Richard Spencer critiques the "banality of empathy" in leftist culture, contrasting a Caltech graduate's pacifist game, "Boredom," with violent titles like Grand Theft Auto. He argues this toxic positivity masks psychopathic tendencies, citing the creator's alleged plot to kill Donald Trump as evidence that pathological empathy drives actions against perceived evils, similar to incidents involving Tyler Robinson and Lance Twiggs. Ultimately, Spencer suggests this anxiety-driven desire to avoid stress fuels dangerous silencing behaviors rather than genuine moral progress. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Video Games As Male Fantasies00:08:59
So he went to Caltech.
And now, was affirmative action involved in that admissions process?
Probably, no doubt, in fact.
However, you still have to go through the motions.
You still have to do it.
One of the problems of affirmative action is that they will sort of give an African American student this bite at the apple and they've got this amazing chance and they blow it.
And so it's sort of.
Worse for everyone in a way.
But Mr. Allen, he has a degree from Caltech.
So he should be applauded to some degree.
He's able to sort of do the work.
Now, maybe I am being willfully naive here, and the grade inflation and the ability to sort of skate by is worse than I would imagine.
But at the very least, he's sort of a nerdy type.
He also created a video game.
You tweeted about this.
It seems.
I was about to show this.
Oh, yeah, I'm there.
This is a look into the mind of this man.
This tells us so much more than a manifesto.
So, hi, I'm a proton with a smiley face.
And you have this little cute music.
Now, the electron is bouncing around an imaginary sphere.
Now, the electron is receiving radioactive energy.
Apparently, and now he has to redirect it toward the electron to try to avoid a collapse.
That is the game, and it's called boredom.
Boredom, B O H R, bore, the quantum physicist, the physicist of atoms.
Boredom, you do this when you're bored, you feel boredom, you play some game, you learn about physics, you learn about not to be a bigot because you get educated.
I think this guy was in the total institutional mood of.
Science training, science education.
He ended up being hired as a teacher of physics.
So this guy has been surfing on basically, yeah, education will free you.
If you learn more about the atoms, you're going to know more, you're going to be a better citizen.
This is the kind of memes that are absolutely endemic to leftism and to leftist corporate culture.
He's very millennial.
Is he technically a Zoomer if he's 31?
I don't know.
I think he is spiritually millennial.
Yeah.
Say again.
I don't know about the generations and where they end and stop.
He's a millennial.
He fucking loves science.
Yes.
Like, what are the most successful video games?
Like, obviously, I'm sure.
What is it?
What is the one called where you get to, like, put a dead hooker in a trunk and, like, GTA Audio?
Okay.
GTA.
Grand Theft Audio.
Yes.
Okay.
That's the most successful.
I think Madden, where you get to be a player.
So, in some ways, like the or COD, like Call of Duty, you get to like refight the Civil War, but the South wins this time or whatever.
So, basically, video games that are the most popular and influential are this like deep male fantasy or the first person shooter, or you're blowing the heads off zombies or whatever.
It's this like fantasy of being athletic.
For what it's worth, MLB The Show 26 is actually very fun.
I did a home run derby as Babe Ruth.
It's kind of awesome, but whatever.
I've also kind of forgotten about it now.
I'm not a big video gamer, but anyway, the video games that are most successful are sort of like deep male childish fantasies of warfare, glory, power, violence, sex, and so on.
It just is what it is, you know?
But what does he do?
It's like, oh, I can educate you about the atom.
And then he's playing a game that looks like Pong.
Like, when was Pong developed in 1969 or something?
I mean, like, this retroactive technology, you're just like, why didn't you reinvent the wheel?
I mean, he almost did reinvent the wheel by, like, it's like, this is what I call a doorstop.
Has anyone ever thought of this before me?
Like, oh, he's doing this, like, the technology is not interesting in the slightest bit, but it has this millennial coded, I fucking love science quality to it.
That makes it kind of like brilliant.
It's like, oh, this is great.
The high schoolers need to do this.
They'll learn about science this way.
It's just this sort of like toxic positivity to him.
That is just the worst thing ever.
Extremely wise words.
And isn't it fascinating and ironic that this guy has no shooting violence in his game?
So this guy is out there creating a game that's supposed to be pacific.
And on the other hand, the guy who plays Call of Duty, I don't expect him to go try to shoot Trump.
No.
Because he's being satisfied in his fantasy of domination and violence in his virtual world.
Whereas these guys, they are containing it and it accumulates.
And for him, it accumulates.
It appears to be a plan that he's had probably for four or five years to go kill Trump.
Because he says that was just my first opportunity.
Well, he had no outings.
For any of his desire for being a warrior in the virtual world, and he took it only in the real world.
I want to expound on this a little bit because I think what you said is very interesting to me.
So, so much of the video game is a fantasy, and you can also say it's a pacifying measure by the deep state to keep people from killing people.
So, let me explain.
I can remember in the 90s, Where, you know, Tipper Gore was on her high horse talking about rap videos and they were putting labels on music and so on.
And this notion of video games creating killers was in the news and talked about and debated and so on.
And one argument against it is that they would just do social science, quantitative research and say, look, there's no real connection and so on.
I think a deeper analysis of this would engage in psychology.
And actually, I would say that.
You're not a killer precisely because you play video games.
You're not a rapist precisely because you're addicted to porn.
So it's the opposite.
Porn is not inspiring rape.
Porn is, if anything, preventing rape because you're gooning and deadening yourself and you're living out the fantasy.
Now, I say this I think having a fantasy life is important.
Obviously, it shows that you have an imagination.
And I don't really, you know, I don't know.
Video games sort of rub me the wrong way a little bit in general, but, you know, I don't, if there's a young 14 year old boy and he wants to fantasize about refighting World War II or blowing zombies' heads off, I think it probably is an expression of something good.
He has a bit of an adventurous spirit and et cetera.
I don't think it means that, like, oh, he's a killer.
He's a killer.
He wants to kill people.
And so, like, in some ways, it's video games are in porn.
Are neutralization strategies much more than they are inspiring things, much more than their aphrodisiacs say.
And I think that has to be understood.
But again, what your fantasy is says a lot about you.
It gives us a glimpse into the inner life.
So, what is his fantasy?
His fantasy is about like being a math teacher or something.
His fantasy is about being a good boy, a helper.
And yet, the reality is that despite his failure, the reality is that he's.
Obviously, a dangerous, violent psychopath.
Pathological Empathy And Inner Life00:01:20
Absolutely.
And I've often said that the leftists, they suffer from an empathy that is pathological.
And look at this.
His atoms had feelings.
Some of the atoms are peaceful, busy, or stressful.
Now, this is the psychologizing of nature.
And it shows in exactly this kind of personality that wants to apologize all the time because they're constantly anxious about.
I don't want to hurt other people.
I don't want to make other people stressful.
I wouldn't want my existence to put you at stress.
And this pathological empathy leads them to believe well, if there is Trump that is causing so much stress among America, if he's causing this anxiety, if he's victimizing young girls, then I need to take action.
And that's more empathic than doing nothing.
Yes.
Do you think that this was going on with.
Tyler Robinson and Lance Twiggs, and so on.
It was a sort of someone needs to shut up that just evil person who's saying bad things about my girlfriend, you know, and her community.