Do you know Jay Dyer? The Right-Wing figure influential in MAGA conspiracy-based politics who hates modernity and thinks the Dark Ages were better. How Dyer’s worldview likely influenced J.D. Vance as our “Tech Bro” meets “Trad Bro” future fascist Presidential Candidate by MRG Staff

I would highly recommend going to YouTube, going to Jay Dyer’s page, go to videos and then filter for older videos and then start your journey from there.

Jay Dyer when it comes to explaining geopolitics, political dialectics, etc., has had a big influence on me, however, I am not a social conservative, Orthodox, etc., and I believe Dyer’s worldview has already been co-opted and incorporated into the “system” and will be used to by those in power, even though a person such as Dyer would blame the political left. For example, I don’t think being LGBTQ is social engineering but is something a part of the human species. It was simply suppressed, and for example cultures with more than two genders have existed, granted they were outside of the context of Abrahamic religions. And at the end of the day, all Dyer can do is debate. I am not saying that his belief in God is bad. I believe in God; however, it’s really Dyer’s words versus his opposition, and luckily, we live in a country of pluralism, i.e., the ability to agree to disagree.

One reason why I strategically like Dyer is that he helped undermine Jordan Peterson, libertarians, etc., even though he does go after the Left, but in this case, the enemy of enemy of my friend.

A lot of people have talked about Curtis Yarvin having influenced J.D. Vance, but there is little commentary on Jay Dyer who I consider to be one of the largest online sources for the how the Trumpian brain works, with its emphasis on ultra nationalism, pandering to Christian Nationalism & Dominion Ideology (such as a belief in revoking the separation of church and state), and a belief anchored around a conspiratorial worldview where everything that is not conservative (and isn’t Caucasian male heteronormative) is an automatically conspiracy. For example, conspiracies of Qanon, the Federal Reserve and Jekyll Island history, the Rothchild’s owning the world, etc., are more so firmly Right-Wing oriented conspiracy theories. Even if there is truth to them, they are often twist towards preferencing Right Wing positions.

However, I do not think that Jay Dyer is a bad person. He is very intelligent and had an influence on my worldview and how I analyze politics. I however stopped following and listening to Jay Dyer years ago, largely because it became more apparent that he is firmly within the Right-Wing ecosystem despite having criticisms of it. To Dyer, the system is not conservative enough and Dyer seems to reject pluralism. I consider myself to be progressive in my politics and even though I may not agree with conservatives, I still do believe that pluralism and democracy are worthwhile efforts in defending, whereas Dyer is symbolic of anti-modern and anti-democratic neo-reactionary movement.

To get my main criticism of Dyer out the way up front, my criticism is that Dyer thinks he’s being against the establishment when his ideas are very conducive to the establishment. If anything his ideas are the original establishment with that being theocracy.

Even though he understands things such as dialectics, etc., Dyer seems incapable of admitting that his ideas have largely been influential, let alone plagiarized, by those in “the machine”. The machine is system, i.e., the amalgamation of various complexes that all feeds into power of the current elite class (i.e., that of the capitalist, multi-national corporatists, etc.) and there’s no real fighting this behemoth of a system, so even though Dyer’s works seem to be against the system, the system will find a way to co-opt it and use it to its advantage.

Thus, Dyer’s beliefs, which I will go into detail below, can be seen in the contemporary Republican Party’s shift towards anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian politics. Dyer is either (A) so naive of this that he loses a bit of respect, since he seems to know everything, or, (B) he is a part of the system itself but pretending to not be, or (C) he is being strategic though faithful to his beliefs, i.e., he knows the system is flawed but he figures influencing certain spaces and being incremental in his approach is the best way to eventually convert “the machine”.

My argument against Dyer isn’t that I disagree with his worldview, which is that of a God First “Essence precedes Existence” worldview, because it’s hard to argue that God exists or not, so him being right is always a possibility, though one could say that the opposite to his views can be true too, but rather my concern is that Dyer seems to be naive to the fact that this worldview was the original way of controlling and oppressing people.

Even though Dyer can argue that he is approaching everything from a theistic belief in God framework, once can also say that his religious beliefs are simply covering up his personal fears, biases, prejudices, need for controls, etc. In other words, Dyer like many white male conservatives can say they believe in God first, when really, they believe in God to give credence and justification to their identity, and notably the social privileges afforded to that identity. For example, a rise in religiosity amongst young white males, could be argued as not being very religious at all, but more so people wanting a meta-physical justification for their identity, which they feel in the physical world has been the analyzed, deconstructed, critiqued, etc.

It is impossible to know whether Dyer’s personal needs and wants precedes his religiosity or if his religiosity precedes his personal wants and needs. To not sound too much like a “Social Justice Warrior” (as if that is a real insult to be one), whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity seems to gravitate towards conservatism, and conservative philosophy as a means of “intellectualizing” and shrouding their wants and needs to maintain power, authority, etc. This why a lot of online racism for instance can often be linked to profiles with “Christian crosses” in their bios. Christianity in the United States has largely been coopted by white supremacy, and the irony is that more white supremacy takes over Christianity, the less people outside of this group trusts Christianity. Thus, these white conservatives may be doing more to kill Christianity than what they are aware of.

But who is Dyer?

Jay Dyer is an online personality who peaked in my opinion in the mid-to-late twenty teens but still has a pretty active online following. He appeals to younger people with his goofy humor, Cold Wave and synth music production, and often 1980s inspired nostalgic thumbnails, fonts, etc., touching upon Miami Vice, etc.

To me Dyer is one of the original “Trad Bros”, i.e., Traditionalis who are Gen X, Millennial, and Zoomer men who reject modernity and embrace Third Position politics which is hostile towards both capitalism and socialism and are in favor of medieval political and economic systems. This group is highly religious, patriarchal, and often favors ethnic nationalism, and engaging in online 4-chan or 8-chan “edgelord” humor which is often racist, sexists, antisemitic, etc.

Jay Dyer is important because he foreshadowed the most powerful Trad Bro, we currently have which is Vice President J.D. Vance.

He was born Protestant to a father who was in the United States Navy. He grew up in Tennessee and is likely living somewhere near the “the Redneck Portland” of Nashville, TN.

Supposedly Dyer went to some sort of special school for gifted children as a young kid if I remember right from his many lengthily videos. He later converted to Roman Catholicism, but then converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, seemingly because the Catholic Church was becoming too progressive and Dyer disagreed with Catholicism’s stance on “filioque”, i.e., the order of operations within the Holy Trinity. He may have also been a political intern for Rand Paul. He is married to a woman named Jamie Hanshaw who often contributes to Jay’s videos.

Separately, Dyer has given some credit to the ideas of white nationalists such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, has stated that a wife should submit to her husband, etc., in certain debates which I don’t have the links for right now. He is pro-death penalty, anti-globalism, pro-ethnic nationalism, pro-theocracy, etc.

When it comes to Curtis Yarvin, who is similar ot Dyer, Yarvin created his concept of the “Cathedral”, and this alongside the ideas and lectures of Jay Dyer can be symbolic of the beliefs of J.D. Vance, and the new crop of young Millennial and Zoomer neo-reactionaries who span every right-wing space from Trad Wives, raw milk drinkers, homesteaders, No Fap movement (no masturbation), Repealing Woman’s Right to vote (and convincing women to be supportive of “Biblical femininity”), White Identity politics (including Hitler apologia by some), pro-segregation ideas, and a rejection of multiculturalism and globalism, etc. The talking points of figures such as Lilly Leigh Coleman Gaddis and Nick Fuentes and his Groypers of the American First Movement could be traced back Dyer, even if a person such as Gaddis adopted her ideas indirectly. Movements such as Patriot Front could be symbolic of the political reality of these ideas coming true.

To understand “The Cathedral” simply, David Phillips (2025), states, “The Cathedral, as Yarvin describes it, encompasses elite universities, mainstream media organizations, the permanent bureaucracy, non-profit organizations, and progressive activist networks. These institutions, he argues, work together not through explicit coordination but through shared assumptions and mutually reinforcing incentives. A professor publishes research suggesting a particular policy approach; journalists cite this research in articles advocating for change; activists organize around these articles; bureaucrats implement policies based on this pressure; and academics study and validate the results, beginning the cycle anew” [Source: Phillips, David (2025). Curtis Yarvin’s Radical Critique of Democracy. https://wdavidphillips.com/curtis-yarvins-radical-critique-of-democracy/]

Behind both Yarvin and Dyer, there is a disdain for modern democracy and a yearning to return to times of kings, etc.

I have been observing Jay Dyer for years. I used to watch his very long lecture-like videos where he goes into details about the historical roots of modernity, geopolitical intrigues, and what he considers to be the actual New World Order.

He studied Plato’s The Republic, Carrol Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment, Turning Point by Frtijof Capra, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (1987) by Jay Stevens (which Dyer believes LSD is a control drug used to converse with demons who commission people such as Beat Poets such as Allen Ginsberg, to destroy traditional society such as promoting abortion, etc.), etc.

He is also a popular figure in the “Hollyweird Movement”, where he believes that Hollywood is spreading subliminal message and engaging in “predictive programming” to steer the general population in ways that benefits the elites, who I will go into more down below. He is the author of Hollywood Babylon where he goes into details about film, such as of course, Eye’s Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, as proof of what the elite class is actually up to.

Yet, Dyer has also lectured more fringe books such as

And, I learned a lot, however, Dyer and I have very different worldviews and conclusions. Whereas he is essentially a conservative, I see myself as a progressive, so though I agree with a lot of his analysis centering around Western philosophy, both mainstream and esoteric, I however don’t reject modernity, democracy, women’s equality, diversity, inclusion, etc. Dyer does however, so he is firmly within the online Right Wing, and he does have links to Alex Jones, Lauren Southern, Nick Fuentes, etc. He has even gained some celebrity endorsement with people such as Jamie Kennedy. Dyer though his relations with Alex Jones and controversial troll-like comedians such as Sam Hyde, Dyer is effectively just a few degrees separated from the Rogan-verse, which one could argue is main cross-roads between the vast array of culturally conservative spaces, which are often online, e.g., comedy touches upon the conspiracy movement, etc.

The best way to get a quick view of Dyer’s beliefs is to watch the video where he critiques Jordan Peterson down below.

Dyer’s main thesis is that modernity which includes liberalism such as capitalism, libertarianism, socialism, communism, scientism (in the vein of Bertrand Russell), Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, feminism, multiculturalism, etc., are essentially occultic and Neoplatonic, where Neoplatonism is a gnostic (hidden knowledge) type of belief system from late antiquity where ritualistic and magical practices are used to reach higher levels of consciousness since the body is seen as a lower level of perfection, created by a lesser God known as the Demiurge (which Neoplatonists believes to be our Biblical God), who is in the way of true enlightenment found closer to the true God, called the Monad. This thus makes modernity based on what he considers to be Satanic beliefs systems (Luciferian, individualistic, blasphemous, etc.), which has resulted in the modern world (removed from God’s law), where science is something akin to alchemy, i.e., instead of doing black magic, science is just a continuation of Neoplatonic alchemy. Essentially modernity removed metaphysics and spirituality and put all emphasis on materialism, but materialism has a propensity for being subject to flux, change, evolution, etc. He believes that both sides of the political spectrum are used by elites in a type of “dialectical warfare”, where binary opposites are encouraged (e.g., Far Left Communism and Capitalism & Libertarianism/Far Right Fascism), but these binaries are clashed with each other, so the reaction from the clash creates a new paradigm, where the weak are weeded out.

Since these ideas are based on materialism, i.e., without an objective truth based in God, Dyer would argue that materialist philosophies without any truth are spinning in flux, and flux leads not only to a grotesque merging of things (such as his view on Transhumanism, Transgenderism, etc.) but also recurring or cyclical violence, i.e., this clash of dialectical ideas are repeated in perpetuity.

Thus, those who control the system, are akin to something called a “death cult”, because they see themselves as the entitled elites, who see themselves as a “god”, and who task themselves with forcibly evolving the species but evolving the human race in a way that permits the elites to control the population. Many of these elites are modern renditions of the philosopher kings from Plato’s the Republic, where a Republican is a society ruled a few and not the many (a democracy). Even once these elites pit dialectics against each other, they will then begin the process of tension again. This group has a Malthusian world view where they are obsessed with control population which they do through abortion, feminism (which he would argue as being witchcraft, where feminism often has symbology of Gaia, thus links to the Green Movement), the LGBTQ movement, etc. This concept of cyclical violence can be concepts can be seen in Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” and his emphasis on the Übermensch or even within Indian Vedas thought with the idea of Kali Yuga (which was highly influential on European Occultism, which in turn influenced fascists movements), etc.

Dyer believes the goal of the elites is to make a world inspired by Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World where people will be dumbed down, mutated, and forced into caste systems, where they live in “smart cities”. They do this by funding research at the Esalen Institute (which was prominent in the psychedelic drug scene, Human Potential Movement, and Hippie movements), the Tavistock Institute, the Anglo-American Cliveden set, the Council of Foreign Relations, The Bank of International Settlements, the United Nations, Davos, Bilderberg, the World Economic Forum, etc.

Not only does Dyer reject modernity, but he also rejects Islam, nominalism (which is traces as one of the main culprits in creative modernist and relativist thoughts), Roman Catholicism (notably Thomism, i.e., the beliefs of Saint Thomas Aquinas), Protestants, atheists, etc.

Dyer however does not really speak about Judaism, and Dyer does seem to have a Zionist predilection, which could be argued as showing him as being in proxy with the Zionist Occupation of the American politics (e.g., using allegations of antisemitism to suppress criticism against Israel’s treatment of Gazans, etc.), especially considering Dyer’s links to Alex Jones, who is essentially the “conspiracy theory” gate-keeper and handler for the American Republican establishment that is now typified by the Make America Great Again Movement.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/18/politics/kfile-kenneth-chesebro-followed-alex-jones-capitol-riot-jan-6

Alex Jones is a disciple of American conservatism’s weaponization of conspiracy theory culture which can be traced historically to paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan (who argued that liberals and progressives were Cultural Marxists), Eustace Clarence Mullins (an antisemite and Ezra Pound follower, known for popularizing conspiracies relating to the Federal Reserve system), and the John Birch Society, which was an organization so extreme they thought that Republican President Eisenhower was a secret Communist for supporting school integration.

Dyer who claims to be against the system, is really in close proximity to what I consider to be the “Right Wing Deep State”, which is the Judeao-Chrisitan wing of the military and intelligence community, working at the behest of Republican lawmakers and Right-Wing wealthy donors.

But this group has influence and to some degree control of spaces within the Right-wing cultural sphere notably that of conspiracy theory culture. Conspiracy theory culture is often more of a Right-Wing endeavor in the United States and West, where I would argue many American conspiracies all feedback to elitist conservative power by advocating for libertarian ideals, which always disproportionately benefits the wealthy, corporations, etc., largely by engendering a hatred towards government which allows for its privatization.

This “Right Wing Deep State” in my opinion is comprised of military figures such as Paul Valley, Michael Flynn, possibly Michael Flynn’s Brother with Charles Flynn, John K. Singlaub, Tulsi Gabbard (as a disciple to Michael Flynn), Jack Posobiec, etc., but also notable former high-ranking military officials such as John. B. Alexander (who advocated for UFOs) and Albert Stubblebine who was the famed military leader behind the real Project Stargate Experiments that inspired books and films such as the Men Who Stared at Goats by Jon Ronson. Stubblebine became a known right-wing conspiracy theorist after he left the military, such as becoming a 9/11 denialists, where won could argue that 9/11 denialism is more of anti-Zionist conspiracy because the belief is that Israel had details about the attack before it happened and didn’t share information with the USA, or the US intelligence community leading up to Bush didn’t care to act on it.

Where I disagree with Dyer is that his “shadowy cabal” aren’t some “fruity, Left Wing, Social Justice Warriors” as we would argue, but rather…. his camp, even if he thinks he is in opposition to what is going on.

Dyer presents these “globalist elites” as having everything on lock down, however, why do they not also control what he believes? Modernity, democracy, etc., for example is a small part of human history, and I would argue that religious-based traditionalism is the oldest form of human control.

Dyer thus to me seems like he’s a part of the very cabal he claims to be against, but he’s so committed to his beliefs that he can’t understand or admit that. It’s the equivalent to “Say it ain’t so, Joe” mentality, i.e., knowing our heroes (or beliefs) may be flawed but having extreme doubt about it to the point of looking past any flaws.

I say all this because Dyer’s beliefs as best seen in J.D. Vance, and J.D. Vance is as system as you can be despite Vance co-opting reactionary populist sentiments and talking points to make present himself in the same “anti-globalist” vein as Dyer, Elon Musk (who spoke to the Nazi-like part in Germany, the Alternative for Germany, etc.).

Essentially, this “Trad Movement” is just another element of control of those in power, and I would argue that Trad Movements are the strongest and most time tested forms of control, so Dyer advocating for it, isn’t really freeing anyone from anything, but rather enslaving them even more so, but within a paradigm that his hostile towards a united human species beyond color, ethnicity, religions, etc., and a paradigm which is actively hostile towards marginalized groups.

And I say that because Dyer is reflected in the talking points of J.D. Vance, who is both a Trad Bro and also a Tech Bro, but these Tech Bros are allegedly what Dyer is against. If anything, with how much of a constructed politician Vance is, i.e., being fully funded by Peter Theil, one could argue that the Tech Bro elites are coopting Traditionalist through as a means of constructing a future they control.

Nick Fuentes is scum and likely just ripped off other’s people analysis but I’m putting this video up to even show how some Far-Right people are even suspicious of JD Vance.

He often promotes an Anti-Western talking point, which could be argued as having been pulled straight from Russian Kremlin psychological warfare manuals, however, Dyer gets very angry if he is mentioned as being some sort of Russian asset. I won’t go too much into that for fear of losing the “Muh, Russia-gate” crowd (i.e., those skeptical of any sort of Russian influence in American politics).

However, Dyer did have contact with Nina Kouprinova, the ex-wife of White Supremacist Richard Spencer (who divorced Spencer on domestic violence grounds), where Nina as a woman with Georgian Soviet roots, has some sort of links to anti-Western thinker Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is the ideologue behind Vladmir Putin’s neo-Imperialist agenda (with Putin invoking ancient treaties as his basis for conquering lands such as Ukraine). Richard Spencer has some links to Steven Miller of the Trump Administration (despite Miller being Jewish, though he is essentially a Fascist), etc. Essentaiily Dyer is jsut a few degrees of seperation away from the MAGA movement, which I call as being “Antisemitic Zioinists”, which sounds contradictory, but the Antisemitism stems from conservatisms obsession with supersitious and conspiratorial thought, which often leads back to Jews as the culprits, as well as Christian Evangelicals devotion to Isarel for their own claculate reaosns, with that being their belief that Jesus can only return once Israel is made whole again. MAGA is of course Zionists because of its stance on Israel being 100% committed to the “Jewish Reconquista” of the Levant region. Even though Jew’s don’t believe in Christianity or Jesus, and because Christians needs Jews to convert and for Isreal to be whole again for their own prophetic reasons, these two seemingly opposite camps are pragmatically working with each other.

More sinister is that the antisemitism that persist within Western Christian thought (all the way from European antisemitism of old such as the pogroms of Europe such as the Rhineland Massacre, all the way to the more recent Holocaust) is that both parties agree that helping to increase antisemitism notably through conspiracies helps both of their causes. It helps the Jewish Zionists by helping them seem like victims so that any criticism of Israel’s use of force on Palestinians is instantly suppressed with severe economic consequences such as firings, deportations, and even likely targeted misinformation campaigns (such as the Make Ireland Great Again movement funded by the same Cambridge Analytica cabal who are trying to destabilize Ireland for their support of Palestine). etc., but also increased fear in “government” “globalism”, etc., which are unliterally blamed on Jews helps conservatives maintain legislative, judicial, and executive power by claiming Democrats are representatives of the “New World Order”.

The irony is that the New World Order is capitalist, corporate, and thus more in proximity to conservatism, libertarianism, etc., since the NWO is actually the full integration of all nations on Earth into the capitalist framework.

For example, the boogeyman of the West is China, despite the irony that the West used Chinese labor to enrich themselves, and many of these wealthy people are Republican mega-donors. If the USA goes to war with China over a situation such as Tiawan, the USA is hoping that a defeating China will open up on the lucrative Chinese market to unfettered and Western controlled capitalism. This would be the NWO. A world of unfettered multinational capitalism, possibly linked with digital currency, but elites will swing between both globalism and hyper ethno-nationalism as they see fit, because both have elements of control that are beneficial to the elites. If anything, the neo-reactionary calling for ethno-nationalism is something akin to treating cultures like zoo exhibits. By foster hatred over our differences, this actually can lead back to Dyer’s thesis about how these elites are the “death cult” he claims they are. World War I and World War II were more so caused by reactionary nationalism (hauntingly more present than ever) which arose from the decline of globalism’s first modern rendition which was imperialism, where imperialism, notably of the British (who made up arbitrary borders to divide-and-conquer), helped spur nationalism, thus ethnic conflicts.

Sure, Dyer would likely agree with a lot of what I just said there, but again, Dyer’s religious world view has convinced him that somehow even his own beliefs can’t be weaponized and used by those in power, and I would argue that his beliefs are more conducive to traditional power systems, which is what figures such as Tech Bro elites such as Peter Theil, and thus his minion J.D. Vance wants.

Even with Dyer as an Orthodox follower, it is very apparent that even Orthodoxy can be infiltrated by Russian intelligence, etc., to do the exact same thing that Dyer talks about concerning the CIA in cahoots with the Vatican, notably during the Cold War.

My Meta-Analysis, Deconstruction and Review on Sinners (2025) by Ryan Coogler. 8 to 8.5 out of 10. A fresh take on the vampire tale with musical portals through time and space by MRG Staff

Part One: Introductory Comments (Disclaimer: this section contains more of my personal opinions on matters not necessarily concerning the film, so if you want the actual film analysis, I recommend skipping to Part 2 to begin)


Part 2: A few foundational movies that remind me of Sinners (2025). Rosewood (1997), Def by Temptation (1991), etc.


Part Three: Portals, Vampires, The Irish, White Minorities as the Oppressed and then Oppressors, and Evolution of Black Blues into modern Rock and Roll.


Part Four: A non-politically correct take on casting and characters. The Tragic Mulatto, Black Queens, The Oaf, The Action Hero, etc.

“Magic is the politics of the excluded. It’s also, in inversion of a kind typical in such situations, the politics of the excluders” page 91, The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power by John Michael Greer (2021).

“Magic, as we’ve seen, is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. If you are denied access to any other source of power, you can still exercise power over your own consciousness” page 92, The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power by John Michael Greer (2021).

Disclaimers: I really don’t care about race; however, racism, hate, etc., are real and we must understand them. I suspect a lot of people when they hear something like “white supremacy’ they have numbed themselves to not hear it (and some people I suspect get an instant triggered reaction), but I believe I provide some decent insights. This paper is not intended to “shame white people” but rather explain the real effects of a system catered towards white power that has had detrimental effects on everyone, white people included in my own opinion (e.g., artificially inflating egos while stitching those egos to a capitalist system which ironically produces social alienation). I have no issues with anyone based on what I consider to be arbitrary features such as race; however, this paper will discuss topics such as white supremacy and that is important because it is being normalized in mainstream ways that are unfortunate (for example, the cynical and obvious re-application of white supremacy under the MAGA movement as it lazily pretends to not be doing so). Despite me talking on subjects like this throughout the paper, I do believe you will find some interesting and funs tidbits about other films, music history, etc. Enjoy. Q

Part One: Introductory Comments


I hope Sinners (2005) sweeps the Award Season. There are not many good films out at all, but even if there were, Sinners is a good movie that should be at the top of the list. I don’t have too many complaints about the film, and the ones I do I will go into down below, but Coogler’s film – even if not THE best film of all time or of recent – needs to be in the talks for Best Picture, Best Director, etc., because it is the best that is simply out there now. Snubbing Coogler wouldn’t help paint Hollywood in the best light in my opinion. I think people are in need of hope these days, and Sinners (2025) does present a level of hopefulness in the film. What more could you ask for now?

There is really no excuse to not give it one of the top awards. The Academy should praise Coogler, his production team, and the actors for helping save the magic of Hollywood, which as a person who loves movies is waning, and waning because of a general sense of informational overload, nihilism, the popularity/immediacy of more attainable social media influencers as compared to traditional unattainable actors, etc. Hollywood as is, is a consequence of our internet-based world. People’s brains are always on, so attentions spans aren’t the best, so I think people have a hard time rationalizing the price of going to movies that aren’t mindless entertainment. Sinner is helping the entire the industry.

Commentary on Sinners (2025) by Ryan Coogler is interesting because a lot of people want it to succeed for various reasons, sometimes on grounds of black solidarity or non-black allies wanting to be more inclusive of diverse voices, but also there are horror fans wanting their genre to continue to expand its limits as far as storytelling, etc. Also, a lot of people want it to fail, some because they don’t like it for whatever reasons (i.e., not their thing, style, etc.), but there are likely a lot of Right-Wing trolls using film criticism as a veiled way to be racist and exclude any narrative that has diversity in it. These trolls are relying on people putting the blame on “wokeness” (progressive ideology) when people call them out for their likely racial biases, so it seems the Social Justice camp are the anti-free speech types, when really the progressives are calling out their obvious-not-so-obvious strategy of undermining stories with women, traditionally marginalized groups, etc. Conservatives have gotten real slick, where they hide their bigotry but when called out, they play the victim.

Lastly, other people just see the film as art and are pulling good faith, but subjective analysis from the film. These people are not going in with any agenda for or against. The truth is, being a black led film, a lot of black people want it to succeed, whereas a lot of people who are not black want to see it fail, or if it does succeed these anti-diversity types want to believe it is not because of merit, but because of “wokeness”, “pandering”, etc. Film, like most things in the USA in 2025 are a victim to our very toxic culture wars, exemplified by the MAGA movement, which is really a populist vengeance movement by people who got tired that they were being blamed for a system of racism, sexism, etc., despite them ironically voting for a party which is promotes these things.


I should watch it again, but I give Sinners am 8 out of 10. I am happy I saw it, but it is not something I am itching to watch again. I feel quite nullified about the film. The story is compelling enough to be interesting, but nothing pushed me over the edge to get an emotional reaction out of me, nor do I treat it like a classic cult film in any sense. But the film grows me day by day, and at the most I’d give it 8.5 out of 10.


A little better interpersonal dialogue between characters and a different third act would have pushed the film into 8.5 to 9 or higher for me. For a film that is pushing the limits, it also felt like it was playing it safe to me at the same time, so I am left with a null state of feeling. There were some awe moments such as musical pieces, but I did find myself zoning out in some parts, but like I said, I may need to watch it again. I watched the movie fully sober, so there was no amplification from the buzz of booze of sway my feelings, which is a good thing. I went into the theater with a clear head.


The cinematography, costumes, makeup, set design, etc., are all exceptional. One flaw is maybe Michael B. Jordan’s character coming off as too cool for school for me, and I don’t mean that to undermine the notion of confident black masculinity. That is a big discussion nowadays. When black men succeed or seem too confident, the allegation is that if they aren’t liked it is because people don’t like seeing confident black men, because they are seen as “uppity”, “cocky”, “flashy”, etc. I do think that this fear of black, male, heteronormative, cisgender confidence certainly exists (because it usurps the idea as white males being the de facto leaders or those worthy of honorable treatment), and I write this being black myself, but sometimes confident people can just be a little…cringe, regardless of who they are. I think I am too used to seeing Jordan in action or hero like roles (Creed, Black Panther, etc.), where it didn’t feel fresh for me, but he’s a face able to sell tickets so that is important to help convince Hollywood to keep making films that have black main ensembles without them being released purely to black audiences or in limited markets.

My mind may change in a few hours, or tomorrow, or never. I don’t know. I am more of an “everyman” hero, rather than an “action hero” person when it comes to films that are trying to have deeper meanings. To be honest, maybe they could have dropped one of the twins and gave the character Sammie more of leading action-like role, because it would have been more out of character for him since he is depicted as a slightly wet-nosed young man.


To me, Sinners is great because it is a deep film, and not an action movie. If it were sold as an action movie, then great, then I think there should have been better action throughout (giving me my internalized pre-teen boy need for 1980s or 1990s cult classic action), but Sinners is really a deep movie, that put action into it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was more of a Hollywood executive decision to set up the acts the way they did, because Hollywood often does treat art like a mathematical insurance formula. Directors are given the hard task of balancing studio needs with their own vision.

On a side note, and this may seem petty, and I am not trying to be a hater to Ryan, but in an interview with Indie Wire, he talked about how “he and his family love Irish music”, and that’s very well possible, but I also think that’s…not true (and, I say that playfully and with humor).

