Helldivers 2 and the Antifascist State ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 3⧸6⧸24
Episode Stats
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Summary
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
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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We've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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So a new game is kind of sweeping the internet right now.
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A lot of people are really saying this is the return of great multiplayer shooters.
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The return of hanging out with your friends and really enjoying this,
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playing a game just because it allows you to create a story with your friends.
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But alongside this, there has also been a lot of criticism.
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It has an attempt to satirize, bring perhaps a certain political message.
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Half of this is just me taking the excuse to talk about video games.
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But the other half of it is getting to dive in and talk about what I think is a very interesting
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aspect that this game allows us to criticize or look at when it comes to our culture.
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The Prudentialist wrote a great essay on this, as he so often does.
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And so I really wanted to have him on to talk about this.
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I'd already even had the wheels turning about some of this.
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And you bringing up Paul Godfrey's anti-fascist state in relation to this game,
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So we want to dive into the game, give a little bit of background, and then talk about the
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politics and the controversy that is also attached to it.
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But before we do all that, guys, let's hear about ISI.
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Let's get a little background on this video game first.
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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.
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I'm lucky if I can get in a few games, you know, at the end of a night if I'm lucky.
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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.
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Obviously, it's a sequel, Helldivers 2, but I'd never heard of the original one, and I wasn't familiar with this studio.
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It's a big hit, but it's not coming out of a studio I'm familiar with.
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Yeah, so the game was made by Arrowhead Game Studios.
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They have around 100 employees that work there, according to what I could look up.
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And they made the first game in 2015 as sort of a top-down sort of shooter.
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They've done a lot of sort of top-down multiplayer and cooperative games like that.
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And it definitely has shown they had server issues when the game released
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because they had only planned out for so many thousand people to play it.
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And they're at capacity when half a million people are trying to play it, myself included.
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You and I have played a few games together as well.
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And, I mean, it's an enjoyable experience, but it kind of was timed just perfectly
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because at the same time this game is released and everyone's talking about it,
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my Twitter timeline for like three weeks was talking about nothing more than
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Paul Verhoeven's take on Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
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The author and writer Isaac Young had a very viral thread that got over a million views
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talking about why this isn't, you know, it fails as satire,
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And that led to numerous people on the left talking about why it's important to sympathize
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And you have a game that has a very similar aesthetic, you know, just armored military
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guys, powered armor, fighting against, you know, bugs.
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But at the same time, the homage, everything down from the music to the propaganda posters
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and videos that you see right to the very beginning where the Ministry of Truth tells
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you to watch this propaganda video as you witness this guy watch his wife and kid get eaten by
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a bug and then gets radicalized to join the military.
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So, I mean, it's very similar to, you know, I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all.
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Yeah, it was interesting because I saw the explosion of people having the old Starship
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It came out when I was like in middle school or even older, actually, at this point.
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And so people have had this debate over and over again, but it always returns in different
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And I wasn't I wasn't aware that there was attached to this video game, because like
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I said, I'm pretty far outside of the video game cycle at this point, the news and knowing
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I've kind of burned out on these video games as a service game.
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And so the idea of, you know, oh, this is going to be my life now and I'm going to grind
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If anything, I'm looking for video games that are shorter at this point.
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So I can I have a well-designed experience that I can kind of enjoy in the small amount
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of time I have rather than something that's looking to just eat up as much of my life
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My hours are actually somewhat valuable to me as a human being, and I don't want to just
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You know, and so, you know, this model didn't sound great to me, but having played the game
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now a decent amount, I'm still pretty, pretty low level.
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I'm not caught up with many of you, but, you know, but but having played a decent amount
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And like you said, you can tell right away that this is an unlicensed Starship Troopers
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You walk into the, you know, the original video, the intro video, and it is this Ministry
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So and you go through the tutorial and it's very clearly like you're a disposable cog in
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And, you know, you need to go ahead and, you know, battle all these space bugs.
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And it's got the comical splat of meet this interesting wildlife as the blood of the bug
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So it's wearing its influences directly on its sleeves from the beginning.
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But like you said, we entered into the cycle of discourse because it's very clear that the
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interests of the of the company was to lean as hard into the satire as possible to show,
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We're not promoting this this idea, this patriotism, this level of military involvement.
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But just like Starship Troopers, it kind of immediately falls falls apart.
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That attempt at satire falls apart because what they're depicting.
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But you're depicting is far closer to actually what we have now in the global American empire
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than it is to anything like fascism, which is, of course, the first thing that people's
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minds go to when you have like cool capes and a skull somewhere on a helmet.
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But yeah, and this a lot of the I hate the word discourse because it has such a muddied,
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But I mean, a lot of the writing from games journalists, which, you know, we press S to
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But I mean, the a lot of people were saying that this is sort of the anti-fascist answer
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to games like Call of Duty, where it's, you know, and I mean, the Call of Duty series has
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There are numerous military consultants and advisors for those games to be produced from
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weapons to story to narrative to technological capability.
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And so to have a game that sort of is trying to make fun of, you know, military adventurism
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in the name of, quote, managed democracy, you can't help but feel like this is more of an
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accurate representation of the world around you than anything else.
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I mean, I kind of wish I had recorded my reaction because when the video plays, it's
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sort of the first thing that you have to watch if you sign on for the first time.
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And you're kind of watching this sort of like schlubby, skinny, fat white guy say hello
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to the soldiers walking down these like clean suburban streets, you know, like visions of
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And then all of a sudden you watch his black wife and his mixed race child get like brutally
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murdered on and off screen by the bugs that you'll be killing later in the game.
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And then all of a sudden, you know, you're realizing that, oh, this is way more like any
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commercial I'd see online for any sort of television ad for recruiting or not so much
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They try to get white guys to join the army again.
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But the progressive messaging is right on board.
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I mean, it's the same problem you saw with Bethesda Starfield, where it's more token progressive
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representation than to explain why these characters are the way they are.
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Like you'll you'll I'll log on and I'll jump onto my ship.
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And then all of a sudden I'm there's a woman who's the shipmaster.
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Her name is Skogsberg is her last name, but she looks so ethnically ambiguous.
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You don't know how she got the name Skogsberg, but neither here nor there.
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And all of a sudden the words about liberty or freedom and managed democracy, the same
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kind of terms that we hear President Joe Biden talk about or the fortified democracy of 2020.
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And it sort of falls flat in the same way that the whole Starship Troopers argument falls
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flat, because the world that you're trying to make fun of, one, the combat loop is really
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It's a lot of fun to play with friends and to talk over them and to, you know, try and
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But also because, you know, the the world that we live in, why do we call the global American
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I mean, Helen Andrews wrote about that in the American Conservative not too long ago last
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year, where it's where we're promoting things like feminism.
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The idea of the guise of human rights allows us to commit the most insane forms of inhumanity
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ever, as Carl Schmitt remarks, where, you know, we're trying to destroy cultures, languages,
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religious traditions for the sake of maintaining an empire that wants to trans your kids and
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to promote gay marriage and uproot any sort of culture and language that you once had
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for the sake of being part of this greater managed democratic empire.
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And that's sort of the problem with a lot of these satire pieces these days about trying
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to make fun of fascism or use fascist aesthetics to make fun of their worldview is that most
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often than not, you're going to come off looking like the real world more than anything else
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to a point where I almost want to use like Jonah Goldberg's term liberal fascism, if that
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But it really does illustrate that the managed democracy world of like Helldivers 2 and their
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attempts of making fun of it is far more realistic to what we have today than anything else, where
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it is a girl boss, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, the military is integrated in terms of the
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And, you know, even though you're a useless cog in the machine, you know, the primary demographic
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for gamers these days are still white males, and you're the only helmeted character.
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So there you go, dying for an empire that finds you disposable.
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And if you manage to get anything to survive, congratulations, you'll be on addicted substances
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for the rest of your time, similar to, you know, painkillers in the VA and how we've killed
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thousands of our vets over the last 15, 20 years.
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So it hits more closer to home than it does making fun of any sort of fascist regime in
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Yeah, it really is that importing of the progressive narrative into the whole thing.
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They can't make a video game that doesn't have that level of representation, right?
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The message has to be there even when the satire is supposed to be front and center.
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And so you need your mixed race couples and you have to have women involved.
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You know, when you're in the game, if you want to choose your body style, it's, you know,
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It's, you know, brawny and or, you know, or more feminine, but they can't call it that
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because, you know, that would type A and type B body types.
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And you've noticed this and I mean, even Japanese studios have sort of leaned into catering
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towards the Western demographic in that respect.
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And I mean, this goes in the on the face of things that there are numerous consultant
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groups, whether it's like Sweet Baby Inc or, of course, the infamous Anita Sarkeesian, right,
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where there is this sort of threat and sort of progressive Damocles over the necks of any
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major studio wherein, you know, if you're if you're not, you know, progressive and diverse
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enough, then lo and behold, you know, this could be very bad for you.
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And I mean, it's an excellent extortion racket.
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And in the future, one day we shall be doing the same things with our own respective media.
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But this isn't just about this one particular game.
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I think it's a good jumping off point because you'll notice in all forms of science fiction
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media, especially long term, you know, franchises as well.
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I mean, Halo is a really great example of how how far it has fallen from its former early
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2000s greatness to where now, of course, it is a, you know, same sort of multi ethnic
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sexually integrated armed forces in the same way that it's all there here in Helldivers
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And it's very reflective to what, you know, we would call the anti-fascist state from,
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He wrote this great book in 2021 called Anti-Fascism, The Course of a Crusade.
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Highly recommend that you read it is probably one of his best books.
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And if you don't mind or and I'm going to quote it from a little bit here.
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And this is from page 137, quote, in contrast to the fascist state, which held its plebsitary
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events to affirm what the regime planned to do, the anti-fascist state holds elections
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between mostly indistinguishable candidates and parties.
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Leaders of the anti-fascist state can mold public opinion without having to resort to overly
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transparent manipulation because they can avail themselves of an international body of support
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consisting of multinational corporations, the mainstream media and almost all public institutions
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Next to the sophisticated resources available to the anti-fascist state, the side of Mussolini
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delivering a speech in Rome's Palazzo Venezia might seem bizarre and ancient.
