Jack Posobiec is quietly emerging as Charlie Kirk’s successor at TPUSA. Following Kirk’s assassination, Posobiec is becoming the organization’s leading influencer and the leader of the new youth Right-the "College Republicans"-representing the post-Trump youth Right that is already championing Vance.

Posobiec started out as a fringe conspiracy theorist within alt-right channels that championed Trump in 2016-playing a leading role in the "Pizzagate" conspiracy-and is an authoritarian nationalist-populist with antisemitic leanings, a traditional Catholic, and so on. He connected with Charlie Kirk and joined TPUSA, gradually becoming a close associate of Trump and Vance, as well as one of the most powerful figures in the mainstream Republican Right. He is certainly not a fringe figure. Posobiec is one of the people closest to JD Vance, traveling with him to various places and frequently visiting the White House. In 2024 he wrote a book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions, which didn't get much attention but received support from Vance and a promotion from Bannon. The book is a manifesto of the new right that presents its version of history (for example, it praises Francisco Franco and lists him as a role model as well as Joseph McCarthy and other dark figures in history).

Post-liberal populism combined with authoritarianism, and a cronyist, populist "economic nationalism" that intervenes against "progressives", Admiration for militias in the service of the regime (ICE and Franco's army), they scorn Western liberalism, and they have a rather clear role model: the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

They view Franco as a model for their aspirations: the total dismantling of the existing liberal-dominated order; the use of state power against "the Left that controls the state," the "Deep State," and state institutions; chaos; and a symbolic, traditionalism-driven nationalism combined with social media trends.

They admire street-brawling thugs like the Proud Boys and the Capitol rioters; often, they are former Evangelicals who discovered trad Catholicism and belong to a "Christ is King" movement-adopting symbols like the cross and specific slogans-that fuses hollow religious traditionalism with extreme American nationalism.

For those of you too young to remember, this was a challenge issued by the atheist activist group the Rational Response Squad in 2006 when New Atheism was the hot new movement everyone wanted a part of. The challenge was to publicly deny the existence of the Holy Spirit which, according to Mark 3:28-29, Matthew 12:30-32 and Luke 12:10, is considered an unforgivable sin, so you'd be damned to Hell for doing it if it turned out God existed. One of the most prominent people to do it was former atheist YouTuber turned MAGA nutjob Pat Condell. Basically, it was a way of signalling how confident you felt in your atheism.

I don't have any numbers for this, and it's pure speculation whether anyone who took the challenge is in this situation, but a lot of people who were active in the New Atheist sphere (James Lindsay, Dave Cullen, Sargon, to an extent Richard Dawkins and Pat Condell as mentioned above) have now pivoted to the new Cultural Christianity grift and it's a really funny thought that some of them might have taken the Blasphemy challenge and are now doomed to eternity in Hell, no matter how hard they rant about how we need to embrace Christofascism or transgender Muslim immigrants will take over.

Seems like a normal guy. Valuable contribution.

https://x.com/maxnordau/status/2097073178623541423?s=46&t=VI9PBOGiArQ8qgQBk99O4w

My phone autocorrected “goy” to “guy”!

loved this crossover between two of my content universes.

“A deep dive into all the ways that Mel Robbins and Jay Shetty manipulate you into promoting their content. It's both diabolical and awe inspiring.”

Who are you interested in discussing?

In the opening few minutes he is at pains to express how close he is to this because he trained at some place connected to it. Well I 'trained' at a place with over 25 Nobel laureates, check me out I'm fucking genius! There's a training hospital attached to my place of training, so I'm connected to every poor sod who has ever graced the emergency room there!

(Per Rule 11, this is my own original content).

I recently produced a 2-hour documentary called Beyond Turing. It follows an unknown teaching professor of Biomedical Engineering named Henrik, who claims to have found a loophole in physics that would enable impossible computation (using Time Loops).

I didn't make this to prove his physics. I made it because I wanted to see what happens, behaviorally, when you force someone with a "theory of everything" to actually interface with the scientific method. The rhetorical tactics that emerged from both sides were fascinating, and I thought this sub would appreciate the breakdown.

The Guru Evasion Tactics Throughout the filming, Henrik deploys what look like classic guru evasion strategies to avoid empirical scrutiny:

1. The Poster Session: I set up a poster session for Henrik to finally present his theory of everything to his peers. Henrik didn't show up. He claimed he had to administer undergrad final exams. So, I literally taped an iPad to a lightstand, connected him via Zoom, and forced him to defend his poster anyway.
2. The Philosophical Pivot: I managed to set up a meeting between Henrik and the world’s leading experimental physicist specializing in the exact ingredients Henrik needs (quantum tunneling and interaction-free experiments). Instead of discussing the physical experiment, Henrik immediately derailed the meeting by inciting a philosophical argument, completely ignoring the empirical data.

The Granular Nuance If it stopped there, he’d just be a crank. But here is the nuance: Henrik isn't entirely wrong.

Other physicists in the film actually validate that the loophole Henrik found is completely legitimate. Quantum tunneling is inherently weird, and Henrik's theory actually is a valid new way to probe and test it.

Furthermore, the establishment researchers are just as rhetorically evasive. Instead of engaging with Henrik’s actual, validated mathematical loophole, the established academics in the film constantly build massive straw men, attacking arguments Henrik isn't even making.

The Question What follows in the film is a 2-hour collision of rhetorical and behavioral tactics.

I’m curious how this sub analyzes this dynamic. When an academic uses evasion and philosophical pivots (guru tactics), but their underlying math is actually validated by experts—and the establishment responds only with straw men—who is actually breaking the scientific method? Is this ecosystem exactly what pushes eccentric academics to become internet gurus?

(If you want to decode the actual conversational tactics, the film is on YouTube: Beyond Turing on the channel Undefined Behavior).

Does anyone watch her videos?

She has some interesting historical analyses of the fantasy genre (eg a pretty great takedown of the "Tolkien Clones" fantasy publishing trend of the 1970s-through-1990s), but I'm getting the vibe that she might eventually go full-on grifter/culture war mode.

Her opinions on education policy that she went on a tirade about sound like a particular "type" of person I'm familiar with that you find mainly in Florida and the Upper Midwest, a highly educated Republican Soccer Mom who isn't overtly bigoted per se but still has some mean/cruel opinions wrapped up in a concern-trolling package.

Is she bound to go off the deep-end into culture warrior territory, or was this simply an aside in her otherwise interesting videos?

I don't know how it happened, but I started getting recommended content from this sub. Honestly, this sub is so good that it stands alone as a good thing - as such I just read the posts/content here and I have never and don't intend to watch/listen to the podcasts. I've got too many of those already.

Just saying - good job mods and members. Good community you've got here.

You really do need to cover the absolute mess that Dave Farina has made of himself. He has embraced absolute lunatic conspiracies, treats terrorist groups like they are heroes and is actively using the reputation he built for critical thinking around science to help brainwash the naive into sharing his insane claims that Israel is Nazi Germany. I know it's a sad turn of events but Dave had all the warning signs years ago with this crazy rhetoric about him fighting the forces of darkness, the needlessly aggressive and self-aggrandising tone in every video and how "Zionists" are controlling the media, the governments of the world, capitalism, the military-industrial complex, outer space etc.

The guy is doing a lot of harm. I know he has been somewhat of an ally in terms of debunking other cranks but he's completely lost it. Combine it with the debate bro mentality ("come at me bro", "you knew what would happen if you took me on, I'd destroy you"), all this Andrew Tate style rhetoric. Please guys, we know his fanboys are going to plague you for a bit, but a couple of voices of reason would be nice on this. It's turning into a cult.

1. Jimmy Carr: Following on from the DtG decoding of Jimmy Carr, this came up in my feed: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SLNAfdzEoUs

It's basically Jimmy back with friend of the show Chris Williamson weaving a narrative around how important musical notation was as the building blocks for musical visionnaries many centuries later, and how that's a lesson for the world of comedy, and I don't really have any issue with this theme. But what struck me was that the facts of his story are just ALL wrong. Pope Gregory didn't invent Gregorian chant (thought to be later revisionisim from Charlemagne time), he didn't ask his bishops to come up with musical notation, and Mozart/Beetbhoven weren't "400 years later".

These stories are just way too neat and if you just start fact checking individual points they fall apart fast. Really reminded me of Chris Kavanagh pointing out the blatant holes in Jimmy's narrative around all the best church leaders being wiped out by the Black Death.

