This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The main thing that differentiates him is that he is fun to watch. He streams on Rumble and search engines throttle his content, so most people only know who he is secondhand instead of having ever watched him themselves.
I um.... I admit that he does seem to rack up half a million views, which is impressive. But I started one of his streams and it's all - jumping around, random cartoons, it's making me queasy. So I jumped forward, and forward, and forward, and at the 2 hour mark he actually shows up on camera. He's just talking to the camera about headlines, like Tim Pool or Viva Frey, but they at least have the sense to show screenshots and videos of what they're discussing. Fuentes is just his face and a camera. His demeanor is honestly not as entertaining as Matt Walsh.
Some of his videos have a ton of views, but his channel has half that in subscribers, and only 5k likes on the video. Don't know what is good for Rumble but the ratio seems weird to me. Comment section also wasn't super supportive of him, which is surprising I assume because most people on Rumble sought out that kind of content. Viva Frey and Tim Pool have many more subscribers but fewer views per video.
All I can say is that he does seem fairly popular and I still have no clue why.
Edit - Three years ago his videos were getting less than 2k views. His first video to break 50k views was this one and I don't know why. Then he goes back to less than 10K for a while. He starts to get consistently 50k views around October 7th, 2023 and it increased rapidly from there. So his shtick seems to be the anti-Israel right.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link