Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 2 - Sam Hyde
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Today, we go old school.
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You might have heard of this one before. A comedian's career is going pretty good until he takes a stage and decides to just say it like it is. A lot of people get upset by what he says. He's been cancelled. They're trying to shut him down. Although most of his audience stops watching, a small hardcore contingent remains. They were always here for the edgy stuff. They have found their guy. He's not afraid to stand up to the real powerful voices in society, like the disabled and people on benefits.
SPEAKER_08Let's take this call. Someone's saying they are this uh Sam Hyde guy. Let's see if it's him. Sam?
SPEAKER_10Hey.
SPEAKER_08What's up?
SPEAKER_10What's up, man? How you doing?
SPEAKER_08Good. How are you?
SPEAKER_10It's fucked up that my show was taken off. That our show was taken off because of because it was it's politically incorrect, and if something that would have flown, you know, ten years ago, it would have been fine. It's it's fucked up.
SPEAKER_08I'm sorry, dude. I've had my I've had shows canceled, everyone gets shows canceled. You can feel bad about it, pick yourself up, make no shit.
SPEAKER_04What you just heard was comedian Sam Hyde calling into comedian Tim Heidegger's live show in December 2016. Sam Hyde is very upset that his Adult Swim sketch show has been canceled. Insiders reported that the Adult Swim Standards Department frequently had to remove, quote, coded racist messages, including swastikas, before broadcasting the episodes. A year after that, Sam Hyde pledged $5,000 to the Legal Defense Fund for Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website styled after the Nazi era newspaper Dachstomov.
SPEAKER_09I'm Hitler's top guy. What am I gonna do? Adolf Hitler chose me to lead the revolution.
SPEAKER_06He looks like, honestly, he looks like if Trotsky had come in contact with like the Toxic Avengers sludge.
SPEAKER_03Dude, he he is Trotsky that was Kirkified. Like I know this is episode two, and I'm still in the earlier God's ears, baby. Like Trotsky's face, look at his face. It's like it's it's it's Trotsky's face, but made tiny on a larger head. It's literally zoomed in. It's Trotsky zoomed in. It's like uh if Trotsky's head was uncircumcised. Like, what's that mean? It's just because it's inside. Like it's inside. You have to open it up. It looks like if you take some Sam Hyde's head and you and you like stroke it really hard, it like not really hard, like fast hard, but like when you love someone and you like do the slow like down and up, down and up. But without without going up, you just stroke it down. You you release the foreskin. And uh if you do that on Sam Hyde's face, it would look like Trotsky's face. You understand what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_06It's like it's zoomed in. Okay, you guys are getting all you're getting all like political with her, but I think he looks like Beaker. Beaker? You see, you guys are not you're not familiar with American Muppets.
SPEAKER_03That is such an old that is such an old man reference. Dear listeners, if you if you if you understand this reference, I respect you. I would like to date your daughter. This is insane. Okay, motherfucker.
SPEAKER_06It does, it doesn't look like the Muppets are a fucking national treasure. Yeah. It looks like if Beaker got arrested for possession of God, yes, he does. I'm you go.
SPEAKER_04This is the Reaction Podcast.
SPEAKER_03Okie dokie, let me tell you about a new genre of comedy that's emerged over the last decade. One that doesn't really care if you laugh with them. In fact, it actively prefers if you don't. The joke isn't really aimed at your funny bone anymore. It's aimed at something deeper, more reactive, more exploitable. Your anger, your offense, your sense of violation. Welcome to Reactionary Comedy, Sam Hyde's Bread and Butter. Now, if you're not familiar with Sam Hyde, I want to congratulate you. You touched the appropriate amount of grass. Good for you, Queen. Uh for the rest of us, though, he's always been a fascinating animal to the sect. Mortar's comedian, a perfect, rather complicated example of the corrupting effect of fascism on well everything. Before we start opening up his ideological scrotum, you'll need some context. So I threw together a quick run through of his career. Uh, if you can call that a career. In 2009, Hyde co-founded Million Dollar Extreme, MDE, a YouTube sketch comedy group with two other guys, uh, pretty similar to how we started up a reaction podcast, but just with less lurs for now. They built a following doing provocative boundary pushing comedy sketches that were genuinely, to be honest, inventive, weird editing, surreal humor, social commentary, and so on. They toured, they built a cult following, and by 2016, they landed a six-episode deal with Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's late night program, Rest in Peace Cartoon Network. The show, Million Dollar Extreme, presents World Peace, premiered in August 2016. People expected edgy, but they got something a lot darker. Blackface, David Duke references, and unaired sketch literally titled Thank You White People, where you know black and Hispanic people thank whites for creating civilization.
SPEAKER_09Since the beginning of recorded history, the white man's been coming up with technologies, cultures, civilizations worth keeping, worth saving, worth giving a damn about.
SPEAKER_03And by December, less than four months after airing, Adult Swim cancelled it. The network cited mounting pressure, though the exact story of why remains contested. Hyde claims it was political persecution because he supported Trump, but internal accounts from MDE members suggest he refused to comply with requests to tone down the stunts and wouldn't sign off on other people's sketches. Either way, the cancellation became his foundational narrative of persecution, a story he would return to repeatedly, elaborating it with new conspiracy theories over time. After the cancellations, instead of retreating, Hyde went deeper. He started appearing alongside actual neo-Nazis. In 2017, he donated $5k dollars to the legal defense of Andrew Anglin, founder of one of my favorite newspapers of all time, the Daily Stormer. It's got like great comic books in there. Great like tips on how to lose weight. It's it's it's true.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, reading for the articles type shit.
SPEAKER_03Always, always. People tell me it's uh like I open it down, uh like I open up uh I open it up in the metro and uh I get very weird looks, but they don't understand that it's got uh incredible puff pieces on uh highbrow stuff, right? But yes, uh jokes aside, it's literally the most prominent Nazi website on the internet. And when asked why, he boasted the money was nothing to him and made a veiled threat to a journalist inquiring about the whole thing, saying, worry about if people start deciding to kill reporters. He showed up on Nick Fuentes' streams, and when Fuentes speculated that the country could become more racist, Hyde responded while driving his car, by the way, with fingers crossed.
SPEAKER_05Obama tended to be the best thing that happened. Hopefully, it'll just make everyone more racist if Kamala Harris gets in. It'll make the Mexicans more racist, opposition media will get stronger. So fingers crossed.
