BONUS: Hanging Out with Eiynah 3 - Barbie & Right-Wing Tears
While Daniel and Jack continue working towards resumption of IDSG, Jack is once again invited by best-friend-of-the-pod Eiynah (@nicemangos of the Polite Conversations podcast) to co-host a Twitter space [obligatory Elon Musk joke here] about the new Barbie movie and the tsunami of reactionary tears it has invoked. Conversation (with contributions from various guests) ranges over the movie itself and Barbie herself, Musk and X, Dutch politics, the culture wars, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Piers Morgan, and that weird guy on YouTube who dresses like a medieval knight. Obviously, this being an X space (sigh), sound quality is variable.
I thought, um, I found some lumps on one of my beloved cats, but they've been sent off to biopsy, to be biopsied, and come back non-malignant.
Oh my goodness.
So I'm really chipper about that.
Oh, well, thank goodness.
That's amazing news.
Well, I'm very happy about that too, and what better way to celebrate.
Yeah.
Talking about Barbie.
Absolutely, yes.
That's what I always do when I'm feeling happy.
I talk about Barbie.
Right?
Me too, totally.
I don't think I've had a long conversation about Barbie since I was twelve, maybe?
I'm not convinced that I've ever had a conversation about Barbie.
Maybe when I was seven.
And I had a friend who was a girl, I won't say girlfriend because it's a different thing, you know, and she was explaining Barbies to me.
That's probably the one and only time.
What was she explaining to you exactly about Barbies?
Oh, well, all the mysteries, obviously.
Which are?
Do elaborate!
Presumably the new movie explodes them all, I don't know, I have to confess straight away that I haven't seen it.
Look at us, both of us are doing a Twitter space on a movie that neither of us have seen!
Yeah, typical libs, am I right, talking about stuff they don't know and they're about judging things before they've... Well look, I do know some stuff about Barbies because I...
Hate to admit this but as a little kid I did have quite a collection and one time I lost a Barbie at a party when my mom told me not to take it and I promised her I wouldn't lose it there.
Yeah and I did lose it so I was pretty traumatized by that.
I had Action Man, which is the British version of G.I.
Joe.
And that's just Barbie for boys, really, isn't it?
It's the same thing.
Right, right.
They are like dolls, right?
But you can't call them that, because men are so manly.
That's right.
Girls have dolls.
Boys have action figures.
You know, the other day I saw a tweet about a bar of soap that smelled like alcohol and tobacco and had, like, pieces of, like, tobacco in it.
And some, like, artisanal... It looked horrendous!
And, I mean, what is happening with men's products?
Like, a little sidebar here, but what can you do?
Can you help me understand why I smell like that?
I don't know.
It's always been a thing though, hasn't it?
Tissues.
Tissues for women come in, like, pink boxes, you know, and tissues for men, they come in man-sized tissues for a start, and they come in red and black fascist colours, you know, with hand grenades on them.
I don't know.
Do they still come in colours?
Because I remember in the 80s you did have some coloured tissues.
Do you remember that?
Did you have that in the UK?
I don't know.
I think they come in all colours of the rainbow, don't they?
But it's the boxes I'm thinking of.
I remember being quite a small child and being puzzled by the concept of a man-sized tissue.
I remember thinking, like, is the tissue six foot tall?
But of course what it means is it's big enough to cope with the amount of material that comes out of a man's nose, I suppose.
I don't know.
Nose, yes, right.
Yeah, is it bigger though?
I've never seen a bigger tissue than a regular sized tissue.
Yeah, I think that's what, in my experience over here in Britain, I think that's what a man-sized tissue is.
It's like a big tissue.
I don't know.
Well, I guess we're being deprived.
Yes, I just use my sleeve like most normal people.
Well, look, you know, they should only have pink tissues because, as we know, the world is turning and changing into this feminist nightmare that is, like, coming to destroy all the men.
And everything will be washed in pink.
And, I mean, that sounds like a fucking nightmare to me, too.
Because as much as I love Barbie as a little girl, as much as I enjoyed pink until I was about seven or eight, then something happened.
I don't know what happened.
But then I only wore black ever since then.
Like, I don't know, I turned, like, ten and everything was black.
Yes, very similar.
Very similar, this end.
So you were all about pink before, Tim?
I was all about pink, yes, exactly.
I used to at least allow some colour into my life, but you start, you get to any sort of age and know everything must be, everything must be black.
And I still do mainly wear black.
I have to confess, I'm still essentially a very, very goth student in my aesthetic sensibilities.
Excellent, this is why we're friends.
Yes.
I can't talk to people who don't wear mostly black.
That's right.
There's only two ways you can dress, either mostly pink or mostly black, and that's why Barbie is acceptable.
The two genders, mostly pink and mostly black.
Speaking of that sort of gendered marketing stuff, We're speaking to you now, not in a Twitter space, listeners, but in an X space.
Apparently we don't tweet anymore.
We Xeet or Zeet or something, with an X.
But it really is, like, this stupid new logo, this stupid new X logo, white on black, it does look like, somebody pointed this out, I can't remember who said this in a tweet, but it really does look like, sort of, pathetic, macho, underarm deodorant logo, or something like that, it really does.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and someone said, like, man wipes, or something, I think they compared it to, like, That's what brought it to mind, I think.
Somebody called it in-cell marketing or in-cell branding?
Right!
In-cell design, I believe it was.
And as much as graphic design is my passion, I have to say that in-cell design is not my passion at all.
It's not what you want, really, is it?
I mean, I'm not carrying any particular torch for pre-Elon Twitter, don't get me wrong, but it's just so stupid.
You have a universally recognised brand.
You know, I mean, it's just common currency in politics now.
You watch political journalism on the TV and they're talking about tweets.
And everybody knows what a tweet is.
And everybody knows what that little bird logo means.
And that particular shade of blue is now brand associated.
People, they achieved what everybody wants.
Universal recognition of particular shapes and particular colours.
Universal use of words associated with your brand in mainstream conversation.
And he's just, apparently on a whim, he's just shat it all away!
He's such a fool!
I read a phrase that someone called it, like, cultural vandalism?
I think that's what it was, and I think that describes it.
I don't know about that, but it's certainly very, very foolish, just from a capitalist point of view, you know?
But even beyond just the branding, it is very foolish from the capitalist point of view and the branding and marketing and all of that.
He's thrown it all away, what people aspire to for their brands.
Yeah.
But aside from that, like it had entered into just like pop culture, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
And that's where the, you know, cultural vandalism comes in is that Twitter was like, as much as we hate it, as much as it's a hell site, It was like somewhat of a place where we found a community or where we found like, you know, different kinds of communities and, you know, came across lots of interesting people, Nazis too, but like, you know, people that we also liked.
And he's just like shitting all over everything because I don't know, it feels like he was so mad that like leftists got to have a voice here and he just wanted to destroy it.
It's so weird.
I mean, I tend to agree that he bought it by accident, really.
He sort of tripped bass-ackwards into buying it and didn't mean to, and I agree with that, but I also think he has been completely red-pilled, to use that phrase, and I think he has been trying to use Twitter with all the zeal of the recent convert, you know.
He's trying to use it for social and political engineering, and he's managed to He's managed to wreck it by bringing back all the people that former Twitter banned.
Just, you know, not from a leftist agenda for God's sake, but just because you have to have a moderation policy if your platform is going to be usable by most people.
Because most people are not Nazis.
But he's brought them all back and it's just so stupid.
It's just so incredibly stupid.
And his big thing was like, Twitter should be the global town square where people can say whatever they like and yeah well done with that Elon because you've made it absolutely useless as anything approaching that thing you said it was supposed to be because of your ridiculous insistence on well it's not absolute free speech because it never is they just use that as an excuse obviously
Well, no, he's been super, like, anti-free speech, if you take into account, like, what he's been doing.
You know, when governments asked him to suppress certain types of speech, he happily obliged.
So, hypocrite on that one, too, like, majorly.
Yeah.
Free speech absolutist always just means right-wing bias, doesn't it?
And that's...
But it's not even that that's wrecked everything.
It's just this ridiculous tinkering that he's doing with everything, because he's got this idea in his head that he's a genius.
And he's got to prove this to everybody.
And he's not.
He's really, really not.
He's not very good at the thing he's supposed to be good at.
And he's fucking it up, frankly.
But there you go.
And he's also mad about Barbie.
Has he made an official statement on Barbie?
I don't know if he's actually said something, but I think someone tweeted something about his likes being all the anti-Barbie tweets, and then, I don't know, maybe a one-word thing, like, concerning, or something like that.
I don't know.
But that's not very surprising, is it?
No.
No, not at all.
Because, as I say, he's just one of them, really.
If he hadn't been, if he hadn't happened to be born the son of an apartheid diamond mine owner, he would just be another one of, you know, right-wing online chud number nine billion seven hundred and twelve.
He's got nothing else to say.
Nothing else.
Even with all that wealth, it seems like he's so desperate to be, like,
You know seen as funny or hip or cool or and he just he just can't he just comes across as Try hard every single time Yeah, but you know it Barbie yes, it has been Thoroughly wonderful and enjoyable to just witness the Absolute Like massiveness of
the right-wing outrage about this movie.
And like, I don't know what they were expecting, but like, fuck, it's Barbie, man.
Like, some of them have been complaining about it being too pink, too girly, too feminist, too inclusive, too trans, because there's a trans actor in there, and just ridiculous.
Ridiculous because It's Barbie!
It's Barbie.
Like, obviously it's too pink.
You know, I'm gonna tell you a secret here.
The pink is not, um, my favorite color, but, uh, I'm not going in with my, like, spiky collar and, you know, fishnets and crying about Barbie being too pink and with not enough bats and spiders and stuff in there.
No, because you know what... anybody going in is going to know, at least aesthetically, what they're getting.
I mean, you can't have missed the posters and the trailers and the advertising campaign.
It's telling you that it's very... it's almost parodic.
Well, I think it is parodic, isn't it?
Again, I haven't seen the film, so I feel a bit hamstrung, but my feeling from what I've read about it and from the trailer that I've seen, my feeling is that it's kind of...
being parodic and ironic with exactly these signifiers that that Barbie brings to mind all the extreme pinkness and the extreme girliness so to speak and it's it's representing the the aesthetics of Barbie faithfully on screen and then yeah yeah and again I haven't seen it so I don't know but to one extent or another it's deconstructing all that stuff it's it's looking at what that means it's It's examining it, you know.
If that doesn't interest you, or if you don't have an eight-year-old to take to it, then just don't go.
But it's not really that they're offended.
Yeah, Ben Shapiro.
Yeah, it's not really that they're offended.
Ben Shapiro with his little clipboard and shit, like an angry photo.
Took a photo with his clipboard, like, next to a Barbie poster, like, I'm so mad that I had to be here.
It's like, dude, nobody is forcing you, though.
Here I am, you can see I have a clipboard, I'm going in to take notes for you.
Uh, yeah.
His, his alibi... Oh, I love, I love British Ben Shapiro.
It just sounds, my Ben Shapiro just sounds like a Dalek, you know?
It just sounds like a... But, um...
Yeah, his alibi for having gone to see it at all is that his producers dragged him.
He didn't want to, but his producers dragged him in to see it.
Yeah, sure, Ben.
Okay, fine.
We all believe that.
We all believe that.
It's not at all that you saw an opportunity to make some content that would be easy red meat to throw to your audience.
No, no.
Just feeding that outrage machine constantly while complaining about how the snowflakes of the left are so easily outraged at everything or looking for things to be outraged about.
But really, who is even buying that anymore?
How many of these children's things have we seen them get mad about?
Recently, I think I saw a video about Ben Shapiro getting mad at Blue's Clues because he saw, you know, like a five-year-old episode about some, I don't know, pride inclusivity celebration or something, but very kid appropriate.
But he found this five-year-old episode angry about that.
I think it was, it was Dr. Seuss not too long ago.
There was Roald Dahl.
There was, um, well, Mr. Potato Head.
The Little Mermaid.
How can we forget?
Oh yes, she wasn't fuckable enough.
Snow White is not white enough, apparently.
That's the new one, isn't it?
She wasn't fuckable enough.
And let's see, Snow White.
Snow White is not white enough, apparently.
That's the new one, isn't it?
Yeah.
Because this is incredible.
White in Snow White does not refer to her ethnicity, according to 19th century race science.
It doesn't denote Northern European heritage.
That's not what it's about.
And also it's a fairy tale.
It's fictional.
Oh no, I've broken X. I've broken the app.
Can we not, can you not hear everyone?
Hang on a second.
Okay, okay, good job Twitter.
All right, while we're waiting for Jack to, I don't know, connect again.
Jack, if you want to disconnect and connect again, maybe sometimes that helps.
We can hear from the person who has their hand up, DS, and if anyone else wants to Participate, just like send a request to speak, and if I recognize you from Twitter, or I feel like taking a risk, then I will approve you.
Yeah, I'd like to speak about the Barbie.
This was the last vestige of American manhood, my Barbies.
And you woke bastards, just came in and destroyed, you destroyed my entire With all this girly stuff?
I'm sick!
Are you doing a voice?
Because that's really good.
Yeah, yeah.
I am.
Thank goodness, because, um, yeah.
This was our last safe space.
This was our last haven.
The Barbie one?
Someone tweeted something about, like, just found out Barbie is not, you know, it's not masculine enough or something and the meme where there's, like, a hole punched in the wall, it was so good.
You can just picture, like, a bunch of really angry, like, men just, like, punching holes in the wall because Barbie wasn't masculine enough.
I went to a Barbie movie, it's all this pink crap.
Oh, shit.
They ruined it!
Good, that was good.
Wonderful, thank you.
Alright, Kareem, hello.
Hello, hello, can you hear me?
Hello, are you gonna complain about Barbie being not masculine enough?
I mean of course, Barbie is like the beacon of manliness.
Always has been.
Like when you told earlier that people were mad that the movie is too pink.
Have you seen like Barbie toys?
Like aggressively pink.
Since I can remember it.
Right, aggressively pink.
Going to a zombie movie and saying it's too violent.
Like what did you expect?
But I have to say, I haven't seen it right now, like the others, but I saw that it has apparently some feminist messaging in it, that patriarchy and matriarchy are a thing in this movie.
And the other thing I've seen is that it's a huge success.
Like just today on The Guardian, 377 million on the box office, which is huge.
What's that they say?
Go woke?
Go bro?
No, get rich?
This is what I wanted to talk about.
This is what I wanted to mention.
Because this is why they are so aggressively angry on this movie.
Because it single-handedly has debunked this myth.
That people actually care about that and that movies go broke and movies will fail if they have a too quote-unquote woke messaging.
Like, audience seems to like it.
Like, I see on Rotten Tomatoes a 90% from critics and an 87% from audience.
And I think a few days ago it was a 90% from audience, so some new...
Some new opinions probably came from the Daily Wire or something like that.
But yeah, the movie is a success.
Simple fact.
Like it or not.
And just some days ago, roughly a week ago, before the movie was officially released, I actually saw a video talking about other movies with female lead characters where also The idea of a strong female elite in a movie was explored, and they showed there are contemporary successful movies with strong female leads, with just the difference being that they are good.
They have a more explored character arc, they are more deeper.
Of course, this whole criticism of wokeness destroying our media is bullshit, but deep down in there, there's an actual criticism.
The problem is not wokeness, the problem is tokenism, which you have in many Disney movies, where you have characters from certain demographics, which should give the false image of alleged progressiveness, but these characters are super flat, not unexplored, they don't have a real character arc.
But when the movie is done well, and I've seen so far phenomenal criticism from Barbie, then the movie will also be received well.
It has nothing to do with this alleged agenda behind it.
Yeah, yeah.
Let me just read an excerpt from a contrarian review that I came across.
Absolutely fucking ridiculous shit.
Gerwig's Artifice defies the special feeling that females might know, the fulfilling personal escape into free femininity, childbearing, family, homemaking, and romance that should be the essence of a Barbie movie.
She ignores the childhood fantasy in which kids dream of being wives, moms, teachers, Nurses, etc.
Roles essential to the world.
Oh my goodness.
It's so good.
I can't tell you how much I've been enjoying this stuff.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Lawyer Barbie and Dr. Barbie and all these Barbies with serious jobs and success and careers.
Aren't these already pretty old things and pretty established things?
Yes, absolutely.
But I mean, do they even have a trad wife, Barbie Kareem?
They don't.
So that's the problem, right?
They don't have a homemaker Barbie.
I have a Barbie that dreams of being a wife and a mom, and that's upsetting, I guess, to some weirdos.
But you know what's really funny to me is that I would never consider Barbie as this, like, feminist hero, right?
I think the question could still be asked, is Barbie actually woke or is she anti-woke?
Because she's quite stereotypical.
Her body is like, you know, it's not realistic.
It's, you know, it has an impact on a lot of girls growing up who can possibly not look like that.
You know, I think her, her neck and her waist are like almost similar sizes and her Bust is like impossible to support with that size of waist, so... Like, I would really appreciate if there are people here in the chat who have seen it, because I've heard this is something which is apparently brought up in the movie.
Oh, is it?
I mean, yeah.
This is something apparently mentioned in it, that like this problematic beauty, ideas of female beauty and specifically in regards to physics and physicalities of a woman, body measures, all of that.
So this is apparently something which is mentioned in it.
I did read that it was brought up, but not like truly addressed, you know what I mean?
Glossed over but I don't know because I haven't seen it and apparently this is a Twitter space for a bunch of people who haven't seen Barbie and You know Ben Shapiro has had the decency to go and see it for God's sakes, but none of us woke But you know, you know, I think The term Vogue, when it comes from the likes of Ben Shapiro and so on, is pretty hollow anyway.
Just today I saw a compilation of adult jokes in older cartoons.
I watched them when I was a child, and I somewhat recognized it, but when you see it now, in my case with 26 years old, you say, wow, how often did Bugs Bunny do cross-dressing?
Like, it's really a lot, and not just cross-dressing, like seducing other characters while doing it.
And just think about it, like a cartoon doing this today, and how all of Florida would go insane!
There's some kind of alarmism and false outrage about things.
Of course, like, the media has changed.
It tried to be more inclusive.
It tried to also criticize, like, established views.
But some things are not that new at all.
Like, and some things are not that special in that sense at all.
Like, they try to really, like, they're grasping straws at this moment.
They are trying to see, like, this big enemy, this big monster of vokism everywhere.
Like, there's a huge paranoia about this alleged cultural Marxist threat of vokism, which isn't probably that big of a deal as they pretend it is.
It's not.
I mean, I can assure you it's not.
We're, you know, seeing the constant rise of, like, far-right and fascist bullshit and, like, the stripping away of reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights in America, at least, which is very threatening to me as a Canadian.
And I'm sure it inspires other fascists around the world as well.
So wokeism is not really at the top of my mind as a massive threat.
What I meant by that, of course it's not an actual threat or something dangerous.
Even if we claim what they see as real, it wouldn't be a bad thing.
Because I don't consider progressiveness a bad thing.
But they are exaggerating something in a sense.
When Republicans talk about Joe Biden and you're saying, like, I wish he was half what they pretend he is.
It's not such a... I would wish there would be just as much progressiveness in contemporary media as people like Ben Shapiro pretend they are.
I know, they make everything sound so wonderful.
That was my concern, like, I'm gonna go see Barbie and it's going to disappoint me with, like, how it's not exactly as wildly feminist as they're claiming it is.
I think they touch on the topic maybe indirectly about incels or something, and that seems to have touched a nerve with a bunch of people who think that Um, Ken is being subjugated and, uh, oppressed by Barbie.
DS, what's up?
I haven't seen Barbie yet, but this Nazi guy was replying to me and he said, he said, I'm a Kenist.
And I don't, I guess that's like some kind of inside joke for the Nazis online is they say I'm a Kenist.
Oh, okay.
Have you seen this yet?
No, no, no.
I have not seen.
Hey Ina, how's it going?
Good, how are you?
I'm pretty good, big fan.
Yeah, I was just gonna pick up on that, you know, Barbie is just the latest one we've gone through, like you and Jack were going through the litany of grievances.
Maybe they care more about Barbie, it's like Bud Light, it's something they used to own that was kind of culturally conservative.
And yeah, I mean, we've seen this going on for decades, and the people that we follow in the rationalist New Atheist sphere used to care so much about the big ideas and, you know, here comes jihadism and nuclear war and Steven Pinker's book about the trends of everything's getting better and look at the biggest numbers possible.
But, you know, all we can talk about now in the discourse is bullshit and these culture war issues that, I mean, we're fighting about nothing over and over again.
You know, like the environment is collapsing, all those graphs that people are posting on Twitter and And yeah, it's just an endless cycle of nothing.
And, you know, all these guys who are meant to be big thinkers, talking about their big ideas, really don't talk about them at all anymore.
And it's just this aggrievement about what the latest thing is that they're offended by.
Yeah, it feels almost like a distraction with really ridiculous things.
Bud Light, Target, Mr. Potato Head, Green M&M.
So, we don't actually notice that they're constantly trying to chip away at human rights.
But, let's see, who put their hand up next?
Let's see, JD?
Yeah, I was just wanting to say that I I have not seen Boybie or any of that.
I just know that, like, I was reading a book recently about, like, post-World War I, and a lot of the stuff that those proto-fascists like Miklos Horthy were complaining about would fit right in with today's Who, sorry?
right groups.
For example, his army in 1919 was ranting about combating international feminism.
Who, sorry?
Miklos Horthy.
He was a far-right dictator of Hungary in the interwar era.
Yeah, his army was publishing propaganda aimed against supposed international feminism in Yeah, yeah, these things are not new.
They just keep repeating themselves, unfortunately, and people keep buying them again and again.
Let's see, Vera, hello!
Well, Jack figures.
Hey, good evening.
How's it going?
How's it going?
Well, it's the middle of the night here in Europe.
Oh wow!
I'm staying up late for you guys.
Oh thank you!
I am honored.
And I've actually seen Bobby.
Oh wow!
We have one person!
One person in here!
It was quite fun.
It was a lot more fun than Oppenheimer.
I'm a Barberheimer.
I've both seen Oppenheimer and Bobby.
Within two days of each other.
Within one day of each other.
There's a lot of physical comedy in the Barbie movie.
Ryan Rosling is the actor of Ken, right?
Yeah.
The physical comedy of how he just has those massive muscles and just sits on a chair because he just has those and that's just the standard of Barbie Universe to have those bulging muscles.
I've read the criticism and I might agree with it that Ken has the better storyline than Barbie in the Barbie movie because he sort of comes to the realization that the world he's living in is a matriarchy where men are sort of secondary to women
When he and Barbie make it to the real world as you've seen in the trailers and also like the main conflict Barbie herself has is that she sort of starts to feel slightly more depressed than the ultra happiness she's used to.
Right.
Then is told to go explore the real world because that's the only possible source of her vague sense of unease.
But, yeah, it breezes by.
It was quite fun.
Did they address the, I guess, body image stuff well?
Well, the Barbies, like there's just the main Barbie and then there are a lot of other Barbies.
So there's more body inclusivity than you might at first think of.
Of Barbie, like there are bigger Barbies and all the Barbies are represented in Barbie worlds that have ever been issued by Mattel.
So you've got Dr. Barbie and you've got Boatworker Barbie.
All the jobs are done by Barbies and then there are just some Ken's also about.
Just some Ken's.
Yeah, it's never... They do come to the realization near the end, the Barbies do, that Barbies all have homes, but Kents don't have Barbie homes.
So where do the Kents actually live?
Well, we don't know.
There's a lot of... Yeah, there are some really good things.
Yeah.
As well.
No, it sounds fun, like it sounds like... Yes, it is fun!
Yeah.
But yeah, it's the closest thing, Mattel, and it's grown up, like it's not a movie for kids.
She just straight up says to some road workers at some point that she doesn't have genitals when she first comes to the real world.
Yeah, I heard about that.
Sorry everyone, I hope you kind of like assumed that there would be spoilers in this space, like I haven't seen it, but I'm sure there will continue to be spoilers, so just letting you know.
Yes.
But yeah, no, it sounds like a fun thing to watch.
I'm gonna find like the one thing that is pink in my closet maybe.
Yeah, I woke up only 15 minutes before the screening was supposed to start because I I napped on the couch, but the theatre is... I live in the city, so it's only 10 minutes from my home to the theatre.
So I did make it on time.
That's good, that's good.
Jack, do we have you back?
Can we hear you?
I hope so.
I think I'm back.
Yes, you are back, but you're showing as if you did.
Yes?
Hello?
Oh no, please.
Oh no, I can hear you though!
I could also talk about Dutch politics if anybody's interested.
It's a very big whirlwind at the moment.
There are only five different parties doing a leadership election before the next elections next November.
Oh dear.
Well, good luck with that.
Hopefully no Fascists come into power.
Yeah.
No good news on that front.
Did you say no good news on that front?
No.
Oh, dear.
OK, well, what's Gert Wilders up to these days?
He hasn't been the biggest fascist in Dutch politics in ages.
The real mainline act in Dutch politics has been Thierry Baudet for some time now.
And then there are all the splinter parties that split off of his party, the Forum for Democracy, the Forum for Democracy, or abbreviated as FGD.
When Gert isn't your main fascist, things are fucking bad.
I'm sorry to hear that.
You know, we mirror Anglo politics quite a bit.
So now that you've got fascist insults in the US, we've got fascist insults.
You've got farmer fascists, you've got Christian fascists.
I've got them in all sorts of shades.
And you know what, actually?
There's a lot of Barbie fascists, too.
Like, if you just look at the lineup of Fox News's, like, women co-hosts.
Well, there's a Twitter celebrity.
I forget her name.
It's quite the Barbie.
Yeah, I'm sure.
But let let me um talk to Jack just so that I can feel secure in the fact that he's actually back.
No no he's going again!
While we wait for Jack let me hear from the next person that put their hand up was let's see I guess uh either DS or Kareem I'm not I'm not sure but
Yeah, I was just gonna say, somebody was talking about how we do these stupid cultural fights endlessly now, and it's sort of like, I think, I've been thinking about this a lot, like, trying to think about, like, will we ever get universal healthcare in the US in my lifetime?
With the filibuster it's like I've just come to this dark realization that it's basically like this is what we're consigned to for you know because you we we can't get anything big unless we have 60 senators so basically there's just There's gonna be no universal healthcare, no big climate change stuff.
We're just gonna argue about this BS forever.
Hopefully, eventually, there'll be a breakthrough.
I hope so.
I hope so.
Alright, Kareem, what's up?
Regarding these culture wars, like, um...
It is a classic strategy of fascism to always create this false alarmism of cultural degeneracy to the current civilization.
Aiming towards ruins and all of that.
It's not new, it's just a reinvention of it.
And it also existed from a more Marxist perspective to aim the interest of part of the working class towards other issues rather than, as Dias has previously said, universal healthcare, workers' rights, etc.
So we're talking about this instead of pending issues.
Even on the left and you have like people who are trying to give in on these cultural war things by simply ignoring them or saying we have like more important things which I would agree per se but this makes these propaganda and these narratives not less threatening and not less dangerous and that's why they still have to be faced and certain myths still has to be like deconstructed.
Absolutely.
For example, you just earlier mentioned this thing with Snow White and Snow White being not white or whatever.
I was just thinking when people say we have to stay true to the source material and to its original cultural context and blah blah blah.
They also said the same regarding The Lord of the Rings show and everything like that.
You guys know one of the older versions of Sleeping Beauty?
From like the 17th century where she was raped in her sleep?
I can guess why Disney, when they made the adaptation, that they changed that.
This is just normal.
This is just what I also meant earlier.
They claim something is new, some new inventions, new changes, which in a certain way have been done always.
Also, when people complain about... I hate myself.
I sometimes watch these videos by some stupid right-wingers who get angry about nothing.
I know how that feels, yeah.
Yeah, and then there was this one guy deconstructing the trailer of the new Napoleon movie by Ridley Scott, and what is all historically inaccurate in it.
Like, oh, you don't say.
These movies have never been historically 100% accurate.
Like Gladiator has been 100% historically accurate, or Braveheart.
Even before filmmaking, when you see the dramas by Shakespeare, when he adapted certain things based on historic events like Henry V or Macbeth or even Hamlet, he changed a whole bunch of stuff to make it entertaining.
It's not a history lesson, but this is the world these people are living in.
And also this ignorance It's a myth.
It's a fake world.
It's a fake narrative they live in.
And because it's not based on anything, it's sometimes hard to debunk.
You know what I mean?
Because it has no real base, because it's invented, you cannot really debunk it.
They want to see reality proving the myth.
Right.
And a slightly related point is that, you know, when people say that There's like a kind of, um, I guess anti-ID poll type of left, which often talks about like, oh, we shouldn't focus on, you know, things like racism, homophobia, and we should worry about the real issues.
And, oh boy, I think Jack was gone again.
Is he gone again?
Sorry, this is very, very distracting.
What was I saying?
Yeah, so the people that say that, you know, these are not important issues and we should work on, like, you know, workers' rights or class issues and we should just, like, you know, not worry about culture war stuff because that's just, like, insignificant.
I don't agree with that because these things are all very connected and they impact what's happening in the world around us.
They impact our politics.
Fuckin' even, like, bullshit like the Green M&M will impact our politics in ways that we'll come to see, you know?
Like, all this fear-mongering about wokeness.
These are all the bricks that build that up, right?