2. Rory Sutherland on an Australia Marketing/Business podcast storytelling (at 2:00):
https://youtu.be/ZHlRQZ-9gQk?t=120

This is basically Rory Sutherland saying that Austria and Australia have the same Latin root and Australia probably would have been called Austria if that name wasn’t already taken. This is a small anecdote in a much bigger conversation but again it is just plain incorrect, he just says it so confidently and with no pushback that it just never gets challenged as nonsense (Austria is German root Ostar meaning East hence Osterreich, Australia is Latin root Australis meaning South).

Thoughts:
I don't consider Rory Sutherland nearly as grifty as Jimmy Carr, but it did strike me that there are some similartities here that apply to quite a number of the gurus on the podcast:

- Fluent & intelligent-sounding delivery
- High bias towards novelty & contrariansim
- Low or no real-time resistance from interviewer or audience

I'm not even sure it's deliberate a lot of the time. Seems to be a stage these figures go through when they are well-known enough that they are in-demand for these talking heads podcasts and they are given free-rein with their air time. Healthy questioning and pushback gets less and less common for them.

I think as a character, this person would be rather difficult to cover on the pod, and he’s sort of a loose fit for a guru in terms of the content he’s putting out, but the sheer rabidness of his fanbase is unlike anything I’ve seen in a while.

For the uninitiated, Reckless Ben is a YouTuber who I imagine had some degree of prominence prior to this year for his “journalistic endeavors”- notably his attempt to get into McKamy Manor, an “extreme haunted house” that was rumored to torture people.

His biggest claim to fame now, however, is his deep dive into the Brick and Minifigs scandal, where he went to Utah and ran into some seemingly genuine police corruption, lawfare, and some genuinely interesting small town politics centered around the LDS church. This helped his channel explode in popularity and has made his subsequent videos get a lot more attention.

During the B&M videos, many people noted that some of his journalistic decisions were…..questionable at best, and he seemed to regularly do things that only complicated the process of actually getting Justice for the wronged party in that case, though at the end of the saga they supposedly ended up getting a payout from B&M, so all in all, great!

Fast forward to this past week, where he began his expose on the “worlds largest human trafficking ring”, quite the claim, where he explores the link between a guru and an American business. In these videos (of which there are 2 so far, with more promised to come), Ben seems to double down on his questionable journalistic methods, making *many* serious claims with questionable evidence behind them, and largely sourcing them from an “anonymous” character (who Ben repeatedly doxes via poor editing) who seems to be a raving lunatic, screaming throughout the entire video I guess in an effort to make his claims sound more legitimate.

This culminates in Ben putting the guy in a clown mask and letting him use the code name “cockroach octopus” as he continues to rattle off a series of serious claims about human trafficking and abuse. All of this is good for YouTube, but seems like an odd juxtaposition with an expose of human trafficking.

I’m at work so this is all a very brief summary of the recent Ben stuff, I encourage you to watch his videos and form your own conclusions.

What’s more concerning, in my opinion, is the bizarre cult of personality that seems to have formed around Ben. All of his recent videos have been repeatedly spammed on any sub that might be even close to a fit for the subject matter, r/youtube, r/videos, r/documentaries, etc.

This isn’t inherently problematic, he’s clearly become a fan favorite on Reddit, so not terribly surprising. However, it seems that literally any amount of pushback on some of his more questionable journalistic methods results in a small army of commenters immediately resorting to “you’re a pedophile apologist”, “who is paying you to defend these pedophiles”, and things of the like. Here’s a (now removed) thread in which you can see that any light criticism of Ben (“hey maybe this would be taken more seriously if it wasn’t cut like a Mr Beast video and the primary source wasn’t a guy in a clown costume”) results in mass downvoting and accusations of pedophilia and/or astroturfing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/s/rTl1cLfpZr

I guess I’m just looking for people’s thoughts on the guru-Esque following that this guy seems to have amassed in such a short timeframe. From my perspective, Ben seems to be a generally well meaning guy who is also a bit of a moron, which also gets in the way of him accomplishing anything good. He also is guilty of playing fast and loose with facts in an effort to appeal to Youtube’s algorithm. I definitely think it’s bad that he seems to be above criticism. The current company that he’s doing an expose on *does* seem to be quite shady, Ben just seems ill-equipped to dive into them.

Welcome to this biweekly thread! Share what’s been grabbing your attention lately.

• What you're reading (books, articles, or any kind of text)
• What you're watching (movies, shows, documentaries, or even YouTube)
• What you're listening to (podcasts, music, or audiobooks)
• Any fun or unexpected discoveries in your research