One of the shibboleths of the increasingly fascist American right is a quote commonly attributed to the decade-dead Andrew Breitbart: " Politics is downstream from culture." It's a notion that drives a lot of the relentless right-wing whining about "woke Hollywood." The belief, which isn't entirely irrational, is that the more people see same-sex couples, drag queens, Black hobbits, and female superheroes onscreen, the more tolerant they'll become of the idea that one can be a person while not being a straight white male. Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only. For the far right, however, the only question is "does this song trigger the liberals?" For most people, what they like in a pop song is if it has a good beat and you can dance to it. They like white nationalism and think that, by listening to this song, they're helping support the cause. In other words, people aren't listening to this embarrassingly subpar emo "music" because they like it. As Daily Beast documented, Pool has garnered more than a billion views for his videos hyping far-right conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideas. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, while claiming to be a "disaffected liberal," Pool has "pushed his commentary in an extreme hard-right direction in recent years," amplifying figures like January 6 organizer Ali Alexander, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Infowars founder Alex Jones. Unfortunately, the answer to the mystery is far more terrible than "a lot of people have bad taste." Timcast is the, uh, brainchild of Tim Pool, a YouTube personality who pretends to be a liberal to give cover to what is, in fact, a steady stream of fascistic propaganda. It's a song so bad that it provokes retroactive respect for the songcraft and musicianship of the mid-2000s cut-rate emo bands that it's ripping off. For those living in that blessed intersection of hyper-aware of the music charts but totally ignorant of the world of far-right politics, it was no doubt a mystery: A comically terrible rock song called " Only Ever Wanted" by a band called Timcast had hit #2 on the iTunes music chart.
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