u/Junior-Key-5043

I'll start by saying I watch the show, every week, or I used to as laughing at dumb people is a fun passtime. However one disturbing thing I've noticed recently is a large uptick in Caleb Hammer super fans that unironically believe Caleb Hammer is some kind of finanacial genius.

These people have convinced themselves Caleb Hammer is a savant of the finance world because he drops nuclear knowledge bombs such as "don't spend more than you make" and "don't carry a credit card balance" and "don't take out 25% interest car loans."

My issue with this isn't that what he's saying is wrong, it's that it's the most basic of the basic finanacial literacy and he's used it to launch an entire merch business, budgeting apps, and has now been veering into politics. I've noticed a lot of Caleb Hammer super fans are run of the mill low IQ "BOTH SIDERIST" fence sitters (read: right-wingers pretending they're above it all.)

Caleb Hammer himself is clearly one of these people larping as a centrist that just so happends to hold almost exclusively right-wing or right of center neoliberal views. His producers are now also clearly setting him up with easy wins aginst the absolute dumbest leftists to ever exist:

https://youtu.be/XT02_pqmbeM?is=yUhDyFId8s44SrM1 Here we see a very poorly educated far-left "queer" named doomsday have very strong opinions on things she clearly has not a basic understanding of, naturally she gets ripped apart and the comment section is full of people that also do not know what they are talking about applying the least generous understanding of her arguments possible.

At one point she compares fascism to capitalism, which is reductionist, and Caleb rips into her reading off some very dubious definitions of fascism. Fascism isn't inherently capitalism, but it has a very different relationship to capitalism than socialism does, as capitalists were and are perfectly willing to work within the fascist framework in the name of profits or being left alone. Capitalist leaders were fully on board with nazism right up until nazi ideology increasingly conflicted with capitalist goals, and capitalists went along with nazism explictly to take down socialism. Indeed, fascism was an unholy alliance of capitalists and other sects of German society. Richard evens sums this up in the 3rd reich trilogy:

> The conservatives who levered Hitler into power shared a good deal of this vision. They really did look back with nostalgia to the past, and yearn for the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the Bismarckian Reich. But these were to be restored in a form purged of what they saw as the unwise concessions that had been made to democracy. In their vision of the future, everyone was to know their place, and the working classes especially were to be kept where they belonged, out of the political decision-making process altogether. But this vision cannot really be seen as pre-industrial or pre-modern, either. It was shared in large measure, for one thing, by many of the big industrialists who did so much to undermine Weimar democracy, and by many modern, technocratic military officers whose ambition was to launch a modern war with the kind of advanced military equipment that the Treaty of Versailles forbade them to deploy. Like other people at other times and in other places, the conservatives, as much as Hitler, manipulated and rearranged the past to suit their own present purposes. They cannot be reduced to expressions of 'pre-industrial' social groups. Many of them, from capitalist Junker landlords looking for new markets, to small retailers and white-collar workers whose means of support had not even existed before industrialization, were as much modern as they were traditional.123 It was these congruities in vision that persuaded men like Papen, Schleicher and Hindenburg that it would be worth legitimizing their rule by co-opting the mass movement of the Nazi Party into a coalition government whose aim was to erect an authoritarian state on the ruins of the Weimar Republic.

of course Caleb then mocks the woman for being unable to define fascism, an ideology better defined and viewed as a national mood with fluid ideology (whatever needs to be true, is true) while reading off layman google definitions without context, surprise, he can't define the term either.

The comment section of course eats this up, as they're also politically illterate fart sniffing "le both sides" midwits.

Caleb at other points, in true fake fence sitter fashion, is desperate to constantly declare himself a centrist that "dislikes both the right and left" while always applying the most generous reading of right-wing bullshit and the least generous reading of left-wing bullshit. It becomes very obvious Caleb is less interested in finances these days and more interested in laying the groundwork to being some type of political finanacial podcaster, while knowing very little about either topic outside of trite le centrist "I'm so smart and above it all, both the right and left are bad" drivel and "buy less fast food."

Who is he trying to convince, really, himself or the audience? Are we in heck? is the new norm low information podcasters building large audiences of low information dumbasses discussing political concepts in the most reductionist way possible? Engaging in the most simple content possible that somehow has a very sonorous ring to the midwit median voter? if that's the case, how do we ever fix anything?