Thus Sam Kriss returns with a piece about race, and pokes the hornet’s nest invoked against him by an anonymous denunciation made three years earlier, at the height of the #MeToo hysteria. His offence: he once acted clumsily on a date. Have you ever acted clumsily on date? Many people have, which is why the accusation exploded which such force, as the guilty-minded scrambled to deflect attention from themselves.

The episode drew, at its nadir, Jess Phillips, a low-voltage British member of Parliament, to call for Kriss to be imprisoned and destroyed his career as a professional writer. Amongst his vanished clients was the Leftist magazine the Baffler, whose owner Win McCormack, a major Obama donor, once helped cover up a case of child rape by former Portland mayor Neil Goldsmidt, whose victim later killed herself. And now we have individuals like this man, compelled to state a viciously dehumanizing condemnation of somebody he’s never met, based on things he says he’s heard, but does not state. One can only wonder what he might be hiding.

Like anyone who derives their ideas and pathic structure from the crowd, as opposed to from fixed principles, all these people are ideologically flexible. Under the Bolsheviks, they would have have been Bolsheviks. Under the Nazis, they would have Nazis. Today, they are male feminists and woke Leftists. (I myself would be an asshole under any ideological regime).

The reality is that Sam Kriss did nothing wrong, except for saying at some point in his past some idiotic things, a crime of which nobody is innocent. Here, as ever, the desire of the sadistic Left to target blameless individuals tells you everything you need to know about them, and nothing about their target. “He who is without sin can cast the first stone,” Jesus said, when he was himself without sin, and yet he did not cast a stone.

Enacted in a state of panic on the back of hyperbolic models, against a virus whose lethality now seems wildly exaggerated, the assumption is eventually the lockdown has to end. How will it end? What if this is the new normal, or a prototype of the new normal: a 5G prison planet, with entire generations growing up under the shadow of Corona, as in Ballard’s 1977 short story Intensive Care Unit, which depicts a contactless society organized around a telecoms technology called Zoom?

This crisis has been driven by political agendas from the start, as a nexus of political and economic interests initially motivated to dismiss the danger became incentivized to drastically exaggerate it: hospital administrators registering increased Federal payments for Corona fatalities; police forces taking advantage of an ambiguous legal environment to impose their own will to power, and democratic politicians, knee-deep in a sunk cost fallacy, compelled to keep extending lockdowns to avoid admitting their futility.

Just as the disease itself is almost powerless in the absence of old age or catalytic comorbidities, it was the immuno-compromised political condition of the West which unfolded the attack surface for contagion. Encountering a power from outside, an unprepared, dysfunctional society turns against itself, in a scrambling of intelligence and judgement, and sets the stage for a pandemic which is psychological as much as medical.

Man in general, as a opposed to certain individuals at certain times, is a timid, stupid animal, controlled by fear, especially the fear of death, and the desire to be loved: never has this tragic fact been clearer then in our era of Social Media Occupied Government (SMOG) as a clown managerial class jacked into a dopamine delivery matrix, who have reached their positions through surrender of self, call in experts to tell them what button to push.

The virus did not invent this situation but has ruthlessly revealed it; still, despite the tempting dreams of intellectuals from Bayle to Brecht, the exposure of the mechanism does not automatically destroy it, and depending on the situation may entrench it, as the joy of mass humiliation augments the power of the lie. Already, the credulous Left are running their new subliminal scripts, and attacking the new designated targets, whether the intransigent Agamben, or anti-lockdown protestors in Germany and the United States. Meanwhile, the narcissistic online right remains committed to a hollow claim to vindication without victory, and the ongoing evasion of their intellectual and moral responsibilities. Not for nothing has it been the more traditional Conservatives, whether Agamben (every Aristotelian is fundamentally a conservative, and vice-versa) or Peter Hitchens who have retained their judgement in the swirling pandemonium; as for America, despite the endless waves of propaganda ranged against it, the backbone of the nation will not be broken.

TOTALITARIAN REGIME OF QUANTITY

Evidently, the pandemic is the most spectacular global event since 9/11, but whereas 9/11 marked a one-way television spectacle, if not the apotheosis of the television spectacle, the virus transmits through social media, and also transmits it. The message is the medium, and inevitably, a virus is the most viral story cyberspace has ever hosted; the virus is the telos of the internet, and lockdown is what the internet wants, and has been screwing tight for years. Hence the folk epistemology of a link between the virus and 5G, this upgrade no one asked for, as parallel features of the same system of power.

“A computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary,” Vito Acconci once remarked. “If you can have all the information in front of you on a computer, do you need the actual city?” Just as the ultimate competition for Coca-Cola is drinking water, the city as a vital space of social life, like the Athenian agora, is the final enemy of cyberspace. Information wants to be free, as Stallman says, but information is a signal seeking a receiver, or receptor, or a latah, until every surface glows with data, and every flickered iris is recorded.

China’s early lockdown on information out of Wuhan, starting with the neutralizations of the earliest whistleblowers, and the smokescreen which it pumped out through the WHO, did not stop the memetic transmission of the virus, just as it did not arrest the movement of the microbe, but only made it visible to a specific group of people: the online anon right, the wet market of cyberspace, with their antennae for catastrophe, and their intellectual antagonism to the media consensus narrative. It was their infection, led by Curtis Yarvin, patient zero, and super-spreader Nick Land, which primed the pump for exponential panic in the West, and at the same time demonstrated something else: the secret affinity between the NRx heretics and the neoliberal mainstream.

From New Zealand to Malibu Beach, revealed preferences speak for themselves, but structural assumptions remain silent: every liberal is NRx about what they know best, and even as it understandably resents the presence of a progressive ideological police force permanently pointed at traditionalist targets, NRx does not contest the liberal premises of secular modernity which makes the contract possible. “Tell me, Strangers, is a God or some man supposed to be the author of your laws?” inquires the Athenian stranger, cardinally, at the beginning of The Laws, and Curtis Yarvin blinks.

Behind the camouflage of social justice, nobody in power anywhere has any doubts about IQ or HBD, or any number whatsoever: nobody who condemned Andrew Sabisky really has a different point of view, if they even have a point of view. Whether advertised explicitly, in silence, or unconsciously, the doctrine is as follows: man is an empirical animal, metaphysics is meaningless, and death, like happiness, is a scientific problem to be solved, rather than the door to eternity, and the mirror of life.

Fixated on misogyny, to sublimate their homosexuality, or racism, because transgressive, to the point of imbecility, while dreaming intermittently of techgnosis or collapse, what the post-Landians are disinclined to grasp is that the true taboo is deeper: that race is human quality, with the emphasis on quality, and sex is a cosmic principle, with the emphasis on principle, as opposed to the Undifferentiated Human Matter of what Renaud Camus calls replacism and the artificial privilege of desexed, post-race PoC.

Liberalism, unable to think beyond the category of the individual, terminates in being unable to grasp the individual itself, yourself, as project, character, and destiny. As Pessoa pointed out: the problem isn’t that we’re individualists. The problem is our individualism is static, rather than dynamic. Hence the fast regime adoption of the apocalyptic NRx account in March, flipping almost overnight from blank dismissal to hysterical exaggeration was simultaneously the end of NRx as a credible intellectual project, to become a simulacrum of thinking, like others, for a bodiless American Mind. Like Cassandra, suddenly reduced to silence, as the chorus started to repeat her lines, having never understood the enemy as spiritual, but only as political, if not emotional, forced to show its hand, NRx revealed it had no cards, as the Cathedral bet on fear of death and pestilence as panic raged around the world.

OFFICIAL NUMEROLOGY

In the eye of the cytokine storm of the media as it reports daily deaths, stripped of all explanatory context, as if the normal rate was zero, against the backdrop of apocalyptic models, already proven wrong, by Imperial College academic Neil Ferguson, a credentialed numerologist wrong on every single claim that he has ever made, the global power elite now saw an opportunity to break the back of atavist resistance to the technocratic modern project.

As David Cole points out, whenever science is unsettled, the State will always favor the account that enables it to display dominance, and impose repression: the true meaning of the figure of the expert as instrument and alibi for will to power.

How many times over the past four months have the public heard the repetition of authoritative claims from “experts” which have later been proved wildly exaggerated, if not completely false? In January the World Health Organization was insisting there will be no pandemic, that face masks are unnecessary, and that “stigma” was the real threat, today it stutters catatonically, and yet the organization and its ludicrous Director-General is still advertised as credible.

The issue is not just a contingently low quality of expert (“We need better experts!”) but the category itself. Because the function of the expert within the paradigm of what Thomas Kuhn calls normal science is to reiterate the institutional consensus, like the function of a liberal politician is to affirm the climate of opinion, the real surprise is to encounter expert competence and wisdom, as in Sweden, as opposed to the arrogant, incompetent, passive aggressive norm. James Watson, who discovered DNA, lost any claim to expertise when he transgressed the party line on race, but Neil Ferguson, discoverer of nothing, the kind of figure who appears at the sunset of great nations, with the ear of a weak king, retains it through his readiness to tell politicians what, secretly, they want to hear.

SPANISH TRAGEDY

Perhaps nowhere does the rhetoric of expert science ring more hollow than in Spain, where another weak-man, ugly-girl team of the narcissistic Pedro Sanchez, and the sociopathic Pablo Iglesias have aligned their own political survival with the devastation of their country. As Francisco Rosell remarked in El Mundo, with a line that could be generally applied, to characterize the scale of the government’s mismanagement one could reverse Churchill’s famous praise for the pilots of the Battle of Britain: never have so many suffered so much destruction in so short a time at the hands of so few.

The stage was already set six months earlier when the Socialist Sanchez launched his election campaign in October with the reckless decision to exhume Franco’s body from the Valley of the Fallen in Madrid. “He who moves the dead winds up paying for it with the curse of Tutankhamun,” Vox leader Santiago Abascal warned ominously at the time. Failing to win a clear majority, and entering a coalition with Iglesias, a repulsive, rat-like figure, ideologically-determined hubris continued into March, with the government promoting a national Woman’s Day March on March 8, attended by 120,000 people where demonstrators waved banners insisting that machismo is more lethal than the virus.

Six days later, the horse now far away and running free, Sanchez spasmed into panic mode, and slammed close the stable door, with the imposition of the most arbitrary and senseless lockdown in the world, banning all outdoor movement, except trips to pharamacies or supermarket, one at a time, and all Spanish children from leaving their homes. The measures produced no clear effect on halting the spread of the virus, indeed, given that it seems to spread more effectively indoors, may have encouraged it. What they did was create the groundwork for a Communist police state.

Since March 14, the Spanish police has handed out around 650,000 fines ranging from 600 to 10,000 euros, and the head of the Guarda Civil has informed the country that his duties include “minimizing the climate of opposition to the government’s management of the crisis.” Meanwhile, the government has threatened to impose five years in jail for anyone found spreading “hoaxes” and “misinformation.” As in the UK, where places of worship are closed, and the British find themselves instead compelled to participate in the new ritual of applauding the NHS medical death cult (as Solzhenitsyn pointed out: never be the first to stop clapping) every evening, the Spaniards, confined to their homes, are compelled to applaud a parade of the emergency services, like prisoners applauding their jailers. But discontent is mounting. Each night hashtags calling for Sanchez and Iglesias to resign, if not stand trial, circulate on Twitter. But hashtags are hashtags, and so long as the Spanish Left controls the state, and Franco’s ghost remains abroad, Spain remains in the role which it played in the thirties as herald and sigil of the future to come.

PLAGUE COMMUNISM

If traditionally, the appearance of the plague marked a sign that a regime had lost legitimacy, and heralded a fall from power, when a regime is already an anarcho-tyranny, corruption and incompetence augments it. Make no mistake: the lockdown does not end the power of the global Left, but marks its triumph — the apotheosis of the safe space and the cancellation of the world.

In the shadow of the virus, the regime’s repressive apparatus upgrades from policing the supernatural contagion of symbolic heresy to the biopolitical emergency of a planetary pandemic licensing even more senseless and sadistic measures: hence arrests for surfing on an empty ocean or walking in a park are accompanied by releasing murderers from jails.

Meanwhile Facebook and Amazon expand as small businesses stay closed: the idea, not exactly plan, but systematic tendency, is that they all close. At the end of a long century of relentless Party-State expansion, plague communism completes the triumph of post-liberal power and the FAANGs with the greatest destruction of liberty since the great transformation of Karl Polyani: a great confinement, following the seventeenth and eighteenth century acts of enclosure which threw the peasants off their land to turn them into proletarianized raw material for the industrial revolution. Not for nothing was psychoneurotic Sophie Lewis pushing family abolition in the Ford Foundation funded Open Democracy one of the first post-Lockdown pieces to appear: this is what the police state wants. As Adorno once observed, what disintegrates, along with the family “is not just the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which indeed oppressed the individual, but also strengthened the latter, if not indeed producing such.”

In the world they want the individual is a string of random coded letters, LGBTQ-138, embedded in a UBI cash-matrix connecting digital serfs and OnlyFans virtual prostitutes, in which every statement is recorded, and any opposition is deleted in advance. YouTube’s Susan Woznicki has already clarified that her remit for censorship includes the removal of anything contrary to the advice of the World Health Organization, the institution whose failures played a key role in allowing the virus to spread; among the first casualties were the two Bakersfield doctors whose skeptical video presenting their own clinical test data racked up five million views before being removed from the platform; meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg (reminder: the son of Dracula) is deleting from Facebook initiatives to coordinate protests under the Soviet category of harmful misinformation.

And soon enough, this account will also disappear…

At the beginning of The Theatre and its Double Artaud recounts the story of an incident from Cagliari in Sardinia where in 1720 the viceroy Saint-Rémys “despotically and insanely” refused permission to the ship Grand-Saint Antoine to dock based on a dream he’d had the night before: of Cagliari destroyed by plague. “He observes every infringement of morality, every psychological disaster; he hears his body fluids murmuring within him; torn, failing in a dizzying collapse of tissue, his organs grow heavy and gradually turn to carbon.”

In the face of threats of canon fire, the ship retreated from the port; it rerouted to Marseille, where its appearance coincided with the worst outbreak of the plague in the history of the city — and the last outbreak of the plague in Europe. “The Grand-Saint-Antoine did not bring the plague to Marseille,” Artaud writes, “it was already there, at a particular stage of renewed activity, but its centers had been successfully localized. The plague brought by the Grand-Saint-Antoine was the original, oriental virus, hence the unusually horrible aspect, the widespread flaring-up of the epidemic, which dates from its arrival and dispersion throughout the town.”

China, mother of plagues since the Black Death, transmitted to Europe by Mongolian armies hurling cadavers of plague victims over the battlements of the besieged cities of the Silk Road, today replays its classic role, now accompanied by incantations, screams and grunts. In line with globo-theocratic norms, inoculate against the spread of xenophobia first of all, like clips of superstitious Shi’ites licking shrines. The rites are culturally specific, but the mechanism is the same.

Except where are these clips from? These rapidly disseminating bits of information. This beautiful Chinese girl eating bat. This kid falling over in Tehran. A team in hazmat suits boarding an airplane on the tarmac in Milan. “Between the viceroy and the plague,” Artaud remarks, “a palpable communication, however subtle, was established. The Grand-Saint Antoine, which passes within shouting range of Cagliari… does not deposit the plague there, but the viceroy gathers certain emanations from it.” It would be a mistake to plot the distribution of the data independently from the spread of the disease: now emanations are proliferating at light speed.

Corona is, also, if not primarily, an information virus. NRx, the quickest zone on Twitter, put their hazmat suits on six weeks ago, mimetically already infection: according to the iron laws of social physics, everything the disagreeable and open-minded online far right predicts gravitates inevitably into the centre. Panic is itself the virus, in its social side. Is Nick Land not entertained?

Artaud’s phrase is “la peste orientale, le virus d’origine” and he distinguishes between them. The plague only “reactivates” the virus: the virus was already there. “Personally, I regard this microbe only as a smaller — infinitely smaller — material element which appears at some moment in the development of the virus, but which in no way accounts for the plague.” The empirical breaks down under the impact of “a disease whose laws cannot be precisely defined and whose geographical origin it would be idiotic to attempt to determine… No one can say why the plague strikes the coward who flees it and spares the degenerate who gratifies himself on the corpses.” Le virus d’origine is metaphysical: “a malady that would be kind of psychic entity” connected to “the most profound political upheavals, downfalls or deaths of kings, disappearance and destruction of provinces, earthquakes, magnetic phenomena of all kinds, exoduses of Jews…” The two organs most severely affected by plague, Artaud observes, are the brain and lungs, both of which depend directly on the consciousness and will.

THE REAL CORONA

Pre-modern medicine conceived the plague according the principle of correspondences between the macrocosm and the microcosm; post-modern theory takes the model of contagion and applies it to contemporary discourses of “virality” and viral media; today the idea that information can be described as viral is a contemporary cliche, all clichés (essentially) are true. In so-called plague texts left behind in plague infected towns, as doctors fled according to the principle of cito, longe, tardo writers conceptualize a moving cloud of poisonous gas and plot the progress of the plague astrologically; is it significant that Cov-19 started with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction on 12 January 2020?

For Artaud the plague unleashes chaos. For Foucault: “The plague is met by order.” The latter is the mirror of the plague, its double: “Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.” Under cover of corona, what operations now transpire? What conspiracies, assassinations, bodies, hidden beneath bodies?

In the frame of the panoptic model, the city-form, the schematic grid of power, and the possibility for quarantine which it facilitates, the urban form particularizes into a lattice of control, transforming into the “enclosed, segmented space” which is the signature of Foucault’s work. In today’s “reversed panopticon” of the networked society of surveillance, free-floating, ultra-rapid and specific algorithmic exploits take command, now with increased “lightness” and concomitant “economic” viability, within a saturated system, upgraded control: le théâtre s’installe.

