As I shared in my previous post, I expressed my feeling that this blog has run its course given the current state of the country and world. I still hold that position, but I will keep this blog up until the Silicon Valley overlords decide there are too many Wrong Opinions here.
If you enjoyed these posts, I have started a new blog. There will be occasional content that resembles the pieces here, but the focus will be centered on my journey on the road of Orthodox Christianity. I’ve chosen to call the blog Roads to Damascus in the spirit of this new blog’s overall orientation. If you enjoyed the content here, and this sounds appealing to you, come check out the new blog. Thanks for visiting.
Yes, indeed. The death knell has struck. Put a fork in it. The America that most of us knew and loved is over.
Joe Biden has officially taken the White House as the 46th POTUS. While a certain segment of the population undoubtedly sees this as victory and vindication, there can be little doubt among those of us who don’t subscribe to the ruling class ideology that we now live in an occupied country and all bets are off. Everything you once considered normal or sacred about Americanism or life in America has been trampled underfoot in mostly peaceful protests and canceled by Big Tech. Since this blog has been primarily focused on critiques of the post-Enlightenment liberal project, I believe that its purpose has been fulfilled and this will be my final entry before I deactivate. Before I do that, I want to share a few final thoughts as a postmortem on this election and the death of the country I once knew and believed in.
Donald Trump and The Last Stand of Classical Americanism
There can be little doubt that despite all of Trump’s bravado, his administration was too little and too late to make the kind of impact that he certainly tried to make. The global establishment, and by that I mean the “two-party” duopoly, had already succeeded in consolidating their hegemony in all key areas of influence. Subsequently, he was fighting a futile battle to preserve the old paradigm of Americanism on a foundation that was both badly damaged by modernity and not well suited to a shared consensus on objective truth. In other words, an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, a fixed notion of negative liberty, and despite his own personal failings, a fairly clear minded set of ethics. Needless to say, this drew the ire of an establishment that has been sowing seeds of moral relativism and global cosmopolitanism for decades. Literally everything the man did or said was seen through the lens of hashtag ethics and woke sloganeering. In other words, he was the caricature of a fascist boogeyman they have been trained to fear through media indoctrination. His actions violated the one arbitrary moral absolute that somehow has attained the highest priority amongst the progressive cognoscenti: don’t be a bigot. His very existence was an affront to the woke consensus which sees any affirmation of traditional masculinity, Christian virtue, or defiance of the establishment as nothing short of tyranny.
It was ridiculous, but it didn’t matter because it was effective. Every day would usher in a whole new collection of indignant clickbait which saw only nefarious dog whistling to some nebulous group of huwhyte supremacists or disinformation campaigns to deranged Putin loving conspiratards. Would his economic and trade policies have restored American economic sovereignty or would they simply have temporarily forestalled the inevitable for four more years? It’s a moot question now, but the latter seems likely.
QAnon and The Storm that Wasn’t
When examining the carcass of the 2020 election, many large questions remain around Donald Trump’s ultimate endgame. Was QAnon a psyop and a LARP for Boomers? Or was it a propaganda campaign for what was promised to be the biggest sting operation in American history that simply didn’t pay off? It’s difficult to say conclusively without additional information, but the latter seems plausible.
Donald Trump’s entire election challenge in conjunction to various moves made behind the scenes are not well explained by Orange Man Throws Tantrum mantras. Why bring back firing squads, fire Kissinger and Albright, consolidate DNI and DOD under Ratcliffe and Miller, cut off military support to CIA operations, and mobilize 30k National Guard troops on inauguration day if you weren’t trying to execute some elaborate end run around the process in order to secure a second term? Most importantly, why would you present a front of defiance and resolve and turn the Capitol into a Green Zone with 2k deputized NG if you weren’t implicitly promising comeuppance to the establishment?
I hope the story is told in full at some point because everything has the distinct appearance of a plan that either failed somehow or simply didn’t get executed because Trump lost his resolve at the final hour. In light of these things, one question remains. Was Donald Trump a well intentioned plutocrat who simply didn’t want to go along with the establishment consensus or was he controlled opposition from the start and his entire presidency was little more than a giant humiliation ritual intended to demoralize conservatives and destroy any last vestiges old school Americanism? Either interpretation seems valid. Regardless of which interpretation is correct, there can be little doubt that Trump pulled the curtain all the way back on the establishment Wizard. Anyone who still subscribes to the idea that there are “two sides” or that somehow conservatism represents a real opposition to global progressivism is either willfully blind or just retarded.
Joe Biden and the Great Reset
It should be apparent to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the ruling class consensus that Joe Biden is quite literally a Manchurian Candidate and a Trojan Horse for the Great Reset. With his victory, the global establishment has fully secured and consolidated its grip on power and has literally nothing standing in the way of the full implementation of the Great Reset. There are no legitimate opposing views. Free speech is no longer an inalienable right. Reality is whatever they say it is and you are a dangerous disinformation agent if you dare utter an opposing view. Joe Biden’s 81 million votes are now an uncontested fact in the historical record. The Constitution, SCOTUS and the Electoral College are slated for demolition or reinvention. Why? Because they’re a threat to #OurDemocracy. The digital pogroms and real world cancellations have only just begun. Mandatory vaccination, a biometric police state, a synthetic food supply, the abolition of cash and implementation of a social credit system, and restrictions on consumption and movement are but a few of the utopian wonders that await us in this Brave New World. It’s merely a question of how soon at this point. There can also be little doubt that the duration of Joe Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office will be short lived. There will either be a manufactured health crisis, a possibility he suggested himself when questioned on how he would treat a disagreement between him and Kamala, or scandal that will trigger a 25A procedure which will result in what everyone could see coming a mile away: the ascendancy of Kamala Harris to the POTUS. From an esoteric perspective, it would represent the final demolition of the Old Order (i.e. the huwhyte male) and the enthronement of the New Aeon of the Divine Feminine.
