MONTHLY RECAP: Banned by Atheist Reddit! Victimhood! Synchronicities! Meta Puritans!
A look back at March madness on Quibblers & Scribblers.
While not its primary purpose, the catalyst for this newsletter was to deconstruct social fictions using storytelling techniques so that readers within my almost entirely liberal bubble might be able to make more informed decisions in terms of their support of Wokeism, specifically. If the path to Hell is paved with good intentions, then America is well past the gate guarded by Woke Cerberus, flitting between the Sixth Circle (Heresy), the Seventh (Violence) and the Eighth (Fraud).
Subscription-based content is the future. You the readers are the future of premium online content. Just as apps ask you to upgrade to avoid ads, you’re doing the same by subscribing to Substack newsletters, with many bonus gold-star brownie marks: far fewer clickbait headlines and subjects, and access to voices like mine, which legacy media companies won’t touch with a roll of quarters stolen from a beggar’s tin cup. It’s hard to make a living as a heretic who is really just trying to get his truth out there.
"Writers and readers are two sides of the same gold coin."
— Mario Vargas Llosa
On that note, my obligation to my rockstar hosts makes me shake my own tin cup:
WITCH!
What am I witching about, now? Last week’s ‘Orthodox Atheist’ piece was pulled by the mods on the r/atheism sub on Reddit, the most powerful atheist forum in the galaxy. Read on.
The past couple of weeks have seen Substack brought from out of the shadows and placed firmly in a VIP enclosure off to the side of online social discourse: Elon Musk has effectively banned posts containing Substack links after it launched Notes, a social media app that is essentially Twitter with The Atlantic-style formatting designed for discerning, well-educated Veep/Succession fans who don’t watch Maury, aren’t willfully mendacious politicians, TV celebs, comedians, or activists with false-flag causes sharpening their pitchforks for hysterical witchhunts of children’s book writers who dare to stand with science.
While I was banned on Facebook for lewdity for 30 long days — it was just a loincloth, sheesh; you would think it was an Andrew Christian bulge-fluffing, pass-around-party-bottom’s concept jockstrap in bamboo polyester and spandex — I finally confronted engaging with others on Twitter after 12 years of using it for what it was originally intended: microblogging, just slapping a thought on there to be retrieved later, or not. I’m relieved I don’t have to do it anymore: it’s a little too egalitarian for me, and I say that from the depths of my expansive, naturally DEI Yankee soul.
Good Gal Quillette, a publication that is itself beginning to emerge from the long shadows cast by people’s fear, jumped into the fray two days ago, sending an extraordinary email backing Substack, and declaring that a seachange brought by subscription newsletters and sites like Quillete was underway, pulling readers from traditional social media and legacy media outlets, which have behaved in flagrant contravention of established journalistic standards.
There’s no “You know how it is, James: we have to maintain a balance between editorial and advertising.” These publications are subscription-based, too — they do whatever they want.
Here’s how I know when we can leave the bomb shelter without a hazmat suit and an oxygen tank: When I stop agreeing with Tucker Carlson. I fucking hate that.
The Q&S month in review:
THE OSCARS WEREN’T AWFUL
The first piece in the March cycle was a pre-Oscar mashup between All Quiet On The Western Front and Triangle of Sadness, both of which I loved. From a pure filmmaking standpoint, there was nothing to beat All Quiet, much as I loved Everything, Everywhere. But the Academy signaled loud and clear where it was going when it nominated All Quiet for Best International Feature and Best Picture.
Even though my critique of both films came months after their release, readers still engaged; part of the reason I call what I write ‘critique’ is because it often isn’t a timely review. The Triangle segment is more a takedown of A.O. Scott’s unseemly review. In good critical theory fashion — I’m mindful that I use their own techniques and language to deconstruct them; this whole newsletter is meta that way — I try to tie my pieces on the arts and entertainment to some part of the social discourse.
VICTIMHOOD AS A SAFE SPACE
The first part of this two-parter went down well with almost everyone. I explained my own lifelong journey as my family’s “Piggy the Scapegoated Black Sheep,” and how my first breakthrough in therapy was realizing that being the whipping boy was the role I expected in life, where I was most comfortable, a shocking realization that pushed me toward leaving that role forever.
My plans to use three examples of Wokeism’s cult of victimhood from each of Woke Cerberus’ heads — antiracism, gender-queer activism, and MeToo feminism — were scuppered when Rasmussen Reports dropped survey results indicating that a large part of the breakdown in dialogue in the modern era is due to Black racism about Whites. I decided to address the flaws, hypocrisies and injustices of antiracism’s gaze on the White experience exclusively.
The second part was more challenging for readers, but not nearly as much as it was for me to write. I began with how I met Vanessa Crane at St. Stephen’s School in Rome at the beginning of my fateful sophomore year, how she educated me in New York Blackness, specifically how to make an insult seem funny with a “stoop guffaw,” which Dave Chappelle also uses in his racist and homophobic tirades masquerading as comedy. In the end, I turn the tables on Chappelle, imagining a car ride with him driving Charles Blow, Colin Kaepernick and Ta-Nehisi Coates, a parody of his famous analogy of “Alphabet People” driving in a car together and squabbling, which added another pejorative about us “bitch-assed faggots” to an overly long list, which also includes ‘queer,’ except now that queer theorists, in their desperate scramble for edginess and relevancy, have elevated it to Pride-float status by tacking it to the end of ‘LGBT’ like a martyr to a cross during All-You-Can-Eat Christians Night at the Colosseum it’s become like, totally gay and acceptable.
I’ll be honest: reader engagement is down 12% since Part Two was released. Having said that, Substack drills down pretty deeply as to how readers read, which is important with long-form essays. Did people make it all the way through? The answer is that some of you guys read, you really do. And that counts more than some people’s feelings about the feelings of people whose reality is formed by completely different factors than their own.
These are difficult conversations to have. A lot of people would rather not have them at all; they’re set in their ways, fine with a tinfoil halo rather than a gold one — and that’s totally normal. When I get silent pushback in the form of ghosting or a drop in readership, I remind myself that in the early days of Reddit even cute kitten photos were downvoted by ~40% of Redditors.
A BREAK FROM THE HEAVINESS
I began a new section, My 2 Bits, off the Oscars post: a mashup of two seemingly unrelated themes that I somehow try to merge at the end.
The first bit was a sort of coda to the Victimhood essay: Waiting for Vanessa Crane’s reaction to my step into an unknown place as a White man talking about Black racism.
Over the endless weekend, while I was waiting for her to read, an episode of Better Call Saul reached out to remind me of a raunchy, irreverent, PC-slamming short film I made at NYU Film School, starring Vanessa herself. I contemplated the synchronicity of this reminder from Existence: Being opposed to shallow, rote political correctness is how I’ve always been, that the first time I gave PC a wedgie was a surprise runaway success, so I shouldn’t worry unduly about upsetting some people, much less a woman who is effectively a soulmate.
The second bit was about being banned on Facebook for 30 days, right when I was launching this newsletter. I detailed the reasons I’d been banned, almost all of them absurd.
I tied the two together with the realization that these neo-Puritanical times we’re in are something of a new Prohibition, with Wokeism in the role of the Temperance Movement that switched off the entire country’s joy at the beginning of the 20th century.
As Logan Roy said in Succession in the pilot of Season 4, “Nobody tells jokes anymore.” Great observation. Dave Chappelle isn’t telling jokes, and he’s eliciting the wrong kind of laughter.
REDDIT ATHEISTS ATTACK!
