Just Wait Until 'Moderate' Tim Pool Meets Actual Tim Pool

Nah bro.

Aug 18, 2026

One thing you never see people do is claim to be a moderate when they are, in fact, quite far left. For instance, I wouldn’t go around telling people I’m a moderate any more than I’d go around bragging about my beautiful straight blonde hair, as I’d just have to assume that people would know I was lying and that would be very embarrassing for me.

Not so for Tim Pool! Despite being very clearly and blatantly far right, Pool has for years maintained that he is a moderate. He also, as we have seen over the years, truly does not know when to be embarrassed.

Like this time when he went on a very creepy and sad monologue about how people who call him a “bootlicker” for defending ICE were wrong because “It’s my boot!” and he was living vicariously through the ICE officers violently attacking/killing undocumented immigrants and citizens alike.

Or the time when he got caught being paid $100,000 an episode, by Russia, to make content like this.

Or the day when he first decided he was going to just go ahead and wear the beanie forever. Though I feel like maybe that could be a thing like the story about the lady who wore a green ribbon around her neck every day for her whole life and then finally took it off in front of her husband when she was on her death bed and her head fell off. Like, maybe if he takes the beanie off, what’s left of his brain cells will fall out? Could be!

Anyway, shameless grifter Tim Pool finally made his debut appearance on Jubilee’s Surrounded, the internet show in which one moderately well-known internet personality is pitted against a group of people who supposedly disagree with them. I say “supposedly” because the episode that Glenn Greenwald did was titled “1 Journalist vs. 20 Trump Supporters,” instead of “21 Trump Supporters.” Personally, I thought it would have been more interesting to pit Greenwald against people who actually hold the beliefs he at least pretended to have from about 2005 to 2017, but that’s just me.

Similarly, Pool’s episode was titled (at least initially) “1 Moderate vs. 20 Progressives.”

Yes. One moderate. One moderate who, up until very recently, worshiped Donald Trump and thought he could do no wrong, opposes same sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights in general, describes white nationalist Nick Fuentes as “correct in a lot of things, for sure,” stated that “high value men” — whom he described as those who have “nice watches” and drive Bugattis, things that all women know and care about — need to do more to shame women about their body counts so that women would have less sex, blamed feminism for his inability to get a date and so on.

It has since been changed to “Tim Pool vs. 20 Progressives,” perhaps because the top comments on the video all looked like this:

But he does this on purpose. He claims to be a moderate so that stupid people will see his extreme views as being moderate. He also knows which things to play up in order to maximize this “moderate” street cred — he talks a lot about having supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, while failing to mention the fact that he’s since spent the rest of the decade talking about how horrible Sanders is and how much he hates him. Also, half of the “claims” he put forth were things that could reasonably argued by people from either side of the political spectrum.

His first argument was “The mainstream Left commits more violence than the mainstream Right.” Now, you can tell that he really, really thought that this one was going to go well for him, because he exists in a bubble where people repeat this ad nauseam. Why do they repeat it ad nauseam? Because they think if they do that, everyone will just eventually accept that it is true. They also very much want people to see the property damage that occurred during some Black Lives Matter protests as more upsetting than the police killing unarmed Black people. Or, you know, the protesters being killed at those rallies by right-wing agitators like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry, the latter of whom was directly inspired by a tweet from Donald Trump.

Or those, like Summer Taylor, Robert Forbes and Barry Perkins and others who were run over by cars, just like in the memes and other ephemera promoted by so many conservatives online.

A former West Virginia State Fire Commissioner wearing an ‘All Lives Splatter’ T-shirt

Even though I would argue that many of those “debating” Pool could have done better (to be fair, they’re not told whom they’re debating or what the topic will be, so they can’t be super prepared), it really did not go well for him. His two main “points” were, of course, Black Lives Matter-related riots and the shootings (at cars) in Tesla dealerships — which he claimed were “inspired” by the notoriously bloodthirsty Elizabeth Warren having supposedly said that Elon Musk was “a dangerous threat to this country.”

Thank goodness no Republicans have ever claimed anyone was a dangerous threat to this country!

It’s clear that Pool was used to being around people who just accepted this as true and did not actually question it, ever. He tried to qualify it by admitting that there is technically more documented violence from the far Right, but “when you break down the ideology that motivates individuals that commit political violence, there is more more often an overlap between what the Democratic Party espouses ideologically and what we see in street level violence as well as maybe assassinations, then there is with what Republicans espouse.” And what he meant by that, really, was that both Democratic politicians and those participating in said “street level violence” think it is bad when police officers kill unarmed Black people.

Multiple participants pointed out that Donald Trump was quite friendly with several far-right figures and groups (they didn’t mention the Proud Boys, but let’s mention the Proud Boys), as were several members of his Cabinet, that he had called for the death of members of Congress with whom he disagreed, etc. etc. Pool insisted that this was not true, and also tried to claim that Nick Fuentes — who had dinner with Trump and whom Pool has praised — was not even a right-wing figure because of how he has recently turned against Trump.

Veteran Surrounded participant Mason, who goes by OneHandPolitics online, also pointed out that the Right has institutional and state violence on their side that they can cheer for and live vicariously through, much like Pool and the boots he shares with ICE officers who kill and beat people. Pool attempted to claim that police in blue cities were “controlled” by and working at the behest of Democratic mayors and that therefore police violence in those cities was “Left on Left violence,” but even he didn’t seem to be buying that.

I will say, I was a little disappointed that no one brought up Mauricio Garcia, the Tim Pool fan who shot and killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas. But surely lots of others will.

Pool’s next claim was that “the Democratic Party has embraced authoritarianism,” and of course this all had to do with conservatives supposedly being “censored” on social media (by people not in the actual government) and the Biden administration encouraging social media sites to ban those pushing dangerous misinformation during the pandemic. However, he spent most of the time complaining that people kept pointing out all of the authoritarian shit Republicans did that was worse than not wanting people to go online and encourage anyone to drink magic bleach or colloidal silver or tell them that vaccines were dangerous when they were not.

His next claim was, unsurprisingly, that “the United States is tracking towards a civil war,” a thing he’s been claiming for about a decade now. No one really bought into it, and they shouldn’t — because really, we don’t have guns like the Right has guns, so if there were a “civil war” it would really just be them murdering us en masse. Would I put that past them? I guess not, but I still wouldn’t call it a “civil war.”

It was during this argument that Pool got up and walked away when the aforementioned Surrounded participant Mason suggested that — just maybe — he was a grifter who was purposely ginning up fears about a civil war so that his audience would stay tuned and keep giving him their money.

Pool’s last claim was equally stupid — he claimed “the Constitution doesn’t exist anymore” because the Left thinks the Right is violating it and the Right thinks the Left is violating it. No one seemed too interested in discussing that with him. I think he just didn’t want to put forth one of his more controversial claims so that he could continue with his ridiculous “I’m a moderate!” facade.

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I do want to note that at various points throughout the debate, Pool kept trying to claim that he “doesn’t like Republicans either” and didn’t want to have to defend them — so I am going to need to point out that it was not too long ago that he was raging over the fact that he believed Candace Owens was going to cost Republicans the midterms. That’s a real weird thing to get worked up about if you don’t like Republicans.

But hey! That’s Tim Pool for you. He wants to say horrible things and then never be held responsible for them, he wants to push far-right bullshit while pretending to be a “moderate,” in hopes that people will come to see far-right bullshit as moderate and reasonable. He picked arguments that he believed would result in him (and the Right writ large) being seen as moderate and reasonable — perhaps even objective. Maybe just a regular guy, calling balls and strikes but being fair to all in the end.

Unfortunately for him, however, there are thousands of hours of video of him saying all kinds of not-so-moderate-and-reasonable things, so no one but his audience is buying it.

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