I hate to keep hammering away at the same talking point, but Tim Pool has done it again!
This will be a companion piece and rejoinder to last week’s post regarding Tim Pool’s bombastic explanation of the origins of wokeness. For those unfamiliar with his thesis, Tim has repeatedly asserted in shrill and overbearing tones, often steamrolling podcast guests who have differing opinions, that the sudden spike in wokeness that the planet experienced en masse from 2012 is due to nothing more than social media algorithms favouring inflammatory outrage content.
I have, in turn, repeatedly opposed this thesis – most notably in my essay The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness – purporting instead that wokeness is a very deliberately engineered program of demoralisation and destabilisation against the West, as well as a divide and conquer tactic employed by the big banks in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, which has its genesis in Marxism, and has been funnelled into our institutions over many decades through the infiltration of the philosophy of Herbert Marcuse and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School, and culminating most recently in the gross abuses of the COVID scam and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset – a nakedly Marxist redistribution scheme, global in its scope, underpinned by ESG and DEI, and enthusiastically endorsed by the entire global financial establishment.
This topic is what propelled me into my Substack endeavour. It is what drives me; what keeps me returning to this often-thankless pursuit, month after month now for the past two years. And I hope you will forgive me for reverting to this bugbear of mine once again this week for one simple reason:
We, the working- and middle-class people of the West (and indeed the whole world) are being intentionally and nefariously marginalised by a diabolical managerial class of bureaucrats, politicians, and media and celebrity mouthpieces, on behalf of a supranational banking elite whose abject corruption and evil is unparalleled in human history.
Tim Pool, for all the good he’s done in the Great Culture War of our time, would have his millions of listeners believe otherwise. He would have them believe that what is being done to us – the transgender nightmare; the race war; the erasure of the traditional family; the never-ending assault on men – is all simply an accident of technology.
And the reason I hammer away at this subject is that to misunderstand the nature of wokeness is to misunderstand the nature of the war we are fighting. And to misunderstand the nature of the war one is fighting is to ultimately lose that war.
I do not want to lose this war, so it is incumbent on me as an intelligent man with the gift of coherent and persuasive language at his disposal to refute Tim Pool’s egotistical poppycock at every turn of the road.
Thankfully though, I am not alone! This past week the brilliant and even more coherent and persuasive Dave Smith took up my exact position on Tim’s show and owned the snarky beanie man in front of not only his millions of viewers, but a live studio audience also. Nice one Dave!
I have clipped the segment (above) and while it is 20 minutes long, I do recommend watching it if you have the time as not only is it immensely satisfying to see Tim finally forced to concede the point on this issue, but the long-form dialog around this topic provides rich context, and also an irrefutable thesis as to why we cannot (and must not) be so lazy and complacent as to write wokeness off as a grassroots cultural aberration and unfortunate accident of social media algorithms gone awry.
As Dave stresses: It wasn’t just bottom up, it was top down as well.
Here is an important point: Tim is of course partially correct. Social media algorithms were helping to drive the proliferation of woke content. I saw it myself in the early-to-mid 2010s at which time I was working with advertising agencies creating social media campaigns. But what’s hilarious is that early in their debate, Tim accuses Dave of being “reductive” in his claim that pressure was coming from the Obama administration to shift the conversation in the direction of social justice…
The lack of self-awareness this guy displays at times is staggering, and another good reason why we should not put our trust in princes, as I am always saying.
It is Tim’s assertion that is reductive.
Dave poses the question: Why was this program of radical progressivism suddenly embraced by every big corporation, social, cultural, and political institution at the same time in 2012? Dave simply asked the question, and immediately Tim leapt in with his usual schtick, interrupting his guest (as is his MO) and said, “There’s an answer: Social media.”
That, my dear Tim, is the very essence of reductionism. And you have the nerve to call Dave reductive for positing a different thesis – and not even an opposing thesis, mind you, but merely a complementary one.
I’ll say it again: Tim Pool is a potentially dangerous egotist who may be doing our side more harm than good at this point.
