My friends are worried about me.
I’ve been skipping social events. Ditching familial commitments.
Instead I’ve spent the last three months in a basement, drinking Red Bull and watching Rumble streams.
I’ve developed a sick fascination for right-wing political influencers. And I’ve noticed one thing.
These grifters are all Batman villains.
Watch the full video essay on YouTube
Which is why I call them The Joker Right.
Because I can’t be the only one who feels that American conservatives are like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie that never ends.
One of those 90s Batmans, with visible nipples, and a leading man who is only there for the money, and at least two too many villains.
Because that’s what we are dealing with here. The patients have taken over Arkham Asylum.
The Batman villains are running the show.
The thing the Joker Right understands about Batman is that the villains really are the whole of the story.
Which is ironic because in the Batman mythos the nasty caricatures of mental illness were coded as threats to social order — which, in mid-century America, meant anything smelling vaguely leftist, radical, or nonconforming.
You really don’t get a much more establishment hero than Bruce Wayne, a fortunate son of inherited wealth, a capitalist elite. A man who solves social problems by punching poor people in the face.
Batman’s creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger wrote iconic Batman villains like the Joker and the Riddler as parodies of anti-establishment radicalism, strawmen which showed anything that went against the conservative values of 1940s America as “criminal insanity”.
A tradition that continued for most of the history of Batman.
Posion Ivy is literally an eco-terrorist…sorry…activist. She’s basically Greta Thunberg but hot and ready to kill for the cause.
Catwoman at her best is a socialist thief in the archetype of Robin Hood, stealing from the 1% to give back to the rest.
Matt Reeve’s The Batman made the Riddler a literal incel raging against the power of the patriarchy.
Lesser known Batman villain Anarky is a full on anti-statist revolutionary. A deliberate critique of anarchist philosophy. It’s not even subtext, it’s right there in the text.
Then of course there’s Bane, imagined in Chris Nolan’s worst Batman movie as a populist demagogue, raising up the people with – fake – leftist rhetoric against Gotham’s deep state.
“We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity!” BANE, Dark Knight Rises
That sounds like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Jean Luc Melonchon teamed up to topple Gotham.
But Bane is an agent of the League of Shadows, selling the socialism of fools to Gotham the same way Trump sells it to America.
And how can we forget the Joker? The greatest of all Batman villains. But we’ll come back to the Joker.
The Joker Right’s entire thing is to make the political right look like the revolutionary left. That’s the trick. That is the prestige.
To reimagine blue-haired Wokesters and penniless adjunct professors as the “establishment.” To convince you that the people with pronouns in their bios are the ones with the boot on your neck.
And somehow persuade millions of Americans that the inherited wealth of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are for the “revolution.”
And that stunning act of role reversal… has worked too well.
A message from our sponsor
Whatsup guys, let’s take a timeout for realtalk.
Do you feel like you don’t fit in this world? That society is a constant performance? Like they want you to become someone you’re not?
Introducing today’s sponsor
STAGNATE : Maturity Blockers
In a world obsessed with “emotional development,” “self-reflection,” and “not being exhausting,” STAGNATE Maturity Blockers™ let you pause your psychological growth at a stage that suits you.
Becoming a man shouldn’t have to mean moving out of your parents basement or not getting angry about Star Wars casting a black actor. These are societal constructs that don’t have to apply to you.
STAGNATE Maturity Blockers™ actively suppress:
Empathy.
Self-awareness.
And the phrase “I don’t know”
STAGNATE : Maturity Blockers are entirely natural. We source pure red for every pill, and our lead flakes are scrapped directly from pre-regulation automobile exhaust pipes.
STAGNATE Maturity Blockers : because growing up is for Woke people.
Maturity Blockers™ not approved by science, philosophy, or anyone who knows you. Side effects include permanent outrage, alienating loved ones, starting a podcast, and confusing age with wisdom.
I remember when the conservative…
…I remember when the conservative was a man in a suit. A grey haired man in a grey suit.
Not a Botoxed, spray-tanned narcissist.
A boring man. A man who wanted to lower capital gains tax and conserve the established social order.
Not an orange balloon of grievance.
The Right are still pretending to be decent conservatives. Oh yes. They are going “Orthodox.” They are becoming “TradWives.”
“I am making sourdough bread in a prairie dress to own the libs.”
But underneath the Laura Ashley aestheic, they have gone insane.
Today’s ‘Right” are the sum of all Dark Triad personality disorders in our society. Narcissism. Machiavellianism. Psychopathy.
And like all abusers…
…like all abusers, the Right blame their insane behavior on their victims. The Left.
“Look what you made me do! I had to storm the Capitol because you suggested we use pronouns! I had to embrace fascism because you made a mermaid black! I had to embezzle billions of dollars of military contracts because DEI.”
While the Left.
The Left are booo-ring. Dull. Fact based. Sam Seder is just some guy who watches too much news. Hasan Piker livestreams are like CNN for Millenials. The Novara media team are about as spectacular as a cup of tea. A tepid cup of tea in a Quaker meeting hall.
And that’s a good thing.
Because you can’t grift Left.
Left-wing audiences actually do things like “checking sources.” The left has entire shows dedicated to debunking. They have footnotes. They have peer review.
The right has grifting. The left has…academic tenure.
If you start bullsh*tting the left we stop watching.
If you STOP bullsh*tting the right they stomp off to find the next low integrity influencer who will keep feeding them their favoured brand of bullsh*t.
And this is why the left are losing. The left still has this crazy belief that the purpose of information is to inform.
But the Joker Right realised long ago the only reason to say anything…
…is to strike sick a pose while surfing the vortex of bullsh*t.
INTERLUDE
Early in my career I did a gig for a UFO magazine that was going online.
As a naive twenty something I asked the editor if the articles about alien abductions and corn circles weren’t a bit…unbelievable?
And got the blunt response – that was the point. “Anyone who believes this sh*te will believe anything.”
Like those Nigerian email scams that are deliberately dumb to filter out all but the dumbest idiot, the point of UFO stories is to identify the credulous who “want to believe”.
Then target them with highly profitable financial “offers” and other scams.
That was the 00s. Now think about the value of UFO…sorry UEA…media in the age of crypto and AI scams.
One moment the credulous are learning about TicTac aliens on Joe Rogan, the next they’re losing their pension on Melania coin.
Or being told to vote Trump so the billionaire oligarch can “fight the deep state”.
UFOlogy is a potent form of what Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt called “bullsh*t” in his famous essay On Bullsh*t.
Yes, bullsh*t has an academically rigorous definition.
“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullsh*t requires no such conviction.” Harry Frankfurt, On Bullsh*t
Bullsh*t is information that the producer and the consumer know to be false, but choose to believe for…reasons.
For the consumer it’s easier to believe that snake oil cures all ills than face scientific reality.
For the producer who is unscrupulous and immoral enough the fake cure is a great way to get rich and gain power.
The MAGA movement is nothing but an accelerating vortex of bullsh*t. UFOs. Immigration. Pseudo-archaeology. Anti-vax. Health supplements. Crypto. Trans athletes. All whipped up to hurricane speeds to serve rule number 1
If you’ll believe this, you’ll believe anything.
And once you understand that the Joker Right is a business model — sell bullsh*t to the credulous, then sell the credulous to the powerful — their insanity comes into sudden clarity as brutally, terrifyingly sane.
But those who live by bullsh*t, die by bullsh*t.
The All-Father of the vortex of bullsh*t, the bearded Texan Chronos vomiting up the lesser gods who would follow, is Alex Jones.
Jones kickstarted the bullsh*t-o-sphere by realising that his Infowars show, on cable then the internet, would face zero consequences for spreading any lie.
Until he was sued for $1.4BN by the Sandyhook families.
Slap a muzzle on him and Jones’ variety of faux anti-establishment, fake populism makes him a shoe-in for Batman’s ultimate nemesis.
But Jones has been left crying boomer tears by his gen-z children.
The internet is for porn.
And Nazis.
Stick with me for one minute while we talk about a dead white man.
Sigmund Freud is remembered as an all-time great philosopher because he reminds us that men are not reasoning rational beings.
We are driven by deep unconscious drives.
Civilizations uses Eros, our erotic drive, to tug men around like a bull by the nose.
Want a pornstar GF who’ll do all the porn things? Well you better finish school, college, hit the gym and Make Money.
But with Eros comes Thanatos. The opposing drive – to dominate, destroy and kill.
Civilization has through the millennia desperately struggled to contain human eros and thanatos.
Or it did until somewhere around the mid-1990s when civilization howled “Unleash the internet and let’s GOOOOO.”
Generation-Z are lab-mice in a deranged psych experiment. Pumped full of ever more hardcore porn to hyper-stimulate eros.
Then shoved into immersive virtual realities of megaviolent video games to satiate thanatos.
But you can’t ever satisfy the god of death.
Even by becoming a Batman villain.
To give them credit the Joker Right understand that to talk to politics to gen-z they have to embody the drives of eros and thanatos that drive the next generation.
And nothing screams overactive death drive.
Like becoming a Nazi.
“Hitler was cool.” Nick Fuentes
Jordan Peterson became an unlikely gen-z icon because he speaks in riddles.
