I think that the ‘weird’ argument honestly came from a bunch of 24-year-old social media interns who were bullied in school, and they decided they were going to project that onto the entire Trump campaign… I’m a normal guy. -J.D. Vance

In a 2020 appearance on the podcast “The Portal,” Republican Vice Presidential hopeful J.D. Vance extolled the value of multigenerational households, noting that his mother-in-law’s participation in the raising of his son “makes him a much better human being.” The host of the podcast, member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” Eric Weinstein, then said, “that’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory,” to which Vance explicitly agreed. This moment has been the most recent gaffe in a broader set of scandals related to Vance and his strange comments about women and families, which have fed into a fairly effective liberal attack on both Vance and the Republican campaign more broadly as being “weird.” This line, it seems, has done a particularly good job upsetting Vance and many of those who are ideologically aligned with him. Yet why is it so effective?

Ironically, the general sentiment behind Vance’s words in this old podcast clip is not particularly unconscionable. This is in the sense that most people have a fairly positive view of multigenerational households. Yet Vance’s underlying justification for why they yield positive results is discordant with our general moral intuitions. It is as if one asked an intelligent alien life form, whose ‘moral’ or ‘social’ calculus is entirely foreign to us, what they thought about the matter. It is a strange, uncanny, even ‘weird,’ ordering of the social that does not ground itself in some moral first principle but instead relies upon a justification seemingly entirely outside of our moral understanding.

For Vance and those that think like him, the value of multigenerational households cannot be justified through reference to compassion. Vance did not substantiate his belief by saying, for instance, that his heart swells when he sees his son bond with his grandmother. He instead praises multigenerational households as a result of them being in accordance with a rational ordering of society based upon a scientific categorization of human beings that facilitates the greatest productive output. The particular, Vance’s mother-in-law, is reduced to the general, her existence as a “postmenopausal female.” Her individual experiences are subsumed under her biological sex and her life’s purpose is determined by this placement in advance. While for the premenopausal, fertile “female,” her purpose, following Vance, is to give birth above the population replacement rate, this is no longer the case for his mother-in-law. She is part of a species within the genus of “female” whose differentia is her biological obsolescence. She must therefore be given a new purpose, where she is relegated to the task of assisting in child-rearing carried out by her daughter. 

Before modernity this patriarchal viewpoint was undergirded by the passions, with heterosexual love being the worship of the feminine as unconquered nature that must be brought to heel by the masculine order of property. Yet the bourgeois age has brought about a scientific medicalization of this discourse. It has become passionless and sterilized, reducing the female to a social category made evident by biology, no longer in need of “taming” or “conquering” but instead baring its entire essence to a cold scalpel on an examination table. Patriarchy is not romanticized by those who uphold it but cynically spoken of as if it is of a nature derived from scientific discovery. Yet the “nature” of the female sex is circular. It is not so much discovered as it is invented in order to entrench patriarchal social relations and solidify them as natural. The female psyche is uncovered as biological fact in evolutionary psychology journals and alpha male dating podcasts alike. Both are able to speak of the female, her motivations, her dating habits etc., as if they are scientists in lab coats studying a new species of animal. Yet both discoveries of this ‘nature’ are only legible as a result of power. They are derived from the same domineering institutions that structure the historically contingent intricacies of heterosexual relations. They are self fulfilling observations that may only successfully speak of the ‘female’ in virtue of the control the observers have over her.

The uncaring, instrumental, bourgeois rationality has brought about an annulment of love as a mediator of patriarchal control and subjected the female body directly to the rules and laws of industry. Unlike the liberal feminist position, which attempts to turn women into rational, independent participants in the market, Vance’s patriarchal rationality is totalitarian in nature. The “postmenopausal female” must do her duty to the family, the nation, the state etc., as must we all. Her labour is, or at the very least ought to be, as publicly mediated as Value producing economic labour.

While this practical, uncaring form of reason structures our lives, we are used to the language of liberal democratic states being accompanied by a human face that alludes to compassion, love, charity, etc., guiding the underlying logic of its inner machinations. Yet Vance makes no such allusions. He does not pretend to care about childless women as ends in themselves who should be encouraged to follow whatever path in life brings them the most happiness.

It seems that the revulsion towards many of Vance’s statements is more intimately connected with the form of his ideas rather than with the content itself. He once, for instance, suggested an inverted, yet logically identical, version of tax cuts for families by saying adults who do not have children should be taxed more. While ‘tax cuts for families’ is a fairly popular Warrenite reform, Vance has managed to invert the framing of its purpose, with it now being primarily a mechanism to punish those who do not comply with the demands of the state as opposed to rewarding those who do. Yet any form of economic incentive provided by the state, negative or positive, is undergirded by the domineering structure of capitalism wherein one must compete on the market with others in order to survive. Any good state administrator can see the value in increasing fertility rates when they are below replacement level and must react to this information through the only language that the state is able to speak: coercion. 

The bourgeois liberal subject is used to a version of this language altered by a propagandistic, sentimental moral filter. In virtue of Vance campaigning within a liberal democracy his rhetoric is a strange blur between the practical reason of the sensible bourgeois politician, who must humanize himself and demonstrate his compassion to his constituents, and the totalitarian instrumentalized reason of the ascendent fascist, who no longer must make his cruel, sadistic, amoral urges answer to any other law than the ones that govern economic production. Vances is openly guided by a form of reason freed from the burden of moral sentiment. This reason is not weighed down by the requirement of understanding other human beings as ends in themselves and thus allows them to be treated as things. It is as if the ordering and administration of people becomes an end in itself. This cold rationale removes compassion as a mediator of human social relations, as it has become superfluous for the one and only task of practical reason, the domination of nature.

We should understand the right’s obsession with “wokeness” as connected with this tendency. Fascism’s ascendency necessitates the destruction of the last remnants of Enlightenment utopian moral ideals embedded within civil society. Any attempt to shame acts of cruelty committed by an ego that is unburdened by compassion can only be understood by this ego as a threat against its nature which therefore must be destroyed.

Vance and those like him despise the term “weird” in a similar sense that they hate “wokeness.” Both serve as reminders that to many, their cruel amoral urges are despised. The term weird, though, is particularly effective as a result of the fact that it is an attack against these sadistic urges that is not moralistic. The sadist loves when they are considered “dangerous” and a threat that should be feared. It makes them feel ‘aristocratic’ in the Nietzschean sense. It reminds them that they are the oppressor and that the “natural order” they see themselves on top of remains intact. Yet the “weird” line does not paint the right as something that should be feared. Instead, it reeks of the subtle forms of domination that structure juvenile social hierarchies. This line places them in a subordinate social position, under those whose political rhetoric incorporates compassion as a virtue (known to them as “virtue signallers”). It is thus an inversion of their ‘natural’ order, an articulation of Nietzschean slave morality wherein the last shall be first and the first shall be last.

It is important to take note of the feminine associations that many on the right have with this line. Members of the far-right “politically incorrect” forum of 4chan seem to associate the “weird” attack with conventionally attractive ‘popular’ women. One reason for this relates to the increasingly large ideological gap between young men and women. Many-right wing men feel as if the destruction of old patriarchal bonds has ‘robbed’ them of a wife. In a sense they feel the fallout of patriarchal institutions no longer being mediated by heterosexual love. Yet while they might imagine that they desire a ‘return to tradition,’ they react to this ‘problem’ through an intensification of the cold, cruel, instrumentalized reason that abandoned the passions as useless in the first place. Their unrequited object libido has been redirected towards an increase in ego libido, drawing them further and further away from an ability to love, only allowing them to conceptualize the problem through the “female” being an unruly disobedient sex that ought to be made to perform in accordance with their biological duty. Yet even J.D. Vance, who one might think ought to be the incel’s hero, is decrying them as useless. The male sex, too, has been given a ‘purpose’ within this totalitarian logic which the ‘incel’ has failed to live up to as a result of their failure to find a mate.

Some may frame the “male loneliness epidemic” as the fault of women or, at the very least, the result of the fact that the ‘left’ has not sufficiently coddled misogynistic men. However, these diagnostics fail to account for the ways in which the sentiments that undergird this so-called epidemic result from intra-patriarchal discourses. Vance’s contempt for the young male who is not doing his biological duty of starting a family is a microcosm of this discourse. Young right-wing men feel a gap between what they are told they deserve and what they are actually able to attain. They are promised that their placement in the natural hierarchy entitles them to one of their lessers, a ‘female,’ who must do her duty in accordance with her biological essence. They are no longer even promised the love that mediated patriarchal relations of old, and no longer seek it as it could only possibly get in the way of their desire to control and dominate nature as they were told was their purpose. Their rabid misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia are symptoms of the feeling that the natural order they were promised has been slowly deteriorating and only unmitigated cruel, sadistic violence may bring it back into focus. We cannot possibly be naive enough to think that the solution to this problem is to coddle these men. As if their worldview in its most cynical, depraved, and sadistic form is not merely the bourgeois subject freed of all moral tutelage, no longer weighed down by the social rules of polite society which the right currently decry as “woke.” They, as a demographic, will continue to hold on to this domineering attitude towards nature so long as market relations continue to deceive them into believing that the gratification of their desires lies in treating other human beings as a means to an end instead of as ends in themselves.

For more:

Adorno, Horkheimer, “Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality” in Dialectic of Enlightenment

Butler, Gender Trouble

Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1

In order to develop a coherent account of wokeness, it is crucial to understand that it is a relational term. It cannot be defined through some common attribute shared among all the things generally considered to be woke. Instead we must look at what these heterogeneous phenomena arise in common within those who are using the term. In this sense, ‘woke’ is quite psychologically rich, as it tells us that for many on the right, they feel a similar form of unease, anxiety, and quite possibly guilt concerning the vast array of phenomena which they have unified under this phrase. 

One of the odd quirks of the term “wokeness,” which is explained by its relational nature, is the fact that conservatives speak of it being a fairly recent phenomenon. This is despite the fact that many things which they consider to be woke are far from new. Few of them would dare contextualize Martin Luther King as a woke figure despite the fact that one of the primary examples they use of wokeness is the recognition of the existence of a racial divide within American society. The novelty of “wokeness” does not come from the phenomena themselves being new but instead from a new feeling of unease which has developed surrounding them. This feeling, it seems, has developed as a result of a shift within culture that has left many conservative social demands no longer able to draw upon a sustained period of cultural hegemony as justification for their existence. Far fewer people live a life structured by ‘traditional values,’ and there is a general unease among many on the right that if they do not rectify this situation soon, this state of affairs will be impossible to dislodge. This feeling is at the core of how the term woke is mobilized. To label something woke is to imply it is a symptom of a scary new world where conservative values are no longer hegemonic; it comes with the insinuation that if something drastic is not done soon, all that resists this new so-called ‘clown world’ will be destroyed.

Yet, of course, conservative social and political institutions across the West are far from under immediate threat of total destruction. In this sense fear of the woke mob is irrational and paranoic; it is predicated upon a conspiratorial mode of thought which is only able to explain the ground which conservatives have lost culturally through reference to a nefarious shadowy plot by powerful institutions to manipulate gullible liberals into enacting their evil plans. Anyone who has had the misfortune of dealing with a ‘young conservatives on campus’ group as a university student is well aware of the complex which undergirds this belief. These groups are unified in their assertion that to be mocked, ridiculed, and shamed by their peers is the same as to be oppressed. They are unable to conceive of the destruction of conservative cultural hegemony without it being a direct result of the complete destruction of conservative political power. Despite the fact that these young conservatives are continually ridiculed by their left-wing peers, the modern university itself remains a firmly neo-liberal institution whose vested interests lie in opposing all forms of social progress which threaten its ability to generate profit. These groups fail to understand that they are feeling the ground shift under their feet as a result of a change which is first and foremost cultural in nature. It is not the product of them losing power but, in fact, the result of a society in which reactionary power remains entrenched despite it losing its grasp over many of the rules which govern polite, respectful public discourse. For many who are a part of this cultural change, ridicule of those who continue to praise oppressive social institutions feels like one of the few mechanisms to resist these institutions that does not threaten jail time. While the petulant sycophants involved in these “conservative on campus” groups may have an unstoppable mass of institutional power behind them, there is some consolation in the feeling that we are, at the very least, able to make their social experience miserable. The supposed crusade against ‘wokeness’ is in part a reaction to a broader cultural shift which mirrors the aforementioned schism within campus life. The image of what it means to be a ‘good person’ as dictated by social rules has evolved to be far more considerate of avoiding labels such as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

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In this sense, conspiracism can be seen as categorically the result of both irrationality and feelings of powerlessness. It is the product of individuals whose social world is presented to them as opaque and impenetrable and yet is also their primary source of pain. They are lab mice stuck in a cruel behaviourist experiment that perpetually shocks them at random intervals, who have developed a conceptual schema to explain these random, disconnected events in a way that they believe may mitigate their suffering. In the case of QAnon and its adherents, this can be seen in how willing they are to connect the evil shadowy cabal supposedly fighting Donald Trump with perceived threats to their own personal ego aims. Liz Crokin, for instance, once claimed that a violent surfing accident she was involved in was caused by Hillary Clinton and her supporters using satanic rituals to hex her. The drive to ‘bake,’ or come up with grand conspiratorial connections as a means of explaining events, is then, broadly, ego preserving. It is an irrational method of ordering an equally irrational world in such a way that contextualizes the conspiracy theorist as an agent with power who has the ability to act against perceived threats in their world.

For most who are left of Donald Trump, this analysis of QAnon is perfectly acceptable. I have anecdotally come to realize this about the general public’s perception of QAnon from giving a streamlined version of this account to strangers, a conversation which is directly proportional in frequency to the number of times someone has asked me “what do you do for work?” Even fairly conspiratorially minded people are quite happy to disparage QAnon, a movement which has now been deemed ‘old news’ even by those who agree in substance with a majority of its claims. And yet while QAnon is dead, its ashes have been spread across the marketplace of ideas, and even those standing across the culture war divide have begun to think in startlingly ‘pilled’ terms. But why should we be surprised by this? Liberals and leftists live in the same ‘behaviourist experiment’ as QAnon adherents and are thus vulnerable to many of the same psychological techniques which satisfy the structurally produced neuroses present among those who were tricked by QAnon. Yet while this may not be particularly surprising, the rate at which QAnon-esque conspiracy theories have been deployed to satiate the neuroses of those on the liberal side of the culture divide is shocking. “Blueanon” is a term that I have generally been reticent to mobilize given that (1) it is most commonly used by right wing conspiracy theorists who are far more irrational than the phenomenon they are condemning and (2) out of fear that it may imply liberal conspiracy theories are equally irrational and violent as their right-wing equivalents. Yet while it seems clear that “BlueAnon” is in no way as dangerous as its Republican double, its similarities to the original have become too noticeable in recent months for me to not at the very least identify it as an object of concern. 

The most horrifying instance of “BlueAnon” I have observed has been from a collection of fairly influential ‘Biden dead-enders’ in the last few weeks of Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign, who responded to the influx of calls for Biden to step down by asserting that there was some broad conspiracy being put into action by the liberal media which was attempting to slander Biden as a means of helping Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Not only were these dead-enders conspiratorially minded, insofar as they explained the cause of events through reference to non-existent conspiracy theories, but they embraced a form of conspiratorial thought that bears a startling resemblance to that of QAnon. This group was unable to concieve of their own interests as diverging from that of Biden’s, even in an instance where a better Democratic Presidential candidate may have suited them. For this group, all threats against Biden’s interests were simultaneously threats against their own ego aims, and all of these percieved threats were a part of the same grand coalition working to ensure Donald Trump recieved another 4 years in the oval office. As I will elucidate in this newsletter, this general form of conspiratorial thought paired with identification towards a leader is startingly similar (in form at least) to what I have observed among QAnon adherents.

Making the Case for “BlueAnon”

It has been clear for more than a year that a majority of the American electorate (even a majority of registered democrats) believe that Joe Biden is too old to run for a second term. This is not an electoral newsletter (for a better account of how disastrous the Biden campaign was set to be, I recommend Ettingermentum.news), yet what is important to note here is that any rational agent who is concerned about a Trump presidency would want Biden gone from the dem ticket yesterday. This was the developing consensus among Democratic voters, donors, and politicians following Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June. Members of his party began to publicly call for Biden to step aside following his refusal to budge privately, donors began to withdraw their money, and liberal journalistic institutions reported the growing discontent within the party. Nothing about this series of events requires the construction of a particularly grand ‘conspiracy theory.’ It is a collection of heterogeneous actors pursuing their own unique set of interests, which happen to align with putting increased pressure on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. Party elites wished to improve the standing of the Democratic party by replacing Biden with a more competent candidate, wealthy donors did not wish to invest their money into a race that they perceived to be already lost, and journalists wished to publish a story that generated the most clicks. 

One fairly large and zealous contingent of American Democrats did not perceive Biden’s final weeks in the 2024 presidential race in this way. According to them, the liberal media was supposedly responsible for ‘manufacturing’ a narrative surrounding Biden’s age and mental acuity because Trump becoming President would be better for business. As this theory developed, the individuals who subscribed to it became increasingly zealous in their attempts to expose this supposed conspiracy wherever it appeared. As all mainstream liberal American news organizations were in some way reporting on this story, or at the very least showing clips of Biden’s many verbal flubs, it required these individuals to expand their conspiracy to heights that one would not think possible given their previous longtime allegiance to these same institutions. One prominent Biden dead-ender made a post on X, which received 6 thousand likes, calling on their audience to “Cancel your New Yorker subscription. Cancel your Times subscription. Turn off Pod Save and cable news.” Many Biden dead-enders even went as far as imagaining that liberal news channels were manipulating audio of Biden speaking to make him sound senile. A user on X received twenty two thousand likes on a post which claimed that “Bidens mic was EQ’d to pick up as much low end and high end ambient noise as possible” in an ABC interview.

As calls for Biden to step down grew, so too did the scope of this conspiracy. While the theory was fundamentally undergirded by the idea that Biden was under attack by journalistic institutions who were chasing profits against the better interests of the nation, the narrative also now had to account for figures these individuals had previously worshiped, such as Barack Obama actively working towards ending Biden’s bid for reelection. Those who do not rely on conspiratorial thinking have a fairly easy way of explaining why prominent members of the Democratic party were publicly calling for Biden to step down. These individuals have an investment in the party succeeding and do not perceive Biden to be a viable candidate. Yet those who are drawn towards conspiratorial thinking wish to understand perceived threats to their ego aims in absolute terms. It cannot be that some actors are attacking Joe Biden, an individual these people identified as an absolute guarantor of their interests, for good and fair reasons. All threats must be unified, even in such a case where an argument must be made that Obama, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and a collection of Democratic Party Senators and House Representatives are all now in some form collaborating with Donald Trump. One prominent Biden dead-ender, who has 700 thousand followers on X, attempted to square this circle through the discovery of a talent agency that many people who were attacking Biden had connections with. On July 19, they said this on X, receiving nineteen thousand likes.

Something to keep in mind: Tom Strickland - the megadonor pulling dem donations from folks who back Biden - is a co-founder of the WME talent agency. Another co-founder is Ari Emanuel who repped Trump. They also do business with LIV golf tournament, Miss Universe, UFC/WWE (wrestling), Obama (Ari’s brother Rahm was his chief of staff), Elon Musk, and god knows how many media personalities are repped by WME. 

In other tweets, this user highlighted how “Pod Save America,” a prominent liberal podcast that had also called for Biden to stop running for reelection, was also represented by WME. This was supposedly their smoking gun, the nefarious actor who is underpinning the calls from within the Democratic party against Joe Biden, connected with the nefarious liberal media plot to get Trump elected for the sake of profit. When Democratic Party House Representative Zoe Lofgren publicly called for Biden to step aside, the previously mentioned user replied to their X post by saying 

Hey, @ZoeLofgren: did Strickland at WME threaten to withhold money from you if you didn’t come out publicly against Biden?

It is interesting to observe what happens to conspiratorially minded individuals when the grand irrational conspiracy theories they have constructed does not reflect the reality of a given situation (as tends to happen often). In this case, the theory that any attacks against Biden’s reelection campaign come from a conspiracy led by a nefarious Trump-aligned media is clashing with the fact that a supposed ‘good guy’ (a Democratic Party House Representative) has acted in a way that would logically connect them to this evil plot to do harm. It is interesting to see how, in this case, this individual has squared this circle in classic QAnon style by asserting that their intentions are still good and they are merely being manipualted to do evil from behind the scenes.

If one squints, this general mistrust of the media adheres to a standard left wing critique of journalist institutions being run as capitalist firms. Trump’s initial rise in 2015 was certainly aided by the fact that many news outlets boosted him because that got them the most views. Yet what makes this belief truly ‘conspiratorial’ is that it presupposes that concern surrounding Biden’s mental acuity began as a result of a grand conspiracy by shadowy institutions to manipulate the masses. In reality, Democratic voters have been concerned about Biden’s age for more than a year now, and his disastrous debate performance only made these concerns worse. The media was not publishing stories about his age to a reader base that was originally disinterested as some supposed grand plan to eventually produce a more profitable political situation by getting Trump re-elected. They were publishing stories about Biden’s age because their readership was already interested in them. The invention of some grand conspiracy in an instance where it is not required to explain events is, of course, the hallmark of irrational conspiratorial thinking. It is an attempt to remove any nuance to how the world works out of fear that doing so may lead one to miss some evil secret plan by nefarious forces attempting to do evil.

One point that Biden dead-enders repeated ad nauseam as evidence that narratives about his age were invented by the media was that this focus on him being the oldest Presidential candidate in American history was ‘unfair’ or ‘hypocritical.’ And to a certain extent these points were true. Yes, it was hypocritical of the media to focus on Biden’s age while not talking about Trump, a man who is only three years younger. Yes, there are far more ‘impactful’ issues that could be taking space on the front page of a newspaper than Biden’s mental acuity. But these biases in print are first and foremost a reflection of the opinions of a liberal reader base who has long been shaped to obsess over concerns like the mental acuity of their President, especially in a context where he is barely able to stumble through a minute long prepared speech without slurring his words. Americans conceive of the President as a colossus who is singularly responsible for protecting their empire against both foreign and domestic threats. Despite the American President holding far more direct influence than most heads of state in other republics, he almost appears like a figurehead in comparison to the imagined role he plays within governance in the American subconscious. It is no surprise that a liberal media that has been selling this image of the President has now encountered an active reader base whose primary concern is whether the senile 81-year-old will decide to run for a second term.

There is a reason why Biden dead-enders only began to sound like a dollar store version of Noam Chomsky as a result of a news cycle attacking Biden for his age and not, for instance, when the liberal media began carrying water for his support of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. This is because their conspiratorial mode of thinking involves anointing Joe Biden with the ability to protect their own percieved interests. As I stated before, conspiratorial thinking is first and foremost driven by one’s self preservation instinct. These Biden dead-enders perceived attacks against Biden as simultaneously attacks against themselves. In this sense, they partially share in a central psychological component of QAnon: identification towards a leader. QAnon adherents perceive Trump’s self interests as identical to their own and will pursue Trump’s ego aims as if they are merely aiding themselves. Yet seeing one’s interests in a certain political party succeeding over another does not necessarily imply the conspiratorial mode of thought that is the object of study in this newsletter. What connects these Biden dead-enders to QAnon adherents is the irrational identification of their self interests with a leader. For those within this online milieu, any threat to Biden was a threat to their own ego aims, even if this threat was attempting to replace Biden with a more viable presidential candidate, a decision which, as loyal Democrats, they should have actually embraced. This form of conspiratorial identification is unable to see the instances where one’s own ego aims diverge from that of the leader. It is thus the primary psychological mechanism which undergirds fascistic movements, as adherents become entirely unable to recognize instances where they are being manipulated by a demagogue whose interests have diverged from their own. As a prime example of this form of politician worship, one image macro shared by many Trump supporters displays an image of Donald Trump and reads, “In reality/they’re not after me/they’re after you/I’m just in the way.” This meme is, of course, nonsense, and Trump is an individual who has shown time and time again that he is only concerned about himself. This form of conspiratorial thinking does not allow threats to the leader to be heterogenous and disunified. These threats are not allowed to have nuance or be reasonable. They all must come from the same grand coalition that is not only after the leader but also the adherent. As an example of Biden dead-enders exhibiting this logic, one user on X received eight thousand likes by posting this on July 18:

I have never been more convinced that the “Biden should drop out” is a Russian propaganda op. The Internet Research Agency is up and running in full swing.

Ironically, if we were to actually think of Putin’s interests as concerns the 2024 American election, he would obviously wish for Biden to remain in the race. This was also the position of his American ally Trump, who has openly complained about not getting to run against Biden in November. Yet Biden dead-enders are unable to conceive of these sorts of nuances. The form of conspiratorial thinking that drove QAnon posits that any and all things which threaten one are unified. It thrives on a deep sense of dread concerning mysterious agents working in the shadows to ‘get one over’ on you. Identifying these agents and their machinations becomes its own way of providing one with some form of power to fight against them. Thus, if one has any hunch that a nefarious conspiracy may have caused a particular event, not considering this possibility would weaken oneself against these conspirators.

