This is insane.
It's apparently a pretty popular Youtube enterprise, ostensibly aimed at "dialogue" where by a person sits at a desk opposite an empty chair and has 4 or 5 propositions they want to argue for, surrounded by 20 people in chairs with a red flag in their hands. A proposition is declared, and there is a countdown. The first one who makes it to the other chair at the table gets to respond to the proposition and they debate. Those who didn't make it can raise their red flags at any time to vote that person out. At some point in the back and forth, we see enough red flags up, the person debating the guest is voted out and a new contdown starts. Each proposition has 15 minutes of debate total.
It is to debate what speed chess is to chess, if speed chess also allowed player to tag team. It's an exceedingly stupid format that is intended to generate as much heat as possible so that you can like and subscribe, blah blah blah. Just another platform that actually reinforces extreme positions and packages it as entertainment under the guise of "fostering dialogue" (which is, utter bullsh*t).
I've seen a couple of these for the heat and layers of absurdity each installment practically guarantees.
I got curious when Mehdi Hasan was invited as a guest ... the journalist who was fired from MSNBC, if memory serves, for caring too much about dead Palestinian babies, who then formed his own media company, Zeteo, and who once wrote a book titled "Win Every Debate".
So he's supposedly surrounded by "20 far right conservatives" and it quickly comes out what those people really are. If I remember the first quesytion came from a white dude who asked him what his ethnicity was, and it goes downhill *very* quickly from there.
There's a lot of performative stuff going on obviously, as demanded by the format, but some of these people are .... hollllly sh*******tttt! They're all out in the open now. They're convinced that they are winning, and I fear that they may be correct.(Some of those characters turn out to be social media figures known to be operatives in the Nick Fuentes circles, so there's that too). I'm posting it not for the usual "Hasan crushes white nationalists" nonsense. I am mostly looking at this as a good reminder that next time you're greeting some kid down the street, and having a nice chat with them, who you might actually be talking to. The first rule of living in a fascist society is to keep your guards up when talking to strangers or people you just know superficially. We haven't crossed the threshold of politically motivated violence between ordinary citizens being a thing yet, but we have more than three more years to go with this guy and these people are ascendant.