It’s hard to deny that we’re in a state of rising tension in many nations across the West as right-wing populists try to imitate, for some reason, possibly the most unpopular US president in history. Nevertheless, worrying anti-migrant trends are rising as times get tough and populists continue to use what history has shows to be the laziest but most effective way to explain those tough times to white people. In Australia, the white nationalist One Nation party is surging in popularity for the first time in its long, stupid history. In the UK, Tommy Robinson and his Restore dickheads are burning houses down while Nigel Farage rides the popularity train.
Now, obnoxiously, popular media is here to make a buck off all of this, because of course. That’s a frightening trend, as the media feeds off people’s rage, so too do the people feed off the media. This could escalate to very frightening places. But what if we’re more optimistic? What if this is actually just another kind of bubble, or quick-burning fad? Like NFTs or the Metaverse?
Remember Armie Hammer? No, of course you don’t, but he’s an actor who liked to think he was gaining traction to be a real movie star one day. You might know him from that attempt a Lone Ranger revival where he was overshadowed by Johnny Depp playing a Native American wearing a dead bird on his head.
Johnny Depp is not Native American. He lied about having Native American heritage in order to dodge controversy for taking this role, but he wasn’t cancelled for redface. Johnny Depp is almost impossible to cancel, despite his domestic violence and spousal abuse, which cost him a role in like the 13th or 14th Harry Potter movie and little else (it’s the one where Harry goes to space, I think).
Armie Hammer is no Johnny Depp and so his spousal abuse did get him cancelled, right as he was gliding on the acclaim of his breakout role in the Oscar darling Call Me By Your Name. While Depp enjoys the benefit of the kind of cool, grunge, rockstar reputation in which punching women in a drunken “tortured poet” stupor is almost expected of him, Armie Hammer is a pretty-boy rich-kid from a business dynasty whose sexual proclivities allegedly involve a cannibalism fetish. So, more Ed Gein than Tommy Lee.
So how does a guy whose career fell off before it really got going maneuver his cancellation in such a way that the money spigot turns back on? The answer came via a phone call from a 60 year old German con artist named Uwe Boll. If you’re struggling with how to pronounce that, you just switch the W with a V—Ooveboll. It sounds like an obscure Eastern European sport.
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Boll is a film director of some, uh, notoriety, and his newest flick, starring Hammer in his first post-Weinstein project, is Citizen Vigilante. It’s basically pornography for Tommy Robinson fans, the latest gambit in Trumpist culture’s efforts to turn cinema right-wing. That means you don’t get a character arc or much in the way of character at all. The movie is about what it’s about—a white guy who goes around killing migrants, judges who are too lenient on migrants, and “woke leftists.” There’s no moral complexity to what he does because, in the universe of the film, the migrants are all Muslim and, by extension, rapists. At one point it is explained that these are the “values of the Koran.”
Usually, vigilante films, even the ones where the vigilante is unambiguously the good guy, will show in some way that the vigilante, too, pays a price. Even John Wick has trauma. Not so in Citizen Vigilante. The titular vigilante isn’t so much a character as he is the writer talking directly to the viewer. As I’ve said before, the right very much prefers to be unambiguously told what the message is, and in this case, the message is that we should all be vigilantes and kill migrants. In one scene, Hammer’s character kills a stranger for hesitating to break the road rules, a bizarre scene intended to prove a rhetorical point to another character who can’t learn anything from it because he is, himself, immediately murdered by the teacher. But, of course, the lesson was really for the audience: You all need to start breaking the law, preferably in a way that harms brown people.
Unsurprisingly, this immediately became Elon Musk’s favorite movie. To be clear, it is very low budget and very boring—almost all of the killing happens off screen and the story is largely told to us via fawning news reports and TikTok videos—so I’m unsure whether Musk has actually seen it or whether he just touched himself while watching the climactic ten minutes on loop. That’s when the vigilante massacres a whole extended family including a young teenage girl because her brother raped a white woman. Musk, who has been trying for weeks to incite race riots in Britain, gave Citizen Vigilante a phenomenal amount of free advertising that has pushed it to the top of Amazon and Apple’s charts despite its Sharknado 5-tier acting, script, and effects.
This is all according to plan. If you don’t know anything about Uwe Boll, his movies may be stupid, but he is not. He’s the cinematic equivalent of a shitposter. He made his career originally by exploiting a German tax loophole that makes it profitable to make movies that flop, kind of like in Mel Brooks’ The Producers. In recent years he’s also tried to tap the zeitgeist for cultural anger to exploit—in the Occupy Wall Street era he made a movie about a guy who does a heroic spree killing of Wall Street bankers. Boll isn’t so much a rancid Restore hooligan as he is a cynical grifter, but he is leaning heavily into the violent white nationalist media sphere in a tactical effort to get himself as cancelled as possible, thus tapping a new revenue stream.
The thing that grinds my gears about the so-called cancel culture isn’t that I regularly weep for its victims—though I know that there have been unjust “cancellations” that have damaged lives and careers, I’ve seen it happen, but a more frustrating thing about it, to my mind, is that getting “cancelled” is so reliably a career benefit to those who want it to be that you frequently see people doing it on purpose. It is the most obnoxious behavior imaginable.
If you’re not Australian you probably don’t know who Karl Stefanovic is, but he’s a popular and inoffensive daytime TV star who has been keeping stay-at-home mothers company for the last two decades until, just this year, he did a bizarre hard-right turn, started a podcast, and began interviewing and fawning over a slew of prominent white nationalists of escalating disrepute with a big, stupid, knowing grin on his face. Doing the Dril tweet, basically:
Finally, Stefanovic got what he wanted when he did a big, smiling, back-clapping interview with Tommy Robinson and got himself fired from his TV show. Now he’s doing victory/victimhood laps around Twitter for getting the outcome he wanted. The truth is that his contract was running out, he saw the writing on the wall for network television, and he was desperate to move into his new Cancelled Alt-Right Podcaster grift before he was forced to part ways amicably, which would have been devastating. Network Nine, no doubt, understood what he was doing and needed to do a calculus—give him what he wants now, or wait until he says the N-word on daytime television.
So it sure ain’t great that we’re in a place in Western culture where agitating for the violent excision of non-white people from society is being treated as a savvy media career decision like pivot to video or a Polymarket partnership. My curiosity about all these people who want to jump on this bandwagon is how stable to they actually think this gig is?
We’re talking about a quick-burning candle that’s already running its course. Uwe Boll is insinuating that he’s working on a Citizen Vigilante sequel where Armie Hammer goes to America and kills Somalis. Okay, great, what’s your next idea? Mexicans? Haitians? Armie Hammer shoots up a Pride parade? Do we start to see the problem, here?
Karl Stefanovic has just about run the well dry on anti-immigrant interviews and his podcast isn’t even more than a few months old. He’s teamed up with Drew Pavlou, the most transparent grifter on the internet, who also went from normie lib to white nationalist about five minutes before Stefanovic did, and whose entire schtick is already reduced to watching that American kid who harasses daycare centers and mimicking what he does.
They’ve interviewed all of the One Nation people, and now they’ve glazed Restore UK and Rupert Lowe and Tommy Robinson. These people all just give the same interviews, over and over again, to a different interviewer. After the novelty wears off that the king of inoffensive Aussie breakfast television is dancing around the 14 words, what does he do? The man has no special charisma. He could just stitch together clips of these people from other interviews and he’d be offering no fewer insights. There is absolutely nothing special about Karl Stefanovic, or for that matter, Armie Hammer or Uwe Boll, to be the ones specifically delivering this propaganda.
Obviously, the worst could happen and someone might snap and decide to take Armie Hammer’s monologues as serious advice. Maybe worse, some more severe riots might be ahead. Or maybe the grift runs its course and the Cancelled By Choice run out of things to say. In either case, it’s hard to see any of these guys sticking around. It seems a fitting fate for those who would respond to a career setback by embracing bigotry and weaponizing societal decay for their personal benefit: To be cancelled from cancellation. The ultimate double tap. No outrage, this time, no victimhood lap, no fanfare. Just fade out and gone.
So hey, I'm writing a book about toxic masculinity, online culture, and how it all led to Elon Musk and Trump. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop.
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Some News on My Book, and a Requiem For a Career
Next week I’m going to be submitting a 20-page book proposal to a real, living, big-deal literary agent, but it feels like being tagged out as I’m sliding into home base.
I just...even if you're a devotee of the 14 words, citizen vigilante sounds so extraordinarily boring. Why are these people so fucking boring?