Jarred Corona

Nov 29, 202438 min read

The Left Needs to Clean House

After their loss in 2024, what should Democrats do to win back the presidency in 2028? Nominate Senator Fetterman and have him call JD Vance a r-slur on stage. Wait, what?

The defining pop artist of the 2020s so far is Taylor Swift. Argue with a wall, I don’t care. To quote Swift, she came “back stronger than a 90s trend.” That’s true. The Clintons, free trade, mismanaged pandemics, middle parts. Taylor Swift definitely came back stronger than all of those. If there’s one trend that might eventually give her a run for her money, it’s the return of slurs.

When I was growing up in the 2000s and 2010s, there was a real push for people to be nicer to each other. I know, wild. We were taught all about why we shouldn’t use gay derogatorily, how using the r-slur is cruel, and so on. There’s always been a pushback against this primarily from edgy people. I once dated a bit of an edgy boy who was elsewise a decent and left-leaning dude who had a South Park ideology when it came to slurs: they’re okay to use if you don’t mean them in a bigoted way. “Gay people aren’t f-slurs. People who act like f-slurs are f-slurs.” That’s the attitude the original poster took when someone else said using the r-word is ableist and not cool for a supposed leftist. “JD Vance isn’t actually mentally handicapped so it’s okay.”

To me, this sort of anti-reclamation that claims to be ironic like the definition of ironic is simply, “Nooo I don’t want to be judged for anything I’m a special birthday boy,” reads as reactionary and therefore conservative. But that tweet I referred to where the guy said it was fun to use the r-slur... He’s a socialist. Supposedly, that makes him leftwing.

What’s with le epic leftist poasters and being absolute assholes? Why are we using the r-slur?

I did a video a while back about how some leftists openly fantasize about a torturous hell where they can stuff all their enemies and enjoy the schadenfreude of cruelty being enacted upon them. We talked about Hasan Piker, the Deprogram, Chapo Trap House and Queen Elizabeth II. I talked about Cat Janice, a lady with cancer who was a zionist that a bunch of TikTok teens went all, “I’m glad she got cancer,” on. So in a way, we’re walking through the familiar. We’re home, you could say. Unfortunately, the house is a little messy right now. So let’s go through and clean it up.

One: The Office

We’re in an office for comedy reasons. That’s right. I’m going to tell jokes. Joke the first: What do you call a tattoo of a tiny letter n right here? An Arminian. Joke the two: Because of the immaculate conception, there isn’t an actual come to Jesus moment in the Bible. Joke-a le thrice: Despite leftwing politics talking a big game about compassion and making the world a better place, there sure are a lot of streamers, podcasters, and debate bro types who like to use slurs.

Now if there’s one thing I really hate doing, it’s listening to those three things. They’re not the type of art that I care to consume. Like, the angry bro media empire hits me the same as those TikToks that were super popular a few years ago where people would talk like they were in an anime. I’m not going to begrudge anyone for making them and I’m sure there are those out there I would be enamored by, but they aren’t typically for me.

That’s all to say, I watched a Vaush video for this. Who is Vaush? That’s a good question. What’s the difference between him, Keffels, Destiny, SecondThought, and Hasan Piker? This is a mystery the universe has no answer for. I think that’s really funny to say because the main thing I know about these people is that their stans hate each other and I bet any of them who heard me claim that were malding. Anyway, the way to tell them apart is that Hasan is the adonis one who posts pit and has this handsome sidekick named Austin who apparently likes twinks and flirting with Hasan.

To say I was shocked when I watched the Vaush video wouldn’t be accurate because I don’t have any electro toys or a dom at the moment, but I was expecting him to be a lot… louder. I don’t really appreciate loudness. It’s like a texture thing. I know that doesn’t technically make sense, like I don’t like most soups because the texture of broth tastes like dirt. What is that sentence? Has anyone I’ve said it to been able to make sense of it?

The video I watched was about Vaush’s history of using the n-word and the r-slur. He posted the video on his YouTube page in 2021. That’s gonna be important later. In it he seems to have grown from his past position that using the n-word in private or in jokes or “tactically” is good and those who don’t like it are babies. Vaush discusses how there are a bunch of edgy white boys out there who can be brought into left politics but do love edginess. He claims excising them completely is probably a bad tactic. I agree with that to a certain extent. I know, title clickbait, whatever. People can improve. They can get better. For that to happen, we have to, you know, let them. But. That doesn’t mean claiming it’s good or that we should be using those slurs ourselves.

Vaush goes on to relate his own journey from being against using these words to using them jokingly to feeling the call of bigotry to slowly rejecting it and those words once again. His premise is that jokes, as a form of communication, do affect us. If you tell “dumb woman” jokes, he says, there might eventually be a part of you that starts to believe them.

One of my favorite stand-up sets is Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. Gadsby is an Australian comedian who, before the success of Nanette, was considering quitting comedy and that’s sort of the premise of the special. It’s a highly divisive piece of work that I needed to see when I saw it in college. Here’s what she had to say about how jokes can affect perception. “I think part of my problem is comedy has suspended me in a perpetual state of adolescence. I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point and I sealed it off into jokes. And that story became a routine, and through repetition, that joke version fused with my actual memory of what happened. But unfortunately that joke version was not nearly sophisticated enough to help me undo the damage done to me in reality.”

In the joke tweet about calling JD Vance the r-word that we started this video with, someone asked what’s up with leftists using the r-word, and he responded that it’s fun. It’s a good time. Because he’s an edgy boy and edgy boys enjoy being, well, edgy. They think it’s a substitute for being sharp. And everyone wants to B sharp because then you can C. As ContraPoints says, the sea is mother. Don’t you want to return to the sea of existence? I bet after those three jokes I just did, groaning your way into relative non-existence is sounding pretty good.

