#i just want normal not jew hating monsters in your government is that too much to ask?

[houseofpinkboombox]

As an American 🇺🇸 and someone who has been a life long dem. I'm 45, I can't believe I'm thinking of voting for Trump. I fucking hate that POS, he fucked our supreme courts.

But at least he didn't gut title nine. Put sanctions on Israel, one of our best allies.  or have a ministry of truth. Also, Joe Biden has dementia. I work with dementia patients that motherfucker has dementia. We don't actually know who is running our country right now so that's fucking terrifying.

Our best right now is that Trump pics Tulsi Gabbard, and then dies in office. Like I'll take it.  Joe Biden was five minutes in office and he bombed fucking Syria. And destroyed the middle class yes, he is responsible for gas prices. He turned off the fucking Spicket. Well OK the person puppet him turned off the spigot.

Trump might be vicious, horrible fucking narcissist, but at least he's our vicious, horrible fucking narcissist that won't throw the rest of us to wolves.

Maybe he'll fix title nine I donno. Maybe it will be worse I donno. I'm having these conversations with reformist Holocaust survivors and they're thinking the same thing. Like damn how's Biden make Trump look good? Truly. Wild.

 Like as somebody who is incredibly liberal, this is a crisis of the soul moment for a lot of us.

I've been saying this for a while, but finding this post on my dash has, I feel, given me more tools to express this thought about why Jews (especially in the US and American-dominated online spaces) are feeling increasingly alienated by their leftist friends. Why many Jews who otherwise lean left will vote right, much to the dismay and even revulsion of their leftist friends. Why many Jews end up feeling "safer" leaning right. Why it is not fair or reasonable to "blame" these Jews for exercising their democratic right of secret ballot in such a way.

I'm screenshotting the post because (a) it's long, and (b) most of its content is not actually the point here. I'm not trying to argue with the OP or with my acquaintance who reblogged it onto my dash. I just want to explain what I find troubling about it.

The post is, as I said, long. I'll be honest: I only skimmed it. I'm not American. So skimming past - scrolling past to see the rest of my dash - I saw a lot of things where my brain went "Oh, that looks bad," but, you know, in a vague sort of way. Bad, but doesn't impact me directly. Or bad, but not in a way I can do anything about it either way (especially since I can't vote in the US). Or bad-ish, but that's not an issue of deep importance to me personally. And then I saw this:

And suddenly I felt hostile to the OP, because oh look, they just lumped in supporting my homeland, where my family live, which is currently under attack and in dire need of support, as a "bad" thing. Suddenly I feel like OP hates me, or at least, considers my continued existence on their own list of "bad-ish, but that's not an issue of deep importance to me personally."

But you know what? I kept scrolling. It felt like such a mild lip-service anti-Israel line that I thought, "Maybe this person doesn't hate Jews and Israel so much." I reevaluated my initial hostile response and decided to give OP a second chance, to walk it back. It sickens me that I've gotten so used to racism against my people that some expressions of it just don't register anymore. But I kept scrolling, and it got worse.

So what I'm reading here is an excerpt from the document that sounds, to me as a Jewish person, eminently reasonable and reassuring. Couched in language and context from OP that wants to paint it as a bad thing that the writers of this document believe that Israel, the Jewish state and Jewish indigenous homeland, should be able to defend itself against... *checks notes* three terrorist organizations with genocide against Jews explicitly in their mandate, and one dictatorship country which has repeatedly expressed that it has the desire and is working on having the means to "wipe Israel off the map."

Perhaps OP has been living under a rock (or, like me, only really focuses on political updates that hit close to home) for the past 7 and a half months and is unaware of Hamas's horrific attack of October 7, 2023 against Israel, in which civilians were brutally slaughtered, young women raped, mutilated bodies paraded through the streets, and dozens abducted - many of whom are still in captivity to the terrorist organization which has not allowed any humanitarian visits to the hostages or even confirmed proof of life for those it still holds.

But when I read the above excerpted paragraph, I went from "I'm not American but I guess most of this sounds vaguely bad" to "I hope this party wins." "I hope that this specific part of this platform is implemented because it is offering support, protection, and safety for me and my family."

You - OP and people who share their views; you as non-Jews who do not share in our unique suffering - you have no right to blame us for choosing our own survival. I would expect you to prioritize yours, as well.

It is things like this - not this platform, but this post, lumping in support of Israel against three terrorist organizations and a genocidal dictatorship with all the other "bad" things like deforestation and nuclear weapons, that push Jews to the right, or at least away from this part of the left. It is reading things like this, that take it for granted that my family and I should not be protected, should not have a right to live in our home, that radicalize people like me.

You're right: most of the other things here are things I would deem as "bad," but if I embrace this platform with open arms at least I get to survive, to fight against the rest another day. Better than rejecting it in favour of someone who has otherwise wonderful ideals but wants me dead.

I want to be able to care about all the other "bad" things in that post, in that document, but right now, we are bleeding. If I had to vote on it right now, I would choose whoever penned this document or stands behind it, because I need to prioritize my safety and continued survival over any other platform issue, and if I am not for myself, who will be for me?

Not my friends on the left who decry support of Israel against genocidal terrorists as a bad thing, that's for sure.

[matan4il]

lowkey not even as invested in 911 lonestar but ronen has been getting so much hate i feel so defensive about the show like. oof, there's gonna be too much chaos when the season airs

Hi Nonnie!

Honestly, IDEK when the new season airs, or whether real life will allow me to watch it, but all of my solidarity and support goes out to Ronen. Jews do not deserve this kind of abuse and de-humanization for caring about their people and their homeland, especially when it's someone who actually was born and grew up in Israel, and still has friends there (he even mentioned a personal connection to unfathomably young kids who had been butchered by Hamas).

This wouldn't be done to someone of any other nationality. For example, no matter what the US or UK or Iran has done that people might strongly disagree with, including in recent years, I've never seen individual American or British or Iranian actors held responsible for their government's actions, and expected not to care about the American or British or Iranian people when they are suffering. Because that would be de-humanizing. It would be acting like these American or British or Iranian (or any other nationality, really) actors are political billboards first, and humans second.

It's de-humanizing to expect Ronen not to care about the well being of Israelis and Jews, about their safety after the massacre that was committed against them on Oct 7, and which Hamas leaders promised to repeat whenever possible, about those who are still held hostage in Gaza (whether it's their bodies being denied of having a proper burial and their families of closure, or whether they're alive and continuously abused by people who we know raped, mutilated and tortured even children just because they were Jews), about the rocket attacks on Israel from several fronts (do people realize what it feels like to see the photos of Israeli Jewish kids taking cover from rocket attacks on the ground, with their little hands held over their heads, of all days on Yom Ha'Shoah, our national Holocaust Memorial Day? How do people expect us not to care about that?) which have continued uninterrupted since Oct 7, about the on going psychological and emotional trauma people have and are suffering here, about the repeated personal (because yeah, anti-Jewish terrorism and violence in Israel was not born on Oct 7, and many of us carry scars from previous attacks) and intergenerational trauma (because most of us grew up with the knowledge of what antisemitic violence, including in Arab and Muslim countries, has done to our families) that all of this evokes...

And going, "But so many more have died on the other side!" is de-humanizing as well. It's as if you had your mother murdered, and when you wanted to express your grief and loss, you'd be told that you should care about your neighbor's pain more, because he lost five cousins, not just one mom, and five is more than one. As if this is exactly how human pain works, by numbers... (not to mention, this notion ignores that at least two of the cousins are actually responsible for the murder of your mom in the first place, and they're also responsible for causing the deaths of their other cousins)

IDK, it's just... not normal that Jewish pain and Jewish solidarity are being demonized like this. And it is about demonizing these specific expressions of Jewish bond, because even Jews who have expressed compassion for both sides have been vilified (Ronen even included innocent Palestinians suffering in his initial IG statement, made on Oct 9 and linked above and there's a screenshot below, then he shared an extra statement that was even more about innocents on both sides suffering, and he was still crucified like he's some sort of a heartless monster).

It is NOT okay if the only Jews acceptable to you, are the ones who do not express Jewish pain and solidarity.

I hope people who may see my ask reply are capable of... IDK. Even if in the past they attacked Ronen or other Jews for expressing any kind of compassion for fellow Israeli Jews, I hope these people can really take in how de-humanizing that is, and what sort of a message it sends to Jews out there, re-consider whether that's a path they want to take again, or support when others take it, and do better than they have before. It's never too late to learn and fix things.

De-popularize the de-humanization of Jews!

