The Woke Trojan Horse ｜ Guests： Last Things and Gio Pennacchietti ｜ 1⧸24⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 33 minutes
Words per Minute
179.60535
Summary
In this episode, I'm joined by Oren and Gio from Content Minded and Digital Archipelago to discuss the phenomenon of the Woke Troop Horse in entertainment. They discuss what it means, why it exists, and why it matters.
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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Got a great stream with some returning guests that I think you guys are really going to enjoy.
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You know, we've got the art, we've got the cultural critique.
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They're down to help me talk about some TV shows that started out kind of based, but ended up going awoke and kind of talking about this phenomena of the woke Trojan horse in entertainment.
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And then, of course, I've got Gio from Content Minded.
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And Digital Archipelago, which is tomorrow on Prude's channel, too.
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Both gentlemen have YouTube channels that you absolutely must check out, and they'll make sure to tell you all about those as we kind of wrap things out or up.
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But make sure that you're checking their stuff out.
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Now, last things gave me this idea, and I thought it was a great one, which is why I had to enlist these gentlemen for this talk.
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He was telling me about this idea of the woke Trojan horse.
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We've got the, or as we used to call it, the SJWs, you know, running the entertainment these days.
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There are these, you know, little things that Hollywood likes to throw out there.
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These shows that start off with kind of a based premise.
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Now, it might even be communicating a message that we agree with.
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But over time, we slowly see that these things morph and change.
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Can you tell us a little bit about the woke Trojan horse and why you thought of some of
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the TV shows that we're going to talk about today?
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I guess that's kind of my working term for this phenomenon.
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And honestly, I think it's, it troubles me that I think it's something that gets buried
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under people speaking generally and broadly about the phenomenon of woke shows.
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Because I find it to be something quite a bit more kind of nefarious and, and kind of uncanny
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And one of the reasons why when you and I were batting around this idea for a show, I
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wanted to bring on Gio is because I know this, this, this man is my art historian.
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And I think it really does deserve its own scrutiny and its own term.
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Woke Trojan horse is a working title, by the way.
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If we can think of a better neologism tonight, let's, let's do it.
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But, um, you know, I think it just unsettles me a lot more than things that just kind of
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come out of the gate woke, whether, I mean, even if it's an adaptation of a preexisting
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product, if it's, you know, if in episode one, it's woke, there's still something that
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there's a, it's a bit more of a fair fight, I guess, or, or it still seems like there's
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something kind of above, above board about the subversion and the transgression.
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But I find it very eerie and, and unsettling that the, I get, I think the way I put it
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to you, Oren, in an email was, you know, if we think about other eras, you know, before
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television, you know, if you, if you were just staring at an oil painting of Napoleon
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Bonaparte from like the, the, the 1700s, it's not going to suddenly become a oil painting
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about gay marriage or no, well, actually, no, no, they could be, it could be last.
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Maybe if you look at it long and hard enough, given the hermeneutics of it over time, given
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But, well, I mean, Gio, tell me, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong here, but is there any, anything
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that would have, that has existed that you think would be kind of comparable in any kind
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of artistic medium to, to a TV show, just having its, having its messaging be completely
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I mean, I think, um, well, the, a lot of the Greek pictorial art, I mean, that always has
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in the minds of academics, homoerotic subtext, uh, there is ambiguity though.
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Caravaggio, for instance, I mean, let's face it, he kind of was a classic gay man, but like
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there, there, in terms of his outlook, there, there always is sort of, uh, a level of profanation
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But, but when you're, what you're talking about though, is when it comes to visual medium,
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when it comes to the art of reproduction that is afforded by certain, you know, technology,
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such as the camera, the fact that narratives can change and shift, it seems that we live
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It seems that the Hollywood film after the, uh, for YouTube purposes, the certain medical,
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um, state of exception that happened the previous two years, it seems that series work is now
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the thing and the Hollywood movie is like on its, on its last legs.
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But when it comes to a narrative medium, the fact that it can be so subverted so easily,
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Whereas it takes a lot of intellectual, uh, let's call it, uh, intellectual subversion to
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take a painting like a William Waterhouse painting and say that, you know, it represents
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some unique form of either, you know, uh, social messaging or subversion, or for example, the
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way they canceled Picasso because he painted certain ladies of the night.
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So therefore the, um, the figures of the three women that has a new subtext, which is evil
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and terrible and patriarchal, but you know, but what you're saying is the direct transmission
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of the message over a sort of a narrative piece over time, how that sort of shifts, which
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You're right to point out that it seems with series work in particular, there's this unique
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And I guess I should, I should say, I, I, I think there's kind of multiple potential,
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it's hard to read into things some of the time.
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Um, but, but there, there are multiple agendas or multiple things at play.
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I think in some circumstances, it may have sort of always been the intention to sort of,
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you know, turn the dial up to 11 with the, the progressive messaging.
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And it was just a matter of, of kind of lulling.
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You take season one to just kind of, um, get people acclimated to a series and then it
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But I think in other circumstances, it, it feels much more to me like it, it has been kind
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of torn out of the creators or the showrunners hands and really just becomes someone else's
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No, I was just going to say that, that I think that's a big part of it that you hit
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their last things at the end where you're talking about the committee taking over, right?
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Like one of the things about these is that there's such an involved production.
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They happen over time, like Gio was talking about and because they happen over time and
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unlike a movie, they end up with a lot more writers.
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Like movies get notes, of course, like they, they have the studio process and in many ways
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movies are, are now so much more made by committee, which is why they're such garbage now.
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But this is even more true, uh, true TV shows because no one's writing like the full run for
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And so that means that you've got many, many different hands that can shape and craft this
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set as it goes, each one is getting different kinds of notes.
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And over time, when you have kind of this woke subversion throughout Hollywood, even if there's
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a singular vision that was provided by a showrunner that might've been more based, the people who
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are going to come in after them, the people are going to have control of that project, especially
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as it grows and becomes more important as a media franchise and needs to appeal and have
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its rough parts smoothed out for a wider distribution.
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You're going to see that stuff creep in over and over again.
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Yeah, I think, I guess one, one other point to add about, about this is I think it's when
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We are kind of living in the, the era and the epoch of, of the series.
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And when we were, we're, when the primary art form was really just film, you had a lot
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of films that were kind of a reaction or a revision of existing, pre-existing movies or genres
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that, that really kind of came out as a critique.
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I mean, one example that I've used in one of my videos is the Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood.
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That's a Western that's, that's really an anti-Western.
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A lot of people have written about it, but it's, it's something that's trying to kind
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of critique the John Ford style cookie cutter Western of, you know, the lone gunman, the
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kind of earlier Clint Eastwood movies, like the good and the bad and the ugly.
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Uh, and, and, and it, it, it, it, it's something that came out of a critique of Westerns.
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It would not exist were it not commenting on these more straightforward and simplified genre
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films, but now it's, it's, that critique happens within the same artifact within the same, uh,
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And it's, it's so, um, it's so, it's so jarring and strange.
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You can sort of see sometimes this battle, this, this struggle for happening within a show.
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I find myself sort of watching two dramas at once.
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There's the superficial surface level drama of a television program.
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And then there's sort of what the, the, what I'm able to read in as sort of the political
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drama occurring within the executive producers or the writer's room, um, for these, you know,
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for these characters or for the, um, the messaging.
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And I mean, that, that is really what, um, I'm trying to kind of articulate.
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I know obviously people are going to have different interpretations of, of paintings or that there's,
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there's always the possibility that a, a very talented critic could, um, provide an interpretation,
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uh, that, that undermines the intentionality of the, the writer.
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You know, we could go full Foucault here and death of the, death of the, the author, but I think
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I'm describing something that's a lot less, um, subtle than anything that Foucault was getting
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I'm not talking about, you know, the writer's intentionality doesn't matter because of whatever
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subconscious desires or, um, you know, political power structures to which their subject are
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I'm talking about people just getting kicked out of the writer's room or the director getting
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kicked out of the director's chair by woke Janissaries.
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I think to give you a genealogy though, speaking of Foucault, uh, someone mentioned, I think
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Merkley mentioned Stalker, can you, can you woke up by Stalker?
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You can't because Stalker is like the quintessential anti-woke film.
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No, Stalker is a metaphysical film that defied basically every film censorship board in the
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Uh, I have, I, my Patreon actually, I have a bit about Stalker.
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Uh, but what, so there was this question, I believe it was around December before Christmas.
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Someone asked, it was one of these viral tweets.
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They asked, um, when did Hollywood become woke?
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And of course people give out the answers like sex in the city.
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Um, you know, what's another, um, house I saw a few times house you could say because
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medical dramas always are at the field, but here's, here's a little red pill for you guys.
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Go all the way back to the late seventies, early eighties, Norman Lear, all of it, except
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for Sanford and Sons, mostly, mostly all of the Norman Lear shows, like all in the family
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mod was about women's lib on the families, but multiculturalism like this was the genesis
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Norman Lear and his television empire was like directly the genesis of like quote unquote
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And people don't know this because if you look at the later seasons of all in the family,
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for instance, they were like, you know, um, what, what was the wife's name?
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Um, the, the wife, she died later in the seasons, um, Archie Bunker's wife.
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Um, but you know, she befriends like a lesbian and there's a thing about, uh, you know, a
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Someone mentioned Grey's Anatomy, Grey's Anatomy of course was the acceleration of it.
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And when you actually look at the evolution, for example, of medical shows in particular,
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you could like see like they progressively go, for example, house, there's like this ambiguity
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there where they have to topple the old order of like Christian religious America.
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So house was like the, the, the peak of like the new atheists, you know, like the four horsemen.
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And so you have like house debating about God with Watson.
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And, but then by the time you get to the newer medical shows, like Grey's Anatomy, then you
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Like, um, what's that one new Amsterdam every single week.
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It's about like trans and a certain other medical procedure.
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Like they hit you in the face with it, but if you look at the history of television, it's
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slowly, but surely creeps towards a certain direction.
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And other people are pointing the chat Star Trek.
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I mean, I grew up in a Star Trek household, but I realized that, you know, very early on
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Star Trek was sort of like the, uh, end of history dream, you know, even, yeah, yeah.
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No, I think it's interesting that you, you make the point about medical shows.
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Cause what's interesting is the way they end up woke most of the time or some of their
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most, uh, aggressively woke ones are always episodes where like the doctor has to make
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decisions in contradiction to the parent, right?
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The parent has some silly religious faith or some kind of, uh, you know, backwards idea
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And it's really important that I, as an enlightened, you know, progressive, uh, professional step
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in and separate this poor child from the authority of their backward parent so that I can now,
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you know, use the authority of the state to press this onto these, you know, these rubes,
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these chuds that hold, that clings to their gods and their guns.
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So I do think I had not thought about it that way, but, but that is very interesting.
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But before we get too far into just wokeness in general, cause we, we will hit that for
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I do want to get to the specific shows that we had kind of talked about here so that we
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We have a lot, we have a lot of these ideas floating on the surface, but I want to tie this
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to kind of the particular process that we're talking about.
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So the first things that last thing had sent me was, uh, the boys, which I think is interesting
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because when I watched the boys, I saw at the very beginning, they're just dunking on
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They have these really dumb, like really, really ugly, um, uh, you know, pot shots at Christians
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So I didn't really see it as a base show, but then last things had, you know, some critiques
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about, uh, the boys that pointed to some of the things that they were attacking.
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They were talking about corporatization, militarization.
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They were talking about kind of the veneer, the neoliberal veneer of a lot of this stuff.
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So there are some messages in there that you're looking for it that I could see as base.
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So, so last things, do you want to lay out kind of the groundwork for this transition
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And, um, as, as Oren mentioned, I do have like a three-part video series where I go into
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Um, but I won't, I won't take 90 minutes to do this.
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You're, you're, you're right to point out, Oren, that there's a lot of anti-Christian messaging
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Although in, in defense of the boys, Garth Innes, who wrote the comics is, um, that's kind
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of something that happens throughout his comics as well.
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I don't know if any of you guys read like Preacher.
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So that kind of, um, proto new atheism has been part of Garth Ennis's work.
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Um, so that's not necessarily something that the, uh, the studio, uh, had to, had to add
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in there, but I think focusing on the part of the show that was always the most fascinating
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and innovative and fun for me was the soups, um, like the superheroes, which are just these
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other utterly, you know, cynical black comedy, um, pot shots at, you know, Cape, Cape shit
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Um, and that's really where the, the, the heart and the soul of the show lives.
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Um, there's a, and there's a ton of kind of bureaucracy with the, um, the superheroes dealing
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with the, the mega corporation that, that, that runs them that sort of subtly mirrors what
00:19:05.100
you imagine a, um, uh, uh, uh, a TV show to be like, right.
00:19:11.980
So there's a kind of a meta commentary going on because all of the superheroes are in care
00:19:16.520
are terribly concerned about their, their Nielsen ratings and the, uh, you know, that
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their Twitter followings and their presence and their personas.
00:19:24.880
Um, but, uh, in particular, like the, the figure of Homelander, who's this sort of composite
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sketch of, of Superman and Captain America, sort of the most absurdly patriotic, um, superhero,
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wears like a red, white, and blue spandex, uh, in the, in season one, he's sort of this
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personification of just terrible corporate insincere canned, um, come overly commodified
00:19:57.400
Um, and I, I think, and I, I honestly, I know I've heard sort of secondhand from people in
00:20:04.420
the industry that they did not like, they, the, the show, the show was somewhat surprised
00:20:12.600
at the, uh, affection and attention that it received from its audience as, as sort of a
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Um, the people that, that were complimenting it and, and found value in it were not necessarily,
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you know, Overton window libs, but, um, so by, by season two, all of this stuff gets, gets
00:20:38.500
subverted and in a really, really kind of ham fisted, absurd ways.
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Like they, they attempt to sort of transform Homelander into more of like a, like a Donald
00:20:50.440
Trump figure or somebody who's trying to like seed QAnon, you know, style.
00:21:00.140
Well, and I mean, the big, I mean the big, the big.
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They literally named the new character like Stormfront.
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The biggest, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest wrench that they throw into the gears
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There's a new superhero that comes, that joins his team.
00:21:18.280
Who's an ex Nazi, uh, that he fall, you know, he, he, he winds up becoming romantically
00:21:24.200
involved in and she just sort of starts, uh, corrupting him and feeding his ego and persuading
00:21:30.700
him into being, being more of a, more of a right-wing megalomaniac than a left-wing
00:21:36.680
Well, you're really underselling this though, because like she comes in and they, they sell
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her as like, uh, she's the anti-woke person, right?
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Like she comes in and she's not, you know, she's not playing the game.
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She's not doing, you know, she's a strong female, but she doesn't.
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She's the huntress, the feminism and everything.
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Like, so, so they, they really lean into this on the way up.
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And then of course it turns out that actually she's leading him down this path.
00:22:04.340
And it's funny too, because I like when, when it first started, when they first introduced
00:22:08.180
Stormfront, I mean, it's obvious from the name and from, you know, she has this like
00:22:14.900
She's got this, you know, haircut that's kind of fashy new wave fashion.
00:22:20.100
So it's obvious that they're like the, the, the aesthetics are, you know, mid-century
00:22:26.000
But when it, when it, when it first started with the first few episodes, I still thought
00:22:30.460
that that was this meta commentary on like on, on wokeness in some way.
00:22:37.560
Cause I was like, they're going to make her woke, but it's really saying that like woke
00:22:40.860
people are as intolerant as, um, you know, as, as the, the mid-century Germans or something
00:22:49.280
I didn't think that they were going to go full bore.
00:22:51.980
Oh no, she is in fact, like she's been, she, she, I mean, she was alive during world
00:23:01.900
Wait, she gets de-radicalized and then she becomes woke.
00:23:06.960
She, it was, it was as, as Oren was trying to describe it.
00:23:11.780
You, you, you suspect that she is going to be kind of like the character that's, um,
00:23:20.400
Um, and you, and you know, so that people kind of sympathize with her.
00:23:24.940
She seems kind of cynical and, um, uh, and with it, but then they, as the season progresses,
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she gets more and more homicidal and, and, and crazy and, and more and more of a cartoon
00:23:38.180
Or, you know, they were trying to pull like the libs of the real Austrian painters, but
00:23:45.560
Like they, it's, it's, uh, we want to, so, so the interesting part about this, like the,
00:23:51.560
the, the based part that last things is talk about the reason that the, the show had its
00:23:55.680
audience in the beginning is that they're, so they're attacking all the things that were
00:24:09.360
Media companies are controlled by, by the government, blah, blah, blah.
00:24:14.300
The problem is that all the things that they're targeting now are very obviously run by progressives
00:24:20.760
So it's the lag between when the comic is written.
00:24:24.660
But the cultural lag between the nineties attack and the actual people in power of the, in these
00:24:31.160
positions in 2022 means that the people they're attacking is inadvertently the progressives.
00:24:38.320
And so once people start picking up of like, oh, wait, all the people who like this show
00:24:42.400
like it because it's actually attacking progressive institutions.
00:24:45.460
They need to find a way to like make it very clear that actually all these institutions
00:24:53.280
And so like, and so this character has to turn out to have been like seeding this ideology
00:25:01.560
We're not attacking like woke Google or woke Apple or, you know, woke Merrill Lynch.
00:25:07.800
These corporations are all actually secretly mid-century Germans.
00:25:13.280
And so now we're on the right team guys, right?
00:25:17.980
It's almost like an irony leftist view of reality where it's like, you know, um, the
00:25:26.640
It's all about like, it's all about the corporations.
00:25:29.560
Actually, they're secretly in bed with, uh, I guess Russia's all funding us.
00:25:35.280
It's incredibly difficult to get rubles in Canada nowadays, but you know.
00:25:38.620
Tuesdays and Thursdays, you know, the conversion's a little weird, but we work it out.
00:25:43.620
It's, it's basically like the woke Bernie bro view of reality where the corporations
00:25:48.500
Oh, by the way, it's like, Noam Chomsky saying that academia is ultra right wing because
00:25:55.460
Not to like, you know, beat up on the old man, but it's, but like you were saying that
00:25:59.300
culture lag between the Bush era, um, it reminds me and like, forgive me for using this
00:26:06.260
And, and he's speaking of irony leftist, but, uh, there was this, um, article by Sam
00:26:10.480
Do you remember Sam Chris Orton when he was back?
00:26:13.980
Well, he was like one of those, he was hovering around Chapo, but he's a great writer though.
00:26:20.820
And he had this article about the new matrix movie where he said there was this moment
00:26:25.620
in the like late nineties where you had the slew of media, whether it was like, um, certain
00:26:31.380
television shows, like the outer limits, whether it was the matrix itself or like existence,
00:26:35.680
which I feel is like the more mature work, you know, by Cronenberg.
00:26:39.300
And basically you could critique the system as being an illusion.
00:26:43.760
And it was sort of like, all of this isn't real, but then he goes, as time goes on, when
00:26:48.940
it comes to the 2010s, the sort of cultural evolution of the 2010s, now it's no longer
00:26:56.540
So now media is telling you that it's not the system and it's sort of intransigent ideology.
00:27:01.320
That's the problem, or it's rather like these other things.
00:27:07.800
If you like, you know, consume product and like, you know, get excited for the new show
00:27:14.120
So that cultural shift is, it's hugely significant.
00:27:17.180
And when you see all these shows, like, especially like as soon as they hit like the mid 2000s
00:27:25.160
Like it's, it's cop shows, you know, like, uh, one of the last great ones was the shield.
00:27:33.240
You know, it's what's interesting is that I have not, I have not watched the shield,
00:27:37.980
but every time I, I, I go to Twitter or I, or I talk to anybody, any of our guys,
00:27:45.860
Can I please, please tell me something that it's not gonna, that isn't woke.
00:27:49.840
And it's not going to become woke every single time.
00:28:03.140
They let it, they let it get greenlit for seven seasons.
00:28:06.180
But, um, it's, you know, what's funny though, is if you watch, um, like other Anglosphere
00:28:11.600
shows around the two thousands, if you watch, for example, Australian or British cop dramas
00:28:17.020
or medical dramas, they start off having their colloquial sort of ways of doing things that
00:28:24.740
Because they're still in, but the fact that they're still English language, as soon as
00:28:28.460
you get around to like 2007, 2006, then they have to like respond to the American culture
00:28:35.780
Like for example, when, um, when, what was that show?
00:28:50.280
So if you look at like British cop shows and Australian cop shows, it's like, you could
00:28:56.740
see the later seasons transforming to be like, not necessarily woke, but like more like bombastic
00:29:06.840
And so there was this like huge transition throughout the Anglosphere where basically
00:29:10.860
medical dramas, cop dramas, they had to basically conform to like the big, huge American culture
00:29:17.780
And of course this was the era before the internet like sunk everyone into different forms of
00:29:23.900
media because like back in the day, like everyone watched a CSI, like everyone watched, you
00:29:31.240
I mean, I think the culture industry is in some ways panicking because there is such a
00:29:36.260
There's such like a, a glut of like media you can choose.
00:29:40.080
That's why streaming services are so big, you know?
00:29:44.360
I think like the whole like cultural moment on mainstream media, they're still around,
00:29:50.200
but it's not as significant as like, for example, an internet meme going viral, like,
00:29:55.180
like a woman filming herself in the gym saying like, she's a 21 year old minority and the
00:30:00.060
guy's creeping on her like when he's not really right.
00:30:02.820
It's, it seems like they have no, they have little control over like mass cultural happenings
00:30:10.460
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00:30:42.440
Well, the next one, uh, or did you have anything else you want to touch on with, uh, the boys
00:30:50.520
Um, if, if people are curious, uh, my, the, um, I've got a three-parter on my channel.
00:30:57.620
They could, they could hear everything I have to say about it there and, and season one's
00:31:03.600
Yeah, yeah, no, you've, you've gone to it very through a very extensively and did a good
00:31:08.940
So the next one that you wanted to mention was Peaky Blinders.
00:31:11.760
Now this one is interesting because I really only watched the first season.
00:31:15.240
It was good, but I just wasn't like in a space where it grabbed me at the time.
00:31:21.840
So I didn't see it go woke or, or, or kind of change over time.
00:31:25.720
But what were the things that you kind of saw in there last things that you saw where
00:31:31.180
And I, you know, I will, I will admit that I feel like this is, this is a, a more subtle
00:31:37.300
shift and one that probably a lot of people that stuck with the show did not, did not
00:31:43.620
I really wish I could take off the, the nightmare vision goggles.
00:31:46.540
Like I, I can't even, I can't watch, just sit and watch shows with my wife anymore.
00:31:52.440
At some point I'll just step, I'll step up and leave the room and say, no, it just went,
00:31:58.240
But so Peaky Blinders is it's based off an actual historical person in a historical gang
00:32:07.400
from post-World War I England, it's specifically the city of Birmingham and the character of Tommy
00:32:15.960
Shelby, who basically became, it's, if you could think of it as sort of like World War
00:32:24.000
It's a family of gypsies that sort of establishes this criminal empire.
00:32:31.200
The main character is this, this World War I veteran, total nihilist.
00:32:36.380
He's been shelled during the war, suffering from PTSD and is just, just kind of ruthless,
00:32:43.640
willing to do anything he can to, to, to, to get ahead in the world.
00:32:48.560
So very, very, very much a noir style show, beautifully shot.
00:32:54.920
And so fast forward, however, I forget if it's on season four or season five, but, but
00:33:01.700
the latest season, essentially the, the arch nemesis, the, the main villain of, of the
00:33:08.380
last season is another historic, an actual historical person, Sir Oswald Mosley, who was the, the leader
00:33:19.920
And he is, and Thomas Shelby is like a secret agent working for Winston Churchill to try and
00:33:27.500
undermine Oswald Mosley, Mosley's ascension, because he's about to, you know, get everybody,
00:33:33.260
he's going to, he's going to start World War II or, or turn, turn the UK into a, a nightmare.
00:33:42.980
So like this is, I think, I think the BBC and, and British stuff, not that this is a
00:33:48.260
BBC, BBC show, but I just noticed things in the UK seem to have an even harder time of
00:33:54.340
this, but like, you know, Thomas Shelby has a sister who's now in a, in a mixed race relationship
00:34:04.060
And this is like, it's 1920s Birmingham, England, and like somehow half the characters,
00:34:12.980
are in mixed race relationships, like, like everything.
00:34:17.360
And it just, you know, it breaks the, it breaks the, the, the, the mirage.
00:34:22.840
They got an actor that looks like Oswald Mosley.
00:34:29.720
And I'm just like, there's probably no, like Tommy shell, the real Tommy Shelby probably
00:34:40.800
I could imagine like it was violent gang leaders from the 1920s weren't super progressive is
00:34:48.020
Like they, they might have had some backwards views, uh, you know, on these things, things
00:34:53.940
that today, uh, the, the left would have found very offensive, but, but we can't portray them
00:34:58.560
that way that instead they're all on board with the plan.
00:35:02.260
And, and I mean, the whole, the whole premise of the show is that, that Shelby is this, this
00:35:07.300
anti-hero who's only out for himself, not, not seeking redemption sort of refuses any,
00:35:14.360
any kind of, um, black and white definition or understanding of good and evil.
00:35:19.980
And then, and then, I mean, very similar, I mean, this, I often the, um, the woke Trojan
00:35:26.080
horse comes in the form of a Nazi or pro like, you know, pseudo Nazi, um, to, to, to focus
00:35:37.560
the, um, the hero's attention or the, the main character's attention, um, and, and to draw
00:35:43.220
the, the, the viewer's attention away from, um, liberal writing and really, yeah, precisely,
00:35:52.520
So, um, yeah, I mean, if neither of you are that familiar with the show, we don't have
00:35:56.940
No, but that is amazing that they, that they managed to transition it to like, yeah, there
00:36:02.500
That's who he's badly, even though he's like a gang member.
00:36:05.120
It's like, uh, the rocketeer when he ends up fighting the, the, the, the mobsters end up
00:36:12.220
Like all of a sudden the U S government and gangsters are in a shootout with the, the
00:36:16.920
Nazis, you know, we'll get to the walking dead, Charles, but, uh, here's a question
00:36:22.280
for you, or, and actually, can you, or I, about, well, both of you, although Gio, you
00:36:26.340
kind of mentioned, you know, you, you see this dating back to shows in the seventies
00:36:29.700
or eighties, but could either of you pinpoint, I mean, I don't know if either of you suffer
00:36:33.380
this as much as I do, but I let it like, I really, I want to, I want to go back.
00:36:37.520
I want, I want the blue pill at least when, when it comes to like.
00:36:43.420
I want a very specific window of blue pilling in which I can like sit on my couch at the
00:36:51.160
end of the day and watch 30 to 90 minutes of television without the nightmare vision
00:36:57.600
goggles perceiving the, the, the subtext and propaganda of every, every piece of media.
00:37:04.840
But can you, if you yourselves find yourself in that situation, could you, could you pinpoint
00:37:10.760
a moment or a TV show where that, that happened, where you started to just like realize that you
00:37:18.480
were observing, um, the, the, the propagandistic elements of a show? You could, you could read
00:37:26.340
the agit prop the same way that you were, you were absorbing the plot.
00:37:38.020
It could have been a house with the fedora tipping. I don't know. Maybe, maybe even earlier.
00:37:42.480
I don't know. What do you think, Orrin? I mean, I can't think of one show, but I can say that
00:37:47.540
probably about four, four or five years ago, it got to the point where I could start the clock
00:37:54.100
on shows and be like, how many, you know, my, my father-in-law has this game. Like he, he could,
00:38:00.100
he'll watch any show, but he'll basically throw it in the trash the minute it gets woke. And so like,
00:38:06.380
he'll, he'll start an episode and be like, Nope, started right away. Done. Or, you know, he'll get a
00:38:10.560
half a season. He's like, Nope, they already dropped all the, all they checked all the boxes on all the
00:38:14.400
characters. It's all coming. I can see it a mile away. So I wouldn't say that there's one show that
00:38:19.780
immediately said, okay, this, this is what's happening now. And all TV is going to be this
00:38:24.680
way. But I can say that probably about five years ago, I started feeling the creep, like where every
00:38:31.020
show I started was like, all right, how long is it going to be until we get the trans? How long is
00:38:36.080
it going to be until we get the speech about racial injustice? How long is it going to be until two
00:38:40.400
characters disappear to be replaced by those that meet all the progressive checkboxes? Like you
00:38:45.840
could, you could start feeling those, you know, especially the character replacements. Like when
00:38:50.400
all of a sudden it's like, well, the main character needs a few more friends, you know, that looks a
00:38:56.220
little too much like a, you know, like a barbecue in Milwaukee here. So we really got to switch this
00:39:00.660
over, you know, too many primary colors. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. More, more, more, more colors of
00:39:06.500
Benetton in the show. Sorry, I got to forgive me. That was a quote from Oz where Vern Schillinger,
00:39:12.880
the AB leader, he's like, you notice there's a lack of primary colors around here. That was a
00:39:18.600
great show, by the way, before the Sopranos, I think the template of HBO was laid out with Oz,
00:39:23.780
but it's a dark, dark world where you have to go back to a show about gay prison prostitution to
00:39:30.460
find something that's not, that's not, you know, overly, it truly was anti-woke, like the prison
00:39:36.320
prag stuff. But, uh, no, Oz was truly an incredible show, even though like near the end, you had to
00:39:41.280
like suspend your disbelief. But, um, what I was going to say about Peaky Blinders is that it seems
00:39:46.700
that, you know, there's a, a sort of like neurotic, wow. I mean, the left is all neurotic character,
00:39:53.180
but there's a certain like fixation or fetishism or neurotic fixation with like the underclass
00:40:01.700
as harboring revolutionary sentiment. It seems like it, like even Oz, I hate to say, had this as well,
00:40:08.460
like Kareem Saeed, the leader of the Muslims had this speech about it, right? Where essentially
00:40:13.340
criminality is equated with like, these are the ripe underclasses to commit the revolution. And you
00:40:21.000
have like this leftist, like literally dating back to the October revolution, you have this like
00:40:25.460
leftist obsession in the West with like, well, actually Mohican wholesome criminal underclasses,
00:40:32.440
they're the ones that can be the foot soldiers of the revolution. And we see this nowadays with
00:40:37.000
certain, uh, one very prominent group, uh, that came into the news recently in Atlanta. We all know
00:40:42.960
that one, right? Um, the, the one that the FBI is pretty sure doesn't exist. Exactly. They don't exist
00:40:49.240
by the way, they're like mafia to, you know, they don't exist. Uh, but the, it's like this sort of
00:40:54.840
like revolutionary. Yeah, exactly. The Langdon industry is revolutionary pornography where
00:40:58.440
the underclasses, they're criminals, but at least they're not Austrian painter fans. And actually
00:41:05.240
they're the vitalistic spirit of the, you know, they have this vitalistic spirit that can overturn the
00:41:12.280
regime. And it's like criminality is actually good. And because they're the foot soldiers of the
00:41:16.580
revolution. So, and it seems like consistently in like leftist media, that is like, like comic
00:41:22.640
books have that where, you know, actually the criminal underclass, they're like the downtrodden
00:41:27.880
subalterns that can lead to the better utopian future. Um, if we just empty out the prison
00:41:34.080
streets, sorry, go ahead. So I have to concept, but I have to jump in here just because there's a show
00:41:40.560
that I watched that was so ridiculous and fits right into this perfectly. It's not one that we
00:41:45.080
discussed earlier, but, but I gotta throw it in. So there's this new musketeer, uh, uh, redo. I
00:41:51.160
think it was the BBC that did it. So they're doing the three musketeers and it's, you know, it's
00:41:55.460
everything you hope it isn't right. Like, you know, it's, it turned, it turns out that actually
00:42:00.340
all of sub-Saharan Africa showed up to France at this time, but like one of the, one of the
00:42:05.460
amazing things is, so one of the, um, one of the, uh, musketeers ends up getting into a romantic
00:42:14.040
relationship with a, uh, black, uh, revolutionary who is a new immigrant, uh, into the area. And
00:42:23.340
she comes in and she immediately starts printing pamphlets about, you know, she literally just
00:42:28.980
like, this is their, their storyline. They created this. It feels like something that
00:42:33.280
like, um, you know, that some kind of white nationalist might create as propaganda. Like
00:42:38.540
she, she comes in and she immediately comes in and says like, I'm, I'm the one who's going
00:42:45.920
to lead a revolution. Literally just showed up. Like these people are feeding her, like
00:42:49.520
clothing her. She just got back from a war, but it's like, I'm not being treated correctly.
