First of all, there’s of course the podcast. In Bed with the Right has been on a tear this year. By December 31, 2025, barring major snafus, we should be releasing our 115th episode. Which means between the main feed and the Patreon, we will have released 60ish episodes in 2025 alone. That’s a lot! We also had our first true live show (as in a theater and not at a college or a bookstore) at the Swedish-American Hall in San Francisco in November — the Moral Panic Bingo Night was so fun, we’re likely going to do a number of live events in 2026.

For the rest of the year, we still have a few things in store: first up is our annual “awards” show, The Cursties, which recognizes some of the most cursed discourses around sex and gender of the year. This year, it’ll be on the year in anti-woke discourse, because somehow it’s been another banner year. We still owe our listeners the final episode of Project 1933 — Episode 10, which will deal with December 1 to December 31, 1933, and will also serve to close out our reflections on that year. 2026 is already shaping up to feature a couple of fun conversations on the podcast, as well as a new series (on denazification and its pitfalls — not sure what made us think of that…).

Speaking of Project 1933, I’m thrilled to tell you that Project 1933 will be a book. It’s due to come out in Fall 2026 (early fall, too!) with Astra House Publishing.

This book will combine a lot of the research I did for the podcast series, and follow a similar conceit. But it will have more of a narrative thrust, draw on a much wider set of witnesses, and will give me a chance to delve more deeply (and at times with the benefit of (limited) hindsight) into the machinations of the Trump administration. So the 2025 part that we’d draw out in each “Project 1933”-episode, will be more explicit and more present in the book than it was on the pod. It’s an exciting chance to write a history of a faraway time and of my own time at once.

Even before Project 1933, I’ll be publishing a follow-up to 2020’s What Tech Calls Thinking. This one will appear with Suhrkamp in German first (Was das Valley herrschen nennt) in late March; it’ll then come out in English (as What Tech Calls Governing) with Stanford University Press in the fall. So here’s the cover of the German edition for now, but the SUP cover won’t be out for a little while.

The topic is what the title promises: the big tech companies are in control, in power. But what do they take control to be? What is their view of power? How did they come to this view, and how did its genesis influence how they now exercise it? It’s very exciting to get to work with two publishers I’ve worked with before (they were the exact duo I worked with on The Cancel Culture Panic), but it’s also a slightly different kind of book. It’s about ideas in action, about ideas that animate how we experience power and how power is brought to bear on us. Which means it’s got more reporting (admittedly light), more archival finds and is overall more essayistic. Unlike What Tech Calls Thinking, it’s no longer structured around specific buzzwords used by our tech overlords, but rather around ways in which their power is generated, conceptualized, concealed, applied, or lived. The individual chapters are: “Capital”, “Vibes”, “Domination”, “Distinction”, “Maturity”, “Creeps”, “Compounds” and “The Long Term”.

As for this newsletter itself, I have like 10 post drafts that are burning a hole in my pocket and that I can’t wait to share with you. Stupidly, I picked a bunch of weighty and complicated topics that I really want to do justice to (shoulda gone back to those trucker films instead!). I’ll also start writing posts around the books and other projects as they come out. Thank you for your support of this newsletter, and thanks, as always for reading!

Like politicians in other cities targeted by the President, Mayor Daniel Lurie has begged the administration not to do this. Our State Senator has been more blunt, saying SF “neither needs nor wants Trump’s personal army on our streets”. But what do they know, they’re just our elected representatives. The President would later claim that “government officials” had “requested” a National Guard presence in San Francisco. “I think we can make San Francisco—one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess,” Trump noted.

So just to be clear: it sure seems like the “government official” from San Francisco who requested the people who brought you the invasion of Granada should patrol in front of the Nintendo Store in Union Square is Marc Benioff. A billionaire who lives in Hawai’i. And who has been elected to exactly nothing in SF, though he did build us a train station with no trains in it, so I guess thanks for that. More importantly: to the Trump administration, it seems, “government officials” by now just means your friendly local neighborhood billionaire. It sure feels like we’re operating by some kind of liege lord logic here.

People absolutely love having opinions about San Francisco—something Moira Donegan and I did an entire episode of In Bed with the Right about. They parachute in and film some trash, an unhoused person or a syringe, and get out again. The actual problems the city has—the affordability crisis, for one—not only doesn’t seem to matter to them. The real problems to them don’t seem quite real. Because we who live here are not quite real. We’re props to be played with.

Especially the titans of the tech industry seem to have more opinions about us the less they actually live here. How many profiles have we had of tech billionaires “leaving” San Francisco—written by credulous reporters who never ask the obvious thing of how a person with 20 houses and a good chunk of an island can possibly claim to be “leaving” a place. Or why the opinions on the subject of street violence and cleanliness of a man who hasn’t set foot in a Safeway in 15 years should matter, and why his feeling of safety should be worth anyone’s time.

But that’s the thing: long before Trump’s crusade against cities that didn’t vote for him, descriptions of San Francisco tended to get traction the less time the person providing them had spent there recently. Which is why it’s not an accident that it’s a tech billionaire who decided to sacrifice his former city as a cheap sales pitch. Because complaining about San Francisco allows billionaires to pretend to still be locals.

When Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App, was stabbed to death in San Francisco in April 2023, tech executives competed on Twitter and in the media to lament the decline of the city. A city, we might add, which most of them had officially turned their backs on long ago. Venture investor David Sacks speculated on his podcast that he was betting the perpetrator was “a psychotic homeless man.” Elon Musk sounded off on X about “violent repeat offenders.” When San Francisco police warned against jumping to conclusions, angel investor Jason Calcanis lost his temper: “EVIL INCOMPETENT FOOLS & GRIFTERS WHO ACCOMPLISH NOTHING EXCEPT ENABLING RAMPANT VIOLENCE,” he wrote on Twitter. (It’s worth reading the sheer outpouring of founder hate in the wake of Lee’s killing—Scott Alan Lucas has a fantastic rundown in his recent book about the murder, Last Night in San Francisco.

In the end, it turned out that Bob Lee was the victim of another tech entrepreneur he knew personally. A relationship crime involving drugs, ambition, and elite parties. What was interesting, however, wasn’t just how instinctively the city’s richest people identified the culprit among the city’s poorest; how readily they identified people like themselves as victims, and people who, by any logic, were actually their victims, as perpetrators. What was especially interesting was how quickly Sacks, Musk, and Calcanis reintegrated when it came to disparaging “their” city, after having gone to great lengths to separate from it. (Although admittedly Calcanis didn’t officially leave San Francisco until 2024.)

So I thought it might make sense to give readers a sense of what SF is like right now. I was inspired partly by having had to walk a lot in downtown recently—long story, but basically my car broke down two weeks ago. And while I have always walked and biked around a lot around in SF, I hadn’t spent much time downtown—the place where out-of-town journalists, conservative influencers and conservative politicians tend to land when they want to observe some stuff they can then breathlessly report.

And I was struck by how quietly busy everything was. People were on their way to work, traffic was a nightmare. But the two Muni trains I took were on time, the stations were clean and full of people. You wouldn’t know it from the doom loop coverage, but SF opened a new underground trolley line during the pandemic. Which I took down to 4th and King to jump on one of Caltrain’s new electrified trains down to Palo Alto. Not a single piece of infrastructure I set foot on that morning was older than 2020. Not many cities can say that for themselves. But sorry, you were saying something about the “zombie apocalypse”?

“But Adrian, you can’t just pick a bunch of anecdotes!” Sure I can, that’s all Elon Musk, Marc Benioff and their ilk are doing, after all! If you walk around San Francisco, a city of immense socio-economic differences, looking for visible poverty, believe me, you will find it! But talk about “hell hole”, “zombie apocalypse”, etc. isn’t about socio-economic differences. Musk et al are not offended on behalf of the poor. They’re offended at having to see the poor. The victims these men imagine are, as the Bob Lee fiasco made clear, … these men themselves.

And because poverty in San Francisco is disproportionately concentrated in SoMa and the Tenderloin, i.e. areas that immediately abut downtown, visibility is really all these “SF hellscape” stories can rely on. Because while the statistics on homelessness in SF are indeed grim, the statistics on crime bear—to put it mildly—no relationship to the story people like the President like to tell about the city. So since we might get boots on the ground in SF based on our supposed lawlessness, let’s have a look at that lawlessness. The Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) compile statistics for the most populous cities in America, provided that those cities have reported data to the FBI UCR system.

For the year 2024, the UCR lists 596.50 “violent crimes” per 100,000 residents in SF. That’s not nothing, but it’s worth noting that that’s lower than Denver (993.03), Charlotte, NC (733.21), Oklahoma City (676.01) and all major metro areas in Ohio on the UCR list save Columbus. You may notice that none of these cities have come up as possible candidates for invasion, which is just so weird!

San Francisco’s murder rate in 2024 was 4.36, about an 8th of the rate in Detroit. It is in fact on par with some European capitals, such as Berlin, Germany (4.7), though different methodologies make those kinds of comparisons difficult. If you’ve clicked through the UCR database, you’ll notice that two Florida Cities—Jacksonville and Orlando—don’t show up in the table because the cities simply didn’t report their stats to the UCR. Florida is of course run by a governor who loves to stand on street corners in SF to pontificate about “failed” liberal cities.

San Francisco’s crime spike during the COVID years has attracted outsized attention, but it’s worth pointing out that it has proved exceedingly short-lived. The overall trendline when it comes to crime is down. The murder rate—usually considered the best benchmark for measuring “crime”, since a dead body is less open to interpretation than many other crimes—has declined 45% from the 2019 (i.e. pre-COVID) number. During that same time, Oklahoma City saw an increase of 45%, Fort Worth saw an increase of 30%, and Austin, i.e. the place every tech founder seems to abscond to while whining about SF’s rampant crime problem, saw its homicide rate jump by 115%. This year, San Francisco’s homicide rate is on track to be the lowest since the 1950s.

As for those projections: according to the SFPD’s own crime dashboard, when you compare the numbers for 2025 to the number the same crime had hit by the date of this writing in 2024, those numbers are lower across the board. In the chart below, the golden bars represent the number of incidents of each crime from 01/01/25 to 10/12/2025. The blue bar represents the number of incidents for the same date range in 2024. Not only is crime at an all-time low; it looks to be decreasing in 2025 in literally every single metric. Yes, even theft, even car theft, even burglary.

As the State of California notes in an appropriately snippy press release, in 2024 California’s homicide rate was “the second lowest it has been since at least 1966.” According to CDC data from 2022, the state doesn’t even come close to cracking the top tier for homicide rates in the country. That honor would belong to Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas. Mysteriously, no National Guards deployments appear to be planned in any of those places. Nor do I imagine that big national newspapers will do long features about their violence problems. To be fair, who could find the time, when there are life-and-death issues like shoplifting in SF to be reported on?

While I could not find a complete list of the 30 or so homicides in San Francisco during 2024, a search of LexisNexis and the San Francisco Chronicle’s archive gives a pretty good idea of what these crimes looked like. And to be clear, the kind of thing Republicans seem to be imagining—a homeless person in the throes of substance abuse or a mental health crisis attacking a random passerby—does exist in San Francisco. There was the case of a woman being pushed in front of a BART train by a man described as a “transient” in July 2024. There were shootings that news reporting at the time suggested had to do with narcotics. But each of these appear to have been in the low single digits.

The overview is necessarily partial, but it is clear from the data that what violence problem exists in San Francisco bears little relationship to the problems conservatives seem to want to attack. There’s the stabbing at the BART station in mid-November, which prosecutors decided not to charge, suggesting that it might have been in self-defense. As far as I can tell, the most prolific killer in 2024 in San Francisco is Mary Fong Lau, who drove her car at 80 mph on the wrong side of the street into a bus stop, killing an entire family of four. I am not sure whether her four victims were “investigated as homicides” and would thus be part of the 35. But, if so, it really looks like Mary Fong Lau’s Mercedes SUV killed as many San Franciscans as “the homeless” as a whole category did in 2024.

But of course Lau’s case is being reported entirely differently. I’ll briefly note that Lexis Nexis gives me about 1300 hits for “San Francisco” and “Homicide” (and over 15,000 for “San Francisco” and “Crime”) for 2024. That means mentions of SF homicides exceeded the actual incidence of the crime by a factor of about 37. And for every theft in San Francisco there was a newspaper report talking about it. Them’s Taylor Swift numbers, folks!

Let me return to something that Trump said in his remarks in the White House: “I think we can make San Francisco -- one of our great cities 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and now it’s a mess.” What exactly makes it “a mess”. 15 years ago it was one of our great cities—and its homicide rate stood at 98 (in 2007). Now it’s projected to hit about one quarter of that number, and suddenly it’s “a mess”. Look again at the crime dashboard above—what’s our mess exactly? Not assaults, not arson, not burglary. What is it?

I think, as always, it helps to take Trump’s ramblings literally. When he says “mess”, he means “mess”. As, I think, does Marc Benioff, though he’s too smart to say so outright. When Trump first mentioned SF as one of the cities he wanted to militarize back in August, his exact words were: “Look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco. They’ve destroyed it. We could clean that up, too. We’ll clean that one up, too.” His revulsion, Marc Benioff’s revulsion, is aesthetic. It’s not about violence, it’s not about corruption. After all, Violence and Corruption are the President’s first and middle names.

Much more likely, these are men who would militarize a US city because they saw poop on the ground. Because there was a person living in a tent as they were being guided to their limo. “Cleaning up” is about the types of things they have to see here, or whichever right wing billionaire has their ear this week. So what are Musk, Thiel, Benioff, Ellison grossed out by today? Let’s send in men in armored vehicles to police them. I’m guessing it’s the unhoused and the visibly poor. I’m guessing it’s San Franciscans who are mentally ill. But I’m also guessing queer people, drag queens, Black people. As people have been pointing out while Trump has sent military units to LA, to DC and attempted to send them to Portland and Chicago: there are constitutional reasons why you don’t have the army take on policing; and there are pragmatic ones. They’re not trained to fight crime. And they’re not trained to deescalate — so you’re far more likely to see violence spike in this city than have it go down further once the men in fatigues show up.

Which is of course the entire point. Because another reason they’re picking on us is because we won’t take their shit. There will be protests here and there will be unkind words hurled. And right wing influencers can fly in and make their demented Insta reels. Which Chaya Raichik can then use to doxx everyday people. Which Elon Musk can use to get people fired. Which Bari Weiss can use on her new and de-wokified CBS news. Which Bari’s wife (another scion of billion dollar fortune, by the by) can use in her I-hate-SF-columns. It’s a snake eating its own tail and it would be darkly funny—disgusting, but funny—, if there weren’t men with machine guns coming to my street.

There’s a good chance I get to take my child past men with machine guns in a few weeks’ time because one checked-out billionaire wanted to curry favor with another checked-out billionaire. I’ll point out that the guns she will see on those soldiers (because let’s be clear, National Guardsmen are soldiers) will be the first guns she sees in her life, in her city of San Francisco. And at the end of the day, I’m simply furious about that. So if you work in media and you’ve invoked the word “war zone” to describe my city in the last few years, take a victory lap: depending on what the next few weeks bring, you may have helped, in however small a measure, to turn it into one. You fucking disgrace.

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One thing that had struck me during my first foray into the wave of Sword & Sorcery films from the 1980s was the old-handness of it all. While they starred some very fresh faces who’d go on to lucrative careers (Matthew Broderick, Tom Cruise, Liam Neeson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others), very few of these films were made by young guns. Instead, the Sword & Sorcery films were directed, edited, written and scored by old hands, often inveterate schlockmeisters with far more respect for the craft of making B-movies than for the fantasy genre itself.

But here's the thing: the movie industry was less globalized in the early 1980s than it is now. And it was probably less globalized, more localized the further you moved into low- or micro-budget filmmaking. While interest in Sword & Sorcery fare seems to have been a particularly Anglo-American phenomenon, in the end very few of these films were filmed on Hollywood soundstages. These films had both a pretty global character, but were were steeped in local situations and preoccupations. I will center this second part of my series on the Sword & Sorcery boomlet on films that emerge out of very different film industries or production processes. None of them are “good movies” or even “movies”, if you want to be a real stickler about it. But they show how this new genre reflected gender politics in the early 1980s, and how it registered various confusions in that politics. Though they’re invariably set in lands before time, with witches and wizards and ancient gods walking the land, they do constitute reactions to feminism, to body culture, to changing notions of masculinity. I’ll try to talk about a bunch of movies, but my focus will be on three: 1980’s Hawk the Slayer, and 1982’s Hundra and Sorceress.

One theme that emerged for me in watching way too many of these back to back to back over the last few weeks is the figure of the kick-ass woman warrior — which on the one hand seems miles ahead from the damsels you get in comedies or most of science fiction at the time, but which ultimately isn’t as progressive as you’d think. That’s usually not about the set up (Red Sonja is an absolute badass), or about the resolution (Red Sonja triumphs) — it’s about the path taken between those points. I kept being reminded of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, And Chain Saws, the classic gender analysis of the “modern horror film”.

What’s proved most enduring about that book is Clover’s nuanced and ambivalent description of the Final Girl of the slasher film. “She’s the character whose story we follow from beginning to end; […] and it is she who, at the end of the film, brings the killer down.” “Needless to say,” Clover adds, “this sounds more like a male protagonist than a female one.” Clover’s point is that the Final Girl may “look something like a female hero”, an avatar of empowerment, but that, looked at more closely, she’s far more ambivalent. Once you take into account “affect, identification, pacing and audience,” Clover says, “the picture gets kinkier”:

“Yes, the Final Girl brings down the killer in the final moments, but consider how she spent a good hour of the film up to then: being chased and almost caught, hiding, running, falling, rising in pain and fleeing again, seeing her friends mangled and killed.”

I think the female-led Sword & Sorcery films, though nominally far removed from the then-new genre of the slasher, feed on the exact same ambivalence, although the sequence is usually reversed from the slasher. The Sword & Sorcery barbarian starts as a complete badass and is then brutally worked through, before she can finally in the end assert herself again. The overall effect is the same though: the heroines of these films, like the younger, scrawnier and more androgynous Final Girls, are “victim-heroes” or “tortured survivors”, as Clover calls them.

The Sword & Sorcery boom is about US cultural imperialism and it also isn’t. On the one hand, greenlighting these pictures seemed to be a North American specialty, as were D&D, Mattel toys and the Satanic Panic. Still, making them always involved other countries serving US interests, and sometimes doing their own thing with it. And the boom clearly hit different countries’ film industries differently. There were people making sequels to Corman fantasy films shockingly late into the 80s, the Italians kept cranking out Ator films (Ator the Fighting Eagle, Ator 2: L’invincibile Orion, Iron Warrior and The Quest for the Mighty Sword) until 1990.

The fact that the genre represented a fad intersecting with various, and very different, national film industries is something you can tell just by looking at the visuals. Hawk the Slayer (1980) beat Conan to theaters by almost two years, debuting at the Odeon Marble Arch in late 1980. Part of the delay with Conan the Barbarian was something that’ll be one of the themes of this essay: the violence. These films were, as I pointed out in Part 1, kind of stuck between several rocks and hard places: children’s story framing commingled with brutal violence, creature feature goo with literary references, homosocial bonhomie with grindhouse sadism. Conan cost almost 20 million dollars to make when all was said and done, so it had to figure out a way to thread that needle. Hawk the Slayer looks like it cost about 20 dollars, and generously half of that ended up on screen. So it didn’t have to worry about picking a lane — and didn’t. It got to be first of the pack. But at the cost of not really being part of the pack at all.

Hawk the Slayer was directed by Terry Marcel and starred John Terry and Jack Palance. It tells the story of Hawk who seeks to slay his brother Voltan in revenge for killing their father. Also Hawk’s wife — separate incidents. His dying dad bequeathes him a sword that gives him command over terrible special effects. The film has an abiding respect for the literary genre that inspired these films: In his quest for revenge, Hawk encounters new and old friends, assembles a party, consisting of a fighter, a giant, an elf, and a dwarf with a whip. Roll initiative! He and his group inevitably get captured and sprung by a sorceress. It’s arguably closer to your average D&D game, or to Swords against Deviltry than Milius’s version of Conan the Barbarian would be.

At the same time, the film’s visuals place it in a very different genealogy than the other films I’ll be discussing. The film gives you a good sense as to why some of the better efforts in this genre were largely filmed outside, and in in tax-favorable locales. Hundra (1983) and Hawk the Slayer have the exact opposite problem: Hundra was filmed in a Spanish national park and the outside photography is uniformly excellent — the characters (largely played by athletes) hop around striking rock formations, making the best use of the landscape. But while the locations look great, the set design seems to consist mostly of lighting fires and draping furs around the scenic outdoor locations.

Hawk, like Labyrinth, was mostly filmed on soundstages. But unlike the massive Elstree Studios for Labyrinth in the case of Hawk the Slayer that soundstage seems to have been the size of a Fiat Uno. The rest of it seems to have been filmed before some of the most scenic matte paintings in all of England, and in one single actual forest, which the filmmakers populated with random snakes and lizards to make it look a little less … Buckinghamshire. I’m not kidding, I felt like I started recognizing individual trees in scenes 20 minutes apart!

Hawk the Slayer is pure, glorious cheese, right down to a soundtrack that can only be described as “what if Swedish porno soundtrack, but more brass?” The film’s fantasy elements are fairly attenuated. Yes, there’s magic, yes, there are elves. But there are monasteries, knights, castles. This is more of a period piece; there appear to be Christian nuns here and the castles look medieval. Hawk is eons away from Conan’s Hyboria. That historicism, the reliance on interior shots and its squeamishness when it comes to showing actual blood or nudity position this as less a successor to the Western, but the Hammer horror genre. Producer/composer Harry Robertson was a Hammer veteran. There are some hat tips to the Western genre – director Terry Marcel is fond of close-ups during Mexican standoffs, even when his combatants are wielding claymores –, but overall these scenes feel stagey, talky and character driven. The set design, long a Hammer strong suit, does as much work as the special effects. These aren’t just old habits dying hard, of course. It’s a bet, albeit a different bet from Conan, Krull, Gor and Masters of the Universe on who the hell this is all for.

I don’t know enough about the British film industry to know exactly, but it feels like Hawk was made for a very different distribution stream than Conan, let alone something like Sorceress. It apparently had a theatrical release in the UK, but it debuted in the US on CBS. The lack of bare breasts and bloody swords must have been an asset in the transit to TV, even if that hadn’t been the producers’ original intent.

There was a garden of forking paths through the media streams of the early 1980s for this crop of films, one that Hawk navigates differently than the rest of the fantasy boomlet: go for TV rather than either multiplex or grindhouse. These various streams intersected with the various anxieties swirling around kids, media, sex and fantasy in the early 1980s. Hawk made its debut on CBS as a Late Movie on December 3, 1982. About 4 weeks later, on December 28, CBS ran the Tom-Hanks starring D&D panic movie Mazes and Monsters (which I discussed with Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About (unfortunately behind a paywall) here). This is what I pointed to last time: Again and again, the fantasy boom ran up against notions of appropriateness, in a double sense: what was the best way to find the kinds of people who’d want to pay money to see this? And what was the best way to make sure the wrong kind of people didn’t see it?

Perhaps it isn't altogether surprising that one old hand who delved deep into the mini-genre was Roger Corman. A man who — although only slightly older than the people who had fueled the Sword & Sorcery boom in literature and games (Corman was born in 1926, while Gygax, Moorcock and Zelazny were born in 1938, 1939 and 1937 respectively) — had been making exploitation cheapies since the early 1960s. So, just as in the spaghetti-western-to-sword-and-sorcery pipeline, Corman brought a pre-established sense of market, genre and production to the Sword & Sorcery genre. This in spite of the fact that the market, genre and modes of production were of course all shifting in the early 1980s.

If you’d never heard of the various minor entries into the genre I mentioned in the last installment, prepare to be confronted by a bunch of films you’re even less likely to have heard of. Corman decided to start cashing in on the Sword & Sorcery boom the moment the first Conan film hit theaters in 1982, first with the movie Sorceress (more on that one in a second). From the first, Corman wanted to make the film abroad — looking into Italy and Spain, i.e. the countries where the more upmarket entries into the genre had been or were being filmed. Then he considered the Philippines, Portugal and eventually settled on Mexico. Starting in 1983, Corman collaborated with an Argentinian film production company, with whom he produced a whole slew of Sword & Sorcery pictures — all shot in Buenos Aires using mostly Argentinian crews and a few American actors. Among them: Deathstalker (1983) and its sequel Deathstalker II (1987), The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984), Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985), Barbarian Queen (1985) and its sequel Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back (The Empress is apparently also not afraid of a lawsuit) (1992), Amazons (1986) and Stormquest (1987). Corman and his Argentinian director/producing partner Héctor Olivera stuck with the genre longer than Hollywood proper did.

Sorceress, however, wasn’t directed by a Latin American director slumming it to get their own films made. It was directed by Jack Hill (b. 1933), an exploitation auteur who had cut his teeth on horror films in the 1960s and then had directed several influential Blaxploitation films, including Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Hill took his name off of Sorceress, which is now credited to his alias Brian Stuart. So where the films in the Conan mould come out of the spaghetti western tradition, Sorceress draws on the talent pool and sensibilities of 1970s exploitation film.

This has ramifications for the gender politics of these films: the Sword & Sorcery films that drew on the spaghetti western were adapting a formula that didn’t really leave much space for women, and part of how these films didn’t seem to know what to do with women, and didn’t seem to know whom to ogle, had to do with that. Corman, unfortunately, had a very clear sense of what to do with women and none of it was good.

His fantasy pictures essentially threw in a bunch of sexploitation tropes: the Conan-films also leered and ogled, the Conan-films were also violent. But there was something unpracticed, something maladroit in their view of gender, sex and the body. The most spectacular body in Conan is of course Schwarzenegger’s; and the bodybuilding craze had a tendency to transform traditional gender presentation. Conan was not an everyman, and the women in Conan were more jacked and androgynous than women on screen generally tended to be in 1983. Corman — in keeping with the values of sexploitation cinema, which professed to be all about transgression, but actually constantly reasserted conservative gender roles — did things differently. In his films women were pinups, flattering a male gaze.

Watching Corman settle into his accustomed perviness, a sexploitation gaze honed on generations of nudies, nudie-cuties, roughies, kinkies and ghoulies (all real genres; don’t look them up), makes you realize that there’s something comparatively untethered and free-floating about the eroticism of the more famous Hollywood films like Conan the Barbarian. It’s clear that beefcake aesthetics aren’t exactly anti-patriarchal, but precisely because swoleness in those movies was available to men and women, being absolutely jacked tended to mess with gender conventions at the same time as it seemed to confirm them.

More importantly, with people like Schwarzenegger, you get male stars that themselves are sort of pin-ups. Skimpily-clad, fully objectified, told not to open their mouths but just smile and look good. Conan is a (certain) male wish fulfillment fantasy, of course, but on a visual level masculinity is trying to come to terms with its own objectification. Not that there was resistance to it: men were just new to being presented so obviously and lasciviously for ogling. The generation of male stars that starred in the Sword & Sorcery flicks were the ones who had to figure out how to be looked at pornographically while starring in a Hollywood film. An entire essay could be written about Sean Connery, paragon of tuxedoed, speedoed mid-century sex appeal, dressing up as whatever the hell this is in Zardoz (1974). It’s not that Connery was new to being objectified on-screen. But with this outfit, you realize there’s a measurelessness to the gaze it attracts, one that accentuates the measuredness of earlier objectification.

I think in a strange way the bigger productions, perhaps precisely because they had to sublimate harder to attain an acceptable MPAA rating, ended up with the murkier and more interesting gender politics. They weren’t allowed to panic. Corman’s films are deeply traditional in their way: women are to be looked at and to have their tops pulled down at least twice every fifteen minutes. They are to have boobs and they are to be naive and they are to crave sex.

When male nudity does happen in Sorceress, there’s inevitably a note of panic to it. Consider a scene where a hunky thief/secret prince is tied buck-naked to a pole. His bare ass is mid-frame in a way that you really don’t tend to see in movies from 1982, unless they play on a different part of 42nd Street. But here’s the thing, the scene is played for some humor and tons of panic. The character is sliding down the greased pole (hah), towards a sharpened wooden spike (hah!) that is supposed to skewer him … somewhere (hah!!!). Get it? In case you don’t get it, the thief/prince tells the bad guy: “You don't have to stick it to me!” I guess that’s the level of subtlety you need to make yourself heard over all the rustling of tissue paper. In a Corman production, being naked on screen means being subject to penetration, by the gaze and/or by a wooden spike — Corman’s women accommodate themselves to that gaze, his men panic at the prospect. And here’s the thing: that’s not true for Conan and the other less exploitation-themed Sword & Sorcery films. Those films are equal opportunity oglers, and its characters — many played by non-professional actors, who’re all seasoned vets of professions where they’re on display to the crassest of gazes — all have a certain unselfconsciousness about being ogled.

On the one hand, the amount of Dungeons & Dragons in Corman’s first foray into the genre is high. Someone involved in the production clearly loved the Sword & Sorcery genre. While a lot of later knock-offs seem to take only a glancing interest in the literature that was ostensibly informing this boomlet, and mostly seem to have rewatched Conan the Barbarian a bunch, Sorceress gets a lot of things quite right: a party assembles and has to resolve a quest two of them have a personal stake it. There’s a fighter-type, a rogue-type, and two amazon-types. It even has a real dungeon crawl: a viking warrior dude and a skimpily attired blonde navigating some tunnels where they get attacked by zombies.

Other parts of the production are comparatively careless. Sorceress tells the story of — you guessed it — not a sorceress. I have no idea who the sorceress is supposed to be. There’s a henchwoman to the main sorcerer, who might be a witch of some kind? The main bad guy doesn’t seem to be a sorceress either. And the twin protagonists (played by twins Leigh Harris and Lynette Harris) are not only not sorceresses, they spend the entire film very much not doing sorcery, but getting ensorceled. Just constantly ensorceled.

So what’s this thing about? The evil sorcerer Traigon has promised some demonic/divine entity (there are a lot of proper names, I’m not even sure the screenplay kept them straight so I won’t try to) his firstborn. But the mother of his firstborn has other ideas and runs away. She delivers twins and refuses to tell him which is the firstborn. It feels like, if you were a psychotic madman bent on world domination, there would be a workaround for this difficulty, but it does not seem to occur to Traigon. The twins’ mother banishes the evil wizard for 20 years, then dies, leaving the newborns in the care of a farmer. 20 years later, Traigon returns and starts looking for his firstborn to finally complete the sacrifice. In any event, they have grown up into two ass-kicking and extremely bare-chested young women who can’t act. They have some sort of special power which manifests in them lighting up in blue in an effect I can only describe as retina searing.

Since Traigon’s minions will be looking for two girl children, the twins have been raised as boys. You might think this would lead the movie into some interesting ideas about gender. You’d be wrong. It’s mostly an excuse for men to stare in disbelief at the twins’ extremely ample breasts when they’re revealed, as they frequently are. And it’s an excuse to have the twins be absolutely uninitiated into sex — a motif from sex comedies, although unintentionally reminiscent of Siegfried’s predicament in Richard Wagner’s Siegfried.

Watching Sorceress you can see why Corman wanted to make films down south. For how cheap this movie must have been to make, it boasts some truly cool sets and large crowd scenes (this one was shot in Mexico, but it’s perhaps not an accident that Corman moved his future productions to Argentina, a country that had violently destroyed its unions just a decade prior). There’s a real panther and some immensely fake looking persons in monkey suits — like an Ewok you bought at Spirit of Halloween and left in the wash too long. There’s a horny satyr-type goat man, a part, I found out, “written for Sid Haig.” Which is amazing, as the part is absolutely wordless and, more importantly, sucks. The cape throwing of various mages, warriors and booby villainesses is truly next level, though.

Everything else is just a huge fucking mess. The fight choreography is so manic and chintzy you can practically see the styrofoam bend and hear rubber bonk against rubber. The visual effects look like Robert Rauschenberg paintings. In the final battle, all the bad guys die making the exact same sound, while two animatronic deities hover in the sky looking like they’re holding in farts. The soundtrack is simply the soundtrack from Corman’s Star Wars ripoff Battle Beyond the Stars (1981) looped and edited slightly. (Poor James Horner had signed a contract he really shouldn’t have, and Corman used the soundtrack in like a dozen pictures. Joke was really on him, as Horner went on the recycle his musical ideas from Battle for like a dozen other films himself.)

The acting is incredibly wooden and the editing baffling. There's a scene where an old wizard decides to join those he has failed to protect by walking straight into a fire. You can hear the crackling of the fire as his body presumably burns up. Everyone shields their eyes for like half a second and then the the viking warrior who’s just sort of ambled into the scene moves on to business: "Now lads," he says turning to the girls, "lay aside your grief" — it has been about 8 seconds! — "and avenge these wrongs!" King in the North/Pope of Mope Jon Snow could learn a thing or two from this speedrun through the Kubler-Ross stages.

So there’s a lot to love slash hoot at here. Then there’s the gender politics. Hoo boy. There’s lots of nudity and women in sexy costumes, of course, especially when it comes to women extras who look like they’re locals and being paid hardly anything for their trouble. There’s a thin empowerment message overlaid with optics that undercut female agency at every point. And there’s the ever-present threat, and frequently enough, the reality of sexual violence. Sexual violence is both the thing moving the plot along, and the dusting the filmmakers sprinkle over a scene when they don’t think it lands. It somehow manages to be the most and least essential thing in Sorceress at the same time.

It’s stomach turning, for sure. But there’s also something interesting about it to me: I’m trying to think where one would have encountered this movie in 1982. As in: I think the film’s nastiness (which later Corman productions would easily exceed) masks a profound confusion as to who the hell this is supposed to be for. Men, sure, but what age? What’s true of the man this is intended for? I don’t think Corman by and large made films for the home video market yet, but this strikes me as a bit too juvenile as drive-in bait. Was the target demographic seventeen year-old boys who are somehow intrepid enough to sneak into a grindhouse theater on 42nd Street, but who then decided against straight up porn in favor of this stuff?

As mentioned, 1983's Deathstalker was the start of a series of Corman ventures in Argentina. Corman drafted a whole Stefon-bit’s worth of not-really-actors into starring in them. These films had everything: playmates, professional athletes, a judo master from Sweden. Most of those were Sword & Sorcery films, and their gender politics made Sorceress look like Jeanne Dielman. James Sbardellati, who directed Deathstalker, had shot the upsetting and graphic rape scenes Corman had cut into Humanoids from the Deep against that film’s director's wishes, and without the knowledge of the cast and crew. I’ll have a few things to say about the rest of the Corman-films, but before I say anything more, I’ll say: please don’t watch these. The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) stars Keith Carradine in what can only be described as one of several career nadirs. The Barbarian Queen (1985) starred Lana Clarkson who had had a small role in Deathstalker. Corman claimed that it was “his Xena, the Warrior Princess”, which takes chutzpah if nothing else. Amazons (1986) seems to be that rarest of birds: a Black-led sword & sorcery flick. It's a magicked-up version of the story of the warrior women of Dahomey — and naturally I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere.

You can’t really open a box labeled “80s schlock” without at least one Golan-Globus production popping out. Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus bought the nearly bankrupt Cannon Films in 1978, and over the next ten years cranked out an incredible number of movies in almost every conceivable genre. They are today most fondly remembered for right-wing coded actioners like Death Wish, barely-there sex comedies like Hot Resort (1985), razzie-bait fiascos like The Apple (1980), diminishing-returns sequels like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) and trend-chasing cash-ins like Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). But Golan and Globus were capable of bringing home literary adaptation, arthouse fare, or the occasional multiplex success. My sense is that their success essentially dovetailed the rise of the video store market: films like Missing in Action no longer needed to figure out regional markets in which to release for some quick cash; they found the freaks that would pay money for this shit at the local Blockbuster.

In the last installment I pointed out that, unlike the nerd-bait wave of the 2010s and 2020s, the films of the Sword & Sorcery craze were not, by and large, what we today call “established IP”. Sure, it all looked a little like Robert E. Howard, but clearly there was no sense among producers that there was much advantage in having a recognizable hero’s name grace the marquee. I don’t know what that means, and can think of three possible explanations: (1) it may be that unlike, say, comic books, Sword & Sorcery literature just didn’t have as big an audience that would follow the characters into a theater; (2) it may be that Sword & Sorcery literature did have an audience but that audience wasn’t legible to movie studios; (3) it may be (and I think this is most likely the explanation) that Sword & Sorcery literature just didn’t have a fanbase that could be easily identified and marketed towards. Yes, it was juvenile in its basic orientation, but most of the classic texts were by then decades-old, more fondly remembered by early-80s dads than their teenage kids. This probably meant that marketing was more about visuals and vibes than “hey, you’ve heard of this” — because, well, you couldn’t count on your target audience having heard of this.

The one big exception is Golan & Globus. Because Cannon Pictures actually went for established properties. They were the ones who adapted Masters of the Universe into a movie that managed to bomb in the midst of He-Man Mania; they adapted H. Ryder Haggard’s Alan Quartermain stories in King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and its sequel. So when it came to cashing in on the fantasy boom, they likewise turned to an established property to option. In the end, though, their solution was much the same as Corman’s. They resolved the tension in pitch, tone and target demographic in favor of more violence, more sex, more kink. At least in principle. In a decade where one could have adapted Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books, or Michael Moorcock’s anti-imperialist Elric-novels, Golan and Globus picked the Gor novels.

