This might be old news but it's kinda wild to me.
You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)
Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left "YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism" or "One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU" style of slop. Y'know, the stuff where it's super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it's super serious marxist critique when it's actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.
Yeah, that sort of stuff. He's good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.
Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he's uncritically buying into the whole "woke ideology" narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin's #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn't handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn't really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.
In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn't faze him - doesn't matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it's kind of a weird pivot.
I think Peter Coffin's angle is pretty apparent - he's just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.
But it's still weird to me. Maybe they're proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they're all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.
But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I'm not surprised if he doesn't give a damn, doing a similar thing and he's broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It's giving Strasserist vibes tbh.
Luckily it's online and not the real world, I guess?
It's gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because "tankie redfash", only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:
We live in interesting times.
somebody spill the tea on this
Peter Coffin went from middle of the road BreadTuber who was making winks and nods to being communist but who actively courted the BreadTube audience by hedging their bets and being mostly focused on anti-capitalist analysis and driving his concept of the "attention economy", or something to that effect. They had a partner and maybe some kids with a woman who was... Irish? I think Irish. She featured in some of their videos, but not all that often.
Then suddenly, around the time where the Maupin/CPI spanking scandal drops, Peter undergoes a massive pivot, breaks up with their partner, wipes most of their old YouTube content, and becomes an avid Maupinite and has a new partner who features on their channel pretty regularly.
I remember coming across a clip of them talking about how... Maduro, maybe? Had name-dropped Maupin and the CPI in a speech and how the movement is kind of a big deal, gaining international recognition, and I thought that it must have been satire or part of a bit but, upon further investigation, it became obvious that they went all-in on Maupin for some reason.
I don't really know what happened between them and their previous partner and I didn't dig because their previous partner seemed to shy away from much media attention and I figured that she probably doesn't need people getting really in her business over this. I'm sure it sucked and was awful and she just wants to move on with her life, which would be completely understandable.
Edit: Holy shit, I completely forgot that they had a fairly significant sketch comedy arc and got massively catfished by a troll or a team of trolls, some people arguing that they self-catfished in order to make themselves seem cool to others because they had a hot girlfriend (you wouldn't know her - she goes to a different college), prior to their BreadTube arc.
i don't think coffin's turn was that sudden. in fact i think they're a fascinating character because they put their psyche on open display and have been mocked so many time by so many people that they're pretty much immune to shame by this point. my read on them is that they were desperate to be a celebrity (something that they openly admit to) but failed miserably at comedy and kind of had the personality of a dog turd, so they decided they'd have to become a human engagement farm (something that, again, they openly admit to), first by crusading against gamergate on Twitter, then by starting shitfights on Left Twitter, typically about cancel culture and identity politics.
the marriage is something i feel okay wildly and baselessly speculating about. i have no idea how or why Ashleigh (she's Scottish) married and (apparently?) had kids with Peter, but the videos she first started appearing in were lightweight reaction content where she seemed incredibly tense and uncomfortable in front of a camera. My wild guess is that she had no desire to be a youtube star, but Peter recognized the attention economy value of a really hot woman, begged or cajoled her into Making Content with them. At one point they convinced her to start a channel of her own, to which she posted exactly one video (about the Joker movie) before giving up. She also had a Twitter account that went silent after she left online, but it was actually funny so I'm pretty sure it was really her and not a Peter sockpuppet.
Also I believe Peter's story about being catfished could be true but at this point it's more likely that they made her up.
i dont know whats wrong with me
Oh there you go, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the additional information, that clarifies a lot of things.
I never followed them closely enough to really get a decent measure of what was going on with this shift. I can just remember coming across a clip of them talking about Maupin and being astonished since it was a pretty dramatic pivot and I didn't hear about what happened to them from anywhere, I just stumbled across the whole thing and tried to piece it together.
That definitely sounds like their wife though. I remember her being pretty awkward and uninterested in the spotlight, and since an expose about what really happened never came out from her I figured she was done with it and ready to move on.
As for the catfishing thing, I'd be inclined to believe your take. I wasn't there when it went down, it's all a bit clouded by history and competing claims, and it just didn't interest me enough to investigate it for myself so I didn't want to stake a claim in any particular narrative by representing it as fact. It's one of those things where I didn't feel comfortable editorialising too much since it's not worth gambling credibility on.