Some More News - Revisiting Some News: The Negative Effects of Toxic Nostalgia

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

Hi. Today on the podcast feed we're re-releasing our September 2025 episode "The Negative Effects of Toxic Nostalgia," with a new introduction from Cody Johnston about how great it is that we're already nostalgic for an episode we made in the before-times of... September 2025. Watch the original episode: https://youtu.be/qEddowzqOQEYou may think things were better in the '80s or '90s – when things weren't so gosh darned political – but what you're forgetting is that you were 12. Nostalgia, while fine in small doses, is also readily used as propaganda for fascists.Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by Thomas ReimannProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by John ConwayPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, everybody. Do you ever look out your window on a cool summer's eve or on a cozy winter's night or a sleepy Sunday's morning or any week, month's day of the time of day, and think, wow, I wish I were 12 still? Well, folks, you're not alone. Everyone just can't stop talking about how they wish they were 12 and watching commercials, even if they don't really know that's what they're saying. Of course, we're talking about the seductive and sometimes destructive power of nostalgia. Yes, folks, we are already feeling nostalgic for our episode about nostalgia that came out like 11 months ago. Because 11 is so close to 12, which we all wish we could be again. Anyway, as you might have guessed, rerun. It's a rerun today. So for this intro, I just wanted to share this

funny single moment from, I'm sorry, Los Angeles mayoral hopeful and failure Spencer Pratt. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. And I might even be sorry, but it's happening. So on the 4th of July Independence Day, Spencer Pratt, who failed to become a nominee for mayor of L.A., made an angry response video to a separate video made by mayoral hopeful and success, Zoran Mamdani. Mom Dani, of course, talked about the, let's say, problems with a lot of American history. He talked about immigration, he praised, gasp, descent, et cetera, and so forth.

Pratt, however, took this to mean that Mamdani wanted to, like, do Sharia communism and delete history to rebuild it in his image and all that stuff. At one point, he said when we came to America originally, we, quote, reclaimed a beauty. beautiful slice of earth, reclaimed? Because we had it before? The implication, of course, is that white Europeans are ordained by God, and implicitly and spiritually already owned the land. So we reclaimed it from the savages or whatever. It's stupid.

He's stupid. I'm not going to get into the details of the 7 to 8 minute long video. This is all just context for this next part. Hit it, Spencer. History is what anchors you. It's what makes us attach to something. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. History breeds an almost irrational attachment to things,

an attachment that is more powerful than anyone can imagine. Okay, stop, stop, stop, Spencer, stop talking, please. I won't play more of it. He's annoying, we all know, et cetera, and so forth. But yeah, great point, Spencer Pratt is, I guess, what I'm getting at here. Nostalgia is indeed a hell of a drug that breeds an, almost irrational attachment to things. Thank you, Spencer, for saying that, even though you were saying it positively, as if you're, like, going to now use that as a tool in your arsenal for

your stupid propaganda that you're going to do. He's going to do like a weird Prager You knockoff thing, like Pratt you, I don't know what's called. Stupid. Anyway, that's that. Here's our nostalgia episode from less than a year ago. Yo, yo, yo, it's Rad Cody. Roady. Here's some rad Roady news. Remember rollerblades? Why aren't the kids today always on rollerblades like we were? They're just about the coolest thing you've ever seen. I've ever seen. I had ever seen when I was 12.

Boy, do I miss being 12. The future was so bright. Your rollerblades had to wear shades. Oh, and here's some more news. Gosh, the old days were just so, you know? Am I right? And kids today. Boo!

Seems like kids aren't even 12 anymore. Have you seen a single 12 year old? They don't exist. Remember when TV was better too? Oh, we had so many shows like, I don't know. Evening Shade, I guess? Burt Reynolds used to visit us at home every week. These new shows on streaming put out like six episodes every two years,

and Burt Reynolds is in almost none of them. You used to be able to depend on your favorite TV show friends, and also the TV show Friends, to be there for you nine months out of every year with some reruns and breaks for summer and sweeps week. Oh, sweeps week when we'd get made for TV movies based on books by Stephen King or Peter Benchley. Look what they took from us.

Because these days, yeesh. I mean, remember those recent Star Wars films, folks. Yeesh. Oh, I just saw the most recent Jurassic Park movie, Jurassic Park 7, Dead Reckoning, Part 1, a Jurassic World story from the world of Jurassic Park? It's a reboot of the Jurassic World films, which were already a reboot, a movie that's asking me to feel nostalgic for a franchise that ended three years ago with the worst dinosaur movie ever made, and that includes the movie Dinosaur. Unbelievable. Things are just

not what they used to be, or at least they're not what I remember them too. to have been. And I really wish things could go back to the way I remember them to have been. So I guess I'll just, I don't know. Embrace fascism? I mean, what choice do I have? They changed the Cracker Barrel logo. Toxic nostalgia.

Remember when they got mad at the new Cracker Barrel logo so mad that the company had to change their logo back? I super need to talk about that. later because it's actually somehow important to this thesis. Everything might hinge on the Cracker Barrel logo. It could be the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of this whole thing. But to start, it just seems like lately nostalgia sucks. Not necessarily the stuff we're nostalgic for, but the act of being nostalgic. Yes, I'm saying I'm nostalgic for when nostalgia was better.

Not just on one side of the equation, both the corporations appealing to our nostalgia and our obsession with it have grown monstrous and boring and sad. And I want to explore that in this episode and declare at the top of this that nostalgia is actually kind of dead. We have killed it without realizing it and are now batting its body around like a golden retriever bonding with a decomposed gerbil. And this is not the only, but one of the reasons

that so many people are either really bummed out or in this alternate reality where fascism is good and cool. because the world is scary. And for a lot of us, it seems like there's nothing we can do to change it. And you can either be really depressed about that, but still have hope for humanity that we can power through and work together for a better world, or retreat into an alternate reality where everything is actually fine. Personally, I'm on the fence.

It's just, I'm still so damn nostalgic. Remember 1995? Back when the colors seemed a little brighter on our Batman Forever t-shirts, T-Pock was still with us, Snap bracelets cut lead poisoning right into our wrists, bodaciously. Even OJ had a good year. Sure, white supremacists blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, but other than that, things weren't so political.

You know, everything is so political these days. Even this show, remember when we weren't so damn political here on some more news? Warmbo and Katie were there more. We even made a movie. Oh, those were the tays. Back in 2020, when things weren't so darn, so gosh darn political. It was like one big summer vacation then,

watching Tiger King and the Great British bake off all day long, ordering McDonald's for every meal of the day, getting to watch blockbuster films at home, like The Little Things and Moulon, those who wish me dead, the lovebirds, infinite, locked down, the Tomorrow War. So great, how we were all at home doing that and those things, for reasons that I forget.

You know what? I'm going to go back and watch the Some More News movie, okay? It's been too long. Such a fun movie we all love equally and remember fondly. Remember David Cross was in it. And when Warmbo stole the Challenger wreckage to take us all to his very informative home planet, Lorimbo, oh, that was the best. We should make another movie, or just remake the last one.

Who knows? Okay, everyone hold on while I watch this. 8,127 seconds later, Mr. Cody. Wait, so Warmba wasn't in that at all? He's just a featured extra? He doesn't even play Warmbo with the puppet version of some guy named Cody. They must have changed it.

Damn you, Lucas! Bring back the Warmbo cut! Okay, maybe, maybe. Maybe our versions of the past aren't as reliable as we think. Perhaps, no matter how clear your memories may seem to you, the reality is that they're fuzzy and selective and mostly based on your point of view rather than an accurate recollection of events. You may have had a great time at the roller rink, shredding wood in your sick-ass roadie blades at Jackson's eighth-grade birthday party,

but you weren't the one too busy having diarrhea in the family restroom because that's the only one that locks. In fact, there are studies showing that we tend to forget the negative emotions of a memory faster than the positive ones. And at least one psychologist believes that to be an evolutionary function for our survival. We have built-in rose-colored glasses. But interpreting your happy memories as some kind of universal truth about how great the world used to be, ignores the fact that nearly half the world's population has never and will never be able to afford a pair of rollerblades.

Plus, there's the fact that we human beings notoriously edit our memories, whether deliberately or subconsciously. And every time you call those memories up, they get a little fuzzier, requiring your brain to fill in more and more gaps, like swapping in bullfrog DNA to make a velocisaurus. We don't have good hard drives, is my point. Which is ironic because it's actually kind of similar to how AI works, in that these language learning models aren't having independent thoughts so much as scraping together existing chunks of ideas and smashing them together like a kid winging it through a spelling bee.

And when they start scraping those ideas for new content and then those ideas and so on and so on, you wind up with something truly cursed. Our memories are a lot like when ChatGPT was asked to render the exact same image of the rock over and over and over again and ended up with this thing. Look at it. Keep looking at it. Don't look away. Look at this thing. Look at it. Looks like if ritual suicide was a Pokemon card. This is all to say that this country has been in a vice-like grip of blinding, unreliable, and increasingly toxic nostalgia to the point where every single decision at the national level is being fueled by hot rage over the loss of a mythical past

when America was a noble, ordered utopia, and there's a really obvious and clear reason that nostalgia has gotten this way. I think the instinct is to assume that we've always been this stuck in the past. Heck, the onion did a bit about it in 1997. But again, I'm not denying that nostalgia has always existed, but claiming that nostalgia has gotten worse.

And I think we all know what's to blame for that. Uh, 9-11? Yes. Actually, sort of. Your joke was correct, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. It's worth noting that while nostalgia is worse now, it's not the worst it's ever been because nostalgia was originally seen as a mental disorder. Specifically, the term was coined way back in the 17th century by Johannes Hofer to explain the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers returning home from combat. But nobody really understood PTSD yet. These were the days when a shell-shocked infantryman would be called jelly-lil. and have his ankles removed in debtor's prison or whatever.

But while it was a blanket term to cover several symptoms, the word itself more specifically referred to extreme homesickness. The condition became even more widely discussed during the Civil War as soldiers struggled with depression, hallucinations, and suicidal ideation. Again, all symptoms we now understand are associated with extreme trauma, but were classified at the time as people just really wanting to go back home to a simpler time. You know, before they were being shot at. As mental health understanding began to grow more sophisticated in the 20th century,

nostalgia was rewritten, rebooted, if you will, into a broad term for general feelings of wistfulness and longing for a bygone time. Nostalgia as an industry was alive as early as the 70s, probably way earlier. Cave men were probably rebooting the stick puppet shows they saw as a kid. And so today we mostly understand nostalgia. as being really into Thundercats. But it also refers to longing for the days when gas was less than a dollar a gallon, or when everything was hair gel and frosted tips,

or for some, it's longing for when you could wear a fedora without looking like a dickhead and women couldn't vote. Put a pin in that, we're coming back to it in just a few Meat Man reboots. That's a superhero, right? Meat Man? I guess that's all of them, actually. The point is, nostalgia will always be with us. us. It's fine. But that history sort of also explains why we've had such a huge surge of

nostalgia lately, and specifically for anyone born from the late 70s to the early odds. Because going back to that original trauma definition, well, do you think that perhaps there are a lot of national traumas this generation has been dealing with? Let me think. Oh, right, the 9-11 thing. Yeah, yeah, sure. Iraq war. That one too. Sure, sure, sure. Can't forget the big short. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, school shootings, don't want to leave out all those dead kids. Oh, COVID. Oh, well, COVID. All right, what else? January 6th, definitely can't forget the coup, no matter how hard we try. Anything else?

Um, yeah, that genocide. So, we've really been through a lot together over the past 25 years, is my point. If only there were some way to make us all heal and unite. Can't. Don't start singing. I wasn't gonna. Geez, although if I had, it was gonna be a bitch and cover of Lits, my own worst enemy. They were lit before LIT was lit. So America has had a wicked run of tragic events.

Bursts of violence, which we individually have no way to stop or control. Not to mention the constant knowledge that climate change will, of course, make our futures worse. We've talked about it in previous episodes, but everyone is sort of dealing with this in different ways. For conservatives, they've funneled all that anxiety into blaming this unseen cabal of who they believe are actually making things worse. But everyone is kind of on the dissociation spectrum. And the most common tactic was already primed at the start of the millennium. The 2000s began the era of endless sequels, which in the late 2000s blossomed into reboots

on top of those sequels, into the 2020s era of meta reboots and sequels where the characters seem aware of what they are doing. Endless crossovers and nonsense, cinematic universes, and so on. We don't have to sit here and complain about the state of blockbusters, mainly because we already have. But this is all to say that since Marvel released Iron Man in 2008, we've had two Spider-Man reboots, two Batman reboots,

two Superman reboots, two Indiana Jones sequels, three Lord of the Rings prequels, and a TV show, and another film on the way, one and a half Harry Potter series, Five Star Wars movies, about a dozen canceled Star Wars movies, three alien movies and a TV show, a Men in Black sequel and a Men in Black reboot, and endless Disney live action reboots, which are the same movies they released 30 years ago, only bad and longer. Over at DC, they're actually remaking an entire cinematic universe.

Oh, and there's also been two Ninja Turtles reboots, two Transformers reboots, a Charlie's Angels reboot, a new space jam that was the cinematic equivalent of walking through Blockbuster and pointing at things, a Hunger Games prequel and a second reboot on the way, Father of the Bride and Cheaper by the Dozen, a Red Sonia and Conan remake, a Star is Born, a Mummy Dark Universe reboot attempt, which was rebooted with an Invisible Man and a Wolfman,

Nusferatu technically counts, those Trons, a Power Rangers reboot, a Tomb Raider reboot, a Dread reboot, the Crow reboot, Scoob, a Roadhouse reboot with a sequel on the way, a Jacob's Ladder remake, a Haunted Mansion reboot, two Ghostbusters reboots, three Predator reboots or spin-offs or something, the naked gun sequel, two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels,

three Scream sequels, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Candy Man, Jeepers Creepers Reborn, two Hellboy reboots, Freaky Fridays, Annie, two Robin Hoods. I think that's it. We've also made a bunch of movies based on our old toys and games, such as Battleship, G.I. Joe, Ouigi, Legos, Barbie, and D&D. Roughly like 80% of all movies based on toys or games have been made since 2000. Oh, also, there was a house party, that old boy remake.

There was a Shaft sequel, a Soft Oceans 11 reboot, an Evil Dead reboot, Eli Roth's Death Wish, Point Break, Poltergeist, Red Dawn, Robocop, Total Recall, The Running Man, Overboard, The Remake, Resident Evil, Welcome to Raccoon City, a Star Trek universe reboot, and a ton of lukewarm series and films in that reboot, A Matrix reboot, a Suicide Squad reboot to a Suicide Squad film made four years earlier. Fire Starter and It and Children of the Corn and Carrie and the Dark Tower, the Toxic Avenger, The Craft Legacy with David Dukovny, a Pet Cemetery sequel with David DuCovny, also that other Pet Cemetery and Witchboard, three Terminator reboots,

a thrilling War of the World's reimagining, a Beetlejuice legacy sequel, a sequel to a Halloween reboot, and a Requel, which is a sequel reboot, a reboot of the remake of The Grud, the first omen, a prequel to the Omen, The Exorcist Believer, a failed legacy reboot, a ducktail, and Zero Blade Films. We've stagnated, is my point. At least when it comes to mainstream culture, and millennials and Gen X specifically. You don't need me to tell you all of that. You know that already. And while I love blaming things on 9-11, like how I was late to file my taxes this year, it's not the only reason for

this. Yes, we have all undergone multiple collective traumas that only seem to get worse, which encourages us to escape into our nostalgia like a womb, but that womb had to be available in the first place. That womb was opened up, which I'm now realizing is a disgusting metaphor that I regret committing to. Let's do some ads. Remember ads? Oh, we love ads. We'll do some ads, maybe for street sharks, and then we'll return to talk about the second component. to this nostalgia problem, and how it became toxic, and the very worst place it's all heading.

Stay tuned. Remember the movie Stay tuned? It had that pedophile guy in it. Stay tuned, I mean. We were talking about stay tuned before the break, remember? It's fine if you don't remember. Also before the break, we were discussing as a family how this country has undergone a series of traumatic events

that's made it very easy for us to escape into our fuzzy and rosy memories of the past. specifically boosted by studio executives pushing remakes and sequels and adaptations. It's nobody's fault except for George Lucas and Osama bin Laden. Just those two. Oh, and Al Gore, inventor of the internet. Those three, because that's the second component to all of this, the merging element that created the perfect storm of nostalgia, the World Wide Web, Cyberspace, the Net, remember the Net?

See, while our actual memories are fuzzy, all the TV shows, and movies and commercials themselves have been perfectly preserved thanks to this internet. VH1 gave us some nostalgia with I Love the 70s, I Love the 80s, I Love the 90s, and fucking I love the odds. But then Al Gore gave us the internet, so now literally all of us are able to do I love the everything. All of it, all the time. I love just all of it. The entirety of human thought and existence is now available 24-7, something that never existed before 20 years ago, which means it's much easier to stay mired in nostalgia for the things you loved as a kid. Because they're always there for you. They never went away. You want to see that episode of Next

Generation where Beverly Crusher fucks a ghost? You can right now in HD. Remember lost? I know I do. You don't have to remember it at all, though. You can just go watch it again. And so when you think about it, How could modern TV and movies compete with that? It's hard to be gassed up about the 40 episodes of Stranger Things being spread out over 10 fucking years when you can pop on Supernatural, a show that made 20 plus episodes a season for 15 goddamn seasons. There are 327 episodes of Supernatural. They made 86 new episodes since Stranger Things first debuted. Check out this podcast, they talk about it.

It's not bad that we have this. It's probably good that we now have all of human knowledge available to all of us, including the complete works of Shakespeare and also that one episode of Briscoe County Jr. where he goes to the Bates Motel for some reason. The problem is that culture is meant to be iterative. Just like anything else, it should evolve and build on itself. Indiana Jones was just George Lucas and Steven Spielberg doing their version of the adventure series, they watched as kids.

Star Wars was what George Lucas settled on making after he couldn't get the rights to do Flash Gordon. And then both of those movies became genres unto themselves, inspiring further iterations of the same concepts like National Treasure, The Fifth Element, Firefly, the Mummy, crawl, etc. The late 70s and early 80s were dominated by sci-fi fantasy films all trying to replicate the success of Star Wars.

But after a while, pop culture moved on to the next thing. Talking Babies. We didn't stay stuck in 15 years of Star Wars sequels, spin-offs, and reboots. Art has always used nostalgia as a source of inspiration. But when nostalgia is the only inspiration, you're just reheating the same old socks. It's like a time loop, like that Star Trek episode where Picard meets another version of himself that's stuck in this time loop and too hyper-focused to realize it. Oh, remember the new Picard show?

Yes, they brought back data and the Enterprise D, despite both of those things having exploded. They even brought back Professor Moriarty from those goddamn Holodeck episodes. Everyone cheer for Professor Moriarty! I remember that! Look, even without digging into the psychology of it all, a society whose culture is stuck in an infinite loop simply can't be good, right? Like, just stepping back from that. Imagine an episode of Star Trek or Star Trek Picard, where they land on a planet where everyone is just telling the same handful of stories over and over and over again.

You would instinctively know that such a thing would have deep repercussions spanning far outside of entertainment. It can't be good, right? To be stuck in the same place culturally for decades with no end in sight? Shoot, there's a name for that, a specific name for a period of cultural backsliding. It's right on the dark of my ages. but I can't quite dark ages it. Ah, oh well, it'll dark ages to me.

Oh, remember dark forces? Ooh, you don't have to. It's on Steam. You can play it. You can play it with the rise of the triad and Commander Keene and all the other shit you loved. Again, that's not bad, but stagnation and regression are bad. It's why I said that nostalgia was dead at the start of this.

Remember that? Everything we ever loved is either still available to us or never ended. And that's new and weird. A good example of this is The Simpsons. We love The Simpsons. We all go re-watch the Good Seasons because they are all still available. And also, new episodes, because it's still on. We refuse to let The Simpsons end.

It is the longest-running primetime scripted TV series ever. It has been on for 36 years. And what makes it so weird is that it's the perfect metaphor for our cultural stagnation, because no one on the show is allowed to age. That's unique. There are a lot of soap operas and game shows that have run for longer than The Simpsons. But as a cartoon, everyone stays immortal.

It had to rewrite its own history half a dozen times because of that. Marge and Homer originally met in 1974, which would put Marge in her 70s and Homer at least 11 years in the grave. For them to still be in their mid-30s in 2025 at the time of this recording, They would have had to have been in high school in 2008. Their first date was probably going to see Iron Man.

The show has had to change Homer and Marge's memories and backstories so many times they're completely different characters. Here's a clip of a recent flashback episode. It all began six years ago. The president of back then was the president. Funnily enough, six seconds before that, Bart complains about how many Planet of the Apes movies they keep making. But in that episode, Bart and Lisa are little kids again.

Bart even has the clown bed still. Six years earlier in the show. Bart and Lisa, the ones that exist today, grew up in the 2010s. And if you're curious, the first clown bed episode was from Lisa's first word, which was a flashback to 1983. So 1983 is now six years ago. Except that episode I just showed you was from 2015 10 years ago. I know this is an animated comedy show,

and time doesn't matter. and most of these shows do this. But it's still very surreal when you've been alive for the entire show. It's like a Twilight Zone episode where this family is all stuck in this one moment of time. The nostalgia of a single 71-year-old man, the only indication of progression being the aging of their voices. Again, other shows are like this too. But when it starts to span decades, it starts to feel more and more like Groundhog Day.

Remember Groundhog Day? We only see the suicides he does in that. But there were murders. You know there were murders. This is all just another now old-ass movie, multiplicity. It's a copy of a copy of a copy. That AI video of The Rock, the voices of Marge and Homer aging while their bodies stay the same. This is all to say that we've created this ideal environment to toxify our nostalgia. We have unreliable memories that naturally cherry-picked the pleasant emotions over the negative ones. Then, there's this unprecedented access to old pop culture, these fake and rosy versions of the past

that we can recall crystal clear. So it's no wonder people will start glorifying the past, even pasts that people weren't born or sentient in. And then you add trauma to it. Research has found that nostalgia can be a regulatory response to help get you through a difficult period, such as going through a bad breakup or returning home from Jurassic World Four. That's why we all turn to our old favorite shows and movies to slog through lockdown. Of course I checked in with Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, she's all alone on the frontier. But even though psychologists recognize the benefits it can provide, they also stress that you can't stay mired in nostalgia for too long because regressing to the past is just avoidance.

While some level of avoidance is okay and even necessary in extremely traumatic situations, Avoidance is also what keeps you trapped in that trauma reaction, unable to heal and move forward. I'm so sorry I have to do this. I really am. Please forgive me, but there's an episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9, literally about this. It's where Nag, that's Quark's nephew or Rom's son, Quark's nephew or Rom's, I don't know. He becomes a member of Starfleet, I guess. He might even be the first Ferengi to do so. I'll have to look into it. And Nag goes to war, like a really fucked up and messed up war. And during his time at war, he keeps listening to a cover of the song, I'll be seeing you, sung by their hollow deck lounge singer Vic Fontaine.

Don't worry about it. The hollow deck is like a big video game. Nog then injures his leg during the war, comes home, and retreats into the hollow deck and becomes roommates with Vic Fontaine, demanding to hear that song, I'll be seeing you over and over. He regresses into this weird fake 1960s Las Vegas simulation because of his trauma in the war. And at first, everyone lets it happen until they realize that Nog isn't healing. His leg still hurts.

He can't get over the war because he's just stuck in this fake little nostalgia world running a nightclub with Vick, who kind of become self-aware during this time. Don't worry about it. They devoted like seven goddamn episodes to Vick for some reason, including a heist episode where, interestingly enough, Captain Sisko points out that the era everyone is getting nostalgic for was extremely racist, and it's weird and wrong to treat it so fondly. You really want to know what my problem is? I'll tell you, Las Vegas, 1962, that's my problem.

In 1962, black people weren't very welcome there. Oh, sure, they could be performers or janitors, but customers never. Maybe that's the way it was in the real Vegas, but that is not the way it is at Vix. I have never felt uncomfortable. there and neither has Jake. But don't you see, that's the lie. In 1962, the Civil Rights Movement was still in its infancy. It wasn't an easy time for our people, and I'm not going to pretend that it was.

It is cool that we can just find and show a clip of that. Thanks, Internet. That episode, like all of Deep Space Nine, was pretty ahead of its time. See, when that came out in the 90s, they were having their own nostalgia for eras like the 60s, and even earlier. These episodes were pointing out that, while there's nothing wrong with indulging that nostalgia, a lot of the 90s, little bit, you have to remember the reality of that time and you can't get lost in it. In this case, literally in it via Holodeck. And so here we are in our terrible future present being fed Slop AI videos like this.

You know the 80s miss you, right? Let me guess. No one even talks face to face anymore. Here? We're out until the street lights come on. You should stay. The world feels real here. Kids, the 80s sucked. Nothing looked like that.

Everything smelled like cigarette smoke. Blockbuster sucked, you know. They gouged you on late fees and were too expensive. Arcades sucked. The video game sucked. How long do you think you really want to play Gallagher? That robot is lying to you. This is toxic nostalgia, creating a false memory and begging you to get lost in it.

But you can't. Do not go there. Do not stay. You simply can't dwell in it. It's like the hot tub at a holiday inn. It's nice for exactly as long as it takes you to realize that the water feels like soup. It's just a bowl of strangers brought to a light boil. In many ways, nostalgia is exactly like a cummy old jacuzzi.

You always remember it being a way better time than it actually was, and if you stay in it too long, you become deluded. And cummy. And speaking of cummy old soup, we're gonna finally talk about Cracker Barrel changing their logo, and a bunch of right-wing weirdos freaking out about it, and also the one Democratic Party account trying to score culture war points against people who hate them. Great job, guys. Now, this might not seem as important as, say, the president having ties to a child sex trafficker.

But hear me out. Because it's not just that Cracker Barrel changed their logo and people got mildly upset. I mean, the old new logo did look worse than the new old logo. If people just went online and pointed that out, made a few jokes or whatever, who cares? But the freak out over Cracker Barrel really illustrates the rock bottom of toxic nostalgia and wear it all heads because the specific accusation from some conservatives was that this brand change was woke. Here's known idiot Chris Rufo going off on the wokeification of the new logo and waging like a holy war against Cracker Barrel. But when you think about it, you know, hey, hi.

What? I'm sorry, I keep staring at the new logo and looking for the woke and then looking at the old logo and trying to find the non-woke that was removed. Is it the barrel or the cracker? Was that honky some kind of civil war general? Can an expert on wokeness please explain to me what the big problem is? It's a bad move. It's a very bad move. It is getting rid of historic IP in favor of something absolutely and ridiculously generic.

Oh, okay. I guess I see what that child is saying. Like if something is historic, like a restaurant that I assume has deep historical roots in our country, it's a bad move to erase that rich history. Still not seeing how it's woke, but go on. So when it first opened in 1969, apparently Cracker Barrel had a logo with Just Text. In 1977, it updated its logo to have that dude who is resting by the barrel. I'm sorry, Ben, did you say 1977? Right, so this historical IP, as he put it, is as old as Sarah Michelle Geller. Even Cracker Barrel itself wasn't created until 1969. More specifically, it was invented by a Shell Oil middle manager who wanted to sell more gas. That's it, buddy. That historic logo was created by a graphic artist named Bill Hawley who designed it on a napkin.

The man in that logo, the one that this steak and shake. tweet is treating like the image of Jesus Christ, he's nobody. It's Ronald fucking McDonald. It's a hollow corporate entity for families to stop at on their way to Yellowstone National Park. And changing that is, according to some conservatives, Woke! They're freaking out over a corporate logo, not even an old one, that they are treating like a piece of American history. And that's the final piece of this. Almost everything we're nostalgic for came about no differently than this one chain restaurant logo. There's a whole show about this starring the guy from 30 Rock, this romantic

idea of a golden age America, where folks treated each other better, is almost completely fabricated. After all, we aren't feeling nostalgia for history textbooks. We're feeling nostalgia for movies and TV and advertisements. Fake reality. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. In case you haven't seen the show, Don Draper too sells himself as this ideal, decent family man, when in reality he is an alcoholic philanderer. He is an advertisement. It's a great show you should watch it. And this is actually the case with much of what we can see

cornerstones of American culture, the nuclear family, the two-car garage, the doofy hats these freaks love, even the Pledge of Allegiance. All of it was invented by an advertising agency. No really, the Pledge of Allegiance was a PR stunt. The concept of rugged cowboys, even before the Marlboro Man was invented ironically by Democrats or Dixiecrats or whatever after the Civil War as something for ex-soldiers to do. You might notice that when Nazis or dopes or MAGA or whomever post about what they took from us or the good old days. It's usually accompanied by an ad for like Super Nintendo. It's Mad Men all the way down. They're furious and they don't know why. Like Don Draper,

they're mythologizing the past and faking the present to avoid the future and the past, I guess. This mythologizing of and reverence for a false past can be very effective. And it can be seen in the Trump administration's taking over of the Smithsonian and the infusion of history he prefers, as well as in Ghostbusters' Afterlife. In that film, the granddaughter of Egon Spangler goes into his old secret basement and we see the dusty Ecto 1. Oh, we see the proton packs, all of our favorite memories. The music swells. We have so many emotions. Oh, look, the original suit! And what's that in the pocket? What? Am I supposed to know what that is? Or even worse, cheer at the candy bar?