Because that's the freaking decent thing to do.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[schizo-spoon-blog]

Spoonbender Society: Selected Schizoepistles

FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE:

We Live In A Society

People say we live in a democracy/democratic republic, a form of government intended to amplify what people think and address problems they find to be important. But it doesn’t ever seem to function that way.

The issue is in voter suppression, but as always not in the way people generally think voter suppression works. The issue is psychic, spiritual, and social suppression of citizens. Systemic over-development of senses of rationalization, neuroticism and anxiety, industrially incentivized narcissism.

People develop a deathly fear of what others think, or may think, or what they may have thought about them or what they think, what they may think, or what they may have thought.

A democracy where we’d rather not hear what other people have to say, because we find their thoughts offensive and retarded. That’s one thing people are happy to share. But because we suspect that there are so many offensive retards in the world, we fear... "Perhaps I’m a retard too?" You wonder that even for just a second in your life, if you have a soul. It’s OK to be a retard really, but you’ll never believe that it’s OK, and that's probably What Your Fucking Problem Is.

The opinions of us purported non-retards, to avoid sounding like complete retards, end up soft, ambivalent and stale, phrased like True Neutral Orgasm in Ego-Death Nirvana, but less Chad, less gratifying, and nobody cums. To not be reminded of the possibility of our own retardation, we like to pretend that if the retards just shut up and nobody can hear them, they go away. If they are Physically Removed from our presence, their evil thoughts and their malicious intentions will go away with them. We win. But they don’t. They never do.

We always fail to Psychically Remove them. We lose.

We can hypothesize a law of conservation of hatred, correlate one too of love, but the truth is banal. How can it be in light of our timeline? Why are these Hate Groups all over the place? Hitler’s corpse is rotting or burned to a crisp, or embalmed in a tomb or made a toilet for Some Rich Dude ((parenthetical removed)). (Or was he cloned?)

Great Fatherland Germany - defeated by the "untermensch" and partitioned like a cheese between rats. That Great "Faustian" and "Supreme" "Aryan" Race is subjugated by the hated "Juden" and all the "vermin" of the world, humiliated, castrated to be reunited a shadow of its former self. Yet the Nazi threat is omnipresent nearly a century later, in an era which may be an alien planet to those who lived in Hitler’s time.

How is it that the Great Allies, our fathers and grandfathers, achieved such total victory over so loathsome a foe, so unsympathetic and vile, only to see his Evil infect their own countrymen and posterity? How can something so thoroughly defeated still persist in what could be our neighbors or our co-workers our bosses or our employees? Each one could be a secret Nazi now. In parenting blogs moms worry that their children are becoming Nazis from goofy men they see in videos on line. Marriages are ending in divorce because the husband or wife is allegedly or apparently a Nazi. How could this happen?

Have you ever seen “The Matrix? Who hasn’t? You know all about the red and blue pills, and all the rainbow-flag DLC that it comes with, black and pink and green and brown and in configurations invisible to the human eye, I’m sure. If you don't know, the pills are portals to different realities. Take the black pill and you only see death, take the white pill and everything’s alright, take the blue pill you vote for Hillary, take the pink you become genderqueer. But this is not about taking any pills. This is about going off your meds. Going straight edge - except for whiskey, cigarettes, cocaine and pussy. It’s about the spoon - no, not for shooting up. It's for bending - with your mind. Remember? That spoon - The Spoon That Isn’t There.

That spoon is a Nazi.

If you are aware that there is no spoon you can tie it into knots. You can make it into a balloon animal. That Nazi Spoon could be a Jewish Socialist from Vermont, or a kosher Brooklyn Zionist, or a Dominican Taxi Driver. It could be an evil copy of your own son from Bizzaro World. It's probably your uncle. It could be Rottweilers, and Chihuahuas. Whether Pitbulls are Nazis or Jews/Blacks is an ongoing debate in the contemporary discourse.

But imaginary shit can be whatever the hell you want. You don’t have to be "The One" to Bend the Spoon. You don’t have to be anyone at all. What was the name of the kid who said the line about the spoon again? Nobody knows, nobody cares, and that's the beauty of Spoonbending.

"The Nazi" is the guy who keeps talking when he should shut up. He might be autistic, but he could just be an asshole. There is a strong possibility he could be both. Why does he keep saying all of this ridiculous stuff? He’s more offensive and more retarded than the usual, but it feels like He Has To Be This Way. Like it’s his curse, He Knows Too Much. He fell down some rabbit hole and ended up gorged on Fascist Propaganda. He mentions some girl named Celine. He rambles on about some guy you’re pretty sure is a Tekken character... the guy who turns into the Devil maybe. He mentions a vacation in Turkey with his family but insists on saying Constantinople and there’s a wild-man tear in his eye. He insists he knows about Atlantis and calls you gay for saying you liked Aquaman. Instead of saying goodbye he says “Subscribe to Pewdiepie.” The Nazi belongs in an institution. You wonder if he has guns and if maybe he should have them taken for a while. He probably doesn’t, but you can’t be sure. He’s 12.

When is it too early to become a school shooter? Is 12 too early to be an incel?

12 is probably the age at which incels hatch from their human hosts.

“Who is Pewdiepie, and how has he groomed my nephew into the Hitler Youth?” many families today are asking. They think they’re looking at a spoon. Conditoning fills your heart with a desperate desire to see the spoon. A fact, pure fact, logical, reasonable, peer reviewed, widely accepted, So True, a Textbook Fact. The spoon. Everyone else sees it too. That goddamn Nazi Spoon.

You ever try to ask this at a party as an ice-breaker and see how the guests react?

“So, anyway, was The Holocaust Real?”

“Excuse me, what?”

“What do you think, was it real, how many people do you think died, don’t the gas chambers sound goofy to you?”

”Um… no… they don’t sound goofy. What are you talking about?”

“You ever hear about the Nazi Roller-coaster they had at one of the camps? They’d put Jews into a roller-coaster except they’d fly off the edge and get splattered. That’s how the Nazis killed ‘em. I swear. I read it in a book by a Holocaust Survivor. Impossible to believe if it weren’t so True. No shit. You hear about that?”

”I’m… gonna get another beer.”

Of course there’s a Correct answer to that initial question. It’s also the Right answer. Who would ever get this wrong? It's the 2+2=X of History. Well…

Pop-Quiz, Random Nazi Check, Anybody here Hate Jews? You a Groyper, Son? What’s so funny? You think the Cookie Monster committing genocide is a laughing matter boy? We don’t take kindly to your kind around here.

Maybe you should give the Nazi-check thing a try, it’ll separate sheep and goat real easy for you.

If you do this everyone will think you are The Nazi.

The Nazis hated Jews, but did they hate real Jews as Jews exist, or did they hate the Fascist Propaganda Jew who was a work of fiction? On that note, were you in love with your last failed relationship, or just pretending you were? Have you ever had one impression of a person, but then learned they were another kind of person entirely? That first impression you had, the one that wasn’t True, was that a Real Person, or Imaginary? But you still spent all that money and sweat on an imaginary girl, huh?

Hope her hole was real.

I think that fake bitch of an ex you dated was a nazi. Your ex was a fascist. Oh, was she Jewish? It doesn’t matter, changes nothing. I’ve never met her - wouldn't matter if I did. When I imagine her, she's in Hugo Boss black and got skull-and-bones on her officer's cap, and she's saying racial slurs as she ruins your life, cheats on you, drains your bank account and kills your dog after getting custody over it in court. I imagine all bad people this way. All women who rejected me were exactly like this.

But I must breach working-class anti-fascist solidarity, and admit, on That Question ("Would you?").... Yeah, I would. Sorry bro. Take me away Comrades, I admit it, I'd give it to that Nazi Jew raw. Would I do that to her as she exists, or the Fascist Propaganda her who is a work of fiction?

That depends. You still got her number?

haha it's ok you can call me an incel, it's a step up from what i actually am

(User was banned for this post.)

The Nazi and the Fascist aren’t my hallucinations. That’s not my mental illness. But it’s adjacent to me, it’s thrown at me without my Consent, and it's a Trigger. I'm paranoid about commies myself.

In the multicultural cyberpunk year of 2019, with its trans-human gender-sex-orientations, anti-racist ethno-narcissism, fanatic anti-normalism, cultish critical theory intersections, grand byzantine minimalism, placidity, in such splendid predatory banality… In the absolute state of the world! – Aah! An undead ideology conceived by a salty Frenchman in the badlands of South Dakota in the 1890s shambles forth the devour all that is Good and Holy in the Great United States of AmeriKKKa, God Help Us All! And A Child Will Lead Those Dreadful Legions of Corruption Upon All The Meek Of Our Fallen World!

Or it’s just a spoon that isn’t real.

Nobody wants to be straight-forward, and I gotta navigate the labyrinths of euphemism. Maybe there's something weird going on - how people talk, how people act, how people think, none of those correlate to each other. It makes you feel schizo when you do all your mental rain-man calculus and realize there's a fucking Elephant in the living room and he's not wearing any goddamn pants. Once that little ray-of-sunshine blesses your tiny bug-man brain to enlighten you that the elephant is real, and the spoon isn't, it's only a matter of time before you're crowned in tinfoil a Potato King on your off-grid Bug-out estate in the Idaho Panhandle, or start drinking yourself to death and bullying mailmen (or both).

If you'd like to avoid that sort of Elephant-Mania Spoon-denialism, maybe you should try answering Uncomfortable Question instead of being so Weird about it, oh wise Mr. Kirk, Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Talking-Head, Mr. Important-Guy, Mr. Movement, Mr. Politics, Mr. Voice of Reason, Mr. Metatron. Take it from a schizo-maniac with a manifesto, you’re freaking out the hoes.

Try Praeger U talking points out on a Tinder date and watch her shrivel up from instathot to instahag -- she will go through menopause before your very eyes, that's how dry her pussy will get. Trying not to sound racist while talking about the Antarctic Nazi base and the importance of craniometry in ethnocultural anthropology will get you more action than anything that sounds like a paraphrase of Charlie Kirk -- because even if you're still being cringe at least you aren't being fake. Point and laugh at that fucking elephant - the moron isn't even wearing pants! That'll get her thinking about taking your pants off. Or not - it's not foolproof. If she doesn't laugh, red-flag, she's a Nazi so Begone Thot!

Please, for the love of God, go off-script! See the damn elephant and forget the spoon, and forget the wise Mr. Kirk, Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Talking-Head, Mr. Important-Guy, Mr. Movement, Mr. Politics, Mr. Voice of Reason, Mr. Metatron. Take it from a schizo-maniac with a manifesto, you'll go insane if you don't.

[. . . ] [T]hen there's that neuroticism, that narcissism, that fear. The whole point of these politics groups and gatherings and Q&As is what, anyway? Is it really just basic marketing tactics, like a live-action advertisement you expect for people to passively consume as though it is persuasive? To shove free-markets and free-speeches down my throat and have me swallow it without having anything that’s been bothering me answered? What do I look like to you, an Ideology Whore? You don't even reciprocate a good time, huh? I'm not that kind of girl. You didn't even buy me dinner. You made me pay to bore me. I'd cuck you if we dated just to make a very important point -- fully aware it'll go over your head. Fuck you.

We gotta hear The Script. We gotta recite The Script.

Real Conservatives Think Like This. Real Progressives Think Like This. White People Walk Like This. Black People Walk Like This.

Gotta hear that joke ten thousand times so you can recite it like a mantra in your sleep.

Free markets mean free people. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Private Companies can do what they wish. What you do in your bedroom is your own business. We want legal immigration, not illegal.

Abolish ICE. Your childhood hero says Trans-Rights. Do you not want me in the movement? Abolish whiteness.

The Racism of Lowered Expectations.

Reparations.

A white nation.

Workers of the world unite!

Abortion is a human right.

Have you got it memorized?

Let’s go over it a few more times.

Say it with me! Hillary was found innocent in a hundred hearings and it is sexist to besmirch her reputation.

Repeat after me! Trump’s economy is the best in history, and if he's racist why is black unemployment is at historical lows.

You benefit from unearned privilege. You suffer from toxic masculinity.

The world is about to end and everything you know and love will die, and it is your fault, for not believing in the correct things at the correct time.

Are you laughing yet?

I’m dying. I feel like an e-girl, and my orbiters are sides.

But do you wanna know what I really think? The whole bit about psychic and social suppression? You ever hear about the Procrustean bed? Well, what if we put your political, social, moral consciousness and your psychic abilitys into a bed like that. We could talk about it. You ever play Xenogears?

Or you could just put me in a box. I really wouldn't mind. I'm Houdini. Hey, was Houdini a Nazi, like Henry Ford? Can we get a fact-check? I didn't mean to be problematic.

Break the Conditoning - Step outside the box, and use it as a step ladder. Ascend, Beyond the Box - use The Spoon.

Bush did 9/11, the Israeli’s danced, the Aliens killed JFK - sure - but I only say this because of my MK Ultra Schizo-brain. It’s true, it’s false, it’s fact, it’s myth, I don’t have to believe any of it -- I also don't have to believe any of you if I don’t want to. My feelings do not care about your facts, and did you know that some of the world's most uncomfortable facts are manifested into being by uncomfortable feelings? Is it the fact of the bullet that kills the political dissident, or the feelings of his executioner? Is it the deranged lust of the rapist that violates his victim, or the fact of his power to do so? I guess it depends on whether the perpetrator said "nothing personnel kid" before he committed the act. I don't know about that Nazi Rapist's feelings, but MY feelings are valid and I can believe or disbelieve whatever I want on the basis of my feelings, and my feelings alone. My feelings bend the spoon of your facts.

Are you going to say I don’t have the right, Adolf? Sucks for you, bud, I may be a commie by blood, but the heart that pumps it was assembled in the ole USA -- and we got the Right to be a Retard here in America. It's a Free Country.

[Note: please insert image of Jonathan Frakes from Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction]

Now that the dust has settled: Was the Nazi Roller-Coaster Real? Or did we put the Truth in a Mass-Grave? We will let you know at the conclusion of our program.

Sincerely and Full of Suffering Your Friend Always, Orcbrand

[adrianvsart]

memorable and overall funny camp camp quotes

well…after 8 HOURS, i’ve finally rewatched the camp camp series for almost the 5th time. and boy, was it agonizing to say the least. nevertheless, it felt very rewarding after i finished gathering all the quotes together.

ill be updating this as new episodes are released but these are the ones out to the public so far (not including the new ones released on the rooster teeth website as i will wait until its posted on youtube).

it’s under the cut because, oh boy, is this LONG;

Episode 1, Escape From Camp Campbell

“Can you believe it, Max? We’re getting not one! not three! but two new campers today!” “Yup! it’s really truly horrifying.”

“I’m not here to make friends, David! I’m here because camp is where kids are sent when their parents don’t wanna deal with them. Why do you think we return the favor when they hit seventy?”

“Hang on a sec, what are you even doing out here?” “Well, it’s definitely not because the bus only comes from the city to drop off and pick up campers and so far seems to be my only reasonable method of escaping this fucking nightmare of a camp. Definitely not that.” “Heeey…language.”

“Suck a dic-” “All I want is for you kids to have as much fun as I did when I was a Campbell camper! Is that really too much to ask?” “I refuse to believe someone as happy as you can possibly exist.”

“No, silly! This is adventure camp! Ad-vent-ure! My mom said so! Unless she was lying…again. Sorry about that hand by the way, just exerting dominance, you know how it goes.”

“Max, you are not leaving my side for the rest of the day!” “We’ll see about that, CAMP. MAN.”

“Tell ‘em just how much you love it, Max!” “See, that’s the sad thing…he still actually thinks that I love it.”

“Gooood morning, Gwen!” “MOTHERFUCKER!”

“Nurf, you don’t crank shit! Get down from there Space Kid!”

“What about that astronaut kid?” “Astronauts, the wannabe jocks of the scientific community? Please.”

“Yeah, so far every attempt to answer our questions just raises more questions.” “Hey, good for you! You’re starting to catch on!”

“[Pulling out guitar] Well, I’m glad you asked, because I have a little song that I can sing–” “No.” “[Putting back guitar] When Gwen’s not around.”

“You are the bane of my existence.”

“This is bullshit!” “Woah, check out the balls on new kid.” “[Looking down at her crotch] Where?”

“Oh god, it’s coming back, the crippling anxiety and regret.”

“Why would you help us?” “I’m an agent of chaos.”

“Oh no. I hope YOU learned, David! I hope you learned that before today, you only had one little bastard to deal with. But now you’ve got three." 

Episode 2, Mascot

"Oh, he talked! Did you hear that?!” “Are you a gypsy?” “Uhhh…”

“[After just flinging the camp mascot to the next island with a huge rock instead of hitting David] Aw, man…That was supposed to kill you.”

“Well, Max, we were going to make hand-made ice cream, but someone killed our mascot and now we need a new one BECAUSE EVERY GOOD CAMP HAS A MASCOT, MAX!”

“Lady-sickness. My mom used to get that all the time.” “How do you cure it?” “EDGE CLOSER TO DEATH.”

“Calm down, it’ll be fine. Besides, anything’s better than hanging with DAVID." 

