Tim Pool. Investigative journalism in Sweden after Trump allegations on immigration problems

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Shortly after publication in December 2017, the quotes from Pool about Ferguson were removed from The New Yorker’s story, titled “The Live-Streamers Who Are Challenging Traditional Journalism.” The magazine wrote that the changes were made because Pool’s statements “contained several errors.” (In his emailed responses to The Daily Beast, Pool claimed the excised quotes were not reflective of his comments.” He expressed similar sentiments recently on YouTube, calling it a “fake story.” But in August 2018, Pool said while he disagreed with the framing, the reporter who’d written the article “does a good job” and had been “fair.”)
Shortly after that night of filming, Pool got on a plane while Vice continued to cover the events on the ground in Ferguson without him. It didn't take long before Pool had left Vice altogether and moved on to yet another media gig.
Fusion had been on a hiring spree in 2014. Flush with Disney and Univision cash, the site had poached well-known reporters, editors, and columnists. They had access to a pricey TV studio in Florida, and a 100-person digital team was soon assembled. (That same year, Fusion reportedly suffered $35 million in losses.) Daniel Eilemberg, then the chief digital officer of Fusion, told The Daily Beast the protests and unrest led Fusion to believe Pool would make for the ideal addition. They had pursued Pool aggressively while he was still at Vice, and signed him to a two-year contract, which Eilemberg said was in the “low six figures” per year. After coming on board in September, Pool was dubbed Fusion’s “director of media innovation.”
Soon enough, staffers and executives at Fusion began spotting many of the same issues with Pool that had cropped up at Vice.
In late 2014, Fusion sent Pool back to Ferguson. Like the Vice staffers before them, a former Fusion employee familiar with the shoot said interviewing people didn’t seem to pique Pool’s interest that much, particularly Black people. He would check his phone regularly, “obsessed” with his social-media metrics.
Pool took it as a given his colleagues would do the work for him. “Very much a prima donna,” is how the Fusion employee described him. Juan La Riva, an assistant producer at Fusion who worked with Pool, had a similar experience. “[Pool] always came across as this know-it-all who never wanted to hear anybody else’s input,” La Riva said..
In-office problems like those at Vice persisted, too.
“The editorial staff took issue with his reporting,” said Eilemberg, the ex-chief digital officer. “People took issue with his treatment of people.” Multiple Fusion sources mentioned an incident in which Pool berated a female subordinate in public to the point she was visibly upset. “We didn’t like him and the feeling appeared to be mutual,” Felix Salmon, one of the splashy Fusion hires, told The Daily Beast. In an October 2020 video, Pool suggested he didn’t “get along'' with Fusion employees, either.
The outlet was not exactly functioning at peak capacity. According to an investigative article by Gizmodo Media Group, “a culture of complacency and excess” festered at Univision, Fusion’s parent company. (Univision also owned GMG when the story was published.) Fusion in particular, was pinging from one content strategy to another, and chasing Facebook traffic and virality at the expense of more substantial reporting. One staffer told GMG the outlet decided, “We’re going to be the super-woke millennial-focused media outlet.”
Pool has similar complaints. After being lured to Fusion with promises of full editorial independence, he claims to have been directed to reinforce leftist pieties. “Lie. Lie to the audience. Tell the audience what they want to hear,” is how Pool puts it now. Four years ago, Pool indicated in a Reddit AMA that Eilemberg had given him and other Fusion staffers marching orders to “side with the audience.” The ex-Fusion boss does not recall saying so, nor does Pool’s description match company policy.
“To suggest we bent, ignored, or fabricated facts is simply not true,” Eilemberg said in a text message. “Fortunately, both Fusion’s reporting and Tim’s YouTube channel are public, so anyone can come to their own conclusions about who’s peddling baseless narratives to fit an audience’s point of view.”
Like some of the other high-profile names on staff, Pool wasn’t producing a ton of content for the site. A former Fusion staffer who worked with Pool said, “There were many weeks where we didn’t do anything.” Pool describes his stint at Fusion as having been slapped with “golden handcuffs”—well-compensated but with his ambitions thwarted. “So I sat around,” he said. “It was boring and eventually I left.”
Pool’s contract with Fusion ended in September 2016.