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Everything is meant to mold public opinion and to get it on board.
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And alongside that, the anti-fascist state is all about erasing, you know, any sort of culture,
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It all has to be one together because there's only one global thing that causes us to move
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Yeah, it's that's the very managed democracy that they're mocking, right, is the exact type
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Oh, well, you know, we get all of these different stories about how the ability of people to vote
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I see that you have, you know, rural white voters over there.
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The most dangerous thing to democracy seems to be the people actually being allowed to
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And so it is the the very thing that they're attempting to satire is the satirize is the
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thing that they would support is that the thing that these people would support in real
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And it's very strange, like I was saying, because while they import all of this stuff
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into the game because they have to have this diverse cast, they're people who are supporting
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them, the people online who would attack them for not having these things in there.
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They would be angry if that wasn't in this future version of fascism.
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And so you look at this this kind of super earth, you know, future fascist state, you know,
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quote unquote, and you realize it has all of the things that progressives think prevent
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And so the only thing that codes it as fascist is the fact that people are safe and they
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In this case, they're patriotic and like they have cool stuff on.
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It looks cool and people are happy and people are safe.
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If that's what's supposed to indicate that it's fascist, like everything else about it
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is decidedly, as you say, anti-fascist, it's all the things that you would think would
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be coded as anti-fascist, all the progressive narratives and all the things that would prevent
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And instead, the only things that are supposed to code this as a fascist satire are the things
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that kind of make it fun and a place you would actually want to be in.
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Well, I mean, that's sort of the funny thing about a lot of these progressive tropes that
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you see in gaming, but also in just mainstream media as well, is that I mean, like take HBO's
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I think it's on HBO Max, the whole television alternate timeline for all mankind, wherein
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the idea that America wins the space race and becomes this great spacefaring civilization
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along with the rest of the world because the Soviets beat us to the moon in 69, is kind
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of funny because the whole future timeline split indicates that, well, if America wants
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to succeed and beat the commies and to beat the private sector, it has to double down on
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sort of its fully automated gay space liberalism, where everyone is diverse and we can be competent
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when you look at the real world and you know that that's not true at all, whether it be
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from airlines or the state of American infrastructure or that we're relying more and more on immigrant
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labor and technical capabilities than we are domestically.
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And you know, just the dissonance between what people consider to be anti-fascism and being
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good progressives and putting on yourselves the right side of history is quite funny because
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you look at some of the things that get said in sort of like the tips section when you're
00:19:18.640
You know, shoot anyone that manages to negotiate with you diplomatically.
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So very similar to how, you know, you can't really have a dialogue with a rabid leftist.
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They're there to smash your brains out with a bike lock.
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They're not there to do anything else or that, you know, you have to trust the science when
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it comes to certain medical procedures that are out there.
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You're there for democracy, you know, and that you can't forget to understand that if you're,
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you know, democracy only works when you're hungry, angry and fighting.
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And it's sort of a weird, like the woke or more correct than the mainstream moment where
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it's like, oh yeah, democracy really only does tend to work on such a mass scale when
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you're willing to kill millions of people in order to make it happen.
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And then you look at the news and you think about, oh, the rural white male voters that
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And it's like, oh, they really want to kill millions of rural white people because they
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And again, I noticed when I was playing it not too long ago with a friend of mine that we
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had finally found a white person in the game who's working in the back as a munitions
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operator for one of the airstrikes that you can call in on your ship.
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And it was just funny because as Gottfried says, you know, anti-fascism involves sprawling
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administration, efforts to demasculize and deethnicize populations, a term favored by the
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German government officials of our time who do not want to be associated with any terms
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The anti-fascist regime operates with forces dedicated to fighting, quote, hate with mass
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And again, like that's the world that we kind of live in now.
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And it's because we live in that world, an anti-fascist one.
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We're haunted by the specter of fascism or anything that could resemble El Duce or the
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And so all of our media has to constantly reify and reiterate these sort of quasi-religious
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fervors where the state religion, since the end of the Second World War, is to ensure that
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anything that resembles nationalism, anything that resembles homogenous states and countries
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I mean, one only has to look at what happened in the United Kingdom earlier this week, where,
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you know, a gentleman simply putting up stickers warning about demographic replacement wasn't
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even arrested for any actual crime, but rather his intent, because he held beliefs that were
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contrary to the public religion of making sure that diversity is our strength and that we
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can be a great cosmopolitan metropolitan world and a new kind of Great Britain, so to speak,
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where, you know, the immigrants come there rather than anything else.
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And so that's sort of the world that we live in, and our media, from video games to music to
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all sorts of endorsements from celebrities, illustrates that, you know, to add as a corollary
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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,
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like, which is a really interesting and dangerous game to play.
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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
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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
00:23:50.700
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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.
00:28:58.640
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00:29:10.080
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00:29:21.580
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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.
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
00:56:38.040
your first time here, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Make sure you click the bell,
00:56:43.140
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00:56:51.360
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00:57:01.020
it really helps with the algorithm magic. Thanks for coming by guys. And as always,