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YouTube: I'd Rather Shoot Myself in The Face than Get All My News From There [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-08-31

From MeidasTouch, to Hasan Piker, to David Pakman, to The Bulwark, to The Majority Report….after a while, I need to shut them all off. Sometimes one needs to flee the click-harvesters of dread and outrage. Also, at 55 years old, I don’t need lectures from Gen Zers about politics or history. Some of us have come to our own opinions about a topic, after decades and decades, of thinking about it. You were not the first to discover that the Democratic Party isn’t fair, and sometimes, kind of sucks, and is even reactionary ( see Fetterman), but it is still the best electoral vehicle for setting the ship right. So stay involved and keep making us better, but no lectures.

Now I shall proceed to lecture...

No matter where these podcasters are on the political spectrum, the pitch gets repetitive in the constant quest for algorithmic-relevance, the stories take on a sameness, the answers offered are pat and simplistic. In some cases, people turn out to be ideological charlatans. Some refuse to talk about Gaza, others refuse to stop talking about Gaza. (By the way, I am 100% against the genocide, but If you are a self-identifying white Christian who won’t ever shut about Gaza to the exclusion of literally anything else in the world, you could be mentally ill, and also, please stay away from me)

Some content creators platform assholes who push important stories. Sometimes stories get undercut by shitty takes. In the quest for clicks and likes and reaction, the ability to think clearly is held hostage by the ever hegemonic attention-economy. And can we quickly slip an advertisement behind your eyelids for just a second? There ya go!

Meanwhile, my actual politics ( anarchism, or more precisely, anarcho-syndicalism) is rarely spoken to, even obliquely, by nearly anyone in the Left media sphere as it relates to current events. Maybe I should return to watching Democracy Now. At least Goodman is a real journalist; she has nearly been killed for her reporting. And at least Goodman speaks to activists (or used to) and instantly plugs you into something to help address the given thing which sucks in the world.

Beau of the Fifth Column used to offer a dispassionate analysis of news stories and provide a political context in a way that was both calming and illuminating. He was like doing opposition research for civil society.

Contrast Beau with a Hasan Piker.

As a younger man, Hasan Piker started as a bro-caster, where he talked about “picking up chicks” and joked about tips for getting laid. You can still find these videos by the way. They are only slightly cringy as his current schtick where he sits and eats lunch in his expensive rings and Rolex, decked out in high end couture ( often done up in Palestinian colors). It was slightly surprising how much his often edge-lordy, tankie, bullshit brings in major bank and sends him to the top of the podcast charts. He earns about a million a year to provide this confused drivel for horny housewives who are ready to fight fascism from their computers through the art of salty rhetoric.

The David Pakmans of the podcast world have an opposite problem. Pakman puts way too much stock in electoral politics and the normie political space— though I think he is among the most intelligent of anyone offering a liberal slant. I am not saying we should give up on electoral politics, but I am saying, by now we should be talking about mutual aid, civil disobedience, general strikes over and above elections. And this is simply because we are going to need every measure available to fight what’s coming. Likewise, though I am glad Meidas Touch is around, they can be insufferable, where the guys says: “play the clip” and we are not remotely surprised for the thousandth time about how shitty our president looks. The Majority Report has not been the same since we lost Micheal Brooks. Ciao

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