The Making of a YouTube Radical

Well, modern progressives are a far cry from the leftists of my time too. In fact most of them would sound like lunatics back in the 70s and 80s.

It's going to be hard to discuss the problem here if just mentioning it draws such a vast quantities of spam from the other Caleb Cains of the world.

who's your go-to left equivalent of Jordan Peterson or PrisonPaul or Crowder?

site doesn't let me reply but I can't believe you're seriously saying Chomsky and Zizek are the left equivalents of Crowder and Prisonpaul, lol

Let's narrow it down to those two. Who's the left Crowder/Prisonpaul if not Hbomb? And if it's Hbomb, how can you deny he's better than those two?

> Stefan Molyneux, thunderf00t, Paul Joseph Watson

I can see how Stefan Molyneux and Paul Joseph Watson make people very uncomfortable (heck, they often make me feel uncomfortable, particularly Molyneux), they are certainly "extreme", for current mainstream definitions of the word.

But then again, FTA:

> “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”

I've watched some of these guys videos, and I believe anyone claiming that they do not have at least some valid perspectives worth discussion is being intellectually dishonest.

> Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated. “I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.” When Mr. Cain first saw these videos, he dismissed them as left-wing propaganda. But he watched more, and he started to wonder if people like Ms. Wynn had a point. Her videos persuasively used research and citations to rebut the right-wing talking points he had absorbed. “I just kept watching more and more of that content, sympathizing and empathizing with her and also seeing that, wow, she really knows what she’s talking about,” Mr. Cain said.

"persuasively used research and citations to rebut the right-wing talking points he had absorbed" - the right-wing talking points that also used research and citations. That's the thing about propaganda and statistics - it's a double edged sword.

> I've also watched Shapiro, Milo, and Peterson, recognized from the screenshots shown. You can agree or disagree with the positions they take, but where are those "conspiracy theories"?

I too noticed the subtle guilt by association. I wonder if the commonality of this tactic ever adds fuel to the fire of conspiratorial thinking.

I continue to believe that one of the biggest reasons that "right wing extremism" is so effective at recruiting is because there are so many holes in official/proper version of reality we're sold.

This article just included Milton Friedman in a collage that seems to imply he was a conspiratorial, racist, misogynist? For those who might not know who he was, here is is Wiki entry. [1] He's a nobel prize winning economist and more or less critical reading to understand the logic behind much of our current economic processes, without casting judgement on the rightness or wrongness of said systems. He died 13 years ago. I am, for once, at a loss for words. That is just so unbelievably idiotic.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman