Gender and Sexuality (continued)

• Thought Slime, who is nonbinary, gave their perspective on how gender abolition alone is insufficient.[3.25] Vaush dismissed it as “obviously dumb”.[3.26] Thought Slime said it was dismissive.[3.27] Vaush said “Are you always this fragile? A person asked me for my opinion on your take and I said it was dumb. It remains dumb. We’re both free to hold our opinions; I’m not pressing you for a debate.”[3.28]
• “‘A lot of people say that you talk over trans people.’ They just make stuff up.”[3.29]
• Transphobia, “balancing socialism and minority rights” class reductionism, and thinking that direct action is ever not possible.[3.30]
• Thinks a transphobic comic by Stonetoss is funny even though the punchline is just “lol trans suicide.”[3.31],[3.32]
• Said that Mel (a trans woman with voice dysphoria) used the abusive tactic of talking in a soft voice. “It’s the same thing that abusers do, by the way. There are a lot of abusive women who will play up their femininity or soft uwu shit as a way of avoiding responsibility for the behavior that they engage in.”[3.33],[3.34]
• “Do you luhh tran peepoh […] qui dogin thuh queschun do you luhh tran peepo”[3.35]
• “Actually i got a warning earlier today for using the t-word”[3.36]
• “I posted trans porn and didn’t get banned”[3.37]
• “Trans people do not have a better understanding of trans-ness.”[3.38] While this is superficially true, it ignores the phenomenological question of “What is it like to be a bat?”
• This was said jokingly, but it was also targeted towards the trans people he dehumanized: “you know / not suggesting anything / but if trans people didnt exist my notification feed would look a lot better rn / somebody needs to do something about the (((lovely trans advocates))) in my feed”[3.39]

Race

• “In this video, i drop an n-bomb. Biiiig one; hard ‘R’. I did this to show my interlocutors that their language doesn’t impress me, that their slurs don’t frighten or disarm me. You can see from their reactions that it worked - they were clearly taken aback. It was a power over which I am entirely unashamed of, but I understand how that language might have upset some of you. This is an example of what i would call an ‘invocation of a slur’s power for good’, but that’s a subjective judgement. I invite you all to discuss this in the comments, critically or otherwise!”[4.1],[4.2]
  • “Damn right, that was a tactical n-bomb and I’d do it again / also i dont care about moral offense, i care about arguments. i offend nazis all the time, i read the /pol/ threads. Gotta make an argument for me to change my mind, not just complain impotently”[4.3]
• Said Black people trying to preserve their culture that was systematically eradicated is exactly the same as white nationalism.[4.4],[4.5]
• “The Democratic Party of The United States of America - even those milquetoast weaklings - are also committed to this. Like even people like Pete Buttigieg were talking about the Friedreich Douglass Plan to put forward reparations to Black folk and ease the racial economic divide. What you’re talking about, what you’re trying to sell to me as Black Nationalism is so milquetoast that you could speak about it on the public debate stage in a presidential election.”[4.6]
• Anti-Indigenous.[4.7] Said “I’ll listen to the scientists,” which excludes the subaltern, naively assumes objectivity,[4.8],[4.9] and ignores the deep effects of racism.[4.10]
• “‘Until then white people should stop demanding PoC talk to [Vaush].’ Dude the tankie-wokescold, like, horseshoe theory collides right here. By the way, this is unironically racist, just so you guys know. Delegitimizing my opinions because of my skin color and saying that the only reason I hold those opinions is because I’m a chauvinist. This is like, actually unironically racist.”[4.11] This equates whiteness with chauvinism, which is accidentally correct.[4.12]
• Called Hakim, who is an Iraqi physician, “this kid.”[4.13]
• “you guys know ive called black and trans people subhuman too”[4.14]
• “I do fetishize black people”[4.15]
• “Don’t need The Blacks mad at me again”[4.16]

Miscellaneous

• ‘Watching my videos and doing nothing else makes you “braver” than the people who listen to Chapo Trap House and do nothing else.’[5.1]
• “There’s nobody on earth braver than fans of mine.”[5.2]
• “It does exhaust me constantly arguing with the entire left. […] There aren’t really any good pockets of the left, I feel, outside of my community.”[5.3]
• In response to an insult: ‘Not an argument, debate me bro.’[5.4]
• “I’m really fucking needed here. […] Everything the Chapo boys represented with their podcast really was just a sort of veneer of educated cultural commentary stretched over dumbfuck apathy bros justifying their apparent unwillingness to engage with the political reality sincerely. Yea, they’re like triggered that I’m voting Biden. Well, all the lefties that don’t want to vote Biden are triggered by me because they know I’m right and they know they don’t have any good arguments. That makes them really upset.”[5.5]
• “Yeah, enjoy your Left, built on weakness and a collective inability to criticize one another. I’ll be over here building my left, which isn’t full of mentally ill crybabies desperately craving out safe spaces and whining about criticism. Debate it if you want, elsewise fuck off.”[5.6]
• In response to Socialism Done Left’s bigotry: “Haven’t seen anything that looks, like, bad enough that I would stop associating with him. […] Is the shittiest parts of SDL’s online presence representative of the totality of his content?”[5.7]
• Vaush’s sysadmin, WhiteNervosa, tricked ILiedAboutTheCake. ILiedAboutTheCake helped WhiteNervosa set up a website for free, but that website was actually for Vaush.[5.8]
• “To everyone saying I said “I apologize BUT” / You know what? Yeah, I think internal problems with leftie cancel culture are a thousand times more damaging to the movement and to the safety, frankly, of trans people and other marginalized groups. / I’ve not seen a single good counterargument to this, only whataboutism and, funnily enough, tone policing. These tendencies within the left are the reasons why I engage in the type of rhetoric I do - to strengthen the left, provide a broader range of opinions and to rope in the countless disaffected edgelords who feel alienated by the left’s really fucking high internal standards for behavior. […] My apology was only directed at a small subset of people, to people who didn’t take it to mean I’m a bigot but still got offended by the tweet. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have made it, because it seems to have cheapened my words on the broader problem. / Anyway, enjoy cancelling me again / EDIT: I’ll remove this edit bit if I see somebody beneath me make a good argument”[5.9]
• Irony:
  • “They don’t read it, but they’re very fucking confident that what’s inside the text of those pages agrees with them. So they’ll say any shit and they’ll link it back to whatever out-of-context quotes they can.”[5.10]
  • “I like to operate on the principle of charitability, meaning that if you want to do a good job understanding other people, you shouldn’t be incredibly uncharitable in your interpretation of their values.”[5.11]
    • “It seems like the most ethical way to handle all this is to find the single most oppressed person on earth like a disabled trans woman somewherei n Bangladesh and ask them if they want to nuke the rest of the planet.”[5.12]
  • “There are a lot of lefties that have a factually incorrect view of the world. […] If you try to correct them, they call you a liberal.”[5.13]
  • “It’s really, really, really easy to be duped by arguments like the ones Hakim used in that video, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’m the one being arguing against, and the position is one that I disagree with, I would fall for it to. […] There’s no shame, we’re all human.”[5.14]
  • “Tankies like Hakim are literally a fucking cancer on online leftist discourse. They don’t convert anyone. The only people they convert are fucking lefties into pseudo-fascism, okay? I don’t give a fuck about any of these people, okay? They’re worthless. They’re a cancer. […] Because I, with my superior ideas, got fucking five times the [subscribers] Hakim did in half the time, okay?”[5.15]
• Comments from his fans: ‘He didn’t say that. And if he did, it was out of context. And if it wasn’t out of context, it was ironic. And if he specifically said that it was unironic, he already apologized. And if he didn’t apologize, it was actually good. Besides, he said that a whole 3 months ago, that’s long outdated. Why should I care about your opinion when you don’t even have 100,000 youtube subscribers? You’re reactionary for purity testing, woketard. There are valid criticisms of him, but this isn’t it.’

Gender and Sexuality

• Called trans people who criticized ContraPoints “subhuman.”[3.1],[3.2],[3.3]
  • (The first link is clipped out of context. The second link is of Vaush himself adding context, which is that rather than dehumanizing all trans people, Vaush was only dehumanizing trans people who think Buck Angel’s attack helicopter jokes are transphobic.)
  • “If you’re not an idiot, you’ll agree with me on this. If you have any fucking experience with online LGBT or leftist discourse, you know it’s cancerous as fuck. You understand this. People are hyper-fragile. There’s a ton- a ton of mental illness.”
  • “You can’t convert these people. They’re not reasonable. They have to be excised from the left.”
  • “These people are less than human to me. I have no respect for these people.”
  • “You don’t need to be a psychologist to see that a large portion of the broader fucking woketard, cancel culture idpol left is predicated on shared mental illness. This is particularly prominent in the trans community. If you disagree with me on this, you’re wrong. I know it sounds yikesy. It happens anyways.”
  • “Most of the time when a wildly irrational lefty comes in to make bad faith arguments against me, it’s a trans person. That is a fact.”
  • “If all of these dumbfucks recognize that I despise them and think they’re every bit as detrimental to the left as Nazis are, I am doing good. I want these people to know that they’re my enemy. I fucking hate them. I really do despise them. […] Every time some dumbfuck trans girl on Twitter who’s acting out mental illness, whining, calling people like me transphobic because I disagree with them, they’re hurting the left.”
  • “These people are ill. These people are a cancer. They’re subhuman.”
  • “A lot of the people who are trying to cancel ContraPoints are fucking dejected, worthless, mentally ill, basement dweller, fucking queer people who have absolutely nothing to offer the world apart from their bitter scorn so they lash out at people more successful to them and they put all the time in the world into it because the only validation they get is out of performatively cancelling people with more social capital. When I see 30-tweet threads about how horrible ContraPoints is, it is impossible to imagine this person is anything other than a dejected removed sucking off of the back of society like a leech. It’s impossible for me to think about anything else. I know this is fundamentally reactionary thinking, but still, I can’t think of anything else.”
  • Context:
    • ContraPoints received both criticism and harassment for having Buck Angel (who is anti-nonbinary and transmedicalist) voice a line in a video. Afterwards, she had a Patreon-only stream where she tacitly defended Buck Angel.[3.4] She was speaking impromptu to a private audience, so it should not be judged too harshly, but she misrepresented both Buck and his critics to make Buck look better. She also did not mention the various things Buck has done,[3.5] including spreading disproven[3.6] transphobic conspiracy theories.[3.7][3.8] Vaush responded to the stream with “Everything she says is correct. Absolutely everything.”[3.9]
    • In a later video, “Canceling,” ContraPoints states, contrary to the evidence: “I don’t think Buck’s ever actually said that non-binary people aren’t valid, but I personally don’t like that he seems like he wants to distance himself from them. And that’s my disagreement with Buck. It’s not that he invalidates non-binary identities, because I don’t really see him doing that. And if he was doing that, I would have seen it, because for the last two months a lot of people have been doing nothing but sending me problematic Buck Angel tweets.”[3.10],[3.11]
  • In response to criticism:
    • Despite his fans’ denial, Vaush has repeatedly reaffirmed the statements above. He only retracted the phrase “subhuman” for being bad optics, not because he believed it was wrong.[3.12]
    • “Wait are they tankies or are they wokescolds?”[3.13]
      • Vaush called anarchists “tankie” for thinking that Marx, Engels, and Lenin would not vote for Biden, yet he does not understand why critics think his usage of the term “tankie” is imprecise. “Why do Marxists keep pretending - Marxist-Leninists or whatever - why do MLs keep pretending that every time I say ‘tankie’ I mean ‘ML’? Why does that keep happening? I don’t know how many times I’ve said this really, really clearly: that there’s a difference between the two and I’ve explained the difference many - maybe even hundreds of times by this point.”[3.14]
    • “I said that group of people, the people cancelling ContraPoints religiously, were subhuman.”[3.15]
    • This also happened in the past when he was criticized for transphobia in a now-privated video. “To everyone saying I said “I apologize BUT” / You know what? Yeah, I think internal problems with leftie cancel culture are a thousand times more damaging to the movement and to the safety, frankly, of trans people and other marginalized groups.”[3.16]
• “Pride should be a cool, queer-friendly block party you can attend to meet with organizers and get cute shirts. Everyone should be able to attend. It should be safe and uncontroversial.”[3.17] This assimilationist argument centers the reaction of queerphobes. Moreover, this is a reversal from his opinion a year ago, when he said “Seen some people saying Pride Parades are dangerous because they’re inappropriate for children. You can see more skin at European beaches. Cry harder”[3.18] Vaush reversed his opinion in defense of his friend shoe0nhead, who said that drag is inherently sexual and should be kept away from children.[3.19] shoe0nhead made the common conservative argument that queerness is inherently sexual, which plays into the trope of queer people inherently being sexual predators. U.S. conservatives made the same argument in the recent past when then villainized Drag Queen Story Hour, where drag queens read books to children at libraries.
