The Auron MacIntyre Show - March 06, 2024


Helldivers 2 and the Antifascist State ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 3⧸6⧸24


Episode Stats


Length

57 minutes

Words per minute

193.14221

Word count

11,029

Sentence count

575

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Oren Prudentialist joins me to talk about Helldivers 2, a new multiplayer game that has been making waves on the internet. He also talks about the controversy surrounding the game and its political implications.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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00:00:30.240 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:31.940 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:33.400 We've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.360 So a new game is kind of sweeping the internet right now.
00:00:41.440 Helldivers 2 is a great multiplayer game.
00:00:43.700 A lot of people are jumping onto it.
00:00:45.420 A lot of people are really saying this is the return of great multiplayer shooters.
00:00:49.620 It's everything fun that you want.
00:00:51.360 The return of hanging out with your friends and really enjoying this,
00:00:54.940 playing a game just because it allows you to create a story with your friends.
00:00:58.760 But alongside this, there has also been a lot of criticism.
00:01:03.560 The game has a very particular aesthetic.
00:01:05.480 It has an attempt to satirize, bring perhaps a certain political message.
00:01:10.320 And there's been a lot of debate over this.
00:01:12.680 Half of this is just me taking the excuse to talk about video games.
00:01:16.780 But the other half of it is getting to dive in and talk about what I think is a very interesting
00:01:21.340 aspect that this game allows us to criticize or look at when it comes to our culture.
00:01:26.320 The Prudentialist wrote a great essay on this, as he so often does.
00:01:30.620 And so I really wanted to have him on to talk about this.
00:01:33.160 Prudentialist, thanks for joining me, man.
00:01:34.740 Thanks for having me on again, Oren.
00:01:35.700 Always a pleasure.
00:01:37.040 Absolutely.
00:01:37.620 Like I said, your piece was really good.
00:01:39.240 I'd already even had the wheels turning about some of this.
00:01:42.720 And you bringing up Paul Godfrey's anti-fascist state in relation to this game,
00:01:48.120 I think really hit the nail on the head.
00:01:50.040 So we want to dive into the game, give a little bit of background, and then talk about the
00:01:55.020 politics and the controversy that is also attached to it.
00:01:58.440 But before we do all that, guys, let's hear about ISI.
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00:03:03.680 But perhaps most importantly, ISI offers college students a community of people that can help them grow.
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00:03:18.620 ISI is here to educate the next generation of great Americans.
00:03:22.120 To learn more, go to ISI.org.
00:03:25.060 That's ISI.org.
00:03:26.820 All right, so Helldivers 2.
00:03:30.240 Let's get a little background on this video game first.
00:03:32.640 Because I used to be a big gamer, but, you know, career and family and everything has just consumed a lot of this free time.
00:03:40.020 I haven't been able to keep up like I used to.
00:03:41.400 I'm lucky if I can get in a few games, you know, at the end of a night if I'm lucky.
00:03:46.580 And so I'm just not familiar as I used to be with the kind of stuff that's coming out and what's going on.
00:03:52.280 Where did this game come from?
00:03:53.540 Obviously, it's a sequel, Helldivers 2, but I'd never heard of the original one, and I wasn't familiar with this studio.
00:03:59.380 It's a big hit, but it's not coming out of a studio I'm familiar with.
00:04:02.640 What's the background here?
00:04:04.060 Yeah, so the game was made by Arrowhead Game Studios.
00:04:06.580 They're headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.
00:04:08.700 They're kind of new to the scene.
00:04:10.600 They were founded in 2008.
00:04:11.980 They have around 100 employees that work there, according to what I could look up.
00:04:16.760 And they made the first game in 2015 as sort of a top-down sort of shooter.
00:04:21.720 They've done a lot of sort of top-down multiplayer and cooperative games like that.
00:04:26.200 And so this is their, you know, big hit.
00:04:29.020 And it definitely has shown they had server issues when the game released
00:04:32.140 because they had only planned out for so many thousand people to play it.
00:04:35.020 And they're at capacity when half a million people are trying to play it, myself included.
00:04:39.480 You and I have played a few games together as well.
00:04:41.580 And, I mean, it's an enjoyable experience, but it kind of was timed just perfectly
00:04:45.660 because at the same time this game is released and everyone's talking about it,
00:04:49.820 my Twitter timeline for like three weeks was talking about nothing more than
00:04:53.860 Paul Verhoeven's take on Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
00:04:58.080 and why that movie fails as satire.
00:05:01.400 The author and writer Isaac Young had a very viral thread that got over a million views
00:05:05.900 talking about why this isn't, you know, it fails as satire,
00:05:09.840 but it still is a great piece of art.
00:05:11.520 And that led to numerous people on the left talking about why it's important to sympathize
00:05:16.440 with the bugs.
00:05:17.280 And you have a game that has a very similar aesthetic, you know, just armored military
00:05:21.980 guys, powered armor, fighting against, you know, bugs.
00:05:25.540 And you're doing as much fun as you can.
00:05:27.100 It's a quite enjoyable experience.
00:05:28.500 But at the same time, the homage, everything down from the music to the propaganda posters
00:05:34.420 and videos that you see right to the very beginning where the Ministry of Truth tells
00:05:38.780 you to watch this propaganda video as you witness this guy watch his wife and kid get eaten by
00:05:44.440 a bug and then gets radicalized to join the military.
00:05:47.060 So, I mean, it's very similar to, you know, I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all.
00:05:51.500 It's a very fun time.
00:05:52.640 Yeah, it was interesting because I saw the explosion of people having the old Starship
00:05:59.040 Troopers discourse, which isn't new.
00:06:01.320 It's this eternal cycle.
00:06:03.400 You know, this piece of media is quite old.
00:06:05.340 It came out when I was like in middle school or even older, actually, at this point.
00:06:09.480 It's a very old film, you know, at this point.
00:06:13.400 And so people have had this debate over and over again, but it always returns in different
00:06:17.920 waves.
00:06:18.380 And I wasn't I wasn't aware that there was attached to this video game, because like
00:06:22.940 I said, I'm pretty far outside of the video game cycle at this point, the news and knowing
00:06:27.720 what's new and what's going on.
00:06:29.640 I've kind of burned out on these video games as a service game.
00:06:33.140 Like I said, my gaming time is limited.
00:06:35.720 And so the idea of, you know, oh, this is going to be my life now and I'm going to grind
00:06:40.060 this out every single day.
00:06:42.300 It's just not attractive.
00:06:43.540 If anything, I'm looking for video games that are shorter at this point.
00:06:46.720 So I can I have a well-designed experience that I can kind of enjoy in the small amount
00:06:51.800 of time I have rather than something that's looking to just eat up as much of my life
00:06:56.100 as possible.
00:06:57.200 My hours are actually somewhat valuable to me as a human being, and I don't want to just
00:07:01.480 light them on fire.
00:07:03.680 You know, and so, you know, this model didn't sound great to me, but having played the game
00:07:08.020 now a decent amount, I'm still pretty, pretty low level.
00:07:11.440 I'm not caught up with many of you, but, you know, but but having played a decent amount
00:07:15.220 at this point, it really is a lot of fun.
00:07:17.020 I enjoyed everything.
00:07:17.880 And like you said, you can tell right away that this is an unlicensed Starship Troopers
00:07:22.940 ripoff from the very beginning.
00:07:24.680 You walk into the, you know, the original video, the intro video, and it is this Ministry
00:07:31.280 of Truth propaganda video.