So you have to counter it.
You can't just be like, well, this is just silly stuff.
I'm not going to address that.
Ten... tenkraty?
I don't know how to say that.
Yeah, that's just whatever, you know.
Yeah, I completely agree.
We have to focus on it.
We have no choice.
That's the only terrain there is to battle on.
And you have to defend trans rights and you have to defend, you know, things that we've are backsliding on because that's the only thing that's possible to fight on.
If you look at what gets traction, you know, you get millions of views for, you know, like Johnny Depp, Amber Heard or something like that.
Right.
That's what people care about.
And, you know, people watch Access Hollywood and those people voted for Trump.
And you can't escape that.
And that's what's making money, too.
And you see a lot of these people get captured by their audience, you know, whether it's like even Richard Dawkins or something, you know, it's all about.
Yeah.
And like, it's all, you know, whatever they're talking about, you know, black people in some textbook or like, what about, you know, a girl, you know, a boy and a girl in a girl's dress?
Like, this is the biggest affront to humanity.
So, yeah.
I mean, if you're not gonna fight it, they're just gonna keep pounding it.
And they've got unlimited ground to go on, because that's where the money is.
And they're gonna get all the views, and you can make all the videos you want about climate change or universal health care or some, you know, intricate union thing.
I mean, we're talking about the movies.
No one is, you know, the right wingers don't care at all about the movie strikes and all the labor action and, you know, so it's all this bubblegum like Barbie would like and it's, you know, it's cotton candy.
And that's the only thing that people are able to consume.
And I would like to see more public media and, you know, more money to PBS.
And, you know, in Canada, at least you have more of that.
But, you know, it's not happening.
And all we have left is social media.
You know, Twitter is getting gutted.
So I don't know.
I mean, it's not hopeful, but, you know, you have to get an algorithm.
You have to try to do something.
Because, yeah, we're gonna be stuck spinning our wheels in this mud for a very long time.
Like we have been for decades.
Unfortunately, yeah.
I mean, you make a little progress and they pull you right back.
It just seems bleak right now, particularly.
I remember periods where I was thinking, Oh yeah, you know, things are on the right track.
We're only going to progress from here.
So, but now even basic rights seem to be like sliding backwards and that's not something I expected.
And, uh, yeah, it's worrying.
Can people hear me?
Yes.
Hello.
I can.
Yeah, I've been fighting technical issues to get back on, but I think I am back, for whatever that's worth.
Yay!
Have you been listening to what we've been talking about, or were you not able to hear or connect?
I've heard bits and bobs of it, because I've been connecting, disconnecting, I've been in and out, so I have heard a fair bit of it, but I've also missed a lot.
Yeah, well, we were just talking about, like, the anti-ID politics type takes on the left that you get sometimes, and how people say that these are, like, silly issues and we should focus on, like, bigger issues, policy, and things like that.
Yeah.
There's that discourse on the left, like, you should scorn all discussion of what is called culture war stuff, because it's all, like, the ruling class trying to distract you from what they're really up to.
And that's, firstly, that's far too conspiratorial for me.
I don't think anybody's consciously trying to distract them.
I don't think Ben Shapiro sits down and thinks, how can we distract them from us?
Yeah, I don't think it's like a conscious distraction, it's just that these are the things that hold people's attention, as Tom Crady was saying just a little bit before.
It's like the junk food of politics, but that's what gets consumed a lot, but it does feel like a distraction from the bigger issues, you know?
It is a distraction, I just don't think it's a conscious distraction.
It's also not quite right to call it a distraction because, I mean, you wouldn't, certainly not with, I hope, with the benefit of hindsight, we wouldn't want to call the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Nazi Germany a distraction from the real issue, which was like the Nazis restructuring of the economy and stuff like that.
It was absolutely a cultural issue, It was absolutely culture war, as we would call it now, but it wasn't a distraction from the real issue.
Yeah, no, that's a really good point, actually.
I didn't think about it like that before, but like, yeah, absolutely.
Until we can zoom out from all this and see the bigger picture, we won't really know what the main issues are, so something could be, you know, pivotal or I think we have a pretty good idea.
I mean, I think we know what they're doing.
They're talking themselves the right in general.
They're talking themselves into a homicidal, if not a genocidal, state of mind with regards to certain groups.
You know, immigrants and trans people and queer people more generally.
They are getting... Pretty fucking blatantly now, you know?
God forbid they get the opportunity to put any of this into practice, as the Germans did during World War II, the Nazis during World War II, but if the opportunity comes, they will have talked their society up to the point where it's, if we let them, they will have talked their society to the point where it's ready, psychologically as well as politically, etc, to commit
Exterminations, potentially, you know, and I think we do need to be... we need to be aware of... this is one of the problems, we have to be aware of so many bloody things at once, but we do have to remember that the culture war issues, I think, are not just... I mean, the assault on Barbie as woke and feminist, etc., is also an assault upon feminism, and it's an assault upon women.
This is their agenda, you know, putting women and queer people and everybody back in their place, so to speak, by force if necessary.
That is their agenda.
And the culture war is one way of doing that, or one of their, you know, to get towards doing that.
So it's not just a distraction.
I think that kind of, you know, you get that kind of talk a lot, very glibly, from like the young Turks, Jacobin, edge of the left, you know, and I find it very glib, personally.
Ben Shapiro's video, right?
You look at all the... there's this whole cottage industry, the right is now basically... right-wing online media, to me, is like consumer journalism now.
And it's selling attention, you know, attention on itself, clicks and eyes and stuff like that, to its audience.
And it's doing it via doing basically media consumer journalism, but with a right-wing ideological perspective.
And then you have, like, the whole ecosystem, because then you have a whole load of liberal or progressive people who then respond to that.
So yeah, Ben Shapiro does his stupid video about Barbie, knowing full well that that's going to generate loads of, quote, outrage, unquote, so you get hundreds of right-wing YouTube videos defending him, and then you get hundreds of left-wing YouTube videos pointing out that, you know, and if you...
Loads of the quote-unquote progressive stuff criticising him is pathetic.
It's just like, oh, here's a grown man who cares about Barbie, ha ha ha.
If you look at his video...
I mean, I found it actually quite disturbing, because what he does at the start is he chucks a Barbie and a Ken into, like, a bonfire bin, you know, and he sets fire to them.
And not only that, we get, like, sound effects.
We get, like, burning flesh sound effects and screaming.
Like screaming in agony.
And he's also, supposedly in the same video, he's also reviewing Oppenheimer.
And the whole bit is where I'm going to review Barbie in an Oppenheimer sort of way.
So what he's doing there is he's kind of making this great big joke about, oh, the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, people burning to death in agony.
That's an Oppenheimer review now.
You know?
And that strikes me as extremely disturbing.
That's, like, normalising... And, you know, loads of people will say in response to this, oh, well, Ben's not actually saying we should... Ben has said we should burn people alive.
He's said that many, many times.
He supported the war on terror.
He supports Israel's rampages in Gaza.
He said when he was a very young man, he sort of started out in this, you know, Palestinians just live in filth.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I remember that.
He has consistently been in support of exactly that.
Bombing people and therefore burning them alive.
So this thing that everybody's mocking like, oh, he's silly, isn't he?
It's actually pretty bloody sinister.
As I say, they're gearing themselves up for violence.
Yeah, I mean, who was it that recently just said that we need to eradicate trans, was it trans, they didn't say trans people, but transness?
Trans, yeah, there you go, trans, transgenderism from, oh, public life and then they tried to do this semantic trick of like, "No, no, no, I didn't mean trans people.
I meant the ideology." And that's what they always said about Muslims, right?
So it's very similar and horrendous.
And as you said, genocidal sounding.
The other bit of that that people didn't notice at the time, I think, is the phrase "from public life" because, you know, not to Godwin myself, but that's exactly what the Nazis said, We need to remove Jews from public life.
We need to, because supposedly they dominate banking and the arts and so on, and there we are.
We're right back at the Degenerate Art Exhibition.
That was part of how they started removing Jews from public life.
And it never begins at Treblinka.
It begins with the culture war.
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's a really good point there.
Cultural Bolshevism.
Cultural Marxism.
Culture is where people live.
They know that if they want to get to people, to get them to get behind stuff like this, then you get them through culture.
I remember when Majid Nawaz called me a cultural Bolshevik or something, because I criticized his apologetics for Tommy Robinson, and of course that's what he called me.
Yeah.
Normal.
Normal people in the intellectual dark web.
Very, very normal people.
Yeah, burning Barbies and putting soundtracks of people screaming in agony over the top of it.
Very normal.
And can you imagine if, like, anyone on the left had remotely burned anything?
The outrage about the silencing and the oppressiveness of that would never, ever end.
And what was it that Matt Walsh tweeted today?
I remember sending it to you in DMs and you were like, oh yeah, that's about Ben upstaging him.
He tweeted, this is a good time to remember that feminism has killed far more people than the atomic bomb.
It is perhaps the most destructive force in human history.
Trans ideology, its offshoot, is competing for the title.
And it's like, It's so ridiculous because sometimes they say that trans people are, like, you know, attacking women and coming for feminists and taking people backwards with, like, gender stereotypes and just, like, bullshit, right?
But when they feel like it, it's like, oh, trans ideology is an offshoot of feminism now.
And it's like, can you make up your mind?
Which is it?
Well, they love to appropriate Orwell.
Yeah, all the time.
People who've actually read the book will remember the scene where the guy is making a speech about how dreadful Eurasia is, the evil hordes of Eurasia, and how we have to destroy them.
And then, in the middle of the speech, somebody comes up to him and hands him a note, and without
pausing for a second he starts talking about the evil hordes of East Asia and how we need to do it because you know that the enemy in the war has just switched over and you know like like nothing has ever happened he just switches over to talking about a different country that they have to destroy and everybody in the crowd just goes oh these signs are wrong we need to get rid of these signs and nobody acknowledges that a change has been made and that's what they do all the time you know it's you have to you have to hate trans people because they're anti-women
And then you have to hate them because they're feminist.
Right.
And no attention is paid to the contradiction.
Yep.
The wokes are too mean or they're too weak and snivelling snowflakes.
It's like, can't be both.
Because they don't really have politics.
What they have is enemies.
And you make any political or aesthetic or rhetorical argument you need to make at any given time in order to attack the enemy by any means necessary.
That's it.
Right.
All right, let's hear from some people.
I think CU Later had their hand up first, then it was Dave, then Tavish, and then Kareem, and then JD.
Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Oh, great.
So a lot of what I was going to say has already been said now, but I wanted to add that Back to the question of, is this something that is like a distraction or like a deliberate distraction?
I feel like a lot of what maybe might be a difference between left versus right politics is kind of the attitude towards culture's position in regards to politics.
Because a lot of what I hear or see from right-wing pundits It's like this idea that culture shapes politics, while a lot of left-wing criticism is always like trying to, you know, we need to prioritize the political, like let's say economic policies or something like that.
And that will then inform the culture.
And I feel like that might be a kind of fundamental difference in attitude towards how the world works.
That is kind of behind the reason why culture war issues can garner so much more attention on the right than they can in motivating people with a right-wing leaning.
position to become like politically active.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
Dave?
So sorry about the way I sound.
I'm on the world's oldest phone because I keep buying studio equipment.
Hi, Ina.
It's been a while.
I hope you're well.
Hello.
Yes, I am.
Hope you are too.
So as the maybe the token gay guy here, I want to, the jean jacket, we have to talk about the jean jacket.
I've never seen Ben Shapiro wear a jean jacket.
I wonder if he was like trying to like blend in or kind of hide in the crowd at the movie theater where he was at because of the choice of the jean jacket.
Was he wearing one?
I remember him wearing like a black jeans and a black t-shirt.
I don't remember a jacket.
Yeah, if you go back and look, he was wearing a jean jacket.
It was a weird choice.
The people in my chat were commenting on it, but that's kind of silly.
What I want everybody to think about is, what version of this Barbie movie would our intellectual opponents Have enjoyed like what would it what would the content of this movie had had like had to have been for Ben Shapiro or Michael Knowles or that weirdo the quartering or whatever for those people to have been like oh this Barbie movie was great I really liked the Barbie movie I just want people to think about that a little bit and that's it I'll let the next person go.
Yeah, I don't think any kind of Barbie movie would have satisfied them unless it was like a fashy Fox News Barbie movie.
That would be it.
Just to very briefly jump in, I think what they would have liked would have been like Barbie the movie with everything according to the underlying assumptions that went into creating Barbie back in the 50s or whatever it was, completely un-interrogated.
Yeah, so the dumbest, dumbed-down version ever.
Yeah.
There's no layers, no irony, nothing.
There's nothing to question anything or anything to be interrogated, anything from the past, anything that represents established power relationships just has to be left eternally unquestioned.
So if you just take Barbie from 1940, 1950, whatever, whenever it was started, And you take all those assumptions about women and domesticity and femininity and all that stuff that went in to creating Barbie in that, in that first, you know, the sort of classic Barbie, and you just represent those faithfully on screen, they'd probably, well they'd probably be bored as shit like everybody else, but they'd claim to think it was great.
Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, if it was like all about trad wife and home making and baby making and yeah.
That'd be great for them.
That's conservative for you.
They literally just never want to move ahead.
I think I saw a clip on Instagram, Dave Rubin so angry about Snow White and saying, instead of destroying things that are old and things that we already have, why can't you just come up with a new story?
And it's like, Because people want these stories to evolve and reflect the values of our time.
That is why these fairy tales, which belong to everyone in the culture, not just the right, someone or another wants to remake it to be more reflective of our world today.
That's all.
It doesn't destroy it.
The Chris Pine Star Trek movies don't make 60s Star Trek go away.
We still have both.
Forbidden Planet doesn't make The Tempest not exist anymore.
We still have both.
It's fine.
Dave, don't worry.
Right, right.
And I remember on my early days on Twitter, I think it was like 2012, 2013, I said something about nursery rhymes.
um being like you know reading them back as an adult and thinking holy shit these are terrible like we need new nursery rhymes or we need to revisit these nursery rhymes and like a bunch of uh pakistani conservative men got really mad at me for like wanting to revisit things like sugar and spice and all things nice or Do you know the one I'm talking about?
So silly.
These are the things that girls are made of.
I don't even remember it anymore.
Boys are slugs and snails and puppy dogs.
Puppy dogs, tails.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's always the kids stuff.
I remember, like, it's been going on forever.
Like, we experience it so much more It's more omnipresent now I suppose because of social media but all my life I've been reading these things in British newspapers from these old reactionary farts who are complaining about political correctness is going to Ban Biggles or Tintin or Dan Dare or something.
They've always done this and I think this concern about children's media, it's just really telling because whether they're conscious of it or not, what they're worried about is the idea that we won't be indoctrinating the kids.
well enough in patriarchy and capitalism and nationalism and all this stuff.
If we don't drum it into them, drum it into them right away, you know, we'll be in trouble.
And yeah, actually, you will.
And tough luck.
Well, that's how they continue like this.
I don't want to be too much to undermine capitalism, but because it's a megacorporation, you know, commodity, it's not going to... but yeah, attitudes are going to change.
And they just, they cannot, they cannot handle anything changing or progressing.
And it must be so hard to live like that.
To want to just like stay stuck in a time capsule forever and ever and ever because the world around you will keep changing.
And to just be unable to adjust or try to adjust It seems like a very difficult and miserable way to live, which is why they're always so miserable and angry.
Well, the truth is that they do adjust.
They adjust all the time.
They adjust to things that benefit them.
You know, the internet comes along and yeah, they've adjusted to that just fine, haven't they?
Things change all the time.
And they react, they go, oh yeah, this is great, this thing has changed, it benefits me, I can make money out of that.
And this other thing over here, I'm worried that it might make women feel slightly less subservient to me, that's evil.
It's the hierarchy, can't fuck with that.
You can, you know, get them a better computer, high-speed internet, you know, glasses, They'll adjust to that.
Medical care advances and surgical techniques, if it benefits them, though I suppose some will object to any sort of medical advancement as well.
But yeah, you're very right, they do adjust to some things, but it's the things that challenge their hierarchies, you know?
Lobsters and shit.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it was Tavish, I believe.
Hello.
Hello.
How's it going?
I had a very brief remark.
I haven't seen the film, but my friend watched it.
He said that the film was about feminism and how it is, like, utilized or misused by the Corporations?
Was that what the film was about?
I mean, if you've been listening to The Space, you'll know that most of us have not seen the film, so I can't really comment on that, but we're commenting more about the outrage that we've seen in the media.
If there was an exposure of what corporations do and how they misuse No, I don't think so.
I think the outrage is about it being too feminist and too woke, too inclusive.
Quote-unquote woke, let me say.
There does seem to be some, from what I've heard, there does seem to be some anti-capital, sort of corporate critique stuff in there, of like the Mattel Corporation.
But that's not what's been causing the right-wing outrage, yeah.
Exactly, they don't get that far.
Yeah, yeah, they don't get beyond the, it's too pink and they hate men!
Alright, Kareem, what's up?
Yeah, and I liked two things I wanted to mention, like something you've talked about far earlier, or more like I have slightly mentioned it.
It's regarding the threat coming from these cultural wars and cultural war narratives.
I think it's quite interesting to see how they've evolved over the past, let's say, decade, when it started like in roughly 2014, 2015, like that, where it's really got a hype.
That back then, most of these people, like influencers, journalists, politicians, and so on, they would never claim that it's about, oh, I am against LGBTQ people, or I'm against black people, or yadda yadda yadda.
It's only about politics and media.
I don't want politics and media.
I don't want any agenda.
And it slowly but surely evolved to the point, no, I don't mind agenda, which we all know was always the truth.
I mind this agenda.
I mind feminism.
I mind transgenderism.
They still are a little bit reluctant to be open about racism.
But we all know that this is the real idea here.
And I don't know if there's a similar way to paraphrase it in English.
In German, we say they like always put the toe into the water.
Like they're testing how far they can go.
And they do that.
They keep on going forward and more overt with their speech.
Yeah, yeah.
This is like what you see right now.
Currently, the main target is transgenderism because they have recognized that there is a hatred and bigotry beyond the, let's say, established right-wing.
That you have self-proclaimed feminists and some people on the LGB spectrum and so on who have their concerns, quote-unquote, regarding this topic.
Or other religious minorities like Muslims, for example.
And so they stretch out on that and they are more eager to be overt.
But they still are a little bit more reluctant when it comes to other topics.
But we all know that this is behind it.
And when it comes to that point where they become super overt, this is where you should be mostly concerned.
But look at what's happening in Florida, how they're trying to do the revisionism around slavery.
Right, they're trying to say that slavery benefited the slaves, and they were learning skills that they could put to good use, and it's just, like, horrendous!
It is!
Like, this is what I'm saying, like, I'm also really, really certain, which is, some would say it's pessimistic, but I'm really certain that we will get a more overt racism also, and not something which is, like, a little bit more
Covered up as it is still slightly currently like people still claiming that is not about race But as you said like this new narrative about let's maybe make a revisionism and how we see slavery is certainly a step into that direction and And this should be concerning this should be generally concerning about the left so like what you said earlier that we have like a Many people on the left not really considering these cultural war topics or even pandering towards them, like agreeing even slightly.
This is really, really concerning because we are basically allowing these people to step-by-step dehumanize certain minorities.
And the other thing is, me personally, I'm not sure if I mentioned in some earlier spaces, I'm a religious studies major, also focused on history, so I'm a historian.
And when people ask me what do I see like as the main idea of an historian, I would say it's the criticism of ideology.
Ideologies are based on narratives and they mostly rely on alleged history for that.
So this is why historic education is so enormously important.
It's why we can see that the right is trying to purposely censor that, like in Florida.
