What is a Jreg?

As someone who spends way too much time in the online watching the tides of the Culture War go by, there’s one fundamental truth about the Internet in the West: any online community that allows space for fascists will eventually find themselves overrun by them. If a community does not, at the onset, make it clear that it rejects bigotry in all forms, fascists will take it over. This has happened with 4chan, 8chan, incel forums (the word incel was invented by a woman, if you can believe it), various subreddits. With a couple of exceptions, the sway of the Internet leans right by default.

Because of this, left-leaning communities, at least the ones I waste my time in, have more or less come up with a few standardized ways of ensuring their own survival. These principles are more or less:

Boundaries and expectations are set beforehand. Almost all leftist spaces online have a robust and extensive set of rules that are enforced by a mod team without prejudice. We have rules about doxxing, harassment, content warnings. We have rules about how to talk about abuse and mental health. We have rules about if you’re allowed to talk about elections or not, if tankies are allowed to fight anarchists, if you’re allowed to quote the CIA or not, if “stupid” is an ableist slur or not. Our right-wing contemporaries don’t really have rules. The moderation team is just there to hide the worst members of the community from site admins so whatever forum or server doesn’t get taken off the Internet. Ambiguity and irony in political views are not tolerated. In most leftist spaces, everyone is expected to be upfront about what they believe at all times. We don’t have euphemisms about us and (((them))), we say proletariat and bourgeoisie. If you’re being vague about where you stand on abortion or trans rights or whatever else, you’ll usually almost immediately be asked to clarify. And if you don’t, that’s almost always as sign that you’re a fascist who ought to be removed from the community. Emotional honesty is valued. Left-wing spaces are typically home to a lot of people who have been through a lot of crap. People of color and women who have experienced violence, LGBT people who haven’t been accepted for who they are by the people close to them, people suffering from financial stress, people suffering from depression or other mental illnesses who are unable to get the treatment they need, disabled people, and more. Left-wing spaces are designed to be as accommodating as possible, so people can get the help they need and fight for a better future. Right-wing spaces see all of this as weakness. Opening up about your depression on /pol/ or whatever will probably just get you called a slur.

These values are more or less a natural reaction to marginalized people being targeted and harassed online time and time again. It sucks forming what you thought was a safe space before one day waking up and realizing you’ve been rubbing shoulders with strangers who want you dead.

Jreg Guevara (pronounced jreginald) is an YouTube satire artist and musician that became know for political content after his song “Political Compass Rap” took off. He’s best known for pioneering the… “ideology” (?) of anti-centrism: the idea that all political extremists from every end of the political spectrum have more in common with each other than they do with the status quo, and his “Centricide” series: a series of short films that depict a pantheon of centrist, moderate, and extremist ideologies fighting for world domination.

If you tag yourself as anything other than the left two I will banish you from existence (Used under Fair Use)

Jreg takes all of these precious, hard-earned techniques the online left has built from years of painful trial and error and just, like, douses them in gasoline and lights a match.

It’s for that reason his content tends not to go very far in leftist spaces.

I have seen this video so don’t send it to me. Gutian seems nice and all, but I think she’s wrong on basically every level. Otherwise I wouldn’t’ve wrote this!

Boundaries? Expectations? There aren’t many things you can expect from Jreg. He basically lies all the time. He’ll post a “video essay” on how neoliberalism commodifies parasocial relationships, just for you to click on the video and realize it’s an ad for Raid: Shadow Legends. He’ll post a 10-minute, informative, well thought-out explanation about how we live in an era of post-truth only to reveal at the end that he made up all his sources.

Emotional honesty? He’ll post a video called “Managing Your Anxiety During Times of Hysteria” in the middle of the worst global pandemic in a century, only to proceed to make up facts about the coronavirus to make sure you don’t sleep at night, and then maybe imply that he also, just, like, has the coronavirus. He’ll make a half-hour video documenting his life-long struggle with depression only to admit that he made the whole thing up as a thought experiment.

“Stew in that anxiety and wonder why we let this happen.” (Used under Fair Use)

Clarity of political intent? Jreg will post a video entitled “i am a progressive” in which he talks passionately about how he came to accept himself as non-binary and how he wrote his anarchist character as an enby with neopronouns to validate them in his art, and how his Jewish heritage informed his opposition to fascism. Then, in the same hour, he’ll post another video entitled “I am an identitarian” in which he speaks openly about how he just prefers his race over all others and how the white race needs to be defended and how he’s sick of hiding his political views and how it’s not racist to see “differences” in races and then he’ll include a clip of him doing slam poetry at an anti-abortion rally five years ago.

And then you’ll realize he’s also posted “I am a libertarian”, “I am a Marxist-Leninist”, “I am a centrist (surprise!)”, and “I am unironically an anti-centrist” as well, each one speaking with the same level of sincerity as the two you just watched.

By the way, the libertarian video is the only one that’s just over 10 minutes long. For YouTube ad revenue.

What does it all mean? Should we average all these positions out on a political compass? Are the lengths of the videos Bible verses???

No, actually. It means nothing.

As far as the Jreg (pronounced jeorge) YouTube channel is concerned, the real-life human beings behind the scenes do not exist. This is not like Philosophy Tube, where Oliver Thorn will appear to you in a colorful costume and peal away the separation between author and reader to speak personally about mental health, trauma, or the realities of being an artist online. With Jreg, it’ll feel like that from time to time. Sometimes it’ll feel exactly like that. But Jreg is always sure to scald you with 50 layers irony before you start getting too attached.

The video “I’m A Spook” establishes that, in the… lore (??) that Jreg and YouTubers more generally are abstractions created by higher-dimensional beings to turn parasocial relationships into cash. This point is reiterated in “Stop Asking If I’m Okay”, in which he asks his audience to put the energy they put into treating him like a real person into checking in on their real life friends instead.

The latter is also sponsored by surfshark. Because, y’know. Jreg.

(Used under Fair Use)

All of this, I think, would make any leftist more than a little uncomfortable. After all, pretending to be a Nazi as an “edgy joke” and then shitposting online while hiding your true beliefs in layers of irony is literally just what Nazis do. Jreg could tomorrow decide that he wants to start pedaling alt-right beliefs to his audience and then that would be over 200,000 people and growing who are exposed to a deluge of fascist propaganda. The only check the left has to that sort of thing is BreadTube and… well… I mean it’s BreadTube. They’re useless, we’d be screwed.

But for now though, the creator has successfully kept his audience guessing about his political beliefs, and I don’t think we’re in danger of a fascist Jreg takeover happening. For one thing, Jreg’s community is kind of unwelcoming to fascists. The main reason why is actually because Jreg is hot. And so, when he plays different political ideologies, people tend to want to draw gay porn of those political ideologies. And the all gay porn drives the Nazis away.

Even more general communities around political compass memes, which have themselves been growing more and more fascist lately (story for another time), don’t really engage with Jreg because “the community is unhinged” .

I’m not kidding. I saw this happen in real time on the subreddit. It’s very funny. And based.

“It’s also disheartening working really hard on a script I think is funny and then having everybody just comment on the size of my bulge (which to be fair, is sizable)”

I’d argue that being made uncomfortable by something because it breaks social conventions you’re used to isn’t a valid reason not to engage with it analytically. To take someone with a platform as large as Jreg’s and dismiss his content because he’s not “useful” to the “movement” would be a mistake. A lot of people see his stuff. A lot of people didn’t really know what National Bolshevism, anarcho-communism, homonationalism, or posadism even were until Jreg introduced those ideas to his audience with his work.

Jreg’s content begs the question around what Jreg the person thought while making this or that video, but this view is entirely inaccessible to the audience. We only ever know what Jreg the character thinks at any given time, and projecting your own sense of judgement onto that can often be a dangerous exercise in self-gratification. Anything that you think a single video saying could just as well be asking why you think that video is saying what you think it’s saying.

I want to analyze Jreg’s entire body of work, or at least as much as I’ve been able to watch, as a singular piece of post-postmodern art and without needing to analyze Jreg as a person. I want to see what political and social implications we can draw by analyzing art which looks you in the eye, dares you to try, and does everything it can to make sure nothing has any meaning whatsoever.

Not only is this the ultimate challenge for someone like me, who’s building his whole brand on analyzing media too hard, I’m also just a huge Jreg fan. He’s super talented and his content is a lot of fun.

This is as fun for me as it’s supposed to be interesting and informational for you.

(Used under Fair Use)

For the sake of clarity (and because it’ll be useful when I reveal my thesis later) I’ll split Jreg’s work up into three distinct “eras”:

Pre-political — everything on Jreg’s channel from its first video to before “Political Compass Rap”. Anti-Centrism as an idea actually appears earlier, but the clear shift in content doesn’t come until the political compass rap

— everything on Jreg’s channel from its first video to before “Political Compass Rap”. Anti-Centrism as an idea actually appears earlier, but the clear shift in content doesn’t come until the political compass rap Pre-centricide — everything on Jreg’s channel from “Political Compass Rap” to just before “The League of Anti-Anti Centrists || Centricide 1”

— everything on Jreg’s channel from “Political Compass Rap” to just before “The League of Anti-Anti Centrists || Centricide 1” Post-centricide — everything from “The League of Anti-Anti Centrists || Centricide 1” up until the last video at time of writing, which was “Stop Asking If I’m Okay”

We’ll start Post-centricide, because it’s where the channel gets its notoriety, and work from there.

Begin the Centricide

(spoilers, duh?)

(Used under Fair Use)

The Centricide series tells the story of The Radical Centrist and his brother, The Anti-Centrist. The Anti-Centrist is composed of the spirits of various extremists, namely: Ayn Rand, Julius Evola, Kim Il-Sung, and Che Guevara, and has possessed an innocent YouTuber named Jreg. Through this newfound platform, The Anti-Centrist disseminates radical extremist propaganda to his audience. Less people now believe in the status quo and, as such, the powers of the centrist ideologies have been waning.

The Radical Centrist gathers his allies: The Horseshoe Centrist (“who cares about politics when both sides are the same?”), The Political Nihilist (“who cares about politics when it’s all rigged and nothing matters?”), Ape-Political (“who cares about politics?”), The Anti-Radical (“society can be changed somewhat, but all ideas outside the mainstream are evil”), and Moderate Lee (“always compromise between any and all extremes”). The centrists team up to kill the Anti-Centrist before they fade away completely.

On the other side of the war, we have The Communist, The “White Identitarian”, The Anarcho-Capitalist, and The Anarcho-Communist.

“I am sick of boomers calling leftists liberals. We are very different! It’s-it’s a blatant misunderstanding of political theory and it means when I say ‘liberals get the bullet’, it means I get the bullet, but that’s not what I mean at all!” ~The Communist

Later, we meet some more niche ideologies like The NazBol (“communism for white people only”), The Transhumanist (“free humanity from the human condition with advanced technology”), The Anarcho-Primitivist (“the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”), The Homonationalist (Nick Fuentes), The Anarcho-Monarchist (“everyone thinks they’ll be the king in anarcho monarchism but that’s not how that works”) and The Posadist (“the contradictions of capitalism will eventually lead to nuclear war and humanity will be forced to implement global communism to survive”).

This is where I say these aren’t terribly good stand-ins for political ideologies. For example, The Anarcho-Communist is kind of the SJW of the group. Qi is an individualist who opposes all hierarchy and the state because they infringe on individual rights. Qi doesn’t read theory or understand politics all that well beyond calling everything racist and complaining about pronouns.

I’m an anarchist and a pretty big SJW, but I’m not an individualist. I subscribe to the orthodox Marxist view that class conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie is the primary contradiction of capitalism. I’m just skeptical that a state can lead to true equality. Societies at large are changed by groups and systems, not individuals. So I find myself agreeing with The Communist as a character more than you might think.

(I got this meme off Twitter)

I think what makes all these characters compelling is that they’re not really supposed to be perfect stand-ins for political ideologies. They’re more like archetypes of the kinds of people you’ll meet if you spend too much time online.

The “White Identitarian” is probably a further to the right economically than most Nazis in real life. However his character embodies the /pol/-dwelling gamer trolls who show up in your DMs to tell you to kill yourself to a tee. Yes, most communists in real life have critical support at best for the USSR, China, and the DPRK. Real life communists want to learn from the mistakes these regimes made to build a better world for all people while recognizing intersectionality and identity as key in doing that. But man if you’ve spent enough time on Twitter you’ve definitely seen tankies larp about daddy Stalin and how everything bad about North Korea is CIA propaganda and it’s funny to see that represented on-screen.

As a reminder, North Korea scrubbed all mentions of Marx, Lenin, or Communism from its government buildings and its constitution in 2009.

I’ve talked to these kinds of people too (Used under Fair Use)

Centricide is a better planned story that people give it credit for. When I rewatched them all in a row for this essay I noticed quite a bit more foreshadowing than I did for the first time.

The NazBol, for example, has a bit of an arc. As a “mix” of left and right-wing characteristics he starts out trying to ally himself with the Centrists. In Centricide 3.5, he shows up at The Council of Wacky Ideologies with the other minor ideologies, and claims to be fully-fledged, legitimate ideology that will appear whether the extremists like it or not. Somewhere along the way, we’re told that The Horseshoe Centrist is the most powerful member of the centrist team. Finally, in Centricide 5, The “White Identitarian” and The Communist are unable to overpower the Horseshoe Centrist, so they fuse together and form The NazBol.

(Used under Fair Use)

As neoliberal capitalism continues to collapse under the weight of this pandemic and global warming, it’ll be far, far easier to convince people on the economics than it will be to convince them that racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities are just as deserving to be saved from disaster as “their people” are.

People laugh when Tucker Carlson, a white nationalist, says that Americans are divided by class and the media distracts us from recognizing the economic inequality in America. We scratch our heads when he and Ilhan Omar agree with each other on Twitter. But this is just how fascism survives into the future. National Bolchevism, Strasserism, National Anarchism, even Trump saying he might expand healthcare. All these forms of “leftism” are some of the most rhetorically effective ideologies in times of crisis. And if the right realizes this before the left can organize, we are screwed.

This is the shit that keeps me up at night, and it’s really well done in Centricide.

(Used under Fair Use)

And I could go on. I could talk about how funny the series is over all? In Centricide 3, both sides are trying to convert political moderates (The Conservative, The Socialist, The Progressive, and The Libertarian) to their sides. The Conservative tells The “White Identitarian” that he opposes all “left-wing ideologies” and The “White Identitarian” just goes

“Left-wing. Left-wing! You think I’m a left-wing populist? Do I look like fucking Bernie Sanders!?”

Funniest shit I’ve ever seen.

Second best joke of the series — Nazi: “Don’t you want to kill black people?” Conservative: “Not enough to want to do anything about it!” (Used under Fair Use)

I can talk about how all the music slaps. Especially recently. I mean, Leftist Unity? Ancapistan? Bangers.

But I’m ostensibly supposed to be making a point here so we’ll turn to Centricide 4. The centrist team has captured The Libertarian. They want to turn him into a Neoliberal to gain enough strength to defeat The Anti-Centrist.

“Centrism is by definition support for the status quo, but the status quo is not always centrism. But the status quo… the status quo is often extreme. […] The thing is, Libertarian. Centrism doesn’t exist. […] It doesn’t exist! It’s a trick of the light! All centrism is is different ways of supporting the status quo. And do you know what the status quo is? […] It’s neoliberalism.” ~Radical Centrist

Back at the extremist headquarters, the extremists are reeling from the recent lost of The Anarcho-Communist, who has transformed into The Post-Left Anarchist and left the extremists. The Libertarian questions The “White Identitarian” on if Jreg can even be trusted. It sort of a long bit of conversation to transcribe but it’ll be useful to have handy.

Ancap: “It just… it seems like [Jreg]’s after blind political chaos and not a tangible goal!”

Nazi: “Ancap, remember when we used to laugh at those SJW compilations together? And I laughed because they were degenerates who deserved death and you laughed because you thought they were going to infringe on your rights?”Ancap: “Well, yes.”

Nazi: “I… want to infringe on your rights.”

Ancap: “Well I’m not like that at all.”

Nazi: “Yes. Yes actually you are.”

Ancap: “I am good. I respect people’s rights. You don’t.”

Nazi: “Mhm. How do you make your money, Ancap?”

Ancap: “I pay people, that’s how.”

Nazi: “And how much do you pay them, Ancap?”

Ancap: “A couple dollars a day.”

Nazi: “And how much money do they make for you, Ancap?”

Ancap: “Hundreds of dollars a day, but they agreed to do it! That’s what capitalism is!”

(Used under Fair Use)

Nazi: “And are their living conditions humane, Ancap?”

Ancap: “Well, no. But I’m improving their living conditions by offering —”

Nazi: “That’s what I can’t stand about you ancap. You claim to have the moral high ground because you won’t kill and individual, but on a broad scale, you sell out our culture.”

Ancap: “I… I wouldn’t!”

Nazi: “You’re okay with anything if it’s “consensual”, Ancap. Culture is just another commodity to you. I don’t want my people starving on the street, Ancap. You do. You endorse that. But you know, that’s what I kind of like about you, Ancap. You’re the biggest monster of us all. You want to do to poor people, worse than what I want to do to minorities. Your moral code is a blatant contradiction and maybe if you ignored it and started being a selfish person like you know you are you would actually be of service to this team.”

This conversation is later followed with a similar conversation between The Anarcho-Capitalist and The Communist.

Ancap: “Commie, I’m not a bad person, am I?”

Commie: “You, kulak?” [laughs]

Ancap: “You killed millions! Why are you laughing at me? […]”

Commie: “You are the worst person I could possibly imagine! You create system where billions toil away and starve for nothing just so that you can get a couple extra hundred dollars. Kulak! The Nazi is nothing compared to your villainy! […] But seriously, no one would miss you if you were gone.”

(Used under Fair Use)

So under normal circumstances I would point to this and go “Ahah! It’s doing an anti-capitalism!” But it’s not necessarily so easy. After all, Jreg has been on record of being everywhere on the edges of every political spectrum at the same time. The fact that a part of his art parrots some critiques of capitalism doesn’t mean much.

But as a writer, I think about the narrative implications of having The “White Identitarian” give the anti-capitalist critique over The Communist. First of all, it means the text argues that capitalism on its own, as a moral framework, without government intervention, is literally worse than Hitler. The system of global wage exploitation that sees the global proletariat living on starvation wages or outright slavery and bombed in imperialist for-profit war for the stock portfolios of a few businessmen on Wallstreet is literally worse than any atrocity committed by Nazi Germany, or Pol Pot, or Stalin, or Mao.

Like, I’m a communist. And I don’t think I’d just throw that take out there like that.

Second, consider the following: if The Communist had given this exact same critique, it probably would not have been taken seriously by the audience. After all, a communist saying commie things about capitalism can just be chalked up to ideology. Getting the only other pro-capitalist character in the series to make these criticisms was probably the only way the ideas would actually sit with the audience.

Because this is Jreg (pronounced jradrian) we’re talking about here, we can’t just criticize things clearly and openly. The Anarcho-Capitalist of course gets his redemption arc in Centricide 4.5. He and The Libertarian quit the Centricide war and set up a town called Ancapistan filled with other libertarian right ideologies like The Minarchist (“capitalism but the government has nothing but the police and military”) and The Hoppean (“anarcho-capitalism for white people only”).

The Anarcho-Capitalist is back on his two feet. He’s found where he belongs and he gets the rhetorical upper hand over the people who were just making fun of him. Storytelling-wise, The Anarcho-Capitalist is redeemed.

(Used under Fair Use)

But here’s the thing, the narrative doesn’t ever, like, refute the moral criticism of capitalism it made earlier. It doesn’t turn around and justify wage slavery. The Anarcho-Capitalist as a character is no longer seen as weak, sure. But he doesn’t overcome that by proving his ideology is moral or compassionate. He does that by proving he’s just as good at being as ruthless as the others. I mean, look at how the episode ends:

You will be so happy here

The roads are broke but no one cares

We pay $12 each breath of air

And everyone’s a billionaire!

(Except for the cripplingly poor!)

When we combine this with the idea presented earlier, that neoliberalism is just as extreme as any other ideology, we can begin to chart a pattern of using left-leaning language to criticize capitalism and neoliberalism more specifically.

Moving away from Centricide the series, but still in the post-centricide “era”, we can look at videos like “china”. “china” is a video about the Hong Kong protests that has Jreg show his unconditional support for… the CCP. It’s got a few great gems in it, like:

Think about the beating arm of those poor Chinese police, whack after whack goes by and they just have to keep beating. Don’t you think their arms get tired too?

and

And of course, I am critical of colonialist thinking! European colonialist thinking. When China does colonialism, it’s good, actually.

and

Oh those silly Chinese people brainwashed by their media, haha! Well back to CNN!

But the crux of the video is this:

I am so desperate for any force to oppose capitalism, that I will devour any and all propaganda of anyone or anything even claiming to be communist! Now some may say that those like me on the economic left are only supporting China because we want some kind of force to oppose the ubiquitous capitalism present in the Western World. That we’re so desperate to fight against capitalism, that we’ll actually support a more ruthless kind of capitalism to destroy it.

(Used under Fair Use)

But am I wrong? Modern day neoliberalism is genuinely so bad that I want an authoritarian, neo-colonial regime to come and take over my country, replacing it with an even more efficient kind of ruthless state capitalism. Because what could be worse than this? Btw Xi, you can deposit those social credit points right into the bank account.

It would be a mistake to take this character Jreg plays as Jreg stating his opinion. He’s obviously playing like a communist character of some kind for laughs. And in typical Jreg fashion, after making fun of communists he immediately makes fun of Western liberals and conservatives.

Just keep that description of neoliberalism in mind.

Neoliberalism shows up elsewhere post-centricide. There’s a running joke on the channel that neoliberalism is literally Hell. It started with “The Worst Possible Political System || Hell || Negative Politics” where Jreg goes through a thought experiment of trying to construct the worst possible political system called “Hell”, only to conclude that modern day neoliberalism was already that. The trend continues in “Hell Isn’t Perfect But It’s The Best System We Have” where Jreg wakes up in Hell only to realize that the people there have grown jaded to how awful the system is. And it was lately revisited in “Vote Blue No Matter Who” which compares Joe Biden to Satan.

“So we’re voting for Satan?” “Yeah, I mean he’s not my first choice, but — “ (Used under Fair Use)

There’s also one of his more recent songs, “Office Life”, which just… describes alienation under neoliberalism. Like, that’s just the whole song. “I Want To Die In A War” is the same, except the song asserts dying a horrible death in a pointless nationalist war is preferable to wage slavery under neoliberalism. It’s also very catchy.

When I lay this all out like this, it feels a bit disingenuous. Jreg criticizes the left as much as he criticizes neoliberal capitalism. For example, he made ““Antifa Are The Real Fascists”” which describes a world where anarcho-communists take over the world, deport every white person, kill everyone they’ve democratically decided is a fascist, and put anyone who doesn’t respect “whatever pronouns you happen to identify as in this millisecond” into horizontally organized, community-run, voluntarist concentration camps.

It did bring us the line: “You can’t kill me! I’m the democratically elected CEO of Antifa!” Which is such a mood.

RRRRREEEEEEEE (Used under Fair Use)

But yeah I mean it’s an obvious critique of anarchism, among others critiques of the left that exist on the channel.

A lot of his videos are also deliberately vague? So, for example, in “Give Me All Money” Jreg plays a man running for world president on the platform of stealing the world’s money for himself. As a communist, I can say this is clearly a critique of capitalist wealth hoarding. But libertarians will just say this is what governments want and conservatives will say this is communism. It’s made specifically for the viewer to read whatever political ideology they dislike into it.

But what I will argue here is this: just because every ideology gets criticized doesn’t mean that the criticisms are always mutually exclusive. Generally speaking, when Jreg criticizes capitalism, his art criticizes capitalism as a system of exploitation. And when his art criticizes fascism he, well, it’s self-explanatory. They’re Nazis. They kill minorities.

But when his art criticizes the left, his art usually doesn’t criticize socialism as a system. He’s perhaps a bit more skeptical of communism than he is socialism. Regardless, his art usually criticizes the behavior of leftists as activists. So his art will criticize anarchists and communists for being too unreasonable and narrow-minded to actually bring about change, but socialism as an idea doesn’t actually get touched in the same way that neoliberalism does.

In addition, these critiques of neoliberalism almost always come from the left. There are right-wing critiques of neoliberalism Jreg could make. Nazis tend to see corporations as promoting so-called “degeneracy” for profit. But this is almost never the angle Jreg takes. The problems with neoliberalism almost always have to do either with exploitation or alienation, which are left-wing concepts.

Stepping back a little: Socialism or Barbarism

In the pre-centricide “era” we get more of the kinds of on-off political satire that much of Centricide is based on. In “A Neo-Nazi With They/Them Pronouns” , an anarcho-communist questions why an apparent non-binary person is promoting fascism, only to realize that the fascist was actually 5 different beings occupying the same body and goes by they/them for grammatical correctness.