  • A counterargument: [3.20]
  • “Your kink isn’t a discriminated identity! […] ‘Shit like this keeps people in the closet’? Yea, no shit. And if I were an in-the-closet fucking queer teenager and I saw the behavior of some of these, I’ll say yea, removed, who unironically think that Pride should be about them and their fucking erection, absolutely disgusting and I would feel ostracized from the community. I stand with the real queers, okay?”[3.21],[3.22]
  • “‘Weren’t some old Prides a bit [kinky]?’ Yea, but we’re trying to make Pride more accessible now.”[3.23]
  • “Just why, why do you have to have this? Why are kinksters obsessed with infiltrating this space? It’s really weird to me. Why? You don’t need it. It’s not yours. Stop. Please.”[3.24] This is ahistorical. From “Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano: “The words ‘transgender’ and ‘queer’ came into vogue during [the early 1990s] as umbrella terms: ‘Queer’ attempted to accommodate lesbians and gays as well as the growing bisexual and transgender movements; and ‘transgender’ was used to promote a coalition of distinct groups (including crossdressers, transsexuals, butch women, femme men, drag performers, intersex people, etc.) that previously believed they had little in common with one another. These alliances were not based on a presumed shared biology or set of beliefs, but on the fact that these different groups faced similar forms of discrimination. In fact, the notion that transgender people ‘transgress binary gender norms’ came about to create a cause for its varied constituents to unite behind, not as a litmus test or a criteria for them to meet.”

Politics (continued)

• ‘Most online leftist communities are “unhinged,” and if I were to be like them, I would be twice as popular and make a lot more money.’[1.35] ‘Contradictorily, I think my channel has grown so quickly because we outnumber those “unhinged” leftists.’[1.36]
• Western chauvinism (that ignores leftists who don’t speak English, and thus aren’t watching an English YouTube video) and a self-own on why he’s palatable to liberals: “I wonder if it upsets any of the tankies online that it took me about a year to become larger than every single hard-tankie Youtuber on the platform. Because nobody likes their ideas and they are utterly irrelevant outside of people with severe emotional issues and a desire to overcompensate for a feeling of powerlessness in their lives so they project their desire for authority onto societies they like the aesthetics of.”[1.37]
• “It’s very funny how the social patterns of [tankies and Nazis] mirror one another.”[1.38]
• To theorize on a violent socialist revolution in the U.S, Vaush said that he “would need to go through it on a state-by-state, county-by-county level if I want to be truly comprehensive,”[1.39] rather than thinking through more important topics such as conflict within the bourgeoisie.
• “‘What about the Black Panther Party?’ I don’t give a fuck. Maybe I’d go back in time, I’d talk to Black Panther Party members and a lot of them are dumbfucks, but you know what? They did a lot of really cool shit. So it seems like whatever they called themselves, the ideology they hold themselves to, ended up being pretty based. […] I’ve talked to Black Panther Party members […] and these people are generally intelligent and reasonable. […] Most of them, practically speaking, are either very radical end of social democrats or anarchists (at least in the ways they talk) and fairly pragmatic in the ways they want to go about it, with a heavy emphasis on communal militancy (which I’m in support of, as long as it works, which seems to be their position as well). […] I’m so done with labels and ideology, dude. I’m so fucking done with it. All I care about now is policy and moral… descriptive and normative statements. […] Like really, when was the last time the world was made materially better because leftists argued over with label of leftism is better? […] Every single time, it leads to sectarian infighting, and then people like me (that is to say, people who aren’t autocrats) usually end up getting our throats slit by people like Hakim.”[1.40]
• “US geopolitical power is important to me personally, because I’m not ready to lose that to China.”[1.41]
• Downplayed antisemitism[1.42],[1.43],[1.44] to tacitly supports the anticommunist Finnish government which allied with Nazi Germany because ‘haha bouncy ball, no subtext here.’[1.45],[1.46]
• “While Jewish people in America are certainly an oppressed minority in many, many respects, there are elements of disproportionate control that they enjoy.”[1.47]
• “Remember, tankies are pro-imperialism, okay? The only real anti-imperialists are anarcho-Bidenists, okay? You have all of the anti-imperialist pragmatism of being an anarchist, and you have all the realistic understanding that Trump is not good for American foreign policy of being a Bidenist, okay? It’s the only way forward.”[1.48]
• “God, I fucking hate leftists. There is no left unity with me.”[1.49]
• The labor theory of value “is a moralistic theory, meaning it deals with value statements and not empirical reality.”[1.50]
• “You can still satirize liberals. It’s very, very possible to satirize us because we’re reasonable.”[1.51]
• Contemporary U.S. domestic politics:
  • “Donald Trump and other prominent members of his administration are announcing to us that they intend to commit a coup in the United States. This isn’t a fancy, you know, a frivolous use of language - this is a capital-C coup d’etat. A traditional seizure of government power by one group against the democratic wishes of the majority. They have been broadcasting their intentions now for quite some time, and it is clear to me now that they are committed to following the plan. That is what is going to happen in five weeks. Things may actually end up being worse than I imagined this week. I am going to explain this to you. And I am going to be right. […] We’re about to see a constitutional crisis that will make [Bush v. Gore] look like child’s play. […] The likely outcome of this, in my opinion, is that Donald Trump is going to lose this election terribly, and then he’s going to win it.”[1.52]
  • “I would actually say Biden is further to the left of Trump than people like Virgil Texas are to the left of Biden.”[1.53]
  • “When Joe Biden wins I worry some lefties will spend more time gloating over how terrible he is rather than bullying him, which is step 2 of The Plan”[1.54]
  • “The single greatest reason I chose to stop arguing with Bernie-or-Busters on my channel - despite many still expressing interest - is because, after dozens of such arguments, I’ve found it is a belief they adhere to as irrationally and dogmatically as a religion. I don’t care if they’re grifters or just very stupid True Believers, but here’s one thing they’re not: brave. The support & income you can draw from boldly proclaiming “both sides are bad and I’m not voting” is absurd. It’s an easy narrative. Whatever their motivations, I think these people to immeasurable harm to the online left - not because Biden needs our vote, but because they make everyone who listens to them stupider.”[1.55]
  • “If Brie ever wants to come on stream so I can explain to her how fucking moronic her empty virtue signal for a $25/hr minimum wage is, I’m down. Collapsing the economy wouldn’t be good for American workers. She won’t, of course. Gotta keep that grift going”[1.56] “Anything less than $50/hour minimum wage is neoliberal, whatever that means. I don’t know how economics works but I’m sure there wouldn’t be any negative consequences. I hope Democrats don’t also start to push for $50/hour because if they do I’ll have to push for 60”[1.57]
  • Vaush’s only political donation was to Joshua Collins.[1.58]
  • “BIDEN PLEASE STOP DISAPPOINTING US WITH YOUR MILQUETOAST REACH-ACROSS-THE-AISLE BS”[1.59]
  • “America is F*cked if Democrats Can’t Fix This”[1.60]
  • “Hillary didn’t get the media to destroy [Bernie Sanders]. Please do not sink to the lowest levels of regressive conspiracism, okay? The reason why Fox News and right-wingers talked about it is they knew that Joe Biden was going to end up winning (or at least it was very lightly that he was) and they wanted to poison the well against him by getting disaffected leftists so disgusted with the Democratic Party that they didn’t vote for Joe Biden. [… Trump] brought it up because he knew dumbfuck lefties would look at those tweets and think ‘wow, even Fox News knows they’re being shafted. I’m not going to vote for anyone then,’ and then Trump wins and blah blah blah, okay? Please, this is like level one media opsec shit.”[1.61]
    • As he himself said a few minutes later, the far left does not have numbers. The obvious implication is that when the Republican Party cynically reported on the Democratic Party’s mistreatment of Sanders, they were appealing to Republican voters, not the far left.