In the third of four Establishing Shot posts, ‘The Meaning of Orthodox Atheism and the Three Forms of Religion,’ I discussed how American atheism in particular has become a religion of its own; how my years in a Sufi order lead me to atheism, and then to what I call ‘orthodox atheism’ after reading Yuval Harari’s expanded meaning of religion, which includes social contracts and constructs. From there I created a diagram, the Great Triquetra, roughly categorizing the components of the three forms of religion: spiritual, social, and systemic.
From there I went off on a less-sensible, wilder jag, hypothesizing that — now that mankind has taken control of evolution, which I proposed is unconsciously motivated by Existence to become self-aware — we have realized we’re not much more than organic machines, part of the “Meat Lego Matrix,” as conservative feminist Mary Harrington calls it.
I ran off even further down that speculative path by stating that the Singularity, the tipping point when AI surpasses us and becomes superintelligent, is the next step in our evolution. Will we merge with machines and become transhuman? Is the Singularity the Übermensch prophesied by Nietzsche?
When I posted the piece on the r/atheism sub on Reddit, the most powerful forum for atheists on the planet, their reaction was exactly what I’d hoped it would be: dismissive sneering and ad hominem attacks that were nothing close to a reasonable rebuttal to a reasonably thoughtful post about their greatest obsession.
The first comment was posted within a minute of my posting a link to the essay with commentary, which means they only read my reason for posting: “There is no such thing as orthodox atheism or wokism [sic].” Important quibble: ‘wokism’ is a religious preference for cooking with a wok rather than a skillet, which is Satan in Teflon-coated steel, hot oil everywhere.
The sanctimonious mods helped me prove my point about the state of atheism in America — I mention the forum specifically in the essay. They took it down and marked it as spam so that it can’t be published anywhere else on Reddit, I believe:
Even the r/atheism banner has changed: it used to show a Reddit ‘Snoo’ alien in Russell’s Teapot, the most-used atheist trope, based on the analogy Bertrand Russell made between an orbiting teapot and proving God’s existence — it’s not up to atheists to disprove the existence of something that is unlikely to exist in the first place. Now the banner is trite low-res Carl Sagan book-cover imagery.
The original Reddit logo:
The mods’ excuse for removing it and marking it as spam, despite the fact I checked the rules on the sub’s landing page first, is in the fine print two clicks deep: It could be construed as self-promotion, despite the fact I’ve been a member of the sub since 2011, and am by no means a spammer, nor a self-promoter. Still, self-promotion is “skating on thin ice” with the mods.
There is a possibility that if I’d used another account I have somewhere that only Google Password Manager knows — note that I’m one of the few Redditors who uses his real name — and pretended I stumbled on it and was posting it to start a discussion, they wouldn’t have marked it as spam.
There is also a possibility that André Aciman did have an immaculate conception and came up with Call Me By Your Name from a preternaturally fecund imagination that no other fiction writer possesses, but he hadn’t displayed it before the book and hasn’t since; his sequel, Find Me, shows precisely what happens when you don’t have real-life inspiration.
Ah, if he’d only found me and asked; there’s plenty more stories from my life than my romance with Oliver Stewart. Based on Guadagnino’s interviews, my life past what happened is in line with his vision for Elio as an adult. Would I have shared? Absolutely. Anyone is welcome to borrow my toys, as long as we’re clear they’re mine. It’s not clear, yet, and that’s annoying.
I mention that not to prove my point with a dodgy equivalency, but because the mods on Reddit’s r/callmeyourname, the only forum still going that is devoted to both the book and film, took down my post linking my exposé last June, also marking it as spam, which is how I discovered that it couldn’t be published anywhere else on Reddit, either. The subsequent lengthy back-and-forth emails with a panel of mods writing as one voice like a SCOTUS decision was quite something, just like Galileo facing the Catholic Inquisition. I’ll write about it at some point down the line, and reprint the exchange.
Thank you for reading.
Substack wants a subscription reminder at the end, too — it gets uppity when I try to press the ‘Publish’ button if I don’t. Such a diva: