Please allow me to blogpost for a moment. I need to finally come to terms with something ugly.
This will be a bit lengthy, sorry in advance.
Every few months I pop in here when the thread is in the community features again, read like half a page, become incredibly sad, then log off again.
I remember watching the Fuentes streams way back in like 2017 or so, when the High from Trump winning wore off and the cathedral moved into overdrive.
Never donated or participated in the chats, didn't have any active social media back then either. Just kind of letting the streams run when work allowed or when doing household chores.
Fuentes was genuinely funny, he was witty, he had his own
thing. There was this endearing underdog quality about him, the way they tried to deplatform him for so long, and somehow he managed to stay on Youtube for quite a while. Despite the gamer words! The superchats were mostly shit, and it was refreshing to have a "content creator" tell the retarded part of his fanbase (which makes up most of any fanbase) to fuck off instead of pandering to them.
I'll be honest, there really was something to him and his brand of humor and irony, but also the way he so casually transgressed everything leftists held sacred on a mainstream web platform, in addition to being smart and quick-witted.
I think there was also something going on inside of me, something to do with realizing I'm getting older and my generation being on the way out:
Maybe some of the other older male users can relate. There is a certain melancholic joy of seeing young men excel at what they are good at ā which was political entertainment in Fuentes' case, I would say. Maybe about the way he tried growing out his mustache, or the way he gushed about fast food, or the way he fumbled that e-girl that was into him...
It felt a bit like watching your own kid going through puberty. Don't know how else to put it. It was endearing in a way.
Truth be told, I don't think I've ever enjoyed any podcast more than I enjoyed AF back in 2017. Not only because Fuentes was funny, but also the outrageous things happening around him. The way they bullied Charlie Kirk, I think in 2018 or 2019, was one of the greatest things I ever saw live on a screen. The guy telling the audience to "google Dancing Israelis" still makes me chuckle all those years later when I remember it randomly.
Then he was deplatformed for good and he simply stopped existing in my world when he was unpersoned by Youtube. Kind of assumed him to mellow out, become a bog standard conservative, get a gf. Have him drop off the internet maybe. He's smart and attractive, a young guy, all that incel shit has to have been irony, right?
Now please keep this in mind.
Keep in mind I was only ever watching/listening to his streams, did not participate in social media, never had any idea of what was going on around him or his community.
Keep in mind I stopped hearing
literally anything about him after he was deplatformed in 2019.
Keep in mind all he was to me was an attractive and talented young political streamer that gave me some laughs and suddenly
stopped existing.
Not somebody I looked up to, but somebody who I enjoyed listening to for a while, who gave me some good laughs. Some of those I still spontaneously remember and chuckle about. "oh, you have your gay little garden and your gay little organic tomatoes... just eat a fucking Big Mac!"
Just something my mind had connected to this "it's a slow day at work, let's open youtube while you daydream" feeling. Or that "it was a rough week, let's tune in to a podcast while you cook yourself some comfort food and wind down". Maybe a bit of a low-level passive para-social relationship of the unconscious.
Not somebody whose whereabouts I ever consciously pondered, just kind of assumed he'll probably be grown up and doing fine today.
Please keep all of that in mind. That's all the background info I had.
Now think about what else all of you know about Fuentes, the people around him, the kind of things he does and says.
The general trajectory of his life, and all the ugly and nasty decisions he made.
Now imagine you did not get to watch his descend ā if there even was such a thing, and this had not always been his intrinsic nature ā but you're suddenly confronted with
everything in this thread.
And now this motherfucker has actually spent the last years cultivating a community of rapists, groomers, molesters, pedophiles and sexual degenerates around him.
This fucking piece of shit. All he had to do was log off. Where does he even find all those sex pests? What the fuck?!
This is some Ian Watkins level shit.
It's a bit like hanging out with an old school buddy, and reminiscing about the good old days of having mom drive you and your whole computer tower, CRT screen included, over to your friend's house so you could binge play cracked Counter Strike 1.6 on LAN all weekend, swap music videos via Windows file sharing, drink way too much canned coke, talk about girls trying to act as if you had any idea but your buddies can't call you out because they don't have any either, fail at microwaving frozen pizza... all that innocent, silly teenager stuff. Nothing of importance, but it's innocent and connected to this vague feeling that things were just better back then, you know?
"Yeah bro, remember we used to play
fy_pool_day while blasting
Limp Bizkit and
Lost Prophets? It's been half a lifetime, wonder what those guys are up to. Huh,
Limp Bizkit is actually still touring! And
Lost Prophets... Jesus Christ,
what the fuck?"
Another thing tainted in hindsight.
It's all truly megalolz.
