 For centuries, capitalists ruled the world. They crafted a dystopian hellscape and commodified everything. Life, democracy, even the planet. Facing extinction, a rebel group emerged to challenge the capitalists. The online left, a group of deviants, zoomers, and millennial misfits devoted to shitposting their way to a better world, one tweet at a time. Will they put aside their hatred of one another to defeat their capitalist common enemy? Find out now on dystopian times. Folks, welcome to dystopian times. I am not in my usual set because we had we had a little bit of a problem with the chair that I was using. It was a bat killer and now that I'm a boomer, I have to be as comfortable as possible. So I'm in the regular studio, but I still feel like I have the vibe going. I've got the unicorn, which is the most important aspect of the set. And folks, I just want you to know that being here right now is a sacrifice to my well-being because I am under studio lights that is cooking me more so than the weather is. So right now on the Pacific in the Pacific Northwest, it is over 100 degrees. It's like 104 where I am. And there are going to be times where my brain might leak out of my ears throughout the course of the stream. It's a good thing that you all will be totally understandable. So if I don't make sense, just know that my brain is melting. But folks, regardless of how hot it is, we are here. And this is going to be the best show of this series yet because I have a phenomenal panel here. So first, folks, I have the individual who I think is probably the face of means TV. I'd like to think that I'm the face of means TV, but it's indisputable that the individual who is the true face of means TV, the host of means morning news. Folks, it's Sam Sacks. Sam, welcome. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me on. You knocked me out of the top five of hottest guys on means TV. I'll still come on your show. Well, hey, I didn't know that I was in any top hottest guys list. So I mean, this is truly like I'm really happy to hear that. Well, folks, the next individual who I am bringing on, you might have already sensed who this person was if you're feeling a little bit of a demonic presence and also, you know, a motherly presence. Well, that's because I have demon mama here, demon mama. Welcome. Hello. Hello, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have you on. I love the beautiful dog picture behind you. I watched your Stardew Valley stream the other day. And I've got to ask you real quick, demon mama, Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing? Oh, I like, well, OK, I haven't played Animal Crossing to a great degree. Oh, I'm going to boot you. I'm going to boot you. Well, it's fair. I think the cool thing is I have a switch. So OK, we'll be playing in the future. I love Stardew Valley, though. Also, if you use the petting machines, stop, stop. Auto petters get out. Auto petters get out. That is the type of automation I do not stand for. Well, when you start Animal Crossing, we will have to visit each other's islands on on stream. And I will give you one of the dick shirts that I made in Animal Crossing. Yeah, all right, folks. Well, the next person is one of my favorite people, one of the sweetest people on the entire Internet. I am a little bit butthurt because this individual decided to rip me off. Copy the dog cam that I introduced to the world on Twitch. But nonetheless, you know, I'm very happy to see this person's dog. It's Lance from the serfs. Lance, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute honor to finally be on dystopian times live. Yes, it's it's a long time coming, but it's it's really nice to have you on. And yeah, thank you, Lance. Is this like is this like a game show? Is it going to be like that British one? I hope so. We can turn it into a game show. We can turn it into a game show. You're going to give out points that don't matter or mean anything. Yes, I could do that. I could give away prizes that are hilarious like Dave Rubin's book. That's what I want on the serfs TV show. So yeah, definitely, I actually have your copy of the book right there. By the way, I just haven't shipped it, but I can pull it out to prove that it exists. I would I would look like I've been looking forward to this, Lance. And I feel like you're denying me the joy of reading Dave Rubin's book. So it'd be nice to have that. Just just saying, Lance, I'm just not it's OK. It's OK. All right, folks. The next individual is riding high right now, aside from the fact that they're being cooked because they live in the same location as me. Off of a really huge debate that was very useful to me because it stopped me from having a panic attack as I watched the Nina Turner Chantel Brown race. I still had a panic attack, actually. But nonetheless, I was a little bit more distracted thanks to Vosh. Welcome to the show, Vosh. Hello. Actually, tragically, Nina Turner's campaign team reached out to me and said the reason that she didn't win was because leftists were distracted by my debate with Charlie and they didn't turn out to vote. So actually, that one's on me. I'm sorry, guys. Super bad planning on my part. At least you're owning up to it. At least you're owning up to it. Blame Vosh for Nina Turner, folks. And by the way, Vosh, thank you so much. So when I went on your charity stream, you recommended Castlevania on Netflix. I binge that in like a weekend. So that was a great recommendation. It was very, very good. So thank you for that. So, folks, I'm really excited to get started. Usually, we'll start with like news stories, but I think it would be useful since we have so many brilliant people here. I want to open it up to a discussion topic that's kind of been on my mind lately, possibly because it's affecting me as well. And that is doomerism disproportionately on the left among younger people. So, you know, we saw Bernie Sanders lose in 2020. We just saw Nina Turner lose. We are dealing with, you know, a pandemic, a housing crisis, a student loan crisis. And every time you tune into the news and if they're talking about climate change, which is fairly rare, but if we learn about climate change, it's always bad news. This week we got the IPCC's new report and it looks really, really bad. So my question to the panelists is how do we keep people engaged amid all of the doomerism? Because the way that I kind of feel sometimes and I don't necessarily vocalize this because I don't want to discourage people. But I kind of feel like nihilism is a little bit alluring. And I always feel this instinct to check out like every extra loss that we feel, you know, Bernie Sanders losing, Nina Turner losing, I always feel the instinct to check out of politics and, you know, I fight that. But I know that young people, they also feel that urge as well. And so I try to find ways to keep them engaged in politics that are destructive, try to find ways to get them to channel their anger and disillusionment with electoral politics and capitalism. But sometimes I don't have all the answers and I don't necessarily think that there's a perfect answer. Hence why I kind of wanted to bring in all of the wonderful people here. Lance, what are your thoughts on this? Like, what's the one thing that you think is helpful in trying to keep people engaged and not just during election years, but, you know, during off years like now, it's such an open end question. So feel free to take it wherever. I mean, if this is a lot. Yeah, well, I was hoping I was going to be like the third person. Well, I could jump in there and be like, and by the way, the corporations want you to be sad. That's how they win. Don't give in to there. So I'd sound powerful, but instead I'm going to be like, well, take some time, please, to log off like everyone. People use that as an insult. But, you know, sometimes it's nice to, you know, touch grass, touch ass, touch sand, those sand is sand is coarse and all that kind of stuff. But it does it does help with the mental health in terms of what's going on. I'd say maybe we should celebrate victories more boisterously. I don't know if there's a better word I'd use for that because there are still leftist victories going on all around the world and not just concentrating on Canada, the United States. But if you look at Central and South America, there has been some very good decided pushes towards leftist governments. I know they are problematic. I'm not I'm not going to try and open up a whole other can of worms here and get us talking about, you know, geopolitics going on around the globe. But there are still there are more victories than sometimes people think. And when we just concentrate on the news itself, it's very hypercommercialized to make us think, well, the vaccine apparently doesn't work 100 percent of the time. We were promised invincibility juice. Instead, we're getting 97 percent juice like what the hell is going on, right? Whereas there's like we can concentrate on the other good news that places where mass vaccination is happening like in British Columbia, the numbers are plummeting, you know, stuff like that. Sorry, I'm talking for a while. No, no, I think that that's, you know, that's a great start. I tend to focus on the negative and part of it is and Sam probably has the same problem. You know, we covered the news and almost all of the news is negative. You're like, whenever there is a victory, I tend to try to over celebrate it. But oftentimes it's difficult. Do you want to weigh in on this, Sam? Because you're the other like news video person on the panel and everyone else is kind of video slash streaming. But, you know, how do you like how do you deal with this issue? Because I'm afraid just like with videos that I post and covering certain news stories that it's going to turn people off to electoral politics and politics in general. And I'm trying not to do that. But at the same time, you know, I don't want to sugarcoat it. Sometimes maybe we can use demerism to make it some sort of a spark or be the catalyst that, you know, encourages someone to get up and get involved, perhaps join DSA or something of that nature. But how do you deal with this, Sam? Well, it is tough. I mean, there is a thin line, I guess, between, you know, demerism and false optimism and trying to figure out where to draw the line. Things are bad. And we have to recognize that and tell people that. I do think that there is a bit of a problem in terms of, you know, taking a bigger picture that people don't like it. Like Lance, you know, mentioned there are victories happening in South America, big victories, rewriting the Pinochet era, Constitution in Chile, socialists coming to power in Bolivia and in Peru. And it seems like here in the U.S. the sort of demerism popularity or the the notion that there is no left, you hear that repeated a lot in sort of leftist media circles, which is kind of odd for someone like me, who's kind of been paying attention to politics for 20 years. And, you know, there was no left 20 years ago. I can assure you there's a lot more of something resembling a left today than there has been at any other point in my lifetime. And yes, someone can counter and say, well, it's not like it was in the, you know, 30s and, you know, when we had militant labor unions and we had labor unions, you know, a third of workforce in a labor union. Sure, we're not there. And we may not ever get there. But like there is an entire left media ecosphere. There's a lot more organizing on the left than there's been at any time in my life. And a lot of, I mean, all of us are here as a result of this new left space that's been created. I mean, when I first started doing this, I was working for a guy named Tom Hartman, who is a progressive radio talk show host. And he was one of the few games in town, you know, 15 years ago. And I was working on RT with people like Abby Martin. And that was one of the few places that you could sort of get anti-imperial leftist news content. And now there's just so many more sources. And I guess, you know, the debate can be had of whether or not that's advanced our goals, but I think it has very much so. So people just joining politics, you know, with the Bernie Sanders where I can understand how disappointed they are by things. People who jumped in seeing Dennis Kucinich as the best option for the left on like the wings of a debate stage being ridiculed. You know, there might be a little bit more optimism into the situation, but I guess there's a perspective here. And, you know, I bring that perspective and try to tell people, you know, what I what I'm saying. But at the same time, the IPCC report and the situation with climate change and the the enormous task in front of us. It's it's it's hard to repel the doomerism. You just yeah, we just have to lie and wait like for an opportunity. I mean, there's been doom throughout history for the left. Like it's kind of the default situation for us. Yeah, that reminds me of something that Vosh said after Super Tuesday in 2020. Basically, you were talking to your audience and I was I was tuning in and you told them, look, Bernie Sanders, you know, he got blown out. This was before he was out of the primary, I believe. And, you know, you were saying losses are kind of just like an inevitable thing. This is part of the process. And if you're going to be engaged in politics, you have to kind of expect this thing. You have to acknowledge that this is going to happen. And especially if you're a leftist and I'm paraphrasing what you said, of course, this isn't verbatim. But, you know, if you're a leftist, you kind of have to expect that you are always going to be the underdog. This is the perpetual state of your life if you are fighting for the good thing. And I've tried to like use that message, but, you know, make it my own. But I felt like it was really hopeful. Do you have anything like to add with regard to that message Vosh? Because I felt like that was one thing that I tried to use to like keep my nieces and nephews who were like old enough to vote for the first time for Bernie Sanders engaged after the primary. You know, I'm bearing success, right? Some of them don't care at all anymore and that limited when it was gone. But, you know, some of them are still engaged in politics. Like, what's your overall take on this? Like, what's your advice for the youths, Vosh? Yeah, unfortunately, and I don't think this is exclusive to the left, but I do think it's a problem. I think there's an unfortunate narcissism in left-leaning activism among some groups that reminds me a little bit of the logic of conspiracy theorists. If you set aside all the irrationality of a conspiracy theory, the underlying emotional core of it is that there's some broad truth people accept, but you're the one who knows what's really going on. And you're part of some epic battle against the establishment that be and that ultimately all of this, all this knowledge you have as part of a narrative where you are part of the underdog overthrowing whatever system and whatever they believe QAnon, anti-Semites, they all have their theories. Now, of course, leftists are the underdog in virtually every sense politically, but our fight for civil rights isn't a narrative. A lot of people get it in their head that like, oh, like in 2016, they realize, oh, my God, you know, you're right. We are being screwed over by the oligopoly. And then Bernie Sanders makes them aware of this. And then they get super doomed or six months later when he loses. And it's like you're an infant. You've dipped your toe in this. Can you tell me any point in history, any group of left-leaning people who you would think like accomplished everything they wanted or hell, any group of ideologically motivated individuals at any point in history? Can you ever think in all of human history, do people who get involved in politics ever die happy? No, we never do. So stop expecting that your life is going to be part of some three act arc where we overcome all the problems that you were made aware of in your lifetime. It's not going to be. You're going to set yourself up for misery if you focus on things from that narrative perspective. So don't it's not that's not how it works. OK, people, tens of billions of people died throughout human history, thinking that they were facing the end times, watching their civilizations collapse, their ethnic groups being exterminated, plague, ravaging their land, famine, drought. Sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. But the narrative of recognizing injustice and then overcoming it singly in your lifetime, it's a fake narrative. Latching onto it will only worsen your mood in the long term. But there is a solution and it's a very simple one. OK, focus on yourself. Make yourself the kind of person who is good at advocating for the things you care about. That's what you need to focus on. Your day to day process, the thing that you adhere to, the thing that you base your mood around, isn't what you see in the news that day. It's how effectively am I acting as an agent for my own will? So stay happy, stay healthy, stay educated. And when the time arises that you may be useful to some service or cause, go for it. And that's what you should focus on. And if you do that, you'll be an infinitely better advocate for your ideals than somebody who engages in the opportunistic, you know, bandwagoning of hitching a ride to whatever movement they think might have a chance at passing over the crest, realizing it won't, sinking into depression for six years and then riding the next one. It is an ineffective and counterproductive cycle. Focus on yourself. And by being good to yourself, you can be good to the world. Yeah, I love that point. It kind of goes back to Lance's point about like touching grass. And whatnot. And I made this point a couple of weeks ago on my program. Every once in a while, we have to recalibrate, I feel like, right? And I think that's a great point, Vosch. You're kind of alluding to this idea that like we all in some way suffer from main character syndrome. I mean, we're all podcast hosts and news show hosts. So certainly to a degree, we experienced that. But I think a lot of people visualize their like the beginning of their political journey as the start of all of politics. When in actuality, you're jumping in and you're trying to continue a movement like one thing that really bothers me is there's this sentiment that goes beyond demerism. It really is disempowering where people will think, you know what? Democracy in America is flawed. Therefore, there's no reason to participate. Now, is democracy flawed? Absolutely. I think that we need to do away with the electoral college. I think that we need to end gerrymandering and remove our first pass the post electoral system, because I don't want there to be a two party system, you know, perpetually. Having said that, though, democracy has never been like just this thing that you establish and as perfect as it is in the United States of America, at least, I don't even think you can argue that we were a real democracy at the beginning. But as you as like, you know, we grow as a country, you keep adding to that project like each generation, in my opinion, kind of like contributes in their way to democracy and further enhancing, you know, the democratization of the United States. It's never perfect and trying to like stop people before they check out once they jump in and trying to like change their expectations for the better, so that way it's more appropriate. I think that's a really important thing. Demon mama, did you want to jump in here? Because I know that you like when I tune into your stream, you do a really good job at mixing up like very, very like sad political issues, heavy topics. But then there's always this sense of like, you know, camaraderie between you and your chat. And, you know, you'll cool down with video games. And like what do you think is like the best thing to like keep people engaged? Because basically this is my this is my my thing here. I get people like I'm the boring news guy and people tune in during elections. And once they're there, I try to, you know, stop as many people as possible from leaving and keep them engaged. But that's not necessarily something that, you know, I'm not going to have a 100 percent success rate. So in your opinion, like what what do you do to keep people, you know, engaged and stop them from, you know, being a political nihilist? This is such a tough question to answer. But like if you want to share your thoughts just in general, this is something that I've been thinking about increasingly over the course of my career as a streamer and over the course of my involvement in politics. And I've I've been interested in politics for a very, very long time. And I've come to this position where I believe in a very, I don't know, organic form of politics. I think that it's it's good and well for us to be informed on many topics to the greatest degree that we can, you know. And of course, we have to sort of select select those carefully. But I think one thing that there is a hunger for and that we're lacking is is connecting that in a real way to people's lives, the the day to day moments of their lives. I think especially here in the United States, like a lot of our politics centers around this like these like checkpoints of like an election or a bill that might pass. And a lot of times we spend sort of just like digging into the digging into the details of such a thing when long after the fact, after we've cast our votes or or decided on our our representatives or whatever. And there's nothing really we can even do to touch that thing. I I like to focus and I've been increasingly focusing on things that people can touch. So and this is incredibly true right now as we're talking about climate change and we're talking about COVID and some of these other just I mean, they're dooms. They are apocalyptic scenarios that are so large that they're things that humans have grappled with through all of history. And I think that one of the ways that we do that is by taking the focus and and and turning it sort of like tuning the focus a little bit closer to us saying, OK, so who am I connected to? Who do I know? How can I make sure that these people are going to be OK? How can I make sure that that I don't have that I don't see neighbors starving or that my family isn't hungry? What are the things that I can do? Who can I connect with that will help me lift myself up and that I can help lift them up? And I think this is something that I've been like increasingly interested in. One of the reasons why my my stream is so community focused and I focus on encouraging people. We do community events on my Discord all the time, specifically for the goal of getting people to meet each other and build actual social bonds because and and it's limited. There's only so much that a content creator can do. A content creator doesn't. I mean, ideally doesn't run like a church or anything like that or movement. You know, there's there's only a certain level, but people are shockingly alienated right now. People are shockingly atomized. They are they find themselves almost sometimes blindsided. I know that happened to me where it's like the circumstances of life had me moving after a job after job. And it's like suddenly I don't know anybody around me. I don't know who do I know? I could connect with people on the internet. And then sometimes you connect with people who are near you and you can build these these sort of networks. And I feel like that like rebuilding these connections, rebuilding like material connections between people is just so incredibly important right now. And I've done two sort of big streams recently focusing on how we can actually do that. How do people visualize their relationships? How do people visualize their participation in politics? And I'm a little different in that. I think, you know, I mean, I do cover electoral politics, but I'm probably the most doomer on this panel about like the electoral aspect of things. It doesn't mean I don't think that you should vote or that you shouldn't be informed on it. I really, really do. But I I think that a lot of people get into the habit of watching things unfold when there are things that they could be doing in their life right now, even small actions that could be building a better political foundation for the world that they want to see happen. Something that I think about a lot as like a small offhand example of this is something like gardening and that seems like such a small thing. But but but but learning a skill like that, a skill that can be shared with the community. If more people actually do that, they're not just themselves, but their community becomes stronger. They're sharing a skill that can keep people alive. And if you can encourage people to pursue those types of skills to talk to each other, one of the reasons why my Discord has a huge creative section that is specifically designed for people to share information about how to make art, how to make things themselves, how to teach each other like how to use the tools that they're doing. The reason why I believe in that is because I think that people take those things off the Internet and then they put them into the world and the world changes. It is a direct one to one thing. And I think that really is something that defeats doomerism. I think that we've gotten we've gotten into a state where we're very much politics is a spectator sport. People have heard that term before, but it's very much so when everything is deferred, when all of politics is sort of viewed as deferred across these big life, you know, or these big milestone events of an election or whatever, when there are things that you could do to be making your your community, your particular political context, even if it's an online political context, stronger, more powerful, more capable of directly influencing the world around them. And I think that's incredibly important for defeating doomerism. I think that's a really great point because, you know, politics is everything. So you're not going to fully detach politics from your life, but you can kind of dissenter it and distract yourself for lack of a better word. I think that that's really important because like for me, I got to the point where I would basically base my entire mood on on the outcome of a political election. And that's that's so unhealthy, which is why I think that, like Lance's recommendation of touching grass and touching ass, whichever you prefer, if not both, maybe it really is important. And Lance, you do a lot of good like distraction streams, like you do a movie night on the serfs. Did you want to add anything to this? Because I think that's actually a really, like, you know, constructive thing to say for younger people. Yeah, I will add this, like if you are actually doomer about the current state of things and I can understand why, like keep in mind, what was the scene in 2016, like pre 2016, before the Bernie Sanders runs, right? Before everyone was galvanized, before everyone suddenly thought that saying like, oh, I'm a social Democrat or I'm a Democratic Socialist was something that was acceptable at the dinner table and not something that would have your parents be like, communist, excuse him or anything like that, right? Like all of a sudden it was like everyone was talking about this. And hey, wait, are we interested in theory? Are we going to read about the stuff and how we're all united? And then there's this old man who's galvanizing all of us and he's getting us all excited about all these ideas that, yes, all the money is being funneled to the very rich and the working class are getting fucked over and we don't have any more unions anymore. We don't have any more worker co-ops anymore. And everything is fucking terrible. And they're pointing the finger at things that don't matter. They're pointing the finger every day at the immigrants. So yes, it's the people from across the pond that are going to attack us. That's the real problem. Meanwhile, the people who are fucking us over are right here. And it doesn't matter if it's in Canada or America. So people can become united. People can come together and get galvanized. And I would say decisive action. We just need to be inspired and do something about it. Yeah, there is a positive frame that you can put on the doomerism. And sure, there are people who use it for benefit to get views, to get clicks, whatever. But the sudden rise in it does reflect people's expectations of what the government should provide for them and what sort of material interests should be met. People are getting this doomer feeling because their expectations have increased and their conditions have not increased. And the gap between those things is disheartening, especially not just in the near term and now, but especially in the future as you look at a world that's going to be changing due to climate change. It's only going to get worse. People weren't really despairing that much in 2010, I don't remember. I mean, we were, legislation was the debt ceiling stuff. That was what's going on. And it sucked. But there wasn't this like, it kind of was like, oh, well, this is just kind of the way it is. This is politics in America. There's no left. There's Democrats and Republicans. But I think that, and it's not just Bernie, it was the material conditions on the ground after the financial collapse that was never resolved. And people just kind of getting eviscerated with their wages not going up and having to fill out their credit card to make ends meet and then going into debt. There are all sorts of reasons. And Bernie comes along and articulates these things. And I think a bunch of young people suddenly like, oh, we can have better things. We can organize our society in a different way. And when that didn't happen immediately, because Bernie wasn't elected, and even if he was, it wouldn't have happened. Let's face it, it turned into this like, well, well, you're not meeting our expectations that have rapidly increased. And I mean, there's theorists who have written about this, Davies and other people, like how revolutions are started and stuff. But I don't see a revolution anytime soon. But the fact that you're getting this, you have people's expectations of what society should look like have to be there. And you can look at the entire neoliberal project has been an effort to lower people's expectations of what the social contract should be, what government should provide to you. And it seems like we're finally starting to like chip away at those ideas and start developing new ideas of what we're owed and what as citizens of the US of what our lifestyle should be like. Yeah, that's really important perspective because things are different now than they were. Things now that are being discussed weren't even discussed at all, like Medicare for all, for an example, like we don't have Medicare for all yet, but we have shifted the Overton window. Sorry. The healthcare debate in 2009, where when Obama came in was an absolute nightmare where you had people like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, who as bad as Joe Manchin is today and I can't stand the man, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman were the foils and they were far, far worse. You wouldn't see these guys advancing a $3.5 trillion framework. I guess it is right now. We'll see what it is at the end of the day. Yeah, that's a great point. I just had a little bit of a different perspective. Oh, sorry, sorry. I think there's a little bit of a delay. I apologize. If you want to go first, go for it. Oh, sure. No, I'd be happy to. I just want to say I think the main character syndrome hit it on the head. I think that there's an incredible degree of counterproductive self-centeredness. Imagine if you could anthropomorphize the history of American progressivism. You somehow had some 250-year-old organism who was responsible in all ways for all progress made in this country. Imagine from the perspective of that individual watching somebody enter politics of 2016 and then after two years of being involved, they'll be like, this doesn't work. Nothing's going to work. And then drop out. It's like, okay, we would have nothing if everyone throughout history had had that attitude. I mean, nobody ever gets clean wins if all the union organizers back in the beginning of the 20th century had been as willing to give up because of the seeming insurmountability of their opponents, that we would have nothing. And our workers would have nothing. I mean, they had bombs dropped on them. We have people, and I don't want to get into, this isn't like a millennial sensibility thing. I think a lot of it is just that we don't have a very strong existing infrastructure for a willing, for sort of a means of effective engagement. That, and I think people are more and more making politics their personality, which is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because the needs towards change in a political system and the needs to define yourself as a person do not always coincide. And when you try to make them the same thing, that's going to lead people to make personality-driven political decisions and politically-based personality choices. And both of those can be really, really destructive. Politics is slow, arduous, gradual, messy, and often counterproductive. Personalities are the fanciful whims of whatever you think you are at the time. And that's great, and that's how it always should be. But there's not much personality to be had in, yep, politics is slow struggle and we're just going to keep at it for decades and decades enjoying small victories and suffering small losses forever. Like that's not, people don't like that. It's not exciting. So people want to get involved almost to a parasocial extent with the political happenings of their time period. And it just leads to people making really bad decisions. Yeah, that's a great point. Duman Mama, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I actually have some sort of disagreements with both Sam and what Vosha said here. So the first one that I was going to respond to was the idea that people have asked for more and then gotten less. Actually, don't think that's true. I think people have asked for less and still gotten less. I think that the average, and this is somewhat anecdotal, but I would love to see a broader scale look into this. But I think that people have been lowering their expectations. I think when, I remember when I was younger, most of my peers were like, yeah, I'm going to go to college. I'm going to get a house someday. Nobody thinks that now. The people I know, even my peers, some of my peers who were doing well, sometimes feel lucky to have an apartment because of how rough things are right now. So I think that people have continually lowered their expectations and found that the answer is still lacking. When it comes to politics, there's this, there's this sort of trite saying, but that I kind of like to keep in mind, which is do not wait to strike until the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking. And I think that that is a good way of looking at politics. I think a lot of times we're sort of lulled into this constant waiting period. We're waiting for this. We're waiting for this. We're waiting for this. And that's one of the areas where I sort of disagree with Vosha a little bit. I don't really think that you can separate personal and political in the same way. Like political movements are often very inorganic or very organic and very messy. They are sometimes flashes in the pan. Sometimes the energy that arises is like almost unpredictable. Like we have with something like the George Floyd protests and stuff, which, and they're going up against a system that is very cold and calculating. But the thing is that we don't always have to wait on that system. And again, that's not to say that there's no need to participate in when the chance comes to vote. It's just there's all this time and all this energy in between. Something that has really shaped my outlook on politics was living through a couple of disasters. When I lived in California, before I started streaming, we lived through one of the worst wildfire seasons. I mean, only now surpassed by this wildfire season. And we had our power just shut off. Like one day we just got a letter or we got a phone call and they said, hello, your area has been selected for a power shut off in order to prevent forest fires. There's nothing you can do about it. You can't contest it because it is, the state has given the power to the power company to make that call and they did. And then our power was gone. The power for our entire town was gone and nobody was ready for it. We didn't have power. We just lost. I couldn't watch streams. I couldn't research anything. I couldn't do my job. I just, and there was no recourse. The only recourse was to try and solve the problem. And we ended up like talking to our neighbors. We ended up like finding out who had a generator. We ended up like actually solving issues that arose when that infrastructure was taken away at last. And we didn't wait for anything. No aid came. We never got aid from the government. We never got aid from any of the local political parties. That aid just didn't come. And when COVID hit here in Seattle where I live, I was involved for a long time with this incredible mutual aid group that's like organized by some anarchist collective. And it was incredible. And they did that exact same thing. They, there was no, there was all of this fighting back and forth in Congress. All of this, as the money gonna come, as the money gonna come. They put up a Google, a Google sheet and they orchestrated at the last time that I was working with them, which was some time ago admittedly. I know that they've raised a lot of money. $300,000 worth of groceries and groceries delivery to people who were so in need of food that they were searching Facebook for groups that would be able to give them food. This wasn't like a party that was giving food to its members. This was people who were running, who were out of food and they were looking for it. And they put food into the mouths of those people, giving those people another day to live. I think that changing our focus to that sort of politics. A politics that can be a bit more accepting of people's sort of personal weirdness and their personality and their organicness. Politics that is willing to engage with that at face value without judgment and move forward with that organic assumption built in, I think is very, very powerful. And I think we should focus on that more personally. I kind of see common ground, not to be a fence that are here between you and Vash. I think that there's common ground on that particular statement because I do think that your personality, I think there are some benefits to that being linked to politics, but I do see how it can become something that's problematic. I mean, perhaps it depends on the personality. I mean, we can all think of individuals who are very problematic personalities on the left who I won't name, but it just kind of depends on the situation and perhaps the personality, but Vash, I'll let you weigh in on that. Oh, no. I just think that in a lot of ways, we should treat our political engagement with the kind of steadfast and tenacious involvement that we would say a job. Not that to say that we need to commit eight hours a day to it or anything like that, but that as a part of our interest in and willingness to contribute to a broader collective goal, we make it something that we care about. We treat it as such and we do so with some degree of seriousness, but we do so with the understanding that the responsibilities were taking the effects of our actions. They extended beyond just us. They're not just a reflection of our personal willpower, our personal wishes. I'll give you an example. Okay, Biden. I don't like Biden. I've never liked Biden. I didn't like voting for Biden, but I did vote for Biden. If I had considered a vote, an extension of my personality, a reflection of my personal interest and identity, then I would have simply not voted or what I would voted for a third-party candidate or something. But I don't. I consider it a stark and utilitarian choice about who is the least terrible person who has a shot at being in there. So I cast a vote for Biden. A lot of people turn it into this big identity thing, that they're not the sort of person who would vote for Biden or they're not the sort of person who would look at what's going on in the world today and continue to invest time and energy into it, because things are going so poorly that it's easier. It's emotionally easier to just withdraw. And that's what a lot of people are doing. They're withdrawing. They're saying, oh, this just doesn't work. It's never going to work. We're doomed. You know, they kind of just want to cross the arms and smirk as everything else falls apart, you know? And I think this is a horribly counterproductive attitude. There are people who have done a lot of good in much, much, much worse circumstances than what we're dealing with today, you know? I mean, obviously I'm a live streamer, so I've got nothing to complain about. But even like broadly, left-leaning people today in this country probably can't hold a candle to what the left felt back at the beginning of the 20th century or how the left felt back during World War II. Or like for example, when America refused to take Jews that were being sent out from Germany prior to their execution, you know? I can imagine how being a leftist must have felt at that time, you know? Like seeing all of that happen. It's always been a process of suffering. But they still did good work back then, you know? So if all of them, they'd thrown their hands up, ah, nothing but a revolution will fix this. We never would have gotten anything. But that is a very personality-based decision. It's a product of an emotional fallibility, an over-emotional investment into what's going on and a need to withdraw to shelter your own emotions. That's why after Bernie Sanders lost, I didn't have much of a problem endorsing Biden right after. It's not because I didn't love Bernie because I wasn't disappointed. And it's not because I like Biden. It's because it was never about how I felt. So it was an easy choice for me. I mean, it sort of is, right? I mean, voting is sort of how you feel. I don't think I take that view where people who didn't want to vote for Biden somehow put their personality above what was good for the country at the time. Because, you know, it treads offly close on scolding powerless people on what they should be doing. That does not provide them any options and has completely eviscerated them. So, and ultimately like the people who are sitting on the fence or didn't want to vote for Biden because they're too left of Biden is a very insignificant portion of the electorate and not really driving any of the bads or their lack of participation isn't really what's responsible for what's the engine of destruction that's happening. No, but that's kind of a deflection, right? It's, I mean, it's a significant portion of the left. The discourse about Bernie or Buster not voting for Biden was super present online. It still is super, super present online. Is that a huge part of the electorate? No, but we're talking about the mentalities of leftists here. And yeah, the person thinks that not voting is a preferable choice to voting for Biden. I'm okay scolding them for that. I mean, we're at the probably the sort of, and I don't know, maybe there's more influence of that sort of sect of the left, but Biden still prevailed in the election, despite, you know, there, whatever, how many people held their nose up or didn't hold their nose up and chose not to vote. Can I respond to that, Mike? Yeah, thanks. Do you want to jump in? Yeah, I just wanted to say that I, Sam, I'm totally on board with a diversity of tactics. I think that's very, very important. I think that you should have people doing mutual aid. You should have people doing unionization. You should have people doing worker cooperatives, all that kind of stuff. But in terms of harm mitigation, I think that's also incredibly important because if we don't engage in those kind of tactics or even better yet, you know, try to get progressive or leftists into office, then we see that ground to liberals and conservatives. And they dominate those arenas. And trust me, they are very invested in maintaining the levers of power, getting in there, making sure they stack the courts with judges, making sure they stack the courts with supreme judges so it just haunts us for years to come. So the left can't kind of like stay by the side and be like, I'm going to do like a fourth party or I'm going to do some kind of a, I don't know, I'm not voting just to show that I don't care about this process. Like we cannot let that ground simply be controlled by conservatives and liberals, would be my point. Well, I'm not against, I'm not saying people shouldn't vote. I think, I mean, look, I mean, I'm a communist. I don't think that democratic party is ever going to get us to a situation where we need to go. But I do recognize, and I don't agree with people, okay, I do recognize that you can still improve the lives of millions of people by electing Democrats over Republicans in certain situations. And I don't subscribe to the belief that like, it's necessarily counterintuitive or counterproductive to any sort of anti-capitalist struggle to settle for electing Democrats in the short term. Otherwise, like what's the point of fighting for things like Medicare for all, which isn't socialism or anything. And you could argue would delay whatever kind of heightened contradictions that could lead to a revolution or whatever down the road. So I don't, I don't really buy into that. But at the same time, I think that voting is the least effective type of politics you can engage in or the least impactful or important type of politics you individually can engage in. And I think that yet we play so much importance on it, mainly because we all are kind of political commentators and reporters. So, we operate in this scene around elections all the time. I just, I mean, to me, we shouldn't focus on it too hard. It's just, it seemed like so many people were making the objectively wrong choice. You know what I mean? It'd be like flushing after you take a shit, you know? That's not a huge part of my brain, like telling people they need to take a like flush after they take a shit. But if I, if I realized quite suddenly that all the people around me didn't do that, it would, it would, it would suddenly become a much bigger deal to me, you know? I don't know. It just feels like pretty straightforward. You get