Jimmy the Giant
Appearances
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
the nerds and the hipsters stop engaging with it. And I sort of feel similar-ish about right-wing politics. In the beginning, it was like interesting and different because it was counter what you were being told in school and stuff. And then now it's so mainstream.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I think those people originally, the natural desire to be a little bit contrarian or just sort of explore different viewpoints, they've now sort of been self-reflective. So I think there is a percentage of people that were trapped in that kind of pipeline who have come out of it or are starting to come out of it. So I'm a bit more optimistic than a lot of people are.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I would say I was very much like curious to find out about these topics and stuff. And it was never coming from like a place of hate or anything like that. It was just, I'm being told that, oh, the reason the gender pay gap doesn't exist is because of these facts and figures. It's not because women suck or something like that. And the mood and the vibe has definitely changed now.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Like when you see like Andrew Tate, it's because women suck. And so it's like... I think the people who do have some intellectual curiosity, they will now be seeing that this is kind of bullshit. And they might start like what I had with Ukraine, which was like where I was seeing how the right were talking about Ukraine. It made me go, well, hang on a second. I know they're full of shit on this.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
So then it made me question it.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And I was like, because I had, I don't know, like, yeah, a lot of people go, he got married and then obviously became a lefty. He met a woman. Met a woman who became a lefty. I was like, yeah. But it was sort of like, it wasn't in the way that people would perceive that, that she was some lefty and such.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
It was just because it was a topic that showed me a different angle than what the sphere of content was telling me about. So like, I think, I don't know if people need like an individual topic where they see that they're chatting shit on.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Because a lot of it is just like they build a whole like... a Jenga tower of like bullshit and like it sort of loosely stays together but if you pull out a few pieces then it falls down and that was it Ukraine was one of those pieces where I was like they're just chatting complete shit about Ukraine yeah so then what else are they chatting shit about yeah exactly and then it makes you question
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
everything it's like the gender pay gap then it's like you know crime and like this whole they they're obsessed with culture they think like everything comes down to individuals making bad decisions they never talk about systems or like structures that cause bad outcomes in society never talk about that it's always are these people are just bad people and they've just decided to be bad because cardi b is telling them to shake their ass or something yeah
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
what felt counter-cultural to you about the right and the sort of political right yeah yeah there was that feeling because I remember they said it's so cringe now but they were like conservatism is the new punk and it's like very cringe there was an era where it was just you were the different guy if you're a right wing and you're in a group of people your age you're the one that when they start complaining about I don't know or they start talking good about Jeremy Corbyn you're like well actually yeah right nationalisation is inefficient and you know blah blah blah
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Oh, God. To anyone who went to a party with me, I'm so sorry.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I just think I've always liked new ideas. And that's like something as I've got older, I've realized is it's not a problem. It's just part of my personality that I'm attracted to ideas that contradict what I think. But when I was younger, I put trust into that where I was like, that must mean it's correct. There's a thing, it's called like the Galileo's Gambit.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I think because Galileo, he obviously thought the world was circle. I think if my history is not fucked up. But he thought the world was circle whilst everyone thought it was flat and he was right and everyone was wrong and they all ridiculed him.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And so a lot of conspiracy theorist people will use this one situation that happened maybe once or twice in history to basically come to the conclusion that anyone who believes in anything that's different than the mainstream is always correct.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Oh, Tommy.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Because what they've done is so fucking clever because they re-skin, they repackage racism. It's good to look into the history of these movements and how their rhetoric changes. So the BNP, Nick Griffin, when he came in, he realized that if you stop talking about ethnicity and ethnic purity and start talking about cultural preservation, that's way more palatable because ethnicity is inherent.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Like we don't have a choice in our skin color. But culture, you could argue like if you live in this country, you're kind of following the ideas, the beliefs, the... the sort of attitudes of that country and that can change. So there's this sort of separation in someone's mind where you can separate culture from race and you feel like you're not a racist anymore.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And maybe arguably you're not a racist, you're xenophobic. Like that's effectively what it is. And I think xenophobia is much more marketable. It still has the...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
liberal idea that these are individual decisions and choices without it being like tied to their ethnicity so when it came to Tony Robinson he although now I've looked back he did say some racist shit but the way they would frame it themselves was like they were just talking about ideology so like radical Islam to them is literally all Islam but their market in it is so smart what's