What are the Gor-novels, you ask? The Chronicles of Counter-Earth are the magnum opus of John Norman (a pseudonym for the now-retired philosophy professor John Frederick Lange), which has spanned over 6 decades and dozens of novels (the first novel, Tarnsman of Gor appeared in 1966, the most recent, Treasure of Gor came out last year). The novels feature a tremendous amount of women in chains, women being whipped, women being enslaved and realizing they’re sort of into it. Lange/Norman even wrote an advice book of scenarios for those wanting to bring this sort of roleplay into their relationships — 1974’s Imaginative Sex.

Gor (1987) was aimed at the US market, but was, like most of its competitors, filmed far away where unions were weak and the human rights record resembled the planet of Gor. In this case, both Gor and its sequel Outlaw of Gor (1988) were filmed in South Africa. And before you start wondering “hey, was apartheid over by 1987 and 1988”, let me save you the googling. No, no it was not. The film starts — as do the books, sort of — with a scene literally dozens of viewers will find recognizable. Professor Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) makes a pass at his teaching assistant and she rebuffs him. In his frustration, he plays with a magical ring, in a sequence of events I beg you not to read too much into, which transports him to another planet — Gor — populated by scantily clad women and the evil sorcerers who capture and bondage them. Before long, Tarl is transformed into a sweaty, muscle-bound 80s Sword & Sorcery cover beefcake and has to locate the fabled [checks notes] who cares from [checks notes again] overpaid thespian who was on set for like two days.

The thing about Golan and Globus is: they were masters of overpromising and underdelivering. They constantly created massive expectations, and often genuine industry buzz, for films that hilariously held back on the thing fans were ostensibly clamoring for. Whatever the opposite of fan service is, G&G were the Paganinis of it. Masters of the Universe was promised as the Star Wars of the 80s (which, to be fair, they’d promised multiple times before), but instead of taking fans to Eternia, most of the film takes place in Southern California in the mid 1980s. Gor is no different: presumably people came to this movie expecting the S&M trappings of the Norman novels, if they came at all. But it’s low on nudity, low on violence, low even on bondage. You get the feeling, as with many of the Goland and Globus production, that this is essentially a poster (or more likely a video slip cover) with barely a film behind it. Not surprisingly, this one ended up teeing up a theatrical release, but then became a direct-to-video affair. Its fortunes improved slightly when the sequel became the subject of a classic MST3K episode in the late 90s. But if being the subject of a classic MST3K episode in the 90s improves them, your fortunes weren’t particularly great to begin with.

Have you seen Conan the Barbarian? So has Matt Cimber, because he does a 1:1 retread of the basic set-up of the first Conan movie in the first 10 minutes of his 1983 film Hundra. Hundra (Laurene Landon) is a warrior, member of an all-female tribe of warriors, whose village gets wiped out by invaders sent by an evil sorcerer. If that sounds familiar that’s because it’s basically what happens in Conan, minus the amazon aspect. The soundtrack – by none other than Ennio Morricone – even leans on a similar pastiche of the “Dies Irae” from the Verdi Requiem as does Basil Poledouris for Conan.

But the gender swap does of course matter: Hundra presents itself as a feminist fable a la Wonder Woman. And unlike Corman’s execrable Barbarian Queen, Hundra commits to its own bit. Hundra is unusual within her tribe for spurning the advances of men (the others say they “use” men “through their use of us”). The whole movie is then getting this virginal warrior queen laid. Hundra tells an oracle: “No man will ever penetrate my body with sword or his self.”

So the movie is a strange hybrid: There’s exploitation cinema, but also some truly gorgeous external locations. The same way Conan used Alméria to great effect, Hundra shows off the beauty of … the exact same place. In fact, there are parts of the film that have the look of a Spaghetti Western, except with swords and a lot fewer pants. And the basic conceit — overly self-possessed woman must somehow open herself up to men — seems to derive more from a sex comedy than any of the usual inspirations for these types of films. She even has a gaggle of lady friends (but no gay-coded hairdresser, alas) to tell her what men really want!

The movie is all about gender and sexuality, and about what they’re good for. It’s all about a girlboss kicking ass, but its ultimate message is a theodicy of gender roles. As the priestess Chrysula tells Hundra: “Without a man to plant inside us, we have nothing to cultivate. We have use of men, through their use of us.” You can practically feel the anti-feminist anxieties swirling through this, in the end, pretty feminist, film. Some of these are about family, about sex, about women taking men’s jobs, such as ass-kicking barbarian.

But some of those anxieties are far more basic: Like many movies of the Sword & Sorcery wave, it’s about steroids and how they can blur and complicate the gendered body. Hundra is very interested in what is a normed and normal body — many of the bad guys (and they are guys) do masculinity wrong: there’s a sexual masochist that gets his due, there’s a guy who thinks he can buy a mate. But there are also tons of queercoded dudes among the film’s rogues’ gallery of shitty men. So Hundra’s defiance of gender stereotypes in some way straightjackets masculinity all the more tightly. But Hundra herself is of course what happens when peak gender performance makes the gendered body unavailable sexually. It also makes her an outlier in the film’s world. Hundra is a free woman in a world in which few women seem to know how to be free. When she roughs up the sexual sadist, his concubines stand around not knowing what to do. “Go, you’re free,” she tells them after she’s done with him. They briefly scatter, only to return to his side

Even Hundra — just before you rush to check it out — has, by 2025 standards, truly shocking amounts of violence against women. Which is somewhat offset by the fact that Hundra of course is just nonstop brutalizing dudes. This would also be true for the movie that Hundra anticipates, 1985’s unofficial Conan-sequel Red Sonja. This is something the other films I watched for this do a lot less of. Their heart isn’t in the violence women mete out. It’s in the violence that they’re subject to.

I gotta be honest that this part of the essay was neither fun to research nor write exactly. Roger Corman went all in on Sword & Sorcery in the early 1980s, and he had a very specific m.o. Part of this was filming outside the US, part of it was reusing the same James Horner-soundtrack. But part of it was also just an astonishing degree of misogyny and violence against women. I really can't recommend any of these films, even when they have fun goofy moments. I don’t want to dwell on this too much, but I do think there’s a particular motif that recurs in many of these films that’s worth thinking through in detail: the original trauma.

An amazing number of the 80s Sword & Sorcery films start with a brutal assault on the hero’s edenic village, which will then propel the hero on their epic quest for revenge. It happens to some of the male heroes, and to almost all the female ones. Besides Conan and Hundra, it’s how Beastmaster opens, it’s how Roger Corman’s Barbarian Queen begins. Some other entries have it after their opening (Gor, for instance). Sometimes it’s just a few burning buildings and some screaming women. But as the riffs on the motif percolated into the grindhouse, the sequence seemed to get more sleazy with each iteration, right down to the explicit sexual violence. Red Sonja, the unofficial 1985 Conan sequel, wound up giving Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonja of Rogatino the explicit mission of avenging her own rape.

There are a couple of things worth pointing out here: apart from the offensiveness, the reflexive turn to sexual objectification undercuts these films’ ostensible you-go-girl messages. These films often feature, or even center, warrior women who easily best the men — the tagline for The Barbarian Queen was “No man can possess her. No man can defeat her.” But at least in the Corman films, the plot seems to persistently forget that these women are badasses, or remember only once they’ve been stripped naked, humiliated, and brutalized. The same women who we’ve seen stab a dude through the neck in one sequence scream at seeing a severed head in the next. There’s an absurd sequence in The Barbarian Queen, where Queen Amethea (Lana Clarkson) defeats a would-be rapist with the strength of her pelvic muscles. These women win in victimization, and they can’t win without also being victimized. These films combine threadbare messages of women’s empowerment with a vicious, reactionary version of the Hollywood gaze.

And it’s hard to escape the suspicion that it isn’t just the gaze that is exploitative. Dawn Dunlap who plays Queen Amethea’s younger sister made her debut in a film called Laura, L’ombres de l’été directed by soft-focus pornographer David Hamilton. She was 15. She did her first Corman film when she was 17. According to the helpful commenters on IMDB (🤮🤮🤮), she has nude scenes in both films. The Barbarian Queen was her final role before leaving the industry altogether. As for her co-star, Lana Clarkson made a bunch more movies with Roger Corman, but is mostly remembered today for her murder by producer Phil Spector. I don’t want to speak for these actresses, but their resumés post-Corman read as though they didn’t experience much in the way of the threadbare empowerment messages in and through these films, so much as the constant degradation.

At the same time, I also want to point to another valence to the village attack sequences. What makes The Beastmaster interesting is that it’s drawing on a novel in which the main character is Native American, but Beastmaster the movie moves that story to “the Kingdom of Aruk”. These are deliberately fanciful and non-allegorical movies, but the resonances with recent US overseas adventures must have been obvious to early-80s audiences, given they’d seen the real images less than ten years prior. The good guys in these movies are native coded, the violence against them is the violence of the invader.

The film John Milius wrote immediately before writing and directing Conan the Barbarian was Apocalypse Now. Another movie, that is, in which an idyllic village with swaying palm trees gets destroyed by an invading army — in this case the 9th Cavalry Regiment of Colonel Kilgore, “tear-assing their way through ‘Nam looking for the shit”. That sequence too had, as Jean Baudrillard pointed out back in the 80s, a funny way of castigating America for its violence while also restaging that violence — unleashing the full power of Hollywood explosives on a fake Vietnamese village in a former American colony. The film exorcises the “hell of Vietnam” by “having forests and Phillipine villages napalmed” to retrace it. “One revisits everything through cinema and one begins again: the Molochian joy of filming, the sacrificial joy of so many millions spent, of such a holocaust of means, of so many misadventures,” Baudrillard writes. “In this sense, his film is really the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis.”

Apocalypse Now is a movie torn between imagining Americans as perpetrators and victims, of imagining US power as mad and as kind of awesome. I think the fantasy film trope of the destroyed village does the same thing: it’s one of those imperial boomerangs that can seem to indict the hegemon, but that can then be appropriated by the hegemon to imagine itself as the underdog. Think about the fact that the film’s female protagonist inevitably goes out and slays everyone — and the viewer switches from being accessory to her trauma to being spectator of her violent revenge. This makes her into an avatar of what Roy Scranton has called “trauma heroism” — a way to discharge “national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma for the victim of violence, the enemy.”

But of course, even in their heroism the films disidentify from these women. They leer at them, laugh at them, set them up to fail and be humiliated. In this they’re different from Scranton’s trauma heroes — as Clover noted with regard to the Final Girl, they’re only provisionally the hero. The Final Girl can look like a feminist figure, but she’s actually also an avatar and product of backlash. I think there’s something similar going on with these girlbosses of Sword & Sorcery. These ass-kickers are resignatory images of male hyperpower. The men who bring them to the screen (whether it’s Corman, Golan/Globus, Milius or Richard Fleischer, director of Red Sonja) feel, on whatever level of awareness, the way Baudrillard thinks Francis Ford Coppola (and Milius) feel about Vietnam: they think the battle is lost, so they simulate it one last time on a soundstage or in some far-flung outdoor set. They call it pre-historic, but with a note of regret. This isn’t quite the cinema that Susan Faludi would identify in 1991 as backlash cinema — the one where men are beset by cruel, shrewish feminists who Want It All™️. But it’s one step before that: the cinema of barely getting away with it one last time.

Today I want to look at a different genre, though. Not the ones trying to desperately put daylight between themselves and the authoritarian crackdown on the universities. But those seeking to join it, all without giving up their earlier rhetorical strategies or tics, because updating shit like that is work. I am thinking here of a piece by a huge booster of the “wokeness”-panic, published by the grand marshall of the “cancel culture”-panic, signed by a who’s-who of the right wing assault on higher ed. The “Manhattan Statement on Higher Education” authored by Chris Rufo and signed by exactly the people you’d expect.

The piece appeared — perhaps not insignificantly — on Bari Weiss’s Substack The Free Press. On the one hand, it’s more of the same, on the other hand, it’s clear that some people have left behind their pose of anti-woke liberalism for something far more overtly authoritarian. Sure, the fact that Chris Rufo thinks universities “have contributed to a new kind of tyranny”, or that Bishop Robert Barron or paleocon Victor Davis Hanson think that universities have “in effect, declared war on millions of Americans who simply want to live, work, worship, and raise families in peace”, isn’t that surprising. Jordan Peterson, Mark Bauerlein and David Rieff have long been explicitly conservative critics of US universities.

But in the case of some others — Niall Ferguson, for instance — adding their name to this manifesto suggests that these people are grappling with the new situation by, to use a phrase they’d hate, leaning in. People like Peter Boghossian, Christina Hoff-Sommers, Roger Kimball, Eric Kaufman (who — just by the way — doesn’t even go here), Dorian Abbot and Gad Sad have had long careers (almost forty years in the case of Kimball) claiming to be defending the liberal, pluralistic university against the totalitarian onslaught of the PC/CC/woke Left. In the case of Ayan Hirsi Ali, that was initially her entire pitch: defending Western secularism against some sort of islamoleftism. Rufo’s post frames the critique as what it has long been: conservative.

This claim to liberalism was always threadbare — whenever they attacked anyone in higher ed, it was the left; whenever they had to name a supposedly imperiled position in academia, it was a policy preference of the right. But the fig leaf was still integral to their whole shtick. It does seem interesting that these deeply opportunistic members of the anti-woke grift machine are now aligning themselves openly with fascism. My suspicion is that what this indicates is that they see their role changing: their critiques of campus politics, such as they were, long presumed that the institution would not change much, and that they’d be able to repeat the same old cavils and disseminate the same disinfo every 5 years in a book and make some money off of it. They seem to now be betting that the assault on higher ed will really transform the university. So I think it’s worth looking through the document in some detail, because it might well tell us where these people are going, and where they see the institution going.

The other reason it’s worth looking at is the exact opposite one: it’s astonishing how little these people feel like they need to adjust their talking points of the last 40 years, their supposedly full-throated defense of “classical liberal” values, to accommodate themselves to full-out authoritarian state control of educational institutions. I think it underlines something I pointed out in my book: for forty years these people have warned in apocalyptic terms about the imminent far left takeover of the universities, have cited contorted statistics and the same few out-of-context anecdotes to support those warnings. And very rarely, if ever, were they asked a very simple follow-up: what do you propose to do about this? The reason they wouldn’t say, or the reason that when they did say it was such absurdly milquetoast shit that it wouldn’t possibly remedy the problem as described, is that their remedies were always, well, this. What Trump, Rufo, DeSantis, McMahon, Miller, Thiel, Kennedy, etc. are pursuing. What is, we can now safely say, the official education policy of the ruling party of the United States.

So let’s look at this thing — and Chris Rufo’s framing of it — more closely. It’s an interesting bridge document in that it combines some old conservative cavils with an implicit defense of Trump’s crackdown on free speech and academic freedom. The actual demands of the “Manhattan Statement” are cast as deliberately anodyne, the kind of shit that polls well, but that presumes a bunch of facts that are not actually given. They build on the fantasy version of tHe CAmPUs conservatives have managed to establish in the American popular imagination. Some examples:

• “The universities must advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.” First off, we already have tons of that. None of the authors of this statement went through it, but that’s not really a shocker — rigorous standards are for libs, not for conservatives. More importantly, what would this look like? Conservatives routinely describe research aimed at discovering the truth “ideological”, when they don’t like the truths it discovers.

• “The universities must cease their direct participation in social and political activism; the proper vehicle for criticism is through the individual scholar and student, not the university as a corporate body.” The idea that our universities as institutions — hedge funds with large law firms advising their every move and pronouncement — somehow engage in political activism is risible. What we do get are members of university faculty, staff or student bodies saying stuff conservatives don’t like. Which, it turns out, these people don’t like either, given how many of these folks they’re trying to get fired or deported. Oh, is “the proper vehicle for criticism … through the individual scholar or student”? I guess someone forgot to tell the woman who published your piece, because she tried to get professors fired for saying stuff she didn’t like (also being Muslim).

• “The universities must uphold the highest standard of civil discourse, with swift and significant penalties, including suspension and expulsion, for anyone who would disrupt speakers, vandalize property, occupy buildings, call for violence, or interrupt the operations of the university.” This one isn’t even worth spending time on, because the moment there’s a noose outside of a Black fraternity, or a conservative student yells “die of AIDS, f*ggot” outside of an instructor’s windows, they’ll think the university is faaar too quick to punish student speech. Think I’m making that up? The student in question was Keith Rabois, and Peter Thiel and David Sacks wrote an entire book about why he should get to say that shit.

If you’ve read any of my work, you’ve heard me talk about arguments like this, and why they’re not nearly as neutral as they pretend. But I’m actually interested in something else here: Rufo starts with a hat-tip to the kind of phony even-handedness these people almost compulsively traffic in. “The administration’s supporters have applauded the president’s decision to strip billions of dollars in funding from the Ivy League, while critics have warned that such actions are an overreach and will have a negative impact on the hard sciences.” On the one hand, this is deliberately obtuse. These people have made perfectly clear where they stand. But note also that while their demands are meant to sound exceedingly reasonable, they also echo almost verbatim the Trump administration's purported reasons for attacking the universities. If you read the document from its supposed description of the problems, you get the vibe of a reactionary centrist document. When you read it from the prescriptions backwards, you get a straight-up endorsement of Trump’s war on science.

But the document doesn’t quite come out and say that either. Who could possibly say whether stripping billions from cancer research because someone in the grant used the word “gender” is good policy, or even legal? Whether all this shredding academic freedom might perhaps be schmutzing up our first amendment fetishism? Our anti-woke pundits don’t want to get tripped up in such specifics, because such specifics are terrible. So they do what they always do when the evidence for their claims isn’t there: they paint an abstract picture of a Big Mood.

“Beneath the dueling headlines, however, there appears to be an uneasy, if often unstated, agreement: Something is deeply wrong with academia, and no one is quite sure what to do about it.”

You know the drill: You were only able to find eight examples of attempted disinvitations for the year? Easy, just cite three and then talk about the “climate of fear” these must be indicative of. Is the only example of someone on a campus going rhetorically overboard the associate vice-dean of student affairs who got fired immediately after they opened their mouth? Well, still, doesn’t their saying it tell you all you need to know about the vibe on campus? Still, it’s worth dwelling on what exactly this document is doing: it seems to want to claim the very longevity of disingenuous claims about higher education in the US coming from the right attests to the fact that they are now somehow correct. And it tries to restate for the Trump age the core principle of conservative attacks on academia: that it is insufficiently like the country, doesn’t react correctly or quickly enough to the country. But also that when it comes to things they don’t like (Black Lives Matter or COVID, for instance), the university has been too quick to react to the country it finds itself in.

“The American people have been enormously generous to our universities. It is time for the universities to honor their end of the bargain. […] Its deepest purpose is to remind the public that there is a compact between the citizen and the university, and that we all have a common interest in seeing the universities succeed.”

As the authors of the Statement duly note, theirs is an old complaint, first popularized by William F. Buckley in God and Man at Yale: the universities are too different from the country in which they find themselves. Buckley, recall, charged in 1951 that the universities were taking the money of individualist capitalist Christians and using it to turn their sons into godless homo communists. This is essentially also the criticism of the “Manhattan Statement”: the American people are not woke, America being entirely peopled by anti-woke pundits with decades-old Ph.D.s, and the universities are taking their money to turn America’s kids woke. But that’s the thing with long-running cavils: they are long-running. And this cavil has been running during a period of absolute dominance in US higher education. This is the central contradiction in this document: either higher ed has fallen away from its purpose and is less successful because of it, but if so, that’s a fairly recent development, and earlier versions of the critique were wrong. Or conservatives (as distinct from Republicans, by the way) have simply always had a problem with higher education, and this is yet another restatement of it.

Because they are trying to create a sense of crisis, the authors of the Statement imply that somehow universities are more out of touch than they were then, and more dependent on the government dole (“enormously generous”). That’s where their fixation on elite schools transcends distortion and becomes straight-up disinformation. As a matter of fact, the American people are significantly less generous with their universities than they were 20, 30 or 50 years ago. Individual Americans of course have had to make up the difference with enormously onerous student fees and tuition. But in terms of public support of the universities, the numbers are clear: the reason tuition is so high, the reason universities are so dependent on big money donors, the reason grants from NSF and NIH can have the impact they have, is that universities are getting less from the state than they were forty years ago.

Are colleges becoming more elitist, and do fewer Americans enroll in them. No: when Buckley was writing, about 5 % of Americans had attended some kind of college. By 1990 that number was 21%, by 2020 it stood at 37%. This development is not without problems, but in general it is absolutely true that college students today on the whole reflect a broader swath of the American populace. And let’s be clear: part of the right’s increasing emotional and fiscal disinvestment from higher education likely has something to do with that fact. Recall that these are the people who paved over public pools rather than integrate them. They are fine with public assistance, so long as they don’t suspect that public assistance might also benefit people they deem their inferiors.

Whatever the case, there is a deep paradox at work in conservative criticisms of higher education: due to the retrenchment of public financial support for universities, due to the takeover of university boards of trustees by conservative donors out of private industry, and the takeover of boards of regents/governors by appointees from red state governors, a lot of universities have become more and more like the kind of thing conservatives pretend to love: a private business. What has emerged is something that — to the chagrin of lefties like me — looks very much like a marketplace, where universities compete for just about everything. This is something conservatives understand. We know that because their attempts to establish their own institutions of higher learning have been an abject failure: PragerU may make money, but not sure anyone’s gonna expect groundbreaking research out of it anytime soon. Hillsdale College has managed to become a YouTube channel with an associated campus. And Bari Weiss’s fake university offers “forbidden” courses so forbidden you could literally enroll at any college in the US and take a version of them.

But that’s the thing with our new conservatives: they go on about competition, but they do not, in fact, like to compete. “Competition is for losers”, Peter Thiel was fond of saying in the course he got to teach at Stanford. And that’s exactly been their plan for higher ed all along. None of their fly-by-night segregation academies, or their wingnut welfare programs for scholars of skull measuring and age of consent laws have ever been able to dim the luster of hated institutions like Harvard or Yale. Or, for that matter, any state university in the country. But their plan has always been a slightly different one, one in which the takeover of the university was more of a bonus and less the main goal.

I sometimes think people make too much of the Powell-memo, a document from 1971, in which Lewis Powell made the case that private business and businessmen needed to start seeing right-wing think tanks and lobbying orgs in order to win back the country from communism (read: New Deal Democrats) — including at the universities. I think its importance as a kind of secret plan is vastly overstated. But it is super important in intuiting the basic outlines of a future grift economy. This wasn’t a way so much to get Americans to switch their allegiance away from science and expertise, with all their well-known liberal bias. But it was a way of getting rich off some Texas oil heir. Around the time of the Powell-memo, the conservative project increasingly became:

1. Astroturf fake institutions, fake science, fake journals.

2. Have those crank out copy or events that flatter rich conservative weirdos.

3. Fleece said rich conservative weirdos.

What the 21st century has added to this playbook is a fourth step — but notice how that fourth step isn’t actually necessary for the grift. Almost all the people who signed the “Manhattan Statement” are products of this machine: they’re fellows at right wing think tanks, their research is funded by right wing foundations, they make their money substacking about how wokesters are trying to suppress their work. But Rufo embodies the next step. He’s got a sinecure at the Manhattan Institute, but he aims higher. Step four is:

4. Hope for the conservative weirdos to take over the government so your fake institutions can take over the market.

This has now happened, and it’s paying dividends already. PragerU content is replacing NPR content in America’s classrooms. The demise of the Department of Education will make it easier to launch and fund weird quasi-universities. And an assault on the accrediting bodies seems only a matter of time.

So this is what they want. But it’s fascinating to look at their old arguments and see how they’re being marshaled towards these new (or newly acknowledged) ends.

“Conservatives have long made the argument that academia has been corrupted. And since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the Hamas terror campaign of 2023, an increasing number of centrists and liberals have joined the chorus, recognizing that many once-great universities had been captured by destructive ideologies and are no longer truth-seeking institutions.”

What I’d like to do in the final section of my essay, just for a moment, to pretend that there’s merit to a blanket assertion like “academia has been corrupted”. Let’s forget for a moment that “academia” in this sentence consists of over 5,000 institutions that are all quite different from one another right down to their structure, org chart, financing model, intellectual mission, etc. etc. Let’s say it happened. “Academia” got “corrupted”. How would that happen? How would “once-great universities” be “captured by destructive ideologies”?

The obvious rejoinder here is that the periods of greatness that Rufo’s “once-great” is meant to hearken back to where periods when conservatives made those exact same complaints about the universities. The universities where the atom was split? Became targets of McCarthyism and Red Scares. The universities where the modern social sciences and humanities were established? Were in Reagan’s crosshairs. The universities where the ground was laid for modern information technology? Bastions of “political correctness” that had “lost their way”, according to some of the same people signing the “Manhattan Statement”. So the greatness of these institutions is always in the rearview mirror, no matter the year. My private suspicion is that every reader of such a line is supposed to imagine the year they graduated as the high watermark of US higher education, and the one professor whose class they hated as the beginning creep of the “corruption”.

While we’re at it, let’s be clear: the university Buckley was fondly looking back to in 1951 — insofar as it existed at all — was ultimately a comparatively mediocre one. It was open to very few, its standards were astonishingly lax, people complained about the unseriousness of the students all the time. Many, including Stanford, were finishing schools for the super rich, lousy with pseudo-scientific weirdos, and in many fields really lacked international stature. For a long time, my department kept all dissertations in our department library in bound volumes. The ones from the 40s and 50s were, as a rule, these spindly affairs of generously 50 to 70 pages, on like one poem of Virgil’s. By the late 60s, they had ballooned — to the general length and scope they have today. Ironically, I think that bygone version of the US university is the one we will return to once Rufo and his ilk have succeeded in their campaign. The university that established the supremacy of US academia is identical with the university conservatives were, and have always been, at war with.

So Rufo and his fellow conservative critics have to pretend that the “corruption” is of more recent vintage. Otherwise this whole thing doesn’t fly. They want you to understand their sudden reshaping of American higher education as a reaction to an earlier, equally sudden reshaping done by lefty wokesters. It’s not true, of course, but they’ll keep trying to tell this story. You can’t really blame them because liberal institutions and media let them get away with that story for decades. Why change tune now? Of course, Rufo being Rufo doesn’t give us any specific examples or benchmarks for what constitutes either “greatness” or “corruption”, what constitutes “truth-seeking” and what “ideology”. But he does give us two recent events — Black Lives Matter and the Gaza protests. He of course hedges his bets and says that these events have only “revealed” the corruption. But it’s worth asking: has there been a major shift in the academy in, let’s say, the last ten years — a shift that 2020 and 2023 might then have “revealed”? No, of course not, and the authors of the manifesto know that too.

How do I know they know that? Because Chris Rufo, as he’s the first to point out (in paragraph three of his post), has been running the New College of Florida, and by all accounts running it into the ground, for a few years now. Rufo’s assault on New College, the Trump administration’s assault on universities, don’t by and large target casualized labor and student life. They use student expressions to attack much less temporary structures. The trumped-up complaints about Columbia were about what students had said and what the university had done about what they said. But the demands included … changing departments, changing faculty governance, changing faculty hiring, etc. They are most interested in going after tenure, after institutes and departments, after long term research. So it’s worth noting that any university you look at cannot possibly change dramatically in and through normal functioning in the kind of timeframe Rufo suggests.

Think about how slowly the professoriate teaching at a place like Stanford changes. How few of my colleagues in 2025 were hired after 2015. The vast majority of those hired at a place like Stanford are assistant professors, many of them don’t get tenure, many of them leave for other reasons, and getting a search re-authorized can be an incredibly onerous task. And things are even slower when you’re hiring above the assistant professor level. I once was part of an effort to fill a newly created professorship that took either seven or eight years to complete (depending on whether you count to the moment the colleague accepted the offer or to the moment she actually arrived on campus), including two failed searches and negotiations with three separate candidates at various moments in the process. Imagine trying to “corrupt” an institution on that sort of timeline — you’d be retired before you even got the institution 25% pod peopled!

Let’s talk timelines: my unscientific estimate is that most departments fully turn over every fifty years — meaning you have to go a half century for no one to be left from whenever you started to count. The oldest member of my tiny German department at Stanford joined the faculty in the mid 80s — 1984 or 85, I believe. He is still an active faculty member, and indeed he’s department chair of my other department. When I arrived at Stanford as an assistant professor, two faculty members out of seven had been on the faculty the year I was born. Meaning: if someone tells you the standards of a department have slipped, they are telling you about a development that happens on a very large timescale. It can happen of course — a department can decline in quality. Every field’s convention gossip is full of talk like that.

But, as Henry V says, “Every subject’s duty is the King’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.” A department that is slipping of course reflects on the university as a whole, but it would go a bit far to say that it constitutes a decline in the university if the accounting faculty are dysfunctional or the music department keeps hiring bad composers. It wouldn’t be hard for you to find a literature professor who is unhappy with the way their own field has developed, or a computer scientist who is dismayed by the mercantile attitude of their students. It’s not hard to find faculty who think another department’s research is essentially frivolous. But these are, insofar as they are well founded, discreet stories of specific disciplines and even within those disciplines specific fields.

For a “destructive ideology” to take a hold of a university, all these departments, fields, intellectual enterprises and business models would have to move in lockstep for going on a quarter century. Engineers and sociologists, the dance department and data science would need to embark on this together. This makes sense under two very specific conditions. One is: you suppose that a bunch of people who have nothing to do with each other, do not on the whole like each other, are beholden to very different professional standards, economies of prestige and the like, all decide to get together in secret and settle on promoting a destructive ideology just because they’re evil. You have to, in other words, be a conspiracy theorist.

The other is the one that I think people like Chris Rufo has in mind: authoritarianism. Viktor Orbán was indeed able to change the overall character of teaching at Hungarian universities, even if he had to shut down one or two in order to do it. Vladimir Putin was able to change the overall project of the Russian university, even if a surprising number of people had to accidentally fall out of windows to accomplish it. And for that matter the Nazis managed to completely change the make-up of the faculties at German universities in 1933. We know many of the signatories of the Manhattan Statement like the first two, I sort of feel we’re getting an indication they might not be totally against number three either.

Maybe this isn’t about departments. Is this about the institutional framework outside of traditional academic fields, about newfangled centers, institutes, and the like? It might be — the “Manhattan Statement” certainly keeps citing newly established “DEI” programs (though their definition is overbroad, to be sure). But those are usually student service programs. They don’t involve teaching faculty, research, or anything else. The attacks on higher ed target the business of teaching and research, even if the rhetoric (and the layoffs so far) has targeted staff. The very fact that professors (whom these people hate) haven’t been fired in as large a number as these people would clearly like them to, tells you that these weren’t the most powerful people on campus by a long shot. What happened was that universities indeed invested more in diversity in recent years, but mostly by hiring easily fireable staff. Then, at the first sign of trouble, they fired them. Rufo and company are casting the most cynical ass-covering by these universities as an expression of their most central governing principles, as an indicator not of their timorousness, but of their “corruption”.

But when it comes to the attack on higher ed, “DEI” is clearly intended as a trojan horse. RFK, Jr. isn’t cutting funds for mental health services (mostly because he can’t); the new threat of political appointees reviewing all federal grants to universities isn’t targeting academic affairs officers; and most of all, note that Rufo and his co-signers are talking about the mission of the university as dealing with “truth-seeking” — clearly they’re thinking mostly of research, and secondarily of teaching.

So are there many new research or teaching bodies of recent vintage? No, the US university as a rule hasn’t added a ton of new programs, centers, schools or departments in recent years. For the very simple reason that adding any of those things is a massive headache, and the upper administration tends to hate adding them. Stanford is actually an outlier in this respect in that, starting in 2020, it began turning its program in African and African-American Studies (AAAS) into a department. So that would seem to confirm Rufo’s point perfectly, wouldn’t it? A new department studying (gasp!) identity-categories and (double gasp!) focusing on non-white people, established (triple gasp) in the wake of what Rufo calls the “Black Lives Matter riots”!

Well, let’s slow our roll here for a second. Has this new department brought a whole bunch of new scholars to campus? I’m not asking whether it led to the kind of transformation Rufo claims (spoiler alert: it didn’t); I’m asking: could it even? And here too the answer is no. As far as I can tell, the newly formed AAAS department has not brought any new faculty to campus — not surprising, a good search takes time. All members of the department were hired into other departments, years, in some cases decades, ago. Their current chair started his career in 2001, and has taught at Stanford since 2006. The other members of the department, were hired into a variety of departments in the aughts and early 2010s. There are no assistant professors in the department at all — most likely because the prospect of undergoing the tenure process in a newly established department is quite daunting, and could be quite fraught. Before the current leadership team, the nascent AAAS department was steered predominantly by scholars who started at Stanford in the 1980s!

To be clear: I welcome the change the AAAS department embodies, and I believe it is a change. But, as someone frustrated by the pace of that change, I’d feel remiss not to point out how incredibly incremental it has been. The point one has to make against people like Rufo isn’t that academia isn’t changing — let’s hope that it is! It’s that this change is incremental, measured, careful and thoughtful. Stanford departmentalized AAAS after having it as an interdepartmental program for a measly six decades — it was first created in 1969, the year US universities and scientists helped put a man on the moon. And the year Ronald Reagan sent the California national guard to attack students at Berkeley, and the national guard ended up shooting and killing a bystander.

Some of the changes people from Reagan to Rufo have bemoaned are not real, others are. But they are slow, incremental and based in rigorous analysis. And from McCarthy via Reagan to Rufo runs a long and storied history of conservative attacks on higher education — attacks that have been, 100% of the time, been underinformed, slapdash, and most of all careless. The picture of academia beholden to rash and hasty change, irresponsible when it comes to tradition, given to fads and shallow thinking that emerges in these attacks is essentially a self-portrait. It has been what has characterized their attacks, not the thing they attacked. Each time, they have presented their attacks as being motivated by a sudden, recent and decisive shift within the universities away from “America”. “America” in each case being spoken for by some dweeb with a bowtie and right-of-right politics.

In 1980, Columbia Pictures wanted to create a fantasy film drawing on the then-massive success of Dungeons & Dragons. That movie eventually became Krull, Peter Yates’s big budget spectacle about a fortress from space and the handsome prince who has to assemble a D&D style adventuring party to repel the invaders. By the time Krull was released in July of 1983, it was at best in the middle of the pack of a whole host of shockingly similar films — Hundra among them. The Sword & Sorcery films came as quickly as they then vanished from the cultural landscape.

The one most people still remember from that time is of course 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, which made a bodybuilder and sometime actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger into a superstar. But Conan was preceded by several attempts to capture the zeitgeist, the apparently deeply weird, oiled-up zeitgeist, of the early 80s. And it was followed by many more. Hawk the Slayer (1980), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1981), Dragonslayer (1981), two Conan movies and the unofficial sequel Red Sonja (1985), and many, many more or less inspiring knock-offs crowded into (some) cinemas and otherwise onto video store shelves between 1980 and 1985.

I think this is an interesting time capsule for two reasons: it’s a moment when something that had been nerdy and marginal reached for the mainstream. Suddenly things that outcast teens were reading after lights-out was being turned into big budget entertainment. This was a process that didn’t last — the genre eventually became defanged into either children's entertainment, self-parody, or both —, but it’s of course a process that would repeat, and this time complete itself, in the 2010s. After all, today comic books have gone from something that had been nerdy and marginal fare that marked you as a social outcast, to being pretty much 60% of what is playing at the local multiplex, and like 60% of whatever on my streaming services isn’t yet House Hunters International. The 2010s were a time when erstwhile pop culture margins became the center.

That was the true beginning of the moment when every TV show had to tell ongoing stories, when no drama seemed capable of just putting together a good, coherent episode of TV, but forced us to commit to like eight storylines that wouldn’t resolve for another two years, all on the assurance of our friends that “it gets good” after the eighth hour or so. In other words, shows began interpellating their viewers as the opposite of casual consumers — as nerds. Nerds became the norm, normies became the aberration.

There’s a clip from a late night show from 2013, where George R.R. Martin watches clips of people reacting to the Red Wedding – a shocking scene in Season 3 of the show and in A Storm of Swords, Martin’s source novel from the year 2000. In the interview, Martin points out that each of those clips were of course taken by people who knew what was coming and had been shocked by the scene 13 years ago. And now got to use that knowledge to punk the normies. That, I think, was the moment when it became clear that nerd culture had attained some sort of dominance. The culture identified with the person expectantly holding the cell phone waiting for the uninitiated who didn’t know what was coming to react to a joke they weren’t in on. Those who were not absolute nerds about Game of Thrones had become the objects of the cultural gaze, curios and a little goofy much in the way nerds once were.

I won’t hide the fact that I don’t think that this is an altogether good thing, especially because nerd cultural productions, having been made by people who felt themselves to be marginal, even marginalized, can be suffused with a resentment that becomes vicious when fused with any form of dominance. Not for nothing has John Ganz pointed to the central dichotomy of our present fascism as that between jock and nerd. But that’s not my topic here. I want to talk about an early stage of this process, when, in the wake of Star Wars, the fixations of pimply teen boys became something more serious and ambitious. Because yes, the movies I’m talking about today are deeply silly, but they weren’t exactly marginal. They launched a bunch of careers. Conan was conceived as John Milius’s Nietzschean paean to the ubermensch. It was his follow-up to writing Apocalypse Now, for crying out loud!

And that gets us to the more important part of them: they are all about how bodies were interpreted and gendered. Much the same way that Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe probably have a more pervasive influence on the body politics of the 2020s than we tend to realize, these movies articulated and often furthered some really important shifts in what was masculinity. That’s because their ancestors aren’t just Star Wars or Excalibur. Their ancestors are also spaghetti westerns and exploitation films; comic books and Hammer horror. Once Robert E. Howard’s creations (or Gary Gygax’s, in a way) began populating the big screen, in other words, they updated a filmic vocabulary that the Boomers had grown up with for a Gen X audience. A lot of that involved gender.

Speaking of Gen X: which part of this phenomenon you’re familiar with might depend on where in that generation you fall. Because while the true exponents of the genre — the Conan-clones filmed in Spanish national parks with an Ennio Morricone score — were cultural artefacts targeting people who were older teens during the first Reagan administration, this was a nerd invasion that — unlike the Marvel invasion of the 2010s — was highly differentiated by age cohort. My parents would not have let me watch Conan in a million years, but all my friends when I was 5 had Masters of the Universe action figures, which greatly resembled the beefcake aesthetic of those films. So I got something similar to kids who were teens when I was in kindergarten, but I also got it in a very different guise. By the time I bought my first D&D book – I must have been 9 or 10 at the time –, I purchased it from the super cool guy working at the local game shop, probably 20 at the time, with impressive white guy dreads, and the nickname “Conan”.

All of which is to say: when we’re talking about Sword & Sorcery epics, there are some overlaps with other genres, and I think those distinctions often coincide with target audiences. And those target audiences are tied up with age. These are fundamentally juvenile pictures, but we’re at a time in the history of youth culture where gradations between entertainments for various age cohorts became not just firmly established, but in fact pretty seriously politicized. This was the sunset of the Age of Aquarius, and the dawning of the age of the Parental Advisory sticker.

Remember that the PG-13 rating was introduced in 1984 (the first film to receive it was, in fact, Milius’s follow up to Conan the Barbarian, the commie-hunting militia flick Red Dawn); and the films that led people to demand this rating – above all Steven Spielberg’s 1984 splatterfest Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) – coincide with this wave of films as well. There was a lot of concern – maybe a newfound concern – as to what was appropriate, specifically what was appropriate for certain ages, one that started well before the PG-13 rating and that would endure for much of the rest of the 20th century. The Sword & Sorcery wave both participated in those anxieties and represented the more freewheeling time before them, where a few severed heads, some boobs and a fairy tale story aimed at children could sort of inhabit the same movie without one of the studio suits going “huh”.

So besides films like Conan the Destroyer (1984) or Red Sonja (1985), there are high fantasy films à la The Princess Bride or Willow. There were creature centric children’s films like The Dark Crystal (1982), Labyrinth (1986), and of course The Neverending Story (aaaaaah aaah aaah). There were fantasy films that drew more on what’s called planetary romance fiction (think Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series) – so science fantasy films like Flash Gordon (1980), Masters of the Universe (1987), or Krull (1983). And there were movies that mixed in time travel scenarios – again, Masters of the Universe and The Lords of Magick (1989). Another distinction should probably be made between sword and sorcery and the attempts to class up the genre by either reflecting on the nature of myth itself (The Princess Bride), or to recreate mythology through film. Ladyhawke and Legend are attempts at using mythology to ask basic questions about humanity. A film like John Boorman’s Excalibur (1980), which drew on the Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur with a score drawn from Richard Wagner. Many scenes can resemble ones in their more roided-up peers, but no one would mistake it for Red Sonja.

I think this distinction matters because fantasy fare in the early 1980s was strongly bifurcated: you got movies where muscly heroes severed heads trying to free bare-breasted women from giant snakes made of papier maché, and you had movies like Krull that worked hard for their PG rating. This distinction probably also overlapped with different distribution streams: The VHS conquered North America in the late 70s and early 80s, but the direct-to-video market was dominated by exploitation cheapies that catered to more lurid topics. Films like Krull, by contrast, were enormously expensive to make and chased Star Wars and ET money, not Iron Eagle IV money. Sometimes these films diverged in both directions at once: Dan Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster (1982) split the difference, by spawning both direct-to-video sequels (which, albeit entirely tame, really look like pornos on their covers), and eventually an Australian Xena knock-off, essentially a live-action cartoon. So these movies still straddled distinctions that were becoming firmer around that time: Ralf Bakshi’s Fire and Ice (1983) is an animated film that can look like a children’s cartoon, until you get to the themes, and the sheer number of women’s backsides in revealing thongs…

There’s just no easy way to say this: the genre’s immense horniness cuts across the different target demographics and subgenres. It really didn’t seem to matter what demographic a particular piece of media targeted, it was just horny as hell. Whether it’s Bakshi’s booty-crazed children’s cartoon, Arnold’s lubed-up torso, Tim Curry’s distractingly sexy Lord of Darkness in Legend, or — infamously — David Bowie’s omnipresent crotch in Labyrinth, these movies feel confused about the place of sex and sexuality in both their world and ours. They are inappropriate, in part because notions of appropriateness around these kinds of media were still in the process of firming up.

Some of that is about skin. People in these films simply show a lot of it. No one ever seems to wear pants, or a shirt, or a bra. But it’s also about the sweat. Maybe it’s the Spanish locations, but everyone is just constantly perspiring. Unlike the upper-lip sweat of an Eastwood Western, most bodies appear to be perpetually glistening in these films. And where in method acting, as Shonni Enelow has pointed out, sweating on stage was part of showing an actor was working hard, the various semi-professionals that populated the Conan movies (at least in front of the camera) may have sweated because they were in over their heads.

There’s a sense that no one — not the professionals behind the camera, the often novice actors in front of it, not the screenwriters trying out something new and not the studio heads trying to capitalize on a craze they don’t fully understand — knew enough to dose things exactly correctly on these movies. In them, kink aesthetics and adorable critters could still coexist. There was free-floating desire in them, and no one could quite nail down of what type it was and whom it was aimed at. As a gay kid who grew up with a bunch of friends who loved Masters of the Universe, I’m perhaps hyper-sensitive to this — but I distinctly remember a kind of confusion at the time, as to what the fuck adults wanted me to do with these action figures and what among that range of stuff could possibly be considered appropriate. So many pecs, thighs, bulges everywhere — it was a beefcake aesthetic for the kindergarten set. Which is, frankly, absolutely fucking bizarre!

I also can’t help but think that these epically crossed wires are connected to the rise of the home video market. The first VCRs that private citizens could buy and afford came out in 1975. The first video store in the US opened its doors in late 1977 on Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. By the time the first Blockbuster opened on October 19, 1985, the US had 15,000 video rental stores. That period coincides with the Sword & Sorcery wave. I suspect that these movies thrived in an environment where the visual cues that told you what kind of a movie you were about to see — prestige or schlock, softcore porno or horror film — were still evolving. One thing I kept thinking as I put together the first graphic for this piece — the one with all the movie posters — was: gee, I’d have a real hard time telling what the hell kind of movie this is from this poster. Is this supposed to be a children’s movie or one for adults? Is this supposed to be titillating or not? This sense of supposed I think is what was fundamentally in flux in these movies. Like the druids, no one knew who they were or what they were doing.

Boorman’s entry into the genre, which clearly prepared the ground for a bunch of the other films, draws attention to the fact that, outside of Conan and Excalibur, these were by and large original stories. Or, in the parlance of the Marvel Age: outside of Conan, most of these aren’t drawing on established IP. There was no attempt to do an Elric movie, or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, John Carter of Mars. Even the rights to The Lord of the Rings, so central in today’s IP flogging economy, kept bouncing around like hot potato. The attempts to bring Thongor to the big screen sputtered out. The one exception is The Beastmaster, is (I guess?) based on the novel by Andre Norton (really Alice Norton) from 1959, though “inspired by” seems closer to the truth. Some of this may have had to do — again — with the difficult question of target audiences: the heyday of this genre were the years 1980 to 1985, which was a time when Dungeons & Dragons was present in media via a Saturday morning cartoon.

In terms of cultural history, the genre seems to be a merger of three different developments: an early mainstreaming of nerd obsessions (especially D&D); a mainstreaming of 70s body culture into Hollywood film (GLOW, Mr. Universe) and the fracturing of the Western genre.

Let me take these three one at a time: I was surprised to look back to see the impact of D&D on Hollywood. I knew that after starting TSR, Gary Gygax had decamped for Hollywood. I think the reason why I was surprised is because his dungeon crawl through the Hollywood Hills (and, rumor has it, the cursed Mountains of Cocaine) famously came to naught. But I think that’s a very 21st century way of thinking about how nerd culture gets assimilated into Hollywood — where fans reign supreme and a filmmaker “messing up the canon” will yield endless YouTube videos and the occasional death threat. I think the modus operandi in Hollywood circa 1980 was an entirely different one: the professionals would take a look at your silly toy line and then make a movie in which Frank Langella would wear a mask rather than be undead, where characters had entirely different names, and also it was set in LA now for some reason?

In a way, Gygax succeeded in his mission and D&D got suffused in Hollywood — just not in a way TSR could monetize. Because Hollywood was happy ripping off certain motifs and grafting them onto what worked, or what they hoped worked. So these movies are what happens when nerd culture and deep lore meet a bunch of seasoned professionals, some of them working at the top of their game, some of them more or less inveterate schlockmeisters, but in any case old hands. And when those professionals feed the cultural phenomenon through the meat grinder they’ve fed everything else through.

Second point: The early 1980s seem to have been the heyday of people moving from wrestling or bodybuilding into (usually B) movies. Whether it’s Lou Ferrigno’s two Hercules movies, the emergence of former bodyguard Dolph Lundgren or the wrestlers making their film debuts, this was a moment of great porousness between new forms of entertainment and mainstream movies. One of the movies I watched for this project that I had never seen before is Matt Cimber’s 1983 movie Hundra, starring former model Laurene Landon. Matt Cimber (born Thomas Vitale Ottaviano) would later co on to co-create the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) – if you’ve seen the Netflix show about it, the Marc Maron character Sam is clearly based on Cimber.

The third point is perhaps most surprising for those who haven't — like your present tour-guide — consumed a bunch of these movies in rapid succession. These movies were filmed in the ruins of an ecosystem that was just in the process of disappearing. There had been over 600 westerns made in Europe between 1964 and 1978. Even by the mid-70s, most italo-westerns were parodies with Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill – but even their careers were starting to decline. Sword & Sorcery came on the scene as that bumper crop came to an end. Think about a movie like Hundra (1983): if I described to you a movie about a taciturn outsider seeking revenge on the people who murdered their tribe, shot in Spain, with little dialogue, and a few American actors supported by a large cast of heavily accented euros, and the whole thing topped off with a too-much-by-half score by Ennio Morricone, you'd ... picture a Western, no? These movies indeed sound like Spaghetti Westerns: lots of overdubs, lots of extras who seem to have had to learn their lines phonetically, including, I suppose, Ahnuld himself.

But if these are kids playing in the sets and backdrops left behind by The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, it's a very different crew, especially in the gender department. I think it's fair to say that the Spaghetti Western was fundamentally backwards looking in its casting. It sort of disregarded Hollywood casting conventions, but mostly because it could not afford sticking to those conventions. It hoovered up wash-ups, has-beens, Silver Age relics. But if Spaghetti Westerns were a hybrid, or bizarro Hollywood in one way, the Sword & Sorcery pictures were an entirely different one. Instead of washed-up actors, they were open to outsider art. The cast of Conan the Destroyer included: former Mr. Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger, singer and model Grace Jones, NBA star Wilt Chamberlain, professional wrestler Pat Roach and the strongmen André the Giant and Sven-Ole Thorsen.

One side effect of this casting style is that these people couldn't act their way out of a paper bag. But the other was to give these films a blunt physicality. Gender, above all masculinity, was changing outside of Hollywood, and Hollywood wasn’t always catching up. These movies were campy and goofy, but above all they seemed to be deeply ecumenical when it came to body types. And since the conventional actors were often cast as the villain, it was often the heroes who didn’t conform to what an actor was supposed to look like.

Even seasoned actors, like Jack Palance in Hawk the Slayer, seem to have been encouraged to act as unhinged as humanly possible. There was simply no sublimation anywhere on set — the accomplished thespians who didn’t want to be there vamped it to eleven because they couldn’t be arsed to sublimate; and the assorted athletes, starlets, models and strongmen didn’t sublimate because they lacked the range. As a result, the masculinity here was on display in a way that you don’t see in other genres at the time — it is anything but button-up. It leered and dominated, it hissed and chewed the scenery. It was both super full of itself and more than a little hysterical. The masculinity of a Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef in the euro-westerns had been the cool remove of someone who felt he was perhaps better than the movie he was in. The amateurs that populated most Sword & Sorcery films gave it their sweaty, oily all, partly because they literally didn't know how to hold back.

But there’s one obvious change between, say, The Return of Clint the Stranger and Conan. Spaghetti Westerns were an absolute sausage fest, whereas Sword & Sorcery films not only feature lots of ladies, but also have those ladies kick absolute ass. There’s a scene in Hundra (1983), where our heroine finishes eating a turkey leg while overpower a guy attacking her. It’s phenomenal.

It’s a scene that I think gets at why I think these movies are so interesting in terms of their gender politics. Their masculinity is so overstated as to feel sort of sexless. And their women are so jacked, so hardcore and so … different from the kinds of women you tend to get in films from the era, that in spite of all the ubiquitous sexual violence against women that they depict, in spite of all the queer-coded villains, in spite of all the princesses needing rescue, this feels more free-wheeling than most films of the era gender-wise. The logic of bodybuilding was just orthogonal enough to the logic of gender of early-80s America to make the friction between the two kind of interesting.

I realize I promised you Hundra, and I’ve so far not given you that much Hundra. In part II of this essay, I’ll spend some time on some of the individual movies in this mini-genre. So expect a part two with some Conan, some Hundra and some Hawk the Slayer! Hope you’ll come along with me, your trusty Dungeon Master!

I think that a lot of today’s controversies about “the humanities” and “the social sciences” rely on confusions that arise in the process of trying to turn those two animating impulses into the actual messy business of (a) teaching these fields, (b) doing research as your job and (c) doing that job in an institution of higher learning. And you won’t be entirely shocked to learn that I think a lot of these confusions are indeed stoked deliberately by people arguing in bad faith. But I think these confusions can catch on among people who aren’t arguing in bad faith, but simply are either unfamiliar with academic research and institutions, or haven’t worked in one in a while.

Ignoring the institutional framework of the university — to focus, for instance, on “arguments”, on a “marketplace of ideas”, or on “tradition” — will almost always involve a failure to answer a simple question: as what is a specific text, position, or author being offered? Are we saying: “people have thought this at some point, and that’s significant”? Are we saying “this is an important position in the field, and you should know it”? Or are we saying “this is a foundational idea in our field and you need to know it if you work in it”?

The as what cuts to the very nature of academic freedom. “Every viewpoint” should be represented on a college campus? Yes, sounds nice, but also obviously wrong. Most viewpoints should be expressible somewhere on a college campus, but they don’t have a right to be represented as scholarship there. If a student casually drops that he’s a flat earther in my class on the bourgeois tragic drama, I don’t get to lower his grade for that. But if someone were to demand the geology department platform more flat earthers, then that would be obviously counterproductive to the mission of the university. Universities should not discriminate against people; scholarship by its very nature discriminates. No progress would be possible without it.

Likewise, any lecture invited by a university faculty should be given the widest possible deference. Otherwise, how could unpopular research positions be given room to assert themselves. But what if someone is invited as essentially a provocateur? What if a student group invites a comedian? It’s their right, of course, but I think it’s important to ask as what are they inviting this person? Not everything that happens at a university is covered by academic freedom. You can tell how absurd that proposition would be if I argued that a pop star’s academic freedom would be infringed for shooting heroin on stage while performing on a college campus. So when we talk about ideas that are “taboo” or “forbidden” “on campus”, I think it’s worth pausing to think about what we’re talking about. And what we find is I think this: yes, academics can tends towards faddishness, yes, there’s something sad about certain authors, approaches, debates being mothballed (for the time being, at least); but eppur si muove. Whereas the same can’t be said for critics of academic debates and systems of knowledge productions. They, on the whole, have proven unable to move on, to build on previous research, or even to update their material.

I. The Taboo as Totem

Last quarter, I became aware of a course offered by two colleagues at Stanford, which was not listed in official course lists. Intrigued by what might have occasioned such secrecy, I set out to get a hold of the syllabus. The course bills itself as “Taboo Topics: Adventures in Critical Thinking”. The framing of the syllabus will be familiar to many readers, since it’s basically also the pitch for Bari Weiss’s University of Austin and its offering of “forbidden courses”. “We named our program Forbidden Courses,” the university explains on its website, “because higher education has made it difficult to inquire openly into vexing questions with honesty and without fear of shame.” Those “vexing questions” include “When the Truth Is Too Much to Bear: The Fearful Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Greek Tragedy”, and “Who’s to Blame for Inflation?”, both of which I’d venture to say you could offer at any US university “without fear or shame”, but whatever.

Here’s how my Stanford colleagues frame their course on the syllabus for “Taboo Topics”:

“Certain topics are taboo in current academic culture—there are implicit and explicit norms against even discussing these topics. Some of the topics are so taboo that even mentioning them is risky. This is a sorry state of affairs. We believe that any topic, however controversial, can be discussed rationally. We do not believe that students are harmed by encountering arguments for positions that they disagree with or even find abhorrent.”

If it is indeed about adventures in critical thinking, it’s a set of adventures we’ve all been on before. An entire week appears to be devoted to the work of James Damore, author of the famous Google-memo. There’s a week on COVID restrictions. The week that really caught my attention though was “Race Differences in Intelligence & Criminality”. Here are the selections for that week:

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Tár was directed by Todd Field and came out in October of 2022. Given its topic, it was quickly connected — for better or for worse — to the then-buzzy problematic of “cancel culture”. "A tense thriller and thoughtful study of cancel culture", the Daily Express titled its review. And the Telegraph headlined "A searing Cate Blanchett — and the first cancel-culture thriller?" As is so often the case, the movie’s stars and director, in promoting it, were prompted to sound off on the culture war issues the film was reflecting on, and their takes in interviews were – as interviews tend to be – perhaps not as thoughtful as what’s on screen. In its framing of an interview with Blanchett, The Australian even seemed to imply that she was thinking of retiring from acting because of “cancel culture”.

To get this out of the way: there’s a lot to love here, especially for a gay German guy with a collection of about 3500 CDs (turns out they have become very cheap when everyone started abandoning them). Great Berlin locations, an amazing Cate Blanchett acting up a storm (and literally speaking my language — her German is excellent), lots of Mahler and the Elgar Cello Concerto. This movie was made for me. But I have to say I’m very ambivalent about this movie. To the extent that I find it interesting and suggestive, it is not the movie described in the reviews I just cited. So let me first talk about the movie Tár that some critics seem to have seen. That movie is contained somewhere in Tár’s jagged, two and a half hour runtime. But it is, I think, not Tár.

That movie has a thesis, and it’s a thesis about the need to “separate the artist from the art”. At the same time, the movie seems oddly confused about which artists need to be separated from their art. It’s a movie about conductors — the then-recent forced retirements of Charles Dutoit and James Levine are name-checked —, but it spends a lot of time defending the idea that we shouldn’t treat Bach’s or Mahler’s gender politics as a reason for not playing their works. Which … sort of feels like responding to a question nobody asked. Note that while people acknowledge that Bach and Mahler had some problematic gender politics, no one in the film outside of a single caricature of a SJW seriously suggests we stop playing them or listening to them. And even Lydia Tár finishes the movie still conducting. Her voice is still being heard, she’s still making music.

What has fallen away, it seems, are the private cars (she’s reduced to cabs), the fancy dinners, the Saville Row tailor and the gorgeous brutalist house outside of Berlin. So, okay, are we asking whether great art should no longer be listened to or referred to just because of what we know about its creator? Or are we asking whether we need to be subsidizing sex pests in order to listen to it? As a classical music person, I have not personally taken any of my recordings done by Dutoit or Levine out of rotation. I listen to Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Alfredo Casella with just as much joy and profit as I always have. It feels genuinely weird to me to act like these are somehow persecuted individuals. Would I pay money to go hear Dutoit conduct if he came to town this week? Probably not.

If we take it to be a thesis movie (which, to repeat, I don’t), the movie also sets up a bunch of equivalences that don’t really hold up. There’s this nimbus of sexism around many famous composers, but the idea that this should influence the repertoire seems — at least at the orchestras whose schedule I follow — absolutely marginal. Separating the artist from the art may be something the chattering classes find difficult, but those of us who have to study or perform these people, it’s simply business as usual.

“Cancel culture”, as those who have read my book will know, was initially not about purging people from the canon — it was about not giving more money to someone. These were fans (of a certain wizarding saga, say) who weren’t going to throw out their books, but who maybe weren’t going to invest their hard-earned cash into subsidizing a raging transphobe’s second Scottish castle. So as a “thoughtful study of cancel culture”, this film is less-than-successful. But that’s not an argument against the movie, it’s an argument against the Daily Express being allowed to see movies in general and then typing words about them into the newspaper.

Lydia Tar (played by Blanchett) is the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (played by the Dresden Philharmonic). She’s an absolute genius, but also — we gather — a very difficult person, and possibly an abuser. Krista Taylor, one of her former protégés (and likely lovers), who we learn has been blackballed at her instigation, kills herself; the orchestra revolts because they think Tár is playing favorites to benefit the attractive women around her. An edited cellphone video of a master class goes viral and protestors dog her public appearances. One after the other, everyone in her life turns against her — her team, her wife, her daughter. At the end, she finds herself in Manila, conducting video game music; and going to a massage parlor that turns out to be a whorehouse.

I think the starkness of that contrast makes it very clear that the movie has a point of view on what happens to Lydia. Which is: it shouldn't have happened. I say "the movie" and not "the filmmakers", because we don't quite know what's real and what's not in the movie. And what's not real is almost certainly a representation of Lydia's point of view. So there's a chance that what we're seeing are the self-pitying self-justifications of a brilliant but abusive artist. But it's worth pointing out that, if so, then that's the entire movie. There is no moment when we step outside of Lydia's increasingly claustrophobic perspective.

We’re watching Lydia Tár’s descent into hell — hell in this case meaning going from being interviewed by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival to conducting the Monster Hunter soundtrack in front of an audience of Filipino cosplayers. In other words, it’s a movie about that incremental professional adjustment of status often described as cancellation. And of course there’s the question whether she deserves or does not deserve her success (which the movie, in a pretty classic gesture, underlines by having her return to her very lower middle class family). At the end, she’s back on the outside looking in: looking at Juilliard, looking at Lincoln Center, looking at the performance of Mahler’s 5th she was meant to conduct. It’s clear that this is supposed to be an injustice. She’s moved from the center (Berlin/Manhattan) to the periphery (Manila) and her childhood home (on Staten Island).

For much of its runtime, the movie hews closely to the real world: almost all of the people Tár name drops and refers to are real, even the character of the Mahler-obsessed amateur composer Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong) is clearly based on Mahler-obsessed financier Gilbert Kaplan. All the labels, album covers, and, yes, famous #MeToo cases mentioned and shown in the film (minus Tarr herself, of course) are real. The camera work, with its long tracking shots and over-the-shoulder shots gives the film a fly-on-the-wall feel.

Except. Except that the film doesn’t sustain that realism throughout. As the film goes on there are more and more scenes that we suspect cannot literally be true. In some cases they are resolved by having Lydia wake up, implying it was all a dream — for instance, when she finds a ticking, spookily backlit metronome in her office in the middle of the night. In some cases they are left fully ambiguous, as when Lydia hears a woman screaming in terror while jogging in the park. But then there are the scenes where you can’t tell: is the film being sloppy, or is … is this not real?

Well, you might say, it’s a psychological drama movie, of course it’s gonna have moments that look mostly inside the protagonist’s head. But in the end, it’s also – or at least was widely read – as a “cancel culture” movie. A movie, then, presumably about the consequences of actions. A movie about the real life consequences that come for a flawed woman. If the film were to be instead about what that flawed woman imagines or hallucinates (or desires?) her possible downfall to be like, well, then that would be a very different movie.

There are a lot of structural reasons to think of Tár as typical of what I’ve described as “the cinema of cancellation”. Which is another way of saying, the story of Lydia Tár has a lot of parallels with a typical cancel culture anecdote. There are the class anxieties running throughout the film, which I discussed in detail in my essay on David Mamet’s Oleanna. The cinema of cancellation is always also about PMC fear of falling. Though her transgressions seem modeled on those of male conductors like James Levine and Charles Dutoit, the film heightens the surface irony of a woman being accused of sexual harassment – something I discussed in detail in The Cancel Culture Panic. It’s always the last person you’d think would get canceled, which is a sign of how bad the whole thing has gotten.

The screenwriter has Gopnik recite her CV. And that CV doesn’t just emphasize her credentials (a lot of big orchestras, she’s EGOTed like Tracy Jordan), he also gives her serious SJW credentials: she lived among a native tribe studying their music for five years, she performed for a bunch of refugees, and has championed women composers (still a rarity in concerts), including the film’s own composer Hildur Guðnadóttir! It even has a genuinely reprobate old school white guy (retired conductor Andris Davis, played by Julian Glover) who complains about Dutoit and Levine in the same breath as Furtwängler and Karajan: “Surely you’re not equating sexual impropriety with being an accused Nazi?” Lydia shoots back. See, she’s pushing back agains the sexists and reactionaries!

The second reason I think it fits the canon is: the generic compact of cancellation cinema is all about the uneven distribution of ambiguity. The film is admirably interested in gray areas, about the ambiguities that open up around powerful people and around towering works of art. Which is all the more interesting when the movie isn’t nearly as ambiguous as the screenwriter seems to think. Whenever she’s being flippant or cheeky, it’s immensely charming. And it’s usually to swat down some SJW nonsense or other. The way we find out she’s a deep thinker is that she makes a complaint about language. And she sort of rejects gender as a category in thinking about conducting, which is certainly a choice.

The third reason is that this is another movie about frustration. About something that we and the protagonist want to have happen, but the movie is about that something being stymied and foiled by a censorious mob. Lydia Tár is about to complete her Mahler cycle, which will be put out by Deutsche Grammophone in a boxed set. Weird how the 5th is supposed to be the Everest here. It’s also one of those things that foreshadows that obviously she won’t get to complete the cycle. But it also builds in the narrative frustration of a goal not being accomplished.

Nevertheless, returning to that opening sequence with Adam Gopnik, there are some nice thematic bits woven in that suggests that this movie will — for whatever reason — exceed its brief.

The first is something the screenplay has Lydia say, which is I think central to how this movie wants to interrogate #MeToo: “But time is the thing. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. ” This is the overall interpretation this movie brings to cancel culture: it’s about sequences of events, and about how events and their meanings can slide apart over time. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it’s an interesting and suggestive position for a character to be taking at the beginning of this story. Gust as Tár accuses Bernstein of making the Adagietto in the 5th mean something it didn’t when Mahler wrote it, it matters what things mean in the moment. Resurrecting those moments at a later time exposes their fragility to misinterpretation.

(Just as a sidenote, there’s something kind of funny about this exchange because it has an extremely subjective understanding of musical meaning — most conductors and musicians, I think, don’t just ask “how was this person feeling when they wrote this?” when preparing a piece. The genius aesthetic in this movie can be a little immature, tbh, but the bigger problem is that it needs that genius aesthetic in order to get to what I think are its politics.)

The second lovely theme the screenplay has Lydia spell out in that first exchange is about Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein, Tár says, treated conducting as teshuvah, “the talmudic power to reach back into time and to change the significance of one’s past deeds.” This is of course also what the movie is asking about, or at least thinks it’s asking about. But isn’t it also what the movie is doing? It fan fictions something like the James Levine case, but this time decides to make it about a YouTube video and being an asshole as a mentor. Dutoit had half a dozen accusers; Levine had 4 or 5. (Both conductors were relieved of their duties in 2017/18). And Lydia’s main provable offense in the movie seems to be telling “a BIPOC pangender person” to shove it. It feels like a rewriting of history. Which is fine if you’re making a movie about music; but the movie was taken to be one about #MeToo.

***

There’s a scene early in the movie that I think emblematizes this problem. Lydia Tár is teaching a master class at Juilliard. To the connoisseur of this type of movie it feels very of this type of movie. She is badgering the students, talking down to people, incredibly abrasive. You can see her comeuppance spelled out in the individual beats. You are watching them squirm and recoil and you think “it’s easy to see how this would be misunderstood”. This has always seemed to me so fake and vaguely exculpatory, because it presumes something that – if we presume it – seriously prejudges things for the viewer. Which is: it insists that misunderstanding is going to be at the heart of the downfall we’re about to see.

Anyway, Lydia gets into a prolonged exchange with a student named Max who says things straight out of a Atlantic cover story. It’s a scene that is supposed to feel evenly matched, I think, but doesn’t. Max barely talks, and when he does, he comes across as a complete idiot. “Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender- person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously,” is not what you have someone say who is supposed to make some good points. It’s what you have a sock puppet say. Or how about: “You play really well? But... nowadays? White, male, cis composers? Just not my thing.” Throughout it all, Max is bouncing his knee, which – even before reading in the script that it is “now on overdrive, unignorable and intolerable to Tár” was unignorable and intolerable to me. I guess every viewer is different, but my creaturely response to this scene was identical with Lydia Tár’s. When Max is put in his place and storms off calling her a “fucking bitch”, I felt relief.

Meanwhile her lines, which frankly don’t always follow from his – admittedly inarticulate – objections, are just these crystalline zingers you get in anti-PC/cancel culture screeds. And which are so crystalline because they don’t argue with any actually existing person, but instead shadowbox brilliantly with a person the writer just recently made up. “Can classical music written by a bunch of straight, Austro-German, church-going white guys, exalt us individually, as well as collectively?” Tár brilliantly asks the students, and us, an audience that has paid money and is sitting through 150 minutes of a movie about classical music written by a bunch of straight Austro-German, church-going white guys. You know, the kind of person who would think of ““The architect of your soul appears to be social media” as a hell of a zinger.

The scene reoccurs during Lydia’s downfall in the shape of a YouTube video of her class posted on Twitter/X. It is, as the screenplay says, “aggressively edited, in the most damning way”. There are “at least two angles here implying that there was more than one person involved with its creation.” This reoccurrence is deeply interesting for two reasons: on a plot level you always knew it would, it’s what gave the exchange its queasy tension the first time around.

The choice to have it be not just edited from a single point of view, but apparently from several seems kind of remarkable. On just a diegetic level, you don’t see a bunch of cell phones out during the first scene. How did this video supposedly come about? On an aesthetic level, having seen these types of gotcha videos in the wild, it just feels far too well put together. And on a logical level, it makes the thing feel less like an object that could exist in the real world and more like a fantasy object. What if people watching you teach also had the camera skills of an academy award winning cinematographer, the editing skills of Walter Murch, and cameras and boom mics distributed perfectly throughout the room? This is about the camera as an idea, not about an actual cell phone video.

What do we make of this? Is it a slippage on the movie’s part? Doesn’t seem like it, since it’s in the script. It’s a paranoid fantasy, but is it the movie’s? This gets to another aspect of Tár: that, as the film goes on, I kept wondering whether the things I saw represented on screen were literally happening in the world of the film. Some of this is pretty minor: the sound starts doing something interesting at about 36 minutes in. Things are louder than they should be, something that intensifies as the movie goes on. For instance, in the hypermodern home Lydia shares with her wife and daughter, the elevator doors sound like an infernal screech.

It takes a while for their significance to be explained: Lydia is developing a sensitivity to sound. But there’s of course a greater significance to it: it’s the film signaling that what appears like an objective staging is actually focalized through Lydia. In other words, we’re seeing what she perceives, not some observer’s/camera eye’s idea of what’s happening. “You cannot start without me. I start the clock,” Lydia tells Gopnick and the varying ways in which time and causality work or can be said to work, are at issue in a lot of Tár. There’s Lydia’s persistent need to control and conduct her environment, right down to a scene in Manila where a group of “masseuses” face her behind glass as though a messed-up kind of orchestra, and she instinctively raises her hand. But there’s also director/writer Todd Field’s control over time: we just don’t know the timeline of events entirely.

But not only are there moments where we don’t know whether what’s being represented is literal reality; those moments get more frequent the longer the film goes on. In one scene, Lydia is threatening her daughter’s bully in frankly terrifying terms. It’s filmed with a fish-eye lens and you wonder: is that what she’s saying or is this what she would like to say to this punk kid? (You can see why this would matter for a movie in which the protagonist gets in trouble for what she said to another punk kid.) When Lydia first spots an attractive cellist in the women’s room, it’s shot similarly. It’s a wide shot, which creates fisheye effects at the margin. Lydia is at the center, meaning that she is undistrorted, but Olga (the cellist) stays to her right and thus is distorted. Meaning, I think: are we sure this is happening?

When exactly does this start? Is there a moment when the film leaves behind realism for something more surreal, or possibly supernatural? In the opening scene at the New Yorker Festival, Field cuts away several times to “the back of a redheaded woman” in Seat 140, Row V — she is, at least in the screenplay, “centered in frame like a fact”. “Like a fact” is a little like Mahler once notating that a passage is to be played “without any irony”... it really begs the question. Is she a fact? Or like a fact? We later are positioned against the redheaded woman again when she appears to be observing Lydia’s comings and goings, and editing her wikipedia page — something Lydia will later accuse Krista Taylor of.

The redheaded woman reappears in the script (and in the movie) when Lydia returns to the austere, brutalist Berlin apartment she shares with her wife. “We may glimpse the redhead in BG [background] out of focus,” the script notes. We may indeed. The script doesn’t say that this person is Krista, at least not yet: much later, Lydia is asleep, and “the Hamburg Steinway offers the appearance of a casket containing someone lying in state.” “Tár wakes. Sits up, as she leaves we glimpse Krista in a chair across the room staring back at her.” There’s the Derridean coinage of “hauntology”: when did Krista become a ghost? She clearly ends up as one. But was she really in the theater during the opening scene? Or was she a vision even back then? But here’s the thing: if she’s flesh-and-blood Krista in that first scene, then she would seem to lend credence to Lydia’s characterization of their relationship – that Krista was a crazed stalker.

That’s the tricky part of making a movie with unreliable narration around a she said/she said scenario. Because in some way the movie has to draw the viewer into trusting some of what they see and other things they’re told as not squaring with what they saw. Remember that the main inflection point in Tar’s trajectory comes from a video that misrepresents what she said during a master class. It’s a common trope in these kinds of movies: we know what really happened, but social media misrepresent it or take it out of context. But do we know that, if what we’re seeing the first time around is basically Lydia’s edit of the exchange? Notice that the most creepy thing we see Tar doing during the film is deleting all the evidence of the affair/blackballing. She is an editor.

That's one possibility. The other is that the movie simply shares Lydia's point of view. We get two versions of the confrontation between Lydia and the Juilliard student who calls her a "fucking bitch". We get the heavily edited (as in many cuts) version on social media, and the languorous long takes of the movie. The movie, I think, wants us to believe that its version is "better", whatever that might mean -- truer to life, more patient in chronicling the interactions, more revealing of character. It’s definitely more patient. There are moments when the movie clearly accommodates itself to Lydia's perception of the world. But just as often, its perception of the world is simply hers. The movie, like Lydia, believes that her demotion to conducting a video game score is an outrage, that her fall from grace is tragic. Like Lydia, the movie might harbor worries that she deserves it, a sense that it was coming. And like Lydia, the movie seems to think that Elliott Kaplan working from her annotated score of the Fifth is essentially an act of plagiarism. The movie, as the phrase used to go, shares her values. Not about #MeToo or power or sexism, but something more basic which #MeToo has always also been about: where attention is due, where recognition is deserved, where ambiguity is important and where it is faintly irritating.

Tár is a funny movie. As you can tell, I like large parts of it, perhaps in spite of myself. Maybe in spite of the movie too. I feel like it takes some getting there, for the simple reason that this is the kind of movie that congratulates itself (and you) for originality, but is ultimately a little bit staid in how it deploys its tropes. Tár is a pretty standard tortured genius, when it comes down to it; her downfall has all the beats that we’d get in this kind of “public hounding” movie. You’re being larded up with so much Mahler and Boulanger and The New Yorker and Karajan etc etc., it honestly feels like the film’s austere surface is supposed to hide the fact that this film is working like hell to ingratiate itself to you. You, watching this movie, are smart and thoughtful. Other people, including some of the very specific types you see on the screen, are not.

This gets worse when we get to the actual #MeToo passages, where the film is both super selective in what it shows us and seems content to paint with the broadest brush. It’s also where the film seems to strategically abandon its pose of ambiguity, and suggest that, in the end, there is something deeply illegitimate in what’s happening to Lydia, even if she’s not innocent in what’s happening. Someone ought to take this lady down a peg, but not those people.

Or what do we make of a scene like this?

But this is where it really matters whether what we’ve seen of Lydia’s life so far is meant to be straight-up reportage, or whether we’ve been seeing some unreliable version of it. Because either the scenes are so recognizable and queasy because they are clichés and, as several reviewers note, seemingly ripped from various op eds or thinkpiece headlines. Or they are so clichéd because this is in fact our protagonist’s imagination. This isn’t what’s actually happening to her, it’s how she perceives what’s happening to her, or what she imagines might/could/should happen to her.

Look at Anthony Lane’s (quite good) review in the New Yorker. Note where he locates ambiguity and where he doesn’t:

“To what extent she is a proven predator; how much she deserves to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation; and why, despite everything, she should enjoy our lingering sympathy in a way that a middle-aged man in her position would not: such issues will, no doubt, be aired and contested in due course. Field is wise enough to reserve judgment.”