00:07:33.360 So and you go through the tutorial and it's very clearly like you're a disposable cog in
00:07:39.820 the machine of democracy.
00:07:41.240 And, you know, you need to go ahead and, you know, battle all these space bugs.
00:07:45.760 And it's got the comical splat of meet this interesting wildlife as the blood of the bug
00:07:50.640 is just spattering all over you.
00:07:52.740 So it's wearing its influences directly on its sleeves from the beginning.
00:07:56.880 But like you said, we entered into the cycle of discourse because it's very clear that the
00:08:03.520 interests of the of the company was to lean as hard into the satire as possible to show,
00:08:10.420 oh, we are we're we're downplaying this.
00:08:13.500 We don't think this is good.
00:08:14.720 We're not promoting this this idea, this patriotism, this level of military involvement.
00:08:21.400 But just like Starship Troopers, it kind of immediately falls falls apart.
00:08:27.320 That attempt at satire falls apart because what they're depicting.
00:08:31.260 Well, we can get into it.
00:08:32.800 There's a lot there.
00:08:33.820 But you're depicting is far closer to actually what we have now in the global American empire
00:08:39.540 than it is to anything like fascism, which is, of course, the first thing that people's
00:08:44.300 minds go to when you have like cool capes and a skull somewhere on a helmet.
00:08:49.360 But yeah, and this a lot of the I hate the word discourse because it has such a muddied, 1.00
00:08:55.340 ugly term on the Internet.
00:08:56.440 But I mean, a lot of the writing from games journalists, which, you know, we press S to
00:09:01.000 spit.
00:09:01.420 It's been 10 years on since Gamergate.
00:09:03.120 But I mean, the a lot of people were saying that this is sort of the anti-fascist answer
00:09:07.500 to games like Call of Duty, where it's, you know, and I mean, the Call of Duty series has
00:09:12.080 been well associated with the military.
00:09:13.780 There are numerous military consultants and advisors for those games to be produced from
00:09:19.640 weapons to story to narrative to technological capability.
00:09:23.060 And so to have a game that sort of is trying to make fun of, you know, military adventurism
00:09:27.340 in the name of, quote, managed democracy, you can't help but feel like this is more of an
00:09:31.780 accurate representation of the world around you than anything else.
00:09:35.060 I mean, I kind of wish I had recorded my reaction because when the video plays, it's
00:09:40.200 sort of the first thing that you have to watch if you sign on for the first time.
00:09:44.000 And you're kind of watching this sort of like schlubby, skinny, fat white guy say hello
00:09:48.280 to the soldiers walking down these like clean suburban streets, you know, like visions of
00:09:52.740 based world happen.
00:09:54.160 And then all of a sudden you watch his black wife and his mixed race child get like brutally
00:09:58.000 murdered on and off screen by the bugs that you'll be killing later in the game.
00:10:02.280 And then all of a sudden, you know, you're realizing that, oh, this is way more like any
00:10:06.220 commercial I'd see online for any sort of television ad for recruiting or not so much
00:10:12.360 recruiting anymore.
00:10:13.060 They try to get white guys to join the army again.
00:10:15.060 But the progressive messaging is right on board.
00:10:17.980 I mean, it's the same problem you saw with Bethesda Starfield, where it's more token progressive
00:10:22.300 representation than to explain why these characters are the way they are.
00:10:26.060 Like you'll you'll I'll log on and I'll jump onto my ship.
00:10:29.140 And then all of a sudden I'm there's a woman who's the shipmaster.
00:10:32.300 Her name is Skogsberg is her last name, but she looks so ethnically ambiguous.
00:10:36.000 You don't know how she got the name Skogsberg, but neither here nor there.
00:10:40.020 Right.
00:10:40.300 And all of a sudden the words about liberty or freedom and managed democracy, the same
00:10:44.600 kind of terms that we hear President Joe Biden talk about or the fortified democracy of 2020.
00:10:50.080 And it sort of falls flat in the same way that the whole Starship Troopers argument falls
00:10:54.960 flat, because the world that you're trying to make fun of, one, the combat loop is really
00:11:00.120 entertaining.
00:11:00.620 It's a lot of fun to play with friends and to talk over them and to, you know, try and
00:11:04.320 survive the best.
00:11:05.220 It uses the same engine as a Warhammer game.
00:11:08.040 So it makes it even better.
00:11:09.260 But also because, you know, the the world that we live in, why do we call the global American
00:11:14.820 empire?
00:11:15.260 I mean, Helen Andrews wrote about that in the American Conservative not too long ago last
00:11:18.760 year, where it's where we're promoting things like feminism. 1.00
00:11:23.020 The idea of the guise of human rights allows us to commit the most insane forms of inhumanity
00:11:28.900 ever, as Carl Schmitt remarks, where, you know, we're trying to destroy cultures, languages,
00:11:34.580 religious traditions for the sake of maintaining an empire that wants to trans your kids and 1.00
00:11:39.760 to promote gay marriage and uproot any sort of culture and language that you once had 1.00
00:11:44.280 for the sake of being part of this greater managed democratic empire.
00:11:48.900 And that's sort of the problem with a lot of these satire pieces these days about trying
00:11:53.080 to make fun of fascism or use fascist aesthetics to make fun of their worldview is that most
00:11:58.820 often than not, you're going to come off looking like the real world more than anything else
00:12:04.160 to a point where I almost want to use like Jonah Goldberg's term liberal fascism, if that
00:12:09.260 term wasn't so cringe.
00:12:11.060 But it really does illustrate that the managed democracy world of like Helldivers 2 and their
00:12:15.640 attempts of making fun of it is far more realistic to what we have today than anything else, where
00:12:21.560 it is a girl boss, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, the military is integrated in terms of the
00:12:28.120 sexes, just like Starship Troopers.
00:12:30.400 And, you know, even though you're a useless cog in the machine, you know, the primary demographic 1.00
00:12:35.140 for gamers these days are still white males, and you're the only helmeted character.
00:12:39.420 So there you go, dying for an empire that finds you disposable.
00:12:44.120 And if you manage to get anything to survive, congratulations, you'll be on addicted substances
00:12:48.840 for the rest of your time, similar to, you know, painkillers in the VA and how we've killed
00:12:53.480 thousands of our vets over the last 15, 20 years.
00:12:56.200 So it hits more closer to home than it does making fun of any sort of fascist regime in
00:13:00.720 the mid and early 20th century.
00:13:03.240 Yeah, it really is that importing of the progressive narrative into the whole thing.
00:13:09.000 They can't make a video game that doesn't have that level of representation, right?
00:13:14.380 The message has to be there even when the satire is supposed to be front and center.
00:13:19.840 And so you need your mixed race couples and you have to have women involved. 0.82
00:13:23.460 You know, when you're in the game, if you want to choose your body style, it's, you know,
00:13:28.100 there's no male and female.
00:13:29.800 It's, you know, brawny and or, you know, or more feminine, but they can't call it that
00:13:35.020 because, you know, that would type A and type B body types. 0.85
00:13:38.920 And you've noticed this and I mean, even Japanese studios have sort of leaned into catering
00:13:43.700 towards the Western demographic in that respect.
00:13:46.260 And I mean, this goes in the on the face of things that there are numerous consultant
00:13:49.800 groups, whether it's like Sweet Baby Inc or, of course, the infamous Anita Sarkeesian, right,
00:13:54.800 where there is this sort of threat and sort of progressive Damocles over the necks of any
00:13:59.820 major studio wherein, you know, if you're if you're not, you know, progressive and diverse
00:14:04.400 enough, then lo and behold, you know, this could be very bad for you.
