POSTED IN POLITICS AND MOVEMENTS: US
The popular streamer explains the appeal of streaming as a new form of political media and what it tells us about masculinity in the internet age.
BY TAYA GRAHAM AND STEPHEN JANIS NOVEMBER 3, 2023 (therealnews.com)
Screenshot from TRNN
The media environment morphs with dizzying speed year after year, and the rise of political streamers is just the latest arc of the digital age. How do we explain the rise of streamers in the context of rising inequality and atomization? And what do we make of the popularity of many such streamers among a predominately male audience? Popular Twitch streamer and libertarian socialist Ian ‘Vaush’ Kochinski joins Taya Graham and Stephen Janis for a special discussion.
Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello, everyone. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome back to The Inequality Watch, a show where we examine how corporate elites manufacture inequality, and weaponize it against us. Why do we call the show the Inequality Watch? Well, it’s for a pretty simple reason. There is no greater existential threat to our supposed democracy, or life on this planet, than the unjust enrichment of the few at the expense of the rest of us.
This extreme and unprecedented wealth leads to an unhealthy imbalance of power and opportunity. The result is an economic and political system warped by the naked theft of both our political and physical resources on a vibrant planet that should belong to all of us, but instead, ends up in the hands of a corrupt few. Part of the reason that we can and do report on this is because we’re independent media, right, Stephen?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. The tentacles of inequality run deep and my mainstream media counterparts often have to answer to them. Fortunately for us at The Real News, we don’t. So we can hopefully give you actual truth and objective reality.
Taya Graham:
You’re right, Stephen. The mainstream media often avoids challenging these powerful interests. No, not individual politicians, but the real power, the dark money that warps our political processes. Where do you turn? Where do you go to find news, information, and commentary that’s untainted by establishment politics and corporate interests? Well, could a video game streaming service be the next frontier of a new political movement? Could young progressives be shaping future policy positions while playing Dark Souls or Baldur’s Gate?
Well, that’s actually a distinct possibility. And why? Well, partly because of the work of my next guest. His name is Ian Kochinski, but he’s better known as Vaush, and he’s at the vanguard of what’s commonly called the Debate Bro Movement. His work is why we are taking a slightly different approach for today’s show. We’re starting on a series of reports on new media, and investigating a cultural phenomena that he is a part of.
It’s a sphere of fierce political debate, where some of the youngest voters go to learn and discuss the best policies and politics to save and prosper our nation. Where is this gladiators’ arena? Well, although I discovered it on YouTube, it initially evolved on Twitch. What is Twitch? Well, for the uninitiated, like myself, it’s primarily a streaming website for gamers, where they share their love of eSports. But like most social media, it has evolved to reflect the concerns of our day. In an era of a global pandemic, a worldwide economic crisis, and a surge in social unrest and political division, finding a space to break down and understand the shifting sands of today’s politics is happening more and more in these online communities, and are needed now more than ever.
To understand these new political communities, and the movements they’re fostering, I delved into what’s known as the realm of the Debate Bros. Young folks, often, but not exclusively men, who step into the arena to fight for their ideals in politics, philosophy, and ethics. To understand this world better, of course, I had to call in one of the reigning champions, Vaush.
Vaush:
I can’t precisely do that. I’d have to run you through specific scenarios in which it fails to make my argument.
Stephen Janis:
What’s your political ascription?
Vaush:
I’d say left liberal, for the most part.
Stephen Janis:
Damn. All right. Why are you punching left, comrade? What’s up?
Destiny:
All I’m saying is that one of the biggest ways you can control your budget is to control the place that you live in. And that sometimes if you’re a poor person, sometimes moving to a different area can be a good way of managing your budget. That’s all I’m saying. Is there anything there that you disagree with?
Vaush:
Yeah, that sometimes the costs associated with moving are substantial and they can prevent people from moving, especially if you’re disabled or have a family.
