“Jeep 1941: Let’s kill fascists,” writes YouTube user A D. “Jeep 2021: Let’s meet in the middle.”
For reasons beyond my understanding, noted rich person Bruce Springsteen broke his decades-long prohibition on doing any ads (really a lot of missed bandana opportunities there) for a schlocky promo about reconciliation and “meeting in the middle,” as if the country didn’t just elect the center-right politician most famous for the Crime Bill. How this sells Jeeps, I don’t know. How this makes anyone feel anything but pandered to, I also don’t know! I’ll leave these thoughts to Twitter, or to Facebook, or wherever else. What I do know is that I could trust the one pure place left on the internet for sage insight: YouTube comments.
I won’t say that the comments section of YouTube videos is a good place on the internet, but you can trust it to give you the raw shit. The immediate, unvarnished responses of people who don’t care at all what they say online. This isn’t Instagram. This is one step up from what you see unraveling on the side of a Twitch stream, and YouTube commenters know this:
There is going to be garbage. A lot of garbage, but also wonderful expressions of online id. And that is most valiantly expressed here, by the ten people who live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula complaining that they got left off the map again:
A lot of the comments spent time going back and forth about the 1 percent trying to lecture the rest of us, but I appreciated this one pithy line from a clear lefty, juxtaposed against someone who popped over from a far-right YouTuber’s channel:
Generally, people are pissed that Jeep is trying to offer reconciliation with the right, and that it’s coming in the form of an ad:
The humor of this, and the joy of taking this ad in via YouTube comments is that you can see that the right hates the shit out of this ad:
Honestly, I don’t know what that last one even means. We are passing into the realm of an internet so pure, coherent sentences are left behind. I encourage you to take a peek yourself and see just how many people are mad at Bruce’s hat.