Fortunately, though, Tim is not entirely devoid of good sense, and occasionally he hosts guests who will not be browbeaten by his uber-nerd, know-it-all belligerence. Guests like Steve Bannon who once nearly reduced Tim to tears with his unflinching postulation of the stolen 2020 US Presidential Election, and several others besides, not least of whom is Dave Smith – and I again encourage you to watch the video above in which Dave calmly and respectfully exposes Tim’s reductive thesis for the nonsense it is.
However, if you don’t have the time to watch it, I will summarise.
After Tim interrupts Dave and tries to tell us all for the hundredth time that wokeness was simply born of social media algorithms, Dave goes on to point out that, while there was certainly an algorithmic element to the rise of wokeness, there was concurrently a top-down force from the government whereby the Obama regime rolled out a massive DEI (diversity equity and inclusion) program, state governments refused to invest their pension funds with asset managers such as BlackRock unless they adopted ESG criteria (environment social & governance), Congress began leaning on social media companies to censor conservative content, and federal agencies such as the FBI and the CIA actively worked with these companies to affect this.
This is not conjecture, it is all a matter of public record now, especially since Elon Musk’s release of the infamous Twitter Files. Feel free to fact check all this at your leisure (though I would avoid using the Google search engine, or at least the first few pages), and I do apologise to any readers who prefer linked sources for every postulation, but I have never claimed to be an investigative journalist; I am here in the capacity of an unpaid activist essayist, writing in the limited time I have away from my soul-sucking corporate servitude, and in the interests of time-management I must make the somewhat brazen assumption that most of my readers know a lot of this stuff already. However, feel free to comment if you would like further context and I’ll be happy to explore things further with you.
We also know that the noises coming out of nebulous trans-national edifices such as the UN and WEF for the entirety of this century, and the back end of the previous one, have slanted excruciatingly towards Neo-Marxist progressivism in all its permutations and indeed, since 2012, heavily in the direction of ‘Sustainability’ which underpins the entire woke platform – laid out in alarming clarity in the books of Klaus Schwab: The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016); COVID-19: The Great Reset (2020); and Stakeholder Capitalism (2021).
Tim, are you trying to tell us that the UN and the World Economic Forum are just gullible victims of social media algorithms? Are you somehow trying to convince us that the climate Marxism, radical feminism, and the far-left infiltration of universities which Yuri Bezmenov warned us about in 1984 (all of which has been going on since long before Facebook or Twitter even existed) is the result of social media algorithms? More to the point, are you trying to claim that the FBI and CIA began leaning on social media companies to ban conservative content… because… the people who staffed these agencies were turned into raving far-left nutjobs by the content they were being served by these very same companies?
It's laughable.
It is manifestly observable that wokeness was deliberately engineered by human decision makers, and that there was a coordinated push to saturate popular discourse with it from 2012 onward.
And finally, what Tim completely misses, is that even if one accepts his thesis, and agrees that it’s all down to social media algorithms, those algorithms are still programmed by humans… Humans who have bosses… Bosses who answer to the big banks, and indeed – as we have seen – to the intelligence agencies. Tim’s assertion that it was all driven by clicks and likes holds no water – for as Dave correctly reminds him: these social media companies were busy at the same time censoring conservative, anti-establishment content (Alex Jones for instance) – content which got just as many, if not more, clicks and likes.
It was not about internet traffic and money – it was ideological.
Tim is an egotistical fool for clinging so stubbornly to this pet theory for so long.
But thankfully I can stop ranting about it now, because Dave Smith has effectively debunked Tim’s ridiculous hypothesis live on air and even… (you may be astonished to hear, if you have not yet watched the clip to the end) … made Tim concede the point!
I very much hope that the next time this comes up on Timcast IRL, our friend Tim, instead of leaping into the fray and proclaiming, “IT’S SIMPLE: SOCIAL MEDIA CAUSED WOKENESS”, might instead, stroke his scraggly beard and say something like, “Well, I’ve always said it was algorithmic, but we had Dave Smith on the show a few weeks ago and he made a very good point…”
Etc, etc.
We live in hope, but I won’t hold my breath.
