It’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention that the entertainment industry has become the Death Cult’s propaganda ministry. The more astute observers know that the subversion of Hollywood started decades ago.
The movie, music, and game industries aren’t alone in their anti-evangelism for the new civic religion. Almost every major corporation has enthusiastically jumped on the antichrist bandwagon. As a matter of fact, they’re driving it.
Here’s megacorp super nerd Bill Gates explaining his scheme to dim the sun. The fact that a captain of industry is trying to make a 90s Simpsons plot real tells us two things:
- The heads of megacorps have entirely too much money and power.
- The folks in charge of the megacorps are not the serious, clear-eyed and levelheaded businessmen of old. They are Pop Cult nerds living out their most extravagant power fantasies.
Even the more astute cultural observers who see that the rot started setting in as far back as the 60s tend to have a blind spot for the 80s. But the Death Cult’s hold on major studios hadn’t slackened since The Pawnbroker and Easy Rider. Amid the pulp resurgence led by relative outsiders like George Lucas, it was easy to miss the ongoing subversion beneath the surface.
A vector for that subversion that largely flies under the radar is the nerd comedy subgenre that carved out a niche in the 80s. 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds is the prime example, but all of these flicks had the same basic premise: a motley gang of college misfits get hassled by the football team and use their smarts to get even. Hilarity ensues.
Because people naturally root for the underdog, audiences overlooked the subtext of these movies. The sympathetically drawn protagonists were always a bunch of neckbeards, spergs, and effeminates–including drag queens–put upon by normal people.
If you’re at all clued in to how the Death Cult operates, that inverted dynamic will look awfully familiar. Like all religions, the Cult gives its adherents an identity. That identity, which is on thinly veiled display in the nerd revenge flicks, is that of the long-suffering underdog persecuted by the tyrannical majority. Even in the 80s nerd movies, the tyrants are always straight, white Christians.
It’s no accident that those movies’ plots look like 2010s Reddit with a time machine. The whole point is to portray deviancy as smart and cool while denigrating normality. That’s culture war in a nutshell.
Fast forward thirty years, and real-life nerds who watched these movies in high school now run global corporations with undreamed-of war chests. Guys like Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai still see themselves as victims just because normal Americans exist. They’re still fighting the Man long after having become the Man. It’s Revenge of the Nerds: 2021, and we’re all WASPish ski instructors.
Renegade comedian and Crimean jihadist Sam Hyde suggests an antidote:
Apologies to Salam-al-Hayid, peace be upon him, but his solution may be too little, too late. I suggest reclaiming what dignity you can by not contributing to our nerd overlords’ coffers.
This was a big realization in my youth when I saw all these shows and movies with the put upon meek geeks bullied by the bad jocks, when my life experience showed that this never actually happened.
The only people who ever caused problems, especially in high school, were the wastoids and stoners. Seth Rogen-types like the people who write these films. Think John Bender from the Breakfast Club except without the cliched parental issues or Hollywood wit.
Makes you wonder just why they needed to ingrain this impression in the general populace so badly.
Agreed. The only grief I ever heard my local high school jocks giving nerdy kids involved peer pressure to maybe put down the comic books and go outside.
In retrospect, they were performing a public service.
Brian,
These grown men haven’t outgrown their adolescent hangups and still perceive themselves as the marginalized despite their immense power.
They act like the cartoon mad scientist with a chip on his shoulder due to his bad experiences as a teen
xavier
I’ve noticed this tendency among Lefty Boomers as well. They still think they’re fighting the Man decades after having become the Establishment. They neither understand that they’ve won the Long March, nor the sheer horror of their victory. The parallel also holds among GenX Lefties. They seem dedicated to fighting fascism, even if it’s all in their heads.
I don’t remember having problems with jocks in high school, or much of anyone else, really. The jocks were so far outside my own orbit that they might as well have gone to a different school. The biggest jerks I knew were a couple of rich guys on the debate team, which I suppose made them a different kind of nerd from the computer and theatre geeks I hung out with. I think there was probably more bullying within the various stereotypical groups than between them.
I think the nerd vs jock thing has more to do with the nerds envy of the jock’s relative celebrity – particularly in a place like Texas were football is a religion – than with any real pattern of abuse. Revenge of the Nerds is self-insert fanfic, complete with Gary Stu winning at life. In reality, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos can’t even stay married. Guys who are that full of themselves never figure out that they have to be good, not smrt, to land a nice girl and keep her.
“That identity, which is on thinly veiled display in the nerd revenge flicks, is that of the long-suffering underdog persecuted by the tyrannical majority.”
You see the same theme in Harry Potter.
As I tried to warn people last week.
The pushback that post got shows how deep the conditioning runs.
I think one of the first of these movies was Animal House. Granted, the misfits were a bit less sympathetic in than in later movies, but the “bad guys” were obviously conservative Christians. Unfortunately, it was also kind of entertaining.
Boring films make bad propaganda.
A while back me and my brother watched The Animatrix. Afterwards we discussed the various shorts. My brother hated, absolutely hated, the short “World Record.” I said that I wasn’t too fond of the animation style and the bleak ending. But that wasn’t my brother’s problem. The issue was “jocks don’t deserve to escape the matrix.”
The short is about an athlete, in the matrix, who is devoting his life to breaking a seemingly impossible sprinting record. His determination is enough to let him not only succeed (probably by unconsciously manipulating the matrix) but also to momentarily break free of the program and get a glimpse of the real world. It’s not a happy ending: the machine’s agents are aware of this being a possibility and quickly bring him back into the matrix and erase his memory, while in the matrix the strain put on his virtual body leaves him crippled. There is no hint that he will be rescued by the resistance, or that they are even aware of what he has done. The only bit of hope is that he was able to glimpse the true nature of the world.
But despite this bleak ending my brother was very pissed off. He was insulted by a “jock” being able to achieve anything whatsoever, even at so great a cost. We watched it when I was finishing up college and he had finished college: our high school days were well in the rear view mirror. And the character in the short isn’t really a “jock” anyway, but an adult professional athlete. Neither of us had much of a problem with bullies, and the ones that were around weren’t in any sports anyway.
It’s interesting how the Chad meme went from a symbol of “toxic masculinity” to a representation of self-improvement. There’s something about lifting other guys up by encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad behavior that has resonated with a lot of young men online.
Wouldn’t the snobby gammas be more likely to be the bullies? I don’t remember my own bullies as Chads, and I definitely wasn’t an alpha when I bullied others.
The Game-derived alphabetical male rankings were useful while Gen Y men were still in their 20s and early 30s. Now the Millennial women who dominate the marriage market have gone full Xanax-popping Witch, and their men are so disinterested in masculinity as to gleefully castrate themselves.
There’s a reason all the old Game gurus have moved on. The Death Cult has so changed society since the 2010s that the old behavioral models no longer describe current reality.
A new approach is needed. Of the former Game purveyors, Roosh looks to be bearing the most fruit.
“Game” is overthinking. I didn’t game the woman that is now my wife. I was, quite literally, myself. We met at work and became friends. Shortly after I moved into my house, she sent me a text during the weekend asking if I wanted brownies. I told her that I did. She came over and we talked for nearly 6 hours into the night. The next weekend we went out on a date. We went out to eat. I ate a chicken sandwich, and she ate a salad (later she told me that she ate a salad, because she didn’t want to chance having to fart around me lol). We started dating. I saved up for a ring and proposed to her on Christmas morning. My wife does the cooking and cleaning. I pay the major bills and do the yardwork. I do not live in the city. I live out in the country. But, shh… keep it a secret about country girls. And please, for the love of God, keep the STD-infested city tramps in the cities. In the words of the great Hank Jr. “All these pretty little southern belles / are a country boy’s dream / They ain’t got wings or halos / But they sure look good to me” 🙂
Yeah, Game is yesteryear’s marriage market strategy.
I assumed it was never really a marriage strategy, just a hook up one. Of course it sometimes led to marriage, but that wasn’t the original objective. I was never a game player, so I could have it totally wrong.
The early guys like Mystery and Neil Strauss were dedicated pickup artists. Second wave PUAs like Roissy and Rollo Tomassi wrote about applying Game techniques to marriage.
The gist of it was Gaming your wife to maintain her interest and stave off divorce.
Teddy Spaghetti claims to have success with applying his game theory to project management; his model applies to men’s behaviors in general, as opposed to mere testosterone or appeal to women.
I can’t speak to how many Millennials he hires, however. Where you would use “Millennial,” Teddy would use “gamma”–provided that the Millennial in question would still care about social status.
VD uses “gamma” as shorthand for what psychologists would call men with cluster B personality disorders and what I call effeminates. They’re low-ranking extroverts.
Anyway, we can count VD among the Game gurus who’ve moved on. He closed down his Game blog years ago after having exhausted the topic.
Teddy’s rankings were admittedly not the right way to frame what I wanted to say. Even if men behaved differently among gen Y than they did among mine, I couldn’t help but detect a hint of projection among the nerd films of the 80s. You and JD both noted that you never saw the jocks grief the nerds like their on-screen counterparts.
You do realize that using “Teddy Spaghetti” instead of Vox Day immediately outs you as a gamma who most likely has never known a woman, right? Your bully in high school failed you.
Any chance you will do a review of “PCU”?
Yep
I never liked “Game Theory” in the first place. Anything that reeks of putting people into little boxes rankles me in general, and this always seemed like trying to “figure out” romance in a way that always seemed wrong, as if they were speedrunners trying to figure out the optimal route through a videogame.
Game devolved into astrology for men.