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Right-wingers were so busy getting scared about Muslims affecting their Western Christian values that they forgot to tell their kids why dictatorships are bad. Surely that's more worrying. Right-wingers love to be scared of the shadows. They're not scared of the thing that's in front of them. They're like all these things like potential threats.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Yeah, yeah. That again, it was kind of the Ukraine thing where it kind of shifted my perspective where my personal relationship to Chavs was going to school, there was like the chavvy kids, you'd have fights with them, you'd got to co-op, they'd throw harry bows at you. So my perception of Chavs was that. This is what I like about the left is it's...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
more interesting like it's not just people are bad that's such a boring way of like looking at things it's like well this thing happened with social housing where they changed the dynamic the makeup of how social housing like the types of people that were allowed in certain areas you'd have the people that were more troubled put in these social houses the people that were better off putting these ones that started making a divide you then had this process like they call it like residualization which meant that like certain more troubled backgrounds so yeah
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
pooling together and they didn't get the support they needed and then like there's like an actual story there there's like an obvious starting point which was at some point we had these good council houses that brought communities together they made really connected communities people had more opportunities and then over time that changed we neglected lots of the community and then
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And then you get a whole culture from it. And then it's interesting, that culture, they start wearing a certain type of hat and a certain type of like track suit and listen to a certain type of music. It's interesting. The right wing answer to that is that they're just people that are lazy and I don't know, work shy or whatever. And that's so boring and like uninteresting as a...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
counter-cultural by being left-wing because to be left-wing meant to be against the banking system that plunged us all into enlightenment that is what left-wing is and so like it was that's the big shift that happened so you have like your social left and right and then you have your economic left and right they don't actually have to marry up like clean but it's like it's that thing where I guess socially at least in media and at least like overtly we're quite left-wing as a country it might be shifting now I can feel it it's like shifting on certain issues but
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
In general, we're quite left-wing socially. We certainly moved in a more progressive direction.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And so a society can appear to be socially liberal, or at least in the media. When it comes to economics, which in my deep opinion is the driving force of everything, is we're so right wing. And it's like, you can't argue that. And so they have to push the conversation onto the culture issues. So this is their last bastion to sort of prey on people's, you know, like prejudices and stuff like that.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
That's all they got.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I think young lads, they want to feel like our life progresses. So we want to feel that we put in hard work and we build something. And I think that is a pressure that's put on lads to make something of yourself, be something, move out of your hometown, go to the big city, do something. That's kind of a rhetoric that's sold to us a lot.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
If you have that mentality of like self-betterment, self-improvement, then you have to buy into like meritocracy. And if you buy into meritocracy, you kind of have to be right wing because it's like the only way to believe that there's a meritocracy in this society is by not looking into like the systemic things and critiques on capitalism.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
So I think that's why it lures in men a lot because maybe we have this sort of insecurity. Like I think being a man, you do not want to feel powerless. Like you want to feel like you're not vulnerable. You're not a victim. You're not weak. You want to be powerful and in control.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And when the right wing talks about the left, they talk about like these people that have just flopped over in the road and they've just given up and everything sucks. I don't believe that is a true, accurate depiction of the left, but that's what they get told about it. I think dating plays into it. I think a lot of like young lads want to meet a girl. So they like...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
watch some videos on YouTube, how to talk to women, how to be more confident.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
The one good bit of advice they can give, the only bit, and you should turn the video off after they said this, is speak to women. That's the only bit. And half of them don't even say that anymore. They just complain about women. But that's the one bit of advice.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
But that's what's mad. That's where the misogyny gets pushed into it. Because really, like, the dark side is they would say women don't know what they want.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
They'll be like, women will tell you one thing because women are very empathetic. And they'll tell you that they want this type of guy, but actually they want Chad. A lot of it gets in this dark, strange territory. And again, that'll push you into the right. All these things are like, they're just these pipelines that just pull you into right-wing politics.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
No young person wants to fucking be 20 and think I have no chance and everything's stacked and shit. I'm a Christian. I don't literally think that Jesus walked on water and shit like that. But it gives me this faith that there's something good in the universe and there's something that, even if it's bullshit, it doesn't matter. It gives me a good frame to operate my life toward.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And I think that that's something that the left really could do better with. Because the one thing the right does get correct is that the left doesn't give a very optimistic outlook. Because there's not a lot to be optimistic about. It's very fair, but... But, like, so fucking what? Like, that will never help. Like, you cannot sell.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Cadbury's ain't going to make a chocolate advert where they say, it's all right, it's chocolate.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Yeah, it has to be. This thing's going to change your fucking life. So I just think, like, the right gives that message of self-improvement and betterment. Even if it's bullshit, a young 20-year-old wants to get hopped up on some bullshit to improve their life. And they want to have something to kind of, like, aspire to.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
So I, like, I'm, and I don't know if it's because I've not been left for very long, but I'm super optimistic. I think, like,
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And the only like, I think the way that we achieve like the post-war consensus was by people, working class people who were in a worse scenario than we are now coming together, finding strength in like the bottom where they could have possibly been like living in slums and squalor, being like overworked in these factories and shit. And they all just went, fuck this. Yeah.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Like we're going to do something. And they did something. They fucking changed the world and made it a million times better. They did incredible things. It was just by people like coming together and realizing they have power. And I think the left needs that message, like an optimistic message and not give up because what fucking Corbyn lost a couple of times.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Bernie Sanders lost a couple of times. But Nigel Farage has been in the game like 30 years. He's a failure until now. So it's like people need to be more motivated, not give up because we lost a couple of elections.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
That's why they love all the motivational speakers. But you need that energy. You need that.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Whereas the right had a few good years, maybe in the 90s, where everything was being sold off. So it was a bit of an economic boom. But those good years were a spike in unemployment and a spike of poverty.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Let's be honest.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
As opposed to the 60s and 70s. Yeah, true, true. But those were introspective.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Like, to be completely honest, it's a dumb stereotype. It's not true. But like, I think this is all they've got. They've got a few guys to take steroids and talk about...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
neoliberal economics and then all of a sudden that's the image but I really loved that era to be honest like looking back on it and I was right winger at the time but looking back on like the Jeremy Corbyn when Grime got like the Grime for Corbyn shit it was kind of sick that like Stormzy was like pretty political it was more like diverse it had all the sort of range it had academics it had like sort of
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Yeah, and I think that's what it kind of needs. It just needs people with different personas and different energies to come and push a positive message.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Obviously, yeah, our odds are pretty fucked. Realistically...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I'm sorry to defeat my whole point that I made earlier but what I'm saying is like it's like 4-3 and there's like 10-20 minutes left on the clock so it's like we're not in a fantastic position like right now but it's not over the right has co-opted it which is worrying but it's not like over it's like we have to look at what did we not deliver on and it's like whilst we were talking about all these nice things about like Black Lives Matter and all this sort of stuff it never was going to actually fix the fundamental core problem of income inequality
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
So there's always been that elephant in the room, which is income inequality, which is what lefties need to talk about. And that has to be what we push because that's what actually fixes it.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I think that has to be forefront now. And it's the same, I think also class. I think talk about class more than ethnicity and gender. I really do think, I know and I 100% understand that your average, I think it's something like your average African, like sub-Saharan African in Britain makes 10p to every one pound a white British person does. So I understand there is that deep problem.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
But I think in this landscape we're in, we have to focus on class as the connecting factor. Because when you split it all into these categories, that's when the right go, well, look, they care more about the black people. They care more about the gay people. They care more about the feminists or whatever. And it's like, really, no.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
The left-wing people are actually just saying, look at this problem, look at this problem, look at this problem. But if we unite it as a message, just on messaging, as being more about class and inequality, I just think that's going to...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
How do you think you can avoid the right picking apart at those divisions? Because that's all, because I fundamentally agree with you, but it's like the right is so opportunistic.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I think you have to get into those spaces. That was one of the things I said in the video.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And I don't like...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
fundamentally massively agree with destiny i like his critiques on some of like magger and stuff like that but like he was the only guy going into those spaces like he was the only guy going in because everyone else took the sort of like principled stance of your platform in them so i think yeah you just have to get into those spaces i don't know if it's something i would like to do is debating because there's a lot of pressure but i think it can be done i do have one one one related question though
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
This is something I've been wrestling with. It's like...
