Right Wing Aesthetics, or Life at the End of the World

Recently, as part of a small magazine I have now all but left, I had the displeasure of getting into a conversation at the paper’s drinks with someone who took exception to my appreciation of beauty. He will go unnamed, but he will not avoid description. He was scrawny, couldn’t retain eye contact, wore a plain slightly dirty t-shirt, and big, round, insectoid glasses. The term “bugman” has circulated around Frog Twitter for a long time and, whilst the saying so is cruel, it captured his essence. I could tell from his appearance immediately that he was on the extreme anti-populist Left, which in every university in the Anglosphere is, if not the norm, since most people don’t care, the mold that you’re expected to fill. Perhaps I got my hopes up when he asked me about Neo-Platonism and I mentioned how the True, the Good, and the Beautiful intersect in the writings of authors like Pseudo-Dionysius, because as soon as he heard the word “Beautiful”, he looked me in the eyes, and, after stuttering through two or three “likes”, told me plain and simply that “Beauty is Hitler”.

At this point, I knew that the discussion wouldn’t be productive any longer, and two of my friends, who were drinking outside the bar, could seemingly tell this based on my facial expression. I was aggravated, not however due to the absurdity of the statement. I was annoyed because I realized I was in front of one of the many hall monitors of consensus opinion, and if I disagreed with this weak vessel, I would immediately risk being called a fascist. The amount of energy that is expended by academics and bureaucrats of all kinds, STEM included, to avoid being called a fascist is truly incredible. Then again, given that geneticists like William Shockley have had the windows of their accommodation smashed in by the Far Left, their events picketed, and their locations doxxed — the internet slang for releasing where someone lives — it is perhaps unsurprising. In The Enemy of Disaster (2023), recently published by The European Conservative, Renaud Camus calls this phenomenon “The Second Career of Adolf Hitler”. It is an academic black hole into which everything and anyone that asserts virility, strength, and power, usually regardless of whether the person is a White European, must descend and let the anxieties within overwhelm them. You must always remember to say sorry or risk your total ostracization as the inhuman enemy of the Human Rights discourse. I have seen Singaporean and Jewish friends caught in the crossfire when they forgot this attitude of submission. Given recent history, it is the latter who are increasingly bearing the brunt.

The apparatchiks that are willing to enforce these suffocating social codes obviously derive from them their only means of wielding status over other people. They are frequently insecure, subpar academics who understand the location of what Neema Parvini has accurately described as the “suck pressures” in academia. These are pressures generated by a given academic social consensus that “suck” in a particular direction. There are, for example, suck pressures that make it easy to publish a paper on the idea that beautiful hummingbirds serve as an historical expression of National Socialism; see Noah Comet’s paper, “Unternehmen Kolibri: Of Hitler and Hummingbirds”. There are, and were, especially during 2016, suck pressures on describing Donald Trump as a fascist, Hitlerist, ultra-rapist with very little research basis in both journalism and academia. We might hesitate to form an opinion on the soon-to-be president’s second term, although the New Republic did not, portraying him with a Hitler mustache under the caption “American Fascism” this year. Here is the historian of ideas Paul Gottfried recalling an instance of what has come to be known as Trump Derangement Syndrome before he was elected for his first term, which passed without Hitlerian incident.  

An equally interesting example of wielding the f-word can be found in Timothy Snyder’s denunciation of Donald Trump in The Guardian published October 30, 2018. According to Snyder, both President Trump and “the Nazis claimed a monopoly of victimhood.” Like the fascists, “Trump and some of his supporters mount a strategy of deterrence by narcissism: if you note our debts to fascism, we will up the pitch of the whining.” All Snyder manages to prove here is that Trump behaves like other presidents when he is beset by a hostile press. It is difficult to see how Trump has been more fascist in this respect than FDR, who denounced and tried to ban abrasive Republican journalists from press conferences. How Does Trump compare as a fascist to Harry Truman, who as president wrote a letter to Washington Post music critic Paul Hume threatening to punch him in the nose because Hume panned a singing performance by Truman’s daughter?

Yet just as the f-word can and has been used as a convenient weapon of cultural hall monitors the world over to discipline the Right, Gottfried goes on to note that Neo-Cons have applied it to the populist Left as well, even during 2016.  

An equally glaring misuse of the charge of fascism shows up in a commentary on Senator Bernie Sanders by National Review columnist Kevin Williamson. According to Williamson, Sanders “may call himself a socialist, but so did Mussolini for a long time.” Sanders’s earlier opposition to immigration, we are told, indicates that he was “all too happy to appropriate the rhetorical scheme of the altright knuckleheads.” Williamson seems not to know that both the European Left and US labor unions were long on record opposing unskilled or low-skilled immigrants moving into their countries. One wonders why such a policy should be regarded as peculiarly characteristic of Italian fascism.