They create a false image of the past as basically the fundament of their ideological myth.
And this is usually where, as a scholar, from a scholarly perspective, what you need to attack.
Like, for example, to go back to the Barbie topic, Like, oh, manliness and our manlihood, and this is the end of masculinity.
And, like, if you have, like, a somewhat educated idea of history, you know that the idea of masculinity, even in patriarchy, changed drastically.
It was always a fluid concept.
Like, just take men from the 18th century.
Like, just look at their dresses.
Like, how they clothed.
Like, it's a drastic shift from what was previously and from what came after.
Like, these things were always fluid.
Or what men or women, on the other hand, allegedly should be interested in.
Like, for example, horses were the top man topic throughout centuries.
Like, not even centuries.
Millennials.
Because men were the ones who rode.
Who ride horses and go to war and all of that.
And now horses are considered a girly thing.
And who knows, maybe in 500 years, cars are considered a girly thing.
God knows.
But this is just like the point to deconstruct that.
And this is what the right is most scared of.
Because they rely on these narratives about things that allegedly always has been that way.
Things that are allegedly natural.
Yeah, I think that was very well said.
And when, like in Florida or in other countries, education is attacked, then this is the most drastic step they will put in because they will start to shift our perspective on history.
Yeah, I think that was very well said.
Yeah, indeed.
Yeah.
The reactionary politics is always about taking the present moment and just sort of freezing it and amputating all the contexts of the past and also kind of prohibiting all imagination of the future, which is something that I think just comes inherently when you start to interrogate the past.
And that's, as I say, I haven't seen the movies, so I can't speak for it, but that is something that works of art can do.
Films and novels and so on can look at the past and the values and the aesthetics and the ideologies of the past that I don't think a film about the Barbie franchise could possibly help but do, even if it didn't want to.
And deconstruct and think about them a bit, and so on and so forth, and that sort of analysis of the past, and particularly a part of the past that continues to exist into the present, like these long-running IPs, be they toys or film franchises or whatever, criticism of them, and fairy tales that just live on, and they are artefacts of the past that we still have with us.
And any examination of them, any interrogation of them, any deconstruction of them runs that risk that people might, through doing that, through thinking about the past that way, They might start to imagine a different future.
And the reactionary viewpoint is just, no, we have to do not look left, do not look right, just look ahead.
You know, pretend everything else doesn't exist.
Here now is it.
And that's how it has to be.
And that's the way it's always been.
And you can't, not only should you not change it, you can't.
It's impossible.
It's genetic or whatever.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's in your DNA.
Yeah.
Time to get your calipers out, everyone.
Yeah, it always comes down to calipers, doesn't it?
And measuring skulls.
Yep, yep.
I mean, I wonder if Ben Shapiro went home and measured Barbie's, like, skull.
I don't want to think about what Ben does with Barbie when he's on his own.
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry, sorry.
Nobody think about that.
But there are probably calipers involved.
Based on that video, he probably just burns Barbies in fires, you know.
Did you notice in that video how large the matches were?
That was a strange choice.
No, they just look large because they're being hung by Ben Shapiro.
Right, right.
Alright, so Jack, you sent me I think an article about Barbie by none other than Piers Morgan.
And I thought it was hilarious because he was so, so mad.
Like, I think he said something like, if I made a movie about treating women the way Barbie treats men, Feminists would want to execute me.
That's actually the headline that they've put in the New York Post.
That's the headline of the opinion piece.
Oh, is that the headline?
I didn't notice that.
And, no, Piers, no, they wouldn't.
They wouldn't want you executed if you made a movie that treated women badly.
They might criticize you.
Right, which is the same thing.
Come on.
Well, right-wingers, it is the same thing, right?
Just to be mildly criticized by another group is basically like being executed.
Meanwhile, they can talk about eradicating Muslims or transgenderism or whatever, and you're too sensitive if you get upset by that.
Exactly.
What I like about Piers' article is that he doesn't pretend.
Even Ben does this thing where he says, well, politics aside, it's a terrible movie.
He actually comes up with loads of riffs on, you know, a dog shit burning bin inside of a dog shit mountain or something.
He's trying to do that sort of performatively angry YouTube film criticism thing.
It's cringy, but Pierce just comes out and says it.
He starts with, I'll read a bit of it to you, he starts with, what is the patriarchy?
I bet most people reading this haven't a clue.
Actually, Pierce, people reading an article by you in the New York Post, I think you're probably right.
Even I don't really understand it, and according to radical feminists, I'm supposed to be the very personification of what it supposedly represents.
And then he talks about how it's said in Barbie.
I mean, it's said.
The word is said in a film.
Can you imagine?
In recent times, the concept of patriarchy has been hijacked and corrupted by feminazis, to suggest that every aspect of life and society is dominated by powerful, privileged males over subjugated, underprivileged females.
Men are evil oppressors, women are unimpeachably perfect victims, and anyone who dares challenge this notion is a disgusting misogynist.
Yeah, that's exactly what feminists say, Piers.
Well done.
Ten out of ten.
No notes.
Aren't you quoting Judith Butler there, actually, Piers?
And then, really, the rest of the review is just him saying there's feminist stuff in the film, you know?
Imagine!
Yeah, I know, because that's illegitimate.
They want freedom of speech, but also some viewpoints just shouldn't be in media.
No, no.
Yeah, absolutely.
His review of the film makes me want to see it.
I'll be honest with you, it wasn't on my list of things to rush out and see, but his review of the film makes it sound like it actually does.
I mean, he makes it sound like it's basically The Scum Manifesto, the movie.
But reading between the lines of Piers frothing idiocy and reactionary politics, And misogyny, don't forget that one.
Reading Between the Lines actually sounds like it is trying, and of course the director's Greta Gerwig, isn't it?
So she's an intelligent director.
It is trying to do what I thought it would try to do, which is try to sort of interrogate and deconstruct loads of those Aesthetics and assumptions and tropes around women and domesticity and family life and the relationship between the sexes and genders and stuff like that, that the Barbie IP is just inherently based upon.
This is the thing that's invisible in their complaints.
Barbie is, and you mentioned this yourself, Barbie is itself ideology.
It itself pushes a view of women and a view of life.
And that view is not... I know it's made all sorts of, like loads of brands, it's made all sorts of efforts to be much more inclusive and much more diverse and stuff like that.
Lots of brands are doing that now because it's good for business.
They realize that they can talk to more people if they start including people more and different types of people more.
It's made all those efforts.
And probably people working at Mattel are doing some of it in good faith.
I expect that's true.
But even so, the whole...
Whatever you call a franchise when it's toys, IP I suppose is the term I'm using, it's all based upon those assumptions and they are patriarchal and they are reactionary and they are relics of a previous time.
And that's in the lives of millions of children all over the world.
And so we have a text here that it sounds, I mean, maybe it'll be a big disappointment when I see it, but it sounds to me like it is actually trying to think about some of these things a bit and interrogate them a bit.
And that's just the fury The rage that that causes in people like Piers Morgan.
You want to think about things?
How dare you!
Oh, and he's honest about it, right?
And imagine that you're calling like a group of right-wingers like Nazis with such, you know, so freely The way that they use feminazi, you know, you remember that whole thing that they say where if you call someone a Nazi, you're just pushing them further and further, right?
Right?
Yeah.
So, like, where's a group that often gets called Nazis, right?
Feminazis.
All the fucking time.
Has that made, you know, feminists turn into Nazis?
I mean, maybe TERFs, but I don't believe they're feminists.
For real, but yeah.
If reality isn't up to your standards, you just invent it.
So you would say, yeah, they are Nazis, actually.
Yeah.
Because they don't accept their place.
They don't know their place, so when you're a privileged person and you get even the slightest bit of pushback, then that starts to feel like oppression.
And throughout history, when that's happened to people, they've constructed the people they fear and they hate as, like, folkloric monsters.
They've constructed them as vampires and bacteria and rats and stuff like that.
And we live in the era where, thanks to things like Hollywood, the Nazis are kind of folkloric monsters.
We have this... the Nazis are constantly being Fed to us as villains, you know, both in actual literal Nazis or Nazi analogues in film after film.
Whether it's the, you know, sort of cartoon Nazis in Indiana Jones or it's the Empire in Star Wars and stuff like that.
They've become monsters of folklore.
So these people are just doing what these people have always done.
Except that now they're calling them Nazis.
Because they don't really understand what the Nazis were.
They're just these folkloric bad guys.
Yeah.
Karim, did you have anything?
Yeah, I was just thinking, when you mentioned Piers Morgan, I still sometimes have the impression that in the United States, By some people, hopefully not by most, or maybe the Smith also disappeared, but Europe is like a beacon of progressiveness, at least compared to the United States.
And I mean, Europeans tend to run their mouths on Americans quite a lot and make fun of them.
And to every American in the chatroom, don't let them give you that.
As someone who lives in Germany.
Like, they are not that much better as they pretend they are.
Actually, not at all.
And like many of the issues, like what you just said, with feminazis, Springer is the biggest media corporation in Germany.
They run several newspapers, they have a TV channel, they also, some years ago, they bought Politico, so they are now also active outside of Germany for quite some time.
They are what is usually considered more right-wing establishments.
They still try to distance themselves from the far right, even though they copy all their talking points.
And just like the labels they have created in the past years in Germany, and the really unhinged hypocrisy from them, like for example, Wokuharam.
Like the chief editor of Springer's biggest newspaper Welt.
He has kind of coined that.
And then some years later, a German satire show made fun of this group of certain politicians and specifically Springer journalists.
And this is a satire show where they have created an image depicting them of the RRF, which is the most infamous leftist terrorist group in Germany.
And they went all nuts regarding that.
...image, which is, like, based on a wanted poster, an historic wanted poster of the RAF, with all, like, the key members of it depicted.
And they changed that with, like, the image of some politicians and some journalists, including a horse, which is... including some corruption scandal, whatever.
