Why so serious? The 'Joker' was never on our side



The "Joker" movies were always a trap for the left’s untouchable castes.

When I saw trailers for the first film back in 2019, I was immediately turned off. While so many were hyping its praises, I was still burnt out from "The Last Jedi." By that point, I was spiraling away from the mainstream, and nowadays, I only go to the movie theater when my family wants to go on an outing.

But I have to wonder whether the romanticization of these villains is a product of cultural rot. Why don’t we have an unabashed love of heroes and a hatred of our villains?

Now, I didn’t ignore "Joker" to make a stand or whatnot — I think I was still in high school at the time. I just didn’t like the idea of exploring the Joker as a loser with mental illness.

Joker's wild

For me, the character was never just some rando who had a bad day and decided to put on clown makeup. Although he would do everything to assure you otherwise, I always saw that as an illusion, even if the writers believed in it.

When regular people snap, they don’t become criminal masterminds who can rob banks with impunity and contend with billionaire detectives. No, the Joker I knew was a whirlwind, a catastrophic force of nature that appeared from nowhere and wrecked utter bedlam. He was a demon, literal or not, summoned by the excesses of a corrupt culture. His claim of being an ordinary man was only to mess the characters’ heads, to break them.

But the face of evil isn’t so readily understood. He was always more than that, an almost supernatural presence that our materialist culture could only explain away with a vat of weird chemicals.

To see him on-screen as a regular, beaten-down guy instead of a trickster devil was enough to dissuade me from watching entirely.

Stop me if you've heard this

But that turned out to be a good thing, because that meant I wasn’t invested for when "Joker: Folie à Deux" came around.

The backlash to this movie is part of a fomenting undercurrent that I’ve noticed for some time.

First, we all knew since its announcement that it was an intentionally bad movie. The idea to make it a musical was alone a dead giveaway that the creators were not making this for the fans. It’s a film downright hostile to its audience.

But that’s not what I’m interested in.

Die a villain

Tell me, what does it matter if the Joker gets raped or humiliated? Tell me honestly. The man’s a psychopath, and furthermore, why is anyone invested in a character study about a villain? Are there any heroic qualities to him that would make you want to relate to him, understand him?

People don’t get this attached to genuine dissections of evil. And looking beyond that, I’m certain I can find plenty of worse things that have happened to him in the comics. I think at one point he got his face flayed off or something. Why is this any different?

But we all know it’s different. Everyone knows instinctively that this is an attack on fans, and more importantly, everyone on the right who thought they saw something in the character. After all, this particular incarnation was supposed to be the most relatable. And I think it was meant to tap into this fascination Western culture has with psychopaths — especially psychopaths with a “code.”

Why are people so fascinated with these villains? You would think they would inspire a visceral sense of disgust, or at least dislike. They are thoroughly immoral people who do horrendous things, and yet, we can’t get enough of them. We can’t get enough of villains who have a point, who deep down have a critique of the West that lands true.

Cultural rot

The Joker is fascinating in part because he makes you question what a good person truly is. Patrick Bateman is trying to find something that’s real underneath the shallowness of his life. Anton Chigurh is a bit more tricky, but there’s a component of him bringing savagery and primal violence back into a tamed West. And we can go on and on. This is not an uncommon trope in the slightest.

But I have to wonder whether the romanticization of these villains is a product of cultural rot. Why don’t we have an unabashed love of heroes and a hatred of our villains? Why is the bad guy so often more charismatic, more primal than our protagonist? Why has the good become associated with the lame and the bad associated with vitality?

I would wager that the right tends to attach itself to these figures because we intuitively sense that something has gone awfully wrong. The heroes in mainstream stories are not actual heroes, and while the villains are horrendous, they at least point to something that’s truer.

Deep down, the Joker is absolutely right that people aren’t the moral paragons they like to think themselves, and they have no foundation to prevent utter chaos when their hypocrisy is brought to the surface.

So ought we take the frame of the Joker? Was he the right-wing paragon all along? Is he the man we should get behind?

Absolutely not.

'How about a magic trick?'

One of the left’s favorite tricks is to invest psychopaths and demented crazy people with right-wing ideas and aesthetics. If the right concedes that the character has a point, they also associate themselves with that character's evil. This prevents a noble vision of the right from ever fully manifesting, distracting people in digital clown games.

No matter what the Joker has to tell us about the plight of incels or the corruption of society or whatever, his flaws outweigh any message. It’s not just his mental instability. He’s a pathetic loser with no moral compass, and his solution to decline is to accelerate it.

In other words, he’s a villain. He’s an actual bad guy.

And should the ironic take prevail, should the mainstream ever receive a different message from what the writers intended, they have one final trump card they can play.

Controlled op

The Joker is entirely fictional. That means they can do whatever they want to him, and more importantly, make him do anything they want. He’s controlled opposition, and leftists will happily lose hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure he stays that way.

The left does not play for money. It plays for the message. And that message is:

You’re the bad guy. And also, lol, you got gang raped.

The lesson to take away is to never invest yourself in modern media. Memes and edgy takes are one thing, but they are nothing to attach yourself to.

The left will never make a true right-wing hero, only right-wing villains. Never embrace imagery unless it’s genuinely worthy of emulation. And most importantly, never attach yourself to a caricature your enemies control.

Again, I’m not saying don’t engage in meme wars or ironic takes. Just don’t get attached to them insofar as the left can turn them into a weapon against you.

The proper response is to just shrug and let it go. The culture is completely hostile to you, and your ability to remain indifferent is the ultimate weapon against people who slovenly desire your outrage.

All good sci-fi is religious



Atheism is a really boring ideology for storytelling.

There’s no God, no morality, and no meaning. Everything is an accident, and we can take only the most superficial material interpretations possible. This kills all storytelling except the most nihilistic genres.

And this presents a problem because nihilism is well ... boring. It can’t sustain a narrative. People seek meaning. People seek purpose. It’s not just instinctual. It’s necessary. So what do atheists do? They take old religious meanings and filter them through an atheist lens.

We can talk about humanity’s grand destiny all day, but the future of humanity is not something particularly inspiring to the guy working nine to five.

So what are we going to do? Look at Ridley Scott's 2012 "Alien" prequel, "Prometheus." God is real but he’s an alien. Creation has a purpose, but it’s evolution.

The redemption of mankind is through our IQ and eventual ascension into godhood. It’s all the same beats except through atheistic and materialistic virtues (or subversions). The story is just as religious, but it’s now bent for a really shallow religion.

No atheists on starships

These tropes are so ubiquitous that we take them as given assumptions for the sci-fi genre, but they’re just recycled ideas (mostly from Christianity). And so atheists steal their depth from truth that rightfully belongs to religion. They just pretend it’s more “scientific.”

Deliberate design is a completely pseudo-scientific concept (according to atheists). There’s no evidence for it, and the mainstream consensus is that life was a cosmic accident. But you can’t say anything about a cosmic accident. You can only shrug your shoulders at it.

Nearly every sci-fi story has some form of deliberate design, they just replace the Christian God with aliens or whatever. Even though it is often atheists writing the stories, they reinsert this completely pseudo-scientific concept. Why? Because atheism is really boring.

Here’s a fun drinking game: Take a shot whenever you see a story treating evolution as a series of progressing stages. This is a completely nonsense read of evolution. There’s no moral component to evolution. It’s just adaption to environment. There’s no end goal.

But nearly every sci-fi story treats it as such. It gets to the point where it’s straight disinformation. Every time the story is about mankind’s rise from apes to the stars when that’s utterly irrelevant from an atheist perspective. Why? Because atheism is really boring.

Mankind's end goal is something like "Star Trek’s" Federation. But why is that a good thing? Why is space liberalism the default? What is morality based on? Where are we going? Who’s to say the Klingons don’t have it right? Why are there good guys and bad guys?

“But it’s all just fiction!” I hear you say. “It doesn’t matter.” But fiction isn’t nonsense. It’s an outlining of ideals, principles. Writers don’t just write random chaos. They write an extension of their worldview. Why then don’t we have properly atheist stories?

A properly atheist story would be completely materialistic, accidental, with absolutely no meaning or morality that has whatever intrigue being completely incidental to the plot. Now I have to ask: Doesn’t that sound like a really boring story?

How, then, did professed atheists like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Gene Roddenberry create the the archetypal myths that define the modern world?

The mystics of progressivism

By the 1960s, progressivism had reached a new ascendancy. Fueled by the unparalleled wealth that came with a modern economy, millions were lifted into new, luxurious lifestyles. Now was the time to put aside the ignorance of religion and finally embrace the freedoms offered by a world liberated from Christianity.

It isn’t hard to understand how so many fell for the deception. Things were getting better and better. Technology was improving, and more importantly, accelerating. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, yes. However, too many had already seen the miracle of science, and it seemed a better horse to back than spiritually weakened priests who were quickly conceding to the liberalism’s demands.

