Encore: Jubilee Is Making Debating Worse
Slate Technology
Slate
4.6 • 636 Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s encore episode, hosts Candice Lim and Kate Lindsay are joined by Slate staff writer Aymann Ismail to discuss the controversial YouTube channel, Jubilee. A video of political commentator Mehdi Hasan debating 20 far-right republicans has gone viral, but as Ismail argues in his piece for Slate, it also crossed a line. When political disagreement becomes content and extremism is rewarded with clicks, everybody loses.
This podcast is produced by Daisy Rosario, Vic Whitley-Berry, Candice Lim, and Kate Lindsay.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, I'm Candice Lem. |
| 0:14.8 | And I'm Kate Lindsay. |
| 0:16.4 | And you're listening to I see why am I. |
| 0:18.4 | In case you missed it. |
| 0:20.0 | Slate's podcast about internet culture. |
| 0:22.1 | And Candace, I don't think you nor I are marked safe from the plague that is Jubilee. |
| 0:29.1 | No, no, no, no, no. |
| 0:31.3 | No, I mean, they are at every other TikTok on my For You page. |
| 0:36.3 | When I was on Twitter, the videos were being shared around. |
| 0:40.7 | It is like, it is the new, the new upworthy, the new dodo. |
| 0:46.1 | The new monoculture internet rage bait. |
| 0:49.4 | It's everywhere. |
| 1:00.7 | But these past few weeks, Jubilee has been going viral, like crazy viral, even by Jubilee standards for a video that they posted on July 20th, and that video is titled, One Progressive |
| 1:07.7 | versus 20 far-right conservatives in parentheses featuring Medi Hassan. |
| 1:13.3 | That video has had 10 million views in two weeks. And like for context, they have videos in |
| 1:18.7 | their most popular that have been up for months that have about the same amount. And so it's |
| 1:22.4 | popping off. And not only is the video crazy, but sort of the ripple effect it's had is also wild. So |
| 1:28.7 | one of these 20 far-right conservatives is a 24-year-old named Connor Estelle. He actually |
| 1:33.8 | lost his job from some of the heinous things that he said in the video and then immediately |
| 1:39.5 | managed to turn it into a crowdfunding campaign that at the time of recording has $39,000. |
| 1:45.9 | Candace, did you watch this video? |
| 1:50.8 | Watched as a, yeah, that's too passive a word for what it did to my body. |
... |
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