Power, like a virus, is a psychic force, originating from an Orient which is not just geographical: “We are bringing them the plague,” Freud commented to Jung when disembarking in New York in 1909; Deleuze and Guattari would later recapitulate the thought in Anti-Oedipus, describing psychoanalysis as an “Oedipus Bacillus.” Oedipus Tyrannus, Girard reminds us, was a plague play: at the beginning of the story Thebes is benighted: mimetic crises run amok, authority breaks down, rites collapse into dysfunction. Who do you trust? The plague is antinomian: “Beneath such a scourge, all social forms disintegrate.” The plague is a convulsive, cataclysmic power of contagious violent action — the herald and sigil of a world in which antithesis is no longer in abeyance.

By the time of publication of The Theatre and its Double, Artaud was interred in the mental hospital of Centre psychiatrique Sainte-Anne in Paris following an apolcayptic trip to Ireland where he had travelled from Havre in August 1937 on a mission to return a stick of knotted wood “that he believed belonged not only to St. Patrick, but also Lucifer and Jesus Christ.” After landing at Cobh, and traveling to Galway, Artaud spent the next several months in a hotel room he was unable to pay for, before being forcibly removed from the grounds of Milltown House, a Jesuit community, when he refused to leave, and taken to Mountjoy Prison before being deported as a destitute and undesirable alien, at which point the stick was lost.

On his return to France by ship, Artaud believed he was being attacked by two crew members and retaliated, before being put in a straightjacket and institutionalized. In February 1938, his book was published in a numbered edition of 400 as part of the series Metamorphosis by Gaston Gallimard. On April 1, suffering from “Délire de persécution, hallucinations, mégalomanie, paranoïa” Artaud was moved to the Centre psychiatrique Sainte-Anne where he’d remain for the next seven years, plagued by the nightmares of Europe as the war raged around him...

The conviction of Harvey Weinstein for rape and sexual assault is a travesty of justice and an indictment of the American justice system.

As Janice Fiamengo reports in her video The #MeToo Trial of the Century the case against Weinstein didn’t come close to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Jessica Mann and Miriam Haleyi, the women Weinstein has now been convicted of raping on the basis of their memories of incidents taking place on March 18 2013, and in July 2006 respectively, both maintained friendly relations with Weinstein for years after the incidents took place: for both women, criminal sexual encounters apparently took place in the context of consensual sexual encounters.

Mann‘s testimony was particularly bizarre. An unsuccessful actress who grew up in rural Washington State in an environment she described as a Pentecostal cult, with a history of depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm, she told the jury she’d been diagnosed with panic disorder, and anxiety disorder, and acknowledged that her medical records included suggestions of Borderline Personality Disorder. At one point she broke down in tears on the stand as she described a sexual assault she may have suffered as a child. Asked by the defense if she had anger issues, she responded: “Yes, I’m angry. Are you my psychiatrist?” Weinstein, she said, was a “drill sergeant” and “pseudo father” with whom she maintained a sexual relationship, despite not finding him attractive, out of a combination of compassion and self-interest. “Harvey validated me,” she told the court. “He always offered to help me in ways that my parents didn’t. I felt approval to pursue the industry because he was encouraging. Harvey was my father’s age and he gave me all the validation that I needed.”

During the trial Weinstein’s defense lawyer Donna Rotunno presented messages from Mann, telling Weinstein that she loved him, and that she considered him a blessing in her life. Following his conviction, all this had evaporated.“The day my uncontrollable screams were heard from the witness room was the day my full voice came back into my power,” Mann stated. Now she recounted mysteriously how Weinstein apparently had once threatened her father “with a old school mafia bat beat down — my father who was dying of cancer at that time. If you have any sympathy for the man you see before you — consider that Mr. Weinstein took joy in beating to a pulp a dying man, a man poorer than him, a man who was an extension of me.” During the trial Rotunno had shown that Mann had reached out to Weinstein as her father was dying in search of support. Now she described an “invisible gun to my head ready to be pulled if he felt in the mood. Invisible weapons known as abuse of power, are still a life threatening aspect a victim has to endure.”

Weinstein’s transgressions towards Haleyi related to menstrual taboos; she testified that Weinstein invited her to his Soho apartment on July 10, 2006, and forced oral sex on her: “He held me down on the bed and he forced himself on me orally. I was on my period. I had a tampon in there. I was mortified … He forced himself on me orally, he put his mouth on my vagina.” According to Haleyi: “And then I said, ‘No, no,’ and at that point I started realizing what was actually happening: I’m being raped.” Nonetheless, she decided to embark upon a sexual relationship with her rapist, meeting Weinstein later that month for a consensual, if unpleasant liaison at the Tribeca Hotel. Several years later, Haleyi wrote to him: “Just to remind you what a genius I am — didn’t i tell you that was a great idea like 3 years ago at the mercer bar..hmm? Lots of Love Miriam.”

Are these actions of rape victims? Apparently unconvinced that their testimony would prove sufficient, the District Attorney Cyrus Vance padded his case with four other women accusing Weinstein of similar actions, which were not themselves being litigated, in a highly dubious legal maneuver which aimed to establish a pattern of unsympathetic behavior. But his key witness was undoubtedly “expert forensic psychiatrist,” Barbara Ziv, also a witness in the Cosby trial, who testified that continuing an intimate relationship with one’s assailant, or even pretending that the assault never happened, or even bragging about it, or a hundred other possible behaviors might ensue from an assault. There are, it would seem, no guidelines whatsoever concerning how one might reasonably expect rape victims to act, and consequently no way of assessing their credibility. Victims, Ziv claimed, lie to themselves and others about the event — but are definitely not lying when they come forward, more than a decade later, after many amicable years in between.

“The fact that such empty theorizing as Ziv’s,” Fiamengo observes, “is now considered authoritative and is quoted with respect by pretty much every news source covering the trial gives us some indication of feminism’s terrifying success in the realm of psychological theory.” But feminism is not the true name for it: what is at work here is older, and deeper and darker.