Vaush was actually touching at one of the core theses of Gadsby’s Nanette: jokes can become reality. As you grow older and make fun of slang people younger than you use, you come to figure out that irony is a quick road to being unironic. Same. Mood. *fingerhit* Retweet. Things I said ironically and then for a time just literally said. It stopped being a joke and simply… was. You also see this a lot in sexuality, especially in regards to kink. If you want to adopt a kink, it seems like one of the most accurate ways to do it is to ironically pretend to have it through jokey jokes. You go from making fun of it or yourself or whatever the ~joke~ is to, sometimes, legitimately having the kink.

Remember how Vaush said his dumb woman jokes, that everyone makes, had a small effect on him and how he viewed women? Realizing that caused him to cut back on using the r- and n-words as a joke because he did not want to joke his way into adopting bigoted thinking.

People don’t like this premise, especially the edgy boys on the left. In part it’s because it’s asking for self-reflection and it is hard to take that as not being an attack. It feels like someone is assuming you’re a bad person and that the jokes have already bigotrified you. It’s sort of an internalization of the process behind canceling and trashing that ContraPoints talks about in her video on cancel culture. It can bring a level of shame which is always annoying to deal with and can be very harmful as an emotion. We want to argue that art doesn’t really affect reality in that way, which is a very long complicated conversation. But I think left-leaning people, lefty edgies, have an additional problem here: it feels idealistic. If you call yourself a socialist, a communist, a democratic socialist, an anarchist, there’s a decent chance that you like so-called scientific materialism.

Am I about to get into the debate between materialism and idealism? No, I find it boring and I don’t care. It also doesn’t really matter at this moment. Saying that the jokes you make can affect your beliefs feels like saying you can insert an idea into your mind by pretending to have the idea. Reality becomes formed by some weird Inception magic. I think you can explain this materially, in a way. Just as emotions can trigger physical responses, so too can physical responses trigger emotions and thoughts. Laughing can make you happy in a similar way that being happy can make you laugh. Telling these sorts of jokes requires you to say these slurs and “ironic” phrases. Physical repetition changes the thoughts in your mind.

The problem, which Vaush touches on, comes from those who consider themselves to be against bigotry who then engage in bigoted language. They can argue that their actions and the material effect they have as a person are anti-bigoted. It’s like Side B Christians who argue that non-affirming, that is anti-gay, theological personal convictions don’t qualify as homophobic if they aren’t followed by homophobic political or personal action. A person who thinks it’s a sin to be gay but votes for pro-LGBT politicians and policies, is loving towards the LGBT people in their lives, and doesn’t engage in homphobic attacks aren’t homophobic, right? Well, no, they are. That’s a pathetic argument to make. If you personally think Black people are inferior to white people but you don’t act on that, you’re still a racist.

At the end of the YouTube clip, Vaush says that he makes femoid jokes. Time to bring up that date again. 2021. In 2022, left breadtube streaming twitter had an apocalypse or something, I don’t know. Listen, the people who engage with everything as if it’s Drag Race Untucked were very happy and very loud and incredibly annoying. I’m not going to touch on most of it. To be honest, I don’t find drama all that interesting. I’m a film and theatre boy, I prefer artistic drama. But Vaush responded to Jowling Kowling Rowling being transphobic by making a lame misogynistic joke. It turned into a whole shitshow that I’m sure is very nuanced on many sides, many sides. What I think is interesting is how these things are connected. He made a video talking about how his old edgy racist ableist jokes and slurs were bad, and how tiny misogynist jokes did affect his viewpoint a bit. He said he was making femoid jokes. I’m going to assume that, yeah, they were just jokes. Then here… another misogynist joke. I wonder if he’s taken the time to connect that moment to the video I’ve been talking about. It seems like his desire to engage in edgy content has remained steady. “I can recognize that this bad and yet I have a slight addiction to it.” That’s not… great.

Don’t go harass that man. Don’t harass anyone, but especially not anyone I bring up in any of my videos. I do not consent to be your outrage fuel so you can enact cruelty on anyone. Put a pin in that idea.

YouTuber Jessie Gender made a video about the whole situation. Another video essayist, Maggie Mae Fish, commented, in part, “I have found most people who are able to make "jokes" like this, especially this aggressively, at the very least do not understand or care about the gravity of the issue. It feels like they are making light of real, tangible, and unending pain that they themselves do not have to experience and most likely never will!”

So let’s bring this all back around to the r-word. People who like to use it, who find it funny, fun, as the OP twitter user said, don’t take it seriously. This is what I assume is true of the Chapo Trap House people supposedly using it.

In the Vaush video, he specifically talks about fellow weird vibes leftist politics streamer Destiny and his history of using slurs. What do I know about Destiny? Approximately nothing, and we’re going to keep it that way!

Destiny would probably really vibe with the original joke tweet. Following the Harris-Trump debate, he tweeted, “god I'm so envious at the unbelievably low standard conservatives have for their candidate, it must be amazing to go on stage and speak like a retard and no one really care about it.”

Now. This seems to me to just be a pretty clear use of a slur as a slur. It’s almost like all this “Oh I don’t mean to demean people with disabilities” talk is a motte-and-bailey birthday boy argument. Destiny has a habit of this sort of thing. He quite likes slurs from what I’ve gathered.

Another streaming slur lover is a former streamer who recently retired from the game: Keffals. I’m putting her back to back with Destiny because something something internet drama. My knowledge of Keffals is that she’s a trans woman who has something to do with noodles that may or may not be racist. That sounds like really dumb internet drama to look into, so I refuse to figure it out. I also know that Keffals has had a particular love for the r-word. Slur lover Vaush has tweeted out defenses of Keffals' use of the word. From my memory, Keffals has defended her use of the slur because she herself is not neurotypical, thereby claiming it’s some sort of reclamation. Unfortunately, that’s a bastardization of what reclamation is. If you use a slur as a slur, it is inherently not reclaimed. Sorry ‘bout it.