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
they call it like a relationship of convenience you know so it's like sometimes you have to think about everything strategically and it's the same with what I was saying about focusing on class over like minority and like gender and stuff it's just strategically if we're looking at like a board game the position we're in currently that makes more sense to do something unifying and then move on I get your critique I think it makes sense what you're saying like then it's the rise and tide for us all but
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
But I think sometimes you have to think strategically. So like me and my mates play board games a lot. We play like Catan. Yeah. And like there'll be a time in the game where you're ahead, you're winning.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
The best game ever.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Settlers of Catan.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
When you get bored of Monopoly, you go, right, I need something deeper. So it's like you have this map and you're trying to fight for like control of certain things. Okay. So you're winning.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Actually, you're winning. Yeah. And me and you are like sort of working together. To take him down.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
But at some point, you start winning and then me and you are now working together. Yeah, yeah. At the end of the game, I don't want either of you two to fuck him when I want to win. But we have to work together in certain moments in order for the game, for me to have a chance of winning. I would say sometimes when you have people that you don't necessarily agree 100% in, I don't know.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
I'm not saying this is what I think for sure, but I just have a feeling it makes more strategical sense.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
And that's why now that they're in power, they're having friction and stuff because that's what will happen. So when you do the relationship of convenience, you might win, but at some point you will start fighting each other.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. That's it. Practical, assertive, hopeful.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
If the sponsors approve it tonight, then it'll be Elon Musk's war against Britain, which is my longest video I've ever fucking made. I rewrote it 20 goddamn times. Literally, when I started the video, it was when they, it was saying about the 100 million donations. So that was where it started. And a lot has happened since then. That was like three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, literally.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
But that should be out tonight. Yeah, Jimmy the Giant on YouTube.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
That was the best intro ever. Amazing. Thank you very much for having me. The political Andy Dufresne. Yes. Yeah, God, I saw that poll the other day. What is that age bracket? 13 to 27. That's more worrying. I thought it was like zero to like 15 or something.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
You're building these people. They're going to say that's part of the conspiracy.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Yeah, that's worried me more because when I first read that, I was like, ah, it's just really young people. Up to 27. That's kind of fucking crazy. Well, I swear, sorry.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
Yeah, I've been deep in it. But I like grew up... you know, video gaming and watching YouTube. So I was like, I've always, I followed YouTube from its kind of 2008. Yeah. I think it was started in 2005, 2006. So I've seen the whole industry change. Yeah. And like how it went from just guys in their bedroom making stupid videos to now it's like what it is now, which is, it's wild.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
But yeah, it's sort of around 2016, the kind of political side started popping. Before then, it was always like the Young Turks. Maybe you'd see an odd Alex Jones video. But it was so interesting. I said this in that Alt-Right video. It was like, Back then, I wouldn't have even really been able to tell you what right and left was. Yeah.
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
You were just being fed like stories and like, you know, who did 9-11 and all this sort of stuff. And it was like very different to now. Now it's very much categories and there's two camps. I mean, it's just totally my... How old are you?
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Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right Pipeline
yeah I would say so I've sort of become a lefty as the left have like really fucked up and failed and I'm really optimistic you know how like trends happen where you have like the hipsters will find something or like the nerdy kids will find something then the hipsters will get on it then the popular kids get on it and then by that point the sort of