What is that referencing? You gonna take back some of the things I said about you. You've earned it. Oh, it's a throwaway joke in like the first 10 minutes of the first movie about Bill Murray's character being kind of a sarcastic dickhead. Also, as you might notice, it's just product placement, which is throughout the original film. Nostalgia for product placement. Oh my gosh, oh, I can't believe they put the Nestley candy bar in the new gun. Ghostbusters!

Hazzah! Let's pray to the candy bar! Let's pray to the Cracker Barrel Man! Our favorite... Corporate logo! Of course, people like Ben probably do know all of this deep down inside, because there is still another layer to this. The thing conservatives are actually nostalgic for,

and the reason why toxic nostalgia is actually hurting more than just our psychological states. Because when all of pop culture keeps making you remember the 80s and 90s, it's easy for some gigantic asshole who was famous in the 80s and 90s to show up and start a political movement based entirely around making America like the 80s again. Try to imagine a world where that happens while we take a quick break to watch some ads, most likely for things we loved as children, like cash for gold ads starring G. Gordon Liddy or breast milk.

Gosh, remember breast milk? What happened to breast milk? Nobody I know drinks breast milk anymore. It's ever that one guy. So we were talking about Cracker Barrel and the reality that the things we are nostalgic for and associate with old American values were largely made up to sell things. But we never really solved why conservatives are calling Cracker Barrel woke, did we? I guess, ultimately, because it changed.

That's kind of it. That's what's so incredible about the Cracker Barrel freak out. The realization that the wokeness they are mad about is simply the concept of change and modern A thing they allegedly liked as a kid got changed, likely because of corporate meddling, and that upset them. And then we all had to watch as they backwards engineered a way to blame the wokes for it. So I'm not sure what Cracker Barrel is doing here. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Cracker Barrel does, of course, have many DEI initiatives. If you take a look at their corporate website, they have the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, Alliance.

Hey, Ben, what do gay people have to do? do with the fucking new Cracker Barrel logo. You can tell even he isn't convinced, but it's just going through the motions, because he's got to tie it to the wokes instead of boring capitalism and corporate idiocy. That's his job now. When conservatives get angry about anything but especially change, they inevitably tie it to diversity. Because now that we're all mired in nostalgia, it's easy for certain people to use that nostalgia to push an idea that we need to go back to this fabled time and that any change from it is an attack and that these things are and were being taken away from us. By whom? Oh, you know who.

Uh-oh, it's fascism. Shucks. See, another thing about nostalgia is that it works really well with deeply regressive policies. After all, you know who else really romanticizes the past? Racists. And it's really easy to slowly steep that. in with the larger nostalgia and try to see the idea that the past was better because of bigotry. It's why the rallying cry of the Trump era is, make America great again. The entire movement is steeped in toxic nostalgia for a bygone era when everything was somehow better while painting the present and future as unlivable wastelands of crime and depravity.

It's been so effective that a majority of Americans believe life is worse now than it was 50 years ago, according to a poll by Pew Research Center. That number jumped from 41% in 2017 to 58% in 2023, meaning that nostalgia has rotted half the country's brains so much that they believe America was better off in 1973, a time when we were limping out of the Vietnam War and into gasoline rationing. And sure, a lot of things about the modern world suck.

It's why we do this show, but way more things sucked in the 1970s. Even Star Wars. That was Star Wars. I mean, okay, the Eritz Tridge is the best. I'm not gonna pretend that there weren't things from this era that were better than today. The levels of union membership and the tax rates for the rich were better in the past. But those aren't the things these people are nostalgic for, are they?

That's not how they want to make America great again. Is it? And it's not just America. Brexit, Germany's Reichberger movement and far-right political Uprising, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. These are all things fueled by nostalgia, specifically the roiling nostalgia of fleshy white men and the white women who love them. But it isn't just a conservative tactic.

Bleeden Joe Iden's 2020 campaign heavily pushed a return to normalcy before Trumpism. Even after he was elected, Biden was still talking about going back to the before-for, to restore the soul of the nation and get things back to normal. What normal? Iraq war normal? Obviously the big difference here is Biden's messaging is about maintaining the status quo, invoking the idea of relative peace and calm, while Trumpism and similar far-right movements are about total societal regression,

a campaign of scorched earth revenge against whichever marginalized group they've decided is responsible, usually all of them. Nostalgia gives these movements the power to push explicit populism and overtly racist policies. It's like the nexus in Star Trek generation. It warps itself into whatever comforting memory you need it to be, even though it will destroy all of civilization around you in the process. It will also make you go horseback riding with William Shatner. Speaking of horse actors, even the MAGA movement itself is a nostalgic throwback to the Reagan era,

where the slogan, make America great again, originated, though obviously Make Germany Great Again was the original hit. Probably nothing to worry about there. Reagan, like Trump, represented a bygone era that never actually existed. Both of them are or were just fucking Hollywood elites playing a character as hollow as the Cracker Barrel guy. And of course, as I alluded to mere seconds ago, there's Hitler, the ultimate Cracker Barrel. Now, I know it's easy to make comparisons between the current administration and Nazi shit. You know, because of all the Nazi shit.

But preying on people with nostalgia is some Nazi shit. In fact, it's a constant theme among far right and fascist movements throughout history. Mr. H. campaigned on restoring Germany to the dominant empire it had been in the 18th and 19th centuries. That was the whole Third Reich idea. His regressive policies appealed to Germans struggling under the economic devastation wrought by the aftermath of World War I and the stock market crash in America. Employments dropped by nearly 50% in 1933. They were looking for some relief and a big strong German Empire sounded pretty good after the perceived failure of the Weimar Republic's democratic policies. Hitler and his propagandists argued that a racial purification of the nation

was necessary to restore German society and install the Third Reich because he was a racist shithead who wanted to be king of racist shitland. He even used national nostalgia to win support for his genocides, invoking a fantasy idea of Germanic barbarians of the ancient past endowed with the grim but noble purpose of maintaining order via the extermination of lesser humans. Seems like a bad guy. So in other words, Hitler convinced a whole country to turn traitor to the entire world and gleefully commit mass murder by hyping them up with a version of the past they'd never even heard before. But it gave them an enemy to blame for Germany's extreme poverty.

You know, instead of the government that dragged them all into the single most devastating war in history at the time. And so when you hear people post or say, look what they took from us, it's important to recognize that there are two parts to that. Some mythological state or time was taken from an in-group, and it was taken by a they, a target, an enemy to blame. That's how you weaponize nostalgia. We're seeing a similar situation play out in Germany today, with the far-right political party alternative for Germany polling at a record 26%. The AFD pushes its explicit anti-immigration platform by creating a crisis around reunification politics and the recent waves of immigration and asylum seekers,

Hey, what a familiar tactic. That's like the Hedrukken of racist politics. Researchers have studied the AFD's messaging and found that people tended to agree more with the party's populist messaging when it was gussied up and nostalgia for Germany's post-war economy. The irony being that Germany's post-war boom

wouldn't have been possible without opening its borders to foreign workers. But these movements are only concerned with the fake pass, not the real one. God, remember when we were talking about, Talking about Jurassic World, I am nostalgic for the start of this episode. Yes, even the Warmbo part. Anyway, over in Hungary, Victor Slick, Vick, Orban has remained prime minister since 2010, largely

by pushing a return to the former Kingdom of Hungary, which, like Germany, was pretty well shattered following World War I. Orban's nationalistic views are centered around Miklos Horthi, the former dictator of Hungary, who steered the country into fascism and anti-Semitism before World War II. So already several checks in the cons column. Orban has been courting Hungarian nationalism in part by offering citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people with Hungarian ancestry and funding strictly ethnic Hungarian communities both in and outside of the country.

Outside, meaning they didn't even have to live there to be considered a citizen. And hey, wouldn't you know it? All those ancestral Hungarians he graciously invited back to the homeland are only too happy to vote to keep him in power, including those ones that didn't actually live there. Even Mussolini, the Goldar to Hitler's Rita Repulsa, had some success with the nostalgia angle by pushing a return to the glorious Roman Empire. Similar to Hitler, he made vague promises of restoring Italy's greatness

by calling on a heavily mythologized version of the past, which proved to be a more difficult cell because most Italians weren't really interested in fighting a war, and Mussolini suffered a string of huge, embarrassing losses for most of the conflict. Just the worst player in the Axis fantasy football league. The strategy ultimately ended with him dangling upside down from an ESS station like a Marlin caught stealing gas. Unfortunately, Georgia Maloney, the current Prime Minister of Italy, is a fascist gremlin with such a deep nostalgia for Mussolini that her administration has been called the most far-right government since World War II.

So, not much has changed there, I guess, except I think that ESO is now a McDonald's, apparently. Mick, look what they Mick took from us. Eh, probably just as sturdy. So this is the inevitable result of toxic nostalgia. When people forget real history and replace it with a fake and rosy version, they inevitably forget the hardships and progress that got us here. This is the thinking that allows people like RFK Jr. to declare that autism simply didn't exist when he was a kid, when in reality it wasn't as well understood, so it wasn't being properly diagnosed. He just never heard about it because

he's a fucking Kennedy. He was too busy collecting rotten bear meat to feed his hawk. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has probably never heard of stamps. This is true for so many people who do nostalgia posting, whether it be for the 80s or 90s or oates or teens. They don't miss the way the world used to be. They miss being 12. That's it. You had fewer responsibilities and obligations and had a simpler understanding of the world. It was a simpler time. Yes, literally, for you, because you were 12. That's why you're posting the Super Nintendo ad and doing fascism. When you say, things didn't used to be political, yeah, you were 12. Racism wasn't an issue in the 90s. For you. You were white and black.

12! The world was better in the 60s for you. You were 12 or not even born yet. Nostalgia has gotten so accelerated and truncated that Gen Z is already nostalgic for the 2000s. And thanks to the internet they easily can be. Because also thanks to the internet, they know about everything happening in the world and to the world, and so they're understandably incredibly anxious about the future. So instead of thinking about the future, well... The 80s miss you. We all do. The world feels real here. Maybe it's time you came back. You coming or what?

You should stay. The point is that comparison I made to the Dark Ages earlier obviously wasn't that much of an exaggeration. Yes, many historians today seem to think that the term Dark Ages is a little overblown and overused and more applies to a lack of records than utter regression and stagnation. But colloquially, it's apt. Just take a look around us.

The country is crashing back into the past like a big rig driven by the T-1000 on his way to return a lottery ticket. I don't know why he'd need that money, but he does. Also, that's a 34-year-old reference, and it still makes sense because we're still making Terminator movies. It's like if I said something was this stuff dreams are made of, and everyone clapped because we're on season five of a reboot of the Maltese Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Nostalgia is fine in small doses, like heroin. Not everyone who is nostalgic will become a Nazi,

obviously, but you can't trust nostalgia. It's Freddie Kruger disguised as your dead mom. It's luring us into an objectively worse past by stapling a familiar comforting face to it. It's that AI video selling an illusion of a dream of a false memory and asking you to stay in it. It's why AI generative art is so well-suited for fascist propaganda. The White House certainly seems to think so. So much of AI art is a nostalgic loop of slop, a mix of comfortable and familiar things that hit that part of your brain just right. Hallucinated memories creating a mythic past with the false promise that you can return to it. But you can't.

And shouldn't. I mean, look at the rock! We are not going back! Because that is actually an impossible nightmare. To really drive this home and to bring all of today's points together, I'd like to show a clip for more than a year ago. It's from actual dumb guy Tim Poole, who here describes, seeing an AI video, feeling nostalgic for something that allegedly reminds him of being 12,

points out how addictive and powerful that feeling is, concludes that it's good, and then uses it to do fascist propaganda. Oh, there's a recently, I saw on Instagram an AI generated video, which created the most intense version of this feeling. I would say it's akin to some kind of nostalgia, some kind of like feeling of home. it was an AI video of a cabin with a full 20-foot glass wall, overlooked, from the hilltop, overlooking the town with heavy snow falling, a fireplace, and a TV playing cartoons.

And there's a reason why this video had like, you know, tens of thousands of likes and was being, you know, algorithmically pushed on Instagram. Because people from areas with winter know that feeling. There's my point. These feelings you get, and many of you know exactly the feeling I'm talking about, it feels good and you never want to let it go and you want it again and again. And when you're sitting in these moments, sipping a hot cocoa with a loved one with the lights turned low and the muffled snow just before, just during dusk in the winter, the clouds are out so it's, you know, very dim, but you can see outside and the lights of the city. You want to share that feeling. You want your children to know these feelings.

Something truly fascinating. Now, I think this is why people say, I'm upset when I hear that Muhammad is the most popular name because it's that thing you grew up with, that connection to your roots, to your history, that the feeling you get, it's going away. People are going to fight for that feeling. We didn't write that. That wasn't AI. He just, he just did all the stuff.

We didn't even need to do an episode about this. We could have just shown you that clip. Truly an incredible mind. Tim, do you really remember playing Super Nintendo near a full 20-foot glass wall? Hey Tim, that wasn't something akin to nostalgia. That was just nostalgia. Anyway, it's grim, man.

A remake of the brothers' grim? No. Not yet at least. Just grim. But it doesn't have to be this way. What we've largely been talking about in this case. about in this episode is what Svetlana Boym called restorative nostalgia, which is that feeling of extreme homesickness, a desperate need to return to and rebuild a lost home, which again may have never existed, romanticizing the past and ignoring the negative feelings associated

with it, and so we always need another hit. But nostalgia can also be reflective, where you accept that the past is the past, but you can still appreciate the feelings those memories evoke good or bad. You can still learn from them, lament them, all kinds of things. But you're not stuck in them and clawing your way back to the mirage that they are. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have the facts of life. The facts of life. There, another fucking 80s reference for you.

Point is, nostalgia doesn't have to be so negative and boring. We need to move forward, not back. Leave the Iron Man's in the fire for a little while. Let him roast, he deserves it. There's nothing wrong with indulging in some nostalgia once in a while But ultimately we gotta start making new things and that doesn't just mean new policies for the government Culture needs to become unstuck or else we're going to keep sitting here picking our butts like the rock biter Moping about how great it was when cereal came with poggs It's literally not literally but almost literally a spell of malaise being whispered

into our collective ears by Bradley Wormtong. Because even if it doesn't lead to outright fascism, it's stagnant and it's depression. We need to open the windows, get some fresh-ish air in here. We need to stop longing for a past we haven't remembered properly in years and start looking forward to possibility again, towards a better tomorrow, where every child will have rollerblades. And one where we probably don't do another some more news movie,

or not one for a little bit, I guess. At least not one where we go to Lorambeau. Nobody needs to know where he came from. No matter how many t-shirts he sells. And he sells almost none. He wanders away from the register after eight minutes. People just walk out with the shirts. You know what?

We'll probably do another movie. At some point, you gotta clean out my garage first. It's just, it is filled with rollerblades, top to bottom. I can't move these things. Maybe the sequel can be about Rollerblades. Oh, and there was that new West Side Story, and that prom night remake, The Magnificent Seven, Straw Dogs, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three, the Stepfather. Was that Fright Night remake after 2008?

Yes, yes, it was. House of Wax? No, that was before. But there's my big fat Greek wedding too, and also two Bridget Jones films, The Witches, that Fantasy Island horror reimagining. What was that? Oh my God! Coming to America!

2011's The Thing! Da Vinci Code sequels. Remember those? The Crazies remake is another one. The Seth Rogen Green Hornet exists. That new top gun. Beverly Hills cop. All that karate kid's stuff. A few final destinations. There's like a couple hellraisers. Those Jumanjis did Saw reboot or what? What was spiral? What else? The day the earth stood still, I guess. Flatliners. Those Godzilla's and those King Kong films. Totally forgot about those. Oh my god, I guess I guess those dunes count. Oh, so does that Blade Runner. And I think they're doing another of the Blade Runners, they're also making a new clue.

They made a backdraft 2 and a Benji, kickboxer, vengeance, do little, hard target 2, 22's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and that Wall Street Legacy sequel, The Howling Reborn, Zoolander 2, Little Fokkers, Street Fighter, The Legend of Chun Lee, Childs Play, Anchorman 2, Gladiator 2, Ben-Fucking Her, Paranormal Activity, Next of Kinn, Blue Lagoon, The Awakening, Nancy Drew in the hidden staircase, free willy escape from Pirates Co, the transporter refueled, lepricon, origins, all those punishers, that Jack Ryan series, Quantum Leap, oh my God, I forgot about all the TV stuff. I can't, I just, I just, I just can't.

Doom Annihilation. Oh, I forgot of the Lone Ranger, Rob Zombies, fucking the Munsters, new Shrek. It's gonna be a new Shrek. Piranha 3D. Alex Cross. Movies are back! Also, all those revivals and stuff, they did like a Frazier revival for two seasons.

You know, there were two seasons of New Frazier? He was the only one in it. So I bet that was bad. Anyway, thank you so much for watching the show. Please like and subscribe. It really helps us out. Leave a comment about your favorite fucking thing that won't go away.

We've got a podcast called Even More Ngo. news, you can check it out on this channel twice a week or the podcast store twice a week. You can listen to this show as a podcast instead of watching it and seeing all those posters. Oh my God, there were so many posters on screen for you to enjoy. And I hope you did. We've got a patreon.com slash some more news. And we've also got a merch store with him. Do you remember him?

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