Since that guy dug up my old Jimmy Dore-inspired post, I figured I'd follow up this post. The last couple years have been a real separating of the sheep from the goats in the online left.
MM wrote:
Jimmy Dore show/Aggressive Progressives
Jimmy Dore pissed me off during the election spinning fantastical rationalizations for wasting your vote on Stein that Buster friends IRL were citing to me in the lead up to the election. After the election I got into him for a couple months because he gave vent to my frustration at the 3rd way Dems and occasionally had great interview guests. But he was always dropping little turds that let you know he wasn't nearly as informed as he pretended to be, always was a hair-trigger away from shitting on Keith Ellison for the tiniest little thing (including things Jimmy COMPLETELY misinterpreted), then finally lost me when he started echoing conspiracy theories from alt-right land ranging from "Hillary has Parkinsons" to "Hillary had Seth Rich killed (using fox news as a source, you moron!) He's entertaining but I also think he's actively harmful to the left (there's a difference between saying MSNBC talks too much about Russiagate and saying that there's nothing to find there).
SELLOUT
Sold out like ex-lax at a pants-crapping contest. Attacked AOC relentlessly after she stopped doing his show, ostensibly over single-payer healthcare, but in the 2020 primary when Tulsi came on his show after announcing she no longer supported single-payer he played defense for her in the most slavish pathetic way. Moved on to full anti-vax and only went downhill from there. To this day I'm embarassed that I was into his show for a couple months before I realized he was making up his sources.
MM wrote:
Humanist Report
In retrospect I must have been SUPER pissed to have listened to this guy. His commentary is like diet Jimmy Dore and his lisp is incredibly distracting. I rate him above Jimmy Dore only because he isn't actively pushing right-wing conspiracy theories.
Didn't sell out.
Improved his speaking voice, and his commentary is angry but doesn't drift into conspiracy land. He went from the thumbnails being the best parts of his videos to the outro songs being the best. I still watch him occasinally.
MM wrote:
Secular Talk
Stands out for having the ugliest set of any political talk show. He kind of teeters between pragmatic progressivism and Jimmy Dore land. I really liked him at first with his angry election postmortems, but pretty soon I got tired of the fact that EVERY SINGLE VIDEO ended with a shouting fit. I also didn't like the hypocrisy of complaining about PC outrage culture one minute, then complaining about the corrosive cultural impact of "atheist-shaming" the next.
Didn't sell out.
His sets are no longer eye-cancer. His thumbnail headlines will give you agita. Most notable thing that caught me by surprise was that he married former MSNBC hottie Krystal Ball. Well done, son!
MM wrote:
David Pakman
Getting into smarter territory here. Unlike the previous hosts, Pakman has never said anything that made me facepalm. Unfortunately I can only take him in small doses because his delivery is so incredibly boring. Then again he could be boring like a fox because he can get interviews with skittish people like Dave Rubin and give them enough rope to hang themselves.
SELLOUT
I don't know the full details of this influencer network thing he started with Brian Tyler Cohen, just that when he was called out on it Pakman pretended he didn't know what AIPAC was, performatively mispronouncing the name "Eye-Pack? What's that?"
MM wrote:
The Young Turks
I got a serious love/hate relationship with this show. I like most of the older hosts like Cenk and Anna and Michael Shure, but with the exception of Nomiki Konst I DESPISE their "hip" younger hosts, especially Brett Erlich and Cenk's goddamn nephew. I really appreciate them bringing attention to stories ignored by the mainstream press like DAPL or a failed Project Veritas sting BEFORE the Washington Post made those cool, but I hate that they give equal time to Jimmy fucking Dore's wading pool-deep political analysis.
SELLOUTS
Specifically Cenk and especially Ana sold out in disgusting fashion. All the other TYT hosts who haven't jumped ship seem to be deeply uncomfortable and trapped there for the health insurance or something.
People have their theories on whether Ana's sellout is due to trauma from her story of being attacked by a homeless man, but I think it was a pure calculated cynical shift. Because for a while she was a regular on The Majority Report and The Michael Brooks show making fun of the original TYT sellout Dave Rubin in exacting detail and when she decided to go for the money on the right she followed every step. This old clip of Sam Seder on Chapo Trap House details in jest how a leftie can pivot to the right and Ana followed every step to a T, including the offhand remark by Sam at the end that a woman should bleach her hair blonde.
Her big announcement was that someone in California called her a "birthing person" instead of a woman, and it proved that the left were the real sexists who reduce women's personhood to a biological function. Unfortunately for her the right had moved on from its Ben Shapiro "Logic and Reason" phase and had gone full scumbag. So when she tried doing a conservative version of "The View" for Patrick Bet-David's channel, during a debate about Gaza, his co-host's retort was to throw a tampon at her:
"God Dammit, Adam, I'm arguing that the LEFT is reducing women to a biological function here!"
Cenk's sellout was more boring and pathetic. He can't give up his TV-quality studio in Los Angeles, so he's been chasing after billionaire cash by trying to buddy-up with every tech bro-adjacent right-winger he can find. He even renamed his studio "The Polymarket Studio" for a while.
I think the best way to sum up my feelings about TYT is that they pretended to be movement leaders, but in the end just turned out to be run-of-the-mill fair-weather Rainbow Capitalists.
Who'd have thought that Cenk's fucking nephew Hasan would be the one to come out on top???
MM wrote:
The Majority Report/The Michael Brooks Show
This has been my favorite show for the last several months. It's as informative as Thom Hartmann with some great guests, but they sprinkle in humor to take the edge off. They also have some really smart regular callers. Some people say Sam Seder's a dick, but when he gets into a debate with a Jimmy Dore or a Tim Black or The Rational National and exposes how hollow their understanding of politics really is, what other people see as dickishness I interpret as exasperation at people ostensibly on your side who are enabling Trumpism. It seemed weird that I never got into his show back on Air America, but a couple weeks ago he had Janeane Garofalo as a guest and her constantly talking over everyone just got on my nerves even though I was on her side of the argument. Like I said earlier, I think Michael Brooks is a great impressionist and it's interesting to hear commentary from an actual real-life marxist instead of a center-leftist who's just called that by the right.
Didn't sell out.
This show has been steady as a rock for me. I think the biggest indicator of which shows sold out and which stayed true to their principles is whether or not they were about political goals or about being leftists. The leftier-than-thou's all sold out in one way or another, but Sam Seder and his motley crew from a variety of political takes have always stayed on an even keel.
This ironically stood out for the period that Jaime Peck was a producer, because she was a communist in a very performative way compared to Michael or Matt, and she constantly ground gears with the rest of the show when she would interject something asinine to the discussion like "...or we could have a communist revolution and that would solve it all!" But I do give her credit that after she left the show she didn't sell out unlike many TYT hosts.
The sudden death of Michael Brooks from a freak blood clot was a huge loss, he was truly a unique commentator and comedian not properly appreciated in his time:
