This time we are honoured and delighted to welcome special guest Kelly Weill of The Daily Beast (etc) to talk to us about her new (and excellent) book Off The Edge, a history of Flat Earth, the current state of the Flat Earth movement, and our cultish and conspiratorial times generally. A fun and thoughtful – and sometimes melancholic – discussion.
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Human Bondage returns with a banger of an episode on The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore’s classic third outing as James Bond. It’s a good time: we cover nuclear bombs, submarines, and conclusively solve the problem of Steven Moffat.…
In rank defiance of all the various conflicting things we’ve told you Episode 105 would be about, here is an episode about 2015’s (and sadly also 2022’s) Lauren Southern (lying, untruth-telling nazi liar-nazi) and the mainstreaming and normalising thereof.
In this episode we consider Lauren’s career (in brief, owing to the fact that chronicling her trail of lies and evil acts has become something of a cottage industry for the online left), her departure from politics and regrettable return, her ostensible changed nature (lol), her pub-excluding ideological lenses, and her sitcom life which comes complete with eccentric stereotype boyfriend, slapstick boat adventures and rollerblading accidents, and snarky one-liner strewn bickering with her mismatched (or is he really so mismatched?) buddy ‘Destiny’.
We take a stop-off with fan-favourites Posobiec, Elijah Shaffer, and (by mention) Rittenhouse, via Lauren’s lie-filled ‘documentary’ Crossfire. We listen in on Lauren’s conversation with Nicky-Boy Fuentes’ old friend (turned undeadly enemy) James Allsup back at the time of Unite the Right. Then we also pop in on Lauren’s friendly and boozy and giggly stint as a guest of our old ‘person we talked about’ Tim Pool. It is possible that unflattering nicknames were mentioned, and not just Tim’s. We then round it off with some seriously nerdy shit. Elvish swords at the ready for the protection of pan-Western civilisation or some such stupid bollocks.
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We were sitting together in her living room, while she scripted a video, when her new boyfriend emerged from the bedroom. George Hutcheson, who was 30 at the time, runs a Canadian group called Students for Western Civilization, which works to “advance the interests of European peoples.” Her most recent boyfriends had also been adherents of far-right ideologies. She had nearly gotten engaged to a prominent conspiracy theorist, and had had an on-again-off-again fling with a Croatian neo-Nazi. “Maybe I’m too picky,” she’d mused before Hutcheson joined us on her IKEA couch. In appearance, Hutcheson is the caricature of the Aryan ideal. His undercut haircut, known in the alt-right as the fashy(short for fascist), and his fit, thick, soldier-like frame give him a Teutonic air. He and Southern decided to go out to dinner, and to let me film them. Hutcheson refuses to eat food originally from nonwhite countries, such as ketchup, whose origins are in China, so the two, facing limited restaurant options, chose the British-style Oxley Public House in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood.
This time, we look at the recent AFPAC conference, Nick Fuentes’ gathering of the Groypers, i.e. the even worse version of CPAC, attended by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Arpaio, among many horrible others. Controversies, squabbles, coalition-building, Christian dominionism, and very long, weird speeches. Daniel and Jack both do voices.
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Hey Eruditorum Press readers. I have two new shows out. I genuinely think both these shows are, in their different ways, among the best shows I’ve been involved with recently.
The first is a new episode of It *IS* The Same Log, with myself, George Daniel Lea, and Elliot Chapman. This one is on Nicolas Roeg’s mesmerising and mysterious film about grief, marriage, murder, and precognition in Venice Don’t Look Now (1972).
Here. (My Patreon supporters got this a week ago.)
The second is, of course, a new episode of I Don’t Speak German with Daniel Harper, this one on the removal of Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel about the Holocaust and historical memory, Maus, from the curriculum by the McMinn County School Board in Tennessee.
So, McMinn County School Board in Tennessee decided to remove Maus – Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel about the Nazi Holocaust and historical memory – from their syllabus, on the grounds that some simply sketched mouse nudity and a few very mild swears would upset and corrupt their pupils, which is obviously very reasonable and evidence of extremely well balanced priorities. Actually, alongside the epidemic of attempts across the US to remove certain sorts of books from school libraries and curricula, it is evidence that an insidious reactionary agenda is gaining traction.
In this episode we talk about the decision of the school board, and look through the minutes of the meeting. Daniel even gives an impromptu dramatic reading. We talk about where the appalling decision comes from, and what it really means both for the students and in terms of the wider culture. Along the way we consider the lies of slimy propagandist Christopher Rufo and the spluttering fanaticism of the increasingly unhinged James Lindsay.
Content very much warnings.
Podcast Notes:
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“Continuing the recent spate of conservative book-banning initiatives, The Mcminn County School board just voted to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “MAUS” by Art Spiegelman from all of its schools, citing the inclusion of words like “God Damn” and “naked pictures” (illustrations) of women.”