00:14:07.560 And I mean, it's an excellent extortion racket.
00:14:09.520 Don't get me wrong.
00:14:10.360 And in the future, one day we shall be doing the same things with our own respective media.
00:14:14.660 But this isn't just about this one particular game.
00:14:18.400 I think it's a good jumping off point because you'll notice in all forms of science fiction
00:14:22.880 media, especially long term, you know, franchises as well.
00:14:27.500 I mean, Halo is a really great example of how how far it has fallen from its former early
00:14:32.220 2000s greatness to where now, of course, it is a, you know, same sort of multi ethnic
00:14:37.140 sexually integrated armed forces in the same way that it's all there here in Helldivers 0.62
00:14:42.600 too.
00:14:43.180 And it's very reflective to what, you know, we would call the anti-fascist state from,
00:14:47.660 you know, Dr. Paul Gottfried.
00:14:49.020 He wrote this great book in 2021 called Anti-Fascism, The Course of a Crusade.
00:14:54.080 Highly recommend that you read it is probably one of his best books.
00:14:57.620 And if you don't mind or and I'm going to quote it from a little bit here.
00:15:00.220 And this is from page 137, quote, in contrast to the fascist state, which held its plebsitary
00:15:07.120 events to affirm what the regime planned to do, the anti-fascist state holds elections
00:15:11.420 between mostly indistinguishable candidates and parties.
00:15:14.420 Leaders of the anti-fascist state can mold public opinion without having to resort to overly
00:15:18.540 transparent manipulation because they can avail themselves of an international body of support
00:15:23.480 consisting of multinational corporations, the mainstream media and almost all public institutions
00:15:29.020 in the West.
00:15:30.000 Next to the sophisticated resources available to the anti-fascist state, the side of Mussolini 0.92
00:15:34.420 delivering a speech in Rome's Palazzo Venezia might seem bizarre and ancient.
00:15:39.680 I mean, that very is true where we're at here.
00:15:41.860 Everything is meant to mold public opinion and to get it on board.
00:15:45.640 And alongside that, the anti-fascist state is all about erasing, you know, any sort of culture,
00:15:51.340 tradition, ethnicity, language, tradition.
00:15:54.140 It all has to be one together because there's only one global thing that causes us to move
00:15:59.960 forward for progress.
00:16:01.160 And that is the the specter of fascism.
00:16:03.800 Yeah, it's that's the very managed democracy that they're mocking, right, is the exact type
00:16:09.140 of democracy that we see all around us.
00:16:11.820 Oh, well, you know, we get all of these different stories about how the ability of people to vote
00:16:16.620 for Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.
00:16:18.640 I see that you have, you know, rural white voters over there.
00:16:22.120 They might be a threat to democracy.
00:16:24.020 The most dangerous thing to democracy seems to be the people actually being allowed to
00:16:28.780 select their leaders in a democratic fashion.
00:16:31.580 And so it is the the very thing that they're attempting to satire is the satirize is the
00:16:37.940 thing that they would support is that the thing that these people would support in real
00:16:42.700 life.
00:16:43.080 And it's very strange, like I was saying, because while they import all of this stuff
00:16:47.620 into the game because they have to have this diverse cast, they're people who are supporting
00:16:54.820 them, the people online who would attack them for not having these things in there.
00:16:59.420 They would be angry if that wasn't in this future version of fascism.
00:17:03.500 And so you look at this this kind of super earth, you know, future fascist state, you know,
00:17:09.980 quote unquote, and you realize it has all of the things that progressives think prevent
00:17:15.420 fascism.
00:17:16.260 It features all of those things.
00:17:18.280 And so the only thing that codes it as fascist is the fact that people are safe and they
00:17:24.640 love their country or world.
00:17:27.180 In this case, they're patriotic and like they have cool stuff on.
00:17:32.720 That's it.
00:17:33.480 That's the only there.
00:17:34.620 That's the only thing.
00:17:35.600 It looks cool and people are happy and people are safe.
00:17:38.380 If that's what's supposed to indicate that it's fascist, like everything else about it
00:17:42.680 is decidedly, as you say, anti-fascist, it's all the things that you would think would
00:17:46.900 be coded as anti-fascist, all the progressive narratives and all the things that would prevent
00:17:51.300 fascism.
00:17:51.900 And yet none of those things are acknowledged.
00:17:55.560 And instead, the only things that are supposed to code this as a fascist satire are the things
00:18:00.200 that kind of make it fun and a place you would actually want to be in.
00:18:05.160 Well, I mean, that's sort of the funny thing about a lot of these progressive tropes that
00:18:11.120 you see in gaming, but also in just mainstream media as well, is that I mean, like take HBO's
00:18:17.120 I think it's on HBO Max, the whole television alternate timeline for all mankind, wherein
00:18:23.000 the idea that America wins the space race and becomes this great spacefaring civilization
00:18:28.080 along with the rest of the world because the Soviets beat us to the moon in 69, is kind
00:18:32.660 of funny because the whole future timeline split indicates that, well, if America wants
00:18:38.300 to succeed and beat the commies and to beat the private sector, it has to double down on
00:18:44.060 sort of its fully automated gay space liberalism, where everyone is diverse and we can be competent
00:18:49.960 when you look at the real world and you know that that's not true at all, whether it be
00:18:53.920 from airlines or the state of American infrastructure or that we're relying more and more on immigrant
00:18:58.900 labor and technical capabilities than we are domestically.
00:19:03.240 And you know, just the dissonance between what people consider to be anti-fascism and being
00:19:08.140 good progressives and putting on yourselves the right side of history is quite funny because
00:19:12.620 you look at some of the things that get said in sort of like the tips section when you're
00:19:17.300 diving in the game, right?
00:19:18.640 You know, shoot anyone that manages to negotiate with you diplomatically.
00:19:22.660 So very similar to how, you know, you can't really have a dialogue with a rabid leftist.
00:19:27.120 They're there to smash your brains out with a bike lock. 0.52
00:19:29.740 They're not there to do anything else or that, you know, you have to trust the science when
00:19:34.480 it comes to certain medical procedures that are out there.
00:19:37.900 You're there for democracy, you know, and that you can't forget to understand that if you're,
00:19:43.360 you know, democracy only works when you're hungry, angry and fighting.
00:19:45.760 And it's sort of a weird, like the woke or more correct than the mainstream moment where
00:19:50.580 it's like, oh yeah, democracy really only does tend to work on such a mass scale when
00:19:54.980 you're willing to kill millions of people in order to make it happen.
00:19:58.060 And then you look at the news and you think about, oh, the rural white male voters that
00:20:02.180 they hate.
00:20:02.600 And it's like, oh, they really want to kill millions of rural white people because they
00:20:05.940 want to vote for Donald Trump.
00:20:07.860 And again, I noticed when I was playing it not too long ago with a friend of mine that we
00:20:12.940 had finally found a white person in the game who's working in the back as a munitions 0.96
00:20:17.760 operator for one of the airstrikes that you can call in on your ship.
00:20:20.800 And it was just funny because as Gottfried says, you know, anti-fascism involves sprawling
00:20:26.240 administration, efforts to demasculize and deethnicize populations, a term favored by the
00:20:32.200 German government officials of our time who do not want to be associated with any terms
00:20:36.320 like nation or Volk.
