Who turned Gen Z fascist? (With Felix Biederman)

Every four years America suffers through a national election, with its own distinct collection of far-right freaks. Yet against the trend, in 2024 many of the youngest voters started finding them appealing. So who or what turned Gen Z fascist? Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House joins us to discuss the main players in the right-wing (mano)sphere, and whether this ecosystem of new guys will keep our nation’s youth in their thrall. Our guest Felix Biederman co-hosts Chapo Trap House (https://www.chapotraphouse.com), found wherever you get your podcasts. You can purchase the Seeking A Fren for the End of the World series for $5 at: https://www.patreon.com/cw/chapotraphouse/collections Or it, along with all their premium episodes and other acclaimed miniseries like Hell of Presidents and Movie Mindset, are available to all subscribers for just $5 a month at https://www.patreon.com/cw/chapotraphouse And you can listen to Ryan & Felix’s extended conversation by subscribing to Panic World’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Audio Maverick, a new nine-part documentary about one of the most visionary figures in radio, Himan Brown. Out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  Would you like to hear my favorite right wing crank?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:03Ryan Broderick?

  I always have had a soft spot for Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, because I interviewed him once several years ago and he tried to hypnotize me over the phone.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I love Scott Adams and I feel like Scott Adams was, you know, this is, this is like a truism about lefties that people love in America, that being on the left is, is being right too early.

• 0:23Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I think that's true a lot of the time, but Scott Adams is sort of the perfect mirror image of that in that he was insane in the wrong way, just a little bit too early.

• 0:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  He was just right place, just the wrong time. A couple of years later and he would be, he would be in the cabinet.

• 0:41Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah. But he, yeah, he went like too hard, too soon. And I also feel like you couldn't shake the Dilbert baggage, you know, like it's hard to take him seriously because he invented Dilbert.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  And he would try to like obscure it in these weird ways where he'd say, I have a, you know, $200 million business. And it's like, yeah, that's technically true. You do, but it's Dilbert.

• 1:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, I guess. I mean, literally you do have that.

• 1:25Ryan Broderick?

  So every four years, America suffers through an election and it seems like as a side effect, it produces a whole new, you know, squad of right wing goons that try to become like the voice of the new right. Right now they're all kind of camped out on X, the everything app. But here's some past examples, right? We've got the, the earlier figures like Glenn Beck, Taco Carlson, who's obviously made a comeback now with his like, I don't know, podcast or whatever it is. And you got like that next generation after that where you have Miley Yanopoulos, you have Mike Sternovich, you have Donald Trump's possible ex-girlfriend Laura Loomer, who I believe at one point changed herself to the door of Twitter's office, wearing a diaper. There's a lot of diapers in this world, I think. And now you have these newer figures coming out who are sometimes extremely political, or

• 2:10Ryan Broderick?

  they're completely apolitical, but sort of live in the soup of the far right. But recently they've had success doing something liberal elites thought was impossible. They swung the youth vote by over 30%. So who turned Gen Z fascist?

• 2:27Ryan Broderick?

  And what do they want? I mean, other than I guess like some sort of race war? And most importantly, how long will this last? This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. Joining us is Felix Peterman of a little podcast called Chapo Trap House. Welcome to the show, Felix.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Hey, thank you for having me.

• 2:46Ryan Broderick?

  So the the inspiration for this episode was your recent show, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. And this is how you put it in the description, which I thought was really nice. How did the Republican Party, once the dominant force in American culture for almost a generation, become a group of bow tied cosplayers and rapist streamers yelling about litter boxes? So to give us a teaser for people who are going to go check out your show, what are some of your like main takeaways from from working on this? Like to try to answer your own question, like, what is like, the top line of how this did happen?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Both media trends and the inevitable like devolution of both these political projects, both movement conservatism and American liberalism. This is the logical endpoint, a very mercenary environment. Where this became much more interesting and much more contested, at least among our listeners, is in the aftermath of Trump winning. Like, we went through a lot of changes, because I would say like 80% of this was written before Biden did the switch out. And it was more addition than subtraction, really. And the biggest

• 3:55Speaker 01

  the biggest criticism that I have gotten from my audience has been that it's too dismissive of the prospects of this movement after they have, you know, obviously won so big in such a way.

• 4:11Ryan Broderick?

  I'm like you, I am equally dismissive of this movement. Like, for reasons we're going to get into this episode. But I do want to sort of set this up just a little bit before we go further. And I want to run through kind of like a gamut of like who we're talking about. Because like for our audience, I want to make sure like they can kind of picture these people. So like, you started at the top of the show, kind of going all the way back to like, the magazine cranks of the 60s, right? But I do think like our current conversation starts in like the Rush Limbaugh and Colter. Glenn Beck era, we move into like the Milo Yiannopoulos, Diamond and Silk, James Yoke,

• 4:42Speaker 01

  yeah, Project Veritas, Gavin Mcginnis, Mike Sernovich, and now we're sort of in this like weird,

• 4:47Ryan Broderick?

  like almost Twilight era where it feels to me where there are so many of these people, but none of them are particularly big. Do you have a couple of the, of let's say the, the first Trump era that stick out on your mind as like still being important now?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Well, actually, and this is a guy that we didn't talk about in the series because I don't really feel like he's necessarily a part of movement conservatism. Maybe the most interesting to me out of all the modern guys and I think has the most longevity going forward because he's not really a movement conservative, I think is Nick Fuentes.

• 5:25Ryan Broderick?

  I, I sort of see your argument here because he might not be the most influential or the most popular of these young fascists, but he's clearly leading the charge and sort of setting the agenda in a lot of ways. And I think the most important thing about him, which we can, we can talk more about in today's episode, is his real lack of fear with bucking against the conservative establishment and sort of redefining what it means to be far right in the 21st century. And yeah, yeah, like, you know, his use of live streaming in particular, when I first saw it, I thought, okay, like this guy's just doing like an impression of like,

• 6:07Ryan Broderick?

  he's like teen Alex Jones. But no, he was tapping into something very real and creating not just like the political playbook, but I also think the, the digital content strategy for much of the new post-Trump right wing.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  The way that he is, he becomes known to the world after Charlottesville, the posture he takes is like very familiar and kind of like, I would say like set the tone for a lot of guys going forward because he did, he uniquely like, do you remember that first interview he did after Charlottesville?

• 6:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, vaguely, but for the audience to describe it if you can, yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Charlottesville was so significant to me because it was like, There was this constant fever pitch during both the election and the presidency of Trump up to that point. And you could always get him to like, promise, or even try something very dramatic or daring, but he would always like, walk back and the move always was, "Oh, you thought that was gonna happen? You're a fucking idiot. You're hysterical. You're crazy for thinking that's happening." And there were just, that was the constant like sermon drawing of it all. But Charlottesville was the first time where he was really like, you know, kind of like on his hands and knees, like, "Please let me keep having Twitter."

• 7:28Speaker 01

  And it's obviously like, January 6th was a way bigger example of that. And he like, really threw everyone under the bus. And even that's been memory-holed more now. But it was, it was a significant turning point because it showed the futility in Trump won. Like, how, how limited all of this was and how disgusted most Americans were with like, far-right stuff when it was presented to them this way. But, and everyone did kind of like, do the same thing Trump did. All the, all these people who were like, there. Like, even like Jason Kessler, who organized it, was like, "I'm sorry, I'm not racist."

• 8:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Like, it's so weird. It's so weird. But then Fuentes doesn't do any of that. And he's on, he's on like, he's, he's on national news. And he's, you know, completely like, unapologetic. And like, firm in this way that like, none of the like, Trump-affiliated people were really being. And while all the other people in the more like explicitly, you know, white nationalist movement were sort of like scatterbrained and like, turning on each other and like, informing on one another. It really was like a marker of things to come.

• 8:44Ryan Broderick?

  Before January 6th, I remember him as like, the kid on the live streams that would deny the Holocaust. That was like, his main role. But after Charlottesville, he starts building like, what he calls like, the Groypur Army, the sort of Gen Z wing of like, this far-right movement. And the, the moment that I sort of just started treating him differently in my mind, was when he crashed CPAC. Basically, right after January 6th, like that summer, and they all get thrown out. And I remember thinking like, oh, that's really interesting that he's effectively playing the same game as his contemporaries, but he's, as you said, he's not backing down. And I think there was a moment where I was like, oh, I think the Groper thing is going

• 9:26Ryan Broderick?

  to get shut out. Like, these are like weird trad cath isolationist freaks, and I think Republicans won't ever embrace them. But looking back on it, it was clearly the sea shift that has led us to where we are now. Like, he called it right, as far as the movement goes.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And all the people on the more like, um, I guess, like, you could say, like, presentable or like, normal side of that, people who still want to be like in electoral politics, they still feel like they have to, like, impress him in a way. Like, do you remember when, like, J.D. Vance was talking about how he got banned and was like on the no-fly list, and he said, "I've gotten a lot of criticism from Fuentes, a lot of it unfairly, I think," which is so interesting to me. You know, when you compare it to what, you know, Trump going, "We're not racist. We're against white nationalism," all these things that he got yelled at. I think the most telling thing about, like, a modern media figure

• 10:22Speaker 01

  is the way and manner in which they are able to weather storms.

• 10:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And so many things that would have been like the end of people in previous eras, he's just completely withstood, partly because of changing media environments, but partly because he is sort of like a product of his time. I think of him like Eli in Metal Gear Solid 5.

• 10:44Ryan Broderick?

  I'm playing that game right now. It rips. I think you're right that he sort of shifted the way that these people deal with blowback to the point now where, like, I don't think any of them really care what, like, the quote-unquote "establishment" cares about. But I also think he opened the door to sort of a flattening of all of this stuff. His big ideological goal, as dark and awful as it is to say, is mainstreaming Holocaust denial. It is something now that you see every single time you open up X. He has figured out a way to make previously unquestionable topics around race and religion.

• 11:25Ryan Broderick?

  And gender, totally fair game, even within the mainstream conservative movement.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  The most interesting thing that everyone is sort of using his playbook now, and we're all kind of like, living in his world, but he has definitively like, split with Trump and Vance.

• 11:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  And did it a while ago, and he thought they would lose, but he's, even though they won, and like, won the popular vote, the first to do that since, some would say 2004, some would say before that, it depends on what you think happened in Ohio. But, uh, he's very committed to this idea that this is like, a hollow, Peter Thiel-funded project, and I think more than that, he foresees the logical conclusion of austerity politics. He thinks, things may look great now, but just fucking wait, you will not want to be holding this bag.

• 12:22Ryan Broderick?

  I kind of put him in the same category as Steve Bannon, where like, he, he has effectively seen the way things are going very clearly. He's obviously evil.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:32Ryan Broderick?

  But like, he is oftentimes the only one that is correctly, like, understanding the situation, um, which, you know, obviously makes him even more evil. So, I'm really glad you brought him up, because I do think he's shaping the culture, even if he's not, you know, winning over new voters. But, I do want to switch gears slightly, to look at the influencers who are actively succeeding into turning Gen Z into little Hitler Youth, and also, making a lot of money and getting a lot of views because of it. So let's start with, a group that I think is the most influential, but probably the least ideological, which, uh, you know, let's call it like, the bro-sphere, the manosphere. And at the top of that, are the Nelk Boys.

• 13:17Ryan Broderick?

  Do you know the Nelk Boys?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, they're, yeah, their whole thing is really funny to me. That Steve Will Do It guy is hilarious. He used to be like, he was basically like, a carnival sideshow Victorian freak for FaZe Banks.

• 13:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  He would be all these like, Banks and FaZe vlogs, where Banks would be like, you know, drink this terrible fucking vodka I got from a grocery store, drink this handle in three seconds, and he would do it. He was just this, sort of idiot farmhand he would torture.

• 13:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they are there.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  He didn't get, you know, Steve, Steve will do it. Did not get any more charismatic or interesting or better at any of this. The standard just got lower. So he gets to be FaZe Banks. He gets to be the star.

• 14:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  FaZe Banks because of the lowering standard of what it takes to be, I guess, a financial magnate, a financial professional. Now, he gets to become that. Everyone moves up.

• 14:13Ryan Broderick?

  They have not changed. The world has changed around them. And for people who are listening, who have not heard of these guys, this is how a friend of the show, Taylor Lorenz, described their whole channel back in 2021. She wrote that their channel produces new revenues neither a fluke nor an accident. Their videos revolve around frat-like parties and elaborate pranks that sometimes promote illegal activities. They drink and curse and make crude jokes on camera, and the police show up a lot. And their, their stunts include stealing a segue and pretending to be a mall cop, changing restaurant menu QR codes. They threw a huge COVID party.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  That's such a shitty prank.

• 14:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  The QR codes don't work.

• 14:46Ryan Broderick?

  That one's shitty.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  They do half the time.

• 14:48Ryan Broderick?

  Like, it's already so, so much of an indignity to scan a QR code at a restaurant, then to find that doesn't work? Brutal. But the thing about them is that they are a brand the way Mr. Beast is a brand, just for like a slightly older horrible boy. And it seems like everything they do is not a political project, but ultimately a means for making a lot of money. And they're, oh my God, they, they were estimated to be making around $70 million through merch and hard seltzer sales.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  They're giant. They're giant. And like, I'm not an expert on them. I know that most but Steve will do it. But there are two other ones, or three other ones. I, I know.

• 15:32Ryan Broderick?

  The main guy is Kyle. Kyle Forgied.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, he's like the, I guess, like the leader, but then there was Skyny, who I think this is fascinating, like Aiden Ross, Jewish.

• 15:48Ryan Broderick?

  Hmm. I didn't know Aiden Ross was Jewish. That's interesting.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  That wasn't, like, you couldn't be a fucking Aiden Ross if you were Jewish in, like, 1925.

• 15:57Ryan Broderick?

  No.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  That's amazing. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's like, I think, as significant an achievement as Obama becoming president, just like in the other direction. You know, instead of being like a boxer, or a hitman, or later a lawyer, or a doctor, or a fucking, I don't, a guy who makes a web series, you could be Aiden Ross, or a Nelk Boy. That's amazing. You could do anything in America.

• 16:30Ryan Broderick?

  Interestingly enough, they started out like, not liberal, but like, at least they, like, one of their early videos in 2020, like, they're making fun of Trump supporters. But then, two months later, they meet with Trump on Air Force One. Do you know how they connected with Trump? Have you heard how they did this?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  What, was this a Baron thing?

• 16:47Ryan Broderick?

  It was Dana White, the president of UFC.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I don't know how I didn't know that. But no, I know Dana, Dana is a big fan of them, despite being in his 60s.

• 16:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. They, they went to, they, they went to UFC fights in Abu Dhabi with him during the pandemic.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, during the Fight Island era.

• 17:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Then they launched a podcast in 2021. Trump was like, one of their earliest guests, which is incredible. And then the video got pulled down, because Trump spent most of it yelling about election interference.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, yeah, back when you, you would still get pulled off the air for that. They, like Logan Paul, like everyone, was like, very passively liberal. But like, much more liberal than their equivalents in traditional media would have been 15 years prior.

• 17:45Ryan Broderick?

  And, and I think the Nelk Boys are a really important node in a lot of the media ecosystem that helped Trump win this time, because through them, you know, this is how Trump like, connects with like, Kill Tony, and Mr. Ballin, and Jake Paul, and sort of like, this like, new wave of shitty man podcasts that, you know, are pulling in, you know, millions of views and multi-millions of dollars. And I, I'm curious, like, your thoughts on the rise of these spaces? Because like, I remember in the 2010s, like, a lot of these shows did kind of exist, but they weren't nearly as, as you said, kind of aligned with the right. They were sort of, by default, liberal, or at least like, you know, keeping up appearances of being mainstream acceptable.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were as liberal as like, the background radiation of the rest of the media was.

• 18:33Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And then something happens where they just shift.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot. I think it's a lot of things. Early COVID did kind of like greatly affect people in ways that we are still comprehending.

• 18:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And I also think that that all modern politics, which is all politics since the election of Joe Biden, is a reaction and counter reaction to everything that happened in 2020, which is not just COVID and not just, you know, being alone with your own thoughts for too long. But specifically, it is a type of person who were as liberal as the background radiation dictated they should be. And in 2020, that obligated you to a lot more than previously.

• 19:19Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  It, some would say, would even obligate you into saying things that seem utterly ridiculous in a very short time. Like, the example I always use is Gushers going, Gushers recognizes that black Americans are their experiences, part of, you know, like all this fucking goofy shit. You know?

• 19:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Even though, even, even though, like, the origin point for all of this was like a legitimate thing.

• 19:52Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. No, I, I was there. I remember.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Legitimate grievances with legitimate popular support.

• 19:57Ryan Broderick?

  But wait, wait, hold on. You don't think the Papst's Blue Ribbon Twitter account should tell me to eat ass for Dry January?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:03Ryan Broderick?

  You don't think, you don't think that I should celebrate Dry January by eating ass?

• 20:07Speaker 01

  It's this weird thing where they're saying these insane things, but in an incredibly, like, anodyne, passionless, bloodless way.

• 20:14Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  That is so fucking alien. To be like FaZe Banks, to be like a buffoon wrangler and a buffoon yourself and be like, slavery was fucked up. I just, I wanted to say that. You know, like-

• 20:26Ryan Broderick?

  I personally think the Rand Corporation should be doing land acknowledgements, Felix. I actually think that that's good for capitalism and the world.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  But like, there is a specific type of person that like went along with all of that.

• 20:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  They have like a real like spite and bitterness towards that.

• 20:44Ryan Broderick?

  I think that was totally in the air and part of the reason why Nelk as a, oh god, I hate saying Nelk. Why Nelk as a brand and Nelk, Nelk as political agents were so successful. And I think they just represent like a big part of our politics now, which is just shameless opportunism. Like these guys threw a huge party on the beach during COVID, not as a political statement, because like it would get clicks. And I think when you look at these guys buddying up with Trump, to them, it's probably just like good business and also like, you know, Trump's probably fun to hang out with, unfortunately. And I think that's evident in how they've become more political, like not, they're, they're still doing pranks,

• 21:23Ryan Broderick?

  but they have also launched this podcast, Full Send, and they have guests on there like JD Vance, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, RFK Jr. They're not like ruining their fun brand, but they've realized that like this is a totally different revenue stream that they can tap into. And exposing their audience to like Trump's various goons and cronies.

