Chapo Trap House - 624 - Valhalla Whining (5/2/22)

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Fighting suppression from Joe Brandon’s Ministry of Truth, the boys go berserker to bravely take on the dual enemies of Dark MAGA and reactionary article-slingers who dare ask, “are all films actually fash?”

Greetings, friends. It's Chapo Monday, May 2nd. Hello, gang. We're back again. And the show is still continuing despite the fact that we are being censored by Elon Musk and we are now being censored by Joe Brandon's official government board of Ministry of Truth in 1984. Can you believe it, fellas? They've gone and made 1984 the year. It's no longer 2022. It's 1984, like George Orwell predicted. It's 1984 again. His dystopian novel The Future of 1984 is now the present that we live in thanks to Joe Brandon and his Ministry of Truth. Yeah, the new Minister of Truth is a Polish woman. So she accidentally did 1488. Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen much about the Ministry of Truth other than people

talking about the 1984 parallels, the Ministry of Truth. I mean, this is just mainly set up to combat disinformation and stuff and Russian election narratives and stuff like that. But I don't know. I mean, you could obviously complain about this is the kind of shit Joe Brandon is doing instead of forgiving student loans or whatever. But no, this is exactly who the people... He is delivering, but he's delivering to the people who vote for and care about the Democratic Party. This is their priorities, not forgiving student loans. It's combating misinformation on Twitter because, you know, it's a huge problem out there. So many people, millions of people don't know whether they're talking to robots

or not all day long. And the Ministry of Truth is going to let you know, are you speaking to a robot or a real human being? It's running a Turing test on all of Twitter to make sure that everything is true out there. I mean, I just don't see how this department could do anything. I mean, if it does actually do anything, it's absolutely horrifying. So the only thing that it can do is like make slideshows about how to identify disinformation. At the very worst, what it'll do is there'll be a government department that quote retweets you with not a good look instead of just somebody who roots for the government. I mean, the scary response to quote unquote disinformation has already happened. It's

like consortium news and shit getting banned from PayPal and getting taken off Facebook. It's like the slowly expanding vague mandate that only three social media platforms have to just root out anything that goes against the Atlantic Council or APAC. So it kind of reminds me of like great research. It already happened. This, if anything, is sort of reassuring because it shows that there are still a ton of people doing this that absolutely suck. This lady who did like a musical Harry Potter erotica thing, this is kind of who you want in charge of censorship, like a fucking boob like this. Is that true about the erotic Harry Potter musical?

She sang this song where like Harry Potter eats her pussy in a bathroom. This is not misinformation. She calls it an egg, which like gives me a lot of questions about female anatomy. It's like the older I get, the less I know. Okay. Okay. Okay. We need a fact check on this disinformation right here. The head of the Ministry of Truth was in a erotic Harry Potter theme musical in which Harry Potter eats her pussy, which he refers to as an egg. Yeah, I could be misreading that. See, this is what this agency is being tasked with, stopping out this sort of misinformation. I mean, I guess like once a month, the pussy is kind of like an egg. It has a wonderful

like gooey thing in there that we all want. It's like the only time of the month that like, just like how it's the only part of the egg everyone really likes. It's the only part of the pussy I really like. I think you're thinking of a kinder egg, Felix. You're thinking that has like a treat in it, has a little toy. So do regular eggs, the yellow part. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's just I personally think disinformation and misinformation is like the funnest part about social media. Yeah, it's just spreading, spreading, spreading misinformation is basically the funnest thing to do on social media. And you know, I just, we need, we need, we need better, we need better disinformation out there because this

birds aren't real shit is not cutting it for me. It sucks. Those guys run 60 minutes last night. Pathetic. Birds aren't real are like jib jab for the, for, for like the post truth era. Yes. So like the joke with that is like it's making fun of conspiracy theories. Yeah. But like QAnon people believe they like astrally project into each other's dreams and kill each other. Yeah. Like you can't really parody the real thing. Like the real things already funny. They believe like a homeless, like a harmonica player or I don't even know what he does is, is the son of the dead president who died. Yeah. No. Donald Trump is president and his right hand man is a guy who lives in his car.

Yeah. You cannot top that. I did think that this, like you said, that this whole thing is about pleasing the constituents, you know, people who care about the democratic party and think the only problem we have as a country is people that just have too much darn misinformation. If they had the real information, they'd know everything is fine and they would support Brandon, but of course it won't do anything at the same time though. It does. I mean, it really does get everybody. It's, it's a great four quadrant program for everybody who still loves the news because now all of the Republicans get to feel finally like it's 1984 and that they're repressed. And so they'll, the, the, the branded people will get to fantasize

that there's some misinformation bureau out there cleaning up the internet. And those people get to pretend that they're in the fucking white rows in Germany in 1944. And in reality, yeah, they will just like be posting out fucking infographics. That will be the, the entirety of it. Yeah. And like to my original point, like the, the, the most committed democratic voters, the people who are really like hype to show up in the midterms, they do not want any student loan relief. They can't stand the idea of it. Like they're, they're, they're sickened by it. So, but, but this, the ministry of truth, this is, this speaks to a direct concern

in their life, which is, are, am I talking to a robot or not? Or M or M or other people making fun of me, secretly Russian agents. This is, this is a top concern for them. But I gotta say, those birds aren't real people. I know it's all just a joke to them, but it's not a very funny joke. And I would like to personally just arrange an encounter between these dorks and a shoe bill stork and just have, just to just have this giant gaping maw just fix itself around their skull. And then, and then we'll see, then we'll see who's laughing about if our birds real or not. No, they're real as fuck asshole. That's a shoe bill, like ever attacked a person.

Well, I mean, God, I mean, you look at those fucking things and you got to assume that's the case. Maybe they just look scared. Okay. How about this? Cassowary? Cassowaries definitely have attacked people. They, they could, they could gut you easily with their dinosaur feet. Which bird is the cassowary? A cassowary is a flightless bird. Oh, it's got like, it's basically got the feet of a velociraptor. Yeah. It has huge, huge talents and like, and one, it's like a velociraptor has one particularly

giant, you know, sort of claw and they go straight for your gut and they're, they're quite aggressive. So, I mean, as someone would say, they're the realest bird of all, the cassowary. So, but it's flightless. It's flightless. Yeah. So like, if you had the jump on it, you could just punt it like a fucking football. They're pretty big. They're pretty big.

What are these, what are these, what are these birds aren't real guys? Just kill all these beloved rare birds. Then who's going to be sorry? I would fight a cassowary if I had like some sort of like a great shield, you know, like a shield of some kind that I could protect my, my abdomen with. Then, then, then things would get real for the cassowary and not. Yeah. I would have to grind my strength. I've currently just been killing like pigeons and sparrows

that said my apartment. And I think like once my boys gets high enough, probably next week, I can take on a cassowary. You have to, you have to farm for a little bit until you get to the, the shield boss. But anyway, so that's the, that's the ministry of truth. I mean, hopefully, hopefully it'll make all our, all our experience of online better. But to kick off today's show, I wanted to just sort of continue a little bit of a conversation that we had last week on Thursday show about the new, new post-post right wing in this country.

And this is an article that comes courtesy of Newsweek that is seeking to explain the latest phenomenon on the online post everything right that is known as dark MAGA. It's MAGA, but it's dark. And this is the cool new aesthetic that the online right is at least some, some, some sectors of, I would say that this is responding to these same things in the Vanity Fair article, but like the proponents of this are a little bit, a little bit further downstream. And you know, this is a cool new aesthetic and you'll never, you'll never guess what it is.

Would it surprise you if I, if I told you that dark MAGA basically, okay, like unlike previous forms of MAGA, this envisions Trump as sort of like an Adolf Hitler or Napoleon and seeks to share memes of him where his eyes are glowing with, with, with red light. Whoa. There's like, there's nothing new in this, but like, like this is, isn't this just like what the vapor wave shit was like six years ago? There's like nothing new. I don't like, I don't give a shit if, if the new thing were like killing me personally,

I wouldn't care so long as it was like something that I hadn't seen before. If like the new memes of like any political affiliation was just posting my exact GPS coordinates and like blowing me up with a pipe bomb, as long as it wasn't like exit, like like the article last week, you know, which was just, that was just NRX. Like if it was just any new people or new things. The dark enlightenment. Yeah. If it was like a kill Felix enlightenment, I'd be like, well, no one's done that before.

Okay. I mean, well, dark MAGA is sort of like the dark counter enlightenment, you know? I mean, they're, they're, they're reaching back here. And courtesy of Newsweek, it says, a small fringe of Donald Trump supporters is calling for the former president to get back on the highest stage of US politics with a vengeance, with the motto, dark MAGA. More of a meme than a political slogan, dark MAGA is a post alt right aesthetic that promotes an authoritarian version of Trump in dystopian terminator like images.

In some, the Trump tower is painted entirely black and the former president is seen piercing through the screen with blue laser eyes. I guess a blue laser eyes would be the new part of this aesthetic because usually they're red. So like, do they, is that like, they mean that they want like Trump to make that part of his slogan, dark MAGA? I think that they're just like, okay, like, I mean, that's an article like I seeks to explain it.

It's like, it's just, it's just the latest iteration of the kind of thwarted hopes and dreams of the MAGA movement and the way that they've tried to metabolize losing a presidential election and their fantasies of, you know, the very real possibility that Trump could be president again. And like now, I mean, like this is exactly like everyone was talking about, you got to wait for second term Obama. You got to wait for like, you know, Trump to return from exile, and then he's really going to drain the swamp and like, you know, do violence to all of the enemies who, you

know, slighted him or took, took away his presidency from him. Yeah. Hamburger party was the compromise. This is like, this is, it should, it seems like if we were like in 2020, like Bernie, this time we got it. I know, I like, I know it seems like maybe, uh, South Carolina was a roadblock, Super Tuesday is not looking great. What if you, like, what if you made the symbol of your campaign gritty?

Well, I mean, like, yeah, or just, or, or, or guillotines, you get some guillotines going. Yeah. Not bad. Uh, news week continues. The aesthetics of the movement are easily recognizable. Images edited in red and black or red and blue, featuring people with blue laser eyes often holding weapons or standing in front of neo-Nazi symbols. Dark MAGA supporters are calling for a ruthless, unforgiving version of Trump to take revenge

on his political enemies at the 2024 election. Though the movement hasn't been recognized or endorsed by Trump in any form, the former president hasn't even formally confirmed whether he'll run for president in 2024. In the description of the dark MAGA hashtag creator, as described by the global network on extremism and technology, dark MAGA represents Napoleon being exiled, then raising a fucking army to attack Europe and to attack elites. Dark MAGA is exactly what Trump is like. He's like Napoleon.

He's exactly the same as him. I'd like, I assume for political enemies, like they obviously mean Democrats, but also like rhinos. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anyone who didn't let him overturn the election. Yeah. Trump, like, just forgave a political enemy.

He doesn't even know JD Vance's name and he's like, oh, I like him. Oh, yeah, that was interesting, like, hating me, hating me until like 2019. So yeah, when he was, when he, he said, uh, he's, he's endorsed JD Mandel. So he confused it. Like, are he sort of mashed them together like a Brindlefly thing, Josh Mandel and JD Vance, which I don't think was an error. I don't think, I think that was done on purpose. I think he wants to like basically endorse both of them and sort of cover his bases to

see because if any one of them wins, then he can take credit for it. But I think he'll just be like, oh, like, whoever wins, he'll say he endorsed them. But I think he's, he's intentionally flubbing it so he can cover both the Mandel and the Vance supporters. JD Vance got circumcised right after that, just in case. Bad news, Jewish JD. It's the realization that there is no political solution beyond vengeance tweets another user. If you want to win, if you don't want to repeat the past, you have to get mean.

You almost have to embrace the villain role they're bringing with you, describes another support or quoted by Jeanette. You know, this is, I mean, yeah, well, but in terms of like, you know, the aesthetic with the laser eyes and like the neo-Nazi symbolism and like, you know, like a trope brandishing some sort of golden sword to put, to smite his enemies or whatever. I think like this, this does, this does rhyme with last week's episode because like, you know, I know, I know the beliefs of these people and I guess like these are the ones who are willing to say what JD Vance or like Blake Masters like chooses to sort of shade

through innuendo. But I think you're really, you're doing it despite how, you know, poisonous or dangerous you may believe they're beliefs. So I think you're really doing these people a favor by talking about them in these like apocalyptic dangerous terms. Like they're like, because like, oh, they're like, they're villains, you know, they're the super villains of our society. And it's like, I mean, like, yeah, like, I certainly don't want to see the politics

that espouse a comter fruition, but I don't know. I mean, it's just like, I think these people want to be seen as villains and they want to be seen as frightening, you know, liberals and liberals want to see them that way. Like this is all once again, it's the same thing as the disinformation thing. This is serving every quadrant. It's getting everybody to feel validated. The dark maga people we get to feel like instead of the most pathetic losers on earth, they're the vanguard of a political movement and the people who want to scare themselves about

Trump all day instead of like looking at anything else, because there's nothing they can do about that other than just holler about Trump more, which is what they wanted to do anyway. This is great. It feeds their anxiety. I mean, it's, it's, it's a win-win. Everybody wins with this. Yeah. A lot of people are about to hit their heads and lose their Ukraine expertise and maybe

return to being extremism experts. Yeah. But yeah, like just the, this is sort of like a, I would say, you know, I was thinking about Thursday's show and I'd like to, you know, like I'd like to paraphrase a friend of ours, Cliff, who we were like, we were talking about this. And he said something that I think like we were all sort of trying to sort of grasping at trying to communicate. I think he summed it up quite eloquently when he said that like this sort of new, new post-post-right

and they're kind of like ominous fascist leanings or whatever is sort of like, and, you know, like, you know, if something smells like fascism, like I don't mind people talking about it or naming it as such, and this certainly does, but like, I don't think these people really want to wage some sort of like blood-soaked war for their American sea. Is there, I think they want to remove themselves from mainstream society and replace the institutions, not to destroy the institutions they're attacking, but to kind of replace them with institutions that they're totally in control of rather than like raising all of American society to the ground?