00:20:38.300 The anti-fascist regime operates with forces dedicated to fighting, quote, hate with mass
00:20:42.900 media and public education.
00:20:45.180 And again, like that's the world that we kind of live in now.
00:20:48.900 And it's because we live in that world, an anti-fascist one.
00:20:53.640 Jacques Derrida was wrong.
00:20:54.980 We're not haunted by the specter of Marx.
00:20:56.860 We're haunted by the specter of fascism or anything that could resemble El Duce or the
00:21:02.500 Fuhrer or anything like that.
00:21:03.900 And so all of our media has to constantly reify and reiterate these sort of quasi-religious
00:21:09.800 fervors where the state religion, since the end of the Second World War, is to ensure that 1.00
00:21:15.520 anything that resembles nationalism, anything that resembles homogenous states and countries
00:21:20.540 is to be punished and to be eliminated.
00:21:23.920 I mean, one only has to look at what happened in the United Kingdom earlier this week, where,
00:21:28.540 you know, a gentleman simply putting up stickers warning about demographic replacement wasn't
00:21:33.440 even arrested for any actual crime, but rather his intent, because he held beliefs that were
00:21:39.080 contrary to the public religion of making sure that diversity is our strength and that we
00:21:44.640 can be a great cosmopolitan metropolitan world and a new kind of Great Britain, so to speak,
00:21:50.180 where, you know, the immigrants come there rather than anything else.
00:21:53.560 And so that's sort of the world that we live in, and our media, from video games to music to
00:21:59.100 all sorts of endorsements from celebrities, illustrates that, you know, to add as a corollary
00:22:05.380 to your term, Oren, that the total state is an anti-fascist state, and it has to be if it wants to
00:22:10.780 survive, because any resistance to it has to be viewed as the greatest public evil in the West as
00:22:17.140 we know it, despite the fact that that evil has been dead for over 80 years.
00:22:23.080 Yeah, and you can tell because they're coding functional society as fascists at this point,
00:22:27.620 like, which is a really interesting and dangerous game to play.
00:22:31.960 But yeah, it was amazing that, you know, that event in the UK, of course, we know that they've
00:22:39.020 arrested people for praying silently outside of abortion clinics, they all kinds of insane
00:22:44.100 stuff in the UK. I'm trying to remember who, you know, who was talking about it. But it was
00:22:49.740 something like, you know, 400 people had been arrested in Russia last year for saying something
00:22:55.540 against the government, over 3000 had been arrested in the UK for saying things that the government
00:23:01.160 doesn't like online. Obviously, the you know, the blaze, we just had a reporter arrested for
00:23:08.420 simply reporting on the events that happened during January 6, as where regime approved reporters
00:23:14.080 can walk right into the Capitol and face no punishment for that. It's very clear that the
00:23:19.440 West has a very managed form of government, a very managed form of democracy is clamping down on any
00:23:25.940 and everyone who thinks incorrectly. And we're supposed to pretend that somewhere Vladimir Putin
00:23:31.680 is the most dangerous threat to our democracy. But I want to get more into some of the parodies in
00:23:38.340 there, some of, you know, some of the propaganda in there, because it is interesting. At some point,
00:23:42.140 you feel like maybe one of our guys is in there writing this stuff, because yeah, it's just like
00:23:46.400 there's no way they're not self aware enough to realize what's happening here. But before we do
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00:25:03.440 So I, one of the fun things about the game is if you're just standing on the bridge of your ship
00:25:09.520 and you can name your, your ship, uh, an assortment of random and ridiculous things. Uh, but when
00:25:14.700 you're, when you're standing on your ship as you're waiting for maybe to queue up with friends or
00:25:18.740 something like that, the propaganda is playing the ministry of truth videos are playing as you stand
00:25:24.760 there. And so I was kind of doing things, uh, while I was waiting for, for possible people to join me.
00:25:30.360 And so I ended up hearing some of those in the background and the, the, one of them was about,
00:25:35.680 uh, equality and the, the, the, how critical equality was, uh, you know, to super earth to the
00:25:42.480 global American empire in space. And, uh, you know, the, the, the attempt at satire was, oh, well,
00:25:49.160 everyone is equal, equal as, you know, equality is fundamental to super earth and its empire and what
00:25:54.240 we're fighting for. But the more dedicated you are to the cause, the more equal you become. And so
00:25:59.780 the more you'll sacrifice on, on kind of, uh, in support of the regime, the more, the more,
00:26:05.860 uh, equal you will be in, in the eyes of, uh, those that operate it. And I'm just sitting there
00:26:12.140 and thinking, how does anyone write that and not realize they're talking about today right now,
00:26:18.300 this is not some future fascist empire. It's literally just the way we treat people in the
00:26:24.760 United States today. And, and how could the people writing this not be aware that the very
00:26:31.320 propaganda they're attempting to satire is the stuff that is applied to them on a regular basis.
00:26:37.400 And I mean, I'm sure they'll make a claim that that was the intent, even if, um, you know, it,
00:26:42.840 it clearly is way too on the nose to make you feel like that this would be the constant broadcast of
00:26:48.020 some, you know, great leader type deal, you know, what you, you see this with like some,
00:26:53.480 with some very masculine white voice sounding general brash. That's telling you all these
00:26:57.960 hints and tips about how to succeed in the game and to use cooperative, like two man weapons to,
00:27:03.040 to, you know, encourage team play and things like that. But at the same time, you, you listen to them.
00:27:07.920 And I, I screen capped quite a few that I thought were interesting to go through for the essay I wrote,
00:27:12.460 but also just because they're really entertaining. Um, so for instance, you know, keep, keep super
00:27:17.980 earth safe by reporting any unpatriotic behavior to your democracy officer, which I mean, you see
00:27:23.320 that all the time with, uh, human, with human resources. Yeah. They're, they're HR, right. You
00:27:29.640 know, like that's, that's basically it. We have, there's whole memes about, you know, when a joke
00:27:33.900 that you made at work is so funny, HR wants to hear the joke that you had said, and that's very
00:27:37.980 concerning. Um, other ones of course, like, uh, managed democracy is the cornerstone of an advanced
00:27:43.760 civilization. Um, or when you, when you win the, when you achieve the win condition for extraction
00:27:49.340 in a match, it will now say, you know, uh, another victory for the right side of history, which of
00:27:54.440 course the right side of history, it corresponds very well with sort of the, the end of history
00:27:58.980 narrative that liberalism is the end all be all success story for how we in the West are to manage
00:28:05.300 and to survive and what we're supposed to do. And it does have the same problem that political,
00:28:11.060 uh, comedies or political thrillers had during the Trump years and still do. I mean, uh, after Trump
00:28:17.600 got elected, television shows like Veep or house of cards had to jump the shark in a, in a writer's
00:28:24.400 room just to be stranger than fiction. Despite the fact that, you know, 1980s, you know, real estate
00:28:32.340 mogul and, you know, apprentice star Donald Trump was the president of the United States and whatever
00:28:37.040 he tweeted out was far more interesting than whatever Frank Underwood or, you know, Julia Louise
00:28:42.340 Dreyfus could ever come up with in their, in their respective shows and stories. And it does illustrate
00:28:47.220 that you can try and make a parody as hard as you want, but it's so transparently bad. Like I know
00:28:54.600 what this is. It's a greater reflection of my own world. And if this is where.
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00:29:29.440 Some extreme people on the left might say we do live in a fascist state and that this is important
00:29:34.840 for us to conceptualize something else. Then I'm sorry, like this is not fascism at all. And we're
00:29:41.580 nowhere near what fascism actually is. And to go back to, you know, Paul Gottfried's book, I mean,
00:29:47.340 he has a whole chapter on this called defining and redefining fascism to where, you know,
00:29:52.480 we're nowhere near the 1920s, 30s, or 40s at all. But instead you have people out there that are
00:30:00.820 doing things like Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works, The Politics of Us Against Them. And he claims that
00:30:07.480 fascism is the authoritarian response to globalization and not, you know, fascism's original direction,
00:30:15.680 which was a brutal and, you know, quick violent response and reaction to Bolshevism and communism,
00:30:22.100 which had way more power over in the, you know, Western Europe. And we had our own Red Scare in
00:30:27.380 America where countless people were bombed and attacked and murdered during the night, late,
00:30:31.760 you know, the end of the Great War and the end of the 1920s and 30s to where now it just evolves to
00:30:37.660 where anything that's a response to globalization, mass migration, the absolute destruction of nations and
00:30:45.040 peoples, that's fascism. If you react to the destruction of your people and the destruction
00:30:50.880 of your country and its traditions, if you don't like the fact that the Robert E. Lee statue was
00:30:55.120 melted down and then gloriously gloated by regime media, that makes you a fascist according to these
00:31:00.580 people. And because that's all that this is, all of a sudden Trump's America is somehow Hitler's
00:31:07.520 Germany, despite the fact that those two leaders couldn't be further on other ends of the political
00:31:12.680 spectrum at all. But this is the world that we live in. Everything has to be fascism. It's right
00:31:18.340 around the corner. Everything is going to be leading towards fascism. And this is, again,
00:31:22.840 why the left is the true owners of like the Schmidian exception and the state of emergency, because
00:31:28.480 to them, every election is the most existential election ever, whether it's Joe Biden back in 2012
00:31:34.360 saying that black people will be put back in chains when it comes to the election of, you know,
00:31:39.240 a guy who spent $45,000 on a consultant on how to wear mom jeans, Mitt Romney. But this is the world
00:31:45.460 that we live in, because any reaction to the present being as awful and as ugly as it is,
00:31:52.400 that's fascism. And we even see this with people like that Josh Urkel guy from Project Liberal
00:31:57.400 on Twitter, which is basically Occupy Democrats, but for Twitter, where he had the iceberg meme where
00:32:03.180 it's like, I hate ugly things. And then the bottom of the iceberg is a picture of Hitler. 0.61
00:32:06.620 This kind of hyperbole is the, you know, just the natural position of the anti-fascist state of
00:32:13.200 the West, because anything like looking back towards the past where we have color footage
00:32:19.720 of a better world and functioning cities and societies, they have to constantly tell you that
00:32:25.800 that's bad to a point where there was a viral tweet a few weeks ago showing a high school from 2002
00:32:31.880 and how it wasn't fights and it wasn't drugs and it was pretty nice as a hot public high school can
00:32:39.660 get. And someone said, oh, these people would have called me a homophobic slur, you know, 22 years
00:32:44.360 ago. And it's just, we have to constantly make the past evil so that the march of progress illustrates
00:32:50.240 some kind of victory for their ideology. Despite the fact that I think everyone can look around and
00:32:55.940 see that this ideology and the state mandated religion of anti-fascism, anti-nationalism,
00:33:02.740 anti-immigration is, you know, not working very clearly. I mean, we have little to no sovereignty
00:33:09.320 in the United States when it comes to the Chinese buying land in America. We have no sovereignty when 1.00
00:33:13.660 it comes to numerous people taking money from the cartels along the U.S.-Mexico border. We have no
00:33:19.000 border at all whatsoever. And the nation itself is being cheered on for its destruction. I mean,
00:33:24.820 this is what leftism is, right? The whole suicide contagion and ideology on a civilizational scale.
00:33:31.920 And this is, and again, even our popular culture and our media and our games, even if they're not
00:33:36.600 made by Americans, because this studio is from Sweden, all that it tells you is, is that this
00:33:42.500 kind of ideology is so far, so vast, so everywhere, that if you think some competent military that can
00:33:49.540 maintain an empire is fascism, despite the fact that, you know, the things that the state fights
00:33:56.080 for these days, you know, the idea of human rights and democracy, meaning, you know, transgender
00:34:00.580 surgeries and, you know, gay propaganda in all sorts of countries. I don't know what to tell you, 0.98
00:34:06.080 but I don't, I don't live in a fascist empire. I live in something probably far worse.
00:34:10.640 Yeah. You know, I used to tweet out all the time. They have to destroy the beauty of the past. So
00:34:15.780 you don't realize how small and ugly they've made the world because that shatters the illusion of
00:34:20.540 progress. They, the, the lie of progress and progress is the entire goal. It's the, everything
00:34:26.200 we're doing has to be worth it because if, if you don't sacrifice all of these things, I mean,
00:34:30.580 we just had Jon Stewart say this, right? Like getting mugged in a subway is just the price of
00:34:36.720 democracy. It's just part and parcel of living in a, in a modern city, right? Like this is the deal
00:34:42.080 we've made is we have to sacrifice functioning societies for the anti-fascist vision. And, and so
00:34:49.180 any attempt to look back at the past and say, Oh, actually like buildings were nice and society was
00:34:55.600 more peaceful and people got together and they had a shared vision and understanding of the future and
00:35:01.280 these things, these were all, you know, positive things. Well, no, that's fascism. And, and therefore
00:35:06.640 fascism has just become this Manichaean term. It's just good and evil. And, and, and fascism
00:35:12.120 is evil. It's been vacated of any actual political ideology. It doesn't have, it doesn't actually
00:35:17.800 reference. And this is why it drives me nuts when people on the right are like, Oh, the Biden
00:35:22.080 administration's becoming fascist. Guys, come on, like have some level, just the small, I am begging
00:35:30.080 you. I am begging you conning. I am desperately begging you right now. Have just the smallest
00:35:36.340 ability to maintain message discipline. Just, just the tiniest amount of self-control when it comes to
00:35:44.860 the language you use so that you're not just feeding directly into the narrative of your enemies at every
00:35:51.240 single opportunity. But anyway, for, for, for as much talk as the, as a lot of leftists on Twitter
00:35:57.540 want to scream and reach about, you know, media literacy, I'm asking con Inc, please for five
00:36:02.620 seconds, have some historical literacy and understand that your entire vocabulary is formulated around the
00:36:09.020 left's frame game. For the love of all that is good and holy, just the small bit of effort, just
00:36:15.300 the tiniest amount. But yeah, the, the, this desperate attempt to, to vacate any actual historical
00:36:22.820 context or political meaning from the term and just make it the blanket, uh, the blanket evil
00:36:28.900 allows them to just destroy the past that that's all it is. It's just a blanket attempt to destroy
00:36:34.040 the past. Progress is the God. Everything must be sacrificed for its good. There is no way to look
00:36:40.980 back and understand anything else as, as valuable or valid. Only the new thing that the party is
00:36:47.460 putting directly in front of you can be of any worth. And you mentioned this a couple of times,
00:36:52.120 so it's probably a good, uh, moment to step into it. Media literacy, right? Like this, this was a big
00:36:57.640 part of the discussion too, because whenever we get into this, it's always like, well, the chuds are 0.99
00:37:02.860 dumb. They don't get it. Uh, you know, uh, starship troopers is a satire of them. The, the chuds don't 1.00