These extracts come from Gottfried’s excellent Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (2021), which charts the origin and implementation of this anti-intellectual trend at the heart of the American academy in the 1950s and, by now, all Western cultural institutions influenced by it. Given the nature of the above example concerning Sanders, perhaps it should not surprise us that an anti-populist Left sentiment was built into this ideology gradually as it developed. “Reaching its apogee long after the age of European fascism and Nazism, today’s triumphant antifascism is a reaction not to the spread of self-described fascist regimes but to the breakthrough of a Left that must be understood in terms of its own morality and mandate for power. After World War II, both the psychology profession and social theorists assigned prominence to émigré critical theorists and to those whom they trained. If critical theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Ilse Frenkel [Else Frenkel-Brunswik] could not change Russia’s imperfect socialism, they nonetheless hoped to sell their market brand of antifascism to New World inhabitants.” This is where Adorno’s book, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) comes in, which worked to redefine fascism from being a specific cultural and political movement of the 20th century that combined dictatorship, socialist economic reform, and the entrenchment of class structures in an effectively quasi-feudal arrangement, to being a set of attitudes measurable on the ”F scale”. Gottfried notes that, “Being anti-semitic, antisocialist, and expressing disagreement with FDR’s New Deal were all considered highly indicative of the ‘authoritarian personality’.” We might add that, according to Adorno, so was the figure of the strong American father of any particular class. Since the precarious proletarian father just as easily qualifies as a proto-fascistic parent under Adorno’s criteria, when Communists heard about the new anti-strength, anti-male, and to a certain extent even initially anti-White Liberalism on the so-called Left, “European Communist regimes were understandably offended by this unsettling invention.”

The impact of Adorno’s book and others like it in the post-war period on the academy cannot be underestimated. To this day, the California F-Scale Test “has continued to be used in personality assessments for adolescents and job applicants throughout the US, and elements of the F-Scale Teste [sic] have been incorporated into psychology inventories in, among other states, California and Minnesota (with the California Psychological Inventory and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory).” By Adorno the seed of the modern Antifascist academy was planted, yet not principally to restrain the excesses of extinct Nazism or soften the cultural influence of Soviet Communism, but to express the will to power of the class of emasculated nerds to which Adorno belonged and the character I mentioned at the beginning of this article corresponded to. The 21st-century radical Antifascist is empowered by the knowledge that the system he lives under was founded by those exactly physiologically like him. The scholar Massimo Bacigalupo once described to me how during the late 1960s Adorno’s class was raided by a group of Soixante-huitard Far-Left hippies, including a girl who, midway through one of his arguments about musicology, leapt onto the stage and subsequently exposed her breasts in front of him. The heart attack that Adorno apparently experienced next was punctuated in the story, as Massimo told it, with the songful Italianate conclusion, “And that was the end of Adorno.”

There is no better summary of who has been running our cultural institutions into the ground for the past half a century than Costin Alamariu provides in his seminal accomplishment Bronze Age Mindset (2018):

The left realizes they look weak and lame—because they are. They know they have nothing to offer youth but submission and lectures. They know they’re unsexy and staid. If indeed young leftist men will start lifting and worshiping beauty, they will be forced to leave the left. 

The bugman pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful. 

The dominance of the bugman, a being that only attains success by his total loyalty to the system of disembodied arachnids that created it in the post-war world, and no courage or creativity of his own, uses Antifascism as a crutch to destroy the beautiful because it intimidates him. Despite the term being ‘Antifascism’, because of the history of the term’s distortion we have already discussed, it really doesn’t matter to him whether he is dealing with a card carrying National Socialist or with some random Israeli girl, whether it’s Donald Trump or Achilles, Arnold Schwarznegger or the muscular South Sudanese Nuba tribe. Adorno’s contributions to American and European academia paved the way for the Leftist “March Through the Insitutions” prophesied by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, albeit he did not want his fellow intelligentsia to ever forget the working class, whereas the modern intelligentsia of the bugman have nothing but hatred for such all too embodied people, enjoyers as they are of sport, women, and merriment like he could never be. Yukio Mishima, who perceived himself as being one of these book-drowned cryptids and managed to lift his way out of that category, achieved this perspective from the outside-in once he escaped: ‘Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero; and when he does so, how dishonest it is that his phraseology, partaking ostensibly of a logic so universal and general should not (or at least should be assumed by the general public not to) give any clue to his physical characteristics. I have yet to hear hero worship mocked by a man endowed with what might justly be called heroic physical attributes.’

