JOURNAL ENTRIES, Jan 2025, by Adam Lehrer

2024's final thoughts, and some words on the year ahead

Happy New Year. Welcome to 2025. 2024 was a deeply frustrating year, but it turned out to have been a momentous one in my life. I have been hired as the Deputy Online Editor for Tablet Magazine where I will now be responsible for co-authoring The Scroll, the publication’s daily newsletter, as well as roughly two long-form pieces a month, either gonzo journalism or cultural critique or what have you. I am deeply honored to be a part of what I consider to be the absolute best publication still in existence. It comes at a perfect time in my life, where after years of being relegated to underground carnival barker, enough of my prophecies have turned out to be true that I believe I’m owed a little prestige. Tablet Magazine is among the very few publications that takes a dissident and staunchly free speech position while maintaining a truly prestigious platform.

How this will impact Safety Propaganda remains to be seen, but it is likely that my output here might be less than what I am known for. The balance will be struck, however, but of course my greatest loyalty will be to the great people of Tablet who have deemed my work to be worthy of a real salary. I’m ecstatic really, and eager to start the new position next week.

JOURNAL ENTRIES

Everything “transgressive” IS and has been normalized since the 1990s, the problem is we haven’t evolved what transgression means to adjust for the changes to our society and power structure. Artists still rebel by screaming at a patriarchal Christian male authority that simply does not exist and has been long supplanted by the shrieking and hysterical cries of empowered feminist women

Nosferatu is good, 8/10, hmmm. No, more like a 7/10. Bill Skarsgaard’s deep voiced and rapey Count Orlok is the scariest Dracula of all time and the film is infinitely better than the pretentious midwittery of Herzog and Kinski, who managed to make the most entertaining novel of the 19th Century into a flat dull circle
Nosferatu isn’t a masterpiece though. I get why people are excited about Eggers, between his cultivated visual sensibility, autistically refined and methodical research, and the fact that there’s no one else doing what he’s doing. However, all of his films might have elements of a masterpiece but also all fall just short of becoming masterpieces through that undefinable element, that mystique, that the likes of Polanski and Friedkin always had. There’s a really nerdy quality to his films where the artist seems so obsessed with fitting in as many references to film history and creepypasta art history that he rarely achieves in finding the substance beneath his style. While his films, Nosferatu included, are beautiful, sumptuous and replete of stunning images, they still leave me a bit emotionally flattened. I’d argue that Nosferatu is the mosy competent of his films so far, but I wanted more from it than just another retelling of Dracula. Instead, it’s a very cool and modern version of Dracula with a slight reframing around the Lily Rose Depp character and some commentary on negative female sexual drive. The more I think about it is even the less I like it so I’ll stick with my first response to it: it’s cool, but not amazing or particularly deep. One thinks that Eggers would benefit from detaching himself from the arthouse prestige branding and embrace himself as a genre filmmaker, in the way that John Carpenter once did. Carpenter, in allowing himself to be perceived as a competent genre formalist, allowed the audience to find the deeper meaning in his work. If Eggers embraced that, we’d go into his films with less expectations and thus the work might be weighted by less baggage. As of now, I still argue that Ari Aster is the only legitimate genius to come out of the A24 era.

I love having reduced the remainder of the Bernie POC left to defending black guys harassing defenseless Asians on the subway, these people are DEFEATED, a glorious 12 year reign of MAGA is upon us https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1872144690394570947

I would absolutely love to be able to watch a Ryan Murphy series on Hulu without being subjected to brainwash ads for seven kinds of PREP drugs all of which cause death or incontinence or both https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1872106754810736889

I hate this equivocation a lot. “Supporting Kyle” doesn’t mean we were rooting for Kyle Rittenhouse in the sense of some comic book fantasia reality that leftists inhabit, but that we thought he was INNOCENT of the charges brought against him because he was within his rights to self defense
https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1871797408440705274

If a movie is boring it better at least have some right wing dog whistles in there

I stopped taking Xanax to sleep four weeks ago and i was assured that I would basically die if I stopped taking or, at the very least, was about to experience the most gnarliest drug withdrawal pharmaceuticals have to offer. Alas, I was a bit disappointed when the withdrawal peaked at 12 to 18 hours - shakes, mild seizures, muscle spasms - and then, after a night of insomnia, I felt basically entirely restored the next day and slept like a baby completely naturally the next night. It honestly was easy, disappointingly so. If I’d known how easy they were to kick I’d have flushed that script six months ago.

Whether you hate the person you kill based on their skin color or you hate the person you kill because they cut you off on the freeway, what’s the difference? The person you killed is dead, and deserves justice regardless of the motive. Dylan Roof deserves to die, the Boston Marathon Bomber deserves to die, and every single one of these murderers deserves to die. When the Biden admin does stuff like this, letting all these killers off of death row, it almost makes no sense. Who benefits, really? The killers? Maybe, but that’s only if you think life in a super max is a better way to go out than a swift death, which I don’t. No, it’s the remnants of the NGO leftoid apparatus that slithered its way into the Biden admin trying to make its final stand realizing full well that it will never get this close to power or influence again.

Conservative panelist: “So Cenk Uygur, when did you realize that not all Trump voters deserved to be starved to death and gassed?”
Cenk Uygur: “well just this morning I was eating my 14th donut and thought maybe it’s a bit over the top to wish death upon every Trump voter”
Conservative panelist: “come on can we get this man a round of applause!?”

Mikey Madison put in the best performance of the year but if Pam Anderson’s tone was to be the judge you’d think that Mikey’s role as Anora would be something she should be ashamed about. Honestly I don’t know how to take this as anything other than an aged out hag being envious of a young beautiful girl. The dynamics between the two are like a Catherine Breillat film.

2024 is the grave of elite taste. Looking over some of these best of the year lists (Cahiers Du Cinema put M Knight Shyamalan's unwatchable TRAP on its top 10, Sight and Sound awards some Indian film no one has ever seen, Love Lies Bleeding treated as important art work by multiple critics inclding John Waters) and I feel like I'm occupying an alternate reality. Are these people just coping? Pretending that the art forms they've dedicated their intellectual lives to aren't completely meaningless?
https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1871234718253097101

Fashion magazines are perpetually locked into Gen X thinking in which the central paradigm of power or “the man” is some fire breathing right wing evangelical who wants to censor porn and art. As leftism became the central paradigm of power, these kinds of subversions started to feel increasingly hollow, less like the man was being challenged than he was being propagandized on behalf of. It is what it is these people are cooked.
https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1871222782840983991

Did you know that one of the goals of the CIA acid tests was to break through human subconscious in order to immunize the “global citizen” from all forms of “totalitarianism” (as mostly defined by Adorno)? Globalist multi culti borderless liberal “utopia” was always the goal.

Just remember, if leftists ran the world it would be legal to kill in the first degree so long as you killed what they considered to be their political enemies but completely illegal to defend yourself from someone they consider to be a victim OR, in Kyle’s case, defending yourself from a convict rioting on behalf of someone the left considers to be a victim. Everything for these pricks is opposites land. Upside down. Take any normative understanding of right versus wrong and a leftist will flip it in reverse.

Cenk is a repulsive opportunistic worm and it’s embarrassing to be a part of a political movement that would so easily welcome its enemies when the enemy is in need of a rebrand.
https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1870837019938574539

Leftists are so desperate for a symbolic martyr figure that they will make a hero out of a murderous Reddit spazz like Luigi Mangione

Luca Guadagnino did the exact same annoying thing with Queer that Cronenberg did with Naked Lunch; incorporating Burroughs’ imagery into the script in hamfisted ways not really necessary to the plot. Didn’t hate it. Kind of boring, could have been better.

Elon Musk saved free speech on the internet, he’s done more for “the people” in the last two years than any leftist has ever or will ever accomplish, including that old WASHUP and soc dem DNC sub BERNIE SANDERS

White men are the best artists and it’s not even close.

As leftists face the reality that they will never again get a sliver of power after they squandered any good will they had with the last four years of abject failures, the leftists who remain will grow more radicalized. In their desperation, there will be a subset of them that becomes “pro terror.” They hate giving up power every bit as much as they refuse to concede on their most thoroughly debunked talking points. Their powerlessness fuels their biases and the violent reaction. The pro Luigi dirtbag leftists could become the new Weather Underground whom, having failed to make a case for themselves and proved themselves incapable of governing in a sensible manner, will lash out in terror and justify violence. When the leftist feels cornered and dejected, he accelerates the emotional terrorism that has always been an aspect of his politics to the point that emotional terrorism is not enough. If the world is irreparably fucked, which is essentially what the dirtbag leftist thinks, then burning it to the ground is “justified.” For a leftist, destruction is creation.

A self-respecting conservative man shouldn’t care about how Yellowstone ended. That show is an abortion and always has been. A soap opera unaware of its true nature, horrible actors, flat performances, asinine stories. I could watch 40 hours of Melrose Place and they’d go by faster than 10 minutes of the very best Yellowstone episode. I know you guys like to see your viewpoints reflected at you in media from time to time but please I implore you have higher standards than the absolute slop that is Yellowstone.

I believe that one of the factors driving really low IQ anti-semitism on the left is the fact that leftists have to worship all of those whom are “oppressed”, and since Jews are a high status minority they have to stand in as the one minority that is acceptable to loathe on the left to fuel the catharsis that can’t be expelled otherwise. When your morality forces you to constantly sympathize with and excuse the worst behavior of all minority groups, it only makes sense that you would take out the pent up aggression on the one minority group that doesn’t, at the moment, fit neatly into your master/slave dialectic.

I tell my wife that she's my muse. Makes her feel good but it's a lie. My X feed is my muse.

Supreme Court justices should not have personalities or interests. A Supreme Court justice who has the lifelong goal of doing LGBT musical theater is obviously a D.E.I. hire.

Don’t see much wrong with this given that MFAs have been awarded to retards for as long as art schools have existed https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1868671077985206454

Proselytizing before the church of transgenderism, Richard Hannania is the only man on earth who could be doing a call with three trans women and still be the most repulsive figure on screen https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1868338613324566700

Favorite reads of 2024: I finally finished Colin Wilson’s the Occult, got into Karl Ove Knausgaard, read RD Laing’s the Divided Self that left an impact, and the new Houellebecq was Ok.

Are leftists really this willfully fucking ignorant or just outright barbaric that they are prepared to die on the hill of the grave of a guy who shattered an old woman’s jaw and kidnapped a child!? Both crimes that happened ON THE SUBWAY, mind you!

Tarantino’s old head argument about TV being formally inferior to film is retrograde and only works because he uses a terrible show like Yellowstone to justify it. Plenty of shows have the incredible cinematic moments that he longs for. Most of them do not, but many of them do. Some of them:
Melfi getting raped in the Sopranos?
Walter finding his money stash emptied out, certain he’s soon to be murdered in Breaking Bad, howling and maniacally laughing beneath his floor boards?Tanya shooting the evils gays on a Yacht in the White Lotus?
Point is, TV is absolutely capable of creating cinematic, visual, and memorable sequences. Unfortunately for Tarantino, movies are every bit as bad as TV is now, and both forms seem well passed their prime at the forefront of visual storytelling.

BLM’s ranks are now dwindled to its “trained Marxist” founders and complete craven maniacs too crazy to have a real impact on politics. The organization has been completely neutralized.

Leftists really do think being a coward and/or pussy is a noble value

Absolutely monumental revelation. Duke Lacrosse was absolutely essential to the 21st Century American narrative that white frat guys were the most dangerous humans in America. It’s the definitive beginning point of rape politics, or rather rape allegations as politics. #metoo built upon a false premise at its origins. https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1867607044963926108

*Dr Manhattan voice: It’s November 2012. I’m a fresh faced left leaning graduate MFA student at NYU. I’d just returned to New York from Massachusetts on the Amtrak. I’m carrying leftovers from Thanksgiving given to me by my nana.
A black schizo approaches me on the L train, claiming he’s hungry and needs money. Charitably, I reached into my leftovers bag and offered the guy turkey, stuffing and bread. He says “fuck that” in a hostile way, and storms off.
The people who approach you on the train are looking for trouble, not food, typically.

Maybe he can prove me wrong and demonstrate some talent that he hasn’t shown before, but I think Austin Butler as Patrick Bateman is bad casting. Butler has no subtlety or humor, all he does is purse his lips at the camera like a catalog model. Perhaps that mannequin like vacancy is the thing that Guadagnino thought would be interesting reflected in Bateman, but Christian Bale is an exceptionally subtle actor intelligent enough to read the humor and irony in the Bateman character.
That said, I’m very curious to see Guadagnino’s conception of American Psycho. The original is a classic but, for me, always lacked the literary grandiosity of the novel. Too small a budget, made by a woman working on a shoestring. I’d like to see that largesse quality in an American Psycho adaptation: big set pieces, big club scenes, New York sized framing, and visceral, blood bath murder sequences.
Guadagnino does violence well. His Suspiria remake climaxed with the most epic cascade of blood and gore of the 2010s. This kind of violence through the humorous and off kilter detachment of Bateman does sound like a titillating prospect for this film.

Leftists essentially don’t believe in a sub textual or spiritual dimension and can only interpret art through the narrow lens of materialism.

Oh my god I’m fucking tired of this midwit take. Breaking Bad is about feeling like a beta and taking your opportunity to be an alpha, that’s it! Walt just needed the cancer to justify his decision to grow his balls back to his dour, cuckholding wife. https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1867076991750459870

How fucking dumb are these people? How unrealistic and ridiculous? His suggestion is to have a boxing match with an insane drug addict? Yeah, sure dude, just keep popping that jab haha!!
No of course not; you have to put the threat down as rapidly as possible by subduing him. https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1866868842271740142

Daniel Penny’s humility is shocking. I’m such a flagrant egomaniac I’d be like “you all owe me your gratitude and worship!!! I’m a fucking legend!!! You see me leap into action?? You see me vanquish da bad guys!?” https://x.com/AdamLehrerSP/status/1866643964465647960

Daniel Penny’s innocence is further proven by the fact that BPD e-girls AREN’T inappropriately thirst posting about him, despite his obvious handsomeness. They crave evil and sadism as fixtures of their warped and narcissistic psychology, so they astroturf themselves into being attracted to sick freaks like Ted Bundy. If there was anything evil or criminal about Daniel, they’d be posting about how horny they are for him..

Half the followers on my new account that I had on the @SafetyPropagan1 account but getting far more traction and engagement. Complaining about shadow banning always sounds like whining because it sounds trivial, but it’s very real and very much impacts your ability to make a livelihood.

Is @AOC, the 2028 candidate in all likeliness (the democrats are for sure that desperate,) seriously arguing that Daniel Penny presents a risk of recidivism? LMAO, that’s truly rich coming from someone crying a river about recidivist criminal Neely!

We, noble men and women of the right wing, always get me a bit more nervous than we should. Leftists are an extremely loud minority opinion, I knew in my heart of hearts that it would be a very tall order to find a jury that could unanimously agree on Penny’s conviction.
People are retarded, but not THAT retarded

I’ve endured opiate withdrawal twice. At 21, and again at 27 after a bad relapse. It was wretched, worse somehow than anyone can possibly describe in art or literature. The 2nd time,I remember waking up on the 7th morning since last use, completely well. A sublime feeling.
It was so glorious to not be in physical need of the drug that I knew I would never use a drug like that again. It was a decision.
Addiction is not a disease. There are many of us, like me, prone to poor impulse control as a result of social conditioning, and some drugs are very powerful over you. For me; it was opiates. I couldn’t casually use them, they suited me and they made me a slave.
The key to breaking addiction is really gaining the resolve to brave the sickness. The physical withdrawal period can’t be circumvented, it must be endured. You have to go through it. You can prepare for it, give yourself five days where you will be completely out of commission. See it through and get it out.
I hesitate to criticize the program because for a lot of people, it works, and that’s proof enough that it’s worthy of consideration. For me, however; I was a bit put off by the way the program insists on making your drugs your booze and your recovery a central aspect of your identity. In my opinion, it’s best to put the shit behind you. It can be done, too.

Leftists only like ACTIVE drug addicts, they only feel empathy for the smelly schizo shooting junk on the train, not for the guy who is decades into recovery and changed his whole life. They love failure, they hate success. The idea that someone could persevere in the face of something like addiction is a direct challenge to their perverse slave morality…

Publications still doing “top 100 records of the year” or “20 best films of the year” it’s like WHAT THE FUCK are you people trying to prove to yourself? You didn’t like all those albums ! You didn’t watch all those movies !

Joker 2 is an awful and boring movie with terrible performances that just happens to have a really good ending. A good ending doesn’t make it good. If an album has 12 tracks, 11 of them are dugs but the 12th is a banger; it’s still a shit album
Burn-out old heads like John Waters and Tarantino, both of whom love Joker: Folie a Deux, just love the idea of wasting a studio’s money to “stick it to the man” but this retrograde punk attitude never takes it into account that by fucking over the studio you’re actually fucking over the audience and the fans. We wasted our money too.

Re-watching Homeland season 4, the only season of the show that completely nailed it and is a kind of one off masterpiece within the greater arc of the series. Claire Danes’ CIA mental case Carrie Matheson, riddled with PTSD following the public execution of her Taliban joining baby daddy Brody and the birth of their daughter heads to Islamabad, becomes the “drone queen”, and then psyops and fucks the 18 year old nephew of a major Taliban target, eventually getting him killed.
Incredible depiction of more than just global intelligence, but of postpartum depression and the female inability to face responsibility and repercussion.

The fact that they want the head of Daniel Penny, who killed accidentally in self defense, while condoning the murder in the first degree of a healthcare CEO is demonstrable proof that these people are immoral and completely ideologically motivated. Leftists would kill your whole family for a talking point.
Support for Luigi also proves that as much critical theory as they plagiarize they also have no concern for real systems of power. They’re all crack heads for memes, they want the hit and they want it now, the man’s death was worth it not because it’ll change healthcare in America, but because they get to shock their dads by supporting it.

It was very obvious to me early on that Kamala Harris was a weaker candidate than Biden. Her personality is easily the most triggering of any politician ever, far more so than Biden’s oldness (which is ultimately sympathetic). The problem was that her personality is beloved by the base of the democrats, homosexuals and women, but triggering to everyone else. Therefore, she got a “enthusiasm bump” on X that was never real among the electorate. A real case of the bureaucratic class being completely blind sided by their own preferences and biases.

Growing up on Cape Cod surrounded by white conservatives, I was a leftist. Living in New York for 14 years now, my politics moved sharply and swiftly to the right. I figure this is pretty normal for anyone with a basic sense of pattern recognition suddenly exposed to diversity

Racism is ok when…. When you want a black guy to put headphones on when listening to trap rap on the subway or being cut off by a Latino blasting bachata or smelling Chinatown or

I feel like Hollywood might’ve reached the pinnacle of its evil in the 1980s, because it’s the only decade that routinely launched the careers of mediocrities so brazen one wonders how they ever got their big break in a town full of good looking desperate actors in the first place.

Keanu, Corey Feldman, Andrew McCarthy, hard for me to believe any of these guys didn’t have the blessing of some producer that they blew, for instance.

Despite all that, movies were obviously better then


Megalopolis is a fucking disaster, anyone who said anything mildly positive about it is a new breed of retarded. every midwit wannabe cultural critic is dying to elevate themselves by finding the brain wormed reason that something so retarded ugly and offensive is “muh ahkshually good”.

2024 FAVORITES: Yes I realize I did just make fun of end of the year lists, but I spend so much time neing negative I would like to shout-out some art works that moved me this year without more editorializing

10 Favorite Records of 2024:
Mammal Deserted
Y$ Vultures 1
Legowelt A Fieldguide to the Void
Departure Chandelier Satan Solider of Fortune
Meinschaft It was a Very good Year
Verity Den Verity Den
Rostorchester Der Zinnen Sang Vom
Omit in/Sec
Bladee Cold Visions
British Murder Boys Active Agents and House Boys

Five favorite films of 2024:
The Beast (Bertrand Bonello)
The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi)
The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)
Red Rooms (Pascal Plante)
Anora (Sean Baker)

Five favorite art exhibitions of 2024:
Stan Vanderbeek at Magenta Plains
Stanislao Lepri at Clearing Gallery
Win McCarthy at Francis Irv
Matthew Barney at Gladstone
Matthew Barney and Alex Katz at O’Flaherty’s