Based Safety vs. Cringe Propaganda #40
This week in Based and Cringe...
HARD TRUTHS
In this interview with the podcast The Exile Hour, Jim Goad communicates his disappointment with what’s become of “The Alt Right” after Charlottesville.
"My theory is that somebody, probably federal agents or high powered financial types, broke apart the Alt Right using this way. ‘Send them all to Jesus,’” says Goad. “It’s so depressing that’s where these guys turned, and comical. Way to prove you guys never understood a thing.”
Indeed, these comments ring truer than ever this week, as I’m witnessing what appear to be (less than organized) targeted smear campaigns and digital hit jobs put out on my friends Jack Mason of The Perfume Nationalist, Zach Langley Chi Chi of I’m so Popular, and Filthy Armenian of Filthy Armenian’s Adventures by the so-called “Trad Caths” or traditional Catholics that have turned a certain segment of right wing Twitter into a hostile, cruel, and ruthlessly dogmatic nightmare every bit as shocking and debased as the Antifa Twitter of a couple years ago. Of course, it’s so predictable in so many ways that the right of liberalism would react to the left of liberalism’s supremacy by using its identically repressive and depressing tactics. Dogmas, orthodoxies, and utterly intellectually bereft internet ideologies are what the weak minded cling to in moments of cultural pandemonium. But where do these conservative “trad caths” of the right actually think this will end up? Do they really think that aping the delusional, out of phase orthodox Christian right ideas of Jesse Helms, he who got the NEA defunded over its support of Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz and other artists in the early 1990s, would actually lead to anything other than the exact same phenomenon that put millions of normal voters off of the Republican party in the 1990s and kick starting the ideological supremacy of left liberalism? I don’t know, and I don’t know if I really care. I never held much hope for anyone being able to dismantle the cultural monolith of the media and the activist industrial complex, but I am upset to see three men who I know to be amongst the most talented and interesting in this entire sphere be unduly smeared for failing to adhere to the dogmas of a bunch of aggro Internet users mistaking their algorithmic frenzies for actual political movement building.
”Just know that you will eventually encounter the same purity tests with conservatives that repelled you from liberals,” writes Jack on Twitter. “My advice is to not invest too much in the relentless dead-end discourse cycle and cultivate friendships with people who like you for you rather than for dogma.”
Indeed, where tunnel visioned political dogmas are formed is where talent, style, and originality are demonized. Losers who contribute nothing to the culture will clutch their pearls and attempt to takedown the talented for their eccentricities – that is, the qualities that have made them interesting to people in the first place. This is not specific to the left nor the right either: hysterics are truly a bipartisan phenomenon across the liberal “divide”; a divide that seems more nebulous and artificial by the day. Breton eroded the surrealist movement with his insistence on kicking anyone from the group — minds as great as Bataille, Dalî, and Artaud among them — for having questions about or seeing contradictions in Breton’s adherence to Marxism within the surrealist ethos. The great Ernst Jünger was derided by both liberals, for his alleged influence on the Nazi party, and by Nazis, for his refusal to support their doctrine of “Blood and Soil.” The greatest thinkers and artists will always face derision for their failures to conform in the present, only to be celebrated for their specificities of vision in the future.
The Trad Caths are functioning in a similar way: gatekeeping the right and thereby sanitizing it of its most interesting figures. Really guys, you want to bring homophobia back? I can sympathize with their rage about so-called “groomers” and the transgender movement (even if it does err into the territory of hysterics more often than not), but exactly which Western culture are you looking to conserve by preventing gay men from claiming their rightful place in its history? Donatello: fag. Michaelangelo: fag. Caravaggio: bisexual. Gogol: fag. Francis Bacon: fag. And on. And on. What kind of Western culture would there be to preserve without these GAY men? Get over yourselves.
BASED SAFETY
The most glorious news of the month without question is the announcement that a year after the death of its iconic creator Kentaro Miura, Berserk is returning and the story will come to its conclusion! Miura’s studio will be helmed by his close friend and fellow manga artist Kouji Mori, best known for his Holyland series, who claims that Miura explained to him his plans for the rest of the series. I commend and applaud both Mori and Miura’s team for their courageous decision to keep the series going despite the massive potential for failing to live up to the departed artist’s titanic legacy. I would forgive these guys for letting the quality in drawings and plotting slip just for having the bold audacity and ethical principles to keep this beautiful story alive.
Nina Power discusses Matt Walsh’s new documentary What is a Woman; applauding its boldness to take on the transgenderism question in medical and political institutions head on as well as criticizing it for failing to address the severity of this political issue RIGHT NOW: “His interviewees—distressed trans people, parents, the odd reality-based psychiatrist—make it abundantly clear that the lying and destruction needs to stop as soon as possible, before more people, particularly children, suffer grave harm.” Two of my best and closest wiggas, Barret Avner and Alex Bienstock, band together once more to discuss Laruelle (who I’ve never read and likely never will, they make him sound cool though) and the over-looming specter of finance punk. Paul Skallas, he who declares all that which is either “lindy” or is not “lindy,” appears on Red Scare to explain his philosophy to the world.
Dean Kissick laments the NFT world’s insistence on forgoing not just taste, but reality itself, in his new column. I’d like to shout out this interesting text by Nicholas Dolinger: weird shit, man. I fuck with it. In celebration of the re-release of his 2006 head fuck of a masterpiece, Inland Empire (which I took a very sexy latina girl to see at the movie theater in Tucson in 2006, and thereby evokes pleasantly erotic memories in me), David Lynch appears alongside stars Laura Dern and Justin Theroux at the Lincoln Film Center. In proof that quality content can still occasionally appear in the absolute most bottom of the barrel, libtard outlets, I thoroughly enjoyed this text by artist Richard Hawkins on the correspondence between artist Forrest Bess and Carl Jung in the 1930s, about dreams and Bess’s very weird self-surgery (you can read about it yourself).
Finally, and perhaps this will surprise you, I am thrilled about the news that has leaked about the sequel to Todd Phillips’s Joker. If the trickle out of Hollywood news is to be believed, the sequel will be called Joker: Folie à deux. The subtitle refers to a medical term for an identical medical disorder that effects two different patients the same way. More shockingly, the sequel has been announced as a kind of musical, with none other than Lady Gaga taking the role of Harley Quinn. Fan boys, predictably, are enraged. I, on the other hand, am delighted. Phillips appears to be the real deal: a mass media artist with a real zest for the trollish tactics of the enfant terrible, confounding and enraging audiences in the process to wild success. Joker opted to throw out the superhero film arc and embrace the dark character studies of sociopathy as practiced by Scorsese in Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. The sequel will throw out that structure, which allowed Phillips to create perhaps the most interesting film to ever make a billion dollars globally, in favor of a musical. Fantastic. Rage. Fervor. For all his libtard pandering and “Drumph” complaining (I think filmmakers are contractually obligated to be gay politically now), his instincts are sharp as a fucking tack.
CRINGE PROPAGANDA
I have a novel to write so I’m going to attempt to bang through the cringe as fast as possible. I’d assumed that someone would write this article eventually, but remained curious about who would be so dreadfully braindead AND brainwashed to actually put their name on it. Nevertheless, it appears that The Quietus’s Layla Legard is that person! “Is the mythologising of extreme violence in The Northman historical accuracy or merely providing succour to the toxic masculinity of the modern far right?” she asks. Actually, Layla: it’s clearly fucking both. That’s what makes it a great film.
Jacobin complains that elites are lying about inflation. I mean, sure, that’s true. But it doesn’t have much weight from them considering they too lied disastrously about inflation. I’ve got a lot of respect for Ariel Pink as an artist. I also have a lot of respect for Alex Lee Moyer, who similarly appears in this article defending her friend Ariel. But one wonders if Ariel’s refusal to move past his cancellation and make the cancellation such a big part of his identity is hurting him artistically. Ariel, my man, I know that if you just made a new album, people would listen to it. I would listen to it. Hell, I’m sure there are labels out there that would put it out not in spite of your cancellation, but BECAUSE of it. Use it to your own ends and make music! Simon Wu is retarded; what else can you say? Speaking of retarded, it’s getting harder and harder to even satire VICE. Don’t believe me? Read Tess Owen here expressing her concern that nature itself is being colonized by the (GASP!) far right!
Proving that running a museum in 2022 is one of the worst jobs you could possibly ask for, Kate Fowles is already out as director of MoMA PS1 after a brief, three year tenure. After god knows how many woke exhibitions and liberal political pandering, Fowles was still eaten alive by the continued controversies about who sits on the museum’s board. It seems that the mainstream media, which we of course understand as the misinformation arm of the Western intelligence sector, is turning on Zelensky and is more than prepared to throw him to the wolves (in this case, the wolves literally being the barbaric Nazi thugs of the Azov Regiment) after his repeated failures to do a bare minimum level of diplomacy during the conflict. Perhaps the DNC is finally starting to realize that this war is disastrous politically. Or maybe it’s now that Raytheon already got what it wanted, the US state is ready to move on. But even if calculated and hypocritical, a potential end to our involvement in this conflict is good news.
Finally, at a moment of historic economic decay, social conflict and political turmoil, THIS is who leads you. “So tell me, how do you feel? Well I dream of you the whole night through, And I don't even shut my eyes.”
ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Caravaggio “Judith Beheading Holofernes”
2. Joker
3. Spacemen 3