"Apolitical" Entertainment Won't Cure Cultural Cancer
We need a better class of messages in our stories.
The “all media is political” people are superficially right. In that everything has a message, and culture and politics inherently feed into each other, blah blah, whatever.
The thing is, the same people who say that have politics that are INSUFFERABLE to encounter in media.
The strong rebuttal to them is, “No, I don’t care if there’s politics in my games/movies/shows/books/etc. I care if YOUR politics are there. Because your politics are bad and you should feel bad.”
This quote is from a Twitter user named “The QuQu” with a furry avatar. This furry’s take on the problem of our current culture being overrun with vapid, preachy, hostile, socially radical-left propaganda across all forms of entertainment is more insightful and correct than 90% of “anti-SJW/anti-woke” takes on the issue.
Such is the state of modern political commentary.
The most popular take is that “nonpolitical” or “apolitical” entertainment is the cure for “woke” entertainment (radical left wing social propaganda).
“I just want to grill, for gawd’s sake!” As though everyone else sitting back, idly grilling, and consuming whatever media was poured into their eyes and ears while left wing extremists were busy subverting, deconstructing, and gatekeeping to total media titan domination isn’t how we got into this mess.
Unsurprisingly the call to “get politics out of my [X]” started primarily with centrists and moderates, but has been adopted by many self-styled conservatives and libertarians as well. Steven Crowder recently praised the Super Mario Bros movie as “anti-woke” for example, a statement I criticized him for.
Whether you enjoyed Super Mario Bros or not, what about it is “anti-woke”? That Peach didn’t have a black lesbian girlfriend or tell Mario that he was oppressing her with his white male privilege? Why would any piece of media deserve praise or recognition for something it DIDN’T do? If that’s how low the bar is, I’d like to compliment Velma for not just being ten hours of scat fetish videos spliced together. I’m sure that took a great deal of restraint on the part of that show’s (alleged) writers.
The fact of the matter is, while it may be a fun nostalgia-bait popcorn flick for many, and it’s not aggressively pushing any sort of radical agenda, Super Mario Bros made the character of Peach less feminine and de-damselized in comparison to the games, a decision one can’t help feel was partially informed by how left wing (anti-traditionalist, anti-heirarchical) western society has become. Mario saving the girl (once one of the most traditional forms of storytelling in existence) would’ve felt like more of an upset of the status quo (on top of being more narratively satisfying for his character growth) than her rescuing herself, as we got.
This is the problem with apolitical entertainment. Although to elaborate, I need to clarify what “political” and “apolitical” mean in the arts.
People who say “all art is political” are indeed technically right. Politics is, at its core, the power dynamics of human social interaction. Because every piece of entertainment or art involves human social interaction in some way (usually in the story it tells, but always between the artist and the audience) there is always some level of “politics” happening.
But this isn’t what most people mean when they complain about “politics in _.” They mean one-sided messages about issues that are controversial in the time and place they live in. In short, they mean propaganda. Therefore, when people call a piece of art or entertainment “apolitical” or “nonpolitical” what they really mean is “uncontroversial.” By its nature, uncontroversial entertainment sits squarely in the middle of the Overton Window of the time and place when it was made.
The problem is, the Overton Window doesn’t hold still. It’s constantly shifting. Who and what is doing the shifting? The people making art that’s controversial. Art that pushes the boundaries. And as anyone with an ounce of environmental awareness can tell you, that has overwhelmingly been the left since at least the 1960’s. So anything “apolitical” has been trailing behind radical leftism. What would have been considered “progressive” in the 60’s becomes “apolitical” and then “conservative.”
Because apolitical art, by definition, avoids controversy, it will never reverse this course. So it gets dragged in the direction of whatever is doing the pushing. And then centrists and conservatives wonder why everything is so “woke.” It’s because only one side is presenting their point of view and ideas in the media that normies consume.
Right wing pundits do little to effect this, because the only people who actually consume pundit content are the converted (and hate watchers or on rare occasions people who consume them for meme purposes). The unindoctrinated masses don’t engage, certainly not with an open mind, because punditry has very little value outside of politics. Unlike a movie. Or a fiction book. Or a song.
Anyone who wants to actually do anything on a cultural level to curb radical social leftism should be focusing not just on the arts, but art that has MESSAGES. Sorry for using that dirty word, but it really isn’t as dirty as our current age of out-of-touch nepotist and diversity hire hacks makes it seem. Aesop’s Fables were stories with a message. Alice in Wonderland was a metaphor for an 1860’s controversy in the English academic world over how to do math. Battleship Potemkin was Soviet propaganda. Star Trek was born from progressive utopian daydreams, and we probably have network mandates and ratings demands to thank for it not being insufferable from the start. Lovecraft’s stories are rooted in xenophobia and several of them are centered on an anti-racemixing message. And on and on. Yet people still not only enjoy these works but love them, including people who vehemently disagree with their messages.
Messages in art, even explicit one-sided political messages that might be accurately called propaganda, don’t have to ruin the art. Whether they do comes down to the skill of the artist and respect for their audience. The former is often lacking and the latter is nearly ALWAYS lacking in the modern big entertainment industries.
So what sort of messages should we be sharing in our creative endeavors? Seriously, I think this needs to be discussed more in rightwing circles. There’s a lot of regurgitating of liberal themes from past decades among “dissident” indie creators, probably because those were the eras they grew up in, and they’re imitating the “good” media they consumed. I might agree with them that the classic media from their decade is very enjoyable, but that doesn’t mean that all the messages were good or are good counters to modern radical left wing social ideology. The liberalism of previous decades brought us to where we are now, after all. We need a harder counter than this.
There’s also the issue of division. The right has many different factions that don’t see eye to eye on issues. But to build a large, dedicated audience, common ground must be found.
Themes with broad appeal, that can be adapted to many different stories, genres, and mediums, and are direct counters to the cultural revolution of the radical social left are needed. This might seem hard to visualize for those who have been swimming in the sea of left wing media messages their whole lives, but it’s really not. Here’s an depth dive into a few of the most important/appealing of these themes:
1. Actual “anti-woke” content.
This means media that is directly critiquing, satirizing, mocking, or otherwise taking aim at the modern radical left identity politics jihadists who are commonly called “woke.” When I criticized Crowder for abusing the term, I also shared images of the movies Demolition Man and The Hunt, and told him that these were films that properly deserved the label “anti-woke.”
Demolition Man is a satire of left wing totalitarian nanny-statism that was ahead of its time, along with being a kick-ass action movie. The Hunt is an action/horror/comedy in which a Hillary Clinton stand-in organizes a Most Dangerous Game style hunt of “deplorables” for wealthy leftist celebrities not too dissimilar from your standard frothing-at-the-mouth leftie internet slacktivist.
This theme has been explored well in other mediums as well. Indie author Steve Stark wrote a horror/comedy novel about a group of narcissistic, trendily-leftist social media influencers getting trapped in a hotel while a drug transforms residents into rage zombies. Tabletop game company Incel Riot made a card game where YOU take the role of a far left slactivist, in a ruthless, backstabbing game of clout chasing.
Modern leftie social activists are largely a nasty, hypocritical, overbearing bunch, yet media criticizing them is algorithmically suppressed, so there’s an enormous potential audience. Dislike of the “woke” brings together not just right wingers of all stripes, but also centrists and apolitical normies together. Even some of the “anti-woke” left can join in on the fun. Criticism of modern activists is important not only to curb their power, but also to keep them from rewriting history and public memory of their behavior, which they’re trying to do on a constant basis.
But being against an ideology is insufficient for replacing it. You have to be for something too, which brings me to the next topic…
2. Content that respects and promotes tradition as a force for good.
This can take many forms. Children honoring parents, healthy and loving family relationships, a church actually being a force for good in a setting (what a twist), the traditional warnings and taboos of the protagonist’s community proven to exist for damn good reason.
When I was a lad, we read a short story in school called “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It featured a group of people in small town America drawing lots for one of them to be stoned to death to ensure a good harvest. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but the story is a simple yet powerful piece of anti-tradition propaganda.
The message is: “Traditions are irrational, dangerous, and generally evil things that people came up with one day, for no reason at all.” That’s essentially the leftist viewpoint on history as a whole. The counter view: that most traditions became such because they performed a useful function, tried and tested in the laboratory of history, didn’t get a school story. And this was many years before the term “woke” would enter common parlance. The widespread acceptance of The Lottery viewpoint (not necessarily from the story itself, but from many bits of propaganda in modern society) is responsible for much of the cultural destruction and debauchery we’ve seen and continue to see.
A different perspective, a wiser perspective, is a vital foundation for any cultural gains. Grimm’s fairy tales were all about this. Tolkien’s Legendarium is steeped in it. Respect for ancestors, respect for history, respect for roots. Here is a rich vein of storytelling that speaks to the human soul.
3. Masculine men and feminine women as heroic ideals.
This is “the big one” of this article, because it’s so important and there’s so much to say about it.
“A heroic tale is more essentially a factor in education than a proposition in Euclid. …What the modern world wants more than anything else… is a new birth of the heroic spirit.” So wrote education reform advocate and Irish revolutionary Padraic Pearse.
If a culture’s heroes are a primary influence on its youth, it’s no wonder that our culture’s youth are in rough shape. The belittling, humiliation, and general emasculation of classic male heroes has been widely noticed and decried. Luke Skywalker became a grumpy nihilistic failure (before dying with the rest of the old cast). Gene Luc Picard spent a large portion of the first season of his show apologizing for being both a leader and a white man (well, that was the subtext anyway). Peter Parker’s supernaturally-unmarried ex-wife is cucking him with a yuppie with a manbun while she was also given cosmic powers that put his to shame. And on and on. Many heroes spend more time apologizing and battling depression than they spend doing anything that might be considered heroic, when they aren’t stepping down to make room for abrasive, self-aggrandizing female replacements. It’s gotten to the point where even Hollywood actress Evangeline Lilly is complaining.
And she’s absolutely right. The knife cuts both ways. The emasculation of male heroes gets most of the focus, but the defeminization of women has, if anything, been even more widespread and pronounced, gone on much longer, and gets far less pushback. I think it helps to understand why to visualize positive masculinity and positive femininity as two archetypes. Positive masculinity is the Righteous Warrior. Positive femininity is the Nurturing Mother. Both of these roles are essential for a healthy nation, a healthy family, and ultimately, a healthy individual needs someone playing both roles in his or her life. Both are thoroughly undermined in most modern entertainment.
-3A. The Heroic Masculine Man: The Righteous Warrior
The current ruling class of the west doesn’t want any citizens to be Righteous Warriors. In fact, Righteous Warriors would be a big problem. Recall how the powers that be whimpered and raged about the rather timid attempts by Dutch farmers and Canadian truckers to stand up for their rights. 50 or 70 years ago, those men would have come with rifles, or if rifles had been taken from them them, axes, clubs and molotovs, and would not have begged but demanded. There would have been a Battle of Athens and men would have died, but it would have caused such a disruption that the governments of those blighted countries would have been forced to make concessions. A generation of Righteous Warriors is a huge problem for a detached metropolitan elite that has utter contempt for those they rule over and views them as cattle in a petri dish to milk and experiment on.
They don’t want Righteous Warriors. They want slaves. And the people who control the mainstream entertainment industry, while not holding as much direct power, are cut from the same cloth. Which is why they’ve been trying they’re damned hardest to replace the Righteous Warrior as the masculine ideal with the Good Slave. Not an easy task considering the two are damn near polar opposites, and a project that has been quite unpopular, but one they continue with dogged determination. After all, it’s not about the money. It’s about sending a message.
This is the reason for all the emasculation of male heroes. To teach the men of society to be submissive in the face of indignities, to settle for less, and to only speak up when given permission, usually by a woman. Notice that I didn’t mention being physically weak in this. While there are many cases of emasculated male “heroes” being betrayed as physically weaker, less skilled, getting beaten up, etc, I don’t think this is the most important aspect of them. In fact, too much focus on it can blind people to more insidious versions. One should not think that the Good Slave can never fight, or be a capable fighter. Look at the Ottoman Janissaries. But the Good Slave never fights for himself or anything that is, in any sense, “his.” Not his family, not his home. He fights, and if necessary dies, for his masters.
And if you look at the left wing idea of positive masculinity, as much as one exists, which is hardly at all, it’s very much this. Of course it’s phrased as men protecting “the weak” but any time that’s elaborated on it’s quickly revealed that “the weak” consist of the identity groups that social leftists, who control modern western society, claim are “oppressed” and nobody else. So “real men protect the weak” becomes “real men protect the groups the major institutions tell them to.” Not that “protect the weak” is a sound moral code to begin with. Just because someone is “weak” doesn’t make them morally good. Look at Chris-Chan. But critical thinking doesn’t play any roll in this. A “real man” per modern propaganda does not think for himself. He listens to the experts, aka the people who have been credentialed and approved by those in power.
The Righteous Warrior stands as a stark contrast and refutation of all of this. He has his loyalties, and is even willing to die for them if necessary, but he is also a man with self-respect and self-confidence. He takes responsibility for his mistakes, but he doesn’t take kindly to being insulted, talked down to, or “knocked down a peg” simply for expressing an opinion or taking necessary action. He respects those who respect him and behave respectably. His loyalty is not blind, but well thought out and justified. He endures indignities and sufferings stoically when he has to, but he does not settle for them as an acceptable state of affairs. He is a man with agency, intelligence, and wisdom. He does not fight protect the weak, but to protect the right. The morally just. And of course he knows how to fight, and fight well. This is important (the psychological aspects of its importance are touched on well here), but I’d say that all of the above are possibly even more important, consider all the current attempts to supplant the Righteous Warrior with the Good Slave while convincing people they are one and the same.
“So every hero should be this idealized man? Won’t that get boring?” I hear the skeptics say. Well first of all, no. Our civilization is full of stories of idealized heroes, from King Arthur’s knights to Superman and Captain Kirk. People rarely get bored of them. Secondly, the Righteous Warrior as an ideal doesn’t have to translate to the Righteous Warrior being fully formed as the protagonist of every story. There are countless other ways to reflect this in a story with more flawed heroes. One might have a young protagonist struggling to fill the shoes of a legendary hero, or a Good Slave learning to cast off his chains and slowly transform into a Righteous Warrior, for example. An ideal is generally more of a goal to strive for than a reality in real life, after all. The important thing is that it’s recognized as what one SHOULD be striving for. What is not only better for a man’s own mental and physical actualization, but is also better for those around him and society as a whole.
The same holds true for…
-3B. The Heroic Feminine Woman: The Nurturing Mother
I’m opening this section with a picture of Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender because I want to get some misconceptions about the Nurturing Mother out of the way up front.
First, the Nurturing Mother does not have to literally be a mother. Although her temperament and nature tend towards that role, she may be too young (per Katara), may have been unable to have children due to some circumstances, her children may be dead (character defining tragedy), or she may even have grown too old. The Nurturing Mother is an approach to life. It is a woman (or girl) who is focused first and foremost on supporting, protecting, and caring for her family (or pseudo-family, as an actual family is substituted with a gang of close friends in many stories with “adventuring party” protagonists). She also encourages responsibility. The Nurturing Mother is NOT an enabler of bad behavior, and this is of central importance to the ideal, especially nowadays.
The second misconception is that the Nurturing Mother is in some way weak or “boring.” It’s true that the Nurturing Mother lends herself a bit less naturally to stabbing, punching, and shooting baddies, but that hardly means it can’t be done if a creator so desires. “Mama Bear” stories, where a Nurturing Mother goes on a roaring rampage to rescue (or avenge) a family member are an ancient and honorable storytelling tradition. There also exist many stories of such characters being called to action against some broader threat to her nation or the world, and defending her family by proxy in the process. I’d say it’s generally easier to make the Nurturing Mother a fighter than the Righteous Warrior a pacifist, although the latter has been done successfully too (in Samurai X, for example). Really, if you see the Nurturing Mother archetype as “too restrictive” that’s more an issue with YOU and your lack of creativity than with the archetype.
I really do think, that while the replacement of the Righteous Warrior with the Good Slave in media has gotten more attention and outcry, the replacement of the Nurturing Mother has been even worse, partially because it has gotten significantly less outcry and is, if anything, even MORE damaging to society.
It’s no exaggeration to say that a large portion of modern western society, western women in particular, have a violent hatred of motherhood. Motherhood is a prison and a baby in the belly is a parasite, per many abortion advocates on social media. So what should a woman be striving to be if not a mother? Why a career woman, of course! What career? It actually matters very little. The important thing is that she has a name plaque with some high-status title and her photo on the wall in a place of honor. And that she goes on vacation in similarly high-status (and expensive) locales where she can take instagram photos of her fancy drinks and meals. Hedonism and status are the center of the “ideal” modern woman’s world. They’re the center of many modern men’s world too, but this is criticized. For women it’s praised. It’s encouraged and celebrated in media.
The Nurturing Mother’s replacement is the Girlboss. The Girlboss is, above all things, a social climber and status seeker. But not in a feminine way. She’s a social climber in a man’s world and of course the key to making it in a man’s world (as the bitter women and submissive men who write the Bitch know) is being really aggressive and abrasive. The Girlboss is hostile on a hair trigger, always acting belligerent toward her peers, her inferiors, and her superiors, and always expects to be listened to and obeyed without question. After all, that’s what leadership is! It’s all about talking down to the people around you, insulting them, keeping secrets from them, and expecting their loyalty to the death in return!
In contrast to the Nurturing Mother, the Righteous Warrior, and even the Good Slave, the Girlboss is utterly self absorbed. As a status seeker who shows no real concern for anyone else, everything around her is an extension of her ego or a problem to be lectured or beaten down. She may sometimes be paired with a younger female (it will always be female) character in an attempt to give her some more humanity, but she’ll view that character as a proxy of her younger self. If she has a male love interest (usually an MC) their relationship will revolve around her making him into a Good Slave by “putting him in his place”, making him adopt a subservient role in a variety of ways. Their relationship will be as devoid of love, affection, and passion as possible. If she has friends or a lesbian love interest, they will serve as accessories to her, not important in their own way at all except to boost her.
In short, she displays behaviors that would be considered peak toxic masculinity in a man, but because she’s a woman, it’s passed off as a good thing. There are several reasons for this, but the primary one is that the Girlboss is the physical embodiment of the politics of envy and spite. Practically everything she does is motivated by spite. The Girlboss wants to climb to the top of her field, not because she loves doing whatever she does, but to show the men in that field that she’s better than them. This isn’t subtle. It’s often explicitly stated. Her entire driving force is social status and the entire reason she wants social status is to be better than men. In her desire to prove she doesn’t need and is superior to men, her entire character revolves around men. It’s really a rather sad and pathetic existence, when you step back and look at it. Unlike the Good Slave, I think this character is usually less an attempt to brainwash the masses than a reflection of the brainwashing that has already taken place. The Girlboss is a twisted reflection of what a major portion of society, especially on the left, believe an “empowered” woman is. That she’s an ideal consumer: a hollow status seeker, certainly helps corporations get on board with promotion though.
A character like this could work as a villain, or a flawed protagonist in need of a whole lot of growth, but such is the nature of modern mainstream entertainment and the people who make it that the Girlboss is put forward time and again as a paragon hero. The Girlboss isn’t very well received, much like the Good Slave, but unlike the Good Slave where there’s a somewhat coherent vision of what should replace it by those who oppose it, there’s a lot more fumbling around with the Girlboss. Lots of people insist, for instance, that the Girlboss would be fine if she weren’t so abrasive towards men. This may make her tolerable to watch for a couple of hours, but it’s not what society or countless individual women need. We don’t need more hedonistic, corporate consumers.
We need Nurturing Mothers. We’re sitting on several generations of broken men and women, raised by dysfunctional, often self-absorbed women. To even begin fixing this mess (an enormous task), we need to inject a better image into the public conscience, a better ideal.
In conclusion:
I could go on spitballing quite a few more ideas (villains who play the victim, for instance, which is a talking point the left is using more and more, but in action in a story I think will always end up favoring the right more since we live in an age of self-declared “oppressed” elites), but these are the most essential ones to tap into right now.
There’s a lot of buzz about “trads” and “retvrning to tradition” in right wing spaces, both positive and negative. I think this speaks to a massive void that the modern age has left in most people’s lives that the left, by its nature, cannot fill. People are rootless, atomized, lost, without any deeper meaning than shallow consumption. Unfortunately though, the antics of online trads are often quite alienating to many people. Internet trads tend to have largely negative messages. They talk a lot about banning things, things being evil/demonic, etc. Sometimes they’re onto something, sometimes they seem to just be wildly flailing around, trying to come up with some coherent plan of action just for the sake of it. Regardless, this is a losing tactic. Killjoys never win long term.
For the right to gain any ground, there needs to be a focus on being for things, not just against them. Positive traditionalism is what society needs. Family, hearth, home, history, and spiritualism. These are the backbone of healthy and strong civilization.
This is my message. This is how we change things for the better. Semper fi and seize the day.