 

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Invariably, it’s a tale he recounts constantly and with a purpose, like an origin story: He ditched Fuson and digital media as a whole because they’re utterly corrupt and feckless, not because of his own failings.
Only now, unshackled from his corporate masters, could he tell the real truth, the whole truth, the things they didn’t want you to know. And no one would be in a position to tell him otherwise or stop him from getting a story floridly wrong.
Since being liberated from working with editors and producers, Pool’s affiliations with the seediest elements of the far right have only grown. And the falsehoods have rapidly accelerated.
Scroll through Pool’s current output and it’s hard to find a video he’s produced which does not contain some combination of rank distortions, conspiracy theories treated as if they were credible ideas, or a basic misunderstanding of the subject at hand. (A recent study named Pool as a “superspreader” of falsehoods about voter fraud in the run up to the 2020 election.) Take Pool’s response after a handful of stories came out about adverse responses to the vaccine in December. Maybe, Pool baselessly speculated, the left and the media wanted to reduce the public’s confidence in the vaccine. That way, they could deny Trump the rightly-deserved credit for this miraculous feat and lower his popularity at a critical moment—while Trump was “fighting for the presidency,” he said, (By July, he’d pivoted to fearmongering about the Biden administration’s efforts to reach the unvaccinated.)
Then there’s Pool’s record of political predictions. In 2020, he routinely forecast a Trump win—possibly by a 49- or 50-state landslide, per Pool. When Biden won, Pool tried to retcon his history, claiming when he said “landslide” it was tied to “hypothetical” contingencies, like Trump appointing Tulsi Gabbard or legalizing marijuana. (This is false.)
As Pool readily admits, “I turn the camera on and I rant,” whether he’s deeply familiar with a subject or not, and for viewers who treat him as a valued source for news and a way to understand how the world really works. “There’s no script, there’s no plan.”
Staking out this turf inevitably leads him to some untenable positions. But when confronted with concrete evidence of mistakes, Pool often doubles down. Sometimes, this results in him siding with despots.
Or, as was the case in 2017, he’ll lend credence to the conspiracy that Seth Rich had been the source for documents published by WikiLeaks.
Two years later, he denied having done so while threatening legal action against outlets—including The Daily Beast—which had accurately covered his comments. Pool even announced in March that he’d begun strategically posting contradictory information about his opinions and beliefs on Twitter. That way, none of his social-media posts could be included in any articles about him.
Of course, no group attracts Pool’s enmity more than the mainstream media. Most reporters are “morons,” he has said, who “publish garbage nonsensical drama and ragebait trash.” As Pool has drummed into his audience over and over again, the profession is rife with lazy incompetents and “evil” “vampires” who are perpetually lying—unlike him. “They hate you,” he often sneers.
Mining the right-wing outrage cycle for stories—and serving as a sanitized conduit to the far right—for an audience desperate to have their misperceptions validated and grievances nursed has proven an extremely effective business model. From summer to early autumn 2020, Pool’s three YouTube channels racked up over 100 million views per month, according to SocialBlade. Pool claims he topped out at around 120 million “during the election season.”
As a member of YouTube’s partner program, Pool was handsomely rewarded. In August 2020 alone, Pool raked in $600,000, as he boasted during the recorded September conversation. By Pool’s calculations, YouTube accounted for 90 percent. (In his email to The Daily Beast, Pool claimed the income total was “wildly incorrect and easily disproved” but declined to provide the correct figure. “Perhaps the audio has been edited,” he said without evidence.)
Two industry experts told The Daily Beast that Pool may be exaggerating somewhat—SocialBlade’s public estimates of his potential earnings are lower, too—but banking about $540,000 is within the realm of possibility, they said, if, as Pool claims, 90 percent of his videos are monetized. Anecdotally, the rate squares with the frequency of ads seen by The Daily Beast in its examination of Pool’s content. These days, and since he more than halved the number of videos produced per week, he’s down to 45 million or so, about where he was in April 2020.

 

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Still, though his Facebook viewership pales in comparison, Pool has prospered on YouTube. For over a year, he’s easily surpassed better-known right-wing yakkers like Dennis Prager, Dan Bongino, and Ben Shapiro on the platform. (Steven Crowder leapfrogged Pool this April, the same month in which he was demonetized for violating community guidelines. The following month, Crowder was suspended for two weeks.)
It is unclear how much revenue the podcast version of his videos brings in. Pool said in December the viewership numbers were dramatically lower than on YouTube, despite the show reaching sixth place on Apple’s charts as of January. He doesn’t do many live ad reads on his channels, but one sponsor sells survivalist bulk food buckets. (Pool hawked them while Texas was suffering mass power outages.) During Timcast IRL live broadcasts, which air five times a week and began last summer, fans can pay for YouTube super chats, putting their questions to Pool at the top of the queue. On any given livestream, the take often tops four figures. Production expenses are minimal, he has said.
How did Pool reach these levels of prominence and profit? Becca Lewis is a PhD candidate at Stanford University. Three years ago, she conducted a study examining how the YouTube algorithm was funneling viewers to the far right. Pool was a central subject of her work. Like social media influencers, political YouTubers packaged themselves as more authentic and relatable—and therefore more trustworthy—than mainstream news sources, Lewis told The Daily Beast. And while a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the effect YouTube has on audiences, the converse is also true.
They continually A/B-test ideas and receive direct feedback about what works. Pool is no exception. In the recorded September conversation, Pool told his ex-colleagues that since he announced he’d be voting for Trump, “My views are skyrocketing.” Publicly, Pool makes it clear he’s well aware of which stories his audience wants to hear. Over a long enough timeline, the question of whether they’re true believers evangelizing for the far right or motivated by profits and attention becomes unanswerable and not really relevant.
“One of the more visible forms of evidence we can find of radicalization on the platform is watching the influencers themselves get radicalized over time,” Lewis said.
That’s definitely the direction Pool’s content has headed. After leaving Fusion, Pool went back to covering demonstrations and political events like the DeploraBall, a D.C. shindig hosted by extremely online MAGA luminaries the week of Trump’s inauguration. This meant greater contact with the fringes of the ideological spectrum.
Pool scored a few appearances on Fox News and talked about being threatened by antifa. (A trip to Milwaukee in August 2016 was cut short, with Pool stating that the unrest had made the area “unsafe” for him and others who presented as white.) On YouTube, Pool hosted or was a guest of far-right personalities like Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, Mike Cernovich, Mark “Count Dankula” Meehan, Gavin McInnes, Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, and more.
Those extremists were given space to air their views without much in the way of resistance from Pool. With Gionet, who had just gained notoriety for tweeting “1488” and other antisemitic memes, Pool asked, “Are you a racist?” Gionet said no. Pool called the posts “jokes” and seemed satisfied with his response. Within months, Gionet attended the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville. He used a similar line of questioning to interrogate Cernovich. At that time, the Pizzagate promoter was trying to distance himself from the openly bigoted factions in the alt-right, like the white nationalist Richard Spencer. Cernovich said no and Pool didn’t press him.
Lewis told The Daily Beast that mutually beneficial collaborations between conservative and far-right circles were commonplace in 2016 and 2017 when YouTube was taking more of a hands-off approach towards moderating extremist content. Far-right creators viewed the soon-to-called “Intellectual Dark Web” and others like Pool as a useful bridge to a new, possibly lucrative audience, and a batch of fresh recruits. For their interlocutors, engaging with personalities considered to be on the fringe added a patina of salaciousness, bringing them attention as well. (To this day, the far-right mines value from intermingling with ostensible centrists.)
At the same time, Pool and others of his ilk strove to maintain some plausible deniability: They weren’t espousing far-right beliefs themselves, mind you—they were just reporting. Pool is still running the same playbook. He has ridiculed and condemned QAnon, but that hasn’t stopped him from inviting QAnon-associated figures on his nightly live show. Stop the Steal promoters and organizers and election-related conspiracy theorists also made appearances, both before and after Jan. 6. None of them, nor any of the other far-right extremists, were pressed on their views. Whether Pool is purposely downplaying his guests’s beliefs and prior acts or was not aware doesn’t really alter the resulting impact.
By definition, YouTube as a platform can blur the lines between a rigorous interview and pals hanging out online. Consciously or not, the end result is “actually just amplifying someone else’s ideas behind the facade of an interview,” said Lewis.
In private, such distinctions seem to evaporate entirely.

 

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Pool was in Berkeley, California in September 2017 for “Free Speech Week,” an ultimately canceled four-day event organized by Milo Yiannopoulos. Daniel Lombroso, the director of White Noise, a 2020 documentary featuring white nationalists like Spencer, was in town doing preliminary research. At an AirBnB rented by a handful of right-wing figures, Lambroso drew the ire of Pool and Benjamin, a YouTuber and staunch anti-feminist who told jokes about raping a member of the British Parliament.
“The two of them were just a nightmare,” Lombroso told The Daily Beast. Their behavior was “really vicious,” he said, with both repeatedly calling him “fake news” and “evil” because he worked for a mainstream news outlet.
When Lombroso took out release forms, “That’s when [Pool] really lost his mind,” the filmmaker said. He described Pool as loudly and vehemently arguing he was not to be trusted, saying the release forms shouldn’t be signed. (Asking participants to sign a release form is a standard practice when filming a documentary. Benjamin did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
Later that night, Lombroso recalled, Benjamin stridently railed against media coverage of race and equality issues, with Pool concurring. The media was lying to the public and focusing on these issues in order to purposely “start a race war in America,” he said. “They kept saying that.” (In addition to the 2019 comment made to Johnson, his Black ex-employee, Pool also told the former Fusion staffer about the “race war” soon to come.)
These associations continue to this day. In the recorded September conversation, Pool confessed to his then-colleagues that former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio privately asked him to delete a tweet, and effectively provide cover for the far-right street gang. On Sept. 7, 2020, a man wearing a Proud Boys T-shirt was caught on-camera bludgeoning a leftist counter-protester in Salem, Oregon. At first, Pool condemned the Proud Boys on Twitter. But Tarrio sent Pool a message saying the alleged perpetrator was not a Proud Boy. “You’re going to get my dudes hurt,” he claimed Tarrio told him. At his request (and perhaps without checking to see if Tarrio was correct) Pool deleted the tweet and posted a new one, wrongly telling his hundreds of thousands of followers—without disclosing where his info came from—that the Proud Boys did not seem to be involved. Currently, Pool boasts more than 841,000 followers.
Five weeks later, Pool hosted Tarrio for a friendly sit-down. In private, Pool had offered a much more pointed and accurate assessment of the Proud Boys than he would ever deliver on-air. “It sounds like their fucking whole existence is predicated on showing up to where antifa is to start fights and then complain they’re being attacked,” he said in the recorded conversation. (Though critical of the gang for attending the same protests as leftists, Pool has asserted the Proud Boys acted in self-defense “nine out of ten times.”) As of this writing, dozens of Proud Boys have been arrested to date for their roles in the Capitol insurrection. One arrested Capitol rioter, though not a Proud Boy, used a photo of himself wearing a Tim Pool T-shirt as his avatar on his since-deleted Twitter profile in July 2020.
During these initial years as an independent act, Pool didn’t attract much in the way of attention. That changed when he embarked on a joint effort with Paul Joseph Watson, a YouTuber and conspiracy theorist.
Then-President Trump had made a speech in April 2017 partly devoted to wailing about a non-existent terrorist act in Sweden. (Swedes were confused, to say the least.) Watson entered the fray. Regardless of whether Trump had fudged the details, migrants and refugees posed a serious threat, Watson, an Alex Jones acolyte, opined. So did much of the online far right in the U.S. To those criticizing him, Watson proposed footing the bill for any reporter who spent a week investigating the “crime-ridden suburbs of Malmö.” (The idea that migrants—nonwhite migrants—bring crime and squalor with them is a long-standing white nationalist trope.)
Only one journalist took Watson up on his offer: Tim Pool, who was already planning a reporting trip prior to Watson’s challenge. The $2,000 from Watson was added to a successful $20,000 GoFundMe campaign for the project, titled “Investigating Swedish Crime Waves.” In the description, he swore he’d only report the facts and not take sides.
The final product did not bear this out. But in these dozen-odd videos, you can see how and why Pool began appealing to a right-leaning audience: the patina of authenticity and objectivity masking deep-seated biases, conveniently omitted context benefitting a right-wing narrative, and animosity towards the press fact-checking his assertions.
In Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm, Pool hunkered down in a bowling alley to gab with three men whom Pool says he just happened to meet. During their chat, the men aired suspicions about the recent influx of refugees while praising Trump.
As the Swedish press and leftist YouTubers like HeyIt’sVadim previously documented, the men weren’t locals—they didn’t reside in Rinkeby at all—but rather members of Folkresningen de Fria (the Free People’s Movement), an anti-immigrant, far-right fringe group whose leader has blamed Jews for both the Holocaust and 9/11, among other conspiracies.

 

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During a Reddit AMA 10 days after the video was posted, a user informed Pool about his interview subjects and de Fria’s extremist beliefs. Pool didn’t seem troubled. “I was introduced to them as ‘from Rinkeby,’” he replied. The description in his video has not been updated.
The de Fria members weren’t the only far-right individuals Pool failed to accurately depict. To introduce IIvar Arpi, Pool says he’s a “journalist” who “has a really good perspective,” but “it might be controversial.” What those controversies might be, Pool doesn’t say. Arpi is a far-right columnist who later opined that Google search results are manipulated to serve “Blacks and gays'' while harming “white heterosexuals.” Chang Frick, who served as Pool’s guide in a couple of the videos, is also described by Pool as “controversial” and “aligned with the right-wing,” according to “some people,” but “others say he is a good journalist.”
Viewers are not informed that Frick held political office as a member of the Sweden Democrats, a far-right, anti-immigrant party, as BuzzFeed reported, or that a high-ranking party official prodded Frick to found Nyheter Idag, his right-wing news site. A year after Pool’s visit, the outlet was named a leading purveyor of “junk news,” according to an Oxford University study (a charge Frick has disputed). Pool told BuzzFeed in 2017 he wasn’t aware of Frick’s affiliations.
Identifying left-leaning interviewees wasn’t a problem. When Pool talked with Nils Karlsson, Malmö’s deputy mayor, he framed Karlsson’s response—that refugees were not responsible for the increase in violent crime—as coming from someone with a “very liberal” perspective, he said.
What caught the conservative media’s eye was a scene where Pool and Frick were idling about in a shopping center in Rinkeby when suddenly they had to beat a hasty retreat. Pool claimed he was instructed to leave the area and escorted out by the cops, as up to 50 unnamed men could possibly show up and begin pelting them with rocks.
The Stockholm police called the allegation bunk (a small group of individuals made it clear they didn’t want to be filmed; Pool was not “escorted” out) but that didn’t stop Pool’s tale of imminent peril from being trumpeted by the likes of Watson himself, Breitbart, The Daily Mail, The Daily Wire, and even The Daily Stormer.
Following the Swedish excursion, Pool began to abandon on the ground reporting and shift almost entirely into commentary. (The “death threats” he claimed to have received from the left were a deciding factor, he’s said.). A second YouTube channel, Timcast News, was created in November 2017 to include “less polished” work, said Pool, and address a wider array of cultural topics like “technology” and “skateboarding.” Initially, not much was posted. By July, the pace had picked up. Pool never did branch beyond culture war battles, but over time, he settled on a replicable, scalable, and cost-efficient format. In each video, he’d read a newsworthy article out loud, pausing to add his opinions, cite social media or other stories, and riff.
Watch Pool’s content from this period, and some differences become clear. He still defended and mischaracterized far-right cranks and blamed the media for all manner of ills. But rather than ever openly endorse right-wing ideas, Pool did position himself as a centrist laying out both sides of an issue. But considering whether one party was engaging in hackery or misrepresentation was mostly outside of Pool’s job description, he told The New Yorker. No wonder, then, a commenter called Pool a “milquetoast fence-sitter,” a descriptor he has since reclaimed. Later, Pool’s viewers would say he underwent the world’s slowest red-pilling.
In January 2019, Pool ramped up his output. Producing six videos per day, seven days a week became the norm. The uptick coincided with a “dramatic increase” in views, he has said, over the first two months. Two appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience in February and March 2019 also swelled his number of subscribers, per Pool. Within months, Pool scored an invitation to the White House for a “Social Media Summit''—a photo op featuring online extremists, conspiracy theorists, and assorted trolls.
For close to two years, Pool rarely if ever took a day off. Whatever else one wants to say about him, he maintained a rigorous, diligent pace—12 to 16 hours on the job per day, according to Pool. He also insists he spends hours fact-checking, and does “a lot more journalism” than New York Times reporters tend to, in contrast to what his Vice and Fusion colleagues recalled about his work habits.
Creating this sheer amount of content had other unforeseen impacts. Most people would be hard-pressed to maintain the baseline expertise and/or do the extensive research required to pump out multiple 20- or 30-minute videos per day on a wide range of events. (Pool often hits record hours after a story is reported elsewhere. The most frequently used source material in his videos as of mid-2020 was The Daily Mail, according to Jack Lawrence, a British medical student and independent journalist who’s carved out a niche documenting Pool’s work on Twitter at @TimPoolClips. Right-wing shit-stirrer Andy Ngô’s tweets finished fourth.)
Inevitably, this production schedule—and videos needing to last ten minutes in order to maximize monetization—will result in content packed with careless errors, rambling, circular or contradictory diatribes, and anecdotes which confirm his priors repeated incessantly.
But as a growth strategy, it’s quite shrewd. Viewers know exactly when to tune in and catch their favorite show. (His broadcast times rarely changed, though he ended the three 6 p.m. and weekend videos in December 2020.) They can be assured their extremely online, skater-ish millennial buddy will hit the same beats at some point during each episode: the left has gone insane, the “Fake News” media is lying to you, the right is being targeted, and societal collapse or a “peaceful separation” is imminent.
Even a 20-minute video from July ostensibly about a George Floyd memorial which was struck by lightning culminates with Pool proclaiming the left is “acting against the natural order” and is the sworn foe of creation itself. By definition, his content traces the fault lines of the culture wars. Not only because those engagement-grabbing grievances have supplanted policy concerns on the right, but because the logistics alone don’t allow for deep-bore policy analysis.
If nothing else, it makes for a frictionless consumer experience. The body of Pool’s work is geared towards triggering his audience’s anger and fears—ones the host seems to share.

 

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A rotating cast of villains are held up for scorn and ridicule in the Tim Pool Cinematic Universe. President Biden, who Pool and his then-co-host called a “pedo[phile]” last summer, heads “one of the most criminally complicit and corrupt families in this country.” What’s more, the president may be beholden to China or “compromised” and is a “fascistic nutjob.” Dr. Anthony Fauci is “evil” and a “psychopath.” Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is obsessively referred to as a lying, “evil” ignoramus, and cops who enforced COVID-19 regulations during lockdowns were betraying the Constitution or “oath breakers.” (Capitol rioters screamed the term at police officers on Jan. 6. MAGA internet dwellers similarly consider members of Congress who supported the vote count to be “oath breakers.”)
Nurses posting a TikTok video of themselves dancing weren’t blowing off steam after a brutal year. To an enraged Pool, they were mocking and laughing at “us.” Both the Hunter Biden saga and the FBI raiding Rudy Giuliani’s office were described as, “One of the most consequential stories of our generation.” The shambolic lockdowns and bungled response to the pandemic might be part of a conspiracy to intentionally tank the economy and impose totalitarian one-world rule. When Gen. Michael Flynn and other bold-font QAnon adherents were grumbling in December about a military coup or begging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, Pool posited, “Maybe the solution is martial law,” if only to restore constitutional rights.
Before the 2020 election, Democrats plotted to rig the election, Pool brayed that summer and fall. After Biden won, Pool pinned the defeat on Trump being “Ocean’s 11’d”—the unwitting victim of an intricate scheme involving shadowy, powerful public and private actors determined to thwart Trump, whom Pool considers an “anti-establishment” figure. (A Time magazine report detailing how a coalition mobilized to protect election integrity and increase voting access was regularly cited as evidence he’d been right.) One day before Jan. 6, he suggested Pence could declare Trump the winner. QAnon circles had been spreading this unconstitutional fantasy, calling it “the Pence Card.”
Confronting these perceived adversaries will win Pool’s praise. He showers Tucker Carlson and James O’Keefe with hosannas and respects the “spine” shown by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon promoter and conspiracy theorist. QAnon-friendly Rep. Lauren Boebert, who tweeted “Today is 1776” on Jan. 6, also earned Pool’s admiration for being “strong’’ and carrying firearms unlike other “spineless, little, weaselly” GOP politicians. On the morning of the Capitol riot, Pool praised Boebert as being “principled” and a person of “integrity.” Afterwards, not much had changed. “I actually think she’s kind of all right,” he said a week later. “She seems cool.”
To be clear, none of the above would in all likelihood warrant a strike on YouTube. Pool takes great pains not to run afoul of YouTube’s community guidelines, and getting kicked off or demonetized would be “crippling,” he has confessed. Regardless, “YouTube generally avoids taking punitive actions against creators with big audiences, especially if there is little public scrutiny or criticism of them,” Lewis explained.
When it comes to building a durable, large following, this all works. Pool has been approvingly retweeted by both Trump and his eldest son, Donald Jr. On the day of the first 2020 presidential debate, the Trump campaign bought out YouTube’s homepage to share a testimonial from a Black man who credited Pool with his newfound admiration for the now-former president. “You unlocked me,” he says of Pool in the video. “And I’m sure you unlocked a lot of people.”
And of course, given his reading material and nightly guests, rarely does Pool expose his audience to anything but a straw-manned version of the countervailing perspective. (When Pool wishes to belittle a leftist perspective, he often adopts a whiny, high-pitched, lisping accent.) To maintain the useful if fictional selling point that he’s still left of center politically—in October 2019, Pool swore he would never vote for Republicans; by 2020 he’d donated to multiple GOP candidates—Pool will toss out mid-video that he is in favor of a progressive income tax, opposes U.S. military intervention, or believes structural racism exists, as if it counterbalances the entirety of his output.

 

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But on the rare occasions he comes face-to-face with an actual leftist, it usually doesn’t go well. Sam Seder, the host of The Majority Report, appeared on Pool’s channel in 2019. For the bulk of the broadcast, Pool stammered and sputtered, unable to offer cogent arguments. In one widely shared and derided clip, Pool said he refused to vote for Hillary Clinton. The only way to justify doing so, he explained, was by adopting a utilitarian philosophy, not unlike the Marvel supervillain Thanos, who wanted to eradicate half of all life in the universe.
In October, Pool brought the leftist podcaster Vaush on Timcast IRL. Once again, Pool came across as out of his depth, no more so than when talking about critical race theory. The once-obscure academic theory has become an increasingly prevalent catch-all term wielded by right-wing activists to stave off a reckoning with the ongoing racial disparities in America. More than two dozen states have since introduced legislation broadly targeting critical race theory in education.
Pool was an early adopter, citing critical race theory and “leftist identitarianism” as key reasons why he voted for a straight GOP ticket. But when pressed by Vaush to define critical race theory, he was at a loss. (On air, Pool blamed not having the “academic definition” handy. Months later, he still needed to read the Wikipedia page out loud.) That night, he fired off a string of vaguely connected buzzwords.
“Specifically, like, privilege plus power, whiteness, minorities, white, traits of whiteness would be specifically, like, hard work, scheduling,” said Pool before pivoting to one of his pet anecdotes: a chart created and then quickly removed by the Smithsonian Museum.
More Pool projects are on the way.
His recently erected website, Timcast.com, had “thousands” sign up in 2021, Pool claimed. The site provides protection against his channels being demonetized or removed entirely by YouTube. Subscribers doling out between $10 and $1,000 a month receive access to “stuff YouTube doesn’t let us talk about,” Pool promises. In a June 2021 paywalled interview with Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart honcho called people who get vaccinated for COVID-19 “dumb.” (Pool implied in December and last month that “bad food allergies” prevented him from getting the jab.)
He also hopes to attract viewers under 18 years old to the site with nonpolitical videos about “culture,” like skateboarding or UFOs. There, Pool and his younger fans can congregate and not fear the specter of cancel culture.
“We want to play the circle game without being accused of being Nazis or whatever,” he said. Whether throwing trollish “white power” hand signs or not, there are reasons why Pool’s programming might prompt such accusations.
Cassandra Fairbanks, an extremist online personality and bureau chief for the far-right website The Gateway Pundit, was named editor-in-chief of Timcast.com in June. She has a habit of posting and deleting gleeful tweets about those she disagrees with politically being physically harmed. On the day officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty in the murder of George Floyd, Fairbanks declared him a “political prisoner.” (Other extreme-right figures reacted similarly.) The daughter of white nationalist Peter Brimelow started blogging for Timcast.com later in June. (In his email to The Daily Beast, Pool wrote, “I don’t know who [her] dad is,” adding that Fairbanks recommended her.) In one paywall-protected video, Pool’s co-host Ian Crossland bitterly complained about not being able to say the n-word. “It’s a fucking English word,” Crossland yelled. “It means black in Spanish.”
In the original Pool-produced livestream, the n-word is not bleeped out. After the clip made the rounds online, Pool claimed it lacked context and was misleading.

 

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But a prime example is the livestream on Jan. 20, an episode that started out as fodder for comedy. That night, Pool and his Timcast IRL guests didn’t catch the self-evident satire in a Jacobin cover depicting Biden as a saint. They got heated at what they thought was simplified political imagery being used to manipulate clueless Americans. When Pool et al. were ridiculed on social media for their gaffe, Pool began firing off excuses. First, Pool said he and his crew weren’t familiar enough with the socialist magazine to parse the cover’s meaning, which doesn’t explain why they were discussing the publication without doing minimal research. Then he blamed the giggling onlookers for impeding his efforts to “unify” people against “the machine.”
Casual observers, the kind who only caught the jokes made at Pool’s expense, missed out on the extremist politics which followed minutes later.
That night’s roundtable included Lydia Smith, Pool’s producer and show booker, who tweeted Pinochet memes at Ocasio-Cortez this past November, plus Crossland and Luke Rudkowski, a former Alex Jones employee and old school 9/11 truther. The show’s guest was a frequent one: John Goldman, aka “Jack Murphy,” a former D.C. charter school employee who was fired in 2018 after pseudonymously blogging since-deleted thought jewels like “Feminists need rape.”
The self-styled “leading voice in the men’s space on Twitter” has of late written about the concurrent decline in male sperm count and grip strength. Goldman made dozens of appearances on Timcast IRL in 2020 and 2021. (Reached for comment, Goldman wrote, “eat a bag of dicks.” Crossland and Smith did not respond.)
After incorrectly dissecting the Jacobin artwork, the quartet veered off into seemingly unrelated topics: Pool falsely said Occupy was intentionally subverted when powerful forces “introduce[d] identity politics” and drove “white people” from the movement; Crossland casually called Native Americans cannibals; and Goldman postulated that since the 1960s, people of color had been used as a blunt instrument by the left and the Democratic Party to “hammer” white men.
“The nail is white dudes,” he said. “And the hammer is what now? The state and all the nonwhite dudes behind them.”
As the old lie goes, one dating long before the ’60s, the demands for social justice by people of color are secretly being promoted by a cabal of elites whose true endgame is the subversion of majority-white rule. Sometimes it’s explicitly Jews out to sow destruction from within. At other moments in history, it’s been communists and Marxists, the “deep state,” or an ever-swirling hodgepodge of the above.
The names may change, but the paranoia remains the same. During the broadcast, Pool never said he disagreed with Goldman. When asked by The Daily Beast if he too believed people of color were used by Democrats as a cudgel against white males, Pool declined to say. Instead, he listed a few leftist Timcast IRL guests who “made several claims I also did not contradict,” and said he’s pro-immigration.
But when Goldman said so on-air, Pool awkwardly changed the subject. Perhaps because he seems to understand how to boost similar narratives without crossing the line.
The full livestream has been viewed more than 361,000 times on YouTube as of publication. Four shorter excerpts have been viewed more than 331,000 times.
All told, those two hours of fact-free, at times bigoted bantering put a few thousand YouTube ad dollars in Pool’s pocket. His audience got a free dose of white nationalism.

 

[hitmouse]

.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

I remember a youtuber I watch doing a video on tim pool

 

[DaveCinzano]

Cheers

.

Cheers hitmouse much appreciated! I started reading on the site but then it booted me off when I was only about a quarter the way through.

 

[killer b]

 

[DaveCinzano]

 

[steveo87]

Every so often, I forget Tim Pool exists.

Not Darren Grimes, though, I've dreams about that cunt.

 

[hitmouse]

View attachment 281921

The thing is, I'm fairly sure that's a pisstake, and yet..

Pool complained last year that feminism had negatively impacted his ability to find a romantic partner and start a family. “You know what the problem is, though, it’s definitely not me,” he said. “I think it’s everybody else.”

 

[bimble]

I watched a bit of his angry whining videos earlier today, about how all the women on ok cupid are communists and how feminism has stolen his Right to have a woman in his house to take care of all ensuing babies and social interactions for him and it made me feel really happy.

 

[DaveCinzano]

I watched a bit of his angry whining videos earlier today, about how all the women on ok cupid are communists and how feminism has stolen his Right to have a woman in his house to take care of all ensuing babies and social interactions for him and it made me feel really happy.

I can get onboard that train - every day you think about how Tim Pool feels unsatisfied in life can only be A Good Day

 

[hitmouse]

I've got a new one to add to my list of minor achievements/personal affirmations as well - the same way that I can honestly say that I imagine less people will celebrate my death than did Thatcher's, I can also now boast about the fact that, to the very best of my knowledge, I've never had a job where I pissed my coworkers off enough that they drew a cartoon of me as a walking talking cock.

 

[bimble]

is tim pool bald?

 

[fishfinger]

A bit...

 

[glitch hiker]

Apparently he's minted to fuck, peddling this whiny nazi adjacent outrage crap. Probably like the Swindon cunt.

I fuciking hate these people. In fact I can't even be bothered to spe;ll check

 

[Dogsauce]

I watched a bit of his angry whining videos earlier today, about how all the women on ok cupid are communists and how feminism has stolen his Right to have a woman in his house to take care of all ensuing babies and social interactions for him and it made me feel really happy.

This reminded me of the old ‘nice guys of OK Cupid’ tumblr which is sadly defunct, full of self-described ‘nice guys’ whose answers to the various questions screamed ‘Avoid!’ (such as ‘a no is just a yes that needs a little persuasion’ and gross stuff like that). Proper ‘Incel’ territory.

Poor Tim. I probably know a few gay guys who dig that chubby, bearded, boyish look, though they’d have better taste than to go near some far-right enabler.

 

[DaveCinzano]

He's getting a bit antsy about the questioning of his revenues...

 

[DaveCinzano]

Thus just popped into my timeline

 

[DotCommunist]

this facial recognition beating mask looks familiar:

 

[SpineyNorman]

There's a crowd funded porn themed video game (at least I think that's what it is) called subverse. Apparently Pool used to call one of his websites or something subverse and there was some drama where I think he tried to Sue him (not sure and to continue the theme of this thread and as a tribute to @anudderoik I'm not going to actually research or check the veracity of any of this).

So just to fuck with him they've put an obvious parody of him in the game in the shape of a crab called dim fool.

I think this happened about 6 months ago but missed it at the time.

 

[DaveCinzano]

"Beanie shopping network"

 

[Pickman's model]

Anudder Oik

 

[rekil]

He reckons squid game is a critique of communism.

Being thick got him that big house so why not.

Spoiler

 

[SpineyNorman]

He also thought trump was going to get a 50 state landslide in 2020. Imagine how much of a dickhead you'd need to be to get taken in by him. He's not even a clever grifter.