• 21:45Ryan Broderick?

  I hate to say it, but like it, it moves the Overton window.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:49Ryan Broderick?

  And it, and it triggers the YouTube algorithm to send more videos like that to people who are watching their stuff. You know, in front of creators that do have a real ideology. And we're gonna get into that right after our break. Uh, today's sponsor is, uh, I hope it's pri, I hope it's Feastables. I wanna, I wanna wash down some Feastables with some Prime Energy Drink.

• 22:16Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, um, Felix, are you familiar with the Dark Enlightenment?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. I was on the, um, early to middle period Obama internet. I was there when they came up with the moniker emo Prague. I was called that.

• 22:33Ryan Broderick?

  And so I was there. What is that? What is that? What is that?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Emo Prague meant someone who like supported Obama in 2008, but like took exception with his expansion of the drone war and sort of his.

• 22:43Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. I thought it meant you were into emotional hardcore and progressive metal.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Well, it's a very stupid moniker, but it was widely used around this time. So I got to see the dawn of the dark enlightenment, or at least it's it's public debut. On the first podcast I was ever a part of, I did sort of, we did sort of like a gag interview with Justine Tunney. Where we like, do you know that name?

• 23:07Ryan Broderick?

  I don't. No, no, I don't.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Justine Tunney is, I don't know if she still works at Google, but she at least at some time like worked for Google after being part of the Occupy movement and became. Had this like, you know, in cranking.

• 23:24Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Where she becomes like a, you know, crazy techno fucking monarchist. All these proto figures that sort of like were showing up around the same time as Curtis Yarvin, but never reached his profile.

• 23:39Ryan Broderick?

  So that's who we're going to be talking about right now. So, so just before we go further in, I want to kind of give a very broad strokes definition of what we're talking about here. And you can tell me if I get this wrong, but basically if, if for listeners, if you hear the term dark enlightenment, or sometimes neo reactionaryism. There are different strands of this stuff, but it largely is about the idea of a technologically optimized city state with some sort of like CEO monarch figure at the top. This kind of like futuristic version of monarchy and, and Steve Bannon is a proponent of this stuff. But I think the, the big name du jour, he's back is Curtis Yarvin, who, yeah, he's a, he's a blogger crank from like, who's been doing this for about 30 years.

• 24:21Ryan Broderick?

  And he's caught the ear of a lot of people, namely JD Vance, I would say. In terms of in the administration.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  I mean, like the dark enlightenment as we knew it 10 years ago, or even five years ago is kind of. It didn't go away, but people just either they became fully invested in the Thiel program.

• 24:42Ryan Broderick?

  It's the sort of thing you'd think would never catch on widely or have cultural cachet, but billionaire money can go a long way.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He's sort of like he stripped it for parts and made it more salable.

• 24:55Ryan Broderick?

  So what kind of parts would you say he stripped away? Like, how would you say it differs, you know, between then and now?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  I don't think Peter Thiel in the next 10 years is going to try to establish an American royal family. I think he sees that. I don't think it's because he's too invested in the Constitution. I just think he sees that sort of thing as like too weird and too much of a waste of time.

• 25:18Ryan Broderick?

  I also think it's absorbed a lot of very like quintessential American libertarianism, like the idea of like the Silicon Valley city-state, this sort of like snow crash, like from the novel, the idea of like the Silicon Valley guys like Peter Thiel see the Dark Enlightenment as a path towards, I am the CEO of this city-state that's networked with this other city-state and we don't have a federal government. Like it's, I think it's become more American over time as it's become more popular here.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. What it ended up becoming, I would say is like it's, it's Peter Thiel looking at the type of individual city-state that a person like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos is and going, no, I would rather be, you know, I would rather be like a Medici, you know?

• 26:03Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Yes, that's exactly it.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  I don't want to be an NGO and a person. I want to be an individual sovereign.

• 26:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think that would be the big sort of difference is that I think the original, the original stuff from the Dark Enlightenment or Neo-Reactionism that I read was very much based on sort of centralizing power, whereas the newer stuff I'm reading is not that. It's actually quite, it's almost the opposite in some instances.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  It is interesting, though, like how.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Both irrelevant the original definition is, while at the same time, it's probably like way more articulated than Trumpism is as a concept.

• 26:41Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, sure. I mean, Trumpism is not really an ideology, I would argue, but.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And likely the next, at least the next presidential candidate that we could say with like 90% sureness, J D Vance is a member of that. He's basically a member of this.

• 26:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I would agree. I also think the trickle down sort of effects of dark enlightenment, the sort of like hipsterfication of it. It's not surprising to me that former Occupy Wall Street, like, Google employees would love this, you know, like debate club dorks like J D Vance would would love it. But that it could be hip to young people just feels so absurd to me. Are you familiar with the Hegelian e-girl drama?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Oh, God. I, you know what really fucking astounded me was I saw this stuff is going on in Chicago. I couldn't believe that. I grew up in Chicago. I was so appalled, you know? Young people in Chicago aren't supposed to know about any of this. They're supposed to.

• 27:48Ryan Broderick?

  They're supposed to go to piano bars?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  They're supposed to go to River North.

• 27:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, exactly.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Sky vodka cocktails.

• 27:54Ryan Broderick?

  They're supposed to, they're supposed to be drinking cardamom lattes in the park at a farmer's market. That's what they should be doing in Chicago.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Buy like a $300,000, 1,700 square foot condo in Wicker Park that's still somehow overpriced despite being like one tenth the price of its equivalent in New York. You fill it with like shit, like, like a sort of like Pan African art, even though you've never displayed an interest in that before.

• 28:21Ryan Broderick?

  No one in the Buffalo Wild Wings in Chicago should know about Hegel. That's not how it's supposed to work.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  It made me realize what like, you know, the guys in the movie The Battle of all Cheaters did. That's how I felt. You know, I wanted, I wanted to start, I wanted to like go back there and like, you know, snatch books out of people's hands.

