In the Voting Booth Today - Feeling Torn Between Chad's Roommate and Benjamin Studebaker's Quests

The War Within: Sincere Irony vs. Ironic Sincerity (Guest appearance: JREG)

After my part-time teaching gig at the local state university this morning, I hopped on my scooter and headed to the church with “Vote Here” signs near my apartment.

As always, it felt weird walking into a church to vote. I thought, So much for separation of church and state. But I was there for neither church nor state.

I was there to complete a quest.

It took a little bit of time to prove my new address and finish registering. I was handed a ballot and directed to one of the booths. 

In the symbolic imaginary: As with America, so with me. There was a war being waged for my soul.

Most people probably felt like there were two options at the top of the ballot. I guess I felt that way too—they were just very different from Trump vs. Harris.

My two options were to complete one of two quests. I felt torn between Chad's roommate and

Benjamin Studebaker

.

Before explaining what these quests were, I want to be clear about this analogy. In games like Skyrim or Zelda (games I have seen friends and family play) you can run around and talk to the townsfolk. Some townsfolk give little side missions, whereas others genuinely get you on your way with main quests.

Running around physically and virtually over the last year, I discovered that there were only two serious townsfolk offering me quests. They were, tragically, mutually exclusive quests.

The Chad’s Roommate Quest

Chad's roommate is someone you should all be familiar with at this point. 

He¹ was the author of the “I am literally shaking” email. If you didn’t read it, the short version is that we received a very long email last week from someone who was totally distraught that we had Nick Land on our platform. (read it via the link below)

In that email, he shared a whole bunch of transmissions from his roommate Chad’s laptop. These, in combination with the roommate’s story about what Chad told him, prove that there is a coven of online wizards doing sick-sick chaos magick to get Donald Trump elected. What’s craziest is that they targeted Theory Underground in particular to make that happen.

People think Chad’s roommate is either psychotic, a troll, a very sincere and naive liberal, or, and this is my position, a very creative writer having some fun. Of course these are not mutually exclusive.

The issue is that I can either play along or not. I wanted to play along, but Chad’s roommate needed proof from me that I am against “The Purple King.” This proof would mean voting for and publicly endorsing, from my channel, Kamala Harris.

Chad’s roommate said that if I did he would send more files, and disclose names. I wanted to see those files. I wanted to see those names. I wanted to play along. I even responded:

Thank you for this email. It's absolute gold. 

I would like to know more. If that means sending you proof that I will vote for Kamala, then I'll do so.

Is it ok if I share this?

Best,

To which I soon received a response:

Yes, proof you aren't voting for a third party or the evil one (DJT)...[but a vote for a third party is a vote for the evil one. And that is a fact, no 'philosophica'l debate needed]...would calm my nerves. However, I saw on substack your show was still promoting the idea that both sides are bad. So I am going to need your show to publicly endorse Harris (you have two days) before I give you all the receipts. If not, I'll just assume you are in on the sick game like Chad. I'll just take my evidence to a real journalist that can expose it all. I have a connection with someone at Vice that is interested in this story. Vice does amazing work as you well know.

I saw you posted my email on substack, yes that was fine, I guess... your readers seemed to think it was all some joke. And called me crazy, don't forget, Chad is the crazy one! He voted for DJT and I voted for Harris! Someone that votes for Harris by definition can't be crazy! Anyone that votes for the evil one is crazy, by definition! 

Chad wasn't mad I posted their documents, he was just more concerned with my feelings, and wanted to make sure I was OK. He said he is concerned I will lose my mind "when dad wins on Tuesday." So Chad not being mad at me and being more concerned about me has really increased my suspicion and anxiety. I'm shaking as I type this. 

Sleep is all but impossible now.

Your readers are criticizing me, thinking this is all a game. Look, I'm not one of these Crowley Satanic freaks so I don't know all of what I am seeing, I'm just trying to blow the whistle on this possible (probable?) vast right-wing, dark-MAGA, Crowley-magic, billionaire-cult. 

You do know all of these tech billionaires are into this e/acc stuff!!??!!! 

This isn't one of your philosophical games, this is real life! This is sick-sick, dark-dark stuff!! 

Also, I'd like to email with Land directly. I've started to believe it isn't Land that is leading the dark coven because I saw Land talk online about how the evil one is indeed evil, so I am thinking he has come around to Harris and has left his right wing ways behind him. Chad assured me this isn't the case... If I could talk to Land directly I could confirm all of this, Chad has given me a number from that bullshit 'numogram' so if Land gives me the same number I will know he is indeed their dark coven leaders, which I now am not so sure of. Please give him my email so he can clear his name before Vice runs this story. 