What Now?
This new era is indeed deeply unsettling because it feels as though there is no way to resist or opt out. Everything feels like an inevitability and the notion that you no longer possess free will or the ability oppose without making yourself an enemy of the state is pretty terrifying. In light of the perilous nature of the road ahead, I see only one final refuge: God. Specifically, the one Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church. Surely, many will say this is just another normal rebalancing of the “two parties” and things are going to proceed just as they have in the past. Again, you have to be willfully blind or completely retarded to draw such a naïve and asinine conclusion, but when it comes to spiritual delusion, there is no bottom to the depths of absurdity one will plunge. It used to be funny when it was limited to emotionally incontinent SJWs, but not when they occupy every corner of power in the world.
So friends, I thank you for reading and I hope you got value from my work. I may be back with a different blog that’s exclusively focused on my spiritual growth in Orthodoxy. May God protect and have mercy on all of us. We’re going to need it.
Nearly every significant 20th century musician was a tangle of irreconcilable contradictions and Frank Zappa was certainly among the most complicated of them all. While undoubtedly a covert establishment asset, Frank Zappa was the aspirational artistic archetype for peers and subsequent generations alike. Since the dawn of the commercial artistic age, musicians of every stripe have had to grapple with the conflict between artistic ambition and the imperatives of the profit motive. Few have navigated this problem with more success than Zappa. Despite the fact that a Zappa documentary presents a seemingly impossible challenge for a filmmaker, Alex Winter’s attempt is as good as one could hope for given the enormity of the subject’s legacy and influence.
Notoriously cantankerous and obsessive to an extreme, Zappa had something to offer to nearly everyone regardless of your ideological orientation or artistic preferences. In a world of democratized artistic standards and relative tastes that often favored the lowest common denominator, Zappa insisted on pursuing art that demanded both an objective standard of excellence and deep instrumental prowess in order to execute. He may have belonged to the surrealist and deconstructionist end of the avant garde, but his music rested on an objective foundation of aesthetic beauty. He appropriated the trappings and iconography of the counterculture, but he openly ridiculed drug abuse and hippies. He was attuned to the corruption of the music industry very early on, and sought an independent path in order to preserve the integrity of his vision. He even paid the London Symphony to perform his composition just so he could have a recording of the best musicians playing his piece. Admittedly, his music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but you can’t say he didn’t swing for the fences.
Rhetorically, Frank was a jumbled mixture of fearless truth telling, blunt pugilism, and blatant misdirection served over heaping portions of sops to leftist pieties. Naturally, he frequently targeted Republicans and religious conservatives, but he was equally contemptuous of feminists and the counterculture. You have to look to Ted Nugent to get the kind of red meat Frank was serving on a regular basis. Since we now live in a world where Van Morrison and Morrissey are dangerous apostates and the entire music industry is a monolith of wokeisms, Frank’s seemingly sincere defense of free speech would be a welcome voice in these times. It’s a damn shame he didn’t live long enough to witness the corporations casting art down the memory hole and the tech monopoly’s brazen censorship because it would have been interesting to see how strong those convictions actually were.
One might look at Frank’s staunch refusal to be pigeonholed and believe that he was a true anti-establishment contrarian, but I believe it’s evidence of the opposite. Following the milquetoast lead of Echo in the Canyon, Zappa subtly suggests what Dave McGowan spent an entire book exploring; that Frank Zappa was the quintessential establishment man. At the beginning of the film, Zappa himself discusses his father’s employment at the Edgewood Arsenal as well as his own fascination with gunpowder and explosives. In other words, his father worked at a facility which produced enough chemical weapons to wipe out a significant chunk of the global population. When Frank tells you that LSD was used as a chemical weapon by the military, you should take him very seriously.
Despite all the stories of establishment opposition, Zappa amounts to another posthumous affirmation of his place in the global establishment. His latter career shift to a shill for the IMF and World Bank advocating for the Czech Republic’s transition to a market economy attests to this. When Frank encourages the citizens of the Czech Republic to retain their uniqueness, it sounds great on the surface. However, did their subsequent admission to NATO and the EU help or harm their chances at national sovereignty? I’m going with harm. Would Frank have been pro-Brexit? Would he have stood by Poland and Hungary in opposition to the EU? Doubtful.
At the end of the day, I see Frank Zappa’s work and legacy as similar to fellow iconoclasts like Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Their lives and works serve as iconic affirmations of the success of secular globalism, but it doesn’t mean it’s devoid of artistic merit or revelation. Frank Zappa had a lot to say about the world in which we live. What made him truly extraordinary is that he left it up to you to decide what to do with the information he presented.