00:42:53.760
So I'm going to lead an uprising. And she starts like printing subversive literature and gathering
00:42:58.980
all the immigrants together so that they can start like riots over this thing. And like,
00:43:04.000
this is the person you're supposed to be rooting for. Of course, like, like she's a hero because
00:43:09.400
she just showed up to France and she's immediately leading like bread riots with, uh, with all of
00:43:15.460
the people who just traveled into France against the people who are like feeding and housing them
00:43:20.060
as refugees from a war that like, they just escaped. And like this, this, this is the hero
00:43:25.340
of the show. And so like, it doesn't even occur to them like that. They might be portraying like
00:43:31.280
something that people might not want to happen in there. Like this might be some kind of cautionary
00:43:36.280
tale about, you know, it's, it's insane. Like, like they, they, they, they're completely, it's like
00:43:42.600
that Netflix show, uh, that they had where like the portrayed like camp of the saints, but like
00:43:47.500
they're for it. So it's fine. Like, uh, like, I don't know if you guys saw that trailer for that
00:43:53.700
one, but it's amazing, but it's the same thing. It's like, Oh yeah. Like this is something that
00:43:58.480
like the farthest right, you know, person in the world might, might warn you against in their like
00:44:03.380
hysterical, you know, dystopian novel. And we're just portraying it as like the heroic thing that's
00:44:09.140
happening. So we're on board. It's it's celebration parallax, like all over the place. It's sort of like
00:44:13.760
that new book by who's that journalist yak mood. Is that his name where he's like, Oh yeah. Like
00:44:20.100
the end of Christians or white guys or something. Is that, yeah. It's like basically like everything
00:44:24.500
like Richard Spencer believed in 2007 is correct, but actually it's evil. So that's why we have to
00:44:31.740
fight harder. Um, it reminds me of the example of, uh, the, there I, maybe I shouldn't recommend it's
00:44:40.060
a little too edgy, but there is one of the best movie review sites is sold cinema. I believe Jack,
00:44:44.980
the perfect nationalist interviewed the guy and they had this review of, uh, and here, here's my
00:44:50.000
crazy thesis. Uh, cause I'm an Italian myself here in Canada. Right. So, um, you know, uh, do the right
00:44:56.500
thing. Right. Um, yeah. Right. By Spike Lee. Was it Spike Lee or Spike Joe? I think it was Spike. I'm not
00:45:03.500
sure. I, I, I don't think I ever saw it, but like, I'm familiar with the movie. Yeah. But like,
00:45:08.940
basically it's like the evil racist Italian, uh, pizza shop owners against, you know, my heck yes,
00:45:15.640
Spike Lee, my heck and wholesome, you know, by POCs. And like, the whole point is like, he gives the
00:45:21.680
one guy a job, but that's not good enough. So it's like, then there's this like race war riot. And it's
00:45:28.760
like, it's, it's, I believe truly that that film was the final nail in the coffin of like Italians in
00:45:37.000
America being like, like sort of like Asians, like a semi minority, but still has the sort of
00:45:43.400
coding of white America after that Spike Lee film. Now Italians are racist. Ergo Italians are just
00:45:49.640
white people now, you know? So it's like the whole history of like Italian immigration in America and
00:45:56.260
anti-Catholicism and all that. Like that's against like one of the worst hate crimes ever happened in
00:46:01.180
America was against Italian village. Right. So, uh, a little Italy, but you know, that's all swept
00:46:06.040
on the rock now because we're racist against black people. So it's like, um, but the whole,
00:46:11.960
the premise of the film is that the sort of civil society that Italians largely conformed to that,
00:46:18.320
that was, they were complicit in the evil racism of it. So ergo, you know, you'd internalize the
00:46:25.320
culture and become a, you know, become a product of it. You were now critical for the system. Yeah.
00:46:30.880
How dare we give the, the, the, the guy a job, you know? No, I will say the Italians didn't do the
00:46:36.400
right thing. We're kind of like, I know someone posted the one dialogue on Twitter, the one pizza
00:46:41.780
shop, you know, they were racist. We were, we were Italians. We were racist. Don't worry about it. But
00:46:47.360
I think it was a bit over the top in terms of like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, I just had to say,
00:46:55.540
it's, it's funny to hear you describe your, your father-in-law's, um, game that he plays where you
00:47:00.980
watch him in until it goes woke, because I, this is my, the next video I'm working on is on, is on
00:47:05.880
Neil Gaiman's Sandman since that was recently. I wanted to talk about it so we can, we can talk
00:47:11.620
about that. Oh, definitely. I will definitely have you on to talk about it. But I told myself, I was
00:47:16.040
like, I know, I know this is going to make me upset. This is going to be terrible. So I, I, I made a deal
00:47:21.880
with myself. I said, I will watch this up until I encounter the first character, the first cherished
00:47:28.600
character that I remember from my, you know, my adolescence reading these comics is, has either
00:47:35.260
had their gender or their race reversed. And it was literally the first character that came on screen.
00:47:42.300
Yes. Yeah, no, that, that show is amazing because yeah, they, they, obviously they changed everything.
00:47:49.360
Like Constantine is a female. Now I've heard that, uh, defended because they don't, they can't have
00:47:55.020
the rights to the same Constantine because it's still like, it's still going in like the WB show
00:47:59.760
or whatever. So, so maybe you can give them a pass on that one, but yeah, no, like death, you know,
00:48:06.440
like, like the, the, the entire character is based around like the super pale goth girl. That's the
00:48:11.940
iconic look. That's like everything about that character. And yeah, no, completely re re racialized
00:48:17.700
immediately because of course. Um, so yeah, I know that, that show is a mess top to bottom,
00:48:22.680
which is very sad. Like it's weird because Neil Gaiman is of course, proto woke in some ways,
00:48:28.720
but in other ways, uh, his like Sandman is very aggressively, uh, uh, offensive for woke people.
00:48:37.180
Like there, there's an entire, like he introduces a trans character in some of the later comic books
00:48:42.340
for, for like a series, but the character is explicitly told by the gods that it's not female.
00:48:48.640
Like you can pretend all you want, but the gods know. And like, and, and the character is not
00:48:53.240
allowed to go on journeys that other characters go on because the gods don't care how you identify.
00:48:58.320
Like at the end of the day, like there is a truth that you cannot subvert, you know,
00:49:03.080
that they can see past you. So like it, it, so there it's weird because, because Gaiman talks
00:49:08.400
about like eternal truths in, in, in, in a kind of Petersonian way. Like he had, like there's
00:49:15.240
these different archetypes that are built in and these structures. And that's a lot of what Gaiman
00:49:18.580
is drawing on, even though he himself is very clearly like progressive in his ideology,
00:49:23.480
he's drawing on things that are too deep and ancient to subvert entirely. And so like a lot
00:49:29.180
of those things aren't he, he still carries too much baseness into his stories, even if he's trying
00:49:36.600
to subvert it in some ways. He's very interesting. I mean, I hate to use the word, but he is a
00:49:41.340
transitionary figure because he, I mean, he's somebody that's obviously completely. Most Gen X writers
00:49:47.460
are that. Yeah. Enmeshed in the, the Western literary tradition. I mean, a lot of the characters
00:49:53.140
within Sandman are like Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, characters from Greek mythology.
00:49:59.180
You know, he's, he's not, he, he, he's, he occupies this strange sort of, um, I don't know,
00:50:06.180
like, you know, missing Neanderthal cousin between like the missing link. No, but they could do it
00:50:14.120
though with mythological characters. I mean, there are a lot of academics that talk, talk about like
00:50:19.220
certain myths, like Inanna in, in Sumar that are like proto trans. Um, they, they always talk about
00:50:28.080
like, uh, I said this to me, Therese once where there's a huge body of academic literature where
00:50:33.740
like Christ is trans, like, and you know, like what they're doing, right? This is total subversion,
00:50:39.220
but even, even like the media of like yesteryear didn't seem that like bad, even though it had like
00:50:47.340
an anti-racist or like a proto-woke message, like Nullis, my good friend, Nullis in the chat.
00:50:52.060
Um, I said, my good friend, there you go. That's the geo bingo card right there. Uh, he said, he
00:50:57.320
mentioned the heat of the night, but in the heat of the night, like it was like proto anti-racist,
00:51:02.860
but it had like the whole like normie boomer con sort of like, they're both kind of prejudice.
00:51:09.060
Like that one scene where, um, they're like, uh, oh, what's his name? Like Rod Stagger's character,
00:51:16.100
the sheriff, he's talking to the detective and he's like, I want to get that white guy. And he's like,
00:51:21.620
Ooh, you're just like the rest of us, boy. And it's like that sort of recognition. But then
00:51:26.960
like, for example, if you were to remake in the heat of the night now, I could only imagine like
00:51:31.820
the terror of it. Like it would just be like totally over the top. Right. Like, which is
00:51:37.840
another thing. I think it's funny. Cause yes, last week on my channel, me and Prude, we were talking
00:51:43.020
about the, um, the Mark Fisher, um, lecture that came from his book, the slow cancellation of the
00:51:49.220
future, but his book was called ghost of my life, right. About hauntology. And it seems like a lot
00:51:54.380
of these like, and let's face it, they're mostly millennials in like my generation, the writing
00:51:59.580
staff nowadays of these shows on prime and Netflix and so forth. It's, it, it's very much like they've
00:52:05.740
submitted to the lackluster culture, killing phenomenon of like total, like post or hyper
00:52:13.820
modernity where Mark Fisher talks about, you know, everything can come back. There's no
00:52:18.740
distinction between past and future. You could take a classic like Velma from Scooby-Doo and make
00:52:24.460
her woke. And, you know, Fred is like a, a nep, a racist Nepo kid. And Velma is like this woke
00:52:31.460
goddess Mindy Kaling. And it's like, but really when you examine that, you would think that the
00:52:37.620
revolutionary left, that they would be the ones to create media that breaks through that
00:52:43.120
conditioning, but really no, the future isn't this utopian vision. The future is actually
00:52:48.340
the postmodern robbing of the past for the service of the present, which is really crazy.
00:52:55.240
They almost submitted to the reality of hauntology and all of these shows, like even the shows that
00:53:00.300
we're discussing now, they like have this pervasive, like trope nature. They're very tropey. It's like,
00:53:06.100
we're going to take old tropes and we're going to subvert them. It's like, that's good enough for us.
00:53:10.160
Like it's, it's just going to make money. Right. Cause all these like terminally nostalgic
00:53:17.220
Gio, this is, this is really interesting. I have, I'm going to make you read the script to my,
00:53:21.360
to my Sandman video before I record it because you're, no, you're entering into like some of the
00:53:26.520
themes that, that I'm trying to explore. And I think that Sandman is a, a very strange and the
00:53:31.500
adaptation is something strange to examine because real, and Oren, Oren, you were touching on this too,
00:53:37.000
because what's so, what I I'm, I'm developing such a rarefied taste for like the, the woke
00:53:43.060
of vacation that, that like sometimes the, the decisions, the, the, the intricacies or the
00:53:49.480
subtleties of the decision-making is, is something that sticks with me and puzzles me because
00:53:54.140
Sandman, the whole series is, is, is honestly something you could not hand, hand a next,
00:54:00.880
a Netflix producer, a more perfectly gift wrapped multicultural, like, um, you know,
00:54:08.280
check off the boxes. I mean, they, like there are characters, their main character, like it is a
00:54:12.960
pan optic globalist series from the nineties, but they're like, you know, there are, there's,
00:54:18.940
there's stories about like African tribes. There's a character who's like, Oh, a white guy who's
00:54:25.680
immortal. That was a slave trader and is now in a relationship with a black woman. There's like,
00:54:30.520
Oh my God. That's how far they went. Orin mentioned, as Orin mentioned, there's like,
00:54:34.720
there's a trans character. There's like, I like women outnumber the men. It is some of the most,
00:54:39.740
uh, some of the most beautiful artwork from the series is the, uh, the, all the stories that take
00:54:44.180
place in, uh, in Arab countries. Like they're like, it travels the globe. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not,
00:54:49.440
it's not at all, you know, West, it is not necessarily like Western centric in its, in its
00:54:55.720
storytelling. But, um, the first slave owner, having a relationship with a slave, that would
00:55:02.340
be like, like, you know how they try to like, um, like basically destroy like the sort of American
00:55:08.800
history by like point out the slavery thing. I thought that was like abuse and exploitation,
00:55:13.480
other things that we can't say on YouTube. Like, like, why would they write that in there? I thought
00:55:17.860
that would like have the vibes would be all, because they're removed by generations. Oh,
00:55:22.480
okay. It's not the woman who was his slave is now his wife. It's, it's that like, yeah,
00:55:27.740
it's that you could write in a woke academic paper about like how that is the fetishism for the
00:55:33.240
subject. Yeah. It's taking it out at the end of the day. Yeah. It's, it's, see, this is why,
00:55:37.140
this is why, uh, the, the, the, maybe I shouldn't say, I shouldn't mention, I shouldn't cause beef
00:55:42.880
with you, uh, Orin, but this is why like the, the, the, the dark web, like James Lindsay's the
00:55:47.780
world. You have to actually like, you gotta read the woke text to really, you can just say it's
00:55:53.400
Gnosticism or something, but you know, hold on, hold on. But here's my, here's the main point I'm
00:55:57.780
trying to make about, about the Sandman subversion. So there's plenty of stuff that's just like handed
00:56:03.080
off the, the, and, and there are, but there are even characters who it would not be that glaring or
00:56:08.320
that offensive or that disruptive to the plot. If you change their race or their genders, they're,
00:56:13.620
there, there are still kind of characters that I would be like, okay, I'll give that to you. It's,
00:56:18.160
it's a freebie. But the, the first character that comes on screen, the one that I, I mentioned
00:56:22.720
was the, the original character in the comment comic book is Sandman's butler. Who's a, who's a,
00:56:30.040
a British Anglo archetype PG Wodehouse butler. Like this is the most, this is the most angle,
00:56:38.500
like the most archetypically Anglo like gentleman servant. And, and, you know, he's a, he's a,
00:56:46.720
a character in the dreaming. So he's supposed to like, what gives life to him, what gives form to
00:56:51.580
him is actually the fact that this does exist as an archetype within people's imaginations. Like
00:56:57.080
you think, but you hear the word butler, you think British, like stodgy British white dude.
00:57:02.260
And it's been, and the, and the character's name is, is, is now Lucienne and is being played by a woman
00:57:09.020
from Ghana. And it's, it's sort of, it's, that's the part that's so, that's so strange. And so,
00:57:16.140
so like, honestly, it's sort of, it's the horror. It, it, it, it verges on horror, the, the,
00:57:27.600
at the level at which they go to, to, to, to, to, to, to change and alter the characters where it
00:57:36.800
makes the least sense. It's the least plausible. It's the most, it's going to make, it's going to
00:57:41.840
be the, it's going to make the tiniest possible noise. You know, like they had a fat, there were,
00:57:46.820
there are dozens of characters that are, that would be less glaring. And, and, and that's the one
00:57:56.020
that they, they choose to sort of turn inside out. Sorry.
00:58:06.680
So, so Gio, I want to make sure, cause you were, you were talking about The Walking Dead. I want
00:58:11.620
you to get a chance so that we don't, we don't run you off before you get your, your examples here.
00:58:15.460
So Walking Dead is another one of those shows. I think I watch four or five. I mean, it's got to
00:58:22.920
I think the show has some of the worst writing I've ever seen.
00:58:27.160
So I read most of the comic books. I read, you know, a hundred, a hundred, some issues of the
00:58:32.540
comic books, but I only made it to like season four or five of the show. But what's, what's your
00:58:38.540
transition on this one? How did it go from somewhat base to woke?
00:58:43.120
Okay. I think that this is a longer point. I think that a lot of these shows, like the essence of them
00:58:49.080
is that they still have to get like, they have to have a get for like largely like male
00:58:56.060
kind of like still mostly white nerdy audiences, especially like comic book series type of stuff
00:59:02.840
or like any sort of action orientated franchise. And so with The Walking Dead, like my video on it,
00:59:11.020
I essentially said that it was like the white savior sun setting, like riding off into the
00:59:17.760
sunset, literally. And it's like, now it's the multi-racial, multi-sexual coalition of the willing
00:59:25.000
that are to take up the place of Rick Grimes, who is like the white savior who sacrificed his own
00:59:30.840
lineage, his own livelihood, his own standing to give it off to this cast, like this motley crew
00:59:37.680
of, you know, no, no relationship is single race or single sex. Like there's always like,
00:59:45.660
like, like, you know, lesbians in the apocalypse. I'm pretty sure that, you know, fertility age women,
00:59:50.540
when most of the world's population is decimated, I'm pretty sure that there's just lesbians
00:59:54.420
everywhere. Right. So, but also with The Walking Dead, it gives you the aesthetic of it being like a
01:00:02.320
a masculine show. Right. But then as time goes on, you have like the main characters are all like
01:00:09.940
girl bosses, apart from like Daryl, who's like still again, another white savior that gives himself
01:00:16.580
to the girl bosses to do their work, to, to lead society. And then at the very end where, you know,
01:00:22.480
that spoiler alert, when you have the, the last like bureaucratic apparatus, what are they called?
01:00:27.820
The Commonwealth. You have like a female villain, but of course, like, it's not even about like
01:00:35.100
saving the people that are there. It's just the group of the original survivors that are there.
01:00:40.480
Like it's the Alexandria group. There's this one scene where, um, where, uh, they're walking and
01:00:46.580
the guy who's like the henchman for, um, the woman that runs the Commonwealth. He's like, well,
01:00:52.260
you guys have an opportunity to save everyone. Are you going to do after this? And, and, uh,
01:00:56.060
Carol is like, there is no after this. You don't realize that we're number one. And it's like,
01:01:01.300
you guys, who cares? Cause what happens with walking dead is the formula is they find a new
01:01:06.380
villain, they find a new group. And then, you know, thousands of people die, millions of us die
01:01:11.940
and like, they move on. Right. And it's like all their pretensions to saving people or to arrive at a
01:01:18.640
normal life are gone. But along the way, the villains progressively get more ridiculous,
01:01:24.840
but they get less nuanced. They, and so for example, the governor, my argument, the video
01:01:31.320
was essentially that the group from Alexandria, that they're the wrong ones and all their villains,
01:01:36.680
they were the real ones that knew that in this environment, in this world, you have to do what
01:01:42.240
needs to be done. It's very Nietzschean in a sense, like Negan, who would win in that war?
01:01:46.640
Negan or Rick Grimes? Negan would win because he has the will to power. Right. But Negan's evil.
01:01:53.140
He has a harem. He's sexist. He's, you know, he's like all of the patriarchy wrapped up in one,
01:01:59.400
but then Negan, his humiliation ritual is he's captured by the group and they lured it over his
01:02:05.840
head for eternity. Like, uh, what's her name? Um, he killed Glenn, the husband, what's her name? Um,
01:02:12.620
Oh, the, his, his wife, uh, the romantic entrance. Uh, I can't remember all, it's been a while.
01:02:19.120
She becomes a girl boss too. She, she becomes a leader. So it's basically Negan is me a coping
01:02:25.760
for, I believe nine years into the apocalypse. That's how long it takes. Like they jumped to the
01:02:31.220
future, like in, and I believe season 12 or 13. And so it's like, Negan is the evil patriarchy
01:02:39.300
that has been brought to heel by the girl boss, multicultural, multi-sexual world order.
01:02:45.540
Maggie. Thank you very much, Charles Maggie. And so Maggie like lords it over his head for like
01:02:51.220
multiple seasons. It's hilarious. And of course, Rick Grimes is still in the background,
01:02:56.600
but even the presence of Rick Grimes becomes spiritualized. He is an ideal later on. And of
01:03:03.040
course, I think of the movie that they're making, he comes back. Right. But, um, no,
01:03:07.540
they're making a movie and they're making three other spinoff seasons series, including the two
01:03:16.120
spinoffs. And by the way, they have, my mother watches all this crap. I only watched the original
01:03:20.540
one and maybe a little bit of the, the other walking dead one. Um, and so they have the zoomer
01:03:26.100
version called the, I think it's called the walking dead, um, beyond the beyond something.
01:03:33.520
It's like a zoomer version of it. And that's even worse that like, there's no white savior
01:03:38.700
there. There's just like, like, like zoomer transmogrified, you know, they're sexually
01:03:46.280
ambiguous. Soy, you like, you know, all the adjectives, right? All the adjectives. A lot
01:03:51.160
of cat girls. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cat girls. Um, but they're like zoomer cat girls. Of
01:03:56.280
course. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they have a unique sort of like ambiguity in terms of racial and
01:04:02.880
sexual character, put it lightly. Right. So the walking dead, it has the aesthetics of
01:04:08.640
an old Western in terms of it confront man, confronting the wilderness and man sort of
01:04:15.040
arriving at a post-apocalyptic future. But that vision of the post-apocalypse is then subverted
01:04:22.640
to the service of the present. It's very much like what Nick Land said in Xeno systems with
01:04:28.300
all of the stuff we're talking about today, where he said that current liberalism is the
01:04:33.540
enslaving and erasure of both the past and the future in service of the present. Whereas
01:04:39.720
traditionalism is the, you know, present and future in service of the past. And of course,
01:04:45.540
futurism is like everything is towards the future. But what we have is like the worst of both worlds.
01:04:50.260
We're in media and everywhere. It's like the present enslaves and erases everything.
01:04:56.060
Like the walking dead is a post-apocalyptic vision of the present into a post-apocalyptic
01:05:02.860
future that that present would maintain that we're going to have lesbians and trans people.
01:05:09.940
Well, no, the last, didn't the last of us have a trans woman?
01:05:13.820
Oh, I could go on about the last of us for a few minutes.
01:05:16.360
You know, but you know, what's funny, the memes though, were great. Like the choking meme,
01:05:20.360
like that was like, there was this one where it was, um, it was Chris Chan being choked by
01:05:25.500
Sonichu and Chris Chan's like, I created you. I don't know why I find that funny. It's terrible.
01:05:31.160
The thing that puzzled me about the last of us, I again, I, again, like watched like the first
01:05:37.740
episode and was like, I'll just go until that pisses me off too much. But they, they did not,
01:05:44.360
this is, this is something that has left me scratching my head. Maybe you guys can help me
01:05:47.700
think through this, but so they did not wind up. I mean, did you guys played the video game?
01:05:53.000
You kind of know the basic premise. I'm familiar with the video game. I haven't seen the show yet.
01:05:55.980
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the main characters are Joel, who's this, this older guy who loses
01:06:01.120
a daughter in the apocalypse. And then he winds up, um, being the guardian and the steward and the
01:06:08.140
shepherd of this replacement daughter, other little girl who's his quasi daughter named Ellie.
01:06:12.440
And they, they don't turn Ellie black, but they turn his daughter black. And the daughter,
01:06:20.360
the daughter is basically only there like for the first 30 minutes, you know, you kind of like,
01:06:26.120
she's sort of like the prologue of the story. And I was like, why didn't they, I mean, if they had just
01:06:32.720
turned Ellie into, if they had just turned Ellie black, then it would have gotten like way more screen
01:06:40.360
time for a, a POC, it would have probably like angered the fan base of the, um, the video game
01:06:49.360
more. And I think it's strange to notice that like something about how, I feel like there's,
01:06:57.040
there's more, there's something more, there's more cachet in, in showing mixed race children,
01:07:05.320
or even just alluding to mixed race couples than there is to having a sort of higher, higher count
01:07:15.100
of, of, um, actors of color, you know, it's just, well, that's like the walking dead where you have
01:07:21.800
Rosita who is Latina, who goes with an, like an Indian doctor, right? Like, I mean, subcontinental
01:07:28.760
Indian, right? And who is, but then he gets killed and is raised by a black pastor as like a replacement
01:07:35.860
father. So like that you have like, so, so I can actually answer your question last things, like
01:07:41.620
why they didn't do this. So, so the first thing is like, I just would like to note is that means that
01:07:46.500
they, they killed the, uh, the black character immediately in the horror, uh, show. That's true.
01:07:52.640
Yeah. Which is the trope in and of itself, right? Yeah. So, but, but like the actual answer to your
01:07:57.360
question is that later on in the second video game, uh, which I haven't played, but I think I saw,
01:08:03.000
if I remember correctly and someone correct me if I'm wrong, it's possible. I've heard that it's a,
01:08:06.600
it's a nightmare of subversion. So, so she, uh, the Ellie, the, the, I believe is the name of the,
01:08:12.640
of the, of the surrogate, uh, uh, daughter. She ends up, um, having a romantic relationship with
01:08:20.700
a black female. She becomes a lesbian in an interracial relationship. And you can't do that
01:08:25.500
if you've already gender swapped, you can't get the interracial, you'd, you'd have to like
01:08:29.820
gender, gender swap the eventual, uh, interracial lesbian relationship again, if you, if you did it
01:08:38.280
later. Right. Right. So I think that's actually why they left her, uh, as, as a white girl. So
01:08:43.800
eventually she could enter into her, enter the proper interracial, uh, yeah, but lesbians have
01:08:49.600
to go with trans women now. I mean, that's, that's what I've heard. Otherwise, otherwise
01:08:55.540
they're, they're transphobic. Right. They'll end up getting destroyed. The recent video game with
01:09:02.620
Harry Potter is transphobic. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I wanted, I wanted to hit one more thing
01:09:09.640
cause we're, we're getting near the end here. Um, but, uh, I wanted to touch quickly on shows that
01:09:16.100
start with subversion and they go to wokeness just because that's the only place to go once you've
01:09:21.800
burned through all your materials. So the thing that made me think about this, and there's, there's
01:09:25.740
plenty of shows like this now, but, uh, last things just did a video on, uh, the magicians. And of course
01:09:31.740
the magicians starts as a subversion, right? It starts as a subversion of like the Chronicles
01:09:37.280
of Narnia and Harry Potter from the very beginning. And so like they, the first season or two,
01:09:42.880
like it's, it's, it's woke from the beginning, but it's got some interesting, like, because
01:09:46.960
they're just, they're, they're subverting all this stuff. But after like a season or two,
01:09:51.060
there's just nothing left to subvert. They burnt through like all the stuff that they want
01:09:55.520
to like completely, you know, turn inside out. And so the only thing left to do is then
01:09:59.660
just like triple down and just make the wokest possible thing where like, everyone is in
01:10:05.120
a thruple or some kind of, you know, polycule and they're all, they're all marrying, you know,
01:10:11.080
there's interracial marriages and, and, and everybody's got the different sexes. Like
01:10:15.900
everything is, you know, there's just nothing else to do. So they start like singing musicals
01:10:21.280
and stuff in the show that used to like, have like completely brutal and dark scenes. Like
01:10:26.160
they, they all just break it and break into one big LGBTQ musical in the middle of Narnia.
01:10:31.940
Like, so like, that's all there's left to do because they spent the first two seasons just
01:10:36.120
burning down and like, you know, like lynching any meaning inside these properties. Right.
01:10:42.580
And so like, that's what there's only thing to do. And I've noticed this.
01:10:46.900
Like, like, so, so I think that like, that this is also a thing we see where, where, you know,
01:10:52.640
shows that they're already woke in some sense, but like, they're completely just subverting
01:10:56.940
everything because that's all they have left to do is to just tear down all these cultural
01:11:01.140
icons. Like they've got nothing left at the, in the last couple of seasons. So they just go woke
01:11:05.680
because at least at the end, you can like run out the clock by parroting out like woke talking
01:11:10.020
points. And that'll pad you out for a season two while all the fans argue about like, you know,
01:11:15.320
I'll be honest, Orin. And this is something my, my wife always gets really paranoid and angry if I
01:11:22.800
don't watch something I'm going to comment on through to the end. But I, I just, all I could
01:11:32.700
I could not go on. I couldn't go on another inch.
01:11:35.960
Oh, you could, you could have written like three more videos. Trust me. Like, like, like it gets,
01:11:41.380
it gets bad. It gets real bad. Like, and it's, um, it's, uh, I, I, I didn't watch it to the end
01:11:47.540
to be fair. Like I, I, I had to stop eventually, but yeah, no, you've got to, it might be worth
01:11:52.700
pushing through for another scene. You might get material at like, like just woke acceleration.
01:11:57.740
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, but that's what I mean. I feel like that's like the quintessential
01:12:02.320
example of like Bojard's like after the orgy type of scenario where we burn through everything.
01:12:08.300
There's no subversion left, you know, like we've literally subverted everything to the
01:12:12.740
point of exhaustion where we have to like make up more subversion, which I feel like I hate
01:12:17.800
to say it, but unfortunately I feel like conservative media is responsible for this as well, where
01:12:23.580
the, the discourse around like the quote unquote woke show is like talked about like as a memefied
01:12:31.520
form to exhaustion. And I feel like it is true that a lot of these writers, they know that
01:12:36.640
if they gender swap or race swap or sexuality swap, you know, characters that it'll create
01:12:44.460
a news cycle and that the usual like conservative, like Fox news response would be like, this is
01:12:51.420
bad. Like it's almost reminds me like Bill O'Reilly, like they should bring him back at,
01:12:55.000
well, I know, I know he had some funny business in Fox news. They can't bring him back, but you
01:12:59.140
know, he's too old too. He's too old. But you don't remember like, I remember watching
01:13:02.920
the O'Reilly factor back in the day. And it's like, it's like, uh, you know, the war
01:13:08.300
on Christmas, freedom fries, like all that stuff was already there, but it was like, let's
01:13:14.340
talk about it. It's like, it was like same with the Gamergate, the ADSJW channels. It
01:13:20.160
was like a, it was like a, a weird cartography of the way that culture was going. And the only
01:13:26.940
thing you could do was point it out, laugh at it, move on and to the next absurdity that
01:13:33.460
would come down the pipe. And then when it comes to actual cultural creation, that cycle
01:13:38.560
would continue because of course the people in charge of cultural production now at the
01:13:42.860
most mainstream of levels, they themselves experienced this, like after the orgy type
01:13:47.900
of exhaustion of all culture. And it's sort of, it's really like profound at the level
01:13:53.300
that like, even in 2023 from like 2013 onwards, even before that, it's like the cultural discourse
01:14:00.120
has largely stayed the same when it comes to pointing out like, this is another woke character.