So we don’t know whether Lydia is “a proven predator”. And the film wisely “reserve[s] judgment” on the second question, “how much she deservers to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation.” I think this part is tricky, because Lane seems to think that this preying is all too factual. The ambiguity is whether she deserves the punishment. I think I’ve laid out the aesthetic reasons for doubting the facticity of that part of the movie; but it’s also worth making the political point, that deciding someone has been punished, sufficiently punished, etc. etc. is something that people were all too ready with during #MeToo, even when there was little evidence that any punishment of any kind had taken place. The facticity or imaginariness of the punishment is the central issue in how #MeToo was metabolized (it is also where “cancel culture” is born: from the idea that someone who hadn’t actually been punished had been metaphorically punished).

But in some way, Tár exemplifies the inherent danger of what I have called the cinema of cancellation: that it conflates an existential point and a political one, and that it is then taken mostly to have made the political point. To be blunt: Tár isn’t about the public, the audience, the internet, the institution. Tár is about Tár. Everything else is epiphenomenal. Now, you might say that for a movie supposedly not about these things, it sure features a lot of people, a lot of finely observed workplace interactions, etc. But here’s the thing: I think they’re here insofar as they matter to the transcendental solipsist at its center.

I think the film dramatizes something a director like Todd Field and an actress of Cate Blanchett’s caliber instinctively understand and find interesting. The experience of suddenly finding yourself at the top of your particular game, at the center of this world that revolves around you. Not only are you good at something, but people are recognizing you for being good at it; yes, it gives you power, but it gives you something else – a recognition that, like the conductors whose LPs Tár studies at the beginning of the movie – you might get to endure in ways other people around you do not. In the interview with the Australian with Blanchett I cited earlier, she’s not saying she’s gonna retire because of cancel culture. She appears to be saying that there is an indignity to having this amazing connection with material, roles, and an audience, and to be destined to lose that connection eventually. I think that that’s a better reading of Tár than “Lydia got cancelled”. Lydia’s position in her world at the beginning of that movie is wish fulfillment; but so is her downfall.

Because here’s the thing: unless (and even if) you’re a sociopath, this recognition, this adulation, this willingness on the part of other people to center you in their lives, will feel like a miracle, incapable of being justified by any possible action on your part. You don’t deserve it for the simple reason that no one can genuinely deserve something like that. It is a stupendous, incomprehensible gift. And so the recognition is always shadowed by its other: by that recognition being universally, hyperbolically, cruelly, needlessly, wantonly withdrawn. Withdrawn, in other words, the same way it was once bestowed. There’s something deeply cringe about Gopnik’s words at the beginning of the film (even more so once we realize Lydia’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) wrote them for him). But they also contain a threat: an adulation this irrational, this dizzying, can easily, yes, can only turn into its opposite.

There’s something the movie gets very right, I think: in following Lydia, you really sense how endlessly she has to talk about what she’s doing, and how much everyone keeps expecting her to say something surprising and vaguely controversial. The tension comes from the fact that her saying something shitty at some point becomes almost inevitable, especially as we keep getting visions of her being metabolized by social media, wikipedia — including, it is implied, by her possible stalker/possible victim Krista. But it also seems kind of made up – part of what makes every utterance of Lydia’s feel so fraught is that we’re watching them happen in a movie that is obviously about someone’s downfall.

This is the fantasy. This is the fantasy at the heart of the cinema of cancellation: What if everything bad you’d ever done came out at the same time? What if you had to answer for all of it – for your choices, your value system, etc. – all at once? What if all the things that life has given you were taken away? What if everyone decided that everything that always felt too good for you to deserve it, you did not in fact deserve? During the Juilliard masterclass exchange, Lydia accuses the student of the “narcissism of small differences”. I think the movie she’s in suggests something different about the cinema of cancellation: in order to make the points these films want to make, there is a price of admission. Which is: you have to stipulate to a narcissism so colossal and so solipsistic it swallows the entire film. The results can be exhausting, as in Oleanna, or they can be intriguing and sort of campy, as in Tár. But it’s the price all the same: you headfake towards making a point about the social, but end up with just your own psyche.

Last week, I finally broke down, and I’m kind of glad I did. Not because Alter Weisser Mann is any good — it isn’t. But because Alter Weisser Mann is in its own way an amazing artifact. A message in a bottle from the golden age of anti-wokeness. It is a film comedy about our moment seemingly written by an AI trained on Atlantic-articles (or their equivalent in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), heavily funded by the German government, and indeed fairly successful at the box office. It pretends to be a testament to changing times; its existence testifies to the fact that very little has changed at all.

Satire exaggerates. And for a particular kind of person that seems to mean that, if you're being satirical, you don’t have to really justify what you’re trying to say. That particular kind of person seems to have made Alter Weisser Mann. Of course, that's not true: you're still responsible for those exaggerations, you are still making them after all. There are forms of comedy -- absurdist ones, physical comedy, etc. -- where “it’s just a comedy” is indeed an excuse. "Jackass" may be making a point about masculinity by having the dudes pee in snow and then turn that snow in to shaved ice. But it's totally plausible and fine if the filmmakers were to say "hey, we just thought dudes drinking their own pee was funny." But satire? Well, satire has a point of view on the world, and that point of view can be identified, interrogated and — gasp! — critiqued.

Alter Weisser Mann contains pretty much every cliché of recent German culture wars, but it skips one. Arguably because that cliché actually is the reason the film exists at all. It’s the Kurt Tucholsky bonmot that “satire is allowed to do anything”. A movie like Alter Weisser Mann feels like it wants to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to be taken seriously for the things it’s saying, and it also wants to not be saying them. For those who agree with the film’s obvious politics, this is what makes Alter Weisser Mann important and indeed fun (the Lawrence of Arabia-line about a “funny sense of fun” comes to mind). And those who disagree with the film’s obvious politics will be told that the film doesn’t actually have politics. It’s just a comedy. Lighten up. Satire becomes a token for unassailability. You’re only “joking” because you are shocked to have gotten pushback on a statement that twenty years ago wouldn’t have gotten any. Because this type of humor is, in its own way, deeply serious.

The film stars Jan Josef Liefers as Heinz Hellmich, a middle manager at a large German corporation in what is supposed to be a wealthy West German suburb, but in fact appears to be a composite of Hamburg’s and Munich’s outer rim. An everyman in an anytown. But Heinz finds himself slowly ground down by a change in the zeigeist. Wokeness is afoot.

Liefers is probably best known for playing half of an investigative team for the extremely long-running German police procedural Tatort. Since 2002, Liefers has portrayed the haughty, pretentious and aristocratic pathologist Prof. Dr. Dr. Börne, who helps shlubby plebeian inspector Thiel solve his crimes. The show featuring this mismatched duo does incredible numbers, when Thiel and Börne solve crimes on Sunday (which happens about 4-5 times a year) something like 1 in 5 German households tune in. Börne is an absolute genius: he appears to speak at least seven languages, plays piano at a professional level, is a great cook, etc. etc. He is also an insufferable asshole — think Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, if he was right only 50% of the time. Börne haunts the Hellmich-character in Alter Weisser Mann, in that Börne is an unapologetic elitist where Hellmich has begun to give up on defending both the kind of culture and the ego that comes naturally to Börne. Hellmich is beta-Börne.

More recently, Liefers has also been in the public eye for anti-lockdown hashtagtivism during the COVID-19 pandemic. I’d venture that most German cinema goers would have been aware that Liefers himself had been at the center of public opprobrium — and there’s a scene late in the film where Liefers’ character finally stands up for himself that seems to have been written for Liefers the actor, not for Heinz his character. The paratext of the actor’s recent activism, and the blowback he received for it, casts an interesting light on Heinz’s travails. As so often, the film transmutes an experience of public blowback for public statements into a more straightforward fable of professional consequences. The hit to his professional and financial future that the real Liefers did not experience for his public statements, fictional Heinz now experiences for his. Oh, and just in case, you’re wondering about how much of Liefers is in Heinz and vice versa, here’s a recent interview with the actor in BILD:

“We have diversity and pronouns, but not enough living space.” The film Alter Weisser Mann winds up talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to wokeness. But paratextually, as the literary critic says, we’re clearly supposed to recognize which side of the mouth reflects its actual opinions. Sure, to some extent Liefers might be poking fun at his own persona; but most of all his public persona seems to inform the politics of the film he’s in.

Hellmich is a middle manager at a German company with global aspirations, and is terrified that his whiteness and maleness will cost him the promotion he desperately needs. Heinz is also struggling with the ravages of middle age, torn between his obsessively un-PC father (Friedrich von Thun) and his hyper-woke children (Momo Beier, Sarah Mahita and Juri Winkler). His wife (Nadja Uhl) seems much more at home in the Brave New World of wokeness, which creates further tensions. When his smarmy boss, basically a PMC nightmare straight out of Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s Elite Capture, proposes a dinner at Heinz’s house, he smells a test. “They want to know how male and white I am. Not outwardly, but in here.” The evening goes wrong in predictably unpredictable ways, and in the end Heinz learns a valuable lesson — or something?

One review I read called it “a fleet, provocative and yet light-footed comedic dance on mined social terrain.” Which fascinated me, because I’d question every single one of these words — above all the emphasis on “lightness”. The movie feels encumbered and undercooked precisely because it seems to have imbibed so much discourse it now feels the need to regurgitate. Sure, the film may not endorse a statement like “today you’re called a Nazi just because you said a man can’t get pregnant”; it’s too self-aware for that. But it doesn’t seem aware that having its characters constantly vomit up the kind of stuff culture warriors put into their columns is in its own way exhausting and hemmed in. It ties itself into knots to provide an original take on the topic while showing us nothing that could motivate or justify this original take. The review I just quoted speaks of “mined terrain”, which is itself a phrase drawn from the exhaustingly repetitive vocabulary of German culture wars. This is the central problem with the movie and its reception: it’s just people congratulating themselves on saying the same thing they’ve been reading, saying, shouting on talk shows … again.

As I mentioned, the movie plays like a greatest hits of German culture-pages debates — to the point that explaining this to a non-German feels like explaining Doctor Who 45 seasons in. To any American viewer it might be deeply mysterious why we start with Liefers in full Native American garb, riding a white horse across the prairies in a dream. It’s a deliberate (and repeated) nod to the German freakout about cultural appropriation. One of the biggest victims of “cancel culture”, according to the German culture pages, is adventure writer Karl May (1842 — 1912) and his tales of global travel that were ultimately not particularly interested in other cultures. And Germans of a certain age seem particularly incensed at the suggestion that having worn a native head garb, painted their faces red (!) and waved a plastic tomahawk in some mock ceremony as a kid may have been … the teensiest bit problematic. The film firmly establishes from minute one whose biography, feelings and fixations it will center — hint: it’s in the title — and whose biography, feelings and fixation it will demote to mere epiphenomena to those of the “old white man”.

Because, you see, the whole dream sequence is mostly a set-up for a conversation with Liefers' (Black) therapist who is offended at his use of the word "Indian", and tells him his fantasies of riding in red face across Monument Valley are nothing to be ashamed of — "so long as you're aware that Winnetou [a May character] is not a genuine representation of indigenous life, but the colonial fantasy of an old white man". It’s an interesting moment twice over: who in their right mind would hire a therapist who lectured them in this way? I’m really hoping Heinz isn’t paying out of pocket to essentially have his therapist read social justice tumblr posts to him! But I think the bizarre moment is actually indicative of something deeper: the film wants to put people of color in positions of authority over Heinz. But that authority doesn’t flow from traditional power structures — a Black boss, say — it’s rather the imposed, “fake” power structure of the therapeutic regime.

For the German edition of The Cancel Culture Panic, I built a database of thousands of German-language articles about “wokeness”, “cancel culture”, and, yes, “old white men”. The screenplay — credited to director Verhoeven — reads in its first third as though someone had just gone through that database with Control+F. The second word uttered is “shitstorm”, uttered by Liefers’ secretary, who is in her car outside of his house. You see, an ad for his company is too white, and his company (which appears to make fax machines or something) takes the internet’s opinions about the relative whiteness of its ad campaigns so seriously that his secretary shows up at his place at like 2 am because of it. We get a smarmy Silicon Valley dude who keeps apologizing for “mansplaining”. Five minutes in, Heinz has to conduct a job interview with a coddled, easily triggered softie straight out of a Jonathan Haidt book. Everyone is “gendering” (i.e. using a glottal stop to indicate gender neutrality — I wrote about this particular moral panic here) like there's no tomorrow. Heinz mistakes one Asian person for another like 20 minutes in and everyone gets mad at him, though he didn’t do it “in a racist way”. The word “language police” shows up a bunch. Also everyone seems to also just be totally sensitive to words like "shit" and "fuck" for like no reason whatsoever (Wait, is it unwoke to say "fuck"? Fuuuuck.). The first "identifying as a cat"-bit (and the first Lia Thomas bit) are 10 minutes in, in case you're wondering. In other words: It’s relentless.

Even the rhythms are those of exhausting social media or print media gotchas. There’s a running gag (I think it’s a gag? It’s very hard to tell.) where Heinz’s kids declare some term problematic or racist — because it contains the word “black”, for instance. And then Heinz’s wife will correct them and provide the actual etymology of the word — you know, a very normal thing normal people do in everyday conversation and not at all a thing persnickety posters with a “classical liberal” in their bio do on X, or failed doctoral candidates do in the culture pages. Or maybe she’s supposed to be a retired etymologist, and I missed it. She’s such a non-factor that I didn’t even catch her name. The screenplay is fully an artifact of processes of normie radicalization that it pretends to decry.

The film opens with just a non-stop cavalcade of culture war topoi. Which makes the shagginess of some other parts of the film all the stranger. The movie loses focus repeatedly. Heinz takes a detour to Berlin, goes partying with a bunch of young people who don’t seem either woke or unwoke. The effect is that the viewer gets to relax, to enjoy that finally there’s a moment without various wokescold harridans pursuing Heinz. As in the anti-feminist movie, the movie has a metapolitics of “those people” just shutting the fuck up for a moment. The movie takes two minutes out of its two hour runtime to show a bike courier playing pretty much half of Rachmaninov’s “Bells of Moscow” — because, you see, people contain multitudes, which the wokesters won’t tell you.

In the end, everyone in the film, including Heinz, learns a valuable lesson that maybe it would be better to confront each other without “culture war terms” (“Kampfbegriffe”) and speak to one another “without foaming at the mouth (“ohne Schaum vorm Mund reden”). Two terms that are themselves hoary tropes of “cancel culture”-articles in the German press. This is the position this film wants to craft for itself: it dredges up the jetsam of right wing culture war-polemics for most of its runtime, and for the remainder it seeks to fashion a kind of consensus position out of it. As our poetess laureate of wokeness would say: good luck, babe.

In coming to its ostensible consensus position, the movie also shamelessly relies on the very social mechanisms it's ostensibly critiquing to have its characters arrive at some easy lessons to learn. Because this is the moment where everyone gets to gang up on Heinz’s boss, the unctious Dr. Steinhofer (an excellent Michael Maertens), who for most of the film was my favorite part of it: misguided, oily, panicked, but horrifically recognizable. Well, scratch that because Steinhofer does a complete heel turn — revealing himself as such an awful classist/sexist/homophobe/liar/likely embezzler that everyone gathered at the table (Heinz, his anti-woke dad, his woke kids, his Turkish secretary, the therapist he invited in an act of literal tokenism, and the South Asian delivery guy his dad hit with his car) can hate. The film chides people for not bothering to try to get along, and then concocts a scenario to have them at last speak to each other “without foam at the mouth”, which requires a set of contrivances Rube Goldberg would dismiss as farfetched.

Early in the film, there’s a bit that the movie seems very proud — it’s supposed to be the biggest moment in the movie. It’s been decided that Fernfunk AG’s latest ad campaign for its new family plan is too white, too heteronormative, too ablist, etc. So Heinz and his team keep adding people to the visual — with predictable results.

It’s a deeply predictable gag, not exactly a knee-slapper, but perhaps an okay observation of how identity politics has been operationalized in the field of advertising. But here’s the thing: take another look at the poster that advertises Alter Weisser Mann:

Am I crazy to think that this is essentially the same poster? The same yes-and logic the movie lampoons seems to motivate its own plotting. Roger Ebert famously had a “law of conservation of character”: “Any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems.” Well, clearly Ebert postulated this law without having seen German mainstream comedies, which are chock-a-block with characters whose inclusion only makes sense based on some bizarre corruption scheme. Maybe this is where public funding of films in Germany gets you: whether it comes to actors or whether it comes to op eds, the film seems unwilling to edit or skip any one.

So the movie itself doesn’t seem to believe its own message. Or perhaps better: the movie doesn’t believe that message, because that isn’t in the end its message. It’s message is rather: we should get to freak out about all this to our heart’s content, and then our gay children should sit down with us for dinner and be at least a little civil about it.

The central part of the movie is barely a comedy at all, as Heinz has relationship problems, tries to reconcile with his children, goes to Berlin and gets totally fucked up on drugs. Suddenly it’s a movie about midlife, about the sacrifices we make and how they come back to haunt us. It’s a yuppy redemption movie, and the perils of wokeness seem far, far away. It’s a totally different movie — vaguely amusing, but if the point is that life happens elsewhere, not in dumb internet freakouts about cultural appropriation, someone might have told the screenwriter. It’s fine that it's shameless boomer wish fulfillment, right down to everyone grooving out to David Bowie at the end. But the problem is that the film clearly takes itself to have said something along the way. When in fact it has just stuck five years of dumb German articles into a centrifuge and then evenly spread out the resulting gruel.

As tends to be the case in the source material — tens of thousands of massively interchangeable articles about “cancel culture” —, the movie doesn’t seem particularly concerned with accuracy, or particularly curious about the phenomena it’s critiquing. There are moments where just being mean to someone is somehow unwoke, or old white man behavior. There’s a hacky moment where everyone is trying not to use the word “fat”, which feels like a bit Dennis Leary rejected for a 1993 standup set and also manages to get the politics of fatness at the present moment completely wrong. Then there’s stuff that frankly feels like just things a boomer focus group might come up with about kids these days. Everyone is on their phone, Heinz has one of those douchey bluetooth headsets, there is a zoom call during which Heinz does something embarrassing (no, not the Toobin thing). There’s even a Twitter/X joke.

There are a few funny bits. Heinz Hellmich repeatedly chews out his employees for keeping around a mug that hints at an authoritarian management style. But otherwise it's pretty much sub-Gervais shit. “Sub-Gervais” because Hellmich feels like a composite of every beleaguered white male figure we get in various anti-woke freakouts — and thus not much of a person. He desperately tries to do the right thing, and keeps accidentally getting in trouble. He creates an ad campaign so “woke” his older co-workers complain that it looks like a “circus” and the younger ones say it feels “tokenizing”. He’s having solar panels put on his house by a guy he’s too polite to admit is a fuck-up.

That’s the Heinz Hellmich we meet in every other scene. In the others he seems more like an Archie Bunker-figure, deeply upset with the PC argot of his age. He’s a total beta, and then again lets out traditionalist aggression, with rants straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm. There are two kinds of protagonists in anti-PC films: hapless betas who nevertheless get ground up by the forces of left-wing censoriousness; and proudly defiant assholes who won’t give an inch. Liefers’ Heinz is both at once, or seems to forget which one he is throughout the film’s two hour runtime.

There is an odd mini-genre of a workplace comedy where a member of the majority is forced to pretend to be a minority in order to “survive” in their job. Some Like it Hot has some fun with this premise and doesn’t seem to take it particularly seriously. But shows like Bosom Buddies (1980-1982) and Tootsie (1982) do seem to take at least somewhat seriously the idea that there are gendered inequalities at the heart of their cross-dressing conceits. Maybe women’s hotels being so cheap is ultimately unfair to dudes? Maybe women do get all the good roles? But the utterly misconceived 2012 sitcom Work It (you can find Emily van der Werff’s excellent review of it here) makes the simmering gender resentment underneath the conceit explicit. In Work It (which I sincerely hope you haven’t seen) two all-American manly-men caught find themselves caught in the throes of a “mancession”, and decide to apply for jobs as women instead.

These shows are premised on a degree of plausible deniability: “of course we’re not saying this is literally true” the creators can (and will) say. There is always the possibility in — and the implicit defense of — these kinds of movies and shows that they don't mean to depict the world as it really exists, or as the filmmakers think it exists, but a version of that world that presents itself to the main character. See, this is how this type of person looks at the world, people will say. It's satire, so of course the film is not taking this worldview altogether seriously!

This has always seemed to me a little question-begging. There is a kind of satire that is sort of free-floating, seeking one target, then another. At the same time, satire does proceed from a fairly stable picture of the world -- that's why it feels so comfortable exaggerating. A satire that didn’t believe in its central premise — that skewered, let’s say, Hollywood vapidity — without believing that the problem it describes is to some extent real, would be a strange satire indeed. It may in the end say “hey it’s not that big a deal, we’re just having fun”, or “the opposite position is just as annoying”, but it’s unlikely that it completely invalidates the moral basis of its satire. Doctor Strangelove does not come around to a position that the army is a bunch of hardworking people who deserve their nukes. Triangle of Sadness doesn’t conclude that the wealthy are just like you and me. And Death of Stalin does not in the end decide that maybe totalitarian dictatorship gets a bad rap.

So here's what we know is true in the world of “Alter Weißer Mann”:

1. German companies are at the mercy of social media opinion, corporate DEI-consultants and activists. The people nominally in charge — the Dr. Steinhofers of the world — are at their mercy, or at least act as though they were. "It’s enormously important, that we react quickly when accusations of racism arise," Dr. Steinhofer says. And tells Heinz that he needs to “present yourself from your most progressive side".”

2. The young are oversensitive when it comes to their own feelings and completely insensitive when it comes to the feelings of their elders. This differs markedly from the feelings of the middle generation (i.e. boomers or early X-ers), who desperately seek to do right by both their elders and their children.

3. Traditional progressive or leftist opinions have been abandoned and are being declared “Nazism” by the young.

Not all of these seem to me equally questionable. But it’s hard to argue that the film doesn’t stipulate to these facts. And those facts are, at least, debatable. It’s a film about racism and immigration that doesn’t include anyone who is positioned as an explicit racist or as being anti-immigrant. Even Heinz's retrograde dad is insistently coded as a former hippie who just hasn't gone with the times. Heinz's world is a world in which people accuse each other of racism, even though in the end — the movie thinks — no one is racist. In the end, they all want the same thing. Which, in a country where something like half the population seems to want nothing more than the mass deportation of neighbors who don't look like them ... is certainly a choice. And the film might have to answer for making it.

And that’s the point where Alter Weisser Mann becomes an interesting artifact. Because it has its own moral geography around issues of race and identity, some of it surprisingly specific. Just one example: Heinz’s world at work is consistently threatened by outsiders. There are a bunch of people brought in from the outside to help the obviously ailing company (again, it appears to make fax machines, so go figure). There’s a hip New York PR team and a Silicon Valley investor douchebag (who namedrops Elon Musk and goes on and on about AI), and that AI itself. Other than the AI, the two others appear to be Germans who have left Germany ... and neither of them are white “potato”-Germans (they are played by Yun Huang and Elyas M'Barek respectively). Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but the idea seems to be that Silicon Valley disruption and PR newspeak are the ethnic other’s revenge on the (white) German workplace. That perhaps these are the avenging angels of previous exclusion — people who were shut out of German workplaces, moved abroad, and are now returning to torment and destroy the old homogeneous workplaces.

That’s an interesting fantasy, as far as it goes. And an old one, at that. In Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956), a wealthy widow returns to a small town where she was badly mistreated as a teenager. She offers the bankrupt tone a huge amount of money. All they have to do is kill the man who got her pregnant and abandoned her. But here’s the thing: it treats the outsider as an inciting factor, as a moral test, not as a coequal participant in the story. That’s why we get the odd AI-subplot, with Heinz Hellmich’s imperfections being measured against the supposed flawlessness of AI: The film seems to think that “wokeness” is an unwillingness to admit that we all are imperfect. Again, where this movie feels to countenance and notice imperfections, where it treats them with curiosity and empathy, is deeply revealing: and again, if you’re wondering where, the answer is right there in the title.

The Trump administration’s unrelenting assault on the US education system has made for strange bedfellows. Suddenly everyone (or almost everyone) has always been against this. Suddenly people acknowledge that the image of the campus as a woke ideological echo chamber that supposedly drags conservatives before kangaroo courts needs to be nuanced. Which … yes. That’s great. It’s certainly nice to see so many people who have spent the last few years jumping on every ill-sourced and belief-beggaring campus freak-out (including the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which, one must assume, wrote the entirety of their article excoriating Trump’s attack on Harvard while sweating inside a hotdog suit), come out against the obvious and almost inevitable consequences of their own bad faith reporting. Suddenly Quillette thinks the University of Austin has “betrayed its principles”? Things are bad. And we’re in the unenviable position that seeing many of the same people who helped create this moment are now the people explaining to us why it’s bad … counts as a good thing.

At the same time, I think it’s a moment of great risk, because these people seem largely incapable of saying “our bad”. And they seem to want to retain their image of the universities, all the while claiming to want to save those universities. It’s characteristics of moral panics that there’s usually no real reckoning at the end of them. Rarely has there been an “our bad” about the Satanic Panic, the panic about gangs, about rainbow parties, what have you. Which is why moral panics are so easy to revive or recycle. We never grappled with them in any of their previous iterations, so repeating them is easier than working through.

Moral panics are about misallocated attention, they usually deflate by re-distributing that attention. Several thousand headlines about a specific topic or worry become a hundred, then dwindle to a handful. They almost never become several hundred headlines about what the purveyors of the moral panic got wrong, or how this could have happened. This is part of why moral panic-mongering is so seductive: people know instinctively that there is no real accountability at their end. They know that consequences exist only for those who are unfairly maligned in them, never for those who do the unfair maligning. After all, these panics tend to be about outgroups — does a TV reporter, a national pundit, a Member of Congress really care that someone went to jail for an incredibly long time because of some dumb freakout they participated in?

This is part and parcel of our contemporary pathology — one reason I wrote The Cancel Culture Panic (out on audiobook this week!) was because I wanted to create a record of what was being claimed in a language game that I felt a lot of people would walk away from the moment it showed its true face. To try my best to not let another one of these periodic panics pass without some message in a bottle that says something like “here’s whom people believed, maybe don’t trust them next time.” Well, my worry is we’re about to.

There’s an argument to be made that a public whose discourses seem to know no accountability practices is on extremely shaky ground. Why wouldn’t you get tons of misinformation and straight-up lying, if people get away with same constantly? But that’s not the only problem: It’s frankly a relief that people like Stephen Pinker are now trying to walk away whistling from the clusterfuck they helped usher in. But in walking away whistling, they seem also keen to write the final draft of what just happened. And because the purveyors of the recent campus panics are extremely influential and tend to congregate in the upper reaches of our media, I think there’s a real risk that their final draft is what sticks.

Consider how the Wall Street Journal editorial board closes the text I cited above:

“Even if it’s modified, Ms. Noem’s order will echo around the world as a signal that the U.S. is no longer open to educate the world’s brightest young people. Foreign students will get the message and take their talents elsewhere. […] Like most of U.S. higher education, Harvard needed a jolt to return to its mission of educating open minds. But that requires reform. The Trump Administration seems to think it needs to destroy Harvard to save it. This is the opposite of making America great.”

This is to some extent face-saving for the WSJ. They’ve been peddling what Bradford Vivian has called “campus misinformation” for years — including the bizarre and utterly dishonest freak out over the notorious “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” at my own institution. And they’re now starting to realize to what uses that misinformation is being put. To what uses, we might say, it was always going to be put. And they want to push back. But, as Vivian points out, “arguments about perceived leftist dogma on college campuses” are largely modeled on “political pressures for greater ideological balance or viewpoint diversity in mainstream journalism — frequently on behalf of conservative interests, to counteract a presumed hegemony of liberal voices in the media.” The latter has, of course, been the WSJ’s raison d’être and its bread and butter. So the WSJ institutionally has to insist that the Trump administration’s frankly fantastical picture of the universities and what to do about them is deeply misguided and just a power grab; all the while not so subtly sharing that picture, and wanting some kind — though I suppose not this particular — power grab.

Steven Pinker similarly took to the pages of the New York Times to write about the Trump administration’s “Harvard derangement syndrome”. The piece has some good points — for instance, how little of the university’s curriculum ever consisted of the kind of stuff the anti-wokesters routinely choose to freak out about. But he once again can’t resist saying that Trump’s derangement had a point. Partly, frankly, because he shares it.

“Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions.”

Pinker is far too smart to equate the “notorious persecutions” (read: not actual persecutions) and the onslaught (read: actual persecutions) coming out of Washington at the moment. But Harvard nevertheless had it coming … somehow. The Wall Street Journal and Pinker both put this “nevertheless”-paragraph towards the end. It’s a kind of gestural flourish — largely designed, it seems, to swat away the dawning realization that their panicky “Harvard has completely lost its way and must be fully razed and rebuilt”-takes over the years might have done something to influence the current administration’s vendetta against the institution. There’s one other thing about these essays, which read like mea culpas, except they never actually get around to taking responsibility: they are uniformly extremely long. Pinker’s essay certainly is. These essays are — to some extremely unacknowledged extent — self-analysis, and are therefore kind of interminable. They need that space for the “nevertheless”. They need the extra words to not say they’re sorry.

I realize that my interest in “anti-wokeness” outside of the US is something that others may not care about as I do. But I think I have a good reason to look abroad: it’s in these texts, which are so interested in the US, but in many ways so distant from us, that we find the characteristic language games and buzzwords around “cancel culture”, “identity politics” and “woke” at a greater remove from the daily churn of the news cycle, which permits us to watch the discourse operate almost in a petri dish. These people pick up on the overall operations of the discourse far more than they can make sense of any of the specific imbroglios that provide grist for those operations.

Everyone in the European press seems to have an even more pronounced fundamental sense that none of these stories are all that serious. Their conclusions may be deeply serious, but their work with the sources that (supposedly) give rise to those conclusions? Not so much. However little of a shit the Wall Street Journal gave when it looked at the introduction to the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”-list, noticed the disclaimer on top and said “eh, close enough”, these guys give less of a shit. In Europe, in addition, no one has a very good grasp on the facts or the people purveying these stories and terms — they’ll refer to Niall Ferguson or Francis Fukuyama as neutral observers, not as people who have staked their entire careers on the existence of the thing this news story is supposedly about.

For most European writers, there is a purity and abstraction to these stories and these conclusions. The terms are playthings, essayists and pundits use them with deeply unserious glee. But what are they to do when this plaything has been taken away from them? They can’t rehash a dumb little anecdote from UPenn for their long essay without people asking them whether they condone what’s happening to UPenn because of dumb little anecdotes like theirs. They are grieving that loss to some extent now. Their little plaything is gone, or worse, their toy has gotten water on it and is now a destructive little Gremlin.

There’s a long German essay from mid-March that I think sheds light on this dynamic: it’s an anti-woke pundit not-so-subtly grieving his lost plaything. But it also exhibits the tendency I started with, the tendency to retroactively reify and stabilize the very “wokeness”-discourses with whose consequences your text is allegedly grappling. It’s the same kind of self-soothing of the reactionary centrist you find in Pinker, but because it’s written from the bizarro world that is the German feuilleton, it doesn’t have to be as careful about not seeming to endorse Trump’s deranged crusade against the universities. The piece appeared in Die Zeit, and is by Ijoma Mangold, a literary critic who has, I believe, been the head of the paper’s culture pages. “Now we get a right wing morality police”, the title tells us. “Now”. Aha.

The entire article oscillates between a great deal of proximity to the US situation, and a curious remove. Mangold starts his essay with an anglicism, in this case “vibe shift”. The neologism, we’re told, is necessary because it helps us “better understand the present we live in”. Mangold’s ambition, according to Mangold, is “to describe the phenomenon” — presumably of the “morality police” : and “to describe it as precisely as possible.”

That may be what Mangold thinks his essay does. It is not what his essay does. His essay plays with terms. There’s the morality police, there’s the vibe shift, there’s wokeness, and the “descriptions” he promises are really a chronicle of the various gyrations and positions these terms can be forced to. In order to understand the vibe shift, we’re told, “another term is helpful: the shift of the Overton window. The vibe shift also reflects a shift of the Overton window.” This is, as they say, good to know. Each time you think you’d get some clear description of things happening in the world, you instead get another neologistic term of art fornicating with the others. It’s like a kid bending their GI Joe figures into various positions and then grinding and slamming them against each other. And has about as much descriptive power.

German intellectuals of a certain stripe really have become members of a cargo cult: any discursive detritus that washes up on their shore they begin to integrate into a complicated, but more or less fantastical, belief system. So fine, now it’s vibe shift. Of the Overton Window. Mangold is mostly interested in the vibe shift as a “reversal of thrust when it comes to culture.” Reversal of thrust. Yes, Mangold wants the canceling of grants, the detention and deportation of international students based on protected speech, defunding for entire disciplines and fields of study, massive layoffs in the tens of thousands, with … that time a student yelled at a professor for woke reasons. It’s quite likely that the anglicism is meant to facilitate that sleight of hand: by importing an English term that’s already overused, and for applying it just about 85% correctly, Mangold doesn’t have to explicitly make the comparison he wants to make.

For good reason: It’s a truly monstrous comparison, and Mangold doesn’t have the guts to make it outright. You might think that comparison really doesn’t hold water: a few people being yelled at online versus being whisked away in an unmarked van for an op ed? He could acknowledge those two are not the same, but that would mean adjusting his priors, acknowledging that something about the warnings about wokeness over the last 7-8 years was less-than-serious, and perhaps missed the main or most important threat to liberal values. That is not the road he takes. See, the reason the comparison might seem absurd to you is because you — reading his text in German in Die Zeit — have no idea just how bad woke was. Because in the United States, the reign of terror of wokeness, this German journalist knows and will have you know, was a brutal, all-out war:

“Because this culture war has only taken place in Germany in a much weakened form, far below the level of an intellectual civil war, we easily underestimate the extent to which the woke social pressure, especially at elite American universities, has first worn down liberal minds, then made them desperate, and finally ripe enough to vote for Trump.”

See what he did there? Any cognitive dissonance you (meaning: he) might feel is owed to not having fully appreciated the scariness of woke. Beyond that, I think there are three things to note in this brief passage: first, the “cancellations” of the last few years, the fives of professors who had to take slight demotions or experience — at times vituperative — blowback were “an intellectual civil war”. No word on what that makes what’s happening right now, when the very existence of institutions of higher learning hangs in the balance. Second, note that people who voted for a candidate who ran on “mass deportations now” and “I will be a dictator on day one” and “let’s destroy trans people” were apparently “desperate” “liberal minds”. Third, the vibe shift we’re told concerns “hegemonic ideologies and changed socio-political plausibilities”, which is a lot of fine words, but empirically, the claim that “wokeness” was somehow the hegemonic ideology of the last 4 years is frankly deranged, or — more likely — based on an understanding of the United States gleaned entirely from following Jonathan Haidt on X.

The examples — quite scant for an essay that appears to be three to four thousand words long and claims to be interested in detailed description — rehearse basically the absolute classics of the genre: people being mean to J. K. Rowling, for instance.

“Author J. K. Rowling's position that trans women have no place in women's shelters would probably no longer lead to book burnings among repentant former Harry Potter readers today, as it did in 2020.”

Quite apart from the fact that that’s not what people got mad at J. K. Rowling over, it feels like a fool’s hypothetical: what does this even mean? In a world in which J.K. Rowling had not been quite so vociferous about her feelings about trans people, and had only let loose in 2025, there would have been less blowback in 2025 than in 2020? How and why would Mangold know that?

2025 isn’t 2020, okay, but that’s the nature of chronological time. It’s quite likely that media might not fixate as much on the behavior Mangold describes — former Rowling-fans burning their copies of the books. But it’s a big planet, and literally setting your Potter-books on fire was likely a pretty unusual step to take in 2020 as well. For all we know the same people would set the same books on fire today, or say they did, or chase clout by saying they did, or whatever happened in 2020. But it’s likely it would enter the media cycle in a different way.

If that’s what Mangold means by “vibe shift”, then it’s a telling slip. After all, the “vibes” that have shifted would not concern former wokesters seeing the error of their ways, or gaining less acceptance for their ideas, or whatever. The “vibes” that have shifted would all be about the way people like Mangold pay attention to what these wokesters are doing. Just as frequent as evocations of the terrors of “woke” are declarations of its “death” — because birth, death, life and opinions are ultimately in the minds of the critics, and dependent on where they fixate their attention.

But in some way the non-sensical re-litigating of the same old wokeness-fights matters more than any of those fights. Because in the end, in a bunch of places these re-litigations allow people like Mangold to engage in what can really only be schadenfreude. There’s a part of him that’s excited that the “vibe” is shifting, there’s a part of him that’s excited that people he’s taught himself to look down on are scared for their lives and their careers. Perhaps that is, to his mind, simply as it should be.

“The cultural vibe shift is changing ideological assumptions and moral intuitions. And social etiquette is also shifting again: What did Trump's campaign poster read? ‘Kamala is for them/them, President Trump is for you.’"

How is this passage anything but an endorsement? To his mind, Trump read the signs of the time correctly, he went after the right people, and now he’s delivering the shift that people like Pinker, Mangold and the Wall Street Journal editorial board have been clamoring for all this time. Except Pinker and the WSJ are smart enough not to admit that.

“And that's why many leftists are horrified by what is suddenly possible to say again – even the taboo regime changes in such times of historical upheaval. Whereas previously, statements that could offend minority groups were criminalized, they are now branded as supposedly unpatriotic statements.”

“What is possible to say again”; the “taboos” on “statements that could offend minority groups” that were once “criminalized” have been lifted. The sigh of relief is audible. He’ll get to the terrors of the “right wing morality police” eventually. But in passages like this, you can tell that any shock about the Trump administration’s actions is laced with … glee. His team has won. It’s also noteworthy that Mangold attributes everything that characterizes the current illiberal onslaught in the US — the criminalization of “DEI” for instance, the mass firings, the arrests — to the old “woke” regime, except in a metaphoric register. Thank goodness we have been delivered from non-literal criminalization of speech by the literal criminalization of speech. Not sure what you call that, but liberalism it ain’t.

Being an anti-woke critic requires a very specific kind of recall: hyper-memorious when it comes to specific incidents, incapable of of remembering even the basic outlines of similar debates of 10, 15, 20 years ago. There is an immense capacity for surprise in their self-presentation, a kind of guilelessness that is often in bad faith, but in some cases appears to be genuine. Cancel culture, they intone — get this! — from the right??? Now I’ve heard everything! This form of surprise is everywhere in German media at the moment: Mangold’s entire essay is drenched in it, Germany’s biggest pop philosopher (and frequent self-declared cancel-victim), Richard David Precht basically rehearsed it for an hour on his podcast. René Pfister, who had spent years flogging a book about how wokeness was ushering in a new illiberalism in the US, has started talking up the idea that wokeness “has changed sides”. Just to stick with Mangold’s essay, here’s what this trope looks like:

“For instead of abolishing the left-wing thought police, we are witnessing them being replaced by a right-wing thought police: […] Anyone who doesn't fall in line gets kicked out.

But that's not what this is about. The crux of the matter is that the very tool of language policing, once the holy grail of the woke movement, whose followers spent ten years renaming everything that seemed to them to be an expression of patriarchal colonialism, is now being appropriated by right-wing culture warriors.”

These pundits seem deeply sensitive to even the most minute shifts on the left; and even though they seem to get most of their information from right wing sources, they don’t seem to be at all aware of developments and trends on the right. The reason for this is simple, and in fact identical with their central mistake: they have mistaken a right wing propaganda narrative for an objective description of the facts.

They do this all the time: now we’re even getting “identity politics” on the right, now we’re getting cancel culture even from Republicans, now wokeness has changed sides and Republicans act as censoriously as they imagine college students behave. This is, of course, utter poppycock. The idea that somehow Republicans had to “learn” how to censor art and research from “the Left”, let alone “wokesters” is pretty rich and kind of depends on not knowing a single thing about the Republican Party. But the whole language game is absolutely nutty. The first “identity” that came up when critics first attacked “identity politics” in the 1980s was the identity the critics were trying to defend: WASP identity.

People like then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett thought that the US was a WASP country, and it was horrible that universities were forgetting that and offering “separatist” courses in things like African American Studies instead. They wanted to defend the “legacy” of European America, they wanted to defend the whiteness of US political institution, they wanted to defend the “canon” (which meant for them keeping people like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker out for … reasons). The entire language game around “identity politics” has been “people are fixated on their identity [which isn’t the majority’s identity].” Anyone who has spent any time with these discourses, and has turned to them over time, can and should know that. The anti-woke critic conveniently represses this knowledge.

A second point: the mimetic theory that suggests that right-wing authoritarianism has learned from left-wing censoriousness is deeply trollish. The people claiming that must know it’s not true. In Germany it comes with the added frisson of the forbidden, because it mirrors the basic structure of Ernst Nolte’s argument that Hitler’s crimes had been inspired by Stalin’s, which triggered the Historikerstreit (historian’s controversy) in the 80s. It is meant to trigger the libs, in other words. What it isn’t meant to do is describe facts: We know that, because in introducing ideas like “political correctness”, “wokeness” or “cancel culture”, writers would reliably say: we know this stuff from the far right, especially the Christian right, but did you know leftists do this too? In other words, the left-wingers from which the right-wingers allegedly learned their behaviors, learned their behavior from the same right-wingers now learning from the left-wingers. A classicist might call this an ouroboros. I would call it bullshit.

To be clear: the vast majority of descriptions of “PC”, “cancel culture” and “wokeness” turn to pre-existing analogues on the right. Wokesters are fanatical like Christian fundamentalists, they are obsessed with purity like the conservative morality police. The reason for this is simply: most of the people who coined these terms were from the US, and were likely all-too-familiar with Christian and conservative freakouts over various speech issues. Does anyone recall “Freedom Fries”? Was that not a “language police” according to Mangold? If so, did Republicans learn that from the wokesters by means of a time machine?

While I’m at it: Was Piss Christ a left-wing freakout? What happened to the Dixie Chicks in 2003? How would we describe the kind of disciplining of public speech that ensnared people from Susan Sontag to Bill Maher to totally ordinary college professors after 9/11? Most US professors are not in fact worried that their “woke” students write about them on social media. Being featured on Bill O’Reilly’s show back in the day, being talked about on Fox News, being subject of a Christian Right freakout, or today being in a video on Libs of TikTok is far scarier a proposition. We know this, but I guess we can repress it in favor of this babe-in-the-woods vision of history.

Since Mangold seems so fond of anglicisms, here’s another one: cope. “This isn’t what this article about”, he says at several points, and in a way it’s really quite hard to figure out what the article about. But it’s fairly easy to figure out what the article is: it is cope. Sorry, Ijoma, you had to realize that the language game you’ve participated in so enthusiastically for the past few years, was what your critics and friends have long told you it was: a Trojan horse discourse that would be used to justify a far-right crackdown on speech.

Not realizing that doesn’t make you “a liberal (of European style)”, it makes you a dupe. You were duped. But you can’t admit that, and in not being able to admit that you do something far more unforgivable: at the moment when it’s abundantly clear what the language of “wokeness” and “cancellation” is meant to authorize, you keep giving credence to this narrative. You cannot speak the language your essay employs and then harrumph about “cancel culture from the right”. Because if you use that language, you are part of that cancel culture from the right, you are its partisan. The people you identified with — the “classical liberals” who were “free speech absolutists” — have mostly revealed themselves to be closet fascists. And even as their protestations wear ever so thin, you are willing to credit them.

Admittedly, when it comes to a Berlin-based literary critic, this kind of cope is telling but fairly inconsequential. But the tendency to retroactively concede the bases of the attacks all the while (feebly) attempting to push back against the attack has even become a favorite rhetorical tool of our university presidents. Longtime readers of this newsletter will remember the brief media frenzy over the “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” at Stanford — which started, coincidentally, with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The TLDR is: this initiative, which was reported as “Stanford” “banning” certain “forbidden” words, was nothing of the kind; it was Stanford IT services (i.e. the people who maintain our websites) having a conversation about what potentially problematic terms they could possibly get rid of in their web infrastructure.

And yet, the folklore version of “EHLI” has had a surprising afterlife of its own: parts of the Stanford faculty, various media outlets, and university critics continue to act as though the fever dream version of this list that briefly made the rounds in late 2022 were real. I won’t hide the fact that that bothers me, especially coming from within universities. Not because the lie reflects poorly on us — plenty of stuff reflects poorly on us. But because universities are fundamentally supposed to deal with what’s factual. We don’t investigate pizzeria-based child abduction cults, because they’re not real (though we may study the people who investigate pizzeria-based child abduction cults). It is disturbing to me that a group people whose fealty is ultimately in whatever measure to what is the case, can be so absolutely cavalier in pretending something that wasn’t the case was the case. Well, in 2025, that group includes the university’s president: Stanford’s president has taken several opportunities now to single out “EHLI” not as an example of bad-faith attacks on the university, but as evidence that those bad-faith attacks were totally onto something.

There’s so much going on, and it feels weird to harp on something ultimately fairly minor. That having been said, it does bother me for a place that isn’t a party-political institution, but one ostensibly concerned with facts, to stipulate to facts they know to be false, in order to make someone else feel better. And while I am not a journalist, I also feel like it should bother journalists to stipulate to facts they have reason to know are not facts.

I won’t comment on the fact that the “facts don’t care about your feelings”-crowd has been oddly protective of the feelings of imagined or real Trump voters or supporters. I don’t like to point to such inconsistencies, for the simple reason that they’re unlikely to be actual inconsistencies. For these folks, some people’s feelings do exert a pull on the facts, others do not. There are two kinds of people. Those who are real and whose every feeling, even when based on lies, speak the language of legitimate grievance; and there are insubstantial people with insubstantial feelings, whose every feeling, even when based on facts, is eo ipso illegitimate and annoying.

And that is the most important thing that people like Mangold deny: that what they decry as “wokeness”, and what is now being destroyed by an increasingly authoritarian government, is an empirical analysis of our world. Not an ersatz-religion, not some kind of cult. Facts that don’t fit your priors are not therefore religious. Gender Studies, CRT, etc. etc. were doing empirical research and were doing theoretical and archival work; you may not have liked it, or what it told you about the world, but too bad. To accommodate ourselves to those triggered by our research, only because they feel more real, more American, more substantial than the constituencies we took ourselves (incorrectly, I think) to offend, really does enormous damage to the institutions we take ourselves to be defending. With friends (and presidents) like these, the American university may in the end not need enemies.

I got deeply interested in what I call the “cinema of cancellation”, but I had a hard time describing it. I’ll be arguing that it is (a) a fairly long-lived, but small subgenre in Hollywood, one that has started to find international imitators. But more importantly, (b) the “cinema of cancellation” is a set of tropes that can be deployed in a whole range of genres (from courtroom thrillers via erotic films to comedies), where it is all about inverted economies of prestige — a person who is owed respect and admiration instead is ostracized and made a victim of the very hierarchies they were once atop of. There are thus classic cases — films that are about professional downfalls and public reckonings, and films that seem to at least entertain the possibility that those downfalls and reckonings went too far. I’d include in this list films like Oleanna, Presumed Innocent, Disclosure, Deconstructing Harry, Disgrace, The Human Stain and Tár, as well as TV-shows like The Chair and Douglass Is Cancelled. (I’m sure there’s a bunch I am missing — I’ll be opening the comments below, so please chime in and make further suggestions!)

But these core films share a vocabulary with a far broader range of pop cultural products, which don’t make public ostracism their main topic, but derive their energy, their moral impetus, their narrative drive from this inversion in status. These run the gamut from The Simpsons’ 6th season episode “Homer Badman” to the opening montage of the Harrison Ford Fugitive. It’s noticeable that these tropes become so ubiquitous around pretty much exactly with the time period of the moral panic around “political correctness”. At some point, these kinds of tropes just sort of emerged. But whether the whole film turned on these tropes, or whether it was just a throwaway bit, they drew on several long-lived antecedents in Hollywood.

And — and this is the real reason I’m writing about them now — they seem to have greatly influenced how people think about the real stories, the real-life anecdotes that make up the grist of the PC and cancel culture-panics. We know how these scenarios are supposed to go, because we’ve encountered them as scenarios. In The Cancel Culture Panic, I traced an odd tendency to treat Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) as evidence of a social problem, rather than what it manifestly is, namely a novel about a fictional case of racism accusations revolving around a made-up professor at a made-up college. How, I asked, did this fictional story come to feel so real to so many people? Well, in this entry and the next few, I’ll try to flesh out one answer to that question: because these types of fictions have decisively shaped our way of paying attention to and interpreting real life. Because they have reinforced our way of interpreting challenges to authority, and the role of media and public discourse in those challenges.

In our first episode we focused on the David Mamet play Oleanna, in which a professor (played by William H. Macy) tries to help a student (Debra Eisenstadt) who comes to his office in distress. She misinterprets a few of his gestures and utterances, and the next time they meet, she’s mobbed up with a bunch of feminists. We never see the public dimension of their disagreement, but the play derives its entire tension after the halfway point from the fact that there is a public dimension. We know he’s starting to be disciplined by his institution. His life is a shambles. And she’s seen distributing leaflets about him. By the end of the movie, she has escalated her HR complaint against him, his life is a shambles and she finally baits him into hitting her. Her triumph consists, as Moira put it on the podcast, in turning him into the monster she thought he was all along.

One thing that my list above and my earlier request to you might make clear: the films we’re talking about here weren’t massively influential. Oleanna definitely was a conversation starter among my parents’ friends when I was a teenager, and the play has been revived periodically. But I don’t think it’s had an outsized legacy. Why then talk about these films at all? Well, because they cannily reworked older tropes and genres that were in fact quite influential. So when we hear of a professor accused of being racist because of “one wrong word”, it’s not just that we flash back to Philip Roth or David Mamet, we flash back to decades of Hollywood stories. This first essay in the series is about the genealogy of these tropes. For before there was “one wrong word” there were “wrong men” — and lots of them.

Alfred Hitchcock was very fond of the “wrong man”-scenario, whereby a person is accused of a crime they didn’t commit. That kind of “wrong man”-scenario gets started by a logic of contamination. The wrong man is in the place where a crime is committed, where a spy is expected, or — in the case of Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest — simply accidentally raises his hand when another person’s name is called. He is never selected at random, but through a series of mistakes and misunderstandings. What we’ll call the “cinema of cancellation” — about people unjustly accused (or excessively accused) of personal malfeasance whose lives are gradually destroyed — functions by a similar logic. The accusation is essentially an oopsie: as in Thornhill’s gesture which turns him into the spy George Kaplan, it’s a misinterpretation. I see why you picked me, the film’s protagonists acknowledge, but you’re still not right about me.

The wrong man as an image contains both terror and a certain thrill. It’s about how a small mistake can have outsize consequences. But it’s also about how a small gesture might, just might be immensely important. “What does the ‘O’ stand for?” Eva-Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall asks about Thornhill’s middle name in North by Northwest. “Nothing,” he replies. This cypher, this man with nothing at his center steps into the far more exciting life of George Kaplan, and suddenly the world appears to revolve around him. There is a degree of wish-fulfillment in these scenarios, even when they’re deeply scary.

Which is also why it matters that it is almost always a wrong man. They are usually white middle-class men who can indignantly tell the cops “this is outrageous, officer!” rather than simply end up shot dead. They usually have the resources and privileges to turn the tables on their pursuers eventually. These are fables of professional masculinity, both its risks and its rewards. They are also, without acknowledging as much, fables about the professional white man as a type. It’s where being universalized as an “everyman” turns into a bit of a boomerang, as — for once — a wealthy white guy “fits the profile”. One reason you don’t get many “wrong woman”-scenarios in mid-20th century Hollywood is likely that screenwriters found it difficult to construct a series of events in which a woman was mistaken for another, who was however a nationally wanted criminal, notorious Soviet spy on the lam. Even in persecution, then, the “wrong man” story is about privilege.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s there was a slew of movies that were essentially “wrong man” movies. Except that where the “wrong man” of the 1970s New Hollywood thriller had usually been persecuted by shadowy agents of the state, these wrong men were prosecuted by public opinion. Even when these were legal thrillers, the legal system got a healthy assist from a fired-up public. And rather than being accused of espionage, it was usually ultimately something having to do with sex — their lover would turn up dead (Presumed Innocent), their fling would turn out to be crazy (Fatal Attraction), or their ex-girlfriend would prove adept at manipulating corporate hierarchies and HR departments (Disclosure).

So when I say that the “cinema of cancellation” is ultimately a continuation of the “wrong man”-film, except with a misunderstood fling (Fatal Attraction), one wrong word (The Human Stain), an errant gesture and badly put invitation (Oleanna), substituted for espionage or murder, I use the neologism of “cancellation” to point to something else. The reason I’m not calling them anti-“PC” films, for instance, which they also are, is that they don’t spend much time on the PC stuff. They center on the wrongly accused man (usually it’s a man). They do not give the revolutionaries, the inmates taking over the asylum, much screen time, or bother to delve into their motives very much. Oleanna is a two-person play, the other feminists — who are clearly coaching and radicalizing the student — enter only as a malignant outside force through pins, leaflets, posters.

Something I realized only in making my list for our podcast-series: There are surprisingly few satires amongst their number. Even a film like 1997’s Deconstructing Harry, which — in a metaphor I actually quite like — is about a Woody Allen (or more likely Philip Roth) -style artist who has “forced the world to adjust to the distortion he has become”, has that world just kind of yell at and about him. Women (and a few men) barge in from off-screen and call him a “motherfucker”, and Allen starts riffing, self-analyzing, mugging in various self-deprecating ways. The focus is still on him; their moral dudgeon is the permission structure for his narcissistic self-interrogation. Roger Ebert’s review of the film almost got there: “There is hardly a criticism that can be thrown at Allen that he hasn’t already thrown at himself (or his alter ego) in the film,” he noted. Deconstructing Harry is a movie about a public persona that in the end manages without the public.

Deconstructing Harry is a film that is disturbed and disrupted internally. I mean, it’s in the title. Allen cuts scenes to highlight discontinuity, his camera seems deliberately positioned to disorient the viewer (within the very real limits imposed by his genteel Bergman- and Fellini-rehash, of course). But in Deconstructing Harry this technique actually ends up giving the game away: disorientation works because it makes the viewer long for orientation. We want the world to be back in order again. The way the women (mostly) that come at Allen in various scenes fracture and charge visual space makes up most of the (modest) aesthetic appeal of this film. But they also create the tension that, structurally, we want to see resolved. Even though the movie claims to think they’re right, they are an audio-visual disturbance. Kirstie Alley as Allen’s jilted wife (well, his second jilted wife) gives a great performance, but the whole point of it is its … well, shrillness. Not in the sense of pitch, of course, Alley had a famously husky voice. But in the sense of auditory disturbance. Part of watching her go mano-a-mano with Allen is joy in the sheer free-wheeling chaos of it. But her obstreperous physicality, her hoarse screams, her apoplectic incoherence also point to the only way this tension can be relieved, the only way the viewer can be re-oriented, re-centered: by having that crazy lady finally shut her trap.

That’s what happens when critics and debate are reduced to epiphenomena of a great man’s voyage of self-discovery. They become background noise, they become tension generators. We sort of know they need to be there for the plot to happen, and we sort of wish they would just go away. We viscerally feel the yearning for the moment before Kirstie Alley barged into the room. Which also means these films reserve their true horror for the violation of homeostasis. They ultimately, just on the level of inciting incidents, long for hierarchies that they feel — and that they want their audience to feel — are sacrosanct, but out of whack. What I mean by that is: Roger Thornhill does not deserve the kind of treatment he receives as “Kaplan”. We may be amused at Cary Grant’s everyman trying to fit himself into an outlandish spy scenario, but we understand intuitively that what needs to happen, what ought to happen is that Thornhill be dis-identified with Kaplan. So three things seem centrally to carry over from a “wrong man”-thrilled to a cancellation fable: (1) it centers the man who has been unjustly accused, (2) it focuses on his martyrdom and (3) the implied desideratum (whether the film gets there, or whether the film ends with a downbeat ending that frustrates that desideratum) would be to see this person restored to the perch they deserve.

So these films have a horror of being judged; but they also wind up coming out in pretty unironic defense of a certain kind of entitlement: In Oleanna, Macy’s professor character expresses a secret fear that “they’ll find out my dark secret.” “What secret?” his student asks, because the play can never stop itself from presenting her as an utter imbecile. “There isn’t one,” he assures her. “But they’ll find an index of my badness. Am I entitled to my job and my nice house and my family?” The answer that these movies tend to give is, I think dual. On the one hand maybe not. Maybe this person is a jerk, is an arrogant bastard who deserves to be taken down a peg. On the other hand: absolutely. For as much as they might doubt the legitimacy of their own positions, the films are doubly convinced of the illegitimacy of those assailing them. Macy’s concern for his tenure, his house, his family might seem fussy, and the play/film will rib him for it. But in the end, the film thinks he is entitled to all of them, and those forces that would deprive him are … essentially monstrous.

This highlights a way in which what I call the “cinema of cancellation” is different from “anti-PC” cinema. Because films and TV shows that imagine themselves as offending elite “PC” sensibilities (and the critics that imagine the same, calling things “deliciously un-PC” and similar tripe) wear their anti-bourgeois self-conceptions on their sleeve, while the films of professional downfalls are aimed at … well, professionals. The “I’m not PC”-crowd see themselves — whether justifiably or not — as working class insurgents attacking liberal bourgeois pieties. If you watch John Cleese’s path from Monty Python to anti-”PC” crusader, you get a sense of how someone can turn increasingly reactionary all the while being convinced they remain insurgent and rebellious.

There’s plenty that’s incoherent in this position, of course, but that’s not what this essay is about. Because no one would mistake Oleanna for South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. The “cinema of cancellation” is about high-minded, middle aged, professionals and aimed at their box office dollars. One thing these films are not is carnivalesque. They are restrained, serious, and ultimately quite joyless. Or rather, their glee and their joy have to seep out in unacknowledged places.

I was recently re-reading Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash, which has a great chapter on backlash cinema — I’d say that what I’m describing certainly overlaps with that genre, though it isn’t identical with it. One point of overlap is probably Adrian Lyne’s 1987 movie Fatal Attraction, an early entrant in a mini-genre where a professional man’s minor transgression occasions a set of trials that he both does and does not deserve. As in Oleanna, as in Deconstructing Harry, as in Disgrace, he deserves something, the film seems to say, but he doesn’t deserve this. These are erotic thrillers that are not about liberation, but about guilt and consequences. And that seem to displace their newfound Reaganite moralism onto women who mess with consent (say yes when they shouldn’t, say no when they shouldn’t, say yes too enthusiastically, etc.).

Faludi’s chapter goes into detail about how incrementally, painfully, Fatal Attraction changed from a film that said, as producer Sherry Lansing put it, “you are responsible for your actions,” to a movie that’s ultimately about the limits to that responsibility. Right down to an ending that star Glenn Close hated and fought tooth and nail, in which crazy single lady Glenn Close repeatedly stabs “Victorian hearth angel” (as Falludi aptly calls her) Anne Archer, only to first get drowned in the tub by reformed hubby Michael Douglas and then gets shot in the chest by the Archer character.

Like a lot of domestic or erotic thrillers (Body of Evidence comes to mind) of the era, the film’s final beats — Close coming back to life for one last jump scare — abandon the logic of the psychological thriller and instead turn to the vocabulary of the slasher film. As does the setting, which has abandoned gorgeously shot New York City streets and tony offices for the bathroom in a suburban house. A location fit for a Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. Ah, but what a bathroom it is! I found myself unconsciously pricing out the tub during the interminable sequence of shot/reverse shot where Douglas is drowning Close. And when Archer delivers the coup de grâce, she does so standing next to an impeccably framed art exhibition poster. This is a horror film for the professional managerial class. The Close character doesn’t just threaten to disturb the familial bliss of the nuclear family; she’s threatening a very specific socio-economic arrangement.

There’s another genre that overlaps with the cinema of cancellation quite a bit. The same years when fear of “political correctness” washed across the United States, was the heyday of the micro-genre of “yuppie horror” films. These are near and dear to my heart, because one of them — the 1990 John Schlesinger film Pacific Heights — is about San Francisco! In Pacific Heights — for those of you not up on middling 90s thrillers — Michael Keaton plays a psychotic con man who moves into the in-law unit of San Francisco homeowners Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith. When they try to evict him, they set in motion a chain of events that culminate in an ending every bit as savage as Fatal Attraction’s. I would contend that the stories of professional downfalls in films like Disclosure and Oleanna are basically less schlocky versions of the same dynamic. They are about middle class existence being disordered — a disorder that, like Deconstructing Harry, they find some exhilaration in, but also seem disturbed by.

The other representatives of the “yuppie horror” genre I can think of are Bad Influence (1989), Single White Female (1992), Malice (1993), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), Unlawful Entry (1992), and (kinda) the 1994 werewolf movie Wolf, which seems way more interested in the publishing industry than in lycanthropy. They are all about the vicissitudes of young professional life: sharing swanky apartments, buying homes, hiring nannies, having pets, getting or not getting promotions. Many of these have horror elements — at the end of Pacific Heights, deranged con man Michael Keaton literally re-enacts a slasher film in a gorgeous SF victorian. But ultimately they are probably closer to noirs. Malice has almost entirely unlikeable characters and a view of the everyday world constantly perched on the precipice of mayhem that feels very much like a noir. In other films — especially those concerned with yuppie parenthood — the main characters are fundamentally decent people, but have committed serious lapses: an affair, having their own career or handing over their child to Rebecca De Mornay.

These films are all fables about the trappings and rituals of middle class life turning on you. They are, moreover, gauntlets by which their protagonists prove that they in fact deserve the nice things they have. In being willing to fight for these things, they imbue their possession of them with a legitimacy it didn’t previously have. Those things can be: a nice house, a nice family, a cute child, a great career. So the movies of the PC-panic might seem to fit in with this mini-genre, except for one major difference: Barry Keith Brant proposed that these films by and large transform “evil” from “the classic horror film's otherworldly supernatural to the material and economic pressures.” I think that is on the whole true. Still: a film like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle may be about material pressures as well, but it is ultimately a morality tale about hubris, sin, fate — especially the sin of being a woman with a job and, again, entrusting your child to Rebecca De Mornay.

So Brant is probably right that there’s a profound materialism to the way these movies scare us: their frights (at least in their first half) arrive in the shape of eviction notices, citations, court hearings, or disciplinary processes at work. But I think he underestimates that these quotidian terrors always push up against something metaphysical: about duty, about fate, about control. And I think this is where the PC-movie comes in. A movie like Oleanna isn’t just Fatal Attraction for people who find Fatal Attraction distasteful. It is also Pacific Heights for people who’d be embarrassed to watch a movie about real estate deals gone bad. It’s about the economic security of the professional managerial class; but the genre exists as a genre only insofar that it can plausibly insist that it is about so much more than that.

The house in Pacific Heights both is and is not a house. Anyone who’s done a home reno will wince in recognition at the ins and outs of buying a rotting old building with supposedly “good bones” in a famously foggy city. But it is of course something else as well: a representations of social compacts and their fragility; a nexus of the niceties of civilization and what it takes to reveal the savagery beneath. There’s something kind of funny about the fact that in Pacific Heights one truly shitty tenant becomes a stand-in for what good people do in the face of radical evil. I mean, No Country for Old Men needed a nail gun and a huge body count to make that same point!

But that disconnect is characteristic for these types of films, which telescope — not totally without justification, mind you — the slings and arrows of middle class fortunes into restatements of life’s great questions. But this incongruence is in fact the secret principle of these movies — this is the emotional truth they capture. Sure, this is at best a minor annoyance, but what if it WAS LITERAL MURDER. Their escalations — think of the infamous “boiled bunny” of Fatal Attraction —, the way they turn metaphors literal and then back into metaphors, however ridiculous, appear to capture certain yuppie structures of feeling.

The most interesting in these selective de- and remataphorizations in these films has to do with the language of crime. A lot of these are court thrillers (Presumed Innocent), or involve (off-screen) lawyers, as in Oleanna. But they are ultimately morality tales — they treat questions of guilt, of what someone deserves, and most importantly of punishment as both literal and figurative. There is this an interesting conflation in these kinds of movies. They raise the question of “is this a good person?” And then they go through a whole courtroom rigamarole, where the point seems to be that this person is guilty of the crime of being a bad person. The feminists, the “PC”, the overeager justice system are just narrative shortcuts to arrive at that conflation. It allows you to stage a literal courtroom scene about what is ultimately just odious personal behavior, and it allows you to sell that narrative contrivance as somehow a political point and ultimately feminism’s fault.

Macy’s character in Oleanna does seem like he’s kind of an ass, a hypocrite, and yes, a sexist. But of course by their second meeting, his student has accused him of sexual harassment, by the third of attempted rape — acts that have legal definitions and that can be substantiated. The film wants you to think that the student and the “group” — her scary feminist consciousness-raising group that seems to be turning her against him — are confusing personal failings for a crime. But the confusion is in fact the movie’s. Because the film is all about perspective and grey areas: the structure of the play (as with most two-handers) suggests that sometimes you’re supposed to side with him, sometimes with her. But if what we’re seeing on stage/screen is all that happens between these people, she is indeed lying in her accusation.

The film head-fakes towards even-handedness, but actually tells us she’s making it all up. She’s not really accusing him of a crime — that accusation is a misunderstanding of the fact that he’s a bit of a jerk. That move — “oh he isn’t a sexual harasser, he is just sort of old-fashioned” — doesn’t somehow represent neutral ground, it’s a standby of anti-sexual harassment discourse. Right down to Clarence Thomas whose confirmation — and Anita Hill’s very clear and specific accusations — clearly form the basis for Oleanna. Hill knew the law and pointed out that specific actions of Thomas’s had violated it. But when David Mamet restages their disagreement, it’s feelings on her side, the facts on his.

These films — and the associated tropes in films of other genres — are conversion engines: they convert petty annoyances in big metaphysical questions. They convert public disapproval into a courtroom, they convert consequences of any kind into legal punishment. And they thus ultimately seem to take a winner’s view of punishment: their sense of punishment is that of Clarence Thomas who still sits on the highest court of the land, but feels himself the victim, punished for life by free trips in his billionaire-sponsored RV. It’s that of #MeToo perpetrators who still release movies every six months, while their victims appear to have been blackballed. In other words, these are films that are able to find punishment in the absence of punishment.

In a movie I haven’t yet rewatched for this series — Alan Pakula’s 1990 legal thriller Presumed Innocent — this is made hilariously clear. I actually think it’s a pretty great movie — Pakula’s direction is great, Harrison Ford is just perfect whenever he’s accused of killing his wife, and John Williams’s score is wonderful —, but the ending voiceover is deeply hilarious to me. The plot — spoiler alert for a film that came out 35 years ago — is the following: Ford works as an ADA, and he’s having an affair with his co-worker (Greta Scacci). She ends up getting killed, and he first is put in charge of finding her killer, and eventually gets accused of the killing himself. In the end, the charges are dismissed. Ford then discovers that the actual killer is his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) who knew about the affair and wanted to punish him.

So, to sum up: Ford has an affair, which is resolved elegantly, when his dutiful wife murders his girlfriend and then takes him back in spite of a murder rap. She also gets away, in her case with murder. But Ford’s faith in the justice system is totally shaken. We end with a voiceover:

“The murder of Carolyn Polhemus remains unsolved. It is a practical impossibility to try two people for the same crime. Even if it wasn't, I couldn't take his mother from my son. I am a prosecutor. I have spent my life in the assignment of blame. With all deliberation and intent, I reached for Carolyn. I cannot pretend it was an accident. I reached for Carolyn, and set off that insane mix of rage and lunacy that led one human being to kill another. There was a crime. There was a victim. And there is punishment.”

You see, Ford’s character having to live with the knowledge that his wife did it, but that he can’t turn her in without ruining his home life, is like legal punishment. Which I suppose it is. If you squint. Real hard. This is the magic of these films: they overload their courtroom and legal scenarios with metaphysics — what is the truth? what does a person deserve? what do we owe one another? — and then boil that down to so many yuppie annoyance (what if what owe one another is last month’s rent?). To the point that they can’t figure out when they’re tackling actual legal and political questions, in which “there is punishment” would certainly at least involve allocating publicly to a crime. This is ultimately what I think links together the small canon of public cancellation-themed films over the last 35 years and the broader tropes that have suffused more widely within the culture: they are about those grey areas and indecidability that privilege affords you. And that defend certain people’s rights to those.

As I was contemplating a future in which I had to pick up every cup of milk with trepidation, in which I had to check the internet to make sure others hadn’t gotten sick from the jar of whatever I was about to open, in which I had to accept that the fight against preventable food borne illness was part of my job as a parent, I realized that I recognized the portrait I was painting in my mind. It was a woo woo Marin dad.

For those of my readers who are not fluent in Bay Area, Marin County is a wealthy county to the north of San Francisco, known for beautiful open spaces, excellent cheese and seafood production, and … a kind of freaked-out, oppositional, at times conspiratorial wellness culture. I should mention that this is not a large contingent of that fine county’s populace, but they appear to be more numerous there than elsewhere, even in the privileged (and often very woo woo) Bay Area. But the vacccine skepticism (and measles rates) have traditionally run high in that area — as has a sense that money can buy you out of the “corrupt” food system and the “poison” it introduces into our bodies.

It’s important to note that this group is not as marginal as you’d think. Consider Nicole Shanahan, Silicon Valley founder and ex-wife to Google co-founder Sergei Brin. Shanahan was until recently mostly known as a big-ticket democratic donor, but she early on embraced light anti-vaxx positions, and began bankrolling democratic candidates that were, let’s say, pretty far out of the mainstream (such as self-help guru and outsider candidate Marianne Williamson). This is how she became better known to a wider audience — as running mate to one Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during the 2024 election.

Shanahan has questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccines, suggested that the MMR vaccine causes autism, and warned on “X” against getting vaccinated against COVID-19. She has expressed the opinion that “chronic disease” is the real epidemic in the United States, and that “electromagnetic pollution” from cell phones is partly to blame. She has also — because these people appear congenitally unable to update their material — engaged in some light chemtrail trutherism.

Since the election, in which he and Shanahan got clobbered, Kennedy’s fortunes have improved in a way previously unheard of for third party candidates: he is now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in charge of its 80,000 employees and thus the very public health apparatus he’s spent 35 years attacking. He’s in the job with a healthy assist from Shanahan: As Kennedy’s confirmation loomed in the Senate, his erstwhile running made posted a video on “X” threatening to bankroll a primary for any senator who voted against RFK.

Shannahan (and to some extent Kennedy) embody what some have taken to calling “Woo Anon” — a mélange of conspiracy thinking and wellness talking points that can sometimes sound like New Age blather and at other like a screed from the John Birch Society. Given that it is largely delivered in short clips on your phone, in inspirational tiles on your favorite influencer’s Instagram profile, that is to say in small bursts, it’s a discourse that doesn’t really have to settle on one or the other. It can flit between its various vocabularies and tropes, and doesn’t have to specify whether the “they” that’s poisoning you with seed oils is Big Business or the Jewish World Conspiracy, or whatever.

Most importantly, affectively these are the same. Kennedy and his MAHA followers may not self-identify as conservative, but their affects are recognizably those of water fluoridation conspiracists. They may not have the same feelings as MAGA on every issue, but they share the most important feeling of all: as an already-classic Onion-headline has it, “bravely frightened of everything”. Sugar, food dyes, the MMR vaccine (but oddly not measles, mumps or rubella themselves), seed oils, black pepper, pancake mix, breakfast cereal and so on.

I used to wonder what it must be like to go through life this way — thinking that everything on the breakfast aisle at your local grocery not only was unhealthy, but could in fact kill you. Well, I have a feeling, I won’t have to wonder much longer, since not doing basic food testing, no longer recalling possibly contaminated food does sound really freaking dangerous. And, most interestingly, we will get to feel the way these people feel courtesy of these very people. If RFK gets through with all of this, our fears reaching for that carton of milk that may or may not have been inspected, that may or may not have been pasteurized, that may or may not give us endless diarrhea, will resemble, in some structural way, the fear he felt reaching for milk that had been inspected, had been pasteurized, and was exceedingly unlikely to give you endless diarrhea. And I suspect that this reversal — making us feel what they have felt — is part of the point.

So much of our new authoritarianism is about attention, about feelings, about a dark kind of empathy. As we all are far too much up in one another’s business online, “liberal tears”, triggered “snowflakes”, “OWNED” “lib professors” seem far more important to right wing feelings than actual policy. In the internet age, imagining how “they” must feel is clearly way more powerful than in previous decades. From being the most unpleasant guy at the school board meeting, to the pointlessly intimidating questioner at the end of a lecture, it is not so much about invading space as it is about having a foothold in the Other’s emotional and affective life. You can’t not think of us, these intrusions say. The one option you don’t have is the one we fear the most: not thinking about us at all.

There is something Lacanian about this, which is why I went with the Žižek-allusion in the title: the disorienting experience of the Trump restoration in 2025 is to be someone else’s funhouse mirror. Welcome to the desert of the imaginary — which I guess is where you wind up when the other guy thinks he’s taken the red pill, but is in fact in a blue pill K-hole?

“The cruelty is the point”, was one of the common refrains of the first Trump administration. What it often missed was that the cruelty also had a point. For the cruelty was supposed to constitute vengeance, was supposed to constitute atonement, for an earlier cruelty visited upon the people who voted for Trump. When you looked at it objectively, that sense of aggrievement quickly lost its legitimacy. But the sense was of course in its own way objective. They wanted their enemies to feel vis-à-vis very real threats the way they had felt about imaginary ones. Just as RFK, Jr. wants those of us who feel better having FDA scientists guarding our food supply to feel the fear and paranoia he felt via-à-vis those very FDA scientists. The objects are fundamentally different, and I don’t think we can lose sight of that. But the affects attached to those objects are homologous.

I don’t know if you heard, but I just wrote a book on “cancel culture”. “Cancel culture” was the idea that “one wrong word” would send you to a “cancel dungeon”, to the “public pillory”, that it could destroy your existence, that it would destroy higher education and democracy. That fear, as I tried to show in my book, was clearly overblown, and relied on a bunch of carceral metaphors to express what, when looked at objectively, was mostly just somewhat overheated public debate. But note what has been done since Trump took office to combat “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. Students are currently in jail for “one wrong word”; not a metaphorical jail, but an actual one. Having the wrong opinion does seem to be able to destroy your existence, and the repression brought to bear on our colleges does seem to threaten higher education and democracy as such. So, in the name of combating a thing that was always more figure of speech, or picture thinking (“I feel like I’m in prison, I feel like I’ve been deprived of my liberty,” etc.), the Trump administration is making it literal.

