The Fate of the Frog Men

hello everyone so today I want to talk about white identity now one question I get a lot on my curious cat pages are you worried about the prevalence of white nationalist rhetoric among younger white men online and my answer is always yes I am but today a fourth of flesh that answer out a bit and discuss these young white guys in their increasing familiarity with open white nationalism and we're going to tell a bit of a story we're going to talk about how this identity coalesced and gained steam during gamergate and how it transformed into the a avatar all right Trump's aborting messages today and the reason I really want to talk about this now is that I've been noticing a certain dissatisfaction with Trump among a lot of the frogs and many of them understandably don't seem too happy with the general level of ineptitude ease displayed since coming to office and many others are even openly expressing regret for even having voted for him you know you've got the usual Pepe avatar people that folks using the Frog emoji in their Twitter name Zanna Trump's also apparently lost the support of Darth Vader Frankenstein's monster and Skeletor so I also want to ask how did all of these chumps get hoodwinked so easily and once they all wake up to the fact that Trump was just using them all along then where are they gonna go next now a few disclaimers before we start unlike some people I don't think gamergate caused Trump to become president or anything you know while there was a small swing away from the Democrats among younger people and of course Trump was definitely favored by white men I don't really think any of these Pepe memes or the likes really affected the outcome of the election that much we're given them too much credit I think when we suggest that another disclaimer this video is not a defense of these guys when I run this idea past gen as she thought it sounded like I was making excuses for them and I don't want to do that I'd like to try and explain their behavior and motivations there but not excuse their actions so I thought that just make that clear here and I apologize if it seemed like I'm giving them an easy ride and a final thing before we start I'd like to say hello to any of these people who are watching hello thanks for stopping by to hit this like and call me a cook and so on but once you're done with that though I would encourage you to stick around and watch the rest of the video just for a change of pace if nothing else right now you won't agree with anything I say and you'll think I'm an idiot but it'll plant a few seeds in your head that will slowly come to fruition and eventually in about two or three years there you'll realize that I was right about everything that's the hope anyway anyway let's get to it so let's set the stage who are these people who were talking about well burn ads on the internet who have typically straight white sis young and male not exclusively granted you know for every one of those identifies you can find a few outliers but broadly that's who were dealing with and to start off let's try and get inside their mindset now this is something easy for me because I used to be one of these people and so I grow out of it you know my parents have met five to ten years later I probably be watching all right YouTube videos and tweeting about cactus tan whatever that supposed to be and that's a scary thought you know there but for the grace of God go I and here's the world according to the Frog people at first of institutionalized prejudice is a thing of the past then indeed if prejudice against minorities even exists at all anymore it's purely on an individual level it's a personal choice informed in no way by wider society and legality Trump's all arguments here you know minorities have the vote now and business discrimination is technically illegal therefore it doesn't happen outside of a few bad eggs secondly we live in a meritocracy if women get paid less than men that's because they can't compete if black people get arrested and incarcerated disproportionately that's because they're more likely to be criminals everyone is on equal footing now you see and if anyone can't keep up with straight white men well that's just because they're not as good now most of them know not to say it this directly in the open of course but basically this is what they believe and it stems in part I think from a misunderstanding of history if you don't know too much about history it's hard to contextualize a lot of this stuff especially if you're a younger person everything that happened before they were born took place sort of nebulously a long time ago and now it's all the same as ancient history has no bearing at all on the modern day or so it seems to them for example it was not that long ago in my own life that I realized how relatively recent legal slavery was in the West and the effects of that system and not something that disappear overnight obviously similarly with women's suffrage and so on speaking in terms of the span of human history this all happened yesterday and another factor here is just a natural tendency to wanna see arguments break in your favor you know it's much easier to believe in a meritocracy if you're someone who is already doing okay or rather and it gets a little complicated here someone who is not doing okay what feels like they should be and blames the fact that they're not on the enemies of the imaginary meritocracy you know if the playing field is naturally already level then any attempt to advocate for any type of social minority is coming directly and unfairly at the expense of straight white men you know when is white History Month why can't we have a straight Pride Parade when is international men's day you see to these young white guys it seems like everyone else but them has an identity that they're allowed to be openly proud of and that doesn't make sense if we're supposed to be on a level playing field you know why is it that a black person or a gay person can take pride in those identities but I'm not allowed to openly take pride in my race or my sexuality that's not fair now as a straight white man myself I understand the answers to those questions but that understanding came at the tail end of a lot of learning and reading and contextualizing perhaps more learning and contextualizing than it's reasonable to expect a teenager to have done especially considering the state of the education system in a lot of these places in the state's book you know that's just a younger ones I want to make clear some of these guys are in their forties and older so I've got no sympathy at all for them anyway with these minority identities they're calm narratives narratives that include being oppressed and working to overcome by oppression and now if we don't consider all the negatives of oppression you know if we take the actual oppression out of oppression and it can seem quite romantic you know succeeding despite being the underdog is a lot more exciting and heroic narrative Lee speaking than succeeding when society expects you to succeed and among these young white men there's definitely an unvoiced and perhaps even subconscious jealousy of being left out of that narrative in fact they share their identity with the oppressors in all of these narratives you know white over black straight over gay sis over trans men over women and so on so it seems to them that they've been unfairly cast as the bad guy without actually having done anything wrong as an individual so society rather than being biased against people who aren't them is actually therefore biased against straight white men who are not allowed to have an identity or a narrative and I'd just like to reiterate at this point that I don't agree with any of this and this is happening primarily in their own heads that's just to clarify for Jan if she's listening now let's first position ourselves in time a couple of years ago and we've got a bunch of angry young white dudes on the internet without much historical economic or political context with which to understand the world and they're feeling increasingly left out if something unfair or embarrassing or upsetting or disappointing happens to them they can't say it's probably because I'm white or straight or a man you know there's no socially acceptable explanatory narrative and for them to rationalize the negative aspects of their lives in fact society is constantly signaling to them the opposites that they should be doing great you know you're the best you should be on top but that's not how it feels to them and they can't openly bemoan the face of straight white guys without being called idiot racist so what do they do well they displace their anger and frustration onto the one other identity that pretty much all young white men on the internet sure they're all gamers they all play video games so gamergate where the gamers finally said we're not going to take this anymore and everyone else said take what anymore and the gamers replied we're not going to take this anymore but louder so I'm going to say some things about gamers here so full disclaimer I play video games I play video games I play too many video games but I've never really cared when someone insults capital G gamers because video games are just a hobby for me you know there's something I do for fun in my spare time being a gamer is not my identity I don't define myself by the fact that glazed video games and nor should anyone else but that's just me anyway gamergate now my own experience of gamergate was to sit on the sidelines heckling and metaphorically throwing rotten fruits of people now my guilty pleasure was going on reddit or for Channel something awful and asking hey so what's this gamergate thing everyone's talking about you know just to make everyone type huge text walls about what they thought gamergate was if so for the blessedly uninitiated of what is gamergate well briefly hopefully in mid-2014 independent game developer zoe quinn was the subject of a blog post published by a former friend but accused her of cheating on him with various men including a games journalist who had previously written about her and a video game she made so what does this incident have to do with anything who does it affect outside of the people directly personally involved the answers are nothing and nobody of course a couple had a messy breakup basically but hey something had to like this trash fire and it wasn't going to be something legitimate was it so were stuck with this nonsense and if you think about it the zoe quinn incident is sort of the perfect storm in a teacup to mix my idioms that it's a minor incident but it's got a lot of contextual multipliers acting on it it's about a woman which is a good start a woman game developer so a woman trespassing in the no women treehouse she had sex which is usually a frightening concept in and of itself for self-described gamers she allegedly cook older the man and of course the most frightening type of sex a woman can have is sex that is not with me and this implicit fraud and deception proving true all my suspicions about women being duplicitous harlot still deceive me at every turn and all of these multipliers act to make this remarkably trivial and stupid incidents actually significant in the minds of certain people and so they proceeded to organize on sites like Reddit 4chan 8chan and so on and built the movement primarily concerned with endless complaining about zoe quinn and various other game developers and journalists who were apparently conspiring to maliciously ruin video games for everyone using feminism really though gamergate wasn't about Zoe Quinn or Anita sarkeesian or ethics in video game journalism which I think became a joke roughly five seconds after the first person even dared to suggest it it wasn't even really about video games it was about young straight white men and their lack of an identity in my opinion and Gaming was the one area of entertainment that they felt was still created for that because that's not true but they felt it was true which is the important thing you know gaming being the relative newcomer among television films books and the legs has been lagging behind somewhat in its representation of minorities and it's only fairly recently that people have been talking and writing about games as if they're a real artform subjects a real thoughtful criticism once almost exclusively the domain of young white male nerds gaming's in the process of opening up to all sorts of players and all sorts of game developers and all sorts of people writing about games and what they're like and what they could and should be and game developers are listening to all these people and games are changing the slowly obviously but they are there which poses a problem for the folks who had taken on gamer as a surrogate identity you know for young white guys video games were a safe space where you didn't have to deal with all these other people and all their different opinions and narratives and now here they come insisting that the thing you've adopted as the central pillar of your identity the only aspect of your identity that you feel comfortable actually openly enjoying needs to change and they respond to this with a hysterical ferocity that can seem inexplicable if you don't realize that in their heads they are a genuinely maligned minority it's every bit as serious to them as they imagine that civil rights marches where for black people or the suffragette movement was for women it's ridiculous obviously but lacking an easily identifiable oppressor these young white men have simply fabricated one they've constructed a movement and us-versus-them their narrative has become us versus the people who won't let us have a narrative social justice warriors feminists whatever you want to call them they won't even let us play video games in peace anymore they hate us and want to change us just for being who we are which means we are oppressed finally so these communities exist now and they're backed into a corner in their own heads you know their game our identities are roading under the horrific onslaught of walking simulators about lesbians and relatively unobjectionable women saying they think female soldiers should wear more than a bikini and about and it raises an interesting point it's always the minorities that get accused of being obsessed with feminism and identity politics and so on but in reality those things ultimately exist to level the playing field there are means to an end that end being equality now ostensibly you think these straight white men don't have to be concerned with all this stuff if they don't want to be you know they don't have to go on about feminists online there's nothing keeping them here really they can go and be free become Randy and Superman you know genius alpha male CEOs or whatever it is they imagine they'd be in an ideal world but that's not happening is it because of course it's not we don't live in this ideal world we live in and often rubbish wealth so let's talk politics if you're aged 18 to 26 in the United States then the only president you've known during your adult life has been until very recently Barack Obama the Bush administration is a distant memory by now if you voted for the first time you're able to in 2016 then you were five when the Iraq war broke out that's scary isn't it so a Democrats been at the helm for eight years and yet there are all these problems still in society and of course there are excuses for the existence of all of these problems perfectly legitimate excuses even the Obama came to power shortly after one of the worst economic downturns in the century you can blame Republican obstructionism corporate lobbying the news media capitalism in general and there's at least some merit in all of these factors especially the economic ones there's something about huge layoffs and wage freezes and bag out that gets everybody down societally speaking so what does this mean for our fresh-faced young white men well they don't want to be told that this is as good as it gets you know tons of things suck under Obama but at least he's not doing as bad as a Republican you know it's not much for carrots really is it it's true in a sense but nobody's getting all that excited about it it's certainly not motivating a bunch of young white gamer dudes to go and vote for a woman that's for sure I mean they haven't seen enough political cycles yet to understand the only choice they have they've got the Republicans who have the image of being old religious stuffy and uncool and the only other option seems to them to just be more of the same and in the boom years the system can get away with this you know people have jobs they're earning money things are taken over there but then inevitably you get the bust years where suddenly young people's expectations and possibilities start diminishing you know compared to their parents which is one of the main parameters by which their success in life is going to be judged it's more expensive to go to school it's harder to get a job that job won't pay as much money it's harder to afford a house and then when it comes voting time you have to choose between the people who are actively encouraging all of this and the people who keep promising to fix it all it but never actually seems to get around to doing it and both parties are staffed largely by people funded by the corporation's who have a stake in nothing being done this is not much of a choice now a little disclaimer here I'm not saying both parties are the same they're not particularly if you're anything but a straight white man is massively in your interest to vote against the Republicans the Democrats action on minority rights is rather lackluster actually in my opinion but it's better than the open hostility of the Republicans for straight white men however it is easy to see why so many was suckered in by Trump you know there's the obvious he positioned themselves as an anti-establishment candidate in a year were establishment candidates were incredibly unpopular he attacked the usual stable of Republicans running said he was going to drain the swamp and so on really though for our young white guys we're talking about I don't think that Trump's political positions were all that important compared to what Trump represented he was a fantasy in a sense because he was a white man who said whatever he wanted to and he got away with it he was openly pander to bigoted white people and was a big market for that lately as it turns out his ideas are all laughable practically speaking anyway a Muslim ban a big wall to keep foreigners out it's cartoonish and ridiculous clearly but none of that matters Trump was a white man sticking up for white men when it seems like no one else would make America great again you know when when was it great if you're not a straight white guy then the further you go into America's past the worse it gets make America great again is a threat to most people now I spend a fair bit of time listening in on the discord server for the reddit page for Donald Trump supporters that are /da Donald and I won't go into it too much right now but you know as you can see here well you get the picture the talk is openly racist worrying about the future of the white race using all the racial slurs Under the Sun and I've had a few people tell me oh well this isn't serious you know they just like his policies and all this race talk is just a joke but honestly get a grip if you think this is just a joke then you've been tricked it's amazing I know what racism actually still exists and it's coming back in fashion now over the course of Trump's term or terms in office a lot of these kids are going to drift away from supporting him as they realize he actually is just a politician who spun them a bunch of crap in order to get elected and this brings us back around to where we started with beef first bunch of suckers slowly coming around to the fact that they've been conned so what's next what's going to happen from here on out well it's not enough for these people so just stop supporting Trump anymore you know the legitimization of Trump's rhetoric has already happened Trump won't be the last regardless of how he performs in office a lot of potential future candidates will have been watching it rise to power and taking notes and if I were doing that then point one a on my list of tips to get elected would say you do not have to hide it anymore you know the fascists have come out of the woodwork analogy white nationalist narrative is running at full steam online and many young white guys are flocking to it you know we are past that point by now I don't we can all agree a clever a person and me could write an interesting paper about how memes and icons and emojis have taken the place of a uniform the pin and the armband and so on as the signifiers of a political movement now these people will mostly all abandon Trump eventually not because they've had a change of heart necessarily but because they'll find him a disappointment he won't drain the swamp or make America great again and they'll all move on to someone else promising the same things but even bigger so my question going forward is what can we do about these people you know how can we break them out of the spell of this research in white nationalism with it's easy racialized answers for all the world's problems because that's the thing it is easy it's comparatively difficult to learn about the economy for instance and how that operates but white nationalists look at complicated systemic problems like that and make them simple racial problems you know it's not our banking system that's broken it's the Jews for example it's not the justice system it's a problem with black people it's not immigration law or foreign policy it's the Muslims you know if we just get rid of X type of person then the relevant problem will go away combating this is difficult it requires more effort to properly understand these issues managers to believe the easy lie so we're starting out on the back foot here and you'd have to have some inhuman amount of belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity to think that all of these guys could simply be talked down from the white nationalist ledge though on the other hand I'm sure a lot can and I'm sure many will grow out of it and I'd argue that as they become increasingly disillusioned with Trump over the next four years it's a prime opportunity to try and change their minds though honestly I don't blame anyone who doesn't have the patience to argue endlessly with the little pricks like running on a treadmill you know it feels what you get nowhere now I don't know how to ultimately solve this problem but I do have one suggestion I think could help they could really use another political narrative to get behind you know the popularity of Bernie Sanders say definitely proved at least the desire for a more left-leaning platform from the Democrats which the Democrats themselves are now ignoring as much as possible instead of capitalizing on there are even some people who swapped from supporting Sanders to supporting Trump when Sanders dropped out which seems like an inexplicable position if you focused on policy it's ridiculous but it actually kind of makes sense if you think in terms of the narrative of the political outsider there's a hunger for politics that differ from the mainstream and the actual specifics of how they differ from the mainstream seems not to matter for some people and there's a way I feel to appeal directly to the part of these young white guys that subconsciously maybe want to be part of an oppressed movement and it's ironic because economically the answers bright there in front of them they have no choice but to take part in an impressive economic system that's heavily biased in favor of the rich the lack of a political identity that some young white men feel could ideally be filled with the class identity you know still talking about real problems but through and actually helpful economic lens instead of a misleading and bigoted racial one criticizing capitalism is kind of a hard sell in the States though I understand and I'll throw it open to the comments you know what else can we do to reeducate these people out of their white nationalism and yes i said to re-educate i want to re-educate you you gave it a go by yourself but you [ __ ] up and now your brain is wrong and needs to be reprogrammed because ultimately if this doesn't stop it's going to come to blows and I don't mean a street scuffle between a group of anti-fascists and a group of white nationalists but potentially you know well if this movement doesn't sell out by itself it will eventually end up being stamped out and it'd be better to solve all this with words before it comes to them because the white nationalists will definitely lose that fight if it happens just like they did last time it's an ideology that is destined to lose so I'll leave you today with a warning for any of my fellow straight white gamer dudes who are listening it honestly really is in your best interest to stay away from the old fascism the it never turns out like they say it will I promise thanks a lot for watching everyone and let me know what you think in the comments please I'd like to hear your feedback on this on and you can get in touch with me on Twitter or curious cat if you want ask a question if you liked this video and would like to help you make more videos consider pledging me a dollar on patreon I don't run advertisements on my videos at all and ideally I'd like to keep it that way however sadly I do still need to eat and it turns out they don't let your opt out of paying for food just because you don't like capitalism if you broke right now and you can't afford to pledge anything now I also accept payment in the form of photographs of genitals I'm really kidding please do not send me photographs of your genitals

Channel: undefined

Views: 955,627

Rating: 4.6856351 out of 5

Keywords: pepe, trump, shaun jen

Id: a_yfnQPaD_E

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/RandyMcRandface]

I love this video. In my opinion the number one thing that straight white guys can talk about is how they didn’t become some right wing sociopath. That subject lends itself to how we prevent others from becoming that way.

[u/Ocelotocelotl]

I’ve always thought that this was probably Shaun’s best video.

[u/Exertuz]

this and the sequel are probably my favorite shaun videos. classics