Yeah, because their lives depend on all those institutions. They have no other way of living. None of us do. That's why everyone is fucking paralyzed. Yeah, I mean, this is the grubhub country. We're not making new institutions. Continuing in the Dark Magga article, it says, uh, the Dark Magga idea of this glorious leader who has been punished and sent away, deposed and humiliated, and he needs to come

back with and harden his heart is a narrative that wouldn't be out of place like in games like Warhammer 40,000 or a Japanese anime, Squirrel says. Squirrel's one of the, um, he's the head of communications and editorial at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and it said, Dark Magga, according to Alice E. Marwick, associate professor of communication at the University of North Carolina and principal researcher at the Center for Information and Technology in Public Life, is an evolution of the feeling of disappointment and disenfranchisement that many Trump supporters have felt after the 2020 election.

So I mean, Dark Magga was born from the alt-rights feeling of having lost power and seeking to regain that power at any cost. Dark Magga posts are far from receiving the same kind of attention that brought similar sorts of political memes to become so relevant to the 2016 election, but in the next two years, things might change. So, yeah, I mean, things might change, but in the meantime, it's just everyone is stuck in just trying to discover a new aesthetic and a new meme. But you know, no one's really, uh, uh, taking back power or, like you said, threatening

the institutions that govern American life, or, I mean, I mean, it depends. I mean, like they're like, you know, the right wing in this country is, you know, currently trashing the threads that are left of our civilization, but I don't know, I mean, what do you guys think about this? I mean, is there any further thoughts on Thursday's discussion? No, I just, I think the same thing, that it's just going to be like a dance at increasingly short intervals of cultural swings until, like, something breaks. And I don't think that breaking point is like necessarily like armed civil war or nuclear

holocaust. I think it's attractive for people to think those things, whether it's like, you know, civil war fantasies on the right or fantasies of Americans specifically being wiped out by climate change in the next 50 years, they're all attractive to think because that means you don't have to reconcile with the fact that you're a first worlder and you have to live out the rest of your life and you have to figure out what that means. A breaking point could just mean it's the end of whatever this is that we've been doing for the last 30 or 40 years.

And I legitimately do not know what comes after that. I don't think that's, it necessarily means what comes next is better or worse. I mean, time will tell. But I certainly don't see anything that new. Well, this stuff tells quite nicely with our next election for this week. And, you know, we're talking about, you know, politics that seem fascist. Here's another thing that's fascist, movies. Movie mindset.

Is it a pipeline to white supremacy? Well, we're going to investigate. Yeah. So I don't think Dark Maga is fascist. I do think movies are, though, but that doesn't mean, I mean, I support them both. So this comes courtesy of The Guardian and, you know, like this kicked off a debate last week surrounding a certain movie that just came out. Robert Eggers, The Northman.

And the question is, is a movie that makes Vikings seem cool? Is that inherently fascist, or is the fact that certain unsavory characters are embracing this movie for nefarious reasons, does that mean the movie itself should be wholly condemned for accidentally inspiring evil in the world? I have some thoughts on The Northman. My thoughts are, like, if I were reviewing it for a newspaper and I didn't like it, I would say Eggers' gloomy Northman is sunny side down. Well, I was going to say here, I have seen The Northman, Felix, and Matt, have you seen

it? No. Yeah, I saw it. You saw, OK. So, yeah, Chris and I saw it. And I got to say, like, all this controversy over The Northman could have been avoided had Robert Eggers chosen to come on the show. But he didn't, and now, unfortunately, he's canceled, sis.

He is a white supremacist. And that's that on that. I mean, have you seen the guy's haircut? No. Just kidding. But we did ask Robert Eggers to come on the show, but unfortunately, they declined. But this is the Guardian article about The Northman. His headline is Norse Code.

Are white supremacists reading too much into The Northman? Robert Edgar's Viking blockbuster has already been hailed by white nationalists keen to exploit European mythology. Can Hollywood tell historical tales without unwittingly appealing to toxic ideologies? No. No. Yeah. Yeah.

No. Of course they can't. Yeah. I've seen Spy Kids. I've seen how that inspired Charlottesville. At the London premiere of The Northman in early April, the director Robert Eggers explained on stage how he was seeking to reclaim Viking history from right-wing groups. Many of these groups thrive on myths of an imagined European past, a time before racial

mixing or progressive politics, when men were mighty warriors and women were compliant child bearers. As Eggers told the Observer recently, such associations almost put him off making The Northman. The macho stereotype of that history, along with, you know, the right-wing misappropriation of Viking culture, made me sort of allergic to it, and I just never wanted to go there. Eggers has spoken of his scholarly research and commitment to getting Viking history right down to the smallest details, but as rigorous and accomplished as The Northman

is, it might in fact be the kind of movie the alt-right loves. The Northman's 10th century society appears to be uniformly white and firmly divided along patriarchal lines. Men do the ruling and the killing, women do the scheming and baby-making. Its hero, portrayed by Alexander Sarsgard, is not a million miles from the macho stereotype Eggers complained of, a brawny warrior who settles most disputes with a sword and without a shirt. So, having seen the movie, if Robert Eggers' intention was to make the macho bloodlust

of a Viking culture seem uncool and unappealing, then I have to say he has failed in that regard, because I thought it was very cool. I mean, I wouldn't want to live in 10th century Iceland, but, you know, watching it was cool as hell. Like, when they go Wolfman berserker mode and just massacre that whole village, when Chris and I saw the movie, I was nickel-sing knotting in the scene where they throw children into a barn and then set it on fire and lock the door. You know?

I mean, look, when they show you, like, you take mushrooms and turn into a wolf and then massacre a village, is it macho? Yes. Is it cool as hell? Also, yes. But that doesn't necessarily mean I would like to live in Viking times. You know? Like, and I think that is, honestly, like, if you think about Eggers' movies, like, leading

up to, like, I think, like, he, especially with the witch, but certainly in the lighthouse too. But, like, and now, definitely the Northman. I think he is very good at portraying the past like a totally different galaxy than the present and allowing the viewer to sort of experience the completely different ways of thinking with people in the past, like, that their subjective experience of reality was categorically different than anyone in a modern era can really, like, metabolize or understand.

And I thought his movies do a really good job of rendering that, which, you know, necessarily involves portraying a set of values and codes of behavior that are rather frightening or immoral to a modern audience. Continuing on, it says here, Sarsgard's love interest, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, could be the far-right male's dream woman, beautiful, fair-haired, loyal to her man, and committed to bearing his offspring. Even before the film's release, far-right voices were giving their approval on the anonymous message board site, 4chan.

Northman is a based movie, and I like that The Guardian puts in brackets next to based, agreeable, in case anyone wasn't familiar. Yeah, it should be taken out of theaters because 4chan guy said it's based. It says it's a based, agreeable movie, all-white cast, and shows pure raw masculinity. Robert Edwards, he is restoring pride in our people with his great films. The Northman is going to be epic, Hale Oden. So I mean, I guess this 4chan guy didn't even see the movie. He said it's going to be epic.

Is this like the only argument he has that like 4chan people were excited to see it? So Robert Nagers failed? It's like, it's a 4chan comment, and then I believe later in the article, he quotes like some sort of storm front account. This is just nothing. At any point, do they claim that like it'll help recruiting or anything? Or do they just say these people who are bad enjoy it? I think it's basically, yeah, that these people are bad who enjoy it.

And that's, I mean, that's very fitting because, you know, that is the future of politics, politics as entertainment is, as we've all said a million times, like everyone has given up in any fantasy even of things getting better, everyone kind of is bracing themselves for things getting worse with politics and the spectacle that we absorb politics through does offer the opportunity, the fantasy of our enemies, our ideological enemies, who we blame for things getting worse to be punished some way, to feel bad. And so things like what's a good movie boiled down to, will this movie make people that I dislike feel good when they watch it?

And if it does, that makes it a bad movie because the movies to be good should make people I don't like feel bad. If they make them feel good, if they provide them with like the basic pleasure that that filmed entertainment is supposed to provide, you know, a hypothetically apolitical audience, then that they have failed because they're not consciously provoking and undermining and upsetting the people we don't like. I mean, this is a this is a point our friend Andrew Hudson made about Robert Edgar's movies and particularly the Northman and The Witch.

But Edgar's as a director like he does he does choose material and I think he's very canny at portraying the kind of foundational myths of white people back to them in a very kind of both historically accurate, but kind of like brutal and upsetting way. And I think that's actually to a great his great credit as an artist and a filmmaker because, you know, like The Witch is basically about, you know, like the myths of like the founding of America, like the Puritan colonists in New England in the 17th century. And the Northman is just is is the myth that Hamlet is based on the way the way his films on like, you know, like channel the kind of like the myths and culture of European people

in the Americas and then in the distant past, like in the 10th century, which is when the North the Northman takes place. And it's a question of like, yeah, like, obviously, like the alt-right likes, you know, or neo-Nazis or whatever, like olden times, because they think it was like, you know, more hospitable to their point of view or would allow them they could have a sort of like a broad sword and a shield instead of like, you know, whatever bullshit job they're doing on the computer. But you know, I like it just like this is what this article goes. It's like it begins the question like, is any depiction of the past of like European

peoples in the past, is it like it would implies that it's inherently white supremacists continuing on in the article. It says on the face of it, some images of SARS guard in the Northman bare chested pumped up with battle rage wearing a wolf's Peltis headgear are uncomfortably close to those of Jake and Jelly, aka the QAnon shaman, the abiding mascot of the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. Oh my fucking god, oh my fucking god, if this guy really believes this, he should live in daycare for the rest of his life, but he doesn't.

He just like, he needed to write an article. God, like just every bit of culture is just the thinnest fucking rule. It's just like stretching, it's stretching like a teaspoon of cornstarch in five liters of water. It was a while ago now because obviously Colin Kaepernick has been about of the league, but for years. But I remember I read an article or something about ESPN and this is like right after Kaepernick had his first big season, where I think he took him to the World Series, he took him

to the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl where the lights went out, which I always think will be the perfect place to start any, you know, documentary about the final collapse of America with the fucking lights going out at the Super Bowl. But Ron Jaworski, who's a former quarterback and was a talking hat, I don't know if he still is, was talking out on ESPN, was essentially assigned the opinion to have on the shows that he was going to go on and talk that Colin Kaepernick might be the greatest quarterback of all time when he's done with his career because of how much potential he had and how good his first season was.

And in this article, there's just these depictions of Jaworski just sort of walking around, going into the break room, drinking coffee and just sort of talking to himself and talking himself into it and being like, I can sell this, I can sell this. Yes, absolutely. And I feel like these guys all are that now. Like they all, yeah, there's such a thin gruel, there's so, there's like a few things that are flash points at any given moment. There are only a couple like opinions you can have on them that will hit the right quadrants

as we discussed. And then you just are assigned an opinion about them that you are then forced to figure out a way to justify and to justify your job and to keep the people reading this shit on the hook. Yeah. If you're in media now, like in the past like 10 years or so, your job is like a cross between a dunk tank clown and a health tonic salesman, you're like, you're completely full of shit and you don't really like believe anything that you're saying.

But the highest place you can get at your profession, like the most paid, the most seen, the most recognized is being someone whose articles routinely get them yelled at. I cannot believe for a second that this guy actually believes this. Maybe he does. I don't know. But it seems like it was two days before a deadline and either consciously or subconsciously thought like, okay, I need something that like people will quote tweet. And he came up with this sort of warmed over 2017 horse shit.

Well, I mean, Matt, this speaks to your point about how all bases are covered because I'm certain because of this reaction to the Northman, like if there weren't white supremacists that were excited to see this movie before, they certainly are now. And the evidence of that, I don't know if you guys saw this on Twitter, but it was a gang of fellas who all decided to go do some movie mindset together, go to the movies with your friends. That's one of the most mindset things you can do. But they chose to go to the movies and sneak in their own food with them.

Milk duds, maybe a little beer, popcorn, nachos, no. It was raw ground beef. It was raw meat or like that they were eating out of a big bowl together at the screening of the Northman and zig-hiling the screen together. And as far as historical accuracy goes, could you be eating some pickled fish, please? Because I'm sorry, the Norse people did not eat a raw beef. That was not a staple of their diet. But I mean, it just goes to show, like I said, this is what these people really believe in

is eating raw beef in a movie you think is going to frighten people or just like play into, you know, just rile people up. And like I said, I'm certain it is because of articles like this in The Guardian and that people need to believe. And then on the other side, people who need to believe that they are part of, like, they are like errors to the Nordic races of people and the Viking conquest of Europe by eating raw beef in a movie theater. Yeah.

The dance between article heads and the online edgy dudes is it's like if when a parent puts his hands over a baby's eyes and the baby thinks he disappears, if the parent really thought they were disappeared during that time, I also want to point out that the real thing that Vikings did that these guys got right because yeah, no, they didn't eat raw beef or like ground beef, certainly not. They did love movies produced by like 11 Jewish guys. The real Vikings would go to royal courts all over Europe and steal court Jews and have them compose epics, the basis of which are several of which were the basis for things

like mad about you and Frazier. Yeah, Viking word roughly translates to story Jew and it's a tradition that's passed down to white people today. Yeah. A king can do of Denmark had a long sort of like a written correspondence with a, it was like a scribe psychologist where you write in your queries about your life to him and then he responds and that was the basis of Frazier and he also had a sort of an effeminate brother who got involved in this.

This was one of the most ancient myths of the Western Caucasian people. I love traditions continuing. Matt, did you like the Northman? Oh, yeah. It was awesome. I mean, the main thing that the reason it's so funny to talk about is politics and any kind of like practical sense is that the main thing that I got from it is that those people in that time were essentially aliens.

Yeah. They lived in an entirely different psychic world that is absolutely inaccessible to any of us and we cannot go back to. Yeah. And that fetishizing it is just this pathetic play act because you can't get in there. You cannot believe that Valhalla is real, you can't do it. You can poison yourself with fucking Kroger ground beef, all you want. It's not going to make Valhalla real.

You have to have it socially reinforced from like birth. It's a different universe. And like this is my point earlier about like how Egger is portrays the past like a science fiction reality and what I think the strengths of his movies, you know, Contra did this Guardian article and what I think people are losing the ability to do and like with, you know, adult serious works of art is that Egger presents these characters but like makes no effort to moralize about their behavior because like, yeah, Alexander Sarsgard is the hero of this movie.

But like in one of the like the first half an hour or so of the movie, you see him massacre a village of people and like sell them into slavery. And at no point does he question like, oh, is this wrong or feel bad about it? No, because like this is the values of the world he inhabits. And the movie, like, I mean, like it doesn't it doesn't give the viewer like any any touchstone for like, you know, what what is how should I feel about this? I mean, well, it's obvious how you should feel about it. It's wrong to massacre and enslave people, but that's not what the movie is about.

The movies are the movie is about people who thought that that was a normal way of life. I will say, though, that there is a element of truth to all of these anxiety articles and posts about movies being such and such movie or such and such director being fasc or whatever. And that is that movies are kind of inherently reactionary, like it's a it's a popular art form where you are subjected to like a totalizing artistic vision. And it's totally aesthetic. I mean, you're just you're just watching it.

And the stuff that is fun to watch is, you know, the surrender of all of your precious ideas of, you know, liberal humanity that people are trying to so so fretfully tend to nowadays. And that's what that's why there's this like note of desperation and hysteria behind this desire to create to create virtuous entertainment that is always going to be sending good messages so that people can behave well and why so many people are literally fleeing to turn everything into children's entertainment. They want every book to be YA, they want every movie to be some Pixar, because conveying

like adult reality is it's it's it's it's literal violence. Yeah, I mean, the world is filled with literal violence and the art we seek to reflect that world will often contain the, you know, nastier elements of the reality we'll inhabit. But I want to go back to his comparison of SARS guards character to the QAnon shaman. I mean, like, that's the most offensive thing about this, because like, I did not make that connection in my head until I read this fucking article. And anyone who would make that connection, it's like, no, SARS guard, when he's wearing the wolf pelt and going berserker mode looks cool as hell.

The QAnon shaman has never looked cool. Yeah, like he I mean, like he's got a good physique. But like, come on, like the face paint, like this is this is this is this is wearing khakis. Yeah, he had fucking dockers on can sing with the article. It says here, Eggers would doubtless be horrified to be associated with such movements. But the Northman illustrates how cinema can be misappropriated in ways the makers never intended.

And of course, you either matter that you just watch a movie and chillax, or then we have to go pull pot mode and have no movies for anybody. Yeah, in the past year, they're there, they're like probably schizophrenics who watch Teletubbies and think it's giving them messages to kill their parents. Should they should like they take responses? Should the producers of Teletubbies take responsibility for that? Like who fucking gives a shit? You know what's next, folks are coming for Barney next, you know, party's always been

controversial. Nothing new for him or fans, fans of his going on, it says in the past two decades, the entire cultural landscape and films about European history in particular has been weaponized and politicized by the far right. A guide to the far right mindset was created on Stormfront, the notorious white nationalist site in 2001. A contributor named Yegg Dressel, there is that North mythology again, began a thread on content that we can watch repeatedly, laying out guidelines and making and soliciting suggestions.

The thread now runs to 154 pages. Yegg Dressel's criteria for what qualifies as a good white nationalist film include positive portrayal of whites in defense against the depredation of liberalism, crime and attack by alien races. Positive portrayal of her. They haven't invented liberalism during the time that's predicted, like there's hundreds of years before anyone came up with the idea of that. Oh yeah, I hate it when I hate it when I'm like raping an entire village and like pussy

hat people protest me. Positive portrayal of heterosexual relationships in sex, marriage, procreation and childrearing. Portrayal of white males as intelligent, sensitive and strong in positive leadership roles and or romantic leads, and particularly intense portrayals of white female beauty in non-degrading roles. Disqualifying themes include homosexuality, racial mixing, negative portrayals of Christianity and portrayals of white people as inferior. The Northman pretty much ticks all these boxes, but then so do many other movies.

Indeed, if you're looking for a Hollywood movie to support white supremacist beliefs, you don't have to look far. So there we go. Movies are fascist. Does he give examples? Yeah, they are. Chill out. They all are, then.

Yeah. Even pics are. It should be made by massive collections of fucking capital. What message do you think they're really sending here? There's nothing to do with anything that you're absorbing consciously. Well, here are some examples of some Stormfront film recommendations are predictable. The Birth of a Nation, Trying for the Will, Braveheart, Zulu, a lot of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Clint Eastwood.

Few will be surprised to see the Lord of the Rings movies come highly recommended. Neither J.R.R. or Tolkien nor Peter Jackson consciously framed the fantasy epic as white nationalist propaganda, but as with Nordic mythology, it harks back to an imaginary Eurocentric realm in which the heroes are considered to be white-skinned and were cast as such in the movies. And their chief enemies, the orcs, are characterized as dark-skinned, ugly, and uncivilized. I mean, I've been waiting for someone to cancel the Lord of the Rings because I'm tired of those fucking movies.