SPEAKER_03Well side tangent here. I don't know if you guys ever watch this. It's gonna play in the clip, but uh I recommend everybody maybe go and uh check it out if it's in the citations below. Because if I was an astute fascist content creator and Nick Fuentes, my little daddy king, calls me up on the show, I would be like in a suit and tie, like fucking locked in. But there was, I feel like a slight tinge of uh who the fuck are you to call me up up on your show when you watch the Sam Hyde and Nick Fuentes interaction? Because Nick Fuentes is in his studio, like actual recording studio, and Sam Hyde is just driving. Sam Hyde got called up, and he's just like, Man, I was doing this when you were in your diapers, gay boy. Literally, in this case, probably what he thought. But yeah, I was just like, this is an interesting flex. Like, if I if I was in the brain rot uh universe of uh 4chan adjacent hierarchy of who my true fascist daddy is, and I saw Sam Hyde take such little interest in the fact that he was invited on Nick Fuentes' show, I would have been like, Man, this is this is this is not an odd flex at all. But, anyways, uh yeah, big comment uh when you say fingers crossed about America becoming more racist. Moving on, then came Fish Tank Live. I'm personally a massive fan. Starting in 2023, Hayden editor Jet Neptune created a 24-7 live streamed reality show where vulnerable people were confined to a house with zero privacy while thousands of anonymous viewers bombarded them via text to speech. Mike, does this sound like uh your job? Literally, the show ran for four seasons before being shut down mid-season in June 2025 when local authorities threatened criminal charges against both the production and the property owner. So when we talk about reactionary comedy as a genre, let's be serious now. We're not talking about some abstract concept, we're talking about an actual person with an actual career trajectory that shows exactly how this thing works in practice. To understand this, we need to go back to the foundational lie of post-ironic humor, the claim that nothing is sacred. Because that claim isn't actually true. It's a rhetorical weapon designed to make you think it's true. What reactionary comedy actually does is make everything a target following a very clear ideological pattern. That's the thing about Sam Hyde's comedy. It doesn't work the way traditional comedy works. A traditional comedian, even an edgy one, wants to generate what? Laughter. The setup, the misdirection, the punchline, it's all engineered towards that moment of release when the audience L-O-L. But High's approach is fundamentally different. He's not after the laugh, he's after the reaction. You know, when in the movie they say the show's name. But jokes aside, he is after the reaction. And then crucially, he and his audience laugh at this reaction.
SPEAKER_06Can I just say that this is very normal for fascists and has been noted for a very long time? Uh, I'm thinking right now of a very famous quote by John Paul Sartre on anti-Semitism, where he says, Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that the remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. And I think that's basically Sam Hyde in a nutshell, right? Like he is not really doing comedy. He's trying to intimidate you, he's trying to disconcert you. And like that quote reporter you quoted earlier, when you start pinning him down into what he actually believes, then he makes his little veiled threats.
SPEAKER_04I think there's also another element to this, uh, which is that whatever they're doing with this uh weird quote unquote comedy, it it's also a a means of community building. It's a way of creating a collective identity for themselves that's then put against these people who you know who are offended, um, who they're laughing at. When they're laughing together, they're you know, they're building this community.
SPEAKER_06I think it's that it's close, but not quite. For me, it's like an anti-community. Really? It's like a reaction against what actually exists. It's a framework that depends upon the kind of like 90s, you know, post-racial society we all were promised and we were all living in. Hyde's comedy or commentary or very existence only makes sense with that as the baseline. It's like a parasitic worm in your intestines, right? And it can only feast on your shit if you eat. And so Sam Hyde doesn't really have a message, it's more of an anti-message. It's an attempt to negate it and to make everybody feel like nothing matters.
SPEAKER_04It doesn't have to have any sort of consistency or any sort of like real message or anything. It's not a community working towards an end necessarily, it's a community that exists around the means, not the end. If I could quote like a quick quote from authors uh Mike Fielditz and Holger Marx from the University of Hamburg in a 2019 paper on digital fascism, they said, quote, it is not so much ideological consistency, but rather the cultural practices in the digital community itself that work in a community-building way. Engaging in those digital cultures through offensive rhetoric and transgressive behaviors is thus the meaningful means for a collective identity. It's not like there's anything shared beyond the fact that they all say slurs. You know?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but the fact that they say slurs is what makes the that's their shibboleth, that's their in-group, right? The fact that they they can say slurs and get away with it, that's the fun thrill that they're all sharing.
SPEAKER_03So in their anti-community, they do create community, right? Because they alternate from your classic definition of since we've, you know, since we're stuck on this particular conversation, comedy, with their reactionary interpretation, offset comedy. And the fact that they have an alternative interpretation of this, you know, great cultural pastime or whatever you want to call it, creates uh redefines them as a subsect of society, giving them, you know, feelings of uh every single notion that you can think of, you know, oh, we're original, oh, we're different, oh, we're edgy, oh, we're superior, etc. etc. While, as both of you very eloquently said, not actually creating anything new, not actually contributing to absolutely anything, even if we ignore all the negative effects. They are simply redefining what humor is supposed to be about. And they're moving it away from. Now we're not even doing like complex ideological analysis. I'm just simply talking about their degeneration, as funny as it is, off what comedy is supposed to be like. And like maybe some of our audience members are, you know, or maybe this is uh floating over their head, not because they're stupid, but because obviously, as I said earlier, they're touching grass. So let's try and explain this particular like comedic aspect first, and then we're gonna go into you know more deep, more um complex ideological analysis and so on. So let's say your name is John and you go to see Sam Hyde. He says something offensive or or dumb. Let's say it's about women being, I don't know, only good for breeding or something. You react, you you're offended. Uh maybe you even leave, right? You tell people how offensive it was. Now that becomes part of his content. Your reaction is the punchline itself. And his audience, his in-group, his community, his anti-community, they're not laughing at the joke. They're laughing at your reaction to it. They're laughing at the libs getting owned, they're laughing at how easily provoked you are. The whole feedback loop becomes provoke, reaction, meta mockery of the reaction, community bonding over shared mockery of the outgroup. This is completely different from what comedy. Now I'm gonna sound like a like a proper unk myself, what comedy used to be like. When George Carlin, one of my fucking OGs, pushed boundaries, he was still trying to communicate something. He had a point, you know, he had a perspective. He was using transgression uh not uh just for transgression's sake, but as a vehicle for insight. But reactionary comedy doesn't need insight, the whole point is avoiding it. And that's the genius of it. Respect your enemy. You can't really win against that, you can't debate someone whose goal isn't to make a coherent argument, but to get you to react so violently that your reaction itself becomes what embarrasses you. Here's what Hyde himself said about his comedy approach. Uh, take it from the king himself. So, Freda, you want to read this out?
SPEAKER_04Sure, yeah. I can't do like an impression, but I'll uh I'll uh I'll read it. I was trying to get those people the fuck out of the room because I do not like Brooklyn hipsters. So I was trying to see how fast I could get them out.
SPEAKER_03Man, you sound 100% like him, man. No, I hate you. But uh yes. He's not making an argument about gay rights or liberalism or them being sissy or cultural critique, nothing substantive at all. Just generate a reaction by being maximally offensive, then laugh when people react to it. That's the entire architecture. And this, you know, framework makes everything he does 100% deniable. When confronted, guess what he says? Mike, American accent, read this one.
SPEAKER_06I'm as racist or biased as the average regular white guy.
SPEAKER_03He can claim satire, he can claim he was mocking something else, he can layer on the irony so thick that nobody can actually pin down what his sincere beliefs are. Because that ambiguity, my friends, is the point. It's defensive armor and an offensive weapon simultaneously. But my dear sexy co-hosts will tell you more about that later. I want to finish off by hammering in on the cost of so-called right-wing commentary. And you know what it is? I'd like to title it human dignity. Nothing is sacred to it. Hell, not even children. There was a girl, Marky, 16, when Hyde, in his late twenties, pursued her after she messaged him admiring his work. According to corroborated accounts from her friends and other victims, he groomed her, had sexual contact with her, and later publicly humiliated her. When the allegations emerged, when she tried to speak publicly about it on Instagram, she was immediately targeted with mass harassment from his entire fan base. They called her a whore. They defended him, they made her life online uninhabitable. And that brutalization of the victim that's part of the same content ecosystem we talked about until now. The mockery of people trying to hold him accountable becomes its own shared joke within the community. You see how the precedent sent with a bunch of jokes about the gays and the blacks can then very easily spiral as a defensive mechanism that can protect you from almost any consequences, including sexually violating. A child. This now this is a commodification of interhuman experience pushed to its absolute logical fucked up endpoint. Everyone, victims, audiences, critics, participants become raw material for content extraction. The fish tank live stream that he made is the ultimate expression of this principle. Take vulnerable, desperate, naive people, strip them of privacy, physically confined them in a house, let thousands of anonymous strangers bombard them constantly with demands and provocations live stream every moment for twenty-four hours a day, for weeks on end, and treat any psychological degradation that happens as just part of the show. As entertainment. The human experience becomes raw material. Suffering becomes entertainment. Vulnerability becomes the price of entry. There is zero human dignity in the equation because there's zero points in the equation where dignity was considered. Reactionary comedy desperately needs you to believe that nothing matters, nothing is meaningful, and that the only authentic response to reality is cynical detachment and perpetual mockery. That if you genuinely believe in something, if you're sincere about your values, then you're the real target of the joke. Because sincerity, actual commitment to something beyond the meta commentary, beyond the reaction, beyond the joke is what threatens uh this entire apparatus. Is the one thing that cannot be co-opted or ironized away. So maybe the most radical response is actually believing in something anyways, or caring anyways. Recognizing that the demand that nothing is sacred is itself a political demand made strategically by people who benefit enormously from your very detachment that they tell you is funny.
SPEAKER_06I think one of the things about Sam Hyde's comedy is that it almost isn't comedy. It's more saying somebody's laughing, therefore it's comedy. It would be like if I could make a analogy, if somebody took an ice pick and shoved it into the part of your brain that causes you to laugh, and then you started laughing because of the stimulation of the ice pick, and then everybody started going, Wow, he's such a good comedian. That guy's laughing a lot. The trauma, the destruction of the person, that is worth less than physically observing like the the the laughter or the reaction of the offense.
SPEAKER_03If there's anything that our audience will learn from from this first segment, is that if the third Reich ended up winning in some, I don't know, magical alternative world, like comedians would still exist. I I genuinely believe that. But they would but but they the comedy would be adapted to the material conditions, blah blah blah, to the to the ideology in which it would develop, right? It would adapt to the ideology in which it would exist, and it would look very similar to what Sam Hyde tries to do time and time again. Punching down, which is very simplistic, but more importantly, pure 100% commodification of the human experience. That's it. Hardcore reality TVs, cameras everywhere, pay to punish shows, literal gladiator battles. If you gave Sam Hyde an unlimited budget, this man would 100% put like 50 people in a room, give them knives, and let you bet on who wins.
SPEAKER_04That is what reactionary comedy is. And he would do it on Little St. James Island as well.
unknownAbsolutely.
SPEAKER_06I mean, I I think one part of the bully experiences that you're missing is it's not just the bully and the victim that make bullying so offensive. There's oftentimes third parties or you know, bully participants or assistants or flunkies of the bully are of people who support the bully so that they do not become a target, right? Like they themselves could easily be bullied by the bully, but they are his little flunky and his little assistant to avoid becoming the target themselves. And I feel like that phenomenon explains a lot of the sadistic streak of the conservative movement. It it is the philosophy of a flunky, of a toady.
SPEAKER_03And especially of comedy like his. No, that is a very, very, very astute point. Yeah. Like his whole quote unquote community, anti-community audience is a bunch of pathetic little bitch boys who always wanted to be friends with the bully. And he monetizes that. He says, Hey, hey, hey, I know you always felt very small, but now you can feel very big because we can you can through me through me bully others only because they you know want to react to the stupid shit that we say.
SPEAKER_06And make no mistake, irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All American irony is based on an implicit, I don't really mean what I'm saying. So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say. That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already. Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying, how totally banal of you to ask what I really mean. This was a quote from David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest. And I think it explains Sam Hyde's reliance on irony as part of a larger political style that defines what may be best called postmodern conservatism. This tendency rejects older right-wing moralism and replaces it with ambiguity, detachment, and the claim that nothing is sincere enough to be criticized. Ideology dissolves in the acid of power, nothing but vibes. Hyde's history is not a story of audience capture where a comedian found himself with fans that were eager to pull them down in the right-wing pipeline. It is a record of repeated flirtation with far-right ideas, symbols, and networks, followed by denials that rely on the claim that everything is a joke and therefore beyond accountability. Hyde first gained wider attention through the sketch group Million Dollar Extreme, whose adult swim show World Peace aired briefly in 2016. Even before the show, Hyde was known online for a style built on shock, cruelty, and transgression for its own sake. This was not politically neutral absurdism. His comedy consistently punched down mocked feminism, racial justice movements, queer people, and framed left-wing politics as both ridiculous and tyrannical.
SPEAKER_11The problem is that homosexuals can't even leave the homes without being abused and assaulted by bad whites. I don't know. Did you try giving someone head? Or maybe you let a haggard pound your ass. It's whatever, yeah.
SPEAKER_06And, you know, in that environment, it was like adolescents rebelling against parental directives, right? If everybody, you know, you never say no, no words and and racism is bad and diversity is our strength, there was nothing that could symbolize adolescent rebellion more than going back to reactionary ways of for the first time. The N-word and racial humor serve the same kind of shock function for that generation.
SPEAKER_03Freudian hours with Mike, 10 out of 10. And I love that analysis. I think it's really good. I think it's really good.
SPEAKER_06And in the context of the insurgent 2016 Trump campaign, there was a growing online ecosystem of alt-right men. And MDE was quickly known as like the only base TV show. Sam Hyde publicly embraced this association, and he even appeared on podcasts and live streams with white nationalism and far-right figures, like we discussed earlier, and openly donating that $5,000 to Dare Sturmer. But I wanted to point out that it got its name from the Nazi-aligned tabloid Der Sturmer, whose publisher, Julius Stryker, was executed at Nuremberg for inciting genocide. So these, you know, associations were knowingly neo-Nazi and they were not subtle.
SPEAKER_03By the way, like uh third world moment right now. I know that the fret is not third world, but still basically compared to America. I always thought it was actually Der Sturmer. I I always call like the American Stormer. This is the first time I'm actually hearing somebody properly pronounce it. I always called it, I always thought it was their Sturmer, like the you know, in the German pronunciation. I didn't know that the Americanize it is what I'm I think that's I maybe I mispronounced it.
SPEAKER_06I don't fucking know.
SPEAKER_03I'm no, no, you didn't. No, I'm pretty sure you didn't. I I I always just thought that it was, you know, just not Americanized.