Weinstein was convicted before he even set foot in the courtroom by a media hungry for blood in the wake of #MeToo. The lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have now been destroyed by this vindictive movement, but sporadically and extra-judicially. To justify the sanctity of this frenzied mob activity more was needed — somebody to scapegoat legally. And that was Harvey Weinstein, this monstrous embodiment of a culture of quid pro quo sexual license, unhappy memories, and ethical anarchy.

Weinstein made an excellent scapegoat. An arrogant man whose power at the apex of the Hollywood pyramid made him attractive to actresses, when that power vanished, all that remained was a husk, to serve as repository for the collective sins of the culture. From the very beginning, all efforts were made to cripple his ability to defend himself, with the complicity of institutions: thus in June 2019, Harvard law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. was demoted from his position as co-faculty dean following student pressure over his decision to represent Weinstein. Nothing and nobody could stand in the way of Weinstein’s isolation and demonization: a procedure reaching its apotheosis with Mann’s incredible testimony that Weinstein does not have testicles and his penis ‘looks like a vagina’, and she wondered if he might be ‘physically deformed or intersex’ or a burn victim the first time she saw him naked: these are details from a witch trial.

This is the system of justice that now maintains in America.

The reality of the art system as a landscape of pseudo-events received a new iteration two weeks ago with the launch of the website Artists4Bernie, an orgy of virtue signaling brought you to by Jennifer Teets and Mo Salemy, the opportunist curator who fired Nick Land from NCRAP on the orders of brain-damaged grad school Kaganovitz Andrew Osborne in 2017.

Predictably, given the emptiness of the gesture, the response was immediate, with 665 artists and writers who would never have dared to sign Charter 77, but who are radicals in biennials, signing their names to nothing, to glowing coverage everywhere, across the supine art world press.

Yet like the similar petition of artists published shortly before the U.K. election by eunuch propaganda paper Tribune, the insincerity of the gesture resulted in an immediate misfire, generating an anti-endorsement casting Sanders in a worse light than before: if this is who and what is behind him, there is nothing to support.

Who is Sanders really? What does it mean that hundreds of the most cynical and hypocritical writers and artists in the world, are eager, not only to support him, but to energetically broadcast their support. It means this: that beyond his ridiculous policies, Sanders is controlled opposition, in the sense he is not, has never been, and will never be a real threat.

Sanders is the candidate of individuals who want to signal opposition rather than authentically oppose, to dissent without dissenting: the same spirit of vicarious bad faith which dominates America already, which is why he lost four years ago, and has already lost again. Of how many others is this true? Like his New York cokehead boosters, rather than confronting the anarcho-tyranny of contemporary power, which would cost them dearly, Sanders speaks of oligarchs and Wall Street, as if Harvard wasn’t Wall Street, and the Democratic Party not the oligarchy. Sanders is a loser, and is blatantly a loser: the candidate of half-measures and cowardice, anchored to a willfully preserved naivety which is the other side of cynicism.

Sanders is the obscure ghost of Occupy whose support is constituted from two groups: a downwardly-mobile college-educated middle-class who failed to realize how Occupy was destroyed, and an amoral upper-middle class who helped destroy it, by employing it rhetorically for harvesting symbolic capital: socialism as always is the capitalism of the poor. His base does not include high numbers of blue collar workers or blacks: the former because they know that government by a hypocritical and arrogant college-educated Leftist bureaucracy isn’t really so dissimilar to what America already has, the latter, because, when not functioning as convenient adjuncts for postal ballot stuffing, as in South Carolina, they have no connection with Sanders’ deluded Verso Marxist activists who propose to speak on their behalf.

For the first group, a doomed middle-class millennial or lumpen cognitariat attempt to seize the disappearing dividend of America’s degenerating power, for the second, an ideological supplement or indulgence for a de facto neoliberal reality whose real function is to hold everything in place: in both respects Sanders is not so far away from UK Labour’s Project Corbyn, though admittedly without the same intensity of bitter malice. Pushed by a similarly disingenuous urban middle class rightfully despised by the proles on whose behalf they claim to speak, against a similarly demonized opponent, who in fact they rather like, both represent nostalgic throwbacks to a vision of the socialism of the seventies, formed through a psychological alliance of convenience of grandpa and his grandchildren against their common enemies: liberal Boomer parents and the suicidal pushovers of Gen-X.

But it is the mark of every simulacrum to reveal its artificiality, and in this case we didn’t have to wait long. Almost as soon as the petition was published it became clear there was one name on the list who definitely did not belong there: Deanna Havas, daughter of refugees from Communist Hungary and Cuba persecuted for four years for the crime of being funny and supporting Trump. What gives? Don’t worry, another signatory explained, the petition was meaningless and anyway you might get a show out of it. The same day, in a coup-de-grace of the real, Artists4Bernie was apparently hacked, with the title changing to “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” not a bad summary for this childish enterprise.

I write in reference to your praise of André Breivik. As you may know, I have defended, at some cost, your right to speak, not through sympathy with your position, but because I hold the principle that understanding can be reached through critical discussion of antagonistic points of view.

In recognition of this fact, your own commitment to philosophy, and your influence upon your audience, I write to urge to your to reflect upon, and reconsider your position.

Your stated view on Breivik consists in praising him for murdering Norwegian Leftists as opposed to refugees or migrants. As you put it: “Most Right-wingers who turn to violence and are aware of the white genocide issue tend to go out and shoot some of the Other; I praised Breivik because instead, he shot the members of Us who had turned to Leftism, and so raised the cost of being a Leftist and drove people away from participating in that pathological cultlike gang of civilization-wreckers.”

This argument is ethically and logically deficient. First, neglecting to commit a still more senseless act of violence does not itself legitimate the act that Breivik did commit. Second, irrespective of the ethnic background of the young people he murdered, Breivik’s act was still directed at the Other, namely, the Leftist Other, conceived by Breivik as the enemy. I don’t dispute that Leftism may be the enemy, although the term here lacks precision, and its relation to individual Leftists, its first victims, should be carefully defined. Nonetheless, even insofar as one is moved to fight, a random individual does not possess the right to unilaterally declare a war against a sovereign state, and take up arms against civilians. Nor is such a strategy likely to produce desirable results. As Burke says: “[W]e have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country, who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father’s life.”

You claim that Breivik, by his action, raised the cost of being a Leftist. I see no evidence to support that claim, and plenty to suggest the opposite. For one thing, Breivik raised the cost of your own speech, and in committing to defending yours, of mine, and hence philosophy as such, which is the only territory I defend. For what? The Right doesn’t defeat the Left by spreading fear and ethical revulsion, but by exemplifying courage and integrity. In my view, whether Breivik even was a Rightist, rather than a nihilistic psychopath, ira quaerens intellectum, is open to dispute. What rectifying cause did he advance? How was peace and justice served by him?

You observe, correctly, that the Left has never been unstinting in their endorsement of terroristic violence. This is a reason to reject the same maneuver, not affirm it. The alternative is an escalating spiral of mimetic chaos, which ends in civil war, which is the triumph of the Left, and the direction where we’re heading. Every man and woman of conviction and intelligence has a duty to resist this outcome, which is why I’ve written you this letter. I’ve published it on Medium, and I’d be happy if you republished on your site.

Sincerely,

News that the Institute of Contemporary Art has commissioned The White Pube to serve as resident critics should come as no surprise, even if it marks a fresh nadir for an institution that once hosted COUM Transmissions and Einstürzende Neubauten. But the appointment merits some discussion.

Zarina Muhammed and Gabrielle de la Puente have never written a single interesting sentence, or coherently expressed a single good idea. Nonetheless, in a sense, they are more remarkable than any other current art world personalities, because they represent the pure expression of the intellectual and ethical corruption of the contemporary art system, and the cultural regime in general.

The authors of a deranged and infantile style representing the introduction of Newspeak into art criticism, the front page of their website explicitly declares their own dishonesty: ‘the only reason The White Pube can still exist is because some of our readers choose to support us each month via Patreon. We sometimes do talks n other jobs but Patreon is how we get paid for the actual writing here — the reviews, art thoughts and so on. it’s important to us to stay independent critics without ties to big funders or institutions, public or private.” In truth, they’ve been pushed by institutions from the start of their career: astroturfed into prominence following their graduation from St. Martin’s College by propaganda newspaper the Guardian in 2018, where GCHQ moved in in 2013, and some say never left, they were given a year-long residency by grey man apparatchik Alistair Hudson’s Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art in 2017, then Somerset House, where they bullied feminist internet in dropping a talk with Nina Power. And now the ICA.

In the intervening years, they’ve distinguished themselves as the authors of a series of diatribes against the same malicious white people so strangely eager to reward them. Specializing in now standard accusations of ‘transphobia’ and ‘fascism’ employed like buttons to increase their power, their general procedure is slanderous targeted harassment campaigns, mainly aimed against more thoughtful women than themselves, from the Liverpool Biennale under Sally Tallant, baselessly accused of supporting a ‘sexist and racist curator’; to the artist Nina Edge for reality-based opinions on feminism, resulting in the loss of her job at Liverpool John Moore’s University, and the artist Rachel Ara, hounded out of a lecture she was due to give at Oxford Brookes University.

(It would be remiss here not to mention the ridiculous fake e-mails which they circulated under my name, and then threatened to get me attacked for. If I was another kind of man I might now spend the next two years accusing them of antisemitic death threats, but I can take care of myself.)

The ICA, no longer able to distinguish between criticism and sadism, endorses this behaviour; today standard practice in a psychopolitical aggregate of similarly motivated individuals including the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Lulu Nunn, the “Antifascist” instigator of the Terfs Out Of Art account, some say with friends, and the Birmingham School of Art lecturer Linda Stupart, who last May published a garbled denunciation of the individual to whom she explicitly recognizes she owes her career (admittedly not Nina’s finest hour) on the White Pube website at the same moment she was organizing clandestine meetings in London to coordinate a Zersetzung campaign against her.

These are the kinds of personalities institutional contemporary art promotes, in fact, not despite their behavior, but because of it. The key point is that low intelligence, mental instability, and amorality is not contingent, but essential to their function within a contemporary regime of cultural power amounting to a coalition of mean girls and weak men.

MEAN GIRLS AND WEAK MEN

Weak men or mean (or ugly) girls can be either sex, and specific individuals may showcase elements of both; the one-note sociopathy of Lulu Nunn and the White Pube is paradigmatic mean girl activity while the individuals responsible for hiring them, at the Cherie Blair Foundation, or the ICA, are, structurally, weak men. Marta Kuzma, the ex-director of the Soros Center for Art in Kiev, and current dean of Yale School of Art, who sent out a pathetic e-mail informing her students that she was “deeply disturbed” that the artist Deanna Havas, persecuted now for four years for the crime of being funny and supporting Trump, “achieved a platform within the School” and Krist Gruijthuijsen, the mendacious and confused director of the Kunstwerke in Berlin are both weak men, while Stewart Home, the has-been writer, who last winter felt compelled to declare his feelings of disgust towards Nina Power (to be sure, the one emotion he can feel) while being too cowardly to even mention my name, is a dual-class weak man ugly-girl. David Graeber, the ego-maniacal LSE professor and Joshua Clover, the hereditary academic and male feminist creep whose adolescent homicidal fantasies are funded by the University of California, are both, in fact, quite sad weak men.

Sainsbury’s employees Andrew Osborne, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg, Benedict Seymour and friends who instigated the 2017 campaign against LD50, and then spent the last three years lying about me on social media are all extremely ugly girls, while the artist John Russell, who cynically joined their campaign, despite having previously exhibited at LD50, and thus knowing perfectly well that the allegation it was a “neo-Nazi recruitment cell” was preposterous (the voyeuristic Russell then travelled to London to watch the demonstration) is a parody of a weak man; like Goldsmith’s MFA program director Suhail Malik, who in 2017 gave Osborne and friends a platform to menace his students.