But this gets into another aspect of the critique of this movie is that, yeah, his depiction of 10th century Iceland does not include any people of color. And a lot of people are sort of medievalists or people who claim to have some sort of expertise in this time period pointed out that Vikings, their reach extended well into the Mediterranean and they had contact with North African and Middle Eastern cultures. But that contact was largely them fucking raping and pillaging people and setting up homesteads for their own people to literally colonize. So yeah, Vikings were familiar with other races of people, but there's this weird attempt

to like, okay, white supremacist people, they like Vikings because they represent white male masculinity and sort of like unblemished by cosmopolitan or sort of diverse values or whatever. So like, the way to own them is to say, aha, but what if you knew that the Vikings were actually queer and POC? And it's just like, I don't think that does you the favor or your side the favor you think it does because if you're saying that the people who were marauding the coasts of Europe for centuries like raping and enslaving everyone they came across were in fact, non white POC.

It's like, what are you going with there? What's the angle here? No, the angle is that you've ruined the movie for the people you don't like. Okay. They can't enjoy it now. Like you licked, you licked the bagel and now they can't pick it up off of the tray. Like that. Boom.

Now the people I don't like, here's another, here's a film that they cannot enjoy. I win. I mean, I don't think the licking the bagel strategy is going to work for this one. I mean, eventually there's going to be, I mean, I don't know, this movie kind of bombed. So who knows what they're going to take from that. Maybe it's like no more history movies of any kind or maybe we do need to make them more diverse. I don't know.

I do think it is funny how much it shows the absolute limitations of people's imaginations and how much those limitations are constructed by like the realities of capitalist production that instead of fantasizing about movies about, you know, historical Africa, for example, people can only fantasize about diversifying like historical Europe. Like they want to hit the same stories that I'm told before, but now I wanted to be diverse. Like the, the assumption that you have, you have accepted that these are the only stories we can tell are these Eurocentric historical narratives. And then the greatest feed of representation you can imagine is to a historically bust

them open with with diversity instead of like move the camera to somewhere else that's been underserved traditionally. But where's the market? There's no proven market for that. This is not proven IP. It's not going to get made. Well, yeah, it seems like there's no proven market for movies about the past of any, anyone's past right now.

But Matt, this touches on another thing that you and I have talked about, which is like for the, for the marquee, like top line, like, like art, like legacy directors, it does seem like most of them are not, don't want to have anything to do with making a movie about the present. Yeah. Is that they all want to like all move like they like all good movies for the most part now are set in the past. And then like it could be like a distant past of like the 10th century, or just like, I

don't know, the late 70s or something. But it seems like three smart phones. Well, that's I think the important thing is because, because like the phones, having a phone on you has like changed fundamentally the way that we interact in a way that like we might all say is for the better on, on, on balance, I mean, in the sense that it helps us like compensate for, you know, the loneliness caused in part by that change, sure. But it makes the idea of like depicting the contemporary reality dramatically incredibly difficult.

You know, because like if you're, if you're like previously, if you were going to dramatize a phone call between two people, like that's easy enough to do. But like now I think like filmmakers or like TV shows or movies set about the present, they have to have to incorporate texting into that reality. And a lot of times they will put the text on the screen of the movie, which I really don't like. But like, I mean, what else are you going to do? How are you going to communicate like two people communicating wordlessly with one another

looking at these little boxes in their hands? Yeah, it's that it's death. Like we have made ourselves unfilmable, even though that's all we do all day is film each other. Boom. Here's a surprising recommendation from the Stormfront movie list. It's Notting Hill. The readers of Horsenhound will be absolutely delighted.

The Julia Roberts, Carrie Grant, I'm sorry, Carrie Grant Hugh Grant movie. It says few would have marked the Richard Curtis Romcom as a key white nationalist text, even if it was criticized at the time for excluding people of color from its multi-racial, multicultural London neighborhood. But from the perspective of a white nationalist blogger, Notting Hill is a story in which the white victims of cultural destruction manage to extricate themselves and find happiness. Okay. They've definitely given up any, because yeah, as I said, the only even surface plausible

pitch that you're to make condemning these, because I mean, obviously this is the dumbest part of all of it is like, okay, even if these movies are literally white, white nationalist recruitment things, what does it have to do with you? What are you? Are you are you are you going to make the strong case to ban them? No, then you're just fucking whining. But anyway, like the only case you could make that's even like surface plausible for why you should care is if these things are used as recruitment.

And now I'm imagining some Derek Vineyard motherfucker getting like an impressionable teen kid who just like got beaten up by black kids at gym and taking them to their home and showing them Notting Hill. And then it's four weddings and a funeral after that. But you know, the funeral is white civilization if we don't stand up against the great replacement. I heard that. I heard that before. They watched Moonrise Kingdom to pump themselves up.

Well, Wes Anderson is the other director that I saw people this week calling fascist. He's fasc. He's he's fasc. It's just there. There's no way around it. There's no way around it. He's like, I don't want to I want to have my little my little play for place and I want to make my little dolls do stuff.

And it's like, yeah, that is that's not that's not a liberal politics. That's not social democracy. It's it's it's it is but it is a piece of art and it is aesthetic and movies. I'm sorry. They should be able to justify themselves on the question of their artistic merit that I think is independent of their political valence. And that used to be I mean, I don't sound like a grank me old man, but that used to be understood.

Like Bob Dole was the guy who tried to make movies a culture war touchstone in 96 when he had nothing to run on because Clinton had done the entire Republican playbook in his first term. So he said movies are too violent these days and train spotting. Yeah. And people said, movies don't make you do things. What are you talking about? And now it's been completely flipped because of how much the political horizon has shrunk

and how much. Well, the political horizon shrunk, the imagined horizon of catastrophe has has grown in its horrors and its in its detail that you can imagine. So now people are looking for anything, anything to throw at this future that's coming hurtling towards them. And like, what if we all watch the right movies becomes just this last gasp fantasy of transformation that doesn't require really engaging in a political project that nobody believes in anymore.

It's it's flipped to the point where, yeah, the this sort of left liberal thing is an obsession with movies causing you to do things. And then on the right, it's like sports are fundamentally opposed to our values. Yeah. Yeah. The right wing has taken a turn against sports recently. They're like, yeah, like watching sports is like cucking yourself because they're they're anti white or something or like, yeah, that it's like it's white men sort of like like

offloading their feelings of power and prowess onto to non white men who are competing at the highest levels of athletics. That is one thing I do. That is one thing I do like about like our current thin gruel culture is that both sides of the culture and of the like the political spectrum have taken each other's worst aspects from each other like the both like the thing like not worst aspects, but things that make them the most annoying. Like the right wing is doing oops, is there a spurbs ball on now?

