Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right pipeline | Crooked Media
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January 30, 2025
Pod Save the UK
Masculinity and Misinformation: How JimmyTheGiant Escaped The Alt-Right pipeline

In This Episode

Warning: this episode contains strong language and a term of racist abuse.

 

Nish and Coco dig into some scary data about Gen Z. A poll of 13-27 year olds this week suggested nearly half of them favour authoritarian government. And nearly half of young men think women have been given too many rights. Youtuber JimmyTheGiant joins the pod to tell us about this mindset and how he disappeared into the right wing wormhole, and came out the other side.

 

And newts v planes:  Nish and Coco check out Rachel Reeves plans for growth. Is she pinning her hopes on the tech bros and Heathrow while sticking two fingers up to new Zero?

 

Useful Links

https://www.youtube.com/@JimmyTheGiant/videos

 

Guests

JimmytheGiant

Clare Farrell

 

Audio Credits

Today Programme, BBC Radio 4

Clare Farrell

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Coco Khan Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I’m Coco Khan

 

Nish Kumar And I’m Nish Kumar. Today it seems our young people have lost faith in democracy. A poll this week found that 52% of them would favor an authoritarian government. Scary stuff.

 

Coco Khan It really is. But it’s not surprising. And I’m not just saying that to continue my mission, to make people think I’m younger than I am.

 

Nish Kumar Well, look, we thought it was prime time to get inside the heads of these people. We’re joined by a very special guest who found himself sucked into the Albright wormhole, came out the other side. We’ll be speaking with YouTuber JimmytheGiant.

 

Coco Khan And the government is sending out the bulldozers in pursuit of its growth agenda. But what’s at risk? Let’s hear from the chancellor.

 

Clip This is a government on the side of working people taking the right decisions to secure their future, to secure our future, step up to the challenges that we face. Ending the era of low expectations, putting Britain on a different path, delivering from the for the British people. And I am determined this government is determined to do just that.

 

Nish Kumar That’s the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, laying out her latest plans for cutting down on government spending and kickstarting growth. So how are they going to do it? In an op ed in the Times on Tuesday. Keir Starmer right, will cut the weeds of regulation and let growth bloom, which is very poetic. But what does it mean? Reeves has announced subsequently that she plans to streamline environmental obligations, calling the example of the HS2 bat tunnel that cost 100 million pounds an example of regulation going wrong. They’re going to limit legal challenges and the number of people who can veto projects and particularly infrastructure projects and streamline consultation that would otherwise drown builders.

 

Coco Khan Elsewhere, she has announced investments in new transport links in the north of England. They’re talking about creating Europe’s Silicon Valley in between Oxford and Cambridge. It’s aimed at driving new investments in science and technology. They also want to go hard on building new homes, particularly around those travel hubs. And they say that they will curb regulator overreach.

 

Nish Kumar So the government is already putting its rhetoric on that last point into action. So last week, Rachel Reeves forced out the chairman of the UK’s competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority.

 

Coco Khan Reeves is justification for the removal of CMA chairman Marcus Booker, saying was that they didn’t see eye to eye on how the UK can achieve growth. That’s the magic word. So she’s appointed Amazon’s former UK boss, Doug Gurr as interim chair. And we all know how concerned that’s the right word, isn’t it? Amazon has been in regards to healthy competition.

 

Nish Kumar In her speech, Reeves paid particular attention to our economic links with the US. Following a reportedly positive conversation between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump. But when it comes to slightly less bad trading partners, when asked on Sunday whether the UK would consider joining the Pan Euro Mediterranean Convention, which is a tariff free zone with Europe, Reeves didn’t rule it out, saying that she would consider anything that might attract growth so long as it didn’t cross any of her Brexit red lines.

 

Coco Khan Don’t call it a brentry. And I mean really don’t. It’s a terrible word isn’t it.

 

Nish Kumar Don’t. Awful

 

Coco Khan And the G word growth is on everyone’s lips in Westminster. So Starmer told business leaders at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday that what Rachel and I have done is to make it clear to our Cabinet colleagues that in each of their briefs, growth is the number one mission. So it’s not just a mission for the chancellor, a mission for me or for trade in education. But every single group has to go through the question, is this pro-growth? Did you ever used to watch the day to day? Yeah, There’s like a really famous segment in that with Steve Coogan playing a kind of early Alan Partridge. Carrie. Yeah, it’s doing a skit about driving fast, increasing accidents. And he says this thing over and over again. Is this cool? So he says, I’m driving through the well, I’m driving a hundred miles an hour. I feel great because I’m cool. But is this cool? That shows a picture of someone who’s been bloodied in an accident. Next picture. Is this cool? And this is how I feel. I want to speak to Keir Starmer. I want to show him is this growth? Is this growth is an air pollution mask around the airports? Is this growth High Street just dead of any culture? Is this growth?

 

Nish Kumar Listen, you’re right. And I imagine people who listen to this podcast would be concerned about things like whether we can breathe there or whether buildings are safe to live in, you know, cock shit about. And I can sort of appreciate the people of our sort of political persuasion might be a bit antsy about this. So obviously there’s a progressive concern around defying regulators in the name of growth and sacrificing everything in terms of growth. But there is real concern from economists that the plans don’t fully add up. And it seems to have attracted criticism from from everyone.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, no, exactly. And we you know, we watch all of Reeves’s speech before this show. The two things that stood out to me is that she talked about how actually Labour had delivered on growth, you know, not as much as they expected, but there had been some growth. I thought to myself, well, that is definitely not felt by the general public. Actually, you can keep talking about growth, but I’d really love to hear how that. Would be redistributed, because I think that’s the main question. And when she also kept talking about Europe, Silicon Valley, all I keep thinking about is deep sea and how just overnight it’s like turned the tech world upside down. I just thought maybe Silicon Valley isn’t the model we should be going for.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah. So Deep Seek is a Chinese, AI company who’s kind of emergence into the air space. Yes. Caused a massive, massive drop in the share price of various American tech companies because Deep Sea appears to be able to offer a service similar to things like open air LGBT, but at a fraction of the cost. And so it’s done some real damage to the American stock market. Again, it sort of exposes the fragility of basing your entire economic strategy around AI and growth. But again, I just think it’s really, really important to stress this point. Continued to talk about economic growth is fine as long as you find a way of joining up wider economic growth with policies that are actually going to improve the lives of people living in the country on a day to day basis. And I’m much more interested to hear from the Labour Party and hear from Rachel Reeves and case Dom how this economic growth actually joins up with benefiting people in the long term. I think the loose idea is that economic growth provides jobs for people and also puts money into the via taxes into the government that can then be redistributed and spent. But, you know, I think how does that money get funneled into the economy and how does that money get funneled into the pockets of ordinary people living in Britain? That’s the thing that the Labour Party is struggling to articulate at the moment.

 

Coco Khan She kept returning to this line like we want to make Britain the best place for an entrepreneur. And all I kept thinking was, I mean, it’s a pretty good place for entrepreneurs as it is, but I’d love to hear. We want to make Britain the best place to be a child, the best place to be a nurse. You know, those are the things I want to say, but I’m not. I mean, it was a speech for us.

 

Nish Kumar Fuck the best place I would like to get on a train. I would like to see a doctor.

 

Coco Khan A fine okay place.

 

Nish Kumar I said I would settle for. We want to make Britain an acceptable place to live. A guy like big. Like.

 

Coco Khan Make Britain. Okay, I guess, again.

 

Nish Kumar Just. Just like anything. So amidst all of this sort of bulldozing for growth and cutting of red tape, there’s one hugely contentious decision. The government are giving political support to add a third runway to Heathrow Airport.

 

Coco Khan So as our guest on the show last week, Greens co-leader Carla Denyer said airport expansion doesn’t necessarily improve the lives of everyday Brits and it certainly will not lead to positive environmental outcomes. The Government is already struggling to justify the decision actually. So here’s Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds speaking to BBC Radio Four’s Emma Barnett.

 

Clip I would say there is no tension between the ambitious on climate and being ambitious.

 

Clip There’s no tension. How is an extra runway no tension?

 

Clip Frankly, if people use Dubai or to, for instance, give the example of Schiphol in the UK, that’s still the same emissions. We are absolutely clear on.

 

Clip So if you’re looking for solutions, I don’t follow that. Well.

 

Clip If people are flying to a different airport, they’re still going to fly. You know, we.

 

Clip Don’t expect sorry, you don’t expect emissions to go up with an extra runway.

 

Clip I think people will fly regardless of whether they use a different country as they hope or not. But the point is, we are committed to decarbonizing aviation, this whole industry that just makes it.

 

Nish Kumar Just again, like with a lot of Labour policies at the moment, it just seems to be a lot of people contradicting themselves within the same sentence. Look, we should say that the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and a former guest on this show, Clare Farrell, has had to be in her bonnet about this, so much so that she’s actually dropped us a video message. We’re always thrilled to hear from Clare issues.

 

Clare Farrell In 2018, I went on a two week long hunger strike against the expansion of Heathrow Airport, which was on the table to become government policy at the time. And and shortly after that, we went on to launch Extinction Rebellion. The litigation and the legal cases go backwards and forwards for a long, long time over Heathrow expansion. And just recently the call again for like people to recognize that 10,000 people will lose their homes through this at the same time as the recent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries said that by mid-century, billions of people would lose their homes and their lives to the climate crisis. We have to look at this kind of expansion of carbon heavy infrastructure in this context, us intentionally destroying organized life on Earth because that is what it’s going to do. And quite frankly, that’s rather more disruptive than any just stop oil protests.

 

Nish Kumar This is a huge concern. And Clare isn’t alone here. Rick Parfitt is the WWF climate policy specialist said To boost growth, Rachel Reeves should put pounds back in people’s pockets by insulating homes, decarbonizing power and investing in public transport. The UK’s net zero economy grew by 9% in 2023, compared to 0.1% for the economy overall, spending over 50 billion pounds on airport expansions that will take decades to build is a nonstarter. They would send carbon emissions skyward, leave growth stock on the runway and suck money out of the UK.

 

Coco Khan There’s also been opposition from Labour’s biggest donor, so that’s green energy magnate Dale Vince. He tweeted that if we don’t get on top of the climate crisis, the economic damage will drown out any gains from marginal projects like Heathrow. No amount of runways will save our economy.

 

Nish Kumar Reeves isn’t being shy about the fact that she’s prioritizing economic concerns over environmental ones, telling the World Economic Forum at Davos that growth, not net zero, is the government’s number one mission.

