The entire fight against Hutch is still just about optics

Watching this debate, Hutch and Steven seemed to be consistently looping towards the end until Hutch says he has no disagreement with what Steven is saying about prosecuting MAGA, and then something strange happened: the argument immediately looped again, and Hutch stated that he would propose 10 other things before Steven’s ideas.

It really feels to me that what Hutch is getting at is that the times Steven expresses doomerpill feelings about the state of the US, he’s spending time making his audience doomerpilled themselves and therefore less likely to be engaged in fighting republicans. At the same time, Steven doesn’t want to sacrifice expressing his true opinion and being open about what a lot of the country feels even if it hurts optics in some way, or he may just think that he still does enough positive coverage and encouragement to fight against MAGA that his doomerpill moments are rightfully overshadowed.

I understand why it was probably hard for them to drill into the macro-disagreement while debating live, but I do think this is where the real disagreement comes from between Hutch and Steven. I do not think Hutch would care at all about any of the greater debate if Steven had spent all his time advocating for democrats and hopepilling DGG instead of expressing a lot of uncertainty, pessimism, and disappointment at where the country is today.