But with any new religion, there has to be a story, and the story science told wasn’t so flattering. Men had gone from sons of God to sons of apes. Salvation was a lie, and death was the end. There was no justice in the world, and mercy was just the delusion of fools. Man was a small being in a cold universe. The only thing modern men could be comforted by was his own increasing material comfort.

That’s not a story anyone wants to hear. And it’s certainly not a story anyone wants to tell. While abject nihilism has always had its place in literature, it rightfully has a small audience. Nihilism has nothing that could sustain a city, much less a nation.

Reason and science needed romance. It needed adventure and a destiny. Without these things, it was a boring, uninspiring philosophy. Writers (good ones anyway) instinctively shy away from boring. Better to be dead than boring. If there is a victory, it has to be a glorious triumph. If it is a defeat, it has to be a last stand. And if it is banal, then it has to be the most shuddering and teeth-clenching banality of all.

But the sci-fi writers of the 1960s and later were capable of far more than banality. They knew how to tell stories, and they (unconsciously or otherwise) slipped that dreaded irrationality and religious ignorance back into their fiction.

'2001: A Space Odyssey'

We’ll start with what I consider to be the quintessential story of progressivism. "2001: A Space Odyssey" was written in 1968 by Arthur C. Clarke (one of the Big Three sci-fi authors).

The original novel frames evolution not as random mutation guided by arbitrary natural selection but rather as a series of stages, with each improving and progressing from the last. Guided by the hands of an intelligence, men are the products of a consciousness far beyond our comprehension.

From a purely scientific standpoint, this is complete hogwash. But from a storyteller’s perspective, this is gold. Men are no longer an accident of cosmic forces. Suddenly, we have a destiny again.

There’s a conflict of tug and pull. We are going somewhere and we (at least to this incomprehensible intelligence) matter. We may be apes, but we have the potential to be something more. Can we realize this destiny?

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

You’ll notice that God is back in the equation. Except this god is a surprisingly hollow one compared to the Christian God. This one makes no demands or moral rules upon humanity. This one does not care about the suffering of the life it created. This one wants little to do with humanity except when it achieves a sufficient stage of intelligence.

Make no mistake, this is a despotic and cruel god. But, it is also a god fit for rationalism. Could we be the products of unimaginable forces? Maybe. Nobody wants to believe this was all an accident. And while this god is empty, it is sufficient food for the poets and artists. So long as nobody makes any moral demands beyond the current zeitgeist, it is a harmless idea for scholars to speculate and pine about.

This idea of incorporating evolution into the narrative of progress and a distant, indistinct entity in God’s place is a common thread throughout all of sci-fi. And it doesn’t even have to be an indistinct entity.

In the movie "Contact," this role is occupied by a galactic community that judges humanity worthy to join them after a set time has passed. But do you know the kicker? Humanity is considered at all because we sent out some radio signals. That’s ... depressing.

But there is another problem. What of the individual’s place in all of this? We can talk about humanity’s grand destiny all day, but the future of humanity is not something particularly inspiring to the guy working nine to five. Yay, we’re in the transitionary period where everything is still kinda awful, but our descendants will get to enjoy space utopia.

Flawed 'Foundation'

This question is not answered but sidestepped paradoxically. Another of the Big Three, Isaac Asimov, showcases this bait and switch quite well in his magnum opus, "Foundation." This epic spans the collapse of a galactic empire. Hari Seldon has devised a new science called psychohistory, which charts the course of societies. He goes to set up Foundation, which will be a light of science and knowledge in the coming Dark Ages and eventually bring back the empire.

Rita Barros/Getty Images

This is a story that spans centuries. Its whole premise is charting the course of history. And psychohistory is not a science that is kind to individuals. It says what determines the course of history are large-scale incentives and institutional rot. We are but numbers on a spreadsheet encompassing billions of worlds, and the greater part of humanity is accounted for in the margins.

But how did Isaac Asimov write this story? Well, he didn’t, at least not in the way he thought. A third of the first book follows a shrewd politician named Salvor Hardin as he outmaneuvers factions within Foundation. He eventually consolidates the society and neighboring kingdoms into a religious theocracy. Particularly, he accomplishes this through a clever ruse by outfitting enemy fleets with a kill-switch and faking it as divine power.

14-year-old me put down the book at the moment and asked, “OK, but what if there wasn’t Salvor Hardin?” There is some argument for the Second Foundation and Seldon predicting the rise of great men, but individuals are precisely the antithesis of psychohistory.

You’ll find in each section of Isaac Asimov’s magnum opus there are great men of history. There are people who rise above the paradigm and set the trends of the coming future. And it is not just captains of industry or conniving warlords. Even small people have a huge impact on galactic affairs. The Mule (a mutant with telepathic powers) lost because he fell in love with a normal woman.