    • He confused Hillary Clinton with Joe Biden.
    • That’s not what “opsec” means.

Politics

• Quote mined Marx, Engels, and Lenin to make it seem as if they would vote for Biden.[1.1],[1.2],[1.3],[1.4] In response to criticism:
  • ‘It’s obvious that Bush was worse for Iraq than Obama.’[1.5] Oh wait, Chomsky said the opposite? “I would be interested in hearing that take. That’s totally possible, but I’d have to hear the nuance of that.”[1.6]
  • “Many of these quotes are taken from larger bodies of work. I read those larger bodies of work. None of the quotes that I am presenting to you right now are taken out of context.”[1.7] This contrasts with: “I read the article. Do I have to read the whole book every time?”[1.8]
  • “Are you fucking stupid? Have you not seen how Democrats are treating the failures in this country? Are you a fucking moron? No shit they’re blaming Trump instead of capitalism. Have you seen the discourse? Ah, but this guy doesn’t live in America, so he doesn’t give a fuck about any of these issues and doesn’t know anything about internal fucking American political affairs. He’s just rambling about it from a foreign perspective.”[1.9]
  • Mocked Hakim (who is Iraqi and had his house destroyed by U.S. bombs) over Vaush’s own inability to understand that Biden is a war hawk who fervently advocated for the Iraq War, pushed Democrats into accepting it, covered up inconvenient counterevidence, murdered over a million Iraqis under false pretexts, and now lies about the role he played in it.[1.10],[1.11]
    • “‘Material conditions’ doesn’t just mean servants of capital. Material conditions can mean [sic] Stonewater. It can mean the Black Panther Party, who, by the way, also fought for racial equality, not just socialism. Material conditions can mean fucking lesbians marching outside the Washington Monument. Material conditions doesn’t just mean ‘who capital favors,’ okay? You are disgustingly ignorant of American history, and you are lucky that I personally got Biden into office because otherwise - is he from Iraq? Well, hey listen, okay? We’re going to get Biden to get those troops out of Iraq. Wait, did he already do that? We’re going to keep Biden from fucking bombing any more of your airports, okay? That’s what we’re gonna do. You’re welcome, Hakim! I know it sucks because frankly, Democrats and Republicans both have a pretty fucking bad record when it comes to foreign policy, but listen, you, okay. I got Biden elected and I’m going to wield that infinite power, alright? And I’m going to make sure we quit fucking around in the Middle East, okay? We’re going to pull troops out of Afghanistan, we’re going to pay reparations to the countries we bombed, we’re going to stop that Yemen shit, we’re going to start arguing with Saudi Arabia, we’re going to reinstitute the fucking nuclear arms deal with Iran - the nuclear treatise, we’re going to establish a fucking one state council solution with Israel and Palestine because I think that’s the most we’re going to get. We’re going to do it.”[1.12]
• A criticism of Vaush’s video, “This is How I Want to Build Socialism”:[1.13] Vaush responded to this criticism by not remembering his own arguments and accidentally arguing against himself:
  • Misread the criticism as saying that Vaush views electoralism as the only valid way of advocating for socialism. In actuality, the criticism argued that syndicalism is against electoralism, which is unrelated.[1.14]
  • Despite the criticism quoting directly from Vaush’s video,[1.15] Vaush did not recognize his own arguments and said “Wait, what is this? I don’t even know what half these things are here. I don’t even know.”[1.16]
  • On the political strategy of electoralism:
    • Originally: “We start implementing these policies incrementally up to a point where the general population is getting more and more sold on harder ideas. Not just Medicare for All, but full decommodification of certain industries.”[1.17] “We work on the ground to make people like our ideas, and we put people in office who will disseminate policies that will make them like our ideas.”[1.18]
    • In response to criticism: “This is only half-true, by the way. It would be more like: progressives try to implement these reforms in Congress, but they fail, and that failure blackpills liberals.”[1.19]
• “I do often say that I’ve read no theory. In reality, I’ve read some, and as of last night, I’ve read quite a bit more.”[1.20] If the amount of theory you’ve read can increase substantially over a short time, you haven’t read much.
• “The peasants were the proletariat. There is no such meaningful distinction between peasant and proletariat that I think they have a fundamentally different class relation.”[1.21]
• “Marxism is supposed to be an extension of liberalism, not a rejection of it. […] That’s what leftism is about. It’s about bringing the messaging of the liberal movement forward to make it better, to make it stronger, to make it true to its principles.”[1.22]
• As a self-described anarcho-syndicalist and liberterian socialist, Vaush supports abolishing the state, but not the government.[1.23],[1.24]
• Views far-left political activism as a singular project where any activism outside of his narrow definition is worthless. In practice, his political project is almost identical with that of social democrats: “Even if socdems don’t want to build that building, […] at least they’re helping me move those fucking bricks around. […] Even if they’re going to be a hinderance at the last second, I would rather have helpers today and potential antagonists tomorrow than I would, like, somebody who’s not even going to get me any of the way there.”[1.25]
• “What if a vanguard party is a democratically elected group of politicians beholden to the interests of the populist left? And then, when revolutionary activity takes place, we could sort of work with them to integrate the revolutionary guard into the means of production, into the broader state apparatus?”[1.26]
• “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with an individual maximizing their outcomes within an unethical system like capitalism, especially if they’re a socialist, because it increases the likelihood that they’ll be able to achieve political and economic power. I would love it if we had socialists who were go-getter business majors so when the day comes or something we have people in legitimate positions of power as opposed to a bunch of college students. […] I don’t criticize Bezos […] I try to criticize the systems that allow people like Bezos to exist. […] I think socialists should work to be educated and successful.”[1.27],[1.28]
  • This defines success as being powerful and legitimated by our current society.
• “There is one solution: we prop up their governments. Not us. We don’t do it. We don’t keep troops in there, but we provide the government of Iraq, the state, the resources necessary to prop themselves up.”[1.29]
• “The dialectic is the idea that you can improve a concept, an idea, by resolving it in a dialectical way. That is to say, a person provides a thesis (an idea), and you have a counter-thesis (the counterargument). And then by smashing these two together, idea and counter, the antagonisms are resolved (or at least addressed) and you arrive at a synthesis. Basically, you have a concept and its challenge, and that challenge begets improvement to the original idea.”[1.30]
• Debated “the JQ” (a Nazi dogwhistle for “the Jewish Question”) while playing Bloodborne. When criticized for making light of antisemitism while legitimating and profiting off of it, he misread this criticism as accusing him of being “in favor of the Jewish Question.”[1.31],[1.32]
• “Again America has its problems, but we do not teach people from grade kindergarten to grade 12 about George Washingtonian thought and the glory of the founding of our country. Most Americans just fucking smoke weed through school and then, you know, roll on out. And most of them have no idea who or what capitalism is or cares about. Now, mind you, Donald Trump tried to do to American education what many other countries do to their education. […] Just because America has indoctrination does not mean it is equivalent to what other countries do all the time. Ho-ly shit!”[1.33]
• ‘The list above is of “all of my based, high-IQ takes.”’[1.34]