Destiny:
Okay.
Vaush:
Yeah, substantially so. You do realize the entire video that I have just watched, of yours, is a screed of arguments you would’ve argued against two years ago? Some of these arguments are riddled with survivorship bias, some of them sound very similar to arguments [inaudible 00:03:53].
Destiny:
You’re going way over course. So if you’re like a fucking disabled war veteran with a family of 27 or whatever, and you [inaudible 00:03:58]-
Vaush:
No, no, no, no, no. If you’re a regular, one of the many Americans who lives paycheck to paycheck or can’t afford a $300 emergency, not if you’re a disabled war veteran with 87 children who [inaudible 00:04:10].
Destiny:
If you can’t afford anything in your life, then how are you going to affording your current rent?
Vaush:
What? Because moving is an additional cost, because you added to the existing cost.
Destiny:
[inaudible 00:04:16] and you’d be saving money after moving, you’d move to someplace cheaper.
Vaush:
You don’t know. Destiny, you don’t know anything about me.
Destiny:
[inaudible 00:04:23]. Mr. Mom and Dad paid… Mr. Mommy and Daddy paid for your school. I promise you I know more than you about this. [inaudible 00:04:27].
Vaush:
Then respond to the arguments rather than characterizing what I have to say.
The landlord can’t just walk away unless he’s able to sell the property. He is tied to that property. The renter is not so much wait.
Stephen Janis:
As a homeowner, again, I don’t have a problem with homeowner and I don’t have a problem with property management, I have a problem with landlords.
Vaush:
You don’t have to rent.
Stephen Janis:
Wait, wait. What can you do? Wait. What’s the alternative between renting and owning a house?
Vaush:
No, I’m saying the alternative to being a renter is to buy a property.
Stephen Janis:
So that’s what I was saying. The only way out of this exploitative system is to have an enormous amount of money that most people don’t have access to. You should look up Portugal and their drug policies. Freedom makes societies better, just a better place to live for everyone.
Taya Graham:
Well, figuratively punching Nazis or admonishing impractical or intractable leftists, Vaush is a libertarian socialist. His edgy humor and no holds bards fights for his ideals often leave him somewhat alienated from his leftist comrades, feared and despised by the alt-right, but still beloved by his audience of over half a million subscribers combined. Please welcome to this episode of the Inequality Watch Vaush.
Vaush:
Hello.
Taya Graham:
Vaush, it’s great to have you. Thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis:
Welcome to our show.
Taya Graham:
Join thousands of others who rely on our journalism to navigate complex issues, uncover hidden truths, and challenge the status quo with our free newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox twice a week:
How did you carve out this particular niche? How did you start streaming gaming and debating? Can you walk me through it? How did it go from just playing video games and chatting to this very substantial political debate?
Vaush:
Well, I’ve liked live-streaming as a format for about as long as it’s existed technologically and since basically its inception. Initially it was mostly a gaming thing. I think that live-streaming mostly started out with Korean eSports players, broadcasting like StarCraft matches, going way back. But very, very quickly, it was evident to a lot of people, this was a medium that was pretty revolutionary. The ability for a person to interact in real time with an audience was pretty unmatched in basically any other mass media format. So invariably it was going to become a medium for political discussion, and I wanted in on that.
I think that there’s something very authentic and engaging about being able to do this in a very live quick, easy format. We’re entering an era of populism. More and more so people are distrustful and discontented with who they see as suited politicians, the class of politicians. And live-streaming is innately, if not authentic, at the very least, somewhat populous because you have to be there live, you have to respond and engage live. It’s disarming, it’s personable, and I think it’s endemic to the era. So I’m happy to be here.
Taya Graham:
How would you describe what you do? I would categorize you as part of a new leftist media ecosystem, but how would you describe your work and its goals?
