Has anyone watched the new episode from First Thought/JT?

  • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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    7 months ago

    “I don’t have final say over decisions”.

    Is that not a blatant admission of selling out? He’s just straight admitted that he’s just a face for the camera and doesn’t have the authority to make content decisions on his own channel. He only has 2 employees that work as editors for him, so who’s making the decisions if not him?

    That seems like a damning nail in the coffin for all the accusations of deprogram and JT selling out.

    I remember getting downvoted to hell several months ago for saying that JT was selling out and the liberal aesthetics were becoming undeniable. Guess I wasn’t wrong.

    • ☭ Blursty ☭@lemmygrad.ml
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      7 months ago

      Is that not a blatant admission of selling out?

      If he's "sold out" he'd give a far less "gun to my head" answer. It's obvious he's saying that the decision was not his. Who do you think he's sold out to exactly? Can you elaborate on the conspiracy theory?

      • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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        7 months ago

        Corporate sponsors. But more importantly, a wider liberal audience.

        There is a lot of money to be made from the milquetoast “leftists” who dominate the western world and essentially want to pretend to be leftists while just being liberals. Look at his and the deprograms videos on Russia as other people have mentioned, it is just regurgitated state department lines. Or the other content they make, which rarely looks at interesting communist topics and instead at random things like “poking fun at and listing all the bad and weird things X US President has done with minimal analysis” for multiple episodes; something that would primarily cater to an American audience. Compare that to their content before, with bringing on Vietnamese comrades, doing hardcore analysis while still being goofy, and doing in depth introspections on news topics. But genuinely, what has their recent content been? Bringing on liberals. Random tech YouTubers. Pop history.

        If you can draw in that audience and establish yourself as a “centrist” leftist with “unbiased” facts. Then you can farm a lot of money off of that crowd.

        Why is he doing this? I noticed things deteriorating rapidly on deprogram and his channels roughly around the time following the birth of his child. Which would be a good motivator to try and make as much money as possible.

        • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
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          7 months ago

          I noticed things deteriorating rapidly on deprogram and his channels roughly around the time following the birth of his child.

          Let this be a lesson about making your family's livelihood dependent on a corporate controlled platform and always living with the fear of putting your family in financial straits if you offend your western audience's liberal sensibilities.

          They would do much more good if they still had regular jobs and only occasionally put out videos rather than becoming full time YouTubers but compromising their integrity in the process.

          At the point when it becomes a business, it stops being a revolutionary act. And like what happened with Hasan, their material interests and lived experience are diverging more and more from those of the working class as they become more petit bourgeois.

          • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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            7 months ago

            They would do much more good if they still had regular jobs and only occasionally put out videos rather than becoming full time YouTubers but compromising their integrity in the process.

            Honestly this is why I believe that Hakim’s personal channel is still holding relatively strong compared to JT and Yugo. He is a doctor. Not a content creator. This is a hobby and a pastime for him, not how he makes his bread and butter. In turn, that means he has little to no incentive to try and squeeze as much money as possible from a corporate algorithm that pays his salary.

            Ironically, this is the identical critique that Lenin had for the careerist and electoralist socialist and socdem politicians, and why he still practiced as a paralegal and lawyer while being a revolutionary. If one stakes their financial well being on something guaranteed to them by the capitalist system, they will become increasingly separated from the material interests of the working class, and “sell out” in order to secure their financial well being.

              • LeniX@lemmygrad.ml
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                7 months ago

                Honestly this is why I believe that Hakim’s personal channel is still holding relatively strong compared to JT and Yugo. He is a doctor. Not a content creator. This is a hobby and a pastime for him, not how he makes his bread and butter. In turn, that means he has little to no incentive to try and squeeze as much money as possible from a corporate algorithm that pays his salary.

                Material analysis - hits the mark every time.