01:14:06.200
This is another subversive act. And they just keep throwing it out as like people refuse to
01:14:12.420
watch movies anymore that aren't like niche indie films or like, you know, even like the most
01:14:17.840
mainstream actors, they're resorting to doing series small box work. Like it's even as like
01:14:23.160
the culture industry, like just gets torn apart at its own hand. We still are caught up in this like
01:14:29.140
never ending hell world dialectic of like, this is a woke show. It's terrible. We all know it's
01:14:35.260
terrible. They still make shows that are terrible. I don't know why don't they lose money. Oh, it
01:14:40.320
doesn't matter. Like it's yeah. I tried to explain this to people. Like you are an essential part of
01:14:45.500
this cycle. Like the, the, you know, like when they come out with the rings of power or whatever,
01:14:52.120
like the, the Lord of the Rings subversion, they, they write this stuff. They write it woke. They
01:14:57.400
know it's woke and they know it's going to make people angry. They know the fans are going to get
01:15:01.060
nuts. These, these Kotaku articles are written before the show comes out. They are just sitting
01:15:06.660
there waiting for one guy to be like, can you believe they put black women in the rings of power?
01:15:12.760
So they can just hit send and publish and start cranking out the articles pointing out that
01:15:17.660
exactly. Yeah. This, they knew you were coming. They knew you were what your response is going
01:15:22.000
to be. The show was built with your outrage to the show in mind, specifically all the, all the
01:15:29.500
outlets that are there to launder your outrage, to sell the show to people already had these
01:15:35.420
articles written before you even touched it. You're right. It's an entire metacycle built on top of
01:15:39.860
all of this woke subversion into everything we're consuming. One of the, now that I'm talking to
01:15:44.660
you again, Oren, let me just say, I've used this example on the show with a prude a few times,
01:15:49.280
but, uh, one of the greatest things you ever tweeted once was, I believe this was near Christmas
01:15:54.480
where it was, um, and you can apply this to like the culture industry as well. I think you were
01:16:00.100
applying to Ann Coulter where she said, um, like, in other words, like it's about like conservatives,
01:16:06.440
not getting like the meta of these arrangements, right. In politics and culture where Ann Coulter
01:16:11.360
said it was about that certain event that happened in January, by the way, I'm not going
01:16:15.000
to say it for you too, but you know, right. A few years ago, uh, or a few year ago, a few years ago,
01:16:19.300
uh, Ann Coulter said on Twitter, she tweeted, you mean to tell me that the lesson that liberals
01:16:25.460
learned is that they have to just demonize their opposition. And then you quote tweeted her with,
01:16:30.540
yes, exactly. That's exactly the lesson that they learned. But culture, it's like the conservatives
01:16:38.280
that freak out about like this type of culture. I mean, we're doing it. I realize that we're
01:16:42.980
performatively doing it, but I hope like we're, we're achieving like a more nuanced perspective,
01:16:47.720
but at the end of the day, it's like the right wing or the conservatives that do like talk about
01:16:53.600
this stuff. They realize that in some ways it's part of a dialectical game that when they come out
01:17:00.080
with even more subversive stuff, then it's like, they're already still reacting. Like there's like,
01:17:06.320
like a lot of like Sean Hannity people on Fox news, they're like still talking about like gay marriage
01:17:12.180
and shows, but they moved on to trans people and shows. And then they'll move on to something.
01:17:16.460
Maybe they'll move on to cheese pizza one day. Maybe that will be like a medical drama where don't
01:17:20.920
you know, it's ethical to have a mixed age relationship. They'll come up with some ridiculous term
01:17:26.780
like that. But it's like, as you're fighting the older culture war, it's like they keep the,
01:17:32.860
the Cthulhu keeps swimming upwards. Like, you know what I mean? Like it's an old reactionary
01:17:37.760
point, but it's the truth. Absolutely. Yeah. Last thing's you there, bro. Yeah, I did. We've
01:17:44.220
been drowning him out. I wanted to give him a chance to jump back in. Apparently some of the
01:17:47.280
chat, uh, someone says I could find love in the chat. So I don't know why the bots are hitting
01:17:52.640
you tonight. Oh, or is it? I haven't. Yeah, I should check away. Anyway, sorry. Last thing's
01:17:57.360
good. Oh, I had a, I had a friend of mine text me and say, I like your woke Trojan horse
01:18:02.360
idea. Unless the show runner is tied to the mast, they will eventually follow the call of
01:18:06.940
Cthulhu. Um, yep. There you go. Yeah. You know, I mean, I, I do hope that, I mean, I think
01:18:14.720
that's why I, I wanted to try to focus on, and I think we have focused on some shows that at
01:18:22.460
least started out as a bit of a, a lighthouse or a glimmer in the dark. I think that I completely
01:18:28.840
agree with everything you're, you're both saying, and I feel bad kind of feeding, feeding
01:18:33.520
the outrage cycle. But, um, I think something that does get drowned out is when these shows
01:18:41.160
that actually look like they, at some points have half a chance of attaining some degree
01:18:49.020
of sincerity. Um, you know, the, the, the, you know, that, that I find these to be more
01:18:57.440
of a tragedy and more cause, a greater cause for despair than these shows that are just
01:19:03.280
sort of stillborn. Yeah. It's different than like when shows announce it, like apparently
01:19:08.620
they say that like, uh, Yellowstone is like, it's such a, like a boomer con type of show,
01:19:15.680
but they even say that that has like girl bossism and different, like, you know, there's a critique
01:19:22.600
of Yellowstone there. That's almost like the woke Trojan horse. Oh no, that's the only other
01:19:26.540
show other than the shield that people told me was based and that I should watch. You're
01:19:30.300
killing me Gio. It is based, but it's sort of like my heck and wholesome homesteader type
01:19:35.720
of base. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta take what you
01:19:41.140
can get, man. Like you can't be picky in the desolate wasteland. Like, yeah, I'm, I'm
01:19:46.720
absolutely dying of thirst, but this water, it's a little, you know, it's a little low
01:19:50.400
brow. It's a little, it's a little brown, you know, it's a little tainted, you know,
01:19:54.580
it's got a little dirt in it, but Gio, you know, can we go back to the walking dead maybe
01:20:00.600
for, for a minute? Sure. I appreciate what you had to say about that show. That's another
01:20:03.880
show where like, I, I watched two seasons of it and I find the, found the writing to be
01:20:08.660
so stale and off-putting and dry. Well, after the first season, they got rid of, uh,
01:20:13.980
oh God, he's such a, yeah, yeah, Darabont, like who's like such a like next level show
01:20:19.200
writer, like and, and movie writer, like the Shawshank Redemption, right? Like, but they
01:20:23.560
got rid of Darabont because he, I think like he even said, like he was just pissed off with
01:20:27.920
the rest of the staff. They didn't let him do what he wanted. And like, then they just
01:20:31.940
got these like litany of writers, but the, I guess my main critique of the walking dead
01:20:36.260
was that you can't have a show that by definition has to go on forever. Like you just keep like
01:20:42.340
next level boss leveling up sort of like, uh, it's like a fighting game, like Tekken or
01:20:47.300
something like that. It felt more like a bit, the progression, the dry progression of like
01:20:51.180
a Mario brothers, like, yeah. Like as soon as you get to a final boss. Yeah. Turns out Peach
01:20:57.120
was in the other castle. Got to go fight some more zombies. Yeah. But, but, but this is my
01:21:02.840
observation about it. And I mean, I think it, I forget when it first started, but I think
01:21:06.940
it, I, I, in my memory, I think you're 2011. Yeah. I would like predated the great awokening
01:21:12.060
a bit. And so I did not have, when I was watching it, I did not have my, my nightmare vision goggles
01:21:17.260
on, or at least maybe not, not the current prescription. But one thing that I found that
01:21:23.860
one of the uncanny elements of it was not necessarily explicit, overt, obvious, woke talking points,
01:21:31.920
although maybe it got there eventually, but you know, it was this, it was always out of,
01:21:36.440
out the gate, this very multicultural, multi-ethnic cast. Yeah. And yeah. And, and it was set,
01:21:44.360
it's set in Georgia and it had this like, you know, like 50, 50 black, white characters. And yet
01:21:51.760
everybody was written as this flat sort of, um, like at no point real, there's one character who's a bad
01:22:01.320
guy who dies early. Who's like, who is racist, but everybody else, like the characters were so
01:22:09.080
wooden. There was no, it's like race relations did not exist. I don't think anybody ever even
01:22:15.280
mentioned or brought up anybody's race and the pairings, the couplings they did would just make
01:22:21.760
no, I remember they had this one, like they, they interjected this one love story with this
01:22:27.020
one white character. Who's like the whitest guy. I wish I remember the name of the character. He's
01:22:32.700
like a redhead with like this big hulking red ginger dude with Abraham, Abraham. Yeah. The dude
01:22:40.140
looks like a civil war Colonel, like on the South, like he looked like he was a Confederate statue.
01:22:50.780
And they like threw him into like, and suddenly he's just in love with like the, this like young,
01:22:57.740
much more kind of like cosmopolitan black female character. And it's just like accepted. And I mean,
01:23:06.260
I think they did that a lot. Like the, the, the lack of chemistry overall between any characters
01:23:11.340
was just shocking. And I blame that at the level of the writing, but they did not in any way that,
01:23:17.120
that show in no way, shape or form attempted to write anything that could be recognized as
01:23:24.360
just race relations in a post-apocalyptic America. The most glaring aspect of it was that, that,
01:23:33.980
that, that absence, like I was like, is there going to be tension as things going to evolve along racial
01:23:39.640
lines? Like probably, you know, it's unfortunate, but human nature might happen in a, you know, zombie
01:23:44.760
apocalyptic scenario, but people, people get more racist in the apocalypse. I feel like that's just
01:23:51.360
the thing. But I mean, your point that it sort of erases the past, you had no sense of an American
01:23:58.220
cultural history attached to any of the characters. No, it's totally a historical. Yeah. It's like,
01:24:06.220
there is, they don't even like, I don't even think they even say like that there were,
01:24:11.580
they lived in America. Like they, you know, a good example would be like the road, right? Because
01:24:20.000
the road by Cormac McCarthy is very much a longing of the past. That was the walking dead just accepts
01:24:27.880
that they live in the, the post-apocalypse is actually post-historical that I know. That's like
01:24:35.420
galaxy YouTube millennial video essayist type of, you know, content. But there was some racial
01:24:43.760
relations. I'll tell you what, there was Daryl and his brother Merle. Merle was like the evil chud
01:24:49.440
redneck racist. And Daryl was, yeah. But the thing is, he's the only, but he's the only one that ever
01:24:54.960
recognized, you know, he used, well, that's why they immediately murdered him.
