Tim Pool, Moderate? LOL

The right-wing podcaster played the role of "moderate" on a recent Jubilee video. What?

On Sunday, Jubilee posted the latest installment of its “Surrounded” debate series to its 11-million-subscriber YouTube channel, a video titled “1 Moderate vs 20 Progressives.” It seemed like an odd choice, since the “moderate” in question was right-wing podcaster Tim Pool. I was curious how he’d frame his (pretty extreme) views as “moderate,” and I didn’t have much going on, so I decided to give it a watch.

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For the uninitiated, Jubilee is a media company that markets itself as being about empathy and bridging divides, though it largely profits from manufactured conflict. There’s no shortage of incisive criticism of the company’s formats, and it’s worth checking some of it out; for my part, I find most of the Jubilee catalog grating.

But back to Tim Pool: moderate.

If you don’t know who Pool is, the short version is that he’s the host of Timcast IRL, a show on the right-wing video platform Rumble. He made a name for himself livestreaming the Occupy Wall Street protests from his phone, then worked at Vice for a bit before going off and doing his own thing. For years he pitched himself as a guy the left had abandoned, a Bernie voter and self-described “disaffected liberal” who couldn’t recognize his own side anymore. The drift started around 2016 and never really stopped. By August 2020 he was publicly backing Trump, and he’s been a superfan since. In September 2024, it came out that Pool was being paid $100,000 per episode by the Russian government to produce pro-Russia video content ahead of that year’s election. Pool didn’t know who was funding the project at the time. Here’s a Daily Show clip containing some of Pool’s “greatest hits”

And look, he says a lot of really extreme stuff on his show.