• 28:40Ryan Broderick?

  Somehow this world is appealing to young people that wanna be smart and edgy. And, you know, at least hold books, you know, walk around with them.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:52Ryan Broderick?

  And so like if, you know, if we're talking in the first section about like, kind of like the far right infiltration of bro culture. I think the other side of that coin is the far right infiltration of hipster culture. Hold on, let me just summarize this real quick, cuz it's, it's so goddamn stupid.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:08Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, so the Hegelian e-girl clique were three people, Anna, Nikki and Sanjay. And, uh, they believed in the, in, in a sort of one interpretation of the philosophy of Hegel. And they wanted to discuss his philosophy, but rather than subject you to that, um, here, you can listen to them provide their philosophical insights to a modern world on, of course, it's called The Horseshoe Podcast.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  You guys like clout unapologetically.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  And like, one actually wants power and this is why anarchists are unconsciously fascist.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, this is our, our, uh, controversial take.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Then one talked about this in a video with like Gen Z being the most like social Darwinist generation. Where like all of the Gen Z slang revolves around like aura, riz, folding, it's all about like power.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Everyone before was coping because a lot of people, cuz basically Gen Z is also the most like critical of liberalism. Gen Z is more actually conscious of like these power games and instead of repressing them, they actually just like bring them out and it makes it better. And that's why actually we can talk about your cancellation.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Racism non-racistically, the millennials were the ones who actually got mad at that because you're not supposed to say that.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  But then, but Gen Z people understand that because if you actually repress racism and you repress the idea of racism, you actually become a cop and you actually become in a way more racist.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  You invest more in race, you end up getting resistance from being anti-racist that is ultimately kind of the same as the resistance you get from being racist.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Right, right. Though you got canceled cuz you said anti-racism is racism.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Yes. On some, well, okay, I didn't say it quite like that.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  It's so fucking long.

• 30:39Ryan Broderick?

  It's so long.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Says so little.

• 30:42Ryan Broderick?

  There are people who are like grasping at like obscure and arcane philosophies and like using them to be mean to each other on the internet as part of like a larger kind of fascination with Yarvinistic kind of like politics, this idea of like, we're gonna use the internet to do this weird fucked up spooky politics thing and like be mean to each other on Twitter. And that's sort of it.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  It's like very cargo cultish.

• 31:10Ryan Broderick?

  It's like the Boxer Rebellion, like they find a pamphlet on the ground, they turn it into an entire religion. No, I think that's exactly right.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  I like, I don't have the academic background to like interrogate Hegel or how correctly or incorrectly they're into any of his ideas. I have no reason to doubt them, but just it seems like they're just like aping previous trends and microtrends that they've seen before.

• 31:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  They don't even know why they're doing any of this. It is the most like joyless pantomime of like a shitty subculture that I've ever seen.

• 31:42Ryan Broderick?

  And it all blows up for them in July of last year when they try to like throw a Hegelian e-girl party in New York. They pass her on to Flyer, they get roasted on the internet, the group splits up. And then this is what one of the members, Sanjay, said after the breakup. She voiced a few objections. In particular, she felt like Anna's good standing largely stemmed from her incomprehensibility because people don't have a clue what this is actually about, possibly Anna doesn't either. Sanjay self identifies as a centrist, but was uncomfortable with how it seemed like the e-girls directed most of their ire against the left while remaining more or less silent about the right. I mean, it's

• 32:21Ryan Broderick?

  literally, I think it is sort of a great microcosm of a lot of the sort of infighting in the kind of like post dark enlightenment world where like it's all of these kind of hipsters who don't want to say what they're saying and fighting about it and stuff.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  More than anything, it's a waste of youth.

• 32:39Ryan Broderick?

  That's the, that's a beautiful point, actually.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  I just doing this in your fucking mid twenties. Why? You have the rest of your life.

• 32:51Ryan Broderick?

  You have the rest of your life to be in a.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Your mid twenties are for you. You should be like break up a 10 year relationship. Move somewhere where you don't fucking know anyone.

• 33:01Ryan Broderick?

  I just joined a book club at 35.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Have said like, like, like fuck 50 people on a floor mattress.

• 33:08Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think so. This is, we are essentially talking about a book club. That's what this is. It's like a mean book club, which people in their twenties don't, you shouldn't be in book clubs. You should, you should be in clubs is what you should be. You should be in nightclubs.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  To call this a book club is kind of like an insult to the concept.

• 33:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  No one is reading the book. It's just, it's, it's just all the gossip.

• 33:30Ryan Broderick?

  All right. So to sum up, you have Nick Fuentes, who isn't winning over Gen Z directly, but like, I mean, thankfully, but he is sort of at the top of this ecosystem, shaping the way young people talk about politics, at least atmospherically. And then in terms of like, who is actually doing the work to redefine the way politics feels culturally to young people. On one side, you have bro culture being infiltrated by like literal like members of the Trump administration through like podcasts, which is just an outrageous sentence. And then on the other side, you have like, you know, what would have been like the cool,

• 34:12Ryan Broderick?

  you know, countercultural hipster sphere that would be usually opposed to these ideas, being infiltrated by like dark enlightenment dorks and like Peter Thiel money and like it turning into like not little Nazi book clubs. There's like nowhere for young people to, to go to identify themselves that isn't sort of attached to these ideas. And making that even harder for a young person is that you have organizations like Talking Points USA.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 34:44Ryan Broderick?

  They're like not only infiltrating college campuses physically and like setting up little, you know, fucking Hitler Youth chapters there, but then they're using those chapters to completely flood Tik Tok with right wing and conservative content. So they've effectively snuck into any sphere of young people's lives in America over the last decade.

• 35:09Ryan Broderick?

  And this is Charlie Kirk's wet dreams since he was 18. His massive forehead and small teeth have been trying to reach young people. And as of February 2025, according to New York Times, his Hitler Youth Outreach Group, Talking Points USA, has been able to set up 850 chapters at colleges across the country, which is truly one of the more pathetic things I've ever heard of. Imagine being, imagine like that's how you spent your, your early twenties. My God. Do you feel like this was maybe better for reaching young people than Hegelian e-girl drama?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I think anything with demonstrable results.

• 35:45Ryan Broderick?

  Other than ruining a rave.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Charlie Kirk, one of many secret Illinoisans.

• 35:52Ryan Broderick?

  You know, based on his.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Politics.

• 35:53Ryan Broderick?

  His face.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  You could tell.

• 35:55Ryan Broderick?

  He's from Illinois.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. One way or another, there's something wrong with our natural orthodonty or the ratio of our teeth to the size of our mouth or too much guns, not enough guns.

• 36:07Ryan Broderick?

  He's a lot of guns.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And our, it's that and our anti-charisma, which Charlie Kirk has in spades, a true man of Illinois. His origin story supposedly, like according to him, so take it with a grain of salt, is that he was going to get into West Point, but they gave his slot to like a black guy or something.

• 36:26Ryan Broderick?

  I think I've heard a version of this. Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Very, very funny because it's like, well, it's not like it's hard to become an officer. You could have just gone to like University of Illinois, like, you know, joint, done fucking anything. You don't have to go to West Point.

• 36:42Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, remind me, I want to make sure I get this correct because I sometimes get him confused with Steven Crowder, the former Arthur voice actor. But Charlie Kirk did put on the diaper, right? He sat in the crib wearing a diaper.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  That was not Charlie Kirk. That was.

• 36:56Ryan Broderick?

  It was someone working, it was someone working on a branch of Talking Boys USA. Yes.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It was, it was someone who like worked at a branch somewhere.

• 37:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, one of the diaper boys in one of the far flung branches. But what I think is really interesting and kind of ties to what you've been talking about today with regards to like the pandemic and changing these people's belief systems and sort of like giving them time to like actually figure out how to shake off the, what you call the background radiation of liberalism. Charlie Kirk actually describes this exact process. I'll read it to you. He says, I did a lot of reading on post-modernism. Sure, man.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  I'm sure.

• 37:33Ryan Broderick?

  This was during the pandemic. He said, and I started realizing that what was happening was a slow motion cultural revolution fulfilling the hopes and ambitions of Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida, and Michelle Foucault. This was their contention that in order to usher in something new, this culture must be incinerated. That, I think, is a very objective reading of it. What they were saying was actually the same thing a religious person would say, that everyone lives by some agreed upon code of conduct. The question is, what code? I take that Caldwellian view from his book, The Age of Entitlement, that we went through a new founding in the 60s and that the Civil Rights Act has actually superseded the US Constitution as its reference point. In fact, I bet if you polled Americans, most of them would have more reverence for the

• 38:18Ryan Broderick?

  Civil Rights Act than the Constitution. I could be wrong, but I think I'm right. And then he goes on to say basically that COVID convinced him that civilization is collapsing.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, no, if you told me that that guy never left Libertyville.

• 38:34Ryan Broderick?

  I'm just imagining his massive skull poking up from behind a book about post-modernism that he's reading. I obviously think he's a clown, but I do think that his experience is very, very typical for a lot of these guys, which is that they were more or less like internet slurries pre-COVID, and then they emerged post-COVID much more sharpened.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Charlie Kirk is like the typical type of like Remora to the larger swamp creatures we're familiar with, from McConnell, Bush ecosystem. There have always been guys like this in movement conservatism who run some type of youth wing that acts more as a feeder org for future administrations than it does as, you know, an actually probably effective get out the vote operation for young voters.

• 39:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  But the experience with the background radiation of liberalism we just talked about and the everything being a reaction and counter reaction to 2020, when everyone went outside again.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  When he emerged, he was no longer the swamp creature, the sheepdog, the false tribune. He was speaking for people who had, he finally did have like the consent of the rules.

• 39:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  A significant amount of like young professionals, either in liberal centers or like urban centers within purple or light red states, who felt this immense abrasion after 2020. He did begin to speak for them.

• 40:10Ryan Broderick?

  There's this thing that I continually kick myself about. I regret it deeply in the 2010s. And as a reporter interviewing a lot of these people, like this is when I'm like, you know, I'm regularly talking to like, I'm, you know, I'm covering like Milo rallies or like I, I did an interview with like Richard Spencer, who was super fucking boring and spent the whole time time on Depeche Mode and like all these freaks, right? And I'm like very dismissive about them. And I was very dismissive about Charlie Kirk, the sort of right wing invasion of both YouTube, but also college campuses. And I just remember thinking like, that's so fucking lame. Everyone knows how fucking lame this is. It's not going to work. And I feel like, I think I was being very myopic. I think I was like not really seeing the full picture of what these guys were doing

• 40:54Ryan Broderick?

  and how intensely they would go about it. They really invaded youth spaces and played the long game in a way that I think was very easy to laugh at until it just wasn't anymore.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think you should kick yourself too hard because, you know, for one, it really did appear to most people that they were failing utterly.

• 41:16Ryan Broderick?

  Completely idiotic, yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Until they weren't.

• 41:19Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  But I think, I think you're missing another key element of this and another key element of this whole story. If this like irritation to background radiation, it existed in 2021, it existed in 2020, it existed in 2022, it existed in 2023. Why is 2024 and 2025 so different? It's because liberalism and the guardrails of the deep state spent their last bits of energy on shitty, stupid Joe Biden and his crackhead fucking son.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  And, and, and

• 41:55Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, hold on, hold on. This show, we think Hunter is America's boyfriend. I love Hunter.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  I started this whole fucking Hunter thing in 2017.

• 42:06Ryan Broderick?

  He's the best.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I was the first guy who talked about Hunter in 2017.

• 42:10Ryan Broderick?

  I want to smoke crack and listen to Fleet Foxes with Hunter Biden really badly, actually.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  No, I'm putting an end to this. I started this whole fucking thing in like 2017 because I read an article where a Chinese guy paid Hunter Biden with a diamond and I thought it was so funny. And I thought his life where he's having all these paternity suits was so hilarious and so much like the show fucking Ozarks. And I thought, you know, and I said, he's more qualified than Joe. He should be president. And everyone, um, you know, I'm like the boss in Metal Gear Solid 3. No one understood what I meant.

• 42:49Ryan Broderick?

