Tim Pool Thinks He Knows Everything
Wokeness was not created by social media, it is the manifestation of a deliberate decades-long Marxist assault on the West
Tim Pool is a cultural phenomenon.
Tim Pool is a successful businessman.
Tim Pool has likely woken up millions of sleeping slaves and contributed a net benefit to the great struggle of our time.
But Tim Pool is also a bloody idiot.
I say this both with righteous invective, and great sadness – for were it not for influencers like Tim Pool, Styx Hexenhammer, and Sargon of Akkad, I’d never have experienced the political and cultural awakening that I’ve undergone since 2016.
However, put not your trust in princes...
This maxim goes not only for our great luminaries – the likes of Donald Trump, and Bobby Kennedy… But also, for our internet celebrities. And I apply the same formula to all.
Generally speaking, the fewer the followers, the less distrust I have – for it remains true, regardless of the cultural revolution we are experiencing by way of open and honest online dialog, that the bigger you get, the less credible you get.
Perhaps there are some isolated exceptions, but from where I’m sitting, this appears to be a hard and fast law of physical and spiritual reality – and the isolated exception I’m thinking of in this case is Jesus (and not Jesus the church – but Jesus the man).
I enjoy watching Tim Pool’s daily content – I find him a balanced voice amid a cacophony of reactionary personalities, and I’ve always forced myself to keep tabs on him, even when he pissed me off, because the entire premise of his show is that he was a leftist, who then drifted to the ‘right’ and became red-pilled as he witnessed the outrageous assault on our standard of living and began to understand the true nature of the world.
The good thing about Tim Pool is that he retains enough of his leftist/libertarian character to host a balanced conversation (on the whole). That is to say, he pulls a wide spectrum of guests – from rappers Kanye West and RA Rugged Man (the latter of whom he almost had a physical confrontation with live on air, and the former storming out only minutes into the podcast), to Donald Trump Junior, to Alex Jones, and notorious far-leftists like Destiny and Vaush. Tim has built a commendable cultural institution and a successful business, and I value what he has done, and the immense impact he has had on the cultural landscape of the past ten years.
But Tim is also an insufferable egotist who thinks he knows everything.
There are countless instances of this and the greatest criticism that I can level at him is the way he steamrolls his guests and browbeats them with his snarky Ben Shapiro-like prattle and his insufferable ego, and I have spoken before about his refusal to call out the harms of the COVID vaccines. To my great relief, I recently caught a free-to-the-public episode of his members-only show, in which he delves into topics not generally safe for YouTube and heard him tackle the vaccine issue pretty much head-on, and props to him for this. I refuse to help fund Tim’s growing media empire and thus have no evidence as to how long he’s taken this position on his members-only segments (perhaps it’s a new thing, or perhaps he’s been awake to it all along – although I would say that to adopt two different positions on this, the paramount issue of our time; one for the great bulk of his audience; and another niche position for his paying members, represents the very worst hypocrisy present in the alternative media ecosystem) but at least he’s signing the right tune on this subject, albeit in a limited capacity.
However, one specific issue that exasperates me with Tim is the origin of wokeness. And it is not simply that I disagree with his prevailing thesis, but that he appears to hold two contradictory positions on the matter depending on how he’s feeling, and to whom he is speaking on any given day.
I have asserted previously both in my essays I Support the Current Thing and The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness that the dramatic upsurge in woke activism circa 2012 was a reaction to the Occupy Wall Street movement, whereby the big banks took fright at the populist coalition forming against them and sought to obfuscate the conversation through the various media mouthpieces which they collectively own.
This they have successfully done and, even still, as we near another financial meltdown and our standard of living plummets even further than the vanilla deprivations that immediately followed the Global Financial Crisis, the bickering between ‘left’ and right’ precludes any meaningful populist pushback against the banks and their Ponzi scheme of fractional reserve banking which is gradually impoverishing the working and middle classes.
And yet, Tim Pool, who has often espoused this very thesis (and as a veteran of Occupy, one is inclined to listen when he lends credence to it) and, thus espousing, is admitting he believes wokeness was manufactured by humans, not algorithms, will turn around days later and berate any given guest with an entirely contradictory proposition – that wokeness was spawned purely by Facebook and Twitter and the algorithmic promotion of shock and rage content… No evil plot, no premeditated action by those in positions of power, just a random confluence of technological SNAFU.
I have neither the time nor inclination to trawl through Tim’s thousands of hours of content to find such examples – but trust me, they exist (as recently as this past week). And it’s not just the fact that he contradicts himself on the point of the jaw-dropping global media phenomenon that emerged directly after Occupy Wall Street, but moreover, in doing so he rudely shouts-down guests who posit the more nefarious thesis – that wokeness is in fact the contemporary manifestation of the Neo Marxist program to subvert the long-held freedoms of the Western world, and which has been gradually seeded into our institutions over centuries, first appearing in the writings of Marx, and then in the 20th Century tracts of the Frankfurt School philosophers and from thence into the universities, governments and eventually the corporations of the West, and which we were warned about by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984.
Tim Pool thinks he knows everything, and his ego clouds his objectivity.
And moreover, for a man who proudly states repeatedly that he never went to university (and more power to him) – how in God’s name does he have any basis for comparison?
I’ve often heard Tim berate guests of academic backgrounds, who’ve sat there on his show patiently trying to explain to him that the woke infiltration began in our great academies of learning, long before social media was even dreamt of, and watched with exasperation and growing fury as he interrupts and poo-poos them, and shrilly asserts that wokeness was simply the result of social media AI gone rogue.
And yet the man has spent not one day of his life in a university.
I clearly recall these themes coming through strongly in my university courses in 2002 and 2003, long before Facebook was available to the general public – and a decade before the violent spike in woke activism that the planet experienced from 2012 onwards. And so persuasive were my lecturers that I myself was briefly caught up in some malformed permutation of progressivism. I remember how staunchly left-wing all my arts professors were; how they taught about systemic racism, post-modernism, and queer theory (as I related in my essay Is That What a Man Looks Like?). I remember the prevailing mood of the American Studies and Culture & Society departments in particular, where our instructors had what I considered even at the time, over two decades ago, to be a somewhat irregular disdain for the values and morals I had been raised with – even in what was then one of the more conservative bastions of higher education in the Southern Hemisphere, the University of Canterbury.
The Marxist concept of the ‘long march through the institutions’ has been around since before modern computers even existed, let alone the internet, and can be traced to the writings of notorious communists such as Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. We were warned about it in the 80s by Bezmenov, a man steeped in the statecraft of Soviet socialism. James Lindsay, an academic of unfathomable stamina, has broken this topic down in depth on his brilliant podcast New Discourses.
And yet Tim Pool in his infinite wisdom – a loud-mouth internet sensation, a man of not even forty years, who, for all his brilliance, business savvy, and technological prescience, understands very little outside of his own fizzing intellectual bubble – would have his listeners believe (and only on the days it suits him to take a contrarian stance mind you) that wokeness has nothing to do with Marxism, or its infiltration of our core institutions, and is merely an unfortunate aberration of new tech. At times he is like a child who wanders into the middle of a long conversation and spouts off with only the last three minutes’ worth of context.
Tim Pool thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
And nor for that matter do I.
But the fundamental difference between him and me is that when I say, “I don’t know” (which he often does) – I am being honest. I believe Tim only pays lip service to this fundamental tenet of mortal humility to appease his audience from time to time and maintain his persona as a calm and reasonable guy.
In reality, I believe he is a potentially dangerous egotist who regularly abuses the great power he has amassed and misleads his awakening but still largely gullible audience.
And thus, I will repeat my oft-quoted and perhaps favourite line of scripture: Put not your trust in princes my friends.
We know what is going on in our world. At least, we know enough to know that wokeness did not just spring up out of nowhere as the result of a social media algorithm in 2012, much less that it emerged as a genuine howl of an oppressed underclass.
We know that it is used by our power elites to control and bamboozle us, and we are fast discovering that the past 12 years are not merely an aberration, but the pointy tip of a spear that stretches long back into history – encompassing Gramsci’s long march through the institutions, all the way back to Marx and Engels, and perhaps further back still; perhaps back to the very Garden itself.
I will continue to view Tim’s content, and that of all the alternative media personalities whom I take with a grain of salt. But I say, again – put not your trust in princes.
We have ourselves. We have each other. We have our own awakening cognisance and that, my friends, in the end, is all we need.