This was in 1968. All that has happened since then is that the termite mound has grown, following its inner logic of anti-strength, of anti-confidence, of anti-health, to the point where even the radical feminists of the 1970s who were its agents are now being exiled in the style of Kathleen Stock and Germaine Greer for refusing to bend the knee to the same class of weak men who were always in charge and now, almost tauntingly, wear dresses and make-up before them. The bizarre but interesting suggestions of Susan Sontag in her essay Fascinating Fascism (1974), including the suggestion that Leni Riefenstahl’s book The Last of the Nuba (1973) is a dressing up of Germanic National Socialism under the actual black skin of its subjects, are now par for the course. The link between Riefenstahl’s early filmmaking career, producing The Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) under the Third Reich, is no longer seen as necessary to make. Strength is fascism because, I, the bugman, am weak and jealous. There is no context in which strength is good, or courage. Beauty is Hitler. This is the actual norm in academia.

As one might imagine, the consequences for the imaginative landscape have been dismal. The scene resembles the aforementioned dark, anxious pit, surrounded by but a few edifices half or entirely melting into it. What writers or artists of note even are there anymore? There is the boredom of Rachel Cusk, the anti-White self-hatred of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sally Rooney. The self-consciously anti-fascist insanity of Allison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021), the story of a house ‘haunted by Fascism’, is itself haunted by a desire for a lost norm; the author is so devoured by the messaging of the world they live in—which now effectively amounts to, ‘If you’re a straight White male, you should just die.’—that (s)he reaches the point of imagining an alternate reality, accessed through the house, where (s)he never transitioned and Enoch Powell has been prime minister three times, presiding over a Great Britain with no mass immigration crisis, no taharrush gang rapes, and no murdered Charlene Downes. In other words, we have now reached the point where bugman culture, or wokeness, has ground down and ruined every heroic cultural figure, deconstructed every patriotic narrative, emptied out all wells of collective confidence and love to such an extent that there is literally nothing left. In an academic seminar, I recently quoted the ridiculous imperative of transhumanist Donna Haraway, ‘Make kin, not babies.’ and it was well received. The Anglo-American cultural establishment educating its future members across the Ivy Leagues and top British Universities does not want to live any longer, and it would rather that the strong members of its own population were replaced by whoever grudgingly admit the need for them to establish a better world. 

Obviously, however, since the Humanities are informed by the ethical norms of the same priest caste—Judith Butler, Edward W. Said, Franz Boas, and their less famous but more comprehensible disciples—this doesn’t just go for literature, but everything. Art is vital and therefore it has to be crushed. The sculptor Fen de Villiers (@FendeVilliers), whose promethean male figures try to inspire the viewer to heroic greatness much in the same way as those of Praxiteles and Paul Manship, sent me a few anecdotes about his experiences in the art world. 

1. During a gallery tour, I vividly recall a moment when several directors and art critics stood before my work “Momentum”—an 8-foot, 3-ton stone sculpture. “But Fen! This is Fascism!” they exclaimed, much to my bewilderment. The piece was simply a dynamic representation of a motorcyclist in motion, drawing inspiration from Italian Futurists and Art Deco geometric forms –nothing more than an energetic celebration of speed and power. Yet their reaction exemplified a broader anxiety within the art world: any expression of dynamism or heroic potency is immediately suspect.
2. During an interview, a journalist inquired whether my work would address refugees or “boat people.” When I explained that my focus lay elsewhere –specifically in the depiction of vital, heroic, and powerful figures- her response was telling: a sour expression and dismissive look that perfectly encapsulated the contemporary art world’s expectations. 
3. In another interview, I shared my interest in exploring powerful masculine forms in bronze sculpture. The journalist’s confused reaction quickly turned to criticism as she steered the conversation toward narratives of “toxic and dangerous” masculinity.

Imagine that you’re an artistically minded boy who aspires to create a new Renaissance in any part of Europe. Imagine waking up at 5:45 each morning to write iambic pentameter verse poetry, paint with oils, read, or carve wood. Imagine wanting to rival and hopefully, god willing, overtake the Greats in whatever field. Imagine ambling for success gradually, day after day, night after night, and by hook or by crook developing your craft, honing it while others did nothing of the sort. Then imagine getting into your “dream” university, or what’s left of it, and this is what you’re faced with: an organisation of basically tasteless, spineless journalists that not only wants to discourage all the high ambitions that another time would have been nurtured in you, but, by all appearances, hates you directly for having them.