First off, it is as if he is “trying to keep it real” in this interview, i.e., “black enough to seem authentic to other black people”, but he’s also trying to be more auteur than what he may actually be. Yet, I respect the fact that he has to sell a movie to audiences on his promotional tour.

To me, it is like…why were you not hyping this genre more before you released your movie that interestingly has Irish music in it?

Better put, Ryan alleges that he is into Irish folk music, which may be true, but he did not explain how he came to like it in the interview, nor is he being honest about how liking such as genre – notably in the black community – would have been seen as odd.

Essentially there are likely other people of color who really had to struggle to earn the right to express themselves the way they wanted to, just for a person like Ryan, to make it seem like that this wouldn’t be the case in most instances unfortunately.

For example, I grew up skateboarding as a kid before it was more acceptable for the black masses to admit to liking skateboarding – despite, the rich history of black skaters throughout the industry – yet, fast-forward, after certain rappers legitimized skateboarding (first it was Lupe Fiasco but he wasn’t hard enough, but the Lil Wayne did it), then all of a sudden skateboarding saw a boom in black children wanting to shred. Which is great, but I think we got to stop this “black authenticity” thing.

Check out this post I did after this one. I wrote this about three years ago which alludes to what Ryan is talking about regarding Black and Celtic cultures.

Regardless, hearing Ryan talk just made me feel like he is a person trying to sell a movie, sound more auteur than what he is, while also trying to keep it real with his inflections and speech as a means of retaining his “black authenticity”, thus priming him as the “black savant director”, which many people want, simply because they want that to exist. But… IT does need to exist.


Anyways, with a limited number of actors, let alone black actors, Hollywood is only willing to bet the house if an actor such as Jordan was casted. But I really didn’t care for Jordan in this film. I cared for Sammie more and wanted to see his story arc complete. The film doesn’t really know who the main star is. It should be Sammie as far as the story, but it ends up being Jordan because of his star power to draw in the audience. Jordan would have been great if the film were a true action movie akin to Die Hard with Vampires, with Jordan running around with a gun holster, smoking the undead. But the film wasn’t that.


Part 2: A few foundational movies that remind me of Sinners (2025)


Sinners (2025) is a good movie that smashes in a lot of concepts, histories, and tropes together as a means of painting an atmosphere which a lot of people may not have known about Southern culture, be they a true Southerner or not.

For example, the Chinese of the Mississippi Delta (who often served as intermediaries between the black and white communities), the trope of tragic mulatto (which I have conflicted feelings about), the concept of “passing”, the intertextuality of rock-and-roll music in that it is based on black hymns, Scots Irish jigs, etc., but also to showcasing the Choctaw Tribe of Mississippi.

When it comes to the film Sinners (2025) by Ryan Coogler, a few films faintly come to mind, pulled from my subconscious as I write this, and I often do not hear these referenced in current analysis on Coogler’s recent film (granted, these films are older and many online YouTube content creators are of a younger era).
The films that comes to mind for me are Def by Temptation (1990) featuring Kadeem Hardison and Samuel L. Jackson in which an innocent church going young man, with an overprotective pastor father (who has sins on his own hands), ends up visiting his womanizing (rather, pretending to be a womanizer) childhood friend in the city, just to be stalked by a demonic force which uses lust to corrupt and kill men. I saw this movie randomly one night on BET in the late 1990s, when BET played late night classic movies on Saturday nights such as Foxy Brown, Coffy, Cooley High, etc.

This film was produced interestingly by Troma Entertainment, the same studio that gave the world B cult classic movies such as the Toxic Avenger (1984), however, Def by Temptation added an oddly deep and poignant piece of art to Troma’s catalog. I guess you have got to take whatever distribution you can when you are an inspiring indie director.


This a good video essay by YouTube content creator, Imani the Filmophile. Check out videos!

Also, there is the film Rosewood (1997) directed by John Singleton (famous for Boyz n the Hood in 1991), written by Gregory Poirier, and with acting by Ving Rhames, Jon Voight, etc.


Rhames plays a WWI veteran trying to save a thriving black community in Florida from white mob violence due to false allegations of a black man raping a white woman. The story of the burning of Rosewood, Florida is based on a true story, like the Tulsa Race Riots which burned down what was known as Black Wall Street, The Cincinnati Riots of 1829, 1836 and 1841, or the forceful removal of Black Americans from Forsyth County, GA.

The film Rosewood is a good comparison to Sinners in that Rosewood presents a strong, uncompromising, hyper-masculine black military veteran hero, which is something the characters of Smoke and Stack (played by Michael B. Jordan) attempts to do in Sinners.


Another film, to a lesser degree as far as plot, but to a similar degree because of atmosphere, which also stars Samuel L. Jackson (who is quite the outstanding indie film actor in his own right who likes to take artistic risks), is the film Eve’s Bayou (1997) written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, about a young girl (played by Jurnee Smollett) who uses voodoo (or at least we are made to believe so) against her womanizing and possibly abusive father. This film weaves a Southern gothic mood with ancestral African practices, which can be seen in Sinners as well. It was the best performing indie film of 1997 according to some sources.


Sure, people have brought up Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn, but to me another film is Crossroads (1986) starting Ralph Macchio, Jami Getz, and Joe Seneca. It is a great film that touches upon mythology of the Delta Blues.

Part Three: Portals, Vampires, The Irish, White Minorities as the Oppressed and then Oppressors, and Evolution of Black Blues into modern Rock and Roll.

However, now onto vampires, Coogler presents an interesting vampire story by depicting the main vampire, Remmick (played by Jack O’Connell) as a tragic soul, trapped in eternal damnation, i.e., he must kill to stay alive, but by killing others to survive or by possibly killing himself to save himself from his curse, he forbids himself from spiritual places such as our concept of heaven where he may possibly see his former loved ones.
He is forced to wander aimlessly, addicted to his need to feed on blood, but it is not only physical needs he has, but also his own spiritual needs, thus he is attracted to soul, and soul is often expressed through music.
Music thus can create portals between time and space, and some people are able to channel this energy with almost magical precision (e.g., the concept of mojo). These practitioners – consciously or unconsciously – builds bridges across various dimensions of space-time.

Scene from True Detective Season 1 where Rust sees a Portal to Carcossa.

These musical savants thus become prime targets of what I call “physio-spiritual” vampires, i.e., needing blood and spiritual energy.

Painting of the marriage of Aoife and Strongbow by Daniel Maclise. Iconic image of the Norman Invasion of Ireland. This is the time where Remmick is likely from. He was likely in Ireland near Dublin when the Anglo Normans invaded under Strongbow, i.e., Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke.


The more indigenous and ancestral that soul and music is, the better for the vampire, i.e., it is like a more potent drug. This is why Remmick went to the Native Americans before they cast him away.
The vampire is essentially on a quest for a type of “ayahuasca or LSD trip” to help deal with his own trauma, i.e., a psychedelic experience to help him commune with older times that connects him to his own roots. Culture is thus like a fine wine or as being “organic” food. The vampire is wanting the “raw stuff”, and not the processed stuff. The larger the crowd communing with this music, the better for a vampire like Remmick. A larger crowed, swept up in the frenzy of musical elation is a larger “physio-spiritual” feast for a vampire, thus a stronger “high”.

I like that Remmick is a wanderer with a vague back story. It makes it more haunting. What is even more haunting is to think that if what Remmick is doing is happening in some random backwoods Southern town, there where else has this or is currently going on at? The ambiguity reminds me of the haunting lyrics in The Doors song Riders on the Storm. The Doors are actually considered forefathers of modern goth music as a random side note.

“There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah”

The wanderer in horror reminds me of Stephen King’s Needful Things with the character Leland Gaunt and Storm of the Century with the character of Andre Linoge.

Remmick can see the future potential of Sammie’s Delta Blues (where Sammie is a homage to the legend of Robert Johnson, who supposed sold his soul to play the guitar in a Faustian bargain and is considered the first rock star).

The Delta Blues, in real life would even make itself over to the United Kingdom, and inspire early rock bands such The Yard Birds, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, etc. Many of these bands were the children of World War II veterans, who grew up in the reconstruction of Britian during the 1950s which saw an influx of American commercialization, including music. Many teenagers in Teddy Boy, Mod, and greaser cultures listened to American Black music, and many went on to create cover bands, before expanding upon the rock-and-roll genre, notably during the psychedelic and counterculture nineteen sixties.

Rock-and-roll music is a melting pot genre of African soul and hymnals mixed with jigs and folk songs of the Irish, English, and Scots Irish (Scots who settled Northern Ireland before settling the American South. For example, Elvis was Scots Irish).

Rock and Roll became modern with the insertion of the electric guitar. Rock-and-roll became seen later as a white genre, largely because music studios helped segregate music. White parents often didn’t want their children, especially daughters, corrupted by “race mixing”, so white bands filled the void in a genre which was heavy considered black in the nineteen fifties. This is why they were often cover bands of black musicians. Adding in the racial polarization of the Civil Rights Era (for example with many black people wanting more Afrocentric music), by the seventies, rock and roll was heavily a white genre, notably because of the garage band proto-punks of suburbia revolting against their nineteen fifties Leave it To Beaver upbringings in the late sixties. Largely inspired by the Velvet Underground these proto-punks established punk music, but not in opposition to blackness but simply because that’s just how things evolved based on how America was structured at the time. Punk and hip-hop music in New York City would evolve side by side, and this noted in music documentaries such as NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell by Henry Corra in 2007 (I highly recommend watching this documentary).

Even metal music has roots in black Southern blues music, which would go on to inspire many British musicians who went into the psychedelic and progressive movement of the late 60s but favoring heavier and harder riffs (and darker or realist subject matter as opposed to the utopian ideals of Free love). Metal was emerging at the same time as the parallel-evolving genre of Glam rock (which rubbed off one early punk rock) with the American band, The New York Dolls, and the British band, T Rex.


However, like a lot of these genres, which became consumed by the larger white population, these genres often became filled with Right Wing and conservative people, often of the white working classes, who would contort the genres. For example, the classic case of Skinheads who were often Ska listening white British Youths living amongst the first and second generation of West Indies black friends, became infected with the fascist youth movement of Britian’s National Front party. Skinheads as an image has never really recovered from this appropriation by the right wing, despite the best efforts of SHARPS (Skinheads against racism and prejudice).

Remmick, represents the hot topic of cultural appropriation (also, gentrification to some extent), however, it is not as simple as the concept of a white person in post-colonial nations trying to take and launder BIPOC culture.

Remmick is Irish, and the Irish were discriminated against in the USA and the United Kingdom. Ireland was the first English experiment at setting up plantation (large-scaled farming) settlements with the Ulster Plantations of the seventeenth century under the Tudor and Stuart Kings, and then even under the English Dictatorship led by Oliver Cromwell who served a type of Lord Protector role over Ireland in the absence of the British monarchy before the restoration of the royal family.

These plantations make up in part what is Northern Ireland today.

Remmick is likely even older than the Ulster Plantations and is likely a victim of earlier English incursions into Ireland such as through the Anglo-Norman Invasions of Ireland in the twelfth century (i.e., the eleven hundreds) conducted by the Plantagenet-Angevin dynasty.

However, the Irish, even though facing discrimination and oppression, also did promote discrimination themselves. Today you often hear in rebuttals to black liberation talking points is the fact that the Irish too experience levels of slavery such as in the 1631 events known as the Sack of Baltimore, where some Irish people were human trafficked by Barbary Pirates led by Dutchman and Islamic convert, Jan Janszoon.

Regardless, this “white people were slaves too” argument is often employed to distract from white supremacy within the United States and U.K., by using a lazy form of gaslighting or reverse psychology. The truth is the African Transatlantic Slavey trade was a global institution and industry (with stock brokerage, insurance, traders, advertising for slaves, etc.), where black people were the main commodity, rather than simply being unfortunate victims of consequences or kidnappings.

Certain voices that fight this watering down of black enslavement with the “Irish were slaves too” argument proponents, point to the fact that Africans were subjected to chattel slavery (i.e., weren’t even human and the children of slaves would be slaves too), as opposed to indentured servitude faced by the Irish (and well as other poor people in the United Kingdom) who helped settle places such as Australia, the US state of Georgia (founded in part as a debtors prison by Lord Oglethorpe), and even places such as Jamaica (where the weather didn’t fare too well for the Irish workers, thus promoting more imports of Black slaves to the island.

The famous Jamaican accent is theorized to have strong Irish influences).

Irish Americans have been in the USA since the early colonial times (some even were slaveholders, fought in the Confederacy, and some were slave overseers, i.e., middlemen on plantations), but the largest stereotypical demographic of Irish Americans is those who came to the United States during and after the Civil War, largely to the port cities of New York and Boston.


These Irish immigrants were competing for resources with newly freed African Americans who were migrating away from the South. Further, many new immigrants did not like military conscription to fight for freeing slaves in a land that was still alien to them. The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 are a prime example.
This economic competition between immigrant communities created some cross-over but also tensions, and the Irish became a notable political force such as through New York’s Tammany Hall.

The Irish also became known for entering occupations such as cops and firefighters, often further putting the Irish into situations of tension with other minority or immigrant groups, often living in cramped, dangerous, and unsafe urban shanties.

Fast forward to modern times, cities such as Boston, with its rich Irish history, has the stereotype of being notoriously racist, and there is historical basis for these allegations such as Irish American violent protests over school integration which was brought back into the public consciousness with opening dialogue by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

Also, there was the high-profile case of the Murder of Carol Stuart, where a white Irish American husband killed his wife, and had himself shot to pretend he was attacked too, but the husband then blamed the murder on black people. This false allegation led to manhunts by the Boston Police Department, often violating the Civil Rights of Black Americans living in economically distressed areas.

This historical context I am providing helps to paint Remmick in a possibly more complex light.
He is the oppressed but also the oppressor at the same time.

Certain ethnic groups such as Jews, Italians, Poles and Irish were discriminated against by the predominate White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) community (which even predates later German immigrants), however, they eventually became absorbed into “Pan-whiteness”, i.e., the overarching white superstructure that hovers over Western Civilization, i.e., white is seen as the natural and neutral default position for which all other things are analyzed, appraised, and judged against.

These groups often can relate to and gain access to more oppressed groups, who are more oppressed because of the color of their skin, by uniting over shared narratives of oppression (which Remmick tries to do to be invited – as vampires need to be – into the black owned musical hall in the film).


These “white minority groups” (e.g., Jews, Italians, Poles, Irish, etc.), are also able to move more easily within white supremacist and/or capitalist power-systems, and often there is no reaching back and elevating up other oppressed groups, who as restated are often discriminated against because of skin color. For example, there were Jews in the American Antebellum South, and even the Treasurer of the Confederacy, Benjamin P. Judah, was Jewish, which means Confederate schemes such as backing the Confederate dollar with slave picked cotton that would later be procured by the British (whom the Confederates were trying to court to their side), was likely an idea convened upon by Judah.


In addition, to stay on the same topic, black people played a large role in assisting Irish and Italian mobs, notably during Prohibition, but black people were also barred from most public spaces, more likely to be seen as being a criminal, and unable to capitalize monetarily on the monetary gains of the criminal underworld.


In many ways, Jews, Irish, and Italians were able to use that “immigrant grind” mentality, which often used the underground economy to gain political power. One of my personal theses on Black American issues is that Black Americans were largely denied this ability to convert the “criminal capitalist entrepreneurship” to legitimate power like their “white minority” counterparts.


These white minorities benefited from the “multiplier effect” of white supremacy, i.e., a larger and more powerful force with wider reach and deeper impact. Black Americans however forced into segregation, even though creating their own sustainable internalized communities as a result (which some call for a return to in the modern times – which I don’t fully agree with), would never reach the scale afforded to the white superstructure.


In other words, “Buying Black” for example, can only go so far because (A) there is simply more non-black people in positions of power, and B) at a certain point, internally speaking, this segregated society will create its own internalized one-percent class, still lacking the sheer power of the white superstructure.


Black Americans were unable to convert criminality into legitimate power, unlike others, since black people were needed to be visual, symbolic, and real-world objects of disdain to sustain the racial-caste system where blackness was put that the bottom. Even the early settlers were criminals in that they built their wealth over stealing land or by entering into contracts with Native Americans who had no context of English style contract law, which would therefore make many treaties null-and-void based on modern tenants of contract law (e.g., being of age, not under duress, being sober, etc., when entering into legal contracts).
Black people got the criminality, but none of the means to translate it into legitimate power via politics, banking, policing, media, etc. For example, mafias backing the political campaigns of civil leaders, sheriffs, etc.
This is why I feel the characters of Smoke and Stack are totally fine with having ripped off their mobster business associates, be they Irish with whiskey or Italians with wine, etc. Smoke and Stack see themselves as way more worse off than any white passing Irish or Italian person would ever be, and they were only exploiting Smoke and Stack for their own purposes anyways. There is no honor amongst thieves, so the adage goes.

Speaking on matters of early immigrants or freed Blacks engaging in the underworld as a means of survival (e.g., hustling, grinding, what have you), is that music was often overlapping the underground economy, which is still in part true (for example on drug dealing often financed the careers of many rap artists).


Further in example, the mafias – first the Jewish and then Italian mafias – were involved in the music industry and often reaped royalties of black music. A modern example in pop culture is in the show The Sopranos, in the episode titled: A Hit is a Hit (first aired in 1999), where the character Hesh Rabkin (a Jewish shylock, i.e., money lender), made his fortune in part by taking most of the royalties of black musicians he managed.
Other notable examples of this marriage between oppressed groups in the entertainment industry, but in which one side naturally benefits more than the other because of white supremacy, is the film Cadillac Records (2008), starring Beyonce, Jeffrey Wright, and Adrian Brody (playing producer Leonard Chess).


Remmick, also feeds off his own culture. Supposedly, based on some online movie easter-eggs laid by the Sinner’s promotional team, insinuates in fictional news clippings, that the ancient Remmick made it to the Americas a few decades before the events of the film.


He rode on a ship full of Irish immigrants who were dancing and partying one night (note: imagine the scene in Titanic where Jack and Rose are dancing for cliché imagery), but all the travelers mysteriously vanished leaving nothing but a ghost ship entering port, which is a common and fun theme in vampire lore such as in film depictions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula where Dracula comes to England after feeding on the crew who sailed him from mainland Europe to Victorian England.


This would mean that Remmick will even consume (appropriate) his own culture just to feel that lost feeling that haunts him. To relate this to the world outside of this cinematic universe, is to me similar how to these “white minority” communities will romanticize their Old-World roots in the New World, yet, still be beneficiaries and proponents of white supremacy, which uses appropriation as a means of expanding its own palette, while erasing the non-white source of said culture (i.e., the source of flavors).


Don’t get me wrong though. Remmick is a deeply poignant character, and I am not making him the equivalent to some frat-boy with an unframed poster of the Boondock Saints on his wall who praises his Irishness to sound tied to something deeper, but who is really a perpetrator of white supremacy, patriarchy, etc.


All I am saying is that people to the latter exist like these theoretical frat-boys I use as an example, and though they are kind of doing what Remmick is doing, Remmick however, for the sake of the story has reason to, even if flawed, evil, etc.


Remmick is not a modern, mindless American consumer who lost his identity, clinging onto commercialized versions of his roots – though there are parallels that can be made – but, rather Remmick is totally aware of what he lost, but has no other means of reconciling it since he’s essentially a slave to himself, forever damned with his curse.


In theory, if vampires remain the same as when they were killed, but if their bodies remain the same but become stronger over time because of they are supernatural, then one could argue that the emotions, feelings, memories, etc., after vampiric conversion, would also become stronger too. Vampires not only have supernatural strength, but supernatural feelings. A normal human couldn’t understand the emotional highs and lows of a vampire in this theory, nor could a normal human understand the needs of a vampire with this eternal emotional hole inside of them.


In another analysis I saw online, the content creator did a good job of depicting Remmy as “middle management”, i.e., the often invisible but important force that maintains a hierarchical system between the top and bottom.


Back to my own analysis, however, the supernatural foundation of the film Sinners is that blues music can open a sort of Lovecraftian portal between space-time, and the power of this is what attracts vampires. Using music as a means of potentially opening portals is a cool and fascinating concept in my opinion.


Music touches upon mathematics, string theory, physics, etc., and to me is symbolic of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Dreams in the Witch House, where a young math student at the fictional Miskatonic University is boarding in a room that has odd angles. It is revealed these angles represent a type of non-Euclidean math, and enables travelling through other dimensions, and this also unleashes a witch who used the house with all its strange dimensions and angles in the past.


The house is basically a structural sigil used in a magical “working”, i.e., ritual. This witch has been performing ritualistic child sacrifices and drifts between dimensions. The poor student becomes aware of this, without anyone believing him, and he eventually descends into madness.


This story was made into a short film within the horror anthology, Masters of Horror, in 2005, and was directed by horror maestro Stuard Gordon. I recommend you check it out. Good horror anthologies are hard to come by these days.


Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie in Sinners, was part of the cast of HBO’s Lovecraft Country, which is an interesting link to Lovecraftian elements one could pull from Coogler’s work of Sinners.


Part Four: A non-politically correct take on casting and characters. The Tragic Mulatto, Black Queens, The Oaf, The Action Hero, etc.


Michael B. Jordan, who plays twin brothers, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore, are essentially the “alpha black guy(s)” who end up getting Tarantino-like vengeance on the KKK, which to me was forced in the film, but I do understand this subplot. The brothers buy an old warehouse for their club from a corrupt white man called Hogwood played by David Moldonado who is also in the KKK. The man takes Smoke and Stack’s money but is going to come back to kill the brothers and any other black people caught in the warehouse (turned into a dance club by the brothers). This subplot makes sense enough, but also, I felt it was a little cliche and was about giving the audience a sense of vindicated violence against atrocious people with horrible racist beliefs. It was the equivalent of Pam Grier playing Foxy Brown castrating the evil protagonist, i.e., the character of “The Man”. Symbolically, the fact a Klansman took the twin’s money but later wanted to kill them, just points to the obvious fact that white supremacy will economically exploit you while also devaluing and killing black life.


However, Jordan’s characters are the heroes, but they are…sinners. They are on the anti-hero spectrum. For example, it is alluded that one of the twins has pimped women before, I believe somewhere Arkansas, and this is problematic. I am not trying to virtue signal, but because he seems to not have any issue with it, it could be insinuated that it is cool or “it is what it is”.


Sure, we don’t see the relationship between him as a pimp with the “working girls” he manages (for example, we don’t know if it was a violent relationship or some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement).


But, still the notion of black men and pimping is an unfortunate stereotype (which does have basis in reality to varying degrees – I just think its overdone), and I am not sure if Coogler inserted this to paint the brothers in some sort of “old unc” archetype, i.e., the black community equivalent of a pervy, alcoholic, past their prime, and unscrupulous uncle-type of character (think of the “jailbird” in your family), or if he was paying homage to an unspoken veneration of the pimp in certain elements of urban black culture, such as in rap music or blaxploitation films, such as Superfly, the lyrics of Bay Area rapper Too Short, Snoop Dog, etc.

Regardless, one of the twins being a pimp firmly paints him as on the other side of generally approved of moral norms. Not to mention they shoot a man in his buttocks and another in his leg for attempting to steal, yet all this shows is that the brothers operate with an amoral code of “street justice”. They fact they try to educate a young girl on how to negotiate good deals for herself, and they pay her to watch their truck filled with booze, is them showing they have a good side, but simply are “in the streets”. It is a dog-eat-dog world, and they are just players in the game, and if anything, God helped write the rules.


The brothers, well at least one of them, is the de facto hero of the film but they are also sinners who will have to atone in some way, shape, or form.


Moving on, Hailee Steinfeld, playing Mary, represents the “tragic mulatto”, which as a device can provide good analysis on the intersections of race, but in 2025, it seems to be a tired continuation of depicting mixed race people as being conflicted rather than being at peace with themselves. I will write more on this below.
Hailee being “light skinned” serves to juxtapose herself with the strong dark black female of Wunmi Mosaku’s character of Annie.


Annie represents modern slogans and concepts of “black girl magic”, the good witch, etc., who is a divine feminine character tapped into higher knowledge, where in the case of black identity is tapping into ancestral African customs that have been erased by white supremacy, but which are vital in healing generational trauma.


While helping her estranged husband Smoke in his bar venture, she takes on a “mama-san” like role, i.e., the wise female keeper of a house of “ill repute” as churchgoers of old may say. However, in other analysis I have seen in the past, some people have stated using black people with magical abilities to save the day is the trope of the “magical negro”, which is a character, sometimes oddly used a lot by Stephen King (who is ally to progressive causes, so I am not “cancelling” him). The Green Mile, The Stand, etc., are good examples of this trope that some allege is a thing in media.


Hailee Steinfeld’s character for better and worst touches upon the trope of the “tragic mulatto”. This trope dates to the Antebellum period of the United States, if not earlier, in which mixed race people, often of African and European ancestry, are shown as being in perpetual melancholy for not being accepted by the racialized society they exist in.


Rather than stories of transcending race, most stories centering around multiracialism often centers around a “tug of war” mentality that mixed race people may suffer from. I said, “for the worse”, because even though throughout history, mixed race people have suffered trials and tribulations surrounding their identity, where they fit in, etc., I find it sometimes problematic to always insinuate the lives of mixed-race people as being innately conflicted, unhappy, etc.


The film is set in the nineteen thirties, so of course this identity crisis would have been a very real thing, especially in the heart of the Jim Crow South, however, outside of cinema and outside of this film, I notice more portrayals of being conflicted about being mixed-race, rather than stories about embracing all the elements of who you are. So, I am not blaming the film for analyzing the tragic mulatto archetype, since it is based in reality and is great way at exploring the intersections of race; however, outside of cinema, in the real world as of 2025, I personally think we need more depictions of mixed-race people as being well-adjusted or on a journey towards being so, since in the real world we are likely to hear racially divisive concepts such as “white women corrupting black men”, white femme fatales, etc.


Many black people even insinuate being “light skinned” as weak, effeminate, “suss” (suspicious, i.e., sexually ambiguous), etc. Hailee’s character whether people want to admit it or not speaks to a “See, I told you so, don’t trust those “lite skins” or “white women”” sort of feeling that permeates in parts of the internet.
By depicting liter skinned peoples as inherently bad, it ironically feeds into an internalized colorism that even exists in the Black American community, despite the Black American community being seen often as the oppressed rather than being capable of any sort of oppression.


However, Hailee’s character for the better is not shown as being a villain or evil, which some people in earlier times may have done. She is shown in the film more so as victim of circumstances, and she gravitates towards black community in varying degrees. Even in the film, when Hailee is in the juke joint (the club), the other characters state she is supposed to be there, as opposed to the outsider vampires.


But to be real, Hailee’s character is meant to be a juxtaposition to Wunmi Mosaku’s characters, who is the archetype of the strong, black (very dark skinned, i.e., melanin) women.


Wunmi’s character is healer, the “mamma-san”, etc., who has herbal remedies, converses with the ancestors, has knowledge of esoteric and supernatural things, etc., and this resonates in the real world, notably in our current phase of black liberation politics, e.g., “buy black campaigns”, “black girl magic”, etc.


Whereas Hailee’s character, whether she likes it or not, can tap into her “racial currency” as a “passing” women, i.e., when a person who was able to pass as white would do so in order avoid the limitations that white supremacy imposed, Wunmi on the other hand as a “black” black woman can’t run from her problems or identity, but has to accept it.


By accepting it she accepts it on a spiritual level, outside the limitations and erasure that white supremacy imposed on black African culture from slavery until…today in certain instances.


You add the story device of Wunmi having lost a child, which is a real thing that many women of color who lack access to medical care, face more likely than their white woman counterparts.


Hailee’s character is written in a way to not threaten or overshadow the lived experiences of a black woman, so whether people want to admit it or not, the movie retains the interests of black female moviegoers.
White supremacists, racists of any color, etc., often try to discourage interracial relationship by seeming to care about mixed race people by alleging their lives will be terrible, when really these people simply don’t want the relationships to exist. Better put, people who try to discourage interracial relationships on the grounds that they won’t be accepted by either which side, is ironic because people who allege this are often the culprits of making a racist world that makes it harder for biracial or multiracial peoples.
The Chinese storeowners, Bo and Grace Chow, played by Li Jun Li and Yao, provide a good way of inserting Asian characters into historical depictions of America, and these Chinese of the Deltas of Mississippi are a real thing.


Asian Americans are often absent in historical depictions of American life despite them playing a role in America’s development, that wasn’t always simply building railroads which is the common way people see the Chinese for example in history.


With Asian Americans often not getting roles as strong leading characters, having these Chinese characters, notably in a black-led film, helps link the Black and Asian communities in real life in which sometimes our communities have collided (often centering around the concept of economic exploitation where many stores in black neighborhoods were ran by Asian Americans or immigrants). The film unites enough while also leaving the door open for deeper conversations.


For example, during the COVID19 lockdowns there were certain cases of people assaulting Asian Americans, but some of these people doing the crimes were black people, and this was during Black Lives Matters era (which had high tensions with police, backlash by the Right Wing, etc.).


The Stop Asian Hate campaign arose as a result, but people used these unfortunate attacks to undermine the BLM movement and to paint black people as hypocritical, unworthy of reform, and inherently criminal in nature. Some of these attack cases happened in areas such as the Bay Area, but these areas having such as deep connection to progressive political traditions and social justice, often provide better platforms for engaging in cross-cultural communication, unlike the chaos of online debates one may find on Twitter, or within more racially segregated (non-fluid) communities elsewhere in the United States.


Having a film that unites Black and Asian people as being able to work together is a good thing in my opinion, since often Asian people are painted as “model minorities” who can benefit from white supremacy as a buffer-like race against black communities.


Unfortunately, some Asian people, like other non-white groups adopt anti-black thinking as a means of assimilating to the predominate “White superstructure” that is the United States.


However, there many allies in the Asian American community discussing these issues as a means of bridging the gap with other minority communities, notably the black community, in which they were set up to be pitted against each other.


Showing the complex nature of Asian and Black relationships, notably within the Jim Crow South, but within a horror film which requires transcending racial lines for survival is a good way to ease tensions in the real world in my opinion, even if in a small way.


Next on the list, is the actor Omar Miller playing Cornbread who represents the symbolic “oaf” in horror genres.


Big, rural, loveable, gentle, etc. The Little John from English folklore sort of character is likely where this trope comes from but firmly planted into the American psyche by John Steinbeck’s character of Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men. Ozzie in the Leprechaun film played Mark Holton, or Tom Culllen in Stephen King’s The Stand are good examples of the “big oaf” character.


Cornbread, played by Miller, does fine in his role, and dies in a somewhat comedic way while using the restroom, so he plays into this oafish trope. He also plays a convincingly scary vampire, in which he is shown as feral, which is common in vampire tropes as newly turned vampires learn to deal with their hunger, etc.
Further, the legendary actor, Delroy Lindo, plays the “jaded old drunk”, Delta Slim, but his jadedness veils a wisdom but a type of wisdom, though enlightening, also can lead to a sense of spiritual paralysis. Essentially Slim has seen too much, and he’s numbed himself to not feel. He plays music out of sadness, unlike the youthful hopefulness and energy found in Sammie’s playing.


When it comes to possible ideas that could have worked in the film, I wrote them below.


Vampires are supposed to be good at suggestion and manipulation, so it would have been interesting if the vampires who were stuck outside somehow found a way to mentally torment or influence the people inside the club. This may be a little too close however to Tales for the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995), where the devil, brilliantly played by Billy Zane, tries to tempt humans trapped inside a house to let him in by tapping into their desires.


Each character in the house could have represented a sin (lust, envy, greed, lying, gluttony, murder, blasphemy, etc.,) in which the vampires would try to manipulate as a means of entering the club. The goal of course would be for the humans inside the club to “beat their sins” by confessing buried trauma, facing them head on, making amends, triumphing racism or biases, etc. This story device could have implemented flashback sequences but also interpersonal tensions between the characters inside. The characters in the film were established enough to make sense and create some emotional connections, but more inter-dialogues between the characters may have deepened our understanding of each character.


Also, was no real explanation about why an Irish vampire was in the Delta of Mississippi. Not having an explanation is not bad and leaves a lot to the imagination, which can be effective storytelling. For example, In No Country for Old Men, the protagonist of Sigur, equally as ambiguous, has no real reasons to do what he does besides just being a force of nature or fate. That’s why he’s scared. He is death personified, like the concept of death in Ingman Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.


The Irish Vampire, Remmick, promises community, fun, and family, but with death as the gateway.
And when you think about that last sentence it invokes a very 1960s, hippie, Tim Leary, meets Charles Manson type of vibe to Remmick. Rock and Roll in our collective consciousness, does encapsulate or play with the concept of “sin” with drugs, sex, rebellion, but also an odd tendency to see its heroes die, often at young ages so they can become immortalized.

Remmick is simply offering this, but with otherworldly consequences of eternal damnation. He’s selling all the good parts but not telling you any of the bad parts, i.e., the addiction, the loneliness, the death of loved ones, the need for “stronger and stronger” fixes.


This reminds me of The Lost Boys, where the vampires are essentially just young punks partying forever, but at the price of their own souls.

How Trump won the Psy War and no one cared: Michael Flynn’s “Digital Army”, the Judeo-Christian Rand Straussian elites, Rogan tomfoolery, January 6th, Third Eye Politics, and CIA intrigues of old by MRG Staff

Resistance to MAGA seems futile considering how many billionaires, millionaires, disgruntled military and CIA alumni, religious fanatics, etc., it has on its side.

Below are some ad hoc schematics I like to do to track things

Notes by the author. Quinton Mitchell
Notes by the author. Quinton Mitchell
Notes by the author. Quinton Mitchell
Notes by the author. Quinton Mitchell

I see MAGA as a phase of history that the United States needs to go through. It is the manifestation of paranoia as old as the John Birch Society, the Minute Men far-right social groups, the racism of people such as Willis Carto, etc. It is the amalgamation of things a lot of ideas, that people won’t be content with getting over until tried. That is the simplest and least wordy way to describe it. Only when we are forced to stare at the results of our actions will we learn. That is it. It seems that all societies decay into some form of fascism at some point unfortunately, notably as the nation, like an organism, becomes insecure about any possibility of waning power and prestige.

So, this will all bleed together and flow like a linear story.

Michael Flynn has been waging a psychological war against the American people, and no one seems to…care.

Flynn admitted to commanding an army of digital soldiers in an insurgency.

To get the point, Michael Flynn was a friend of the late General John K. Singlaub.

Singlaub was a veteran of the WWII having served in Operation Jedburgh, but later spent time observing the Chinese Civil War, managing the Secret War in Laos during the Vietnam War, helped provide guidance to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and was later implicated during the Iran Contra Scandal for having smuggled weapons – then banned by the Boland Amendment -, allegedly through a place called John Hull’s Ranch in Costa Rica to the Right Wing Contras in Nicaragua (some allege they were nothing more than death squads).

I think it is fascinating that every region that Singlaub was hot in was also interestingly a hot spot for drug activity (opium in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia) and of course cocaine production in Latin America.

Singlaub not only knew Oliver North of the Iran Contra Affair but also knew Michael Hand, a CIA operative of the Vietnam Era who set up a shadow bank in Australia called the Nugan Hand Bank. Hand became a fugitive from the law after the bank collapsed and his business partner was found dead in the trunk of a car but was later discovered to be living in Idaho as a custom knife maker.

The bank is said to have been involved in drug trafficking since it had offices in places near DEA overseas offices, and this money laundering was likely used to fund CIA clandestine operations across the globe including continental Africa which was seeing conflicts such as Rhodesia, Namibia, etc. The Nugan Bank Scandal mimics other notable shadow banks such as the BCCI Bank and the Banco de Ambrosiano Scandal which had links to the Vatican. This era in CIA history was strongly influenced by William Colby and then later William Casey. Other notable CIA figures of this time, who were connected to Nugan Hand by varying degrees of separation where figures such as Theodore Shackey (The Blond Ghost), Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, Edwin P. Wilson, Frank Turpil, etc. Many of these men such as Shackey were CIA veterans from the days of Bay of Pigs invasion disaster and the assassination of President JFK, and Shackey through his cadre of underlings had links to many Cuban anti-communist radicals, where many of these men had ties to cocaine trafficking in South Florida, mercenary work (some as far as in Congo), assassinations, etc.

As you can read there is a lineage or direct links tracing from figures such as Michael Flynn all the way to deep state figures of the early CIA, yet, the irony is that Flynn and conservatives as weaved this lie that the Deep State is “liberal”, “Democrat”, etc., when the Deep State has always been more Right Wing (pro-elitism, pro- capitalism, etc., but nuanced with a Judeao-Christian, Zionists Millennialism. It’s ardent stance on anti-communism is often a passive-aggressive way for maintaining white supremacy, since most of the traditional wealth in the USA is still owned by white elites. This is why the CIA, when fighting anti-communists forces, often works alongside the extreme Far-Right and by doing so, they create “blowback”, i.e., domestic terrorists, hate groups, rogue veterans, etc.)

William Colby is noted as being one of the creators of Stay Behind Units (along with figures such as Frank Wisner, James Jesus Angleton, etc.) in Europe to fight the Soviets in case of invasion but these Stay Behind Units were often fascists or right-wing organizations including Neo Nazis and European Identitarians. William Casey, who later died from a brain tumor before he was possibly indicted for his ties to Iran Contra, was the creator of the Manhattan Institute, which is a conservative think tank. This think-tank, still in existence today, has hosted figures such as Right-Wing billionaire and Elon Musk associate, Peter Thiel, who has obtained lucrative tracking software contracts from the Trump Administration, but also has hosted figures such as Christoper Rufo.

Rufo has been seen on Fox News segments with Tucker Carlson (he himself a reject of the CIA) decrying concepts such as Critical Race Theory. Rufo was later selected by Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to set on the board of Florida’s state-ran liberal arts college, The New College of Florida, because DeSantis wanted reform the school to mimic Michigan’s Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale College is the mother-brain behind America’s charter school movement, offering curriculum such as the 1776 Project which is a rebuttal curriculum to the 1619 Project (a study course detailing America’s history of slavery, Native American conquests, etc.). Hillsdale College is not only the alma mater to ex-Blackwater mercenary group CEO, Erik Prince, but also hosts many notable conservative and Federalist Society connected individual such as Justice Clarence Thomas, who was later revealed to have received money from shadow donor Harlan Crow. Crow is a man known for collecting fascist memorabilia.

The school also has ties through its president Larry Arnn, a Plato fanatic and self-ascribed “West Coast Straussian”, i.e., after neoconservative progenitor, Leo Strauss. Arnn links to another conservative organization called the Claremont Institute.

The Claremont Institute is noted for having started the Obama Birther Conspiracy movement (alleging Obama is not an American citizen), and this organization attempted the same with Kamala Harris. Claremont was run by a man named Michael Pack who was later appointed by Trump to be the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is the entity that overseas Voice of America (an organization that Tucker Carlson’s father in the nineteen-eighties ran). While at USAGM, Pack gutted the origination and filled it with Trump loyalists, going so far as having been sued by some of his employees for workplace treatment.

Pack later platformed a man named Guo Wengui, a shadowy Chinese exiled “billionaire”, who is a close associate of Steve Bannon who is an ex-Goldman Sachs manager, ex CEO of Brietbart in which Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is a spin-off of, and a former US Navy officer. Bannon of course was Trump’s former campaign manager and is still a diehard supporter. Bannon is credited with having discovered the armies of angry online male gamers via a scam in which Bannon would pay Chinese sweatshop workers to mine in-game digital goods and then sell these goods for real-world money at high markups, often to underage people. Bannon did business with ex-Disney star, Brock Pierce and his accomplice Michael Collins Rector where Rector later fled the country for assaulting teenage boys. Bannon was introduced to Trump by David Bossie, the President of Citizens United, a conservative non-profit known for winning a federal court case that enables corporations to give funds directly to political candidates, thus erasing any real chance of campaign finance law reform in the United States.

Bannon, a real chaos agent, during the early Trump years, went on a European tour courting Far Right candidates such as France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Victor Orban, and Germany’s Alterative for Germany (AFD) Party where the AFD has ties to the Kremlin. Bannon even went so far as to help buy an old Italian monastery to be a “gladiator school” for new generations of Right-Wing activists, though this acquisition was protested by many of the local townspeople.

It is also important to note that Bannon was on the board of Cambridge Analytica, now going by Emerdata or something similar, was the data collection firm who took customer data with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook’s help, to launch targeted political campaigns. Cambridge Analytics also involved Robert and Rebekah Mercer, with the Mercer’s having earned their billions from the Renaissance hedge fund. The Mercer’s were the funders of Brietbart News where Bannon was CEO at. Further, a Hong Kong Billionaire named Johnson Ko was the board and Ko owned a Chinese security group known as Frontier Services Group (FSG) which employed Erik Prince. As you can see this is a closed loop.

But back to Guo Wengui, the Bannon associate and Michael Pack selected mouthpiece, he went on VOA to protests the Chinese government, but he was so unhinged that weary producers cut his segments, which later garnered the wrath of Pack. Pack was later let go by President Biden, yet, Guo was later indicated for having scammed his loyal followers out millions of dollars (some value the fraud as high as a billion).

Guo who courted people such as former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was later discovered to have been recording people in his Manhattan penthouse, and when investigators went back to inquire further, the apartment mysteriously set ablaze from incendiary devices set up in the apartment. Guo was discovered to have fled China for a sexual assault allegation but also fraudulent real estate transactions with corrupt CCP officials. Having fled to the United States, Guo presented himself as a political refugee trying to topple the Communist Chinese but was likely a double-agent working for the Chinese (as a form of probation to ensure his funds weren’t frozen), but his anti-CCP groups were simply a way of spying on dissident anti-CCP voices amongst the Chinese expatriate community. Guo was later found guilty of fraud, similar to his friend Steve Bannon, who was also indicted for hosting private “Build the Wall” fundraisers in which he and others pocketed the money for personal use.

Before I end this tangent on China, it is also important to note that Erik Prince worked for a Chinese mercenary group called Frontier Services Group (FSG) who provided security services to the Chinese regarding their Belt and Road infrastructure project but also security details for their African mineral extraction programs. Prince, a real shadowy player, also met with a Russian banker via a UAE lobbyist, George Nader (later convicted of child sex crimes) while in the Seychelles, and Prince was outed as having broken UN Sanctions by providing military hardware to Libyan warlord General Haftar via Project Opus, where Haftar, a CIA asset, is one of many vying for control of the oil rich region (this meeting was arranged via Trump’s ambassador to Egypt).

Regardless, Michael Flynn in recent years has admitted to having a Digital Army which he admitted at a Young Americans for Freedom event. The Young Americans for Freedom event is a conservative youth organization now under the leadership of Scott Walker, former Governor of Wisconsin who made his fame by going after public employee unions in his state. YAF is notable for having purchased Reagan Ranch. Scott Walker was bankrolled by the secretive billionaire family, The Uihlein Family, and this family also donates to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Kirk himself has said plenty of racist things throughout his career and seems to have strong ties to Arizona’s College Republicans, an organization which seems to have ties through individual members to the America First movement with figures such as white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and his Groypers (which I would assume through individual members have ties to groups such as Patriot Front).

The Uihlein Family are intermarried with the Bradley Family, and both have ties to the infamous John Birch Society, which is a right organization so unhinged they claimed that Republican President Eisenhower was a Communist, likely for his support for desegregation.

What Flynn was really saying is that he runs an army of trolls and bots who see politics as insurgent warfare.

Michael Flynn can be seen online with Singlaub at Phyllis Schlafly Eagles event celebrating his 100th birthday. Phyllis Schlafly Eagles is a conservative organization which according to their site are anti-feminists, anti-political correctness, and supports reduced immigration and fosters free market economics. It is important to note that Phyllis Schalfly was a female activists who opposed female rights. Think about that, you have career military and intelligence officers being celebrated at an organization that is vehemently opposed to modern female liberation. YouTube content creator named Intelexual Quickies has a great video titled, Are White Women Voting Against Their Interests? detailing Phyllis Schlafly. Separately as a side note, I find it interesting that the modern Trad Wife movement, which itself could be understood as a sub-set or proxy to Alt-Right politics, could be considered as being a psychological operation in and of itself, and it has roots in the anti-feminism of women such Schlafly. Yet, these ideas of old have been repackaged for a younger generation of Millennials and Zoomers, etc., who are being inspired to be nostalgic, notably as a reaction to the Social Justice theories they were taught in school, but also they are reacting to the lack of economic ease grew up in since 2008 (The Great Recession) until now. For example, many Zoomers were in elementary school during the tumultuous Recession and Social Activism years, largely defined by the Presidency of Barak Obama (and the ardent obstructionism of Republicans at this time to Obama), and despite the assumption that these younger people would be all become progressive, many in rebellious fashion are looking backwards rather than forwards to gain identity. The reactionary nature to be Far Right to me is a reality of an empire in decay and in which the citizens of said empire refuse or cannot accurately criticize the underlying presuppositions of what props up their realities, notably that of capitalism. For example, as home and other assets continue to rise as worker wages stall, and as the wealth of a few balloons to new heights, many people still put their faith and vicarious aspirations into figures such as Elon Musk. A man who is sinister due to the fact that he not only understands that the game is rigged and able to be exploited by the billionaires and tech elites, but he is so cynically aware that he understands people will simply believe whatever he says as long as he says the rights things, even if he doesn’t believe those things or if he is in fact behind the conspiracies he claims others are.

Yet, back to Michael Flynn and his “Digital Army” (which is very real).

Michael Flynn’s brother, Charles Flynn was involved in the January 6th insurrection scandal. Colonel Earl Matthews alleged the Charles Flynn and Lt. General Walter Piatt misled investigators in that the Flynn and Piatt seemed to delay requests for National Guard support. Lieutenant General Piatt, previously a candidate to run the US Army Futures Command (the command that deals in modernization efforts of the US Army) is likely very salty that he was denied his fourth star by President Biden. Piatt is now the CEO of the powerful Wounded Warrior Project organization, which has loyal followers amongst the veteran and POW/MIA community. So not only does Michael Flynn run a digital army of trolls, but a likely associate of Michael via this brother Charles Flynn, runs the WWP. The political left often loses the “war of aesthetics” regarding the military and veterans, largely due to the pacifistic notions such as cutting military spending, thus giving them a massive disadvantage in political discourse. Criticizing the military is often misconstrued with attack veterans, and conservatives us this as a means of controlling the narrative around the military, intelligence communities, etc. Sadly, the Left falls for this hook and sinker because the Left has no tangible realpolitik on military matters besides emphasizing peace – which is something that arguably doesn’t exist in nature- but, also emphasizes a self-reflective and self-critical gaze, which can be easily misconstrued as not being patriotic.

It is also interesting to note that on the day of January 6th, that Alex Jones was on Capitol Hill with lawyer Kenneth Cheseboro, one the ringleaders of the Fake Elector Plot. Cheseboro later plead guilty to election fraud in the state of Georgia. Interestingly, Captain Emily Rainey, another psychological warfare officer from Fort Bragg, NC, head of US Army Special Operations Command the JKF School for Psychological Warfare, was incriminated for organizing parts of the January 6th insurrection.

Alex Jones of course is friend to Joe Rogan, who as a podcaster platform a litany of personalities involved in steering the general public more right-wing such as Jordan Peterson (who pushed notions such as “Postmodern Marxism”, which is simply a reinvention of the older Pat Buchanan “Cultural Marxism”, and the even older Nazi term of “Cultural Bolshevism”), Sam Harris (who flirted with studies about Racial IQ and acting through his atheist persona would go onto to push Islamophobia), Stefan Molyneux (a man listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate list who too pushed racial IQ hierarchy studies), Gavin McInnes (founder of the Proud Boys), Graham Hitchcock (knowns for his alternative archeology beliefs notable in conspiracy theory, New Age, and Ancient Alien-like subcultures), etc.

Rogan, who I like to call a “Neoplatonist”, a former actor tied to the Disney corporation, is the cross-roads between the Alt-Right, UFC bloodsport, comedy, and conspiracy theory culture such as UFOlogy, the New Age movement (which included the Human Potential Movement, a movement famously lampooned in the film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was inspired by true event such as Project Stargate), Timothy Leary-like “psycho-naut”, i.e., psychedelic drug using subcultures as best typified by the Burning Man festival, MAPS, and The Esalen Institute, etc.

Rogan not only is able to platform and spread “red-pilled” ideas to the masses, but his ability to bleed into the comedy sphere grants him even more authority. Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon, Tom Segura, etc., are all part of the “Rogan-verse”.

Rogan, whose politics could be best understood as classically liberal yet syncretic, i.e., splicing elements of libertarianism and some aspects of socialism (if you catch him on day he’s not fuming about the political Left). I have compared his views to that of science fiction author and US Naval officer, Robert Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers and Strangers in a Strange Land. Starship Troopers details a society ruled by a military government where voting is based on military service, yet, for those who wish not to serve, they live a libertarian and voluntarist existence. Strangers in a Strange Land is noted for having inspired both early hippies in areas such as Laurel Canyon and also libertarians, where libertarians through the Cold War became more so synonymous with Right Wing politics and think-tanks, e.g., the CATO Institute, the Atlas Society (a global libertarian foundation). Republicans such as Reagan, Nixon, etc., all called themselves libertarians at certain points, and both were influenced by thinkers such as Milton Friedman, where Friedman led the Chicago School of Economics, a school dedicated to neoliberalism, i.e., unfettered free markets. Friedman trained a cadre of Chilean economists under the fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet, where Pinochet was known for his kidnapping, torture, and disappearances of his opposition.

Tulsi Gabbard, a politician hailed by the Joe Rogan community because she seems to mix both hippy and militarist elements, such as those I spoke about above, is now Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi herself is the epitome of this nexus between New Age culture and militarism as I alluded to relating to Heinlein. Her youth was largely controlled by the Hare Krishna sect, The Science of Identity Foundation, which is a group known for their anti-homosexual beliefs and also their anti-Muslim stances. She like Michael Flynn is involved in psychological warfare with her meritorious service with the U.S. Army Civil Affairs & Psychological Operations Command (Airborne).

Alex Jones has been hailed by Russian media for his anti-Hillary Clinton stance, and he has links to little known YouTube influencers such as Jay Dyer, author of Esoteric Hollywood. Dyer, a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, has interviewed thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin, who is Vladmir Putin’s ideological architect. Dugin wished to bring back Russian power to its heights in the Soviet Union but instead of Communism he shifted to fascism with an Imperialist Czarist aesthetic. Dugin believed that stirring up as much civil unrest in the USA by fostering racial conflict, ideological conflict, etc., so the USA will implode from within and European forces would leave NATO.

Russian operations have been effective at convincing many in the West that the Ukraine War is explicitly a “money laundering scheme” and that it is the United States’ fault that Russia invaded despite the fact that Russia has had a dictator for over twenty years and was already meddling in Ukrainian politics. For example, the United States borders Mexico in which some security studies organizations deem it a failed narco-state, but the US has not invaded Mexico. Even if NATO was on the door of Russia, Russia had already invaded Georgia and has shown themselves as having a foreign policy which seems to advance themselves at any chance at the expense of the United States.

Dyer often pushes anti-Western conspiracy theories, often disregarding any criticism of Russia, where is Orthodoxy is symbolic of. His conspiracies theories often involve concepts such as “predictive programming in film”, Federal Reserve conspiracy theories, and how science and materialist philosophies have erased God, spiritualism, etc., and therefore enabled an Occultic and Satanic takeover of modern societies. I don’t think Dyer however is a Russian asset, but I think by proxy he leads people down a path towards anti-Western thinking that can be usurped and twisted against the West for the benefit of foreign intelligence agencies.

His remedy is embracing Eastern Orthodoxy, yet the issue is that his feeds into the Kremlin backed information campaigns which seeks to make Russia look the Savior of “Christendom” and the West. Pro-Russia conspiracies have expertly infiltrated the Western and American conservative movements. Fox News hosts such as Tucker Carlson hailed Putin for his stance on LGBTQ issues and his anti-feminist perspectives for example. Yet, a big reason Western conservatives are supporting Russia is because of white anxiety in the both the United States regarding demographic changes, but also in Europe due to Middle Eastern Refugees. The irony about the Middle Eastern refugees is that Russia played a role in helping exacerbate the destabilization of the Middle East such as how Russia stepped in on behalf of President Bashir Assad. Russia used mercenaries in the region and also conducted aerial bombing missions. However, Russia helps send refugees into Central and North Europe often with the help of Russian underling Belarus.

Tucker Carlson currently seems to be undergoing a mental and/or spiritual crisis with his belief he was attacked by demons. Seriously. He said it.

Dyer even connects back to the comedy space, via online troll figures such as Sam Hyde, but Dyer also connects to Alt-Right figures such as Lauren Southern, where Southern also interviewed Russia’s Dugin, but she was also platformed on Rupert Murdoch owned Sky New, where Murdoch of course owns Fox News. Fox News of course has produced Trump cabinet position picks such as Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, and Sebastian Gorka, etc. Gorka of course was a liaison to Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, and Hungary and in many ways has been seen by the Western and American Alt-Right as a bastion of hope because of its anti-migrant stance and perceived social conservatism. Hegseth in true “crusader” fashion with Deus Vult and Jerusalem Cross tattoos (slogans and symbols appropriated by the fascists) has been accused of sexual assault.

[Ending Commentary by Author]

First off, I want to say I love my country, the United States of America, and I do not hate Republicans. I hate that they hate their opposition and how they are pretending that they haven’t always. I may not have been Rambo, but I raised my hand and gave a few years of my life to serve the country.

But I am tired, absolutely tired of the Right Wing thinking they own this country. I see their games about how they try to corner, encircle and engulf the very powerful aesthetics and mythology of the military for themselves, and they try to use this to take the high horse position to undermine progressive ideas as not being American enough or not American at all. Though I have many issues with the political left, such as their idealist stance on pacifism and their lack of a realpolitik when dealing with legitimate threats to the United States, I do embrace the inclusiveness of progressive politics and its empowerment of the working classes.

The truth is the Left Wing lost the psychological warfare fight.

The Left does not seem to have full-time armies of trolls online, nor the funding to afford complex bot technology, etc. The Right Wing expertly conducted a shadow war on the American public such as pushing erroneous and dangerous conspiracy theories such as Qanon. Even though the mainstream media seems to be on the Left because they have to be inclusive as a means of selling advertisements to the diverse masses for their revenues, the truth is mainstream media, as capitalist organizations, are not necessarily in alignment with what Leftists actually want, e.g., Medicare for All, universal education, criminal justice reforms, restrained military spending, etc.

Yet, the opposition in Republicans argues or insinuates that this corporate left-leaning liberalism is proof that the media (including social media) is actually controlled by Leftist.

There is a difference between liberal and leftist. Liberals are actually both Democrats and Republicans since they both trace roots to Enlightenment classical liberalism, which fosters private property, inalienable rights, separation of religion from state, pluralism, etc., whereas leftism, is more on the spectrum of Socialism, i.e., a collective view to property to some, or at least a redistribution of wealth within a liberal system for egalitarian means. For example, in the United Kingdom you have a Liberal Party similar to the American Democratic Party, yet they have the Labour Party, which is similar to the Democratic Socialist of America with figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You can be a Left Wing liberal, a Social Democrat, a Democratic Socialist, a Communists (typically but not exclusively adhering to Marxist ideology. For instance, you have socio-anarchist who reject the state), etc. which are all different things.

Yet, the American public with a short attention span, and easily misled by fantastical and escapist conspiracies such UFOs and “animal-human hybrids” rather than focusing on factual conspiracies, have seemed to have already forgotten the real and apparent attacks on democracy that Republicans and their operatives conducted in this MAGA era.

Getting students at Evergreen State University or Oberlin College to develop a comprehensive defense policy relating to manpower, readiness, intelligence, psychological warfare, and nuclear weapons seems a bit of stretch, but with Trump having won for a second time, the Left needs to do some deep thinking about how it lost and why it will continue to lose. A big reason I believe the Left will continue to lose, is that the left has an ideological issue with the military, despite Leftist regimes throughout history having actual militaries.

The military by the Left is always framed as tool for colonialism for the behest of capitalism and spoken about with an explicitly self-critical tone. And even though it is apparent that this colonialist-capitalist animus is fact a reality of the current military, the Left, despite talking, does not have a plan for an alternative system. Peace is a concept often enforced by violence or fear thereof. They don’t have a concept of what I call Patriotic Progressivism. Even being proud to be an American is often left out of discussions. For example, I have said before that a start in this process is to frame the American Revolution – which is often usurped by conservatives – as being a worker revolution against a charter corporation rather than merely a revolution against taxes. 1776 was a war in which human trafficking victims (African slaves), non-unionized contractors (settlers), and Indigenous peoples rose up against a chartered corporation owed by foreign investors of a global empire.

But what is the end game here of Republicans?

It sounds like a mouth-full of intellectual jargon, but the clear agenda of the conservative movement seems apparent to me.

They seek to establish an anti-democratic Republic ruled by wealthy elites, technocrats, and industrialists, as a type of dreams-of-grandeur vision of ancient Plato’s Greece as understood in his treatise “The Republic”. This sort of “Neo-Greco-Roman”, i.e., fasci, i.e., fascist vision, is layered with Christian Evangelicalism, and they see the United States as a continuation of this Greco-Roman tradition as understood through the thinking of figures such as Leo Strauss, Edmund Burke, Ayn Rand, etc.

These Rand-Straussians as I call them wish for a nativist and isolationist world to protect the culture they have designed in their own image, yet see no issue in exploiting, colonizing, and extracting resources from abroad, indifferent to the destabilizing global impacts these may have, such as migration of the impoverished to their borders. Thus, their ideology is ultimately a Darwinist, zero-sum game of eternal struggle of power versus the powerless.

Underneath the veil of modern capitalism, marketing, commerce, and corporations there is an underlying animus akin to medieval and feudalist thinking. A reality of generational lords and knights (business owners, landlords, the officer classes, etc.) ruling over the renting serfs (the general public). Religiously committed to capitalism, they must ensure capitalism’s continual existence.

As technology reaches its logical conclusions, they are left with only investing in over-charging the people on assets such as housing, using forced obsolescence, and turning the entirety of life into a subscription-based model, etc. Many neighborhoods are now owned by corporations. Even automobiles may require people to pay to unleash special features in the cars they already paid for.

The same way how Kings and Popes of old used fear of “witchcraft” and the Occult to violently suppress progress and dissent, modern conservatives use conspiracy theories to engender irrational fear. Irrational fear of “Communism” as a means of ensuring that they can privatize government, cut their own taxes, and deregulate industries. Fear of racial, gender, and sexual orientation equality because they may pose a threat to the existing Western order that traditionally favored European American, straight, males, and maintaining this white heteronormative order, i.e., a type of caste system, the existing capitalist and colonial inspired order which is the foundation of the USA lives on.

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#trump #maga #intelligence #opinion #military #joerogan #jaydyer #ukrainewar #news

Does YouTube have a Nazi Pop problem? How the algorithm promotes the glamorization of Nazism by MRG Staff

Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, have become, sadly, and oddly, a form of pop culture, and not just any pop culture, but a hyper-real form of culture perpetuated by the omnipotent and fate-sealing power of the “algorithm”. Quinton Mitchell

I call it Nazi Pop.

I understand that history should be taught and preserved. I also understand that having different content creators helps analyze topics form different perspectives. However, I think there should at least be more disclaimers relating to Nazi content or at least some sort more intensive vetting process including but not limited to peer-review for YouTube videos on the subject. Also, creators of such content should have to disclose their public identity rather than hide behind avatars.

A large chuck of the profit percentage should go to charities such as those dedicated to Holocaust education or hate-group watchdog groups.

https://www.adl.org/take-action/ways-to-give

https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

It seems many content creators have learned that making videos about Nazis is an easy way to get paid, yet many people don’t care about the money but rather they are potential Nazi sympathizers who have adapted to not seeming radical but instead brand themselves as “amateur historians”. For example, the YouTube pages such as the Zoomer Historian and History-at-War.

Sure, not everyone talking about Nazis are bad and the intent is often educational. Yet, even with these good faith actors the need to make money off Nazi content still stands. For example, let us look at lovable and iconic YouTube creator, Simon Whistler.

Simon Whistler is known for having many and I mean many YouTube channels (see article, titled: The Many Channels of YouTuber Simon Whistler by Shelly Lawless from CultureSlate. Link: https://www.cultureslate.com/lists/the-many-channels-of-youtuber-simon-whistler).

When I type in Simon Whistler Nazi on YouTube I see the following videos. Why Did So Many Nazis Choose Argentina to Flee to After WWII? (on Today I Found Out); Why Did So Many Nazis Choose Argentina to Flee to After WWII? (on Into The Shadows); Adolf Hitler – The Rise of a Fanatical Fuhrer (on Biographics); The “Nice” Nazis (on Sideprojects); War and Drugs – WWII Soldiers Go Mad on Meth (on Brain Blaze); Inside the Meeting that Engineered the Holocaust (on Into the Shadows); The Rise and Fall of the Nazi War Machine (on Warographics); The 1936 Olympic Games: Nazi Germany’s Gambit (on Into the Shadows); The “XX System”: How MI5 Made Fools of the Nazis (on Into the Shadows)…and honestly, there is at least 20 plus more.

I must stress that I think Simon Whistler is a legitimate content creator interested in sharing snippets of lost history.

Him aside, we have to be real there are likely Attomwaffen SS sympathizers etc. secretly making ambiguous pro-Nazi videos.

This is what I am saying. Is it education or entertainment? Sure, I have hope that humanity has learned its lessons but…we do live in a world that does seem to be dangerously flirting with a nostalgia for strong-men fascism, largely as a means of curbing the externalities of global capitalism (mass migration, free trade, etc.), which ironically is controlled by those who often fund…fascism.

In other words, the elite capital class are responsible for most of the world’s social ills but while they make profit, they also fund isolationist, nationalist, and often racist regimes because these fascist regimes often side with capitalism, especially as a means of opposing egalitarian ideas such as communism.

Elon Musk is the avatar for everything negative I am stating or insinuating in this post. An alleged “autistic savant”, Sorrow of Young Werner, edge lord, “Sit on my face” (Grandma’s Boy film reference), billionaire capitalist who panders to right wing grifters because they are more so aligned with the economic ideology that enables him to exploit, loot, scam, borrow, fake it till he makes it, and profit, etc.

I call this tendency to make Nazi videos for money on YouTube as being Nazi Pop. Nazi Pop Culture.

There seems to be something going on. There are a lot of “historical analysis” videos dedicated to “studying” (cough – worshipping) the Nazis, especially with a target audience comprised of Millennials, Zoomers, and this odd new “Newsweek”-coined generation called “Generation Alpha”. It is as if there is a bot farm spewing out these Nazi historical analysis videos as a means of subconsciously brainwashing a new crop of unwitting racists, “race realists”, etc., notably in the wake of a world that is unfairly – in my opinion – rallying against “wokeness”, where said “wokeness” is often, but not always, code-word in conservative circles for anything that is not white, straight, male, capitalist, selfish and likely Christian.

“Whiteness” has cleverly positioned itself as an “oppressed” status group, however, the political left often can’t help but to not use “whiteness” as the target to most of its own philosophical juxtapositions.  Adding to this, because of the burdens of globalism, climate change, poverty, and wars, many refugees have fled into the Global North, thus causing race realist nationalism to rise.

The political left – though not wrong in its political and economic analysis of contemporary issues, at least from a pure analysis standpoint, as opposed to real life political experiments – often uses whiteness as the focal and starting point for many of its analytical arguments, and this, therefore, helps create a situation that actual white supremacist can exploit by providing a “safe space” for the often lost, frustrated, guilty, etc. White people who are tasked with analyzing their privilege but then rejecting the guilt associated with it when they feel they are being unfairly singled out, and at worst, disarmed from self-defense from the basic truths of human nature beyond race or color.

In other words, many white people feel they can’t defend themselves while also being blamed for the ills of society, and many people reject these feelings and are often recruited by bad faith actors who want to inculcate them into race realism, racism, Nazism, etc. Yet, the left or liberals can often be dismissive of this sentiment, but being dismissive doesn’t mean it goes away. However, this does not mean we need to coddle or excuse the truths of toxic masculinity, entitlement, the hypocrisies of patriarchy and the male gaze onto the female form, racism, etc.

I am not saying that whiteness, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, etc., as is, as they are linked in our contemporary society, are not topics worth studying, however, the folly of let’s say…Marxists analysis…is that it reduces everything to base “non metaphysical” material that is in need of study, analysis, etc. Yet, my argument is that human nature is sure able to be understood, yet most humans are not thinking too deep about social issues besides simply trying to survive in peace. Also, my rebuttal to a full acceptance of applying Marxist analysis is that life is inherently…nonsensical and absurd. The Marxist tries to reduce everything to realist, evolutionary struggle in a sort of godless universe where no objective truths actually exist besides the truths we can analyze based on our evolution as a species, here and only here on Earth, based on understanding the crux of class throughout space and time. Sounds somewhat reasonable.

But why do we make art? Why do we do anything? What’s the point? The point is there is no point but there is a point. Life has purpose and in theory doesn’t. Life is a walking contradiction but because it is, we naturally apply some level of metaphysical justification to our actions. Sure, we can debate about the scope and scale about how we apply metaphysical explanation or justification to sustain our existences, yet, still humans often operate indifferent to being “analytical nerds” where everything is seen as a mindless construction of petty human efforts.

The tin-foil hat in me thinks that our current racial situation is in part manufactured. A sort of dialectical warfare situation where those at the top, typically the capital owners, use race as a means of disguising the institutional power that ironically helps maintain the one percent. The left thinks it is immune to this, but I suspect this is not the case because those at the top, are smarter than given credit for, considering that the left spends so much time in analyzing them. The one percent needs a racially divided proletariat in order to maintain the systems that maintains their power, yet, oddly, when someone says that “things are rigged” notably in matters of race, I notice the political-left itself is often dismissive of this allegation (which I can understand because such as allegation can be used lazily as a means of not deeply analyzing systemic power, however, it is naïve for the left to not admit that pitting the races against each other has always been a key strategy in debasing proletarian and labor-centric power). However, those on the Left don’t want to be dismissive of marginalized groups voices by prioritizing class consciousness over intersectionality, so if anything, it’s on said marginalized groups to accept that such divisive strategies are possible, but it may ironically not be good strategy for historically oppressed groups to acknowledge this considering the status quo can use this as a means of furthering silencing specific causes. Just one of the many seemingly, damned if you, demand if you don’t Catch 22’s we live under.

With the toxic revolt and reaction against diversity and inclusion, I, as black man who grew up largely in predominately white environments (which, I admit were often positive experiences, but yes I have experienced blatant racism), I notice on YouTube that many “content creators” are uploading videos dedicated to studying Nazism.

And, sure, there’s a lot of unpackage there, but I often suspect more sinister intentions. The phenomena are similar to the notion or trop of the “edge lord”.  Instead of seeing what the Nazis did as bad, rather the Nazis are “pornified”. From their Hugo Boss uniforms, their innovations (rockets, synthetic oils, jet engines, the interstate systems, intercontinental ballistic missiles, propaganda, etc.), their national unity, etc., there is something that many people seem to deeply want to emulate. That is the sad thing about these YouTube videos for example. Many but not all seem to be about nostalgia rather than analysis of evil.

We must remember than since 2012 for example, which was the era that kicked off the police brutality riots – often against black people – than many college age people were children. Many have adopted the tenants of social justice to varying degrees, but others see social justice as establishment. This therefore opens the opportunity for actual Neo Nazis, who have innovated into doing video essays online, owning video game Reddit communities, etc., the ability to recruit a new crop of followers or apologists.

At first, the book White Noise by Don DeLillo creeps up in my mind. In that book, the main character, Jack Gladney, is the professor of Nazi Studies at some Midwest college, yet the character of Gladney was used by DeLillo as a means of detailing how even a monster such as Adolph Hitler became a sort of pop culture commodity in a postmodern and post-capitalist world. Even Family Guy by Seth MacFarlane pointed fun at this with his Hitler talk-show in his cartoon.

Even atrocities of wars gone by and the lessons thereof which should humble us as a species, instead become commodities or a means of gaining an income.

DeLillo’s prophetic words in his 1985 National Book Award winning novel (which were not done with justice in the 2023 movie adaptation in my opinion) sort of became reality. Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, have become, sadly, and oddly, a form of pop culture, and not just any pop culture, but a hyper-real form of culture perpetuated by the omnipotent and fate-sealing power of the “algorithm”.

Also see: https://mitchellrg.com/2021/07/14/helping-save-white-men-from-radicalization-progressive-notes/

Contradictions in American Conservative Logic from Conspiracy Theory, Guns, COVID, Foreign Aid etc by Quinton Mitchell

(1) Many Christian conservatives often fall into conspiracy theories, yet, isn’t obsessing over conspiracy theories a sign of not having faith? If their faith is so strong and God is in control, then it seems that Christians don’t really believe God…is…in…control. Once could go further and say that Christians who engage in conspiracy theory are actually engaging in blasphemy because people are still trying to control things rather than having faith in God making things right.

(2) It’s funny how people say the Second Amendment is about protecting us against a tyrannical government, yet, if that’s the case then why did so many white people not pick up arms to liberate black people from Jim Crow? Or, at a minimum be supportive of black people taking up arms to liberating themselves? Maybe it’s because what is “tyrannical” is subjective, i.e., just because you don’t like something you call it tyrannical, but what’s tyrannical to one is not to another. A lot of people seems Ok when a segment of the population was being oppressed.

(3) It’s interesting how conservatives said that COVID was a hoax, yet, the only way how Trump kept out migrants and refugees was through acknowledging that COVID existed with his use of Title 42 laws (the ability to keep people out of the USA because of public health concerns). So either COVID is real and was a real threat, or the Trump Administration used a hoax per conservative logic to keep out migrants, and in theory, per the law, violate the ability for people to seek asylum.

(4) Republicans say they want to bring money home, such as when talking about the Ukraine Russian War, etc., yet, this is the same party…. that wants to cut public education, raise social security (thus, increasing the chance of not getting it since you’re closer to dying, etc.).

(5) Conservatives are trying to argue that religion should not be separate from state, yet this just leads to xenophobia because society therefore becomes a battle of which religion has more power over the other because people don’t want to be rulee by a religion they don’t align with. Christian Nationalist also wanting secular power also negates their faith because in theory God is control and has a plan, yet it seems Christian Nationalist want to control the plan because deeply they don’t have faith and/or their faith is “bad faith”, i.e., for selfish, racist, sexist, etc., reasons. Which church would even rule? There are thousands of Protestant churches. Will we be…Church of God, Southern Baptist, Missionary Baptists, Anglican, Episcopalian, Methodist, African Methodist Episcopalian, Seventh Day Adventist, Unitarian, Roman Catholic, Coptic Christian, Orthodox, Quaker, Mennonite, Amish, etc.?

(6) Conservatives say they dislike government, despite hailing police agencies which are government institutions. Not saying that is good or bad, but just admit that conservatives do like elements of government.

(7) Conservatives want to ban adult content yet state they value free speech between consenting adults, where adults are legally allowed to enter into contracts, including contracts that includes the use of their bodies. By banning legal pornography all you do is create the market for illegal pornography which empowers criminals and ironically may help increase human trafficking. It’s also insane how Conservatives try to merge legal desire between adults with crime as a low IQ and strawman strategy to guilt people away from not being sexually empowered, educated, fulfilled, etc.

(8) Conservatives were saying All Lives Matters or say “I don’t see Color” but then freak out when a person of color is cast in movie in a role that was traditionally played by a white person.

(9) JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President, made fun of modern, independent-minded women by calling them “childless cat ladies”, yet, his benefactor, Peter Thiel is a gay man (not a crime) who can’t have children. Vance claims that people without children don’t care about the country, yet Peter Thiel is his benefactor and mentor

(10) It’s interesting how much the Blue Lives Matter crowd is silent when it comes to supporting Kamala Harris who was a prosecutor helping cops get convictions

(11) Conservatives are saying now that the Democrats are warmongers, yet, Republicans have made it very clear they are willing to go to war with Iran, and some even with China. They also pretended to care when Biden left Afghanistan. So… they wanted us to stay in the war in Afghanistan, yet are saying the want to end wars?

(12) Many American Christians are capitalist, but you can’t bring your money into the afterlife, and what is the point of making a lot of money if you want End Time to happen?

Social Media Destroyed the World. Let’s Be Real. It ruined so much by Quinton Mitchell

Referencing the film Fight Club is quasi-cringey because it represents every angry, in your twenties, posters on the wall without a frame, cliff-note Bukowski, jaded, wannabe Nietzschean “edge lord” that most of us, especially men, have dealt with.

But almost in my forties, over most things, and arguably…content mostly, etc., I do admit I daydream about how Edward Norton saw the banking buildings at the end of the film go down in rubble, but instead of banks, I envision social media companies. Seeing all the symbols come crashing down to Earth. The blue bird of Twitter, well – now the way too bright X shinning down in San Franscisco as drug addicts hiss in piss filled streets being bought up by hedge funds like BlackRock or Vanguard. The F of Facebook. The almost Hello Kitty looking camera symbol of Instagram. This, that, whatever. Yet, before I get flagged, I just want to say I’m not really serious – at least about any violence or destruction, though a world without social media, at least as it is now, would be much better, healthier, etc.

But I don’t hate Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, etc., though, yes, Elon is lame, but when I think of a person like Mark or Jack, I see optimists who had a dream they couldn’t’ control and still can’t control but can’t admit they don’t have control because they’re in charge of capitalist enterprises bent on profits. In other words, Mark, etc., signed out and could care less if the world burns. This adds on more to the irony. Analogous to demi-gods they created a universe but are letting it crumble because they didn’t comprehend the sheer power.

Books aren’t dead but they very well may be dead. To read means to sign out, and to feel catharsis must now be shared instead of silently appreciated by oneself. Basic cable, though organized and safe, doesn’t stimulate us as much as streaming where we can customize our experiences. Social media reigns supreme but still it’s…inhuman. Maybe it’s too convenient? With such an easy way of getting information, maybe it’s making us dumber, yet living in a world that requires us to keep track of the ever-growing interconnectivity of things, that is why people are…depressed? Stupidity mixed with complexity creates a dialectical tension that leads to hopelessness as one realizes they become masters-of-none, just repositories of trivial information.

At least, you get off with porn, though sure, many will say that too is bad, yet at least you get a spike of some naturally occurring chemicals in your body.

With basic social media…what is it even really for? To feel bad? To flex wealth? To juxtapose our romantic relationships against that of others to remind us that we should be happy where we are rather than being “single” or with someone else? To pretend to be a wise sage even though deep down instead you’re just speaking to yourself but through others without the fear of having to actually deal with…people? Are we just projecting our fears out onto the electric ether just like how a child who sees a scary movie will tell his or her friends about it, so they too are afraid but in that collective fear comes comfort, solace?

I think a healthy New Years resolution would be to spend less time on social media. And I get that is hard because in many ways we have “social media friends”, i.e., people we’ve met online who we’ve vetted who are people we consider to be on friendly terms with though you may not have ever physically have met the person. People who know you exist and are a person with a life in a world that may not see that. There are also legitimate close ties with people in your actual personal lives (friends, family, co-workers, business connections, etc.). Yet, the good parts aside, the truth is social media has destroyed the planet.

As with most tools, humans get utility out of it, but most tools become corrupted because of our innate nature as self-serving, self-preserving, aggressive yet passive-aggressive creatures. Instead of saying hello, we spy and snoop. Instead of trying to find common ground, we instead agitate an already agitated public. Instead of pursing our dreams in the real world, we scroll.

We don’t even need to fear Artificial Intelligence because we as humans have a good enough job at driving ourselves crazy, making alternative universes, pushing a culture of solipsistic post-truths, etc.

It will take us as a society to teach the social media companies a lesson by not spending so much on time so they can’t mine our data, etc.

Social media is a postmodern cesspool of racial tension against all groups, conspiracy theories (spanning the Great Replacement Theory, the New World Order, Blood Libel by Jews, a belief we are being turned gay, etc.), racial conspiracy theories, antisemitism, misogyny, sovereign citizens, Qanon, Manosphere & Men’s Rights shaming videos that feed the insatiable appetites of Incels across the blob of angry men who LARP (live action role play) in video games about killing people or dying honorably in battle. Men who struggle with women and publicly commit to “no fapping” (masturbating) as a means of tapping into their inner Marcus Aurelius but taking out their sexual repression on women by providing “fatherly words of wisdom” to women who they think have no minds of their own. How many Pakistanis, Saudis, or other horny Middle Eastern men using VPNs to access Western porn/women are the ones actually crying about their alleged addictions?

Let’s not forget the Instagram “thirst trap” models of large squat sculpted buttocks, sultry MILFs, what have you, but also…bot accounts, covert government operations both foreign and domestic, etc. Or wait, the annoying street interviewers attempting to make people seem stupid or lost for whatever agenda they are really about, such as “drinking liberal snowflake tears.” 

You never know if its Iranian intelligence firms with bot armies infiltrating black “woke” Marxist liberation sites to stoke anti-whitey sentiments because Iran knows they have a backdoor plug into the Black American community via Muslim adjacent hate groups such as the Nation of Islam with figures such as Rizza Islam.

You never know if Israel Unit 8200 bot accounts ran by drafted Israeli teens are stoking racial division to keep the eyes away from Israel and that it’s not Jews behind the scenes but rather hordes of Muslim refugees flooding Europe who will topple the West.

You never know if Russian bot accounts are stoking unrest by infiltrating American Conservative politics as a means of depicting the West as a “corrupt, amoral, Sodom and Gomorrah” so more and more paranoid white Americans and Europeans see Putin as “big daddy savior” of Christendom.

You never know if what you’re seeing is being ran by a legitimate cult who are pushing every New Age conspiracy theory that intends to unravel our linear view of history apart. You never know if hate groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, or any other aspiring group are behind many accounts. You never know if it’s the CIA, FBI, DEA, ATF, local police, MI5/6, Mossad, etc.

We are literally living in a William Gibson Neuromancer nightmare, and we all know it, but we don’t know how to express it because outside of social media, in perfect American fashion for example, we’ve all been trained to be self-serving individuals. Despite out own quiet desperations and ennui, if we see such melancholy elsewhere, we are now trained to simple walk over the dying bodies of others, because we are too busy “manifesting” our own happy little worlds. Any whiff of negativity could lead to the dreaded…unfollow.

It is everything that Philip K Dick lost his mind over.

Social Media is arguably MK Ultra 2.0. A brainwashing tool for various parties, some in unison, and some in opposition, who fart out toxicity to scramble the general public’s brain.

I’ve literally been seeing people get murdered on social media. Seeing the N word is just commonplace now and even if reported, sites like Instagram do nothing. Nudity is even acceptable.

The thing is…it’s all insanity. It’s to the point where I make it a hobby to block accounts. I’ll literally try to block 50 a day because many are just replica accounts, often pushing Right Wing social conditioning that mixes a denunciation of progressive politics with a worship of capitalist greed, misogyny, Abrahamic religion, doomsday Revelation fears, etc. It’s as if the Koch Brother Foundation along with the John Birch Society wrote a blank check and gave it to a bunch of Young Republican college kids and shills like Charley Kirk to fart out as many bot accounts as they can as a means of pulling the youth to the far right, just because rich people or aspiring rich people want a tax break.

Social media is a joke

Deconstructed to an animal impulse the only thing on social media that makes me somewhat happy is a combination of food porn, glamour shots of retro porn actresses from the 90s to 80s, history stuff, and models in yoga pants.

Sex, food, daydreams

The only way to really fix social media is to (1) Dox everyone, i.e., make it some everyone’s real first name, age, and country of origin is on their profile because this will expose the armies of chaos agents stoking tension. Imagine if that Right Wing Anti-SJW account is owned by Boris in some oblast in Russia or Ahmed as the IT guy working with the Iranian Revolutionary guard or a Jewish kid with braces doing a high school project funded by the IDF. (2) Limit the number of accounts a person can have/hunt down replica accounts and limiting how many times a specific video can be uploaded or using digital forensics of some sort to post the date that photos or videos were taken in order to add context to conversations. For example, a racist account intent of shaming black people will upload frequent videos of black crime or racial tension when certain videos may be very old, but pretending they are new helps to feed the current narrative that black people are these “ungrateful criminals” intent on “killing the white man”. (3) More culturally sensitive content moderators because an Indian person in a cubical may not get certain American nuances or vice versa. (4) An active campaign to fight conspiracy theories by having users list sources. (5) Partnerships with sites such as Ground News to help show the political biases of articles (6) continued parental controls

Social media is too cerebral.

It reveals everything ugly about us without any way of making us better. Even most self-help just serve to reduce one into a consumerist bot.

But I saw some good food and yes, some great feminine, squat-sculpted powerful buttocks in an array of multi-colored synthetic material leggings. At least I am honest.

Am I Jack Gladney from White Noise? Are we all?

#philosophy #relationships #socialmedia #technology #books

Helping Save White Men from Radicalization. Progressive Notes by MRG Staff

Using violence is what a child does when it doesn’t get its way. White Supremacy actually let White people down. Supremacy is a construct, like a drug, so when that drug is taken away, there’s negative reactions.

  1. Showing positive examples, new stories, etc., of racial harmony which exists already in the natural world
  2. Celebrating European nationalities over Pan-Whiteness, for example Italian American, Irish American, etc. For example, back in the eighteen-hundreds to early-to-mid nineteen hundreds, whiteness was not the concept we see today. Rather, European groups delineated themselves based on nationalistic cultures, such as Irish, Polish, Italian, English, Scottish, etc., yet as time went on there was a merging of all the groups into a Pan White sentiment, largely since the United States was based on racial segregation, so white groups despite having different customs saw themselves as the same. This merging into Pan-Whiteness occurred after WW2 with the establishment of government segregated suburbs, where upward mobility in a capitalist system took precedent over once hard ethnic lines. Hence, whenever there is a black liberation movement, there is mass reaction from Pan Whiteness regardless of the white person’s ethnic heritage. The way how America was designed was to make it that when black people call for liberation it is seen as an attack on whiteness, i.e., whites feel they are being unfairly treated or “punished” for any sort of reconciliation process.
  3. Showing white ethnic participation within progressive or Leftist movements from history but also how certain European communities were attacked by the pre-existing Anglo Saxon Protestant establishment. For example, Irish Catholics were oppressed by the English. Italian Americans were hanged in New Orleans. Teach black people about these as well, so black Civil Rights action groups can build alliances with white people who are willing to help without white people feeling they are overstepping boundaries.
  4. Educating people of all races about white contributions to Abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, participating in Freedom Marches and Anti-Apartheid movements. This helps educate all people regardless of race the important contributions of white people in helping achieve equality, rather than the current sentiment which seems to assume that white people are inherently problematic. White people feel rejected or scorned, so they regress or find opportunists who are willing to turn them into racists, etc., and this was most prominent in the modern United States with the election and reaction to President Barack Obama and the election of Donald Trump.
  5. Including white leftist movements within the USA within the iconography of the contemporary Progressive Movement such as labor strike movements, Midwest socialist movements of the early twentieth centuries, the Catholic communitarian tradition, etc.
  6. Separating European political philosophy from American political philosophy, since America, despite its many flaws, helped to create the diversity and inclusion we see today. Many within the Alt Right have been radicalized by European philosophers such as Julius Evola, Aleksandr Dugin, etc., and this is a violation of the American progressive tradition that has basis in Anglo Saxon Protestantism typically from Northern American transcendental thought of the Abolitionists. American notions of individualism and Enlightenment thought created the basis for abolitionism and equality, so being American is being anti-racists though it took us a long time to fulfill that dream. Hence, whenever we display imagery of the American Revolutionary, we must remember that within that sentiment was the sentiment of racial equality, even though conservative politics typically appropriates patriotic regalia.
  7. Dealing with what I call the YouTube Nazi Pop problem and creating more diverse content in subjects that males gravitate towards including militarism, history, etc. Individual history podcasts or content creators are not bad, but when you take the aggregate sum of videos relating to WW2 such analysis of Nazism, Indo European studies, ancient European tribalism (many Viking symbols are used by the Far Right, despite not all people into European history are racists), and the separate Far Right videos, YouTube becomes of sort of grooming tool in awakening White Power. YouTube is predominately male dominated and watched, so when you have young white men, who play videos games, watch Anime (which as elements of Aryan ideals within it), are not confident around women, and the fact that men are interested in things of “utility” and history, they become recruits to the “Red Pill movement”.  I do blame the cultural Left for this in part because they have not typically created a way for cisgender masculinity to express itself and feel empowered under Progressive principles.
  8. Force BLM and other movements to show solidarity with white people killed by police so BLM does not look like a racist organization, even though it is not, but as a movement people of various opinions have ascribed the BLM movement with an array of values. For example, the Reverend Al Sharpton spoke at the eulogy for a white teenager killed in Arkansas by police. This is a great example of solidarity, and that police reform is not anti-white.
  9. Operations against white supremacy including doxing, arrests, etc.
  10. Understanding masculinity and how it can lead to fascism. Masculinity, particularly white masculinity as a construct, has been on the chopping board for most of our understanding of progressive liberation. Yet, white supremacy and entitlement and ego-grooming do and did exists. Think of the concept of the 1980s Action Star. Male power fantasies produced during a time of capitalistic avarice where capitalism itself was built on exploitation while covering up the exploitation to expand markets and profits. Or think about sports. Think about Connor vs Floyd in a boxing batch. Connor represented in part the “victim” Cinderella Man in one hand while also being a symbol for “white boys got it to”, yet Floyd was depicted as the “bully, black, mouthy” boxer. For example, as a black male when I grew up all my heroes on TV were largely white because that is all there were, but I never thought about it, yet, when black men started to take more leadership roles such as the Football QB, many suffered backlash. Is this insecurity? If was OK for me to be inspired by William Wallace in Braveheart, then why do some white people have issues seeing honor within non-whites? If non-whites have accepted white heroes, then why do many in white America have a problem with it the other way around. Granted, I am talking in generalities, but the general sense is just that. White America is constantly seeking avatars of superiority but with a mythos of honor, humility, natural prowl, etc. “The Good Ole Boy”. Yet, the rise of right-wing is largely sexual, i.e., psychosexual. The fast-paced progress of sexual liberation amongst females and economic empowerment of women has left younger generations of males without a traditional sense of purpose, yet, this is not the fault of females, but a reality to change. Many Instagram models have used this for money, for example, you will see Pro-Trump models with hyper sexuality making money off men who feel their pride has been hurt and women have options. Change is harsh and people get left behind, or do they? White men aren’t suffering anymore than anyone else but their egos were elevated through social conditioning where challenges to their aesthetic value can create an extreme drop. For example, many supremacists who have not created anything often say that non-whites didn’t create anything, so certain white people are appropriating the achievements of individuals who so happened to have been white and their achievements weren’t produced because they wanted them to be “white inventions”. The need to feel superior is at times a signs of being inferior.

A summary of Running Dog (1978) by Don DeLillo. Political Mystery and the Philosophy of Erotic Mediums. By Quinton Mitchell (c)

Notes from the author: THIS PAPER IS FOR ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. Do me a favor and hit the subscribe button. Also, any sort of shout-out if you use this as a reference would be very much appreciated. I have a full-time job but read in my free time, so I figure share my thoughts and ideas. As I am finishing writing this, the song The Big Country or Heaven by The Talking Heads comes to mind. I remember hearing it in a documentary about them on The South Bank Show and the song was mashed against images of idyllic Americana, yet, later in the documentary, the band performs the song Air and Life During Wartime which peels way the outer surface, exposing America’s hyperactive soul. To be honest this entire documentary was in the back of my mind as I read the book and wrote this. Sure, the Talking Heads are a little strange to most people, yet, from most of my readings into subjects such as postmodernism (which is something important and enduring, yet I am past the point of seeing it as profound), they are an iconic “soundtrack” that helps consolidate a lot of thoughts I have. Also, I have been meaning to read this book for a while in that I am a DeLillo fan, and this book coincided with historical research I do as a hobby relating to the “weird things” about WWII, government, technocracy, Nazi collaboration, etc. As a disclaimer, this paper does reference the Nazis, but DeLillo has used this faction twice in his novels not as a celebration but an exploration about the darkness of the human condition. Running Dog by DeLillo relates to separate book I am currently reading called The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler by Ben Urwand released by The Harvard Press. The goal of this paper is to be more than a book-review but more so a visual guide as I imagine it on the silver screen.  

1. Notable Book Quotes

“Fascinating, yes. An interesting word. From the Latin fascinus. An amulet shaped like a phallus. A word progressing from the same root as the word “fascism” (page 151)

“The whole Nazi era. People can’t get enough. If it’s Nazis, it’s automatically erotic. The violence, the rituals, the leather, the jackboots. The whole thing for uniforms and paraphernalia. He whipped his niece, did you know that?” “Hitler” (page 52).

“The logical extension of business is murder” (page 76)

“Choice is a subtle form of disease” (page 192)

“Those Nazis had a thing for movies. They put everything on film. Executions, even, at his personal request. Film was essential to the Nazi era. Myth, dreams, memory. He liked lewd movies too, according to some. Even Hollywood stuff, girls with legs” (page 52).

“History is so comforting” “Isn’t this why people collect? To own a fragment of the tangible past. Life is fleeting, and we seek consolation in durable things” (page 104).

“Sure, a thing isn’t fully erotic unless it has the capacity to move. A woman crossing her legs drives men mad. She moves, understand. Motion, activity, change of position. You need this today for eroticism to be total.” (Page 15)

“Weapons have become godless since then. Weapons have lost their religion” (page 4).

“Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there’s kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn” (page 148)

“Terror isn’t the erotic commodity it used to be. We know too much. We have seen. We’ve taken up organic gardening”. Page 168

“I’ve always felt the best view is the objective one, and sometimes this is made sharper and keener by distance” page 167

“The rougher the testing, the more certain you can be they’re preparing you to die” page 183.

“All conspiracies begin with individual self-repression” page 183.

“All men are criminals. All women are mafia wives” page 131

“You have to name your weapon before you can use it to kill” page 209

“Vietnam, in more ways than one, was a war based on hybrid gibberish” page 208.

“I’m saying espionage is a language, an art, with sexual sources and coordinates” page 111.

2. Visualizations, Aesthetics, Pop Cultural References, Themes, Locations, Objects, etc.

Genre: A nineteen-seventies post-Watergate Washington DC insider mystery foreshadowing the upcoming “postmodern paradigm” of technology, meta-data, surveillance, online pornography, etc.

Questions asked: Is Pornography art? As mediums evolved from woodcuts, pottery, paintings, nickelodeons, film, magazine, and the internet, pornography takes on a collector element to it. What was once considered filth then becomes arts since the previous medium gains a value in its own right.

Subconscious Film Visual References: The documentary Pornocracy relating to controversy around porn company Mindgeek meets The West Wing, Netflix’s House of Cards, and HBO’s The Deuce with elements of Apocalypse Now, American Made, The Great Santini, and Lethal Weapon meets Times Square in Taxi Driver meets the humor (subtly) of Airplane, Fritz the Cat, etc. The atmosphere of a Cohen Brother’s film. Since this film is based in the late-nineteen-seventies, certain political thrillers from my memory comes to attention such as The Missing (1981) with Jack Lemmon, The Falcon and The Snowman (1985) by John Schlesinger, Blow Out by Brian De Palma (1981). Yet, I must state, despite controversy surrounding the man, Woody Allen, with his films, particularly those based in nineteen-seventies to early-to-mid eighties New York City offer too much of a strong source of iconic New York visuals, i.e., Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, etc.

Directors and/or Writers who could do a film translation: Tom Perrotta who wrote the story behind the film, Election (1998), but also wrote the novel for the HBO drama series, The Leftovers. Perrotta has a nice grasp of dark humor but also drama.

Production Ideas: A film adaption of Running Dog could save on production costs by tapping to resources used for The Deuce, such as costumes, make up artists, possible easier permits for locations, etc. Some possible production companies could be A24, Muse Productions (who helped make films such as Buffalo ’66, The Virgin Suicides, American Psycho, etc.). Annapurna Pictures (produced films such as American Hustle. Pinewood Studios in Georgia is a known set for productions and Georgia has low costs. The only Don DeLillo film based on his books thus far was Cosmopolis (2012) starring Robert Patterson and Paul Giamatti, and was produced by Film Canal+, etc. Using Montreal for certain locations to suffice for NYC, could also cut costs, etc. Rabbit Bandini Productions owned by James Franco of The Deuce could be a great way of leveraging Franco’s expertise and ties regarding The Deuce’s film production. If not a film, then I do think a mini-series could be done on HBO, Showtime, etc. Whichever would be more cost effective considering streaming and subscription based content is more of the future. https://a24films.com/ https://annapurna.pictures/

Michael Wilkinson did the costume productions for American Hustle. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0929452/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr23

Anna Terrazas, Jenny Gering, and Hanna Shea did the costumes for The Deuce. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4998350/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm

Themes: Murder mystery, human sexuality, geopolitical and political intrigue, satire, hyper-realism, technocrats, World War II, intelligence, The Cold War, post-Counterculture 1970s such as conspiracy theories (“KGB linked with ESP”, page 184; “- Russian parapsychologists, at the prodding of the KGB, were close to perfecting a system of assassination by mental telepathy” on page 133 [this was also mentioned in White Noise on page 143]; a reference to the Human Potential Movement on page 39, and a fetish book called “Extraterrestrial Sex Positions”), but also the Patty Hearst “Stockholm Syndrome” story relating to left-wing Radial group the Symbionese Liberation Army, The Phoenix Program, pornography (Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas), kink (fascist leather play), casual sex, fetishism (Nazi exploitation such as Ilsa: She wolf of the SS, Stalag fiction, Joy Divisions), the philosophy of material fetishism, Americana. Mistrust of government after the JFK Assassination and Watergate. Like many Baby-Boomer or Great Generation authors, who seem to a penchant for the attempting “the great American novel”, the JKF Assassination to Watergate scandals are often central premises at one point or another of their literary careers such as Stephen King’s book, 11/22/63

Documentary on Debbie Does Dallas. For ADULTS ONLY 18+
Patty Hurst with the SLA. Allegedly brainwashed

Locations: New York City, NY., Metro Washington D.C., Dallas, TX., San Antonio, TX., and the Rio Grande border region. Barren Dells near the Westside Highway (where Selvy has sex with Nadine Rademacher on pg. 128). Georgetown, Falls Church, VA., and Centreville, VA. Fairfax, Virginia (location for Radial Matrix’s headquarters). U.S. 67 (page 151 – road that Selvy is driving on in the Radial Matrix section of the book). Executive Towers Motor Inn, off Arlington Road (page 136). Fifty-seventh street between Sixth and Seventh avenues (page 98 – where Christophe Luedecke’s widow arranges a meeting with Lighthouse for the sex tape).  116 East, 61st Street, New York, NY, 10021 (page 85 – one of the locations of Running Dogs offices). H Street (page 83 – a storeroom of Running Dog archives used by Moll Robbins). Bronxville Station and Palmer Road (page 42 – where Selvy gets off to meet at Lighthouse’s erotic gallery). Aachen, Germany (page 43 – where Christoph Luedecke is from). Marathon Mines: A fictional training site for clandestine operations like the real-life Camp X and The School of the Americas, that is located near Stillman, Texas and US 385 (page 209, et al.). Houston Street in NY (page 23 – where Moll Robbins hails a cab from to go her apartment). West Seventies apartments (page 23 – where Moll Robbins lives at). San Antonio River Walk (page 207 – where Mudger eats at a Vietnamese restaurant called Lien’s). Kelly Air Force base (page 207 – where Mudger’s friend, George Barber, leads Air Force Security Services). The Barclay Hotel, i.e., presently the InterContinental Barclay Hotel (page 213 – where Grace Delaney meets Lomax for a sexual encounter). Ross Avenue and The General Center Building in Dallas (page 195 – near Richie Armbrister’s warehouse). The New Jersey Turnpike (page 173 – Mudger drives on this going to NYC). Ozona, Texas (page 163 & 164 – mentioned in the book at least twice in that Van and Cao are driving near it, searching for Selvy). Executive Towers, Motor Inn in Arlington, VA (page 136 – Lomax and Mudger meet here for food to discuss things and this a scene where Mudger witnesses a man with a chimpanzee as a pet which triggers Mudger). Times Square (page 116). Irish Bar on Eight Avenue (page 115 – a bar Selvy finds snaking his way through Times Square).

Reminds me of the type of place that Cosmic Erotics gallery might be.

Films referenced: Zabriskie Point (page 40). From Here to Eternity featuring Montgomery “Monte” Cliff (page 42). The Dictator with Charlies Chaplin.

Objects: Nikon F2 camera (page 20 – camera used by Moll Robbins she carries in her purse). Olivetti Typewriter (used my Moll Robbins). Hughes 200 Helicopter used by Van and Cao on their mission to hunt Glen Selvy at Marathon Mines in the Texas desert (page 208). Sam Browne Belt (page 233 – a belt used by Selvy while at Marathon Mines as prepares for a final showdown between Van and Cao).

Historical Figures: Hitler. Fulgencio Batista (page 48), who was a US backed Cuban dictator before the Castro Communist Revolution. King Farouk of Egypt and Sudan having lived from 11 February 1920 – 18 March 1965. Raphael Trujillo, a dictator of the Dominican Republic. Charlie Chaplin.

Buildings: Union Station, Washington D.C. (page 156 – located near the building where Selvy worked at while with PAC/ORD, i.e., Radial Matrix). Howard Johnson Hotel (page 152 – a hotel where Nadine was standing near before being picked up by Selvy). Grand Central Station in New York (page 103 – Where Lighthouse uses a phone to discuss Christophe Ludecke’s Nazi sex tape held by his widow). Fifty-seventh street between Sixth and Seventh avenues (page 98 – where Christophe Luedecke’s widow arranges a meeting with Lighthouse for the sex tape).  Dirksen Building (page 46).

3. Characters

Harold Glen Selvy, is one of many protagonists but he leads the action of the story. He was a military brat to a successful Army officer and a mother who drifted into “lassitude, amnesia, silence” (page 245). He isan operative caught up in a confusing web of intrigue. A man of routine who can use violence, but overall, not an evil character and sympathetic to normal citizens on the streets. He is fed information from Lomax who is a shadowy DC insider. Selvy is hired at PAC/ORD as an “assistant’s assistant” as a cover by Senator Lloyd Percival who is separately investigating PAC/ORD’s spin-off Radial Matrix (an IT firm), which is managed by a rogue Deep State agent and ex-Air Force Officer named Edgar Mudger, in order to help he find a mysterious erotic film reel, yet, it seems Selvy is also working for Lomax who might possibly want dirt on Senator Percival in order to influence policy. Selvy is probably in his mid-thirties, with a crooked mouth and frozen gray eyes (page 134).

He was trained at a place called Marathon Mines, where he learned electronics, code-breaking, currencies, weapons, survival (p. 183). “All the paramilitary sessions. The small doses of geopolitics. The psychology of terrorism. The essential of counter-insurgency” (p. 183). “Selvy traveled in North America, then throughout Europe and parts of Asia. He gathered information on Radial Matrix clients. He paid secret commissions to agents of foreign governments. He arranged the disappearance of a trade commissioner on holiday in Greece. He financed the terrorist bombings of a machine-tool plant. Legitimate business expenditures” (page 156). “Selvy went on salary in a PAC/ORD division called Containment Services, Guidance, and Support” (page 151), but before Selvy was spun-off as a Radial Matrix operative, it was stated, “Back in Washington, he realized something was different. A man named Lomax came to his hotel. There was no mention of PAC/ORD or Containment Services. People he’d worked with didn’t return his calls. He no longer seemed to be on salary” (page 155).

While at Marathon Mines Training Ground, “A great deal of time was spent studying and discussing the paramilitary structure of rebel groups elsewhere in the world. They analyze the setup the Vietcong had used. The part time village guerilla. The self-contained three-man cell. And tieu to dac cong, the special duty unit considered the most dangerous single element of the VC system. Suicide Squads. Special acts of sabotage in ARVN-controlled areas. High-risk grenade assault. Assassination teams. They studied Algerian mousseblines, or death commandos, groups undertaking extremely hazardous operations independent of local army control”, etc. (page 153).

“Selvy thought it curious that intelligence officers of a huge industrial power were ready to adopt the techniques of ill-equipped revolutionaries whose actions, directly or indirectly, were contrary to U.S. interests. The enemy” (page 153).

Later we learn that Lomax is pumping information to Edgar Mudger himself and uses his connections to dig up tax records on Running Dog’s owner, Grace Delaney, whose employee, Moll Robbins is digging up dirt on Radial Matrix after meeting Selvy at an Erotica Exhibition. Selvy has a sex-habit he uses to gauge how well he is maintaining his routine in espionage. He carries a .41 Magnum and .38 Cobra, and has a liking of Jim Bean Whisky, and often wears a three-piece suit. He has grey eyes and crooked mouth. Selvy started working for PAC/ORD but was sent to Marathon Mines (a School of the Americas type of clandestine training center), but his job at PAC/ORD suddenly ceased, and then Lomax approaches him stating he has been absorbed in Radial Matrix, and from here Selvy starts his life as agent doing dirty work for Radial Matrix but is later re-assigned by Lomax as his handler observing Senator Percival.

Grace Delaney is the owner of Running Dog magazine; a counterculture MAD Magazine meets Vice meets Playboy meets Democracy Now! publication. She is a fine dresser with some girly tendencies that she is aware of. She is cautious of Moll Robbins on her quest to dig dealer into Senator Percival and the Radial Matrix links. She drinks vodka and even uses a little cocaine. Grace Delaney is depicted as, very well dressed, and jokingly bailed out “well hung” Black Panthers in the 1960s). Lomax and Earl Mudger refer to her as “FCB”, i.e., “flat chested bitch”. Grace also admits to being a former mob wife. It is later revealed in the last section of the book that she and Lomax are sexually involved though the sexual relationship is a manipulative on Lomax’s part in that he holds Grace’s IRS information over her head. Grace also attacks Lomax when he reveals to her what FCB means (page 220). She has the aura of part ‘sultry mob” wife by night, but then a counterculture fashionista by day. “She sat before the mirror in her bra, panties, stockings, and garter belt” (page 214).

Edgar Mudger: An ex-Air Force officer who was in various engagements from Korea to the Vietnam War, with a specialty of training guerrilla forces for the Air Force and CIA. Former commander of a bomber squadron and long-term contract employee (Saigon desk, Air America). During the Korean War he led airstrikes on Korea from Japan with F-84Es against targets. later runs the PAC/ORD spin off contractor called Radial Matrix, which was considered a rouge contractor, and this leads Senator Percival to start a close-door investigation, yet Mudger and Percival are both searching for a mysterious sex tape of a Nazi orgy in Berlin during Hitler’s last days. His character is genuinely like Colonel Kurtz played by Martin Brando but also Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall, yet he leans more to Kilgore in his demeanor in that he has a sort of good-ole-boy foul mouth tanned white man with California demeanor (likely descended from Southern culturally oriented Okies depicted in books such as The Grapes of Wrath).

Yet, Mudger also comes off as General Peter McAllister, played by Mitchell Ryan, in the Shane Black written 1987 film, Lethal Weapon, where General McAllister leads Shadow Company, which is a drug-smuggling operation ran by US Special Forces. This Lethal Weapon allusion can be read on page 91, “In Vietnam you were involved in drug trafficking, no?” “We did some of that. We were a link”. Mudger comically, as an allegory to Captain Kurtz living in the Jungle and hailed a God, owned a zoo with exotic animals from Southeast Asia. “It was while Mudger was on loan to Special Forces for unknown duties that he became something of a legend in Vietnam. Apparently, he established a feudal barony complete with loyal ARVN soldiers” (page 84).   He has a hobby of metal works such as making custom knives and has a Vietnamese wife whom he met in the war who was an underage Saigon bargirl. He lives in the rural areas north of the Washington DC Beltway.

It seems that Edgar Mudger has a deep grasp of technology and where technology by the nineteen seventies was evolving to, i.e., the global world wide web of surveillance, pornography, etc. “I’ve been studying pornography for a long time now. Hell of an interesting field. Dynamics involved. The psychology. Interesting elements. Strange arrays of people. Pacts and alliances and accommodations. That intrigues me. Systems is all formulation. Essentially sterile concepts. I miss human interest. The war was full of human interest” (page 139).

Mudger even sees the future monetary potential of internet pornography before it was a thing, such as him saying, “Multimillions. Close to a billion, including the soft stuff.” (Page 139). Mudger also seems to understand how online porn can be used for incrimination but also the concepts of “deep fakes” are predicted in this book, such as on page 92, when talking to Moll Robbins, Mudger insinuates he doctor audio to make it appear that people were having sex, e.g., “It doesn’t necessarily have to happen. All we need is your voice and his, which we have. The rest is purely technical”.

Moll Robbins is the main female lead and one of many protagonists who drive the plot. having auburn hair, an-ex hippie and adventurer turned guerilla journalist for the Running Dog, who is the daughter of a wealthy advertising man who worked on campaigns such as Maytag. Molls seems to have adopted a left wing politic out of spite for her father’s work in Madison Avenue-like advertising. Yet, her apartment is furnished with collectible consumerist product). She has a sexual relationship with Glen Selvy. A little bit naïve but aware of it, Moll goes on the quest to find the truth of the mysterious Nazi sex tape, going so far as to meet Senator Percival himself. It seems Senator Percival wants Moll to write about her expose in erotica because he knows the publication that she writes for is not very respected, thus her story would come off as a conspiracy theory able to be disregarded. Yet, she comes under the radar of Lomax and Mudger, who are familiar with her boss Grace Delaney. Mudger tries to entrap her into a sexual relationship (page. 213).

Actress Alia Shawkat reminds me of Moll Robbins and could be a good fit

Arthur “Lomax” a pudgy insider and operative, around 42 years old (“If I were a dog, I’d only be six years old”, i.e., 7 years is 1 dog year), presumably the handler of Selvy, an associate of Mudger and of Senator Percival. He has a mod hair cut with sideburns. He also wears Clark’s Wallabees which Grace mocks him for (page 214). In the Radial Matrix section of the book on page 157, we seem him on Richie Armbrister’s plane, within the sauna section, somehow. Lomax also keeps tabs on Grace Delaney, i.e., Moll Robbin’s boss at the Running Dog, and has the connections to use the IRS to dig into Grace’s past as a Black Panther associate (page. 137). His is depicted as wearing polyester knit trousers and white belt and shows (page 102). He gets annoyed with black street children in that he as a classist mentality who live in Selvy’s neighborhood, going so far as pointing a gun at them (page 102). We later learn that Lomas and Grace Delaney are having a sexual affair, e.g., “she sat before the mirror, wearing a bra, panties, stockings and garter belt. A bobby pin in her mouth…” (page 214), and it is revealed that not only is Edgar Mudger and Senator Percival looking for the Hitler Orgy film, but also is the mob (whom Lomax alleges Mudger is a middle-man for, hence why Mudger and Lomax were able set up the botched mob hit on Selvy and Moll at the Tropicana Bar), and it was earlier revealed in the novel that Grace was an ex-mob wife when she reveals this info to Moll Robbins. Arthur Lomax is the central “antagonist” to the novel in that he is the manipulator, like Murray in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Arthur is partners with Mudger and gives Mudger IRS information on Grace, though Grace does not know this, and she believes that Arthur can help her with her tax issues she acquired during the radical 1960s working as a bagwoman for the Black Panthers. Arthur uses this for sexual access to Grace, even though he is the one secretly bringing light to her tax issues.

Senator Lloyd Percival (a Republican or Blue Dog Democrat who has a private erotica collection, who leading an investigation on Radial Matrix. Known for having a buzzcut haircut, using powered makeup giving him an orange appearance, has a wife who reads the Warren Report religiously)

Lightbourne. A 66-year-old erotica dealer, part charlatan with a penchant of selling knock-off items, who owns the gallery called Cosmic Erotics, which is in a cast-iron building on the fourth floor that uses a self-service elevator. He lives near West Broadway and the SoHo Gallery district back in the 1970s. He wears his hair in a ponytail, uses a walking stick, and wears penny loafers (that he must keep together with glue).

Richie Armbrister a self-ascribed boy genius of smut, based out of Dallas, he runs a complex web of front companies for the pornography business, which some having links to organized crime. He lives and works out his Dallas warehouse. He is a link to Lighthouse who use each other for researching hard to find erotica. HE wears a digital watch and has a DC-9 Boeing Plane. This plane is comically equipped with a sauna and disco dance floor, and pilots who fly the plane are hidden behind funky beaded curtains (page 157). Squeaky voice. He was mentioned as wearing heavy khaki trousers, scuffed cordovans, and a crewneck sweater with a reindeer design which was unravels at both cuffs. He is twenty-two years old in the book with a “nervous disability of a teenager” (p. 143). He has a high forehead, prominent cheekbones, and large teeth. Lighthouse is uncertain if he has the look of a genius or a half-wit (p. 143). Richie uses various shell companies to hide his pornography empire and has an aliases name called “Kidder”, “Sherman Kantrowitz”, and “Sherman Kaye”. These shell companies include B&G Realty, Sherman Kendall Catering, Tall Men’s Fashion, but Preview Distributions is the main shell company (page 176-177). Later, Richie under the alias Sherman Kantrowitz, if that was really Richie himself, was shot by Lomax (page 210-211)

Actor Chris Owens known for roles in films such as American Pie fit’s Richie’s profile perfectly

Odell Armbrister is Richie’s cousin who works with him and the only person Richie trusts.

Christoph Ludecke (a German man living in the United States who was in Germany during WW2, who is closeted cross-dresser, but by day a Systems Engineer for Radial Matrix, who ends up dead, but he had information on a mysterious sex tape from Hitler’s bunker)

The Talerico Brothers (Deep State associates who are members of the NY Mafia Families with links to Edgar Mudger of Radial Matrix who hires a hitman to kill Selvy. Paul Talerico lives in New York and runs a pornography business where Nadine Rademacher works at – see name below – but is described as an unimpressive man. Vincent Talerico, i.e., ‘Vinny the Eye”, lives in Upstate New York or Canada, and does acquisitions, i.e., he uses violence to win pornographic content so he and his brother can copy and distribute). Vincent has facial nerve paralysis (p. 175).

Michael Imperioli with makeup to make his face look like Vinny The Eye’s drooping face could be a great choice.

[[Interesting Note: In real life, there was Michael “Handsome Mike” Talerico: Talerico is related to Anglo LaPietra and was a small-time bookie. He was also once married to former Chicago Outfit hitman Frank Schweihs’s daughter]]

Annette Talerico. Vinny Talerico’s wife, likely of French-Canadian descent or at least understands French (“she was watching a Richard Conte film in French on Channel 25”, page 177). Annette is more of a domestic, slight disgruntled yet seemingly loving wife, who has a brother named Ralphie (who seems to have issues in life like being thrown out of college) who she complains to Vinnie about. She and Vinnie casually argue about watering ivy, which has a level of the “domestic side” of Tony Soprano with his wife in the TV show Sopranos, i.e., Vinnie is violent, but then he’s a “regular husband” who gets into trivial scuffles with his wife, whom he loves.

Augie the Mouse: A hitman from Buffalo New York procured by the Talerico Brothers who does a botched assassination on Selvy, and by proxy Moll Robbins. He later confronts Odell Armbrister and Lightborne after watching the Nazi film-reel, coming as a collector. He has a comical yet disturbed aura about him. Later in the novel he depicting as wearing a long rabbinical like trench coat and carries a sawed-off gun.  

Vincent Gallo reminds meof Augie the Mouse but since he his older, I can see Pete Davidson in the role which would be a turn of character but also in line because Augie is a bit comical through dangerous

Tran Lee Edgar Mudger’s pregnant Vietnamese wife and she is related to Van and Cao. Mudger stated, she was a “Saigon bar girl at fourteen, leaning against a parked jeep, eating an Almond Joy” when they first met. (Page 120)

Van and Cao Lee Edgar’s Vietnamese brothers-in-laws, former ARVN members, through Tran Lee who dress like Cowboys and do missions for Edgar, such as posing as Part Rangers when hunting down Selvy, but Van gets his jaw broken by Selvy’s gun butt.

Levi Blackwater: a sort of sage Buddha-like figure, i.e., a Gringo mystic (page 232), who is an ex-soldier of the Vietnam War who was a POW after having been captured on a recon mission but tortured constantly. Two of his fingers were cut off while as a POW. He learned to like and find transcendence in that torture. This experience has turned him into a sort of Buddha like figure and he worked as a technical adviser to ARVN soldiers at Marathon Mines, which is where he met Selvy. His main lesson to Selvy was to not be afraid of death and to die with honor. Levi lives at the Marathon Mines which details how trauma of the Vietnam War affected so many veterans, i.e., he became his environment in the jungle and feels more at home in spares landscapes living on the fringe than he ever would in society.

Klara Ludecke (Christophe’s wife who reveals the history of the film reel from Hitler’s bunker. Also, so was aware and supportive of Christoph’s cross-dressing, stating he was known as the “Red Queen” by the men of the city district he went to)

Heinz Ludecke Christoph’s father, who as a Nazi officer commanding a tank unit defending the city of Berlin in 1945 who ended up with the possession of the Hitler footage. He remained a die-hard Nazi his whole life

Heinz Ludecke’s cousin (first name is not known but he was stenographer in the Fuhrerbunker who gave the film to Heinz who then gave it to Christoph

Del Bravo and Gannett. Two plain clothes police officers working Canal Street known for sex workers, truckers, etc. Del Bravo and Gannett spot a beautiful woman (later revealed to be a man), but then discover that she (he) to be murdered in an abandoned building.

Lomax’s Limousine Drive (a square jawed man)

Black street-kids who live in Selvy’s neighborhood often playfully giving him grief but also harass Lomax.

Nadine Rademacher (an aspiring actress from Arkansas, noted for having a “healthy reddish face, oval in share, and large brown eyes” (p. 120), who found work reading erotic stories to men, such as Selvy when it goes into her establishment to avoid detection. Sounds cliché, but she reminds me of Jodi Foster in Taxi Driver, though Nadine is probably in her early twenties barely but overage.

Jack Rademacher. Nadine’s father. He has a raw look (noted as being, “all brick and sand”, p. 179), who wears a tie-dyed blue bandana around his neck. He was a former prizefighter in boxing. He shows Glen a photo of himself and two fishing buddies who are called Jack Brady, Vernon, and Buck Floyd (p.182)

Angelo/Stony (the same man with one of the names being a nickname, where this man is the doorman for the erotic club that Nadine works at. Stony, however, could also be the name of a food delivery boy who delivers food to Nadine’s establishment who she knows as a friend/acquaintance)

The Sex Worker, Nadine’s Co-Worker (a woman who dresses up as a Nazi for her clients, seen casually smoking as Selvy and Nadine leaves her work to go get food).

Bess Harris Grace Delaney’s secretary at the Running Dog who drinks with Grace.

Daryl Shimmer: Richie Armbrister’s bodyguard (page 193). He is depicted as a “rangy Negro” (showing DeLillo’s antiquated viewpoint, or racial stereotypes of the time, i.e., black people associated with “jive”, etc.), who was skittering over the dance floor (of Richie’s airplane disco floor), with all ripples and blind staggers (page 157).

Mrs. Steinmetz a lady that Lomax linked Selvy up with who educated Selvy in art history and erotica for his assignment working with Senator Percival.

Lomax’s driver: Squared-jawed, dark suit and cap. (page 86).

Jerry Burke: One of Moll Robbin’s DC insider friends who located Selvy after she met Selvy at one of Lighthouse’s erotic art exhibitions (page 24)

Wetzel: one of the men who bids on Lightborne’s artwork (page 48), who calls Lightborne’s artwork into question as far as authenticity.

George Barber: Mudger’s Vietnam buddy who commands US Air Force Security Forces and loans Mudger a Hughes 200 helicopter so Van and Cao can hunt Selvy (page 207).

Dayton “De De” Baker: A 20-year-old specimen trainee at the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington DC. Senator Percival marries her hours after his divorce to his wife becomes final (page 221).

Freeman Reed Baker: a well-known dealer, who ran Forbidden Rooms, of Persian and Middle Eastern art who later disappeared after being caught up in a scandal about missing erotic artwork (page 221).  

Random Promoter: A random character talking to Selvy while he’s in Time Square who promotes events at Old Madison Square who stated he tried to get a sumo wrestler, Shunko Hakoda (page 116)

The “Jewish” Pimp: a random character shown in Times Square driving a Cadillac, having a wispy beard, a trifle Hassidic in his mink hat and understated black velvet suit. He moved in a little scat steps, half a dancer, etc. (page 117).

4. Story Plot:

The novel starts off with two plain clothes police officers working the scummy areas of New York City, where one comes upon what appears to be a beautiful woman. This beautiful woman is later found dead at a construction site.

We later learn that this woman is a German American man, Christoph Ludecke, from Aachen, in Germany, who is a closeted transvestite, who works by day as a systems engineer for Radial Matrix, located in Fairfax County, VA, which is a spinoff of the fictitious federal agency called PAC/ORD (Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements). Think of Radial Matrix being like how in real-life RAND Corporation spun off from the United States Air Force or how the BCCI Bank was used by the CIA during the Iran-Contra Affair, i.e., private entities spinning off complex government joint-ventures, et cetera, et cetera.

“PAC/ORD had been set up, on the surface, as the principal unit of budgetary operations for the whole U.S. intelligence community” (p.73). Further, “Radial Matrix was in fact a centralized funding mechanism for covert operations directed against foreign governments, against elements within foreign governments, and against political parties trying to gain power contrary to the interests of U.S. corporations aboard. It was responsible for channeling and laundering funds for unlisted station personnel, indigenous agents, terrorist operations, defector recruitment, political contributions, penetration of foreign communication networks and postal agencies” (p. 74).

The fact that DeLillo was familiar with the real-world web of contractors in the Metro DC area, notably in places like Ashburn and Chantilly, VA, involved in similar work such as ‘systems engineering” or IT work, illuminates how DeLillo does research when writing his novels. This is also like how Thomas Pynchon wrote books such as Gravity’s Rainbow, using his real-world knowledge of the Military Industrial Complex having worked for Boeing as a Technical Writer.

Christoph Ludecke is a key figure in that he appears to have possessed or know who possess a mysterious original film reel of a sex orgy that occurred in Berlin 1945, i.e., in the bunkers where Hitler and some of his followers were waiting while the Soviets approached from the East and the Allies from the West. This film reel is of interests to a US Senator named Lloyd Percival (a secret collector erotica despite being a conservative politician, who met Ludecke at a party) and is of interests to Radial Matrix’s CEO, Earl Mudger (who has seemed to have gone rogue, making vast sums of money, thus causing Senator Percival to set up a “closed door investigation into Radial Matrix’s activities).

Deep State Contractors, e.g., Booz Allen, RAND Corporation: Radial Matrix is noted as being “a breakaway apparatus of the U.S. intelligence community” (p. 75). Mudger was a “former commander of a flight-bomber squadron (Korea) and long-term contract employee (Saigon desk, Air America) of the CIA. He’d had civilian experience, briefly, in the late fifties, with a firm specializing in production flow systems and automation” (p. 75). When thinking about the character of Earl Mudger, to me he seems the agglomeration of real-life figures such as Major General John K. Singlaub who was a WW2 veteran, who was an early founder of the CIA and US Special Forces, monitor to the Chinese Maoist Guerillas during the Chinese Civil War, manager of Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s Secret War in Laos and Cambodia, trainer of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and later founder of the private intelligence network known as the West Goals Foundation, which was incriminated in the Iran Contra Affair). Also due to his airline past, Mudger reminds of Medellin cocaine smuggler and pilot Barry Seale (photographed in real life with CIA Chief Porter Goss, Cuban American hitman Felix Rodriguez, to name a few), but also any another real-life officer and veteran who goes into government contracting or “consulting”. 

Further, DeLillo employs a use of hysterical realism when describing the background of Mudger. By hysterical realism I mean DeLillo uses real-world things but then combines or elaborates on them to hysterical/hyperbolic heights for comedic effect, often delivered bluntly or in dead-pan fashion thus maximizing the effect. It also seems that in the following description of Mudger that DeLillo was not only using real-world resumes of military Cold War operatives and real-world missions (which are expanded on in military history books I recommend you read such as the French Secret Services by Douglas Porch of the US War College) but also movies such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now such as the character, Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando.

Ludecke found himself in a triangle for having information on this “precious” commodity (Hitler Bunker sex tape).

Senator Percival however employs a man, called Harold Glen Selvy, a Don Draper from Mad Men like character, or I would even say Ben Affleck playing CIA operative Tony Mendez in the film Argo (2012), working for PAC/ORD as an “assistant’s assistant” (as his cover), who is really a member of the fictitious, US Strike Force, Internal Projects, Special Investigative Unit (p. 44). Selvy has done work including a “counterinsurgency stint at the Marathon Mines in southwest Texas” [this is meant to be funny and poke fun at the CIA’s sometimes odd missions, i.e., DeLillo in my opinion employs what I called “a wavering sense of hysterical realism”] – which links him to Earl Mudger (thus insinuating Selvy has double affiliation to both Selvy and Mudger). He wears a three-piece suit (p. 26), drinks Jim Bean (p. 33) and he is defined as having “quality of relentlessness” who is ‘hard edged” “a dark force” and with a “single mindedness”, i.e., a man with a mission and militaristic routine. Yet, despite this “about business” mentality, Selvy has the demeanor of any rough and rumble CIA man used to drinking and womanizing across the globe, particularly in Latin American countries, and his favorite bar is a Latin and Jazz club called Frankie’s Tropical Bar where he seems to fit into the rough and tumble environment, and lives in African-American section of the city (either for anonymity purposes or a slight love for the rawness of the area).  

We learn later in the novel that Selvy was a military brat to an Army officer father and a disillusioned and medicated mother. This reminds me of the film The Great Santini, where Selvy appears more as the son character to Robert Duvall played by Michael O’Keefe. In The Great Santini there’s a struggle between the overbearing military father and his son.

Selvy also has a habit for detached sexual fantasy as means of helping him “contain his militaristic routine” and a penchant for “sex with married women only” (p.81). He carries a Colt Cobra .38 in a break-front holster and a Smith and Wesson .41 magnum, which is loaded with expandable bullets (p. 82), employs a bug detector when needed, and has a skill of knowing exactly what type of guns is being used if shot, for example knowing a would-be assassin used an AR-18 but was unable to use it properly, e.g., stating “he was letting the muzzle climb while firing. The weapon is designed to prevent that.” (p.66). He is methodical in his actions with a sort of personal moral code ranging from a shaving routine, constant breakdown and cleaning of his gun, and a rule of not sleeping with “non married women” which in the case of the latter he broke sleeping with Moll Robbins, e.g., Selvy is so dedicated to his job and deadly/sleuth skills that something out of place or out of habit can create a slight sense of existential self-examination (that he takes slight pleasure in), yet, he also doesn’t concern himself much with the motives of others such as the would-be assassin who tried to kill him. He is all about his mission. A loner, living in Spartan conditions, obsessive about routine, yet, when a deviation to his routine avails itself, he takes a slight joy in pondering the chaos of existence, his role in the world, etc.

Selvy’s job is to locate this mysterious tape for the Senator, yet Selvy appears to have a shadowy handler named Lomax (described as having a mod haircut with sideburns, always wearing sports gear such as tennis clothes, with an aura of being two-faced, always appearing in a limousine, and having Saint Bernards). Lomax is a type of “policy analyst” or Washington insider figure. Selvy and Lomax seem to have an agenda with Percival who is investigating Radial Matrix, i.e., owned by Percival’s competitor in his quest for this sex tape, yet Lomax is later revealed to be close to Edgar Mudger after taking Moll to his Virginia ranch. Selvy has been working with a somewhat “fake”, “unscrupulous”, or “novelty intellectual” erotica dealer named Lighthouse (like the character to Murray in White Noise in opinion), who owns a New York gallery called Cosmic Erotic’s. The fact that DeLillo inserted this erotic plotline into his novel to me illuminates the sexual culture of the 1970s in which Manhattan or Connecticut elites would talk about the Kama Sutra at swinging parties, or the how the pornographic film Deep Throat was a box office success. The 1970s had a libertine sexuality about it, especially amongst the bourgeoisie class.

Back to the story, most of what Lighthouse has to offer Selvy does not seem to impress Selvy’s employer, Senator Percival. At one of Lighthouse’s showings, an ex-hippie turned guerrilla journalist named Moll Robbins (think Karly Sciortino, the host of Slutever, from real-world Vice Media), writing for the fictitious and presumably left-wing magazine Running Dog, known as the “one time organ of discontent” (p. 21), whose catch-phrase is “Capitalist lackey and running dogs” (p. 30), and occasionally runs airbrushed female nude photos (p. 32), attends the same showing where Selvy is in attendance (not quite knowing his full name at this time), yet snoops her way into the realization that a US Senator is on the hunt for vintage erotica. With Moll knowing the what is going on (kind of) she uses a point-of-contact named Jerry Burke to hunt down Selvy and both she and Selvy on their own separate but related missions start a sexual relationship.

As you can see, there is a web of plotlines unfolding. Selvy, a US secret agent, is a fake employee of PAC/ORD working for Senator Percival who is investigating PAC/ORD’s spin off Radial Matrix, owned by Edgar Mudger, where both Mudger and Percival are supposedly hunting for the same prized tape of a Nazi orgy, brought to light by a murdered Radial Matrix employee Christoph Ludecke; yet, Selvy has a separate handler named Lomax who seems to want dirt on Percival (considering he knows Earl Mudger – though Mudger states Lomax works for everyone as part of the “game”), and there’s Moll Robins (Selvy’s love interests and really the quasi protagonist of the novel, similar to Oedipa Mass in Pynchon’s Crying Lot of 49) who is covering this story for her career and the adventure (having been giving the go by her Devil Wears Prada -esque boss, Grace Delaney).

Despite Moll wanting to write a story about Senator Percival, he wants her to publish the story considering the paper she works for is not much respected meaning publication would call the real-world story of his pursuit into question, thus giving him top cover. Lastly, an erotica dealer named Lighthouse is a source for Selvy, and Lighthouse himself has ties to the porn business through a man named Archie Armbrister, known as a “boy wonder of smut, a twenty-two-year older master of distribution and marketing who lived and worked in a barricaded warehouse in downtown Dallas” (p. 49) with a squeaky voice. Lighthouse is stated having, “…got in the business (erotic art dealing) in 1946 when was down and out in Cairo and managed to come into possession of a ring depicting the Egyptian god of fertility, highly aroused. He sold it to an ex-Nazi for a pretty sum of eventually learned that it ended up on the finger of King Farouk” (p.16).

King Farouk, the real-world past King of Egypt and Sudan is important to this text and a device for DeLillo considering Farouk was rumored to have the world’s largest pornography collection. DeLillo novels take place in “our’, i.e., the reader’s world but in fictional settings.  It is also interesting to note that in real life, similarly to how Nazis were acquired by the USA, some Nazi nuclear scientists went to Egypt to help build a nuclear program, yet early Mossad Israeli operatives hired Nazis such as Otto Skorzeny to kill them.

Moll eventually meets Edgar Mudger, the owner of Radial Matrix. He informs her that he was bugging the Senator’s house including the conversation between Moll and Senator Percival during her interview in which she discovered his hidden erotica collection after the Senator fell asleep after heavy drinking. Mudger insinuates he can take the recording and edit them enough to make it seem like Moll and Percival were having sex.

When Moll is out the picture, he and Lomax reveal that they planned the assassination of Selvy by way of one of their contacts living in Canada named Tericio who hired a man from Buffalo named Augie the Mouse. Tericio is Vincent “Vinny the Eye” Tericio, one of two brothers, who deal in pornography but are mobsters. Vinny’s other brother, Paul, manages sex shops that a character Nadine Rademacher works at, and she becomes a part love interests to Selvy as he is avoiding detection in Times Square from Edgar Mudger’s goon brothers-in-law, Van and Cao (ex-AVRN soldiers who like wearing cowboy hats).

The Talerico Brothers also become privy to the existence of the Nazi sex tape, thus making four parties interested in its existence (The Senator, Mudger, Moll/Selvy/Lightborne, and the Mob). Lightbourne on the quest for the tape taps into his underground network of erotica dealers but also porn-kingpin Richie Armbrister. Since Richie is in the underground world of porn, the mob is also away of Richie as well. We later find out that Lomax has been keeping tabs on Richie (going as far as sneaking on his party plane), and later Richie meets Vinny the Eye and Lomax in Dallas to negotiate locating the sex tape. This encounter makes Richie even more paranoid. Lomax later kills Richie Armbrister, after Richie tried to take him out. Lomax is a central figure in that he connects Mudger to Senator Percival and has mob ties. He is a puppet master. We later learn that Lomax is having a sexual affair with Grace Delaney by holding information about her tax issues over her head, and Lomax used Grace Delaney to keep Moll in line and discourage her from writing a story on Senator Percival.

As the story commences, Lightborne eventually meets with Christoph Ludecke’s widow to discuss an exchange of the film. By this point in the book, Selvy is not much of player in the search for the sex tape, but instead is one a one-man vendetta campaign against his former trainer, Edgar Mudger, who trained him a remote Texas proving ground called Marathon Mines.

Mudger’s two goons have been hunting Selvy and as a result Nadine too, since Selvy took her with him on his journey back to Marathon Mines. Selvy had earlier beat up Van and Cao near a state park when they were posing as Part Rangers searching for him, so both men take killing Selvy personal. Selvy knows too much about Radial Matrix, PAC/ORD, the quest for the Nazi Sex Tape (which is at the cross juncture between a US Senator and the mafia).

Towards the end of the novel, Lightborne and Moll watch the Nazi sex tape but realize that it is not a sex tape but rather a reel of Hitler acting like Charlie Chaplin for children before they commit mass suicide. Being obsessed with a mystery and a search is a theme here. When the results of a journey do not live up to expectations people react in different ways, such as Lightborne not being happy that it was not a sex tape. The importance of the sex tape (reel) being of Hitler posing as Charlie Chaplin for children, helps to reduce Hitler to a person rather than a larger-than-life character, but it also goes to show how powerful cinema is across political, racial, national, etc., divides. For example, Chaplin was Jewish, so by DeLillo having Hitler imitate a Jew it throws the larger-than-life persona that Hitler was given, especially through pop culture, which is a theme explored in White Noise (1985), into question. The fact that he had emotions meant that was capable of fear for example, and people result to escapism when confronted with fear.

After the final revelation that the film is not a sex tape, Lightborne and Odell Armbrister (Richie’s cousin who help set up the film equipment for the viewing for Moll and Lightborne) are approached by Augie the Mouse. Augie the Mouse is a disturbed man, a hit man for hire for the mob. He came to collect the Nazi film reel. Fate of all parties is quite ambiguous.

Meanwhile, Selvy and Nadine have parted ways and Selvy is back at Marathon Mines. Van and Cao have been loaned a helicopter to search for Selvy via one of Edgar Mudger’s Vietnam war buddies who is still in the US Air Force leading Security Services. Selvy at Marathon Mines is surrealist survivalism. Like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now before he kills Colonel Kurtz is a way to describe the upcoming showdown between Selvy, Van and Cao. Levi Blackwater is former employee of Marathon Mines who is a former POW. Being a survivor of torture, Levi has become one with survival, thus he lives as sort of desert sage. Selvy was trained in part by Levi, so when Selvy returns the two catch up, and Levi reminds him of what he taught Selvy, which was not being afraid of death. With a knife and a utility belt, Selvy sees Van and Cao’s helicopter.

Selvy ends up killing one of the brothers but is ambushed by the other and dies. Selvy’s head is removed as a trophy for Edgar Mudger. Levi watches from abroad witnessing the events, and then mourns Selvy with a sort of Buddhist ceremony, i.e., death is not the end and Selvy died with honor. Mudger is important to all these events relating to Selvy. It is a game of hunting to Mudger who just like other Vietnam veterans cannot turn it off. There’s something very Cohen Brother’s No Country For Old Men about this showdown in that the fight between the main protagonists and antagonists is almost a godlike struggle dealing with the fates.

5. Thoughts about the Book, its themes, similarities to other pop culture visuals:

Running Dog by Don DeLillo, published in 1978, was the first time I experienced the crime and mystery side of the writer. Running Dog involves an elaborate post-Watergate-like plot with multiple characters caught in interwoven subplots all relating to the same subject, that being, a US Senator with a hidden secret who is investigating the intelligence community.

It must be noted that this book for me visually inspires a Woody Allen 1970s New York (cliché at this point – I know – yet, still iconic visuals despite Woody Allen unfortunately being himself), but more importantly, it harkens back to the decades real sense of dilemma being that the nineteen-seventies was a decade defined by Richard Nixon’s Watergate impeachment, CIA intrigues relating to the Cold War, the OPEC Energy Crisis, a general sense of austerity (New York City did go bankrupt during the time this novel was released), stagflation, price controls, the social ills of the post-Vietnam War (rising crime rates, heroin addiction), the fall out of  Counter (FBI infiltrated) Culture movement (e.g., burnouts, hippies, tabloid conspiracy theories, real life cults, missing children), the Trans-Atlantic Jet Set Crowd, the birth of the Divorced household (swinger parties with keys in fish bowls included – think the movie, The Ice Storm by Ang Lee), and an emergent urban art and musical scene ranging from disco at Studio 54 to iconic post punk acts at CBGBs calling into question the subtle horrors of a decaying American dream with quirky postmodern irony (think the song Heaven by The Talking Heads) and/or a cold industrial gloominess to the pulsars of synthesizer machines (Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures).

Yet, despite all the socio-economic and cultural happenings of this decade, with the Cold War still in full swing, the United States in real life still maintained its place as the world superpower, and three-piece suit bureaucrat of the DC Beltway was with plenty to do.

The Cold War was still largely dictated by the Ivy League Brains of the Eastern Elite establishment, so there was always a cross-juncture (or, labyrinth) between intelligence and titans of big business be they West Texas crude oil barons planning future Middle East exploits or industrialists who made everything from toxic chemicals, napalm, gizmos for NASA, secret still-classified weapons systems for Israel and Christmas ornaments.

This novel by DeLillo, channels all of this, yet also deals with the shadowy links of the US Establishment with the Nazis before and after World War II relating to Nazis, and this trope is similar – loosely speaking – to how DeLillo in White Noise (1985) used the pop culture’s fascination to appropriate the object of Hitler as a real-world monster into something akin to a commercial commodity, i.e., for example how the History Channel has documentaries about “Hitler’s Mega Weapons”, “Dark Secrets of the SS”, “Eva Braun’s Lingerie Collection” [commercial break for annuities and car insurance, included], etc.  

DeLillo as a postmodern writer was calling into question how objects take on different or subjective meanings due to external forces such as capitalist consumerism, i.e., a monster like Hitler becomes a TV celebrity and the actual horrors he did become diluted over time and his value as a monster finds a sense of acceptability within mainstream consciousness. It is a side note, but to finish this point, one could say that “Pop Nazism” has helped to continue the legacy of right-wing ideas, but the capitalist market is so indifferent to ethics that as long as it pushes product, advertising, etc., then “no harm, no foul”.

DeLillo uses Nazi artifacts (which in and of itself generates a wealth of moral questioning within the reader about the human condition) only as a background device to drive the plot of Running Dog, but the main central questions he analyzes in this novel is erotica and material fetishism, but also the paranoia of large bureaucratic conspiracies. This motif employed in this book seems like it influenced White Noise, where similarly, Nazis play a background role (for reasons stated previously above), but the central premise of White Noise is the fear of death and the nausea or neurosis caused by mass consumerism and being near the zenith of technological innovation where authenticity is subjective (the postmodern condition, i.e., the incongruity of narratives and meanings, etc.).

6. Foreshadowing Technology

“When technology reaches a certain level, people being to feel like criminals,” he said. “Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can’t escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It’s a little like what I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we’re guilty, then we’re guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn’t it? It’s the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we’re committing crimes. Just the fact that these things exist at the widespread level. The processing machines, the scanners, the sorters. That’s enough to make us feel like criminals. What enormous weight. What complex programs. And there’s no one to explain it to us” (page 93).

The fear of technology getting of out control in ways that are beyond human comprehension (what we are living in now, circa 2021-2022) is a theme in many DeLillo books such as Cosmopolis and White Noise. This is a common theme amongst postmodernist writers. For example, “Technology with a human face” (page 211). “We are the sum total of our data” (page 202). The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear” (page 161). “Technology is lust removed from nature.”

Don DeLillo for the nineteen-seventies was hyper-aware about the growing computer industry and its relationship to the government, i.e., considering in real life most of our technology are creations of the military, e.g., ARPAnet via DARPA which would go to build the internet, or one could even state more innocuous innovations such as Barcode technology consulted by McKinsey.

I would not be surprised if DeLillo read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (1976) boo, Between two ages.

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. ” (Brzezinski, 1976)

“In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.” (Brzezinski, 1976)

Technology getting out of control is a motif within postmodern fiction be it science fiction such as Blade Runner (based on the work of Philip K. Dick) or high literature such as DeLillo’s works himself such as White Noise, considering the hyper-pace of technology can have a nauseating or alienating effect on people, especially for those within late-stage (postmodern) capitalist societies. Within such societies where such societies are defined by the “incongruity of metanarratives” (inability to trust grand narratives or objective truths), simulation and simulacrum, the dilemma of discerning the authentic versus the inauthentic (such as the central premise found Philip K. Dick’s postmodern sci-fi classic, The Man in the High Castle), and the relativity of aesthetics (low art as high art or low art mixed with high art, for example the works of Andy Warhol).

In such societies people inhabit systems where corporate mass scale consumerism and capitalist symbols dictates culture and social habits (as in the case of the field of semiotics, e.g., the McDonalds arches having as much semblance as the Christian Cross, or, morality largely comes from television), and Western philosophical thought appears to have reached its zenith (from the pre-Socratics to the postmodernists), i.e., we have run out of things to do at the apex.

Postmodern thought can be defined as a reactionary movement to Enlightenment thought and postmodernists rejected or mistrusted objective truth claims (since tangents of “Modernism”, i.e., scientism, resulted in mass danger to the species, e.g., the eugenics of the Nazis or the advent of the Atom Bomb). Thus, people are simultaneously living in systems created from such Enlightenment thinking while living in a rejection of such thinking, thus we fall subject to existential nihilism, novelty intellectualism, pseudo-science, or conspiracy theory posing as being legitimate and/or used as a tool of purposeful misinformation campaigns, but also anachronisms (recycling previous tropes or styles from other areas since there is no more advancement).

However, before I go on, I must state that postmodern thought is not necessarily problematic (it can be depending on the practitioner of it), but is more of a field of study, analytic, or framework, that simply accepts where we are within contemporary society (based on the things I wrote above), yet this field acknowledges the complexity or nuances of things rather than setting on hard definitions of things. If anything, postmodernism is great because it challenges power. It is a scanning device sort of philosophy able to scan structures to see latent defects with notions of foundational thought. There is postmodernism as a framework or worldview, i.e., a lens of skepticism in the face of objective truth claims, which were created out of noble intentions as a rejection to the atrocities of the predecessor Modernist movements and its precursors, but separately there is the “postmodern condition” which is more of a mood or social phenomena of people living in a civilization which has seemingly pushed its logic to the point where things seem illogical, and might fall victim into becoming what I call the “debased consumerist proletariat”. In summary, there is the postmodern condition but also the field of postmodernism.

The modern world is defined by an odd marriage of what I consider to be the “Analytic” with the “Continental”. In other words we live in world of high technology, empirical sciences, data, the scientific method, etc., yet it exists and merges with the existential, i.e., reality is what you make it.

The importance of Circa Survive: Aesthetic and artistic breakdown. Analogies to the story of Peter and Wendy in the Pan Universe by Quinton Mitchell.

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“Haunting us, these different meanings and spectral beings.” House of Leaves by Circa Survive

“If you allow, something so unnecessary to get you down, there’s no one else to blame.” Drug Dealer by Circa Survive

“If you could only offer love, you’d be like a drug to us, like a drug dealer” Drug Dealer by Circa Survive

Introduction: It was a few years ago, maybe around 2015, when I was at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, Georgia, seeing Circa Survive. I had seen them four times before in concert, and each time was an amazing experience, but on this night, hearing the heavy bass on their song Descensus at minute 2:41 (reminiscent of something one would find in the band Tool), where the bass was interwoven with spacey guitar work invoking the sounds of an Indian sitar, I was taken away. The bass was synced to oscillating white lights in a dark space. All the heads were bobbing in unison, feeling a part of something transcendental. It was a reminder as to why Circa Survive is one of the most important Progressive rock acts of two-thousands, arguably the progressive band for the older millennial generation. The first time I became aware of Circa Survive was in my teen years in the early two-thousands, walking around a mall and going into either a FYE music-store or Hot Topic and seeing the gothic artwork of Esao Andrews on the Juturna album in early 2005. “That looks cool” I said to my girlfriend, and she responded, “Then buy it then”.

I did not buy it though since I was a broke teenager, with enough money from allowance and fast-food job to take my girlfriend to the movies where we would mess around in the back aisles away from any parental supervision (those awkward days). Fast forward to the college days around 2008, and I downloaded Circa’s song, The Great Golden Baby, to my cellphone, which looking back looked like a brick compared to the lean devices we have today. I listened to it on repeat flying home to Georgia in the winter months from Washington State where I attended college, admiring the storytelling. “I’m going on home by own way, going home by my own”. Fast-forward again, I was already immersed in their albums by 2009, but by the twenty-teens while I served in the Air Force, living a lonely hermetic lifestyle after duty (to avoid getting into trouble), I would drink, draw, save all my money for my eventual escape towards freedom (Honorable Discharge), expand my mind, and Circa was always playing. In other words, I am sharing all these stories to convey that I grew up with Circa Survive. So many bands fizzle out and fail to adapt due to being constrained to a particular genre which are embedded within phases of peoples’ lives, etc. Further rock and roll music fell victim to its own balkanization and corporate interests intensified each genre, thus linking a genre to a certain point in time, but time goes on. Where many bands get caught up in making a specific sound thus breeding genre, if there is no intellectual depth engendering multiple interpretations from the listener, then a song won’t stick. The power of Circa Survive is they grow with their audience and their lyrics help guide the listeners, and the lyrics or hooks are brutally stunning/catchy, to the point where average listeners do not simply listen to the lyrics, they internalize the lyrics. Another kudos to Circa Survive being a progressive experimental act is that progressive music defines the norms of genre. It is bending, thus it becomes more egalitarian, whereas many rock bands I grew up with (being African American) there was a sense that rock-and-roll hand sectioned off its own market by appealing to white listeners only. This paper is not about race, but what I am saying is that experimental music sources inspiration from various traditions thus it has a likelihood of touching diverse listeners. I always say that Circa Survive is blues music despite the high-pitched enchanting voice that defines the traditional norms regarding masculinity while definitely being masculine at the same time.

Correlations and Narrative Building through Lyrics: One can easily stitch together the array of lyrics they have and notice a scene appearing such what I did below:

“Make your move, obvious humor – Always on, dressed to impress. I’ll be the last one to find out why.” The Great Golden Baby. “I’ve fixed myself up nice, but you never came.” Kicking Your Crosses Down. “That’s why you never mention my name to them?” Wish Resign. “What brought you back to this place? I knew you never learned, I you never.” Wish Resign. “Can we last through the winter? The weather is starting to freeze.” In Fear and Faith. “If I last through the winter, I swear to you know I won’t call” In Fear and Faith. “Congratulations. Go home now”, from In Fear and Faith. “Don’t go back on your words. You always said you tell me first.” We’re all Thieves. “I’ve been erased. I’ve been erased from the picture” We’re All Thieves. “Time takes its toll on us. It changes everything” The Great Golden Baby. “I already forget I how used to be without you” Meet Me in Montauk. “If you could try and get your timing right. I’ll let you stay.” Descensus. “You mean so much more to me” Meet Me in Montauk. “I won’t let it tear us apart” The Lottery. “I don’t want to feel like this. Ever, ever, ever, again” Nesting Dolls.

Aesthetic Breakdown: Off the top of my head, I consider Circa Survive to be “prog-psych-ambient-gothic (romantically dark)-hippie folk- post emo-blues rock”, where rock falls under philosophical modernism, thus being a medium that plays with boundaries while also psychoanalyzing the human condition, with a range that can be heavy, avant-garde, Lynchian (David Lynch, e.g., the film Blue Velvet or Lost Highway, i.e., surreal), mystical, romantic, jazzy, sad, and empowering. They have accomplished to make themselves the Doors of post-hardcore music but have shown paced longevity to sustain their career for their personal wellbeing but also for the satisfaction of their fanbase. Instead of creating an image and fitting into it, they disregard image, instead focusing on appearing as they are, yet treat music as an art collective for analyzing a range of subjects influenced by personal revelations within their own lives. Relating to The Doors, the cryptic lyrics of Jim Morrison, as if he were a dark harbinger of American vagabond folk soul, flowing through keyboarding of Ray Manzarek, drums of John Densmore, and guitar work of Robby Krieger, seem as if they inspired Circa Survive strongly. However, I also would sprinkle in some Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mack with her witchy folk 70s prog rock aesthetic. If Circa Survive were around during the Woodstock Area, coming from the burbs of conservative America, rocking out in garage cover bands, they would make the journey to Woodstock or out West to San Francisco, to try to showcase their music. Sprinkle in some of the Stooges, MC5, Janis Joplin, Sun Ra, and especially the blues of Otis Redding, Bill Withers, Motown, etc. In such an alternate universe, by the nineteen seventies they would have been influenced by the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements, where once can easily see them playing benefit concerts in Washington Square Park with activists and random listeners clapping and singing in unison.

Scene from David Lynch’s film, Blue Velvet, which samples the imagery of the brooding blues singer with conflict. Lynch films often deal with the inability to grasp a clear reality similarly to themes found in early Circa Survive

Relief from Grief: Circa Survive’s music is for those who wish to deal and overcome burden. By staring at the truth of oneself and pouring oneself out without shame or criticism, it is a healthy way to real self-actualization. Circa is a safe camp. Brutally and poetically emotive but constrained, focused, and arranged thus showing a sense of self-awareness, hence having the capability to have personal strength to pull oneself up. The lyrical makeup seems almost bard-like or troubadour. Some people, and some genres of music, do not teach this. They may give you the aggression and anger, but they do not show you a way out. There is no finish line. Rather, Circa Survive provides the emotive introspection but also offers the possibility of relief and acceptance. There is no issue with trying to find beauty in painful memories. For example, for me instead of saying “I was hurt”, as I came to grow, I would rather say, “I put myself in a position to be hurt, but I learned from it and retained my sense of having a moral center or compass”. “I fell a part in your arms for the last time, and I felt free because of the things of you told me” (lyric from I Felt Free on Blue Sky Noise).

Aesthetic Breakdown Continued: The band hails from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a suburb on the northern side of Philadelphia, and is consisted of Anthony Green who previously was in bands such as Saosin but has had collaborations with other bands such as The Sound of Animals Fighting and Zolof the Rock and Roll Destroyer; Brendan Ekstrom on the guitar who was a member of This Day Forward with fellow bandmate Colin Frangicetto also on the guitar; Nick Beard on the Bass Guitar and Steve Clifford on the Drums. The county has produced many local bands but was notable for being more so catered to sports, such as Central Bucks West, i.e., CB West Football, being a notable national powerhouse, particularly up to the early two-thousands. The suburbs are also near a city with a rich history of skateboarding such as Alien Workshop, Kerry Getz, and the shenanigans of Bam Margera.

Yet, back to Circa Survive, they explicitly fall under the post-hardcore genre, which as a genre leans towards progressive Do-it-Yourself humanist politics with such as that laid down by progenitors such as Black Flag, Minor Threat, Gorilla Biscuits, The Cro-mags, Fugazi, etc. For me poetics plays such a role in this sort of genre be it that of Luis Borges with The Garden of Forking Paths, which one could sense in At the Drive-In’s evolution into the Mars Volta, but there’s also inspiration I sense from poets/writers such as Frank O’Hara and Jim Carroll (East Coast), Sherwood Anderson (Midwest), Flannery O’Connor (Southeast), Raymond Carver (Northwest), Cormac McCarthy (Southwest), etc. For example, Thursday’s Geoff Rickly employs similar themes to that of Circa Survive and could be considered one of the godfathers of the modern two-thousands post-hardcore scene with his beautiful lyrics. Thursday songs such as “Where the Circle Ends” is a spoken word poem calling into question the blights of modern life and its hypocrisies such as claiming to want a better world without participating in its approval, or how urban schools go underfunded. Thursday’s song, “For the Workforce, Drowning”, Geoff makes analogies between nooses and neck ties one would wear in a stale corporate landscape, while also making baptismal allegories about washing away sins each day after coming home from a long commute, yet wails “Just keep making copies of copies, of copies, where will it end?”.  Also, Rickly with Thursday released songs such as “This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb” that relates the warfare of the American machine going on at the time (Iraq and Afghanistan Wars) juxtaposed against memories of lost youth under the skylines of New York. Further, Rickly employs similar trends that are found in later Circa Survive with his emphasis on lapses in memory in relation to trauma or covering up sins, which can be seen in Thursday’s songs, Tomorrow I Will be You, Cross Out the Eyes, etc. Post-hardcore music offers an outlet for male aggression but with progressive introspection, and calls into question the ills of an individualistic, one could argue fascists, capitalist system, where people deal with poverty, drug addiction, dissociation, alienation, etc.

Catholicism: Circa’s sounds to me is a confluence of factors ranging from something akin to a Jack Kerouac Catholic angelic-like inspiration in their lyrics such as “He has risen, hold me under” in the song, Stop The F-ing Car (an allusion to the film Boondock Saints, if I remember right – a film strongly influenced by Northern city Irish culture, which is a culture that is a part of the history of the Philadelphia area, and this culture is musical like other Celtic cultures), but that this particular lyrics seems to play on the act of purging in baptism, yet, the inverted statement of “hold me under” insinuates more sin to purge. Relating to Catholicism, their song, Rites to Investiture, deals with the Catholic procedure involving the order of Mass such as that after the act of homily. Lapsed faith, the conflict between dogmatic belief and personal discovery, will always be an important concept within introspective music, so the Kerouac angelic inspiration I speak of regarding Circa can also be found in Thursday songs such as “Asleep in the Chapel” on War All The Time, but also the cover art of their album, A Common Existence. Catholicism with its concepts of miracles and Saints, and its foundations from pagan Rome, gives Catholicism a mystical property involving elements such as the purification properties of water, the traces of essences, and possibility of apparitions. Since we are on the notion of religion, in which religion is often inspiration for artists, at least when pondering the philosophical puzzles of it, or pondering one’s upbringing in it, Anthony Green has something akin of a power to heal with his lyrics and live performances. It is as if he is at the head of a flock, at a sermon, where instead of Joseph’s Colorful Robe from the Bible, instead there is an electric lightshow.

Aesthetics Continued: Then there’s notions of lost memory, amnesia, with the lyric “Didn’t I Know You?” (a lyric from the song, Oh. Hello) which relates to the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind. Further, fading memory is also incorporated into the song Meet Me in Montauk, which is an obvious homage to Eternal Sunshine. One can add “I already forget I how used to be without you” from Meet Me in Montauk, or in Descensus with the lyric, “If we forget, I’ll do it all again”. You will hear some slight homages to the band Tool as far as the music (however, the cerebral nature to Circa’s work could be considered Jungian as well, i.e., playing with notions of subconsciousness, dreams, fables as allegories into a deeper human connection, etc.), maybe even a little Deftones inspiration with them as pioneers in shoegaze metal such as with their album White Pony, Radiohead, and of course Bjork (“You were in my dreams, half human, half machine” from In the Morning and Amazing, which invokes imagery to that of Bjork’s “All is Full of Love”).

The term of Post-emo I came up with (maybe it already exists? I do not know) is important here. First, by emo I do mean the branch of emotive hardcore music that derived from hardcore punk music, which arose in the late eighties before being solidified into various regional scenes (East Coast, Midwest Great Lakes, Texas) and was hovered above by the transition to introspective rock music such as that of Radiohead, Nirvana and Sunny Real Estate, but by the late nineteen nineties its influence had grown to become commercially viable as opposed to purely independent. This was emo music before the caricature that came to be by the end of the early two-thousands (my high school years). The vein of emotive and experimental hardcore music that Circa falls under is more in alignment with At the Drive In, Thursday, Glassjaw, Juliana Theory, etc. I would consider early post-emo albums to be Further Seems Forever’s underrated album, How to Start a Fire, which amplifies the blues in emo, almost relinking the blues elements in emo back to rock’s early beginnings as R&B (rhythm and blues) and soul music, but also Armor for Sleep’s What do you when are dead, which is a concept album dealing with a full storyline anchored by a main protagonist.  The album by Armor for Sleep involves the five stages of grief model (or the Kübler-Ross model) created by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross which breaks down the stages of grief as being the five emotions of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Yet, Circa is also a product of the other vein of early 2000s emo and screamo bands which were immensely popular under labels such as Victory Records, Eyeball Records, Tooth and Nail, etc. Yet, Circa was different than the Hot Topic crowd (not better, but different) even though early Circa Survive had no other place to be sold but at a Hot Topic (which isn’t an insult to Hot Topic at all), hence, I can understand how people might have overlooked the band as just another band rather than a mature art collective of musicians. I suspect being affiliated with such a specific genre caused the members of Circa Survive like some other bands to branch away from the “emo scene” or screamo/metalcore scene and transcend into the “post-“, i.e., similar aesthetics to their roots of the emo/screamo scene, but away enough to distinguish itself as different, deeper, etc. They have never been a “teenie-bopper” band and I would say the same thing for many of the bands I listed above such as the poignant lyricism of Geoff Rickly of Thursday (who collaborated with Circa Survive in their song The Lottery) whose poetics speaks to that of Frank O’Hara and Jim Carroll (author of The Basketball Diaries). Put it this way, how you can trace metal bands to either Black Sabbath (death metal, black metal, etc.), or Led Zeppelin (hair metal, arena rock), etc., in the emotive scene by the end of the nineties you either went the At the Drive-In Relationship to Command way (grimy, dark, adult) or you went the “system boy band” method.  

Analysis of the Cover Art in Relation to the Music: Four of all Circa’s main releases have included a female figure on their cover art. The first two albums Juturna and On Letting Go, the fourth album, Violent Waves, and their 2018 release of The Amulet, feature a female figure, yet I could consider the first three albums (Juturna, On Letting Go, Blue Sky Noise) to linearly be a continuous concept album, with Violent Waves and The Amulet being continuation of this female character’s story-line (and her male companion’s – presumably the narrator, i.e., Green is speaking most from his experiences). Concept albums are a concept notable in progressive music, e.g., Pink Floyd’s The Wall, King Crimson, Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Llyod Webber, etc.

Juturna and Mythology: On the cover of their first album, Juturna, we see a faceless woman being sucked up into the air, floating towards something unknown, gravitating off the ground in which the picture includes a decrepit stone building with rusted iron fence, and some sort of dead plant or weed too. Leaving a dead garden. Juturna in Roman mythology is the goddess of wells, springs, and fountains, and the mother of Fontus (a god too of wells and springs), and husband to Janus. Water is indicative of a life source and cleansing force. Janus is where the name of modern month of January comes from, where January is the opening or beginning of the new year.  These roman deities were involved in the Mithraism mystery (gnostic) religions of Rome (a onetime competitor to early Christianity), in with the Cult of Mithra was inspired by Zoroastrian thought, in which Zoroastrian thought from Persia – having influenced Greco-Roman thought- involved the sacredness of magi, i.e., magicians, i.e., the foundation of Western magic and later Neoplatonism such as Christian Kabbalistic practice. Mysticism of the Greco-Roman world was a melting pot influences having inspiration in the sacredness of Egypt, proximity of the Levant and Anatolia (Hittites, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Jews), The Middle East such as Babylon, Persia, but also nomadic traditions of the Steppes. Neoplatonism of the Roman Era was a framework created by Plotinus who built upon the esoteric teachings of Plato, and his framework was based on the idea that there are different levels of reality, in which all reality permeates from a source called The One, yet, is controlled by the Demiurge (the creator), and our reality as humans are on the border between the higher spiritual realm and the lower material realm. By engaging in ceremonial practices such as what would later come around such as the practice of Hermeticism, one can tap into higher levels of being or consciousness. Yet, since there is no agreed upon framework as far as ceremony, Neoplatonism has often been seen as occultist or Gnostic in nature, with many frameworks going as far as not believing in the trinity of God within Christian dogma. I am not saying that Circa Survive is by any means a Gnostic band, yet there is something magical or incantation-like about their work.  

Juturna Cover Art Return: The woman in Esao’s cover art (https://esao.net) is feminine with wavy black hair, a beautiful yet subtle dress, but there is something sickly too about her. Who is she? She seems as if she could have been the quiet introspective daughter from a well-to-family, the type who looks down in photographs, always picking at her skin, despite having a natural beauty indicating “good stock”. She is floating from a once lush Victorian garden now turned into a barren waste indicating this place was once happy but is no more, and her floating seems to indicate a break from reality or being drawn which is translated as being from a supernatural force out of her control but in which her actions caused. She is our Alice, but this is no Wonderland. This is gothic. Beautiful and dark. The goddess Juturna and her relation to Janus seems to mean that the album is about entering a new door or gateway of cleansing and renewal, i.e., the girl we see on Circa Survive’s album art is on a surrealist and magical journey towards possible sobriety and finding her center (ground, footing, bearing) again.

The Female Figure on the cover art to On Letting Go and Violent Waves: The same female figure of Juturna appears on Circa Survive’s second album, On Letting Go, yet her head has been replaced by a hot air balloon. It is not that she is an “air head” but seems to indicate that on her journey she is now having to confront the thoughts in her head, the thing which inflates (burns) our minds to begin with. Memories. She is letting go of her past.

On Circa’s fourth album, Violent Waves, we see the same female possibly, having “landed” in some sort of MC Escher room which is being flooded, yet also being stalked by some sort of surreal jackal-like animal. What does this mean? We know where she came from, but now it seems she is landed back to a place where her memories were crafted (her trauma) and the water she brings or emanates is cleansing the structure (her life, her past), yet this jackal-like figure seems to be something lurking (a corrupting like character). The female character is also glowing, illuminating with sort of ectoplasmic (ghostly) aura, denoting to me that she may have found a sense of power of some sort, i.e., the courage to confront. The color palette of the jackal by Esao is similar to that of other shapes that appear such as those on the hot-air balloon of On Letting Go, which to me means the jackal is part of the same surreal fabric of the universe in the which the journey is undergoing, and is a representation of something or someone bad that “haunts the halls” of the female protagonist mind, yet it’s being cleansed by the mystical force of water. 

The Art Work of Esao Andrew: The artwork of Esao Andrews could almost be defined as “punk gothic”, respectfully speaking (this is me attempting to find the most relatable term for the reader) with Victorian and Edwardian influences likely mixed with his modern influences of Southwest skater and street culture, and it is more subtle than something you find in a Tim Burton film, but invokes the same gothic appeal that mixes morbidity with romanticism. He masterfully uses oil paints on panel or wood.  In an interview with Fireside Tattoo Network (2019), Esao stated he partially inspired by Egon Schiele, like another artists I enjoy in Peter Chung, cover-work from the band The Pixies, but also comic book artist, Al Columbia. The differences between dreams and nightmares are what you make of them and how you interpret them. The song, The Glorious Nosebleed, was inspired by a cartoon book by Edward Gorey who was an artist specializing is surrealist dark childhood fiction. I am not sure if Circa Survive such as Anthony Green were aware of Gorey before meeting Esao or if Esao’s influences were shared with Circa, yet both the band and Esao seem to have gravitated towards each other with a mutual interest of things that are surreally gothic and romantically macabre.

Gothic inspirations: Gothic, outside of art, as a literary genre was a reactionary movement to the cherry romanticism of the Victorian Era, thus it dealt with death, decay, loss, angst about the soon to be gone “spiritual world” to that of the modern industrial, etc. One could say that Gothic fiction was about reminding us of our metaphysical possibilities in the face of the growing materialism. The genre was particularly popular in both American and English fiction, but as far as America it was firmly implanted during and after the Civil War, which subsequently coincided and birth of the American spiritualist movements. The Civil War was the conflict which saw countless deaths in a struggle that called the nation’s very soul into question. All that death challenged perceptions, but also created movements where people sought a belief in otherworldly things, and this gave rise to ghost stories, beliefs in specters, seances, etc. When we think about the Civil War, the self-created historical revisionism of the Confederacy takes more a visual space, yet, the Northern Union is where interesting things we happening, such as the abolitionist movement, the transcendental movement with thinkers like Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson, etc.

Photo of Union Soldiers from New York. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/505599495648975347/
Poe
Example of Gothic inspired American architecture

Interestingly, Circa Survive, being from Pennsylvania, is where the Battle of Gettysburg happened, and the war itself, remember – influencing American Gothic -, inspired writers such Ambrose Bierce, the author of surrealist short stories such as An Occurrence at Owl Creek (later turned into a classic episode of the Twilight Zone), where a many, supposedly a deserter, is about to hanged from a railroad bridge, yet, seemingly escapes and finds himself almost into the loving embrace of his family, yet, right as he approaches his family, his body is dropped and hanged. This story deals with memories, romance, death, etc. And of course, before Ambrose Bierce, there was the one and only Edgar Allen Poe (one could even say Washington Irving before him with tales such as the Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Rip Van Winkle), whose life coincided with the quick foundational growth of America as a soon to be economic juggernaut. The time of Poe’s life was in a transitional moment of American culture, where America was a mix of both Eastern seaboard elitism descended from our once English overlords as wealthy families of Boston Brahmin or Dutch Knickerbocker stock made fortunes off still Indian owned resources (“Cause it’s all built upon a burial ground,” lyric from Frozen Creek by Circa), but also the harshness of the frontier. The era as America’s colonial (iconic) tradition transferred towards something mimicking “modern” started during the Era of Good Feelings, which lasted from 1817-1825. The Era of Good Feelings involved a reinvigorated sense of American pride after the War of 1812, the foundation of Manifest Destiny, conflicts with Indian tribes of the plains, treaties with the British and others over land and borders, but culturally speaking the foundation of American culture diverging from English culture. Yet, there was always a dark and gothic sentiment to the architecture, the fashion, etc. It easy to envision Anthony Green as a fresh-off-the-boat Irish immigrant or second-generation American singing around a Union Camp fire as he ponders the truths of the human condition.

Poe’s life basically aligned with creation of the American Way of life, where the American perception is both inspiring, with its vast expanses of untamed land, but also a harsh place such as what one could have easily found on the frontier but also in disease ridden port cities of the coast such as his home of Baltimore, Maryland (interesting fact, Baltimore’s Salad Days Studios is where Juturna was recorded under the direction of Brian McTernan, with the name Salad Days coming from hardcore pioneer band, Minor Threat).  To link Ambrose Bierce, Poe, and gothic romanticism further to Circa, to me, Circa’s roots in the coldness of the East Coast is a foundational element to their music. Circa’s music is influenced by the seasonal changes of New England, with its deciduous forests, leaves, etc.

Minor Threat before Ian MacKaye branched off to create Fugazi, an instrumental band in post hardcore and emotive hardcore

Listen to the opening effects of Holding Someone’s Hair Back, and once can easily relate the spacey effects to that of crystalline white snow falling on a field near an old New England colonial farmhouse, a house in which poetry is about to the read. Snow, just like Gothicism, is both beautiful and harsh in that it represents the death of the seasons but also the renewal of life, e.g., the lyric from In The Morning And Amazing, “From winter brings the spring again”.  One can easily image fall time on the Eastern seaboard where leaves are being burned, such as “Smoke’s filled the air and I’m struggling to breathe” from the song, We’re All Thieves.

This gothic element within music such as Circa Survive can also be found in other experimental music projects such Have a Nice Life, where in the song Bloodhail, the singer refers to arrowheads, which to me invokes imagery of the once rich Native culture such as that of the Algonquin, Mohican, etc., of New England before their demise, and one could even say their legacy still has a haunting effect. Another act from New England, from Pennsylvania like Circa Survive, is Planning for Burial, in which one-man show Thom Wasluck mixes post-punk, black metal, shoegaze, and others to weave a mood that paints tales of emotion, pain, and love in New England landscapes. His albums such as Matawan – Collected works from 2018 inspires the strong Native American roots of New England, his 2017 album Below the House seems to relate to romantic tensions living in a dreary landscape, and his 2020 release When Summer Turns to Fall has no words but it is a classically inspired minimalist song that inspires a sense of Walden by Thoreau.  

Cover Art of Blue-Sky Noise: The only male figure as far as artwork is depicted on Blue Sky Noise. We see a young man who is wearing a tunic thus indicating some Roman about him, thus relating his depiction to the Greco-Roman mystical (Mithraic) inspirations I spoke about earlier. If the other albums mentioned above are about a female character, this male character on Blue Sky Noise could possibly be an iteration of her significant other, who too is dealing with issues of trauma, e.g., drug abuse.

Around the male figures head is both a halo, indicating sanctity, but the same shame also is part of a monstrous creature’s mouth which is filled with sharp teeth. This creature has the body of some sort of ram or sheep, or an equine of some sort, but the imagery to me relates to the lower half the satyr creature from mythology. This creature as a nature spirit in Greek mythology known for their Dionysian behavior of drinking and womanizing, indicating this monstrous animal on the cover art for Circa Survive, who also holds a music horn, is the allure of a fast lifestyle. The creatures wing I honestly cannot make much of but can only relate it to the mystical like elements of this creature, i.e., mystical things typically have wings so why think too much into it, yet the wings could represent being “high” or “speed”. In addition, a prism of light is coming out of this creature’s flesh which I translate as meaning the illumination that drugs can bring physically, i.e., tripping. In other words, this once saint boy or young man is surrounded by a fast lifestyle in which the creature (addiction) has the capability of luring one in while also destroying someone.

Status of Peter Pan

The male figure in the art also has a right arm which is deformed in some way, which to me insinuates drug abuse by injection, i.e., opioids. This art is a surrealist interpretation of a good person who has fallen victim to the allure of a lifestyle in which hardcore drug use has suspended him in an otherworldly state where monsters surround him.

On Love: The common theme is Circa’s earlier albums was a bond between a man and woman both dealing with some sort of trauma, yet Anthony Green’s brilliance is he does not shy away from this darkness, but by confronting it, he is able to write beautiful lyrics towards a path to light. That is the appeal. He is not messing around. He is not lying. He is staring things in the face. He is taking accountability for his actions and grew from those actions.

Peter Pan, Wendy, and Other Visual Relations: A visual that inspires this male and female in a dire situation of addiction is the short film/music video, Sigur Rós: Fjögur piano released in 2012 which featured Shia LeBeouf and Denna Thomsen. The music video by Alma Har’el, depicts two lovers turned drug addicts who are in a conflicted relationship yet still have a sense of love and memories of better times, but both have an antagonist with a surrealist drug dealer. These visuals seem very in alignment with Circa Survive, yet the albums I am most referring to (Juturna, On Letting Go, and Blue Sky Noise) were all released before the Sigur Ros video. I am unsure if Alma Har’el was inspired by Circa, yet, both the Sigur Ros video and Circa’s content remind me of the story of Wendy and Peter Pan in the Pan Universe by author J.M. Barrie, whom interestingly was born in the Victorian Era, and was in the literally circles of other gothic writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes, i.e., the creator of the modern mystery crime genre).

https://vimeo.com/44767537. Stills are from Sigur Ros (c). All Rights are reserved to the original artists and sharing this is for educational purposes.

The time that J.M. Barrie was living was the zenith of the British Empire so there were many cosmopolitan influences making their way back to Britain such as those of India, thus the British elite were mixing English Romantic imagery such as those of John William Waterhouse (his emphasis on Arthurian-like imagery) with that of the ancient mysticism of Hindu India or China and even Africa, so these foreign mystical influences inspired Gothic romanticism (yet, also did drugs, such as that of opium which was legal at the time and pure Absinthe made from wormwood, i.e., the urban legend of the “Green Fairy”). This sort of cosmopolitan influence also influenced French art such as what would become Art Nouveau.  

The characters in Circa Survive’s albums to me are Peter and Wendy who forgot Neverland due to coming to the real world or are real people within the real world trying to find Neverland. For example, there are two cover arts associated with Violent Waves. The first was spoken about above in which the female character is in a house somewhere that seems to be a manifestation of her memories, yet another cover has a ship floating atop a planet or orb or some sense, where this orb has a similar color palette to that of other Circa Esao works. The ship is important because it relates to the Jolly Roger of Captain Hook from the Pan universe.

Art Work for the 2015 film Pan by directed by Joe Wright

I prefer for this paper to entertain the concept idea of Peter and Wendy lost in the modern world and who are suffering from amnesia about Neverland. I imagine them living in a dingy apartment, scrapping by, yet both are recovering addicts, and they lost a sense of light, but are on a mission to re-obtain it. Yet, there are evil characters such as a Captain Hook-like person who is analogous to a drug dealer. Lost Boys could represent “street kids”, who are not bad at all, but trying to survive in a harsh environment, this analogy I’m making about Lost Boys relates to the lyric from the British band, Bloc Party, where in their song, The Good News, states, “Throwing down with all the lost boys at the very edge of town”.

Tinker Bell could represent something mixed in that she is not bad, yet she wants to “keep the party alive”, i.e., keep Peter in particular young. A nymph like creature for mythology, who can promise eternal life, but nothing is without a cost. Peter as the male character for this Circa Survive analogy is a person who has a hard time growing up, i.e., avoids responsibility, whereas Wendy grew up too fast, so there is an opposite attraction to each other, where Peter’s innocence (despite his issues) is a light, whereas Wendy’s maturity and strength is a power. Yet, Wendy is very central to the story, even going so far as having to process the trauma of losing a child, such as in the lyrics of Frozen Creek, but also having dealt with assault, i.e., “She’s got the photos but no reflection, He’s got the motive but no transportation”.

This dynamics between my “Circa Survive Peter and Wendy” story-line is that it would create a powerful story line in that both male and female protagonists are both strong and central, who show levels of courage and vulnerability.

Author: This is is me. Circa Fan. Blogger as a hobby. BA from Saint Martin’s University. MS from Embry Riddle Aeronautics. Always thinking outside the box. A fan of East Coast falls.