YouTuber CopHatesMoe chastised Keffals’ use of the slur while also saying that while people who use the slur are assholes best avoided, there are more pressing concerns than dirtbags using slurs. That led me to a video they made about another political streamer, Xanderhal, whose name I heard before but had no idea who was. I watched both Moe’s video and Xanderhal’s reaction that he posted on his YouTube. At the time Xanderhal had a habit of using the r-word which he said he was actively cutting back on. I’m going to assume it’s no longer really part of his vocabulary. I do my best to assume good things in people, and I’m not interested in the canceling stuff.

The point of contention between the two seemed to be Xanderhal’s assertion that using slurs, specifically the r-word, is a way to draw in members of the edgy right and make them members of the edgy left. To scold people who aren’t on the left about it will entrench them to the right. Furthermore, while critiquing members of the left who engage in edgy slur use is morally correct, tactically, it makes it seem like the left isn’t fun. Because it’s fun to use slurs. He’s clearly in two conflicting minds about it in the video that he’s working through. At one point he does make the assertion that the r-word is on its way to a sort of complete cultural reclamation, a de-slurrage, where it only means stupid. This is an anecdotal assertion a lot of people, not Xan specifically, make when defending its usage. But… is it true?

I’m not sure.

To quote the Special Olympics page on the r-word, “Kantar reviewed nearly 50 million social posts in the U.S. over 2 years. Over two-thirds of posts about people with intellectual disabilities were negative and nearly 29 million contained slurs (i.e., using the word “retard(ed)” or other words combined with “-tard”).” So. It seems like there is still a significant amount of people who use the r-word as a slur to disparage people with atypical neurology.

I want to come back to Xan’s bringing people to the right thing. Put a pin in that because it smells a bit like laundry. Let’s talk instead about fun. Telling people not to use slurs makes their lives less fun. Does it? He talks about how slurs are, ultimately, lazy. That you can read people with creativity if you put a bit of effort in.

Two: The Library

In the grand tradition of Paris of Burning, the library is now open.

Chapo Trap House. You know, Chapo and Chris Hansen have a lot in common. Some of their best work is in a house with a child predator.

JT Chapman, AKA SecondThought… We’re still waiting on your third.

Carl Benjamin–sorry, sorry. Destiny. Destiny. More like Meh-stiny. I’d definitely prefer to be on my knees than see any more discourse about you.

Xanderhal. From the grand Haus of Hall, drag daughter of Jaida Essence Hall. Look over there! Damn, lost him. According to you, if you’re Vaush-lite then Vaush is Destiny-lite and I… prefer the dark.

Vaush. You know, Vaush is blocked on twitter by ContraPoints. Some people think it’s because of tactical misogyny-gate, but really, it’s because Natalie likes Wynn-ers.

Okay, okay, the library is closed due to lack of funding and illiteracy. One of the most popular challenges on RuPaul’s Drag Race is the reading mini-challenge. Everyone has their favorite reads. Etcetera’s pronouns, Ginger breathing, Bob being very talented, Shh Angela. There’s an infectious energy to the reading challenge. These are joking insults. I’d reckon most of us enjoy a good piece of roast. Nikki Glazer ripping into someone is beautiful. Heck, the reading rap battles on Wild N Out are a bunch of fun to sit through and watch. “How’d you lose weight and still look the same?” Brilliant.

The r-word is, ultimately, lazy, like most pejoratives. Calling someone an asshole doesn’t take much effort. If it’s due to being fun, creative reads are more fun, aren’t they? Here’s a low effort but fun one: I slept with your dad. He’s worried about your life choices. This gets at three things: 1) your dad is a gay whore, 2) he likes to have pillow talk with strangers, and 3) you’re so disappointing, he’s seeking advice from the bottom bitches he sleeps with. Is it a great joke? No, but I think you get the point. The fun is in searching for the joke, sorting through the possibilities, building it up in your own head. Heck, I think my favorite part of comedy is telling a joke that absolutely bombs. That is delicious for me. One of my favorite backstage moments for a show I was in was when an applause moment recieved nothing from the audience. Could eat that all day.

But, well, what’s the joke of calling someone the r-word? There isn’t one, is there? It’s not a read. It’s an insult. You can amuse yourself coming up with reads, but people who want to use slurs can’t really amuse themselves off of that. They have to throw the slur at someone and hope it provokes a reaction. The reaction is where the fun is for them. Which sort of gives it away. If you’re trying to provoke a reaction out of someone by calling them a slur, then you are using it as a slur even if you’re telling yourself that you aren’t.

But let’s take a step away from the r-word for the moment. Why are we so obsessed with insulting each other and being cruel in the first place? Why do we see that as, “Fun?” Obviously in part this is because narrative is built on conflict and conflict implies a certain degree of cruelty. Part of this, though, is because of how social media works, isn’t it? As NPR puts it, “This is because algorithms consistently select content that evokes anger and outrage from its users to maximize engagement.”

To extrapolate from that, being cruel gets you more clicks. It gets you more likes. More likes hits that little serotonin button. If you find something that dispenses happiness, you’re going to want to hit up over and over again. Maybe you start using slurs and cruelty more often. It gets you more clicks. More fans. More happiness. It’s fun not because you’re really doing anything enjoyable but because being hateful and cruel gets you close to the almighty. Only, instead of Adonai or Allah of Buddah, this god’s name is validation. Yeah, the big V.

In my video over Avatar the Last Airbender, I talked about torture and defense mechanisms torturers have to build in order to carry out their violences. To reuse a bit from there: As Al-Rodhan points out, torture is much easier to commit if you dehumanize the victims. You don’t engage your empathy as deeply when dealing with non-human entities.

To keep going with these constant insults and cruelty, we have to section it off into one of two paths. Path one: you are reading and roasting, not insulting. Adding a bit of humor helps alleviate the feeling of being cruel. Path two: you dehumanize your target, consciously or not. This is going to happen. Are you making jokes or are you dehumanizing someone? Are you having fun or are you being a sadist?

Sometimes it seems like people are applying a sort of Franz Fanon theory of colonized personhood through online insults. For Fanon, the oppressed become human and assert their humanity through acts of great violence against their oppressors. For righteous assholes, those who justify their dickishness through some marginalization or difficulty they face, they seem so have cast themselves in the role of the colonized and their target as the colonizer. Therefore the use of vitriol is an assertion of humanity. This seems to slowly degrade into a belief that an attack on cruelty is an attack on their humanity.

Unfortunately for them, Fanon is wrong in the first place, and even if he were right, none of that would extend to be a petty and vindictive asshole.

This is a somewhat nuanced conversation, I suppose. I remember a lot of TikToks and capital D Discourse about Drew Afuelo. In response to men being misogynistic, she would insult their appearances, typically based around what would be seen as “flaws” in regards to alpha male skinmaxxing skull shape dudebro morons. She has a specific point she’s trying to…

Sorry. Look, to a degree I do believe that it is nuanced. Most things have a degree of nuance to them. But at the same time, isn’t that just an excuse? I don’t think this is good or healthy. It is seeking out a group or person to whom you can be cruel and get applauded for it.

In my video talking about leftists who gleefully imagine evil people getting tortured in hell, I talked about how that isn’t a desire for justice. It flies directly in the face of the purported beliefs about justice those very people espoused. Rather, it’s an outlet for bloodlust and sadism. “I want to find people I can hurt. I want to be applauded for my desire to harm.”

That’s what the algorithm does. It applauds you for causing harm. This applies to anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. When I make videos criticizing the idiocy of the right, these dude bros pop in and try to insult my masculinity like that’s a thing I give a shit about. Look, I talk about my gender in my upcoming poetry collection A Museum of Art and Eggs, but the long and short of it is: I’m a man in so much as I’m a gay guy who wants other gay guys to want me. That’s as far as my connection to masculinity goes. Otherwise, I don’t care. They do this not because it’s effective. Not because it’s particularly creative. In my case, it doesn’t even get them the reaction they want. But they’re used to it getting them internet points.

And, honestly, I have fun playing with them in my comments. One dude was trying to say I’m a trans man I guess and as part of that he was complimenting my skin, so I just flirted with him. I thought it was funny. Trolling people is kind of fun. I like being absurd. I like entirely ignoring the point of whatever insult someone was trying to throw at me and teasing them instead.

Reading is fun. Interestingly enuogh, I’ve never felt the need to call any of them the r-word because I have morals and I’m not a lazy edgelord who wants other edgelords to appluad me for lazy hatred. Funny, that.

Whenever people complain about the cruelty of the internet, someone pops up to say something like, “First time?” As if something being bad and having been bad is an excuse. If a place has been cruel, then it simply must stay cruel, and there’s no point in critiquing it or trying to be better than that or wanting to enforce a space that is better than that. As Xanderhal says, if you’re against cruelty and enforce that, you become a killjoy. It’s hard to recruit people if you’re miserable. It’s hard to keep people if you seem like boring scolds.

But… I have fun all the time. When people get annoyed at what I say in these videos, they critique the annoying voices that I do. But those annoying voices are fun for me. I like doing them. I’m not going to stop doing them because they’re “cringe” or whatever. I think that might honestly be the difference and selling point. In my view, while there are currently segments of the left and right that will celebrate you for all your horrid hatred, only the left has space for “cringe.” Cringe, as a internet genre, is almost inherently anti-edgy.

On first blush, cringe and edge both seem like the diversionary paths headed away from asceticism. Ascetics is the belief that denial is holy. That doesn’t have to be religious, of course. For an ascetist, the worst thing you can be is self-indulgent. Ascetism likes to cast anything it doesn’t like hedonistic or selfish. We most often associate ascetists with the sort of stereotypical TV conservatives who are like “we must not be of the world” to defend not allowing their children to engage with pop culture. Ascetists are the ones behind things like the Catholic macho Exodus90 bullshit. Suffering is good because Jesus suffered. To enjoy earthly things is to stray from god. You see that in the secular world often times with people who are so politically obsessed that they adopt the Cause as their version of Evangelical Christianity. You may have heard the comparison between revolutionary larpers on the left with Evangelical doomsday rapturists on the right. Both share the sort of “culture is a distraction,” “the glorious apocalypse is coming,” “enjoying yourself is selfish and evil” sort of vibe.

Cringe and edge on the surface both seem to go against ascetics. Cringe is cringe because it is indulgent in some way. It is enjoyable or emotional or beloved. Passionate. You cringe at someone who isn’t good at something but does it anyway because they want to. You cringe at someone with passions you find weird or annoying. You cringe at someone who indulges in sexual activities that go beyond typical vanilla intercourse. Edge also seems like a rejection of ascetics. You are indulging in your anger, after all. You’re going against societal norms and niceties. You’re letting yourself enjoy cruelty. But. This is only on the surface.

What is edge?

We think of it as pushing the bounds in a dark or cruel way. You’re calling up a sort of evil, you might say. It’s using a sort of asociatlity. Edgy humor is often about violence or murder or sexual harms. Orphan jokes, for instance. But then there’s a different of edginess. It makes use of slurs and stereotypes and hatred. And those things are not directed at the ascetics. They aren’t pulling up a photo of a nunnery and going “Faggots.” They’re most often attacking… things that the asceticsts dislike. Edgelords do not have a great enemy in the ascetists. Their enemy is the cringe. They despise indulgence. This version of edgy cannot exist in the same space as the cringe. They will either drive out the cringy or excise themselves because edginess cannot abide by general joy and dorky sincerity.