It is this generation of sensitive, creative and angry young men who are behind the rebirth of Right Wing Aesthetics on Twitter. This reemergence comes both in response to our need for masculine strength socially today in the context of mass third world immigration and in reaction against the dull hideousness of Bug World. All it took was Elon Musk to relieve one channel of expression from the tyranny of Human Resources for sensitive young men to throw off the mounds of crickets that have repressed them for all too long. Accounts post real footage of golden snub-nosed monkeys fighting each other in mountain snows as a Bach concerto plays over the background (@evolacore); Swedish bodybuilders sharpen their physiques in luscious forests (@TheGloriousLion); Lebanese Zoomer e-girls into cryptocurrencies profess their affection for Vladimir Putin (@bronzeageshawty); hitherto buried scholarship on brilliant writers like Wyndham Lewis and religious theorists like Mircea Eliade resurge again(any number of accounts, including @Tom_Roswell). For now, the academic repression mechanisms don’t apply any more. Against death, life has spurted up. Against the hatefulness of the bugman, the militaristic joy of the angel ascends. The mouldering sameness of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which amounts to melting down all the cultures of the world into the same unanimous broth of anti-Whiteness, gives way to the hierarchy of real human difference. Besides the most abhorrent appeals to Nazi imagery, which in themselves are principally a symbolic rejection of our suffocating Antifascist world order, none of these aesthetics used to be exclusively Right Wing. The Communist Tankie was a significant figure in the aesthetics of the Soviet Union, his muscles representing his admirable power and willing bondage to the requirements of physical labour necessary to immanentize the Marxist worldview. But when was the last time you saw one of them? (I can only think of @InfraHaz.) Strength and beauty are now Right Wing. Even as they can be said to reveal themselves in the Far Left art using the masculine Futurist aesthetics inspired by F.T. Marinetti to drive recruitment for the Spanish Civil War, these posters exist against the order of the bugman. Because they are strong. This is where Right Wing Aesthetics come from. They are not produced by Conservatism, or what would amount to defending the increasingly horrific mainstream that has existed in Europe and America since the 50s. No, they are produced by the defiant, actually Right Wing youth in opposition to the sclerotic, managerial state created by men like Theodor Adorno. It is the society that sold us a higher education that charges thousands of pounds worth of debt to tell us to hate ourselves for being White versus the eternal archetype of the boy adventurer. It is the occult bacchanal in the forest in the middle of the night versus two years of Covid Lockdown. It is Yes, rather than No.

Of course, in another way, that isn’t all. Culture is downstream of law as the dreams of youth are downstream of the achievements of age. Right Wing Aesthetics have begun to calcify. Due both to the convincingness of arguments around the dearth of modern romance, and simply how unavoidably bad Europe and America’s Total Fertility Rates and health have become, many have started to question even in the universities whether a culture that produces transgenderism, mass immigration, Rotherham and Rochdale, and Fat Studies, does not have something disgustingly and endemically wrong with it. The low end of this is a revolting misogynist like Andrew Tate, whose low testosterone forehead barely meets the criteria of aesthetic maleness by the standards of the meagrest fan of Physiognomy. The high end is Man’s World, a beautiful magazine produced by the famous Raw Egg Nationalist, which combines the aesthetic of Playboy, images of inspiring male physiques, 19th century Neo-Classical art, ancient historical scholarship, and healthy cooking recipes that reads, to a young European man, like the answer to a question he never knew how to formulate. Perhaps: how to live? Or better yet: how to become Great.

It is a publication that, by distilling the best of various Twitter aesthetics and developing the writings of some of its most notable Right Wing accounts, seeks to give the sensitive young man the first bit of artistic encouragement he’s ever received in his young life. That it’s an ostensibly Right Wing magazine is only due to the fact that no one else cares what happens to such men, especially all of academia’s bugmen, who lacking their artistic sensitivity and yet still envying it, seek to repress or destroy them. Naturally, this meant that Hope Not Hate, a government-funded organisation that not only denied the existence of Muslim rape gangs throughout the twenty-tens but spread the false rumour of White nationalist acid attacks against Muslims last year in order to spur on Islamic riots, saw fit to investigate and dox the magazine’s publisher. Young White men aren’t allowed to have any respite from institutionally imposed self-hatred. Art must look down and doubt itself. There is nothing remotely ‘extreme’ in either print edition of the magazine; the latest edition even spends a great proportion of its time mocking the detestable antisemitism of Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and Asher Logos, people whom, given the overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian sympathies of Hope Not Hate, their own members certainly have more politically in common with. Hence we assume that the principle reason for the attack was the aforementioned ‘titanic hatred of the well-turned out and beautiful’, as of course is endemic to the bugman personality; although if there was a magazine called Bug Man’s World, I would be interested in comparing their advice—presumably watching lots of pornography and advocating the gender transitions of minors—with the original’s (do the opposite of that).

To this end, it is extremely important that Bronze Age Mindset (2016), Mike Ma’s novels Harassment Architecture (2019) and Gothic Violence (2021), Zero HP Lovecraft’s God Shaped Hole (2020), and to a lesser extent DeliciousTaco’s Finally, Some Good News (2018) are books that have all been self-published, have all been best sellers, and have all, with the exception of Ma, been published pseudonymously. Like it or not, these are the best works of fiction of our time because, as well as being directly honest about what life is like nowadays, they represent the retrieval of European masculinity from a world that has increasingly sought to repress and destroy it over the course of the last sixty years. The emptiness of the mainstream and the overwhelming potency of the sidelined is evidence enough of the truth of this argument. What is Hollywood going to do in the next Captain America but portray him as a vitiligoed serf with no balls? 

What the online Right will do is a far more interesting question. How much of it will die after the next Trump presidency? Alternatively: will the influence of Luigi Mangione revive a cultural force akin to the early 20th century New Left, who as Nikos Sotirakopoulos notes, stormed the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Easter, 1950, shouting ‘God is Dead!’, before reciting a blasphemous poem to a crowd of shocked onlookers? Whether or not that behaviour was justified, it occurred during a time when the cultural Left was a site for the manifestation of culture. There is nothing like that today. Pride marches are, by comparison, stolid and deeply anti-erotic affairs that are state-sponsored, quasi-paedophilic (see New York, 2023), and par for the course. They are representations of the decaying cultural imperialism of the American Civil Rights regime, uprooted even from the avant-garde appeal of queer figures like Harry Hay and Leigh Bowery back in the day.

  As a result, I feel safe to conclude that we live under a renewed separation of culture from the academy, much as it was separated when modernists like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov had to go to tiny French presses like the porn publisher Olympia to get their work out, There is therefore an argument to be made based on what we have said so far that this artistic revival is just a lower quality repeat of the emergence of modernist art in the twentieth century. And yet as Isaac Wilks has suggested in his brilliant essay ‘The Zoomer Question’, our situation, for purely physiological reasons, is more dire than theirs. The artistic anti-system radicals of today are also, by all appearances, the only people who can provide solutions to the shocking hormonal deterioration of younger generations, let alone the seemingly irreparable damage done to the survival of European culture by mass immigration; (according to the Office of National Statistics, only 54 per cent of children born in Britain last year were White British).

Wilks summarises the issue well:

Zoomers are the most chronically ill generation in modern history, and this despite the generational declines in smoking, drug use, precocious sex, and even fast food. Sleep deprivation and stress can explain some, but not all, of our mental and physical distress. The rapid proliferation of chronic health disorders since roughly 1970—autoimmune diseases, autism, allergies, obesity, dysbiosis, and maladaptation of the human microbiome, among others—is necessarily concentrated among the newest members of society, and appears to be caused by a variety of environmental stressors: adulterated food, various toxins, perhaps some degree of iatrogenesis…Over half of Americans now suffer from a chronic illness. 

This raises a number of important questions, as does Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino’s book Count Down (2021), a text that documents how from 1973 to 2011, the sperm count of men in the Western world has dropped by 59 per cent, and testosterone rates are continuing to collapse to the point where, if this trend does not alter, a large proportion of men will not have any fertile sperm whatsoever by the mid 2040s. Are Right Wing Aesthetics that portray ultra-masculine men and dream of adventure then little more than a coping mechanism for a generation of screen-addled, friendless, weak man-children? The hilariously named Jonathan Bi recently criticised Frederich Nietzsche for ‘being a loser’: creating the foundational basis for Western art in the twentieth century by writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and The Will To Power (1901), apparently pales in significance next to the fact Nietzsche never managed to seduce his love interest Lou Andreas-Salomé. And maybe Jonathan Bi is right. Maybe it is crucially significant that we are, most of us, nearer to the young man who sits before the image of some lovely harlot he is completely unable to seduce, touch, or love than any really embodied man among men. If this is so, we must work to change it, to become more real, to Live Action Roleplay as heroes and knights, as some have called it, rather than leaving office life to consume us entirely.

Even if we are doomed by the excesses of the academy since the 50s, even though I do not believe we are, it would be better to stand up and fight than lie down and rot. The pursuit of Right Wing Aesthetics in both life and art is a representation of the only way out of the delirium of ugliness and suicide into which we were born, and which is now entering its final stages of development. It is Yes or No. Political correctness be damned. That is all.