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This will be a bit of a nitpicky response since I'm a huge RedLetterMedia fan. But I just wanted to call out that they got famous for their Star Wars reviews. They did a lot of Star Trek reviews, but that was mostly of the next gen movies, and I don't think those reviews are too famous.
Also, they are definitely not right-wing. They're pretty centrist/apolitical, while sometimes mentioning that other people care about politics, but sometimes they definitely lean more towards liberal points. For example, they frequently talk about diverse casting as not necessarily a bad thing. But half of their members lean more liberal (Rich Evans and Jack) and half of them are slightly closer to the center.
Rich is pretty clearly an extant member of the old school, classic internet atheist-libertarian-contrarians (the two things that seem to get his goat the most are organized religion and new-wave mumbo jumbo). If he didn't vote for Ron Paul back in the day I'll eat my hat.
Like someone else mentioned, I definitely get the sense Mike is more woke-averse than he lets on, but smartly hides it or masks it under more innocuous complaints. He is by far the funniest, and a lot of that comes from being clearly unconcerned with being PC. This is even more clear if you have the Patreon and can see the outtakes. Like you said, I definitely wouldn't go so far as to say he's "right wing" though. Probably close to Rich's libertarian, but softer on religion; lapsed catholic vibes.
Jay is the hardest to read. To me he comes across as a truly centrist/apolitical guy who probably hangs around a lot of lefty artistic types, which rubs off on him, but at the same time is too contrarian to really buy into any of it, on either side. He just wants to watch his violent sex-weirdo movies in peace, and dislikes the scolds on either side that might get in the way of this.
Jack and Josh are pretty standard and openly left/liberal. Usually doesn't get in the way of the comedy though. Usually.
I think the big thing about them, and one of the things that makes them great, is Mike and Jay are the rare online content creators that don't appear to be very-online themselves. They seem genuinely and refreshingly ignorant of a lot of the underlying internet culture war BS, outside of where it intersects with a particular movie they may be interested in. It's rare to find such a genuinely apolitcal space online these days, especially with as long as they've been around. Most have either bought into the "woke" framework, or specifically positioned themselves as being "unwoke" and gotten into the right wing grift. Probably helps that they are older, more Gen-X than millennial.
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I'm pretty sure "But I associate most of them with the online right" was referring to "Lots [of] people have already criticized Star Trek over the years" and not RLM specifically.
They are old fat midwesterners who dress as blue collar repairmen in their movie warehouse dungeon and don't breathlessly celebrate 'representation'. As far as wokes who worshipped Lindsay Ellis till Rayagate are concerned, these old white men might as well be MAGA redhats.
Also, RLM skewered girlGhostbusters ,Star Trek Discovery and Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker, the originators of 'fans hate their white male.heroes being replaced with strong women and blacks!' anti-criticism card. Since RLM was the only platform with significant reach to beyond weird film autists, they caught the ire of progressives.
That's true, but they frequently call out people as garbage, who are anti these movies on the basis of hating feminism/woke ideology. And I remember when they were excusing a lot of what Brie Larson said in her rant as "she didn't really mean that, she just put her foot in her mouth". That's not to say I think they're progressives, I think they really try to take a middle ground most of the time, or are just kinda checked out.
Edit: see time 13:00 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=9pQNYeOEFJc&t=780
RLM has consistently dunked on whiny fanboys crying about Canon or muh blacks and girls, and especially mindless Consume Product fanboys. But RLM also doesn't hold back from criticizing mid products and calling them shitty even if they have a protected class in the forefront, especially Star Trek Discovery.
Perhaps the nuance here is that RLM has not actually come out as anti-woke, but that RLM has not onboarded the Message consistently pushed out by 2016-era progressives smirking about how all these legacy franchises were being replaced with new hip exciting Modern Audiences. The media/academic elite narrative came first: these legacy franchises with shitloads of money were ripe for being replaced by minorities and women for social messaging to be readily absorbed by fanboys hungry for content.
