my perspective lightly coming in and out of this drama and having watched a few of peters videos last year:

idk as much for angie but in the case of peter, (taking their argument at face value) they at some point decided that breadtube wasn't using their platform to educate about class consciousness or move people towards a goal and peter seems to think that's what people with platforms should be doing with their time. (at least that's what they say)

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument bc since peter railed on this some breadtubers have released a bunch of videos that are essentially just chud dunking, which isn't the worst thing in the world but I'm personally a little over hearing someone articulate in essay form why ben shapiro is a shit head for the 10th time. Tho I recognize that for somebody else out there it may be their first time, so i see the utility. But I do think we all should be trying to make some kind of effort to actual go out and do praxis instead of just memeing about it and I'd like to see some culture growth in that direction, and I think that's what peter is trying to get at.

Peter's argument is that what breadtube is doing is commodified politics-as-a-superficial-identity stuff, i.e. engaging with in group thinking and mostly mocking those that don't share those beliefs and in that way isn't really all that different to what liberals or conservatives do and isn't help work towards socialism.

Now I can kind of see their point here but peter also doesn't really seem to have much of an answer to this issue either. Tbh the system we live under incentivizes us to engage in politics in this way exactly bc it isn't damaging to the status quo and peter has by and large pivoted to doing the same kind of thing they criticize breadtube for but just in a more class reductionist kind of way. ( most likely bc the platform of youtube and the internet at large incentivizes this kind of content)

also peter talks a lot about reaching out to working class reactionaries, those in the out group, to try to bring them over to class consciousness and puts a big emphasis on them being the group we have to convince to make any meaningful changes. Some twitter lefties found this kind of hard to swallow, i've seen a lot of people say things like "oh ok so we're not gonna help/reach out to marginalized people/liberals but we need to chase down racists/reactionaries?!"

The way they went about separating themselves from breadtube and drawing that line in the sand was ridiculously needlessly dramatic and indefensible tho. They were pretty vitriolic to a number of other creators incl eric sophia of curio who ostensible they were friends with at some time. I really don't understand why peter couldn't have just said "look i don't agree with how you guys are running stuff and i'm gonna go do my own thing." It definitely came off like they were being incendiary for views and/or simply being pettily jealous of younger breadtubers success. And most of the breadtubers they called out were just like "i just make media analysis vids man, i'm not the vanguard" which is of course, fair. most of them are like 24 and just make videos about games and movies with some decent opinions about social stuff.

Either way, ultimately I think the problem with all those involved in this stuff is being on twitter (too much).

edit: i'm also embarrassed i'm so online i could write this many words about this shit. :agony-deep: