying to sell you the quarter set. He's too brave. matter how much they try to stop you, he's not going to stop selling them. Okay, so then he gets into the clavicular thing a little bit. And I thought this was kind of funny because, i don't know, it's just kind of like a crossover between these two strains of incel.
Arrest of Clavicular and Incel Culture
01:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like a political attack.
01:02:26
Speaker
Two felonies? Why? Because he had Adderall in the club or something? Yeah, Clavicular was recently arrested for one in a long string of crimes. I'm honestly surprised he didn't get prosecuted for the time when he hit another guy with his car, another streamer. But anyway.
01:02:48
Speaker
So, free Clavicular. But I heard in Arizona they just don't play around with that kind of stuff. it just I don't know, that doesn't seem like a big deal to me. He used a fake ID. He's in a club. I think he had some Adderall on him.
01:03:02
Speaker
two felonies and a misdemeanor. I think the people that charged him were probably ugly. I think that's honestly, you have to admit they see like a young, good looking guy, live streamer with some motion and they want to take a guy like that and they want to humble him.
01:03:23
Speaker
They want to take away the swag. They hate to see the confidence. I think it's also worth saying it is funny to see this crossover. We should be clear, though, that... At the root, we're still talking about an ideology that is based around misogyny and therefore strongly affiliated with the far right. Yeah. And not even misogyny, but also straightforwardly racism, right? Because we... The looks-maxing stuff, like, a lot of these concepts...
01:03:50
Speaker
you can kind of trace back their origins to phrenology and race science. So it's kind of like, are you the kind of mid 20th century white national, you know, Nazism strain of which, you know, they're obviously also highly related to each other, but are you,
01:04:09
Speaker
that kind of white nationalist or are you like the 19th century race scientist through looks maxing kind of white nationalist right like it's sort of which era of racism are you really drawing your aesthetic from I guess I mean that's a little bit of like a simplifying way of putting it but These things are both highly Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of like Dracula meets the wolf. Yeah, right? It's like... Both of these are coming from pretty similar backgrounds, and there's some pretty notable storytelling similarities going on here. Yeah, so there's some aesthetic differences. There's some set dressing that's different. But fundamentally, we're talking about...
01:04:48
Speaker
ah very misage you know very misogynist worldviews that are also motivated by these like very racialized narratives. And yeah, so it makes sense that they kind of form this coherent ecosystem together and that there would be this kind of overlap and you know that the Groypers would be saying free clinicular, right? Okay, this next clip, honestly, i mostly wanted it because...
01:05:12
Speaker
Most of the clips that I'm excerting here are kind of like when Nick breaks into the flow of the super chats. But the vast majority of the time is just this waterfall of money coming in. And I just wanted to give you like a little impression that. I'm entering the waterfall.
01:05:28
Speaker
Not sure what that reference is, but thanks.
01:05:33
Speaker
probably go to midwest gun range or how about o parkk nick nick you have to start meeting with grow ibers yawning face emoji you can't keep us away also when does my hat arrive jill q sent twenty dollars wouldn't it be cool if kada owen's astra projected to wakanda like forever and never came back dominican roy percent twenty five dollars hey romeo should ani perz be expecting any mail this week winking face emoji red heart emji smiling face with heartsyering Yeah, you I
01:06:01
Speaker
yeah i've met them too thanks for telling me thank you for the big super chat i appreciate wall sent twenty dollars your boy alex jones going off all day that he has one hundred percent proof that epstein made jerky from gentile girls and starved babies to perform oral sex also his bank is bail do you believe alex in this Uh, no, I don't. Pints app sent $100. I am going to kill myself if my wife dies.
01:06:19
Speaker
Okay, thank you for the big super chat. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. You know the scene in The Matrix where they show the guys who like watch The Matrix and they're just like so keyed in that they don't even see the code anymore? They just like know what's going on?
01:06:31
Speaker
That must be what it's like for people who listen to Fuentes regularly and can like interpret that. i My experience of that was like staring at the stream of code. like i What?
01:06:42
Speaker
What is happening? Like... hu Yeah, it's just people sending him inscrutable, like often like pizza gate coded shit. And he's like, oh, that's interesting. Or like yeah or something like that. Or like intensely personal shit. like What is that about? like I'm going to kill myself if my wife dies? What are you talking about? And he's just like, oh yeah, thanks for the donation.
01:07:06
Speaker
and then And then the amount of money coming in. He's clearing 6K an episode easily. Just on these super chats. Okay, so now I'm seeing... Not the subscriptions, all that sort of Now I'm seeing why he's like, I want to get out of Rumble, because I'm sure Rumble is like taking a cut of that. Yeah, absolutely. Then he talks a little bit about the concept of audience capture.
01:07:25
Speaker
Honestly, the audience capture is the worst thing. People start, people watch the show and then they think they own you. You know, they think that they can predict everything you're going to say.
01:07:36
Speaker
They think that, you know, suddenly they think that you work for them. And like, my job is to tell you what you want to hear. My job is to say the right wing set of opinions and be on the team and, um, fuck those people. Like, I don't work for you.
01:07:54
Speaker
I work for the truth. I work for me. And so people come around and they expect a certain thing and then they don't get what they expect. And then they start to say, oh, my gosh, I don't like this anymore. I don't like what I'm getting all of a sudden. And that's just the kind of low IQ thing that I never wanted to be a part of. I don't I don't want that. I don't need that.
01:08:15
Speaker
So he's familiar with the notion of audience capture.
Audience Capture and Independence
01:08:22
Speaker
However, he's not experiencing it. He's too good for it. He's immune to it. I was actually thinking about this kind of thing earlier also. How familiar are you with like Bo Burnham?
01:08:33
Speaker
I feel like he was really big in like 2020. He came out with that special inside. I'm not. i've I've watched that song a few times about, you know, like a funny thing happened. Yeah.
01:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. And that that makes me cry every time. But other than that, I really have no familiarity. He was a YouTuber at first and he just like made some silly songs and he had an interesting kind of experience of...
01:08:58
Speaker
becoming super famous and then kind of not knowing how to handle the fame and exactly that kind of audience expectation. He had an early comedy special on on set on Comedy Central and then he kind of dropped off for a while and then he had a couple other specials and he got really into this like highly choreographed and really intricate kind of show and then that kind of kept growing and growing and then inside is this like really you know he didn't do it live. And so he was really able to play with all these things where like everything is like minutely planned. And part of what he's doing with that form is he's trying to say, i want to calm my anxiety about or or think about the fact that like you are all coming and giving me this stage and I want to earn the stage.
01:09:39
Speaker
In many ways, it's kind of like the opposite of this like Nick Fuentes thing, right? Like he talks a lot about like in order to kind of handle this properly, he needs to like have this division and then also really feel like, okay, I'm putting the effort into the performance to like,
01:09:51
Speaker
be worth your attention. But then i want to kind of seal it off. Whereas like Nick Fuentes is saying like, Oh, I'm going to show up whenever i'm just gonna like insult all of you. If you think you can expect anything from me, like that's audience capture.
01:10:05
Speaker
He has too much contempt for the audience to even be interested in enforcing a division between his professional and personal self. That's too much effort. And so that's where I'm saying, like, there's this interesting thing, because like, part of what Bo Burnham is saying is it' also it's for his mental health, right? It's like for his, right? He actually stopped touring because he was having these like panic attacks before going on stage.
01:10:25
Speaker
There's something like deeply unhealthy. And there's something deeply like destabilizing about this influencer lifestyle. And it's like interesting to see the way that it's like dovetailing with white nationalist politics here.
01:10:41
Speaker
There is something to be said about, like, these don't necessarily need to be linked, like the self-loathing and the loathing for the audience, and then the far-right politics, but something about it is connected, and I'm, like, trying to put the pieces together. Like, there is something going on there.
01:10:54
Speaker
I mean, it's very Freudian. Like, incels are people who are obsessed with their sense of rejection by society, are obsessed with the sense of low status they have in relation to society. And then they play out this drama in miniature with Nick. Right. It's recapitulating their maybe I need to walk back some of my total disavowal of psychoanalysis on this podcast and admit that, like, yeah, sometimes that's sometimes psychoanalysis is correct. Sometimes.
01:11:24
Speaker
Sometimes analysts are cooking. Like, I think it's, I think it is pretty directly Freudian. I think you're right. Like, that's what the dynamic is. Okay. He gets back on his Rogan kick.