"Sorry everyone, just…really overwhelmed by all this friendship right now.”

“What’s WRONG?! I wanted to spend my summer in an air conditioned laboratory! Not walking around a future Wal-Mart parking lot!” “Aw, come on, Neil! Nature can be your friend if you just give it a chance!” “…There’s a raccoon trying to scavenge Nerris.”

“It’s resistent to charms!” “Nerris! Play dead!” “I’m out of mana!" 

"Uh…this looks like the place teenagers go to get stabbed.” “…Probably.”

“Hey, so, how’d you lose that hand anyway?” “[unintelligible mumble] JEWS [unintelligible mumble]” “…I feel like you should be more specific.”

“[Sigh] Well, I guess Nikki was right. Enjoy wearing my skin.”

“[After killing a squirrel] Mascot.” “DUDE! YOU FUCKING KILLED IT!” “…Oh.”

“[Aggressively killing animals] I AM THE KING NOW! THE THRONE IS MINE!" 

"Wh-Where’d it go?! Bring it back!” “Oh…I don’t know how. This is kinda why I’m here.”

“Where do we go now?!” “I don’t know! This was a really bad idea in hindsight!”

“I WANT A VIKING’S FUNERAL! LIGHT ME UP!”

“…Why do you always have to make things weird and complicated?” “Well, I mean, I think this is all pretty normal…”

“Does this mean we’ll be the Camp Campbell Platties?!” “No, I don’t think so.”

 "…What about the pussies?“ "Definitely not!” “Yeah, I like that!” “Pussies for life.”

“…So what’s with the Quartermaster and Jews?”

Episode 3, Scout’s Dishonor

“Ah…another wonderful day at Camp Campbell. All that’s left to do now is recharge with a full eight hours of lying in bed…awake! Waiting for tomorrow!”

“Alright, guys, our first attempt to bust out of this god-forsaken hellhole didn’t work.”

“So…what are you gonna do on the outside?” “Probably live with the animals. Try and get raised by wolves, maybe work my way up to alpha. Pee on stuff.”

“I think I’ll go to my dad’s house and tell him that mom sent me to an abusive summer camp. Pretend to like him more so she’ll try to buy back my love." "That’s really dark, Neil.”

“Where are we?” “Where happiness goes to DIE.”

“WHY DO YOU KEEP HITTING ME?! AND WHY IS IT ONLY CLOUDY OVER YOUR SIDE OF THE LAKE?!”

“God, your face is gross.” “…What…?” “Oh, sorry, that just slipped out…” “Dude…” “Sorry… I know… That was mean.” “It really was…”

“Oh, we don’t kidnap campers. That’d be immoral.” “THAT GUY LITERALLY STABBED ME IN THE BACK!”

“Neeancy, boys are supposed to be tough.” “And rugged.” “And if they pee in you, you get pregnant!”

“Y'all are some ignorant fucking cunts!”

“[Dreamily]…he can pee in me anytime.” “Tabii seriously, what the fuck?!”

“That was super gay.” “We JUST learned a lesson about stereotyping!”

“You know, maybe I don’t hate Camp Campbell, maybe I hate EVERYTHING." 

Episode 4, Camp Cool Kidz

"This sucks…This is the kind of peasant work my parents left their home country to avoid." 

"That’s fucking stupid, nicknames don’t make you cool.” “Pssh, spoken like a true first-part nicknamer.”

“No one’s TOO cool to talk to. Even cool kids take giant, uncomfortable shits from time to time. Helps remind you that we’re all equal.”

“Oh, maybe he’ll give us a raise! Or, tell me I’m like the son he never had!” “…Or explain why he’s wanted by the government.” “Or that. Yeah, there’s that." 

"WE GOT OURSELVES AN UPRISIN’!”

“Max! I am very disappointed in you for this behavior! But I’m also torn, because you were clearly paying attention during knot-tying class!”

“This is just like Le Mis! Ah, I love it!” “Don’t make this lame, Preston.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold the hell up! Did you nerds forget who revolutionized this place?! I should be leading you! Not "x-treme sports barbie” over here!“

"Rage-against-the-machine-fight-the-power-9/11!” “Progressive buzzwords can’t save you now.”

“Like the minutemen of the Revolution, we will fight for our independence!” “Minuteman…mommy calls daddy that when they argue.”

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this. It’s only been a few hours and we’ve already gone shirtless!”

“Aw, man! Sooo uncool.” “MURDER HIM!”

“What are you kids doing?!” “We’re gonna kill Space Kid!”

“You guys are here to rescue me?!” “No! Shut up David!” “Aw…”

“No fighting! Violence never solves anything!” “STAB HER, BITCH!”

“OH GOD! SOMEONE STOP-DROP-AND-ROLL ME!”

Episode 5, Journey to Spooky Island

“I was VERY innocent and impressionable back then!” “…So, last week?”

“What’s scary is how much I wanna kill myself right now.”

“So help me if this involves vampire romance.” “I-It could’ve been werewolves. You don’t know!”

“Here’s a horror story, go look at the job market you’re dealing with after this camp shuts down!”

“[After a squirrel jumps out of Space Kid’s spacesuit] Wait a minute! How is it that you aren’t even phased by that?!” “Might’ve helped if I hadn’t put it in his suit to begin with.”

“Wh-what do you think about that moaning and wailing?” “Pssh, it’s just teenagers from that church camp working on those repressions again. Not that I know anything about it, just being a kid and all.”

“So…No dead campers then?” “Nope! We’re good!” “Damn.”

“What’s with space case?” “Squirrel-splosion.”

“Ah…So the revolution has begun…”

“Pssh, ghosts don’t exist. You die, and then you’re faced with eternal nothingness. It’s gonna be great.”

“HOW DO YOU KNOW?! YOU’VE NEVER DIED!”

“We’ll see who’s yawning when we’re all DEAD!” “Why would we…?”

“That seems redundant.” “Yeah, and I think endangered…”

“I AM NOT ABOUT THIS SHIT, NIKKI! SCIENCE HAS IT’S LIMITS!” “Don’t be so naive, this is mild experimentation at best.”

“You know what this is? Proof that the founder of Camp Campbell is a rich piece of shit with terrible morals and who also potentially kills people! …ALL THINGS I WAS ALREADY PRETTY SURE OF!”

“But the monsters! The wails! You can’t explain that!” “Actually…” “THE HELL I CAN’T!”

“Guess that goes to show that sometimes, the only thing scarier than monsters and ghosts…is real life. Specifically old people having sex. Weird, kinky sex. In a dungeon. Boy, that is…that is some dark shit.”

Episode 6, Reigny Day

“Under my rule, I WILL MAKE CAMP CAMPBELL GREAT AGAIN” “[Thinking] This is probably fine.”

“WHAT DID YOU DO WITH NEIL, NURF? SHOVE HIM IN A LOCKER? MAKE HIM PROM QUEEN, ONLY TO COVER HIM IN BLOOD?”

“You seem pretty confident about that. Where were you on the night of-” “Shut up, let’s go find him.”

“Yeah? What did you think I meant? I’m not some kind of secret police or something.”

“[Nervously] All right kiddos, why don’t we take this conversation somewhere else, like another room! Or another camp!”

“We shall make an example of him! Let the hunt begin!” “[Thinking] This is still fine.”

“[After Preston destroys the floorboards with a crowbar] This has escalated quickly.”

“[Thinking, after getting nervous about the judges] This is no longer fine.”

“[Thinking] I can’t believe I lost to Dolph, he isn’t even a counselor!” “[Thinking] Plus he really looks like Hitler.”

Episode 7, Romeo & Juliet II: Love Resurrected

“Please, the theater demands your utmost respect-” “[Through megaphone] SHUT YOUR YAPS, IT’S TIME FOR THE PLAY!” “Ahem, thank you Gwen.” “[Through megaphone] DON’T MENTION IT!”

“Y'know, Juliet should’ve done karate instead of kissing boys. HIYAH! Maybe she wouldn’t have died then.”

“Has anyone seen my phone? I must have dropped it while doing my smile exercises.” “Don’t admit to that…”

“Guuys, you’re just adding to my anxiety! If you don’t return the phone, I’m going to have a panic attack, and that’s on you!”

“Yo, did someone say black magic?” “[Facepalming] Amateurs!”

“Thanks for your contribution, an inanimate object stuffed with hay could have acted better! [Turning to the platypus] Platypus, you’re doing great! Stole the scene! Keep it up!”

“Alright people, get your SHIT together!”

“You’re up next, break a leg, buddy.” “You’re right! If I’m injured, I can’t preform! Hit me! Hit me hard! It’s gotta look convincing!”

“Our love is forbidden just like Romeo and Juliet’s but we will be together even if it costs us our lives. UGH! It’s so romantic, I wanna die!” “He called us cunts last time he saw us.”

“I’m gonna make that kissing scene so hot, it’ll be rated TV Y 7.”

“It appears, my son, in her sorrow, she killed herself.” “Nooo! [Seinfeld music]”

“Ugh. Why is he so sweaty? Robots can’t sweat. THIS ISN’T CANON!”

“I don’t know who this BITCH is, but she is KILLING IT! AH!”

“I need to stop this!” “Why? This is awesome! Whoo! You go girl!”

“The theater! The cruelest mistress of all! My career! Like the mistakes of so many teenage girls, has been aborted.”

“Oh, nobody plays Bonquisha like that!” “[In distance] Kick his ass!”

“What about me? Where’s MY apology?” “I’m gonna be honest, I’m not sure who you are.”

“[Holding up a picture of Cameron Campbell] Have you seen this man?” “Oh, uh, I’ve been told to tell you no.”

“They don’t give Oscars for stage performances.” “That’s how good it was.”

Episode 8, Into Town

“What did I say? I said don’t do fire safety camp and political history camp in the same day unless you reeeeaaally want it to turn into riot control camp." 

"You’re still on fire, btw!” “Thank you.”

“Eyy, we’re talking here!” “The moon landings were a hoax filmed in Area 51 orchestrated by the government as a publicity stunt designed to humiliate the Russians in the space race!” “Noooooo! No! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

“Ah! Sweet 22.2 degrees Celsius, here we come!” “You idiot! This isn’t about air conditioning!”

“Just what exactly do you think he’s into?” “Hookers and blow!” “[Simultaneously] WHAT?!”

“Neil, you go be Neil in the nerd shop. Just stay here and keep an eye on the wagon. Get ready to haul ass if you see David about to leave.”

“Eeny-meeny-miny-mo, what lame place did David go…in?”

“Don’t serve your kind here.” “Your kind? Your kind?! Care to be more specific, sir? I’m calling you out!” “Kids.” “Oh, well that’s totally understandable.”

“Him? Yeahh, he’s a bit on edge now, isn’t he? Kept saying something about how it was all some kid’s fault.” “I know what you’re thinking. You’re totally right.”

“So, he come here often? Is he a sad drunk? Happy drunk? Gay drunk?”

“He beat a women?! David, you unbelievable bastard, I didn’t know you had it in you!”

“[Coughing] Max? I think I’m dying.”

“[To Max] Don’t come back. [To Nikki] Come back when you’re 18.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t wanna drive him to murder! I just wanted to show him that his entire philosophical outlook on life is flawed and that the fundamental beliefs and ideologies he holds so dearly are trivial so that he’ll start crying himself to sleep like the rest of us! I’m not a monster!”

“You sick bastard! Your getaway from the camp is TO GO CAMPING?!”

“Just. Kill us!”

Episode 9, David Gets Hard

“FUCK YEAH, SCARE ME STRAIGHT!”

“Well, we’re gonna learn that little shit some manners, David! Because we are contractually obligated to!" 

"After all, there’s only one camper at Camp Campbell worse than him, and it’s me.”

“What do you want?” “Double desert, no activities for a week, and David’s social security number.” “Done.” “Gwen!” “SHUT UP, DAVID!” “Okay…”

“Today’s the day I get hard!” “Okay, maybe we don’t phrase it like that…” “Oh no! Rule 1: no backing down! Look out, world! I’m hard and I’m coming! Whether he likes it or not, Nurf is gonna let me in!”

“…So does he want to help Nurf or fuck him?" 

"You’re pathetic.” “And getting blood on my boot.”

“No, no! You’re being positive again! Gwen’s the fucking worst! She slacks off, reads garbage and has no idea what she’s doing with her life!” “[Angrily] What?”

 "There’s no time-travelling doctor coming to save you Gwen! Get your shit together!“ 

"Right! I know that’s probably hard to hear!” “No.” “And may have even been a little too far!” “Not at all” “But by golly, it seems to me you’ve never been very polite to anyone!” “[Muttering] God damn it.”

“Man, he is…way more fucked up than I thought.”

“[Sarcastically] Oops, didn’t see you there! [Normally] Just kidding, I was fully aware of the situation. I’m just acting out for attention. That being said, I do think I need corrective lenses, my mom just won’t take me." 

"Oh, so we’re doing the whole Freudian thing now? Everyone wants to fuck their own mom, get over it!”

“So, what are you gonna do now?” “STAB MY DAD!” “NO! What?! Why?!”

“What do you expect? I’m just a kid! Eat my farts, butt-nut!”

“Well, I guess it turns out at the end of the day…sometimes you just gotta hit kids.”

Episode 10, Mind Freakers

“Sure, Harrison, that’s it. It’s certainly not because I believe in the fundamental laws of everything in existence which goes against the slightest chance of magic even being possible.”

“Get rekt, Harrison. Why don’t you do a real magic trick if you’re so good.”

“Oh! You just got Abraca-OWNED, Max!”

“Yes, and it would’ve been even better if it had happened to Neil as I intended, but you get the idea. Magic!”

“I do NOT feel okay!”

“It’s not like I’m gonna loose sleep over it. [Later that night] Shit.”

“Yeah! I believe! Cut me in half! I’ll be fine! …I’ll be fine? I’ll be fine!”

“Okay, Neil. I got you, fam.” “I don’t know what that means, but thank you.”

“How does Harrison have the Gaul to do something so hurtful, ya know?” “Yeah, it’s kinda shitty. I feel-” “It’s like he doesn’t even care how this affects ME!” “You?!” “Yeah! How can he be so selfish?”

“I don’t know, Neil. There’s still so much I need to learn. I gotta reach level 4 and I haven’t even been sorted into a house yet.”

“Just proving that any idiot with half a brain can do that trick you pulled off yesterday.” “Wait, are…are you calling yourself an idiot, Neil?” “SHUT UP SPACE KID.”

“YOU SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH, HARRISON!”

“The only thing I’m killing is your hocus-pocus bullshit, Harrison!”

“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest trick of all. Getting a cynical, close-minded asshole to believe in magic!" 

Episode 11, Camporee

"Guess who’s got two thumbs, diplomatic immunity and is here to host the annual Lake Lilac CAMPOREE?! This guy!”

“David, what the hell! No one told us about this!” “We’ve literally been telling you about it everyday for weeks.” “Yeah, but we never listen to you guys! Put up flyers or something.”

“Darn it, Teddy, you KNOW I’ve got a crippling gambling addiction!”

“Yo, David! I think I speak for all of us when I say that I don’t wanna become some fascist military peon!” “[Raising his hand] He does not speak for all of us.”

“BOO! Give us actual advice!”

“[Nervously] We just, uh, you know gotta believe in ourselves!” “Nope, we’re boned.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ! Campers, we are winning that FUCKING trophy!”

“[Innocently] Kill.”

Episode 12, The Order of the Sparrow

“Gwen, why is David dressed like a turkey?” “Because he’s fucking David, Nikki, you’ve been here long enough to figure that out.”

“Wow, that is racist.” “Seriously, are you offended?”

“[Whining] Do we have to?” “No, but-” “WAIT! Nevermind! It’s mandatory!”

“Tell us now, turkey man!”

“I can be nice! I’m the nicest!”

“David! You know me! You know I love nature! You know if I could, I would have BABIES with nature!”

“Resistance is futile, turkey man!”

“David. Witness me. Witness my love for nature! [Tries kissing platypus but it bites him instead] Ow! You whore! Let me love you, god damn it!”

“I can’t believe I frenched a platypus for this!”

“Life sucks. And we live in a world of desensitized, apathetic assholes. Why don’t you just get with the program and stop giving a shit.”

“That’s why I’ll never stop trying, because somebody fucking has to.”

“Wake up, buttercup!” “Nikki! No more arrows!” “You can’t control me, white devil!”

“Alright, I fixed it. Everybody hurry up and…ah, shit, he’s awake.”

“Max? Did you-” “DO NOT look too deeply into this. You suck, this world sucks, and one day we’re all gonna die and none of it will matter but if we didn’t do this, I’m pretty sure you’d kill yourself or something.” “[Sniffling] Oh, Max…” “Or shoot up the camp. I dunno, it was a possibility.”

Season 2, Episode 1, Cult Camp

“[Bursting through the door] Goooood morning, David!” “Goood morning, Gwen! Wait, this feels backwards.” “Yep!”

“But today’s the day!” “[Gasp] You’ve realized your love of Camp Campbell and everything it stands for?” “[Happily] HELL NO!”

“Ha, are pulling my leg?” “No leg-pulling here, but we are keen on handshakes!”

“You know, I think now is the perfect time to use my vacation days.” “[Simultaneously] Aw, Gwen. Are you sure?”

“[Picking on Max after he raises his hand] Yes, Max.” “[Points at Daniel] Who the fuck is that?” “Why, what an excellent question!”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.” “Whoa, watch the language there little fella!”

“I don’t really know what you’re selling here, Daniel…but I am BUYING IT!”

“Oh my fuck, he’s ACTUALLY- [Banging on David’s door] A CULTIST! YOU HIRED A FUCKING CULTIST, YOU IDIOT!”

“Again with these cult jokes, Max? Please.” “He gave everyone a "de-toxification” diet then started spouting off Latin from a book with a pentagram!“ "He’s bilingual AND cares about nutrition?!”

“[Sweetly] Hey, David?” “Yes, Nikki?” “WAKE UP AND SMELL THE KOOL-AID!”

“I would just like to point out the fucked-up implications of specifically YOU [points at Dolph] putting specifically ME [points at himself (Neil)] into a gas chamber.”

“I love you, Daniel!” “[Gasp] But…That’s not right! Max doesn’t love anything!”

“Poor guy, must have been some bad fruit punch.” “[Sigh] You’re a moron.”

Season 2, Episode 2, Anti-Social Network

“Nurf, leave me alone, or so help me, I will post photoshops everywhere of you kissing guys!” “Woah! Hey, somebody’s a little tense. You might want to look into some agression therapy. Besides, maybe I already tried to explore my sexuality…you don’t know. [Sniff] Chris, why did you leave me?”

“Oh my fucking god! Is it always just adventures with you two?!”

“It’s a chat bot.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, it’s a programmed, repetitive, humorless, inhuman, simulation of a person.” “Yeah, Neil!”

“Okay, okay. So maybe a couple of you might have critical thinking skills. Good for you, but other than that it’s all going according to plan.” “And what plan is that?” “The "get everyone to leave me the hell alone” plan. I’m a genius!“

"What could possibly go wrong?” “Everything, but until it does, I’m gonna go plug David into this thing and see how it plays out. Have fun doing…whatever.”

“Damn, Neil, you did that with graphing calculators?”

“This doesn’t make any sense. Every calculator’s running an updated version of my chat bot, but they’re all acting different.” “Yeah, I’m about three seconds away from removing the batteries from David’s.”

“Well I guess it’s a good thing we got them all. Can you imagine if someone impressionable and naive enough to believe everything they heard from a chat bot had-” “[Simultaneously] Oh my god, Nikki!”

“I can only hear about "shipping” people’s “bae’s” for so long.“

"Calculations complete. My analysis is…absolutely fucking not! You humans all suck.”

Season 2, Episode 3, Quest to Sleepy Peak Peak

“Get rekt, Mr. Waffles.”

“Actually, we’ll take whatever we can get, preferably we wouldn’t be talking to either of you.”

“[After kicking the ground and supposedly making the Earth shake] Oh no, my anger has manifested!” “Get to a door frame!”

“How do you know so much about it, Gwen?” “Yeah, I thought you had a…liberal arts degree.” “[Sighs] Associates degree.” “Oh, that is so tragic.”

“You coming too, Max?” “Still got those dice?” “Yep!” “[Grabbing the dice and walking away] Nope.”

“You can be the dwarf, because they’re dumb and ugly, just like your face.” “Aww, yeah. That one hurt. But my mom says I’ll grow into my looks.”

“Oh god! It’s chirping menacingly at me!”

“Anyone else want a twenty-sided asskicking?”

“Big deal, so you threw a bunch of dice at some animals. Kind of a dick move, to be honest.”

“This is a level 1 cave at best. There aren’t even any fire-breathing dragons or even a dang ol’ goblin!" 

"Oh, well, I guess that will work.” “[After the volcano starts to shake] IT FUCKING BETTER!”

“[After seeing the lava] Woah! Okay, well, saw the volcano, think it’s time we head back!”

“You’ve angered the mountain, Harrison! Gosh, you suck!” “I do not suck! You’re the sucking one!” “[In background] You both suck!”

“Oh, this is gonna be goood! Neil, are you seeing this?” “[Angrily] I’m going to hit you, Nikki!”

[cultofzac]

YouTube’s Monster: PewDiePie & His Populist Revolt

Felix Kjellberg, known to his fans as PewDiePie, is by far YouTube’s biggest star. His videos, a mix of video-game narration, humorous rants and commentary, have cumulatively been viewed billions of times, and more than 53 million people subscribe to his channel. He has been called “the king of YouTube” and countless variations thereon, and he has remained unchallenged on that perch for years, making millions of dollars and leveraging his popularity into outside ventures.

But Monday night, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Disney-owned Maker Studios, a longtime partner of Kjellberg’s, would no longer have anything to do with him; later, YouTube announced that it was canceling a show developed with Kjellberg, and removing his channel from its lucrative “Google Preferred” advertising program. At issue was a series of recent comedy videos. In one, he found performers on the freelance site Fiverr willing to dance and hold up a sign of the client’s choosing. He asked them to write “Death to all Jews,” and they did; in his subsequent video, he expressed shock that the request had made it through. “It was a funny meme, and I didn’t think it would work,” he said, mock-begging news outlets not to make too much of his stunt. “I swear, I love Jews,” he said, “I love them,” before playing a few notes on a kazoo.

As he anticipated, plenty of news outlets saw a story in his antics. Others saw something more. A post on The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, marveled at Kjellberg’s performances, and wondered in disbelief if they might signal sympathy for its ideology. “Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, since the effect is the same,” the post said, “it normalizes Nazism, and marginalizes our enemies.” As the controversy mounted, Kjellberg denounced the “hate-based groups” that had taken notice of his videos. “I was trying to show how crazy the modern world is, specifically some of the services available online,” he said in a Feb. 12 Tumblr post. “I think of the content that I create as entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary. I know my audience understand that, and that is why they come to my channel.” This explanation, unsurprisingly, did not satisfy Maker Studios, or, for that matter, Google.

It’s tempting to write off this scandal as an inscrutable product of a teen subculture, wrapped up in layers of irony and the peculiar language and aesthetics of YouTube. It is likewise easy to frame the episode as an isolated collision between offensive speech and careful sponsors. But it’s most useful to understand Kjellberg’s meltdown in the context of the vast platform on which it took place — YouTube — and the nascent strains of politics that could come to define it.

With more than a billion users, YouTube has become not merely a platform but almost a kind of internet nation-state: the host of a gigantic economy and a set of cultures governed by a new and novel sort of corporation, sometimes at arm’s length and other times up close. It’s a system Kjellberg has spent recent months antagonizing in a broader and less-inflammatory way, even as he continued to thrive within it. He bemoaned its structure and the way it had changed; he balked at its limits and took joy in causing offense and flouting rules. Over time, he grew into an unlikely, disorienting and insistently unserious political identity: He became YouTube’s very own populist reactionary.

In December 2016, Kjellberg’s account was about to pass 50 million subscribers — a milestone, and a record. But in his videos, he seemed to be ending the year on a pessimistic note. “It’s time for me to complain about YouTube,” he said in a video. “Again.” The platform, he suggested, had changed in a way that he found worrying, and maybe punitive. Subscriptions are the fundamental organizing principle of YouTube – akin to a Twitter feed, they deliver to users exactly what they’ve signed up to see – but, Kjellberg said, they were becoming less important to the way viewers found videos. What YouTube was doing instead, he claimed, was packing people’s feeds with material they didn’t care about, from channels they’d never subscribed to. His viewership numbers had suffered as a result, he said. His rant spiraled on from there, swerving among resentment and self-deprecation, grievance and absurdity, toying with both revolutionary and reactionary tropes, and ending where it had begun: with a threat to close his account.

It might seem hard to believe that anyone would want to watch a YouTube video complaining about YouTube’s internal economic politics, but more than 20 million people did (the video’s title, “DELETING MY CHANNEL AT 50 MILLION,” surely helped). For years now, in fact, YouTube has been one of Kjellberg’s most-addressed subjects, second only perhaps to video games. In September, he even collapsed the distinction between the two, releasing a smartphone game called Tuber Simulator. The object is to become a famous YouTube star. Players begin their careers in a dank, windowless room and scrounge for views and cash, with videos like “Bikini Wax Your Pets” and “GO Outside – Walkthrough,” the latter a play on a common form of video-game vlog. It’s both an extended joke about making money online and a functioning, moneymaking app. “If the intention was to make a biting critique of late capitalism, Pewdiepie and Outerminds have wildly succeeded,” Gita Jackson wrote for the gaming site Kotaku. “But if not,” she continued, “the game still gets there by accident.”

For product reviewers and gamers, for the unboxers and the how-to teachers, for the interchannel drama analysts, the bloggers, the makeup artists and the pranksters, YouTube looms large not just as a context but also as a character. The daily exigencies of life on YouTube are perhaps the only subject that cuts across every major YouTube category. Showbiz loves to make movies about showbiz, and television loves to make television about TV. YouTube has simply democratized this impulse.

It makes sense that YouTube would become home to such a performatively self-aware economy. It is, after all, one of the most mature of the major social platforms. It is extremely culturally productive, and can claim genuine stars as its own. Above all, it pays. And in the people who depend on the platform to pay their bills, it inspires a peculiar mixture of paranoia, desire, gratefulness and disdain that shows up clearly in their work. YouTube’s peculiar relationship with the economy within it is fraught, promising and poorly understood. It’s also unique among social-media platforms — but maybe not for much longer. For now, most of the biggest internet platforms are understood as venues for communication, expression and consumption. YouTube has given us a glimpse at what happens when users start associating social platforms with something more: livelihoods.

Watch enough YouTube programming on any subject and you’ll gradually come to understand the struggles of starting and maintaining a channel. You’ll become familiar with the mementos Google sends creators at subscriber milestones — a silver “play” button at 100,000, around which time your favorite YouTubers might start talking about quitting their day jobs, and a gold one at a million, when they are more to likely have done so. You’ll hear plenty about conversations with YouTube support, many of which contradict one another. You’ll develop opinions about YouTube’s copyright rules, age restrictions and advertising policies. You’ll get an intuitive sense of the YouTube attention marketplace and how people try to take advantage of it, and you’ll hear about advertising rates. You’ll hear conspiracy theories — some rooted in daily shared YouTube experience, others rooted in less visible fears, desires and resentments — some of which gain considerable traction.

And why shouldn’t you? YouTubers are not employed by YouTube, but they are paid by YouTube, because it matches their videos, automatically, with advertisers. The platform and the video-makers share a clear and common goal: to persuade audiences to watch more videos in order to make more money from ads. But even with a unifying cause, creators inevitably discover smaller ways in which their goals and YouTube’s are at odds. It is in YouTube creators’ interest, for example, to understand the best practices for getting the most YouTube subscribers, or the best strategies for making videos that YouTube might algorithmically recommend. But it is in YouTube’s interest for the inner workings of its platform — including recommendation algorithms, the way it calculates advertising rates and the precise locations of its boundaries — to remain at least somewhat secret, to prevent creators from gaming the platform’s quirks at the expense of either YouTube’s user experience or its bottom line. Criticism from its creators is one of the many things YouTube tolerates to maintain this arrangement, which is otherwise clearly working to their benefit.

Emergent politics of social platforms differ in scope and character and sit along peculiar axes, some familiar, others new. On Twitter, which does not pay popular users, they revolve around matters of speech and harassment; the platform hosts a range of progressive movements as well as an extremely visible and openly racist reactionary movement, and they have been at war. On Facebook, which is bigger and less combative, they focus on censorship and governance. But on any major platform, they tend to grow from the same fertile place: the gap between the structures built by the company and what users are allowed to do within them. Inevitably, this leads users to fundamental political questions: Who gets what, and why? Who gets to do what, and why?

Kjellberg’s December video drew responses from other YouTubers, debunking or explaining or affirming the claim by YouTube’s biggest star that the platform just wasn’t what it used to be, some gathering millions of views of their own. In retrospect, though, one brief moment in the original video was especially notable. As he wound down his rant, he hinted at a different sense of victimhood, drawing from the same sense of umbrage but directing it in a startling direction. After criticizing the platform for not understanding the realities of working on YouTube and wondering aloud if he was being punished, or somehow demoted, he affected a sincere voice and said, “I’m white.”

“Can I make that comment? But I do think that’s a problem,” he continued, before a smash-cut and a return to a mocking rant about not letting YouTube win — another assurance to viewers that, as always, he was just kidding, and that the offensiveness of the prior claim was the reason he’d made it.

Here, again, it is helpful to situate Kjellberg properly. He initially rose to popularity within the video-gaming subculture, which, beginning with the “GamerGate” movement and continuing through the American presidential election, became surprisingly and darkly politicized. His core audience is young, and his sensibility clearly appeals to a masculine teenage impulse to shock and provoke. The YouTube platform plainly incentivizes such attention-grabbing behavior, right up until the point that it becomes a liability to its operators or their other partners — a familiar dilemma in the entertainment world, sure, but one that plays out quite differently on YouTube, which is considerably and deliberately less hands-on with its talent. It’s telling that YouTube’s biggest star portrayed the platform as distant and capricious. It’s alarming that following his performative hostility led him to where it did: attempting to rationalize the use of anti-Semitic speech under the guise of transgression.

Kjellberg had, either instinctively or intentionally, constructed a political identity as YouTube’s insider class-traitor, raging against a system that’s — trust him, but also he’s just joking, but he would know — totally rigged. Now he is sketching out what a far more toxic YouTube politics of ressentiment might look like, under the threadbare cover of ironic bigotry, the recent history of which is worryingly instructive. In the meantime, the self-identified real racists are laughing along heartily, even as Kjellberg strenuously attempts to distance himself from them.

Maker Studios, which seeks to create a sort of auxiliary production apparatus for YouTube, has less of a connection to the platform than any of the YouTubers it has partnered with, who belong much more to their audiences, and to YouTube. Its severing of ties, in the bigger context of YouTube, amounts to a disavowal. YouTube’s reaction, and how it follows up, is the thing to watch. As, of course, is Kjellberg’s. His most recent video, posted after Maker Studios and Google made their announcements, was a lighthearted play-through of a gag video game called “Genital Jousting,” and did not reference the scandal. His commenters, on the other hand, did, asking almost uniformly that he not apologize for anything.

The full character of the burgeoning politics of platforms remains to be seen. But right-wing movements have found early traction and see opportunity. Even as farce, Kjellberg’s performance has been illustrative, and a small number of eager observers say they hope that, as backlash mounts, it will be galvanizing. “If Pewdiepie wasn’t #AltRight before,” Vox Day, a former video-game designer and an alt-right leader posted on Gab.ai, a private, Twitterlike service popular with the movement, “he is now.”

[deniscollins]

A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland

If you owned a welding company, what would you do if informed that one of the welders was a committed organizer for the Traditionalist Worker Party, a Nazi-group, who did podcasts for Radio Aryan, and posted Nazi support material on his Facebook page: (1) do nothing and respect his freedom of speech, (2) speak with him about restricting his political viewpoints, (3) fire him, or (4) something else (if so, what)? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall. They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.

Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.

But Mr. Hovater, in the days leading up to the wedding, was somewhat less anxious. There are times when it can feel toxic to openly identify as a far-right extremist in the Ohio of 2017. But not always. He said the election of President Trump helped open a space for people like him, demonstrating that it is not the end of the world to be attacked as the bigot he surely is: “You can just say, ‘Yeah, so?’ And move on.”

It was a weeknight at Applebee’s in Huber Heights, a suburb of Dayton, a few weeks before the wedding. The couple, who live in nearby New Carlisle, were shoulder to shoulder at a table, young and in love. He was in a plain T-shirt, she in a sleeveless jean jacket. She ordered the boneless wings. Her parents had met him, she said, and approved of the match. The wedding would be small. Some of her best friends were going to be there. “A lot of girls are not really into politics,” she said.

In Ohio, amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes, Mr. Hovater’s presence can make hardly a ripple. He is the Nazi sympathizer next door, polite and low-key at a time the old boundaries of accepted political activity can seem alarmingly in flux. Most Americans would be disgusted and baffled by his casually approving remarks about Hitler, disdain for democracy and belief that the races are better off separate. But his tattoos are innocuous pop-culture references: a slice of cherry pie adorns one arm, a homage to the TV show “Twin Peaks.” He says he prefers to spread the gospel of white nationalism with satire. He is a big “Seinfeld” fan.

“I guess it seems weird when talking about these type of things,” he says. “You know, I’m coming at it in a mid-90s, Jewish, New York, observational-humor way.”

Mr. Hovater, 29, is a welder by trade. He is not a star among the resurgent radical American right so much as a committed foot soldier — an organizer, an occasional podcast guest on a website called Radio Aryan, and a self-described “social media villain,” although, in person, his Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother. In 2015, he helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, one of the extreme right-wing groups that marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and again at a “White Lives Matter” rally last month in Tennessee. The group’s stated mission is to “fight for the interests of White Americans.’’