Sci-fi is full of these characters. One moment they are but insignificant specks, the next they are upending everything. In this, you see a paradox which is played whenever the narrative is convenient for it. Humanity is vast and the individual has no power or the individual leads the revolution and remakes society.

I’m not saying this is done deliberately (though it probably certainly happened at some stage). However, progress needed a place for the individual, if only because storytellers demanded it so. You cannot tell a good story without people whose actions matter.

Stories need heroes and villains, otherwise, you have no story at all. It may go completely against the rational point of view, which says people are utterly insignificant, but can’t we just pretend that we are?

The final component of this narrative is a vision of what is trying to be achieved. The stage is set. We have our gods and demons, heroes and villains. For what shall be the contest? Well, the answer varies depending upon who you ask.

The final frontier?

Gene Roddenberry’s vision in "Star Trek" is of a space-traveling humanity for which all material wants were satisfied. Thankfully, the galaxy was filled with different peoples and aliens to meet. Otherwise, his stories would be fairly boring. Of course, that is the least of his world-building troubles. "Star Trek" does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.

Ron Galella, Ltd./Getty Images

However, I don’t think progress was promising material utopia. At least, that wasn’t what people wanted. Utopia is a nice political aim, but I suspect what really captivated the audience was the prospect of an endless adventure.

What is mankind now fighting for? Ironically, the soldiers of progress want the world to go back as it once was, where the horizon was an unexplored frontier. In the 16th century, men put themselves on little boats and crossed oceans for adventure.

But space is too vast an ocean and our boats too tiny to cross. I have seen many futurists on the internet, and the dream of space travel is admittedly an intoxicating one. It tends to fill your thoughts as you work retail. I know it did for me.

In the imagination of many, humanity was just at its short adolescent stage. Once it stepped into the stars, the fun would begin again. Again, this goes against all science. The galaxy so far has been silent, and I think it’s time we begin to accept that alien life, if it does exist, is so far away as to be inaccessible.

Digital heaven

Space is out. But what about computers? "Neuromancer" by William Gibson was released in 1984. A little later than the 1960s, but it’s still a foundational text. Perhaps the future we’re fighting for is a simulation? Of course, I wouldn’t want to live in the world of "Neuromancer," but the dream of uploading your mind is an enticing one. What if your life could be a video game?

Suppose you could do it. Suppose I could turn you into a program and put you in a simulation. Would your life be better than what you have now? For those advocating for this future, most seem to skip that step.

Let’s take a look at the modern day. Are our lives really better with what digitization has already accomplished? Everyone agrees social media is a plague on humanity, yet why are so many pushing to trap themselves on what would be the ultimate social media platform?

You’ll again notice we’ve ditched reason yet again for a digital version of heaven. And our future is so much more enlightened than religious notions of an afterlife. We’ve taken salvation and commercialized it. Your eternal soul will be bought with the U.S. dollar.

But putting all that aside, why do these stories matter? These stories are all fiction. They are nothing to be taken seriously. I can already hear the cry that this all has nothing to do with the actual expectations people had for the future. Had I brought "2001: A Space Odyssey" into an academic debate on industrialization, I would’ve been laughed out of the room.

However, people do not tell stories just for mindless amusement. In them are the beliefs of a people. More than just hopes and dreams, stories are a reflection of the world as we see it. And in these stories I have listed, you see the beliefs of the people writing them.

You see their gods and devils, their heroes and villains, and the reality they want to make happen. Stories are a look at where we are and where we are going. And most importantly, stories are a confession of faith.

Did Arthur C. Clarke believe in monoliths that uplifted humanity? No. But he certainly believed in the god that made them.

A version of this essay originally appeared on the "Trantor Publishing" Substack

'John Carter of Mars': The male archetype we need



One of the valuable things about reading older literature is the way it forces us to question certain assumptions we hold as "modern" Westerners. Not just assumptions about "democracy" and whatever else you learned in AP government but about the very essence of our human nature.

A hero for our time

For me, a prime example of this is Edgar Rice Burroughs' "John Carter of Mars" series. Reading these books is like a splash of cold water in a cultural desert. In them, you meet a character unlike any current male protagonist.

What the dissident right desperately needs is to cultivate in itself a spirit of joy and a zest for life. It is this energy that can bring about true change, not the moping and whining you see so often on X.