  I've also, like Hunter, I also get deeply emotional in strip clubs. So I feel like very akin to him. But I, okay, wait, to get back on track, I think you're right that it's hard to deny how little this sort of like status quo could accomplish, you know, with all the chips pushed up. Like they still couldn't do it. And I feel like now it's over.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Fucking narrative that like, you know, this explicit brand of like JD Vance, Peter Thiel stretching out 19 year olds on a casting couch and sending them on the worst course of austerity in America since Herbert fucking Hoover is super popular after it won by 1.5 fucking points in a national cost of living crisis that is inevitable is so like flattering to Democrats and, and to this fucking movement that also has no future. The immediate future until something breaks, until we get to the next thing of American politics is who was holding the bag last?

• 43:52Ryan Broderick?

  I want to talk about the future, you know, about where we're headed with all this, but we'll talk about it after the break. Uh, we're going to talk about, you know, what is next for this horrible little

• 44:04Speaker 01

  World of right wing influencers and what they're doing to young people's politics. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna drop my personal theory about what's about to happen. And we're gonna talk about that right after an ad from our sponsors. Which are probably gonna be a mix of like meme coins and like ways you can buy gold.

• 44:31Ryan Broderick?

  I want to throw my thesis at you and I want you to tear it apart if you disagree. I feel like the age of the right wing influencer is over in the sense that like there will never be one big one anymore. But there will be thousands of very small ones for every weird thing you believe. Does that sort of clock with the research you've done?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I even think that we're kind of living in that world now.

• 45:03Ryan Broderick?

  Me too.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's the war economy. It's a highly mercenary environment where no one man, one show, e- even one media concern will control a majority.

• 45:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  In that world, or even a sizable plurality that's much larger than the next.

• 45:21Ryan Broderick?

  I think comparing it to larger media is smart where like, because the right is so aggressive about using the internet to organize and, and sort of operate. They are the most at risk of being sort of like guided by its, its forces. So like, as the, the internet has splintered, so have they. Which I do think is a problem that like, they will eventually have to reckon with.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  And it goes back to, who's the guy they're all trying to impress still? We talked about it at the beginning. They're all trying to impress Nick Fuentes. Just in the same way.

• 45:57Ryan Broderick?

  Do you think so? Do you think so?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  I don't think that they're literally trying to win the personal favor of Nick Fuentes. But I think that generally, they do want to be seen as ideologically coherent and at least honest by like his listeners, by that type of person. Because of this specific mercenary environment where no one audience is big enough.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  They are ruled similar to what dictated the background radiation liberalism that came before, who has like the most cultural cash. And right now it's him.

• 46:34Ryan Broderick?

  I think he, he made the right bet on the generational shift that he, I mean, he's young. I mean, he's, I don't think he's older than 26 or 27 at this point still.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:44Ryan Broderick?

  He, and he, he clearly saw the way the wind was blowing for people his age. And I, and I think, you know, Charlie Kirk, I don't want to say like, you gotta give him credit, but like, he clearly smartly understood how large parts of America would start to interface with mainstream conservatism. But Nick Fuentes truly did understand and was able to articulate first, a very Gen Z reactionary politics that like, no one else has even come close, I think, to sort of capturing the way he has.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he was, in a sense, sort of like the monster built by his millennial predecessor.

• 47:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Yes.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Their mirror image, he is formed by the negative image of the millennial media that came before him. He was formed in that crucible as someone who will never leave, will never be forced out.

• 47:37Ryan Broderick?

  Depending on how things shake out, I do think he's going to be one of these guys that either continues to accurately predict the future of the movement, but is like so intense and insane that like, every time the status quo reconfigures, they leave him out of it, but like, everyone's still talking to him. Or he, he does find a way to like soften it without feeling like he's sold out and like takes a position as like, head of Department of Education or something.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, maybe, maybe. I don't know. I, I almost, you, you remember how like, the beginning of Biden was sort of the end for like, um, Squishy monetizable left liberal identity politics. Or like amenable to like a Liz Warren style of polit- a program of politics.

• 48:24Ryan Broderick?

  Are you talking about like, like Instagram infographics?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Instagram infographics, the concept of, of like paying $300 to go to a live podcast taping with D-Ray. Like shit like that, right? Like that was the end of shit like that. Biden was the end of shit like that.

• 48:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, I actually didn't really clock that, that like all that shit dies out the minute he wins. And yeah, yeah. I, I feel like he won and a whole bunch of people who were secretly Canadian stopped talking about American politics on Twitter.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 48:59Ryan Broderick?

  Like a whole bunch of like people wearing no prescription glasses who were secretly Canadian, like making like infographics like on Instagram. All that shit just disappeared.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  The conservative environment is different. But I do wonder, you know? Will we see a similar thing?

• 49:18Ryan Broderick?

  Can I throw a question at you that is like tangentially related to this? But I, it was something that my producer Grant and I were debating earlier today. And it's one of these like sliding door moments that you're talking about where what if this happened versus that? And I, and I do wonder if this is a missing piece of this conversation we've been having, which is the thing that I think about a lot. Is the banning of Trump from mainstream social media. Forced him to change his behavior online in a way that inadvertently made him more prepared for the, the future we were all heading towards. And I think helped right wing media see a path forward in the sense that like we exiled him from the city without, to the woods,

• 50:01Ryan Broderick?

  without realizing the city was burning down behind us and we'd eventually be out in the woods too.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  That's incredibly interesting. I think, yeah, I think I, I kinda, yeah, I think you're right. Because what did he do right after January 6th? Oh my God, I'm so fucking sorry. All these people broke the law. Please let me have Facebook. Please let me have Twitter. It was like the most disgusted supporters ever were with him.

• 50:26Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  And then you you make it so you you banish him from like the liberal realm. And yeah, like there are problems there where you like you can be in a self curated bubble. But the space he was just banished from was also a self curated bubble.

• 50:44Ryan Broderick?

  Which was was was being destroyed like literally at that moment, like it was all ending. And no one really knew. And now you look around and you look at the people we've talked about today, like you look at the manosphere that is just everywhere and everything.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:58Ryan Broderick?