01:11:36
Speaker
GE Narrations outlet sent $20. You're absolutely right about the chuds. I was at a watch party with mostly early Gen X boomers, and they all love the halftime show. Some even danced a fiercely repulsive exhibition indeed. Okay. Let me point out also, by the way, that the way he uses chud and his audience uses chud is kind of the same way that you and I as leftists use the term liberal.
01:11:55
Speaker
Yeah. It's these people who are more to the center than us, and also these people that buy into this ideology of reflexive group affiliation, of fascination with celebrity, like that sort of thing. It's it's very much in parallel. Yeah.
01:12:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, well I don't think it's repulsive. I mean, we just need to live in reality. And lately it feels like the right wing are the ones not living in reality. It's kind of depressing that, you know, as much as Ryan Grimm irritates the shit out of me when he says stuff like Ilhan Omar is trying to liberate you.
01:12:34
Speaker
As much as that irritates me. It seems like a guy like that actually has his finger on the pulse more than Tucker and Candace and basically everybody put together on our side who are just like unlikable, totally insane, in denial, delusional.
01:12:51
Speaker
I'm telling you, dude, ro Joe Rogan is a litmus test. He's not fucking with this stuff. And look, that doesn't mean we need to like, oh, no, Joe Rogan doesn't like it.
01:13:04
Speaker
um But he's a bellwether and we need to live in reality. We actually do want to attract normal people. Again, his conception of what is normal is just like completely tied into Rogan. Like you can see his media diet just bleeding through directly into the show.
01:13:21
Speaker
how often does he talk about Ryan Grimm? And like, who is Ryan Grimm? Like, I only know him as like, yeah, so Ryan, he's a journalist. Yeah, he's a former intercept guy. And so kind of the natural thing for it would be to classify him with sort of the Greenwalds and Matt Taibbi's, he seems to have managed to like keep out of the post-left much more successfully than they have. That is, Greenwald and Taibbi useful idiots for the right.
01:13:51
Speaker
They present themselves as leftists, and they had a long history as leftist journalists. But... all they do these days is critique the left on behalf of power. They're effectively right-wingers who don't believe themselves to be as such. And Ryan Grimm does still like just like completely legitimate reporting on Gaza, that kind of thing, in a way that is often a ahead of mainstream media outlets. He founded this site DropSite News, which is basically like his own personal like intercept spinoff kind of thing. Personally, I still find him like kind of sus, like, but I can't classify him as like, just like a right winger. He seems to occupy so much space in, at least, I mean, this is all just the clips you've picked, right? Like, who knows if we actually went through, but whenever Fuentes wants to, like, reach for a list of leftists, like, Grimm is on the list.
01:14:48
Speaker
i think it's I think it's just because he's big on X. He's big on X, and maybe Rogan talks about him. Because, like, again, like, I'm just not in this Joe Rogan world. Like, I've never listened to Rogan. It's interesting, because I definitely think of myself as someone who's really online. you are extremely online.
01:15:05
Speaker
You often message me on Discord. You're like, I'm just thinking about how online I am. Like, bitch, then stop messaging me. I'm being slandered, but I'm like, there's versions of being more online than me. That's crazy.
01:15:19
Speaker
Oh yeah, Nick Quint is so much more online than you are, Helen. It's astounding the extent to which you can just start to believe that all these people who are big on some social media platform that you're on are actually that big in real life.
01:15:36
Speaker
Like, I think there's two errors to make, right? And one is the one that a lot of like mainstream journalism makes, which is like, oh, that's all on Twitter, it doesn't matter. And clearly that's not true because these people all run the White House. Like...
01:15:48
Speaker
ah they clearly there's political consequences but at the same time these people all think that like what's happening in the average American's head is this kind of like battle between like don't Ryan Grimm and Glenn Greenwald and then Bill Zarian right like who are these guys you think you think like the ascendant political force in the left in America is come town in 2026 like you're just not connected to reality and it's hard sometimes i mean i struggle to like find this thread of like okay i don't want to just be like oh none of this shit matters it's all online because again like the fbi is being run by a podcaster right now like i don't i don't know how to handle this new political moment sarah i don't think there is a way to handle it i think you just have to suffer oh then i'm good yeah okay matt on it on it okay one last snide remark before we move on is that he describes joe rogan as a bellwether do you know what a bellwether is no i can't remember
01:16:47
Speaker
It's like a leading indicator, right? Well, I looked it up and it's literally like it's the lead sheep in the pack who has a bell on them. Oh, that's funny. yeah And that way all the other sheep can follow. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, I remember leading indicator, but that's really funny. I didn't remember that that was the... That's so funny.
