Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Lake-town

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Names: Lake-town, Esgaroth (“Sindarized” word; untranslated)

Description: A quay market town on the Long Lake, south of Erebor, built on the ruins of an earlier settlement, possibly Esgaroth. It is founded by descendants of Dale, who use the lakeside spot to make a modest living trading with Dorwinion and the Woodland Realm. The town is governed by an elected Master. After the Lake-men assist Thorin Oakenshield in his quest to Erebor, Smaug destroys Lake-town and is killed by Bard, a local bowman and descendant of Dale’s former lord Girion. Bard leads the Lake-men in a hard-won alliance with the Dwarves of Erebor and Wood-elves of Mirkwood, after which he rebuilds Dale and Lake-town as King of Dale. By the time Elrond convenes his own personal Yalta Conference to deal with Sauron, Lake-town is just a slice of Dale’s thriving kingdom.

Lake-town (Alan Lee for 1997 edition of The Hobbit)

Shooting location in Wingnut Films’ adaptations: Stone Street Studios, Miramar, Wellington

In its lone ‘onstage’ appearance in The Hobbit, Lake-town perches on the Long Lake, built on “rotting piles of a greater town [which] could still be seen along the shores when the waters sank in a drought” (The Hobbit, “A Warm Welcome”). Some of its younger denizens, who’ve never experienced Dale’s prosperity or seen Erebor in its heyday, “openly doubted the existence of any dragon in the mountain”. Under an ineffective and avaricious Master, Lake-town profits off the Lake’s trade while lacking the wealth or power of its neighbors, Erebor and Mirkwood. When Smaug destroys Lake-town, he plunges its people into true poverty and dispossession. His killer, Bard, saves the Lake-people by reviving their ancestral power.

Prior to its sacking, Lake-town is reasonably lucrative; it “still throve on the trade that came up the great river from the South and was carted past the falls to their town” (‘A Warm Welcome’). It plays liaison for Dorwinion, the wine-makers’ land, and Mirkwood’s Woodland Realm, its customer; Dorwinion floats its wine in barrels up the Running River to Lake-town, whose people transport the barrels up the stream, deliver them to Mirkwood, and then retrieve them when the Wood-elves send them downstream. Tolkien does not indicate whether the Lake-men drink any Dorwinion wine themselves.

In Smaug’s time, Lake-town has neighbors but lacks allies. Whereas Dale’s prosperity was inextricable from its friendship with the Erebor dwarves, Lake-town’s trade is buffeted by “the bickering of the Lake-men and the Wood-elves about the upkeep of the Forest River and the care of the banks” (‘A Warm Welcome’). The Master’s initial skepticism of Thorin and company partially stems from that fact that “the Elvenking [Thranduil] was very powerful in those parts and the Master wished for no enmity with him” (‘A Warm Welcome’). Lake-town rests precariously on the lake of Wilderland class society; it’s not at war with anyone, but its deference to external power cuts against Tolkien’s utopian monarchism.

Lake-town also has an internal class society, illustrated by its socially stratified architecture (a rare piece of social realism from Tolkien).…

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Killing for Art (Book Three, Part 36: The Brotherhood of Dada, Dada)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s early issues of Doom Patrol showed a clear debt to avant garde art of many kinds.

“They would die for art in any case. Killing for art was far easier.” -Kieron Gillen, The Wicked + The Divine

Morrison, however, embraced strangeness for its own sake, turning to these techniques simply because in their view Doom Patrol should be weird and these were the weird things they liked. This was not quite the same thing, and would be an approach that came with perils. Equally, when it worked it was spectacular. Their second major arc, beginning in issue #26, was a tour de force that served in many ways to exemplify the appeal of their take on the book. At the heart of it was their reworking of the Brotherhood of Evil, a recurring set of Doom Patrol villains dating back to Doom Patrol #86 in 1964, the first issue after the title renamed itself from My Greatest Adventure. As with much of Arnold Drake’s run, this group had an endearing strangeness to them—its first appearance offered the rare supervillain team that had a disembodied brain in a vat, a talking gorilla, and a giant robot. The latter of these was named Rog, and was stolen by a man named Eric Morden as part of his efforts to join the group. The Brotherhood of Evil made a second attempt to destroy the Doom Patrol in the very next issue, and continued to appear throughout the original run of Doom Patrol with an ever-shifting membership (Madame Rouge, who eventually killed the Doom Patrol, was one of its original members, and General Immortus eventually joined), but Eric Morden vanished after that first appearance without further mention.

In issue #26, however, Morrison revealed that the mysterious figure who had been lurking around the edges of the previous few issues in a series of one and two page scenes was none other than Eric Morden, who explains, in a gloriously unreconstructed supervillain monologue, that he went into hiding in Paraguay after enraging the talking gorilla Monsieur Mallah and the disembodied brain The Brain. There he took up an offer from a Nazi scientist to make him a new man, a process that involved paralyzing him and leaving him in a sensory depravation tank for three days, where he went gradually insane and then, in a climactic moment, found himself reborn as “the spirit of the twenty-first century, the abstract man. The virtual man. The notional man.” Or, as he ultimately decided on. Mr. Nobody—a strange and cartoonish abstraction of a human figure shown only in two dimensional silhouette. And having recruited a new team he dubbed them not the Brotherhood of Evil but the Brotherhood of Dada.

Dada was part of the modernist rush of new and radical artistic movements—a cousin of Futurism and Cubism. But more than any of these, its approach was one that saw forward and anticipated the postmodern turn. Its best known practitioner is probably Marcel Duchamp, who rebranded his existing practice of “anti-art” to Dada after moving to New York City in the wake of World War I.…

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Of The Rings of Power and Amazon Being Fucking Evil

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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.…

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Four Tiny Essays On SF/F

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.…

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Erebor (II)

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Erebor’s isolation makes it a magical symbol. It hunches over Northern Wilderland like a god of its terrain. Its six spurs reach across its territory like a maimed skulltopus, reaching in every direction, clutching the ground underneath it. Its southern spurs hold Dale like a trinket while Mirkwood watches from an apprehensive distance. Erebor’s power is individualism. What causes more catastrophe in Middle-earth than standing alone?

Tolkien’s identity politics are intrinsically geographic. Tolkien assigns territories to individual peoples: the Shire is for Hobbits, Lothlórien is Elvish, Gondor belongs to Númenórean Men. Threatened homelands invariably drive Tolkien’s plots, which often involve the survival efforts of their inhabitants. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings’s casts are ensembles from numerous peoples and lands who collaborate against a common enemy. Both novels’ denouements involve the improvement of peoples’ and territories’ social and political relationships before everyone goes home to their own peoples. A few characters gain special status among other peoples, like Gimli, the only Dwarf to sail to the Undying Lands, but as ‘exceptions’ they’re nonetheless strictly racially categorized. Otherwise, the Dwarves, who Tolkien considered Middle-earth’s Jews, live outside of the Elves’ resting place.

A quintessential racial home, The Kingdom Under the Mountain is the Dwarves’ greatest city, except for possibly Moria, whose sacking is one of their most catastrophic tragedies. A coil of “halls, and lanes, and tunnels, alleys, cellars, mansions and passages” (The Hobbit, “An Unexpected Party”), the kingdom is seen both through Thorin’s nostalgic recaps and as a ruin, a juxtaposition that underlines its effects. But even then, most of it is unseen. The Hobbit’s third act depicts events in only a few halls and cellars. It’s an underground city with some visible edges, not unlike how some of Pompeii’s ruins are still buried. Erebor’s culture is a secret. Its kingdom is every conspiracy theorist’s wet dream: disorientingly grand, ambivalent, intrinisically racial halls of power and commerce.

“The King under the Mountain” (Alan Lee)

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Past the Front Gate’s “old carven” arch, “a stone-paved road” runs alongside a small channel, which initiates the River Running (The Hobbit, “Not at Home”). At the opposite end, a number of doorways lead to Thrór’s great chamber, which Thorin calls “the hall of feasting and of council”. Its proximity to the Front Gate indicates its stature: visitors will see it before anything else, even if they venture downstairs. It’s where the Dwarves decide and observe significant events. Its designation as Thrór’s chamber points to ancestral pride; the Dwarves commemorate Thorin’s grandfather with this hall.

Thrór is one of Erebor’s pivotal kings, shepherding Erebor’s resurgence after a Dwarvish sojourn from the mountain, driving his people’s return to their kingdom after warring with dragons, and then seeing his kingdom destroyed by a dragon. Over 300 years before Thrór’s birth, his ancestor Thorin I leaves Erebor to mine the “rich and little explored” Grey Mountains, “where most of Durin’s folk were now gathering” (The Return of the King, Appendix A: “Durin’s Folk”).…

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IDSG Ep101 Roman McClay and the Manosphere

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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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Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

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IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

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Episode Notes/Links here: I Don’t Speak German: 101: Roman McClay and the Manosphere (libsyn.com)

…

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Radical and Aggressive (Book Three, Part 35: Crawling From The Wreckage, Experimental Film)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: After finding success with Animal Man, Morrison was brought on to revitalize the floundering Doom Patrol comic, which they began by leaning hard into themes of trauma and mental illness.

“Religions are fictions that modify the world. It’s just that this fiction is more radical and aggressive.” – Alan Moore, Providence

Of course, Doom Patrol was at its core a superhero book, and it wouldn’t do to have it full entirely of fucked up people discussing their trauma. And so with the remainder of Crawling From the Wreckage, which transitions to a plot about the “Scissormen,” mysterious figures who speak in nonsense phrases like “The leaching will be novelistic for effacement! Curdle your pilgrimage! Curdle your pilgrimage!” and who cut people out of existence, leaving a white void where they’d been. This is inventive—a sly use of the two dimensional portrayal of comics, where cutting a character from the page makes obvious sense, that then gets extended to the imaginary third dimension that the characters occupy. These, it’s revealed, are creatures  who came into existence with the composition of The Book With No Title, a book that describes the composition of a book called The Book With No Title, which is designed to alter human thought by introducing parasitic ideas, describing a city called Orqwith full of glass labyrinths and bone towers, that infiltrates other realities and slowly takes them over. Ultimately Rebis, Jane, and Roboman go to Orqwith where Rebis destroys it by addressing two clock-faced entities, one of whom always lies and the other of whom tells the truth, asking them “why is there something instead of nothing?” 

This is a pleasant bevy of ideas, but astute and well-read readers will have recognized the central one as borrowed from Borges, specifically his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” This story is structured much like a classical Lovecraft story, with a protagonist who investigates a mystery that leads inexorably towards a vast and reality-warping horror that drives him mad. It begins with the narrator, who purports to be Borges, learns about an aberrant version of an encyclopedia containing a description of an ancient city called Uqbar. Slowly Borges investigates, finding more information on Uqbar and its own fictional world of Tlön. Eventually it emerges that Uqbar and Tlön were created by a 16th century secret society as part of an elaborate plot to transform the world into a better version of itself by having Tlön slowly take it over, which, it’s revealed at the story’s end, it is doing so. 

This is a clear swipe, though ultimately no more blatant than any number of swipes other writers have done. Crawling From the Wreckage is no clone of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which lacks a terrifying city of bone, the Scissormen, or the accompanying theme of mental illness and trauma. But what is interesting about it is in many ways what Morrison doesn’t do, which is leave any sort of breadcrumbs leading the reader back to Borges.…

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Erebor (I)

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Names: Erebor (Sindarin: “ereb”: lonely, isolated, “-or”: rise, mount), glossed as “the Lonely Mountain”

Description: A solitary mountain in northern Wilderland. Karen Wynn Fonstad estimates Erebor’s summit as 3500 ft (1066.8 m.) while at its broadest spurs its furthest reaches are about 9 mi. apart (approx. 14 km). The Lonely Mountain has six spurs, between the southern and southeastern of which originates the River Running, which flows through Dale, a city of Men. Home to the Longbeard Dwarves’ Kingdom under the Mountain, Erebor encompasses formidable mines, cellars, and throne rooms.
In T.A. 1999, Thráin I, a dwarf refugee from Khazad-dûm, arrives at Erebor and establishes the Kingdom under the Mountain. Dwarves begin mining Erebor, and collect gems and gold, including the Arkenstone (the Heart of the Mountain). The Kingdom under the Mountain prospers King Thrór, as the dwarves of Erebor arm the Iron Hill Dwarves and Wilderland’s Men against Easterlings.
In 2770, the dragon Smaug sacks Erebor, killing and dispersing the dwarves. He occupies the Mountain until 2941, when Erebor’s exiled king Thorin Oakenshield arrives at the Mountain with a small party. In retaliation, Smaug destroys Lake-town, a local settlement of Men, where Bard the bowman kills him. In the wake of Smaug’s demise, the Maia Sauron sends orc forces to conquer Erebor. The dwarves and their Iron Hills cousins fight in the Battle of the Five Armies. They triumph, though Oakenshield is killed. His successor as King is his cousin Dáin II Ironfoot.
In 3019’s Battle of Dale, Easterlings besiege Erebor and kill Dáin. They retreat when Barad-dûr falls. Thorin III Stonehelm is crowned King under the Mountain, and establishes a relationship with Gondor’s King Aragorn II Elessar, after which Erebor comes under Gondor’s protection.

Location in Peter Jackson’s films: Wanaka, Otago, South Island.

“I see the mountain/That is all I see.”

Carter, “The Mountain.”

This adventure began on a mountain. Now it arrives at another one, also solitary, hospitable yet apocalyptic when it chooses to be. The Lonely Mountain changes hands and talons many times, and yet its six spurs, summit, and cavernous interiors belong to no person. The Kingdom under the Mountain is not the Lonely Mountain itself; it’s an occupying force that the Mountain permits to dwell in its guts. Smaug scorches the earth around Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, strengthening its mighty power over Wilderland. Guy Debord says that psychogeography is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals” (“Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”). Some of Tolkien’s most memorable characters are seismically changed and affected by Erebor. The shaking of windows or rattling of walls has little sway on the Mountain’s power; people may only submit to it.

“Smaug flies round the Mountain” (Tolkien)

Erebor is one of the most haunting places in Tolkien’s mythology and a corridor to many of its crucial themes. It’s an anti-realist landmark; Tolkien’s geography has little quarter for geologic reality, a recurring aspect of his mythology that Alex Acks has analyzed in depth.…

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Because We’re Young (Book Three, Part 34: The History of Doom Patrol)

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Peter Milligan made the jump to American comics around the same time as Morrison, but never had as seminal a career, with the highlight being the sometimes brilliant, often frustrating Shade the Changing Man.

“We’re not international criminals. We’re not famous super-terrorists. It’s true we want to tear down everything you’ve created and replace it. But it’s not because we’re monsters. It’s because we’re young and it’s our right.” -Grant Morrison, New X-Men

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Milligan was that the basic framework he was offering—a stranger and more surreal take on superhero dynamics—was already being done. By the time Shade the Changing Man #1 debuted in May of 1990 Morrison was well over a year into their run on Doom Patrol, an absolutely iconic run that was in many ways the crown jewel of their early reputation. 

In many ways, this followed the default British invasion pattern, with Morrison revamping a longstanding DC property for a new era. The Doom Patrol was created in 1963 by Arnold Drake, Bob Hanley, and Bruno Premiani in My Greatest Adventure #80. This was yet another instance of DC’s stable consolidating around superhero books; My Greatest Adventure had previously been an anthology of generic adventure stories with the vague hook of being told in the first person. The first issue, for instance, offered a cover feature called “My Cargo Was Death” (a man driving explosives through South America) along with “I Was King of Dagger Island” (a soldier washing up on a tropical island and convincing the natives he’s a god) and “I Hunted a Flying Saucer” (pretty much what you’d expect), and the comic continued for the better part of six years with this same basic mix of gonzo sci-fi and colonialist fantasy.

But by the 1960s, as DC pivoted increasingly to a superhero based lineup it became necessary to revamp the comic. As Arnold Drake recalls, “AI came in one morning, a Monday or a Tuesday morning, and I’d brought some scripts with me and some plot ideas and [Murray] Boltinoff said to me, ‘I’ve got a problem. My Greatest Adventure is dying and they’re probably going to kill it, but I’d like one more shot at it. What I want is a new feature that might save it.’” He came up with the idea of a man in a wheelchair leading a team of superheroes, but was stuck at two superhero ideas—the size-changing Elasti-Girl, aka ex actress Rita Farr, and the self-explanatory Roboman, aka former racecar driver Cliff Steele, whose brain has been put in a robotic body following a catastrophic accident—and so asked his friend and occasional writer partner Bob Haney for an assist, the bandaged Negative Man, aka former pilot Larry Trainor, who could project an energy entity, but only for sixty seconds at a time lest he die. Under the leadership of eccentric genius Dr. Niles Caulder, these were the Doom Patrol, sold under the Murray Boltinoff-created tagline “The World’s Strangest Heroes!”,…

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IDSG Eps 99 & 100: Sines vs Kessler & Kyle Rittenhouse

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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.

Content Warnings

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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.

Take care, everyone.  We love you.

Content Warnings.

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Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Notes for 99:

Cold Open — Lose to the Crying Nazi

Sines v. Kessler docket

Unicorn Riot, Unite The Right On Trial in Charlottesville

Former Identity Evropa Organizer Tells Secrets In Trial Deposition

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?
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