Viltch
 | |
| Era | Tweeter Is Not Real Life (cast) |
|---|---|
| Age | 25-35 |
| Home | Chicago, IL |
| Demographic | streamer, white, far-left |
| Lean | Strong Democrat |
| Race | white |
A combative Chicago streamer who debates the right live for an audience of young online socialists and regards the Democratic Party as the lesser evil at best. He is the cast's furthest left and its least forgiving.
Who they stand for
He stands for the young socialist and anti-fascist left, whose numbers grew after 2016. In that period the Democratic Socialists of America grew from a few thousand members to more than ninety thousand, and Chicago became the organisation's stronghold: it elected six democratic-socialist city aldermen in 2019, its teachers' union went on strike in 2012 and in 2019, and it backed a winning mayoral candidate in 2023. The formative summer for this bloc was 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests and the unrest in Kenosha, and it regards the police as much of an enemy as the Republican Party. Its members are young, white, college-educated and urban, and they vote Democratic when they vote at all. Unlike part of the online left, this bloc turned against apologists for Russia after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Hasan Radical's audience wants a policy programme, and Natalie Winner's audience wants an argument, but Viltch's audience wants a fight.
Playing to them
He responds to police reform and decarceration, labour rights, a wealth tax, the prosecution of far-right violence, and a hard line against Israel. He will not forgive a president who sends troops against protesters, funds more police, carries out deportations, or sends arms to Israel. He holds a Democratic president to a standard he would never expect a Republican president to meet. He is won over only at the far edge of the political left, and even then he is not held for long. A president he dislikes is not automatically liked by any other persona in the cast.
Winning his support is a sign that a candidate has already lost the political centre. The policies that win him over cost the support of Tucker Carlington, Matt Scots and Nick Guttierez, who oppose him by design, and the support of Bronze Age Deviant, who holds the equivalent position on the far right. They also cost the support of Barbara Wise, William Maha and Simon Harrisson, who hold the opposite view on policing and on Israel. Hasan Radical and Natalie Winner tend to support the same things he does.