Jordo is so much like the Riddler that he actually started dressing in bespoke Batman villain suits.
But when you decode Peterson’s garbled misrepresentations of Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, his message to younger men is basically…
…join the patriarchy and we will give you a tradwife.
Peterson is basically an emissary from the boomer establishment sent to make an offer to millennial and gen-z men.
The problem is the patriarchy can’t make good on the deal. There are no good jobs left, and there is a very limited supply of tradwives.
And the women willing to sign up for a life of submission to a gen-z male are mental.
And so the evolutionary development of the right wing grift-o-sphere escalated to Andrew Tate.
If you can’t subsume your drives to the patriarchy, instead give your eros and thanatos free reign by becoming a pimp and a gangster.
Tatey is a generic henchman. The goon Batman beats up so we can cheer.
The problem is most gen-z and millenial men are house cats not tigers. They’ve been raised in complete safety and have no appetite for real risk. Or a Romanian prison cell.
Meet our Catwoman.
Less the cool, leather-clad thief who steals diamonds, more the Jocelyn Wildenstein archetype.
Laura Loomer has carved her loyalty to the cause directly into her face. She is a walking, talking example of the physical toll of the grift. To survive in the Joker Right’s ecosystem, you have to physically become your own caricature.
Tucker “Two Face” Carlson. Like Harvey dent except both sides speak bullsh*t.
The private face, as revealed in the Dominion lawsuit, is a man who knows Trump is a “demonic force,” who hates the lies, who lives in reality.
Flip the coin.
You get the public Tucker. The furrowed brow. The manic laugh. The man who’ll look into the camera night after night and sell “Great Replacement” theory to your grandma.
Tucker Carlson is peak establishment pretending to be anti-establishment. The wealthy scion of a frozen dinner fortune and failed CIA agent, expert in pretending to be the victim.
And here at the eye of the vortex of bullsh*t is…
Candace Owens.
Candace was the first to the crack the deep code of the right wing grift.
That the best way to feed the vortex of bullsh*t is to bullsh*t about other bullsh*tters.
No sooner had Charlie Kirk, one of the Joker Rights power bullsh*iters, been killed in public, than Candace lead the charge to manufacture a pure bullsh*t conspiracy theory about who killed her “friend”.
The right wing grifters can’t even stop lying long enough to grieve one of their own.
Those who live by bullsh*t, die by bullsh*t. The Ouroboros of disinformation is eating itself, as the peak predator grifters like Milo Yianopoulis begin cannibalising bland weaklings like Benny Johnson for clicks.
I was going to talk about Ben Shapiro here but he’s just…so…dull.
Because the audience has grown tired of conservatives pretending to be Batman villains. They want the real deal.
They want the authentic Joker.
To give Nick Fuentes his due, he’s no grifter.
Nick Fuentes is what happens when men like Peterson, Carlson and Shapiro, spout dog whistles like “Judaeo-Christian culture” and “Western values”, for long enough.
Eventually someone says the quiet bit out loud.
White Nationalism.
Eventually an angry gen-z male looks into the camera and says “No, we aren’t ‘conservatives.’ We aren’t ‘traditionalists.’ We are White Nationalists. We like Hitler.”
When you spend decades telling people that “equality is oppression” and “diversity is weakness,” eventually someone is going to show up and say, “Okay, so let’s just do fascism then.”
Nick Fuentes is what happens when the President himself tells you it’s ok to hate immigrants, it’s ok to hate Somalis, it’s ok to hate Muslims.
Eventually you end up with Nick Fuentes asking “Wait, so, why can’t we hate the Jews?”
Fuentes is the receipt.
The left spent decades saying, “You’re going fascist.” And the right howled. They performed this grand, wounded theatre of indignant denial.
”How dare you? How dare you call us fascists? We just want lower taxes and to preserve the Judaeo cultural Christian values of Western civilization.”
But you weren’t “protecting the legacy of the Enlightenment.” You weren’t “fighting the Woke mind-virus.” You were just on a miserable journey to an inevitable destination.
You were always becoming Nick Fuentes.
The Joker is the greatest Batman villain because he’s the ultimate symbol of…
…thanatos. The death drive.
The man who just wants to watch it all burn.
Let’s be clear, Fuentes is not the voice of his generation. Gen-z are busy leading protests, deposing dictators and saving the planet.
Fuentes is the thanatos of his generation. Why save the planet when watching it burn is “hilarious”.
And Fuentes’ audience loves him for it. Because he’s not boring. He’s not “safe.” He’s not a grifter. He’s American white nationalist fascisms genuine message to the world.
And the message is: the mask is off.
Damien Walter 