Biden and whatever, even if it's the least important thing, it's still something you've got to do. It's not to me so much of an issue because like the online left represents a huge voting block because it doesn't. To me, it was more of an issue of a sort of misplaced or misguided accelerationism. Because even if a leftist doesn't vote for Biden, like to me, it's not so much the vote I care about. It's that they're the type of leftist who doesn't see a difference between the kind of harm Biden could do versus the kind of harm Trump could do. And that to me suggests the existence of a whole of their host of issues, which may be significantly more concerning than their actual singular vote, you know? Like that, that could lead into a whole bunch of other stuff. Like people saying Biden is worse than Trump or people underestimating the threat of fascism in this country or people who think that Trump was better on foreign policy. And it gets like this whole like the, like a branching web of bad ideas. I think there's too much hyperbole on the left. And I do think that that's a problem. Like there are many people online who will say there's zero difference between Donald Trump or Joe Biden. And there's some people who even self-identify as leftists who will argue that Joe Biden is worse than Donald Trump. Which is, if you're a leftist, I don't think that there's an argument there. Having said that though, I do recognize that, you know, times are tough. Like, demerism is the subject. And for me, I like, as a podcast host, I feel like I made a different political calculation than I would have if I wasn't a podcast host. So like after Bernie Sanders lost, I was very like, fuck Joe Biden. Like, I'm so, I'm so done. I'm not going to vote for him. Fuck him. Like on Super Tuesday, I was also like, that was a very, like my dad died on Super Tuesday. So I see Bernie Sanders losing. My dad dies. So at that point emotionally, I was like, so irrational. I was like, you know what, I live in Oregon. It doesn't matter what I do. And fuck Joe Biden, I'm not going to vote for him. But then as time went on and Trump became more authoritarian, and I heard different perspectives, I thought, you know what, I can't just like, you know, hold my nose up in the air and say, you know what, I'm left here than thou because I didn't vote for Joe Biden because I live in a swing state. Because at the same time, I'm telling my viewers, well, I'm not going to vote for Joe Biden, but you definitely should if you live in a swing state. So it's kind of like this, like, there's this fakeness to it, right? And that's how I felt like, I felt like it wasn't fair that there's this expectation that, you know, my swing state viewers support Joe Biden so we could stop Donald Trump, but I don't have to do that. I don't have to feel gross, you know, about holding my nose. And it was Vosha's video where he was talking about burning your bust and I shared it on Twitter and I got a lot of backlash because they were like, oh, well, how can you share this video when he's doing these ad hominem attacks calling people dumb fucks? I'm like, honestly though, when he like said dumb fuck, like something like clicked in me, I'm like, oh, yeah, I am being kind of a dumb fuck here. And I should probably stop putting my emotions before everything. So basically long story short, like what I try to do is acknowledge that like people are people and we should have a diversity of tactics as Lance was saying. And, you know, we should, I don't know, just try to do our best to keep people engaged. Like I had, like in 2016, for example, a lot of folks hated Hillary Clinton, myself included, like for my mom, she registered to vote for the first time in her 60s for Bernie Sanders. And then after that, she's like, okay, well, I guess I'm back to being apolitical. I'm not gonna vote. I don't care enough. And so voting for a third party for her, like for Jill Stein back in 2020, I'm like, well, look, if that's gonna keep you engaged and you vote and then you vote down ticket for other Democrats, you know, the Senate, I think that that's perfectly fine. So like finding ways to keep people engaged is important to me, but it's not a perfect science because everyone is so different. Like a lot of people were probably turned off by Vosh calling everyone dumb fucks, but that actually resonated with me somehow because I'm a fucking weird person. But it worked for me, you know, and sometimes we need to be shaked. Other people, you know, you approach them more, you know, softly and in a more, I don't know, personable way. It just, it kind of depends. But I'm rambling at this point. Dimenoma, I think you wanted to jump in as well. I'll give you the last word on this before we move on to the next segment. This is a topic I think is like super, super interesting to me and there's the whole, touching on the whole Bernie or bust thing. I mean, I think people are prone to be very emotional online in general. They state their sort of unfiltered thoughts into Twitter. And it could be hard to figure out what people are like actually gonna do with that. For the record, I made my own videos against the Bernie or bust position because I think it doesn't help anything. I wish that people would view voting as a strategic chore, as a thing that you've got to do because you want to set up the ground for being as easy as possible for you to get what you want. But that's kind of like, that's a hard sell when our entire political system tells us that voting is the mark of your American identity. There's so much of that emotion that is infused in making elections the sort of center of your personal politics. And I think that people feel a lot of disempowerment. I think that there is a sense that like, yeah, I did the things I'm supposed to do that I've been told I was supposed to do my whole life and it hasn't done anything for me. I'm still sitting here with no power in a mountain in California or whatever, whatever name what it is. If you want to go about COVID or whatever, name a hundred different things. And I think that disempowerment is like, sort of the underlying factor that inspires a lot of these like bad conclusions because people conclude that they're disempowered and they don't know why they're disempowered. They don't know what it is that's disempowering them. I really like that Vosh was talking about like the sort of like old lefty politics. And I think it brings up something, or at least I would like to highlight something about like older leftist politics in America specifically is that it was based around bonds. Leftist politics in the past was based around a union or your community or the company town that you lived in. You would, your farm, your friend's farm, these things that where people had very real connections and they could make that connection up to the next level, up to whatever next level of politics there is. They go, we need this president in here because our union will suffer. Our community will suffer if that guy gets elected. I think it becomes easier to sell people on strategic votes and on voting as a block, as opposed to voting as like a personal expression. If they see their voting in the context of a community of their vote laying a sort of foundation for this network of bonds that they have, I really, really fixate on alienation and the separation that a lot of people have these days because I think it influences a lot of our politics. I also think that we have to start thinking about how communities are formed in a different way. I don't think we're ever going back to a union-based politics. I don't think we're ever going back to like party-based politics in the same way that we used to. I don't know that unions are going to have like a big comeback. It'd be really interesting if they did. I think unions do some really good stuff. But what I think we can start doing is we can start building structures, like, and I'm very interested in building things, but I think we can start building structures and building communities that allow people to like autonomously help one another in the right direction. And those people's bonds will drive them in a better direction than the direction that the society does, which if we look at the trends and employment, if we look in the trends in general well-being over the last like 10 years or so, over the Trump presidency especially, people work all the time and our workplaces are increasingly alienated in and of themselves. You do jobs online working from your own home. You don't know any of your coworkers. You work a gig job. You can't know any of your coworkers because they're all just random cars through an app. How are you going to build a sense of community? How are you going to build a sense of solidarity? We all recognize solidarity is vital to the politics of the left. Solidarity is like what the underlying factor of left politics. But how do you do that? We need to figure that out. We have to figure out how we rebuild solidarity, actual solidarity. How do we build bonds between people again that will inspire their politics? And I think that will have a... If we can figure out how to reconnect people, how to make people understand their context, they will be more interested in politics and they're more likely to be willing to make a strategic vote on something like Biden. If they're truly convinced that they're not powerless, that they can go, oh yeah, whatever, vote for Biden, sure, whatever, check it right off. I don't even think it has to be a matter of suppressing your emotions. I just think we have to change the emotional context. Say, yeah, it's not a big deal to vote for Biden. We're just doing a strategic vote. Now let's get back out there and let's do this thing with our online community, with our IRL community, with our physical household community or our town community. These things that give you a sense of feeling of political power because you can actually impact something around you as opposed to just throwing your metaphorical paper airplane in the direction of Washington DC and hoping to hear back someday while your power is still out. And I understand why people feel so doomer. I understand why they feel so disempowered. And I think it's because one of the things that distinguishes the modern left from the left of the past is that the left of the past went through the Cold War era and got all of their bonds systemically destroyed. Like, I mean, seriously, we're talking organizations that have been broken and collapsed through strike breaking, through union busting, through deregulation, has completely shattered the bonds that were there. And we need to do that. We need those bonds. Those bonds are the foundation of everything else that comes after that. Yeah, well, folks, I think that really, if you're watching this and you're not necessarily sure how to feel and the doomism is still like, you know, it's overwhelming you. Maybe you could take pieces of what each of us said throughout the course of this and like, you know, fill it in. Either way, one thing that I always find solidarity in is that, you know, if politics makes me feel like I'm going crazy, I'm not the only one. And we're all kind of like just going crazy together. But something that makes me feel even better is knowing how much crazier, you know, some people are. And as crazy as we may feel from leftist politics, it's not as bad as what we're about to see in this next segment. So on this week's Weekly Dose of Stupidity, folks, I have really unfortunate news. White Boy Summer is canceled. Damn. In a world of politics dominated by the strange, the deranged and outright insane, we'll now take a moment to shine a light on the craziness of what politics has to offer. This is your weekly dose of stupidity. Well, this week, folks, about this. Shut up, chat. We have some medical advice from the son of Tom Hanks. He's going to encourage everyone to get vaccinated, but there's going to be a little bit of a plot twist. So let's go ahead and and watch. Hey, guys. So just checking in. Look, I've been kind of on the fence about this for a while. That's why I've never spoke on it. But with the amount of people that I know recently that have gotten COVID and with like the numbers rising, I think it's important for me to say like, I got the vaccine. I think everybody should. I think it's really important like that we all do this just as like. Now, if we pause it right here, this is a wonderful video. Is it not like if we pretend as if he stops talking right here, I have no issue with this, but this is going to veer sharply in a very different direction. And since as Americans, we have to look out for each other and get this under control, guys. So like I suggest to all my followers, you guys make set an appointment and get the vaccine first thing. Sike, bitch. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I never had COVID. You're sticking me with that motherfucking needle. It's the motherfucking flu. Get over it. Okay. If you're sick, stay inside. I'm tired of having. Okay. Why are we working around y'all? If y'all if you're in danger, stay your ass inside. I'm tired of wearing a motherfucking mask. The worst part is that you know that he's recording this, thinking that he's killing it. But when I watched this, it makes me want to like find the highest cliff and just like eat myself off of it in roblox of course. Folks, how do we deal with these people? Well, I just want to remind everybody out there that Chet Hanks has a cameo that you can purchase for $1.99. So if you'd like to hear him say anything else, perhaps something in patois or have him say something small, you can order that on cameo right now for $1.99. Same price as Giuliani, isn't it? Is it actually a little? Wait, Giuliani's on cameo? Oh my God. Yeah, Giuliani's on further and further lower. Oh my God. Wow. I mean, I think there's the obligatory thing to say that obviously there are people who haven't gotten vaccinated for fairly legitimate reasons. We have a healthcare system that is built to exclude people, to leave people out, to not give people information about how they can get healthcare, where they can get healthcare. There are a lot of people who think they need health insurance to get the shot, even though that's not the case. Also, children can't get it. But I'm kind of a little tired of this notion that we have to be easy on these anti-vaxxers or use persuasion. It's clear that that's not what's driving these people, especially, and when I see someone like Chet Hanks, it makes me want to personally sign up for a government vaccine brigade of teams that hold people down and insert needles into people. So, well, you need a team of a few guys. There's going to be resistance when you're trying to hold someone down and stick a needle in them. Chet is kind of a big dude. I don't know if I can do it personally. I might need a team. But a lot of these people, they know the facts. They know what the situation is, and they're the same type of people who've always, through their politics, acted selfishly and are now coming on this position where they can be the most selfish person possible because it suits them, and now they're anti-vaxxers. And yeah, I don't have much patience for them. I think we got to have some sort of... I know vaccine mandates are a little bit tricky in how they can be implemented, but I think we can bar people from flying, bar people from certain restaurants. And I don't think businesses are really taking the lead on this, as we're seeing. I did not lie, by the way. Price was accurate. $200. I'm pretty much at mandatory vaccines. I'm pretty much there. Apparently, two-thirds of Americans are on board with that idea anyway. So, in a democratic sense, we'd actually hold a supermajority opinion. I don't know. I think that at this point, choosing not to get the vaccine is a violation of the bodily autonomy of other people. You're essentially allowing an interminable plague. We don't have... Wait, there's a beeping behind somebody's... Does anyone else hear that? I hear it. I hear it. It's not me. So, beep, beep. Beep, beep. Yeah, no. I hear it too well. It's very distracting. Yeah, sorry. I'm not sure. Somebody has a beep, beep. That's okay. I don't have a beep. Anyway, yeah. We don't have many ethical analogs to this, because usually, when we're talking about bodily autonomy, we're only referring to things done to the individual itself. But because of the way the COVID spreads and new variants of it form, which could potentially supersede the effectiveness of existing vaccines, this is kind of a everyone needs to get in the boat situation. We're getting a little bit past these worn out, like, let me do what I want, sort of pseudo-libertarian arguments from, by the way, a man who... I don't know this, but I'm almost positive this is the case. Probably is pro-blue lives matter, anti-BLM. So the libertarianism, I'm guessing, probably very selective on his part and a lot of the other factors. Yeah, yeah, it always is with these people. Libertarians are never libertarians. It's the conspiracism thing. And we've been dealing with this for a while, but right now, we have an entire political party and the media empire that aligns with them that are facilitating and nurturing this conspiracism about as much as you reasonably can. So we're going to have to find a way to deal with that sometime, too. Yeah, and I'm kind of on board with the mandatory vaccines. At a minimum, vaccine passports should not be controversial, but this is what we're dealing with. I just want to give people a sense of the petulance that we're dealing with. So a sociologist from Dartmouth College says that Vax resistors could be tricked into getting the shot if they think it would make liberals mad. This is where we're at, folks. This is where you have to convince them to take a shot to save their lives, to own the libs. How do you deal with this? Literal, baby brain. Literal, infant brain. I just had a great idea. Don't be a cuck. Get stuck. There you go. You've got to come up with that. Yeah, we've got to make it seem like if you don't get your vaccine, it's because you're afraid of tiny germs. And that means you're cuck. That's how we do it. Just saying the vaccine's side effect is that it inoculates you against the increases of estrogen and soy that's being put in America's food. And they'll take it like that. They'll be like, finally, I was getting worried. And also, to that note, COVID-19 has affected some men when it comes to erectile dysfunction as well. So if you don't want your dick to break, then vaccinate yourself so you don't get COVID. And another thing. So this is what I've been doing. So I really hold back a lot because I just want to scream at anti-vaxxers. And there's thankfully no one left in my family who I believe is anti-vaxx. So now I'm moving on to the rest of the people in society. Got to catch them all? Got to catch them all, 100% baby. So this is what I try to share, right? Because these are the stories that I think are going to move people that are still movable. So unvaxx COVID patient, post videos from ICU, begging people to get the shot. How many times have we seen this same story with, you know, right-wing radio hosts dying, saying they're going to be, you know, if they survive, they'll be the biggest pro-vaxx people in the world. I'm not sure if the video is going to play. It wasn't playing earlier, but I just want to play a little bit of this. Okay, yeah, it's not working. But, you know, I think that as much as we can use whatever tactics possible, I think we should go for it. Scaring people, making life very, very uncomfortable if you are not vaccinated so you can't go to the store. Because I'm sorry, like as Sam was saying, if you're under 12, you're not eligible to get the vaccine yet. So, you know, this is no longer just the personal choice as Vash was alluding to as well. You know, you are endangering other people actively so. And your freedom ends where your, you know, your neighbor's fist or nose begins. I just fucked up that statement, but you all know the spirit of what I was talking about. Fill in the blanks. We get the gist, yeah. Yeah. There's so much about this, God. Like, I have spent so much time covering and thinking about COVID over the last, like, year. And it's like, it's so tough. Because, like, on one hand, like, I do agree that, like, the scaring route seems to work pretty well. Like, I just had a conversation with a relative the other day which we haven't spoken in a while because we had a big falling out about anti-vax stuff. Like, this is literally one of my, you know, family members I still talk to and they got into this anti-vax, anti-masking thing. And then their friend almost died. And their friend dying who was a mutual, like a friend of our family. Like, I know this person. Like, they almost, they're just, they're disabled now. They have long COVID. Like, and seeing that made them change, you know, made my family member change their position on it. Which, like, that's the unfortunate reality of, like, all of this is, like, a lot of times it is that that takes it. I don't know about, like, how I feel about things like, like, like, vaccine mandates. Not because of any sort of, like, personal, like, freedom argument or anything like that. But because I worry what that's going to mean from the government's perspective, something that has really frustrated me about our government's COVID response has basically been that all of the policy has been made not around keeping people well and people not dying. I mean, we have 650,000 dead now somewhere in that ballpark, which is a lot of Americans dead. But it's always been about, well, how do we get, how do we do the thing that gets people back to work? And so my fear is that you end up with a, a bold path forward of mandating vaccines and also then everybody goes back to work and you end all the benefits. So everybody has to get the vaccine and you use working and finances and means testing to push the economy back open and therefore force everybody in under the name of ultimately like, hey, yeah, you're getting vaccinated. But we're at a point where that's not just the vaccine isn't just the issue. The Delta variant is already here. A lot of new cases are Delta variant. We're most likely, it is just simply true. We are probably going to get another variant. If they pass a vaccine mandate, and it is like I sort of theorize it will be, where it's this, it's a vaccine mandate to push people into going and getting, getting back into work and whatever. I worry that that would be, that that's just going to lead us to a position where we naively recreate the exact circumstances that led to where we are right now by pushing people back into their workplaces, back into their, you know, into their restaurants and their best buys and their everything like that. And then we just get another variant and we do it all over again. I think that's like a horror situation. So I don't know. I don't know if a, if a vaccine mandate is like the answer, but we, there's gotta be, they're like, I honestly like, I find the COVID, the COVID at this point to be such a hard uphill battle that I, it is one of the topics that I find hard. Like I think that like a lot of what I focus on is like, how do we alleviate it? Like in the lives of the people around me, because the policy level is just chaos right now. It's so chaotic. Yeah, it's, it's one of the issues for me that's really driving my demerism, at least like personally speaking, because it kind of feels like we're just going to be at this perpetual state of, of plague, because there's so many people who are willingly choosing to not take the vaccine. So I'll go back to like what Lance said about like using everything, a variety of tactics. I think we should definitely do that when it comes to vaccines. I don't know the extent to which- I can answer this one specifically though. Oh yeah, feel free. I do, I have two examples that I could give all y'all and they both happen to involve the French, so prepare yourselves. But in the case of both Macron and France and in Quebec as well, what they did is they started implementing vaccine passport systems, whereas you would be required to use a passport to be able to get into things, such as say a nice good old sweaty nightclub to get your sweat on. If that was the case, all of a sudden you saw in both areas, both in Quebec and in France, the amount of people getting vaccinated starts to surge. So I don't think it's like, you'll have the anti-vaxxers who will try to stay outrageous and outlandish things, like this is apartheid, blah blah blah, even though it's a free vaccine that everyone has access to. I think you have to be sensitive to the fact that there are going to be certain demographics within every society that may not want to take medicines directly from the government for historical reasons, right? Like black Americans, for example, would have that. So would indigenous Canadians, they would have the exact same reasons. So you can start outreach programs to help them, but you would find in the places where they've done this, if you implement some sort of a system where, yeah, you don't have the right to go into a crowded area and cough on people and give people disease and sweat on people. That's not freedom. That's not your God-given right. You know? So we do have a passport system. The vaccine is free. You can access it at any time. Boom, number goes up. That's interesting to me because, you know, I saw the same thing with mask mandates. So while I live in Oregon, like there's a lot of us who are coastal elites here. Shout out. But like in Oregon, you know, nobody was wearing masks. So I shouldn't say nobody. Like maybe 30, 40% of people wearing masks. But like overnight, once the mask mandate was implemented, 99% of people at the grocery store were wearing masks. So I think that policy intervention, it does work. Like, you know, you're not going to get 100% of people as Lance was saying. You're still going to have anti-vaxxers, but I think that you need to cast the widest net possible and, you know, moving towards like, not just, you know, mandating it legally. To the extent that government can because I don't know that they have, like the federal government has power to do that. But to the extent that we can, I think that we should, we should at least try to do that. And there is, you know, precedent with vaccine mandates to go to school. Yeah, not, not, not for essential services, not for, not for just regular things. We're talking about like they were, they were forward. Like, do you want to go into a crowded bar? Do you want to go into a nightclub? Do you want to go into a concert? Things like that. So yes, you'd probably need to wear. That's how you get Chad Hanks vaccinated. The mask mandates are fairly easy legislation because it's really easy to tell if a person's wearing a mask. And if you show up and you're not wearing a mask, the person can tell you to leave. And if you don't, they can call the police. Really easy, straightforward, visible. You don't need existing infrastructure. Proving vaccinations is way more difficult. I don't like the vaccine passport stuff that much because unless there was some really rigorous implementation, you know, but the more it gets, the more thoroughly it gets implemented, the more successfully I would need it to be implemented. It would need to be something that's fairly easy to understand and to deal with. We all know how bad the average person is at managing any kind of technology, any kind of registry database bureaucracy. And I don't want that to magnify any existing social inequality. And I'd like to minimize the number of good, honest, innocent people who get caught up in it. I think what we need to focus on more than anything else, and this isn't usually my go-to approach. You know, we're all very fun friendly on my stream, but I think we just need to bully the shit out of people who don't want to get a vaccine. Just like interpersonally, I mean in a mutual aid kind of way, not just policy wise. I think we need to, you know, we need to roll up our sleeves and get back to the good old God fearing earnest work of just making them feel like shit. Okay. Just imagine, just channel all the energy of a homophobe with gay relatives. I mean, just make them feel awful about it. And the good part is, you'd be justified in doing so. Say, hey, you want to see my family? You got to get the vaccine first, okay? You want to do this or that? Nope. You're not doing that to you with the vaccine. Oh, wait. Oh, you're not using the vaccine? Oh, okay. Are you curing your illnesses with leeches and lye over there? Just lay into them. Because the fact of the matter is people only engage in this conspiracy bullshit as long as it's socially convenient to them. It's why Flat Earth took off with the internet, okay? If you are in an environment that doesn't coddle your bullshit, you walk out of it, okay? So with regards to the anti-vax stuff, just feel okay about making them feel bad. And honest to God, I think that's going to do a lot of good. Because logic is clearly not going to do it. If logic had anything to do with their decision to not be vaccinated, we wouldn't be in this position, okay? In the absence of logic, all we really have left are how people feel. And I don't know, what do we want to make them do? Feel a hero to get vaccinated? I'll pay them. Sure, we can pay them 100, 200. I'm fine with that too. We can try that. But we should also boulder them. I do think that like, I think that there are incentive things, like this is where we get to that whole like politically possible versus what's like gonna actually happen. Because like, I mean, I still very firmly believe that if we had just from the get-go, taken a large sum of money and put it towards, okay, hotels have to be closed because nobody's traveling. So let's have the government buy out blocks of hotels to put people in, like homeless people who don't have a place to stay, go stay in the hotel, stay there until the end of the pandemic, get people off the streets, pay people to stay home from work, pay businesses if you have to, subsidize businesses so that they can stay closed. It would have, I mean, it sounds ridiculous to throw that much money at it, but we already did that. We already threw money in the wrong direction and like a lot of it, like Trump threw a lot of money in the wrong direction and like we're still throwing money now and we have a ton of dead people. So I feel like the best thing that we could do that would probably be cheaper than even trying to implement passports and this sort of thing is just pay people to do, like incentivize them doing the right thing. I do tend to agree about the idea of like, people tend to like, you know, they'll like get very on board with their Mike Lindell anti-mask vote, you know, the Dominion voting, these like wild conspiracies, but then when it's like, okay, but I need you to, then you get to the like, the like call to action and they're like, oh man, all the everybody starts sort of mumbling and wandering off in the other direction once the call to act happens. It's true, it is, people are like that. Now, conservatives in America are in a little bit of a unique position with regard to being able to be shamed. So I don't know if it's, I don't know if just shaming them and making fun of them will work because they almost seem to get a pleasure out of it. Like, I mean, we all know about the war against Christmas, right? Like they love that. Oh, I love the war on Christmas. Happy holidays, they'll, they'll, it's been, it's conservative tradition to get, to feel validated by being victimized by a red cup that says happy holidays or whatever. So I feel like they kind of like that, but I think that we can sort of undercut them by calling their bluff and just being like, hey, watch this, if you get a coupon for fucking a beer discount for the next six months, if you get your vaccine, go for it. They're going to be like, okay, I'm not telling any of my family. I'm not going, I'm not going to go online. I'm not going to post about it, but I'm getting that fucking coupon. So I feel like we can, I feel like we should do things like that. I mean, honestly, like in my ideal circumstance, if I was Joe Biden right now, I would tell, I would say, you know, convert the hotels, Jack and have him fucking, you know, really dump a lot of money into this stuff. Food, just make food easy to get. People don't got to pay anything. Take a ton of government money and make life good for people. They'll stay inside. If they can stay inside and play video games and watch streams and do whatever all day, they'll do it and the virus will die. It will, if we choke it off. But if we're not going to get that, I don't know we got to go that far. Maybe we can just do beer coupons or that thing that they did in California with the joint for the jab, you get a free joint and nice, you know, nice, three PS5s. Yeah, whatever. Oh, yeah. There's got to be some solutions. Yeah, there's got to be solutions like that. And I've not seen almost anything like that. I'm not saying that it's Oh no, no, please go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to agree with you that it's hard to, it's hard to have this debate and blame individuals and there is plain, blame to go to individuals when the government has completely failed to provide an adequate COVID response from the beginning. There was a way to stop the pandemic a year ago, paying people to stay home, freezing the economy. And even today, people are advised, you know, if you get a positive COVID test quarantine for two weeks, well, how are you going to do that? Like, we don't have places set up like they had in China and in Vietnam and in other places where people can go if and be fed and provided for if they end up with a positive COVID test. And it's hard to imagine that we would ever assemble those things here. Although, you know, 100 years ago, we had stuff similar with tuberculosis and sanitariums and stuff, but we are not the same sort of society that would like do that because there was no profit ever in paying people to stay home and shutting down the economy. We had to make sure the line goes up. And when it comes to vaccinating people, like, you know, we're all throwing out ideas here because the government really hasn't done much. Here we are at 50% vaccination rate and we haven't really tried all these other methods to encourage more people to get vaccinated, except like on a piecemeal basis locations in various places. But like we really, the government once again really hasn't tried that much. And I do also agree that I don't, I don't want to discourage people from ridiculing anti-vaxxers. That's my tack as well, just because that's, you know, how I'm personally dealing with this situation. But I do think that they want to fight, like that is they now have, like anti-vaxxers have a lot of crossover with a lot of other reactionary politics that is now built on confrontation and fighting. Like they don't have, I mean, other than preserving a white majority in the United States and some sort of libertarian government system. Like beyond that, they just want to fight people because it's a politics of grievance and nihilism. I totally agree with that. I think it does depend on the fight though because I think there are some fights they really like. If Biden went up on stage and said, we are declaring war on the unvaccinated, or some inflammatory statement, you know, they would love that. They'd run with it for years, you know. But there's something, I think they're much less engaged with the actual consequences of social grievance because they haven't really ever experienced it, you know. When it comes to like direct political persecution, the right doesn't actually feel it. Sometimes they do intersectionally, there are poor people who vote Republican, of course, and they feel that. But for being conservative, the only derision they really ever experienced is people being sort of inherently morally put off by the things they believe, you know. And I think that's something that they've always felt the deep shame about. When it comes to stuff like the war on Christmas, it feels like they glorify the aesthetic of social conflict, like the idea that the media elite are coming after them. But people will always change their behavior, often enough at least, when subjected to a lot of interpersonal stressors, you know. I just, I just, I think it's an element of the approach. Paying people to get vaccinated seems like it'd be the most effective. I just, I wonder like, how hard, can you bully people out of QAnon? Maybe. I don't know, but I will say though, I do think that there's value and I want to give credit to Vosh because there is value in my opinion, in the catharsis the rest of us give from making fun of those people. True. I think we would all, if I couldn't make fun of anti-vaxxers, I would have lost my mind already completely across this thing. So that is the value that shouldn't be discounted. I don't know who they mean. What I mean is self-care. True though. What I could say from the made up fantasy land of Canada is that we've got the highest rates in the world right now. I'm not saying this to flex. I'm saying this to say. Rub it inland, God. No, no, no, no. I'm not ever saying this to flex. I'm saying this, what's the biggest difference between B.C. and say like Alabama or other parts of the United States? We don't have own networks. We don't have Fox News. We don't have Tucker Carlson. We don't have the 24-7 cycle that all you amazing yanks are pushing up against, right? Because that's what you all have to do. Like that is your job. And without someone doing that, you get Tucker Carlson on the radio every day saying that it like force feminizes you and 5Gs you and inserts the robots into your testicles. All that shit does have an effect. You can see it in the numbers. Yeah. And I think Greg. I was just going to say, I think you've touched on something that is sort of a unique challenge of America in general, right? Is that like America has this such a deeply ingrained conservative media presence. When Rush Limbaugh, thankfully, departed from this world, I had a big stream because I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh owns America's radio waves. And I mean that in that like it's him. And if it's, if you're not listening to him, you're listening to someone who's backed by him, who's been chosen by, not directly chosen by him, but chosen by him to be that region's Rush Limbaugh. And that's the same thing goes for conservative TV. I don't know. Is there something, is there anything that can even be done about that? I don't know how we do that. I mean, I like to think that like, that like, at least online, like lefties are getting good at SEO. We're getting good at getting our word into the face of people who would otherwise only ever hear Fox News. But network news and radio is almost impenetrable. It is almost impossible to get someone to not tune in to Fox News if they're used to just turning on their TV and letting that run. There's no, you can't insert yourself that. There's no YouTube recommendations. They're, they control the recommendations. They control that echo chamber. And I'm like, I don't know. How do we, I don't know how we penetrate that. I don't know. It's functionally, it's functionally daycare for boomers. Like they just sit in front of the TV all day and they are entertained. But there's also Joe Rogan, right? Who's not traditional conservative media who has millions of listeners and has been on a kick that young people aren't really, young healthy people aren't really in danger of COVID. And I'd say that as much as I've criticized the government's response and it deserves it, if there's one clear message that the government has put out during this pandemic is that this is a disease that affects older people more than younger people. But younger people can still get sick and pass it on to older people. Like this has been something I feel like everybody should have known by now. There's no sort of excuse unless you're completely consuming all your media from a place that is looking to undermine those facts. And I see someone like Chet Hanks. I feel like that is where that's where he has probably gotten his message, this idea that he doesn't need it, that this is for weak people or whatever. And you see lots of testimonials or interviews and there was one recently in the times of a young person who's like, you know, I want to wait for people who need the vaccine more than me. I'm young. I don't, you know, I'm not going to get sick. And he lives with his 80-year-old grandma. Like he has no clue almost that he can get her sick when he's being interviewed by the times. And it's, you know, maybe I'm assuming he's a Rogan listener. I don't know, but like he's probably this guy has influence. And I mean, he's not considered Fox News. He's can probably, a lot of people consider him part of the left media sphere, which I would find, which I personally say is ridiculous, but or at least part of this alternative anti-establishment media frame that is now spewing a lot of anti-vax stuff. Yeah. So folks, we're about, we're a little more over the halfway point. I want to give the panelists a break. So what we'll do is we'll cut to our featured content creator of the week. When we come back, we will dive further into the rabbit hole of stupidity in the United States. Let me just check in. Deepin Mama, I didn't know that you were also in Seattle. Are you and Vaj, like, are you okay with the heat to go for a little while longer? Oh yeah. I mean, I've more or less, I've adapted to unbearable pressure and heat at this point. I like the raw fish at this point. I'm actually going to have to depart at the hour because it's my friend and roommate, Hyena's birthday today. Oh, happy birthday, Hyena. Happy birthday, Hyena. That's awesome. Yay! Hyena's birthday. Okay, yeah, for sure. I will have to depart, too, at the hour's first one was bad. Okay, okay. So here's what we'll do. We'll take a quick two-and-a-half-minute break and then we will dive right back in and get in as much as we can before the hour, folks. How does that sound? Absolutely. All right. So how long is the break? The break is about two minutes and 30 seconds. Okay. Bye, Vosh. Say happy birthday to Hyena and give her a big hug for me. That's awesome. And bye, Sam. It was very nice to meet you. Wait, we're sticking around for a half hour. I'll stick around for a half hour. Okay, well, never mind. Then I'm going to retract all my previous statements. I'm just talking to you, but just don't listen to me. Thank you. Okay, don't go yet. Don't go yet. You'll have to say bye later. You've already said it. I'll be right here. We will be right back, folks. Double Vosh. I'm going to grab a drink. Hi, my name is Amy C3. I'm a leftist housing advocate and independent data journalist and I stream on Twitch. I want to talk about my latest project, though. It is a housing news program on YouTube. So the show is broken down into three categories. I start with the general housing story. I then move to a data portion where we take a closer look at the data that is tied to that housing story and then my favorite, which is the ground game portion and the response by local activists to that issue that was presented in the original housing news story. One of the goals of this program is to inform an audience of people who might be interested in joining the fight and being a part of their community, taking on a role of leadership, joining the DSA meeting, going to a Tenet Union meeting. And for me, that would be the most rewarding part of this program as if it did activate people to want to be part of the community movement of empowerment. It's very new and very much a work in progress. So I'm still working on figuring out the format of these videos. But if you're interested in learning more, all episodes are available on YouTube. Halcyon News with Amy C. Three. Thank you so much. And I hope you give me a chance. Well, folks, if you're watching on YouTube, there will be links in the description box. And if you're watching on Means TV, I will try to remember to comment below the episode of dystopian times. Do you want to jump in, Bosch? Oh, you're talking to me. I was berating my chat for being very kind to me. I'm here. Hello. Hello, Bosch's chat. Okay, one last thing. So before we move on, I just want to plug this GoFundMe. This is for Carly. She's a member of the Human Support Community. She's one of my mods. I've known her for years. And she needs a little bit of money to cover a surgery. And she needs $1,500. So I'll link to this on YouTube. If you can help out Carly, she will be eternally grateful. She is an advocate of Medicare for All. But meanwhile, until we get Medicare for All, I feel like these kinds of things, I try to plug them as much as I possibly can. But Carly is a really, really great person, phenomenal progressive and leftist. And if you can help her out, I will be eternally grateful. So please check out Carly's GoFundMe along with AMC3's channel. So before the break, I said we were going to dive a little bit deeper into the stupidity of American politics. And just to give you a little bit of a precursor, you know, the conservative movement has been fixated on Mr. Potato Head, Cat in the Hat, and lately they've taken a liking to the Muppets. Now, I hope that this doesn't get me like copyright claims because he's going to play a clip of the Muppets. But we're going to watch the Muppets, folks. I'm sure that some of us grew up with it and see what all of the noise is about with regard to conservatives and why they're outraged here. Get away from the transgender issue, right? It's everywhere. Even though transgender issues, well, it really affects a very small number of people. But it seems like they wanted to affect a lot more, especially our children. Meet Gonzo. Gonzo is a Muppet. I just got to pause there real quick because he's trying to create this ominous image and then he cuts to this beautiful, bright picture of the Muppets. And I just, I love everything that's happening right here. Or one of these characters, Disney characters. I didn't know Gonzo was a kid, but Gonzo's big. And, well, Gonzo had a secret for Gonzo's friends. Wait for it. Based. Gonzo, why didn't you tell us? Because you all expected me to look a certain way. I don't want you to be upset with me, but I don't want to do things just because that's the way they've always been done, either. I want to be me. Oh, Gonzo, we're sorry. It wasn't very nice of us to tell you what to wear to our ball. You're our friend and we love you any way you are. Yeah, of course we do. Let me pause her right there before he goes on his rant. We can already anticipate what he's going to say. But is that not the most wholesome, wonderful thing you've ever seen? Like, how could you not love that? It's incredibly chill. I just want to add this before any discourse takes place, that Gonzo has been like basically canonically non-binary since the 1970s. You can actually find episode segments of it wearing a dress with like the hand Muppets. I mean, way back that day before I was born. This is, no, seriously, multiple times, multiple episodes. So this is completely... Yeah, this is canon. It's very base. Gonzo is a species of alien that doesn't have gender. Okay, so you can already anticipate what is going to be said here. We'll also cut to one of my favorite political commentators on the right who's going to also weigh in here. But let's let him tell you why he's deeply offended. Apologies, Gonzo. Sorry. Why is this being pushed? I don't know if Gonzo is a cross-dresser or transgender, but if Gonzo is transgender, that is a disorder. Gender dysphoria is a disorder. It's an alien. All right. Okay, so before we discuss this, that is not all. So Candice Owens actually reacted to this saying, I can't believe I'm tweeting this, but they are pushing the trans agenda on children via Muppet babies. This is sick and perverted in all caps. Everyone should be disturbed by predatory cartoons meant to usher children into gender dysphoria, bring back manly Muppets, anyone. Folks, what is happening on the right? What is happening on the right? I'll just leave this open to the panel, because this makes me want to kill myself. We're all thinking of the sweetest chef, right? Like, she's got to be talking about the sweetest chef. That's the only one that comes to mind. Cross-dress 80 years ago? I think so. I'm just saying that, first of all, they act like this is this trans issue, when no, it's not. There are stories of people dressing up for comedic effect or because they enjoy doing so for literal centuries. Does anyone remember Avatar the Last Airbender, if you haven't seen it, you should see it? Saka dresses up as a Kyoshi warrior in episode like five, makeup and everything. But back then, there wasn't this obsession with using every instance of a guy or whatever wearing a dress as part of the culture war battle against trans people. So it went largely uncommented on. But if it came out today, you know people would be screeching about Nickelodeon pushing transgenderism on the youth or something. Go broke, go broke, go broke, go over. And to really speak to how much things have changed, like, I'm wearing a Zelda shirt in Breath of the Wild. There's this, like, part of the game where Link has to dress up in women's clothing to, like, get into some area. Am I, like... Oh, I've seen drawings of those segments. Right. And it, like, I don't remember... We can dive into the Legend of Zelda lore. But I mean, like, I don't remember it being controversial even back then. I mean, maybe I saw an article about it, like, praising it or something. But now, every, like, conservatives are hypersensitive to where they're fixated on these weird, like, culture war issues that don't even make sense. Like, you know, the cancellations of Mr. Potato Head and Cat in the Hat. When this, these weren't actually cancellations. Please do. Why they don't care about Legend of Zelda or anything that we, that is done today. There's so many examples of things they could get mad about that are way woker or way more trans agenda as the representative of demonic transes who are undermining the world here. But the, it's, it's that old people recognize Muppets and old people recognize Mrs. Butterworth and old people recognize Uncle Ben and old people recognize Dr. Seuss. But they don't know what it means. They're toys. They're like, all right, you need like a link in a chain fence. Like... That's a great one. I don't get it. That's very true. It's that. And, like, I don't know, it does seem to be that they get most mad about things that old people would real would recognize, which to me plays into that whole idea of like the Newsmax and Fox News being Boomer Daycare. Right? Like, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I'm looking through images of Gonzo in a, in a, in a dress from like a million years ago back when everything was drawn on animation cells. Yeah, it's completely toothless. I don't even know if they believe any of the stuff when they say it. Like, I haven't heard, when are we going to get the cancellation of Bugs Bunny? That guy crossed rest all the time. He kissed men all the time. What? He'd put out the voice and the aspects and the makeup. Yeah. Wow. I didn't know this about Bugs Bunny. And kissing on my TV. Maybe that's what, maybe that turned me gay. Is that possible? Like, I don't remember seeing Bugs Bunny kiss men. He can awaken men in you. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so I just, I want to know how the logic of this works because I think you can make people trans by showing them, by showing kids trans people. But kids are shown cis people pretty much all the time. Every human who has ever lived is constantly being shown cis people. So I don't, does it only go one way? Like, sorry, cis sexuality in everything, everywhere, like every single cartoon that you grow up with. It's just like, oh, yes, she muscles, he man, you know, and hell, here we go. It's going to be amazing. Like, things are very subtly changing. I have never seen an instance of a masculine character being feminized in what I thought was a cynical attempt to promote, like, an affinity for trans people. I don't think I've ever actually seen that once. With all the cynical woke shit that comes out to appeal to millennials, I don't think I've ever seen that. Can anyone, does anyone have any, like, can anyone think of that happening? No. I mean, that's the thing. Like, if you want to look of examples of, like, trans representation and, and, and like, stuff like that in film and pop culture, it's, like, overwhelmingly negative. Like, you just get to, like, the, the Ace Ventura, like, the most extreme examples of just, just truly, like, I don't know, like, going back and watching, like, Ace Ventura. Signs of the lambs. So bad. Yeah, Signs of the lambs. Yeah. Oh, Ace Ventura is really bad. Yeah. It's really bad. I rewatched that one a couple of years ago, and I was like, whoa! Yeah, it just keeps going. It's actually just keeps going. It never stops. And so, yeah, like, it doesn't make sense. No, no, go ahead. I was just. Oh, no, we got a glow-up, though, if anyone's been following One Piece for the past 100 years, where we actually have, I think, two trans characters who are treated well and beloved in the current arc. All right. Yeah. Wow. You have, fuck, you have Yamato, and you have, what's the name of the nine-foot-tall lady? Is it three? Oh, anyway. I don't know. Okay. But do kids read One Piece? I don't know. So I follow a couple of conservative commentators who I think are particularly fun to watch on this particular topic. Candice Owens is always a classic, of course. But my personal favorite is Matt Walsh. And that's because Matt Walsh will lose his absolute mind over the smallest thing. And I mean truly. Like, he read a book once on stream, on his little stream that he does. And it was like, and he just read through this book, and it was literally a book that was just like, this is Carla. She was assigned mail at birth by her parents. But later on, realized that she was a girl. And he was like, this is perversion. This is child abuse. This is like, I'm not kidding you. He's losing his mind. Like, being obviously truly angry. And I'm like, what are you even mad about? And he does this to anything. And so it's the hysteria around this trans stuff. I mean, I'm not going to lie. Look, I'm demon mama. So I don't mind being feared a little bit. Okay, like, let's be real. I like that a little. But it's kind of to an unbelievable degree. And you can't escape it. It's everywhere. Last night I got on Twitter, I'm like, oh God, why is the word trans trending on Twitter? And I'm just like, and I'm like, oh God, every single time it gives me a small heart attack because I'm like, what is it now? Is it going to be like some other just unbelievable? Like, you would think that trans people were orcs if you listened to just conservatives. Like, it's beyond even, it's almost beyond parody. The amount of misstep between reality and their idea of reality. And I mean, it really does parallel, like calling Joe Biden a Chinese communist. But see, on that one, only Alex Jones will say that. Whereas with trans people, like any conservative online will have a meltdown about just seeing that a trans person exists. And they're like, that's child abuse. And I'm like, because somebody else that you don't like exists, like, I don't know. It is a level of, it's a level of fear and derangement that is genuinely concerning. And derangement is the perfect word. Because it's like this obsession. And part of it is they're trying to use trans people as, you know, this political football, because this is like, you know, that they can win over the most people by shitting on trans Americans. It's disgusting. But speaking of derangement, the last thing that I want to talk about before we close the show, we'll try to exit before the top of the hour. So everyone leaves at the same time. Is Marjorie Taylor-Green, now I'm very, very thankful that we have a communist on the panel in Sam to react to her definition of not just communism, but what she calls corporate communism. Large corporations are- The military industrial complex. Military industrial complex is a major issue. So I have a term for that. I call it corporate communism. Corporate communism destroys small businesses in America. And I have a very good example from my district. They destroy the small businesses and the corporations gain all the control and they can't be defeated. And they do the bidding of the government like they're doing. Biden's saying, oh, the government's not going to mandate vaccines, but the big corporations are doing it. Corporate communism, they're putting the policy in place through their businesses on their employees and on their customers, like we've seen with airlines. That's capitalism. Yeah, that's the point. That's capitalism. I mean, maybe it's a sign that, like, that we're winning some sort of ideological war that they take all the terrible things about capitalism and just try to call it communism. They at least recognize that it's an unsustainable system here. I used to get frustrated when Bernie did similar stuff when he's talked about corporate socialism and versus, you know, and I guess I know that there is kind of a history. Like Martin Luther King used similar terminology, but it just, it mystifies when we don't need to. We can point out all these things that capitalism is doing and define it as capitalism because they're deeply unpopular and nobody likes them. And by trying to redefine socialism in a way, you just end up helping the right and end up helping Marjorie Taylor Green talking points down the road. I don't know how to respond to something like that other than the way you guys do. And she's describing capitalism. Yeah, at this point, we've long since reached the singularity where none of these words mean anything in the common discourse, especially for the right, right? I mean, the use of the words fascism, communism, and socialism have long since superseded any meaning and have been reduced completely and entirely to thing I don't like. I don't know if you can ever be pulled back from that point, you know? It's because like, if a person's 32 years old and they vote red and they think that communism, socialism, and fascism are all when corporations allow vaccine requirements in their stores. Like, how do you, what could you ever do to re-establish the meaning of those terms in that person's head? It's almost like you have to abandon them and we need to come up with a new term to describe all this, you know? I mean, that's why I think that like, a lot of the time, this is one of the things that I like, I think that there's a lot of, I don't want to say time wasted on trying to win over right-wing people, but like, I think that like, most of the time aiming for everyone who's not already an adherent of Marjorie Taylor-Green and Matt Gaetz is usually a good thing because it is, and I want people to be, to understand that it is almost impossible to fish someone back from a position where they think that like, where you're talking about, where the words are so diluted that they don't even have the same, they're not even speaking the same language as you. They say communism, and that equals in their brain what Joe Biden does when he orders, you know, an extra egg on the tax payer's dime. Like, that's what they literally mean, and they take that 100% and convince them that that's not the dictionary definition of communism or socialism or of anything or of welfare. Like, I mean, when they think of welfare, like, when I think of welfare, I think of an arduous, obnoxious process to get pocket change from the government so that you can have food in the middle of a pandemic where you have to fill out 50 pages of paperwork in order to even do that. Um, but... Yeah, and don't forget, by the way, this is the person who had to learn that the Holocaust was bad by going to the Holocaust Museum. So maybe I don't know if she went to like, Marx's grave, she could learn some things about theory. In the interim, if she wants to keep labeling everything as way more badass than it is, like, I don't understand, because every day I'm hearing how Joe Biden is this radical communist, uh, you know, neo-Marxist superstar, the child of Engels and all this kind of stuff. Like, where does that leave us? Where does that leave the left if all these words have no meaning anymore? I will say it does give us a small... It does give us one small advantage, which is that, uh, in... When people get to that level of having their own entire lexicon, that's totally different from everybody else. It's incredibly alienating. Um, and so, like, obviously, the people who are in are very hard to get out. This is like cults, right? Like, it's like, once they're in, it's really, really hard to get out. It's damn near impossible, and they rely on that. They fish people in, you get stuck forever, and they slowly and surely accumulate. But, uh, this applies on a bigger level. Like, if you can... If we as, like, the online left or as all, like, the general left in America can instill a sense of just, like, incredulity towards this sort of nonsense, which I do think that there's been success at, by the way. I think that, like, especially in streaming spaces, like, people laugh about the, like, Joe Biden being a Chinese communist or being a socialist now. That's good that people laugh at that and think that's a funny thing. I think that's how you inoculate people from ever getting pulled in in the first place. And I think it's a much harder project to try and... And personally, I don't even know that if this is something that, like, online content creators can even meaningfully participate in outside of just sort of chance. Because, like, whether you can get people out of that far right of a thing over the internet alone, I don't know that that's possible. But we can certainly inoculate a lot of people to this idea that, like, that rant should be taken seriously at all. And if people watch that and they think, oh, my God, why is the... Why is this... Why is the scary-looking lady and the scary-looking man telling me that Walmart is a corporate communist? Like, and then they just laugh and turn their brains off because it just seems like a absurd boomer bait. And if we give that impression, I think that's going to be really effective at making their message fall on deaf ears. I was just wondering where the whistle guy was. We needed the whistle guy. Oh, yeah. Dropping the last event that those two were at. That was so good. I like... Committing auditory assault on people. Oh, that was so good. Okay, so we talked about demerism for a good portion of this podcast, but I'm actually going to end on a positive note, folks. So we just watched Marjorie Taylor-Green, and I just want you to know, if you're watching this and you think that you're not worthy enough or you're going to take a test and you just don't think you can do it, you're applying for a job and you don't think that you're qualified, if Marjorie Taylor-Green can get elected to Congress, you can do anything. Anything. So just keep that in mind. Whoa. So, having... He might be a better example, to be fair. He might be a better example. Okay, so folks, we are... At the end of the show, I want to leave a couple of minutes so all of our panelists can plug their projects, give any shout-outs to something that they're doing. Yeah, Sam, we'll start with you. Well, people can catch me on Means.TV doing Means.Morning.News. We're in the process of moving to Sunday. That's going to be fair at the end of the month. Means.TV, subscribe, pay what you can afford, and catch out. A lot of good stuff including Mike's show on there. And I also do a podcast, District Sentinel Radio on Fridays. Got a Patreon if you're interested in that. Yeah, and this show will be on Means.TV as well. So be sure to check it out. Mods are providing you with links in the chat if you're watching this on YouTube. Lance, tell the people where we can find you and what you have in store for people. Hi, people. I do political stuff on the interwebs. And you can find me at thesurf.tv. Just that's the website, thesurf.tv. Also, we've been working for about three months on a GamerGate documentary that I'm really excited. It's coming out very shortly. And next week, we'll have a collab with Amen Animations. That's the super genius who did that recent Stephen Crowder, horrific, amazing, horrifying, incredible piece of work. So you know what? Don't go follow me. Go follow Amen Animations. Go check out Amen Animations on YouTube. He's fucking so based. Yeah, shout out to Amen. That was an amazing video. I literally binged every single video on his YouTube channel. Great, great work. Okay, thank you, Lance. Vosch. Yeah, my name is Vosch. I'm a blood-borne streamer, a professional first person to be blood-borne, waiting on Elden Ring right now. Yes. Going to be a lot of fun. When it comes out, there's a very tall red-headed lady. All going to simp over that when we get there. And yeah, you can find me over at Vosch on YouTube. All right. And DemonMama. Yeah, I'm DemonMama. My website is like right here. It's wait, wait, it's here. It's here. It's demonmama.com. If you go to demonmama.com, all of my links are there. I put out banger tweets on Twitter. So you should follow me on Twitter because I'm really fun. I mostly meme and cream, which is cool. And then you should come hang out and be cream. Yeah, hell yeah, that's what it's all about. That's what it's all about, okay? And then you should come over and follow my YouTube channel. I have a ton, ton, ton, ton of videos that I put up on my YouTube channel. There's some super cool ones. For example, I did a video called DemonMama's Spiritual Deconstruction, which is like a two-hour, long-form story about the cult that I grew up in and my experiences and how that affected my politics. So check that out if you want to like learn about my experiences, where I'm coming from with that. I also have a lot of really fun stuff on my channel as well that isn't about stuff like that. Please come check me out. I'd love to have you hang out on the website and stuff. So thank you so much for having me here. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you all so much. This has been so much fun. You all are incredibly entertaining and insightful, and I really, really appreciate everything that you all brought individually. Thank you all so much. So we're going to cut to the outro, and then I'll come back, read comments, super chats, and all that fun stuff. Folks, thank you so much. This has been The dystopian times. My name is Mike Figueredo. I'll see you all next week. Take care. Bye. Thanks. Well, that was so much fun, everyone. Thank you all so much for tuning in. Lots and lots of people watching on the surf stream, on Demonolus stream, on Vosha stream. Thank you all so much. I'm in the process of trying to pull up the super chats that I missed. I know I have one from Celeste here. She sent in a super sticker. Thank you so much, Celeste. You are always so kind. Love the energy you bring with the super stickers. Really appreciate it. Okay. I don't know why, but it's not loading for me. Let me see if I can pull this up. Okay. Let me try a couple of different things, folks. I'm a boomer, so bear with me here as I try to pull up the super chats. Hang on one second. By the way, it is so much more comfortable broadcasting here than it is on the other dystopian times set. I don't know what it is. Like I brought in a different chair, thinking that I would be more comfortable. It's like my back is destroyed whenever I broadcast from there. What am I doing? Where the fuck is the... Hang on a second. Here we go. Okay. I'm clicking on the wrong boomer mic. I don't have my grandson in the chat. Progressive voice. Okay. Your activity. Okay. I felt... I felt like they moved it. No? Well, okay. I don't know that I can see all of them. So unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to get to all of the super chats, but if you sent me a super chat, send your message down below so I can read it. So, yeah. So a Prairie Fire sends in a $2 super chat. I put the vaccine into Natty Light. Boom, 100% Vax. What is Natty Light? I'm a boomer, so you'll have to fill me in. Mike, you look amazing for the age of 69. Thank you. Thank you. A lot of people say that actually. A lot of people say that. Okay. So this is from Myla Reason with a $5 super chat. I hope Andrea Rovinsky isn't permanently uninvited and then it cuts it off. No, I would love to bring Andrea on at some point in time. Absolutely. I think that she's doing really great work in Elizabeth City and I enjoy her content. She is hilarious. Robert Abrams with a $5 super chat. A COVID tax may work. That's an interesting idea. Interesting idea. And then we have a $199 super chat from Jimmy Dore. I think this is a parody account. I'm pretty sure. It says message deleted. I don't know if the person deleted this message, but it's not there. And then the last one that I'm able to see is John Barr. Like it's a $2 super chat. It says it's plague boy fall. Yeah. Not a white boy summer, but a plague boy fall. Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't know why. So when I click on see all, the link is like broken. So I can't see the rest of the super chats. So if you sent me a super chat and I'm missing it, I am so terribly sorry. It's kind of difficult to go through like the YouTube comments and bring them up on the stream like this. Hello, A day or what is that? A day in forever. It's hard to like kind of manage everything and also keep track of super super chat. So I really apologize. Okay. Okay. Okay. Some of them were bad. Thank you, Tara. Okay. Okay. Thank you for letting me know. If they are abusive, keep it. We don't want your super chats. We don't, we don't need it. We're trying to, we're trying to promote good vibes here at some point. By the way, folks, I promise you, we will get to the pet segment because there is a lot of pictures. I don't know if you saw, there was like 300 or 400 responses to that last pet thread that I put on Twitter. And it's going to take a while to get through it. So that should get us through, like that should get us through the rest of the series anyways. Okay. Let me hang on one second. Yeah. Shout out to the mods. Thank you so much to the mods for managing the chat. It's really difficult for me to keep track of the chat throughout the entirety of the panel while hosting a panel. So I, I really try my best to, to check in, but without the mods, I just couldn't do it. So thank you so much to the mods who try to facilitate a really like friendly environment where people are encouraged to engage. Trolling is discouraged unless it's funny trolling. Yeah. Mods based. Absolutely. Mods are based. Shout out to Tara. Shout out to Mr. Anderson and Sek Mara. Thank you all so much. You all are just incredible. Michael Cuomo, how's it going Michael? Even the Muppet Babies from the 80s gives you a trigger warning when you know it's kind of weird and you wish you were there. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Stupid pet trick segment. I feel like the pet segment in and of itself will suffice because a pet trick segment will make some of our pets who aren't well trained look a little bit beta and I don't, I don't ever want to let my dog have this impression that he's not the best. Oh, so the, okay. Thank you, Brian. Celeste with a 199 super sticker. Thank you so much. Celeste, you are so kind. Thank you so much. Brian Crosby explains there are several parody intros who impersonate Jimi Darko Kalinsky and that's it. Okay. So that's, that's, okay. That's good. We didn't miss a lot. Some, I think I've seen the Kyle Kalinsky account and they like switch it. They were like Trump at some point. The last time I did a live stream or not the last time I did a live stream but the last time I did a non dystopian times live stream, which was kind of a while ago. And yeah, I think it's funny but I let the mods use their discretion. You know, if they think it's too much then I trust the mods and their judgment. Let's see. Have you, have you done any prepping over the last couple of years? Mike, prepping meaning like doomsday prepping because I think that it would be smart if I did do some sort of doomsday prepping. Who knows, right? So we have a $2 super chat from 10 lawn gnomes saying green new deal too little too late. I don't necessarily think it's too little too late. I think that the right has sufficiently like made the green new deal a boogeyman. I don't want to say that it's too little too late. I think that eventually when the time is right when more people wake up to the reality of anthropogenic climate change and its seriousness then you know we'll be able to push it again. Politically right now when you have so many corporate Democrats who won't budge at all it's going to be tough to sell anything called the green new deal but if we can somehow like get the package of the green new deal through and call it something else I don't give a fuck what we call it. As long as we get it through as long as we invest in clean green renewable technology that's a that's it. So we have a $5 super chat from Omega Metal Chase 92. Hey Mike been subscribed to your channel since 2015. Wow that's awesome. Do you think it's generally wise to avoid discussing politics with conservatives? It kind of depends on what you mean by wise. If it is for like your mental health maybe it might be wise to avoid it because sometime like when I used to get into these really big debates with my brother it would be really demoralizing and it would stress out my parents. But in terms of like online if you're on Twitter and you're engaging don't don't discourse on Twitter or Facebook but generally speaking like debating with conservatives and you know talking about things with them politically. I don't necessarily think it's a bad idea to engage with them. I think that encouraging political discussion is actually a really good thing. Right. I'm totally in favor of chatting with conservatives. But I'm going to I'm going to move to that. This is Meredith says avoid discussing politics with two Fargons. This is everything. This point is perfect because that's the thing you have to be able to distinguish between the people who are too far gone and the people who are actually gettable. There are people who may give you the impression that they are too far gone when they're not. So it's kind of difficult to judge but just like talking to people will kind of give you a sense of how far gone they are and sometimes you can win them over. One thing that I will tell you to keep in mind is that it is a process. Right. So if you have a two hour long conversation with a conservative and you go nowhere understand that that's to be expected nine times out of 10 you're not going to win them over. In fact 99 times out of 100 you're not going to win over someone in that conversation but really what you're doing is planting seeds. Like just sowing doubt in their political arguments and ideologies that gets them to do a little bit more research and thinking. I mean this is kind of how a lot of people have political evolution. I mean this is how I had my political revolution. Right. Or evolution I should say. I was very evangelical raised conservative and I went to college I started to get introduced to new ideas. I met people who were socially liberal and little by little like they didn't win me over right away but slowly but surely they made me doubt my own beliefs enough to where I felt inclined to like try to learn more about my own ideology and that's how I ended up abandoning conservatism not that I was like really a tried and true conservative I just was raised evangelical but it takes time right. And Brian says Mike there's a too far gone priest here in Tennessee who has his people bully and more Kyle covered him Kyle covered him. I'll have to check that out I haven't seen Kyle's video on that but yeah this is a great point and Shaya says plant seeds water occasionally that's exactly it folks and I think we're going to leave that there because I sort of God it is so hot it is so hot. Let me see what the temperature is actually okay so it cooled down a little bit but we're still under excessive heat warning it's 94 degrees so thankfully I have air conditioning but when you're sitting under like a lot of really big lights it doesn't make a difference but yeah yeah as Mr. Anderson says perfect metaphor to end on well folks I will see you all next week this is a phenomenal show I'm going to like jump in an ice bucket or something because I'm dying oh one more super chat okay I'll read this Vader with a 499 super chat thank you so much Vader what do you enjoy doing on your spare time when you're not discussing politics I really love to play video games I actually just finished the legend of Zelda Skyward Sword last night really really loved it enjoyed it a lot more when I turned off the motion controls took me a little while to get used to it with the view but I like to play video games I try to like just enjoy the scenery go outside and just like enjoy you know the breeze that really is like peaceful it's it's wonderful oh thank you Tara yeah thank you Tara by the way twitch tomorrow at 7 p.m pst folks hopefully you'll all be there with me twitch.tv slash humanist report my brain is legit melting oh my god I'm so hot well folks I will see you all later thank you so much again you're all just incredibly kind I love you all so much thank you so much for being here thank you so much for tuning in I really appreciate it thank you so much for the the superchats and the kind words and the comments and the likes feel free to like this video actually to help us with the algorithm thank you all so much I'm gonna go try not to have a heat stroke take care everyone I'll see you next week