Ezra Klein is a much bigger problem than Hasan Piker

The institutional left can’t disavow Hasan Piker for all the same reasons it can’t disavow Ezra Klein

“Everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”

~Ezra Klein, “‘Yes Means Yes’ is a terrible law, and I completely support it”

Vox, October 13, 2014

I probably shouldn’t write this one but here we go…

Despite living in Texas, I live in a major city and charge decent money for a luxury service, which means most of my clients are wealthy libs. Plus, my particular trade, personal training, preys on a neurosis that wealthier and more liberal people suffer from more than more conservative or country people, the fear that you will actually look like the spiritually unbalanced and disembodied slob you really are.

Of all the people I’ve met who work in finance or any other profession outside of construction, only two Republicans stand out and looking to my personal acquaintances in risk management or oil and gas, the number of republicans gets no larger. To be clear, I look like an M2M juggalo who should be smoking weed in a Guitar Center parking lot so I don’t think right-wingers feel particularly ashamed about coming out to me. For whatever our disagreements, most of them are safely beyond reproach from a guy who works people out for a living.

The thing is, if you have no nascent political ideas, any career that pays enough will give you a few and, if you want to have the privilege of filing complicated tax forms and complaining about it afterwards, you no longer need to be Republican. In fact, it would probably be best if you were a Democrat publicly complaining that Republicans aren’t funding your preferred projects (probably true) while privately complaining that you should be taxed less (probably also true).

Ancient Alienz

For the entire run up to the 2024 Presidential Election, clients aired their hopes and frustrations between sets, when they should have been doing sets, and sometimes during sets, the idea of a Heritage Occupied Government fueling the office and home-office worker alike as they expended serious effort on not that impressive amounts of weight. And as much as you get a knowing nod when you ask clients whether they really wanted to hear their personal trainer’s take on monarchy, the fiscal cliff or impending constitutional crisis, they do want you to echo their own statements or preempt them with even more radical versions of whatever they’re thinking, which is usually easy to predict. So you validate their effort and let them feel smart while they explain to you how they’re going to win the 2024 election for Kamala Harris.

One of these guys is what most people would recognize as an office gay. Think Mayor Pete but instead of imagining him as whatever bugman villain caricature you have in your head, imagine what Mayor Pete is actually like offscreen and away from mixed company. Pale, medium height, lean, an almost high-and-tight haircut without the skin-fade, wearing completely forgettable monochrome clothes and shoes, while being very chill, polite, and odorless. But even the real Mayor Pete has a few people he can confide in through a combination of rapport, trust, and legal threat, just the same as mine can.

Love this guy.

The Mayor, whose details I’m supposed to keep confidential, this guy who has both a JD and Master of Law, he mentions that he has a friend who hosts one of the biggest alien podcasts in the world and definitely the U.S.

And he has a brilliant idea. He wants to schedule time on the podcast to explain how Kamala Harris is the natural choice of alien-enthusiasts everywhere. While I can imagine everyone from medical billers to surgeons deciding to vote for Harris, alien-, Bigfoot-, and WWE- enthusiasts seem to have certain cultural and psychometric qualities that might make this a bit of a reach. Perhaps there are cultural, biological and/or psychological reasons they aren’t already plotting to get Kamala Harris elected. Either way, there are people who honestly think that if the right guy says he likes Kamala Harris, it will make his listeners vote for her, regardless of their propensity to vote in the first place. An entire army of unfuckable alien chungus replete with bbq stains and pocket pussies, ready to go brat absolutely crazy style. TBH I have more faith in my ability to get buttfucked by little green men in tornado country than I do in Kamala Harris’ ability to win over the green alien crowd, despite her already collecting the coveted bottoms bloc which wields so much power in the U.S.

I say alien but the truth is it’s another subject and I want to maintain some level of professional ethics for the day my own Jason Wilson or Cade Metz finds my Slate Star and decide they aren’t getting enough attention from the reading public.

None of the people who believe in little green men fucking them in the butt vote and none of the voters who like to get fucked in the butt care about aliens

Many are taking aim at Ezra Klein and the New York Times along with Jon Favreau and Pod Save America for trying to sanewash everyone’s favorite canine-lover, Hasan Piker. I won’t bother listing the many claims or arguments Piker has made, mostly because it’s beneath me but also because he’s far less relevant or important than the chatter about him betrays.

Most of his audience is too young to vote, many of them will refrain from voting at any point in their lives, and many live abroad where they maintain non-U.S. citizenship and cannot vote in U.S. elections. But you don’t have to know any of that to understand that Hasan Piker goes to Ezra Klein to pretend to be an intellectual but Klein will never go on Piker’s stream to play games, use slurs, and explain how China and Hamas are actually pretty progressive if you think about it. No one who matters watches Piker but they understand his reputation for edginess, which Klein can use to try to “build bridges” and hide behind. As long as someone looks like an even bigger lolcow for liberal guilt, and knee-jerk thirdworldism, Klein can pretend to be the sane, measured, odorless man, crossing his legs so hard his penis falls off.

Slightly smarter than my Mayor Pete, Klein knows to stay away from Piker’s livestream but leftwing pundits trying to triangulate between Piker and Klein don’t understand what purpose Klein’s show serves, which is why they keep asking for Klein to distance himself from Piker. The Ezra Klein Show is not about shooting the shit with good conversationalists. The show is a pretense for allowing Klein to disseminate the ideas he wants out there and the guest is just a prop that helps the audience buy in. Klein can’t disavow Piker anymore than he can disavow a chair on his set and neither NYT nor Democrats can disavow Piker for the same reasons they can’t disavow Klein. He gives an intellectual air to the excesses of the left which is exactly what he’s there to do. Instead of going after Piker, people should spend more holding Klein accountable for his own excesses which he only retired after helping get Trump elected twice.