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submitted 6 months ago by Llituro@hexbear.net to c/videos@hexbear.net

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.

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[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 3 points 6 months ago

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?"

[-] Llituro@hexbear.net 2 points 6 months ago

"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.

[-] purpleworm@hexbear.net 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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