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Mad Men and Selective Censorship

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“You can show a woman’s breast being cut off, but you cannot show her breastfeeding.”

Creator of Mad Men Matthew Weiner was recently in Paris to participate in a kind of yearly world fair of TV series.

(Unfortunately, I got wind of it only one week before the event, and tickets were long sold out.)

Weiner appeared on two panels, the first one to talk about Mad Men‘s coming finale (I’ll post an update to the review I wrote last year once the show is over), the second one on his cinematic influences.

In the latter, Weiner talked about the hypocrisy of his own network, AMC, which had no compunction in displaying very violent scenes in its show Breaking Bad, but deleted Mad Men scenes in which characters could be seen getting high or laid.

The fair was hosted by Paris’s city council, which might explain why the image and sound are mismatched in the second video. (In my libertarian days, I would have blamed it on public workers.)

I thus decided to extract the audio and repost it on YouTube with a static picture of Weiner. I also transcribed his statements.

It’s all below.

N.B.: Before you remind me: yes, I know that Weiner is not allowed to cook bagels on Saturdays. That doesn’t make his point wrong, nor does it prevent Mad Men from being high culture.

“I hated the control of language, and I hated the hypocrisy of the network.

They have their other show, Breaking Bad, which you’ve all seen and loved. They would shoot people in the face, and I couldn’t show somebody grabbing a boob!

They would tell me things like: ‘He’s squeezing her butt. Could you just have it happen outside the frame? Could he just reach to the frame?’

And of course, the minute you see that, you realise it’s so much dirtier! Because he’s squeezing her butt and she’s reacting to it with pleasure, and now that I can’t see it I don’t know where his hand is. And it just got a little bit dirtier.

They were doing someone teaching people how to make crystal meth, and I couldn’t show Peggy Olson inhaling a joint! We’re on the same network at the same time. Because people weren’t using the drug, they were just making it.

I don’t even know how to explain you the bullshit of American censorship. You have your own problems here, but we love violence, and we hate sex. You can show a woman’s breast being cut off, but you cannot show her breastfeeding! It’s really messed up.

[…]

Part of the story of Mad Men was the crudeness of the culture happening. You’ll see how much more explicit people become as the show goes on. The first time you hear the F-word — and it has to be bleeped in the United States — is around Season 5. These gentlemen were all in the Navy and the Army, and they know how to swear, and they swear a lot. They did not swear in the office, they tried not to. I had people tell me anecdotes about the first time someone swore in a meeting, and everybody just sort of being like: “Oh my God!”.

There’s a certain decorum, and as you watch the show go on, you will see it becomes cruder, louder, more explicit, less poetic. All of it was a deliberate journey into the modern world.”

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America Culture Reviews

“Mad Men”: The Dispossessed Elite on TV

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“All I’m going to be doing from here on is losing everything.” – Roger Sterling

Some of my friends across the Ocean have asked me what I had been up to lately. Well, I’ve mostly been catching up with TV series.

TV drama is a genre I had neglected for years, mainly because of its inferiority to movies (or so thought I). However, being a movie buff is painful these days, with the obvious “creation crunch” that is crippling the industry.

So, before Marvel releases another Iron-Man 28 or The Avengers 42, I wanted to pay a tribute to some TV series I have been watching these last months. Most have made me reconsider the unjustified contempt in which I was holding fiction on TV.

Today I will begin with AMC’s Mad Men. This may not be the most obvious choice, compared to shows that have been far more successful, and that are maybe more relevant to our purposes: Breaking Bad, House of Cards, or Game of Thrones, among others.

Nevertheless, I think that for “craftsmen of the word” like us, the story of a creative director in an ascendent advertising agency is full of precious lessons. Besides, the whole show seems to revolve around a hidden theme that is familiar to Radix readers: the dispossession of the Old Anglo Elite by a new class using its verbal skills to gain power.

For a cultural contrarian, there is always a risk of overreading the producers‘ intent. However, while I believe they wanted to depict this Old Elite negatively, and express some relief about its downfall, I can’t help thinking that the initial expectation wasn’t fully met (think of Cabaret or American History X as similar failed attempts).

For the sake of clarity, I won’t recount the 85 episodes, as I assume most of you have watched the show (for the others, you can keep reading; there will be spoilers, but the general plot is not as important as the atmosphere).

That being said, a rough summary should be done. The story takes place in New York, in the 1960’s. When the show begins, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the creative director of Sterling Cooper, a relatively small ad agency on Madison Avenue. He’s tall, strong, handsome, always perfectly-dressed, smart (though not particularly educated), socially savvy and uncannily successful. Successful in his work, and, of course, successful with women. Despite having a wife that would be rated as a “9” if not a “10” in the manosphere (Betty Hofstadt, played by Nordic beauty queen January Jones), he enjoys the company of many other women, who enable him to escape the sanitized boredom of his white-picket-fenced suburban house®.

We don’t see Don Draper work much. He’s always late, even for meetings, spends most of his office time smoking, drinking (Canadian Club rye at work, “Old Fashioned” cocktails at bars), and taking naps to recover from it all. When the afternoon comes, he often calls it a day to join some mistress in a luxurious hotel room. Despite that, every one of his pitches to the clients is a home-run, making him the main money-maker of the agency (his jaw-dropping Kodak carousel presentation should be turned into a mandatory training in communication and marketing programs). This reminds us that creation requires laziness as much as hard work. All those who write for a living know that their best ideas pop up when they are doing something else, or doing nothing at all.

Alpha/Übermensch Don Draper is “just too good to be true,” to the point that NBC did a spoof “Don Draper’s guide to picking up women”, in which the viewer learns that all he has to do to be as successful as Don is… impossible to fulfill.

So, why do the opening credits show a cartoon version of Don falling from a skyscraper into a sea of advertisement junk? In a Hollywoodian clichéd way, the character can’t be that successful without having a secret flaw, which, in time, will be revealed to be fatal.

As we soon learn, Don’s secret flaw is nothing less than identity usurpation. His real name is Dick Whitman. Son of a prostitute (who dies giving birth to him) and a drunk farmer (who is killed by a horse), Dick grows up in a whorehouse. When he turns 25, he takes the opportunity of the Korean war to flee. There, a field officer named Don Draper is mortally burnt in a fire Dick accidentally starts. Since the officer is totally disfigured, Dick manages to switch the identification tags and become the man who just died, giving him his former identity. This identity theft is symbolized by Season 5’s finale, which ends with Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice.” The story takes place in 1967, which is the year the eponymous James Bond movie was released. (By the way, the song’s powerful lines “You drift through the years — And life seems tame — Till one dream appears — And love is its name” could summarize the dissident rightists’ increasing impatience; just replace “love” with some synonym, like “power,” “victory” or “glory.”)

This 92-episode series (the seven final ones will be broadcast next year) would get boring if it wasn’t for the supporting characters. Though Jon Hamm’s acting is excellent, the contradiction between Don Draper’s rise to success and his growingly incapacitating original sin wouldn’t be sufficient to support the show from Season 1 to 7. The main thing that can be said about Don Draper is that in the age of materialism, which has been the Postwar era so far, such a talented man couldn’t express his genius in a meaningful field. Rather than being an artist, a scientist, or a statesman, he had to devote his talents to selling laxatives, ketchup, and lipstick.

Still, being an outsider, Don Draper is generally benefitting from the cultural revolution of the 60’s, that he fully embraces, despite losing his own family in the process:

Completely different is the fate of other characters, who embody the declining WASP elite. Here are the most representative ones:

Roger Sterling

If there had to be a single one quintessential elite Anglo-Saxon on screen, that would be him. Heir of the original agency’s co-founder (hence his “name on the building” he’s so proud of), Roger always had it easy until the 60’s. To paraphrase one of my famous countrymen, Roger “took the trouble to be born, no more,” except during the Second World War. Roger’s wittiness and charms enable him to be very efficient in handling clients, but can’t shield him from the cultural tsunami that washes America throughout the 60’s. Unable to resist the sexual revolution, he repudiates his wife Mona in favor of an Ashkenazi secretary, Jane, who will give him no heir. Once high on LSD, Roger realizes it was a bad move, which will leave him with two alimonies to pay for. His former wife Mona only gave him a daughter, who ends up living in a rural commune with degenerates after having abandoned her “beta provider” husband and her son.

Drugs are not enough to make him forget his feeling of void, which results in an explicit recognition of his own dispossession:

Having received a Classical European education, Roger thinks he can afford the luxury of playing dumb, for example when he intentionally mixes Spanish conquistadores, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, and “Mexicans” in a single sentence. In an other episode, he explains to Pete Campbell what “Munich” (i.e., surrender) means when it comes to negotiation, only seconds before he attributes to his mother the famous Churchill quote “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Obviously, someone who knows what “Munich” means also knows who delivered this statement after the Munich Agreement of 1938. Unfortunately for Roger, the 60’s are no longer the time for playing dumb, especially since his leadership is under siege.

“Duck” Phillips

While he’s not a very important character, Herman “Duck” Phillips plays the role of a scapegoat in the official narrative about the ’60s. Everything in his behaviour is wrong, to the point that the whole character becomes rather incredible. Incapable of self-mastery when he’s drunk, “Duck” makes fun of the speaker during an adverstising awards ceremony and tries to defecate in Roger Sterling’s office (believing it’s Don Draper’s) after having been fired from the agency. In spite of all these flaws, he’s always impeccably attired, very charming, and quite well-spoken. He’s also a war hero, having killed 17 Japanese soldiers in the Battle of Okinawa. The message seems to be as follows: when a man is handsome, well-educated, and successful, there must be something deeply wrong about him. This should explain why such types have almost entirely been driven out of Western elites in favor of ugly, incompetent, and sociopathic ones . . . but I digress.

Bert Cooper

Cooper is the other co-founder of the initial agency. Unlike Roger Sterling, who is a generation younger than he, Bert Cooper is a self-conscious conservative. He is very skeptical of “civil rights,” and implicitly asks she-office manager Joan Holloway/Harris to make sure the receptionist girl remains White. Bert Cooper is why conservatives can’t win. Though he disagrees with the triumph of the Moral Left in the ’60s, he never dares express it. Quite symbolically, he lost his testicles in a surgical operation that went wrong. He dies childless and heirless, the day Neil Armstrong sets foot on the Moon. One small step for a man, indeed . . . and one giant leap to the dustbin of history for country-club Republicans.

Conrad Hilton

Speaking of the Moon, the only real character of the series, hotel chain-founder Conrad Hilton (“Uncle Connie”), is a very telling one. He randomly meets Don Draper at a . . . country club, and then becomes a client for a short time. He ends his contract with the agency when Don fails to give him “Hilton on the Moon,” a literal request Don thought was only figurative. In a monologue that leaves the viewer wondering whether Hilton is mentally ill, he displays a worldview that is actually quite typical of the postwar Right:

Can we see “Uncle Connie” as a member of the dispossessed elite? Yes, if we bear in mind who one of his great-granddaughters is.

Lane Pryce

In his three-part review of the series at Counter-Currents, James J. O’Meara defined Lane Pryce as the agency’s sacrificial victim. That is true, though in my opinion, O’Meara doesn’t really explain how Lane Pryce is so. Pryce is a former auditor from the British company that had bought the initial Sterling Cooper agency. Then he becomes a junior partner in the new agency started by Sterling, Cooper and Draper. Due to fiscal problems with the United Kingdom, he tries to steal money from the agency. When Don confronts him about his forged check, Pryce resigns and hangs himself in his own office. I would suggest that Pryce is sacrificed for his very Britishness, the same way the Cosmic America fantasized by Conrad Hilton was born out of the sacrifice of English and British heritage. Jared Harris, who stars as Pryce, looks like the usual caricature of the English people in rival countries: a toad face at the top of a fat, listless body.

Pete Campbell

Pete Campbell is maybe even more representative of this dispossession: being 10 years younger than Don Draper, he has been deprived of his birthright before he was even born. At some point in the series, the viewer learns that his ancestry in America goes back as far as the Mayflower. Yet his father found a way to dilapidate his family’s fortune before dying and leaving his two sons with crumbs. Still believing in the American myth of the self-made-man, Pete thinks he’s going to make up for his father’s failures with hard work, only to discover that the dices have been rigged from the start against young, ambitious men like him (which, of course, is more of a concern for our generation than Pete Campbell’s, who is a baby-boomer; this is not the only way the writers managed to inject contemporary issues into the series). In a half-drunk rant, Campbell expresses his impatience about being patronized by the former generation. That reminds me of something.

I could go on and on, since there’s no shortage of examples, from the clients to the employees, as well as their families.

I keep thinking that the producers wanted to celebrate the replacement of this Old Anglo Elite by a Rainbow Coalition including women, gays, and minorities, chiefly Jews, given that the production crew is predominantly Jewish. In the very first episode, Roger Sterling asks Don Draper whether the agency has ever hired a Jewish copywriter. “Not on my watch,” jokes Don. It’s 1960. In the coming decade however, the agency is going to recruit many Jewish copywriters and Black secretaries.

Nevertheless, to show how hard it was for the Rainbow Coalition to overthrow this Old Anglo Elite, the producers had to depict it as a formidable enemy: a caste of good-looking, refined, well-mannered, educated aristocrats. By thus doing, they made this elite appealing, and many viewers could conclude that they would rather be ruled by such a gang than by the current one.

That said, one could have the same feeling watching Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (which was arguably the last liberal movie Kubrick made, before he started making conservative films, or outright reactionary ones like Eyes Wide Shut). The 18th-century aristocracy was, in many ways, admirable by its style and its brilliance. But it adopted the set of ideas and values that would lead to the removal of English rule in the thirteen colonies and of the King’s head in Paris. In like manner, Roger Sterling’s capitulation before the sexual revolution and Don Draper’s abandonment of his own family were foreshadowing the Great Erasure that was just about to happen. In the early 60’s, the agency sells a patriarchal and hierarchical American Dream. At the end of this crucial decade, the agency promotes alternative lifetsyles, women’s independence from their husband and family and minorities’ march through the institutions, with the partners hardly noticing this radical shift, and completely ignoring that it might undermine their rule.

Don Draper may embody all a man could dream of being and may succeed in all ways imaginable. He is also the last specimen of a dying breed. Let’s hope that the next European elite will know better and not confuse the Will to Power with the suppression of the very institutions that make it sustainable.

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America Culture

Frozen

16 min read
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The balance demanded by modernity is between adopting enough symbols of traditional culture to appeal to a mass audience, but enough egalitarianism to be promoted by the media. And the most successful example of this delicate balance is the top grossing animated feature of all time–Disney’s Frozen.

Every little girl wants to be a princess. No little girl wants to be a feminist graduate student. The Eternal Enemy of Hierarchy can never be eliminated, only subverted. The balance demanded by modernity is between adopting enough symbols of traditional culture to appeal to a mass audience, but enough egalitarianism to be promoted by the media. And the most successful example of this delicate balance is the top grossing animated feature of all time–Disney’s Frozen.

Disney has always been Ground Zero for the Culture of Critique. Even though the company is easily one of the most destructive institutions in the country, it ultimately trades on its past as the symbol of “Main Street USA” Americana and even Western traditional culture. Grown men speak of the “magic” of the company’s theme parks; people spend their entire lives dreaming of wearing rubber costumes in stifling heat for low pay, just to be a part of the company. Despite it all–Disney endures. And for that reason, it’s a battleground.

The heart of this battle is over the “Disney Princesses,” the protagonists of the classic tales that revolve around royalty, heroism, and true love with a handsome prince. Needless to say, even the term inspires rage among feminists, but where there is demand, there will be supply. As a kind of quasi-public brand in its own right, Disney responded to the zeitgeist by trying to “diversify” the mostly European Princesses, notably with the black heroine of The Princess and the Frog. Though it was a mild success, “Princess” Tiana never quite captured the imagination of little girls like Cinderella or Snow White. Another non-white Princess, the soldierly Mulan, can only be called a “princess” with an asterisk.  

Frozen tries a different tact–and succeeds with a brilliant head fake. Instead of another affirmative action Princess, Frozen goes full Hyperborean. The story is loosely based on the Danish tale of the “Snow Queen” and takes place in the fictional land of Arendelle, inspired by Norway. Both heathens and traditionalist Christians can rejoice–the royalty of this Aryan land are invested by bishops in a Cathedral conducting ceremonies in Old Norse, the king and queen consult arcane books written in the Younger Futhark in times of trouble, and the only nonwhites to be seen are friendly trolls–who, amazingly, bow to the royal humans.

The palace is filled with Western art, the martial uniforms will warm the coldest heart of the Dark Enlightenment, and there’s even a shout out to Joan of Arc.  Furthermore, neoreactionaries should celebrate, as Arendelle seems so committed to the monarchial principle that all political power is transferred not just from one royal family member to another as circumstances demand, but even to royals from other nations without even the discussion of a domestic legislature. It’s good to be the Snow Queen.

Now that Frozen has been thoroughly celebrated by the feminist friendly media, it’s odd to recall the sputtering rage it initially inspired. When the blond Queen Elsa was revealed, angry feminists took to Tumblr to create amateurish and repulsive “ethnic” princesses with the hashtag #ThisCouldHaveBeenFrozen. If it had been, I daresay Frozen would have had fewer viewers than recent seasons of The Simpsons.  

The flabby feminist failures and their cheese doodle covered keyboard crusading were still duly enabled by the media. Margot Magowan aka “Reel Girl” pitched a hissy fit republished by Jezebel before the movie even came out, protesting the inclusion of a “mountain man” character (Kristoff, who is hardly an overweening male presence) among other grievances. And a Disney animator’s casual remark that animating females was harder than males because of the need to keep them “pretty” unleashed the kind of feminist wailing only seen when the Duggars have another baby.

Therefore, the film’s success in a PC culture is a stunning marketing accomplishment, the media equivalent of BET suddenly endorsing Mitt Romney. Frozen accomplishes this with one weird trick–it pulls a fast one on the audience to transform the “handsome prince” into the villain of the movie.

Let’s look at the plot for those who are unfamiliar. Elsa has the power to control ice and snow. She is close with her sister growing up until she accidentally injures her with her powers. Anna is healed by magic trolls, who warn Elsa of the “great danger” of her magic. Her fearful parents tell her to “conceal, don’t feel” the power and lock up the castle, but they die in a shipwreck, leaving the girls essentially alone. Years later, during her coronation, Queen Elsa loses control of her powers, reveals herself to the people as a sorcerous “monster,” and unknowingly plunges her kingdom into eternal winter. Anna’s mission is to bring Elsa back and free the kingdom from its frozen fate.

Anna also is driven by her desire to be open to the world and find true love. With her memory of Elsa’s powers (and Anna’s near death at her hands) magically removed, Anna never understood why she was always cut off from her kingdom and ordinary human contact. Thus, when the gates are finally opened, she falls for the handsome foreign prince Hans, becoming engaged to him the very night they meet. During the kingdom’s crisis, Hans takes charge in Anna’s absence (because apparently that’s how the constitution works here), distributing cloaks to the people, rebutting foreign leaders who want to steal the country’s resources, and leading dangerous rescue efforts. Eventually, Elsa is captured, but not before accidentally “freezing” Anna’s heart, putting her in danger of death unless she can be saved by an act of “true love.”

Anna turns to her handsome prince and explains a kiss from her true love will save her life–only to be told brutally “if only there was someone who loved you.” Surprise, suckers!

Hans has been playing her from the beginning–as the 13th son of another kingdom, he’s planning to usurp the throne of Arendelle to finally taste power on his own. With Elsa in chains and his “wife” Anna dying, Hans will control the kingdom. The abrupt volte-face would be called clumsy in a soap opera, but cloaked in politically correct messaging, it is hailed as subversive and brilliant. “Finally, a Disney Prince Who’s a Disingenuous Dickweed” shriek the clickbait commissars at Jezebel, preening that “this is the direction we should be headed, rather than risk over-romanticizing the very flawed past.”

Other glorious triumphs?

  • Queen Elsa is alone at the end of the movie, instead of marrying a prince. Elsa can be a cat lady with magic powers–just like every feminist’s dream.
  • When Elsa escapes the powers and fully embraces her powers in the soaring “Let It Go,” The Daily Beast’s Melissa Leon squees, “she lets her hair down, shimmies her hips, and puffs out her chest. Here she is powerful, independent of the male gaze.” Well, not entirely.
  • Anna eventually does end up with a man–the hapless Kristoff, who far from being a “mountain man” is a hapless beta, meekly asks permission to kiss her, and is even mocked as a “fixer upper” with “unmanly blondness” by the trolls who serve as his family.

At the climax, Anna is dying unless she can get her act of “true love.” We see Kristoff coming to save her and the audience follows his death defying race against time. But Kristoff never gets close enough to save Anna–the dying Anna actually sacrifices herself to save Elsa from the evil Hans. This was interpreted as Anna “choosing” her sister over a man.

Is this explanation what the movie is going for? Yes–it is a deliberate fake-out, as the audience follows Kristoff only for him to be rendered irrelevant and stand around uselessly. But what’s actually happening is not Anna choosing Elsa over Kristoff, but Anna choosing Elsa over herself. She sacrifices her own life to save Elsa, and, through this sacrifice, warms her own frozen heart and ironically saves her own life. This isn’t some new bold feminist creativity–it’s the end of the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine. In pure plot terms, the feminist reading isn’t as present as the traditional Western motif of self-sacrifice.

The triumphant song “Let It Go” is being hailed from everything as an anthem of gay liberation to girl power, but the plot undermines this interpretation as well. Elsa may be unleashing her power–but it’s a complete disaster for everyone involved, including her. She has unknowingly doomed her kingdom and her subjects, she manages to endanger her sister’s life (again), and she’s simply hiding from her problems instead of overcoming them. Of course, she can’t really be blamed for this–she is only just emerging from years of grief and isolation. “Let It Go,” is, after all, in the middle of the movie, before the main plot mover of Anna’s quest to find her “true love” even really begins. But is the “liberated” Elsa who sics a murderous snow golem on her own little sister some great hero to celebrate?

In the end, the way Elsa learns to control her power is through “love.” Suddenly, in a kind of PC version of the deus ex machina, Elsa instantly becomes a beloved ruler who effortlessly fires off snow magic whenever she wants to the delight of her adoring subjects, none of whom seem especially upset she nearly killed them all. Anna gets with Kristoff and gives him a new sled–so we know who is wearing the pants in this relationship. Oh yeah, there’s also a funny sidekick snowman named Olaf who is sentient somehow, because, you know magic or something. (Merchandising, cough, cough.)