SPEAKER_04You get what I'm saying? Yeah. It's like Del Stoma or something like that. I don't know. Yeah. Right?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I think you're right. Uh my pronunciation sometimes fucks up. So don't don't don't don't take my pronunciation as a guide ever. Uh uh Anne, you check this. I got you, fam. The Daily Stormer. Hyde would often waffle between making these kind of transgressive statements and then insisting they were just a joke or a form of trolling. And this is the core pattern. He does material support for fascists and then tries to reframe it as performance art, as if the irony or post-irony magically strips away the consequences for funding organized neo-Nazi movements. Hyde's public statements reinforce this alignment with the dregs of the far right. He ridiculed Black Lives Matter, traffic and conspiracy thinking about Jews, media, and cultural decay. None of it was subtle. It echoed the standard grievances of the alt-right, dressed up in the language of edgy jokes. When critics pointed this out, Hyde and his defenders claimed that liberals simply did not understand comedy. This move is essential to alt-right culture. Say the thing openly, then retreat into it's just jokes when confronted. At the same time, Hyde's comedy was being actively embraced and promoted by alt-right figures. When Million Dollar Extreme presents World Peace aired on Adult Swim, it quickly became popular in those white nationalists and reactionary spaces. Andrew Anglin promoted the show enthusiastically, framing it as aligned with his politics. Other far-right figures and forums treated Hyde as one of their own. The cancellation of World Peace became a rallying point. Adult Swim cut ties with Hyde after his political activities and associations drew scrutiny. Instead of reckoning with why a major network might not want to platform someone entangled with neo-Nazi circles, Hyde cast himself as a martyr to political correctness. This victim narrative fits perfectly with alt-right mythology, where reactionaries imagine themselves as brave truth tellers, silenced by the woke mob, rather than people facing consequences for their choices. After the show's failure, Hyde's influence did not disappear. It metastasized online. He became a cult figure on 4chan and Reddit, wherever young men radicalized each other through memes. Whenever a mass shooting took place, his fans would plaster his face all over social media and comment sections as they promulgated hoaxes of him as the shooter. This was effective in boosting his profile as Sam Hyde would consistently be required to deny responsibility. By injecting himself into every tragedy, reporters would have to get a comment from him. So you'd be seeing Sam Hyde every time there was a mass shooting. There would be a Sam Hyde is not the shooter debunking piece.
SPEAKER_03I remember six, seven years ago. Obviously, Mike was a part of the culture OG. Not the far-right culture, but the anti-fascist culture. Probably like thousands of other uh boys, girls, and NBs did the same. Uh and unironically, Sam Hyde's account popped up and then I clicked. And I was like, huh, some of this is funny. Thank God, you know, I had like um two inches of uh grey matter left in my young brain pre-alcohol to immediately recognize it for what it is. But I can see a lot of people not stopping at that stage after interacting with his face uh post um major shooting tragedy. The reason I'm mentioning all of this, and the the reason I'm sharing my personal interaction with Sam Hyde and how I learned about him is because you will listen to the very eloquent stuff that that Mike just said, and you will be like a normal person and be like, who the fuck would like what the fuck like all somebody mentions him and then I who the fuck would actually click on the link and then go to Sam Hyde's profile and maybe find out about him and maybe even become their follower. Well, one of the three hosts of this show literally found out about him because he just kept putting his photo on top of every major tragedy for a decade.
SPEAKER_04Or his fans did, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Or his fans, yes, thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean I that's also like the way I found out about him because I was early on the internet, and you know, back then people were super fucking edgy all over, and you didn't really like as a kid, you don't really know where you are, like what kind of spaces you're in, and then who your friends are and you know what they believe and everything, because like you don't understand any of this stuff, and you maybe don't talk about it that much. And they might, you know, show you this guy and you're like, he seems pretty funny, or whatever. I didn't really think it was funny, I thought it was kind of weird and gross, but not because of like necessarily the content and everything. I just thought the presentation was weird and off-putting. Uh, because you know, I was a kid and English is my second language.
SPEAKER_06It's important to understand like the phenomenon was not random, right? Like these altright nihilistic little boys were embracing nihilism, cruelty, provocation as a tool to boost Sam's profile, right? Because in a moment of panic or fear of one of these mass shootings, to use that as a way of doing gorilla marketing for a guy who would laugh at the dead kids. Right. That was the essence of finding his audience, right? Because who would laugh at that except somebody who was already so brain rotted that nothing was sacred, even dead kids, right? So that's why Sam Hyde was so effective at cultivating that style of comedy where violence was not only explicitly endorsed, it was toyed with as a feature of fascistic cultural product, right? Like, hey, school shootings are hilarious. Think about those dead kids and their mothers crying, and that's the punchline, right? That Sam Hyde would say that in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. It was like dead baby jokes, but doing it at the funeral of the person whose baby died. It's important to mention that Sam Hyde's connections to the alt-right are and explicitly neo-Nazi figures are not vague vibes, as we've discussed many times in the podcast so far. They were direct contacts and material support. What makes Hyde distinctive is not that he hides these connections, but that he's been somewhat successful at using irony to keep them from ever fully sticking. Hyde's work has trained audiences to laugh at dehumanization and to treat politics as a game where nothing is real and therefore nothing is accountable. That posture is not harmless. It softens people up for reactionary ideas while providing endless escape hatches for when those ideas are challenged. He helped normalize a political culture that thrives on racism, misogyny, and authoritarian longing, and then hid behind the thinnest possible veil of irony or post-irony. Statements that would be clearly reactionary if spoken plainly are instead wrapped in absurdity, exaggeration, or deliberate offensiveness. When he echoes white nationalist talking points or mocks movements for racial and gender justice, the content is real, but the delivery provides that slipperiness that gives him plausible deniability. If the audience laughs and agrees, then he proceeds with the message. If critics object and you can't make that content, then those critics became humorless scolds. And as you pointed out earlier, Yagopnik, the humorless scolds running out of the woodwork to try to cancel him is part of the joke. This is precisely how postmodern conservatism operates. Unlike traditional conservatism, which openly defends hierarchy, nation, and authority, this newer form pretends it does not believe in anything at all. And this is something that we're going to be returning to time and time again, episode after episode, is you'll find this theme connects them all. Say what you will about Nazism. It had a mythos. It had beliefs, it had ideas that it was asserting. They were contradictory, they were pseudoscientific, they were laughably stupid. But at least there was some core idea to be proven wrong, to be destroyed. Whereas these ideas of postmodern conservatism don't believe in anything at all. They claim to be above politics, but consistently they find the same target, the left. They borrow the language and ideas of postmodernism, skepticism, and relativism, but only to undermine emancatory politics. Truth is mocked. Sincerity is treated as a weakness. Moral clarity is framed as authoritarian. The idea that a teacher might be gay and talk about their partner in a classroom is treated like it is grooming. And this is coming from a man who groomed a teenage girl and abused her. So smart. So, like you know, pushing boundaries there. Anti-Semitic tropes are circulated not because they are believed, but because they upset liberals and leftists, but also a conspiratorial flavor that scratches an itch that many mainstream politics fail to scratch. Because, truth be told, the status quo liberalism does not reckon with the forces that are controlling our societies. Not Jews, not a cabal of some minority group, but international capital.