Yeah. No, there are. There's an ascendant like soy right. There's like a like a sincere, it's a curious like liberal left. It's it's a it is a great new future. I'm more excited for the soy right than anything. I mean, the the soy right wing like whether it's like, you know, like I just saw I saw some thread from the concept James, which I think is like, I think he's he is probably

like the best embodiment of the the new soy right and that is like it embodies a mode of the kind of the Victorian hysteric. But it seems to me like as his mental illness progresses, he like cycles through alienating himself from more and more basic tenants of like everyday life and society. Like he was saying that Christianity is like two cucks to, you know, do a do a top down remake of everything. And then he said most states are too. And you know, I just like it's this process of like further alienating yourself from like

just the things that were once taken for granted because you think that they become politicized in a way that's untenable to you. Eventually he is going to convert to Wahhabism, which they all are. I really do think on a long enough timeline, they all have to eventually take take the green pill of Islam. I don't think it's I don't think it's Wahhabism. I think he's getting like groomed into nexium as a 41 year old man. Dude, that should.

Yeah, he's hanging out with like a nexium, a nexium cult member who is like recruiting people. That's just really happening. I want to see his brand. And yeah, no, exactly. He got his balls branded by fucking. What's that guy's name? Callie from.

Yeah, from Battlestar Galactica. Okay. Like, yeah, no, he's, yeah, no. And the weird thing about that is like, I mean, like obviously like the obvious hypocrisy here is that concept James is like the the number one proponent of like this grooming. Everyone's a groomer now, except for, I don't know, members of Keith Raniera's literal grooming sex cult. But yeah, like, I don't know, but like man, like to your point about like how like, you

know, like it's a it's a function of like that that nobody believes in politics anymore. But like, do you think that that ties in with what we were talking about earlier about how all the best artists no longer make movies about the present? Yeah. It's just the only thing the only thing like is sort of pleasing or interesting to depict or they can have meaning communicated through it is stories about the past in some way, because nobody really there is there's nothing in the present moment to sink your teeth into. Yeah, everything.

Everything is on its surface. Everything there is no subtext to anything. It's been totally dissolved. Depth metaphor has been annihilated. So what are you supposed to tease out? It just says explicitly what they're thinking about everything because there is this social media hive mind where they go and participate and then bring that back with them and like synthesize their thoughts so that everything is a commentary on itself.

There's nowhere for you as someone who's trying to, you know, evoke to to anchor yourself. Just to just to round up this article here, it says the far right also engages in more in depth forms of movie commentary by YouTube videos and podcasts. Far right figureheads Richard Spencer and Mark Bramond host a podcast that conducts 90 minute and analyses of movies such as Tenant, GoldenEye and Midsummer, parsing their supposedly hidden meetings often through a male chauvinist and anti-semitic lens. Midsummer, which deals with Scandinavian folklore in the present day did not go down well.

Bramond described it as a deep insult against our people. See like these motherfuckers, like this is the soy right here, like these motherfuckers are exactly like the people that are criticizing the Northman because it's not it's not diverse enough and then like they see Midsummer and they're like, oh, this is a slander against Nordic peoples. Yeah. And that movie, by the way, that movie is a slander against boyfriends of whole races. Not Scandinavian people.

Where needs to be accountability out that shit. That would be was literal violence against boyfriends who did nothing wrong. Nothing wrong. That movie did absolutely nothing wrong except when he stole the masterpieces from his friend. That movie's about like an anti-boyfriend cult. Yes, literally. It's about the world's most annoying girlfriend who shoe horns herself into a cool dude's vacation to some Scandinavian village.

And then he's punished for it quite literally in human sacrifice at the end of it. The God in the anti-boyfriend cult, like when you die, the first words you hear are asking you how your day at work was and you remember all the names of your co-workers you don't like. So, yeah, just to say, we could see these activities simply as a form of extreme forms of film criticism. I love that. Extreme film criticism.

Extreme film criticism brought to you by Doritos. Doritos raw beef flavor. But Josh Van Diver, a lecturer at Ball State University in Indiana, who studies right-wing appropriations of popular culture, prefers to describe them as metapolitics. If politics is the occupation of territory, metapolitics is the occupation of culture, he says. They are, at some level, creating a community. They comment upon films.

They try to interpret them. That's what they do together, at least publicly. And we could contrast that to more traditional forms of political organizing that the far-right for decades has not seen itself as able to do, marching in the streets or organizing political parties. So instead, they spend all this time on metapolitics. I mean, I guess to listen here, back to last week's episode, it seems like that's all anyone is spending time on anymore because there are no politics left.

It's like, metapolitics are the only thing that exists anymore. So that's why we need to investigate and parse culture to the extent that is now being demanded of us. And that's why people really believe with a straight face that the Twitter left liberal consensus hive mind is the actual ruling class of America. Because it's the only place where they actually engage with any kind of power, like the power of social exclusion, whereas everything else has been algorithmically alienated from any kind of human interaction.

Yeah. And there is a symbiotic relationship there, too. Just in the same way that there's a relationship between the 4chan posters and the guy who wrote this article, there is a relationship between the shittiest parts of online left liberal media or whatever things on TV you see that annoy you. And whoever wants to write five articles a month to getting angry at their timeline. Both sides of this completely need each other. It's the only thing keeping either going and both fundamentally the signs of a culture

running on fumes. It says here, it would be easy to blame the far right alone for the situation, but it has been given plenty to work with by Hollywood and academia. By and large, films in the histories from which they draw have been overwhelmingly controlled by people of white European descent whose own blind spots might play well into the far right's hands, especially when it comes to matters of race. I mean, I think the interesting thing about that is like, yeah, Matt, to your point, the industry of entertainment is still largely controlled by white people, so the stories

that they seek out and seek to express are largely those of white European culture. But instead of just moving to a different latitude or a different major civilization to draw on, they're putting non-white people in medieval settings. And it's not like medieval Europe was completely devoid of multiculturalism or whatever. But if you're talking and playing into the far right's attitudes about race, then anything making a movie that depicts 10th century Iceland as not being diverse enough is in fact playing into the far right's deck of cards here. Yeah.

I mean, everybody's... It's not a war, which is how people imagine it. It's a game. I mean, it is taking place in a sort of socially constrained arena, and everyone in it is consciously and unconsciously following the rules in order to get something out of it, get enjoyment, get amusement out of it. And then they do the rest of their life. I mean, that's it.

And you need two teams to have a game. Yeah. I think that's a really good way to think about culture war. If you just change the phrase to culture games, then I think that's exactly it. Yeah. And of course, people say, well, yeah, but the political consequences of this, they're not a game. And it's like, yes, that's correct.

But the direction, the flow of that politics, the real politics that you might imagine, it is not some one-to-one consequence of the culture game. It is an independent factor being shaped by the material interests of people who actually are near power, as opposed to the rest of us who are just doing this ritualized performance to distract ourselves, to validate ourselves in our impotence. And the reason that that's important to remember is because it robs a lot of this, of its immediacy, because yes, the fact that we have this culture game thing happening, it is powering politics that then become real and become horrifying.

But the actual content is essentially secondary because what's important is that people are playing. Yeah. But what's important is that the space is filled. What's going to come out of that is going to be determined by people with actual monetary and career stakes in politics, which is nobody that any of us know. Just to close out the article here, the last paragraph, the author writes, in an ideal world, filmmakers wouldn't have to give a moment's thought to how their films might

be co-opted by these groups. We could simply enjoy a movie such as The Northman as a piece of rousing, skillfully made entertainment. Okay, I'll stop you right there because I live in this current world and that's exactly what I did. That's true. I enjoyed it as a rousing piece of fun entertainment. I did it.

Done. Thank you. Thank you for giving me permission. I thought it was a really well-made, interesting movie and I enjoyed it. In a perfect world, I would be able to go to sleep without worrying about a gin who lives in my pantry who's going to cut my cock off and steal it, but unfortunately, the reality that we live in, you know? The fact that it is no longer possible to do so, okay, no, it is totally possible.

It's totally possible, dude. It's completely possible to do so. You are the only one making this world reality. This is not like Valhalla. This is one you can actually change. What does he think he's preventing by thinking about it? I don't know. I don't know.

I'm just saying, the people and especially the people who work in the cultural industry, they need movie mindsets so badly. They need to understand movie mindsets and the tendency of movie mindsets is that movies are more real than reality, but that does not imply because they're more real than reality and they're how we process reality, that makes the stakes for it even one inch higher than you thought it was before. In fact, it makes it lower. There should be four movies a year, three articles, and all three articles should be

like grain reports or the weather, and everyone should have to sit on their hands and think. No more articles, no more movies, everyone has lost their tablet privileges. There should be three movies a year, and those three movies should be Avatar 2, 3, and 4. Yes. Yes. If everyone behaves well and doesn't write the fourth article for the year, the animatrix, you get to watch the animatrix, which is actually not a movie. Short films.

Sorry. They're no longer possible to do so, could be seen as a victory of sorts for the far right, but again, don't give them that victory then. You could easily deny them a victory just by imbibing the lessons of movie mindset and just enjoying movies and just having fun at the movies. You can defeat them. You can defeat them. You don't have to be in twilight struggle for eternity.

You can have a definitive conquest here. It's within you to do it. I just love the framing of this where it's like, I'm really going to war with them by completely relinquishing this movie that everyone is talking about as theirs. They've completely claimed it, not putting a fucking scent into it, just immediately giving up after seeing two posts. One of them was on Stormfront. There is no one under the age of 65 post on Stormfront.

And the Stormfront article wasn't even about the Northman. This was just the Stormfront movie section where they were like, Lord of the Rings, good. Notting Hill. Two thumbs up. The movie where Dev Patel plays, you know, one of the Arthurian knights, Bad. What movie is that? The Green Knight. He plays, what's his name?

Gawain. Gawain. Gawain and the Green Knight, yeah. The Northman was a lot better. But it's not because of this. Yeah. I wonder why you said that. It sucks.

It's the casting. A lot to think about. It says, okay, but it says, okay, the fact that it is no longer possible to do so could be seen as a victory of sorts for the far right. But failing to consider the stories we tell from first principles could be part of the problem that created them in the first place. By this stage, in fact, filmmakers ought to have realized that if the far right doesn't hate your film, you might be doing something wrong.

Yep. If you're not inflicting psychic damage on my enemies, your film is a failure. I just, I gotta say. That's great. Yeah. The only way to defeat this like powerhouse political movement of thousands of Americans is to just think about them all the time and make every bit of culture about them. Yep.

That's really the one new way to win. Reference to it somehow. But like I said, like, I mean, like this goes back to the culture games thing and about how like both sides need to play the game. Like, you know, conceptual James is, you know, joining a sex cult, alienating himself from language itself at a rapid pace. And on the other side, these guardian columnists are alienating themselves from, from love of the movies because they think that someone out there might be enjoying it who they don't

like. And I just like, like the end result of the, of these games here is that more and more, I mean, not conceptual James, because I don't know if he was ever normal, but like otherwise normal people are convincing themselves to become totally like, again, no one forcing them to do it, like forcing themselves to become totally ostracized from like basic, basic fragments of like what, what, what amounts to a shared culture in this country. If such a thing is said to be said to exist. The consequence of the culture game, the game that is not designed to have a winner is that

literally everything in American life, anything that could be like a shared experience will be politicized and if you uncritically enjoy or don't enjoy something, you are helping someone that you don't like. Yeah. And if, um, yeah, it's like, for the right, it's I don't know, like the Frankfurt school or something, you know, it's just whatever boogeyman and on, on, on the left, it's, yeah, it's like, you know, the guys eating beef at the, at the Northman and Zig Highling, Alexander Sarsgar's abs.

Well, there you go. But just in case anyone wants to know the official movie mindset review of the Northman is two thumbs up. Yeah. I enjoyed it. That's a popcorn classic right there. It was violent. And actually like, let me, let me parse what the actual ideology of the Northman is.

And like, you know, mild spoiler alerts for, or actually just full on spoiler alerts for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, the true ideology of the Northman, if we were going to peer beyond the veil of what master filmmaker Robert Edgars is really trying to communicate with this film is, it's simple. Trust no mom. Moms are your enemy. Do not trust you. They're, they're lying to you and, you know, like, you know, if your father dies and your

mother marries your uncle, she was in on that shit. So don't, don't save her. There's a lot of captain save a mom out there and I'm saying no love for these moms, they're, they're, they're, they're shy, they're snakes, they're shiesty. So Robert Edgars, I applaud your movie in spite of its virulent anti mom message. I won't be seeing it. I, uh, now that I know it's anti mom, I do think it presents a dangerous message. It's anti bedtime.

It's anti mom and it's anti, uh, it's anti clean plate club as well. And I won't stand for it. I won't stand for it. I'm not going to let, I'm not going to let the anti mom forces out there, the, the dad supremacists. I'm going to, I'm going to deny them this victory by not liking the Northman. But you know, we feel Robert Edgars, he failed to consider the first principles of the story he was telling, which is it's great, frankly, poisonous anti mom agenda.

So that does it for, uh, the Northman and, uh, today's episode. So gentlemen, I will see you at the movies or as I call it Valhalla, bye.