You and your readers will just call me crazy when I tell you who I think the leader of the dark coven really is... I'll give you a hint: Rocket-Mars. Again, I have receipts and this story has only just begun... 

-Sincerely,

Chad's roommate 

For several days I considered voting for Harris just to play along.

But during this time another quest became available. That’s where Benjamin Studebaker comes in.

The Benjamin Studebaker Quest

In episode 3 of Why Left? with Benjamin Studebaker and yours truly, David McKerracher, I shared a tweet by Benjamin.

@BMStudebaker on X

The most good you can do with your vote?

Write-in the name of a friend or family member. Take a picture if you can. Send it to them. Tell them why they would make a better president than Harris or Trump

Show them you love them and make them feel special

9:43 PM · Oct 28, 2024

Benjamin’s quest is, unlike the irony of Chad’s roommate’s quest, clear and pure. One could make a case that there is nonetheless something ironic about Benjamin’s quest, but we know why he thinks it and it makes sense. We don’t know anything about Chad’s roommates’ motivations, except for the enjoyment of irony itself.

Benjamin and I feel similarly fed up with Democrats hijacking any possibility for large-scale structural change. His recent article about Medicare for All makes it pretty clear:

Nobody seems to care about Medicare-for-All anymore. The remnants of the millennial left have largely abandoned the issue, focusing instead on COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, trans rights, abortion, and the crisis in Palestine. They say we can walk and chew gum, but the energy around M4A has collapsed. Politicians in both parties no longer feel they need to even pretend to be interested in it. These days, they actively guard against any such association. Kamala Harris has backed firmly away from M4A. She is clearly ashamed to have been associated with it ever so briefly in 2019. Donald Trump openly makes fun of “inferior socialist government run healthcare systems.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested M4A might ultimately be little more than a negotiating tactic for adding a public option onto the Affordable Care Act. There’s little reason to think the handful of sitting members of congress endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America or the Justice Democrats still consider it a priority or even a goal.²

There was a time when people like us, Marxish millenials, were critically involved with the Democratic party. We got involved because Bernie was some kind of outsider who was trying to speak to (basically) everybody, especially while seeming to interpolate the working class back into conscious existence. This was a breath of fresh air after Obama era Democrats had waffled on a sort of “oh we’re all one big happy family now and we just need more education” vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates style identity politics (great critique of that split can be read here³)

Yeah, it was nice to hear Bernie speak against the democratic party while rooting for working people, instead of just guilty privileged upper class liberals and their chosen token minorities. But the Marxish part of me was keen to see working class consciousness on the rise. I thought there was something there.

Maybe there was something there. I now cringe at the thought of Bernie, but a lot has changed since then.

We had good reason to not feel duped at the time. Who could blame us for thinking that Medicare for All was plausible. After all, it was wildly popular. Bernie was wildly popular. That was exciting to see.

It was exciting to be a part of something that felt indisputably positive and universalist. Yet the Democratic party and mainstream media did everything they could to erase him from the scene in 2016, or drown him out in 2020.

In 2016, they acted like Medicare for All was fringe, ignored it altogether, or pretended that people who cared about it were idealists and white privileged males (even though it had 70% of the country’s support). Never mind that it disproportionately benefited all the minorities Democrats pretend to care about (Reed Jr. and Benn Michaels are always so good at making these arguments, as they recently did again with their book No Politics But Class Politics).

It turns out that all minorities who are over-represented in poverty benefit from universal programs that help people in poverty. No fucking duh. But we were ritually hazed by the party insiders. They made it clear we were not needed, nor wanted.

A classic case of this anti-popular (elitist) approach was voiced by Emma Vigeland (I was wrong about this⁴) of the Majority Report when she [someone] said “We don’t need Joe Rogan” in 2019 (after he endorsed Bernie) . The American Left loves to lose. Even when it wins it loses, and either way it blames white men or Republicans.

Last week we saw something similar from the Harris campaign. Instead of accepting her invitation to go onto Joe Rogan, the most popular podcast in the world, to show that she can have a real conversation, she put big time diva demands on him.

According to a ton of articles from mainstream sources, Harris said that Rogan would have to travel to her, and that the interview could not be longer than an hour. As though she had more important things to do than reach the most people possible and show that she can go off script and have a real interpersonal conversation (I’m not convinced) on the world’s largest platform with the most open-minded host of all time.

This disdain for the ordinary person is something they try to mask with Tim Walz as VP pick. But that’s not enough to make me forget that Democrats would rather run wildly unpopular candidates than go with someone like Bernie. Medicare for All was actually popular, and after a certain point they could no longer deny it, so instead they flooded the field with younger and apparently more diverse candidates who said they were also for Medicare for All. Suddenly Bernie was considered old cloth. Never mind that the 2019 Democratic primary candidates running against Bernie, including Kamala, were lying.

Lying liars faking. Fool me once…

So with all that said, yes, I burnt out on any hope that social change energy won’t get captured by the Democratic party. Especially after the 2020 Bernie campaign folded on Super Tuesday and all that movement energy went towards BLM.

Call it my white privilege, but I know a universalist-to-particularist bait and switch when I see it. Medicare for All would have disproportionately helped everyone in poverty, especially black people, but instead the big banks and establishment Dems put everything they had towards an absolutely deranged movement whose number one slogan was the most neoliberal thing possible: Defund the Police.

Ah yes, austerity, in the name of virtuous particularism. God bless America.

Fuck that, man.

So anyway, I felt torn between Chad’s roommate’s quest, to endorse Harris, and Benjamin Studebaker’s quest, to vote for a friend.

Sincere Irony vs. Ironic Sincerity

I had this gut sense that the two paths laid out for me on my journey were defined by the difference between sincere irony and ironic sincerity.

But I wasn’t sure what the difference between these two things was, in the first place. So I asked an expert.

JREG AKA Greg Guevara is a popular YouTuber, Postmodern Political Cartographer, and Campaign Specialist who deals in both sincere irony and ironic sincerity. I asked if he could help define the difference between sincere irony and ironic sincerity.

This was his response:

Sincere irony is when one is ironic sincerely and ironic sincerity is when one is sincere ironically. Hope that helps!

A video where I sound really sincere but every word I’m saying I know is a lie and the purpose of sounding sincere is to enhance the irony, you could probably call that ironic sincerity. 

A video where I sound ironic or the context signals irony but I’m actually very serious about what I’m talking about (any time I talk about community) that’s probably sincere irony 

So then, what makes Benjamin Studebaker’s quest either one of these two options? Well, there is something seemingly ironic about doing anything with one’s ballot other than what its direct purpose is. If you’re not going to vote for the “real” options, why bother?

But with that said, Benjamin is sincere in his belief that the best thing you can do with your vote is write in a beloved friend’s name, take a picture of this, and then send it to them with the reasons why they would be better than either of the two candidates on offer.

Therefore, Benjamin Studebaker’s Quest felt like sincere irony—i.e. the context signals irony but he’s actually totally sincere. Chad’s roommate, on the other hand, felt like ironic sincerity—i.e. sincerity was only being used to enhance the irony.

I Chose Sincere Irony

I wrote in the name of my buddy Chris Dorr. Me and him go way back to when I was working a graveyard shift stocking shelves in a grocery store. We’ve been friends ever since (like 14 years at this point—holy shit).

As ironic as it felt to write this in, I genuinely believe Chris would be a better pick than either of the two candidates.

I voted for my old coworker turned best friend Chris Dorr, because neither party has done anything but insult my dignity and intelligence for as long as I have been politically conscious. Both sides gaslight and socially blackmail me while scapegoating other people in my life. Neither has a plan that seems plausible or preferable for a future worth working towards.

Unlike Trump and Harris, Chris loves people, doesn't care about power, and has never scapegoated either side of my family—much less the overwhelming majority of Americans who have rightfully lost faith in both parties.

Chris brings light, laughter, and unconditional love to everyone in his life, and nothing he has ever done sounds like it was focus-grouped, forced, fake, or for profit or power. He genuinely wants the best for everybody.

Maybe someday we’ll have leaders like that. I hope so!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. If Chad’s roommate is reading these, I promise you Chris Dorr is not the evil one. Now get us those leaked transmissions if you’re serious!!!

1. I assume everyone online is a guy. Sorry if I got your sex wrong, if you’re reading this, Chad’s roommate.

2. https://www.sublationmag.com/post/medicare-for-all-requiem-for-a-dream

3. The best critique of the Obama vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates contradiction comes from Toure Reed and can be read here: https://catalyst-journal.com/2018/03/between-obama-and-coates

4. I don’t know who I remember saying this now… I thought it was Emma, but it was almost certainly someone on Majority Report back in the day. Emma Vigeland was point out how stupid everyone’s position on this was, as you see her doing here: *EDIT

Nance

reminded me that she may have had this more sensible position and then walked it back later on the Majority Report.