SPEAKER_03Irish people, though.
SPEAKER_06Irish people, Irish people, the Iberians, the Iberians keep them out.
SPEAKER_03And Albanians. Albanians, okay. Of course. Oh shit. I promise, man, an Albanian told me like 10k a month, he'll send us just not to talk about Albanians.
SPEAKER_04So we'll just have to do the money.
SPEAKER_00So this podcast has been seized by the secret Albanian cabal. Your regular pro-Albanian content will continue shortly.
SPEAKER_06Violence is hinted not as a program but as an aesthetic. This allows reactionary movements to spread while evading that responsibility. Content radicalizes while the tone insists that nothing serious is happening. And that's the important point. And, you know, again, there's so many content creators where this is exactly the model. I mean, recently Nick Fuentes just said, who gives a shit about Jeffrey Epstein? Jeffrey Epstein was cool. You know, it went from, oh my God, Israel is controlling America, America first. We got to get rid of these, you know, the Zionist occupied government. And now he's saying Jeffrey Epstein, approvable Israeli agent, as far as I'm concerned, is now cool. What happened? What happened to defending the white race against Jewish control or whatever the fuck trope he was trying to spread for most of the last two years? It all falls away because you know he's he has to continue his audience is addicted to consistently escalating the like shock value of what he's saying.
SPEAKER_04And now, you know, Jeffrey Epstein becomes a brand and an aesthetic.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and and you know, I don't know if you guys, you know, not to get off too much of a tangent from Sam Hyde, but there is there are memes that I'm sure we're going to talk about more in the future, but basically where Charlie Kirk and Jeffrey Epstein have been absorbed into these like alt-right AI slop. It kind of pretty much perfectly illustrates what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I hinted at it in the uh previous episode. There's like AI slop of Jeffrey Epstein intercepting the bullet that killed uh Charlie Kirk and like bringing him to Agatha or whatever, like you know, Nazi heaven, whatever the fuck. Based.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, everybody should go back and listen to that episode again to make sure that they that they learned everything from it because it was so packed full of information and value.
SPEAKER_03But and the craziest part is like what Mike uh said about uh you know Nick Fuentes uh being like, man, actually, Epstein's kind of low-key based, man. You see how fucking dude he's kind of low-key hot, man. I I wish I could go to the same fucking toilet on the plane with him. Uh this is a direct quote from Nick Fuentes. You cannot sue me, like 100%. Uh I saw it on on Der Stormer. But uh no, the Mike or anybody else cannot uh should talk any right wing talking point to an extent because of what Sam Hyde taught them. I mean not taught them, but let's say turned into a proper applicable praxis slash thesis, which is even if you spend most of your career saying that they are Jewish pedophile cabals raping children, and then you say, Oh, this particular pedophile cabal that happens to be run by you know a Jewish guy, is kind of based on any reaction to what you're saying, uh any reaction to your statement, you can just push away like a pen of a desk because you can just call it cringe libs losing their mind. So TLDR, Mike saying, Yo, what the fuck, Nick Fuentes or anybody else who has made their entire career based on anti-Semitism, now saying that uh pedophile cabals are based has no political power because it can be depicted as libs losing their mind. Right. And could actually be even turned into hilarious content.
SPEAKER_06And that and that's kind of like part of the method, right? Like as soon as Nick Fluent has said that, not that this episode's about Nick, but it is illustrating a point where every liberal retweeted that, right? You know, it was spread around the entire internet, which raises their profile, and then you can see, and then you can see them pointing and laughing, going, ha ha, he got him again, he got him again. This method targets alienated young men who have been taught to distrust institutions, but they fail to analyze power. And it continues to thrive in online spaces where irony is the currency, and being committed to anything is cringe. And this is another element of the Sam Hyde and alt-right ecosystem and how it starts to invade even apolitical spaces and colonize those spaces with the very famous and popular cringe compilations. You know, Sam Hyde was caught literally making the Roman salute with Andrew Weave Ahrenheimer, who is a longtime white supremacist troll and administrator for the Daily Stormer. And as his profile grew with these right-wing spaces, he continued to appear on other conspiracy and far-right media platforms, including Alex Jones InfoWars, a cornerstone of modern reactionary media ecosystem, and actually a key element to why Trump was able to rise. Trump was able to bridge the gap between these kind of like alt-media, alt-right spaces, and more conservative traditional spaces like AM radio, Fox News, and he was able to stand in the breach between the fringe right and the more mainstream right and collect support from both sides. And Sam Hyde is somebody who really symbolizes that crystallization of Trumpism, which is this neofascist movement that we are all dealing with. These appearances embedded him in a network where anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, political paranoia are normalized. He shared space with Nick Fuentes, as we previously discussed, who himself is known for minimalizing the Holocaust and advocacy for authoritarian ethno-nationalism, which is, of course, ironic because he is not a white man, but he calls for America to be a white Christian nation, thereby being the non-white head of a movement for a white society. It the contradictions generate humor in and of themselves, and I'm sure you right now want to say, How the fuck does that work? You saying that is the point.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. I mean, yeah, look at the uh Sneeko and Nick Fuentes and all these guys. Like, there's like uh what one white person in that group, and they're going to clubs listening to Kanye West's like Heil Hitler song. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, yeah, it is it is part of the point.
SPEAKER_06There was only one white guy in the room, and he was the least political of all of them. What was it, cavicular or whatever his fucking name is? Yeah, the guy who like ran over a guy.
SPEAKER_03To quote Hitler's legacy is being carried forward by two half black sex trafficking rapists, a gay Mexican virgin federal informant, a half Filipino, half-Kaitian guy who did gay for pay porn, a Sudanese Muslim, and a crystal meth addict obsessed with facial cosmetic surgery.
SPEAKER_06And who's also sterilized himself.
SPEAKER_03I wish this was a gotcha, but this is basically this is basically the vermacht, bro.
SPEAKER_06I mean, I just love the fact that for a group obsessed with racial purity, the one white guy sperm don't swim no more.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, yeah, you gotta you gotta give you know they're diverse, they're inclusive now.
SPEAKER_06And remember, like by giving Fuentes that platform, that's not it was like what more do you need to say, right? By sharing space with Nick, by treating him like a normal guy, by by making cracking jokes with him, you were treating fascist politics as content and normalizing it for his own audience. So, like, I mean, it's obvious what his political project is, right? Yeah, yeah, it couldn't be any more obvious. And and then his performances as sketches have become even more radical, and they reference anti-Semitic conspiracy language like Zog, Zionist occupied government. He has invoked figures like David Duke. I mean, we've talked endlessly about how he traffics in racial and gender stereotypes, and how every single time he does that, he tries to slip behind that thin veil of post-irony. Taken together, all of these associations are not accidental, they're not exaggerated, that consists of money given to a neo-Nazi, friendly relations with white supremacist organizers, repeated appearances in far-right media ecosystems, and a body of work that reliably resonates with reactionary ideology. Hyde's commitment is not a coherent doctrine, but to a political style where fascism can circulate freely as long as it is wrapped in jokes. The irony or post-irony is not a misunderstanding, it is a method for fascist propagandizing.