01:17:05
Speaker
I'm almost surprised that he's not talking about like Ezra Klein. Huh. Ezra Klein. Ezra Klein is like the less online... pull for me, I think, because first of all, Ezra Klein is very online, but when I try to think about like who are of the people that I know who I think are not online,
01:17:29
Speaker
who are the kind of like liberal he's talking about, maybe to the extent that there is a kind of liberal he's talking about, because again, he's kind of just saying whatever. Yeah, it's just weird to go for Ryan Grimm over Ezra Klein to me. I guess I'm just confused because you're describing him as like terminally online and having his epistemology just completely locked down by that experience. And then you're like, why isn't he talking about this not as online guy?
01:17:54
Speaker
Like, think your question is answered. No, what I'm is, like, no, that's my point, is, like, that's the indicator to me that he does have this really online, like, epistemology is, like, if he actually were paying attention to, like, broader politics and what, like...
01:18:08
Speaker
quote-unquote normies are talking about, like, he would not be going to Ryan Grimm. Like, those guys do exist, and, like, one of them is Ezra Klein, I think. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, fair. yeah Right? That's my point, right? I'm not saying this is a paradox. I'm saying, like, this is an example of exactly this phenomenon. Yeah, yeah. I mean, i'm I don't fall prey to that kind of thing. That's why I get online every day, and the first thing I do is I look up Ezra Klein's newest column, and I listen to the podcast, and and i enjoy it while I hug my Ezra Klein body pillow, and
01:18:39
Speaker
write a little email to Ezra Klein, write some posts and praise of Ezra Klein. If I had a nickel for every time a family member or like acquaintance recommended an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast to me, I wouldn't have to worry about my attitude so much. Like I would be quite so poor.
01:19:00
Speaker
Not that I'm poor, but I don't know. Diet is working. You lifting weights? Thank you for the big super chat. You lifted weights? No, I'm not lifting weights. Thank you for the big super chat. No motivation. He doesn't look like he's lifting weights. Why bother? What's even the point? What's the use?
01:19:17
Speaker
Who do I need to look good for? What's even the use? I'm a rizzless, unfuckable chud. What is it even all for? Lifting weights? I'd prefer not to.
01:19:30
Speaker
You have a look on your face, Helen. Well, first of all, when you were like, he doesn't look like he lifted weights, I was like, oh, I don't have an image. Like when you say like Nick Fuentes, like what does he look like? So I just Googled him to see a picture.
01:19:43
Speaker
But then I'm seeing this photo of him and he's just like some guy and he's there talking about like, I'm a rizzless, unfuckable chud. And he's just some guy. Yeah, he's just just an unremarkable looking dude. Yeah. Yeah.
01:19:57
Speaker
I'd rather not. I thought you were something I already i wanted to hear my opinion reinforced the super bowl is in america weing england in america good point good point i've heard this opinion ten thousand times this weekend but i wanted to hear you say it harder that See, that's why I hate you.
01:20:28
Speaker
That's why I hate you people. I hate... I don't like... Ugly, stupid freaks. I hate... I don't like... You okay, Helen? You're kind of freaking out over there. Here's why I don't like you people.
01:20:47
Speaker
Because, you know, so the Super Bowl halftime shows in Spanish. Stop the presses. Call the National Guard. Everybody is saying exactly the same thing.
01:21:00
Speaker
spanish It should be in English.
Language Dominance Debate
01:21:02
Speaker
now fuck our The country speaks English. The song should be in English. And okay, okay. So we've all heard that. We all sort of agree. Okay, we all kind of agree. We've all heard that.
01:21:15
Speaker
Everybody tune into the show because they want to hear me say it, though. We all sort of agree. We've all heard that. And you want to tune into the show to hear me say it?
01:21:30
Speaker
The show should be in English. I think the show is in Spanish. That's not English. The show should be in English. and you Why? Why do you want to...
01:21:42
Speaker
You want to get up on the coffee table? Yeah! Yeah! The show should be in English! I mean, like, why?
01:21:52
Speaker
i don't know. It's just so low IQ. I have been doing this for long enough in my life that I'm just sick of Like, I'm just tired of it. I'm sick of it.
01:22:04
Speaker
You know? um me to get so you kick Everybody can get up out of their recliner chair. You can get your fat ass up off the chair. Yeah! Whatever.
01:22:16
Speaker
Who gives a shit? Who gives a shit about any of it? Do you have any thoughts,
Critique of White Nationalist Streamer
01:22:21
Speaker
Helen? It's hard to know what to go with first. There's a lot in there. Yeah, there is.
01:22:28
Speaker
You know the thing when you're training a new puppy?
01:22:34
Speaker
I haven't done this, so please explain. Where when it Like, if the puppy... Like, shits on the floor, you're supposed to, like, kind of put its face in it to be like, this is bad, you shouldn't do this, right? It may have, like, reinforcing... i felt this huge impulse listening to this that, like, what the fuck do you mean? Why are you tuning in to listen to me say that?
01:23:01
Speaker
That's your whole deal. Your whole deal is you're a white nationalist streamer. People are going to log in and you're going to be talking about some stupid bullshit like, oh, that he's completely fucking right that there's nothing lamer than someone ranting about how the Super Bowl halftime show should be in English.
01:23:17
Speaker
But that's his fucking political ideology. Like, you literally made that fucking bed. And then you shat in it. And now you have to sleep in it. Like, yeah, like the answer to why people would want the Super Bowl to be in English is completely obvious.
01:23:31
Speaker
It's because they're fucking racist. That's what you do, man. That's thing. And he's saying like, oh, why do you want it to be in English? He's saying, why do you want to hear me say that it should be? Right. He even says like, we agree. Right. He's not even an objecting to the, like, racism of that. He's not even objecting to the fact that that's lame. He's just saying, like, oh, I don't like this feeling that I'm having now where I realize the whole thing is prescripted. This whole fucking thing is meaningless. I'm going on to rumble a website that nobody has heard of outside of his followers and the fucking Groypers, who he fucking hates.
01:24:10
Speaker
And they all know the things he has to say. And so
Trap of Audience Expectations
01:24:15
Speaker
it's not even like he sincerely disagrees with it. It's not even like he's having any kind of like, i you know, let's not mistake this for any kind of pang of conscience that like, oh, I'm starting to feel bad about how lame this is. Or maybe I should re rethink this principle. No, he just hates feeling obligated to go through the motions of his own opinions.
01:24:34
Speaker
Yeah. He's just bored and he should be bored because he's a fucking boring guy And he's realizing that even though, I mean, even though we say like, yeah, like all these White House guys, all these people in in politics right now, like people running our politics are all Groypers.
01:24:55
Speaker
At the same time, we should realize like he's not really in control of what Groypers believe, right? Like it's not like he gets to really dictate, right He's not really in a position of power in the sense that if he wanted to turn around tomorrow and say, actually, we should believe this or actually, right? He's just reaching for the like lowest combo denominator, easiest fucking thing that he can just log on and just say. And sometimes you realize that that's fucking boring and he's like a lame piece of shit. And like he is a Rizlis chud.
01:25:25
Speaker
Yeah, he hates being audience captured. But he is. And it doesn't matter that he says, I'm not audience captured. I'm not going to regurgitate this opinion that you've heard a thousand fucking times.
01:25:38
Speaker
Like in the long term, 99% of what he says is going to be aligned with his audience. It's going to be the same boring fucking racist garbage over and over and over again. And he knows that. And he knows he can't change that. He can't do anything truly innovative or his audience will fucking leave him. And he's stuck with that. He has to live with that.
01:25:57
Speaker
And the craziest thing is that actually that objection, that moment of like, oh, I'm going to stand against what this expectation is, that's also part of the product. Like even that like revolt of his own like brain saying like, hey, this is fucking boring. Let's do something interesting. Like all that serves to do is to convince the Groypers that they're actually cooler than the rest of the right wing because they follow this maverick guy who says it like it is. And it just lends this air of authenticity to the rest of it. So even this like objection, like it's all just, it's equally boring, right? There's nothing more boring
Paradox of Superiority and Misery
01:26:34
Speaker
than this type of guy saying, oh, this is boring. I'm going to say something else. He's just trapped and like he should be. And it's not like a pang of conscience. It's not this moment of clarity. It's just like part of it. It's part of his like fucking brain dead racist nonsense. Yeah. And also, we were talking earlier about this Freudian experience where the incels experience rejection and subordination to society, and then they play it out through Nick. But it's also kind of going in the other direction in that they experience this sense of superiority that Nick has created.
01:27:11
Speaker
to them the sense of being ahead of the ideological curve of being outside. And then that experience of having that with Nick lets them project that out onto their experience with the larger right wing movement. They get to feel like they're the ones that are outside of the movement, just as Nick gets to feel that he's outside of the audience.
01:27:34
Speaker
And that will be very highlighted in our last excerpt. I need my Ebonics to be in English. I need my
Extreme Racist Content
01:27:41
Speaker
bubblegum pop garbage. Oh, yeah, I forgot to warn you about this, but like this kind of thing is a substantial portion of the broadcast. I have played you relatively tame bits.
01:27:56
Speaker
And even here, like I'm clipping off after her some stuff that's really, really just like way too vile for me to play on the show, I think. i knew me I need my degenerate Jewish pop garbage to be in English when I watch my black people play ball while I gamble my money away for the Jews. Like, okay, really? Like, could we all grow up?
01:28:20
Speaker
Wait a second. This country that's a quarter Mexican now has a Super Bowl in Spanish? What the heck? It's like, okay, I mean, come on. Come on, guys. I mean, can we grow up a little bit? It's actually crazy.
01:28:38
Speaker
i don't know. It's all just so... I'm above it all. I'm above it all. I'm too smart for this. I'm better than this. And... I'm better than you. Yeah, I mean, that's a continuation of what I was saying, right? This objection is not like, oh, it's dumb how racist this is. It's like, it's dumb to be focused on this. It's dumb to, right? Even though I agree, even though in my vision of the world, the Super Bowl is in English, right? He's just like, you're focused too much on the halftime show and not the fact that all the athletes are also black, right? like Yeah.
01:29:12
Speaker
And they they experience the sneering, the audience members, and then they go out to sneer in turn at the Megyn Kelly's and at the at the fans of those people, at the Chuds, in short.
01:29:24
Speaker
Yeah, to be completely clear, like Just listening to this episode, never mind the other ones I listened to, I heard literally some of the most racist things I've ever heard in my entire life. And I did not put them in the clips. But like, I really don't want to downplay what this show is like.
01:29:44
Speaker
You know, I feel like I've heard
Post-Charlottesville Rise
01:29:45
Speaker
versions of like reactions to this kind of thing where it's like, okay, someone might say, oh, at least these guys are also miserable.
01:29:54
Speaker
Or... Isn't it so demoralizing that like these guys are in charge and they can't like the whole thing, like our whole political order is about. punishing people to make these guys feel good and yet they're still miserable and i don't know how to like analyze like is he actually miserable or not how much of that is just like this affect he's putting on consciously or subconsciously none of it really matters like it's just demoralizing how stupid he is and how gross and easy all this stuff is and same thing we saw with anglin there's this like pretense towards oh i'm
01:30:32
Speaker
Brave and smart and cool because I'm willing to say these things and I actually know how to get an audience and it's like yeah, you can always get an audience by doing this kind of stuff because You're just like appealing to this impulse that just is i don't know This is a relatively easy way to just like rake in the cash rake in the money. Yeah at the same
Emptiness of Racist Rhetoric
01:30:55
Speaker
time It's actually far from assured I don't even know what Andrew Anglin is like actually doing right now, but he does not have very much of an audience.
01:31:05
Speaker
He's making practically no money. We saw at the end of this Archer episode that he was just reposting repeatedly about how he was going to kill himself and then about how that was actually a joke.
01:31:16
Speaker
Like, his life fucking sucks. And I think Fuentes is aspirational for these guys kinds of people. And I also think he's very lucky that all of this has worked out for him.
01:31:32
Speaker
A lot of his rise in prominence comes after the Charlottesville a rally when a lot of the other white nationalist figures got absolutely destroyed by the courts, destroyed by the FBI, destroyed by doxing by anti-fascist activists, like that sort of thing. I think that really like opened up a bunch of space for him. He was significantly involved in January 6th, and that had that had some consequences for him, actually, but like they were much, much smaller than what they could have been. He has kind of gone through the eye of the needle.
01:32:11
Speaker
And there's no there's no gratitude for it. He has a lot of built-in talent as a broadcaster, I think, but there's no effort to hone his craft. He's just taken the laziest and most loathsome possible approach to all this.
01:32:29
Speaker
And it's just depressing, man. Anyway, I hope you all had a good time listening to the show. Be sure to buy our mugs. Yeah, they they don't want us to be selling mugs, but we're going to keep selling mugs.
01:32:42
Speaker
I just don't know how to like...
01:32:46
Speaker
Right, I guess, you know, I see people, you know, both sides of that, like, oh, these guys are depressed. And it's like, oh, you know, it's depressing that, like, even these guys are, like, you know, ever you know surely the, like, people who are winning, like, are are enjoying themselves. And then there's the people who are like, oh, it's good that these guys are depressed. And it just feels so irrelevant in a way.
01:33:06
Speaker
I guess it's good the theory that their lives suck. I think it's cool if Nick Fuentes is suffering. i think that's nice. I don't feel like it actually tells me much. Yeah, and it also, like, it doesn't help me in any way. And it doesn't help all these, you know, it doesn't help all the people that he and his political movement are miserating, that he's also suffering. It's just so bleak.
01:33:29
Speaker
I'm really feeling like we're at the end of Stalker right now. So if you had a
Poetic Criticism of Content
01:33:33
Speaker
poem of some kind...
01:33:36
Speaker
ah Roses are red, violets are blue. Nick Fuentes, shut the fuck up. I hate you. There we go. Off the dome, baby. I'm the next yay. Yeah.
01:33:47
Speaker
Hell yeah. no don't say it don't say hell yeah when I say I'm the next yay.
01:33:55
Speaker
just trying to support you. Should we do FAG ratings? Let's do FAG ratings. On this podcast, we have a way of rating our subjects. We rate them on a three-point scale.
01:34:06
Speaker
F for ferocity, A for arrogance, and G for gullibility. Each of these is out of five, but that's sort of a soft cap. And when it gets really extreme, we go to six. Yeah, ferocity, I think T's an easy six.
01:34:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think just on the stuff we've listened to, maybe it would be a five. Because the thing... The really distinguished angle and pushed him into six was saying we need to do the Holocaust again. But the clips had adjacent stuff to that. And if you were clipping out the less bad parts, then yeah, I'll go with six.
01:34:43
Speaker
Yeah, I don't remember if he actually discusses the Holocaust on this particular episode, but he's ah he's a Holocaust guy. And I mean, there is like you like the super chat talking about like, oh, the Epstein, clark right? Like the objection to Epstein being that he's Jewish and that and then discussing these conspiracies that like, oh, like the real problem is that on the island they were doing blood libel shit. Like,
01:35:10
Speaker
i don't know, that's so gross. It's just, it's so disgusting that I think a six is is warranted. Arrogance is more interesting because I'm tempted to say a five for arrogance.
01:35:22
Speaker
Because even though we've got this, oh, I'm a Rizlis unfuckable chud. First of all, the arrogance of I stream every night at nine and then just showing up whenever. By the way, on his next episode, the one after this, he's like, ah sorry, I'm late. I'm going to start being on time from now on.
01:35:40
Speaker
And he says it as if like it's it's like a sincere resolution. And Helen, do you think he ever shows up on time after that? No, nothing changes. But the arrogance of the format, the arrogance of the contempt for the audience, and I'm even reminded of like that famous Orson Welles quote. We talked about this on the show before, but that famous Orson Welles quote about Woody Allen, that like the self-deprecating ness is actually just like a form of arrogance in disguise.
01:36:06
Speaker
I'm between a four and a five for arrogance. i'm I'm tempted to go for a six, but I don't think it's quite there. I think there's a little
Rating Arrogance and Gullibility
01:36:17
Speaker
bit too much performance in the arrogance for me to like to be willing to take the confident step into a six, but I'm definitely going to go for a five. I don't think I can go lower than that. I'll join you at five.
01:36:29
Speaker
For gullibility, so this one is, I think, the one that's evolved a bit as we've done the show, and we have sort of a better understanding of how to think about it. And I think last couple episodes, what's been working is to think about, this is a really good place for us to think about what is his role in the production of bigotry, and then how aware of his role is he? Higher gullibility rating means less aware.
01:36:50
Speaker
I could see a one here. This is where I was i was really thinking one, maybe though a two, just for the the clips where he's saying like, oh, this is why I hate you, and why do you want me to say this, and this is boring.
01:37:03
Speaker
I don't take that on his face necessarily, but I do think to some extent he has delusions about being more of a leader than he is. Like, not to say he doesn't have, like, a following on Rumble.
01:37:18
Speaker
Not to say that he isn't, like, the keystone of this movement of Groypers, right, that that does have political power. But I guess if we think about, like, what is his role in the production of bigotry, and this is something that I'm still not totally sure about because I feel like these last couple clips were really wild and I'm trying to assimilate them still.
01:37:37
Speaker
He's like providing a certain kind of outlet for like a certain kind of incel. Really? That's all it is? Like, I don't think he knows the extent to which his role is to just say the things that people expect him to say. Another marker that we've used for gullibility in this kind of thing that is, you know, as I think highly related is like,
01:37:56
Speaker
having a difference in understanding between the public and the private persona, right? Like Anglin was lower in gullibility because we said he has some analysis of like, I need to make myself palatable. He was just totally miscalibrated about what palatable meant.
01:38:14
Speaker
I think this guy's a little gullible, but I don't think he's very gullible. I think no higher than a three. I think I'm going give him a two. I think he definitely has aspirations to leadership. You can see that in him administering the oath to Fuentes on his show.
01:38:28
Speaker
i think other people perceive that in him too, and they perceive him as a leader in a sense that it's not totally clear that he's set up to be.
01:38:44
Speaker
One of the things I watched in research for this was an interview Piers Morgan did with Fuentes. Morgan asks, do you have ambitions to political office?
01:38:55
Speaker
And Fuentes says, no. And if I did, like, I wouldn't say the things I say because they make me quite unpopular.
01:39:07
Speaker
I just got a read on him when he was saying that, like, he's fucking lying. And there's another clip, Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis talking about Nick Fuentes. And they're talking about like, yeah, this guy could be president in 20 years because like, that's how much the culture has shifted.
01:39:25
Speaker
Like he couldn't be as mainstream as he is now, like 10 years ago. I'm not sure I want to describe him as being totally delusional about his aspirations to leadership when there is kind of a sense in the air that it could turn out to be real down the road. Like we really don't know.
01:39:44
Speaker
Right. I don't think any aspirations to leadership in that sense are like totally delusional. I just think that where he's at right now, he is exactly getting a following because he's saying the things they're expecting. And...
01:39:55
Speaker
Part of that is that there's a certain amount of going against the grain and doing something unexpected
Reflections and Listener Engagement
01:40:00
Speaker
that's going to be like... more appealing but he started doing that more generally if he started doing that all the time like the people would leave like i don't think he would keep his following if he weren't mostly saying the stuff they expected him to say i don't think that that's like that damning but that's just where i where i think he's not quite at the level of like operative that he thinks he is like there's i do think he doesn't fully understand the like audience capture thing
01:40:27
Speaker
all right, I can agree with that. i'll I'll go with the two on this. That means we've both given him a 13, which is quite high. Basically, the only higher... Anglin, Ayn Rand, and Schoenwolf are the only... oh and Enoch Powell. Yeah, I think that's appropriate.
01:40:43
Speaker
Okay, cool. That's our episode for today. just want to remind you all to tell people about the show, to promote it, because we don't have any idea how to do that. And so we would really appreciate if you took on the burden of doing our marketing for us.
01:41:01
Speaker
Yeah. and And they don't want us to market the show. so They don't want us to market the show. ah Show that you're a brave patriot. No, not that.
01:41:12
Speaker
ah Show your bravery by telling your friends about Odium Symposium and checking out our Patreon, patreon.com slash odiumsymposium. And thank you again to our paid subscribers.
01:41:25
Speaker
Yeah, goodbye. Bye. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
01:41:43
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you... I'll suck you in your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:42:01
Speaker
some level of masochism.