Call it Disney meets Alinsky. The author of Rules for Radicals advised his acolytes to associate their ideas with traditional symbols like the American flag, knowing that the average person would always confuse the form for the substance. Frozen has Nordic princesses, extreme royal absolutism (of a form never really seen in Northern Europe), adoring subjects fawning over the “beauty” of their leaders, and nobles with magic powers. It sucks in audiences with the appeal of Tradition, and then undermines it.

But it’s not quite that simple. As feminist Dani Coleman notes in a sophisticated review, the “subversion” of the “Traditional” Disney narrative has been done before – many, many times. “No Disney heroine except Anna—even Ariel—has begun her story with love as her goal since 1959.” And plenty of other Disney Princesses actually showed real courage and the willingness to sacrifice, taking charge of their own destinies.

The feminist “subversion” is overstated, as Anna and Elsa careen wildly from disaster to disaster because of their own “vapid, brainless, impulsive and flighty characters whose agency is stolen from them for the sake of comedy and wafer-thin plot contrivances.” To put it another way, to say Frozen is a big deal for “strong women characters” is like pretending it’s a big deal when a black man is elected mayor of a city, or that two men walked down a street in San Francisco holding hands. It’s been done before. And the women don’t really act to save the day–they create problems of their own making, problems instantly cured at the end through pabulum given some kind of magical power.

Yet there is still something subverted here, unrecognized by most critics because it’s long since vanished from our culture. That something is real family. The “true love” between the sisters Elsa and Anna is worthy enough, but it is only achieved after a vast amount of unnecessary suffering due to their own emotional chaos and impulsive decisions. Elsa (aged 21) and Anna (aged 18) act like girls, not women, let alone strong ones. The feminist high fiving that they don’t need men misses the point that it is precisely the lack of a man that has caused all the chaos in their lives–not a husband or lover, but a father.

Early in the film, we are given a cursory introduction to Elsa and Anna’s father and mother, the King and Queen. All things being considered, they react with steady nerves and compassion when Elsa almost kills her baby sister. While it is true they tell Elsa to control and conceal her power, it is worth noting that they don’t tell her to deny it. They simply recognize there is danger, as well as beauty. They aren’t ashamed of Elsa, they want to protect her, and her father expresses his confidence that his daughter can learn to control her growing power.  

God knows it’s not unusual for parents to die in a Disney movie. However, the struggle of the protagonist usually revolves about learning about his or her place in the world, accepting the responsibilities of adulthood, and symbolically replacing the parent as a leader in his or her own right, like Simba avenging his murdered father, taking his place as king, and becoming a father himself.

Here, the parents die so abruptly we never really get a sense of their relationship with their children. Moreover, there’s no transitional mentor for the children to learn from and bridge the gap from little girl to woman (let alone child to sovereign). This seems especially strange when Elsa is isolated from her kingdom for years and then is suddenly made absolute ruler. Who the hell was running the country while she was cooped up?

In one scene, a nervous Elsa prepares for her coronation and looks up nervously at a portrait of her kingly father, who, as some have noted, looks like a young Walt Disney. Just like all Disney products are ultimately in the shadow of w
hat the dead founder created, Elsa is trapped by the requirements of her royal role, even though the source is dead and buried. Not through his own fault, her father failed her by his absence, unable to return home, and manage her transition into adulthood. Perhaps he would have seen the folly of assuming she would automatically control her powers, or returned to the trolls for guidance. Instead, Elsa is left alone, and she instantly transitions from being sheltered and protected to flaunting her power in destructive ways out of a combination of fear, pride, and ignorance.

If we accept the metaphor of sexuality, the role of a daughter’s father is to protect her from the physical or emotional predations of other men (the Hans’s of the world) until the daughter can be “given away” to a man worthy of her. This concept survives in the traditional wedding ceremony. Knowing that your “little girl” is a woman can be painful to protective fathers but it doesn’t sever the bond between father and daughter, it merely changes its form. As Coleman observes (though not in this context), Ariel’s last line in The Little Mermaid is “I love you, Daddy.”

Mothers also have an important role to play. They have to educate their daughter as to what it means to be woman and to understand the power–and danger–of female sexuality. If left on their own, girls can either be terrified of sexuality or impulsively act out, leading to disaster. This is precisely what happens to Elsa, and, to a lesser extent, to Anna. And in a far, far more extreme way, it is what happened to the broken women of the modern West.

Screenwriter and director Jennifer Lee (product of divorce, divorced herself, naturally) may or may not have intended this message, but a Traditionalist viewing of Frozen isn’t about feminism or patriarchy. It’s about the gap left by the absence of family, a gap we see throughout the West. With so many marriages ending in divorce, mothers and fathers refusing to let go of youthful illusions, and, most critically, the patriarchal and matriarchal roles largely abandoned to media, schools, and pop culture, Western youth are left adrift. Instead of extended family or churches plugging the gaps in cases of death or misfortune, the larger culture actually encourages extended adolescence, with the resulting collateral damage all around us. In lieu of real family, we get a “Modern Family” of egalitarian cheerleading and faux loyalty dependent on abstractions and mutual comfort rather than a primal sense of duty to blood and kin.

In Frozen, we get a happy ending because the movie magically whisks away (quite literally) all problems. In our culture, we get an embarrassing wreck of a society. The forms of a real culture may remain – we still call things “marriage,” “families,” or “nations,” but the essence has departed. And what’s left behind are not extraordinary people commanding the forces of nature, but superfluous, deracinated individuals whose only power is to eradicate what remnants remain. But as the success of Frozen shows, even the most degraded has to look up–at least so they know what to tear down.

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America Culture Identity

Monsters’ Ball

11 min read
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The series finale of HBO’s highly rated vampire soap opera, True Blood, concluded with an ostensive picture of Southern Family Values. The show flash forwards several years and the protagonist, the blonde Southern Belle Sookie Stackhouse is pregnant, and her baby daddy—though we do not know see his face—is presumably her husband and appears to be White. Her brother Jason, an incorrigible ladies man, is happily married to a blonde he met a few episodes earlier, and they have a few blond children.

The series finale of HBO’s highly rated vampire soap opera, True Blood, concluded with an ostensive picture of Southern Family Values. The show flash forwards several years and the protagonist, the blonde Southern Belle Sookie Stackhouse is pregnant, and her baby daddy—though we do not know see his face—is presumably her husband and appears to be White. Her brother Jason, an incorrigible ladies man, is happily married to a blonde he met a few episodes earlier, and they have a few blond children.

They are hosting a neighborhood dinner outside the family’s ancestral antebellum estate, and Sookie serves her friends and family a home-cooked meal at a picnic table, underneath a Weeping Willow and illuminated by lanterns and the stars. 

As Sookie is part fairy, Jason and his wife are the only couple of the opposite sex and same race and species. I may have missed one or two, but the couples include an interracial shape-shifter/human with two mulatto kids; a vampire/human (both children of intolerant parents); a witch/human; fairy/human; and, my favorite, Lafayette—a gay, Black, semi-transgendered witch and his White, vampire boyfriend. 

A vampire-human wedding dominates much of the episode, with one character noting that the State of Louisiana bans such weddings. He asks how anyone could deny their love, despite some minor problems: the vampire bride lost control of her urges and killed her groom’s three daughters; the couple cannot reproduce; and the groom will age while the bride maintains eternal youth. 

The penultimate scene preceding this display of domestic bliss shows two vampires enslaving and torturing Sarah Newlin, a blonde Christian evangelical leader who has led various anti-vampire crusades. (Viewers are expected to view this scene with schadenfreude rather than pity.)

While conservatives love to hate this show, I have not seen any reaction to the final episode. It may come, but I doubt the final scene will inspire their ire. I looked over the anti-True Blood articles in the two main anti-liberal Hollywood websites—the Media Research Center and Breitbart’s Big Hollywood—to see their complaints: sex and violence, jokes about Republicans and Ted Cruz, hate criminals wearing Obama masks (would they be less upset if they wore Sarah Palin masks?), and other kvetching.

Breitbart.com ran eight separate stories (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) on an episode in which vampires and the Yakuza attack a fundraiser for Ted Cruz and a character used the portmanteau “Republicunt.” The True Blood producers had asked Sarah Palin to guest star in the episode, which she turned down. She told Breitbart, in full self-parody mode, 

Nice try HBO. I’d put any mama grizzly in America against a vampire any day; for only one of them actually exists. The left wants to talk about a ‘war on women’? Keep engaging in your misogynist attacks on women you disagree with and we’ll see who wins your self-inflicted war in the court of decent public opinion.

Breitbart and the Media Research Center are correct in one sense: no doubt, True Blood‘s writers and producers vote predominantly for Democrats, and the show takes cheap shots at Republicans and Christians. But such things are superficial and dispensable to the essence series. And characteristically, conservative critics ignore, or are unable to understand, the more fundamental and insidious ways in which Hollywood engages in culture distortion. 

True Blood’s premise is that scientists have synthesized human blood into the brand “True Blood”; since vampires no longer need to prey on innocent victims, they are able to “come out of the coffin” and acknowledge their existence to humans. As the show continues, other supernatural beings, including witches, shapeshifters, werewolves, fairies, and even a Maenad, are revealed.             

The opening credits feature signs with phrase like “God Hates Fangs” (get it, like “god hates fags”), alongside images of police beating civil rights activists and KKK cross-burnings. The aforementioned Sarah Newlin, along with her husband, the Rev. Steve Newlin (who turns out to be a closeted homosexual), Republican Congressman David Finch (also a closeted homosexual), and Republican Governor Truman Burrell (not a closeted homosexual, but his wife cheated on him with a vampire) all promote various anti-vampire positions ranging from opposing the “vampire rights amendment” to putting vampires in concentration camps to experimenting on them before committing mass genocide.

Though the show portrays hateful Christians negatively, it is not entirely anti-Christian. In one episode in Season 6, Sarah Newlin attempts to massacre a group of vampires in a warehouse by opening the roof and letting the sun in. She tells herself that God wants her to do it. Yet in the same episode, a Black minister gives a sermon about a recently deceased White character. He praises his devotion to God and says that he understands that he violated Christian gospel, because he knew “he was telling the truth.”

The message is clear: Christians are good when they promote love and understanding, even if it involves ignoring the Bible; they are bad when they promote hate.  

What should we make of this? Charlene Harris, the author of the show’s source material, The Southern Vampire Mysteries, welcomed the idea that the show promoted gay rights, stating,

When I began framing how I was going to represent the vampires, it suddenly occurred to me that it would be interesting if they were a minority that was trying to get equal rights.

Despite debates about vampire marriage, “coming out of the coffin,” “God hates fangs,” and Harris’s explicit statements, True Blood’s producer Alan Ball (who is gay) insisted that this was not the case. According to Ball,

To look at these vampires on the show as metaphors for gays and lesbians is so simple and so easy, that it’s kind of lazy. . . . If you get really serious about it, well, then the show could be seen to be very homophobic because vampires are dangerous: They kill, they’re amoral.

Even the most noble and good vampires have to restrain their urge to kill humans—and they always slip up. Moreover, while the vampires are publicly demanding equal rights, they have their own secret government and code. When Bill Compton, the most compassionate vampire in the first few seasons of the show kills a vampire who was going to kill a human, he is punished because vampires are never allowed to view a human’s life as equal to that of a vampire’s. The same vampire council that publicly promotes “equal rights” has its own mantra that state, “Humans exist to serve us. That is their only value.” At later points in the series, he plots to destroy the true blood factories to force vampires to feed on humans. 

BuzzFeed’s Louis Pietzman noticed the problem.

On True Blood, the larger fears about vampires—that they’re out to kill, corrupt, and ultimately destroy human society—are entirely accurate. The struggle for vampire rights is not the noble fight of the civil rights movement, because it’s not simply about letting vampires live their lives in peace alongside humans: Vampire rights means that innocent people are going to die.

Additionally, many of the vampires do not have politically correct backgrounds to make them ideal victims. Sookie’s love interest, Bill, was a slave-owning Confederate soldier before he was turned, and fan favorite Eric Northman was a Viking before becoming a vampire and served in the SS during World War II.

Yet Pietzman and Ball do not realize the other reason why a civil rights allegory fails. In the words of the Vampire King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington, “Why would we seek equal rights? You are not our equals.” By almost every standard, they are superior to humans, and they discuss this amongst themselves. They can fly; they can hypnotize or “glamour” people; they are faster and more seductive; they have eternal life, can survive almost any injury; and their blood serves as a cure-all drug and powerful psychedelic. Edgington tells Northman, “Adolf was right; there is a Master Race . . . it’s just not the human race.”

Similarly, the vampire movie series Underworld treats vampires as evil Southern racists who enslaved and then later oppressed werewolves. (The first movie was about how the daughter of the head vampire needed to mate with a werewolf to save civilization.) While propaganda, it was at least plausible.

In today’s political culture, only the less capable need “civil rights.” Once America lifted legal and social restrictions on Jews, they managed to excel (in fact, they even excelled with these restrictions). For all intensive purposes, Jewish “civil rights” are about punishing criticism (or noticing) of Jewish power. While Asians will often try to gain special privileges, Asian civil rights groups do little more than complain about Stephen Colbert’s “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”

While Asians and Jews may not be as übermenschy as Eric Northman, they have some things going for them, which makes granting them “civil rights” unnecessary. Blacks and Hispanics, in contrast, need “civil rights” in order to achive success as a group at all. 

For a supernatural analogy to the beneficiaries of “civil rights,” the zombie show The Walking Dead is a better example.  Zombies, or “walkers,” have few instincts beyond killing and eating brains, and destroying everything in their path. In small numbers, they are easily dealt with, but when they gather in herds, they destroy everything in their path.

In the series, there are only two characters who have had any allusions that walkers can be saved or treated as anything other than a scourge that must be eliminated. 

In the second season of the show, the protagonists happen upon a rural farm in Georgia. As the apocalypse arrives, the farmer, Hershel Greene, looks to the Biblical story of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus as a way of understanding the chaos. He claims that people are overreacting and considers the zombie problem as something similar to AIDS—walkers can be saved! The protagonists learn that he puts zombies in a barn and feeds them live chickens, hoping for a cure. The notion is obviously inane, and Hershel eventually comes to his senses. But examples of the human willingness to wish or pray away existential threats get much worse. In the fourth season, an 11-year-old girl named Lizzie insists that zombies are just different and can be their friends. She feeds them dead rats and rabbits. She tries to play “tag” with them. She even threatens to kill her adoptive mother-figure, Carol, after she kills a walker. Refusing to believe that the walkers are bad, Lizzie stabs her sister so that she might return undead and harmless to prove the goodness of walkers to Carol.

Carol and Tyrese (the show is fully integrated) discuss the situation. In a different time, they would try to find Lizzie a therapist; but during a zombie apocalypse, they can’t tolerate psychopathic altruism. They kill the child.

It’s hard not to view scenes like this as expressing something about the racial realities of our time: the sentimental, naive, and caring nature of White people, which can be beneficial in certain contexts, disastrous in others.

True Blood might have beeen the ultimate program for postmodern American liberals: on the surface, the show was about “civil rights” and post-White self-righteousness; underneath, it allowed fans to indulge in the fantasy of being part of a sexually liberated, superior elite.

The Walking Dead seems to express something quite different: that it’s time to rebuild communities and put childish things aside.

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Who Makes History

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Foley died on his knees. With his last act, he condemned his government as his “real killers,” and couldn’t even spit defiance at those about to murder him. He had to condemn the actions of his own brother. He denounced his country.

The most we can hope for is a good death. James Foley did not get a good death.

This is not a judgment on his courage. Such a verdict depends on information we will never have. Making a speech against American foreign policy and then suffering the knife may be an act of astounding bravery if the price for refusal had been the butchery of other hostages. Or his relative stoicism may have been a simple surrender to fate, like we see in the blank faces of those about to be cut apart by chainsaws or pickaxes in Mexico’s cartel wars.

Regardless of context or circumstance, Foley at least met his end with dignity, with no crying or begging for mercy as the steel bit into his throat. Put aside bravado–can you honestly say you would done better with your neck under the blade?

But none of that changes the reality that Foley died utterly defeated. And we can think of recent alternatives. In 2004, Iraqi insurgents captured one Fabrizio Quattrocchi and forced him to dig his own grave. Infuriated, he attempted to rip off his hood and screamed, “Now I’ll show you how an Italian dies!” The insurgents shot him to death in a panicky display of weakness. Quattrocchi was hailed as a hero, a man who met his end in a way the Romans would have recognized. 

In contrast, Foley died on his knees. With his last act, he condemned his government as his “real killers,” and couldn’t even spit defiance at those about to murder him. He had to condemn the actions of his own brother. He denounced his country. And he met his end with words of self-loathing on his lips, broadcast to the rest of the world.

President Barack Obama, in a statement of a few minutes before he returned to playing golf, said “one thing we can all agree on” is “there is no place in the 21st century” for the Islamic State. Of course, this is the same thing people say about the British monarchy, organized religion, or single-sex bathrooms on college campuses. It’s the simple assumption that we have seen the End of History at a student activities fair at Oberlin, and Gaza, Aleppo, and Baghdad are just playing catch up.

But the rejection of liberal modernity is precisely what ISIS is all about. And as large populations within increasingly Islamized Western nations support the Islamic State–including over a quarter of young “French people”–Obama’s passivity is hardly justified. Indeed, the man who beheaded Foley was a British subject and more British subjects fight for the Islamic State than Her Majesty. It’s a simple statement of fact to say more Muslims in Britain are willing to die for the people who beheaded Foley than to try to save him, and those who want to see a successful display of multiculturalism should look to Raqqa rather than Washington.

After all, the America of Obama or the Britain of Cameron are cultural nullities, unable to even define themselves, let alone why anyone should die for them. Indeed, even now, Obama’s statement suggested that the United States must still justify itself to the Islamic World. Before he could offer meaningless platitudes, the President ritualistically insisted that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

  • The main victims of the Islamic State are–wait for it–Muslims.
  • Obama says that the Islamic State may “claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors”–evidently because Muslims who war on the West directly are better somehow.
  • And the President claimed that “no faith teaches people to massacre innocents,” a statement so utterly self-refuting that it requires no further comment by me.

While progressives love to pretend that “education” is the answer to all the world’s problems, the fact is that liberal modernity and all it has to offer has been tried, tested, and found wanting by Western born mujahideen. Michael Brendan Dougherty identifies Islamic radicalism as a revolutionary creed akin to Communism and National Socialism which:

[O]ffer visions of justice that are larger and deeper than some dirty court system. And the struggle in establishing them holds out prizes that are extremely rare for men of the West: glory, martyrdom, and heroism. Revolution beats a life of traffic tickets, creditors, bosses, and — if you’re especially lucky — angst about real-estate.

But it goes deeper than seeking thrills or even fulfilling existential desire. Ultimately, the mujahideen are staking a claim to history and offering a challenge to History, carving out their names in blood and fire across the crossroads of civilization.

In contrast, President Obama says that “the future is won by those who build and not destroy. The world is shaped by people like Jim Foley and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him.” This is an extraordinary claim to make about someone who was essentially a spectator to his own death. It’s even more stupefying to say this of the masses who may have taken a moment to tweet #prayers with a sad emoticon and then gone back to giggling about Mariah Carey getting divorced again.

James Foley was certainly brave in his way–no physical cowards work as freelance journalists in war zones. He even returned to his work after previously being captured in Libya and living to tell the tale.

However, he had a specific agenda with his work–he was trying to expose the “atrocities” of the Assad regime and support the “democracy” movement. Foley may have been a freelancer, but his worldview was eminently predictable and pro-Establishment–trying to break down questions of race, religion, and identity into a game of good egalitarian democrats versus bad reactionaries.

Thus, he was quick to draw critical attention to incidents that the media would call Islamophobic, like when an American military officer made comments critical of Islam during a class on terrorism. He tweeted out articles that we would consider parody, asking if right wing terrorism was as big a threat as Al-Qaeda. And he aggressively, incessantly pushed for NATO intervention in Syria and arming the opposition to Bashar al-Assad–even though he also considered civilian casualties inflicted by the Israeli and American militaries to be murder.

Like so many liberals, he was embarrassed by American power but eager and dependent upon it, disgusted by militarism but anxious to find new crusades to spread Lady Gaga at the point of a gun. His condemnation of Bashar al-Assad is especially poignant given the Islamic State’s actions. As a member of a minority sect, Bashar al-Assad’s power partially rests upon his being able to protect minorities from Sunni militants. The “authoritarianism” is an admission that left to their own desires, one group will simply attempt to slaughter everyone else.

Foley was among th
ose believed that power is passé, and that Assad’s removal would somehow lead to a liberal democracy. Instead, Foley was beheaded by the very rebels he was assisting. The “good” moderate rebels of the Free Syrian Army that Americans are so desperately counting on are irrelevant as they are squeezed between Assad’s forces and those of the Islamic State. If Foley “shaped history,” it was as one of those who inadvertently paved the way for the Caliphate. 

Foley’s death has not taught anyone anything, or even made a real impact. His beheading caused less sincere outrage and righteous anger than Gavin McInnes questioning the mental health of transsexuals. One of the main responses in the aftermath was a desperate plea “not to watch,” to shy away from the reality of violence underlying all social order and pretending that it doesn’t exist. Liberals acted like ISIS was Sarah Palin–“don’t look at it, lest we give it credibility.”

While this is framed as some kind of resistance to the propaganda of the Islamic State, it actually furthers its aims, strengthening the divide between hysterical Eloi wiling their lives away in fantasy and the hard men of the Caliphate imposing facts on the ground.

James Foley’s mother Diane said that she had “never been prouder” of her son because he gave his life trying to “expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.” However, even this is an admission of passivity–what difference does it make if “suffering” is “exposed” unless it is followed by action? The implicit premise is that when Third Worlders suffer, it is somehow Our Fault and Our Responsibility and Foley lived his life in order to awaken guilty Whites to the needs of their dusky charges.

Yet Foley’s mother went on to plead for the release of the other hostages on the grounds that, like her son, “They have no control over American government policy in Iraq, Syria or anywhere in the world.” But journalists do have control, or at least participate in the struggle for control. In Syria, Ferguson, or anywhere else, journalists advance a certain Narrative which supports specific policy aims. These policy aims, like any state aims, are imposed by force and backed with violence. What journalists seem to want is the freedom to advance an agenda while denying responsibility for its effects, to gain credit for their good intentions while avoiding any obligations for additional suffering. 

Foley’s family, the President, and the media interpreted the meaning of his life and death in light of the consequences to the Syrian people. Implicit in all of this is an admission that it is somehow illegitimate and immoral to take on the responsibility of history for your own interests. But contra the fantasies of the great and the good, it is the Islamic State that is shaping history in the Muslim world, and may someday shape Europe as well. Insofar as Foley had an impact, it was in opening the door for them. His defeat was total.

There is no escape from history. Those who shape history take upon themselves the responsibility to shed blood and have their own blood shed. Those who think they are only “bearing witness” are either deluding themselves or serving as useful idiots. And your status as a “journalist,” or “civilian” or “American” somehow exempts you does not mean that you are exempt. “There are no innocents anymore.”

But modern Westerners would rather die than accept the responsibility of being alive, or acting in a world defined by struggle rather than pretty lies. Whites who have a future must divorce themselves from the morality, values, and eventually the political systems of a dying culture, lest we share its fate. We can accept the responsibly of survival–or die on our knees, wondering why it is the people we tried to help killed us.

American Revolutionary hero Nathan Hale, quoting the play Cato, uttered the immortal words “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” before he was executed. Foley’s last words, as deservedly immortal in their own way, were “I guess, all in all, I wish I wasn’t American.”

We will never know if he was sincere or if this was forced. But if his death is any kind of a commentary on what it means to be “American” today, then yeah, me too. 

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Who Will Swing the Blade?

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When the state puts a man to death, it is only because he decided to go to court and wait to be murdered on schedule instead of making a run for it and being gunned down in the street. For some reason, we don’t call that “execution,” and there are only protesters, riots, looting, and moral showboating when the color combination of cops and executed civilians can be whipped up by media race hustlers into something beyond nervous cops going Judge Dredd on uncooperative suspects.

In a dissenting opinion, U.S. 9th Circuit Court Chief Judge Alex Kozinski recently wrote, “If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.” After musing about the reliability and effectiveness of the guillotine, he added, “If we as a society cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by a firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.”

After several torturously botched lethal injections made the news, Americans have been talking about the death penalty again. Kozinski’s call for firing squads will get a “Damn right!” response from couch-riding cowboys everywhere.

There’s something Johnny Cash about a good old fashioned firing squad or a hanging. And Kozinski is probably right — a firing squad would be quicker, surer and at the same time remind the public that the state is killing on their behalf, and not just “putting someone to sleep” like a benevolent bureaucracy of merciful veterinarians.

I don’t object to the idea of men killing other men, especially if they’re doing it to protect their loved ones or weaker members of their tribe from harm. Violence is golden. If you aren’t willing to use violence to show that you mean business, you deserve to be ruled by a group of men who will. Laws are meaningless without the threat of violence, up to and including murder, and when the police “escort” a criminal to jail, he only goes because they are threatening to murder him if he doesn’t. When it comes right down to it, everyone in prison is being threatened with murder, every day. When the state puts a man to death, it is only because he decided to go to court and wait to be murdered on schedule instead of making a run for it and being gunned down in the street. For some reason, we don’t call that “execution,” and there are only protesters, riots, looting, and moral showboating when the color combination of cops and executed civilians can be whipped up by media race hustlers into something beyond nervous cops going Judge Dredd on uncooperative suspects.

Two things do bother me about state executions, and state violence generally.

The first is the legitimacy of state “justice.”

America has the largest per capita prison population in the world. Some of it is even run for profit, which obviously incentivizes incarceration and gets palms greased in some way at every level. Prosecutors advance their careers by demonstrating high conviction rates. Prosecutorial misconduct has been described even by the New York Times as “rampant” and studies have shown that misconduct is almost never punished — even when the accused are later exonerated in part or wholly because the prosecutors had been caught lying or withholding important information from defense lawyers. Harsh mandatory sentences mean plea deals have become the norm in most places, with the accused confessing to crimes they may or may not have committed simply because they know that if they lose a trial they’ll be locked away for decades. Losing or winning a trial may well come down to how good of a defense you can afford — or how much the prosecution is willing to lie or manipulate evidence to get a conviction.

“Justice” may have nothing to do with it.

It’s not that justice never happens, that police never catch true “bad guys,” or that people whose actions are absolutely impossible to defend — serial rapists and psychopaths — aren’t better off behind bars or dead.

It’s just that in America’s increasingly byzantine and often arbitrary system of laws, hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t serial rapists or murderers — perpetrators of victimless crimes who aren’t any worse than the rest of us — often end up in jail with them. Supposedly, 86% of the people doing time in Federal prisons are there for victimless crimes.

It’s easy to say, “let’s get tough on criminals,” but as one author wrote, the average person commits “three felonies a day.” People aren’t necessarily going to jail for being “bad people,” so much that they are going to jail for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s like we’re on the old Spartan agoge system where you’re expected to steal, but beaten for getting caught.

All those times you were speeding but didn’t get a ticket, the time you drove after two drinks instead of one, that season of Game of Thrones you torrented, the income you didn’t report, the girl who agreed that you didn’t “rape” her after her hangover wore off, the fistfight no one prosecuted, that illegal drug you bought in college, that time you did something you were supposed to have a license to do even though you didn’t know it. Maybe you did something I didn’t list, but you know what you did. You’re guilty. You could have been prosecuted and possibly convicted as a felon, but you weren’t. Because you were lucky. Because you didn’t get caught.

You’re a “free range” criminal. For now.

Sure, none of those things are death penalty offenses. But the fact that everyone is breaking laws every single day while people are being selectively prosecuted and punished by “luck of the draw” because there are so many petty laws and no way to punish everyone undermines the credibility of the whole system. And, if you got snatched up by the kiddie claw crane of the police state and found yourself doing a 10-15 year stretch in a prison run by gangs, maybe you’d end up a murderer, too.

Encouraging formal state execution assumes that the American legal system is credible, just, and expresses the will of the American people. Americans are no longer a “people,” but a sprawling population of different people with different races, cultures, and values inhabiting an oversized economic territory. America’s legal system is, at least generally speaking, broken and corrupt from street cop to senator. Cheerleading for formal state executions under these circumstances is lunacy. The “sanctity of life” has nothing to do with it. The American government simply does not deserve that kind of trust. It has the physical authority to do what it wants because it has the largest, most well-armed and well-coordinated group of enforcers within its territory, but I’m certainly not going to give it my mandate, allegiance or moral blessing.

Speaking of cheerleading and madness, mulling over the idea of state execution got me thinking about proxy violence in general.

It’s a little perverse, isn’t it?

Again, not because violence itself is perverse. I can’t think of anything that seems more just or natural than, say, a father killing — even torturing — a man who molested or murdered his child. And, if he’s not physically able to do it, asking a good man with a talent for violence to act in his place seems reasonable. A coalition of men acting together to right some injustice and enforce tribal order — that sounds healthy and right.

But people demanding the blood of strangers? It’s vulgar, low, and weak. Civilized in the worst possible way, like picnicking at a beheading or showing up early to see someone disemboweled at the coliseum. Saying “we ought to be tough on crime” isn’t the same as doing the dirty work yourself. It doesn’t make you a tough guy. It’s like yelling at quarterbacks on TV, only in this case it’s yelling at miserable low-level government functionaries to push the button. It’s vicarious bloodlust.

“Get him! Kill him! Yeah, you show him!”

I agree with Kozinski that if people can’t stomach the bloody reality of what they are doing, then they shouldn’t be demanding it or supporting it.

If they televised executions, though, I wonder how many people would develop a taste for it. It’s happened before, and while they are often denied even the real-life violence of a schoolyard fistfight, Americans love vicarious violence in entertainment. It’s the only violence they’re allowed. As they progressively relinquish power over their own lives, this illusory power by proxy may seem even more attractive, and their handlers may see it as a cheap circus. Dystopian novels and movies come to mind. Death Race 2000. Running Man.

When it comes to tribally authorized execution, I prefer the Ned Stark way.

Not the people passing it off to some jury of “peers” — who somehow have nothing to do for weeks on end — recommending it to some fat, self-righteous gavel-banger who passes it off to some corrections officer.

No, “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

It’s not exactly practical, but ways that seem right are rarely practical in the mess of modernity.

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Militarized Status Quo

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Accept it or not, but what America is currently seeing in Missouri is the new phenomenon of militarized status quo. With rapidly shifting demographics, a changing economy that jeopardizes the jobs of millions of low-skilled workers, and a declining willpower to deal with crime long-term, this is the only thing that can keep majority non-White areas in check.

As the Ferguson riots rage on into another week, America is faced with the knowledge that we can only control non-White violence with uncompromising force. That the current status quo that bourgeois Whites enjoy is only ensured by this is an uncomfortable fact for many Americans to accept.

Accept it or not, but what America is currently seeing in Missouri is the new phenomenon of militarized status quo. With rapidly shifting demographics, a changing economy that jeopardizes the jobs of millions of low-skilled workers, and a declining willpower to deal with crime long-term, this is the only thing that can keep majority non-White areas in check.

Except America’s elite doesn’t want to hear that, and this attitude is reflected in the most middling response to rioting in American history. Many within the government and nearly the entire media has come out publicly on the side of the rioters—while at the same time, the System ist still reverting to tear gas and rubber bullets to quell further violence. Deeds speak louder than words, and in this case, the strong-arm response to the protesters reveals that the System is more than willing to do what is needed to be done to keep the violence contained, even if it might not like the fact it’s firing upon Blacks. Going off Aethelwulf’s brilliant article on the Euromaidan protests, the state in this situation seems more than willing to use sufficient power to maintain its status quo—unlike the government of Viktor Yanukovych. They don’t need to use deadly force in this situation and they don’t need to up the ante because this outbreak of violence does not really threaten the general order of things. This is not prime territory for business and they are no urban elves or government headquarters nearby. They’re content with the response so far.

Local police, decked out in military gear and boasting armored vehicles, were able to deter looting and keep the destruction to a minimum. You would expect the Ferguson Police Department to receive some recognition for this feat, but they have only been recognized for their similarity with Bull Connor’s dreaded Birmingham Public Safety force. It’s worth repeating my earlier assertion that the System is uninterested and unwilling in curbing non-White aggression in the long run, and we’re seeing this mentality play out in the farce that is the national response to this episode.

The prevailing narrative is that Michael Brown was shot down in cold blood while he was trying to surrender to police. After peaceful protests got under way, the all-White police detachment started firing tear gas from their hi-tech tanks and suppressed the non-violent demonstrators with brute force.

We all know that this is entirely bogus and Brown was shot after he stole cigars from a local store, attacked the attending clerk, and then likely assaulted an officer. We also know that the “protests” were mostly characterized by looting until the police showed up in equipment that Bashar al-Assad could envy. And the rioters promptly went back to pillage mode when the riot squads were replaced by the hugs of the highway patrol.

But the center of attention has already passed from the riots to the militarized police and their strong-arm tactics. Sympathy for the looters and calls for the demilitarization of police departments have come from all sides of the political aisle—with Rand Paul being the loudest voice. Due to this convergence, the left has taken the time to pat their conservative bedfellows on the head for their progress on racial issues.

What Rand Paul and others choose to not realize is that the fully-armed police force is the only thing ensuring that business stays in the area and that Republican voters are left unharmed by the rioters. The riot squads perfectly represent militarized status quo. The only way for the town of Ferguson and its surrounding areas to continue to function in modern America is to deploy militarized groups to coerce the hordes back into relative docility. The Blacks that comprise the ghetto only respond to one thing in this situation—force. That is why you need armored vehicles that were intended for Iraq if you want to ensure your community doesn’t get overrun by Black mobs. Safe, lily-white suburbs aren’t ensured by the Constitution—they’re ensured by battle-ready cops. The status quo for conservatives are these suburbs that were created by White flight and protected by well-funded and well-equipped police.

Ferguson used to be one of these suburbs before the “Black Undertow” caught up with it and turned it into a majority Black town.

Law and order has traditionally been the GOP’s calling card as it sided with the interests of their suburban voters and kept the status quo in place. Business could resume in places like New York and communities could ensure that non-White criminals would have little chance of invading their neighborhoods.

In the wake of Ferguson, many Republicans seem eager to drop their association with law and order in another moronic attempt to appeal to non-White voters. Like past attempts, it won’t work. But more importantly, if they sign onto legislation that eliminates mandatory sentencing and cracks down on tough police measures, they jeopardize the ideal status quo they cherish. Crime will take an upturn and businesses may find it harder to operate in some areas of the country. More Ferguson-style riots will break out and more racial wealth redistribution will occur to sate the evergrowing hordes. Whites who can’t afford to live in urban elf enclaves will be driven further out into the recesses of suburbia and more city areas will be inhospitable for occasional visits. The cost of living in an urban elf enclave will increase and the chances of going into debt will skyrocket for those Whites eager to cling to a postmodern lifestyle.

This must be a worthwhile trade off for Al Sharpton’s praise.

However, the new militarized status quo will protect society enough to ensure that the System can keep going and not risk too much chaos. Enough Whites will accept the extra cost the gated community or the longer commute if they know they can still can come home to eight different channels of ESPN. A couple of Whites might be outraged now by the newly, militarized police but most will accept it as the price they must pay for comfort and security.

Even the reasoning behind the displeasure with militarized police reveals what the left and the right think about the problem long-term. The left views it as just another tool to oppress minorities, the right views it as an extension of big government. In the end, both sides will accept it because it guarantees something for each. It guarantees the order of the modern society that the left dominates and it guarantees the security of the Republican-voting suburbs. Neither side will get serious about demilitarization unless they are willing to address the deeper problems plaguing America’s inhabitants. You can rest assured they will never do that.

When America saw itself as a White country, we didn’t need police officers armed to the teeth and tanks parked in the station. We knew we’d have safe streets and riots weren’t tolerated. We no longer consider ourselves a White country though, and militarized police is now a fact of life.

The System’s severe reaction to the riots—albeit reluctantly—contradicts the notion that I gave credence to that the System doesn’t want to use, and won’t use brutal coercion in dealing with race riots. They might not want to, but they have, and they will use it again in the future. Some may cheer the police response as some kind of White backlash against black criminality when it’s not—it’s just the System’s natural reaction to threats against America’s multiracial status quo.

Ignore the initial disgust to these harsh measures from members of our elite class. They were only repulsed that it was done by White bumpkins against lovable Negroes. The Department of Justice and the White House can theoretically stop these officers from stomping the crowd at any time, and they pressured the Missouri Governor to replace them with the more diverse and softer Highway Patrol. And that group continues to fire rubber bullets and turn up the crowd control. They have no problem with the militarized status quo—even when they have to fight their own base to maintain it.

I wondered previously how many more LA-style race riots can the System afford. After witnessing the response to Ferguson, they certainly can afford a lot more.

We will see more advanced noise sirens, more tanks, more police looking like Army Rangers in Afghanistan, and more totalitarian measures to keep anarchy limited to our culture. The police officer who killed Brown is screwed and his trial (I don’t see how they won’t indict him) will be one long, drawn out inquisition of the sins of White people. The criminalization of White self-defense is real and done in order to appease the low-impulse control Black underclass. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to take away the tanks and crowd control sirens—those are here to stay. That’s anarcho-tyranny. This is the reality of the multiracial, continental strip mall we live in.

The fact that the state has to use this show of force to maintain the status quo should wake up a few Whites to the grim reality of this new order. Not many, but a few. When they see images of feral Blacks robbing liquor stores in pants all the way down to their knees, a few will realize that the dogma of racial equality is an utter sham. When they see protests all across the country in honor of a hulking black thug, a few will see the cultural narrative as utterly corrupt. And when they see a White officer who could easily pass for Middle America’s poster boy get run down for protecting his life, a few will realize that the justice system doesn’t serve the interests of Whites.

Incidents like Ferguson are bound to produce an awakening of racial consciousness for a few Whites. We are only going to see more events like this in the future and more Whites will wake up to the living nightmare that is the American Dream.

All the while, the rest of society will grow to accept militarized status quo.

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Satire as News

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PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (U.S.A.) VOTES THAT JESUS CHRIST “MAY HAVE BEEN GAY AND TRANSGENDERED”

Editor’s Note: This was originally published by the race realist satire blog Diversity Chronicle. The site has managed to troll major media in the past and is an interesting venture in seeing how ridiculous our society has become that these stories are now believable news stories.

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (U.S.A.) VOTES THAT JESUS CHRIST “MAY HAVE BEEN GAY AND TRANSGENDERED”

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in a decision that has enraged fundamentalists and those on the radical and extreme right, has voted to recognize that Jesus Christ “may have been gay and transgendered.” This decision has provoked some extremists to accuse the Presbyterian Church of blasphemy and even apostasy. The Presbyterian Church reports receiving hundreds of angry letters of homophobic hate-mail since the decision, expressing hateful, bigoted, retrograde and ignorant views against the LGBT community. Previously, the church voted to ordain openly gay clergy and to allow ministers to officiate at gay weddings, rightly earning praise from progressives.

In another decision that is only controversial among hateful and intolerant bigots, the Presbyterians have decided to begin teaching children of all ages about homosexuality and the transgendered. Experts agree that it is important to reach children at the earliest ages in order to inculcate a spirit of tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Children need to understand that all sexual orientations and lifestyles, as well as all sexual acts, are equal and morally equivalent under all circumstances. No orientation or type of sexual act is better than any other – all are equal!

Statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and other groups, showing that homosexuals are more likely to contract AIDS or other STDs, can have no basis in fact. They are quite obviously the result of a shockingly pervasive institutional homophobia. There can be no other rational explanation. In another decision, praised by progressives, condoms will be distributed at every Sunday school class. The church has decided to give out new glow-in-the-dark condoms in an effort to get children and teens more interested in practicing safe sex.

Children will be taught reinterpreted Bible stories, which include positive LGBT role-models. Based on a literal reading of some biblical verses, like 2 Samuel 1:26, it is now widely accepted that King David, the ancient Israelite hero, was a proud homosexual. The verse reads “I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Another verse even includes a kiss between David and Jonathan! “And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.” (1 Samuel 20:41)

We even read that Jonathan stripped himself of his clothes before David! 1 Samuel 18:3-4 says “Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.” Although most scholars agree that the Torah does prohibit homosexuality rather explicitly (Leviticus 20:13) the Old Testament teaches that, where love is concerned, even God must bow to human feelings and abrogate His law! This might sound like God has changed His mind, which might disturb some fundamentalists, but the Bible cites other examples of this. God regretted that He had made man at one point (Genesis 6:6-7), and He regretted flooding the earth and vowed never to do it again. (Genesis 9:10-11)

LGBT and Liberation Theology Pastor Douglas Calvert observed that “There is actually a great deal of evidence that Jesus Christ was not heterosexual. According to tradition he had very long hair. He was very effeminate and soft spoken. He never married. He had no children, and he never expressed a romantic interest in the opposite sex. He did hang out with twelve guys though, and travelled with them all the time. When they were alone with nothing else to do, did they experiment with each other? Did they sleep together, or engage in orgies? We may never know for certain, but the answer is most definitely that they probably did.”

Paul Oestreicher, an Anglican chaplain at the university of Sussex, agrees. His article “Was Jesus gay? Probably” can be read here. More and more mainline protestant denominations are becoming open to the idea that Jesus Christ, whom they regard as the Son of God, and the third person of the Trinity, may have been gay. Instead of finding this as a source of shame or disconcertion, Christians should be proud and loudly proclaim the fact that Jesus Christ was gay! They should march through the streets advertising it with banners and shouting it through megaphones, loudly proclaiming “We are proud God is gay!”

Although most other prominent religious figures were married, or were polygamous, Jesus Christ never married. Many male pagan deities had wives or several wives and concubines as well. Shiva, the Hindu deity, had at least eight wives and countless concubines according to tradition. Despite Jewish tradition upholding marriage, Christ never married, nor did he own any slave girls. Curiously, the chief founder of Christianity, who sought to propagate it after Christ’s death, the Apostle Paul, also never married. Perhaps Christianity was the first world religion accepting of homosexuality.

Moses, Muhammad, and even the Buddha married and had offspring. Is it possible instead that Christ was not homosexual but perhaps was impotent? Is it possible that he had no sexual drive? Was he a sexually repressed heterosexual, who merely avoided women? Perhaps he was socially awkward with women? While these things cannot be ruled out, they seem unlikely. Some critics point to verses seemingly extolling the virtues of a eunuch’s life. (Mathew 19:12) Those verses however only serve to further reinforce the fact that Christ despised and abhorred the very idea of heterosexual sex!

Feminist Professor Claudia Jackson noted that “Jesus Christ was an early feminist; he understood that any sexual activity between a man and a woman was always rape. It is rape even if a woman expressly asked a man to have sexual relations with her. Men have always enjoyed a position of superiority over women. Thus the relationships between the sexes have always been unequal. Therefore heterosexual sexual activity always represents an indecent assault upon women.”

The Gospel of John refers to the gay lover of Jesus Christ “and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved…” (John 20:2) Before his death by crucifixion the Bible tells us, in John 19:26-27 “When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home.” Clearly Jesus was saying something like “Mom, I’ve married a man. We are gay lovers. So, he is your son-in-law. He should live with you now, and take care of you.” This could not be more clear.

Some fundamentalist opponents of homosexuality cite verses like Leviticus 20:13 “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” There are several possible answers to this, besides the one mentioned earlier. The New Testament clearly teaches that God’s law was nailed to the cross and abolished on the basis of Christ’s sacrificial death. Thus God’s laws in the Old Testament are no longer binding for Christians. (Colossians 2:14) If one is Jewish, one could perhaps argue God was once homophobic but is no longer. God has reformed Himself and become more tolerant. Another retort might be that this verse, incompatible as it is with God’s love, was never inspired by God to begin with and should be dismissed as not truly of divine origin.

The particular explanation that one adopts is not important as long as we understand that homophobia is an ugly crime that we must never accept. We cannot countenance it under any circumstances. We must never allow bigotry to cloak itself in the garments of religiosity or spirituality! A homophobic religion is not worthy of tolerance, but only of hatred and contempt! To persecute such a sick and dangerous cult would not be intolerant, but virtuous and vitally necessary! Intolerance warrants no tolerance and tolerating intolerance is arguably the greatest evil of our time.

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 is also used by homophobes and haters to attack the LGBT community. The verses read “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

Although abusers of themselves with mankind does explicitly refer to homosexual activity, and that is even more apparent in many other translations, these verses too could be rejected as incompatible with God’s love. Progressive Jews and Christians see the Bible as an evolving document. It must change and our interpretations of it must change with the times so that it remains relevant in every generation. To do otherwise would be to make ourselves prisoners beholden to an ancient literary work. Books are written by people, not by the hand of God onto stone! Good and evil or right and wrong are social constructs, evolving and changing over time.

Let us not forget, the Bible also calls shellfish unclean. Shall we all change our diets because of something that primitive nomadic, unwashed, lice-infested, neck bearded and barely literate peoples wrote several thousand years ago? Remember, these are people who owned slaves, sold their own daughters into slavery and murdered their family members and neighbours. Why? For worshipping the wrong supernatural sky buddies or picking up sticks on the wrong day. Hell, even saying that Asherah was Yahweh’s girlfriend was enough to warrant death for an Israelite! They were all, clearly, very far from perfect.

As Progressive Christians understand it, the Bible is the inspired word of God. However, it must evolve and be interpreted in light of present circumstances and conditions. It must not be rigid, unchanging, or seen as somehow inerrant. Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela were inspired by God. The Bible must not be seen as an exclusive or even primary source of truth in life. To do so would be to worship a book, to fall into the sin of bibliolatry. God is love, and therefore love and its daughters, tolerance and pluralism, and not the Bible should ultimately guide us. The Bible is an important literary work, but it only has value to the extent that it affirms humanist virtues.

Although religious fundamentalist homophobes like to claim Jesus Christ was a right-wing Christian who hated gays, the truth is far from that. Jesus opposed public prayer, and prayer in school. Jesus wanted to keep prayer in the closet and out of the public sphere “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” (Matthew 6:6 KJV.) Jesus said to keep prayer, and not homosexuality, in the closet, contrary to what so many bigoted and intolerant fundies proclaim!

We know that Jesus was a trained carpenter by Joseph the husband of Mary. It seems likely that along with building homes and furniture, Jesus offered decorating tips and ideas to clients. In his business, he would have had ample opportunity to discuss and explore interior decorating. No less an authority than Elton John noted that Jesus would have backed gay marriage and was gay himself.

In “The Secret Gospel of Mark” Jesus teaches a youth – who was wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body – the “Mystery of the Kingdom of God.” Obviously, Jesus was initiating him into his first homosexual activity! There can clearly be no other reasonable explanation. The Christian Church rejected this gospel as apocryphal, because of homophobia and intolerance!

Jesus Christ was a strong advocate of economic levelling and redistribution. He once told a rich man “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) He predicted a world where the poor would one day rule and hold all property in common, while the rich one percent would come last, as punishment for their crimes. “So the last shall be first, and the first last…” (Matthew 20:16)

Jesus even drove the capitalists out of the Temple and forbade them from selling their wares there. (John 2:14-16) Jesus was also a renowned peace activist. (Matthew 5:9) Jesus said we are to be judged based on how we treat the least of his brethren. “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40) A rich man asks Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” (Matthew 19:21)

Clearly Jesus was a homosexual and a progressive who favoured economic levelling, banning public prayer, and who strongly denounced the rich. The guy was a radical Jewish liberal as the Bible shows, persecuted and hated by the conservatives of his time! Those conservative leaders ultimately instigated his murder, so great was their hatred of him! It is ironic that conservatives and right-wingers claim to follow his teachings. They do so by systematically ignoring or distorting most of them!

It’s time for progressives to take Jesus back. We should not allow the radical and extreme right to hold the memory of one of our own hostage! Let us reclaim Jesus, who no doubt, if he were alive today, would proudly march with us under a rainbow flag in an LGBT parade denouncing injustice, inequality and intolerance! At LGBT parades across the nation and around the world this year, the Christian LGBT community will march with banners proudly proclaiming “God is Gay!” in his memory!

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America: Imagine the World Without Her

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With that in mind, we have to ask just how many would-be conservatives became liberals because of the seemingly willed stupidity and dorkiness of Conservatism Inc. Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary is another chapter in this sordid tale of political buffoonery.

How can any well-adjusted, thinking person still associate with official conservatism?

People often choose their political affiliation for social, rather than for ideological reasons. They want to align with groups that are smart and successful. With that in mind, we have to ask just how many would-be conservatives became liberals because of the seemingly willed stupidity and dorkiness of Conservatism Inc. Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary is another chapter in this sordid tale of political buffoonery.

America: Imagine the World Without Her has the same flavor as the latest batch of evangelical movies, and rivals them in its lack of intellectual cleanliness. It features two squishy songs (here’s one) by acoustic guitar-wielding boy-men that are more fit for a middle school revival than a documentary that attempts gravitas, and D’Souza talks about the American founding as though it were the Immaculate Conception.

But that should come as no surprise when the film sets to perpetuate the myth of America as the glorious proposition nation that has overcome the universal faults of the world. Like the Messiah, America was created to expunge the universal sins of the world and offer man the promise of living in a merchant paradise. D’Souza also promotes the myth that the old-timey America can be restored and the 1950s can be carried on for all of eternity—as long as we vote Republican and live up to the Constitution.

With this in mind, the only people who should enjoy this movie are over the age of 50 or diehard believers in the conservative movement. D’Souza himself compounds this problem by attempting to inject himself into every scene of the movie.

Just as viewers can’t escape seeing Michael Moore’s corpulent figure in his films, D’Souza’s turtle-like resemblance is nearly as aesthetically unpleasing. The close ups of his smarmy face reveal his unbearable narcissism to many viewers.  His sense of victimization and his depiction of himself as some kind of martyr for conservativism widens the problem. But the real D’Souza is just an immigrant plagiarist felon with no original ideas. He even stole the opening credit scene from Conan The Barbarian—paradoxically, as the film’s message denounces the value of conquest.

The film’s subtitle—Imagine the World Without Her—is misleading as the real purpose of the film is to address leftist accusations that America was built on conquest and theft. Except for the introduction, which dramatizes George Washington being gunned down by a British sniper, we never are shown the path of what the world would be like without the United States.

Instead, the film focuses on combating five alleged charges that the left promotes against America. They are: America committed genocide against the Indians and stole their land; America waged an unjust war against Mexico and stole their land; America enslaved millions of blacks and stole their labor; America practices imperialism and has stolen resources from around the globe; and America practices capitalism, which is an unfair economic system that favors the wealthy over the poor and is theft enshrined as economics.

The heroes of the film are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and (naturally) Martin Luther King Jr. The bogeymen are Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Saul Alinsky, and, of course, Barack Obama. This is history according to conservatives.

D’Souza response to the charges postulated by Zinn’s A People’s History to the United States is simple—those faults are attributable to the universal conquest ethic which America has overcome by adopting the ethic of the merchant. This is in many ways an inversion of the caricatured leftist thinking D’Souza maligns—the parts of American history which violate his moral sensibilities are attributed to universal failings, while the virtues of America, however, are peculiar only to her. And he answers all charges with this mentality.

The Indians practiced conquest as well and Americans sometimes bought their land legally, thus no harm done. Mexico oppressed Texas, we answered the call to save the Southwest, and we gave back most of the country to Mexico, thus no harm done. Slavery was wrong, but blacks can now be great entrepreneurs and we sacrificed 600,000 lives to end it, thus no harm done. Our foreign wars have been on behalf of freedom and we have never exploited countries for resources, thus no harm done. Finally, capitalism is an amazing system that benefits everyone and depends on hard work, thus no harm done.

Unfortunately for D’Souza, all of his rebuttals the left can easily dismiss and they glaringly overlook facts that Zinn and others use for their critical arguments of American history. But that doesn’t matter since this film is an exercise in mythmaking and anything that would undermine the notion that America offers opportunity to all and was founded by entrepreneurs, rather than conquerors, is not expected to be offered.

For the main argument D’Souza uses to praise America is that it took a different path from that of every other nation in human history—that it did not base itself on the “conquest ethic.” America, according to D’Souza’s, based itself on the merchant ethic instead. This ethic placed profit, security, comfort, and materialism above the martial virtues of conquest. The movie acts as an exposition in the merchant mindset—merchant values above all others. For him, the real heroes of America are its entrepreneurs, not its warriors. To emphasize that America is on a different path, he points out that the entrepreneur was frequently far down in the caste system in every Traditionalist society and cites quotes of Traditionalist thinkers disparaging enterprise as less noble than theft to drive home his thesis. On the other hand, the businessman is the pinnacle of American society and entrepreneurship is treated as sacrosanct.

In many ways, the criticisms that Zinn makes of America as a nation based on conquest is what makes the nation worthy of any respect. A country in order to survive has to emerge out of violence and struggle. You either fight, or you die. The fact that a few frontiersmen from the British Isles were capable of taking over an entire continent is something that should be celebrated, not overlooked in favor of entrepreneurs who pushed hair care products to black women (which is one of America’s heroes). Our side probably agrees more with Zinn’s assessment of America rather than D’Souza’s, as well as the actual facts of history.

Considering D’Souza’s intended audience, he adds that America bases itself on low-church Protestantism and how the only cultural heritage America has is how its population was more likely go to church and provide private charity. Thus, when D’Souza wants to pinpoint the “quintessential American,” he chooses Star Parker. Parker is a Black conservative scammer extraordinaire who racked up multiple abortions early in life while living on welfare. She then found Jesus and has become an entrepreneur in conning White conservatives out of their money by promising to do outreach to the Black community. That’s America folks.

This goes perfectly well with D’Souza’s celebration of America as the only true proposition nation, where even non-White plagiarists like himself can make a buck. For this argument, he doesn’t use his smarmy self to make the point—he uses a speech by U2 singer and perpetual Africa activist Bono to state the thesis instead.

 Here are some “highlights” from Bono’s speech:

  • “America’s an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country; it’s not an idea.”
  • “That’s how we see you around the world—as one of the greatest ideas in human history. Right up there with the renaissance, right up with crop rotation and the Beatles’ White Album.” 
  • “The idea is that you and me are created equal…the idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we’ll do the rest.”
  • “This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper.” 
  • “I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do–the family tree has lots of branches. But the thing is, the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths–your truths–they are self-evident in us.”

Instead of a nation united by blood, culture, and soil, we’re a nation bonded together by abstract principles of commerce and comfort. I can’t imagine a more damning argument against the American idea.

The film concludes by focusing on Saul Alinsky and his acolytes’ nefarious plan to destroy these ideas and turn America into a socialist dystopia that hates the Constitution, and how Obama is now going after dissenters—like convicted campaign fraudster D’Souza. Unfortunately for D’Souza’s intentions, Alinksy comes off as by far the coolest guy in the movie. He has gravitas, he has balls, he has ideals, and he seems to oppose all of the stupidity and childishness promoted for the past two hours. After seeing this movie, I’d rather be an Alinskyite than a conservative.