There are edgy element of the left, the right, and the center. Where is the cringe allowed to exist? At the moment, the right is built around a whole-scale rejection of cringe and sincere indulgence. You may be edgy or ascetist on the right. There exists a segment of the left that is woke-scoldy enough to dislike cringe because of their own form of ascetics. We have our edgelords. But we also have space for the cringe. For indulgent fun and joy.

So… is a rejection of using slurs a declaration the left isn’t fun? No, not really. It’s saying we don’t hold your anger as sacred. Put a pin in that.

In all that talk of asceticism, you might be most familiar with how ascetists approach intimacy. It’s behind a lot of the “arguments” against both kink and non-heterosexual orientations. If we’re talking about sex, we need a change of scenery. This isn’t Beauty and the Beast, so let’s head to…

Three: The Bedroom

I have quite a few videos about homophobia. There’s one about asceticism that goes over Side B Christianity. It’s the newest form of ex-gay nonsense for those of you who aren’t familiar. I connect that to my complicated feelings about the movie Knock at the Cabin in a different video. I have one going over homophobic leftist ascetists who call LGBT identies and group politics “bourgeois decadence” which is their version of the Catholic catechism’s “intrinsically disordered” because these people are fundamentally the same as conservative Christians. I have on going over the GOP’s homophobia where I look at the then state platforms, senators, governors, and so on. I have one dissecting the use of the f-slur. And I have a recent one talking about leftists who dismiss queer rights and claim caring about them is selfish.

Given how much I talk about it, you might think there’s not much more to say.

For the purposes of this video, the most relevant video is Noah Shcnapp: Slurring the Baddies, the one where I discuss supposed leftists calling Noah a faggot. A large part of that video is dedicated to examining what reclamation is and what it isn’t. If you don’t want to go watch that, I do recommend reading the article “The Other F Word” by Arnold Zwicky. The long and short of it is: if you are using a slur as a slur, then it’s not reclamation. It’s weaponizing whatever bigotry backs the slur. Often times, in in-group situations, this is to distinguish the “good” minority who doesn’t deserve hatred, scorn, and terror from the “bad” minority who does deserve hatred, scorn, and terror. The gay men who called Noah Schnapp a faggot when talking about his Zionism were asserting to the edgy members of the left that he is a Bad Gay they can be homophobic towards, whilst they, slur throwers, are the cool good gays who don’t deserve homophobia.

I bring all of that up in part to reject any “reclamation” defenses that might come up when calling other people the r-word. That was the defense Keffals liked to pull. But it wasn’t reclamation because she would use it for its slurrage against others. That is simply engaging in ableism and then running away from it when confronted.

One thing you may have noticed on Twitter in the 2020s before we all started to flee to BlueSky in part because the app is getting noticeably worse functionality, is the rise in bigoted statements by supposedly leftwing or left-leaning people that precede their statements by using “white.” So they’ll something homophobic but aim the homophobic statement at white gays. Or they’ll say something misogynistic, transphobic, or ableist but aim it at white women or white trans people or white disabled people. This seemed to be a bit of a cheat code. Especially when public likes went away, those sort of posts allowed people to indulge in edgy bigotry while feeling progressive because of the modifier “white.”

The twitter user who sparked my video on Noah Schnapp, the one who decided to call him a faggot in order to differentiate himself as a good gay and Noah as a bad gay deserving of homophobia, HeyJaeee, recieved quite a bit of love for his little burst of homophobia. People attempted to defend him by calling it reclamation because he too is gay. But as I point out, and Zwicky points out, that’s not what reclamation is. Because this was nominally pro-Palestine, edgy through its slur usage, and allowing homophobic indulgence, it received quite a bit of love. I remember a specific pushback when someone said something along the lines of, “You guys have gotten way to comfortable calling gay people slurs,” a few people fired back, “Not comfortable enough for the white gays.” What’s of note here is that they’re not defending critiquing Noah, a Jewish man, for percieved whiteness or anything. They were defending homophobia because they thought he was an acceptable target whose targeting would bring them edgy internet points.

My fellow leftist and left-leaning gay guys have a bit of a problem when it comes to just throwing out slurs as slurs to hit people with homophobia. Anecdotally, this does seem to have gotten worse over the years as the dirtbag left has entrenched itself. The rising use of the r-word on the left is not isolated. Proponents of the r-word might argue that it’s increasing in usage because it’s losing its slurrage, something we already argued against earlier, but that doesn’t track when there’s also an increase in the f-slur on the left. That would say that the edgy group isn’t merely being edgy. They’re engaging in an increased amount of bigotry because they feel comfortable in expressing it among certain segments of the left.

What happens, then, if we have a very angry, very cruel subsection of the left crashing with a different section that espouses love, equity, compassion, and an embrace of cringe. These two sections crashing leads to folks in the center not seeing us as un-fun scolds but as cruel hypocrites.

It’s really frustrating because I do see and understand Xanderhal’s point that engaging in this weird edginess might be able to bring in edgy boys from the right and steadily transform them into leftists. That is happening, right? ContraPoints used to be known from deradicalizing the alt-right. Surely she was successful just as these edgy boys are now… right?

I’m not so sure.

But listen, if you’re a filthy faggot like I am, after you’re done in the bedroom, you need to wash your sheets. So let’s head on over to…

Four: The Laundry Room

How hatred and cruelty gets laundered into “serious” political thought as “populism”

Is there anything better than sheets fresh out the dryer right after you’ve dried off from a long, hot shower, ready to curl up in bed and go to sleep with the cold air blowing? Well, if you ask online politicos, they’re sure there’s one thing better than that and that’s because it’s better than anything else: populism.

Populism is a bit of a tricky thing to talk about because people really mean a handful of meaningfully different things that they throw under the umbrella of populism. The first, and what you’ll probably see more often, can also be called popularism. Popularism is the wild shocking idea that you should do things that are popular. Yes, I know, mind-blowing when living under any form of democracy. Popularism does run into a few pesky problems. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that sometimes good things are not popular. If you’re a strict popularist, when a minority would like access to equal rights they’re currently being denied, if the majority does not like equality, then the majority should be listened to. That’s not a morally defensible position. It might be so politically, but politics without morals… Well, that’s politics, but still. Another issue you run into is that people like contradictory things. They like both low inflation and high employment. They want higher wages but also lower costs, especially for things like DoorDash. They want affordable housing but they don’t want to build houses. Many of them want tariffs but they don’t want higher prices. Lots of these things can’t be done together because they simply misunderstand how things work. That sounds cruel, but in part it’s because politicians run on easy solutions, slogans, and lies. When you run on easy lies, you get voters who want those lies to be real even when it’s proven they can’t be. But overall, popularism as something to sometimes embrace is simply sensible in our system of governance. “People are more likely to vote for you when you do stuff they like.”

Well. Maybe.

But that’s not the only thing people can mean when they say, “Populist.” The economic research forum posits there are three types of populists: economic populists, political populists, and cultural populists. According to the author, Ali Akarca, economic populism seeks to transfer wealth to the middle and working classes. Political populists seek to remove barriers between populist politicians and enacting their will on the government. Cultural populists seek to identify the “real” people who are up against the sinister elites who must be defeated.

If we apply this to the left, then we have the economic policies of increasing taxes on the rich and businesses in order to pay social welfare programs or forgive the debt of individuals. The Party for Socialism and Liberation’s call to abolish the Supreme Court would count as political populism, the removal of a current check and balance so as to make it supposedly easier to enact their policy goals. Cultural populism would be the class warfare arguments of elements like the DSA, where the working class is the good and the bourgeoisie are the evil elites.

We can apply it to the right as well. For economic populists, we have people arguing for increased tariffs under the false premise that doing so will transfer money from the rich countries and corporations we trade with to the American people, or like tax cuts. Political populism comes from Trump attempting to overturn the 2020 election or, more relevant now, the desire to abolish the Department of Education. This is the type of populism that drives Project 2025 to talk about gutting the federal workforce and adding more political appointees. Culturally, Trump’s entire thing with drain the swamp is “us versus the evil elites.” This is the sort of populism that drives white grievance politics or men’s rights activism, incels, and Christian nationalists.

Often times those three things work together. If it’s the working class vs the evil elites, forgiving student loan debt takes the boot off of people’s backs so they’re better suited to fight, and if the Supreme Court says no, pull an Andrew Jackson and do it anyway because they ruled the President is immune from criminal proceedings for doing crimes. Or, much worse in my opinion to be clear, you argue that the “real” people are American citizens, immigrants are the “other,” and that deporting them will, say, lower housing costs. Promise to illegally use the Alien Enemies Act to do it while bypassing the criminal justice system. Cultural, economic, political.

Or, as Hank Green puts it, “Populism is not an ideology. It’s a marketing strategy.”

What does any of this have to do with laundry or the r-word?

Here’s a quote from Akarca:

(P)opulist leaders may emerge from among the elites. Then, by acting crude, using vulgar and derisive language, and presenting their wealth as self-made, they try to appear as being part of the common people and not of the establishment.

I want to posit that the dirtbag left intends to launder cruelty into “populism” in an attempt to appear as “common” because they view the “common” person as cruel, pretty, and vindictive.

This isn’t to say populism is always bad. There are definitely institutions worthy of critique and restructuring. Populists do not often make something out of nothing. But they are alchemists who turn grievance into hatred.

As Andrew Marantz put it in the New Yorker, talking about Chapo’s brand of fiery and often cruel populist tendencies “(P)eople who objected to ‘Chapo’ on aesthetic ground were sometimes suspected of being insufficiently committed to the cause…. (I)nsults are to the left of arguments.”

Calling someone the r-word is an insult. Because it’s quick, lazy, and edgy, if you call yourself a leftist, fellow supposedly leftist edgers will applaud that more than they would an actual ideological take down or critique. Because the insult is further to the left, in their mind, than an argument. In their mind, this is the way of the common person. To be the “real” people is to be a cruel person. To be of the people is be more on the left, and to be more on the left is to be morally and intellectually superior.

Populists often care more about the spectacle of reality TV dogfights than achieving policy. Hank Green was right. Many of the people who advocate for Democrats being more populist aren’t going to turn around and celebrate populist economic victories if they aren’t paired with the cathartic relief of punishing and hurting their enemies.

This is sort of drives a lot of NIMBYism, isn’t it? For those of you who aren’t too online in annoying spheres of the internet, congratulations. NIMBY stands for “Not in my backyard.” Yeah, it doesn’t really tell you anything about what NIMBY’s believe if you don’t already know, does it? In the housing debate, there are two broad ideological camps. NIMBYs, broadly speaking, do not support additional housing development especially if that development is not promised to be affordable housing. YIMBYs, on the other hand, that’s “Yes in my backyard,” do support development and would like to see a lot more of it. You’ll see vicious fights between the two because this is the internet and everyone mostly cares about getting people already on their side to cheer at them for an epic dunk. One of the things NIMBYs oppose is the idea that new housing will serve to enrichen the already wealthy developers and landowners. New apartments are more likely to be nice, after all, and so will be more expensive. The YIMBY response is that yeah, and the rich will move into those houses, driving down competition and prices for other units. I’m not about to hash out the whole debate between them. Go look it up if you hate yourself. I have the words muted on twitter because I started taking meds and stopped like self-harm.

But we can see how development would go against cultural populism. While it would likely benefit people in general, it would also give quite a bit to the wealthy elites. Populism cannot abide by the idea that its casted enemy group can be engaged with in any way rather than defeated and destroyed. Populism requires a grand, strict story. The populist can only rise in power by building up animosity and claiming they are the one who can wreck damages onto the enemy so that the real people can rise up and enjoy their enemy’s suffering.