They went nuts regarding that and saying, oh, they're calling us terrorists and they're comparing us to terrorists and they created a list of us.
This is so dangerous that the left is so unhinged.
And then like not even a year after that they are now again calling like climate activists climate terrorists.
There is such an unhinged environment with all the right wing.
And there's also a copying of a certain, I would say, American style, specifically created by Fox News, which some media outlets outside of, like in Europe, I'm thinking of Germany, have copied because they recognize it works successfully.
One of the former journalists of Springer, he was the chief editor of their major tabloid.
He was always a racist, sexist piece of garbage, but he was fired some years ago, Not because of that or not directly because of that, but guess what?
Because of sexual harassment.
This was the thing.
He is still active.
He now has his own Sounds delightful.
Sorry?
online news channel which is shockingly based on like you can see it's a mixture of a little bit alex jones with a little bit not too strong or not too outlandish sounding conspiracy theories but a lot of tucker karlson like it's it's really really strong delightful sorry it sounds delightful yeah yeah
there's now currently a whole new news outlet uh emerging of course funded by some right-wing billionaire in germany where he is also included and some others like also a trans exclusive feminist journalist who is quite infamous in germany who just recently said that the real threat is not the right wing.
She specifically mentioned one name, Bjorn Höcke, who was officially labeled by a German court a fascist because he simply fits the definition of it.
But not people like him are the danger to our democracy, but it's the left woke who is destroying our state and blah, blah, blah.
and she's a self-proclaimed feminist again.
And just so you know, the party of said politician, Björn Höcke, is currently at 22% in the polls.
And the far right is still the core lead of every chart when it comes to violent crimes to attacks and to political motivated murders in germany but it's transgenderism it's climate activism or any sort of wokeism quote unquote or specifically in germany it's diversity in regarding to ethnicity like pendering allegedly pendering towards islamism and blah blah but this is still really a thing here
these are the things that are the real threat and not like an actual fascist party yeah you know germany just recently had a an attempted um outright fascist coup attempt you know they're Yeah, exactly, exactly, yes.
It was just last year.
Yeah, the Reichsburg coup, I was trying to remember the word.
But then, it's the same in the States, isn't it?
January 6th, they literally had an outright attempt to overthrow American democracy by, you know, an actual sort of conspiracy of far-right groups with the sitting president attempted to overthrow American democracy and install an unelected government, and the extent to which that's just been
Memory hold, again, Orwell, memory hold by these people that talk like, you know, the big threat to public life and social order is, of course, teachers with blue hair telling kids that slavery once existed, you know.
If they were capable of the self-awareness that would stop them from doing it, they wouldn't be doing it in the first place, would they, I suppose?
So, sorry, I, uh, got distracted, uh, by reading the comments, so I didn't really hear what note you presented on, I apologize, but I'm just, uh, I wanted to get Mustache Bob in, because I know he had his hand up before and then got disconnected, and then we'll talk to Chen Crady again, and, uh, yeah, hello!
Hey, I'm on my porch, so I hope my audio's not, like, too awful.
Is that— Sounds alright.
Oh, okay, cool.
Because, uh, of course I'm imbibing tobacco as I'm talking to you.
But, uh, I've been ducking in and out, and I don't know, um, if you've seen the guy who pretends he's a knight who actually reviewed the Barbie movie for longer than any time.
Yes!
I just watched this thing today.
He's wearing like a full like pretend cheap looking knight costume.
It's not even good.
Yeah I thought it was like chain mail but it was just like a hoodie that had like fake chain mail on it.
It's like fabric.
It's awful and it made me realize that like this guy and Piers Morgan who you were talking about and like especially like Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire people, they all just have terrible taste in movies and they can't engage like They can't, like, engage a culture product unless it's exactly, like, formulaic and marketed specifically to them.
So they, like, freak out and get, like, violently mad where they want it to.
And it's just wild to me.
Yeah, it's crazy.
And you actually saw the movie, right?
I did, actually.
I liked it a lot.
Like, I need to get some more, like, Kennergy, uh, because I dress in, like, all black all the time.
But I need to get some, like... Welcome!
You're on the right Twitter space.
Apparently everybody just dresses in black on here.
Well, it's great.
I never have to worry about matching my clothes, but, uh, it was a great movie.
I'm shocked that they managed to make like a big studio feminist movie like this.
And I'm kind of happy they did because it does actually kind of use a brand that, uh, has like kind of said like some weird and negative images, uh, like body images to people over the years to like send kind of a more positive message or some positive messages you're going to get out of a big studio movie.
Right, we were talking about that, I think, before you came on.
Did it actually address the, I guess, problematicness of the body image messages that Barbie has been giving all along, or did they just, like, skim over it?
Bob?
Bob?
It is a mystery that will never be answered until we go see the movie.
There's literally no way to ever know.
Well, look, Jack, when you go see it, you have to post a picture of yourself in, like, Ben Shapiro pose, but wear a pink shirt or something.
Oh, no, I mean, as I've now learned, conveniently, Ken wears a black t-shirt and black jeans, and that's basically my uniform anyway.
Yeah.
I had Kennergy all along and I didn't know it.
Yeah.
And I'm often mistaken for Ryan Gosling, so...
Well look, your accent's definitely far more interesting.
I do have the accent, if all else.
That's why I'm good on audio.
Okay.
All right.
Do we have Bob back?
Yes, the app keeps like crashing on me.
Tell me about it.
You're saying nice things about Barbie and that is not allowed.
I've been shadow banned by the right-wing culture sphere.
That's right, it's a conspiracy.
I demand a New York Times opinion byline for the next five years so I can properly tell my story about this app crashing on me.
Absolutely, you should get it.
And Jack too.
I mean they were just trying to cancel him and oppress his wokeness or silence him or something.
That's what that was all about.
I did just want to say it's also worth noting that the Go Woke, Go Broke thing has like never been a thing.
And that this movie is going to be incredibly profitable.
Yep, yep.
It's already breaking all kinds of records.
That's why they make woke stuff now!
It's because people buy it, because people want to buy things that they see themselves in, and the consumers come in all shapes and sizes, and it sells to people.
People like inclusive messages, they like diversity, they like to see themselves, and they like the whole idea of being inclusive.
Brands and commodities that make them feel that way, to be a little bit cynical about it.
That's what always gets me about these people that complain about this stuff.
You're complaining about your own thing, guys.
You're complaining about the so-called free market.
It's just a thing.
It's just identified a way to sell people shit, and it's exploiting it.
You should be proud.
It's the way you tell us everything should be organised.
You tell us constantly that everything, from childcare to education to healthcare to streetlights, everything should be just the market.
Because it's the most efficient and it's the most innovative.
You tell us this constantly.
To the extent that we have a free market at all, this is just culture being run by that.
You should be happy.
Ironically, if they consumed critical theory and engaged the concept of the culture industry, they would have a lot better argument about mass media.
Yeah, they should read some Adorno and Horkheimer.
Sorry, the idea of Ben Shapiro reading Adorno just made me laugh.
The idea of Ben Shapiro reading anything makes me laugh, so that's a good reaction.
True, true.
All right, can we get Ken Crady on and then we can think about wrapping up?
Yeah.
Yeah, of course, they are just gonna put out stuff that people want to buy.
I was gonna go back to something Kareem was saying, which was so true about the homogenization of the far right and how everyone kind of follows each other all across the world.
And I think it's because of the internet, largely.
And I think it started as language.
You know, people can only take in the language they speak and that's why you saw, you know, all these Canadians and all these British and Australian far-right, you know, there became this right-wing Anglosphere online where you had, you know, different stars from, you know, Peterson, Douglas Murray, all these people.
You had, like, the Christchurch shooting taking in all the English media.
And then, you know, I know a lot of immigrants and their parents just taking their own perspective, far-right kind of propaganda, whether they're Russian or Chinese or, you know, we're Indian and stuff.
And it's like, where are you getting this stuff?
But all of a sudden, it all starts to sound very similar.
And they're all complaining about the same things.
And, you know, you see these movements bubbling up with Tucker Carlson going to Hungary and Bolsonaro and all these different things.
So, I don't know.
There's not anything to combat it, either.
They're all moving in sync, they're all focusing on the same things.
You know, immigration, culture war, you know, homosexuality, and things like that.
And the center is not really offering up anything that's motivating people at all.
And it's disturbing, thank you.
Yeah, the anti-woke center, especially, like, you know, there's the people that are not, like, right-wing, but they claim to be sort of on the left, but mostly centrist.
But they express their sympathies with the anti-woke cause, like, constantly.
Those people have done so much damage.
So much damage.
It's like the whole New York Times thing, right?
Where their headlines are now just like the stuff of parody.
And for some great intellectuals, the New York Times has apparently been broken by wokeness.
I'll give everyone one guess as to who said that.
Any guesses?
The New York Times has been broken by wokeness.
Is it Barry Weiss?
No, but good guess, good guess.
Jack, any guesses?
Um, Sam Harris?
Yes!
Yeah, yep.
The guy who thinks Ezra Klein is far, far left.
Yeah.
You know, I'm actually very surprised I haven't seen a Jordan Peterson, like, meltdown about Barbie.
I guess he's still too busy with Elsa, but I haven't seen...
Yeah.
It feels like very much the sort of thing he would be on.
Like a fly on shit.
Right, right.
Maybe he's preparing something real big.
I don't know.
Maybe he drinks some apple cider.
The Daily Wire can only afford the one ticket.
Right, right.
Oh, you know, some of them are boycotting Barbie.
Actually, many of them are boycotting Barbie, and it's just such a joyless existence to be a right-winger.
And I saw this clip of, like, a Fox News person, woman, host, saying, you know, I've been boycotting so many things lately, I'm just running out of things to boycott.
Like, because imagine, I think, like, they're boycotting, like, Some brand of tampons or pads.
Some kind of children's toys.
All the children's shows almost.
Movies.
Beer.
All sorts of food and beverages.
Target.
It's just, I mean, how do you even keep track of it?