Of course, the problem for that logic is that fanboys are no longer restricted to whatever slop is out on the theaters or newly released or even in print. Torrents of legacy shows exist, reducing even the friction of going to Blockbuster and hoping the DVD for some oldass show still exists. I don't think ANYONE here on this board would have watched any Star Wars show without their dad or friend digging up an old copy of the Original Trilogy to let John Williams hit us right in the jimmies. Fans don't need to be wheezing 80 year olds trying to capture the magic of the 60s, they can watch legacy shit. The existence of RLM and other media critics (left and right) who can say 'hey this new thing is not like the old thing' is poison to new talent that want to force their relevance into the modern cultural landscape.
For the sin of knowing the past and not really giving a shit about the future, RLM is an enemy. Good thing they can just keep repairing that VCR to time travel to the good old days when men were alcoholic sex perverts and women didn't exist.
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Yeah I didn't mean to hold up RLM as an exemplar of the online right. More like, they made an impact criticizing pop-culture franchises, and lots of other people followed in their wake, and most of those others were on the rightwing. But like the other person said, RLM is not explicitly left-wing, and in today's world, that pretty much makes them right-wing by default.
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And ill nitpick you right back and say they started with their star trek movie reviews, and got a pretty decent following from them (including me) before they did the star wars ones (which admittedly got a much bigger reaction)
Ah ok, you got me there. I don't remember their star trek next gen movie reviews being that popular, but I wasn't really paying attention to them back then so you're probably right.
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I think Mike is keeping his power level hidden.
He’s Polish and openly believes in ghosts. He’ll be back in the pews and reciting the creed soon, if he’s not already.
RLM’s media criticism is pretty traditional as it is. For a movie to work, it needs a certain narrative structure, should have setups and payoffs, etc. One of their compliments they give is “it’s a movie” where so much of what they review lacks the necessary elements to even be called a movie.
Underneath it all they’re really talking about truth, beauty, and goodness.
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Might be but I don't think he's keeping too much hidden. Seems like a slightly lapsed traditional liberal that's keeping his head down to me.
I'd agree with that. But I don't think he seems right wing. He is always talking about how much he loves the Star Trek next gen liberal "positive future" values. There's a lot of progressivism that is kinda baked into that worldview.
I know that’s the general consensus. But it seems to me it misses the huge point that technological change likely changes economic systems. If you move to what seems like a post scarcity, then you likely abandon capitalism. But that doesn’t mean you abandon capitalism before you move to a post scarcity economy. That is, ST’s (incoherent) communism doesn’t address today.
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I'd say there's very little progressivism baked into Star Trek (at least up to ds9, which is the only stuff I've seen). There's no notion of affirmative action. People are subordinate to their superiors. Race and gender is simply not salient at all.
Here's the classic scene: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HKII3sFUCgs?feature=shared
Acting commander Data (a (simulacrum of) a white man) takes Whorf (an Underrepresented Minority in Starfleet) into his office to give him a dressing down about being insubordinate. Whorf takes it like a man and apologizes. Could such a scene be made today?
Relative to the time period this was extremely progressive.
There's a reason Martin luther king jr. famously publicly fanboyed over star trek.
I think the main difference is you're used to post 2010 ish idea's of DEI, and those are definitely much different from the 1960s progressivism in star trek
It seems to me that "treat people as individuals rather than members of groups" is the sine qua non of classical liberalism. Progressivism must necessarily be about the Marxist struggle of the oppressed (groups) versus the oppressor (group).
And that sort of classical liberalism was controversial in the 60's when Star Trek was doing it with the OS and, if not controversial, at least something people had in mind as a sore point when TNG was doing it in the 80's.
And how is that relevant? I don't think progressives should get to claim movents from the past, that they are now vehemently rejecting.
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Sure, but it's different from progressivism.
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Some would argue that it goes even further than that. If anything this is the sine qua non of enlightenment values and post modernism (of which Marxism is a sub school) is by its nature post/anti-enlightenment.
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I don't think there is necessarily a contradiction there, especially for nostalgic media we loved in our youth. You can simultaneously enjoy the utopian idealism of a sci-fi show and don't have that reflect what you believe what current policy would be effective, especially not in all areas.
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