Vaush:
I have a tendency to play down what I do. After all, it is largely live-streaming and YouTubing, it’s not anywhere near as rote and professional as, I guess, what a lot of people who believe what I believe would’ve done in the past. But really it’s just the modern version of pamphleteering or running radio shows, in a day-to-Day sense practically. I mean, at my computer right now, it’s a very informal job with very low professional standards, which I like, both because it’s incredibly personally convenient and also because I think it’s better representative of what it is we’re trying to do. It does away with a lot of ostentatiousness and respectability politics that are otherwise really common to entry level political engagement.
Not having to deal with that, being able to just talk about what I want just to sit here and engage freely, I like that, and I think the audience likes it too. I think it breaks down what would otherwise be a uncomfortable barrier of professionalism.
Stephen Janis:
Did I make a mistake by wearing a tie to this interview, or should I take my tie off at this point?
Vaush:
I think you look great in it personally.
Stephen Janis:
Okay, thanks.
Taya Graham:
You need to break down those barriers. You know what? I have to say though, I have found your conversations with both American and Canadian Nazis fascinating. Let’s take a look at a clip.
Vaush:
Walk over here. Holy shit, you’re losing it. Just move on with the white nationalist ethnostate thing. So let’s say, the moral argument would be that I don’t think it’s okay to say that a person can’t live in a neighborhood or country because of their race. That would be my argument.
Speaker 1:
It’s fighting against the thought that in X amount of years, whites are going to go extinct. And we perhaps, and again, this is imaginative, there’s so much overlapping with societal, cultural, moral claim. I think it would benefit the people of America to have some separation, have some breathing there.
Vaush:
How would it benefit us? How do I benefit from this?
Speaker 1:
There’s going to be less right wing voters in the voting demographics, in the electoral. So right away, you’re going to be better situated to win elections for the left. I know you’re not necessarily a Biden supporter.
Vaush:
Sure.
Speaker 1:
And as a nice guy, white nationalist, I favor secession over civil war and eternal fighting.
Vaush:
If we’re talking pragmatics though, then the easiest thing that I could do is grant you territory in the heartland of America, starve you out with the blockade, deny you airspace in the surrounding area, wait for you all to starve, retake my territory, and now I have 1 million less fascists in my country. If we’re talking pragmatics, the easiest thing that I could do would not be to your benefit. You’re asking to be left alone, which is not something that I’d be willing to do purely because it benefits my voting demographics. If you’re making that argument, why do you deserve this? What’s so wrong with living in America?
Taya Graham:
So what I’ve noticed is that you really take the time to tease out their belief systems and then challenge them. What benefit do you think this brings to your audience?
Vaush:
Well, I think this is something that is very particular to live-streaming. Far right politics has always been about dog whistles and euphemisms. You can’t just go online or I guess in any format really, and just scream the N-word. I guess you can, but it’s not very politically effective. Usually you have to bury it under a bunch of associative issues. Donald Trump represented the death of many euphemisms, but even in his case, there is still a layer of civility and mutual respectability he has to upkeep. The case with live-streaming is that very often people who represent far right values can’t actually keep it in that well. It’s very difficult for them, I almost sympathize, to accurately reflect and describe their politics in a way that doesn’t completely give the game away. So you have to tease out those values, you don’t want to argue what they want to argue because what they want to argue is a substitute for what they actually believe.
It’s like getting into, if you could analogize it back to the 1960s, getting into a big argument about, I don’t know, forced busing, or school rights, or something, when in reality you’re talking about race. You want to focus on what people are actually thinking about, otherwise you’re just shadow-boxing and you don’t want to do that.
Stephen Janis:
I’ve noticed Vaush in your comment section, even in the way just watching your videos, that a lot of times you’re in the process of deradicalizing young men. Can you talk about that process? Because it seems so potent and we’ll talk about more about the right radicalization process. But how do you go about that? How do you approach that? Because it’s so hard, I think as people get programmed on YouTube, how do you kind of confront that, or otherwise try to help people with that?