Actually, they have an app for that.
They give like wokeness scores to different brands and you have to pull out your app and check the wokeness score of each product that you're considering purchasing.
It's just so, so, so exhausting and joyless.
Speaking of professional reactionaries, did you see that Douglas Murray was on Fox outnumbered talking about Barbie?
I did not!
How did I miss Douglas' take?
What did he have to say?
Oh, just exactly the same crap.
I am shocked.
Feminazis and feminism's gone too far and now men are in the oppressed position and, you know, just the same old shit.
That's it, literally.
Ted Cruz had more of a take, actually.
Ted Cruz is very concerned about a map that's in the film, apparently.
Oh yeah, yeah!
Did you see this?
Apparently there's a map in the film and it has some dashes on it which indicate...
Chinese claims to the South China Seas or something that are disputed by Vietnam.
And Ted Cruz thinks this is a big sort of communist conspiracy to try to indoctrinate the eight-year-old girls of America into believing the Chinese Communist Party's claims to fishing rights.
I don't fucking know.
That's so good!
It has been so good to see this because it is so ridiculous, but I guess it should be worrying, too, because there's just so much of it, right?
And as everyone has pointed out, they're so good at all kind of being in step with each other.
They're so well-funded, organized, and I don't think we have that as much on the left, and that is worrying.
It is difficult, isn't it?
Because they are ridiculous, they are objectively ridiculous, but it doesn't make them any less dangerous.
It's like, if you watch the really old Godzilla movies, obviously the Godzillas in them are risible, they look silly by our modern standards.
I mean, classic movies, obviously, but the big dinosaurs look silly.
But it's like if one of those Looking and acting and moving exactly like one of the old original Godzilla, you know, man-in-a-rubber-suit puppet things, appeared and it was actually 200 feet tall and it actually started crushing buildings.
It would look ridiculous, but it would still kill you.
That's what it's like.
Yeah, yeah.
I just love the idea of Comrade Barbie seizing the means of production and bringing us closer to communism.
It's like the whole color scheme of communism has to be changed from red to pink.
This would be it.
I would totally be on board with that.
But yeah, what you're just describing is like...
This is cancel culture, as they always pretend it exists.
They always say, the left is cancelling this and that, and we cannot watch it anymore.
I mean, still recently, this is not something far in the past, like with the Harry Potter video game, who came out, I think it was last year.
And people saying that you probably shouldn't buy it because J.K.
Rowling is a horrendous human being and you shouldn't push royalties into her pockets.
And people then were crying about cancel culture and that you cannot enjoy anything anymore.
Right now you're not allowed to enjoy any Disney movie, you're not allowed to enjoy Barbie, you're not allowed to enjoy Marvel movies, or this or that, because it's all apparently spoiled with wokeism.
Like, it's just what I said, what I mentioned earlier, it's this unhinged hypocrisy where people pretended throughout years that things are not about politics, that they're not about the message per se, but that they just mind politics but that they just mind politics in their media, or that they are against wokeism, but they don't mind politics, they mind the message per se, and they also don't mind boycotting because they boycott
and they also don't mind boycotting because they boycott It's this really, really unhinged hypocrisy, and I think it should be more outcalled because it's such an obvious weakness that these people really care.
But they don't care.
Yeah, that's the problem.
Yeah, that's the problem.
Because they all know, on a fundamental level, they all know what they're doing.
So you point out their hypocrisy and their double standards and it just slides off them because they know and they don't care.
The fact that they're blatantly contradicting themselves and blatantly ridiculous... Ben Shapiro has been widely and roundly mocked for his ridiculous Barbie reaction video.
He doesn't care.
He will make money from that.
He will get clicks from that.
And he will continue doing what he's doing to an audience that has eaten that up and will eat up the next thing.
He's made loads more videos about it, about the reaction to his reaction, and he'll make another video about the reaction to his reaction to his reaction.
He's fine.
The fact that hundreds of people have pointed out his hypocrisy and ridiculousness, he doesn't care.
Fundamentally, as long as they... One of the things that, really, I found really instructive recently was when those, you know, during the Dominion lawsuit of Fox News, and during the discovery process, loads of stuff from, you know, internal stuff from Fox News came out.
And of course the juiciest bits like Tucker saying, you know, Trump's a destroyer and stuff like that, that made its way into the headlines.
But if you look through that stuff, what I found really instructive about that is that they really were not, at least in terms of their communications with each other as an organisation, they were not concerned about politics.
They were not concerned about anything except views.
About audience numbers.
Viewing figures.
That was it.
They weren't concerned what anybody on the left thought of them, or anybody on the more liberal networks thought of them, or any of the criticism.
They were not worrying about what... I don't know who it is now, but in my day it was Jon Stewart.
They were not interested in what anybody was saying about them, about pointing out their hypocrisy and their double standards and the fact that their reporting is garbage or anything like that.
And they weren't They were just worried about the views.
They were just worried about Newsmax poaching views.
They were just worried about their viewers leaving them because they weren't being extreme enough.
That was it.
So, I mean, this is one of the traps we're in.
It does need to be done.
We do need to constantly point out their lies and their hypocrisy and their two-facedness.
But also, it kind of doesn't get us anywhere.
Because, as I say, they know, they don't care.
That's not their job.
Their job is not to make sense.
Their job is not to tell the truth.
Their job is to constantly pander to an audience who need to have their ideological convictions and their feelings reinforced and validated.
Yeah I would just say though that I wouldn't give up on pointing some of the more glaring things out just because you never know like who's looking and it's not necessarily about just like shaming them or expecting them to be like oh I've been you know caught out but it's like about others who are looking
At you calling it out or hearing you calling it out, if you're doing it on audio, then, you know, if they're like kind of on the fence, sometimes those are the things that pull them away.
So it may be slow, but it does do something sometimes.
Okay, shall we wrap up then?
Yeah, I'm good to wrap up there.
If anyone has any last comment to make, I'm happy to hear that, and then we'll just wrap it up.
Just really quick, there are people who are true believers with the anti-woke thing.
Even though, like, the people who invent it know that they're being ridiculous.
There are people who take it seriously.
Like, that night guy is objectively hilarious, but that dude has, like, a daughter.
And because that dude has consumed so much of this ideology, that daughter is going to have to grow up with a father who believes all of this, like, anti-feminist, anti-woke stuff.
And it's, like, really sad and does material harm to people, like, in the real world.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I wasn't saying, I didn't mean to give across the message that none of them are true believers, so I hope I didn't, because I do firmly believe that many of them do believe what they're saying, but it's like, it's not like a coherent Ideology, I think, is what I meant to get across.
It's just that they want to attack the enemy and, as Jack was saying earlier, they'll do it through any means, even if it means openly contradicting themselves.
But I think they do genuinely believe that, like, you know, immigrants are bad or, you know, Anti-racism is the real threat.
Like, I think there's lots of people who believe that.
Like, Dave Rubin certainly is a grifter, but I think he's also a genuine racist transphobe bigot.
Like, I don't want to minimize that at all.
There's a lot of people who are like, oh, no, no, no, nobody believes anything and they're just doing it for money.
I don't think that's true at all.
I just wanted to clarify.
Yeah, that came across perfectly.
I just wanted to highlight that a little bit.
Yeah, I think they all believe it, or most of them do.
But they also know that they're lying and contradicting themselves.
This is why people really should read, actually read 1984.
For all Orwell's flaws, as a writer, as a man, as a political etc etc, that is a truly great book regardless of its appropriation.
by reactionaries, most of whom have never bloody read it.
And one of the great things about it is the concept of double think is what Orwell calls double think, which is, and it's people, I think, I think people would get what goes on more if they, if they go to head on that concept.
I mean I'm not saying anybody here hasn't read it I'm sure but I'm just saying I think if this concept was more widely understood because I think he really gets at something in that which is that the true believer will tell endless lies and contradict themselves Until the end of time, consciously.
And it won't affect their belief.
They will feel all the more righteous for having done that, you know?
It's not just that you believe two things simultaneously that are mutually exclusive.
You then feel even more proud and orthodox about having done it.
That's how their mind, that's how the mind of the truly orthodox party man works, I think.
And that's what these people are.
They're like the party men of Stalin's Russia.
Yeah, yeah.
Double think, double speak, they do it all.
And that shrinking of the language so you have less ability to describe what you're going through.
I forget what the term for that was.
In the book it's newspeak.
Newspeak, right, right, right, right, right.
You're absolutely right.
They shrink language down to reduce the realm of the thinkable, really.
You take away the words that people can think with.
And it's a similar sort of thing to what people that study cults, they call it the thought-terminating cliché.
You know, if you start to have an unorthodox thought, then what you do is, or if somebody else raises an unorthodox thought, Um, as criticism or argument or whatever, you can just invoke a certain form of words or a certain phrase or whatever, and it just makes all of that, it just stops the thought dead in its tracks.
And you see them doing that in their own bloody videos.
Yeah, and that's how, like, these massive, vague umbrella terms, like, wokeness, right?
Everything is wokeness.
That's it.
Yeah, they can't define it.
Yeah, it's like a newspeak word and it is a thought-terminating cliche.
You just say it and people's brains switch off, or you hope they do, anyway.
Yeah, okay, so on that Orwellian note, let's close off our space on Barbie!
Thank you everyone for listening.
This has been recorded so you can hear it through the app.
I don't know, Jack, if you're planning to extract the audio from this one.
Yeah, I probably will get the audio and cut out all the gaps and things and put it up on the I Don't Speak German feed.
And if you're kind enough to share it with me, I can put it up on my feed too.
I certainly will, yeah.
Excellent.
And then you can complain about how I oppressed you into doing that because... That's right, yes.
Yeah.
All right, awesome.
Thank you everyone for tuning in and participating.
I think it was a really fun and lively discussion, considering most of us hadn't even seen this movie.
So, yeah.
Cheers, goodnight.
I'm quite keen to see it now, thanks to Piers Morgan.
