YouTuber And Satirist Greg "Jreg" Guevara Explains His Eccentric Brand Of Political Humor And Why Centricide Is Our Only Hope

ouTuber Greg Guevara, or “Jreg” as he’s known online, has made quite a name for himself in the world of political satire over the last couple of years. Employing both a clever and comical grasp on the often poorly executed art of satire, Guevara has managed to stand out among the crowded field of political discussion with his eccentric take on topics that normally ignite intense passions. Perhaps best known for his caricatures of various ideologies on the Political Compass, Guevara has carved out a distinct corner of the internet, while growing a diverse following made up of fans from every quadrant. Despite this, Guevara is a bit of a mystery himself in that aspect, never truly revealing his personal stance on politics, so we asked him to do a little interview to find out more. Will Jreg finally reveal where he stands on the Political Compass? There’s only one way to find out.

Q: Hey, Greg. It’s nice to meet you and have the opportunity to interview you. Before we dive into more current events, would you mind telling us more about your background and current life?

A: Thanks for having me. I’m eager to spew disinformation, propagandize, have an honest and open discussion about my work. I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario. For fun, I did poetry, including written poetry I posted to a Facebook page and spoken word poetry that I would perform at venues. I would also write science fiction, horror and comedy short stories that I would post to a blog. At 14, I had my first creepypasta published, called “The Twist: A Parody.” It was a very big deal for me at the time, especially because people were reading my story on YouTube. At 16, I wrote a regrettable 200-page zombie novel, called “Inbreak,” and had another creepypasta called “Chef The Griller” published. I would keep writing poetry and short fiction, as well as make videos that I uploaded to either Facebook or YouTube. I studied Journalism at Carleton University, which I was very much not into, but kept working on short stories, poems and songs while I was studying.

Q: Before you started your channel in 2009, what was your history with YouTube, and how did you ultimately get into creating content on the platform?

A: I basically did what every kid did -- found a Minecraft “Let’s Play” that he loved and watched it to the point where it would be more inconvenient if he didn’t have a YouTube account than if he did.

Q: How’d you come up with the name “Jreg?” Is there any significance or story behind it?

A: Well, you see, I’m a big fan of North Korean political philosophy -- Juche, Ayn Rand, Julius Evola and Che Guevara. You can also pronounce it as “DREG,” which means:

* DEHUMANIZATION
* RADICALIZATION
* EXTREMISM
* GENERALIZATION

What, you don’t believe me? You think I’m scrambling to make the word “Jreg” into a backronym in a desperate attempt to create retrospective meaning? You think the name is literally just Greg with J and that there’s nothing more to it than that? You don’t believe a man’s words about his own name? Then who can you believe, I ask you. Who can you believe?

Q: Your first video, “Flava Crava,” was a parody commercial for a fictional food product. What was the inspiration behind that and was this your first foray into making parodies?

A: Flava Crava was a school project I made in Grade 6 about a candy machine. The motive was to critique neoliberal consumerism. We all yearn to taste delicious candy that the Flava Crava creates. It’s bursting with enough flavour to drive a person mad. Clearly, everybody wants to try this Flava Crava. And, yet, at the end, when the number to call shows up -- 555-6352-1754-4263 -- it leads nowhere. A dead end. There is no Flava Crava. There is only the idea of the Flava Crava. I remember the whole class including the teacher laughing at the commercial, and my teacher saying, “You know, if writing doesn’t work out for Greg, he could always be an actor!” I think she was zinging my writing abilities more than she was complimenting my acting. The “Jreg” channel was actually called “Flava Crava” up until a couple of years ago and annoyingly will sometimes still default to that URL (youtube.com/flavacrava) when you search up my channel.

Q: How old were you when you uploaded that first video, and how was the experience like? What did your parents think about you joining the platform at such a young age?

A: I was around 10. My parents never had any concerns about me using YouTube. In retrospect, they probably should’ve, but that’s neither here nor there.

Q: As you continued adding videos to your channel, how did your subject matter evolve over time, and where did you come up with the ideas for your early works?

A: The YouTube channel I use now was never the main place that I put my content. For some reason, I really thought my audience would be on Facebook (it definitely wasn’t, there is not a Zoomer on Facebook and that’s for the best). Every year or so, something of mine would go semi-viral (a creepypasta, a meme, or this depression flowchart I made when I was 18), but I could never capitalize on the attention because I was never linking it back to a page that was just my stuff. That was very frustrating for me, as the only thing I wanted at the time was some kind of following. My channel hovered close to zero subscribers for most of my life. Eventually, I got the idea to start posting my content to related subreddits, sometimes even making videos just to appeal to certain subreddits. This would bump up my numbers ever so slightly each time. At that time, my content was really all over the place. About a year and a half ago, Phillip DeFranco shared my “Shut The Fuck Up” video as his secret link of the day, and that actually got me about 600 subscribers.

Ironic. Acclaimed centrist Phillip DeFranco would sow the seeds of his own destruction. My style after that point started to resemble what it is today. I would make ironic list videos like “6 ways to get over someone,” which would end with me explaining why you never will and will always be riddled with scars. Or “How To Manage Your Anxiety,” which was just me screaming throughout the list. I’m still working on a video from that era, “Top 1000 Ways To Waste Your Life.” It’s been taking me a while -- starting to feel like a waste of time. From there, the “Political Compass Rap” blew up because of it being shared by @the_political_compass on Instagram. After that, my style was pretty solidified into what it is now.

Q: How about some of your musical parodies and songs? Were you into writing music or playing instruments beforehand, or did it evolve along the way?

A: I was always a shitty musician, and still am. My strength was always lyricism. I discovered spoken word poetry and really liked it because it let me just say words. Only then did I realize that nobody else liked it and that I would probably have to learn instruments if anybody was going to listen to me. So I did learn, but out of necessity.

Q: When you’re writing these songs, what’s your creative process like, and how do you put these together?

A: The key to a good song is the same as the key to a good poem. You need a thesis. Something to structure the song around. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a point you’re trying to make; it can be an idea you’re trying to explore or an aesthetic you’re trying to paint a page with. Once I have the words down, I know a few talented musicians that create the beat and help produce the track.

Q: Presently, you’re best known for your political content, but were you always interested in politics in your younger years? When did you first develop a curiosity for it?

A: I was always aware that there was no personal incentive for anyone to get involved in politics. That lack of incentive interested me because I couldn’t understand why people got into politics at all. For example, let’s say you had a business called, I don’t know, “Know Your Weme.” Your profits would take a ding if you ever took any kind of stance on literally any issue. And so the best course of action would be to stick your head in the sand and only engage with politics in the form of some detached entity immune to opinions. Now, of course, nobody can actually do that, so you end up with a bunch of repressed liars pretending like all of their opinions fit neatly into the Overton Window. For a while, I thought that because there was no personal incentive to engage with politics, the best thing to do would be to not engage with politics. This is fine if you think that the world doesn’t need to change, but if you do, it’s deeply worrying. After a certain point, I realized that if everybody disengaged from politics for their own personal benefit (and the vast majority of people do just that), then what we get is a bunch of politically involved people wasting their time attacking each other when they should be turning their attention towards the vast majority of people who think they can escape this culture war unscathed. Like the centrists at Know Your Weme. Hypothetically.

Q: How do you go about selecting a political ideology to parody, and where do you gather information on these?

A: Gather information? What do I look like, a fucking nerd? I just listen to what deeply disturbed young people tell me about their political ideology, take all of it as fact, and regurgitate whatever they tell me to an audience of people who really don’t know any better. Sometimes people will recommend a book to me, and I’ll say, “Wow, looks cool!” I will never read a book. Books are tools of the centrist status quo.

Q: Of all these videos, which one do you think really put you on the map and had a lot of success? Was there a particular moment you thought you’d “made it” or proved to yourself it was worthwhile to keep going?

A: I knew I had made it the moment I looked at my YouTube ad revenue and saw I had made $60 in one day off of the Political Compass Rap. I thought, “I could live off of $60 a day.” That’s all I ever wanted -- to be able to live and make art. The moment I turned down an office job for the chance to pursue this is the moment I knew the course of my life had been altered. I wanted this more than I wanted anything else, and I was willing to sacrifice anything (even my identity) to get it.

Q: A lot of your fans often align with one of these ideologies, but don’t necessarily have a negative reaction to seeing their belief’s parodied. What’s the secret to successfully parodying these, and how do you think other mainstream examples, such as SNL, fail at achieving this?

A: SNL assumes that the political landscape still functions off of a basis of truth, which is, put simply, cringe. The issue with the libs at SNL is they think they can calmly and rationally poke fun at anyone whose beliefs stray from the status quo. What SNL fails to realize is that young people aren’t looking at the public debate, curious, watching to see who’s making the better points. Thanks to the echo-chamber internet, young people have become so entrenched in their worldviews that they’re far past the point of questioning their beliefs and are now simply looking for a way to materialize it by any means necessary. And I couldn’t be prouder of them. When I make fun of an extremist ideology, I do it in the way that a friend might poke fun at a friend. When I make fun of a centrist ideology, I do it in the way SNL makes fun of Trump. I’m looking forward to the next SNL skit, which is just a loop of Hillary Clinton unloading an assault rifle into Donald Trump for five minutes as the audience cheers and laughs Black Mirror-style. Now that’s comedy!

Q: For those that do respond negatively, what do you think they’re missing, or are any of these justified?

A: Anybody who has any kind of dissenting opinion about my work is a centrist shill, paid off by the status quo in a feeble attempt to protect their interests. There is not a single person who genuinely dislikes my work in the entire world. Even people who can’t understand English still love my work, for no reason other than my chiseled jaw. Post-centricide, there will be no haters or critics left. So we don’t gotta worry about that. On that note, let me just say it was great being on Know Your Meme before the Great Purge, and I’m really sorry in advance.

Q: “Political Compass Rap” currently has over 1.2 million views, making it the most-viewed of your videos. What do you think is the reason behind this, and how did that success impact your channel and Jreg on a larger scale?

A: Political Compass Rap is a good example of how I was making content tailored to subreddits in an attempt to grow my channel. I basically tailor-made that video to be popular on r/politicalcompassmemes. I obviously didn’t expect it to be nearly as popular as it was. After I released it, I started coming up with more politically-oriented ideas. For every political video I made, I would come up with two, three, or four other ideas that I wanted to do. After a year of doing this, I have a massive list of skits that I will likely never get to the bottom of.

You can see that it definitely changed the course of my channel. I had one or two political videos before that, but I definitely wasn’t a political channel. The thing is, I don’t feel bound by politics at all. I play it up for a bit of an aesthetic, but my fanbase is extremely supportive of whatever I do, even if it has nothing to do with politics. This means I basically end up creating whatever I want, and it always works out. I’m appreciative of that.

Q: Where did the idea for “Centricide” stem from, and how did the series evolve over time?

A: Centricide emerged organically from the stories and lore I was building up around my channel. It sort of seems insane when you zoom out and look at the webseries for what it is, but at the time, I was just building it up piece by piece. We’ve got this character, and this character, and this character, and obviously, it takes place here, and obviously, there are the rules that govern it, and obviously these are the interactions between the characters. And from there, you’ve got characters and setting, and all you need is a plot -- so okay, obviously the plot is going to be the theme of my channel, teaming up to destroy the centrists. It emerged very naturally as a story that needed to be told, and also as a subtle way to teach some political theory.

Q: How much of the Jreg persona is actually you, or is your online persona completely separate from your real-world self?

A: “Persona?” Sorry, I don’t understand.

Q: What’s your following/community like? Does anyone recognize you out in public these days?

A: People have recognized me in public in my hometown. It’s always a pleasant experience. Every single person I meet that watches my videos is an anti-centrist Chad and really just a model person in general -- with the exception of one centrist that somehow thought I was on his side … that was a harrowing experience.

Broadly, I like my fan base. I think I attracted pretty much the kind of people that I wanted to attract. There’s a good mix of political ideologies, all unified through common themes that are less political and more generational (constantly online, irony-poisoned young Millennials and Zoomers). Obviously there is weird shit, stalkers, death threats, degenerate porn artists, and people who have had the parasocial virus eat out their brain entirely to the point of cult-level adoration, but I’m not stupid. I knew going into this that fan bases have an awful vocal minority, and the best way to deal with it is just roll around the filth with them. That’s what people want to see, anyways. We’re all just rolling in filth, and it’s annoying to see creators act like they’re above that. If people want to form a cult around me and sacrifice people in my name, me saying, “Nooo don’t do it,” isn’t gonna stop them. By that token, I may as well encourage it. Sacrifice people in my name. Do it now. Steal their wallet and donate its contents to my Patreon. See, really, I’m blameless here.

Q: So, would you give us some insight into what the future holds for Jreg? Got any plans or projects you want to share with us?

A: I’d like to start speaking in-person about the pressing need to destroy the centre. I’d like to be able to travel to college campuses and such and spread the message. I would also, uh, like to meet the people who watch my content and hang out with them and make real human connections instead of sitting alone in my apartment all day. I, uh, think that would be really cool. But yeah, this is mainly about destroying the centre, I swear.

I’d like to oversee the creation of a Centricide video game and a board game at some point. A card game would be cool. I’ve been writing a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style novel for like five years now, as well as a post-apocalyptic fantasy book. I’d also like to catalog my ideas into an Anti-Centrist Manifesto. I would never read any of these, of course, because I don’t read books, but I would sell them so people could show them off and pretend they read them.

Beyond that, there will come a time when I have said pretty much everything I want to say about politics and evolve my content into something that is pretty much unrecognizable from what I do now. Phases like the one that I’m in right now are very much ephemeral and there is so much I want to do as an artist. I’m grateful for what I’ve got right now, and what defines me, but I don’t intend to hold onto it longer than is necessary.

I still have a long way to go as an artist. There are so many things I want to learn. The more I learn, the more things I will want to make. The more I make, the more things I want to learn. I feel so lucky to be in the position that I’m in, and I hope I won’t let the people watching me for my artistic journey down. Uh, I mean, centrism bad.

Q: Seeing as how your personal content often revolves around meme culture, do you have any recent favorite memes you’d care to share?

A: The Philosopher’s Meme has some good information about post-ironic memes, meta-ironic memes, and the like. I find old memes really fascinating. Watching memes evolve from TOP TEXT / BOTTOM TEXT to a deep-fried image of Patrick from SpongeBob with the letter “B” on it has been really interesting. Meme culture is so important that if an ideology has no ability to reproduce itself memetically, it is dead. Posadism is a real thing because people memed it into existence. That’s beautiful. But mercantilism? Not a lot of mercantilists out there. Why? You ever see any mercantilist memes? Didn’t think so. I am deeply forged out of meme culture. My channel took off because of political compass memes, and much of the topics I touch on are those that affect memey young adults who are often steeped in meme culture.

Q: We noticed you recently turned yourself into a pickle for a brief amount of time. This actually happened to us early last month as well. What was the experience like, and did you come out of it a better person?

A: I turned myself into a pickle, not in homage to Rick and Morty, but out of deep contempt for the neoliberal status quo that allows a show about bleak nihilism and uncaring ironic detachment to be a cultural touchstone. Wubalubadubdub.

Q: Given your knowledge of politics and experience in such discussions, what do you make of the current political climate around the world? Do you think parodies like yours can help people come together, or do you think it creates a further divide?

A: I hope it creates a further divide. If you are paying attention, we are headed towards some pretty serious divides already. I’m just suggesting we cut to the chase. There might be something to be said about how when we can all laugh at each other, we can all get along, but that doesn’t A C C E L E R A T E us towards war, so why even bother.

Q: For those watching your parodies and videos, what do you hope people take away from them? What would you say the goal of Jreg is in a broader sense?

A: There are way too many things I’m trying to do meaningfully give you any broad message I’m trying to push. I think if you pay attention to what I’m saying, then there are a few themes that I do try to unironically hammer home -- essentially, to genuinely engage with politics and the world. Avoid ironic detachment. Align with who and what you believe in, even if it’s inconvenient. Annihilate the fetid neoliberal world order. I mean, it’s all pretty clear if you’re paying attention.

Q: Will you ever reveal your personal beliefs or ideologies on politics? Will the world ever know where Greg Guevara truly stands on the political compass?

A: “Greg Guevara” is just another character. There is no sincere nugget of genuine wisdom underneath the layers of irony. You peel back the layers expecting there to be something underneath, but there is nothing. All that exists is the irony. And if that’s the case, then everything I’m saying ironically, I mean entirely sincerely.

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Follow Jreg on Twitter or check out his YouTube channel and subreddit for more content.