The stupidity and childishness that underlies this film drives intelligent people into the arms of the Left. The movie made me want to become a liberal. He only has a place for the entrepreneur. The laborer and employee have no significance. Conquest is immoral and consumerism is awesome. Go to a mega church and make a buck off pointless products. That message makes my very being revolt in anger.

From the triumph of merchants over conquerors to the glorification of the proposition nation, Identitiarians have little in common with this film’s ideas. It puts into visual form the vast differences between us and our conservative peers, and dispenses with the illusion that they will ever come to radical thought with their own devices. The state and culture despise the aging Middle Americans who will take to this film, while those same audience members cling to the America that is no longer their
s. These people need to be shocked out of their stupor and wake up to the reality that this is no longer their country and the ideas promoted by schlock like America should be discarded into the dustbin of history.

They need to start imagining the world without America—because their world is about to get worse with her still around.

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America Politics

When Starting the World Goes Wrong

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It represents the faint beginnings of a cancer with the global liberal order, the playing out of internal contradictions that could ravage it from within. This discontent is borne more out of spiritual crisis than economic recession. The danger is that the Islamic State shows (with apologies to Dave Chapelle) what happens when starting the world goes wrong.

Barack Obama is now the fourth consecutive American President to order military action in Iraq. Once again, it seems we must “think of the children”–especially because this time, it seems they are decapitating them. Of course, after two decades of this, one is tempted to ask–so what else is new?

Well, what’s new is that America is not facing a “rogue state” refusing to play by the rules of George Bush I’s “New World Order.” Instead, a self-proclaimed Caliphate has arisen in the Levant, erasing boundaries between Iraq and Syria, seizing Iraq’s largest dam, and easily undoing whatever progress American forces made over the last decade holding the country together.

The breakdown of state power is startling to the Great and the Good, but not to those of us on the New Right who find both hope and dread in the warnings of William Lind and Martin van Crevald about the collapse of state power. Fourth Generation Warfare has already destroyed the Westphalian order in what is fashionably called the “birthplace of civilization.”

Indeed, it’s startling how utterly irrelevant states have become in the current wars. As Israel pulverizes Gaza, street protests are rocking the streets of Europe, as tribe fights Tribe in what is ostensibly the capital of the French. Meanwhile, the fabled “Arab street” seems largely quiet, as are Arab governments. As neoconservative Victor Davis Hanson accurately notes, many Arab states are, if anything, quiet supporters of Israel. Yet Israel still faces an existential demographic crisis that only grows worse even as it gradually strengthens its diplomatic position against former foes.

Meanwhile, while the “international community” can tweet and preen about freeing “Palestine,” far fewer seem to care when Sunni slaughters Shia, or vice versa. Tom Clancy predicted the rise of an Iranian dominated “United Islamic Republic” in Executive Orders that would drive for the Middle Eastern oil fields.  (It’s a mildly uncomfortable coincidence that a subplot in the book was an Ebola outbreak in the United States.) Clancy’s fiction errs only in that that it is the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria who have raised the black banner of Islamic unity and resistance to what they see as Alawite and Shia occupation. Ironically, it’s the forces of Hezbollah and the elite troops of the Islamic Republic of Iran that are the most active in fighting the Caliphate on the ground. A civil war within Islam akin to the Catholic/Orthodox slaughter of the Fourth Crusade is raging before our eyes.

This has led to some speculation that the “Islamic State” is actually a tool of American policy, keeping the Muslims at each other’s throats instead of Israel’s. It seems more likely that, as with Israel and Hamas, the foreign policy experts created a golem they can no longer control. Bashar al-Assad (and his lovely wife) told you so, you bloody fools.

But this goes beyond geopolitics. It represents the faint beginnings of a cancer with the global liberal order, the playing out of internal contradictions that could ravage it from within. This discontent is borne more out of spiritual crisis than economic recession. The danger is that the Islamic State shows (with apologies to Dave Chappelle) what happens when starting the world goes wrong.

It’s hard to imagine the Caliphate ever making the transition to a recognized state. However, unlike Osama bin Laden, the Islamic State has succeeded in creating a global brand that appeals to disaffected Sunnis throughout the world, including those in the West. Even women are joining the group – and we all await Jezebel to tell us what they really want is subsidized birth control and more female role models in comic books.

Of more concern, “Western” Muslims have been fighting for the Caliphate, providing propaganda for their brothers and clickbait fodder for the likes of the Daily Mail. For example, one “Abu Muslim,” a Canadian, went to fight for his god and was “martyred,” giving his Caliphate a new hero. Similarly, Muslims that outwardly resemble hipsters and used to post workout videos on YouTube now spend their days on the streets of Syria riding horses and waving scimitars. Naturally, this comes as a great surprise to all of us who know that “Islam means peace.”

What these Islamic warriors are fighting for is not just a Caliphate but something beyond what liberal democracy offers. It is the pursuit of the Greater Jihad through the Lesser Jihad. Unfortunately for us, Muslim culture offers an eternal and immediately available alternative to modernity. The great danger of non-White mass immigration–or what should be called settler colonialism–is the regression to the mean, both in intelligence and in culture. Even if a largely professional and secular Muslim goes to the West to become a wannabe SWPL, his sons will seek a return to their roots. Whether a rich Muslim turns his back on privilege or a poor one blames the kafir for his low status, the “root cause” of terrorism and extremism is something our ancestors already knew–Blood Tells.

What, after all, does the West–or modernity–offer people? While Fukuyama contends that it satisfies thymos, the desire for recognition, those who live under the postwar Western peace grow less worthy of dignity the more they talk about it. Worse, they know this. Ultimately, this leads to an internalized self-loathing, which modern man resolves in one of three ways.

  1. Pursuit of ever more elaborate forms of equality and revolt against nature (STIHIE)
  2. Consumerism, the political defense of consumerism, or a socially approved consumerist escapism (fandom, cosplay, video games, etc.)
  3. Rebellion – what Jack Donovan has called withdrawing consent in order to destroy the world modernity has created, and start a new one.  If enough people do this, it leads to what Dugin called “shov[ing] the people into the sweet process of creating history.”

What separates starting the world from LARPing? The answer is danger. To borrow from Hegel, the difference between the lord and the slave is the former risks his life and safety for the sake of honor. Modern men are slaves because they define themselves by their intense desire for safety, comfort, and self-gratification. As even movies like Wall-E point out, if human beings are simply transformed into perfectly safe consumers, they are no longer really human–and they certainly don’t have any dignity.

The result is the “elite” of modern society in culture, politics, and (with some exceptions) economics have no obvious justification for their right of lordship. Americans love to read celebrity magazines to be titillated by their betters, but no one is ennobled by them. The more degraded someone is, the more our society seems to reward them. Thus, in some ways, a culture of desperate sincerity–even a monstrous one–will always seem preferable at some level to what we have now. As South Park put it just after 9/11:

Kyle — Do you really think your civilization is better than ours?! You people play games by killing animals, and oppress women!

Afghan boy — It’s better than a civilization that spends its time watching millionaires walk down the red carpet at the Emmys!

Stan – (After a pause) …He’s got us there, dude.

Of course, liberal capitalism specializes in assimilating and commodifying rebellion. A revolt against the system usually just transforms into just another business opportunity. However, there are exceptions.

As the late Jonathan Bowden noted, the two forces completely unassimilable by modernity are the far right and religious fundamentalism. And the modern West only seems able to enthusiastically oppose political and religious extremism that is somehow identified as “pro-White” or “pro-Christian.” Militant Islam always needs to be “explained,” unlike, say, neo-fascism, which is always described as a “plague” or a “disease” that needs to be “crushed.”

Obviously, Muslim immigration into the West is more of a symptom than a cause of Western decline. In and of itself, it is powerless. But it is amazingly persistent and will move to fill a void. And the West is a spiritual void.

For proof, one only has to compare the response of Pope Urban II to Muslim aggression:

From the confines of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople a horrible tale has gone forth and very frequently has been brought to our ears, namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; it has led away a part of the captives into its own country, and a part it has destroyed by cruel tortures; it has either entirely destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion…

Let the deeds of your ancestors move you and incite your minds to manly achievements; the glory and greatness of king Charles the Great, and of his son Louis, and of your other kings, who have destroyed the kingdoms of the pagans, and have extended in these lands the territory of the holy church. Let the holy sepulchre of the Lord our Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially incite you, and the holy places which are now treated with ignominy and irreverently polluted with their filthiness. Oh, most valiant soldiers and descendants of invincible ancestors, be not degenerate, but recall the valor of your progenitors.

To the pathetic, dishwatery mewlings of the current Spiritual Bolshevik-in-Chief on the extermination of Middle Eastern Christianity:

“Never war, never war,” [Pope Francis] said. “I am thinking, above all, of children who are deprived of the hope of a worthwhile life, a future. Dead children, wounded children, mutilated children, orphaned children, children whose toys are things left over from war, children who don’t know how to smile.” This was the moment when the tears came. “Please stop,” said Francis. “I ask you with all my heart, it’s time to stop. Stop, please!”

Yeah, that’ll do it. A far cry from Deus vult!

The West defines itself by tolerance, human rights, consumption, “freedom,” and phony religion that reinforces these decrepit values. It also only expresses its opposition to “militant Islam” in these terms. The result is that the West creates its own existential opposition from within.

When confronted with meaninglessness, with modernity, with either great wealth or the lack of it, there will always be temptation to assert oneself as more than a Last Man through Jihad in any place where there is a sizable Islamic population. After all, what could be more adventurous than re-establishing a Caliphate, leading the conquest of ancient cities, and creating a new world through the sword as the Companions of the Prophet did?  Better to live by the scimitar for one day, thinks the terrorist, than die slowly in a cubicle.

The fact that Islam is still seen as non-White and non-Western will always lend it that fashionable cachet forever denied to neo-fascism or Christian fundamentalism. In its way, modern Jihad is Riding the Tiger of Western decadence. And what’s more archaeo-futurist than getting likes for displaying the severed heads of your enemies on Facebook?

Moreover, while the horror of crucifixions, beheadings, and mass executions is real, Western governments have handicapped themselves in trying to muster outrage. It’s hard to act self-righteous when one only has to recall former Secretary of State Madeline Albright saying that indirectly taking the lives of half a million Iraqi children is “worth it” if it means removing Saddam Hussein. (And man, wouldn’t we love to have him back?)

Of course, at its essence, the cause of the Caliphate is despicable. What the Islamic State offers is a kind of Borg society that destroys priceless architectural treasures, subordinates real identity with a stale and abstract creed, and imposes a cultureless rule of unescapable mediocrity far worse than even that decreed by liberalism.

What is most chilling is not the beheadings or mass graves –we see that south of our own border in Mexico’s brutal drug war. What is worst are those robotic, almost blasé calls of the Takbir that accompany actions both murderous and mundane.  As Churchill said:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!
Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia
in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many
countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods
of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the
Prophet rule or live.  A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and
refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity…Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it.

And the British government arrested Liberty GB leader Paul Weston for quoting it.

The fact that people are choosing this over the Lockean shopping mall bodes ill for the End of History. Someone is going to start the world. We had better make sure it’s us.

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