This is a 6-month old video from Taylor Lorenz interviewing the founder of Jubilee. It came across my feed and in light of recent events, contains some interesting reporting on the rationale employed by people who are going out of their way to introduce liberals to fascist ideas.
This interview starts getting interesting around 8:00 and becomes explicitly about platforming fascists around 15:00. The founder goes on and on about “having empathy for both sides” before finally the mask slips and he reveals that he’s a former Obama campaign staffer who doesn’t like “division.” In other words, this reveals that he is an explicitly anti-revolutionary liberal fascist. The project of Jubilee videos is to depress revolutionary sentiments via exposure, essentially. What do they hope to get out of something like putting Mehdi Hasan in a room with 20 Hitlers then? I think what they’re accomplishing is that liberals get a little less likely to punch a Hitler in the face when they find one in meatspace, a little more tolerant of being around nazis. In other words, this is the ultimate fascist weaponization of identity politics as a framework. It also functions to help sharpen debate pervertry. One final observation: an insidious thing this guy seems to be doing is equivocating “empathy” with being a debate pervert. Which is obviously not a passable human definition of being empathetic.
former Obama campaign staffer
Oh boy, another one of these people actively making life worse!
i’m convinced that the only reason why neoliberals hate nazis now is because they were the enemies in war and were defeated; the americans will not be defeated in the same way thanks to being un-invadeable super power and it will take significantly longer for it to happen through its inherent contradictions.
in the meantime, we’re all going to have to watch it happen.
I don’t think it’s really a “sharpening of debate pervertry.” The quality of arguments on Jubilee from the dozen videos I’ve seen across the last couple of years is almost uniformly extremely low. I think the Hasan debate was a great example of this, because the most standout moments weren’t the clever arguments Hasan pulled out once or twice, it was he fascists proudly calling themselves fascists, saying “General Franco was a cool guy,” telling Hasan he should be deported, and otherwise not engaging in argument nearly as much as using the platform to show-and-tell fascism.
Probably more important for understanding what’s going on here is that we are, based on statements you highlight, being encouraged to empathize with the above. He’s clearly not making a project of having us “empathize” with the fascists on a personal level in a way that’s borderline reasonable, like “oh, he’s not well-educated and he lost his job when he has a kid to take care of and he got taken in by this bullshit, so we need to meet him as a human to dissuade him from it.” No, that sort of thing never appears, so we can only conclude from the repeated showings of deliberately selected fash that we are being called upon to empathize with their fascism, with their hatred of minorities and the disabled and so on.
The most revealing thing to me, personally, is how they have far rightists on all the time, and typically they are debating pretty normal libs, or even “apolitical” (disengaged liberal) people (see the fat vs fit episode). Communists are much less common, and when they appear, it’s always in opposition to some far-right ghoul. I think they have at maximum two videos where they even go as far as having radlibs vs center libs, where maybe a couple of communists snuck onto the radlib side.
i mean sharpening of debate pervertry in the sense that the “empathy” being sought fundamentally consists of debating whether or not certain groups of people have human rights, not in the sense of actually becoming better at formal debate tactics. that’s nerd shit for nerds, like destiny, and not of interest to the general population. i agree though that to whatever extent there is a call for empathy it’s a call for empathizing with fascism, not just individual fascists. part of this inroad though is by performing the act of putting increasingly depraved ideas up for debate. they also want money though, as a for-profit company, so to some extent they’re motivated simply by that. ultimately, i would say that they are very much an incarnation of a zen, enlightened centrist strain of fascist normalizing and propagandizing.
i agree though that to whatever extent there is a call for empathy it’s a call for empathizing with fascism, not just individual fascists. part of this inroad though is by performing the act of putting increasingly depraved ideas up for debate.
“Though” is negative here, but I don’t see the contradiction. It’s precisely the method of “empathizing” with fascism to normalize these depraved views by presenting them as though they belong in the same conversation as “should we give poor people food?”
“though” was only referring to your disagreement about the phrase “sharpening debate pervertry” not negative to the broader point. we’re entirely in agreement about everything but that small semantic point about particular language.
Oh, okay, my bad. I don’t think it’s very worthwhile to fuss about language when it’s a coinage of one of the present speakers (rather than trying to interpret what a third party said). I think “sharpening” is usually associated with “refining,” so it might be better to say “inflame” or something, but you can say whatever you like and I don’t think it’s productive to challenge your phrasing beyond mentioning what I just now mentioned.
empathy and ideology that would see many people considered the other have their extinguished do not belong in the same universe ffs