Vaush:
Well, I think that people fall down those pipelines really quickly these days. Maybe they always have, but it’s more visible now than ever.
Stephen Janis:
I agree.
Vaush:
It simplifies, and it’s weird too, because you think, you just casually like a 14-year-old boy in high school, it’s like, “Here’s my Nazi phase,” or whatever. It’s surreal. I don’t like it. I don’t like the fact that that’s what we deal with, but it’s deliberate, it’s targeted. Steve Bannon spoke extensively about his efforts to reach out to sexually insecure young men and convince them that far right politics were the answer to the issues, like the incel problem.
This is targeted. Deradicalizing, trying to show people that maybe they shouldn’t be 14-year-old Nazis or whatever, at any age or position they have to be at, it’s vital. There is a tendency with some left-leaning people to write-off some groups as lost, that there are some groups of people like, “Why bother with them?” And while I don’t think disproportionate time and energy should be spent, I don’t think we should all commit ourselves entirely to the project of fixing this one white boy or whatever. At the very least, it’s something worth thinking about. And the fact that we keep seeing these recurring cycles of reactionary thought propagated by people appealing to young men, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, clearly this is something worth attention. We don’t want to be caught unawares here.
Stephen Janis:
What do you think makes young men so vulnerable to this? Taya and I always talk about this sentence that he started watching YouTube videos and it never ends well.
Taya Graham:
Exactly.
Stephen Janis:
What do you think makes young men so vulnerable to this kind of… I don’t want to say propaganda, but this type of line of thinking that puts them down the rabbit holes that you’re trying to pull them out of?
Vaush:
Honestly, I think it’s just sexual insecurity. Often unwarranted sexual insecurity, oftentimes held by young men who have not even been old enough… They haven’t been alive long enough to have any real reasons to be sexually insecure. I think that fascism tends to stem from that. Even if you go back to 120-
Stephen Janis:
That’s deep.
Vaush:
Like the Jim Crow days, right? These propagated myths of white insecurity against Black men. What would they do-
Taya Graham:
That’s a good point.
Vaush:
The lynchings they did. There would be castration, accusations of rape or sexual assault. There’s this fear of impotence, it seems, that’s reflected in a lot of this propagandizing, and young people are just really insecure. They’re pretty vulnerable to that just by virtue of being young and stupid. It’s like a messy subject, but it’s worth paying attention to.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, because you had Senator Josh Holly writing a book on masculinity, and you see polls that say that young men tend to be less liberal than young women. It really seems like the right has said, “If we can profit, or if we can somehow exploit that security you’re talking about we can build a larger coalition of young men who will vote for us.” Is that what you see happening with people like Josh Hawley going, saying, “I’m going to define masculinity.”
Vaush:
Yeah, for sure. The right is very, very, very worried about young people because young people are so disproportionately liberal. Look at Vivek Ramaswamy talking about raising the voting age to 25 or whatever. And the demographics show this, young people will be the death of the Republican Party unless something changes, and they know that. So how do you convince these people? Well, in an age of populism and distrust, young people aren’t going to be moved over with these bow tie libertarian arguments anymore. The Ben Shapiro era of young people being motivated by some snobby intellectualism or pseudo intellectualism, I don’t think that’s as prominent anymore.
Ben Shapiro gets picked on by his other daily wild cohorts quite often, the more openly fascist ones. I think now it’s all about the big guns. It’s insecurity, racial politics, sexual politics, get them young when they’re stupid and easy to give narratives to. “That girl you liked didn’t give you any attention? That’s actually because feminism has ruined modern women. You notice that a cool Black guy who plays basketball, he’s getting a lot of attention, you’re not? That’s because racial politics promoted by the left, which is actually promoted by Jews, is convincing young women that they need to be more like…” Shit like that, you know? It sounds crazy, but that is legitimately the narrative that gets pushed in a lot of cases. And 14 year olds are dumb, so that’s a demographic you can push for.
Taya Graham:
And I just wanted to follow up by saying that there are certain neoconservative reactionaries, influencers even, that have gone out of their way to capture the hearts and minds of these young men. And I notice that often in your conversations with… You have a very male audience in general, I hope I’m not misspeaking, it seems like you have a lot of men in your audience-
Vaush:
For sure.
Taya Graham:
… you give them advice and insights into dating, and how to be a good ally, and how to talk to women, what consent is, how to get enthusiastic consent. Why do you think one of the extreme right wing’s goals is hooking young men in the area of dating and relationships, and what do you think the left could or should be doing?
Vaush:
I think that people, especially young people, are very self-interested when it comes to the ideologies they hop on board with. If a good pitch is given to them, they’re more likely to go with it. It’s what benefits them. The left has strong messages of empowerment for young women. If you’re a young woman and you listen to the left attitude on what young woman are and should be, you’re going to hear a lot about freedom, you’re going to hear a lot about empowerment. It’s not always good all the time, but I think for the most part, there’s a pretty strong positive message. Whereas with men, there’s a mixed narrative of it’s not that men are bad, it’s that let’s be real here, men are dangerous. And on the left, that gets promoted often. And if you’re like a 14-year-old boy and you hear that, that’s not really… You hear a message from the left and it’s like, “well, what should I do to be a left-leaning person? How should I be a progressive?”
And it’s like, “Well, you have to check your privilege.” It’s like, that’s not bad. I’m not saying that’s a bad message. I’m saying that it’s a bad onboarding message for your average guy. So the right comes in and they’re like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, you don’t need to change a thing. In fact, you are being held back by the media, by the narrative, by feminists.” They give a much more compelling message. So I try to match that. I think there are lots of ways to promote empowerment and confidence without playing into those tropes.
Stephen Janis:
How do you really craft a message to young men that’s an alternative to the idea of just check your privilege. Do you have any methodology you use or any sort of examples or just if you don’t mind exploring that, because it’s fascinating.
Vaush:
Yeah. Well, I think a lot of it is just about the appropriate ways to channel confidence. A lot of the advice people give for being confident is not that, it’s actually an advice for covering up insecurity. You see this a lot with Andrew Tate style stuff where it’s like, the solution to being insecure is actually to be this monstrous force where you demand or intimidate or otherwise project strength onto others to compensate for a genuine lack of competence in yourself. And the left response, which I think is often very lacking, is, “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t do any of that. In fact, be smaller, take up less space. If you’re a guy, you already take up a lot of space, so take up less space.” And again, is there value to that? To an extent, sure, we can talk about it, but bad messaging. I think that promoting healthy confidence, the idea that the left shouldn’t be afraid of talking about stuff like dating advice, they’re like, “Well, what is it?”
Realistically, give dating advice to a young guy. A lot of left-leaning people can’t because it gets locked up in this performative PSA talk about the importance of being respectful and not being a misogynist or whatever, which is good, but it’s not holistic, it’s not the whole message, and it doesn’t teach people everything they need to know. They miss out on a lot. I guess that’s the main thing I try to focus on. What slips in the gaps? What insecurities does the right pretend to fix and can you actually fix them? What evidence really touches on that?
Taya Graham:
That’s really interesting, and I actually hate to veer the conversation from the direction we were taking, but you made a statement recently that really stood out to me, and I think it was in a conversation with a documentary filmmaker working on a piece about the Seven Mountains Christian Project. And you said What we need to focus on is not necessarily critiquing Democrats, or liberals, or progressives, but fighting the fascist impulse in our country. And I took that to mean essentially that there can be common ground found with Republicans, or Democrats, or libertarians, or moderates, but that the fascist impulse would co-opt everything we cherish. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Vaush:
Yeah. Ultimately, from a left-leaning perspective, if fascism wins, it’s over. It’s done. We see this happen in other countries, there’s no two words about it, they’ll kill us. They will kill us. We’ll all be in mass graves. By we, I mean any kind of remotely left-leaning figure, any visible queer sexual minorities, these groups are done. So their victory cannot happen. I think that there are good and bad ways to do coalition building against that. The bad way is what the Democrats want you to do, which is this, “The Republicans are really bad and they’re so bad that you can’t criticize us, because we’re so much better than them. So fall in the line because we’re the best option you have, and if you criticize us, you’re actually helping them.” And I think that this is the very cynical way that liberals try to placate progressive or socialist critiques of their political strategies in the face of fascism.
The good way is, I think, more of a tactical alliance. What can liberals help on specifically and at what point is undermining them to a more progressive and actually beneficial? I think that’s a really difficult thread to weave. It’s really difficult to find a good balance there. And the frustration I have, I guess, is that it seems like a lot of people just can’t have that conversation. There are people who are very ideologically motivated to despise the Democrats to the point where they downplay the threat fascist pose. And then there are people who think that the fascists aren’t really that much of a threat, so it’s unnecessary to oppose the Democrats meaningfully for that reason. It’s such a mess.
And you see flavors of this all over the left’s face, people argue amongst themselves constantly. I personally side with anything in terms of coalition building is justifiable if it means keeping the fascist from winning, and as long as that need has been met, it’s free game. Any dissident behavior outside of that purview is acceptable, but you can’t compromise the fascism thing. Because, man, it’s like with Biden, right? I don’t want Biden to be the democratic front-runner for 2024. I’m not happy about that, but he is. That’s a fact. And I don’t think Trump should win. So you do what you can.
Stephen Janis:
What do you think is the root of the fascist impulse in this country? Because we grapple this a lot in our coverage of policing across the country, but what’s the root, why is fascism so hard to root out in this country? Why does it seem to be so stubborn?
Vaush:
I think that in a way, fascism is like politics without politics, or politics by other means. It’s a way of supplanting political thought in favor of a frenzy drive that is of course political, it’s fully political, but it’s a way of masking those broader intentions. I think that Republicans are fastidiously pro-corporate. They’re more pro-corporate than Dems are, on average, though, of course, both are corporate parties.
Stephen Janis:
True.
Vaush:
And I think that as is often the case with reactionary pro-corporate parties, the Republicans realize that people are getting less and less amenable to trickle down economic bullshit, because nobody believes that crap anymore. Even Republicans don’t really. The voters, no one buys that. So how do you get people to vote Republican if all the economic arguments are bunk, completely discredited? Well, you have to get them the reactionary angle. But if you go too far down the reactionary angle, people stop promoting reactionary politics for the sake of corporate politics, and instead go the other direction where they promote pro-corporate politics secondarily, and the reactionary impulse becomes the norm.
And that’s, I think, where the tipping point towards fascism really hits on. And right now you take a look at the discourse with the far right in this country, and it’s insane, genuinely psychotic every day. It’s like, “What’s the new culture war talking point? Let me watch this episode of Sesame Street because a prominent senator called it the downfall of the West or something. Here’s a clothing company that released an item for the binding trans men’s breasts or something. Now I need to do research to find out whether or not this person was substantiated and say that it was actually designed by a pedophile in 1973.” It is so disconnected from reality that it’s farcical, but it’s unfortunately also the battlefield and the right has always been better at setting the stage for that. So we just have to deal with it and learn the arguments.
Stephen Janis:
And also, as Taya said at the beginning of the show, we talked about inequality, the show deals with inequality, and how much is the inequality in our country, which makes so many things impossible, like healthcare for all and other things, how much is that driving the simplistic solutions of fascism? You’re saying, “The country can’t take care of me.” We were just talking about how Narcan spent seven or eight years not being easily accessible because of the greed of the company. And when you see a system fail like that, doesn’t that make it easier to make the fascist argument in some ways?
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