 

Coco Khan Right? And I mean, even in her speech today, she talks about she takes a swipe at bats and newts. What they have done to you. You know, and it’s interesting because obviously there was a long time with Labour saying we are the true Green Party. It’s just all being unraveled before our eyes. Also.

 

Nish Kumar Keir Starmer voted against the expansion of the airport in 2020.

 

Coco Khan And we can’t forget that only a couple of weekends ago we had that massive storm that battered Northern Ireland and Scotland. You know, the climate catastrophe is here. I kind of want to have a picture of it so I can ask colleagues, Keir Starmer, is this growth I been this is this growth.

 

Nish Kumar But look, as we’ve laid out here, the political messaging from the government clearly leaves a lot to be desired and is leaving a lot of us feeling pretty grumpy. After the break, we’re going to find out how this can be taken advantage of with someone who’s gone through the alt right wormhole and come out the other side. We’ll be speaking to YouTuber JimmytheGiant.

 

[AD]

 

Nish Kumar Now, as we mentioned at the top of the show earlier this week, came the news that young people are, to put it bluntly, fucked off with the status quo. Channel four Poll of 3000 Gen Z is that 13 to 27 year olds found that over half would prefer an authoritarian leader to a democratically elected one, which is absolutely wild.

 

Coco Khan That’s right. 52% of the people polled agreed that the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections. And nearly half agreed. The entire way our society is organized must be radically changed through revolution.

 

Nish Kumar The study also found that influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Pearson, a trusted by 42% of young men, 45% of young men, also said We have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men. While a similar proportion agreed when it comes to giving women equal rights, things have gone far enough.

 

Coco Khan All of this suggests that Gen Z is lurching to the right and disengaging in democracy with the pied pipers of alt right influencers helping them along the way. So with that in mind, we wanted to talk to someone who was once in this very position but dug Shawshank style his way out of the alt right shit pipe. Welcome to Pod Save the UK, Jimmythegiant.

 

JimmytheGiant That was the best intro. Amazing. Thank you very much for having me.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. God, I saw that poll the other day. What is that age bracket.

 

Nish Kumar There seem to 27 so the yeah yeah.

 

JimmytheGiant That’s more where an iPhone is like zero it’s about 15 or so.

 

Coco Khan None of us generation better. What a terrible name to give them.

 

JimmytheGiant They’re going to say that’s part of the conspiracy. Fair to say this.

 

Nish Kumar Generation Alpha. Then what happened to Alpha?

 

Coco Khan They’re like 11, aren’t they?

 

Nish Kumar Are they?

 

Coco Khan They’re under 13.

 

Nish Kumar There’s another generation. My God.

 

Coco Khan It started this year, right?

 

Nish Kumar Okay. Right. Okay. So that makes sense, right? Okay, well, either way, it’s bad as me.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, that’s worried me more because when I first read that I was. I just really young up to 27. That’s kind of fucking crazy. Well, there is that as well, sir.

 

Coco Khan Yes. Yeah, yeah.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, yeah. You can say whatever you want. It’s on the on the Internet. You know, the rules of the unregulated media. Very unregulated. You know, you’re more experienced of broadcasting on the Internet than any of us. Because you. You started out as like, a sort of or extreme sports YouTuber. Like, you’ve really been involved in the business of doing stuff on YouTube.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, I’ve been deep in it, but I like grew up, you know, video game and I’m watching YouTube. So I was I’ve always I followed YouTube from its kind of 2000 a I think it was started in 2005 2006. I’ve seen the whole industry change. Yeah. And like how it went from just guys in their bedroom making stupid videos to now it’s like what it is now, which is it’s wild. But yeah, it’s sort of around 2016. The kind of political side started popping. Before then it was always like the Young Turks. Maybe you’d see an odd Alex Jones video. Yeah, but it was so interest. I said this in the alt right video. It was like back then I wouldn’t have even really been asked, tell you what right and left was. Yeah, you were just being fed like stories and like, you know, who did 911 and all that sort of stuff. And it was like very different to now. Now it’s very much categories and there’s two camps and.

 

Nish Kumar It’s I mean, it’s just crazy. How old are you.

 

JimmytheGiant I am 30.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah. So I’m sort of I’m nine years older than you. And for me, YouTube was always like, well, we’ll talk about early you Tube of like, yeah, the Natalie Portman rap that the Lonely Island did on Saturday night.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah yeah.

 

Coco Khan The Ninja Cat. You know, just.

 

Nish Kumar For the elder millennials, YouTube is like.

 

JimmytheGiant Charlie bit my finger.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, yeah. Charlie But much is actually it’s like a much more like, innocent and probably, like, apolitical. Yeah. Place. But, I mean, so the.

 

JimmytheGiant Video, how it changed. Yeah, I.

 

Nish Kumar Just got that. The video that you referred to, which is a it’s, it’s just such an interesting like longform video essay. Right. If I could make it sound incredibly boring.

 

JimmytheGiant It’s like.

 

Nish Kumar Because it’s about you talking about, you know, as somebody who was making stuff, making content in the YouTube space. It’s almost all kind of I don’t know if de-radicalization is in a way, it’s like your sort of arc of going from somebody who was watching sort of videos that exist outside of a left right political binary but exist in a kind of conspiratorial place like or almost like a political conspiracy theory videos. Yeah. But then so then sort of traveling down through kind of Jordan Pearson into a kind of alright headspace and then sort of traveling back I think sort of as pretty much post 2016, right?