The critiques of neoliberal capitalism continue. “FAST FASHION IS DESTROYING THE PLANET” where Jreg criticizes the exploitation of third world workers in the fashion industry right before selling you a t-shirt that reads “fast fashion is destroying the planet” that was definitely made from that exact same exploitation.

You… you can still by the t-shit. Like, it’s there.

“Finally! Now I can WEAR my neoliberal Hell!” (Used under Fair Use)

There’s also the time Jreg shilled out to Big DVD case. Honestly I wonder how his reputation survived.

But there’s another really consistent systematic critique of modern life running through Jreg’s art. The channel critiques postmodernism with almost the same consistency and veracity as it critiques neoliberalism. And it does so this time not from the left, but from the cultural right.

“Postpostmodernism” is a recent video that depicts modernism as a coherent structure for viewing the world based on religion, community, and objective truth. Postmodernism kills these three because they’re stupid, and then kills itself. Modernism is left with no framework or structures with which to view the world, existing now in a cold, bloody void. Modernism becomes post-postmodernism and wonders in a confused haze what to do with itself now.

There’s a distinct sense in Jreg’s work that, in post-postmodernism, all forms of higher purpose or lenses through which to view reality have been destroyed, leaving this generation to paw through the dark alone.

Consider the video “Zoomer, Boomer, Q̸̷̛͜’̷̡̢t̡͜҉h͜͞o̴o̸̵̡͞m̷̵͢e҉̴́͜r͏̕͡”. This video is rather interesting because there are less layers of irony than normal. I mean, still irony just less. The video describes the generational struggle between Zoomers and Boomers in rather candid terms. The “Zoomer” in the video states,

“I am young, I am growing up in a world where God is only dead but rotting. Politics and labels have filled the void where my sense of community should be. The postmodernism that preceded my generation has left me in a disassembled world of noise. I try on worldviews like gloves, too afraid to commit to anything. […] So I mask my true feelings through several layers of irony.”

The Boomer continues,

“I am old. […] I cannot empathize with the younger generations because I cannot fathom the kind of world that they are growing up in.”

This video is hilarious as hilarious as it is uncomfortably true.

“Why I Love Politics” (which is definitely about things Jreg, the fictional character being portrayed in this instance, does not enjoy about politics). The second reason Jreg states for why he “loves” politics is that “politics is a supplement to meaning, not a substitute”. The text states,

In an atomized society devoid of God, it would be very easy for something like politics to come along and fill the void that has been left by the absence of religion in our collective subconscious. You know, like some kind of easily adopted philosophy that tells you what’s good and what’s bad and why. We all crave something like that as people, but we live in a world where objective truth has faded away.

(Used under Fair Use)

Later, we get this line:

I mean, if politics (and to be clear by “politics” I mean the absurd satire that politics is online) was actually an exercise in confusion, despair, and hopelessness. And instead people were clearly turning to politics as a bleak substitute for the meaning that a rotting God left us, using politics as a cheap substitute for group identity and meaning, both of which you’d have to construct yourself

And this:

No political ideology can save us more than our dead God can.

So again, I would hesitate to go and say “Ah-hah! Jreg is doing a conservatism!”. Indeed, if you’re familiar with Jordan Peterson at all, his fascination with hierarchy as the source of meaning, his fondness for Christianity as a moral framework for society, and his strong dislike for “postmodernism”, then this will sound more than a little familiar.

(ASIDE: Jreg understands postmodernism a lot better than Peterson does. Jreg criticizes postmodernism on its actual historical and philosophical tenants, while Peterson tends to think that postmodernism as anything the SJWs like. Peterson’s ideas of a “postmodern cultural Marxism” set on destroying the West is closer to a reskin of cultural Bolshevism, an actual Nazi conspiracy theory. Jreg steers entirely clear from this idea, thankfully. More here.)

But as with the critiques of neoliberalism, there is a very clear undercurrent of a specific strain of conservative thought that values hierarchy, religion, and cultural norms as things that give life meaning, and resent the cultural left for trying to dismantle these hierarchies.

The reason why I say “don’t be too hasty” is because, as with the example of neoliberalism, Jreg has criticized the cultural right as much as he’s criticized postmodernism.

As an aside, he did a video on the Zizek vs Peterson debate a while back. And if you took Zizek’s economic policy and Peterson’s cultural policy… put ’em together… nah I’m just kidding. It couldn’t be.

Unless…?