The December ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) workshop was led by the Heritage Foundation’s Bridget Weisenberg and featured Heritage’s Jonathan Butcher and Angela Sailor, Discovery Institute’s Christopher Rufo, American Enterprise Institute’s Ian Rowe, and Woodson Center’s Robert Woodson. Thirty-one state legislators from 20 states attended, along with corporate representatives from Guarantee Life Insurance, EDP Renewables, and State Farm Insurance.
In the second part of our Rittenhouse coverage, we start with a look at Kyle’s reception as a rock star messiah at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and follow the thread where it leads, from more on Elijah Shaffer to Tucker Carlson and his ‘Trial of Kyle’ to Mike Enoch and the National Justice Party via “a twentieth century philosopher” (who Eruditorum Press readers will remember me writing about in the past ). In the process, we consider the currency of the concept of ‘Anarcho-Tyranny’ and how the term Blood Libel is being appropriated. Dialectical? Yeah, we’re dialectical AF. And we don’t apologise.
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Pausing Nowhere and Back Again this week for some words on this Amazon thing. We’ll be back with Lake-town next week.
Well, that was inevitable, even if knowing what to call a show is apparently a spoiler these days. It’s a less Tolkienesque title than Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age, but it scans, even if the existence of a series title with a subtitle is a moral atrocity.
As The Rings of Power is a prequel show, the title indicates a focus on the Three, Seven, and Nine rings. Showrunners J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay (let’s hope they won’t be the next Benioff and Weiss) give the impression The Rings of Power will cover the Second Age, from “the forging of the rings, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the epic tale of Númenor, and the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.” Akallabêth stans rejoice, I suppose.
The period Payne and McKay describes lasts anywhere from 1941 to 2231 to 3409 years, depending on where The Rings of Power starts. That could be the founding of Númenor, Sauron’s time in Eregion, or the Rings of Power’s creation. It seems unlikely that the series would depict any events that happen after the siege of Barad-dûr or Isildur’s death.
The Rings of Power apparently sticks to Tolkien’s overarching story and filling in the blanks, per the Tolkien Estate’s guidelines. It has unprecedented licensing to adapt portions of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, so the Tolkien Estate is clearly pleased with the series. This raises some concerns, as it may mean The Rings of Power is more traditionalist than its predecessors, Peter Jackson’s double-trilogy. At the same time, adapting Tolkien’s conservative mythology in the tedious Marvel Cinematic Universe era should be an interestingly strange sight.
I’m almost wholly unfamiliar with the show’s creative team, so I can’t predict their approach to Middle-earth. The job they’ve inherited, however, is fascinating. They have to work with Tolkien’s plots (outlines, really), which span millennia and contain scarce details. This will give the team ample room to concoct new stories within Tolkien’s framework. I wonder if each season will cover a particular era. Certainly there will have to be an almost anthology-like approach to it: characters will inevitably die between seasons. Maybe we’ll get The Lord of the Rings as True Detective. There are worse ideas than “Nic Pizzolatto writes elves.”
If the tone of this piece can accurately be called “cold,” there are a couple reasons for that. The rampant spoilerphobia of contemporary pop culture is a killer on enthusiasm. Before I watch a series or a movie, I like to know something of its story. As of now, we know basically nothing about The Rings of Power‘s creative approach. I’m not going to go ga-ga over this stuff unless Amazon lets its creators show they have an interesting story to tell.
There’s also Amazon’s involvement. If you’re reading Eruditorum Press, or if you’ve paid any attention to the world these past few years, you know Amazon is one of the most evil and destructive organizations in the world.…
I just drove an hour in a fucking hellish snowstorm and am in no shape to do all the typesetting on Last War in Albion, so that’ll be a day or two later in the week. For now, I’ve had a couple of old Twitter threads get a lot of renewed attention on the back of some debates about current trends in SF/F literature. A couple of these are things I reworked into what I called “tiny essays” for Patreon a while back, and if my views are going to get cited and thrown around I may as well put them up in a durable and lightly edited form. So here’s four tiny essays on recent aesthetic trends mostly around SF/F, to publicly stake out some positions.
The Tor Wave
For three years running there have been precisely zero white men nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, and the last one to actually win was John Scalzi all the way back in 2013. This suggests a clear aesthetic shift in how sci-fi works—one on the scale of the rise of the New Wave in the 1960s or the sudden arrival of cyberpunk in the mid-80s. However nobody has formulated a take on how this movement functions.
Part of this is undoubtedly the nazis. The Sad Puppies attacked this style before it had gotten a chance to self-codify. Their attacks were farcical and largely not even wrong—the claim that this “wasn’t science fiction” remains pure historical erasure. But like any propaganda there were just enough truths mixed in with the lies to make things difficult.
Core principles.