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, I would say so. I’ve sort of become a lefty as the of like really fucked up and fired. Yeah. And I’m really optimistic you know how like trends happen where you have like the hipsters will find something like the nerdy kids will find something then the hipsters will get on it, then the popular kids get on it. And then by that point, the sort of the nerds and the hipsters stop, engage in it. And I sort of feel similar. The Irish about right wing politics. In the beginning it was an interesting difference. It was counter what you have been told in school and stuff. And then now it’s so mainstream. I think those people originally the natural desire to be a little bit contrarian or just sort of explore different viewpoints. They’ve now sort of been self-reflective. So I think there is a percentage of people that are trapped in that kind of pipeline who have come out of it or are starting to come out of it. So I’m a bit more optimistic. A lot of people are. I would say I was very much like curious to find out about these topics and stuff. And it was never coming from like a place of hate or anything like that. It was just I’m being told that the reason the gender pay gap doesn’t exist is because of these facts and figures. It’s not because women suck or something like that. And the mood and the vibe is definitely changed now. Like when you see like Andrew type, it’s because women suck. And so it’s like I think the people who do have some intellectual curiosity, they will now be seeing that this is kind of bullshit. And they might start like, well, I had with Ukraine, which was like where I was how the right were talking about Ukraine. It made me go, Well, hang on a second, I know they’re full of shit on this. So then it made me question because.

 

Nish Kumar It’s very personal. It’s in your home, your wife is Ukrainian.

 

JimmytheGiant Exactly. And I was like because I had, I don’t know, like, yeah, a lot of people. I got married and then obviously became left lefty because I met a woman. I was like, Yeah, but it was sort of like it wasn’t in the way that people would perceive that, that she was some lefty. And it was just because it was a topic that showed me a different angle than what the sphere of content was telling me about. So like, I think I don’t know if people need like an individual topic where they see that the change on.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah.

 

JimmytheGiant Because a lot of it is just like they build a whole like a Jenga tower of like bullshit. Yeah. Like, it’s sort of loosely staged. They have a but if you pull out a few pieces, then it falls down. And that was it. Ukraine was one of those pieces where I was like, They’re just chatting complete shit about Ukraine. Yeah.

 

Nish Kumar So then what else are they trying to say?

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, exactly. And it makes you question everything and it’s like the gender pay gap. Then it’s like, you know, crime and like this whole they their obsessive culture, they think, like, everything comes down to individuals making bad decisions. They never talk about systems or like, structures that cause bad outcomes in society and never talk about that. So these are these people as bad people when they’ve just decided to be bad because Cardi B is telling them to shake their asses.

 

Nish Kumar I’m a Man is a really compelling and interesting story of somebody who almost like programed their brain in a certain way and then was able to deprogram their brain. And so anyway, there’s just always this idea that you essentially move towards the political right as you get older. Yeah. And so I think all of that stuff like you aging into left wing politics is interesting and compelling because it’s an unusual story, I think. Yeah. But also I’m just interested in what was appealing to you about what was what felt countercultural to you about the right and the sort of political right.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. Yeah, there was that feeling because I remember I said it’s so cringe now, but they’re like, Conservatism is the new punk and it’s like very cringe. But there was an era where it was just you were the different guy. If you if you’re right wing, you’re in a group of people your age. You’re the one that when they start complaining about, I don’t know, or they start talking good about Jeremy Corbyn, you’re like, Well, actually, yeah, right. Nationalization is inefficient and, you know.

 

Coco Khan So you sound fun. Yeah.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. God. I have I to anyone who went to a party with me. I’m so sorry. Yeah.

 

Coco Khan I do want to come back to that question, though. What was it about them that you found alluring?

 

JimmytheGiant I just think I’ve always liked new ideas and that’s like something as I’ve got older, I’ve realized is is not a problem. It’s upon my personality that I’m attracted to ideas that contradict what I think. But when I was younger, I put trust into that where I was like, That must mean it’s correct. This is what is called like the Galileo’s gambit. I think because Galileo, he obviously fought the world was circle. I think if my history is not fucked but he the I was circle was everyone was flawed. He was right and everyone was wrong and they all ridiculed him. And so a lot of like conspiracy theorist people will use this one situation that happened maybe once or twice in history to basically come to the conclusion that anyone who believes in anything that’s different in the mainstream is always correct. But it’s like.

 

Nish Kumar Apart from the conspiracy theories that are flat earthers.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. Yeah.

 

Nish Kumar Galileo is their worst nightmare.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. Yeah.

 

Coco Khan In this video you talked about like Joe Rogan and Shapira, the one British one that stood out was Tommy Robinson.

 

JimmytheGiant Tommy.

 

Coco Khan Yes. And I was really interested in your thoughts when you said I had a connection to Tommy Robinson, but I wasn’t a racist because my understanding. Would you talk about that?

 

JimmytheGiant Because what they’ve done is so fucking clever because they they risk it. They repackage racism as good to look into the history of these movements and how that rhetoric changes. So like the BMP, Nick Griffin, when he came in, he realized that if you stop talking about ethnicity and ethnic purity and start talking about cultural preservation, that’s way more palatable because ethnicity is inherent. Like we we don’t have a choice in our skin color, but culture, you could argue, like if you live in this country, you’re kind of following the ideas, the beliefs, the the so choose of that country. And that can change. So there’s this sort of separation in someone’s. Mind where you can separate culture from race and you feel like you’re not a racist anymore. And maybe arguably, you know, racist, xenophobic, like that’s effectively what it is. And I think xenophobia is much more marketable. It still has the liberal idea that these are individual decisions and choices without it being like tied to their ethnicity. So when it came to Joy Robinson, he although now I’ve looked back, he did say some racist shit, but the way they would frame it themselves was like they were just talking about ideology. So like radical Islam to them is literally all Islam. Yeah. But their market in it so small.

 

Nish Kumar What’s so interesting about that is you’ve really identified something that’s incredibly important here. A lot of these things are not new ideas. They’re just repackaging. I mean, this idea of the preservation of Western culture. It sorts of it contains within it the sort of old seeds of white supremacy in Western premises. You know, those ideas that drove the British Colonialism project because there was an idea that these were inferior cultures that needed essentially saving from their own.

 

JimmytheGiant Savage Very true.

 

Nish Kumar And we’re seeing it all the time at the moment in terms of the way that Elon Musk talks about the grooming gangs in this country, which he has no idea about. You know, he does know specific knowledge about the cases that you’re talking about, but you can still see the seeds of all of it, But it’s just been repackaged. You know, someone like Tommy Robinson has realized that he can do what the National Front did in the 70s and 80s when our parents came here and say, we want to get rid of the packets. He can’t do that anymore.

 

JimmytheGiant Right wingers were so busy getting scared about Muslims affecting their Western Christian values that they forgot to tell their kids what dictatorships about. Why? Surely that’s worrying. Right wingers love to be scared of the shadows. They’re not scared of the thing that’s in front of them. They’re like all these. These, like, things. Like potential threats.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah. In the video, you talk about reading Chaps in Jones book about the kind of cultural demonization of the British working class and that being a real eye opening moment for you, right?

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. Yeah. That again, it was kind of the Ukraine thing where I kind of shifted my perspective, where my personal relationship to jobs was going to school. There was like the chubby kids. You’d have fights Worm You’d got a co-op that for Haribo. Is that you? So my, my my perception of Charles was that this is what I like about the left is it’s more interested in like it’s not just people about the sort of boring way of like looking at things. It’s like, well, this thing happened with social housing where they changed the dynamic, the make up of how social housing, the types of people that are allowed in certain areas, you’d have the people that were more troubled in these social houses, the people that are better off, and these ones that started making a divide. You then had this process, like they call it, like residual ization, which meant like certain more troubled backgrounds. So yeah, pooling together and they didn’t get the support they needed. And then like there’s like an actual story that that’s like an obvious starting point, which was at some point we had these good council houses that brought communities together. They made really connected communities. People had more opportunities. And then over time that changed. We neglected lots of the community. And and then you got a whole culture from and then it’s interesting that culture, they start wearing a certain type of a hat and a certain type of like tracksuit and listen to a certain type of music. This is interesting. The right wing answer to that is that they’re just people that are lazy and I don’t know, workshop or whatever, and that’s so boring and like, uninteresting.

 

Nish Kumar It’s infantile, isn’t it?

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, yeah.

 

Nish Kumar You know, it’s like a children’s story. There are good people. There are bad people. And the good people always the good. The bad people always do bad. Whereas actually, it’s a much more sophisticated thing to say. It’s what makes a good film.

 

JimmytheGiant What a good film is when, like, the bad guy has a reason why he’s gone.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That that sort of leads you into kind of reading backwards and going in and doing research around the postwar consensus and the collapse of the postwar consensus as engineered by kind of Thatcher and Reagan in the UK, in the US. And then we now in this sort of crisis point that again, is kind of engineered by a moment of economic collapse. You know, 2008, the financial system essentially collapses and plunges us into a kind of black hole that we still are yet to emerge from. You know, this is what I’m interested in, like this idea of what line of thought is countercultural or anti-establishment, because like, for people our age. Yeah. And you defined yourself as being countercultural by being left wing because to be left wing meant to be against the banking system that plunged us all into what is.

 

JimmytheGiant What left wing is. Yeah. And so like it was, that’s the big shift that happened because you have like your social left and right and then you have your economic left or right. They don’t actually have to marry up like clean. Yeah. But it’s like it’s that thing where I guess socially, at least in media and at least like overtly, we’re quite left wing as a country. It might be now I can fit. It’s like shifting on certain issues, but in general we’re quite left wing socially.

 

Nish Kumar We certainly moved in a more progressive direction within my lifetime. We certainly moved for sure.

 

JimmytheGiant And so society can appear to be socially liberal or at. In the media when it comes to economics, which in my opinion is the driving force of everything, is we’re so right wing. And it’s like you can’t argue that. And so they have to push the conversation onto the culture issues. So this is their last bastion to sort of prey on people’s, you know, prejudices and stuff like that. So they got.

 

Coco Khan Can I ask you what is particularly about young men and why young men, not young women are being targeted by the right? You know, look, I’m a woman. I’m a millennial. I grew up in a muslim family. So I know that I’m not the target audience. I don’t think any of that messaging is going to work on me. Why do you think it has captured so many young men?

 

JimmytheGiant I think young lads, they want to feel like our life progresses. So, like, we want to feel that we put in hard work and we build something. And I think that is a pressure that’s put on lads to like, make something of yourself, be something like move out your hometown, go to the big city, do something like that’s kind of a rhetoric that sold to us a lot. If you have that mentality of like self betterment self-improvement, then you have to buy into like meritocracy. And if you buy into meritocracy, you kind of have to be right wing because it’s like the only way to believe that there’s a meritocracy in this society is by not looking into the systemic things and critiques in capitalism. So I think that’s why it lose in men a lot, because maybe we have this sort of insecurity. Like I think being a man, you do not want to feel powerless, like you want to feel like you’re not vulnerable, you’re not a victim, you’re not weak. You want to be powerful and in control. And when the right wing talks about the left, they talk about like these people have just like flopped over in the road and they’ve just given up and everything sucks. I don’t believe that is a true, accurate depiction of the left, but that’s what they get told about it. I think they in plays into it. I think a lot of like young lads want to make a go. So they like reads watch some videos on YouTube, how to talk to women, how to be more confident.

 

Coco Khan You so wrong. If you are listening to this. Please do not take advice from this one single moment about how to speak to women.

 

JimmytheGiant The one good bit of advice they can give. The only way you turn the video off after they said this is speak to women. That’s the only bit because they often don’t even say that anymore. They just complain about women. But like, that’s the one bit of advice.

 

Nish Kumar I’m fascinated by this idea that all of the experts, especially counting straight cis men like, are all mad. But I’m like, I would definitely take some advice from a woman. Like I would want just just even if you look at it objectively, strip everything away for a second. If your goal is to impress a woman, surely your first port of call is to go to a woman and say.

 

JimmytheGiant Wait. But that’s where the misogyny gets pushed it because really, like the dark side is they would say women don’t know what they wear.

 

Nish Kumar That’s right.

 

JimmytheGiant They’ll be like, women will tell you one thing because women are very empathetic and they’ll tell you that they want this type of guy. Actually, they want chat. Yeah, a lot of it gets in this dark, strange territory. And again, I’ll push you into the riot. These things are like they’re just these pipelines that just pull you into right wing poles.

 

Nish Kumar So then how can progressive people or the left or whatever nebulous term we want to put on it? How do we as a group we speak to young But because, like, I’ll be honest with you, there’s just this lazy idea of people by age that like, we all thought that a lot of the sort of movements around 2016 were a kind of death rattle of conservativism, really. As the millennial generation ages into positions of leadership, the population would move left on social issues and economic issues. But obviously there’s a severe wrinkle in this. If the generation that comes behind us is starting to turn towards social conservativism and.

 

JimmytheGiant Okay, well, no, no young person wants to fucking be 20 and think I have no chance. And yeah, I think stacked and shit. Yeah, I’m a Christian. I don’t literally think that like Jesus walked on water and shit like that, but it gives me like this faith that there’s like something good in the universe and there’s something that like, even if it’s bullshit, it doesn’t matter. It gives me a good frame to, like, operate my life toward. And I think that that’s something that the left really could do better with, because the one thing the right does get correct is that the left doesn’t give a very optimistic outlook because there’s not a lot to be optimistic about. It’s very fair. But like so fucking what? Like that will never help. Like you cannot sell Cadbury’s ain’t going to make a chocolate advert when I say it’s all right, it’s it’s chocolate that’s not going to sell. Yeah, it has to be. This thing’s going to change your fucking life. So I just think like the right gives that message of self-improvement and betterment, even if it’s bullshit. A young 20 year old wants to get hopped up on some bullshit to improve their life, and they want to have something to kind of, like, aspire to. So I like I’m and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve not been left for very long. I’m super optimistic. I think like the only way, like I think the way that we achieved, like the postwar consensus was by people, working class people who were in a worse scenario than we are now coming together, finding strength in like the bottom where they could have possibly been like living in slums and squalor. Bella overworked in these factories and shit and they all just went, Fuck this. Yeah, we’re going to do something. And I did something. They fucking changed the world. I made it a million times, But it incredible things. It was just by people like coming together and realizing they have power. And I think the left needs that message like an optimistic message and not give up because what fucking Corbyn lost a couple of times. Bernie Sanders lost a couple times. But Nigel Farage has been in the game like for years. It’s a fight. Until now. So it’s like people need to be more motivated, not give up because we lost a couple of elections.

 

Coco Khan I’m glad you said that, because I. I feel my left wing politics are entirely based on optimism. Yeah, it’s entirely based on this feeling of like, my my fellow man is inherently good. And with the right conditions can be the best. We’re all going to be the best. I feel like I’m sort of like a motivational. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve all got it enough guys.

 

JimmytheGiant I just want to write do. That’s what I love about motivational speakers. But you need that energy. You need that.

 

Coco Khan Yeah, absolutely. And as you said, even just in terms of numbers, there’s more of us than there are of that. Like, we we are going to win this battle at some point. You know what I mean? So I’m just.

 

Nish Kumar Let me just think about the NHS, you know, like in 1945, in like a country that was just had been bombed to shit.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah.

 

Nish Kumar A an action of a government, basically. I mean, it’s obviously a lot more complicated than that, but effectively in one stroke just turned around to an entire country and said, You all have free health care.

 

JimmytheGiant Yes, I’m saying the.

 

Nish Kumar Single most significant transformational step for the average British.

 

JimmytheGiant Person is incredible. And I think that should be inspiring to people. And like the left has wins under its belt. Like if you look at history, like the biggest continuous growth period of economics was under Keynesianism. Whereas the Right had a few good years maybe in the 90s where everything was being sold off, there was a bit of an economic boom, but those good years were a spike in unemployment and a spike of the year.

 

Coco Khan Felt good because everyone was on drugs. Yeah.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah.

 

Coco Khan Be honest. We know what the 80s was like.

 

Nish Kumar As opposed to the 60s and 70s?

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, True. But those were introspective. just feel good peace.

 

Nish Kumar We’re just talking about cocaine, let’s say I’m just talking about the everything went bad, but loads of people started taking cocaine.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah.

 

Coco Khan I’m remember watching a different videos of yours where you talked about and I’m going to quote you because you said it yourself, you were like, it just felt like the left were pussies.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. Sure.

 

Coco Khan And I find that really interesting because obviously I have a different life. And, you know, when I was growing up, I wasn’t surrounded by loads of political people. But the few that I. Well, I’m a woman of color. And so the few that I well, it was often like anti-racism activism. And the guys in that didn’t strike you as they were, they were fucking about. But they didn’t strike you as weak or.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. No, no. Though I like to be completely. Yeah. Like is a dumb stereotype is not true. But like, I think this is all they’ve got. They got a few guys to take steroids and talk about neo liberal economics and then all of a sudden that’s the image. But I really love that era, to be honest. Like looking back on it. And I was a right winger at the time, but looking back on like the the Jeremy Corbyn when grime got like the crime for Corbyn, Yeah, it was kind of sick that like, stormzy was like pretty political. It was more like diverse and all the sort of range of academics I like. So yeah, and I think that’s where he kind of needs it just needs people with like different personas and different energies. The common push a positive message.

 

Nish Kumar But the means now is the next point, right? And it’s the final and it is the most important point because like for years, you know, when we were growing up, we existed under these kind of press barons like, you know, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell, basically everybody that is an inspiration for local royal succession. And then when the Internet, the advent of the Internet, there’s a part of you that thinks, well, this is incredible. This is like this is going to democratize information and democratize media. And then movements start to spring up that are oxygenated by the Internet, by social media, like, you know, Occupy Wall Street, the kind of anti-capitalist demonstrations, the Black Lives Matter movement, the MeToo movement, you start to see lots of these progressive movements that are oxygenated by social media. But now we’re in a space where it feels like social media. And that all the sort of unregulated forms of the media have been harnessed by the same forces that controlled the old media. And so my question for you is. How do we harness the information dissemination systems to spread the progressive message? When a guy like Elon Musk can look at Twitter and say that’s an interesting way of spreading information by buying.

 

JimmytheGiant Obviously our odds are pretty fucked. Realistically. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to defeat my whole point that I made earlier. But what I say it is like it’s like for free and there’s like ten, 20 minutes left on the clock. So it’s like we’re not in a fantastic position, like, right now, but it’s not over. Yeah, right. Co-opted it, which is worrisome. But is there’s not like over. It’s like we have to look at what did we not deliver on. And it’s like whilst we’re talking about all these nice things about like Black Lives Matter and always sort of stuff, it never was going to actually fix the fundamental core problem of income inequality. So there’s always been the elephant in the room, which is income inequality, which is what lefties need to talk about. And that has to be what we push because that’s what actually fixes it. If you fixed income inequality and you think about.

 

Nish Kumar This, so many thinkers that have pushed both of those things at the same time, you know, Martin Luther King was a sort of avowed critique of capitalism. Fred Hampton was building a rainbow coalition that was existed under the night, you know, under the umbrella of economic socialism. Yeah, the union of those two things has always been incredibly important.

 

JimmytheGiant I think that has to be forefront now. And it’s this I think also class. I think talk about class more than ethnicity and gender. I really do think I know and 100% understand that your average I think it’s something like your average African like sub-Saharan African in Britain makes 10 pounds every 1 pound of white British person does. So I understand there is a deep problem, I think, in this landscape wherein we have to focus on class as the connecting factor, because when you split all into these categories, that’s when the right go. Well, look, they care more about the black people. They care more about the gay people, they care more about the the feminists or whatever. And it’s like really know the left wing people would actually just say, look at this problem. Look at this problem. Look at this problem. But if we unite as a message just on messaging, as being more about class and inequality, I just think that’s going to bring people more together. There’s more solidarity in that.

 

Coco Khan I do understand why feminists and anti-racist activists have previously felt a little bit sort of squashed under just only, only class matters.

 

JimmytheGiant I get it.

 

Coco Khan You know, basically, if you look at trade unions, they’ve always been until recently, have been quite bad in representing women, for example, because there’s a sense of like, just be quiet, you low. And then when when we sort the class issue, you will naturally become liberated. And I’m sure you would become more liberated. But it doesn’t change the fact that you have unique problems. See you now. And you need sort of solidarity to the kind of help.

 

Nish Kumar That the more you pull it that thread, the more it starts to say you like. So what you’re saying is a rising tide lifts all boats like it starts that kind of thinking. I absolutely agree with you that like, economic class is at the core of all of these problems. But I think it is important to also make space because it is about establishing solidarity and it’s about understanding that, like, marginalized people are all on the same side.

 

JimmytheGiant How do you think you can avoid the right picking apart those divisions? Because that’s all it, Because I fundamentally agree with you. But it’s like the right is so opportunistic.

 

Nish Kumar A lot of us had hopes that, you know, as he moved away from essentially like these kind of media moguls owning the ways in which information was disseminated. You know, if you look at the newspapers when I was growing up, like it was, you know, it’s basically like The Guardian and the Independent and the Mirror Points versus the Sun, the Mail Express, The Telegraph, The Times, you know, in terms of like the that were owned by newspaper moguls who had financial and vested interests in not disrupting the economic status quo. So then you get the Internet, you go, this is this is great. This is amazing. It’s just going to be the value of your ideas. And the reality is that we all have to fess up to this idea that conservatives were much smarter and savvier in how they use the Internet and how they used YouTube and how they use social media. So do you still believe in the power and value of being on YouTube? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is it really important that progressives get into those spaces?

 

JimmytheGiant I think you have to get into those races. That was one of the things I said in the video about one of the people who pulled me out of it was Destiny, because he was literally.

 

Nish Kumar This is a YouTuber who went went on and argued with conservative youtubers.

 

JimmytheGiant And I like I don’t like fundamentally, massively agree with Destiny. I like his critiques on some of like MAGA and stuff like that. But like he was the only guy going into those spaces, but he was the only guy going in because everyone else took the sort of like principled stance of your platform in them. So I think, yeah, you just have to get into those spaces. I don’t know if it’s I would like to do is debating says a lot pressure but I think it can be done.

 

Coco Khan Yeah yeah what I do have like you want one related question though and I think maybe it comes back to the idea of solidarity and maybe, you know, solidarity is a muscle that we all need to train a little bit harder because I think sometimes when we talk about the left, we talk about a need for likable characters. But what is a content creator other than someone who’s very compelling? That’s why you watch him on you. She writes, If you don’t have personality, does it matter? And also, should we withdraw solidarity from people that we think are kind of dickheads? You know, I mean, like if you want to have a coalition, there are going to be people in there that you don’t actually like.

 

JimmytheGiant This is like, yes, I’ve been wrestling with is like they quit like a relationship of convenience, you know? So it’s like sometimes you have to think about everything strategically. And it’s the same with what I was saying about focus on class over like minority and like gender and stuff is just strategically, if we’re looking at like a board game, the position we were in currently, that makes more sense to do so unifying and then move on. I get your critique. I think it makes sense. What you’re saying then is the rising tide floats all boats. I think sometimes you have to think strategically. So like me and my mates play board games at all. We play like Catan. Yeah. And like, there will be a time in the game where you’re ahead, you’re winning.

 

Coco Khan And I have no idea what you’re talking about. What is Catan.

 

Nish Kumar Settlers of Catan.

 

JimmytheGiant Best game ever.

 

Coco Khan What is it?

 

Nish Kumar Settlers of Catan.

 

Coco Khan Okay. Please carry on.

 

JimmytheGiant When you get bored of monopoly and say I need something deeper. You have this map and you’re trying to fight for like control of certain things.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah.

 

Coco Khan Okay.

 

JimmytheGiant So you’re winning. All right. Actually, you’re winning.

 

Nish Kumar Yeah.

 

JimmytheGiant And me and you are, like, sort of working together.

 

Coco Khan To take him down.

 

JimmytheGiant Yes. Sort of.

 

Coco Khan Okay.

 

JimmytheGiant But at some point, you start winning, and. And me and you and I working together at the end of the game. I don’t want either of you to fucking win. I want to win.

 

Coco Khan Yeah.

 

JimmytheGiant But we have to work together in certain moments in order for the game for me to have a chance of winning. I would say sometimes when you have people that you don’t necessarily agree 100% and I don’t know. I’m not saying this is what I think for sure, but I just have a feeling it makes more strategical sense.

 

Coco Khan I mean, the right do it all the time.

 

JimmytheGiant So, I mean, that’s why they won. And that’s why now that they’re in power, they’re having friction and stuff because that’s what will happen. So when you do the relationship of convenience, you might win, but at some point you will start fighting each other.

 

Nish Kumar If we’re trying to arrest this like slide in like faith and democracy amongst young people, you got to be practical, be assertive, and also be hopeful.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah, yeah, 100%. I said and I think I Yeah.

 

Coco Khan Assertive hopeful.

 

JimmytheGiant Yeah. Bow I like it.

 

Nish Kumar JimmytheGiant. Thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save the UK. Listeners do check out his channel on YouTube. What’s your latest video on?

 

JimmytheGiant If the sponsors approve it tonight, then it will be Elon Musk’s war against Britain, which is my the longest video I’ve ever fucking made. I rewrote it God damn time. Literally, when I started the video, it was when they it was saying about the 100 million donation. So that was where it started. And a lot has happened since that three weeks ago. So that should be out tonight. Yeah. JimmytheGiant on YouTube.

 

Coco Khan And that’s it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. And as always, we want to hear your thoughts. What do you make of the government’s newest plans for growth? Email us at PSUK@ReducedListening.co.uk.

 

Nish Kumar Don’t forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. While you’re there, don’t forget to check out JimmytheGiant.

 

Coco Khan Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

 

Nish Kumar Thanks to senior producer James Tindale and assistant producer John Rogers.

 

Coco Khan Our theme music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

 

Nish Kumar Thanks to our engineer Jake Bersani.

 

Coco Khan The executive producers Anushka Sharma, Louise Cotton and Madeleine Herringer, with additional support from Ari Schwartz and Katie Long.

 

Nish Kumar And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.