When you tell an edgy populist guy not to use the r-word, you threaten to smash his understanding of the political story. In his mind, cruelty is populism and populism is the only way to be victorious and get to bask in moral bloodshed. It makes the story more complicated. You’re going to see a lot of populists who are what we might derisively call “class reductionists.” That’s because the cultural populism leftists are most likely to buy into is the “real” working class, who are actual beings, versus the “outsider” rich and elite who have forfeited their humanity. Class reductionists believe that solving this fight will fix the ills of society because that’s the story populism has to tell. It’s a grand good versus evil myth. The DSA attempted to defend its union-busting in a similar manner. Because its membership is of the real working class and its National Political Committee is elected from the membership, then they cannot possibly be a valid target of workplace organizing. If that sounds dumb to you, it’s because it is. The story they told was incorrect on the face of it and purely self-serving.

When people say they want populist campaigning, they often mean angry campaigning. Importantly, no matter what you achieve for the populist, it will never abate their anger. They will find a new person, system, or group to direct their ire at. Populism, most often, is not an ideology. It’s a marketing strategy. And the chosen strategy is anger. It ferments hatred. So the performance of anger becomes more important than the work of politics. You call a Republican a slur not because you think it will gain you power, deny them power, or achieve any goal, but because it serves as an expression and performance of anger and cruelty. That performance is of utmost importance. Donald Trump isn’t popular in spite of his cruelty. For many people, he’s popular because of it.

Populism, or at the very least, hatred and cruelty laundered and disguised as populism, has no future to build a trusting, lasting, good society. A politic not based on empathy or a desire for a better world is an evil politic. It’s a theory that we cannot allow to fester within us or our communities. Is it “fun” to say slurs to people and then birthday boy yourself into getting celebrated for being a bigot but wokely? I suppose in a twisted sadistic way. But it isn’t healthy. And it’s not leftism. What is it? Well, it’s shit.

Five: The Bathroom

Are people being deradicalized through leftist content creators posting edgy, borderline bigoted dog whistles with a veneer of anti-capitalist rhetoric? Or… are they being re-radicalized? To put it another way, how many of these people are changing and how many of them are switching their permission systems?

I’m not interested in denying someone’s lived reality. “I used to believe and behave one way. Now I don’t.” That’s a matter of the human condition. All of us, to one extent of another, change our viewpoints on the world, politics, morality, art, everything, at least a little bit. A little Maddie Morphosis can be a wonderful thing. But when someone goes from a hateful, edgy rightwinger to a hateful, edgy leftwinger or even a hatred, edgy centrist, what’s really changed? Have we actually deradicalized or unpacked any beliefs or have we simply adopted a new social sphere with different permission structures for cruelty?

Think about the morality of appearance. You might be thinking, “Morals have nothing to do with appearance,” and you’d be correct. However, that doesn’t stop people of every persuasion from insulting people based on their looks. When I critique or make fun of the right, these precious little edgy boys jump in and they’re like, “You stupid woman. You need testosterone, you lady person. You sooooo cutesy, you stupid… man-thing.” I like to tease them back and start flirting because really what they’re saying is that I look soo submissive and breedable, which I am. The left does this sort of thing, too though. How many times have you seen someone repost a bad selfie and be like, “LOL this is what happens when you’re a bigot.” It’s clearly saying there’s something wrong with not being attractive to whoever the speaker is. The right uses physical insults to enforce what they believe are traditional norms. That’s their defense. Leftists who attack people’s appearance couch it as an attack on someone’s morality or politics. That’s the permission system they’ve given themselves. The two sides are claiming different reasons for the actions, and yet, they’re functionally working in the same way. Both of these hypothetical people are simply being cruel because they want to be cruel, and then they’re searching for a justification so that other people won’t label them as cruel. They want to be mean and be celebrated for it. Morality becomes a defense instead of an actual set of ideas about ethics and philosophy.

Is there a difference between an edgy rightwinger, an edgy centrist, and edgy leftwinger who all use the r-word as an insult against someone they’re debating or dislike? Functionally, no. The behavior does not change. What changes is the performed defense of the action.

What’s easier? To change your behavior with self-reflection or to find a new, more acceptable excuse to not change anything? When Drag Race fans on twitter decided to attack Sugar & Spice over a Starbucks ad, they didn’t care that “Boycott Starbucks because of Palestine” movement was built on mounds of misinformation and misplaced anger. It gave them permission to do what Drag Race fans love most: spend all day shitting on drag queens. The boycott didn’t matter. What mattered was being celebrated for doing what they wanted to do anyway.

Think of the seven deadly sins. What would you say the most holy sin is? If you were to ask me, I’d say either lust or gluttony. Sex, love, longing, and desire are all beautiful things worthy of celebrating and dedicating thousands of museums to. Gluttony, the act of consumption and the desire to consume and be consumed, is incredibly intertwined with lust. I think if you were to ask most people, though, they would pick little Salem Bradley: Wrath.

To very loosely paraphrase Natalie Wynn’s video Envy, revolutionary ideation is a sort of leftwing performance of anger at percieved impotence. These people aren’t actually gearing up for a violent take over of the country. PSL talks a big game about violence and revolution, but it makes no effort to change things or bring this about. The performance of anger and sadism is more important than to do anything with it. I mean, I’m glad that they haven’t acted on it. I’d rather them be loud and useless than out there causing actual harm to people.

Populism is widely fueled by anger. The populist cannot survive without a horny, angry mob looking for witches to burn because otherwise they can’t stroke the flames. It’s stoke the flames? That’s disappointing.

Have you ever suggested to someone on the internet that they’re… too angry? That all of this hatred they’re carrying around and using to lash out at people is unhealthy and dangerous? That it’s harming them, their movement, and the people around them? They love that. They love it so much they start telling you how not being as angry and hateful as they are means you’re living in a fantasy bubble. You’re Glinda if she was a psychopathic narcissist. How dare you critique my anger?

It’s like the people who don’t abide any criticism of self-harm activism. After Aaron Bushnell self-immolated, there were a bunch of nominally leftwing Twitter accounts talking about how such an action was brave and would change things and more people needed to be like him. Did things change? No. Because hurting yourself cannot fix anything. These same accounts, after talking up self-harm to their impressionable, angry followers, balked and got very angry over the suggestion that encouraging suicide is bad. When you say self-immolation is a mental health problem, that performative suicide is not helpful, they’d pull out that dumbass quote about the “only measure of health in this sick society.” They’d lambast therapy, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics. They’d decry the idea that you should engage with art and culture and community that wasn’t forged purely around angry activism.

The performance of anger is very important to them. To say that perhaps it’s unhealthy and they can engage in politics with passion ~and~ better mental health is an attack, in their minds, on their entire worldview. Anger is holy. Wrath is the sin of God. After all, God brings the rapture, and their anger will bring the revolution.

It won’t. There’s not one coming, at least not at the moment, but performing like it might is psychologically important. It feels like doing something without having to actually do anything. It also cements the narrative of cultural populism. If someone is not on the side of “the people,” then they are the enemy. And the enemy, we all know, is not really human. If they’re not human, it doesn’t matter what bigotry you throw at them. Bigotry is dehumanizing by nature. You can’t dehumanize someone you’ve already determined doesn’t count as human. That’s why the cultural populists, the ones who view the most important aspect of politics as permission to hate, are so very cruel. And they scoff and roll their eyes at anyone who doesn’t agree or like cruelty.

When you foster such intense anger and hatred within yourself, you do eventually realize it’s unhealthy. You then have two options: you can work on unpacking your anger and being healthier person in general OR you can lash out with your anger and find catharsis in performative cruelty. Therapy and self-work is difficult and annoying. Sure, eventually life will be better and more fun when you are healthier, but that doesn’t make right this very second fun. The catharsis of theatre, though, alleviates some of the pressure built up in your bones which gives you space to store more anger. You don’t have to change. You just have to play the part of a prick. Using the r-word against people is “fun” in that it provides catharsis.

Six: Media Room

What is catharsis? I’ve said that word like 69 times in the past minute. Like a vers bottom during his annual attempt at topping, it comes at you quick.

So catharsis, broadly speaking, is a purifying expulsion. Most often you’ll hear about it in regard to art and the build-up and release of negative emotions. You know, horror movies are often cathartic in that they build dread and fear before releasing them through either the moments of violence, comedy, or the denouement at the end. I’m a personally pretty anxious individual and I love horror as a genre. It allows me to confront my fears, feel them, and expel them. Outside of things like Final Destination which cause a build up of anxiety that I struggle with for days after engaging with them, horror art relieves my constant fear.

When I was getting my theatre degree, there was a decent amount of talk over whether or not shows should attempt to bring catharsis. I remember this most strongly as it relates to German playwright and Marxist Bertolt Brecht. Brecht wanted to use theatre as a means of enacting societal change. His theory was partially based on the idea that catharsis functions as a sort of opiate, a sedative on audiences that makes it so they don’t leave the theatre with a desire to do anything. In order to fight against catharsis, Brecht developed his strange-making version of theatre. By distancing the audience from the show, by reminding them that they’re watching theatre, by making things strange, he thought you might remove catharsis while keeping the build-up and tension. Denying the relief would lead people out into the real world to enact change based on these now pent up emotions. Instead of passive, sedated audiences, we would get active, angry audiences.

It’s interesting to me. Because, to a degree, I agree with Brecht. I really love playing with Brechtian elements as a playwright and as a director. I like taking people out of the story and putting them back in their seat in the house. I think it’s interesting and sort of funny to mess with people like that. I also think it might, yeah, have a better shot at enacting populist political change.

But. I don’t see populism as a healthy movement. So maybe I need to reevaluate some of my values when it comes to creating and producing pieces of art.

I don’t think we should remove all of these angry, edgy people from society, from politics, or from the left. But I do think we need to draw some lines in the sand. Our enemies are still human. Bigotry is not value neutral. You cannot use slurs as your catharsis. You have to work on yourself. And I think part of the way to engage these people, hot take, is through violent video games.

Art is a better outlet for catharsis than cruelty is. As such, we have to be willing to make, promote, and consume the sorts of art that directly target specific emotions. If you want to let out rage and aggression, then we need rageful and aggressive piece of art. You need Call of Duty. You need John Wick. You need violent, almost evil theatre. We need tragedy and we need sappy stupid romance. I’m not saying that art is the only solution. But it will and can help. And also, if we’re telling you, “Hey, go take out your anger on a video game or one of those “break stuff” rooms instead of other people,” we can’t be accused of not being fun. We’re telling you to go have fun instead of labelling performative anger as fun when it isn’t, not really.

What’ll happen, of course, is people will make the Brechtian argument: If we release our wrath, then the rapture won’t come. Things won’t change. But here’s the thing, loves, the rapture isn’t coming anyway. More importantly, your movements will be better off when you are happier and healthier and not running off anger and anger alone. Wrath is a fuel that burns quick and deep. It will leave you scarred and tired. The movement will have to replace you. And you’ll feel discarded and despair. When you are happier, kinder, healthier, you can survive longer. You become more convincing. People will want to spend more time with you. The movement will be healthier for having a healthier you operating inside of it.

There is certain asocial behavior, a cruelty that has risen with this rise in populism. That is not a fluke. It is, indeed, the very mechanism of populism. We cannot survive by trying to one-up each other’s cruelty. For the left to move forward, we have to clean house. And then I guess we have to stock it up with books, movies, films, and video games that violent, filthy, sappy, sweet, angry, beautiful, and fun.

As they say in Oz: To do magic, grab a broom.