This past Saturday, Trump-era provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos resurfaced on-stream with internet bloodsports veteran and inner circle groyper Beardson Beardly. The occasion was a debate on the spiritual ramifications of grown men pursuing children’s hobbies–in this case, Pokémon cards.
If you’re wondering how the dispute started, one of the Groypers’ wignat critics posted a screen shot of Beardson fawning over a rare Charizard he’d acquired. Milo reposted it with a lament at Western men’s obsession with childish diversions. The gauntlet was thrown down.
Beardson had been predicting an easy win all month, but when Milo got around to showing up, he brought a reminder of why the Death Cult targeted him as cancellation patient zero. Say what you want about his personal vices, he possesses a depth and breadth of knowledge sorely lacking in the new crop of dissidents.
So instead of the expected finger-wagging lecture about how grownups aren’t allowed to have fun, Milo blindsided Beardson with an appeal to Christian teachings on the role and nature of art. He correctly pointed out that art consists of works that aim to represent truth and beauty for the purpose of lifting up the soul to God, who is Truth and the source of all beauty.
As we have documented copiously on this blog, Current Year corporate product is churned out for the exact opposite motive. When beloved cartoon characters are retconned as sexual deviants and American comic book icons are replaced with foreign weirdos, the goal isn’t wholesome fun but audience humiliation.
Milo only made one misstep–or rather, he came up one step short of the full picture. He asserted that corporate games, films, and comics are addictions. He isn’t wrong, but what he’s missing is that for many the addiction isn’t to the flashy video images and cardboard crack itself–it’s to the dopamine hit that comes from membership in a cult.
Now, Beardson convincingly argued the point that Pokémon is among the more benign corporate IPs. St. John Paul II even approved it. Where Beardly fumbled, revealing his hand, was in denying Milo’s assertion, in line with consistent Christian teaching, that art is objective. Someone who thinks beauty is subjective should contemplate his standing in the Church, let alone the new counterculture movement.
In highlighting Millennials’ aesthetic impoverishment, Milo came close to explicating Cultural Ground Zero and Revised Generation theory. Milo, a member of Gen Y, still sees the value in Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt. He has no qualms about recognizing classical art’s objective superiority to contemporary corporate product. Beardson wasted no time manifesting the definitive Millennial contempt for and dismissal of the past.
When someone claims that cape shit movies are better art than Wagner, you can only echo Milo’s lament that Millennials have been robbed, and they don’t even know what they’ve lost.
Watch the debate and learn (Skip to the 55 minute mark for Milo’s appearance).
And learn how to free yourself from the Pop Cult with my #1 best selling book.
Among Millennials, the gay SJWs are more objective about art than the pop cultists. I could link to a trans brony’s explanation of how animation needs a point and can’t be edgy for the sake of edginess. I could link to a Chinese SJW author’s explanation of how the animated Mulan movie better captures the spirit of Asian storytelling—and more masterfully evokes certain emotions than the live action remake. I could even link to an effeminate animation veterans’ explanation of how good character design requires clarity of color and shape.
I could link to any of those things, but I won’t. I don’t want to traumatize your readers.
Art has been the Right’s Achilles’ heel since at least the Buckley era. Guys like Fuentes and Beardson will rail against Con Inc’s betrayal of cultural Conservatism, then gush for hours about Battlefield and Star Wars.
It was around the same time the Jesus Inc. Entertainment Industry showed up with the Evangelical revival. That was the moment art became split between “Religious” and “Secular” in a fissure that grew to the size of the grand canyon over the 20th century. The Right allied itself with Corporate Christ, and the Left allied itself with Hollywood. Now we are seeing the fruits borne such relationships.
The first step is abandoning that old frame. A lot of dissidents cannot quite do that due to a lifetime of not understanding the purpose of art beyond consumption. Until they do, nothing’s going to change.
Millennials and Zoomers look to be as hopelessly hooked on cape flicks and gray goo genre games as Boomers are on television. The way forward is probably to let the younger dissidents be the wrecking balls while Xers and Ys build new culture in their wake.
Conservatives often talk about how SJWs struggle to make good art because their devotion to their communist atheist worldview limits what they can do. There is a lot of truth in this, but at least the have a worldview. The non-leftist pop cultists try to avoid the problems of wokeness by saying that entertainment shouldn’t be made from any worldview at all, nor should it have any purpose beyond consumption for entertainment.
A SJW may first have to say “did this check off the woke textboxes?” But if he says “yes” he can then ask the question of “is there any way that it could be better crafted or have a more consistent theme in order to serve as better propaganda?” A pop cultist can only ask “did this entertain me?” What’s more, if the answer is “no” it is hard for him to say that it is truly a BAD work of art, as opposed to one merely not to his tastes. If they really dig into it they will usually only deal with the level of plot holes and internal consistency, along the lines of Mauler and crew, rather than asking about whether it serves a higher purpose, what its intended tone and message is, what emotional responses it is meant to produce etc. You can’t even start asking those questions if you think that entertainment is nothing but entertainment.
That’s exactly how it works. Propaganda is a craft of its own, and the Hollywood cultists are masters of it.
Brian,
2 books by Elizabeth Lev about art that might be of help and interest:
St Joseph as depicted in art
https://www.sophiainstitute.com/products/item/the-silent-knight
How Catholic art save the Faith:
https://www.sophiainstitute.com/products/item/how-catholic-art-saved-the-faith
xavier
A lot of this is due to how art has been taught over the past century.
When someone says “I just want it to be entertaining, with no worldview”, what they are saying is that they want the default worldview they grew up on to be seen as normal. You can see it with how entire online movements frame their political goals of making everything go back to 1997 again and pretending the recent madness never happened. They simply do not understand their own ideology and believe it the default of existence.
While the woke have a worldview that is insane, at least they are aware they have one. The anti-woke just want to imagine everything will stop being crazy if we accept their assumed view of existence which they absorbed passively from the media they consumed as children.
What we shouldn’t be asking is for art to not be political or religious, but for it to not be propaganda for bad politics or religion. This isn’t an argument we should be focused on, but we are because of the monstrosity that is the modern education system.
I was under the impression that Milo was calling himself “ex-gay” now, and was trying to throw himself more wholeheartedly into his Catholic faith. But I can’t read his heart to know if that is a genuine change.
Still, I am glad to see he is getting back into th efray. I never liked his content, but I recognize he is good at what he does, which is punching back at the Death Cultists (and now, it appears, the Pop Cultists.)
You heard correctly. This debate reminded me why I appreciated Milo’s work, and illustrated why the Death Cult targeted him for cancellation first. The Zoomers are full of piss and vinegar, but their view is narrow. Milo epitomizes the Gen Y chronicler archetype with one foot in the pre-and post-Ground Zero worlds.
Groypers continue taking Ls. Ultimate wignat victory is imminent, and will commence when Nick Fuentes is chased off Gab.
If you will hear some good advice, consider giving up envy. It’s the only deadly sin that’s no fun.
Milo recently purged his YouTube channel but now has some fascinating interviews with Westboro Baptists and others: https://youtube.com/channel/UCocQyQ4GeJc6Grwf-J2M02Q
He and Ethan Ralph are the only two interviewers who really will talk to anyone.