SPEAKER_07And I would say people like these people we keep talking about are re are essentially conservative and reactionary and are trying to move backwards.
SPEAKER_04That was comedian Tim Heideker, who you also heard in the introduction of the episode. In this instance, he's talking about the so-called Maverick comedians, the countercultural icons of right-wing podcasting and alternative media, who at least numbers-wise seem to dominate online culture. Most of these right-wing people aren't online fascists, but some of them definitely are. I say online fascists because these guys are a new phenomenon in many ways distinct from the fascists of the so-called fascist epoch. They're internationalists. They're sharing things across borders. The intellectual fascist tradition largely keeps originating in Europe, but spreads across the Atlantic to the United States, where it larges itself in the culture we consume. Think of terms like remigration, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, the forceful deportation of populations to their perceived homelands, even if they're citizens. That term is now actively being used by the United States Department of Homeland Security and the larger Trump administration. This became normalized through a long-term strategy on the right. There's an international ecosystem of online fascism out there. We've been using the term fascism a lot at this point, and we're going to continue to use it in this episode and many episodes going forward. So it probably bears defining. This is one of the most contentious and controversial definitional issues in academic history. I'm using the lowercase f word to refer to any sort of fascist type. Whereas Capital F fascist refers specifically to Italian fascism. With the lower F fascism, I'm using an academic definition from the so-called new consensus, as outlined by scholar Roger Griffin in his several books on the topic. It's mostly unproductive to use a if it walks like a duck kind of methodology to figuring out if someone is a fascist. Or if they're actually just some other brand of reactionary. Because so many approaches like that, like Umberto Echo's Urfascism, with essentially a list of things that enable fascism, or Stanley Payne's checklist, both actually end up partly applying to all sorts of political movements, governments, and so on. By using the approach by Roger Griffin, we identify fascism in its generic form, in the terms of how fascists themselves understand their political mission, without, of course, endorsing or agreeing with any of their ideas. The fascists have their own diagnosis of the present state of society and history, and a vision for its future, that they want to realize through a process of often violent societal transformation. Fascists view themselves as the self-appointed vanguard of an imagined community that doesn't necessarily have to correspond to any one nation. For example, they're the vanguard of the quote unquote white race. But the imagined community doesn't have to be racial. A fascist movement doesn't have to embrace any phenomena of the fascist epoch, like eugenics, biological racism, corporatism, leader cults, or so on. The imagined community of the fascists is the ultra nation. The ultra nation is an organic national community that they find either in the nation-state, an imagined global ethnicity, anthropological ties made through mythicized history, language, or on online image boards. Quoting Roger Griffin. But all are committed to an ideology of revolutionary ultranationalism tailored to the crisis conditions in which the imagined community finds itself. This is the core of every kind of fascism. Your community is in terminal decline that can only be halted or stopped through palingenesis, meaning rebirth. The thing to be recreated is a mythic conception of the community that either once existed or could have existed. Your comedy is under attack, well, let's return to when it was good. People idealizing 1950s advertisements and wanting to, quote, return to that society are heavily engaged in this sort of myth making. This, what I'm describing, is the fascist minimum, the mythic core of every species of fascism. On top of this, you can layer all sorts of differences.
SPEAKER_06What's really interesting about this epoch is the ease at which regular people can make their own myths. And this is why I think AI is so particularly useful for fascist movements, is because much of what they say is laughably stupid and completely unconnected from history. But I don't know if you saw recently Asmongold say, I don't need to know books, I don't need to read history, I just know human psychology and how people respond to incentives. So I can just look at a situation and know what the correct answer is based on that alone. And AI Slop basically gives them the ability to create the evidence of their mind and give it a symbolic representation that is got the level of versimilitude necessary to kind of trick dumb people's brains.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, exactly. It's not the evidence, it's just symbols and aesthetics that like look like you know what they believe. Because again, they don't care about the evidence.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, when you talk about the 50s advertisements, like that was idealized then. That was a product that was being sold, and now we have this like symbol whose purpose was to sell fucking butter or something, and now it's being used to symbolize what America used to be like. But America never was like that. But because it's an old advertisement, it gains this kind of like sense of being historical as opposed to fanciful.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. Yeah, it's it's the um like the anthropological like myth making. You you look back at whatever historical artifact or whatever you can see, and you create this identity from these disparate artifacts.
SPEAKER_06It's the same shit the Nazis were engaged in, except this time uh the Israelis as are uh you know, the Israelis are doing their fascist archaeology too.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and instead of like that kind of stuff, like actual archaeology, it's like looking up fucking 50s advertising. Or just typing in the fucking grok. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Now you don't even need to search it up. At grok create a black welfare queen complaining about not working, and then you can go look and see how lazy black people are, and it's just a story you made.
SPEAKER_03I uh yeah, exactly. I don't I don't uh I can't remember the particular academic that mentioned it, and I apologize that I cannot properly cite them. But uh one uh like I remember the particular quote, it's not direct, but it's uh they had the technology during the rise of the so-called Third Reich to create pamphlets and posters using cutouts from real photos of what quote unquote Germans were like when they lived or even during the development of you know Nazi Germany, if we want to call it development, that actually lived so-called rural life to which uh you know Nazi Germany wanted everyone to uh return to a true Nordic way of life, you know, developing the Liebes draum, blah blah blah blah. But they didn't because when they would find images, or for example, I don't know, let's touch on misogyny, right? Images of women that have 12 children and that work the land, why couldn't they use those images? Because women that have 12 children and work the land do not look like beautiful, busty, blonde, Aryan goddesses. They look like obviously human beings that have fucking worked their ass off and gave birth to 12 children. So they resorted to just drawing shit from the top of their head, a fetishized image of the past or even their rural communities. But at least they needed a fucking artist to do it, at least they needed the budget to do it, at least they needed, you know, 12 guys to sit in a room and be like, guys, what do we want? Uh, you know, the uh the the the pitch for the bros when it comes to getting their Aryan wife, but also the the Aryan wives to you know see themselves as uh in the future of uh the development of of our beautiful uh you know cause and movement and ideology and state. Now they don't even need the ten guys in the room, bruv.
SPEAKER_04They they don't even it's no, yeah, you just yeah, Ad Groc. But like, you know, you talk about like this, uh them needing like the artists, because you know, it was all shit when they went out there or whatever. But after they took power, they did something even funnier. And I'm pretty sure Adam Toos, um Columbia historian, talks about this in Wages of Destruction. They created this like make work program of like basically like creating these like small rural colonies uh to send people out to to uh a create work and also like uh you know put people back in this like you know idealized idyllic uh rural existence that they thought was like the heart of you know the German race. And A fucking failed to create new jobs really, b didn't really like you know increase like agricultural production at all, but it was fucking great for photo ops because they could construct the sets basically. Yes, yes, so like it yeah, it played so well for propaganda.
SPEAKER_03It did, but but the the the villages and the small towns, etc. etc. that weren't you know just uh stolen from Jews, Roma, Slavs, leftists, etc. etc. That you basically only survived.
SPEAKER_04I mean later they were, but yeah.
SPEAKER_03Sorry, please, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Late later they were stolen, obviously. Like all these were stolen later, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that that was that was my pitch. Like uh the villages would like uh villages that were not massively subsidized by uh stolen capital and land and food and resources. Um yeah, the literally and slave labor thing would uh you know not create the image that the everyday Nordic, aka Aryan, aka German they did not create what they imagined this ideal returning to the roots would look like, but they created, as you beautifully put, the perfect photo shoot.
SPEAKER_04It's yeah. Um also side note to those people who know me from before the podcast, uh, time to start the Adam Twos counter. It took me two episodes to bring him up, and I will bring him up.
SPEAKER_03Let's go let's go anyways. Yeah as a Fred a listener myself, I am fucking excited.
SPEAKER_04But we spoke about the uh fact that like the core of fascism is people committed to this revolutionary ultranationalism tailored to the crisis conditions which they believe their community finds itself, their imagined community, whatever it may be. I'm gonna list a couple of crises or forms of decadence or degeneration that Roger Griffin says fascists often feel that their imagined community is threatened by. Now let me know if uh you recognize any of this from any Sam uh hidbits. Demographic decline, moral decline, the production of degenerate or meaningless art, anonymous townscapes, contamination by so-called degenerate ideologies like political correctness, by perceived alien creatures like Jewish people, or by perceived unhealthy social practices or movements like homosexuality or feminism. These are all things he rages against.
SPEAKER_03The children fucker and children beater, and public children porn publisher and public children post SA Humiliator. Yeah. Pretty much does sound like your classic fascist.
SPEAKER_06Can I just say something about Sam Hyde that needs to be said? This shit is boring. You know, as an adult man, I I gotta tell you, I think I've heard slurs enough that they no longer shock me. It doesn't shock me when a fat, underemployed, undereducated dipshit says the N-word. At no point does it even really cause my hackles to rise. It's just pathetic on its face.
SPEAKER_03I agree, but we would be undermining his like uh to an extent approach to not not approach to we would undermining his the the the height of his tear when it comes to humor. We've already explained so much, so we're not I'm not gonna go back to it. But he will sometimes like surprise you by saying shit that like obviously uh I'll use a quote now pretty misogynistic, pretty strange, you know, in a weird way, like kind of shooting your comrade when it comes to the reactionary cause, and we'll probably have a whole episode on the comrade that he is about to shoot. But I will quote literally from one of the latest videos I've ever watched from him. Yeah, he he says, I fucked libs of TikTok. I wouldn't touch her with Epstein's penis, but I touched her with mine. Okay This man oscillates between Ooh, N word, N word, N word, literally. The bottom of the bottom of the bottom, but then shocks you. And I have to admit that shocks that makes me chuckle.
SPEAKER_06I think that joke works because we've dehumanized Libs of TikTok, because we recognize them as like an enemy of humanity and we have this disdain deep in our hearts. And I think that feeling approximates what a fascist feels like for every other human being. So I think you're right. You know what I mean? Like I despise Libs of TikTok because they are a piece of shit. So when I think of them being harmed, you know, I the empathy that normally springs forth from my, you know, uh lefty brain doesn't, it doesn't trigger. And then I can hear Sam Hyde's joke. Because I dismiss their humanity, it kind of works in the moment.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and because you're seeing the enemy's in fighting, so it's funny. But it only is funny because they're an enemy. Yeah. It is, it is. And even if when he the there you go. I'm admitting to my own like reactionary sentiments. And one really should we all do it? Because that's the only way we we do, you know, introspection and realize it. Uh he also does it with, I have to admit, sometimes when he does it with like very cringe, very like ultra-centrist liberals, etc. etc. Which by the way, we fully support because this podcast is 100% centrist, 0% political. Welcome to Reaction Pod. No politic here, no politic here. But I have to admit, doing research for obviously for this episode, that all of us did uh at least seven months worth of research. I watched, I brain rotted myself into uh into no joke, like at least at least four or five hours of his stuff, just so I refresh my brain on his stuff. And when he would shit talk libs, I mean I would laugh. I I'm not even kidding. I would because he manages to pinpoint liberal hypocrisy, but as every reactionary properly does, he doesn't do criticism of liberal ideology from the perspective of uh hey, it doesn't reach far enough. Or it doesn't achieve the supposed goals, right? Exactly. He does the opposite. He says, eh, uh the fact that it's reaching is already funny. The fact that it's reacting is already funny. The fact that they care is already funny.
SPEAKER_06Oh, I I understand what you're saying. It's like when you know, during the Charlie Kirk episode, uh I think I watched uh uh the terminal incident from every angle I could find. You know, like I I I uh I understand the the impulse. Let me just put it that way.
SPEAKER_04His content was rife with anti-social justice warrior messaging, anti-feminism, generic racism, anti-Semitism, and raging against the political correctness that he believed got his show cancelled. In an interview with a Hollywood reporter shortly after his show was cancelled, he said, It's not the craziest stuff that's ever been on TV here, and we came under fire.
SPEAKER_03I d I don't know why, probably because we aren't anti-white.
SPEAKER_04Thank you. From my knowledge, Sam Hyde has never outwardly aspired to be part of a militant movement that would carry out a putsch or overthrow the government. He is a poster. He makes content. In the 1960s, the leader of the French New Right, Alain de Benoit, made a very conscious decision to move away from the discourse of racial superiority and revolutionary violence, towards a quote, cultural rebirth, as the solution to the perceived terminal decline of the West. We talked about so-called diverse fascism. This is what has paved the way to that. Griffin says these 1960s fascists would, quote, no longer dedicate themselves to the defeat of pluralistic liberal democracy through paramilitary violence or political engagement. Instead, they should devote themselves to a sustained campaign of meta politics. Instead of doing party politics, they would focus on using, quote, intellectual and artistic production to overcome the forces of materialism and the degenerative ethnic and cultural miscegenation and general spiritual chaos of modernity. That's a lot of academic gobbledegu to say serious politics is out the window. It's time to post pictures of Pepper the Frog. The metapolitics framework the far right have adopted is, ironically, like anything else smart the far right does, something they stole from the left. From French Marxist Alain Badieu, one of the ones to popularize the term metapolitics, and the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose theory of cultural hegemony underpins virtually everything the right does now. The idea is simple. In order to seize power, the cultural battle must be won first. The positions of the fascists must seem natural and inevitable. The struggle is over what constitutes common sense. Norms must be pushed, consent must be manufactured. To this end, the online rights podcasters, posters, and so on, the subjects of this podcast, are the foot soldiers of the 21st century fascism. For many fascists, the rebirth has been indefinitely postponed and must wait for the collapse of liberal civilization from within. What the fascist theorist Julius Evola calls riding the tiger. The thinly disguised racism originating in the New Right from the 1960s onwards aimed to preserve diversity and so-called cultural differences, so as to foster a new form of xenophobia camouflaged under layers of sophisticated doublespeak, while portraying democracy as a quote, new totalitarianism, which promotes, quote, cultural genocide.
SPEAKER_11My race is done, you're inheriting the earth, along with some other undesirables, and that's cool, bro. High five. But check it out. Just remember who built this place, alright? Remember to pay homage to the white man.
SPEAKER_04The new direction of this racism insists on the quote human right to belong to a distinctive, historically rooted culture, mythically conceived as ideally homogenous and quote pure. This is the sort of thing that the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer espouses, the man who claims to have coined the term alt-right. And who, coincidentally, Sam Hyde was hanging out with in 2017, when he attended a Nazi book burning ritual. Sam Hyde's eclectic or absurdist style of content wants to defy analysis. Finding the genuine Sam Hyde among the characters and bits is intentionally difficult, as we've talked about. This has tremendous utility. It provides cover, makes it easier for fellow travelers to excuse away anything objectionable as a character or a bit.
SPEAKER_06I do want to take a second here to talk about some of the content that is not so clearly political. Like a lot of Sam Hyde's effective bits are about just the frustration of being part of this society. And it's not even necessarily a rebellion against liberalism. It's a rebellion against serving a function in society, a rebellion of having against having responsibilities, rebellion and frustration with something like working a job and how meaningless it is under capitalism.
SPEAKER_04It's uh, you know, he's he's pointing out the terminal decline that he sees.
SPEAKER_06And like that, I think resonates so well with an audience that is feeling those same feelings of frustration and anger.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. And it's hopefully the main thing that uh our audience deep down, I'm spoiling episode 1000. That is the whole point. That's the whole point. Like you have real grievances. Look at me, I'm Sam Hyde or Nazi Man 785. Uh, your real grievances that have real systemic causes. Uh it's actually black people. At the end of the day, it's people and benefits. Or it's vaccines. It can be anything. It's actually it's actually straight people. It can unironically be it's actually wet. It can. Yeah, it can be anything. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06There's a a specific bit from World Peace. Bit where this guy is the CEO of like a landscaping company. He comes into the office and he like is beat red, and he he you know, he starts to bit already awake in bed smoking a cigarette when the alarm goes off. You know what I mean? Like, and just he goes to the office and he punches down the front door and he's just screaming and being a tyrant towards his employees because of the frustration and futility of his life. That to me represents what exactly the feelings of the people that enjoy that content are seeing expressed.
SPEAKER_04The real feelings, like the the real thing that actually gets to what what is going on in their life. Being the only fascist theorist to make it to post-war prominence, Julius Evola fostered a cult of self-contradiction that, quote, served as a tool for dismantling the stranglehold of logic over everyday existence, for freeing the self from logic's gravitational pull, for demolishing the destructive core of a fallen world. I've seen I've seen Sam Hyde be described as quote Dada or Avant Garde. Some of his stuff certainly seems inspired by those art movements. I'm not an art historian by any means, but there's definitely an anti-art and often anti-comedy element to what he does, which he shares with the interwar Dada art movement. By its own account, Ivola was attracted to Dada by the thrills of his reawakening, instilled in its campaign to embark on a great negative work of destruction, necessary to clean up the filth of modernity. On the other side of this destruction, however, Evola was able to forge a palingetic vision of the world process that opened onto a new modernity. This he achieved through an orgy of unbridled eclecticism. And eclecticism, I think, is a word that describes Sam Hyde's disparate, strange bits quite well. But what if it's all bait? What if it's all just a bit? What if it actually is all just a bit? And it's actually all just bait.
SPEAKER_07We're being using satire, which often involves m cloaking in the thing you're against.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Where do you draw the line between satire and genuine political agitation? Functionally, there isn't one. When Tim Heideker is satirizing Jordan Peterson, he's mocking his ideas. When Sam Hyde paints himself in blackface, well, you get the idea. But a lot of it is bait, and when you fall for it, he and his guys point and laugh. There's little more to the joke itself than that. But it serves a practical organizational purpose. It's community building. Quoting Mike Felix and Holger Marx from the University of Hamburg in a 2019 paper on digital fascism. It is not so much ideological consistency, but rather the cultural practices in the digital community itself that work in a community-building way. Engaging in those digital cultures through offensive rhetoric and transgressive behaviors is thus the meaningful means for a collective identity. Sam Hyde is part of a larger political project and movement. His shitposting and general way of being seems thoughtless and ironic, but he is a digital fascist, part of a larger landscape building these online communities through provocation. Quote For fascism, means are more important than the ends. In this sense, political style and practice are also constitutive for the movement.
SPEAKER_07Oh no, I think you're actually when you're sending me animations of me going into the ovens at Auschwitz, which was happening to me in 2016, you know, memes of Pepe, all that stuff. It's like, no, that's not just to shock. That's like there's a political ideology behind that.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_07Right? Yeah, so irony uh gets kind of got co-opted and and and sort of aligned with an ideology.
SPEAKER_04What you heard was Tim Heideker talking about the sort of hate he received around the time of Sam Hyde's show being cancelled on Adult Swim.
SPEAKER_06I do think this is a very important point that we shouldn't miss throughout these episodes, which is that fascism is inherently a con man's game. You know what I mean? It's all it is. The the the fa the faces of fascism are people who are trying to become famous and powerful themselves. There is no core. It is what they need to do in any situation. You might even say that fascism is pragmatism taken to its most extreme in the sense of the of the self-interest of the fascist leader or fascist influencer. They're saying what they need to say in the moment to make themselves more powerful, richer, more influential, etc.
SPEAKER_04I mean, I would say that uh there is a core, but the core is like it's it's a very generic thing. And then everything beyond that, you can do whatever you want with fascism. Like any fascist movement can do, can like spin everything to their uh local circumstances. Uh the only core is the fact that you want this ultra nation that you construct, you know, you identify a crisis, whether it be real or not, it could be imagined, and you know, you rage against that. That's like the only thing that is core to this.
SPEAKER_03You must preserve the particular hierarchy or you must recreate a new hierarchy which will serve you always as uh as a sort of proverbial king. And you know, as both of you said, kind of to like synthesize, there's you know, there's two types of guys that want to do this. I mean, there's more than two types of guys, but at the end of the day, there's two types of guys 95% because they get to be on top of said hierarchy, and five percent that actually believe that this is the most organic, natural, and ethical way of organizing society, which are troglodite Cretan imbeciles. So anybody following these ideologies, they're following at the end of the day, two types of guys real believers, the five percent, so you're following a literal Cretin, or you're following somebody that's playing you.
SPEAKER_02If there was one race, if there's one race, one uh job having gonna paying race of people that's gonna save humanity, what race would it be? No, ladies and gentlemen, it's the white race. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I need to I need to fuck really bad. I need to calm really bad.
SPEAKER_04So just meet me in the For every fucked up thing that Sam Hyde says or does that he doesn't actually believe in, there's still an underlying strategy. When it's doing provocative or subversive stuff, he's challenging society's ideas about what's okay and not okay to do. Otherwise, it wouldn't be subversive or provocative. When Sam Hyde donates $5,000 to a Nazi's legal defense, if he claims it's a bit, then the bit is fundamentally, why shouldn't I be allowed to do this? That is Sam Hyde, a fascist for the 21st century, an online fascist.