Is there anyone who enjoys huffing his own ideological farts more vigorously and sanctimoniously than Aaron Sorkin? I don’t think so. If you’re not enamored of Sorkin’s brand of flatulent agitprop, you might be wondering why bother? It’s a fair question, but if nothing else, it’s worth a watch because it shows that there’s nothing new in the progressive playbook. The historical drama can be a dubious proposition, but when it’s both a Sorkin and Netflix production, you know the line between fidelity to the record and artistic license is going to be skillfully and intentionally blurred. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is best seen as a form of meta propaganda because not only does it reinforce the narrative du jour, it shows how the progressive establishment moves cultural consensus.
The basic message is not hard to divine. The Chicago 7 were a bunch of principled rabble rousers unfairly scapegoated by a politicized DOJ looking to claim high profile scalps for the unprecedented rioting during the ’68 DNC. All of the requisite 2-dimensional stereotypes, boogeymen and caricatures on which the progressive script depends are portrayed with rote fidelity. Frank Langella cashes an easy paycheck by portraying federal judge Julius Hoffman as an imperious, effete crypto-fascist. As Bobby Seale, Yahya Abdul-Mateen is a defiant and pugnacious Black Nationalist power fantasy and a stand in for the BLM Martyr Du Jour. As Abbie Hoffman, Borat punks progressives with a shitty would-be Boston accent and an earnest portrait of the legendary liberal agitator who’s the archetypal educated, idealistic but misunderstood smartass. We’re to believe that a communist Jew would try to portray the gospel of Matthew in a charitable manner as a way of illustrating how Tom Hayden’s rallying cry might be taken out of context. Maybe he did, but it points to the larger problem with the entire film.
Everything about the film is designed to inculcate a perfectly bifurcated and deterministic view of the past and present; the left are pious crusaders for #SocialJustice and #EQUALITY while conservatives are opportunistic and vindictive hypocrites. It’s a narrative that would be hilarious if it weren’t outrageously effective. When Michael Keaton’s Ramsey Clark takes the stand and testifies that his office concluded that the cops instigated the violence, it solidifies two key articles of faith. It vindicates the current #DefundThePolice/#ACAB narrative, but more importantly, it reaffirms the notion that the most clear headed, even handed arbiters of justice are progressives. The only people who can ultimately be trusted to wield the power of the state are on the Left. But those conservatives. THEY’RE the ones you really need to watch. Right.
The thing that really hit home for me is how the film reveals the source of the Left’s success. I grew up believing in the mythology of the antiwar Left presented in the film. I genuinely believed that being opposed to democratic imperialism was a firmly held principle amongst self-described liberals and progressives. The Monroe Doctrine was an ideological byproduct of the classically liberal Jeffersonian worldview. Based, right? But where was the antiwar Left when Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo? Or when Obama invaded Libya? Why aren’t they roasting Joe Biden for voting for the Iraq War when the fumes of the 60s managed to mobilize a new generation against the GWB administration? How sincere was this conviction in the first place?
Maybe Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and the rest of them genuinely did believe that the entanglement in Vietnam was immoral and illegitimate. Regardless, the point is that the Left has repeatedly taken up social justice or institutional reform crusades that have real nuggets of Christian virtue. The problem is that these positions are little more than ideological apps that can be coopted by institutional power structures and bad actors who will exploit the movement for their own purposes. The film’s inclusion of the COINTELPRO infiltrators raises the question of the extent to which anything on the Left is organic in the first place.
What makes this film truly distasteful and repugnant is how willfully tone deaf it is to the current moment. When police officers are being assaulted and shot, cities are being razed by Antifa and BLM activists, the media refuse to cover the collapse of Russiagate, the tech complex spikes a story that exposes Hunter Biden, and James Comey, John Brennan and David Frum are considered leaders of the #RESISTANCE, one can reasonably conclude that there’s nothing sincere about the Left at all. But Sorkin and company don’t give a shit. They’re all in on the progressive fantasy. They’re certainly not going to rethink their position now that they’re safely ensconced in their gated communities in the Hollywood hills. All together now: #RESIST!
In 1971, Gil Scott-Heron famously proclaimed that the revolution will not be televised. In 2020, we can definitively conclude that he was wrong. Not only will the revolution be televised, it will be livestreamed on Periscope, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. You will be forced to stay at home and self-quarantine, brother. You will be able to plug in, turn on and pig out on Uber eats and Doordash. Not only will you be able to lose yourself on skag, but all the other opoids being shipped in from China as well. You won’t need to skip out for beer during commercials because it’ll be delivered to your doorstep by Drizly. Because the new season of the revolution will be streaming on Netflix and you’re binge watching it with your nonbinary, polyamorous partner. The revolution will be delivered to you overnight by Amazon Prime. The revolution will show you leaked nude photos of J Law, Kim Kardashian, and Ariana Grande. The revolution will be brought to you by Hulu and Disney + and will feature the world’s first differently abled, queer, body positive, atheist Muslim POC superhero. The revolution will give your mouth, butt and abs sex appeal because you’ve been working out to Andrea Rogers’ xtend barre workout app. If it doesn’t make you look five pounds thinner, just use a better filter and post to Instagram. The revolution be viral. There will be lots of cute selfies and photo bombs. There will be pictures of George Floyd, Eric Garner and Michael Brown on instant replay and available as ringtones from Google Play. There will be slow motions and still lifes of AOC, Alyssa Milano, Shaun King, Rachel Dolezal and Jussie Smollett strolling through the streets of Ferguson wearing custom #BlackLivesMatter facemasks that they’ve been saving for just the proper occasion. Black Mirror, Westworld and The Walking Dead will no longer be so damn relevant because the real world surpasses the horror of these shows by several orders of magnitude. Women won’t care about whether Dick got down with Jane because Dick is her biggest patron on her Only Fans account. Black people will be looking for a brighter day because the revolution left their businesses looted and ransacked. The revolution will be hashtagged, contact traced, surveilled, scanned, barcoded, sanitized, searched, unmasked, leaked, deep faked, socially constructed and socially distant. There will be highlights on Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, The View, SNL, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Meet the Press. There won’t be pictures of Antifa throwing bricks or pipe bombs, but there will be photos of pro-2A citizens because those are the people you really have to worry about. There will be a powerful post by Billie Eilish and Greta Thunberg denouncing the usage of #AllLivesMatter and in support of veganism to combat the #ClimateCrisis. The theme song will be written by John Legend and Justin Timberlake and sung by Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katy Perry and Lizzo. The revolution will be right back after a message about white privilege, white supremacy, and how white people just need to use their power to be better allies. You will have to worry about Alexa in your bedroom, a surveillance drone above your park, and robotic police dog in your neighborhood. The revolution will not go better with Coke, but it will go better with Pepsi. The revolution will not put you in the driver’s seat, but you can call an Uber. The revolution will be livestreamed, tweeted, posted, and retweeted. The revolution will be screencapped, brothers. Because nothing is live.
One of the ways you know that Marxism is a social engineering tool of global capitalism is seeing how it is implemented in burgeoning market economies. The coronation of Parasite by the Hollywood establishment can be seen as definitive proof that South Korea’s middle class is ripe for some bourgeois class warfare chic.
Capitalism in South Korea is so oppressive, our heroic proles must connive and grift their way into the good graces of some affluent dolts just to avoid living in their fumigated urban urinal. Apparently, Bong Joon-ho doesn’t just want us to overlook the criminality in the Kim family’s ingratiation of the Park family. He wants us to see Ki-taek’s bloody revenge and exile as heroic because the rich people they’ve exploited are so vapid and clueless, they deserved it. If you’re poor, you’re not bound to any moral standards if you’re getting cheddar from your bourgeoisie patrons. Sounds like a perfect recipe for destabilizing the underclass and fomenting divisions. Look how well it’s worked out here.
There are some interesting details which foreshadowed Coronachan and the coming biometric police state. The Kim family were able to get the Park family housekeeper fired by creating the illusion that Moon Gwang was suffering from tuberculosis. In their infinite suffering at the hands of the capitalist pig dogs, the Kims used their mobile devices to coordinate a way to inflame Moon Gwang’s allergies to peach fuzz, stage a photo at the hospital, and perfectly time her coughing fit so that it was visible to the Park family matriarch. It’s the kind of skill and coordination one would expect from people who were trained in psychological operations. Not necessarily a skill set you’re likely to encounter amongst the urban poor, but whatever man.
And of course, the pinnacle of economic achievement is when the proles embrace their own servitude by using the tools of mass surveillance against one another. When Moon Gwang discovers the Kim family’s con, she is able to subdue them by threatening to send the incriminating camera phone video to the Parks.
Also, it’s worth noting that the evidence of the Park family patriarch’s elitism and detachment was his revulsion to Ki-taek’s odor. This was the final indignity that set him off in the bloody climax. Bong Joon-ho seems to think this sentiment is the sole province of the out of touch upper class bourgeoisie, but this is also exactly what Peter Strzok said about Trump supporters in the declassified texts between him and Lisa Page. The ruling class attitude is certainly not defined exclusively by the size of your bank account.
Parasite is another example of a film whose merits as pure cinema make the editorial go down easier. Bong Joon-ho knows how to make a movie. It’s just unfortunate that he’s chosen to apply his gifts to the propagation of such a dubious message. Now, why aren’t the wokescolds giving him shit for the heinous crime of cultural appropriation of Native American headdresses? I guess it’s ok as long as it’s used to advance revolutionary goals.
The Netflix “documentary” is a dubious phenomenon and perhaps even an oxymoron. If Netflix’s partnership with the Obamas doesn’t send up a red flag over their institutional priorities, then I suppose you’re exactly the target demo for their products. That said, it doesn’t mean that they’re not well made or devoid of interesting content. As long as you go into it knowing you’re getting an approved narrative, there’s still value to be gleaned.
American Anarchist is William Powell’s look back on his manifesto of paramilitary sedition, The Anarchist Cookbook. The Cookbook has gained infamy for being an alleged inspiration for every atrocity from Columbine to the Oklahoma City bombing. In addition to its white hot revolutionary rhetoric, it has instructions for everything from homemade surveillance and explosives to hallucinogens and firearms. Charlie Siskel spends the entire film acting like some kind of puritanical grand inquisitor trying to extract penance and contrition from Powell.
What’s perhaps most interesting is that Charlie Siskel has assumed the mantle of the pious, reformed nu-Left of the post-Obama world. Where yesterday’s radicals openly embraced revolutionary violence, today’s version doesn’t necessarily need to resort those tactics anymore. They have institutional power. They’re running the universities, the media and Silicon Valley. And most importantly, they run all the major metropolitan areas. Sure, you’ve got some Bernie bros who like to larp as neo-Bolshevik “revolutionaries” in their local Antifa chapter. But now that Coronachan has been rolled out, the necessity for that kind of controlled opposition has likely run its course.
Speaking of controlled opposition, this brings me to my central thesis about Powell, the Cookbook and this film. I suggest that the Cookbook was intentionally released as a long range psychological operation in order to infiltrate and coopt opposition groups. If the subversion and psychological warfare deployed in other countries described by spooks like Miles Copeland Sr. are applicable to the dawn of the counterculture in the US, then it’s entirely reasonable that Powell’s book was part of that long range effort.
Why do I believe that? Because Powell fits the pattern we find in a significant majority of the academic, celebrity and revolutionary class. He is a child of the global establishment. His father, William Charles Powell, was director of the Press and Publications Division [emphasis mine] of the U.N. Office of Public Information. But he was rebelling against his father, you dumb conspiratard! Exactly. Rebellion against the establishment was and is the pathway to the eventual conquest of the establishment. Do you think for one minute that a stooge like Bernie Sanders was ever serious about his “revolution”? Of course not. But man! Did that shit ever go over like gangbusters with the kids! For two election cycles no less!
The two questions that were largely unexplored in the documentary were the Constitutionality of the Cookbook as well as its historical connection to the revolutionary ethos of the founders of the United States.
We now know beyond a shadow of doubt that the Left doesn’t give a single shit about the First Amendment. It applies to their unlimited exercise of speech, but the rest of us can pound sand. Anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of the 60’s knows that the sanctity of free speech was at the center of the Left’s civil disobedience crusade. If we’re to adopt the naive assumption that the Bill of Rights is still universal and inviolable and Marbury v. Madison is a legitimate decision, then the SCOTUS precedent regarding the 1A we must honor is the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision. Is The Anarchist Cookbook “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or is it “likely to incite or produce such action”?
Good question. I’m not a constitutional scholar, but it seems like it is.
However, if we take the case that the Cookbook is unconstitutional, then doesn’t that put us at odds with the revolutionary ethos of the Declaration of Independence itself? Isn’t an instruction manual culled from military field manuals exactly the kind of material to which your citizens are entitled if “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” a tyrannical government?
Another good question. It seems like it is.
It also casts doubt on a purely libertarian worldview which places negative liberty as the highest virtue. There’s simply nothing that binds anyone to the Non-Aggression Principle when generic liberty is placed at the apex of the value scale. Objective moral truth and virtue must be paramount.
So if we have material that’s potentially unconstitutional, yet at the same time, completely consistent with the revolutionary ethos of the country’s foundation, what appeal remains for the paleoconservative, reactionary, or run of the mill law and order civic nationalist?
Even if there is a proper secular response to this question, I suspect we’re past the point of having a mature discussion about it in the political arena.
The Trump presidency has precipitated a period of massive upheaval and transformation in the progressive establishment. Setting aside the spasms of selective outrage, acts of political sabotage and the reflexive posture of juvenile recalcitrance that define its outward manifestation, one of the most significant developments of the past few years has been the public deposition and crucifixion of one of its most revered patron saints: Harvey Weinstein. Woke revisionists will cast him down the memory hole as a relic of a bygone era, but there is simply no denying the vaunted position he once held in the progressive power structure. Measured in Hollywood terms, he was nothing short of a King Midas. When his name was invoked by the most admired celebrities at every awards ceremony, it was spoken with gushing praise, gratitude and affection. If it weren’t on the Obama White House archive channel, there’s little doubt in my mind that YouTube’s content monitors would scrub every last bit of footage of that time Michelle Obama publicly thanked him and called him a “wonderful human being” in 2013.
The story of the downfall of Harvey Weinstein is fascinating for a number of reasons. Not the least of which being that Hollywood celebrities enjoy a tacit immunity from public scrutiny and an unearned mantle of moral authority. Hollywood never hesitates to arouse moral indignation with its films, shows and documentaries, but it never seems to train its camera eye inwards. They’ll have us believe that the real predators, hypocrites, racists, dumbshits and deceivers are out there in flyover country wearing MAGA hats or are simply white men who have conservative views. Never the woke beautiful people who wear Versace on the red carpet and gush over Billy Porter’s gender neutral outfit. LOL. As if, amirite?! While the feminist wing of the woke intelligentsia has been ginning up outrage over sexual assault on college campuses for years, sexual predation in Hollywood wasn’t even part of the public discourse prior to Harveygate. Given all these things, you’d think that Ronan Farrow’s account of his attempt to bring the Harvey Weinstein story into the light, Catch and Kill, would be one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism in the modern era.
It may be, but there are reasons to be suspicious of it as well.
Since the Weinstein revelations have come to light, Hollywood and the progressive establishment have adopted a very strident posture of would-be piety and puritanism around the issue of sexual assault. Female celebrities virtue signal their manufactured solidarity with matching gowns while the men dutifully don their #TimesUp pin on their lapels. The woke Twitter brigade immediately went to work deploying facile hashtag slogans like #MeToo and #BelieveWomen. In other words, hashtag slogans that are meant to be construed in one narrow rigidly politicized niche. As the current indifference towards Tara Reade’s allegations amply demonstrates, allegations of sexual assault are to be accorded automatic credibility except if the perpetrator is a Democrat.
While one would hope that people like Rose McGowan, Annabella Sciorra, Mira Sorvino and the numerous others who’ve suffered from Weinstein’s predatory behavior would take some kind of comfort in his conviction, the Hollywood establishment has weaponized Weinstein’s downfall in a way that feels completely calculated. Herein lies my fundamental beef with Farrow’s account. Something about it smells fishy.
Though Farrow certainly deserves credit for bringing this story to light, we must first consider that he is not a politically neutral actor nor is he an outsider who’s trying to bring the whole system crashing down. Farrow is a progressive establishmentarian through and through. Besides his elite pedigree, he worked in the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Specifically, under the tutelage of Richard Holbrooke and CIA veteran, Frank Archibald. He is engaged to former Obama speechwriter, Jon Lovett. His former employer, NBC, is known mostly for its cozy relationship to the national security complex. When one takes into account the various voices throughout the network, they can hardly be considered an unbiased platform when it comes to their reporting.
With credentials like these, one must consider the possibility that he is a controlled asset and this entire affair is and has been stage managed to some extent to serve a larger agenda. Specifically, to propagandize the media establishment itself as a self-policing entity. As a person who is intimately familiar with the tactics of the progressive establishment, one of ways they maintain ideological fidelity is by using journalism as a limited hangout. First and foremost, they are able to normalize corruption and deviant behavior within their own ranks. Second, they are able to affect a pretense of transparency and reform while casting aspersions on the political opposition. By selectively exposing and purging the corruption within their own ranks, they are able to maintain a posture of self-reflection and resume the daily business of opportunistically politicized outrage. Farrow proves himself exceptionally skillful at this task throughout the book.
How’s Jussie Smollett, Ronan?
Farrow tips his hand early on. He begins by rehearsing the manufactured outrage of now infamous Billy Bush/Trump exchange that was spiked by Farrow’s employer, NBC. Farrow describes this fumble as a loss of “one of the most important election stories in a generation”. (p. 6) Right away, Farrow has poisoned the well in two key ways. He reinforces what is now considered definitive proof of Trump’s moral turpitude while he simultaneously presents NBC’s journalistic malpractice as equal opportunity. We’re to believe that the top brass of NBCUniversal were just as skittish about going after Trump as they were a powerful progressive like Harvey Weinstein. Sure, Ronan.
The pattern continues throughout the book. Events are framed in such a way as to subtly reinforce progressive articles of faith. Every good story needs villains, and aside from Weinstein himself, Farrow sets up Phil Griffin and Noah Oppenheim as the unscrupulous stooges who were instrumental in spiking his story. While I don’t dispute that this is consistent with factual record, it is awfully convenient that the anecdotes Farrow chooses to use to illustrate their dubious moral character correspond perfectly with standard progressive bromides. Griffin has no compunction about airing a selectively edited segment with Gwen Stefani which made her sound ambiguous on vaccines (pgs. 176-177). Can’t have the proles getting any weird notions about vaccines, can we? But how about that dirty Phil Griffin? Imagine him being so cavalier as to permit a selectively edited clip of Gwen Stefani to air which might give people a….God forbid….different opinion on vaccinations. What a science hating degenerate. This is NBC not Infowars, Phil! The last thing we need right now anti-vaccine propaganda!
Farrow offers up another story about Noah Oppenheim which casts him in an equally dubious light. In Oppenheim’s case, it’s even worse because as writer for the Harvard Crimson, he had the temerity to…..wait for it…..mock feminists. The horror. What a terrible piece of shit, that Noah Oppenheim. Clearly, someone who mocks feminists would be exactly the kind of misogynistic dirtbag who would spike a story which exposed a serial predator like Harvey Weinstein. Only bad people mock feminists. Very bad. Bad Noah Oppenheim.
Tell us about Gloria Steinem’s stint with the CIA, Ronan.
The ultimate destruction of Farrow’s credibility is found on page 19. When describing the collusive relationship between Dylan Howard, The National Enquirer and Donald Trump, Farrow weaves together a patchwork of references which paint the perennial cliché that political conservatism is the sole province of sensationalism, corruption and unhinged conspiracy mongering. There’s a safe containing secret dirt on Trump. There’s a conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father’s link to the JFK assassination which was purportedly advanced by Roger Stone. And there are those “sycophantic” headlines which painted Trump favorably and highlight Hillary Clinton’s “supposed treachery”. Because the media establishment are never sycophants when it comes to progressive politicians. Right, Ronan?
Got that, conservatards? Her supposed treachery. The predations of Harvey Weinstein would never have come to light if not for the fearless reporting of Ronan Farrow, but somehow, this allegedly unbiased alumnus of Hillary Clinton’s State Department didn’t have an ounce of curiosity around his former boss. Either that, or we’re to take his claim at face value because he’s obviously a brave and scrupulous man. She did ostracize him for pursuing this story, after all. I mean, he believed Meryl Streep when she claimed that she had no knowledge of Harvey’s predations. Meryl was totally oblivious.
Right.
Despite the book’s presumed focus on the Weinstein revelations, Farrow revisits this entire guilt by association tactic by revisiting Dylan Howard and his loyalty to Trump. The title of the book is a reference to the manner in which publications would buy a story only to bury it. Farrow has the absolute gall to assert that the Enquirer is uniquely guilty of spiking unfavorable coverage of Trump in order to sway an election. As if Silicon Valley, the entire mainstream media complex, academia and Hollywood weren’t all in the tank for one party. What a joke.
There are other reasons to believe that this book is a stage managed psyop and a highly refined piece of propaganda. Weinstein hired agents from Black Cube, a private intelligence firm which employed former Mossad operatives. Farrow eventually received help from a Deep Throat-style informant from within the agency who leaked the details of Black Cube’s contract with Harvey Weinstein. Their assignment was to prevent the release of Farrow’s piece and any subsequent harm to Weinstein’s reputation. Because private intelligence operations often operate outside the law, and their assignment from Harvey Weinstein was both illegal and amoral, it sure makes Black Cube, and private intelligence agencies in general, seem like pretty bad actors.