Its leaders claim to oppose racism, though the Anti-Defamation League says the group “has participated in white supremacist events all over the country.” On its website, a swastika armband goes for $20.

If the Charlottesville rally came as a shock, with hundreds of white Americans marching in support of ideologies many have long considered too vile, dangerous or stupid to enter the political mainstream, it obscured the fact that some in the small, loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make those ideas seem less than shocking for the “normies,” or normal people, that its sympathizers have tended to mock online.

And to go from mocking to wooing, the movement will be looking to make use of people like the Hovaters and their trappings of normie life — their fondness for National Public Radio, their four cats, their bridal registry.

“We need to have more families. We need to be able to just be normal,” said Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, in a podcast conversation with Mr. Hovater. Why, he asked self-mockingly, were so many followers “abnormal”?

Mr. Hovater replied: “I mean honestly, it takes people with, like, sort of an odd view of life, at first, to come this way. Because most people are pacified really easy, you know. Like, here’s some money, here’s a nice TV, go watch your sports, you know?”

He added: “The fact that we’re seeing more and more normal people come is because things have gotten so bad. And if they keep getting worse, we’ll keep getting more, just, normal people.”

Flattening the Edges

Mr. Hovater’s face is narrow and punctuated with sharply peaked eyebrows, like a pair of air quotes, and he tends to deliver his favorite adjective, “edgy,” with a flat affect and maximum sarcastic intent. It is a sort of implicit running assertion that the edges of acceptable American political discourse — edges set by previous generations, like the one that fought the Nazis — are laughable.

“I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘edgy’ Republican,” he says, while flatly denouncing the concept of democracy.

“I don’t even think those things should be ‘edgy,’” he says, while defending his assertion that Jews run the worlds of finance and the media, and “appear to be working more in line with their own interests than everybody else’s.”

His political evolution — from vaguely leftist rock musician to ardent libertarian to fascist activist — was largely fueled by the kinds of frustrations that would not seem exotic to most American conservatives. He believes the federal government is too big, the news media is biased, and that affirmative action programs for minorities are fundamentally unfair.

Ask him how he moved so far right, and he declares that public discourse has become “so toxic that there’s no way to effectively lobby for interests that involve white people.” He name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, architects of “anarcho-capitalism,” with its idea that free markets serve as better societal regulators than the state. And he refers to the 2013 science-fiction movie “Pacific Rim,” in which society is attacked by massive monsters that emerge from beneath the Pacific Ocean.

“So the people, they don’t ask the monsters to stop,” he says. “They build a giant robot to try to stop them. And that’s essentially what fascism is. It’s like our version of centrally coming together to try to stop another already centralized force.”

Mr. Hovater grew up on integrated Army bases and attended a mostly white Ohio high school. He did not want for anything. He experienced no scarring racial episodes. His parents, he says, were the kinds of people who “always assume things aren’t going well. But they don’t necessarily know why.”

He is adamant that the races are probably better off separated, but he insists he is not racist. He is a white nationalist, he says, not a white supremacist. There were mixed-race couples at the wedding. Mr. Hovater said he was fine with it.

“That’s their thing, man,” he said.

Online it is uglier. On Facebook, Mr. Hovater posted a picture purporting to show what life would have looked like if Germany had won World War II: a streetscape full of happy white people, a bustling American-style diner and swastikas everywhere.

“What part is supposed to look unappealing?” he wrote.

In an essay lamenting libertarianism’s leftward drift, he wrote: “At this rate I’m sure the presidential candidate they’ll put up in a few cycles will be an overweight, black, crippled dyke with dyslexia.”

After he attended the Charlottesville rally, in which a white nationalist plowed his car into a group of left-wing protesters, killing one of them, Mr. Hovater wrote that he was proud of the comrades who joined him there: “We made history. Hail victory.”

In German, “Hail victory” is “Sieg heil.”

A Growing Movement

Before white nationalism, his world was heavy metal. He played drums in two bands, and his embrace of fascism, on the surface, shares some traits with the hipster’s cooler-than-thou quest for the most extreme of musical subgenres. Online, he and his allies can also give the impression that their movement is one big laugh — an enormous trolling event put on by self-mocking, politically incorrect kids playing around on the ash heap of history.

On the party’s website, the swastika armband is formally listed as a “NSDAP LARP Armband.” NSDAP was the abbreviation for Hitler’s Nazi Party. LARP stands for “Live-Action Role Playing,” a term originally meant to describe fantasy fans who dress up as wizards and warlocks.

But the movement is no joke. The party, Mr. Hovater said, is now approaching 1,000 people. He said that it has held food and school-supply drives in Appalachia. “These are people that the establishment doesn’t care about,” he said.

Marilyn Mayo, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, estimated that the Traditionalist Worker Party had a few hundred members at most, while Americans who identify as “alt-right” could number in the tens of thousands.

“It is small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s one of the segments of the white supremacist movement that’s grown over the last two years,” she said.

It was midday at a Panera Bread, and Mr. Hovater was describing his political awakening over a turkey sandwich. He mentioned books by Charles Murray and Pat Buchanan. He talked about his presence on 4chan, the online message board and alt-right breeding ground (“That’s where the scary memes come from,” he deadpanned). He spoke dispassionately about the injustice of affirmative action, about the “malice directed toward white people” in popular media, about how the cartoon comedy “King of the Hill” was the last TV show to portray “a straight white male patriarch” in a positive light.

He declared the widely accepted estimate that six million Jews died in the Holocaust “overblown.” He said that while the Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler wanted to exterminate groups like Slavs and homosexuals, Hitler “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”

“I think he was a guy who really believed in his cause,” he said of Hitler. “He really believed he was fighting for his people and doing what he thought was right.”

He said he wanted to see the United States become “an actually fair, meritocratic society.” Absent that, he would settle for a white ethno-state “where things are fair, because there’s no competing demographics for government power or for resources.”

His fascist ideal, he said, would resemble the early days in the United States, when power was reserved for landowners “and, you know, normies didn’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say.”

His faith in mainstream solutions slipped as he toured the country with one of the metal bands. “I got to see people who were genuinely hurting,” he said. “We played coast to coast, but specifically places in Appalachia, and a lot of the Eastern Seaboard had really been hurt.”

Friendships Made and Lost

In 2012, Mr. Hovater was incensed by the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, believing the story had been distorted to make a villain of George Zimmerman, the white man who shot the black teenager. By that time, he and Ms. Hovater had been dating for a year or two. She was a small-town girl who had fallen away from the Catholic Church (“It was just really boring”), and once considered herself liberal.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, Ms. Hovater found herself on social media “questioning the official story,” taking Mr. Zimmerman’s side and finding herself blocked by some of her friends. Today, she says, she and Mr. Hovater are “pretty lined up” politically.

As they let their views be known, friends left and friends stayed.

“His views are horrible and repugnant and hate-filled,” said Ethan Reynolds, a Republican and city councilman in New Carlisle, Ohio, who said he had befriended Mr. Hovater without knowing his extremism. “He was an acquaintance I regret knowing.”

Jake Nolan, a guitarist in one of the bands Mr. Hovater played in, stuck with him. “There are people who literally go around Sieg Heiling,” he said. “Then you have the people who just want the right to be proud of their heritage” — people, he said, who are standing up against “what appears to be an increasingly anti-white America.”

Mr. Hovater befriended Mr. Heimbach in February 2015 at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Mr. Heimbach, who two years earlier had founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland, was holding a protest outside the proceedings and praising Vladimir Putin. The pair founded the Traditionalist Worker Party in the spring.

Soon Mr. Hovater was telling people that he would be running for a council seat in his hometown, New Carlisle, population 5,600. The announcement caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the heavy metal press. But he never filed papers.

On a recent weekday evening, Mr. Hovater was at home, sautéing minced garlic with chili flakes and waiting for his pasta to boil. The cats were wandering in and out of their tidy little rental house. Books about Mussolini and Hitler shared shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games. A day earlier, a next-door neighbor, whom Mr. Hovater doesn’t know very well, had hung a Confederate flag in front of his house.

“This is kind of brackish territory here,” Mr. Hovater said. “A lot of people consider Cincinnati the most northern Southern city.”

The pasta was ready. Ms. Hovater talked about how frightening it was this summer to watch from home as the Charlottesville rally spun out of control. Mr. Hovater said he was glad the movement had grown.

They spoke about their future — about moving to a bigger place, about their honeymoon, about having kids.