3:17:22

"This is all of them repeating CIA and State Department talking points to shame dissent. This is how they manufacture consent for war."

We must start asking ourselves: who are these people really? Who are these actors, these comedians, these talk show hosts, these politicians, these influencers--really? Who are they really working for? How did they really get their fame and their wealth and their success? What are they really being paid to do?

"This is coming from the top. This is coming from our government. This is being fed to them by a White House that cannot face the people."

Max Blumenthal is right about the White House and CIA using actors, etc., as intermediaries for their talking points, but he's wrong if he thinks this is a new phenomenon. Many know already that all of Hollywood and the music industry are psyops, built on this propagandistic function. It's called Illuminati. We're just seeing celebrities and media being weaponized more bluntly now. More openly, more ideologically (take, for example, Jen Psaki's training and grooming of a group of TikTok influencers on Zoom). Because, again, there is no curtain anymore. There is no art or entertainment hiding or cloaking or sublimating the message. "They used to have to do this clandestinely," as Jimmy Dore says. Blumenthal: "Now the Left does it on its own without an FBI encouragement." (case in point, Mayor Eric Adams miraculously lifted the vaccine passport mandates on March 7, and yet two weeks later none of the businesses or institutions in NYC have stopped requiring the passports, which means the people are now willingly imposing authoritaraniasm on themselves and others). Art is no long necessary, as I wrote a few days ago. Talent is too dangerous, too transgressive, too individuating. People can learn too much from it. We're in the Gulag phase of culture now.

Compare the laid-back Whoopi of 1992 with today's fascist Whoopi, who should just fucking retire. Isn't she rich enough and old enough at this point? Compare the calm and curiosity of her thoughtful discussion with Rutger Hauer with the general fascist, high-pitched, incoherent hubris of today's mainstream corporate talk shows, pundits, and news reactions.

I used to ask my students to carefully compare and contrast videos from the past with the present so that could understand the differences between how people used to communicate thoughts and feelings and how they express them now. What is different, I'd ask? Why is it different? What is behind the changes? The changes could be as small as the sound of women's voices (the rise of vocal fry), the mannerisms people used to have during interviews, the look in people's eyes. Style. Not to mention Whoopi was so pretty back then and bright-eyed. She was always known for her live and let live stance on life. She was in Altman movies like The Player. She could be annoying at times--too Hollywood, too uncritical--but she was also an individual and had a sense of humor. If anything, she was a-political. Now she's a tyrant. Now everyone looks and sounds like hell. I feel like a dog listening to a perpetual dog whistle. Everything hurts my ears. Everything hurts my eyes.

I watched another really bad (bad because it's just more incoherence and emptiness posing as art)--movie last night, Mainstream (2019), which had a couple of good bar scenes, namely this one in the two screenshots below. I like the one nice, ethical guy in the movie, who says: "We've become the awful people we're satirizing." I always root for the good person. I don't understand the obsession with the villain (not to be confused with the underdog, rebel, or truth teller) and the asshole. I like sweetness.

The two faces of masculinity that Andrew Garfield (a once great actor. I was so blown away by his performance in Red Riding when it came out. I'll never forget it. I was excited about him. Mark Fisher and I used to talk about how great RR was. It also has an amazing score) gives at the end of the movie are bone chilling, but worthless. It's no surprise that his character, Link, is a two-faced sociopath. Don't we know this guy already? Don't we know this tired old story already? Don't we know this script? Don't we know this face? Don't we know what's behind this curtain? So what does it mean for a young director to build her cinematic reveal around the unveiling of a narcissistic male double in 2022, when the truth is everything is worse than even that? When no one even expects anyone to be something real, to be someone good. When no one knows what that even looks like anymore, sounds like anymore. When everyone has that face now, and likes that face now, and wants to have that face now. When the whole culture is lost in the morass of artifice and insanity and narcissism. What is being "revealed" exactly in Mainstream? What is being lost? Gained? Learned? The final face switch in the movie's so-called denouement is what we've known all along, what we've been all along, what all the characters are, save the one nice guy whose scruples cannot be destroyed. His face never changes. His face is real. With Mainstream, and the awful Tick Tick Boom, Garfield is starting to remind me of P.T. Barnum or something--over-the top, bombastic tour de force performances. Too much acting singing dancing. These people don't get genre, or tone or restraint. He's no Gene Kelly or Barbra Streisand. I can't tell the difference between the douchey "sensitive" men he plays in his movies and the douchey "sensitive" guy he played on Stephen Colbert this year when he was promoting Tick Tick Boom. They're all fakers.

Does America ruin everyone?

My mom sent this song today, Goodbye America, by the musician Nautilus Pompilius. It's from 1988. He reminds me of a Russian Depeche Mode. She told me the lead singer, a former post-punk, now spends most of his time listening to and studying Bach. She was comparing his disillusionment with the present to my disillusionment with the present, I guess. She said: "You're both looking back to the past, to tradition. Truly transgressive people always feel most frightened by the destruction of basic cultural principles because without them avant-garde interventions are not possible."