Farrow poisons the well even further by recounting the efforts of Black Cube operatives working on behalf of the……wait for it…….TRUMP ADMINISTRATION to spike the Iran nuclear deal that was struck by the angelic Obama administration. So remember, proles. Just because this makes Harvey Weinstein and his progressive cohorts look really bad, always remember that there are people that prop up these dirtbags who are even worse. After all, they also work for Blumpffft.
But wait! Isn’t it true that Ronan Farrow got help from a Black Cube informant? They can’t be all that bad if they helped brave and intrepid Ronan Farrow. If it weren’t for Sleeper1973, we might never have known the extent of Weinstein’s misdeeds!
Right?
This is exactly why I believe this book is ultimately a sophisticated piece of propaganda. As Anthony Sutton and numerous others have revealed, intelligence operatives thrive precisely because they are able to pit groups against one another through carefully controlled dialectics. Through the deliberate deployment of a left/right paradigm in perpetual conflict, intelligence operatives are able to manipulate public opinion and cultural consensus. I believe that like every other espionage novel or film, clandestine operations are cast as both heroes and villains.
Seen from this perspective, Catch and Kill confirms several very powerful insights about the real machinery of power behind the global progressive establishment. The primary one being that this is a class of people who are completely amoral and have weaponized morality purely for the purposes of manipulating public opinion. The entire system seems upheld through private surveillance, sexual blackmail and NDA’s.
The chances that Catch and Kill has reformed Hollywood in a meaningful way are minimal to nonexistent. They’ve certainly ramped up their virtue signaling and doubled down on the fake piety, but has this book fundamentally changed the culture of Hollywood? I’m going with No.
Ronan Farrow’s account has the appearance of a brave and principled piece of investigative journalism. Perhaps it is. Given that the very media establishment that allegedly blacklisted him after going to the New Yorker with the Weinstein story have heartily embraced him and showered him with glowing coverage and awards, what are the chances they tacitly sanctioned this entire release from the start? I’m going with High Probability.
The day they blew out the brains of the king Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise Right there in front of everyone’s eyes Greatest magic trick ever under the sun Perfectly executed, skillfully done Wolfman, oh wolfman, oh wolfman howl Rub-a-dub-dub, it’s a murder most foul
“Murder Most Foul”, Bob Dylan
When Bob Dylan released a cryptic 17 minute track detailing the JFK assassination during a worldwide pandemic, I couldn’t help but find it damn curious. Perhaps even an ill omen. I also thought it was a good time to revisit Oliver Stone’s 1991 treatment of the same subject, JFK.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way first. Not only is it one of Oliver Stone’s best films, it’s one of the best conspiracy thrillers ever made. Everyone is bringing their A game. Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones are both brilliant as gay CIA operatives. Pesci’s final paranoid freakout is my personal favorite moment in all his films. The appearances of Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are casting masterstrokes. It’s also a tour de force of editing. The way he’s able to weave the historical footage with the reinventions is absolutely masterful. I’d say it’s one of Costner’s finest cinematic moments too. When Jim Garrison delivers that final speech in the courtroom, it’s some stirring shit.
Now on to the meatier questions.
Is this film is disclosure or propaganda? Or both? I’m going with both. You have to be an absolute dolt to think that the Warren Commission report is the definitive word on the JFK assassination. I don’t know exactly what happened that day, but Stone’s account seems plausible. The way the film shows how intelligence operatives work in the world via private investigators, controlled opposition groups, and shell companies is especially revelatory.
The propaganda lies in the mythologizing of Kennedy as this game changing disruptor of the permanent power structure in Washington. Whether it’s the film’s claim that he wanted to dismantle the clandestine operations complex and end imperial intervention abroad, his alleged intention to return the US dollar to the gold standard, or his public denunciations of secret societies, the mythology of JFK as the Great Liberal Messiah is the part that I have difficulty accepting.
If it’s true that he was set up to be a Liberal Messiah, and his assassination was meant to be a sort of public crucifixion, then all Stone is doing is presenting the Kennedy mythology with the curtain pulled back a little more than usual. It’s worth noticing that Garrison unironically referred to Kennedy as “King”. That kind of deference is the province of the traditional Christian worldview. Not the secular, post-Enlightenment democratic worldview.
If that’s true, then what can we surmise about the hidden power structure that carried out this coup?
It suggests to me that these shadow elites have an esoteric worldview. Luciferian even. Why would you traumatize millions of people by publicly executing their president? Perhaps because it represents a sort of mass initiation or sacrament of violence. As Bob Dylan ominously proclaims, “The age of the Antichrist has just only begun”.
By making a martyr of JFK, I’d argue that it served to sanctify liberalism as the New Testament of the Aquarian Age. The irony is that the optimism, patriotism, and unabashed Americanism one would find in embodied in the JFK presidency devolved into militant radicalism, decadence and cynicism in the subsequent years.
This is ultimately what makes Oliver Stone’s film such an anachronism. Is there any doubt that Garrison’s final speech is a proxy for the kind of bygone liberal idealism that Stone himself espouses?
That brings us to what I believe is the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the film and, by extension, the entire liberal democratic project. Garrison sacrificed everything to pursue the truth of what happened on November 22, 1963. Not just “his truth” or a “relative truth”, but The Truth. As progeny of the great American experiment, we’re all taught to believe in the virtues of civic engagement. This entails a robust knowledge of our history, Constitution and the way our civic institutions operate. It also entails valuing the idea that there are fixed principles and moral truths on which the proper functioning of these documents and institutions depend.
But how much does the modern liberal establishment really value the idea that there is Ultimate Truth? When modern progressives insist that biological sex is a social construct and skepticism of an autistic teenager means you’re a science denying bigot, I find their credibility lacking. I’d even argue that Garrison’s idealism has metastasized into a smug sanctimony. The ones who seem the most credulous towards the pronouncements of the intelligence community and the most contemptuous of conspiracy theories are often liberals.
The assassination of JFK was one of the most consequential and controversial events of the 20th century. If you are even remotely skeptical of the Warren Commission report, then you have to concede that there was at its core, a conspiracy. This means that there are highly resourced, highly coordinated hidden powers that do not give a single fuck about “democracy”. Garrison’s speech was awesome, but it’s just pollyanna horseshit for normies if the real rulers of the world can grease JFK in public and wipe away the evidence.
So what can we speculate about Bob Dylan releasing a track about the JFK assassination during a global lockdown?
I’m not sure I even want to go there, and I hope to God my worst assumptions are wrong.
Is there a modern artist whose personal life, public persona and artistic ambitions create more psychic dissonance than Miles Davis? Bob Dylan, Liz Taylor and Elvis would probably qualify, but Miles Davis certainly tops my list for being the one guy whose mystique, flaws and artistry captured the public imagination in an unprecedented way.
If you’ve read Miles’ autobiography, you won’t learn anything new about the man or his career. Regardless, it’s a serviceable synopsis of his life and achievement.
Unfortunately, you do have to endure some of the standard woke talking points that are mandatory these days. To be fair, it’s mostly present in his autobiography in the first place (i.e. wypipo bad except for French hipsters), but there are times when it felt like Stanley Nelson was intentionally emphasizing certain moments in order to maximize the virtue signal. Naturally, the film lingers on the infamous assault he suffered at the hands of a belligerent and #RACIST cop in 1959 while simply trying to enjoy a smoke.
Apparently, Miles never quite recovered from that incident psychologically and he carried a chip on his shoulder from that moment forward. As Farah Griffin reminds all of us privileged wypipo, it just doesn’t matter how successful a man becomes if he’s black. He’s forever forced to contend with a system that’s rigged against him. Never mind all of the wypipo who helped propel Davis’ career into the stratosphere. Nope. None of that counts. And that’s why you should snicker at Miles’ badassery when he tells Columbia executives to get that “white bitch” off the cover of Miles Ahead. Good for Miles that he got the album cover he wanted, but it’s apparently too much to expect that a consistent standard be applied to everyone when it comes to disparaging remarks made about people who are in the racial out group.
As a piece of American cultural legacy building, the contradictions in Davis’ body of work are especially thorny. The film opens with a quote from the autobiography. He recounts the occasion he saw Bird and Diz playing together in 1944 and described it as the most fun he had “with my clothes on”. There’s another piece that I haven’t yet sourced which refers to the necessity for “change” in artistry. I’m not saying it’s inauthentic, but it does place Davis’ work at odds with the idea that jazz is an American tradition. A tradition is something that is conserved. If it’s constantly changing, then what are you conserving?
This brings us to the now predictable schism between Classic Cool Jazz Miles versus Freaky Hippie Psychedelic Miles. Some version of this debate has been alive since at least the time of the release of In a Silent Way. Where Ken Burns fully ceded the debate to the more conservative Wynton Marsalis/Stanley Crouch perspective, Nelson only gives Crouch a cursory moment to rebut Miles’ embrace of the electric frontier. With a stunningly elitist quote by Carlos Santana, Nelson makes it clear that Miles’ demolition of the tradition was central to his artistic genius.
While I remain sympathetic to Miles’ electric innovations, I think Nelson’s full capitulation to the evolutionary ethos in artistry is foolhardy. Miles’ electric innovations had an impact because there was still a residual perception of an actual jazz tradition. As much as the modernists affect a pretense of being brought into subjection by a Crouch/Marsalis Jazz Politburo, they have long prevailed in this debate. The question is how much room is there for the traditionalist perspective at this point in history?
The Classic Cool Miles of the 50s and early 60s did represent a cultural high water mark. Not just for jazz, but for American culture, modern art, and to a certain extent, manhood itself. There was something dignified and romantic about that music. As a cultural role model, I’d wager that the stylish, virtuoso jazz musician represented a better aspirational ideal than say Lil Wayne.
As a husband and a man, Davis was less than exemplary. Naturally, he fulfilled the fantasy of the profligate male celebrity who gets to have lots of beautiful women. It is interesting that when he wanted domestic traditionalism from Frances Davis, it meant asking her to abandon her career. It may just be a commentary on the ways celebrity itself is at odds with true domestic stability, but Nelson and Wayne Shorter seemed intent on hitting feminist talking points when describing her discontent with the role of housewife.
Jazz is regarded as a uniquely American art form and Davis’ contributions to the form are undeniable. Like Bob Dylan, people argue over which version of Miles is the true representation and which is the fake. This documentary won’t settle that debate, but it’s a decent summary of one of America’s most captivating artists.
Samizdat 