The Right-Wing Canadian Infiltration of the United States? When something silly sounding is very real. How the film Canadian Bacon (1995) kind of foreshadowed the actual Alt-Right invasion of the United States. This is not a joke…

Why are all of these pundits coming from Canada? Seriously…. They’re all Canadian. It’s always the ones you least expect… Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, Gavin McInnes, Stefan Molyneux, Nina Kouprianova, Ezra Levant, Laurent Southern, and the movie poster to Canadian Bacon (1995) by Michael Moore

Is the film Canadian Bacon by Michael Moore prophetic? Was it on to something without even realizing it? South Park by Matt Stone and Trey Parker even has its comedic take on Canadians. But, in reality…why are all these Right-Wing pundits…Canadian? Seriously? Have we become so cynical that people who want to do harm to the United States simply have to partake in our cynicism and disbelief? Laugh with us? There was the curious case of Anna Chapman along with nine others back in 2010 who were caught as being Russian spies and were given back to Russia in a spy exchange at an Austrian Airport (Sources: Russia spies plead guilty in US amid swap rumors by the BBC, 8 July 2010; The secrets of Anna Chapman by the BBC, 28 March 2011). We all should know the odd case of Maria Butina in the GOP NRA scandal. The agenda that is most prevalent to me right now, at least a piece of it, is how Right-Wing Canadian pundits that have gained influence in American politics but these people are simply the proxies of an international Zionist cabal spanning MAGA in the USA, the British Right Wing, Israel, and Russia. Trust me… I know that last sentence sounds silly. It will be called that. But I assure you, if you have not heard of people like Lauren Southern, Gavin McInnes, or Stefan Molyneux and their effects on American populism, you are the one who is out of touch. The global phenomenon of the Right Wing revolution isn’t organic but is actually a constructed movement unbeknownst to those who participate (you’re average Trump rally attendee), to build up mobilization for the defense of Israel and to link a newly rebranded traditionalist Russia with the West and USA on conservatism (whiteness).

The film Canadian Bacon I saw as a kid in the mid-nineties, and it did not leave much of an impact. Yet, I am watching it right as I write this. Be warned the film is full of 90s cheese (which is rather enjoyable in the dark times of late 2020) with some grunge music playing by people who are way too old to be listening to it (trying to capture the 90s Fugazi college crowd?), and a black character even drops the 90s phrase, “Can we all just get along”. Yet, brilliantly in satire fashion, akin to that of Don DeLillo’s 1985 book White Noise, Moore uses absurdity and hyperrealism to capture the time immediately after the Fall of the Soviet Union (I was a child) in which the USA was figuring out where to go considering there was no major enemies and the USA throughout the nineties enjoyed relative peace despite defense contractors trying to figure out how to create new revenue streams (sometimes going as far as fraud). It features a ragtag bunch of local cops (John Candy, Rhea Pearlman, Bill Nunn, etc.) who help foil a plot to start a new arms race. The film begins with the closure of a factory owned by a major defense contractor named Hacker Industries in a blue-collar community near Niagara Falls.

The film deals with the conflict of employment in the time of peace considering many US jobs are based within the Military Industrial Complex. The president of Hacker Industries working with a Washington insider, the President’s National Security Advisor Stuart Smiley (played by Kevin Pollack), tries to stir contempt to help boost the arms industry, even though the President (played by Alan Alda) wants peace. However, the President later meets with the Russian President, named Vladimir of course, to reignite Cold War tensions to help boost his popularity and employment numbers. The Russian President jokingly states that Russia is now concerned with state-of-the-art plumbing equipment and America should not be sore winners. The Cold War was costly to Russia. Later on after their plan to reignite war with Russia falls through, General Dick Panzer (played by Rip Torn) while conducting a briefing in the war-room (alluding to the Dr. Strangelove war room) goes through a list of enemies spanning Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Min, and even floats the ideas of an alien invasion. The President floats the idea of international terrorism (an ominous reference considering the Council of National Policy in real life was prepping for the Global War on Terrorism, and other Hollywood films, like True Lies, foreshadowed the emphasis on the Middle East) but Rip Thorn states that terrorist are just a bunch of people blowing themselves up in rental cars. The President then floats the idea of Canada.

The President’s National Security Advisor later consults a veteran CIA agent named Gus (who is still salty about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Korean War) who argues that Canada is the enemy. While strolling a hallway to talk in private, a hallway adorned with photos such as that of Henry Kissinger, Gus and Stuart have a conversation: “You remember the big New York blackout?” “Yea” “Caused by a Canadian hydroelectric plant, Niagara Falls. The Canucks claims it was a faulty transmitter, we have reason to suspect otherwise…” “Why is that?” “These Canadians suffer from a serious inferiority complex. That’s why they built this (whipping out a photo of the Canadian National Tower). World’s tallest free-standing tower. Our scientist cannot figure out what it is for. Canadians are always dreaming up a lot of ways to ruin our lives. The metric system, Celsius, Neil Young…Jesus. We admired them… Clean streets, no crime, no minorities” “How’d they pull that?” “No slavery…. Their entire government is run by socialist” “But it’s not the real stuff”, Stuart responds, before Gus continues, “No no no…that is where you are wrong…they’ve always had these tendencies”. Stuart reads a newspaper cutout, “Capitalism must be destroyed in all its forms? What is this??”, before Gus interjects, “We think they are a little weird with the socialism stuff… They provide free healthcare, education…. free condoms!”. Later, back at the war council room, the President and his staff float the idea of labeling Canada an enemy. One advisor, an African American man, states, “Hell, they’re whiter than we are!”. Yet, the President agrees to manufacture consent against the Canadians, later slipping the story to the media who starts their campaign of muckraking, Charlie Rose-like panel discussions, CSPAN knockoff updates, etc.

Gus later appears with a CIA team posing as Canadians to blow up a power-plant, but the power station is of course being guarded by John Candy and his crew. The event goes viral and causes the American public to believe the elaborate rouse even more.

A funny line so far is when a character, Kabral Jabar, played by Bill Nunn, while attending an auction of surplus military gear of a recently closed plant owned by Hacker Dynamics (maybe a ploy on General Dynamics, though the logo does reflect Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc.), says, “Listen, can we get out of here? All these guns and white people have me feeling nervous”, but John Candy playing Sheriff Bud Boomer, says, “Can you knock it off with the white stuff. You got me looking at em funny”. The fact Michael Moore gave Candy’s character the surname of Boomer obviously alludes to the Baby Boomers but considering this was the nineteen-nineties the term Boomer wasn’t used then as it is now, e.g., a term meant to prove the Baby Boomer’s general sense of selfishness and ambivalence to everything while simultaneously having the need for authority such as surface level politics, cops, simplistic dynamics of good guys versus bad buys, religion, etc.

But the plot of Canadian Bacon aside… There is something sinister coming from Canada in our reality.

The next stuff is serious. I am not…joking.

Canada used to send us quirky comedians. People who came from a higher latitude of the English speaking realm that we assumed had a natural predilection for left-wing, center-left, or moderate politics – granted they do have an important rural heritage as well – considering their single-payer healthcare system, the general perception of cleanliness, a general acceptance of cosmopolitanism, bilingualism, the fact that most of their population centers around urban areas doting the various provinces, and unlike Americans, the Canadians kept closer to their British roots which in itself is seen as more well-read, artistic, capable of understanding the “abstract”, and parliamentarian in nature. The Canadians or Canadiens are our slightly smarter younger sibling who stayed closer to our “parents” as we rebelled to be free but ended up like David Hasselhoff eating a cheeseburger off the floor in a drunken stupor or a film like Robocop makes so much sense it deserves a statue in Detroit.

Americas always saw Canada as the better place to the North with its own unique quirks. Nasally accents and using words like gee, or an over usage oh, or phases like don’t ya know. Something innocent about it. Yet, in recent times, especially in the times that led up to Trump America, I must admit that things have changed about Canada’s export of entertainers. They are all Right-Wingers and often extreme Right-Wingers. This isn’t the era of Jim Carey, John Candy, Mike Myers, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, etc., but rather we got a ragtag incendiary bunch comprising Steven Crowder, Lauren Southern, Gavin McInnes, Jordan B. Peterson, Nina Kouprianova (Richard B. Spencer’s allegedly – I believe her – abused ex-wife), Stefan Molyneux, and Ezra Levant (a Jewish-Canadian Right Wing Zionist) with his “Breitbart of Canada” media outlet in Rebel Media (an outlet that has hosted controversial figures such as Alex Jones and was linked to helping organize the United the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA). I am sorry but Ezra Levant looks a lot like the main character from the Cohen Brother’s A Serious Man. Just saying. Is the United States being invaded by Canada? It sounds funny, it sounds like a movie-plot straight out of South Park or Canadian Bacon, but I am not joking even though it is amusing but…not. It is quite easy to do. We in the United States scrutinize people from South of the Border but is the same treatment given to those North of the border, and if not, gee I wonder why?

How clever of an idea when you think about it. Culturally similar nations with a predominately white population which can at times be reactionary to change, in right-wing politics at least, especially that which challenges the notions of conscious and subconscious supremacy (immigration, gender equality, people of color in lead roles, etc.). If the United States were to be invaded, sure, it could come from South of the Border with Mexico, or be from some shadowy terrorist cell, but we often don’t see Canada in the same light, even though the chances of espionage or infiltration is much higher with our Canadian sibling. It is not the Canadian government that is the issue, but rather non-state actors who are betrothed to a well-funded religious-political agenda that spans the United States, U.K. and Commonwealth, Israel, and Russia. More to come on this later.

Gavin McInnes, formerly of Canadian media outlet Vice Media (which interestingly has links to the Manhattan Institute founded by former CIA head, William Casey, via Vice’s former correspondent, Raihan Salam and this institute also has ties to PayPal founder, Peter Thiel – an ardent Trump supporter and owner of the infamous IT firm, Palantir), represents the Oi! Oi! Right Wing takeover of the British late-seventies punk scene and he uses the prevalence of political correctness, “wokeness”, and the elevation of marginalized groups to turn conservatism into “punk” against the mainstream. McInnes created the Proud Boys harkening back to the right-wing street thugs of the National Front in Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing 1980s England. The Proud Boys, supposedly started as a joke by McInnes, despite being known in the public sphere for years were elevated even further in Trump’s debate against Biden in which Trump stated, “Stand back and stand by” when asked about if Trump would denounce white supremacy, specifically when asked about the Proud Boys. The Proud Boys employ a strategy of surface level silliness to divert attention away from their chauvinistic West is the Best ideology. The Proud Boys require a beat-down initiation in which a man must read off as many as ten breakfast cereals while getting beat up. It seems childish and borderline like suppressed homoeroticism (considering McInnes has made-out with Milo Yiannopoulos) or MGTOW behavior (Men Gone Their Own Way) especially with the prevalence of nude male Greek statues representing logos within the Alt-right sphere of thought. The Proud Boys are a sausage fest of angry males who need identity. This playful silliness is not just common to the Proud Boys who have documented cases of using violence, but also Boogaloo, who took that name from a nineteen-eighties pop cultural reference, who gained notoriety when US Air Force Sergeant Steven Carrillo was indicted for the murder of two deputies in North California in 2020 using the Black Lives Matter protests as cover and a means of inciting a race war.  

Lauren Southern and Nina Kouprianova with their “fraulein” looks aer the anti-feminists who represents femininity’s subservience to masculinity yet are outspoken in favor for militaristic masculinity protecting the “race” – a notion notable in the Right Wing [Note: Nina Kouprianova has been interviewed by vlogger, Jay Dyer, who converted to Orthodox Christianity, i.e., the main religion of Russia, and most of his work are directed at the United States and not at the current events happening in Russia. Dyer to me seems to have an affinity with “people groups”, i.e., differences as being ordain in his words by God). Lauren Southern not only went to South Africa to show a biased view of the racial situation in South Africa such as proliferating the white farmer murders (something Trump has tweeted about) but she has also flown to Russia to interview Alt-Right Anti-American intellectual Aleksandr Dugin.

Jordan B. Peterson and Stefan Molyneux represent an intellectual basis for Darwinism with concepts like “fitness”, “Bell Curves”, the strongest survives, etc., which are notable tropes of the Right Wing even though it hides in high-brow discussions of capitalism, intelligence, systems theories, i.e., alluding to the natural tendency to form social hierarchies which in and of itself insinuates a rejection of egalitarianism, etc. Steven Crowder represents the “bro” of the bunch. A frat boy beer drinking mentality which tries to out masculine you and harkens back to the days where the white male viewpoint of reality, including criticisms of others, dominated the landscape.

The fact that many are comedians helps deliver their messages into the public because they can simply state, “I’m just telling a joke”, so there is a level of solipsism and postmodernism in their tactics, where postmodernism comes into the mix because of the prevalence of memes, vlogs, and conspiracy theories/”true history” videos spanning or touching upon Indo-European studies (a gateway into Aryan studies such as the videos created by British Alt-Right vlogger, Survive the Jive), rejection of peer-reviewed and intensive studies such as the Out of Africa Theory in exchange for fringe theories such as Hyperborea, aliens (where aliens only seem to help people of color and not Europeans), etc., in the digital landscape. Postmodernism simply put (if it can be) is when the world has no reference of what the truth actually is, so truth is utterly subjective and an existential process, and the notion of objective truths or grand-narratives are false. Postmodernism was first a reaction to the atrocities of the right-wing after World War II, but now it seems like it’s being cleverly used by conservatives to deconstruct the new accepted truths of modern human rights, diversity, gender equality, etc. These types of individuals in the right-wing sphere in which I am speaking of broaden their base by being elevated on even more popular outlets such as the Joe Rogan Experience. Yet, whenever this side is called out, they can default to victim status by making it appear those who are fed up with traditionalism, patriarchy, racism, etc., are in effect nothing more than “commies”, “fascists”, “Marxist radicals” or “Social Justice Warriors” who are simply shaming white boys and women who love them. To stir this atmosphere of them being the oppressed or muzzled victims, any time a person is de-platformed they cry fascism, even though their very own ideology is the basis of fascism. They are playing games is where I am getting at. Using amorphisms and ambiguity to Trojan Horse their regressive ideology into the mainstream.

I’ve said this before but we truly live in the era of the Postmodern Conservative who uses deception tactics to de-evolve the modern liberal state back into a conservative homogenous state, but it claims to detest postmodernism in the vein of people like Pat Buchanan who popularized “Cultural Marxism”, despite utilizing postmodernism (asymmetric, shapeshifting, “what is truth?” – tactics, etc.) as a tool for its own agenda. Ironically, Donald Trump himself could be compared to Max Headroom, a Canadian character of a former Canadian TV show, where Max Headroom is a digital avatar and Trump in effect is the same with his use of the online arena to bypass the political process and stir up conspiracy theories to protect himself. The right-wing conspiracy culture that led up to Trump was the clay which gave us a Golem like Trump. Interestingly, certain portions of the Alt-Right, those more in line with the quasi-Nazi Occult elements, have even stated that they are using “magic” or magick when they troll online, i.e., they are willing their wants into existence using meme warfare.  

In relation to the Russian elements regarding my “Canadian Cabal” theory, 541,810 people in 2016 claimed Ukrainian descent, there were 622,445 people in 2016 who claim Russian or partial Russian descent in Canada, and in 2016 about 20,710 people claimed Belarusian descent in Canada. In 2016, Canada had a population over 35 million (compared to the United States with is around 300+ million). The number of people of Eastern European descent might not stand out as being significant, but for a much smaller nation than the USA, the amount of cultural influence cannot be calculated. As far as cultural influence all it takes is one person or a few to gain a large audience to disseminate and proliferate messages. Further, it’s much easier to “fit in” with their American counterparts, especially those in the Right-Wing, which is an arena spanning household “normal” center-Right politics all the way to fringe Nazism, the John Birch Society, the Tea Party Movement, Christian Extremists, Traditionalist Mormons who practice polygamy, Qanon, the Rise Above Movement, Boogaloo (which resulted in the murders of two law officers where the assailant wrote Boogaloo in blood at a crime scene – yet, our media unfairly characterizes the Black Lives Matter movement  as terrorists), the Right Wing occult (Order of Nine Angels, Atomwaffen SS, etc.), race realists, etc.

I am not saying espionage is happening from the Canadian government necessarily since they are US allies, but rather individual actors have the ability to infiltrate and change the culture of the United States by appealing to a sense of sameness. The United States could clamp down on these individual actors if they wanted to such as scrutinizing their visa status, look to see if they’re paying taxes, etc., but considering it is Trump America and he needs these people, it seems the Department of Justice is more concerned with a Hoover like condemnation of the left than it is protecting the USA from actual domestic and international agents who just so happen to be “good ole white boys”.

Most of the people I named are conservative and they speak on American politics more than they do Canadian politics. Is this not strange? Do American conservatives even call them out on this? No. Why? Because the white conservative base of America is so lost in fear than they will take anyone that looks like them and tells them exactly what they want to hear. This fear has created not only a business opportunity for entertainers but also a world-shifting opportunity for influencers who are attached to the agendas of larger and shadowy organizations, which I feel links to the controversies surrounding Trump. Most of these pundits are Trump supporters, even if they cannot vote in American elections. These pundits to me are in the web that spans Russia-gate (Israeli-Russian Gate), Trump, the Alt Right, and the US-UK & Israeli Zionist connection.

So, let me explain my beliefs based on that last statement I made. Russia was not alone in influencing the 2016 election, but rather Israel had the technological means and cultural connections within the United States to help sway the election in favor for Trump. For example, the Republican Jewish Coalition with people like Eliot Brody brought up in the Mueller investigation. Israel was displeased with the Obama Administration for abstaining on a United Nation’s vote over Israeli settlements on disputed Palestinian lands. This abstain vote by Obama resulted in a toxic backlash against his administration especially in the Israeli press and thinking that Hillary would follow suit with the Obama Administration’s policy (and that of previous American administrations who preferred to broker peace between Israel and Palestine), the Israeli lobby backed Trump, despite saving face and managing relations on both side of the political spectrum, particularly by denouncing antisemitism even though many people on the right are Jewish. So, in order to get the majority of the USA, which is white, to back Trump, the US Zionist and Israeli lobby spanning politics, media, alternative media (podcasting such as Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones, even Joe Rogan during his phase of platforming Alt-Right guests), Wall Street, and Washington insiders, effectively created and elevated the Alt-Right. This strategy has in part helped to metastasize into movements such as Qanon, which might still seem harmless to the average American, but people running for Congressional seats are openly pushing Qanon, Islamophobia, Pizzagate, and “Holly-Weird” theories.  It could be argued that Qanon is a cult but a cult for the internet age and it preys on the vulnerabilities of those in conservative politics. Qanon has a Zionist undertone to it, which therefore not only feeds into a support of Israel but also Western conservatism. It sounds strange by Qanon could be what helps turn the United States into something akin to the Handmaid’s Tale. A radical religious reactionary state where the courts are run by Noahide worshiping judges. Noahide is a form of Jewish proselytizing to non-Jews in which non-Jews are encouraged to worship the Jews as the Chosen people and to follow the Noahide Laws issued by Jewish clerics.

This reactionary Right Wing (predominately white) movement is filled with the fringe of conservatism (as we saw at Charlottesville) and is protecting Israel even if many of the people in this arena are not cognizant of it. I say this because many people in this arena have antisemitic beliefs but even antisemitic beliefs can be used by Zionist to increase their power. For example, appealing to a Christian Crusader “Dues Vult” mentality in defense of the Holy Land is essentially getting WASP Christians with Punisher skull tattoos, subscriptions to Soldier of Fortune, and a habit of dropping N-bombs while playing Call of Duty, to defend Israel, but these people must be convinced that they still are the majority, in supremacy, or are in jeopardy of being replaced. Basically, certain factions of the Zionist lobby are willing to fund Nazis as a diversion to what they’re doing but also to build a “street team” for Trump, but really Trump is an ally of Israel who will do what they want which can be seen in Trump naming Jerusalem the capital of Israel, landmarks being named after Donald Trump, the annexation of the Golan Heights in the wake of the Syrian War, leaving the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and leaving ambiguity around the contested Dome on the Rock between Jews and Muslims (which is where the Kusher relationship with the Saudis comes into play since the Saudis are the landlords or trustees of the property).

All these Right-Wing Canadians will shame minorities, the LGBTQ community, welfare, etc., but you notice they never talk about Jews. It is not that I want them to, but rather, they are all Zionists or tied to some sort of Zionist organization. They are the cover for the Zionist lobby simply put there to mobilize the majority that leans right into doing that lobby’s bidding. The marriage between White Supremacy and Jewish Zionism is not new and can trace roots in part back to the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century where there were British movements such as British Israelism where white Britons felt they were the chosen people in order to justify the British Empire. This grand origin story mythology is common among most empires or aspiring empires such as the Nazis trying to trace roots to Central Asia or India largely because they simply wanted that land, or even to the United States with notions like Manifest Destiny. Religions such as Mormonism were created during Manifest Destiny and used Zionist undertones to demonize Native Americans so they could take their land and bolster their own credibility (I do not hate modern, every day, and normal Mormons by the way).

The British elite establishment and the Jews who became prominent in the United Kingdom created a symbiotic relationship, and many prominent imperial administrators were Jewish such as Benjamin Disraeli, and, yes, the Rothchild Dynasty (responsible for helping acquire the Suez Canal, raising capital against Napoleon, treasurers of the Bank of England, etc.).

This symbiotic relationship or marriage of “mafias” resulted in the basis for the establishment of Israel in which the British helped the Jews acquire Palestine after World War I when King George defeated his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm’s, allies in the Ottoman Turks who owned the area. Further, even though it is debatable, King George and the British Establishment with the help of American financiers, may have supported the Bolsheviks in order to overthrow the Czar of Russia in order to obtain the lucrative oil fields of the Caucuses. This symbiotic relationship surrounding being “Chosen”, i.e., supremacy, bled into the United States and Commonwealth nations thus influencing the treatment of the indigenous First Peoples and people of color in these regions (such as African-Americans with slavery which was argued with a misinterpretation of the Bible such as the Mark of Cain, Aborigines, Indians of the Asian Subcontinent, Africans in colonial Africa, etc.). The Rothchild’s did fund Cecil Rhodes’ DeBeer Diamonds in Africa and it is well known Rhodes was a Mason and racist, where Masonry in itself, at least that of the English realm has Judeo-Christian undertones.

Manifest Destiny in the United States was simply White Zionism similarly to how the British Empire was White Zionism, but the Zionism aspect is what links them to the Jews, even though these factions at times are in conflict (Waspy elitism of the Anglo-American establishment or the condescending tones that some Jews have of gentiles), but their working relationship as far as global control outweighs the negatives. In effect, these two groups of white Gentiles and white Jews can effectively merge with each other and have time and time again throughout history, even within some old European noble families such as Sophie von Hohenlohe (who spied for the Nazis) or Prince Rupert Lowenstein (the Rolling Stones former manager). Even though the common average white person or Jewish person might not mix as much, when you get to the upper echelons of power, then what’s ethnicity when all that matter is money?

It is my personal belief that all the weird events that happened from 2016 to 2020 in the present were simply this cabal coming to light for the first time to most Americans. The curtains had fallen and the system went into clean-up trying to get ahead of stories by pretending they were actually covering the stories in full, even though they were simply doing what a street hustler does when they play a “shell game”, i.e., moving around cups with a ball underneath it and making people wage money on where the ball actually is (sometimes the ball being taken away with a contraption so no one wins). For example, the Bronfman Clan of NXVIUM with their ties to the United Nations (via Sara Bronfman’s husband Basit Igtet who negotiated a peace deal in Libya after Hillary’s Benghazi situation), Edgar Senior’s ties to the World Jewish Coalition (where he advocated for improved Russian and Israeli relations) and Edgar Junior’s ties to the music industry; Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s ties to the British Royal Family and even the Iranian Contra era with characters spanning William Barr as a CIA operative around Reagan’s White House, John Kerry as a blue-blood old money Senator, Robert Mueller (classmate of Kerry) as a young investigator who worked on Iran Contra, Judge Robert Morgenthau (a relative to the Bronfman Clan), Adnan Khashoggi (uncle to killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Princess Diana’s lover, Dodi Fayed), the Clintons and the Trumps. This is deep stuff.

The Israeli lobby, at least that led by Benjamin Netanyahu (he does face opposition in Israel) and his allies in the USA and English speaking Commonwealth (various non-profits, social clubs, etc.), understand that hiding behind hyper-Republicanism of the majority in the United States is the best way to keep the light off of them and since Right-Wing politics are often Christian or Judeo-Christian in nature, this religious crux is a helpful variable that increases the power of this strategy. They can appeal to sense of Revelations, Armageddon, Holy War against Muslims, etc.  

Ok, so keep all that in mind, but what about Russia? The truth is that Russia and Israel are closer than what most Americans realize. In the Cold War, the United States utilized Christianity and Zionism as a means of psychological warfare to differentiate ourselves from the godless Soviets. The truth is many Israelis and American/Canadian Jews, or Jews of the Commonwealth are of Eastern European “Pale Settlement” or Russian Jewish descent. Prominent Canadian billionaire, Edgar Bronfman Sr., of the Seagram’s Dynasty, is the father of Claire and Sara Bronfman (incriminated in the NXVIUM scandal), younger brother to Phyllis Lambert (who bailed Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer, out of jail before he pulled a Roman Polanski and fled the USA), and father to Edgar Junior (music mogul with links to Jeffrey Epstein), was the president of the World Jewish Coalition (WJC) and promoted Russian emigration to Israel. Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who was a racist (disapproving his son’s marriage to an African American woman, foreshadowing to me the racist rant of LA Clipper’s owner Donald Sterling), advocated for increasing Israeli and Russian ties. Israel is the crux between the USA/West and the East typified in Russia, and Israel can leverage those multi-national bonds to its favor if the policy of one deviate away from Israel’s own ambitions (consolidating its borders to that of the Kingdom of David and bring forth their messiah, the Mashiach). As an analogy, Israel has positioned itself to the be the woman that two powerful suitors are courting and play them off each other, even though the future of this strategy is for all to…share Israel or Israel to control both, as the Russians and the Americans by way of the Republicans (the party you would least expect) try to join forces.  A White Zionist alliance where the Israelis are the heart of the operation.

So, in 2016, Russia did have a major reason to favor the election of Donald Trump considering the sanctions they faced due to their invasion of Crimea and their tendency to generally annoy the United States by them conducting a “parallel policy” to the USA, e.g., if the USA has issue with Venezuela or Syria, then Russia steps in to show they are friends to these nations in the face of “American Imperialism”. Trump had done business in Russia, ex-Soviets turned businessmen had conducted business out Trump’s properties, Trump has links to many ex-Soviets in one way or another (Tevfik Arif, Tamir Sapir, Lev Leviev, etc.), many people in his cabinet had ties to Russia such as Rexx Tillerson for Exxon Mobil, Michael Flynn was called into suspicion, Rand Paul delivered correspondence to Moscow for Trump, and Mitch McConnell and other prominent Republicans have ties to Leonard Blvatnik etc.

The fact that Melania Trump is of Slovenian descent and Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, is of Czech descent, both former Soviet nations (which in and of itself is not a problem, i.e., they shouldn’t be shamed for this), I could imagine Donald Trump has a large following in former Soviet States as far as the media, tabloids, and news. Nations such as Hungary, Austria, Germany even (especially in the former Soviet Eastern part of the country which is under-developed in relation to the Western part of the nation), etc., has seen a rise in Right-Wing populist politics emulating the success of Donald Trump, and Russia sees this Right-Wing Revolution as good since they have ditched the Soviet style and in exchange are marketing themselves as Orthodox traditionalists against the depravity of liberal democracies, modernity, secularism, human rights, etc. This Right-Wing revolution in Eastern Europe which benefits Russia in its “rebranding campaign” can weaken the primacy of the United States by threatening NATO and calling into question the usefulness of the United Nations (the United Nations has always been a target of Right-Wing organizations such as the John Birch Society which helped coin concepts such as a one-world government. Interesting fact is that the Neo-Nazis in America trace roots back to an internal conflict within the John Birch Society in which a Revilo P. Oliver left the organization because he claimed the JBS was becoming too Jewish, which, even though I reject Nazism and white supremacy, he may have had a point considering post-war Neo-conservatism had many notable Jews such as Henry Kissinger, Barry Goldwater, Milton Friedman, etc.).   

In conclusion, Canada is awesome. It is still seen as an example of a modern and developed nation that fosters diversity, education, public investments, and a rational well-balanced foreign policy. Yet, all of that aside, many Right-Wing pundits are coming from Canada. This to me is no coincidence but rather proof of a larger cabal using these low-level actors, podcasters, and vloggers, to infiltrate the United States political arena by appealing to a sense of sameness and being the “online street team” for Trump. The question is will American conservatives start to call it out, or are they so enthralled with the insanity of Trumpism, that they will take support from any source no matter how nefarious it truly is?

#film #politics #review #canada #american #zionism #2020