Diversity as an underlying assumption. Fantasy that isn’t medieval Europe fetishism but starts from international perspectives. (Rebecca Roanorse, N.K. Jemisin) Overt queerness (Charlie Jane Anders, Tamsyn Muir). This isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake, but rather focused exploration into the options that the white male default precludes.
A massive dollop of fanfic and romance influence. Tamsyn Muir and Charlie Jane Anders are at the front line of this, so it clearly overlaps substantially with queerness. But let’s not forget that Naomi Novik’s breakout series was a reskinned Master and Commander fanfic.
It’s stylistically a big tent, with the lyrical and allusiveness of Piranesi sitting comfortably alongside the cyberpunk reconstructionism of The Murderbot Diaries. Put another way, this is by a generation for whom SF/F has always had lots of different traditions, and who grew up reading all of them. Post-factionalization, although in practice this is still a faction.
Within this, the New Wave clearly has a ton of influence. Its innovations—SF/F conceits as tools for exploring interiority, the foregrounding of different cultural perspectives, stylistic experimentation—are all very, very internalized here. No longer controversial or innovative, just the way things are done. These are writers who grew up with library book sales where cheap copies of Dragonriders of Pern and Left Hand of Darkness abounded. More to the point, these existed besides Rendezvous with Rama and Neuromancer, all in a single “Science Fiction/Fantasy” genre.…
And so we kick off 2022, IDSG’s fourth year, with an episode about the Denver shooter and self-published SF novelist (who put himself and his own murder plans in his own books) Lyndon McCleod, AKA Roman McClay, and his relationship to the infamous ‘Manosphere’, AKA a network of misogynistic and ‘masculinist’ fashy chudlingers like Jack Murphy, Jack Davenport, etc. We follow up a bit on our last episode (Part 1 of our post-verdict Rittenhouse coverage) and drop back in on the nauseating You Are Here podcast, and Baldy McDickface’s Tim Pool’s show, as we explore the recent flap around Jack Murphy’s ‘Cuck Letter’ (don’t ask… well, just listen), before delving a tad into McCleod/McClay’s fiction and his worldview, including some hardcore stoopid genetic determinism. Lots going on in this one, and so we’re issuing bigtime content warnings, not least for the recorded voice of a multiple murderer.
On a specific Eruditorum Press-related note, let me just note that El and I (along with others, of course) were covering the issue of toxic reactionary shit (written by toxic reactionary shits) in the world of niche SF fiction publishing a loooong time ago. c.f. Search Results for “puppies” – Eruditorum Press
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For Episode 99, Daniel and I talk about the Sines vs. Kessler trial (the civil trial of the Unite the Right organisers etc), the way in which the far-right (including the defendants) have conceptualised it, the long-awaited aftermath in the wake of the verdict (which dropped just before Thanksgiving), and the reactions and attitudes to the whole thing among the far-right, including lots of inexplicably buoyant Cantwell lunacy.
For Episode 100, Daniel has prepared a bevvy of clips of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha Killer Kid, pre and post verdict. Compare and contrast his tears on the stand to those he cried in the police interview room. Compare and contrast his claimed trauma with his concerns – as expressed to his interesting Mom – immediately post-‘incident’. Compare and contrast his attitude on Tucker Carlson’s and Charlie Kirk’s respective shows, to his cheeky antics as a guest on another show that Daniel has discovered in the course of his listening…
This is not an episode calibrated to fill you with the Christmas spirit, to be honest. But there is a point to this. It demonstrates something, which will become evident as you listen, and be developed next episode.
Bottom of the Barrel: Charlottesville Trial Defense Attorneys Spread Antisemitism
Joshua Smith, one of the attorneys, is representing Matthew Heimbach, Matthew Parrott, and the Traditionalist Worker Party, a neo-nazi group that helped put on Unite the Right in 2017. Calling in remotely to cross-examine a witness on November 11, Smith went on a meandering digression about so-called ‘ethnostates’. He claimed that expert witness and sociologist, Peter Simi, was ‘anti-white’ because he wouldn’t address Smith’s view that China and Singapore are ‘ethnostates’, and falsely said that white people are responsible for most advances in civilization and technology.
When trying to confuse jurors about sociological concepts like in-groups and out-groups, Smith asked Simi if Hillary Clinton was white supremacist, and soon after he told Judge Norman Moon that cross-examinations can be “conversations” with witnesses, before sheepishly admitting his scattered tangents were “trying to keep it lively for everybody.”
Another attorney in the Charlottesville lawsuit trial, Cincinnati-based, James E. Kolenich, is an antisemitic far-right Catholic. Kolenich told the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2018 that his motives in this case were simple: “My willingness to get involved is to oppose Jewish influence in society.” He questioned the accuracy of long-accepted scholarship about the death toll of the Holocaust: “You can’t call the Jew Holocaust into question, right?
