Nick is definitely burnt out and doesn't care about AF like he used to. His mistake (although to be fair he was young and naïve) was being about as incendiary as possible and then being shocked when he was banned from mainstream social media and abandoned by what political allies he did have. The Jan 6th thing was a hiccup but not a killing blow and something he could have navigated if he'd been more wise. The no-fly list thing was due to him losing his temper and hollering at a stewardess, has nothing to do with his politics. If he could have refrained from telling leftists to kill themselves and comparing himself to Hitler on Twitter he probably would not have been banned. So burnout is understandable but he's put himself in that position.
A grift is a swindle. Nick pretends AF is still a political movement while collecting donos so I'd consider that a grift. Jaden is honest about what he's doing: he's alogging Nick and streaming vidya. Maybe it's lame but I wouldn't call it a grift.
Nick wouldn't be burnt out if he got on meds, ate something approximating a balanced diet, slept 6 - 8 hrs during normal nighttime hours, exercised, let his employees/simps do the political grassroots pavement pounding they want to do, and streamed a little less. But his laziness and hubris has put him firmly in the rut and he's not leaving.
Oh I agree, Nick has been stupid. But when he first started in 2016, cancel culture wasn’t like it is now. Cancel culture didn’t really start to be like it is now until around 2017, first with ad-pocalypse on YouTube, then Charlottesville, both those things really got the ball rolling and people started getting banned off various platforms much more easily and frequently than before. Then, in 2020, George Floyd happened, which made it even worse.
Yes, Nick said that shit about the flight attendants on stream during his show, although I THINK right after he said that, he said he was joking right after that, but either way, being on the no-fly list makes things a lot more difficult, even if it is due to his own stupidity (and that was, indeed, an extremely stupid thing to do).
Then, having half a mil frozen for 6 months, banned on Twitter after the SPLC writes about you so your reach gets really crippled, etc. I’m just saying, to be dealing with that all at once, I can see how, after a while, you feel like it’s an unwinnable battle and get burnt out.
I agree that he shouldn’t claim AF to be a movement anymore, he should just represent himself as a political/cultural commentator and stream based on that. That would be a more accurate representation of who/what he is.
Re: Jaden, you’re right, I guess GRIFT is the wrong word. But I’ve lost respect for his hustle. A lot of what he says is in bad faith and some of it is just shit he doesn’t and couldn’t know to be true. Like him saying Baked Alaska is a fed, he claims he is certain, but he has no idea what he’s talking about. He bases this off the legalese language in court docs that’s written in many plea deals and the light sentence (0-6 months) BakedAlaska is facing, even tho J6 defendants convicted of similar charges have gotten anywhere from 0-3 months so far, so his potential sentence seems right in line with the others. So, for Jaden to put that out there is kinda reckless, IMO. He’ll lash out and get really mad if his chatters ever challenge him on it, tho lol. He also constantly talks about how braindead groypers are, etc. which is not untrue, but if your stream is about deprogramming, you probably shouldn’t be insulting the people you claim you’re trying to reach lol. I get the impression he just wants to preach to the choir, which is odd, if you say you’re trying to wake people up to the truth about AF, you’d think you wouldn’t only want an audience who already knows what’s up and agrees with you. Ya know? I’m just saying. It seems like it’s more about ego/validation from his small group of regulars than it is about deprogramming, at this point. And it’s about money, of course, but that was always a given.
