Mostly talking about stuff like breadtubers, chapo, and media personalities like that, I can kind of tell why people like Bernie and Jezza where they’re at. Is it the added wealth being a popular media personality gives you, the need to give a consistent product, the need to appeal to a wide breadth of people, and so on?
edit: also props to Brett at RevLeft for continuing to radicalise himself as the show has gone on
I thought you were talking about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for a second, but yeah this also definitely applies to most of the breadtubers and the chapo boys.
I feel like he put a lot of emotional energy into making fun of Trump. He fell for the classic blunder of thinking that all the illegal shit matters to anybody who’s not already sold on it being bad. As a result, shit stagnated and the emotional energy didn’t pay any dividends. So his act is worse for wear.
I’d say these people kind of count to, although I feel like saying that any of them “radicalised” people is a bit of a stretch
For those of us who grew up in conservative hell before the internet really took off, this was the only mainstream defiance, or at least questioning of, American hegemony
I don’t think we can understate to those too young to remember just how batshit the mainstream discourse in US politics was from the initial post-9/11 hysteria to around early 2006 when the implications of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the new surveillance/national-security infrastructure started sinking in. Snarky content like the Daily Show and Michael Moore documentaries and fucking Rachel Maddow really were the leftmost political content that reached a broad audience during this period.
Breadtubers/podcasters/other media types got into it for attention, and for money. And frankly the pursuit of money+attention kinda overrides everything else. As an example from the Chapos perspective, why rock the boat, why change yourself, why push yourself to be better when you’re making buttloads of money making fun of op-eds?
i still like Matt, but these personalities act more like signs along the road. i liked Natalie and Olly, but thats because I was looking for philosophy content, I still had to bridge the connection myself to reradicalize myself from when I was a kid.
some are actively serving as guides, looking to help people who are lost towards an answer, but others dont see how much further there is still left to go.
i dont think “wealth” so much as a living. considering the chapos for instance, it’s fucking expensive to live out here, and they’re probably making enough to not be absolutely miserable.
but when you make your living on it, you’re limited to where your audience will follow you.
or maybe their energies are somewhere else, not like they’ve been doomposting like everyone on the sub,
or if i think about the episode with Hypernormalization, no one yet has a belief that could better unify a contingent of people. many of you are no more than a collection of dissatisfaction. others political ideals disfigured to fit and work within the confines of society.
idk, it feel like we’re waiting for our lenin or something, but no one is going out there to do the work.
People Are.Look at Boots Riley’s twitter, the US is having its largest pattern of organised worker revolt since the 60s. Wildcat strikes, walkouts, slowdowns. Just because it’s not in the news doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
A lib is more likely to get into a vaguely leftist or radlib talking head than a full-blown ML or something. Conversely, as most people are libs, those people get the largest audiences. Once they have a large enough audience, they would risk a lot of material well-being by changing their views. But people who get into those talking heads do so because of a contradiction they can not completely solve, and the audiences move past them to their left.
