YouTuber JimmyTheGiant: ‘Forget right or left, it’s people who own things and people who don’t’

I was an internet kid who got absorbed into the alt-right pipeline. They plant seeds in certain communities that became ramps to far-right politics. I would never have considered myself far right, but I had some of those opinions. It’s interesting now looking back with a lot more knowledge, seeing how it all worked on me. I think that’s what helps me make content. I’m able to see how people might perceive things from a different perspective, then how to tailor a message that can get through. 

I was moving on the right when I was 22-23. I was your standard Occupy Wall Street, anti-Iraq War, but without any real understanding. I had a job in an outdoor activity place. One of the guys was super right-wing, and he was challenging a lot of the basic assumptions I had around feminism, the word ‘woke’ – although back then it was ‘social justice warriors’ – this idea that progressives had become annoying, basically. I’d never met someone who described themselves as pro-capitalist. To be honest, it wasn’t actually much on immigration. He was putting me on to people like Jordan Peterson. 

The turning point 

Spaces like the manosphere started to grow after Trump lost to Biden. Back then it was advice for young guys: go to the gym, dating advice, be yourself, don’t try to be something you’re not.  

It wasn’t an obviously right-wing conservative thing back then. It obviously has some tendencies, objectification, seeing women as a numbers game. Then Andrew Tate came along. This world that I was slightly adjacent to had gone mainstream, but it had taken on a different arc. At first his advice was go to the gym, be strong to protect women, the world’s not going to protect you, you need to look after yourself. When he would say more extreme stuff, I always wrote it off as, oh he’s probably just joking to get attention. But over time he became more extreme.  I didn’t like that vibe, this weird ideology, all grievance.

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Then it was seeing the streamer Destiny go on the Fresh & Fit platform to debate. He would be highly factual, straight-faced, which was the allure of the original alt-right pipeline, people like Ben Shapiro. And he really ripped it apart. 

Destiny was able to describe certain left-wing ideas in a way I was finding palatable. I didn’t know any real left-wing voices, and the ones I did know were caricatures, or at least made out to be caricatures by the right. 

From there I got disillusioned. Around about this point, I met my [future] wife. She’s from Ukraine. It was a combination of being very close to a woman, talking about female perspectives on things and seeing how the world treats women differently, then Ukraine specifically. The right become anti-Ukraine for no apparent reason. If there’s anything the left cares about, you have to not care about it, there was no logic.  

It was like pulling out Jenga pieces. They’re wrong on Ukraine, they’re wrong on women, at some point all the foundations broke. I had much more of an open mind, and from there I progressively got into leftist politics. 

I get a lot of comments and messages [on my videos] saying, you helped me out of the right. Sometimes it will be women – I showed your videos to my partner or brother, and slowly their mind changed, or I can see their mind changing.

Read more:

• The manosphere isn’t just an online issue. It’s fuelling domestic abuse
• I went looking for incels – among all the hate and bile, I found some signs of hope
• Andrew Tate is the worst possible example of being a man

The real political divide 

The political compass makes sense, attitudes on the economy, individualism versus collectivism, authoritarianism against libertarianism, they’re useful when used specifically, but people don’t.  

The problem is – and this is the problem with all of these terms – they get baggage attached to them. Once an idea is coined as being woke or being this or that, then it becomes very easy, from an identity perspective, to place yourself on the opposite end of that. There are left-wing ideas, like Gary Stevenson often puts across, that right-wingers agree with, but the moment you tell them they’re left-wing ideas, they stop agreeing with it. 

Fundamentally, I see the political structure split between people who own things and people who don’t own things. The people who benefit from the system are obviously giant capitalists and very wealthy people, but they’re able to have tag alongs, which is middle-class homeowners and boomers. There is a tied interest between those two groups. If there’s no tax on property and wealth that’s good for both giant capitalists – obviously a tiny fraction of people in the UK – and middle-class homeowners.

Then they find ways of recruiting extra people who might vote against their own interests. That’s where you get stuff around identity politics. You’ll have people that on nine out of 10 things agree with left-wing parties, but on this one issue of immigration they disagree and therefore they’ll vote for the right-wing party. 

People want to feel superior to someone else. If you’re at the bottom of the social hierarchy – you live in a rough area, you identify as a poor person – you can feel better if someone else is suffering more. It’s a clever way of making people who have nothing feel like they have something because they’re connected to something greater than themselves, which could be being British or being white, or whatever. 

New old politics 

None of this is new, it goes to show how powerful that story is, viewing the world as this dog-eat-dog battle, every man for themselves. You can repackage and resell the same shit, and they’ve done it forever. People still fall for it.  

When things are good, politics is less extreme. I assume things will one day be good again. 

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