To conceive of Biden as an absolute guarantor of one’s ego aims, and thus any threats against him as threats against oneself, requires a psychological mechanism that Freud refers to as identification, which involves the internalization of the image of an individual into one’s own ego ideal. In the case of Biden dead-enders, it becomes clear that Biden can only represent some ‘ideal’ of what it means to be ‘presidential,’ even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is incapable of doing so. Following a short, prepared presidential address on July 14 where Biden had multiple verbal flubs, one prominent Biden dead-ender on X received thirty thousand likes on a post which read

President Biden is the ONLY candidate running for office with the kind of compassion, character, and decency we have come to expect from American Presidents. His age is irrelevant. His stutter is irrelevant. His leadership and experience: RELEVANT. Excellent speech tonight, Mr. President.

Saying “battle box” when you mean “ballot box” becomes an ‘irrelevant stutter’ to the same group of liberals who subscribe to a ‘West Wing Sorkin’ style mythology that the President is a quick witted debater who has the intellectual capacity to outsmart his enemies and bring them to heel through reason alone. Such a mythology is, of course, nonsense and is a romanticization of a fact that humans have come to know all too well since the advent of the modern state: that when the statesman speaks his word is final. Many of those who hold an affectionate view towards ‘dictators’ wish to pretend that this fact concerning the state is not maintained through the use of sheer violence and that the American state functions through reasoned debate and collaboration, yet to conceive of Biden’s belligerent narcissism as representing this liberal democratic ideal betrays that for many it is merely a mask to hide their enamourment for power and the violence undergirding the statesman’s commands. On X, one Biden dead-ender received thirty five thousand likes on a post which read 

He outmaneuvered the GOP during the state of the union…twice.

He outmaneuvered Kevin McCarthy into preventing the government shutdown.

He outmaneuvered Mike Johnson into funding our allies.

He’s outmaneuvering the pundits right now.

When you underestimate Joe Biden, you play right into his hands.

Those who are this attached to Biden have become convinced he is the primary force within politics looking after their own interests. It is, therefore, unacceptable for them to believe he is an incompetent narcissist who is mainly being propelled forward by the momentum of both state and party bureaucracy.

Yet while it seems clear to me that many components of BlueAnon mirror its far-right sibling, it is admittedly a far weaker form of conspiratorial ideation. There have, so far, been no Biden dead-enders who have went on wild police chases because they believe everyone around them is secretly an agent of an evil conspiracy (as is the case with QAnon adherents like Alpalus Slyman). Their identification towards Biden is far weaker than that of many Trump supporters, and as soon as Biden was successfully pushed off the 2024 ticket, a vast majority of them immediately abandoned their support for him and moved on to posting about the new presumptive Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris. Many of the threats that Biden dead-enders incorrectly assumed Biden would protect them from were also far more ‘rational’ concerns than threats QAnon adherents obsess over. There is good reason to be worried about a second Trump term, for instance. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the comparison is not worth considering. 

What most interests me in this comparison is elucidating the degree to which psychological techniques utilized by QAnon have ‘infected’ public discourse more broadly. As the ‘temperature is turned up’ within American public discourse, most have come to an understanding that their rational ego aims are increasingly under threat by something, yet the irrational character of public discourse has prevented anyone from agreeing what this ‘something’ is outside of reference to cultural signifiers which accompany one of two sides of the culture war. While the similarity in structure between QAnon and some recent liberal conspiracy theories could be a product of this form of thinking growing independently of direct influence by QAnon, in some sort of conspiracy carcinization process, I am half convinced that many liberals have subconsciously copied QAnon even if they consciously hold negative opinions about it. It appears that QAnon has become a memetic cognitohazard even amongst many of its ideological opponents whose obsession with the theory for the sake of condemning it has led to them embracing its structure as a conceptual schema for interpreting events.

One reason I have this hunch is from observing the behaviour of certain liberal conspiracy theorists who have previously marketed themselves as ‘QAnon debunkers,’ specifically with reference to how similar their conspiracy theories are to QAnon in structure. The most absurd example I can find of this comes from a fairly prominent ‘anti-QAnon researcher’ who has embraced the sort of conspiratorial thinking surrounding Biden I have talked about in this newsletter. They wrote this, for example, about attacks against Biden by the media,

It is nothing short of a soft coup against the President. It’s being aided and abetted by a bunch of elite, nervous white men who get air time by going along with this psyop… It’s a psyop being promoted by the corporate media to attack the Democrat, because they profit from a “horse race.” Gullible and opportunistic white men have decided to pile on because they don’t think the outcome will affect them.

Yet this position is far from their most absurd ‘bake.’ They also subscribe to the theory that Donald Trump’s assassination attempt was faked and that the shooter was inspired by, or connected with, Michael Flynn, who had supposedly been planning an assassination attempt against Trump as a means of ending American democracy. They write,

What if this killer thought Trump’s murder would create “the best case scenario” and spark a violent revolution as laid out in detail by Flynn’s network for many months? How are al-Qaeda and ISIS, who rely on individuals and cells to be “inspired” by their propaganda and carry out terrorist acts for them autonomously any different than what Flynn’s network has been doing?

I have no idea if Thomas Crooks listened to Ivan Raiklin tell Alex Jones that “if you assassinate Trump… America will respond in kind” but if he did and wanted to go out a “hero,” how is he different from an ISIS suicide bomber, or the 9/11 terrorists, but inspired by American ISIS instead? How is Mike Flynn, who has been consistently driving this message, different from Osama bin Laden?

This person’s conspiracy theories reek of a bizarre inverted QAnon, even copying the theory’s form through the continual usage of rhetorical questions as a means to soften the fact that the connections they are drawing are completely absurd. While theories about Trump’s assassination attempt are fairly prominent among liberals, I find that they are usually shut down pretty quickly after someone is informed that Trump’s shooter was killed by police. Yet this person has such an irrational desire to connect any perceived threats in their world to a grand conspiracy that they are willing to suggest that the shooter was well aware of the fact he would be killed and sacrificed himself for the movement as a means of bolstering the American right. By comparing this supposed self sacrifice to suicide bombings committed by Muslim fundamentalists, they have also connected another web of nefarious actors to the grand conspiracy threatening their ego aims.

Another indication that QAnon has been almost directly absorbed by many across the culture war divide is liberal’s newfound obsession with “white hats,” or individuals who appear to be working with the enemy but are, in fact, working with ‘us.’ As a recent example of liberal usage of this trope, some Biden Dead-enders appear to believe that JD Vance is secretly plotting against Donald Trump. One X user received 6 thousand likes on a post which read,

Let’s just say @JDVance1 is going to be reading up on the 25th Amendment.

A vast majority of conspiracy theories are ‘negative’ in purpose, meaning they are concerned with a supposed conspiracy that threatens one’s self-interests. Yet QAnon, with its obsession with ‘white hats,’ has helped popularize the ‘positive’ conspiracy theory within political discourse, which posits that there is a secretive coalition of ‘good guys’ fighting for one’s interests. The ‘positive’ conspiracy theory is a particularly irrational expression of feelings of powerlessness, where neuroses derived from perceived threats one has no ability to defeat are satiated through the absurd assertion that there may be some secret shadowy organization that is actually looking out for one’s interests, even in a context where a right wing demagogue with the legal status of a king has assumed the most powerful political office on the planet. 

This concern is far more sympathetic than many of the underlying anxieties that drive QAnon adherents. I am also quite worried about how much death and suffering Donald Trump may be able to inflict with another four years in office. Yet to those who, for this very reason, come away from this newsletter with a sour taste in their mouth because I have invoked the term “BlueAnon” and dared to compare these people to fanatical adherents of a fascistic movement: I do not particularly care. I believe that this form of conspiratorial thought mobilized in direct support of a President who is currently overseeing the mass indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians does not deserve to be treated with kid gloves. Even speaking merely in utilitarian terms, this instance of irrational conspiratorial thinking mobilized tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of ‘digital soldiers’ towards a cause that, if succeeded, would have emboldened the fascist American right by weakening the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the 2024 American election. This is the problem with conspiratorial thought; it is irrational. It lacks a rational character that is able to understand the actual consequences of world events and their underlying causes, and it also, therefore, lacks a moral character that is able to understand politics without direct appeal to one’s own self-preservation instincts. This makes me a supposed ‘ally’ to these people in the international ‘culture war’ only in virtue of the fact that they are currently blind firing towards a perceived threat where I happen to not be directly in the way. 

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This is a rather significant moment in Canadian politics, as a crucial fact connected to long term Canadian political trends that makes both liberal and conservative alike uncomfortable can no longer be denied. For liberals, this moment serves as the nail in the coffin for the lie of 'Canadian exceptionalism.' The so-called ‘bi-partisan consensus’ on social issues that is supposed to unify the country regardless of party affiliation (and therefore make us oh so better than those evil Americans) can no longer be repeated with a straight face. Some significant portion of the Conservative Party is no longer afraid of calling for a ban on gender-affirming care for minors or inviting people from anti-abortion organizations to their conventions. Many marginalized people whose lives could be destroyed by the removal of institutional protections must seriously be concerned about the results of federal elections. We are, despite liberal assertions otherwise, just like our southern neighbours. And for conservatives, they can no longer pretend they aren’t the Canadian party of Donald Trump. The desperate attempts by Conservative Party leaders to toe the line of ‘respectable conservatives' while somehow not pissing off the growing minority of culture war-obsessed freaks have utterly failed. How the fuck has this happened?

On a very old episode of my podcast that preceded the 2019 Canadian Federal Election, I noted that Canadian politics is just America on a five year time delay. And for the most part (plus or minus a few years depending on the given issue), this has been correct. And yet, not exactly. There is an essential caveat to Canada’s cultural dependence upon The United States. We, as Canadians, are cursed to draw almost all of our cultural energy from our southern neighbours, yet we must emulate them in the most farcical way possible. To understand the general nature of this intra-state cultural influence, think of the asinine attempts by American right wing ‘populists’ to successfully copy Trump’s appeal. Now, imagine this applied to an entire country’s political stage. Canadian politics is a theatre where both left and right are awkwardly miming the actions of their southern counterparts. We still have our ‘woke’ liberal president (only he is known for doing blackface), and the various vulgar ‘populist’ conservatives who have attempted to step up to the plate and be our Donald Trump have been completely and utterly forgettable; most hilariously in buffoonish Shark Tank entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary being too lazy to learn French (a requirement for the office). Even our two main parties, liberal and conservative, read like placeholders for Democrat and Republican in a fictional country whose writer hasn’t come up with unique names yet. Even our multi-party system, which at the very least gives some form of federal electoral influence to parties other than the only two who have a hope of electing a prime minister, has become a mere re-articulation of American political divisions. Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the left leaning New Democratic Party, appeared on the American radio show The Breakfast Club to compare the NDP to AOC and Bernie Sanders and the newly formed far right “People’s Party of Canada,” created essentially out of a political schism caused by the conservatives not being sufficiently obsessed with American culture war issues, famously erected a billboard in 2019 that read “stop antifa.” Yet despite the total and utter failure by the Canadian political establishment to produce any equivalent to either recent historically significant ‘once in a lifetime’ American political leaders (Obama and Trump), baying hordes of Canadian voters have continued to demand some equivalence between them and their southern neighbours.

Sometimes I see Americans online making fun of politically minded Canadians for being so incredibly focused on what’s happening in America. Ironically, Americans can sometimes be self-centred enough that it prevents them from understanding just how much influence they have elsewhere, especially in a country as close in spatial and cultural proximity as Canada. And while any mockery towards Canadians is, in my opinion, both valid and morally correct, some Americans fail to understand that Canada is America in almost every way that matters. Our culture, politics, language, and economy are, with slight exception from the French (derogatory) provinces of the country, entirely dependent upon what’s going on down south (although even the French far right cannot resist the urge to invoke le wokisme). The consequences of this fact, as American cultural influence becomes more and more essential to how Canadians articulate political divisions, are remarkably far reaching, both leading to hilarity, such as in the case of a Canadian man invoking their “first amendment” rights in a Canadian court case, and also rather troubling developments concerning Canada’s most marginalized groups. Yet before I dive too deeply into the conservative party’s convention itself, and what it means for the future of Canadian politics, I should first provide a brief history of how we got here in the first place.

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The phenomenon of those on the far right reveling in the neurotic, irrational, and contradictory nature of their politics is fairly old and well observed. Yet perhaps Marx, in his famous addendum to Hegel concerning the repetition of historical fact, failed to add that history need not only repeat itself farcically once. It seems that the contemporary cultural medium of social media, with its anonymity and profit based content distribution systems, has heightened this far right farce to a degree not even thought possible by snickering German dissidents in the 40s who would sarcastically refer to the many monotonous “blood and soil” (blut und boden) novels released by Nazi sympathizers as “blubo” literature. In the contemporary context, these sympathizers would themselves begin publishing books under the category of “blubo,” a revelation of the fact that while public mockery may successfully ‘unmask’ the ridiculous and irrational nature of certain political movements, no such unmasking may upset these movement’s claims to sheer, brute power over their enemies.

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Nowhere does this phenomenon appear more plainly in the contemporary context than in the campaign of Republican presidential hopeful Ron Desantis, who, in July of 2023, released a propaganda video to the “Desantis War Room” Twitter (I’m sorry, X) account utilizing visual association to compare himself to Patrick Bateman and other fictional characters commonly associated with the ‘sigma male’ meme in popular culture such as Thomas Shelby from television series Peaky Blinders and Jordan Belfort from the film The Wolf of Wall Street. The video juxtaposes media headlines characterizing Desantis’ recent surge of anti-LGBT laws as “evil,” “draconian,” and “extreme” with clips of the Floridian governor laughing and making speeches as well as shots of previously mentioned ‘sigma males.’ Through psychological suggestion, the video attempts to initiate a transference of the introjection a viewer may exert towards these ‘sigma males’ onto Desantis.

The video’s explicit content, which is meant to glorify Desantis’ anti trans bills and even take sadistic joy in the anger they have inspired in left leaning media outlets, is inextricably tied to the meme format it references. Just as these ‘sigma males’ are condemned and reviled for the selfish pursuit of their narcissistic desires, as appears both within the content of their stories as well as how they are parodied in ironic ‘sigma male’ memes, so too is Desantis.

While comparisons between politicians and conventional movie stars are not particularly rare, Desantis’ team’s decision to compare him to a reviled character such as the psychotic, sociopathic narcissist Patrick Bateman, appears to have been them, in a sense, saying the ‘quiet part out loud’ in relation to their desire to condition a form of support based almost entirely upon sadistic cruelty, as the video was deleted off of his affiliated Twitter (I’m sorry, X) account “Desantis War Room” following media outrage. Other videos released by Desantis’ propaganda team are equally vulgar and bizarre and born out of the same far right hyper-masculine subculture that openly embraced figures like Bateman as a ‘sigma male.” Yet, of course, this subculture’s ability to propagandize by openly celebrating their narcissistic sadistic tendencies and cursing any social norms which stand in their way works better, in the current political climate at least, if it comes from an anonymous account. But while its fairly obvious that a mainstream politician invoking this meme format is a bad campaign decision, why has the sincere usage of this meme become prominent enough that any Desantis staffer would sincerely think the comparison between Desantis’ draconian transphobic laws and Patrick Bateman’s bloodlust would engender sympathy for him? While the obvious answer to this question is simply “incompetence,” I think that the social causes of this incompetence are structured enough to draw an analysis from.

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The sigma male, as understood by the subculture that coined the term, is meant to embody a hyper-masculine image of success. He is an intelligent investor, self disciplined, physically attractive, charismatic and yet also a “lone wolf,” only preferring the company of a few close associates and being generally uninterested in participating in the social hierarchy he would, in theory, dominate. The sigma is a mutation of the “alpha male,” an archetype based upon a discredited study on social hierarchies among wolves whose acceptance by male chauvinists within the broader ‘manosphere’ has led them to believe that society is necessarily composed of a dominance hierarchy, with the strongest, most disciplined, aggressive men (the alpha males) able to attain the spoils and the remainder of men (the beta males) being left with the scraps. Essentially, the sigma could be an alpha and subsequently a dominant member of society, yet he decides not to. He is the Nietzschean overman, and above the alpha due to his rejection of societal hierarchy. Yet in reality, the sigma’s supposed rejection of this natural dominance hierarchy is meant to appeal to men aspiring to the alpha trope yet unable to attain it. The sigma is, essentially, akin to the Aesopian fox unable to reach for a bunch of grapes. It is a coping mechanism for men who are dealing with the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands on a competitive market that only has enough room for a few winners. The sigma archetype soothes these men with the suggestion that the most powerful spirit is contained in those who could dominate and yet decide not to.

And yet, confusingly, the pop cultural references that typically stand in as representations of “sigma males” are not of the sort described here at all. Think of Jordan Belfort’s depiction in The Wolf of Wall Street, for instance, who certainly relates far more directly to the notion of an alpha male than anyone who ‘refuses to participate in social hierarchy.’ And, even more confusingly, these pop cultural references are essential to what defines the sigma as he appears in the memes that have made the term popular. One is meant to live through these various characters and treat them as ideals for their own life. The sigma male’s real appeal, as can be inferred from the pop cultural references the meme depends upon, is that he is far more outwardly neurotic in a way that is generally deemed ‘unacceptable’ by conventional social norms than the alpha. The sigma male is typically narcissistic, only caring about his own interests, and generally must manage some tension between his sadistic, even sociopathic, urges and the moral or societal consequences of acting upon such urges. This change from the original meaning is, in part, a product of the archetype’s distortion by parody, as its popularity is inextricably linked with the widespread derision and mockery it inspired from those outside of the hyper-masculine online subculture that coined it. This is to the point that most, if not all, sigma male memes in some way depend upon this parodical distortion of the archetype into a neurotic, sadistic narcissist who forgoes all social convention for the sake of their (oftentimes farcical) business investments. And yet, those within the manosphere seem perfectly comfortable with these alterations. This reveals something about the purpose of the ‘sigma male’ archetype that corruption by parody was unable to destroy (and, in fact, likely emboldened). The sigma, unlike the alpha, serves as an ideal that a neurotic, narcissistic right wing patriarchal man may recognize some of their own qualities in (and thus may be much easier to identify with). To ‘not participate within society,’ a la the original articulation of the sigma male, translates in these memes to acting in such a way that selfishly violates social norms.

A crucial aspect of the sigma male meme concerns its dependence upon reference to characters within popular culture. And its dependence upon these references seems to be almost perfectly in line with Adorno’s analysis of television as “psychoanalysis in reverse” insofar as popular culture gains its sway over audiences by glorifying their neuroses as opposed to treating them. Such neuroses are generally the result of capitalist forms of domination that deprive one of their ability to survive and force them to attain their means of survival through competition with others on a market whose laws have enveloped almost all aspects of human social relations. ‘Popular culture’ as it currently manifests itself is only able to gain its appeal in this cultural environment. Its most effective (and therefore most profitable) iterations are contingent upon giving audiences a reflected image of their neurotic self, only presented in a flashy and idealized way that makes them feel as if the solution is not a treatment of their neuroses but instead their intensification. The more intense capitalist domination becomes, the more severe these neuroses will manifest, and thus, the more strongly audiences will demand a glorification of such neuroses within popular culture as treatment.

In the case of the ‘sigma male,’ he displays textbook symptoms of secondary narcissism. He has a poorly developed sense of self, overly aggressive (even sadistic) impulses, and severe anhedonia. These symptoms essentially unify all ‘sigma male’ figures within popular culture. Take Ryan Gosling’s role in Blade Runner 2049, for instance. While he hardly possesses the sociopathic, sadistic, or entrepreneurial tendencies of a Patrick Bateman, Gosling’s character is entirely anhedonic, unable to take pleasure in the world and completely disinterested in the pursuit of any form of fulfillment (upon meeting him, Mackenzie Davis’ character, for instance, says “oh you don’t even smile”). And the popularity of characters exhibiting these traits should be no surprise. Secondary narcissism is a rather emblematic condition of our time, arising from unrequited object cathexis (i.e., wanting something and failing to attain it).

One might write off the ‘sigma male’ trend and the sincere identification with characters such as Patrick Bateman as fairly obscure. Yet the desire that undergirds such identification (which seems to translate extremely well into fascist politics) is also present in how the average consumer relates to various pop cultural products. It is not only the disaffected right wing male chauvinist who struggles with narcissistic symptoms. One example of this phenomenon is the pop cultural prevalence of so-called ‘anti-heroes,’ who serve as deeply flawed and morally complicated protagonists that we are nevertheless instructed to root for. As Ryan Broderick notes within “Why is every character suddenly an ‘anti-hero’ now?”

Science fiction, fantasy, and genre entertainment of all kinds is suffering from serious anti-hero drift, a general flattening of heroes and villains into morally gray but also fairly interchangeable characters that don’t have clearly defined or consistent motivations.

Typically, such characters are charismatic, conventionally attractive, and, most importantly, are not afraid to challenge moral conventions in pursuit of their own ego aims. They are cookie cutter stereotypes meant to be easily reproduced to condition a similar affect in audiences, being the perfect object of identification for those wishing to satiate their narcissistic neuroses. And corporate executives and producers at the helm of popular culture have very explicitly gravitated towards the curation of media centred on ‘anti-heroes’ in recent years. In superhero media, for instance, Erik Voss of the “New Rockstars” YouTube notes of the “Loki effect,” (Broderick) where large media firms are more likely to invest resources towards spinoff television series, movies, and merchandising on characters that fit within the ‘anti-hero’ archetype. The producers and executives at such media firms are not necessarily acutely aware of the psychological mechanisms that make anti-heroes so appealing. Instead, they merely react to what resonates most positively with audiences (through focus groups, opinion polls, and an eye on which properties generate the most profit).

One example of how connected the ‘anti-hero’ archetype in popular culture is with people’s desires to satiate their narcissistic neuroses concerns audience reception of the character Homelander from the satirical television series The Boys (as analyzed by Broderick). Homelander is meant to serve as a dark parody of Superman, having an almost identical set of powers and garnering a similar level of admiration from the general public. Yet he is also a narcissistic sociopath, killing whomever he pleases for personal gain (so long as he is able to do so without jeopardizing the adoration he receives from the public, which he, as a narcissist, neurotically depends upon). Homelander is, of course, not an ‘anti-hero.’ He is explicitly villainous and meant to be despised. And yet, as Broderick notes, many fans of the series on social media websites like Reddit come to the defence of the character, “push[ing] back against the idea that Homelander is a true villain, instead, countering that he’s an anti-hero.” This reveals that for some consumers of popular culture, the function of the ‘anti-hero’ is to serve as an object of identification who is condemned for selfish actions deemed by others to be morally wrong. Like the ‘sigma male’ archetype, the logic behind the invocation of the term ‘anti-hero’ can only be rendered consistent if the underlying psychological motivations behind its appeal are understood.

The tension between the obvious intention of showrunners to villainize Homelander and many fans’ attempts to sympathize with the character seems to have come to a head following the third season of the series, where Homelander functions as an analogy for Donald Trump. While this comparison was meant to serve as a critique or satire of Trump and a warning for the rising dangers of right wing authoritarianism within contemporary American politics, as explicitly stated by showrunner Eric Kripke, some of the more right wing consumers of the series did not take it as such, instead viewing Homelander’s depiction as generally sympathetic. In a style almost identical to the experiences of many genuine participants in a fascist movement, show watchers sympathetic to Homelander supported his political bid up until the revolutionary crescendo of indiscriminate violence, wherein they wrote off the narrative decision as unexpected and a result of the left leaning political position of the writers (presumably tainting an overall enjoyable product). As Broderick notes, such an interpretation was common enough to embroil the subreddit dedicated to the show in “chaos,” where “fans who thought Homelander was cool [were] in a meltdown.”

This discordance appears to result from tension between the shows multiple, contradictory meanings. While the explicit narrative arrives at a conclusion centered around revulsion for Homelander and his intentions, his flashy depiction as a conventionally attractive, charismatic, all powerful superhero commands audiences to like him. As concerns the intentions of the show’s writers, this tension is meant to resolve itself in a critique of the superhero genre. The explicit narrative is meant to win out among audiences, where they instead are instructed to root for the protagonists of the series who are, of course, ‘anti-heroes’ themselves. Yet some portion of audiences were not satisfied with the moral failings of the provided protagonists and reinterpreted the explicit meaning of the series to justify their emotional attachment to its villain. Given that some of Homelander’s admirers discounted his later interpretation as being a product of ‘liberal biases’ among writers of The Boys, instead desiring the depiction of a villainous character who is not as explicitly fascistic and authoritarian, how can we imagine the collection of producers and executives that operate the culture industry will satiate the desires of such a market?

Some might reject this interpretation of popular culture as overly pessimistic, and while certain theorists are correct to assert that audiences are able to recontextualize pop cultural products and derive different meanings from than those directly intended by producers, few have cared to think about the growing list of examples of when audiences have decided to do so for the worse. While one may point to pop cultural products as potential sites of resistance and recontextualization, wherein the appreciative energies directed towards such products are repurposed towards opposition to power, one must be duly aware of the many instances (of a likely more significant number) wherein such energies are instead repurposed towards obedience.

Sigma male memes, more broadly, are an obvious example of a medium that is built upon recontextualizing cultural products for the worse, even allowing such products to be retooled to help right wing politicians justify their cruel and sadistic political programs. They are able to do so as a result of being based upon the psychological language of removing ‘repressive’ social and moral conventions that prevent certain aggressive, sadistic instincts from being satiated. They frame narcissistic anhedonia as a problem that is caused by moral condemnation and shame which prevents one from acting on their self interests (and satiating their sadistic urges). This may help explain why the widespread mockery of sigma male memes only intensified their sincere usage. The attempt at leveraging shame against this form of politic, appealing to some idea of ‘social justice,’ only shows this group that they are ‘offending’ the exact sensibility they see as preventing them from satiating their urges. This form of politics channels the gratification one receives from identifying with these ‘anti-heroes,’ who tell the individual they should love their symptoms and intensify them, towards the destruction of any societal forces that prevent them from satiating their narcissistic sadistic urges.

The basis of what makes sincere sigma male memes effective seems to also structure the general form of ‘anti-woke’ politics currently popular among far right American’ populists.’ And Desantis seems to be the most obsessed with invoking “wokism” of any American politician. A Biden zinger used against Giulani and his reliance on his role in 9/11 during the 2008 presidential race could be reformulated for Desantis, that there are only three things he needs to make a sentence: a noun, a verb and ‘woke.’ Desantis’ obsessional crusade against the ill-defined amorphous phenomenon of ‘wokeism’ is presented as an attempt to ‘liberate’ society from censorship and indoctrination, to cure people of the ‘woke mind virus’ which stifles rational thought and freedom. Yet the term’s amorphous nature can be more precisely defined so long as its subconscious psychological meaning is understood. To reject ‘wokeism’ is, essentially, to reject the social remnants of liberal enlightenment values as they have been internalized into one’s conscience. The demand to ‘reject wokeism’ equates to an intensification of aggressive self preservation instincts through the removal of repressions against such instincts made by the superego (or conscience). Yet this ironically results in an even more repressive state of affairs, where one’s narcissism becomes worse, and a higher share of object libido is redirected towards the ego, causing one to be even further prevented from attaining the gratification they are so desperately chasing after. This manifests itself through increasingly intense and neurotic adoration of whatever ‘ideal image’ one has constructed, whether it be the ‘sigma male’ of popular culture or a political leader, such as Desantis, who uses this psychic energy for the pursuit of his own ends. This is a ‘vicious cycle’ of repression which lies at the heart of every fascistic movement, and it appears to be similar enough to an attitude conditioned in consumers of pop culture for this connection to be explicitly referenced by fascist demagogues.

Thank you to a dead milkman, Badonasm, CAr Gard, Claire Hofbauer, Claudeline aka ArD, E, Ebbtides, Jennifer Coats, Kelly LeMaire, Megan Graves, NoMoonMama, Odin Linga, Sierra, solarbody, and Wish Dragon for supporting me on Patreon!

Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. - Theodor Adorno

People have become sick and tired of talking about politics, and yet they cannot stop doing it. Time and time again, when the dust has settled over such debates, and one’s political opponent has walked away, it has only left one feeling worse. Yet the fruitlessness of such endeavours seems to merely goad people on. It is as if the pointlessness of such disputes is the point. They serve as a vessel to dump one’s frustrations into that somehow seems to make such frustrations worse. Why do we do this to ourselves? 

Whether these debates happen across a dinner table or through Twitter replies, they are carried out under the pretense that they constitute a genuine political act. People seem to ‘talk about politics’ because it feels like it is actually doing something. Political struggle isn’t supposed to feel good; it is uncomfortable and often even violent. And yet the mere presence of this feeling does not constitute a political act. The urge to ‘talk about politics’ is a pseudo activity; it mirrors much of the emotional baggage associated with political struggle, yet it is channelled towards meaningless interpersonal conflict. Far from serving as an aid to resist forms of domination, which drive one’s frustrations in the first place, it instead functions as a subtle practice in self-harm, an unhealthy coping mechanism for channelling excess aggression caused by feelings of hopelessness and despair. 

There is a reason that such discussions, while coated in political language, are generally of a purely personal nature. When one ‘talks about politics,’ it, more often than not, amounts to either moral condemnations or exculpations of individual acts. “People should stop buying X product,” or “has anyone noticed that people who like X book are low-key creepy?” The narrow scope of such discussions is a reflection of the fact that they may only lay claim to affecting the range of decisions allowed to one by the market, the ‘freedom’ given to one after one’s freedom has been foreclosed upon. When class domination has become ubiquitous, the only room for conflict is that of an interpersonal nature. Political discussion has become a sublimated iteration of the general form of neurotic interpersonal conflict that structures our lives, driven by the tension between a modern, strongly developed rational ego agency and the failure to meet such ego demands caused by scarcity. To meet these demands, we must compete on the market with each other for scraps. And, following the erosion of political agency driven by the market becoming a hegemonic force within our lives, that is all we’ve become to each other. Fellow competitors, willing to work together only with the promise of mutual ingratiation, always keeping an eye on each other for when such unions might collapse due to conflicts which necessarily emerge between self-interested actors. In this world, political discussion can only amount to a question of which scraps one is allowed to enjoy.

And yet, while we might expect this general attitude when ‘talking about politics’ from those within a liberal political framework, this is, in truth, embraced by the entire political spectrum. While many imagine they are genuinely resisting the domination that predicates market relations through ‘talking about politics,’ in practice, they cannot help but recognize this market’s dominance (even if only subconsciously through their actions). “Is it bourgeois to pay someone for housecleaning?” While such a question is couched in Marxist terminology, it is almost entirely alien to the theoretical framework. ‘Class’ is not analyzed as one’s relationship to production but instead serves as a signifier which justifies interpersonal condemnation. “Bourgeois” becomes “someone I don’t like,” who spends the limited freedom given to them by the market in such a way that is deemed worthy of spite and aggression. Such a question, which seems to cause a considerable stir on Twitter regularly, and those similar to it merely serve as sublimated acts of cruelty. They utilize the language of ‘political analysis’ to legitimate a target for one’s excess aggression. They take for granted the idea that such aggression can only be channelled through a range of actions that leaves the underlying structure of capitalism unquestioned.

But what about those who give up on ‘talking about politics?’ Is such a thing possible? Some, it seems, attempt to search for methods to cope with powerlessness and domination by escaping political discourse. Most notably through etching out a sphere of consumption within their lives detached from ‘the political.’ This method is fleeting and necessarily structured by the very same ‘political’ one is fleeing from (one must arrive with money in hand for the escape promised at the movie theatre). Yet, at least in there, you don’t have to talk about politics.

Sheer enjoyment seems to be a very popular method to drown out the presence of class-based domination, which manifests itself consciously through the same market-driven competition that drives the urge to ‘talk about politics.’ And many are rather protective of this sphere of enjoyment. This sentiment is articulated across the political spectrum, whether one is shouting “keep politics out of X” or even using the rebuke “let people enjoy things,” a phrase typically levied at perceived attempts to corrupt one’s sacred haven of ‘enjoyment’ with political analysis.

Yet, despite many people’s ostensible desire to keep these two spheres separate, they are becoming indistinguishable. People increasingly enjoy ‘talking about politics’ through the media they consume. Such a concept is essential to the now global’ culture war,’ which reduces ‘the political’ to cultural signifiers connected to acts of consumption. One acts out one’s politics by partaking in these various cultural signifiers and boycotting those of the other side. And I am rather skeptical of the suggestion that this constitutes a serious divide in the population (between those who wish to see ‘politics’ in their media and those who do not). Instead, commands such as “keep politics out of X” are necessarily embedded within the ‘culture war.’ The same conservatives who despise any mention of anti-black violence in their sports broadcasts adore witnessing these same broadcast’s absurd displays of American military might. These people do not wish to keep political discourse separate from enjoyment but instead to remove the aspects of ‘talking about politics’ that make them uncomfortable. People want political struggle without hardship, the good without the bad (I can’t believe it’s not freedom!). But considering the fact that this fat-free variation of ‘talking about politics’ is equally consequential, can you blame them?

In truth, the move to ‘escape’ politics through enjoyment is not antithetical to talking about politics. We are always talking about politics, even when we specifically aren’t. The sphere of enjoyment is not only inextricably linked with the seemingly immutable forms of political domination that structure our world but also the futile acts of resistance we attempt to levy against it.

Nowhere is this better witnessed in the current pop cultural milieu than with audience reactions to the recently released blockbuster hit Barbie. The film, produced by Mattel, positions itself as a ‘feminist’ piece of media, contextualizing the Barbie brand as facilitating female empowerment. And, of course, the typical culture war morons have come out of the woodwork to condemn it, with Ben Shapiro, for instance, producing a youtube video titled “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes,” wherein he declares that the movie is “anti-men” and even, in typical American conservative culture war fashion, burns a Barbie doll in protest. The film’s vague signalling towards feminist politics predetermines this negative right-wing reaction, and this reaction predetermines that seeing the film in some way constitutes a (pseudo) political activity for those on the other side of the culture war. Before the film has even been watched, its consumption is already partisan, with one’s political enemies telling one that consuming it somehow amounts to a negation of these enemy’s political project. Yet, this negation is not towards anything positive but instead holds the same false image of political agency posited by what it attempts to negate.

A central theme of the film concerns the idealized realm of Barbie land, innocent to human strife and sin, being ‘infected’ by the real world, leading to, among other things, the introduction of patriarchy. Barbie land serves as a representation of the idealized image of Barbie produced by children at play. The emphatic message of this theme seems to be that “entertainment is now political” and the Barbie brand must adapt to this situation. And just as one is meant to identify with these toy Barbies in childhood, so too is one supposed to hold the movie Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, as a role model. This form identification is the crux of the Barbie’ brand’ (hence the vast array of different iterations of the doll, made to appeal to as many young girls as possible). The difference, it seems, between the movie and the brand itself is that the movie posits such identification as explicitly ‘feminist.’ Barbie is a role model that has inspired young girls everywhere to do their very best (this Barbie is an astronaut!). We have all grown up now, and the way we consume products is inextricably linked to ‘talking about politics.’

The film makes its feminist argument, in part, by dispelling the beliefs of certain characters who disagree with the notion that the Barbie brand is feminist. But if you’re expecting some form of Platonic dialogue (I don’t know why you would), you will be rather disappointed. One character, a preteen girl named Sasha, initially tells Barbie

You’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented. You represent everything wrong with our culture: sexualized capitalism, unrealistic physical ideals. Look at yourself. You set the feminist movement back 50 years. You destroy girls’ innate sense of worth.

She even ends this rant by calling Barbie a fascist. Yet this future acolyte of Adorno does not later regret these words as a result of rational argumentation. Instead, she develops an emotional attachment to Barbie, realizing the character is not a ‘fascist’ following Barbie’s role in removing patriarchy from Barbie land.

Barbie and others do so in such a way that explicitly postures the film, and its consumption, as composing some form of ‘feminist resistance’ against the real patriarchy. Barbie comes back to Barbie land from a visit to the real world to find that Ken, who accompanied her, has learned about patriarchy and implemented it by brainwashing all of the different Barbies into enjoying being subservient to the various Kens. The patriarchy is then destroyed, and this form of brainwashing is lifted, through America Ferrera’s character making the Barbies aware of the unfair double standards that women face in a patriarchal society. 

This plot point, emotionally speaking, is the crux of the movie’s defence of the Barbie brand. When America Ferrera’s character speaks to the Barbies, who are then freed from the ‘brainwashing’ which caused them to serve the patriarchy, she is also speaking to the audience themselves, who are also meant to feel ‘liberated’ by this awareness. The film instructs us to think that the Barbie film, as well as the brand more generally, is ‘feminist’ (and therefore, its consumption in some way constitutes a feminist act) because we witness her fight the patriarchy.

The suggestion that patriarchy can be fought through the act of ‘waking women up’ to the unfair double standards they experience is obviously absurd. There is no sense in which the contents of the film, or the use of ‘Barbie’ as a role model, can serve to genuinely equip women to combat the patriarchy. Yet this does not matter. Barbie, like most blockbuster films, does not convince audiences through rational argumentation, instead using emotional gratification. It feels good to root for Barbie, and when she wins, it is as if we have won as well. And yet, of course, we have actually lost. The form of gratification one feels through this pseudo-political act is predicated upon an emotional sleight of hand. While the film presents identification with Barbie as constituting some genuine political act in reality, all this amounts to is an act of consumption. A false, irrational image of freedom is dangled in front of our eyes, and we are, for a brief moment, allowed to partake in it as if it is real. But it is built upon a lie which leaves us even more blind to the inexorable and opaque forms of domination that cause our suffering. The psychic energy which drives us to oppose such suffering is channelled toward consumption, which serves as a painkiller that makes the symptom increasingly impossible to identify, underpinned by a form of emotional manipulation designed to extract as much profit as possible from us, even during our time off.

Importantly, the politics presented in this movie, structured in such a way that, above all, encourages audiences to consume more Mattel products, is almost identical to the logic that underpins the desire to ‘talk about politics.’ Its end goal is to make others ‘aware’ of some political fact (heavily attached to the moral quality of a particular individual act of consumption), with little to no consideration for how this awareness relates to genuine political action. And yet it seems that the Barbie movie does not serve as a replacement for ‘talking about politics.’ Instead, it practically begs the audience to conceive of such useless political discussions as genuinely political. In a sense, I may have presented the causal order of this phenomenon backwards. It may be that the desire to ‘talk about politics’ is a cheap reflection of the form of (pseudo) political action roused in audiences through the presentation of consumption as a political act. The gradual transition from this form of consumption serving as a temporary ‘shield’ for forgetting about the political to constituting what defines the political may just be a product of the increasingly hegemonic role that large capitalist firms play within culture. And this phenomenon is, of course, predicated upon an intensification of powerlessness and a withering away of political agency, which leaves audiences increasingly neurotic and emotionally vulnerable to the suggestion that acts of consumption may genuinely constitute a contribution to some positive political project. This may be why our powerlessness causes us to love ‘talking about politics’ so much. 

One might think this is overly ‘pessimistic.’ “Why can’t you just let people enjoy things?” And I am frankly tired of responding to this point when it has already been answered, at least subtly, within the original text I have written. And yet, while my outlook may very well be ‘pessimistic,’ it is a form of pessimism that is dialectical, always holding some utopian image in mind with reference to what is being rejected within the present. This pessimism is derived from a refusal to yield this image to a profoundly unfree world, whose acceptance necessarily foreclosed upon the possibility of realizing such utopian possibilities. In this sense, it is rather optimistic, far more so than its detractors. 

Overall, I’ll rate the Barbie film 4 ‘angry Adorno aphorisms’ out of 5. Really enjoyed it. Highlights of the film include Ryan Gosling, Ryan Gosling, and Ryan Gosling. Favorite scene was probably the homoerotic Ryan Gosling dance number. If I had any critiques of the film, it’s that there wasn’t enough Ryan Gosling. 

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1.     Introduction

“Exploitation is unjust! The boss steals the worker’s surplus value! Labour is entitled to what it creates!” You’ve likely heard slogans like this uttered by Marxists at one time or another. They can be found, for instance, in a new Jacobin article by Ben Burgis titled “Karl Marx Was Right: Workers Are Systematically Exploited Under C…

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Also Content Warning: racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia (all of the phobias) 

Thought I would analyze the collection of Hyperborea memes made by Fascists as shitposts/recruitment tools, where they came from, and tangentially related "normie" memes that came out of them

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We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? ‘I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,’ sighs modern man. This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and …

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Part 2 will be out early for 2$ a month for Patrons at patreon.com/livagar . Additional bonus content about hyperborea will also be posted there.

Music in earlier part of the episode by Jan Janko Močnik:

Sources used in this episode:

Hyperboreans : myth and history in Celtic-Hellenic contacts, Timothy P. Bridgman.

Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, Jonathan M. Hall. 

Adam, Eve, and Agriculture: The First Scientific Experiment, Harry White.

How to change the course of human history, David Graeber and David Wengrow. 

Elevating optimal human nutrition to a central goal of plant breeding and production of plant-based foods, David C Sands et al. 

Introduction

• As we know, surplus value is the difference between capital advanced (the first C) and the product (second C)

• Capital advanced, or advanced capital, is just c + v or the money spent for production

• Capital is made up of the purchase of the means of production (constant capital, so instrument…

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Harvey's "Companion to Marx's Capital"

Stephen Shapiro's "How to Read Marx's Capital"

Heinrich "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital

Fredric Jameson's "Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One"

All of my links at livagar.com

• There are two elements of the labour process (as analyzed through the value form)

• The value added by the labour

• And the value transferred by the Means of production

• This is the value transferred as referred to previously, the value of the means of production that is consumed (destroyed) to create the new …

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Harvey's "Companion to Marx's Capital"

Stephen Shapiro's "How to Read Marx's Capital"

Heinrich "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital

Fredric Jameson's "Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One"

All of my links at livagar.com

Harvey's "Companion to Marx's Capital"

Stephen Shapiro's "How to Read Marx's Capital"

Heinrich "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital

Fredric Jameson's "Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One"

All of my links at livagar.com

Script for this week (including free part)

Capitalist buys labour power, c…

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Harvey's "Companion to Marx's Capital"

Stephen Shapiro's "How to Read Marx's Capital"

Heinrich "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Capital

Fredric Jameson's "Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One"

All of my links at livagar.com

Chapter 4  

• Capital circulates as M – C …

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