None of these people are important in themselves, and others could be named instead. The important point is that they constitute the types of personality that today composes the regime on every level from knitting circles to the top of the pyramid. The Obama Administration consisted of the binary of Hilary Clinton, the ultimate ugly girl, and Barack Obama, the consummate weak man; ideologically the “weak man” of neoliberalism is supplemented by the “ugly girl” of Antifascism as unaccountable secret police force and systematic engine of derangement. Have no doubt: when six-figure salaries and book deals are handed to eager-to-please, psychologically fragile sycophants like Clover and Graeber, holding prestige positions at the apex of a trillion dollar tumulus of student debt (understand: it is not the purpose of the debt to pay for education; it is the role of education to hide the function of the debt) or when “Antifascist” Lulu Nunn is employed by Cherie Blair to intimidate independent-minded women, it is safe to conclude that nothing which they say is threatening to the power structure, but has another function: to extend it.

DIVERSITY AS ALIBI

As Thomas Pynchon noted: “If they get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t need to worry about the answers.” The fundamental point is they don’t need to win the argument, but rather to prevent it taking place, by systematically confusing issues, either through myopia, or active malice; not just the role the White Pube will play for the ICA, but the function of the ICA in general. Thus a self-involved Student Union apparatchik midwit understands enough to talk over Kathleen Stock on Good Morning Britain rather than allowing her to state her case: he was not promoted for his sins, he was promoted by them.

From a systematic point of view, the purpose of the scapegoat mechanism is only to individualize in order to obscure the issues (so that the question is reframed to whether Tucker Carlson, for example, is a racist, from whether what he says is true). Likewise, the diversity, inclusion and equality (DIE) agenda is fundamentally misunderstood to the extent it is identified with authentically subaltern interests, except in the spiritual sense. In reality, diversity is a shield for maintaining incompetence in positions of power — so they cannot be occupied by competence — and a weapon for waging class war from above. Hence the promotion of intersectional theory after Occupy Wall Street briefly flickered to threaten the Washington consensus, and the changing of the conversation from capitalism to fascism and intersectionality and race — as Horkheimer remarked; one talks about the one, in order not to talk about the other.

The fact that many of the most loyal contemporary regime followers identify as “PoC”, this grotesque neologism homogenizing into a single bureaucratic category the culture of six continents and six thousand years (“no Vietcong ever called himself a PoC”) serves this purpose: to disincentive positional criticism through intellectual and moral blackmail. Nobody with half a brain from any background would need to read more than a paragraph by Morgan Quintance (“bollocks, bollocks, it’s all bollocks,”) to realize that this man is not equipped to be an art critic. Yet, thanks to the disordered conscience of the self-hating bourgeoisie, together with his willingness to tell them what they want to hear, namely nothing, he continues to be employed to do so, just as Ta-Nehisi Coates is encouraged by Manhattan liberals to continue to write books. But it is his compliance with the narrative, not his racial background, which is decisive — the brilliant but non-compliant Armand White, Larry Elder, or Thomas Sowell, not to mention Manick Govinda, hounded out of work by the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Lulu Nunn and the White Pube for insulting a cyberstalker don’t enjoy the same protection, and Kanye West is turned into the target of a rolling smear campaign for having the courage to tell people they can think for themselves.

Thus the neoliberal enterprise with its useful Antifascist idiots rolls on. But not for long. A regime built on intellectual and moral weakness is built on quicksand, and now increasingly a clear and strong voice of dissent is beginning to make itself heard.

With the fourth estate, including Brendan O’Neill, once again last week indulging in the virtual stoning of a blameless individual, one is forced to wonder how many times this degrading spectacle will be played out. Forever? Will it ever be enough? What if, say, Sabisky killed himself, as only recently someone else subjected to this treatment has. Would anybody feel remorse? Do any of his persecutors have the empathy to imagine their own faces, for example, on the cover of a mass-circulation daily as a designated racist ‘weirdo’ for an officially approved two-minutes hate. “But I’m not a racist weirdo,” you insist. Are you sure? Who again is free from sin?

One is again reminded of Cardinal Richelieu’s remark that it requires only six lines in any honest man’s handwriting to find enough to hang him. What has Andrew Sabisky really done? Floated some controversial thoughts on social media, now dug-up, and twisted out of context. Told some silly jokes, now repeated without humor, as if by an interrogator in the basement of Lubyanka. Accurately stated the dictionary definition of eugenics, from the Greek ευ, meaning good, and -genic, relating to genes; with this statement now taken for evidence he is proposing a Hitlerian extermination program. And accurately cited data on mean test scores between two population groups — data which nobody disputes, even if they dispute the cause.

For this, Sabisky had been hounded from his job, and his reputation trashed. What, precisely, was his crime? What is so despicable about his thinking, compared, for instance, to the thinking of his persecutors. What is, in specifically the problem? Can anybody clearly say? Does the existence of a difference in mean test scores, on one variable, mean that one population group is fundamentally superior to another? Not in the eyes of God. Nor is cognitive capacity, as such, a virtue, or indicative of moral value: there are plenty of reasonably intelligent people, some who work in media, who have no moral value whatsoever. Integrity and courage, not to mention kindness, are both worth more than intelligence.

It is the ethical horizon of our society, which places moral value in abstract technical capacity, which is abhorrent. Nothing in the differences in mean test scores discharges the responsibility, in fact the privilege — in fact, the highest privilege — of judging individuals based on the content of their character, rather than their race, for better or for worse. Nor does it change the fact that there are hundreds of millions of individuals of every race who are superior in every way to the men and women who participated in this disgusting spectacle.

We are told, by men like Alex Wickham and Joe Mulhall that Sabisky and his views are evil and immoral. It is they who are immoral.“Is this an example of cancel culture?” asks Isabel Hardman in the Spectator. Yes, but cancel culture is a misleading term. What is at stake is the power of a network of intimidation, comprising extra-judicial secret police organisation Hope Not Hate, propaganda media like the Guardian, brownshirt militias like Antifa, and cynical journalists like Alex Wickham to engineer spectacles of brutality calculated to project their own power to destroy people’s lives. This demonic, paranoid and violent network, no different in principle, only in degree, to the witch hunters of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Russian NKVD, or the East German Stasi — is the real contemporary evil — it should be systematically destroyed.

Sabisky is guilty of one thing — he abandoned his position in the face of the intimidation he received. Others will have to show greater resolve.

Brittle and pretentious, achieving no real insight into the new emerging dissident or ‘cancelled’ art it proposes to analyze, Pinto and Stakemeier are writing to condemn, rather than to clarify, but they condemn themselves: their sloppiness, dishonesty and arrogance tells you everything you need to know about why another art is now emerging in defiance of the cultural regime they serve.

The text is choked with factual errors. Among other inaccuracies, it incorrectly gives my name (my middle initial is not ‘C’); incorrectly states the basis of our legal case against Luke Turner, and baselessly asserts that Nina Power is responsible for launching it. The text incorrectly states the name of Matthieu Malouf’s show, which it invests so much energy in criticizing, and states that defending the right of independent art galleries to be curious, against the deranged mendacity of sociopathic activists at LD50 represents, in my own words, my claim to fame. This is the second time that Pinto, who lies instinctively, has put words in my mouth. I’ve never made such claims, and have no interest in this question.

As often tends to be the case when dealing with journalists these days, the truth is found by turning Pinto and Stakemeier’s narrative diametrically around. Thus in responding with tremendous grace and generosity to vicious personal attacks and baseless smears — still ongoing — Nina Power is accused of attempting to “render herself immune to any request for social or political situatedness” (?) and reducing the waves of attacks on her to the fact of her being a “woman”. Not only has Power never done these things (Stakemeier and Pinto can cite no evidence she has, because there is none) she has done the exact opposite — stating her positions on sex, gender, culture and politics publicly, and offering to meet her detractors personally. Naturally, they all declined, and Pinto and Stakemeier also fail to meet the challenge here.

Indeed, they make no effort whatsoever to describe Power’s position, and I do not think they could. What, in fact, does Nina Power believe? In loyalty and friendship, and philosophy, and truth, and justice. What do I believe? In the right to openly discuss ideas, in the right of artists to be curious, in standing-up to bullies, and in a woman’s right to laugh. What do Pinto and Stakemeier believe? We don’t know, and they don’t either.

“Ironic nihilism is the existential philosophy of the alt-right,” the authors write, citing zero sources for this striking claim except the website Urban Dictionary. Is this supposed to be convincing? Who or what is this Alt-Right who they refer to? Who speaks on its behalf? Pinto and Stakemeier do not care: the term is just a screen they use to camouflage the incoherence of their argument. The move is characteristic of their method.

Assessing Matthieu Malouf’s work Pinto and Stakemeier repeat self-serving Antifascist fantasies in identifying a “Jewish-Bolshevist trope popularized by the Nazis whose single conceptual gesture seems to be an attempt to assimilate Andy Warhol to Arno Breker.” Really?

Seems to me that Malouf’s work does not resemble anything ever generated by the Nazis — I challenge anyone to prove me wrong — nor does it refer to Jewishness, or resemble anything to do with Warhol, or with Arno Breker — nor could both parts of this description ever simultaneously be true.

Pinto and Stakemeier speak of “social sadism,” with reference to Malouf, but like the similarly out of his depth Morgan Quitance decline to mention what his show was answering: a truly disturbing exercise in relentless targeted harassment which, like in the excellent Clint Eastwood film The Unforgiven, started with Deanna Havas innocently laughing before spiraling outwards to include everyone defending her, then everyone defending her defenders. Ironically, at one point our authors rather accurately diagnose what happened: “the expression of a wounded narcissism, unable to divest from the pleasurable investment in the (increasingly besieged) notion of its own universality. Nursing its injury, it sets out to injure.” But this does not describe Malouf.

Already at the beginning of their text Pinto and Stakemeier obscure the central issue, namely freedom of expression and the designation of transgression, beneath the opportunist victimology which has become the sigil of contemporary repression. “Rather than discuss “free speech” (or lack thereof), we find it a greater imperative to investigate the conditions under which the pain of others becomes the measure of freedom.” This ghoulish pain is an appropriated pain, revealing nothing except what Deleuze called ‘the indignity of speaking for others’ — in fact, in order to prevent them speaking.

Have no doubt — only some possess the right to suffer. The earnest Dana Schutz, for example, harassed for months by Hannah Black’s supporters after painting 1955 Mississippi murder victim Emmett Till does not: here she stands accused of “disparate grabby sentimentalism” a charge that once again more precisely suits her nemesis.

When Pinto and Stakemeier mention ‘social accountability’ predictably they overlook the malice of the useful ‘anti-fascist’ idiots who function as the de facto attack dogs of the global cultural elite and Silicon Valley. But when they describe “privileged subjects on a rampage, running amok through the public sphere” who better matches this description? For three years now, opportunist activists like Pinto and her friends have been empowered by every mainstream institution in the art world to smear, destroy and threaten galleries and bookstores, artists and curators, cancel shows and lectures, punish women for their insufficiently woke feminism, and systematically degrade the human spirit.

Where is the accountability here? Who is the real embodiment today of social sadism? A nebulous alt-right cowering in the foxhole of anonymity on 4chan? Or magazines like Mute, the Der Stürmer of the Antifa, funded by dimwit supermarket heir and art collector Alex Sainsbury, which mobilized to shutdown LD50 to defend its market share against a nimbler rival — and sycophantic magazines like Texte Zur Kunst.

What is happening today in contemporary art and culture is not some abstract issue of “free speech” nor the fantastical return of fascism but a concrete reality of histrionic political repression, enacted in the name of victims (but not to help them) by half-crazed moral monsters, and what it is producing: the articulation of a counter-movement, and a culture of dissent, whose voice is beginning to make itself heard.

“This frenzied performativity,” Pinto and Stakemeier conclude their text, “fails to yield any meaningful movement — aesthetic or otherwise — that could signal a departure from the aspirational psychology that undergirds the neoliberal matrix.” They are referring to themselves. Members of a delibidinizing death cult in a downward spiral, increasingly unable to make sense of the world beyond the bubble of its self-delusions, they represent a cultural establishment which no longer believes in what it says: the ironic nihilism and social sadism they are describing is their own.