Category: culture wars

Political violence and “punch Nazis” LARPing

A USA Today columnist, Dace Potas, has sounded the alarm on the normalization of political violence in leftwing, progressive circles. He specifically cites the posthumous mockery of Charlie Kirk and his widow, which has taken a decidedly creepy and ghoulish  turn. The name of his piece is: “The left normalizes political violence. We can’t accept it.” You should read it.

Dace Potas is writing editorials for USA Today, while I’m just some guy in Ohio. But I saw this coming a few years ago, when the catchphrase “punch Nazis” became commonplace in progressive spaces online.

Why shouldn’t we want to punch Nazis, you ask. Isn’t that what Harrison Ford did in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

That’s all fine and good, if you’ve got a time machine and you’d like to go back and slug it out with a brigade of the Waffen SS. Be my guest, if you can pull that off. Knock yourself out.

But in most cases, what you actually read about is young punks carrying out cowardly attacks on 80-year-old men wearing Trump hats.

A part of me isn’t surprised. Folks on the far-left fringe have long engaged in a version of “stolen valor”, vis-a-vis World War II veterans, few of whom are still alive to speak for themselves. (Note: My maternal grandfather was a World War II veteran who engaged in combat with the real, historical Nazis—the ones who spoke German. My maternal grandfather lived well into my adult life. We had many long discussions. My maternal grandfather would have had nothing but disdain for twenty-first-century “antifa” goons.)

What “fighting Nazis” really looks like: my grandfather manning an anti-aircraft gun in the Atlantic, 1943

Here’s the problem with the whole “punching Nazis” thing. Who gets to decide who is a “Nazi”?

The historical Nazis are all dead. (A few may be living out the last of their days in nursing homes in Germany. They would be over one hundred years old in 2026.)

Okay, what about homegrown, American Nazis? The American Nazi Party, which had a grand total of 500 members in the late 1960s, doesn’t really exist today.

What about the Ku Klux Klan? There are fewer than 5,000 of them in the USA in 2026, scattered throughout the country. They mostly exist online.

So you’re not punching non-existent “Nazis”. And you can’t even find a genuine, sheet-wearing klansman to punch in Toledo or Poughkeepsie.

So who is it that you want to punch?

Let’s cut the BS, and define what is really going on here. What “punching Nazis” means in practice is: labeling those who disagree with you as ‘Nazis’ so that you can justify political violence against them, while LARPing as a member of the 82nd Airborne, circa 1944.

Likewise, “Antifa” is—if you’ll pardon my technical jargon here—a complete bullshit term. Calling yourself “antifascist” does not make you a freedom fighter, any more than me calling myself “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend” would make me that. If you want to fight fascism, join a branch of the US military, because they’re the last US-based organization to actually do that.

This doesn’t mean you have to silently agree with everyone on the political right. I certainly don’t. I find Matt Walsh (to pick one name at random) to be an insufferable killjoy who wants to outlaw all biblically non-compliant forms of sex (based on his interpretation of Scripture, of course).

But to compare Matt Walsh to Reinhard Heydrich is gross hyperbole at best…and it is the encouragement of political violence at worst, if accompanied by rants about “punching Nazis”.

-ET

Above: A self-styled Captain America (the comic book shirt on a grown man speaks volumes) encourages people LARPing as antifascists to engage in street violence against people LARPing as Nazis.

Everyone in this scenario is nuts. There are no heroes here (and certainly none that rise to the level of the men and women who fought in World War II).

A pox on both their houses, basically.

Safetyism and gym dress codes in Kentucky

A fitness club in Northern Kentucky (not far from my home across the Ohio River) has implemented a new, arguably draconian dress code for its members. While the new dress code would not quite pass muster in Iran, the Islamic Republic would regard it as a reasonable starting point. (Keep reading for some specifics.)

All hell is breaking loose on the local internet as a result. A new front in the War on Women! The patriarchy trying to control what women wear!

While the local gym’s new rules do not explicitly identify women as likely offenders of indecent dress, the policies target “uncovered sports bras and leggings”, items which men are unlikely to wear. Shirts, the new rules state, must cover the member’s “chest and cleavage”. “Inappropriate or revealing attire,” is henceforth verboten.

Since when has anyone ever worried about a man wearing “revealing attire”?Unless the reader is being deliberately obtuse, there is one reasonable conclusion: the new gym policies are designed to compel women to dress modestly when working out.

I have been going to gyms since the early 1980s. Leggings and halter-style sports bras weren’t in vogue 40 years ago, but some of those leotards from the 1980s were form-fitting, and practically guaranteed to raise testosterone levels in the gym.

I may have been distracted at times by such things; but I have never sustained an injury as a result of a woman wearing a form-fitting or revealing outfit in the gym. Never once in more than forty years. Nor have I ever labored under the belief that a woman is obligated to have sex with me because she wears this or that in my presence. By that logic, I would be entitled to everything I see that I might possibly want. And that’s a recipe for societal chaos.

Ergo, what women wear in the gym has never been an issue for me. And going back to 1995 or so, I don’t think many guys ever objected or even cared.

Then Gen Z ruined the gym for everyone.

A few years ago, it became fashionable for young women to call out men in gyms for real and imagined cases of ogling. This being Gen Z, it all took place on TikTok and Instagram.

In many cases, the accusations were either wild exaggerations or outright fabrications. But much drama ensued. Women were not “safe” in gyms with men, we were told.

Thirty years ago, Gen X women had no qualms about telling the occasional creep (yes, they do exist) to get lost or keep his eyes to himself. Women have lost an awareness of the power they wield, with a silent, icy stare or a simple rolling of the eyes.

Gen Z lacks such sophistications completely. For them, an online confessional (and probably some therapy) is required to address every grievance, every trespass. One thing we can be certain of, in any situation that involves conflict or tension and Gen Z, there will be drama.

Safetyism is the standard antidote to the drama of the younger generation. Safetyism is the elevation of both physical and emotional safety above all other concerns—including fun and spontaneity. Safetyism is what has given us microaggressions, pronoun rules, and the hyper-policing of all expression of male sexual intention.

Safetyism has now made its way into the gym, too. When I visit my gym, I reflexively look away from any pretty young woman who crosses my field of vision…as if she, like Medusa, could turn me to stone if my gaze were to linger a second too long. I do not want to end up in some attention-seeker’s TikTok video.

New dress code policies like the one described above are another manifestation of safetyism. If everyone wears baggy bloomers to the gym, if every one wears headphones and keeps their eyes forward at all times, then no one will ever be ogled, made uncomfortable, or microaggressioned.

It’s all rather ridiculous, when you stop to think about it. The world faces many genuine problems at present. Uncovered cleavage and derrieres are way, way down the list.

But this is what happens when safetyism takes over society, when the prevention of anything transgressive, edgy, hurtful or inappropriate becomes the paramount concern. Safetyism always comes with rafts of new rules. Quasi-Islamic dress codes for women in gyms in Kentucky are just one more example.

-ET

Another unlikely bestseller, and the futility of cancel mobs

Way back in 1973, a French writer named Jean Raspail penned a dystopian novel called. Le Camp des Saints, or The Camp of the Saints in English.

The Camp of the Saints presented an overwhelmingly negative view of mass immigration. The thesis of the novel was that Western societies are being destroyed from without by mass immigration, and from within by those who are sympathetic toward the waves of immigrants from the developing world.

Whether you agree with that argument or not, it is not exactly an original idea. Perhaps it was in 1973. It is certainly not an original idea in 2026.

Jean Raspail’s more than 50-year-old novel had long ago passed into obscurity, at least within the English-speaking world. Then a group of busybodies on Reddit learned of the book’s existence, and decided that here, alas, was an opportunity to engage in some performative outrage.

Members of the subreddit r/bannedbooks worked themselves into a lather, then pooled their efforts to get the book temporarily removed from the virtual shelves at Amazon. (Demonstrating the lack of self-awareness that is typical of such folks, they failed to see the ironic connection between the name of their subreddit, and the fact that they were actively seeking a book ban. But I digress.)

The Amazon book removal was quickly overturned, of course. But the controversy generated interest in a book that no one would have heard of otherwise. As a result, The Camp of the Saints skyrocketed to best-seller status at Amazon, finally peaking at #6.

If we didn’t know better, we might suggest that this was a false-flag publicity stunt, perpetrated by the original publishers of The Camp of the Saints. But we do know better, because we’ve seen this before.

The 2010s were the high point of the “social justice book mob”. This is how it worked in those days: A member of the so-called “book community”, who was active on social media, would find a passage, theme, or character in a novel that could be broadly interpreted as “racist”.

They would then make some posts on social media decrying the evils of the book, and stir up an online mob. The online mob would do the rest.

Such mobs were particularly common in YA fantasy literature. Notable mob targets from a little less than a decade ago include: The Black Witch by Laurie Forest and Blood Heir by Amélie Wen Zhao.

Sometimes these mobs did real damage. Amélie Wen Zhao was so traumatized by the outcry against Blood Heir that she briefly delayed the publication of the book.

But patience with the social justice book mobs eventually ran thin for two reasons. The first was that, like most mobs, they overplayed their hand. Chinese American author Amélie Wen Zhao was no one’s idea of a white supremacist. The claims against her and her book were so ridiculous that almost no one could take them seriously.

Secondly, there was the “unintentional false flag” effect. Cancel mobs have repeatedly proven themselves effective at promoting the books, films, and artists that are their targets. The recent success of The Camp of the Saints is the most recent case in point.

I’m in my 50s. I haven’t read much YA fiction for many, many years. The last time I was in that market, Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys were cutting edge. I heard about The Black Witch and Blood Heir, though—because the online morality patrol was loudly denouncing these books in public.

This works both ways, of course. Almost thirty years ago, I heard about Heather Has Two Mommies because conservatives were kvetching about a children’s book that portrayed LGBTQ families and parents in an approving manner.

None of the above is meant to imply that we shouldn’t debate controversial social issues. We should, however, not get too worked up about the impact of “message art”. This is true for you, too, regardless of where you stand on the political continuum.

Novels and films with political messages are most impactful early on, when no one has yet named the issue in public, often out of public reticence about a topic. Heather Has Two Mommies might have been able to make that claim when it was first published in 1989. Today, however, a book or film describing LGBTQ individuals in hagiographic terms is so commonplace that we merely shrug and move on. Likewise, it has been virtually impossible to write an original novel or screenplay about race in America for at least 30 years. The topic has literally been done to death.

Beyond the earliest stages, message films and novels usually devolve into repetitions of well-worn talking points. In this way, most message art is derivative, just like most political speech.

Outrage over such materials now also follows a predictable pattern, as the recent bestseller status of The Camp of the Saints demonstrates. Here is the takeaway: if you don’t like what a particular book or movie is saying (or seems to be saying), your best course of action is to ignore it. In this era of online cancel mobs and counter-cancel mobs, all your efforts to censor a work of art will be in vain. You will only contribute to its popularity, which may have been a long shot otherwise.

-ET

‘Risky Business’: an entertaining film that would never get made today

I was just turning 15 when Risky Business—the movie that launched Tom Cruise’s acting career—hit the theaters in August 1983. I was too young to get into an R-rated movie without an adult; and this wasn’t a film that either of my parents would have been interested in seeing with me.

I neglected to see Risky Business for more than 40 years, partly because I was put off by the much-played clip of Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear. Call me homophobic if you’d like; but that isn’t the way to get me to see a movie. And there were just so many other movies to see.

I finally got around to watching Risky Business a few days ago. (Better late than never!) The movie was quite well done for a film that was originally conceived as a throwaway flick for Reagan-era young adults. (Moreover, despite the ubiquity of that clip with Tom Cruise in his underwear, that scene is a minuscule portion of the 95-minute movie.) Continue reading “‘Risky Business’: an entertaining film that would never get made today”

Angel: scandalous action films of the 1980s

The 1980s have acquired a reputation for being hopelessly conservative, fuddy-duddy times. On the contrary, many of the movies, songs, and jokes that were commonplace back then wouldn’t pass muster in today’s environment.

Consider Exhibit A: the Angel series of thriller films. The tagline of the initial 1984 movie was:

“High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night.”

The movie starred Donna Wilkes (then in her twenties) as the 15-year-old Molly Stewart, a prep school honor student who, for whatever reason, moonlights as a sex worker each night. And of course, she solves a crime or two along the way, as well!

Now, I’m not saying this is a laudable film concept. But people barely batted an eye at it in the 1980s. If such a film were released today, social conservatives on the right would go ballistic. (Jesse Watters and the rest of the Fox News crew would have a field day.) On the dour, humorous left, meanwhile, there would be wailing and shrieking about “exploitation”.

To be sure, there was an element of exploitation in the movie. (This is why a twenty-something actress was cast in the lead role.) But in the 1980s, most folks seemed capable of realizing that a movie was just a movie.

I was fifteen when Angel came out. I never saw the movie, but it was heavily advertised. Many people did see the film, apparently. There were two sequels: Avenging Angel (1985) and Angel III: the Final Chapter (1988).

-ET

Get Angel (1984) on Amazon

Kristen Clarke, Harvard, and “race science”

Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.  At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.

Clarke based her letter on…race science.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

 

Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.

Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.

Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.

Kristen Clarke

Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)

This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.

This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.

Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.

What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.

We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.

I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.

I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.

Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.

Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.

-ET

Kristen Clarke, Harvard, and “race science”

Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.  At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.

Clarke based her letter on…race science.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

 

Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.

Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.

Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.

Kristen Clarke

Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)

This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.

This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.

Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.

What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.

We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.

I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.

I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.

Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.

Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.

-ET