Zack Hoyt, the popular streamer best known as Asmongold, has had one of his channels temporarily banned from Twitch after garnering backlash for a racist rant about Palestinians and the conflict in Gaza.
I went through a brief Asmongold phase about a year or two ago where I enjoyed just listening to him rant and bitch (mostly) about the video game industry. He was surprisingly articulate at times and not quite how I had perceived him. I watched him take a political alignment test and he was dumbfounded that he was fairly left-wing. I thought that might be a turning point for him, but then election season came around and he went right back to being an obnoxious Trump-supporting Texan. I don’t think Asmongold even knows who he is deep down or what he stands for. I think he just spews vomit from his brain and doubles-down on all of it because he’s incapable of dropping an argument or admitting he was wrong. It’s kind of his shtick, but I’m long since done with it.
Personally I think he actually wants to be a decent person deep down, but the environment he built for himself has led to a self-reinforcing manifestation of the macro-scale problems that are facing young men in this generation. For that reason I don’t hate Asmongold because I believe he is still reachable, and has the opportunity to have a moral arc that could potentially help a lot of people if he was willing to do the work of real self-actualization.
I’m my experience, that’s most right-wingers in Texas. They’ll bitch about corporate power, the consolidation of megacorps, the little guy getting fucked over and then just be completely unable to process that the last 40 years of Republican rule are why that’s happening. They’ve decided their identity is Republican and questioning that is something they’re not willing to do, even if their ideology runs counter to it.
I really think it all boils down to the regressive thought prison that permeates religious culture, and anything that is adjacent to it. Asmongold himself has stated on many occasions that he was raised in a Roman Catholic environment even though he personally rebelled against it.
However, when everyone you are around in society still uses the same flawed logic pathways, lacks critical thinking skills, and perpetuates the hegemonic in-group dynamics that surround that religious world-view you are still personally psychologically affected by it even if you don’t subscribe to the religious component of it.
That’s the even more nefarious, pernicious, and hidden damage caused by promulgating religious culture is that it makes being willfully ignorant not only permissable, but REQUIRED in order to conform to the group identity. I can see how that influence has literally broken his brain in ways he appears to not even be consciously aware of yet.
We’ll see if this wakes him up, or drives him further into his echo-chamber in an attempt to avoid the painful process of overcoming cognitive dissonance. Only time will tell, but I will admit the deck is stacked against him when he has such a massive financial incentive resist developing a more mature, nuanced worldview.
I went through a brief Asmongold phase about a year or two ago where I enjoyed just listening to him rant and bitch (mostly) about the video game industry. He was surprisingly articulate at times and not quite how I had perceived him. I watched him take a political alignment test and he was dumbfounded that he was fairly left-wing. I thought that might be a turning point for him, but then election season came around and he went right back to being an obnoxious Trump-supporting Texan. I don’t think Asmongold even knows who he is deep down or what he stands for. I think he just spews vomit from his brain and doubles-down on all of it because he’s incapable of dropping an argument or admitting he was wrong. It’s kind of his shtick, but I’m long since done with it.
Personally I think he actually wants to be a decent person deep down, but the environment he built for himself has led to a self-reinforcing manifestation of the macro-scale problems that are facing young men in this generation. For that reason I don’t hate Asmongold because I believe he is still reachable, and has the opportunity to have a moral arc that could potentially help a lot of people if he was willing to do the work of real self-actualization.
I’m my experience, that’s most right-wingers in Texas. They’ll bitch about corporate power, the consolidation of megacorps, the little guy getting fucked over and then just be completely unable to process that the last 40 years of Republican rule are why that’s happening. They’ve decided their identity is Republican and questioning that is something they’re not willing to do, even if their ideology runs counter to it.
I really think it all boils down to the regressive thought prison that permeates religious culture, and anything that is adjacent to it. Asmongold himself has stated on many occasions that he was raised in a Roman Catholic environment even though he personally rebelled against it.
However, when everyone you are around in society still uses the same flawed logic pathways, lacks critical thinking skills, and perpetuates the hegemonic in-group dynamics that surround that religious world-view you are still personally psychologically affected by it even if you don’t subscribe to the religious component of it.
That’s the even more nefarious, pernicious, and hidden damage caused by promulgating religious culture is that it makes being willfully ignorant not only permissable, but REQUIRED in order to conform to the group identity. I can see how that influence has literally broken his brain in ways he appears to not even be consciously aware of yet.
We’ll see if this wakes him up, or drives him further into his echo-chamber in an attempt to avoid the painful process of overcoming cognitive dissonance. Only time will tell, but I will admit the deck is stacked against him when he has such a massive financial incentive resist developing a more mature, nuanced worldview.