While it's notable that John Carter is a Confederate soldier portrayed in a supremely sympathetic light, there's more to the character than his political incorrectness. He also brings with him a particular brand of masculinity that has been all but forgotten in today’s discourse. To illustrate my point, here are a few choice quotes from the 1912 installment "A Princess of Mars":

Fear is a relative term and so I can only measure my feelings at that time by what I had experienced in previous positions of danger and by those that I have passed through since; but I can say without shame that if the sensations I endured during the next few minutes were fear, then may God help the coward, for cowardice is of a surety its own punishment.

I have ever been prone to seek adventure and to investigate and experiment where wiser men would have left well enough alone.

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.

A forgotten archetype

John Carter is a chivalric ideal, a man who embodies all the masculine virtues in their perfect Aristotelian mean — or at least comes close to it. Duty, but not weakness. Strength, but not cruelty. Adventure, but not recklessness.

He’s a man who knows what he wants and goes after it with every ounce of his being. He does not shirk from battle; in fact, he embraces it. Battle is in his blood, and he’s called to it as his vocation. He’s a leader of men, at all times honorable and fair, ingenious and tenacious in his pursuit of victory. You’d rather have no one else by your side and rather anyone else against you. He is a hero and a true king, an archetype that has been lost in today's culture.

When was the last time you saw a man portrayed so favorably on television or in a movie? When was the last time you saw a man like John Carter?

Away with 'flawed' protagonists

I can tell you this, it certainly wasn’t in the 2012 "John Carter" movie (despite the title, actually an adaptation of "Princess of Mars.")

Now, I don’t want to rag too harshly on this movie as it at least succeeds in portraying Carter as the hero. But it does insist on making him "flawed" in a way that is typical of the last few decades of pop culture. We've swung from strong men being strong men to weak men becoming strong men and finally to weak men being weak men.

You can see this everywhere, even in Peter Jackson’s acclaimed "Lord of the Rings" movies. Tolkien's Aragorn is far from a reluctant hero in the books. He doesn’t second-guess himself. But for some reason, Hollywood writers in 2001 could not conceive of such confidence. And it has only gotten worse since then.

It's easy to trace the way masculinity has been increasingly portrayed as tragic in some way. When men are not outright evil, they’re to be demeaned as the fundamentally lesser of the two sexes. It is always the man who is less capable, less aware, less actualized. If the man is loving, he must also be bumbling and weak. If he’s ambitious, he must also be cruel and tyrannical. And if he is genuinely well-meaning, he must be tragically removed and replaced by his superior feminine clone.

Gone are the days when fathers raised sons. Now they must raise their daughters as sons, and everyone is left unhappier as a result.

Choose vitality

Why so much bleakness? As if the constant stream of bad news weren't enough, our storytellers constantly amplify our worst aspects, offering the most cynical, hopeless, and demoralizing media available to human imagination.

We are so inundated with failure and heartbreak that it’s easy to forget that we have the power to reject it. We don’t have to have male protagonists who are left biting their nails until adventure takes them anyway. We don’t have to have incompetent fathers drinking themselves to an early grave. And we certainly don’t have to have eunuchs for sons who roll over on their bellies and wait for the girlboss to arrive.

Dissident literature, if it is to stand against left-wing art, must be uplifting to the soul — and especially to this masculine spirit. It must awaken the heroism in men again. And while this does not mean all men are called to be warriors, all men are called to be as virtuous as John Carter, to live out whatever his vocation may be with that same vitality.

While I do have a few tiny quibbles, @LastThings4 is fundamentally correct in his assertion that what the dissident right needs is not a Dostoevsky-esque, 800-page manuscript of depression and nihilism. If anyone wants that, they can just go read Dostoevsky.

Something worth fighting for

What the dissident right desperately needs is to cultivate in itself a spirit of joy and a zest for life. It is this energy that can bring about true change, not the moping and whining you see so often on X.

It is only in celebration of the good things — no matter how small they are — that you will find men willing to fight. It is only in cultivating a spirit of hope that you will find young men who are willing to take a stand for it. No one fights for a nihilistic cause that can offer only varying degrees of defeat.

In the Old Testament, the Ark of Covenant was stolen by the Philistines, and they made a mockery of it, placing it before their own heathen god in victory over Israel. All seemed lost. Then, at the last possible moment, God overthrew the pagan idol and the Ark was returned safely to Jerusalem. Upon the Ark’s arrival, King David was so overcome with joy that he began leaping and dancing in the procession, going so far as to make a fool of himself with his outburst.

It is with that same overflowing joy that men must begin to live again — if they are to live at all.

A version of this essay previously appeared on Isaac Young's Substack, Trantor Publishing.