00:37:08.460 get it. Uh, you know, uh, the hell divers is a satire of what they want. And, uh, I made this
00:37:15.460 point with, again, not knowing that this was about hell divers at the moment. I made this point about
00:37:19.600 starship troopers and I got all of these responses from, you know, all the most insufferable leftists
00:37:25.280 because of the tweet went wide and it got into, uh, into the leftist Twitter as well. They're like,
00:37:30.280 you just don't understand. And I had the exact same response that you mentioned in the essay,
00:37:34.160 which is like death of the author guys. This is your whole thing. This is all you have pushed
00:37:38.860 my entire life is that the, the work doesn't mean what the work says. Once people get the hold of it,
00:37:44.560 it's all about critique and deconstruction. And so, you know, we can take every classical work and say
00:37:51.660 that it was all actually about like some kind of Marxist struggle. And so, you know, nothing actually
00:37:56.420 means what it says, except, except this one movie by Paul Verhoeven. That's it. This is the only
00:38:02.820 thing that is exactly that this is, they literally treat this as if it's fundamentalist Christian
00:38:08.600 gospel, right? The, but sorry, sola scriptura, but for, uh, starship troopers, it says exactly what
00:38:15.320 it says in the movie. And that's all you can ever understand it as. And this is the only thing
00:38:20.040 that is just biblically true from it and inherent, uh, from, from its beginning. And you can't have any
00:38:26.360 other read on it. Same thing with the, with, uh, uh, hell divers, just sorry, guys, the intention of
00:38:32.600 the people making it is the only way you can understand it. There's no other read. And if
00:38:36.580 you come up with anything else, you're just an idiot who has no media literacy. Yeah. I mean,
00:38:41.440 a lot of terms like that media literacy or, or touching grass or these sort of nice cop-out terms
00:38:47.180 to say, I don't have to engage with it. And I mean, this goes back to a few things I'll, I'll try and
00:38:53.080 all weave together here. But I mean, for instance, you know, going back to Gottfried's book, he points
00:38:57.940 out that, you know, some of these anti-fascist types say the alternative to, you know, militant
00:39:02.960 anti-fascism, which is what we live under right now is to quote, uh, let's see here, have faith in the
00:39:08.520 power of rational discourse, the police and institutions of government to prevent the
00:39:12.520 ascension of a fascist regime. To which Gottfried says the same author then points that this is the
00:39:17.420 same example of the strategy of appeasement leading up to the second world war. So they're saying that
00:39:21.840 there's no room for, you know, discourse, there's no room for discussion, there's no room for death
00:39:25.200 of the author, because all of a sudden that would mean, you know, uh, that we have to appease
00:39:30.820 Hitler in 1939 and that we'll have peace in our time, but actually nothing does like that happen. 0.87
00:39:36.200 But at the same time, media literacy is sort of the primary school of thought for how a lot of people
00:39:41.000 read into media and not just, uh, you know, video games, but also with film and art and literature
00:39:47.900 to where it is the way that we have to understand, well, this is clearly the author's intent. We have
00:39:53.040 to read it this way. If we are media literate, we can understand this. And that is the more popular
00:39:57.480 school of thought rather than to consider, for instance, the McLuhan school, which I interviewed
00:40:03.000 Marshall McLuhan's, uh, grandson, Andrew McLuhan, the head of the McLuhan Institute, not too long ago,
00:40:07.880 I'd recommend that you guys check that out because he's our, he, he told me, he's like, we, so we're all
00:40:12.920 focused on, on, on media literacy. We're all focused on content. We're so focused on the content and how
00:40:18.620 to interpret it. We never consider the medium itself having an impact on our brain. So the,
00:40:25.260 the drug-like qualities of like the Twitter discourse, where we're trying to get our, our,
00:40:28.600 our new hits of black tar, you know, digital heroin into our veins. We never consider that as
00:40:33.760 we're trying to own leftists or chuds on, on twitter.com, but instead we're arguing over things
00:40:39.400 like media literacy and the intent behind, as you said, sort of the sola scriptura approach of
00:40:45.380 Paul Verhoeven's, you know, movie or, uh, Arrowhead Game Studios' intent behind this.
00:40:51.080 Whereas now with Twitter and being able to disintermediate, I don't have to rely on the
00:40:55.940 authority of one person telling me how to interpret this. Uh, I can just tell everyone,
00:41:00.440 Hey, actually, no, this game is pretty base and you should enjoy it because you get to kill bugs and
00:41:04.200 robots. And it's cool because it's military, militaristic and futuristic. And the game is great.
00:41:08.940 Right. To a point where you're, it's not death of the author anymore. It's hijack of the author.
00:41:14.780 The discursive airplane that we're all flying in right now has been hijacked by the chuds. 1.00
00:41:20.040 You know, halo is based, you know, starship troopers is based all of a sudden, you know,
00:41:24.300 hell divers too is based because I'm having a good time. I'm enjoying it. Despite your flagrant claims
00:41:29.560 that it's satire and anti-fascism. Uh, I don't care. I can't hear you. I've, I've shut the,
00:41:35.280 you know, the, the crew cabin in and I'm going to fly this plane and tell everyone that it's
00:41:38.840 fun and right wing. And, uh, that's how it's going to work. So it's not even just death of
00:41:42.980 the author. It's hijacking it because they can still be there and scream impotently about what
00:41:47.500 the movie is supposed to be or what the piece of media is. But at the same time, me and my friends
00:41:52.840 don't care and we're, we're going to do it. I mean, that has its problems, of course,
00:41:56.560 kind of like con ink where you might be playing into the frame or the language of your, of your foes.
00:42:01.340 But I think it's better to take agency and sovereignty away from leftists than it would
00:42:06.960 be for them to argue about language. Yeah. I mean, obviously it would be better if we could
00:42:12.220 create our own things. It would be great if the right had a large budget, you know, to,
00:42:17.540 to make huge movies and TV series and video games and all these things that that would be the ideal
00:42:23.500 situation. But when you're in this position where you're trying to make as much original culture as
00:42:29.840 you can, but you can't have control of all of these avenues, then being able to go ahead and
00:42:35.340 hijack it, as you said, is, is a key aspect because, okay, you think you're communicating
00:42:41.000 how dangerous this is or how stupid this is or how no one would want to live this way.
00:42:46.300 Well, we can notice that actually half the population does, and it really doesn't matter
00:42:50.060 if you attack us or call us stupid or whatever. We're still going to enjoy this thing. And ironically,
00:42:53.840 and what are you going to do about it? Right. Again, the 40 K, you know,
00:42:57.760 debate has raged forever. Oh, it's a satire. Yeah. Yeah. We know. And still it's vast,
00:43:03.820 you know, the vast number of people playing are like military vets and, you know, that kind of
00:43:07.220 thing. Like the people enjoying it obviously aren't enjoying it. Ironically, they really do like
00:43:12.000 what's happening there. They really do enjoy the spirit and the story and, and, and the world and
00:43:16.620 these things. And you can keep replying, oh, it's, it's satire or whatever, but it doesn't matter
00:43:22.680 because the people consuming it recognize the good parts of it and they leave the rest. And
00:43:27.680 you know, it doesn't matter. You don't have control of this frame anymore. Uh, and that,
00:43:31.820 that has its own, uh, its own value for sure. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead
00:43:36.900 and pivot over to the questions of the people, but before we do Prudentialist, where can people find
00:43:42.680 this essay and all of your other great work? Sure. So they can find this essay and, uh, similar ones
00:43:48.020 like it over at the Prudentialist.substack.com. Uh, I'm also on YouTube, Twitter, Telegram,
00:43:53.700 all podcast platforms. Just look for the Prudentialist and look for your favorite frog.
00:43:57.920 Um, and outside of that, you know, I will be alongside Oren later this June in, uh, in the
00:44:03.860 Memphis area in Tennessee, the old glory club is hosting its first conference. Uh, Oren and I will
00:44:08.540 both be speakers there. You can go get your tickets at old glory club.com slash tickets slash events
00:44:12.640 and have a really good time over there. And we hope to see some of you in person.
00:44:16.180 Absolutely. Always fun meeting people, getting to talk to a lot of people, you know, you see
00:44:21.400 them in chat, you, you, you, or you've run into them on Twitter and things for years and
00:44:25.460 then get to meet them at these meetups. It's, it's really cool. All right. So Creeper Weirdo
00:44:29.640 here says, uh, but guys, fascist, uh, fascism, fascism, satire, satire, media literacy, fascism,
00:44:35.720 satire, fascism. Yeah, it really is fun. Just watching the point and sputter, uh, approach
00:44:41.720 to this. Just like how many buzzwords can we throw at people in the desperate hope that
00:44:45.720 they'll stop noticing that some of the stuff is cool. Uh, definitely entertaining. Uh,
00:44:51.200 uh, trade 50 Daniels held divers to advertising fascism right before Gamergate to get started
00:44:56.480 by sweet baby ink and the like peak irony. Yeah. I was not aware of this until like yesterday,
00:45:02.180 but I guess there is this consulting company that has been going around to, uh, you know,
00:45:09.020 here's how you increase diversity or how you, how you get all your ESG points basically for
00:45:13.580 your new video games so you can get investments in there. And this is kind of the new scandal
00:45:17.860 that's breaking across the gaming world. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they are a 2018
00:45:23.300 narrative development consultant studio based in Montreal, working around the globe, and they've
00:45:27.760 been getting into a lot of trouble for basically trying to, uh, cancel games for boycott lists that
00:45:34.500 they've associated with. And a lot of this is trying their best to basically extort as if they
00:45:41.180 were a mafia group to force diversity and inclusion into their game narratives. And
00:45:44.920 if you, if you thought what happened 10 years ago was rough, um, with regards to, um, five guys,
00:45:51.040 burgers and fries, if you get that reference, you'll definitely understand that this is worse when now
00:45:55.020 you have a legit business that is basically threatening people like that's a nice video
00:45:59.460 game. You got there. It's a shame what would happen if we said it was racist and homophobic and
00:46:04.260 didn't have enough, uh, beige, ethnically ambiguous characters inside. And so that this is the racket
00:46:10.480 that you're, you're dealing with and against there. And it does illustrate sort of the importance of
00:46:14.820 indie developers and studios, because if you can make your own game and you can do your own fan
00:46:20.000 project or make your own mod for something that's actually enjoyable, then I'm going to be more
00:46:24.740 interested in that than any of the latest crap, like Forspoken or anything like that.
00:46:29.300 Yeah. When we win the narrative consultant agencies will have been stocked with people who
00:46:35.160 have read Carlisle and Demaestra, right? That's the, yes, your victory conditions there. Uh, uh,
00:46:40.740 Cooper weirdo says fascism is, is a progressive ideology. Mussolini liked it, uh, uh, and believed
00:46:46.600 it because it was the newest. Uh, yeah. A lot of people who are big fans of a large chin men will,
00:46:51.800 will hate that comment, but, uh, yeah, fascist is indeed a progressive ideology. It is a modernist
00:46:57.020 ideology. Uh, it is a reaction, yes, to liberalism and communism. Uh, but it is still, uh, incredibly,
00:47:03.580 uh, uh, progressive in, in certain areas. And so I think, uh, people should probably think about
00:47:08.980 that in general. Yeah. I would just recommend people read Gottfried's book. It gets into that
00:47:13.100 pretty, pretty well in depth. Uh, Seneca says all hail manage democracy. Well, thank you. Brew your cup of
00:47:20.460 liberty, uh, and, and settle in for a little more of the stream here. Uh, let's see. Uh, capitalismo
00:47:27.160 says real fascism is nerving the real gun and breaker shotgun teach media metal literacy. Yeah,
00:47:33.460 that there is, does seem to be, uh, uh, pretty much two, uh, two weapons available, uh, in,
00:47:39.120 in the game at the moment. And they nerfed it this morning, which made them basically kind of,
00:47:43.700 well, yeah, in a patch, they kind of nerfed the, the go-to because screw having a meta, right? You know,
00:47:48.780 we're, we have to keep things fresh and keep things moving, but it's, it's what it is, what
00:47:52.220 it is. Capitalissimo and I have played the game together quite a few times going through it and
00:47:56.560 making our notes because he and I were just going through all the things we've observed over the
00:48:00.840 last week, which was a big help in writing the essay. And, uh, he has a great podcast called the
00:48:05.700 sidebar where they cover all of the pieces of fiction written by right wing Twitter and on.
00:48:10.080 So if you are interested in that, go check them out. Man, that doesn't look a good podcast.
00:48:13.820 All right. So Cripper weirdo says paradise lost. Satan is the good guy. Lord of the rings,
00:48:18.280 Frodo and Sam are gay. 1984. No, you starship troopers, fascism, satire, media literacy. Yes.
00:48:25.080 Yeah. So all of these different readings that we have, all of these things that we have to accept
00:48:29.000 about characters, the past, beloved characters, understandings of these different works. Those
00:48:34.300 are all acceptable. But again, the one piece of scripture that can never be deviated from
00:48:39.100 is Paul Verhoeven's understanding of a book. He only read like one quarter of.
00:48:44.360 If that, right. Yeah. Ben Dover says the degree to which the left and boomers hate managed democracy
00:48:51.340 makes me think it might be a valid solution for some of our problems. Christ is king. Well,
00:48:55.660 that's exactly what they have. They have a managed democracy. Um, you know, to, to be very clear,
00:49:00.880 um, they, they could talk about, you know, the term as satire, but that's exactly what we're talking
00:49:05.860 about guys. When they're trying to actively remove the only real opposition candidate from the ballot,
00:49:11.000 they're trying to throw him in jail. They're trying to jail opposition journalists. They're
00:49:14.840 successfully actually jailing and arresting, uh, you know, meme makers and opposition journalists.
00:49:19.900 That's what managed democracy is. That's what that means. You, you technically have a democracy,
00:49:24.480 but in reality, there's only one acceptable choice. And if you don't engage with that one,
00:49:29.480 you will be attacked by the state. I mean, what else could that mean?
00:49:33.280 Yeah. I, we, we, you can call it managed, but in the same way that, uh, you, you can read,
00:49:39.920 I mean, even in from, from Yarvin's on, you know, open letter, I think it's chapter five about the
00:49:45.000 secret of government, you know, that what is it other than the manipulation of procedural results
00:49:49.460 to get a desired outcome? And who does that manipulation? Well, it's the managers, whether that
00:49:53.740 be, you know, a, a precinct captain scanning the same 5,000 votes over and over again in order to
00:50:00.020 secure a fortified election victory or large multinational corporations that are willing to
00:50:05.020 spend tens of millions, if not billions of dollars to ensure that you and I, in our political
00:50:11.600 interests are never represented again by ethnic replacement, as well as a legal lawfare means to
00:50:17.860 do so. Yeah. It's why they are desperate to increase the points of contact for regulation and
00:50:23.400 everything guys. It's, it's a increase of the ability to manage outcomes. Cooper weirdo. Look guys,
00:50:29.680 a Nazi liked something once. Therefore yes, I hear, you know, who else drank water? I think we all
00:50:35.360 know. Uh, Joshua BB says create beautiful world full of attractive people with a sense of honor and
00:50:41.040 duty who voluntarily defend their civilization satire. Don't care. I want, yeah, that's, that's pretty
00:50:46.980 much always my response to people who, who take a look at something like starship troopers and they're
00:50:52.000 like, ah, this is a joke. Well, maybe we should stop laughing. Well, I mean, there, there's a, I don't know if
00:50:58.440 you ever saw this movie or, and it was like a made for TV kind of movie about the rough writers, um,
00:51:03.980 back in the, uh, late eighties, early nineties. It had quite a, it had, um, quite a few people that
00:51:10.480 are, I mean, they're still alive nowadays, but I mean, it had, uh, this great line at the beginning
00:51:15.280 about a bunch of young men in the midst of the Spanish American war. And these were all like wealthy
00:51:19.840 sons of politicians and rich men. And they had said something along the lines of, you know, it is the,
00:51:26.140 it is the job of the patrician class to defend the interests of the nation and to lead its plebeians 0.98
00:51:33.000 into battle. And this is about the Spanish American war, you know, 1896 and it's nothing or 1898, but
00:51:39.200 I mean, like it's nothing, you know, that you could ever imagine a wealthy son of some politician or,
00:51:46.260 or elite of black rock say, because they're not associated with this country. They view this place 0.93
00:51:51.000 as a tax base and a place to make their money. But a long time ago, this country used to have
00:51:56.140 strong, young, attractive people that were willing to take up arms to defend the national cause and to
00:52:01.600 lead its people into what it saw as the national interest. And, uh, I'd like that to happen again.
00:52:07.120 Um, but sadly, uh, we don't have that right now.
00:52:10.900 Uh, Reagan Lodge says, uh, shout out to my doodalist, uh, good show guys.
00:52:16.280 Thanks. Uh, John Rogers says on Netflix, there's a new release Spaceman where Adam
00:52:23.300 Sanders literally befriends a space bug. Is this the work? Is this the, uh, I think he means the
00:52:28.200 woke being put away. Uh, yeah, I mean, that was the best part, I think of the, uh, the renewed
00:52:33.920 starship troopers, uh, discourse was the number of leftists who were identifying directly with the
00:52:38.840 bugs, uh, you know, saying, obviously the humans are the bad guys and the bugs, the good guys,
00:52:43.260 just, just the most, it's just the purest distillation of the spiteful mutant, uh, thesis.
00:52:49.140 You know, it's a beautiful thing to behold. Yeah. I love it when communists identify with
00:52:53.860 literal insects again, it's just, it's so delightful. It makes me think about my boots.
00:52:58.660 It's, it's, it's hard to disagree with you guys. Hard to disagree. Uh, Templar says,
00:53:03.420 hoping the phrase managed democracy gets picked up by the left because that would be greatly
00:53:07.060 embarrassing for them. Uh, yeah, yeah, I would agree. Uh, great term to use regardless. Yes.
00:53:14.860 Uh, Seneca says progressives continue to underestimate the appeal of ripped super
00:53:19.500 soldiers, screaming prayers and redacting humanity's enemies. Uh, they really do. Uh,
00:53:24.100 they, they really do. Um, I don't know what else to say about that, but I mean that, that Bennett's
00:53:29.640 phylactery tweet is so true. You know, we're all, we're all in 40 K you're just picking sides.
00:53:33.780 You're just picking sides. Everyone's realizing it's real and we're all just picking sides.
00:53:37.500 Society man says the competency crisis is especially noticeable in gaming right now.
00:53:41.140 Countless American studios went from pumping out bangers every couple of years to taking a decade
00:53:45.260 to make complete tripe. Yeah. I mean, again, obviously we see this everywhere and the arts
00:53:50.300 are no exception. You, when you are constantly trying to fill quotas instead of hiring people
00:53:56.280 who are capable of producing something fun, uh, we just end up with this endless march of,
00:54:01.360 of mediocrity. Like I said, I had mostly abandoned the idea of playing any of these type of games
00:54:05.840 because I was just so tired of, uh, you'd be the relentless grind that was not fun at all. Uh,
00:54:13.060 and so that was one reason that this was a brush of fresh air. I mean, it might be a sense of
00:54:18.040 schadenfreude, but I mean, they're also sort of being punished for it. I mean, between January of
00:54:22.080 23 and January of 24, there were over 16,000 layoffs in the games industry alone. And I mean,
00:54:29.500 it's unfortunate that people lose their jobs, but at the same time, you know, you look at the last
00:54:33.600 10 years and you just noticed that the quality of gaming has just been progressively going down
00:54:38.180 with a few diamonds in the rough in between. This is, this is just the results of, uh, how bloated and,
00:54:44.300 and nasty it's gotten. Uh, John Carter says, any frog who tries jumping out of the pot is called a
00:54:50.640 reactionary. Don't let boomers control you with that. Yeah, absolutely. It's there's, 1.00
00:54:55.200 there's no reason to be controlled by that label or anyone, uh, anyone really attempting to tell you
00:55:01.520 that, uh, you know, thing, things are, are, are fine. Like, obviously that's not the case.
00:55:06.480 Uh, George, uh, Hey Duke says a liberal non-leftist stories, uh, don't need to be,
00:55:12.000 and shouldn't be intentionally made. If you want to tell a good story or an ancient story,
00:55:16.320 it won't be lefty Morrowind, uh, dark souls blade runner 2049. Yeah. I mean, uh, we've mentioned
00:55:23.100 this on multiple podcasts with multiple people. Jonathan Peugeot got into this quite a bit when
00:55:27.820 I had him on, uh, but when you tell these naturally true, good and beautiful stories,
00:55:32.720 they will feel right wing by just, you know, just, just naturally. Again, that was kind of my point
00:55:37.880 with the whole, they imported all of their leftism into their future fascist empire. And so the only 0.67
00:55:42.780 thing that codes as fascism for them is looking cool, having clean streets and being safe. That that's
00:55:49.600 the only thing they could do to, to produce the feeling of fascism, uh, along with, along with
00:55:55.340 some patriotic buzzwords. And so when you, when you just make these things that are naturally good
00:56:00.860 or naturally interesting in this way, you don't have to strain these really, uh, you know, non-leftist
00:56:06.440 stories, you know, to fit in some ideological mode. They will simply feel that way naturally because
00:56:11.740 the, you know, the people around us are so desperately trying to control everything that is said that
00:56:16.120 anything that's not along those lines will stand out on its own. Absolutely. And Jonathan BB says,
00:56:22.680 it's not a joke. If you have to explain it always excellent advice. That is some media literacy there.
00:56:29.020 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. But like I said, make sure that you go
00:56:32.940 ahead and read the original essay over at the Prudentialist sub stack. It is excellent. If it's
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00:56:56.280 Aura McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform. When you do leave a rating or review,
00:57:01.020 it really helps with the algorithm magic. Thanks for coming by guys. And as always,
00:57:04.780 I'll talk to you next time.