01:24:59.700
Yeah. No, but also Daryl learns to become anti-racist. Yes. And is also, he's redeemed.
01:25:08.740
Yeah. He's redeemed. And he's like, first he's with Carol, then he's with some death woman of color
01:25:16.320
a little bit. Because the thing is though, there was a little bit of that racial tension in the
01:25:20.460
beginning, but you have to realize that Daryl and Merle, their TV show inserts, they're not in the
01:25:25.940
comics. And my theory is that Robert Kirkman, who I believe also had control over the show,
01:25:32.420
at least in the beginning, who wrote the comics, he's of course, you know, a South hating Southern
01:25:36.940
Southerner. He's a Hicklib. Like that's like the essence of Hicklib. You know? So it's, it's sort of
01:25:44.100
like, well, Oren, where are you from the Mason Dixon line? What's your family? Oh, I'm down in
01:25:49.140
Florida here. I grew up in the Southeast. So. Okay, there you go. Yeah. So, you know, because,
01:25:54.140
but you know, the type, the Hicklib, right? You probably experienced it. Oh yeah, of course.
01:25:57.260
Absolutely. Yeah. No, there's a, there's a, there's a, I, I, I went to community college,
01:26:02.660
so I'm much better than everyone around me. Yeah. No, but exactly. Right. Like me and Grace and
01:26:09.880
Quay talk a little bit about this on the TL, about the nature of the Hicklib. Because in Canada,
01:26:13.880
we have the Hicklib park salons. We have shows like Letterkenny, you know, which is like basically
01:26:19.480
the Hicklib show, you know? So it's like, but because, but that's what's such a subversive
01:26:24.820
character is that, you know, you can take all of the Southern, like, or, or in Canadian case,
01:26:30.820
like rural tropes and just totally like put them across that, you know, put them on its head
01:26:37.600
where now it's my heck and wholesome, multi-racial, polycule farmstead. Like, didn't like,
01:26:45.020
wasn't there like a, a vice documentary about like a trans emu farm where the, all the emus.
01:26:52.380
Yeah. Yeah. They all eventually died though. The emus. Well, it's like, uh, it's like when, uh,
01:26:58.280
you're, uh, uh, you're, uh, what was the, where they tried to make the autonomous commune out in,
01:27:05.000
uh, during the summer of love. Yeah. The Chaz. Yeah. You know, they start planting things on top of
01:27:11.140
like plastic bags because no one knows anything about farming. So like create, but yeah, it turns
01:27:17.320
out communists have an excellent record of food production. So everything, everything should be
01:27:21.340
just fine. Um, yeah, they all read Hakeem Bay and they thought, yeah, we could do this. Um, yeah.
01:27:27.420
All right guys. Well, we're, we're getting over to that hour and a half. So we're going to go ahead
01:27:31.600
and wrap this one up. Oh, we've got a few, uh, super chats, but before we get to those, uh, how about,
01:27:39.240
uh, let's start with Gio. Can you tell everybody where to find you all your great work? What should
01:27:43.220
they look for? Sure. Um, go to my channel right there. Janet productions. Of course,
01:27:47.720
everyone knows me on Twitter is at giant Gio, my telegram and my patron are both the same.
01:27:53.260
Um, the content minded podcast just yesterday. Uh, I usually upload them on Wednesdays,
01:27:59.360
but yesterday I uploaded a special early edition with my friend, hopefully everyone's friend,
01:28:04.580
default friend. We talked about an internet writer called hum dog. It's very good podcast.
01:28:09.240
And you could find all the paywall content, the full versions of content minded on my, uh,
01:28:14.120
patron and now sub stack. So if you don't want to pay patron, then I understand that I I'm trying
01:28:19.080
to hit all the demographics. Cause I feel like I'm leaving money on the table with like boomers
01:28:24.040
and gen Xers by on sub stack. Um, so all my archive is there. And of course, every Thursday I do the
01:28:32.580
digital archipelago with, uh, with prudentialist. So we switch up. So last week was on my channel.
01:28:38.360
This week's on his channel. And we're going to talk about the new Charles Haywood essay that he's in
01:28:43.900
dialogue with, uh, a good friend of mine, uh, Daniel Miller. Uh, they talk about no enemies to
01:28:48.940
the right. And, um, of course we always cover like current happenings. Uh, and we mostly focus on
01:28:54.160
culture cause you know, prudy's a geopolitics guy. So, uh, yeah, that's, that's all my shilling.
01:28:59.480
So, you know, give me money or a manual typewriter to quote fantasy deck. Yeah. I don't like, I have
01:29:06.920
a lot of exciting guests on the way this week. I'm super busy. It's what I call the, uh, special
01:29:11.660
content operation week. Number two, uh, tomorrow I'm both there and on man's world with red hawk
01:29:17.860
and furious prudence. We're talking about mid girls and e-girls. So there you can simply,
01:29:23.100
so you can't miss that one, man, a geo spectacular to be sure. All right. Yeah. So, uh, last things,
01:29:29.580
what do you got? Where should people check out your work? Oh, wow, man. I don't know if I can
01:29:33.100
follow up all of that. Um, um, uh, last things for on, on Twitter, I had to get rid of the other
01:29:40.100
three, uh, last things that preceded me. Um, you can just kind of Google last things on YouTube to find
01:29:46.840
my, my channel. Um, I've got a pretty good, um, uh, backlog of content there, including some live
01:29:54.660
streams with, uh, with both of these gentlemen or, and I think you're in a couple, uh, and, uh, next
01:30:01.400
week I'm going to be, uh, interviewing raw egg nationalist having him on Wednesday night
01:30:07.460
from, from Tucker to last things. I know, you know, you got to like the pipeline. Now he's,
01:30:12.660
now he's in the big time. Yeah. It was great. He gave me a copy of his book. And, uh, are you
01:30:19.660
talking about the book, uh, eggs Benedict option? Definitely. We'll touch on eggs Benedict. I just
01:30:24.740
got both. I just got both man's world annuals in the mail today. Oh yeah. I'm also in the new man's
01:30:30.460
world. That's right. I have a visual essay about the, that certain era of the previous two years to
01:30:36.380
not say on YouTube, but my, uh, my wife, I left it unfortunately out on like the table and my wife
01:30:42.100
found out and she was like, what the hell is this? What is this? But I was, I was cracking
01:30:48.400
up reading it the whole day. So she knew someone was up. How can people pay you last things? How
01:30:52.500
can they give you man? You know, I I'm too, I'm too, I've been too lazy to like get a, get
01:30:57.020
a Patreon going. I have like a, I gotta get my grift game, bro. Come on. I gotta get my grift
01:31:01.620
game. I need like, I need to a week of vacation where I can just settle down and really like get
01:31:06.700
my, get my grift going. You're leaving money on the table. You're leaving money. I would feel
01:31:12.480
obligated to like make, make paywall content for, for like, you know, I was going to say,
01:31:18.400
then you'd have to make regular content, which would be the, the, the worst thing. Yeah. That's
01:31:22.220
the problem. Yeah. Well, no, you last thing does, it does amazing work, but there could be large
01:31:27.780
lapses in between them. So you're waiting for that, uh, for the next series, you know? So, uh,
01:31:33.760
yeah, he's the man has to have time to work. You got to let the art artists do his thing,
01:31:37.680
right? Exactly. But as, as Oren mentioned, I just finished a part, a second, uh, video on the
01:31:43.000
magicians. Uh, my, my, my videos tend to sort of pick some sort of movie or TV or media as a vessel
01:31:51.760
for, uh, exploring ideas or philosophers. Um, in the case of the magicians, um, I use them to talk
01:31:58.580
about CS Lewis and, um, right, right wing versus left wing sci-fi and fantasy fiction. Um, I'll
01:32:05.740
have another video out next week on the Sandman, um, which, uh, we kind of dove into here a little
01:32:11.100
bit, so that can be a bit of a teaser, but, but yeah, that's my, that's my plug. Someday I'll
01:32:16.500
have a subscribe star. Excellent. It's my dream to go to one day, get kicked off of a Patreon.
01:32:21.700
Yeah. Yeah. That's my, that's on my bucket list. Yeah. Maybe I should have went with a subscribe
01:32:29.440
stare, but, but, you know, yeah, that's where I, that's where I did that. All right. All right,
01:32:33.480
guys. Well, thank you for joining me, gentlemen. Oh, we do have a super chat here. Let me get to
01:32:38.580
that real quick. A creeper weirdo here for $2, but it's better than the comic book. Um, but it's
01:32:45.720
better than the comic. Oh, is that a particular reference to walking dead or the boys?
01:32:51.700
I think it was the boys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was a boys reference, but, uh,
01:32:58.100
but thank you very much, sir. Appreciate, uh, your, uh, your comment there. Uh, thanks everybody
01:33:03.340
for coming by. It's been a great discussion. Of course, if this is your first time on the channel,
01:33:08.740
I hope you go ahead and subscribe. And of course, if you are not listening to this as a podcast,
01:33:14.260
you can now get it on a podcast, wherever your finest podcasts are procured. It's on all the major
01:33:19.720
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01:33:25.400
You want to subscribe to the sub stack, the Twitter, the gab. If you want to watch this stuff
01:33:29.520
on, uh, on odyssey or rumble, of course, all those links are in the description. Also, I just had a,
01:33:35.880
uh, essay go up on, uh, the blaze that seemed to get a lot of good attention. So if you guys want to
01:33:41.960
check that one out, it's about culture neutrality or the myth thereof. You can make sure to go ahead and
01:33:47.520
read that as well, but thank you everybody for coming by. Thanks again to geo and last things
01:33:52.720
always great talking to these gentlemen. And as always, we'll talk to you next time.