  You look at the sort of like weird arcane youth movements that are like fashi without being fashi and like the like normie college students that are like at like Talking Points, USA Mixers. And you think about like all the random ass TikTok influencers that are just like feeding you like AI generated like Hitler quotes. And it's just like

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:18Ryan Broderick?

  Everything broke and we back in the in the bubble were like he's defeated, but we were now with him outside.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  In 2019, you can make someone who is like on an HBO show apologize because like their uncle voted for Trump.

• 51:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  That's how strong.

• 51:35Ryan Broderick?

  They did that strong.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36Ryan Broderick?

  That's not a joke.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Fucking Sydney Sweeney.

• 51:38Ryan Broderick?

  That's real. You're saying a real thing that happened. Yes.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  That's how strong articles were. And then they banish him from Article Zone and suddenly no one gives a fuck about articles.

• 51:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Even when the articles now are like they're doing fucking austerity.

• 51:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Most, you know, traditionally the most unpopular thing ever. Planes are falling out of the sky. Everything is so meaningless and borderless and degenerated. Those are culturally the same articles as Sydney Sweeney's uncle fucking voted for Trump, you know?

• 52:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like a 19 year old like camp counselor has your social security number. And Article Zone is so mad about it and no one gives a fuck anymore. Because like the like the whole, the whole thing changed, the whole, everything shifted.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they didn't realize it was happening because.

• 52:33Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, in some ways, 2022 was like humiliating for Republicans and really bad for them. It was also really bad for Democrats because they thought, everyone fucking loves this.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:44Ryan Broderick?

  Everyone loves this shit. Everyone loves this fucking economy. Everyone wants Ukraine to be at war forever. Everyone loves the state of the world. Everyone loves what Tony Blinken is doing, whether it is him setting the world aflame for Israel or his horrific jazz performances.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:03Ryan Broderick?

  2022, it all falls apart. It was falling apart up until that point, but it is the threshold. Now this shit is everywhere and in everything. The background radiation is no longer in the background and it's no longer liberal. And I guess I want to end with like a very simple question, which is, you know, how can we fix all of this? You know, like one or two sentences. What do you think? Like, how do we fix all of it?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  Um, God, since 2020, me and Matt Khrisman have agreed, a few military officers with a few good ideas can change a whole lot.

• 53:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, cool. Yeah, no, I think, I think that has gone well in most countries that has happened to. I think you're right. I think we just need a charismatic general.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Went well until a certain Secretary of State intervened in Libya.

• 53:50Ryan Broderick?

  I think we need a charismatic general and a bunch of helicopters over the ocean, right?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  No, no, no. But I, I do think that like one of the last working, like one of the last institutions that people have any faith and any genuine positive feelings towards that could actually survive interrogation is the US military. I think one way or the other, the military is going to feel like its hand is forced and they have to take over administrative politics, either directly or indirectly. Maybe there's a good world where we get American AMLO, an American shine bomb.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  And maybe there's a second best world where those military officers that take over in a few years, they they read a little green book.

• 54:36Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, just for a reference, uh, just for clarity, uh, for our listeners, you're referencing the current and the previous, uh, president in Mexico. That's what you're shine bomb amo. Um, yeah, I just, uh, for anyone listening to this that, uh, you know, finds themselves leading, uh, the American junta in five to 10 years. If you want, you know, state-run media organs, happy to help, don't want to be imprisoned for that. Um, so let me know.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  You know, you know who emailed our show a fucking F 22 pilot?

• 55:07Ryan Broderick?

  Really? What do they say?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Um, they've been listening for a while. Maybe I, what I'm saying is like, maybe these guys are out there. I'm saying maybe this is such a long shot.

• 55:18Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, you know, uh, anything to make it so I never have to hear about Elon Musk ever again. That's, that's really, if a junta is what that is required, fine. Um, Felix, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was infinitely fascinating and super fun. As fun as a conversation about various fascists and and reactionaries can be. I feel like this is such a silly question, but I ask it to all of our guests. If people want to follow you on the internet, work and they do that. Oh yeah. What's your truth? Social account? Like, how active are you on X.com?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  I, uh, my Twitter is, um, by your logic. You can also listen to my podcast, Chapo Trap House.

• 55:56Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, you're that Felix?

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:58Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, shit. Okay. Um, are you on Blue Sky? Have you, have you made the jump?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  I do have a Blue Sky account, but I really just, the first day I was there, I saw that there was a posting strike where no one stopped posting and we're just yelling at each other for breaking the posting strike. And I was like, you know what? I'd rather go down with the ship. I feel like I, I, I, everything in my life that I have now, I have because of Twitter. And, um, yeah, no, no matter how bad it gets, I'll, I'll sink with that fucking ship.

• 56:27Ryan Broderick?

  Every minute I spend on Blue Sky, I become more conservative. I'm like, actually, I think Trump rocks and I hate all of you fucking assholes so much.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  I not know bullshit. The first thing I saw was like, How people are people, uh, there's an exemption for sex workers to break the posting strike on Blue Sky. And I could not figure out what the posting strike was about until weeks later. And so it's like the, the perfect, like, incomprehensible intro left bullshit. I, I get, I think, I think it's like banning Trump. I think it's good. Fucking keep those people.

• 57:06Ryan Broderick?

  Quarantined. Yeah, no, I, I had someone today message me in a reply and be like, I don't understand what this means and I hate it. And I'm mad about it. And I was like, yeah, that's it. That's all, that's the discourse on Blue Sky. No one understands what anyone's talking about and they're furious about it.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Blue Sky is like the world's greatest repository of people who like, at like age 45 are like, you know what? I'm meant to be a game dev. I don't know how to code. I don't know any of this shit. I don't know how to build a game. I don't know what a level looks like, but I have great ideas.

• 57:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I'm really glad the, the division of the CIA that invented Steven Universe got another whack at them and created Blue Sky. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  My, my absolute pleasure.

• 57:51Ryan Broderick?

  You can check out a longer version of today's episode on our Patreon, which is patreon.com/panicworld. It's good. It's, it's great. You should go pay money to hear that. Thank you. I love you. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our Durange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude at multitude-production ads.

• 58:36Ryan Broderick?

  For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bagman, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected]. And one piece of advice from me to you, chill out, touch grass while you still can.