Back in the day, if you pointed out that cancel-cases were quite rare and often looked very different from the way they’d been reported, people would often retort that it didn’t matter. After all, the chilling effects didn’t depend on actual likelihoods. I always thought that that was an interesting argument. If all that matters is feeling-as-though, it’s almost immaterial whether or not the feeling is accurate or not. Which can serve to exaggerate something that — when looked at objectively — does not exist quite the way it’s being publicly discussed. But it can also serve to preemptively relativize and negate the real thing. Watching a writer like Thomas Chatterton Williams struggle to come up with a way to explain this process without giving up on the notion that “wokeness” from 2020 to 2025 named a real, all-consuming, and oppressive force in American politics, you get a sense for the sheer disorientation among the anti-woke set as the metaphors they turned to to describe wokeness turn literal, and are deployed in the service of anti-wokeness.

There is, as I point out in the book, a certain privilege that comes with feeling like you’re being “hounded by an inquisition”, “raped” or “executed” when in fact there’s nothing of the kind happening. You are relying for an analogy on something that is manifestly actually happening to other people as you type. What other people face for real, you can claim to experience by analogy. You are a victim, but without all the pain and anguish that would come with the actual experience. It also tends to create a false equivalence between two things — which puffs up what happens to you, but also undercuts what happened to others. I suggested in my book that those who peddled “cancel culture”-anecdotes seemed to think of them as counter-anecdotes to those of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. “I see your story about Michael Brown, who is in fact dead, and I raise you the story of Ian Buruma, who was mildly inconvenienced.”

But it is important to the functioning of these discourses that people convinced themselves that these were in fact equivalent — on some level. It probably involved taking some people and their lives more seriously than others; it probably involved power’s inability to empathize with the powerless; it probably thrived on a pervasive culture in the West to conceive of itself as on the receiving end of violence (from terrorism, immigration, trade imbalances etc.) while being completely insensate to the much greater violence routinely emanating from the West in the opposite directions. Whatever the case, the point is that these equivalencies are both (a) in fact false, the two things objectively are not equivalent, and (b) in fact experienced as equivalent.

Are you afraid of losing your job over some anti-DEI crusade? Are you an American worker who gets the feeling other employees think of them as a “diversity hire” and will be purged as such? Are you worried that your non-white children will have to enter into ultra-white spaces that make zero affordances for people like them to receive any education or professional advancement in the US? Well, in some way you are experiencing what a lot of white conservatives felt themselves to be experiencing. You’re not the funhouse version of their fears. Their fake experience was the funhouse version of what they are now visiting upon you.

They thought that their white sons would not get into Berkeley because some “underqualified Black person” would have a red carpet rolled out to them. They thought that “one wrong word” or “twenty seconds of action” would see their beautiful boy drummed out of college unfairly. They were worried that their children would stumble disorientedly through a world made by woke Marxist transsexuals where they had to speak Swahili and respect trigger warnings and safe spaces. None of these things were true: their children attended white-dominated universities in which consequences for the privileged were exceedingly rare (though I suppose there sometimes were consequences). But you’re now living through the flipped version of their fears. They want those they fixated on to worry they won’t get a job due to their race, gender, sexuality, to mirror the fear they felt (even if that fear had no basis in reality).

For my book I looked at a lot of lists of cancel victims. These were always pretty threadbare, and a real mix of things: some cases were indeed pretty bad, and mishandled by the institution. A lot felt like they distorted what was going on. Some were flat-out made up. These incidents were usually submitted by users with minimal fact checking, so that mix felt both inevitable and sort of intentional. In any event, the numbers were inevitably in the high three figures. The lists of disappeared people, the lists of students thrown out of the country for engaging in speech, dwarf those numbers, and this government has been in office for just short of 100 days. I think we are right to consider these two sets of trackers side by side. Not because one represents a mirror of the other, not because one constitutes a response to the other. But because some people clearly experience or regard them as all of those things.

I suppose in at least some of the cases I mentioned one could turn it around and say: the sense of victimhood was a permission structure for victimizing others. That doesn’t seem to hold true for the milk-example, however. In yet other cases, especially where complaints about “wokeness” and “cancel culture” were really reactions to critiques of rape culture, there was something preemptive about these metaphors: they framed as violence the kinds of accusations that might come up about the writer deploying them. When I wrote that “cancel culture stories are #MeToo for people who are afraid of #MeToo”, I meant that in the macro as well as in the micro. Yes, it was discomfort with a culture listening to the type of people you thought, you had in fact always been taught, were not worth listening to. But in some cases I’m sure it was a desire to cast as a free speech issue (and a defense of democracy) if that one person should ever come forward with their story about you.

There’s a line in Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” that I’m very fond of: “German history prides itself on having travelled a road which no other nation in the whole of history has ever travelled before, or ever will again. We have shared the restorations of modern nations without ever having shared their revolutions.” This ability, to have a counterrevolution to a revolution that was mostly in your own inflamed fantasy, seems key to US politics these days. People want to roll back a push to defund the police that in fact never occurred. They want to stop a coddling of criminals and “the homeless” that is not in evidence. And they want restored hierarchies that were at best mildly inconvenienced.

The administration and its allies, and even those who simply claim that this is the pendulum swinging in “the other direction”, that this is a natural “response” to the excesses of wokeness, want you to be afraid of getting censored by the government as much as they recently hallucinated (and in some cases still hallucinate?) being censored by you. These are people who were bravely afraid of everything. Now they want you to feel that way, but for real. They’re acting out the fantasies contained in their moral panics, but as revenge. Perhaps some of their moral panics were always, or were persuasive only as, anticipations of their revenge.

The idea that we are not paying attention to the right thing, that in fact we’ve lost the ability to pay attention we once had, is, as Jonathan Crary pointed out, a persistent feature of modernity. Of course, we also have consistent moral panics about especially young people paying excessive attention, paying the wrong kind of attention, or paying attention to the wrong thing. So maybe it’s better to say, there’s a longstanding discourse about how we’re not paying the right kind of attention to the right objects, and the wrong kind of attention to undeserving objects.

Crary suggests that this is indeed at least in part an effect of an experience of surfeit, or what Walther Benjamin in his Baudelaire-essay calls “shock”. To be modern is to be overwhelmed by information, impressions, facts, opinion: just leaving your house or picking up a newspaper is a disconcerting, destabilizing experience. To be modern is also to recall — faintly, vaguely, possibly only through grandparents or through literature — a time when it was different. A time when our attention and the world we were paying it to existed in some kind of harmony. When world and attention stood in some more appropriate, intuitive (“natural”?) relationship. Today, we’re always paying attention to the wrong things; and we’re forever telling each other, telling ourselves, we’re paying attention to the wrong things.

This isn’t always a bad thing, of course: Activists and scientists, public health professionals and politicians alike draw our attention to things we aren’t paying the attention they deserve. Sara Ahmed has written very movingly about the kind of inattention that can sustain inequality. Our organizations say that "We haven't been able to give as much attention as we would have liked to this”, when in truth that withholding of attention is how they communicate worth, hierarchy, priority. But the idea that our attention is in the wrong place, and the guilt it occasions, is part of our politics far beyond that, and not usually for good.

Distraction is something of a universal condition of the social media age. Our attention is a valuable commodity, we feel that valuable commodity dissipating, and we feel guilty about that. This has given rise to one of the strangest rhetorical strategies of the social media age: the idea that disciplining the attention of others is itself a form of political intervention. I should be clear, I think that this form of discipline is different from saying “hey, I think you guys are paying too much attention to this, and not enough to that”. That is (a) an implicitly ethical claim (this thing deserves your attention), and is (b) usually dependent on an explanation of reasons. You shouldn’t pay attention to this thing for reasons x, y, and z; you should instead pay attention to this (hopefully related thing) for reasons a, b, and c.

Arguments of this kind can be deeply annoying of course — which argument can’t? — but they’re still a core aspect of public deliberation. If I may go full Hegel for a moment, arriving at a momentary consensus about what the world is like and what in it we as a society ought to be paying attention to, is pretty central to being in a society in the first place. This is what we do: We direct each other’s attention one way or the other. The other thing of course is that arguments of this type simply mark out the content and the bounds of a pluralistic society. You may care about x, I may not give a shit about it; but my recognition of your reasons for your caring about x in some way is my recognition of you as a person different from me. Note that this can still be very much imply an ethical position: I can recognize your reasons for caring about x rather than y, and think they stink and you’re a POS for having those reasons.

Sorry for the lengthy preamble, because in the end this post is about stuff that happened this week. The version of this argument I’m interested in is the “don’t get distracted”-kind. In it, the reason you’re paying attention to x, but paying attention to y, isn’t because you’re different from me, it’s because you’re a dupe.

We all remember this kind of rhetoric from the first Trump administration; we remember it from the interregnum. Don’t shout about the thing you’re shouting about, you’re playing into their hands. Don’t rise to their bait.

There is an important, but unspoken corollary to this kind of rhetoric: “we” shouldn’t have the kind of “debate they want”. The idea that your own side might have good arguments even in the “debate they want” doesn’t seem to enter into the equation. You can only lose this kind of debate, this framing suggests, though it is never made clear why. There appears to be — and I’ll get back to that — almost a sense (possibly not entirely conscious) that the other side is in the end right or at least deeply plausible, and a lengthy debate would reveal this fact. But more importantly, Gavin Newsom is actually conflating two things here: is the problem that Democrats aren’t going to win this debate? Or is it that the debate is a “distraction”? He says both and in fact acts as though those two things mean the same thing. But of course they don’t. Does the other side’s attention to an issue mean that for your side the same issue becomes automatically a distraction?

To me what this strange, unsubstantiated associations outlines is the long shadow cast by Bill Clinton. It’s surely no accident that Clinton’s Crypt Keeper James Carville himself appears to be all over this particular round of chide-the-left. It’s not that Clintonism adopted Republican talking points necessarily; Clinton adapted to, in fact made himself dependent on their attention. He goverened on what they were paying attention to. Clintonism at times consisted of adoption of Republican policy preferences; but more often than not — think about Clinton’s weird and awkward adoption of anti-“PC” rhetoric — it simply accommodated itself to the things “voters” cared about, which in each case turned out to be the thing the other party cared about. A certain kind of self-described liberal pundit is still happiest when articulating their supposedly liberal alternative on a playing field laid out by conservatives. Speaking of which…

It’s a perfect tweet, 10/10. First off, is it true that “everyone should think about which topics they want to raise the salience of and why”? Who is “everyone”? It would seem like a good rule for a pundit to explain why they care about certain issues and not others. It also seems like a good rule of thumb for a politician who has only limited time on camera. But “everyone” seems to seriously overstate the case, and, as so often with Yglesias, he seems to be chiding “liberals” or “the left” by really attacking people on Twitter. And — I don’t know what to tell you, Matt — posting on the internet is free. Which, yeah, does tend to relieve us of the onerous task of assessing each “topic” we raise before we have the temerity to post our opinion on it with our 42 followers.

Second, in its visual the tweet makes the (“popularist”, I suppose) point that the topics one should raise should be the ones where people agree the most with you. Is that true? Isn’t politics also persuasion? Wasn’t the man who convinced Americans that an economy that had recovered pretty impressively from the pandemic was actually dogshit just elected President? The lines in Yglesias’s graph go up and down with time — I’m no expert, but doesn’t that indicate that people’s relative favorability scores on “the economy”, “immigration” etc. are capable of change? It feels like it might be the job of a politician or a political journalist to change people’s views on these matters, if people’s views on these matters are indeed mistaken.

Thirdly, it seems bizarre to untether these issues from morality — some issues are salient, whether the people are on your side or not! Again, this feels like what both politicians and journalists are supposed to do: make issues salient, overcome inattention! Imagine what the Civil Rights Movement would have looked like, if MLK had looked at opinion polling and said, nevermind, let’s pack it up, people love anticommunism, let’s pivot to that. Finally, even if we left morality aside for a moment: surely people won’t forget “inflation/cost of living”-issues, just because Democrats start talking about people getting abducted by masked men in unmarked vans! I tend to notice my cost of living because, well, I’m paying it! It’s hard for it to slip my mind. A single immigrant, by contrast, easily might slip people’s minds. Which is why paying attention to them seems not just morally good, but also in fact prudent. Unless, of course, like Matt Yglesias, you don’t think immigrants “deserve” everyone’s attention.

And I think this is what’s happening here. There’s a division of labor here between one party that brutalizes immigrants, trans people, activists, and students; and (parts of) the other party that dismisses these people as “distractions”. I really stumbled over the following quote from a “House Democrat”, “a centrist” who “spoke anonymously”, on account of he has less courage than anyone you’ve ever met. This talking point about the “hairdresser” is so interesting to me because it’s cropped up in a few places — centrist dems seem somewhat enamored with the talking point — and because it’s also so self-negating.

Because of course the anonymous Democrat who spoke to Axios (it’s Axios, so I’ll allow the possibility that this person doesn’t exist) is probably referring to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which has indeed attracted broad-based support among Democratic politicians and in the media. But Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not in fact a hairdresser; that would be a different man, Andry José Hernández Romero. So the idea that the Democrats were “taking the bait for one hairdresser” is so eager to be dismissive that it refers accidentally to two men who share the same fate (as well as skin color).

That seems to me key here: the dismissal of these men as a distraction and the fact that this man whose fate this Democratic congressman thinks of as a distraction is in reality two people who the congressman can’t bother to tell apart, are part of the same problem. Not only are Democrats wrong to pay attention to men like Garcia and Romero, yes, attention paid to them is in fact “a trap”. But the congressman can’t be bothered to pay enough attention to settle on which one of these two he’s actually meaning to declare a non-entity. This may even be intentional: “I can’t tell y’all apart” is rarely offered as a statement of fact; it is a power move, it says “I don’t have to tell you apart; individuality is for me and my friends, and you don’t rank.”

I think many of us can recognize this double dismissal: our concerns don’t matter because we don’t matter. Attention to our concerns would imply attention to our individual persons and, well, we don’t deserve that. That would be too much to ask. And this is where the congressman’s dismissal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who until recently worked on construction sites, as a “hairdresser” becomes important. “Hairdresser”, I’d contend, in this quote is democrat for “f*ggot”. Why are we making a fuss about this f*ggot, this congressman really wants to know. The government wants to do with these people what it wants, and we would be fools to step into the “trap” of caring about them, or even bothering learning their names or learning that they’re different people. Why, if we end up stepping in and helping this fairy, the bullies might say we’re queer ourselves.

I am laying this out as drastically as I am here, because I lived through years of “centrist” democrats telling the party not to indulge in “divisive” “culture war” issues such as whether people like me deserved rights, or deserved not to get murdered. “Don’t take their bait”, they’d say, the bait being, presumably, the people not having to be scared for their lives. “Being a problem is a strange experience”, W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. So, it turns out, is the experience of being bait. But that’s what we were — our political expression, our personal expression, hell, our personal conduct. Everything we did, we were told, reflected (always poorly) on something, set something back — a cause that those chiding us claimed to believe in just as fervently as we did. It may be hard to imagine all this now — or at least it would be, except that the same people moved on to doing the exact same thing to trans people the moment they (temporarily) no longer could do it to gay men and lesbians.

All this in spite of the fact that if there’s one thing the beginning of the second Trump administration has made clear, it’s that economic issues can no longer be meaningfully distinguished from culture war issues. The United States is about to destroy its education sector, which is an incredibly productive part of its economy for culture war reasons. A school like, say, UPenn may appear to some as an élite and remote place filled with privileged people; it may appear to your Fox News-watching uncle as mostly the place where that trans woman swam that one time. But to Philadelphians it is, of course, also the city’s largest employer. In fact, in terms of top employers in all of Pennsylvania, UPenn ranks just behind the Federal Government, the State Government and Walmart. In what way is gutting such an employer a “culture war” and not an economic issue? As I pointed out on In Bed with the Right’s episode on trade, the new administration seems hell-bent on destroying its vibrant renewable energy and EV sector, because it thinks getting power from the sun is for wimps and real men make energy by penetrating the earth.

At the same time, the tariffs are all about manhood, all about swole jobs as opposed to “bullshit jobs” or “keyboard jobs” or whatever. It was about “depressed and addicted and broken” men returning to “making things”, as far right gadfly Milo Yianopoulos put it on “X”, “in the image and likeness of God the Maker”.

In their overall logic, the tariffs are not about restoring an economic status quo ante — that’s gone. They’re all about recreating the cultural memory of manufacturing jobs, of a certain performance of masculinity coinciding with making good money — which, as Jess Calarco has pointed out, “mistake[s] correlation for causation.” Those who want to bring back a glorious age of good, high-paying, respectable manufacturing jobs “think their parents and grandparents had the ‘good life’ because of jobs in manufacturing. In reality, their parents and grandparents had that life because of unions, pensions, high marginal tax rates, and strong social policies — with a little post-War exceptionalism and a lot of racism and sexism thrown in.”

And of course disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who pay taxes, go to work, buy stuff and keep the economy running because you don’t like the way they look has an economic dimension. Britain found that out after Brexit. Western Europe’s aging countries that alternate between demonizing anyone who doesn’t look and think exactly like them, and wondering why they’re unable to lure more Indian doctors or Taiwanese programmers into the country, are finding that out as well. I doubt Gavin Newsom, Matthew Yglesias and Unnamed Democrat #2 don’t realize that. But they are so used to a reflexive marshaling of “the economy” and “economic issues” any time someone says “hey, this seems kind of unjust”, especially if it seems unjust towards someone other than white people. “The economy” isn’t a separate thing for them anymore. It’s just a way of saying “get real”; it’s a way of saying: pay no attention to the thing you’re paying attention to.

So there’s this interesting split in these kinds of analyses: I doubt that these politicians and writers share the beliefs of Trump and his people; but in a weird way they share the beliefs behind those beliefs. The ideas that there is an “economy” more real than culture, and that Republicans and Real Americans™️ have privileged access to it, etc. I have to think of a remark Slavoj Žižek has in one of his prefaces, which speaks of the “fetishistic split” in ideology: the person who buys into an ideology, Žižek argues, outsources their belief, which actually frees the individual from having to hold obviously untrue beliefs themselves. Here’s what Žižek writes:

“This paradox indicates the fetishistic split at the very heart of an effectively functioning ideology: individuals transpose their belief on to the big Other (embodied in the collective), which therefore believes in their place- individuals thus remain sane qua individuals, maintaining the distance towards the ‘big Other’ of the official discourse.”

I think this makes a lot of sense, and interestingly — though I don’t recall Žižek saying as much — there are two ways of getting to this point of identification/disidentification what he calls “the ‘big Other’ of the official discourse”. You could identify with it on the whole, but then add more shadings and nuances — think of the fact that, as my podcast co-host Moira Donegan likes to point out, seemingly every Trump-supporter will start their defense of Trump with a list of all the things they don’t like about Trump. Their identification with the project proceeds by way of first disidentifying with the man, his tweeting, his boorishness, his stupidity, etc. But there is of course the option of going the other direction — believing the big picture, the official discourses, while pushing towards a point of disidentification from it. And I think that tune goes a little like this: you can’t stand Trump, you think the Dems need to fight like hell, etc. etc.; and then you list all the things Trump understands that Dems do not. The point is: you’ve actually swallowed much of the ideology, you just happen to not … believe it personally?

The fact that our heroic unnamed congressman went to the “hairdresser” even though he was talking (probably) about a construction worker, is thus a telling slip. From David Eng to Jasbir Puar, a lot of queer theorists have pointed out that in the immigration system we see the internal contradictions of what Puar calls “homonationalism” play out. On the one hand, Western countries hold themselves out as havens for queer people from less “enlightened” nations. On the other the demeaning and homophobic way in which they then seek to sniff out “immigration fraud” by queer people betray that their acceptance is often purely formal.

Queer immigrants are like light switches — you can turn them on and off as you need them. Are you using them to argue your own moral superiority, perhaps to justify attacking another country? Well, then they are precious cargo eminently worthy of even the most extreme forms of protection. Their very existence, their thriving is a sign that — the few bombs you’re dropping notwithstanding — you are on the right side of history. But if they go out and go all … queer on you, then you need to crack down on them. And when you point that out to them, you are told that there you go again, paying attention to the thing you ought not to pay attention to.

The irony of course is that the same people are perfectly willing to be distracted by shiny objects, when those shiny objects accord with their priors. Let a majority of the American public, let Senator Van Hollen, let the media obsess over the abstract rights that are accorded to people even when they’re imperfect (yes, including criminals, since those rights are how we determine whether they’re criminals in the first place)! These rocket scientists will be focusing their attention to where it really belongs: with a cherrypicked (and contested) buzzwords (“might have been involved in human trafficking”???) that they gleaned from flopsweat-drenched Fox News reporting desperately trying to backfill a justification for something that is unjustifiable.

This is how we all function in the logic of a centrism both trying to beat back and deeply enthralled to the rise of the far right: we are all future distractions. Our outrage, our arguments, our protestations are heard, of course, but they are heard as irritations, annoyances, as lapses in strategic thinking. How could you be so stupid as to raise this point, or, worse? You are playing into their hands!

Are there ten thousand of us taking to the streets? Well, look at those ten thousand distractions. Are there millions of us taking to the streets? Millions of distractions. Nothing will ever make these people real to Republicans because they are not in the end, to them, real Americans. But nothing will ever make these people real to (some) Democrats and (some) centrists, because they are, in the end, dangerous distractions. Sirens that fill your ears with songs of morality and “never again”, but, which you, in wise foresight, have blocked out in advance. Of course, in the end, it’ll leave just them, tied to the mast. When they came for the trans people, they declared the plight of trans people a distraction. You get the idea. When they come for them, there will be no one left to call them a distraction"

Among the demands the letter made of Harvard:

— Harvard was supposed to restructure its governance system. As at Columbia, this seemingly would have involved ceding a lot of faculty governance to the top of the university. It also would have involved “empowering … from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” Just in case that part was unclear, it would also involve “reducing the power held by faculty … and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”. In case you don’t notice the dog whistle here — this is about scholars of race, gender, and anything else conservatives don’t like. I keep getting asked whether comparing these letters to the policy of Gleichschaltung isn’t excessive — this is literally telling Harvard only to promote people in line with MAGA preferences and policies.

— Harvard was to “cease all preference based on race, color, religion sex, or national origin” in hiring. The university was supposed to submit all its hiring data to the feds for “a comprehensive audit”. Most ominously, “such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes.” Which I think means: hire more MAGA and do it now. As with many of these, the timeline here is breathtaking: academic hiring takes a long time, changing the demographics of a discipline practically forever. These would need to do almost random rush appointments on the say-so of powerful politicians and conservative donors — it would amount to academic suicide by clientilism.

— Harvard was told to stop using race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in college admissions and submit all relevant data to the feds. What is more, “statistical information regarding admissions shall be made available to the public, including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” If you’re thinking: hey, is this just about putting an asterisk behind any non-white person attending Harvard, you’d be 100% right.

— Next is the “no Arabs”-clause: Harvard is told to institute an ideological screening of “international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values”. There were a bunch of bullet points about student discipline that all read like conservative (and anti-Muslim) special pleading: apparently student discipline wasn’t previously applied “with consistency and impartiality, without double standards based on identity or ideology”. Apparently, “deplatforming” is a massive problem that requires the feds to get involved.

— Harvard was to commit to an “audit” (the feds’ words) of “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Several programs/departments/centers were even up for full “reform” directed by outside auditors. And when I say “several”, I might need to take a deep breath, because “the programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.”

Three things that I want to mention about the letter before I move on to the thing I really want to talk about:

(1) Those who have humored conservative talking points — those over “deplatforming” and “identity politics”, for instance — might ask themselves whether they are surprised by this letter, and, if they are surprised, whether they should perhaps have their heads examined. The conservative assault on higher education has known many idiots, and now they’re finding out how useful they were. For this letter is a laundry list of right wing campus grievances, but reformulated not as handwringing concern-pieces with nary a peep on how this is supposed to be implement, i.e. the way you used to present these books in The Atlantic or the way your talked about these issues in your Wall Street Journal column. No, they now present as what they in truth always were — a deeply punitive and authoritarian demand for access to one of the few arenas in American life that is not dominated by white conservative men.

(2) As readers of this newsletter will recall, there are four aspects of the University’s functioning that the Supreme Court singled out as centrally protected by academic freedom: “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study”. Try to figure out how many of those would be left standing once the catalogue of demands were to have been implemented. I’d say it’s literally none of them. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that SCOTUS said “on academic grounds” — what the Trump administration demanded from Harvard would be a hiring scheme that would have nothing to do with academic grounds, but with maintaining its federal financial support. That actually contravenes academic freedom as outlined by the Supreme Court in 1957 twice over.

(3) Finally: many on social media celebrated Harvard’s reaction, and it’s indeed nice to see one of the big Ivies put up resistance (a bunch of less prominent schools have resisted earlier, which weirdly enough seems to have escaped notice — go figure). But when you read the letter Harvard was responding to, it feels like they could not have possibly acceded to the demands — not just on intellectual or ethical grounds, or even prudential ones; but rather on purely financial ones. Acceding to these demands would have been ruinously expensive and completely impractical. So I sort of suspect that this is just a funding cut with some extra steps. This is meant to drain Harvard’s resources, possibly to set up another assault later.

There are law professors and historians who will be able to sort through the wreckage here much better than I will be able to — I’m pretty excited for Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s podcast American Campus to do an episode on this standoff. But I feel like I am well positioned to speak to the campus fantasies that seem to animate the Task-Force’s letter and its demands. Because these kinds of letters are by now a small genre, and they always are at base two things: (1) brutal assaults on higher education and academic freedom, and (2) expressions of a bizarre fever dream of the campus that has become integral to the right’s self-understanding over the last few decades. The reason to focus on both of these is simple: many who condemn the current assault have paved the way for it by peddling these campus fantasies; yes, a lot of peddlers of campus panics maintain these fantasies while claiming to want to defend the university.

Last week, I was part of a radio debate in Germany with a university rector from Germany and a journalist who had written a book about (as per the subtitle) “how a left-wing movement from the United States threatens our freedoms”. The rector was really good and well-informed — most centrally, you could tell that while she was not familiar with every aspect of how a US university is run, she could fall back on a shared sense that universities are complex systems and that simplistic understandings of how they work were probably wrong. No such luck with the journalist. He managed the truly jaw-dropping feat to excoriate Trump’s attempted takeover of the universities, while then granting most of its premises. The universities were too woke, they were echo chambers captured by a dangerous left-wing ideology that destroyed all dissent. At which point you wanted to ask: then why do you disagree with the remedy these people are proposing?

We recorded that conversation on Tuesday, I wish we could have spoken again after the letter Harvard received on Friday. Because it makes clear why it is such a fool’s errand to seek to give intellectual heft to gripes that objectively lack them. Not because the campus these people are attacking is different from what they say. But because that campus simply doesn’t exist. Let me pick out one of the demands made of Harvard, the old canard about “viewpoint diversity”. My interlocutor in the German radio debate echoed this concern, saying that universities had become dominated by “this ideology” (he didn’t say “wokeness”, but … it was “wokeness”) and did not represent the ideological breadth of the wider public. I replied that this was neither the point of a university, nor at all feasible. I think the letter Harvard received gives us a good idea why.

Here’s how the letter proposes to bring about more “viewpoint diversity” at Harvard:

“Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests. Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.”

To quote a slightly tired internet meme: that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. But I get why each of these sounds reasonable to the uninitiated, which is why these kinds of talking points would do well with a German journalist who moved to the US in 2021, decided wokeness was out of control, talked to Chris Rufo and Francis Fukuyama about it and then wrote a book about it in 2022. These are the kinds of claims where to lodge objections gets the response that “surely it can’t be a bad thing to…”. And no, in the absolutely pristine realm of abstraction, untouched by real existing institutions and grown structures, surely it cannot be a bad thing to have viewpoint diversity. But get concrete even in the slightest, and this soufflé of high principles collapses.

So you don’t want “ideological litmus tests”? “Ideological litmus tests” sound terrible, who’d want any of those? But this is the kind of thing where either the remedy presumes problems not actually in evidence, or it runs into logical problems in the few places where it does apply. What do I mean by that? Scroll through the departments of a university and you will quickly realize that most of them cannot possibly have “litmus tests”. If the assumption is that, say, the math department asks you who you voted for or how you feel about tax rates, then that’s just calumny. Who would do that, how would it even come up? If this were brought to a Dean’s attention, a search would be immediately shut down. I’m guessing this is ultimately a cavil about diversity statements, which right wingers have been freaking out about forever, even though (a) honestly most people don’t read those, I fear; and (b) the question of how, on a diverse, international and multicultural campus, you will engage with a broad range of students is a part of doing business, not “ideology”. If I were hiring a Brahms-specialist in 2025, I’d want to make sure this colleague can teach and reach out to students with no previous experience with classical music — so I’d want some kind of statement of how the instructor attracts — gasp! — a broad range of students to their classes. Not because I’m a leftie cuck, but because I want students in my classrooms.

Speaking of Brahms-specialists: If we expand what constitutes a “litmus test” (as we would sort of have to, since literal litmus tests don’t exist), we get to the departments or programs these people are really upset about. Yes, after fifty years of right wing assaults on gender and sexual minorities, after twenty years on the discipline of gender studies, there may not exactly be parity within gender studies when it comes to party affiliation. At the same time: people self-select into these fields, sub-fields, and even specific questions and methods — and while I don’t think it’s totally contiguous with one’s ideology, it easily could be. There are assumptions and priors built into the disciplines, which, yes, can in the aggregate align with the ideology of the practitioner of those disciplines. Sociology is fascinated with inequality, and addressing it, and tends to dislike simplistic answers like that people ought to buck up — so people who think that the government should not ameliorate inequality might find sociology less interesting than, say, studying criminal justice or the law. Psychology tends to gravitate towards methods that suggest people are not fully in control of their own decisions, which might in the aggregate select for a more misanthropic group of scholars than, say, art practice.

These priors cut both ways politically: my university does not have a department of gender studies, you cannot get hired into gender studies at all. What it does have is a vast business school with 119 faculties at last count, a school that quite naturally has a bunch of priors about capitalism, free enterprise, business structure, profit-making, about the uses of a university education. I imagine if you don’t share those, you’ll have a hard time getting a job there. This doesn’t seem to be the kind of “litmus test” the Harvard letter has in mind. More to the point: given that it’s a professional school and is supposed to prepare students for the business world, it’s not an unfortunate side effect that it is pro-business and skeptical of government intervention. It is central to its effectiveness as what it is. I wouldn’t want those people to hire me, if I’m honest. It would make them objectively worse at what they’re supposed to be doing.

Notice, however, that if we were to truly apply what the Harvard-letter seems to be advocating equitably, i.e. not just to fields these people hate, the Stanford School of Business soon might be forced to hire me! If everyone at the Harvard business school were too — gasp! — pro-business, then they’d have to hire dirtbag leftists from Brooklyn until they had at last attained parity. Of course, their graduates would be showing up to interviews asking what it’s all for, man, and calling for world revolution and the interviewers would say, sir, this is a Deloitte’s. The business school is an extreme case, but to some extent this is true for many departments: we call them “disciplines” for a reason; they encode certain implicit values and hierarchies into their status as disciplines; and those values and hierarchies might well translate into the ideology of the practitioners of that discipline. Musicology thinks classical music is worth studying, classics thinks we should heed the wisdom of the Greeks … these are not neutral propositions, nor can they be!

The letter Harvard received disregards all of this. The reason why is simple: it notices ideological prerequisites and premises only where it doesn’t agree with them. Ideology is for other people. Given their hatred for “DEI”, we might well say that ideology for them is other people. But the Harvard-letter gets even more fantastical when it demands remedies: “hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity” is another thing that sounds good in principle. Until you think about it for a microsecond. The joke that this is “affirmative action for MAGA” is snappy and not altogether wrong, but it occludes one central point: applicants do check a box that identifies them demographically. We don’t tend to ask applicants questionnaires about their political leanings, and I’d imagine there would be a (justified) outcry if we did! So where on earth would an applicant indicate whom they voted for, or what their feelings were about January 6, or about tariffs, etc.?

Years ago I was on a hiring committee at Stanford (not in my department), where one of the top candidates wrote on, let’s say, conservative-coded topics. War, masculinity, etc. As I recall, several members of the search committees made a strong push for this scholar, arguing essentially intellectual diversity. Here was someone doing big conservative topics, it would be a good counterbalance to what most of the department did. The rest of us were persuaded: he indeed covered things the department in question didn’t, he had an interesting way of talking about them, he seemed steeped in a different archive than most other applicants. We offered him the job, he ended up taking a job elsewhere. But during his campus visit two things emerged: first, he was absolutely brilliant and lovely, and we’d made a very wise decision. Second, he was a dyed-in-the-wool radical who, when talking about his topic not as a scholar, but just as a citizen and human being, was such a firebrand it made my jaw drop. The reasons one shouldn’t seek to discover an applicant’s ideological leanings are multiple, but one of them surely is the following: at a certain level of sophistication, it’s damn near impossible to guess how those leanings interact with their work. I have colleagues who I agree with politically on everything, and every time we talk literature we get into a massive fight. I have colleagues who are, essentially, MAGA in exactly the way the Harvard-letter seems to imagine, but who every time they talk about our shared field make perfect sense to me!

The idea that universities somehow screen out conservative scholars is fantastical. What’s even more fantastical is that they could. When I applied for my job at Stanford, my colleagues knew three things about me: I had written a dissertation on metaphysical theories of marriage at the turn of the nineteenth century — I believe my job talk was on the Catholic Romantic (and friend of F.W.J. Schelling) Franz von Baader. It was all about binary gender and the way certain Romantics based their conservative politics on it post-1815. Was I pro, was I anti? Not the question I asked, I was trying to explain late Romanticism’s corporate nationalism. My other job talk (yes, they made me do two) was on Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried. The other thing they would have known is that I had just completed a German-language book on four-hand piano playing in nineteenth-century Europe. Which, sure, quoted a lot of Adorno, but it also quoted a lot of Nietzsche. Readers of this newsletter know my positions on many political issues, but — and that’s my point — what part of my CV would have given my colleagues any indication of my political leanings? Now imagine if I’d been a specialist in the Baroque, or the spice trade, or Korean politics, or ammonites.

The reason to dwell on this is simply that “hire more conservatives” says something far more than what it claims to say. Many conservative (and many liberal) commentators like to claim that the academy has become overly “politicized”; but the truth is that in some central respects it’s deeply depoliticized, except conservatives would like to change that. I have taught alongside deeply conservative colleagues of whom I didn’t realize they were deeply conservative until they said something on our way to or out of class. I have taught alongside leftist colleagues who I assumed were centrists or even Republicans. This person studies operas about ancient gods and knights and is upset that their students no longer study the classics? Sounds conservative, but in practice that person could be an impassioned reader of Roger Scruton who thinks multiculturalism has destroyed the West’s belief in transcendent art; or they could be an Adorno-student who thinks that pop culture is capitalist trash meant to sap the working class of its revolutionary zeal. That’s not to say that there aren’t lines to be drawn between our work and our opinions — it would be psychotic if there weren’t. But at a certain level of complexity, and once one’s field of study is sufficiently remote from day-to-day politics (outside, say, the Department of Political Science or the School of Sustainability), those lines are not straightforward or altogether predictable.

I’ve written before about the fact that conservative and liberal critics of “the university” really always pick out certain subsections of it and hold them up as stand-ins for the whole. That’s because they’re trying to get away from the fact I just pointed out: that in the normal day-to-day operation of the university, decisions are made for all sorts of reasons, all of which could be understood on some level as ideological, but importantly not in the sense that these people mean it. These critics like focusing on those fields where the general ideology of the university (evidence is good, we can solve social and technological problems, more education is good, etc.) is paired with a more overt political positioning. These exist of course, but public discourse also tends to only fixate on a select few of them. To go back to my earlier example, I’ve found that the level of groupthink and orthodoxy among business school faculty can be pretty shocking. But sure, let’s keep talking about the department of gender studies we don’t have.

And that’s to say nothing of the kinds of institutions that were created just to offer conservatives comfy sinecures on campus. Think of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, which has an explicit political and ideological program, and which specifically caters to Republicans and other conservatives. My interlocutor during the aforementioned radio debate pointed out that Francis Fukuyama agreed with him that universities were ideological echo chambers, or some such. I don’t grant that. But I also think it’s super rich coming from Frank Fukuyama who was making that pronouncement from within an institution explicitly designed as an ideological echo chamber. As are the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, the Buckley Institute at Yale, etc. etc.

This by the way is the answer to a question I asked rhetorically a little earlier: “So where on earth would an applicant indicate whom they voted for, or what their feelings were about January 6, or about tariffs, etc.?” This is your answer: this isn’t about hiring people who happen to think conservative thoughts. It is about hiring people who run in conservative circles, who have come up through conservative think tanks, who are friends with conservative donors and politicians. “Intellectual diversity” may sound good, but it really is not intellectual at all. It would be about the placement of people in academia based on affinity networks — and while that’s of course something that already happens for both conservatives and non-conservatives, it’s also something we fight like hell because it destroys the legitimacy the university. The fantasy that drives something like the letter to Harvard is a hiring committee that just appoints a random person because they’re Black or trans. This isn’t the world we live in, but it’s a confession of what they’d like to see happen in the form of projection. For the very real world something like the letter to Harvard wants to see is one where a hiring committee just appoints a random person because the right rich right-wing psychos happen to know who they are.

Finally, let me get to the most hilarious part of the entire letter: “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” Yes, you read that right: if your majors tend too far to the left, you have to keep admitting students until you’re at parity. There are just so many things wrong here, it’s hard to know in what order to take them: first off, the idea that we can determine our students’ viewpoints — how would we do this? Why would Harvard want to? It feels incredibly creepy! Second off, they do realize these people are 19, right? People can change their minds, people can evolve, people can nuance. Heck, during a good college education they’ll probably do all of these things on many issues. If a student who entered as a free-market absolutist decides that, no, actually, some intervention is necessary, will they have to notify the Chief Ideology Officer of their change of heart, so that a new Rand-ian can be admitted?

Third, “every teaching unit” is doing a lot of work here: I’m guessing they’re hedging here because if you say “department” the absurdity becomes plain. Simply put: we don’t have ideological litmus tests for our students, if for no other reason that we are desperate for more students. Does the Trump-administration seriously think a department with like eight majors, would turn away a prospective major because they know he’s in the Young Republicans? Finally, it’s worth noting that very few of the units the letter seems most upset about can admit their own students. If the department of African and African American Studies doesn’t have enough white students, it’s because too few white people have signed up to be majors. You could table harder at the major’s fair, you could hand out lollypops or have t-shirts made or whatever. But no one gets admitted to college into a major. You’d think these people would know that.

At this point, you might ask: if this is so fantastical, Adrian, why do people believe this? Well, for a very simple reason: what you’re witnessing is not an accurate picture being painted of our universities. What you’re witnessing is their self-portrait. These are people who haven’t changed their mind since college, people who hated being the one conservative in that one history class, the ones who are convinced they didn’t get that essay prize because they wrote for the Dartmouth Review. These are the people who are convinced they would have gotten into Harvard and wouldn’t have to go to Duke, if it weren’t for their white skin. These are the people who invited Dinesh D’Souza to speak on campus, and when someone shouted at him during Q&A got to go on Tucker to talk about it in their beigest suit. When it comes to DOGE we are all living in the nightmarish hellscape of an aging tech nerd’s failing self-image; when it comes to the government and the universities, we’re living inside the neuroses and biographical hangups of guys who never got over having been deeply, deeply uncool in college.

(1) A first simple point: wow, are we talking about Columbia and Harvard a lot! Again! There’s good reason for this, of course: the media, business and political elites attacking higher ed are obsessed with these universities — either they went there, or they didn’t get in, and someone else got in, which is worse. As I’ll argue below, the attack on the big, famous R1 universities is a spectacle, and it responds to a logic of spectacle. Columbia had the big solidarity encampment; so did Cal Poly Humboldt. But Cal Poly Humboldt isn’t a school that many New York Times writers have alumni connections to, Cal Poly Humboldt doesn’t have wealthy donors who talk to the Times’s financial reporters, and Cal Poly Humboldt isn’t just a subway or an Acela ride away. So Columbia got the attention, and that attention now brings with it the crackdown. The crackdown follows the grooves and patterns of media attention.

That doesn’t mean that universities that aren’t Harvard or Columbia are not affected. But it means that we’re paying way less attention when they are. Even when the developments are functionally the same, the old unspoken rules of “THE CAMPUS” hold. When a University of Alabama student disappeared, it was worth a lot less attention than when a student at Tufts did. Over the last few weeks, states like Texas and Ohio have geared up to remove tenure protections, to put public universities under the control of boards of governors (meaning essentially donors as well as business and political elites — many of these boards do have student members, but they’re non-voting), with governors or trustees in charge of hiring and disciplining students and faculties. It’s what the administration demanded of Columbia, but on steroids. And yet our eyes are, once again, glued to the big campuses everyone’s heard of.

(2) When it comes to the big, famous private universities: As I argue in this piece for Germany’s Der Spiegel, it is important to note that the impression that this is about the feds on one side and “the university” on the other, is mistaken. Consider the sequence of events at Columbia University: when the government cut 400 million dollars in federal funding, a tense negotiation ensued, and it quickly emerged that Columbia would cave. But the place where it emerged was pretty interesting: the New York Times has been obsessed with events at Columbia, and its reporters seem to have been swarming the campus for months to get good quotes and report on even the most minor squabbles. But the leaks about the negotiations appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which has far less higher ed reporting — but whose reporters are naturally super well connected in the world of high finance. So you have to suspect that the leaks came from the Board of Trustees, and you have to suspect (which is an impression many have shared) that in truth the Trump-administration was negotiating with conservative donors on the Board. The fact that the interim president was then unceremoniously replaced by the BoT after when evidence emerged (on Bari Weiss’s website, more on that soon) that she had promised to slow-walk the implementation of the feds’ dictates. The new president is Claire Shipman, a member of the BoT. What we are witnessing is really about a dual assault on the university: state officials and wealthy donors are giving up the (at least nominal) neutrality they have traditionally taken.

The French sociologist Eric Fassin has described the new policing of universities as ‘state anti-intellectualism’—it exists in Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's Hungary just as much as in President Emmanuel Macron's France. What's unique about the US version is that the right-wing populist attack on universities is working hand-in-hand with financial and tech elites. The mania for anti-wokeness that drives Elon Musk's fascist antics runs deep among these elites, even if they don’t express it quite the way Musk does. If you look at Nathan Heller’s recent piece about Harvard in The New Yorker, you get a sense for how the idea that the university needs “rescuing” (from “wokeness”, from entrenched interests, from “group-think”, etc.) merges with the idea that the university ought to be run more like these men and women are used to running their business (or remember running their businesses forty years ago).

The enemy of this kind of thinking are the faculty, students and the institutions and traditions that protect them. Just look at what Sam Lessin, a Harvard alumn, early Facebook guy and current tech investor, tells Heller: “The wild card is the faculty—they’re by far the hardest thing to solve for.” Note the Silicon Valley speak of “solving for” — the University is a problem to be solved, and in its ideal shape it wouldn’t be a university at all, it would be either Meta, or, more likely, what Lessin remembers Meta being like. “The students change every four years, so you can make a mistake, put the wrong people in, select for the wrong things, and fix it. The faculty is a unique characteristic of universities versus companies. It’s not clear what to do about it.” Universities are great except for the people attending them and teaching at them. I suppose for someone who’s come up in a sector of the economy whose solution to the cab industry is to get rid of cabbies this might make sense; the idea here is that the university would be great without any of the people in it. When the AAUP adopted its statement on academic freedom, and each time it has re-adopted it, tenure protections were key to academic freedom. It is clear that the end is coming for tenure: in places like Florida, Texas and Ohio, it’s state legislatures and governors coming for it. At the university, it’s Silicon Valley mega-donors droning on about “free speech”.

(3) It’s important to note that much of this is unprecedented. It’s also important to emphasize that in many respects, it’s not. Consider this passage from William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale from 1951.

What Buckley is calling for here is exactly what we are getting at the present moment: on the one hand, the idea that scholars might need protection to teach and research effectively, yes, that protecting that freedom is what academia may be all about, Buckley dismisses as “manipulation”. I should again emphasize that this even when Buckley was writing, this was understood as the core meaning of the term “academic freedom”: the famous cases that gave rise to the AAUP declaration involved things like the person whose name was on the university (*cough* Jane Stanford *cough*) wanting a professor gone for what they were saying publicly and what they were saying in their scholarship. The specific US version of academic freedom, it seems to me, is all about protecting scholars from the people who lend their names and massive amounts of cash to these institutions. It’s what made them serious institutions of higher learning, rather than just annexes to the bloated egos of the plutocrat class. Buckley is saying that what academic freedom *ought* to mean is the freedom of those very people — alumni, donors, trustees and, insofar as they are politically aligned with Buckley, university presidents.

This is, to say the least, not what most people have understood by that term — including the US Supreme Court. In Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), SCOTUS argued that “to impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.” Meaning academic freedom for SCOTUS resided exactly where Buckley declared it a “chimera”. SCOTUS outlined four basic freedoms that universities had: they could decide “on an academic basis” who ought to teach, what can be taught, how it ought to be taught, and who can be admitted. Note that the current onslaught basically denies all of these. Columbia acceded to a demand to reorganize its curricula and departments, to a demand about dismissing students, and to one about personnel decisions.

These are basically designed to knock out the specific freedoms outlined in Sweezy and they seem intended to also knock out the more specific ruling about clarity and appeals structures in academic hiring and firing in Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967). Recent immigration enforcement action has a very similar effect: as I’ll explain in more detail below, the canceled visas, Green Cards, the detentions and deportations seem to respond to a logic of attention — if your name has come up in the right wing media ecosystem, on a campus blacklist or thread on X involving high-ranking Republicans and/or friends of Elon Musk, you very well may be at risk. If you haven’t, it seems you’re fine for now. This is not systematic, but it is also not entirely stochastic. The reason UPenn had 175 million of federal funds withheld over trans athletes has nothing to do with the university’s treatment of trans athletes right now — it has everything to do with the fact that Lia Thomas went there, and that the right wing made Lia Thomas a big deal. So if you become, or more accurately are made, a big deal, you become a target.

I have spoken with colleagues across the country in the last few weeks, some of them Green Card holders. More than one told me that they were worried that any kind of attention from right-wing or state actors might lead to the immediate loss of their livelihood without any recourse. They also indicated that their university leaders (almost exclusively US citizens) had not grappled with the massive restriction of their most basic academic freedoms comes with that sort of uncertainty. When I say “most basic”, I mean it: not just the freedom to research what you’d like or write about it; even the freedom to grade students. I know anecdotally of colleagues who no longer grade student work accurately if they know the student writes for right wing reporting sites. Not because they fear dissent, or a “shitstorm” — because they fear deportation.

The assault on higher ed embodied Lessin is basically the second coming of Buckley. Just like Buckley, a specific group of donors (egged on by right wing lobby groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni) today think that the university has been captured by … well, by wokeness (Buckley would have said secular anti-individualist, potato potahto), and that therefore the university can no longer legitimately claim or responsibly wield academic freedom. It’s worth noting that what Buckley ultimately advocated was a sort of autogolpe of trustees and alumni: a seizure of power and centralization of power on the part of the people whose freedom “in the last analysis” really mattered. This is at least part of what we’re seeing today.

(4) The recent attempt at “bringing into line” the universities has some historical precedents, and they’re not great. It’s striking that the administrative changes forced upon Columbia University last week are all about centralizing power in and around the university president. University presidents traditionally have very little practical say in personnel and disciplinary matters. There would have been other places on campus where one could have centralized power, if centralizing power were the only object. But I think it isn’t the only object. The idea is (a) to centralize the university around a leader principle, a kind of unitary executive theory of the university; the idea is paradoxically (b) to make everything the president’s problem, meaning they are easy to force out of office whenever something goes wrong on campus. The fact that the president who acceded to these demands lost her job less than a week later seems to bear out my interpretation.

A text I, a historian of German culture, find myself flashing back to a lot (and which I’ll have more to say about in a future post) is Martin Heidegger’s 1933 speech "The Self-Assertion of the German University". It’s often called the Rektoratsrede, since he gave it upon his accession to the rectorship (basically the presidency) of the University of Freiburg. He started his speech by stating: “The assumption of the rectorate is the commitment to the spiritual leadership of this institution of higher learning.” This leadership is at the same time a following, a following of the will of the people.

On the one hand, Heidegger was claiming new authority for himself, proposing a “revolution” at universities much like the one he saw happening in the wider country. His own sense of mission was to reach down deep into how the university operated. As he would detail in a speech to Freiburg students a month later: “Research got out of hand and concealed its uncertainty behind the idea of international scientific and scholarly progress. Teaching that had become aimless hid behind examination requirements.” On the other hand, while he was grabbing power for himself, he also seemed intent on putting that power in the service of something else, something beyond him. In fact, the self-assertion of the German university seems to consist for Heidegger in giving up its difference from the world outside of it. The university has not heeded the changed world around it, and it offends Heidegger. “There is revolution in Germany, and we must ask ourselves: Is there revolution at the university as well? No. The battle still consists of skirmishes.”

It’s worth noting that, if you substitute a rhetoric of counter-revolution for one of revolution, this reads quite a bit like the following passage: In God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley laments what he calls “one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time”: “The institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.” The great failure of the campus, in this passage, is the same as in Heidegger: its failure to reflect the world outside, its difference from the rest of society. To be clear: I don’t think Heidegger and Buckley are making the same point. What I am saying is that these two points can easily be mistaken for one another, or collapse into one another. I believe that this is what is happening right now — we are seeing a Gleichschaltung that understands itself as hyper-individualist, an takeover by monied elites that misunderstands itself as populist, an anti-intellectualism that pretends to want to safeguard “true” scholarship, and an authoritarianism that self-styles as insurgent. It’s where what Eric Fassin has called “state anti-intellectualism” meets what Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey refer to as “libertarian authoritarianism”.

(5) In opening, I said that the crackdown appears to follow past media attention. This isn’t exactly a mysterious process, but it requires a reconsideration one of the old chestnuts of campus media discourses: the campus anecdote. If you’ve been reading me at all, or fellow “cancel culture”-fact checkers like Michael Hobbes, you know that the mechanisms by which these kinds of anecdotes come about, by which they are collected, by which they are disseminated, and by which they are interpreted are (a) anything but accidental, and (b) anything but neutral. There is a right wing information ecosystem out there for basically picking up campus stories, gussying them up as needed, and getting the right ones before a broader audience. Lia Thomas is such an anecdote, so is the sandwich at Oberlin, so is the right wing judge at Stanford, etc. etc.

When I say “infrastructure”, it’s about information systems, but it’s also about some pretty serious hardware. I mentioned the Stanford incident — it made the rounds for a few weeks, there was vigorous campus debate about it. But one particular piece of the fallout those of us on campus lived with was absolutely invisible to outsiders. A conservative group ended up doxxing the students involved in the protests (and apparently a couple who weren’t). For months, when I’d drive onto campus, I’d be stuck behind this truck, which drove around campus in order to display the names and photos (!) of individual university community members.

(Tirien Steinbach was fired eventually, btw.) There was a separate truck apparently rented by the same group that displayed similar signs.

You may think that yelling at a speaker is wrong. You may think that singling out an administrator who you feel mishandled a situation is legitimate. Around the same time, another group (I believe it was David Horowitz’s Freedom Center) ran instagram ads against Stanford colleagues — their crime? No yelling at a speaker, no failure to discipline students who did so. It was “teaching CRT”. People like me have long pointed to these well-funded efforts and the relatively scant attention they were receiving to point out that there was a fundamental double standard encoded in the framing that “cancel culture” was running rampant at US universities. But what I didn’t make as clear, or maybe not drawing out clearly enough: this well-funded right wing “campus watch” ecosystem has been making lists for a long time. When we complained that those lists clearly meant to intimidate scholars, we’d get a lecture about free speech and how we were snowflakes who needed to toughen up. And it was easy to forget how scary these lists were — when I was in grad school, we’d submit panels to the Modern Language Associations’ annual meetings with titles clearly designed to attract the attention of right wing campus watchdogs, and whoever ended up on some watchlist website would get a bottle of gin or whatever.

The present historical moment reminds us what these lists also always were: reminders that, once conditions are right, once the people who have been watching the campus all this time are in charge, it’ll be our turn. We’ve lived with that knowledge, we’ve accepted it as the cost of doing business. We’ve pointed it out, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Now the people who have been watching us are in charge. And the amusing anecdotes that you yourself may have shared, the WSJ articles about some campus fracas that mysteriously had to include the full names of the students accused of being “cancelers” or “wokesters” or “easily triggered snowflakes”, are functioning the way they always also functioned. Just far more spectacularly, with far more horrifying fallout. And with a serious threat to the US university as an independent institution.

The actual Christiane walked out of the film’s premiere. After that evening, at least for a time, Natja Brunkhorst became Christiane F. It was her who kept getting recognized and who eventually had to leave Berlin to get away from it. The two Christianes never met during filming; the producers thought it would rob Brunkhorst’s performance of its authenticity. They briefly met at a concert years later. “It was weird. We didn't really get along,” Brunkhorst said about it later. But perhaps it’s better to say: Christiane Felscherinow walked out. Christiane F.’s afterlife had begun in earnest.

The movie was among the first produced by Bernd Eichinger (1949-2011), who would go on to become Germany’s uber-producer. Eichinger loved adapting literary properties — among his next projects were Das Boot, The Neverending Story and The Name of the Rose. In most respect Christiane F. the movie is exactly that: a literary adaptation. It compresses the timeframe, streamlines the narrative, adds some OG book passages as voiceover. A lot of what made the book Wir Kinder so counterintuitive and haunting is missing from the film, and it’s largely replaced by vibes. I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism, at least not of Christiane F. as a film. Because the vibes are tremendous. Director Uli Edel wrings a lot of detail from simple scenes and even single shots, and captures a set of particular Berlin moods.

It feels weird to say that a movie that’s fully 15% people shooting up, going through withdrawal or worse feels exhilarating. It doesn’t really. But before all the needles and jaundice, the film feels almost like a paean to the city that in 1981 most Germans likely held at least partially responsible for what happened to the real Christiane. Maybe it’s having been away from Berlin for almost 9 months, but there is something deeply thrilling about a movie that evokes the timeless feeling of a late-night ride on a Berlin U-Bahn past endless Neubauten while Bowie’s “V2 Schneider” (recorded at Hansa Studio 2 in Berlin a few years earlier) thrums on the soundtrack. Which muddles the film’s message somewhat, but probably strengthens the story: The film isn’t nearly as searching as the book in figuring out what draws Christiane to heroin (her father, whom Christiane clearly holds responsible in the book, doesn’t show up at all). But it kind of doesn’t have to. If you lived in this city and went to these parties and hung out in these half-space-y half-decrepit buildings, wouldn’t it make sense to try every drug?

All of that is before David Bowie has a cameo as himself, recreating the real-life performance at the Tempodrom, which the real-life Christiane Felscherinow attended. For a movie that on some level knows that its argument has to be that drugs aren’t cool, this movie has just real trouble not being cool.

The film’s Christiane is more of a cypher than the open-hearted, at times disarming narrator of the book. She seems to be newer to drugs by the time Kessi brings her to Sound, the disco where she first encounters her future junkie friends. Her first visit to “Europe’s most modern discotheque” finds the film at its most free from its source material: it’s not the best shot sequence of the film, but it’s the scene where the film gets to make visual points that the book doesn’t and probably can’t. There’s a shot where Christiane examines herself in a bathroom mirror…

… only to then immediately confront a future reflection of her — namely a junkie seemingly dead from an overdose — in one of the bathroom stalls.

Christiane runs outside to throw up, only to have the man in the toilet stall walk past her more or less okay. Their exchange of glances, and his sudden change in relative catatonia, feel almost comedic. She’s out of her depth at Sound for sure. But it’s also that categories of death and life don’t entirely apply in this subterranean limbo. The film underlines that theme by having the kids head to a movie theater inside the disco (I think the actual sound had a laser show, but no actual cinema, but maybe I’m wrong), which is showing George Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead (1968). In a bit of, ahem, ghoulish foreshadowing, the scene they watch is the film’s most horrifying scene of oedipal violence: 9 year-old Karen Cooper, zombified, attacking and killing her own mother. It’s really double foreshadowing: by the end of the film, Christiane will shamble through West Berlin pretty zombie-like; and while she may not succeed in killing her mother with her antics, she definitely gives off the right energy.

The other thing the Romero reference makes clear is that Edel did sort of think of his movie as a horror film. The horror of Christiane F. is: it’s a horror film where our heroine does all the things a horror film protagonist isn’t supposed to do knowing full well what will happen to her if she does. And does it anyway. Whether it’s investigating a strange noise in a toilet stall, whether it’s awful body horror, whether it’s having a car pull up behind you on the street at night: Christiane does the thing you’re not supposed to do, but there’s no shock, no jump scare in it. When that car door opens, she knows full well what she’s getting into.

Reviews for the movie were generally positive. Nevertheless, reviewers naturally used the hit movie based on a hit book from a few years back based on a massive panic from a few years before that, as an opportunity to reflect on what this cultural phenomenon said about the country. Why, they asked, are we being told this story at all? “What is this all for?” the reviewer for Der Spiegel harrumphed. “Drug education? Deterrence? Exploitation? Is this really an inside view of today’s youth culture — or is it more of a classic commercialized horror story, but dressed up in the latest punk duds?”

It’s noticeable that most of the reactions to both book and film were written by men. But by 1981, even male reviewers seemed to wonder about how much of this story was documentation and how much of it was exploitation. Recall that the book only came about because Hermann met Christiane at the trial of a West Berlin man who’d be convicted of sex with young girls. The book has remained relevant as a document of the heroin wave, but its success rested on the fact that it was also substantially about sex work. It also ran as part of a twelve-article series with some fairly voyeuristic pictures, albeit not of Christiane herself. Notice also that the film version traded heavily on the doe-eyed Natja Brunckhorst, a thirteen year-old whom the producers plucked off a Berlin schoolyard and cast as their child prostitute. In its original cut, the film includes a sex scene with (brief) nudity. Sure, the film dutifully spends way more time on vomit and blood than on the sex. But the question Der Spiegel was asking the film’s audience — "why exactly are you here?” — still seems relevant.

None of this is to say that it’s all about titillation and voyeurism. But it’s pretty clear that the drugs were, at least for part of the audience, a way to legitimate gawking at a young woman, to contemplate her body and what she did with it. Worry about drugs was always also a way to explain away sticking your nose in young peoples’ business. Or to not have to think too hard about why exactly you were sticking your nose in young peoples’ business. No wonder that the real Christiane Felscherinow — who had been able to sanitize her own story for Hermann and Rieck — walked out halfway through.

This point will be obvious to my German readers, at least German readers of a certain age, but it’s nevertheless worth making: it’s not that the Christiane F. reporting sexed up news coverage. Reporting on gender or changing gender roles on the one hand, and satisfying a certain (almost exclusively male) voyeurism on the other went absolutely hand in hand in late 70s/early 80s Germany. Here is a small smattering of covers of Der Spiegel about various issues (rape trials, generational conflict, venereal disease, dieting and Idi freaking Amin!) that nevertheless manage to smuggle in naked women offered clearly for a male gaze. They range from 1975 to 1981, so exactly the Christiane F. years.

Part of why I’m showing you covers of Der Spiegel rather than Der Stern (which would look different, but which participate in many of the same trends) is that Der Spiegel’s covers are easily and freely accessible on their website. But my point is simply that the idea that something could be news and the idea that something was titillating were not very distinct in this kind of presentation. So it’s not that the Christiane F. fixation was really about something else — for some people it surely was, but for others probably not. The issue is more that the voyeurism was impossible to divide out. A person who genuinely worried about hard drugs in schools, and who was weirdly obsessed with what fourteen year-olds did with, for and to one another, didn’t have to decide which side of that divide they came down on.

Just how entwined the impact of Christiane’s story and the fact of how crazy young she really was, becomes clear courtesy of an experiment from the fine folks at Amazon Prime (I am being sarcastic; cancel your subscription). That experiment is the juked up … remake? I guess? of the story as Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo from 2021. The series stars then-22 year old Jana McKinnon as Christiane, and the 9 years between her and Natja Brunkhorst make a surprising amount of difference. The show comes across as a story of hard-partying 20-somethings, with lots of colorful fantasy sequences. It’s basically impossible to tell when this story takes place (even though shooting in dingy passages in a Berlin U-Bahn station should be perfectly possible today, so long as you wait until the Le Crobag has closed.); it has lost its specificity with regard to time period. And it has lost something else, something that every frame of the 1981 film was suffused with: Jesus, are these kids young!

I don’t want to be too harsh on the new adaptation — though I’m still entirely confused as to what exactly it was trying to do —, but its ditherings and indecisions, its inability to pick what part of adolescence and what period in history this story is about seem to me linked. And they turn out to be illuminating with respect to the phenomenon that the miniseries attempts (and ultimately fails) to capture. One of the most indelible characters we meet in Wir Kinder the book is Babsi, who is played by Christiane Reichelt in the 1981 movie, and played by Lea Drinda in the 2021 version, where she’s given way more screen time and function almost as a coequal main character with Christiane. The reason she’s repeatedly mentioned in the book is that she was famous before anyone knew who Christiane F. was: Babette “Babsi” Döge was born in 1963 and was, when she died on July 19, 1977, Germany’s youngest overdose victim — her story so shocking it even made the New York Times. The cover reporting on her death is among the final things Christiane sees in Edel’s movie:

It’s the basic affective core of the entire heroin discourse in Germany. Drugs were experienced as an immensely affluent society eating its own young. But there were other places where this was starting to be true (youth unemployment, for instance). But in few of them were the young so young. When Der Spiegel reported on the growing drug problem all the way back in August 1970, they opened with the following story: “He started at the age of twelve, taking pills from his grandmother's medicine cabinet. At fifteen he traveled to Sweden and learned to smoke hashish. A year later, the student Mathias Gerson**, son of a teacher, was found dead in his room one morning — dead of an overdose of Polamidon. He was the first young drug-related death in the cathedral city of Cologne.”

I think that kind of youth has everything to do with the underpinnings of the Christiane F. phenomenon. It’s got to do with the unsettling voyeurism brought to bear on Christiane and her friends. But it also has to do with the fact that the politicization of the book always hit a wall: yes, for some portions of society, Christiane could seem like a verdict on student rebels; but Christiane and her friends were never stand-ins for those students rebels. Their rejection of society wasn’t political at all, at least not in ways the German public in the 1970s recognized, they were simply too young for that. In one article, Der Spiegel quotes an expert pointing out that drug-use had long been political — it was a pointed form of rebellion. With heroin, he says, the scene has become "de-ideologized." "Most drug addicts today are “nothing, not even students.” You can hear the ghosts of 1968 in that little aside. The do-nothings of the 1960s at least had the good sense to enroll in college; these kids couldn’t even hack that.

Of course, we might say that 13 year-olds are perfectly capable of political stances. The expert is probably not wrong to suggest that they are unlikely to be “ideological”. These weren’t little communists, reaching for a syringe and a rubber band, in order to really stick it to capitalist system. But I think the last 50 years, and much theorizing about kinship, intimacy and non-normative bodies have made us more alert that marginalized peoples’ improvised kinship systems may contain more politics than someone looking for another student movement or nascent political party might recognize.

Katheryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child points to the fact that what makes the child a “queer” figure, requiring control and sanction, is in part its ability to form attachments and intimacies unforeseen of and destructive to the (biological) families in which they first appeared. The children of the Zoo Station are queer in exactly that sense: they are children finding intimacy, kinship and a momentary abeyance of exploitation in a society that seems rife with bad intimacy, familial restriction, and exploitation.

Christiane moves on from alcohol to drugs partly because she wants to belong; and partly because she feels safer with junkies than with drinkers: junkies don’t take advantage of you when you’re passed out, they don’t beat you. When Christiane tries to kill herself by overdosing in a station toilet, she collapses onto two boys, “both around fifteen”, who just happen to be hanging out in a public toilet. Not for drug reasons, it turns out. For the other reason: “Satin jackets, crazy tight jeans. Two little homos. I was so relieved they were homos. They caught me, as soon as I came tumbling out of this toilet stall like a ghost. They immediately knew what was up.”

It’s a moment that seems to contain a whole universe of generosity and solidarity. It can make you tear up, and for once, in this incredibly grim book, with a certain warmth. There’s almost a kind of low utopians in the scene of these kids helping each other out in a public restroom in an U-Bahn stop in which, in a better world, they wouldn’t have to be. Certainly not utopian in the sense that everything is — pardon the pun — hunky dory. But it may be utopian in the sense of Bloch and Adorno: in showing us a better praxis, even in utter abjection, it holds up a mirror to reality, a glaring image of where that reality is wanting.

It’s probably no accident that the new series can’t capture that. Also probably no accident: among the many, many changes the new mini-series makes is Christiane’s home life. Domestic violence of the kind Christiane experienced is often understood as pre-political, but that understanding is itself political. Did the Christiane Felscherinow we meet in the book have an articulated politics in the sense that she had an opinion on who should win the next local election? Maybe not, but she had a sense of how power and violence were distributed in the world, and what was unfair about that distribution. My point in critiquing the Amazon-series is not to say “these actors are too old”; it’s to say: aging these actors up turns their challenge to their own society into a different one, and — most importantly — eclipses the one that the children of the Zoo Station, precisely in their status as children, seem to have embodied.

As I explained last time, in talking about the phenomenon “Christiane F.” we’re talking about three things. About a person: Christiane Felscherinow, born 1962. And we’re talking about Christiane F., a media phenomenon. As I explained, the media phenomenon is not a complete distortion of what happened to Christiane Felscherinow. But it’s still important that the Christiane F. that the world meets is not the girl herself, but the girl as assembled by two journalists – Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck – in 1977. But even the version of the book that Hermann and Rieck assembled wasn’t what ended up getting published.Hermann and Rieck had real trouble placing this book anywhere. Eventually Stern, a big West German weekly magazine published the piece as a twelve part series, and eventually put out the book in its own imprint in fall of 1978. Then there’s the movie, directed by Uli Edel, which came out in 1981, and which again selects and reshapes the narratives. For one, the movie looks phenomenal, contains incredible songs by David Bowie, and is far more of a youth-picture than it is an anti-drug picture. The movie, which I’ll discuss separately, was a huge hit: released in April, it had 3 million tickets sold by the end of the year in Germany alone, making it Germany’s #3 movie of 1981 – behind The Empire Strikes Back and The Aristocats.

So, another approach. Let’s start in the place that’s in the title of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. The Zoo Station. If you’ve been to Berlin recently, maybe you’ve been there. But then again, maybe not. There was a time when it was the gateway to West Berlin, the place you’d arrive unless you arrived by air. Today it is what it was before Berlin was divided, a small station, busy but anything but cosmopolitan. It lies in the commercial center of West Berlin, next to (and indeed crossing) the Hardenbergstraße. If you haven’t been, the first thing you need to know is that it’s tiny. Frankfurt’s Hbf (Main Train Station) or Hamburg’s, which likewise both had drug and prostitution scenes in the 1980s, are absolutely immense by comparison. The Zoo was always fairly provincial.

And the station’s provincialism sort of stood in for Berlin’s. This was a half-city, improvised and unnatural; but also, as the writer Peter Schneider once noted, strangely at ease in its improvisations and unnatural rhythms of life. For about 10 years in the early 2000s, I lived on a street that had once been cut in half by the wall. I sometimes asked my elderly neighbors how they’d experienced this time, when they’d leave their front door and stare at a large concrete wall dividing two countries, two systems, and portending possible world war. One of them shrugged and said: we just used it to string up our wet laundry. If Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo ever mentions the wall, it’s just in passing.

A kind of preternatural stoicism has been part of Berlin’s self-identity for quite some time now. Helmut Lethen’s classic study of a kind of cool, detached almost cruel habitus during the Weimar years (published in English as Cool Conduct) takes a lot of its examples (Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn, for instance) from Berlin. The kind of sangfroid that is so unsentimental as to be almost disturbing runs as a thread through Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. The Christiane we meet in the book is never really mad at anyone, almost compulsive in her even-handedness: the vice cops? Pretty okay, when you get down to it. The teachers? Trying their best. The dealers? Generally decent. The johns? Mostly poor schmucks. The Church of Scientology? Actually okay people. This registers as just very … Berlin. A strange mix of extreme worldliness and provincialism — people who’ve basically seen everything but also don’t really leave their own particular district.

Built in 1882 as part of the elevated rail of the Stadtbahn, Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten was expanded to accommodate long distance trains for the 1936 Olympics. After the wall was built in 1961, it was the only long-distance train station fully in West Berlin (others were added later in Spandau and Wannsee). This in spite of the fact that it had only two tracks for long distance trains — just for comparison’s sake: Frankfurt’s main train station has something like 25. It emerged as a hot spot for prostitution, crime and drugs for a couple of reasons: it furnished one of West Berlin’s few connections to the outside; it had a street running directly underneath the elevated tracks; and it had a large 1950s style subway station right underneath, serving two major subway lines, the U2 and the U9.

In an interview Kai Hermann points out that the appearance of these kids at these locations was pretty sudden and kind of surprising to him. He was interested in why they were there, which led him to approach and interview Christiane Felscherinow. The Zoo station was also a place where Berlin had the kind of big city feeling that other cities at the time had a far easier time generating — owing to the fact that they were in fact actual cities with a center and a periphery and all that. So the Zoo station was, to some extent, also a place where West Berlin spectated and analyzed itself.

The Zoo station was a place at once of too much world and not enough of it. It was too international, too cosmopolitan, too worldly by half. But it was also tiny, cruddy and embarrassing. (In fact, Berlin managed to replay this exact dynamic with its recently-opened new airport: a colossus that in the end feels kind of small, and an international embarrassment that in the end isn’t even interesting enough by being properly disastrous.) The essayist Karl-Heinz Bohrer once wrote about West German provincialism that the real problem was that Germans were provincials who “slowly lost the wanderlust and yearning for an elsewhere that is really what being a province is all about, that sense that somewhere else would be somehow more sophisticated, richer, more modern, more important.” Germans instead had started “to mistake the up-jumped province for the urbane, the metropolis.” This was the Zoo Station: provincial without being cute, metropolitan without being impressive.

The point is: whatever Germans recognized in it, they disliked. And generally, we should say about this gateway into West Berlin: it was a gateway into a city it’s fair to say many Germans hated. I won’t say that that’s the only reason Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo became a bestseller, rather than a drug story about, say, the Frankfurt station, or the Platzspitz in Zürich. But a story about a young girl’s descent into hell set in Berlin definitely had that extra spice you needed to make a cultural observation of a particular subculture into a verdict on the city and an entire brand of politics.

When Berlin was the capital of Germany, it was, at best, an unloved capital. When Germany unified in the late 19th century, it was under the Prussian aegis, and not everyone was happy about it. In fact, any misgivings or disappointed hopes people had about the unification process, could be projected onto Prussia and, by extension, onto Berlin. Berlin was a truly modern city and soon celebrated and flaunted its modernity, which to some extent made it a metonymy for everything anti-modernist forces (of which Germany had a lot) hated. It was shaped by proletarian forces and their political movements far more strongly than Catholic Munich or mercantile Hamburg.

As one observer calimed in 1928, the area around the Gedächtniskirche (about a long block or two from the Zoo Station) was the antithesis of whatever was true of Germany outside of Berlin. “The German people is alien and superfluous here. To speak in the national language is to be nearly conspicuous. Pan-Europe, the Internationale, jazz, France and Piscator—those are the watchwords.” The observer, just to drive the point home, was Dr. Joseph Goebbels. But his optic, one that manages to discover in Berlin only whatever is opposed to “real” German national essence, has survived into the present day. “Kreuzberg isn’t Germany,” a speaker declared at the Gillamoos (a Bavarian carnival of sorts, I have no idea and no intention to find out): “The Gillamoos is Germany.” Kreuzberg is a district in Berlin with a lot of non-white Germans. The speaker was Friedrich Merz, who was elected German chancellor last weekend.

As I mentioned in the last installment, drug discourse in Germany was also always about “foreign” influences, and about “foreign” people. There’s the fact that German media could endlessly warn about foreign substances coming in from outside, while all the kids they were describing really got started on their drug journeys by taking drugs with which Germany was inundating the rest of the world. But there was also the matter of cultural influence: rock music, the US counterculture, etc. Christiane F. is also a story about the relationship between Germany and the anglosphere: Christiane’s junkie argot is shot through with anglicisms. From context clues you can gather that she would have pronounced “H” “aitch”; when she’s going through withdrawal, she calls it “turkey”; it’s about US influences, rock music, AlcAnon and later on Scientology! The book – which is based on the tapes, but was ultimately put together by two middle-aged German journalists – seems to sense in drug culture a first shockwave of an unwelcome de-provincialization, globalization.

So a kind of negative identification via Berlin (“we are whatever Berlin is not”) continued after the war. After 1945 both the various buildings designed by Albert Speer and the pervasive rubble became far more enduring reminders of the Nazi years and the Second World War than the fast-to-clean western cities would allow themselves. “I like Berlin for the ways in which it differs from Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich,” the writer Peter Schneider once wrote: “The leftover ruins in which man-high birches and shrubs have struck root; the bullet holes in the sand-gray, blistered facades; the faded ads, painted on fire walls, which bear witness to cigarette brands that have long ceased to exist.”

Starting in 1948, just to make matters worse, the eastern half of the city became the capital of another country, the German Democratic Republic. As Christopher Clark has pointed out, as the Western Allies began rebuilding their parts of the country, they offered the population there a narrative where Prussia, centered around Berlin, had been the problem with Germany all along. It’s not a mystery why Germans living in Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich went along with this narrative: it located Nazism outside of their own borders, and implicitly made it the GDR’s problem. In any event, if Berlin became a symbol of postwar Germany at all, it was a negative one — broken, incomplete, both its crimes and punishments spectacularly out in the open, it embodied everything West Germany didn’t want to see about itself.

In the last installment of this essay I talked about drug abuse as the dark unconscious of West German postwar affluence. As the Schneider-quote suggests, Berlin had a funny role to play in that affluence. Everyone was getting richer. But Berlin didn’t really fully partake, or at least not partake on equal footing. After the war many of the famous industrial manufacturers headquartered in the GDR relocated to the West, industrializing previously rural areas. This very much included Berlin — the encircled city was just too risky a location for strategically important production facilities, and too far from the markets the companies were actually manufacturing for. As a result West German postwar wealth was made in places like Bavaria and the Ruhr area … and if anything it was drained towards Berlin. Berlin, or the three-quarters of the city West Germany controlled, was kept afloat, and indeed populated, by subsidies. This attracted populations that were unusually dependent on subsidies — cheap places to live, for instance, transit subsidies. When Germans looked towards Berlin, they saw a bunch of moochers.

By 1976, they had another reason to look down on Berlin: the city was associated more than anything with the German counter-culture. The lack of a draft had driven a lot of more alternative-minded young Germans to the island half of the “Siamese City”, as Peter Schneider calls it. Berlin wasn’t absolutely ground zero for left wing organizing at the time — Frankfurt, with the School for Social Research and its active squatter scene might have been able to compete for that title. But many of the central attention-grabbing events of what in Germany has become know by the metonymy “68” took place in Berlin.

It’s worth emphasizing again, as I did in the last installment, that the Felscherinow family appears to have been swept up in exactly none of this. But reading a story of a girl gone wild in mid-70s Berlin while you’re living in, say, Dormagen in 1978, the connection between the atmosphere created by these events and the world Christiane inhabits would have been as clear as it would have been illusory.

As Anna von der Goltz explores in her The Other ‘68ers, the mythification of the SDS left tended to tell a story about radical activism — from promise to disappointment, more or less. When the story more realistically is about simultaneity: yes, more young people were joining communes, protesting the Vietnam war, etc. But the vast majority of course were doing different things entirely. They went with the times, but they combined a few select countercultural signifiers with different forms of conservatism. Still, whenever this generation was analyzed after the fact, analysis tended to act as though the student radicals had exemplified the generational experience. This — and that’s my point here — made 16 year old Christiane F., who was not a child of 1968 a metaphorical child of 1968. This is what I meant by distinguishing the biography of the person from the narrative that grows up around her: these two aren’t that distinct in what happened; but the Christiane F. we meet in the late 70s is made to mean something that seems quite distinct from the experience Christiane Felscherinow lived through in the early part of that decade.

1967 brought to prominence the Kommune 1, a commune located in various apartments on loan from young German writers and intellectuals. The Kommune 1 was designed to destroy the institution of the nuclear family, which the communards regarded as the smallest institution of the repressive state apparatus and the incubator for fascism. The Felscherinow family was at the same time living in Nützen, a small town just north of Hamburg. Christiane [quote]. In the late 60s, many politicized young people came to Berlin. The Felscherinow family did not: they arrived in Berlin in 1968 hoping, as Christiane will put it in Mein Zweites Leben, “to parlay government subsidies into opening up a marriage brokerage.” I think it’s worth dwelling on that disconnect: Christiane would one day be regarded as something of a verdict on the libertinism of people like Rainer Langhans and his fellow denizens of the Kommune 1. But in fact, she grew up in a very traditional — too traditional — nuclear family, one whose business it is to … create more nuclear families.

As I noted last time, one place where the book seems to just straight-up agree with its young protagonist is the question of domestic, sexual and gendered violence. The authors don’t seem massively interested in it, but Christiane seems to bring it back up again and again — the way she seems to regard society is just familial violence radiating outwards, through the corridors of the apartment buildings, through the workplaces and schools, and then through the broader culture. There’s a super dark throughline that suggests that junkies are ultimately a better hang than drinkers: drinkers get violent, junkies just kind of shrink into themselves. Drinkers use stupor to take advantage of women, junkies are respectful. The drug scene Christiane describes has way less violence than her home. It’s still noticeable that the way the book was metabolized was basically that it was all her mother’s fault for finding fulfillment outside of the home and not “paying enough attention”.

On June 2, 1967, the Deutsche Oper in Charlottenburg played host to massive protests against the Shah of Persia. After the Berlin police, aided by the Shah’s own secret police, began beating up on protestors, street fighting broke out — a policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, murdered the student Benno Ohnesorg, while the latter was running away. The next day, Axel Springer’s right wing daily BILD, headquartered by the wall in Kreuzberg, titled: “This is Terror”. They were not referring to the police. The paper claimed Ohnesorg, victim of the Berlin police, was instead “the victim of riots staged by political hooligans." "The hubbub was no longer enough for them,” the paper wrote about people who had gotten beaten up by their own police, and by the secret police of an authoritarian dictatorship with no jurisdiction on German soil. “They need to see blood." The Felscherinows were still living in northern Germany at the time. Still, there’s one first tenuous foreshadowing of Christiane’s later fame in the Ohnesorg affair: the idea that cracking down on Berliners with furious state violence and that you could sell that violence as justified and in fact their own fault was an early stirring of the politics of repression in which Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo would later (and despite its best efforts) get entangled.

Because Wir Kinder is to some extent a book about authority, and about how it is good. In the chapters narrated by Christiane’s mom and representatives of the criminal justice system, there is a clear narrative of too much permissiveness. Christiane seems far more nuanced in her assessment, pointing out that a lot of her rebellion had to do with unjustified, cruel and random authority. Mein Zweites Leben even offers a reading of the dynamics of Wir Kinder that suggests that identification with authority might have been Christiane’s problem: Christiane’s tragedy, the author writes in hindsight, is “that her empathy seals her fate, since she tries to understand rather than hate her abusive father.” Wir Kinder, likewise, emphasizes that Christiane has the run of Berlin the way she does not due to parental lassitude, but primarily due to lack of resources: her mother has to work — as it happens at the Axel Springer publishing house.

Christiane’s portrait of her father is fairly devastating, he objected to it upon publication. She speaks with palpable disdain of “my father’s plans”, and none of them appear to be those of a radical. They are stultifying in their conventionality, and his daughter, although just a teenager, senses that only too well. “I didn’t have any idea what was going on with my dad, and why he flew off the handle at every little thing. It only dawned on me later […]. He had big ambitions and every time he tried to make good on them he’d fall back on his ass. His dad despised him for it.[…] My Opa had always had big plans for my dad. The family was supposed to be somebody again, like it used to, before the communists seized all their properties.”

We first meet Klaus-Dieter Felscherinow unemployed, but waxing his Porsche, out drinking with younger men when he’s not beating his kids. At several points her father reappears in her life with various tough-love schemes that he’s far too diffident to pull off, and that usually end up just darkly comedic. While locked in her room, Christiane begins selling her used underwear off the balcony. In the late 70s he is “on a total Thailand-trip”, “of course mostly because of the chicks, but also because of the cheap clothes you could buy there. He saved all his money for his Thailand-trips, that was his drug.” This isn’t the portrait of an over-permissive hippie, in other words. Christiane (or her interlocutors) understand him as a petit bourgeois whose ambitions are too big for his britches.

One of the more heartbreaking motifs in Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is that his daughter more or less thinks she’s accidentally imitated him. Drugs are a way to be less ordinary, drugs are a way to rise up in the world — not in terms of economics, but in terms of an economy of cool. Drugs allow her to feel better than others, a desire Christiane heavily implies she copies from her parents.

Recall the passage I quoted in the last installment: Christiane in the U-Bahn being making fun of the “squares”. Or think of the way she seems to be kind of elitist about “advancing” through the ranks of various drug cultures. She clearly relishes the junkie cant, which merges in an interesting way with the Berlin penchant for nicknaming (Berliners love giving famous locales nicknames, and the junkies have an entire cognitive map of their own — the Bonnhoefer Institute where they do their detox, for instance, is known as “Bonnie’s Ranch”). There’s a kind of low gnosis here. She thinks her johns are “jealous” of her, pities their normalcy. On the other hand, as she hits rock bottom, the book really plays up the idea that she’s desperate for the kind of normalcy she once disdained. The point is: this is a story about a social climber who, like her dad, falls on her ass.

On April 11, 1968, Neo-Nazi Josef Bachmann opened fire on student leader Rudi Dutschke on the Kurfürstendamm. Dutschke, struck by three bullets, survived, but never fully recovered, eventually dying in 1979. In reaction, protestors burned the daily edition of BILD, the paper having launched a massive campaign against the student leader in the months leading up to his assassination. This was the summer the Felscherinows packed up their possessions and relocated to Paul-Lincke-Ufer, maybe 2 miles from the BILD headquarters. Kreuzberg, and specifically SO 36, where the Paul-Lincke-Ufer is located, became associated with communal living, left-wing organizing, and autonomous Marxist squatter collectives, most of that happened in the 1970s and 1980s.

Meaning: when Christiane’s family moved there, the center of radical organizing was in the West of West Berlin, basically within reasonable commuting distance to the Freie Universität. SO 36, hemmed in on three sides by the Berlin Wall, was marginal in that story. Christiane’s mother Ursula worked in the building in which the media campaigns against the student rebels were coordinated. Still, the family story, which really could not have been more conventional and, by Christiane’s own value system, “square” (spießerhaft) would eventually come to be identified with alternative lifestyles the area would later become identified with. After all, Kreuzberg would not always remain marginal to the left. By the time Christiane told her story, and by the time her story was assigned to generations of German schoolchildren, the associations between Kreuzberg and left-wing organizing would have been obvious and natural.

On May 14, 1970 in Berlin-Dahlem, Gudrun Ensslin and five others sprang Andreas Baader from police custody. Baader was in jail for firebombing two department stores in Frankfurt. It was the birth of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), which would conduct a massive terror campaign across West Germany for the next 25 years. In November of 1973, a new terrorist group, the Revolutionäre Zelle (RZ) began its bombing campaign in Berlin. The Felscherinow family had left Kreuzberg by this time: “Excitement was followed by disappointment, the business plan didn’t work out,” Felscherinow summarizes in Mein Zweites Leben. Her parents move, as mentioned, into the Gropiusstadt, a new high rise development that had broken ground in 1962. It’s about as far from the beating heart of things as you can get.

As a guy currently writing a book about car culture, it struck me how much people drive in Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. Christiane’s parents do, her dad is obsessed with his Porsche. But of course so do her eventual johns. Berlin drivers are like New York drivers: they exist, of course, they are even plentiful. But they are a separate species, their experience of Berlin an entirely different one from the vast majority. This was even more pronounced in the early 1970s: what’s the point of a car if you can’t drive more than 10 miles without having to pass a (pretty onerous) inspection at a border check point? If the closest cute small town, the closest campground, the closest gothic cathedral is not only in another country, but in an enemy country? It reminds me of the China Miéville novel The City and the City: there were several different cities co-occupying the physical space people called Berlin. Christiane grew up in one, and what people saw in her story happened in an entirely different one.

We could say that these two Berlins finally become one in April 1976. Christiane attends a concert by David Bowie near the Anhalter Bahnhof, and does heroin for the first time. "That was on April 18, 1976, a month before my 14th birthday. I will never forget the date." There are three things that I think are important to take away from all this:

(1) The German reading public’s relationship to Berlin was absolutely overdetermined by the time Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo arrived in 1978. In engaging with the story of Christiane F., the public was grappling with a bunch of national traumas, national neuroses, and political currents and counter-currents, none of which the real Christiane had really been embroiled in during her descent into addiction and prostitution. Furthermore, the zoo station and Berlin did important work: this was a Berlin story, and about Germany’s increasingly vexed relationship to its capital and — more importantly — what it represented.

(2) There is a tendency in German media to interpret anything and everything that happened after 1968 as a verdict on 1968. I can’t tell exactly when exactly this started, but Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is certainly at the beginning of that process. This impulse has become more and more identifiable as a weird and ahistoric compulsion in recent years, where you get people blaming phenomena on “the 68ers” that involve people who were negative 20 years old in 1968. This is, in other words, an irritable gesture seeking to resemble a historical narrative. There’s a great essay by the writer Till Raether about re-reading Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo forty years later. He describes how the way parents talked about Christiane F. clearly had to do with a kind of reaction to leftism: By the time he picked up the book in the late 70s, “the everyday discourse in the Federal Republic and West Berlin,” he notes, “had seamlessly transitioned from ‘but the terrorists’ to ‘but the drugs’.”

(3) It’s important to emphasize that Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo both is and is not a part of that backlash. It’s pretty clear the authors (and I’m including Christiane herself among them for a the moment) were very much trying to avoid having it be that. The whole point of Christiane’s narrative was that simplistic narratives of the drug problem were misleading. “It wasn't like I, poor girl, was deliberately hooked by a bad addict or dealer, as you always read in the newspapers,” the book says." “I don't know anyone who was hooked against their will. Most young people come to H on their own when they are ready, as I was."

That last sentence is, I think, revealing: Christiane is always so confident in her own self-assessments, but the book has a heartbreaking way of signaling that clearly she’s often terribly wrong in them. But the thing is: the book in a subtle but pretty effective way undercuts all the other people who are supposed to know what’s happening to and with Christiane. As I mentioned last time, the chapters written by her mother are so by-the-numbers, you can’t tell whether her mother is just a deeply incurious person or whether the authors just really hang her out to dry. The overall effect is that Christiane is wrong about herself, but so is everyone else. This extends to the political dimensions of the story as well.

In general, and especially when it lets Christiane do the talking, Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is very explicit that a crackdown won’t work. When it comes to what Christiane would have wanted, it’s about a reassertion of authority, as I said, but really about parental authority. It largely refuses to villainize just about anyone — every junkie, club kid, even dealer in it tells Christiane not to do drugs. Christiane’s empathy, too, feels almost toxic: she won’t blame the dealers, the johns, the cops, anyone really. She’s truly unremitting only when judging herself and her immediate family.

It’s significant in this context that the book doesn’t really follow a descent into hell narrative: in some of these 70s books you get from smoking a joint to shooting up heroin in like a chapter. I think that kind of fatalism exists in books like this because it licenses intervention: if only we had done x after we caught her with a joint, perhaps she wouldn’t have run off with the carnies! If only we had cut her out of our will after she pawned our fine china, etc. etc.! Christiane F does have this narrative logic at moments, though Christiane explains why: she thought of it as advancing, at getting admitted to more and more secret layers of “the scene”, i.e. the drug world. She’s basically really getting into a hobby, just that that hobby unfortunately is injecting herself with heroin. But it also has things very out of sequence: there’s a moment late in the book where she steals money from her mom’s wallet — which she presents as really hitting rock bottom. Thing is, she has been prostituting herself for like a hundred pages at this point and had sex in front of people at an orgy like 10 pages before!

It’s clear that in their selection Hermann and Rieck play up these counter-intuitive moments, and I suspect it’s because they want to ward off a kind of simplistic if/then-logic. They understand that the book will be read as a call for restoration of specific forms of authority. And they seem to understand that Christiane’s story in truth is nothing of the kind. Part of this is probably that they had been in Berlin for the entire period I described above. They knew that, if the books was a hit, how it would be metabolized. What questions it would be used to ask. And what questions it would be used to ignore. In part III, I’ll talk a little bit about the afterlife of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo: if today’s installment was about how the book almost necessarily was read as a final verdict on the 1960s, the next one will be about how the book became the starting gun of the 1980s.

There wasn’t much suspense going into tonight — barring an absolute earthquake and insane polling errors, we knew who would be likely to be Germany’s next chancellor, and who wouldn’t. In terms of who wouldn’t: the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz. The question was how bad it would be. But given the seemingly foreordained nature of tonight’s result, it ended up being … kind of a surprising night?

The headline is: According to the most recent vote count, the center right (I guess?) CDU/CSU is the strongest party — its chairman, Friedrich Merz, will almost certainly end up holding the post once held by his arch-nemesis Angela Merkel. The SPD, under still-chancellor Olaf Scholz, absolutely collapsed and is now only the third-strongest party at 16.4 % of the vote. The second-strongest party is the far right AfD, which doubled its results from three years ago, from 10.4% to 20.8%. Especially in the Eastern German states that are not Berlin, the AfD is clearly the strongest party. So far the more or less expected bad news.

But drill down a bit further, and the news gets more interesting. The CDU’s gains were exceedingly meager. Merz had a pretty clear strategy since taking over the party: basically steal the AfD’s positions and woo back voters the CDU lost to the far right over the last decade or so. In a twist literally everyone saw coming this … does not seem to have worked. The CDU gained a very modest 4 percent, which, given a spectacularly unpopular incumbent government, feels like the number you’d hit if the entire party tripped over something and slipped into a coma on the first day of the election campaign. It’s easy to say a rotted pumpkin could have run up that sort of number. But that would be wrong: it feels like a rotted pumpkin would have easily topped that number.

Merz will try to claim some kind of victory out of all this — and God knows the media will lend a healthy assist. But it’s hard to look at that number and not think that someone who wasn’t running a far right-lite campaign, and wasn’t such a massive, galaxy-sized asshole, could have run up a margin easily two or three times larger. So we’ll get a Chancellor Merz, but that chancellor will begin his tenure basically having to wrangle everyone and everything into line.

Late tonight, it emerged that due to the BSW not making it into parliament (more on that below), a “grand” coalition might be a possibility: CDU/CSU and SPD in a rehash of an unloved centrist coalition, which would still have only a ten-ish-seat majority — meaning bold proposals that would require tweaking the constitution would be out of the question. A black-green coalition, which the Greens seem to have been angling for, won’t work. A coalition with the AfD is possible, and I have a suspicion that this is the outcome Merz favors, but it would likely lead to out-and-out revolt in his party. So either he could either spend all his time wrangling another party, or he could spend all his time wrangling his own. In a way, it’s a fitting punishment for a man who has Musk/Trump-style delusions of just governing by banging his fist on the table. He will … be as far from that as anyone possibly could be.

Let me talk briefly about the parties represented in the previous government, the “traffic light coalition”. Chancellor Scholz’s SPD got completely worked. The Greens meanwhile lost a fairly small vote share — minus 3.1 percent isn’t awesome. Still, given that (1) they were both the main target of Merz’s campaign (yes, they, rather than the Nazis were the CDU’s “main enemies”, according to the incoming chancellor), (2) they ran a pretty confusing campaign that seemed designed to appeal to everyone and no one, and (3) they were junior partners in a coalition that couldn’t get much done, they can be pretty pleased with this result.

As for the third party in the “traffic light” coalition — the FDP — they got absolutely clobbered. Dropping from 11.4 percent in 2021 to 4.3 percent is bad enough. 5% is also the magic threshold under which you can’t enter parliament. Meaning the FDP is out, and deservedly so. Say what you will about Olaf Scholz, he was saddled with about the worst coalition partner one could possibly imagine: after declining to join the government in 2017 because they thought being in the opposition would get them more votes, the FDP hesitantly joined the government with all the enthusiasm of a teenager making their bed. They almost immediately became the government’s most vocal critics, above all the party chairman Christian Lindner, who is the human answer to the question of what happens when a meme coin fucks a ski instructor.

The annals of Lindner’s suckitude are long and oily: just as an example he made an appearance at a protest by irate farmers, giving a brutal speech in favor of their cause against the government he was there to represent. In the end he didn’t even have the guts to actually leave the government, fearing he’d be blamed for crashing the government, so he connived to have Scholz cause the rupture. Luckily, he turned out to be as terrible at conniving as he did at governing — the ploy turned out to have been heavily planned in advance, irate members of the FDP (which still has some decent people in it, apparently) leaked the hell out of those plans. Voters were not amused. Early during the campaign, Lindner hit upon the idea sloganeering for “more Musk and Milei” for Germany — only to have his idols endorse the AfD instead. Hard to forget Lindner sucking up to Elon in a reply after his first AfD endorsement — it’s like gazing into a dimension of pure cringe and everyone knows Christian Lindner. Anyway, the party is a shell of its former self, Lindner already announced his retreat.

The other party that narrowly missed the 5 percent threshold is the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Wagenknecht, who had been something of the Christian Lindner of the Linkspartei (maximum noise with minimal seriousness, tacks to the right but can’t get actual right wing votes), and who founded her own party in 2023. There had been hopes that the BSW would draw votes from the AfD — a kind of socially conservative, anti-immigrant social democratic party in the Danish mold. That did not happen. The BSW drew five times as many voters from the Linkspartei than it did from the AfD. Hell, it stole more Green voters than AfD voters. It’s really noticeable that these results seem to indicate that the attempt to offer an AfD-lite from either the left or the right is just an abject failure.

Wagenknecht almost crashed her old party before she left, and after she left it was understood that the Linkspartei would basically disappear into insignificance. Well, funny how it goes: the Linkspartei doubled its (admittedly terrible) result from last time, and is getting close to 9%. Much ink will be spilled over how this happened, but three explanations seem most salient to me:

(1) The party ran a smart campaign with appealing candidates. Specifically, the campaign ran without Sahra Wagenknecht, who is still a divisive figure. They made for an appealing team: Heidi Reichinnek, who went viral with a brutal takedown of the CDU’s rapprochement with the AfD, and who headed the campaign, is 36. Meanwhile three of the old-timers in the party — Gregor Gisy, Bodo Ramelow and Dietmar Bartsch, median age of 70 — went on a tour of their own trying to save the party through “direct mandates” (if you win enough voting districts outright, the 5% threshold doesn’t apply). The party gave the impression of a very motley coalition that basically agreed on most of its central issues — a real change when compared to a few years ago when Sahra Wagenknecht was on TV excoriating her own party every week. Anecdotally, I know plenty of Germans who started getting interested in the Linkspartei the moment Wagenknecht left in 2023.

(2) While basically every party tried to crib at least some of the AfD’s topics (migration, integration, security, closed borders, deportations), the Linkspartei ran on the issues they cared about — high rents and food inflation. They even had an app that allowed people to ask for help in case they felt gouged by their landlord. Anecdotally I know that they picked up a lot voters disappointed by the rightward lurches of SPD and Greens. The Linkspartei, like the AfD, has its roots in East Germany, and they have a pretty stellar track record in pushing back against the rising fascist tide. There’s every indication that there’s a massive gender gap opening up in the East, with especially young men tacking hard to the right and young women turning increasingly to the left. The Linkspartei was there to greet them.

(3) Finally, as I suggested after the European election back in the summer, the Linkspartei was also unique in not joining in the society-wide nervous breakdown over the War in Gaza. While the other parties basically declared unconditional support for Netanyahu’s course in Gaza official state policy, and went after dissent over the war ferociously, with frequently authoritarian tactics, the Linkspartei simply contained and represented a range of positions. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that especially young people went for the Linkspartei, a group that has more diverse opinions on the Gaza War than the established parties generally. The Linkspartei is also the party with the highest proportion of Germans with an immigration background. The party simply thinks and looks the way a lot of Germany thinks and looks. Just that the other parties no longer think of those parts as “really” German and no longer deign to represent them.

So where does this not-as-bad-as-expected night leave us? Well, unfortunately this depends how people end up reading these results. Jonas Schaible, who writes for Der Spiegel and is one of the best observers of German politics, put it this way in a recent Substack post: the most important question is how the CDU interprets the following set of graphics.

These are the numbers of voters who seem to have switched from the various parties to the AfD. Note that while all parties had voters leave them in favor of the AfD, the numbers from the non-voters (1.86 million), the CDU/CSU (910,000) and the FDP (800,000) are pretty massive. Still notice that the CDU/CSU also attracted more erstwhile Green voters, more FDP voters, more SPD voters than the AfD, losing out only on the non-voters.

Jonas points out that there are two possible readings: Either you assume what I said above, and decide that the CDU/CSU “would have had much more potential with a somewhat more palatable candidate or an election campaign aimed at the center.” Trying to copy/paste the AfD did not work. Or you assume that the CDU/CSU discovered that there’s no real downside for poaching in the far right’s preserves. They did gain votes, after all. So “[the CDU/CSU] could have shown even less consideration for moderation and sharpened its profile even more.”

I agree with Jonas that the first interpretation seems far more in line what we know from other countries in which a center-right party has tried to ape far right parties in hopes of diminishing them: think of Austria, think of France, think of the UK. This has almost always served to strengthen of the radical right. But I think it’s also pretty clear which interpretation Friedrich Merz — a man who can never, ever have been wrong — will gravitate towards. In fact, when it comes to Merz, I always have to think of a lovely line from Edward St. Aubyn’s At Last:

“As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.”

This is pretty much Friedrich Merz’s whole deal. But it’s not just about his individual psychology. After all, his party did just win this election. Feels a little strange to have your chancellor — who is already having to make some pretty difficult alliances to get the job — eat crow before even starting the job. The CDU’s mandate isn’t exactly massive, but it’s real. Why would you weaken it further by getting into a big, public fight about the election campaign that you, more or less, just won? And the vision of the campaign was, as I indicated, rather clear.

So it’s in the CDU’s interest in at least pretending to believe in Jonas’s option 2. But — especially because this theory of the case is almost certainly wrong — the downstream effects for Germany could be absolutely disastrous. Either because the CDU decides to tack even farther to the right, bully its incoming partners into going along with xenophobic campaigns and populist bullshit that doesn’t actually make anyone’s life better; or because they misread the signs of the times so calamitously that they let themselves be drawn into the Austrian option — also previously explored by German Chancellor Franz von Papen in 1933 — and let the AfD into their government.

Part I: “Though nothing will keep us together”

I came to Christiane F late. I imagine that German readers of this newsletter who are 10-15 years older than me were made to go see the movie when it first came out in 1981, and many who are only 5-10 years older probably read the book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo in school. I imagine many of them owned the soundtrack album with new tracks from David Bowie. I don’t recall anything like that. By the time it came to warning my peers and me away from drugs, Christiane Felscherinow’s fate was … I was going to say historic. But perhaps more accurately, it probably was felt to be historic, with its David Bowie concerts and punk jargon and the divided Berlin. But in a way, her world was still very much ours — maybe more so than adults were willing to fully own up to.

The reason I won’t say the book was historic is also the reason I have become so fascinated with this book. Because heroin — and the broader historic moment whose fears it epitomized — feels like it lasted a long time in Germany. You saw graffiti and Mohawks and studded leather jackets in Germany for far longer than even in parts of the US that transitioned from punk fairly directly into riotgrrrl into grunge. And you saw junkies, heard about people being junkies, had friends who became junkies. Germany was largely spared the crack epidemic, and pretty much until ecstasy really hit the market in the early 1990s the drug our parents were scared of was heroin. The Age of Christiane F. lasted for a long time in Germany.

I recently recorded an episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About about this book (we’re planning a separate one on the movie down the line). The host, the wonderful Sarah Marshall, asked me whether I thought that that wave of cultural fixation on heroin was a moral panic, whether, in other words, Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was a moral panic book. My answer was: yes and no. Heroin use spiked very suddenly in Germany and heroin abuse remained a pretty tenacious social problem. Of course, a lot of the warnings about it could also be hyperbolic; of course there was all kinds of other baggage that was tied up with the statistics and the individual fates of junkies. But then I think about my parents’ friends whose kids got into “H” at the time, kids who must now be in their 50s and 60s. I think about the endless needles we’d find in the playground across from the house I grew up in. And I think of a gentleman named Gert W.

Herr W. was renting a small room in our house when my family moved in. My parents decided to keep him there, kept the rent low, and paid him for odd jobs around the house. W., us kids were told, had been a heroin user, but was getting off it now, helped by a local methadone clinic. I remember, as a kid just entering school, finding his pallid complexion kind of spooky, and I remember a kind of affectlessness that freaked me out. But he was a nice-enough neighbor, and for my sister and I he was just part of our world.

Heroin was, I now realize in hindsight, just part of our world: on our way to the tram, on our way to the park, it was why we didn’t use the public restrooms at the train station. There’s an interview with Kai Hermann, one of the two journalist who compiled Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo from taped interviews, where he explains that part of what made him want to interview Christiane Felscherinow was that he’d suddenly noticed “these kids” at the Zoo Station and at other places in Berlin. He was interested in why they were there. We were of the generation for whom there was no more suddenness. This was just what some adults did, exactly as mysterious and as obvious as everything else they did. I don’t exactly know how old Gert W. was, but I don’t think he was in his 20s anymore. To me he registered as an adult.

One night in 1988, my parents got a call from W.’s mother – her son had missed a meeting with her, would my parents mind checking on him. My dad went over (W.’s rooms had a separate entrance), and immediately clocked the smell. Herr W. was dead, had been for a few days, in fact. I’m telling you this because it gets at the weird aspect of the story of this drug in Germany: in moral panics we’re always told this thing we’re panicking about is everywhere, even though it isn’t where we are right now. It’s coming, just you wait, it’s coming! But here was a drug that killed someone right next door to me, and still in hindsight society’s way of metabolizing deaths like his doesn’t exactly strike me as … normal.

The big “comp title”, as a literary agent would call it, to Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo is something like Go Ask Alice, which likewise concerned a precocious young schoolgirl drawn into a subculture of drugs and depravity. But which, in most relevant respects, was completely fictional. Wir Kinder is pretty clearly real. Unlike Go Ask Alice, it is low on melodrama, its story is in parts predictable, in parts deeply offbeat. In some way that made Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo a more potent historical agent: Germans lived with Christiane F., with the real Christiane Felscherinow, with the real milieu she inhabited for decades. She was braided into our everyday lives the way junk was.

There’s a book by Robert P. Stephens called Germans on Drugs – it’s an in-depth study of the drug scene in Hamburg. He points out that problematizing addiction and abuse are always also discourses about how to be an appropriate, measured, “good” consumer. The junkie is the secret sharer of the consumer. In the 1960s, Germany was becoming a country increasingly characterized by consumerism – a consumerism that was (a) much further suffused in society and (b) much more explicitly remarked on.

Stephens points out that prior to 1964, illegal drug use was not a youth phenomenon, and it was largely abused by people with access to it. He also seems to think that it objectively wasn’t much of a problem. I should admit that I don’t find his evidence on this score entirely persuasive. His evidence is mostly police records, media reports and drug busts. I don’t think that means he’s wrong, but it would certainly admit of an alternative explanation: drug busts indeed rose explosively in the 1960s. But this might just mean people largely abused this stuff in private.

At the same time, it doesn’t detract from Stephens’ broader point: drugs became visible as a social problem as they were publicly consumed, and consumed by the sort of people who had to consume drugs in public. If you were getting loaded on uppers or downers duly prescribed by a doctor in the privacy of your own home, the chances for an encounter with the criminal justice system were comparatively scant. Public consumption of drugs became visible as public consumption of drugs by young people.

In 1970, Der Spiegel ran a long title story about heroin. In a side article, we meet three junkies as they prepare to shoot up. The main story works overtime to position drug addiction as (a) new and (b) foreign. Scratch below the surface of early texts about drug abuse in Germany and you hit an anxiety about immigration:

“Only a decade ago, the terms drugs and addiction had triggered uniformly dark but clearly defined ideas in the bourgeois consciousness of the West. The evocative word drugs brought with it the exotic image of the emaciated Oriental, absorbed in smoking an opium pipe, withdrawn from the world and dreamy.”

Big “yikes” on the racism here. Tales of drug addictions became ways of thinking about globalization, about global transfers of goods, wealth and people. You get some of that in Christiane F. which is also a story about the relationship between Germany and the anglosphere. Christiane’s junkie argot is shot through with anglicisms. From context clues you can gather that she would have pronounced “H” “aitch”; when she’s going through withdrawal, she calls it “turkey”; it’s about US influences, rock music (Bowie!), AlcAnon and later on Scientology! The book – which is based on the tapes, but was ultimately put together by two middle-aged German journalists – seems to sense in drug culture a first shockwave of an unwelcome de-provincialization, globalization.

It’s very noticeable, for instance, that in a lot of media stories of drug users from the 70s, the rhetorical framing suggests successive “waves” of foreign substances were pouring to Germany – first marijuana, then heroin and cocaine. But when they interview actual junkies, it turns out the real gateway drug, at least in the 60s, wasn’t weed, which was still very much a drug of existentialists hanging out in jazz clubs. It was Fenethyline, which was invented in Germany in the early 60s, and which is basically an amphetamine – it was available freely under the brand name Captagon. Captagon was prescribed above all to children with what we would today call ADHD, and became a global German export – it was outlawed by the FDA in 1981 and put on an index by the WHO in 1986. It very quickly became an endemic abuse drug in the Middle East. So Der Spiegel seems invested in selling its readers on a tale of “oriental” invasion, when in fact it was Germany that was flooding large parts of the globe with immensely addictive substances that would present problems to the present day.

In general, when you look at what these people abuse alongside heroin, it almost all leads back to Germany: there’s Eukodal, first developed for Merck pharmaceuticals in Darmstadt, better known as oxycodone; Polamidon, developed for IG Farben in Frankfurt in the 1930s, better known as methadone; Pethidin, a.k.a. merepedine, also developed at IG Farben in the 1930s, the first synthetic opioid in the world; methylphenidate, developed in Basel (Switzerland) in the 1940s, better known as Ritalin; Palfium (dextromoramide) put out by a Belgian company in the 1950s; Preludin (Phenmetrazine) developed by Boehringer Ingelheim in the 1950s; AN1 (Amphetaminil), also created in Germany, in Berlin in fact, as a highly potent amphetamine mix. The one exception is the Pervitin, which was first synthesized in Japan in the 1890s, and which had become super popular among German troops during World War I. It is better known today as methamphetamine.

It has become something of a fixation in German discourses about globalization: German media often frame global exchange at something that victimizes Germany, when in fact the Wirtschaftswunder, the post-war economic miracle, had everything to do with German exports. Many Germans regard imports with immense anxiety, while also regarding anything that harms their own industries’ exports as fundamentally illegitimate and unfair. Imagining yourself on the receiving end of global influences, while blithely ignoring what you’re unleashing on the world: this became, in the 1970s something of a German specialty. And when all else failed, one could wave away one’s own chemical exports, and instead obsess over cultural imports. Talk about drugs was always about global trade, but it was also about globalized citizens. A lot of the news coverage at the time was about the involvement of immigrants in bringing drugs into Germany. There was certainly broader global mobility in the 1970s, which allowed drugs to flow more freely: think of GIs coming back from Vietnam, counterculture hipsters on the Hippie Trail, think of the rise in air travel as a routine form of tourism,. Still, as is often the case in Germany, anxiety about this broader mobility became fixated on the one thing Germans reliably fixate on: their neighbor who happens to have a Turkish first name.

But there’s something else to notice in Der Spiegel’s framing. When we get away from the wave of “oriental drugs” crashing on German shores, to the (pretty admirable) portraits of actual heroin users, there’s something funny going on in terms of the timeline. Namely: the evidence Der Spiegel accumulates seems to contradict the experience of suddenness (even though the statistical uptick may of course have nevertheless been real). We meet “Barbara” – daughter of a US GI and a German mom – who goes, like Christiane, from abusing pills (no mention of weed) to taking heroin, prostituting herself, having a girlfriend, overdosing incarceration – all of it by 1968! “Bernd” started at 14, by way of LSD – as a high-school student with good grades … in 1965. So while the main article emphasizes just how sudden and quick heroin’s arrival in Germany has been, the individual stories in the article suggest it’s been around and for quite a while – though not in the same groups.

I think there’s a clue as to what’s really happening in the final “Fixer” (“junkie”) Der Spiegel profiles: 16 year-old “Rita”: “Rita, the only minor in the bunch,” the author declares, “is spoiled. Her father owns a wholesale business and Rita grew up in an elegant suburban villa.” When her parents realized she’s gotten into drugs (from “boredom”, she says) her mother “put her daughter in a mental hospital for two months. After that, she took her on a four-week skiing holiday, gave her a horse to ride and forbade her from associating with the drug addicts.”

In other words: “Rita” is of an entirely different social class. Being a GI’s child raised by a single mom (“Barbara” was most likely born in 1950) would have been legible for postwar Germans as a pretty difficult fate, and such a child would have been understood as an outsider with much going against her. “Rita”, by contrast, is described as a child of postwar affluence – horseback riding, skiing trips, psychotherapy, boredom. If “Barbara” is a reminder of postwar humiliations – disordered families, occupation by foreign armies, the sheer desperation of the immediate postwar years – “Rita” is a sum total of all that the Wirtschaftswunder had made possible for (some) German children. The marginal figure, not “really” German, an orphan, ward of the state, etc. And “Rita”: a child of the affluent German middle class.And here the two are shooting up together.

From Stephens book, I think, four important themes emerge: even if we assume that drug abuse in Germany did not just appear in 1964, but rather that a more socially acceptable form of drug consumption gave way to more heavily policed ones, four developments are pretty clear:

(1) After 1964, drugs became part a specific youth culture. One thing you barely ever see in German news reports after 1964 are old addicts. With that comes drug use in public — these kids simply on average had less of a private sphere to be drug addicted in. Meaning drug use became a public phenomenon.

(2) This youth culture was de-localized and increasingly internationalized – where there had been a dozen local argots and little criminal underworlds, there now were the Beatles singing about doing acid.

(3) This youth culture was expressed through consumer behavior, including – think of the mod/rocker panic in the UK – especially consumption whose selling point was your parents will fucking hate this.

(4) Finally, this international youth culture was a “culture of refusal” – its affects were about refusing the very circuits of respectability and socialization that defined the grown-up world. The contradiction that you mostly refused to buy into the constant buying of stuff by … buying stuff, is almost too obvious to point out. But it would characterize a lot of Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, where the kids feel superior to “the squares” just going to horrible office jobs to make money to stuff themselves in front of their TVs, only to … take on one of the most awful jobs imaginable just in order to be able to get their fix. Consider this passage early in Wir Kinder, where Christiane does acid for the first time:

“It was absolutely insane. I thought I was in this large tin can, with someone stirring the contents with an enormous spoon. The sheer noise of the U-Bahn in its tunnel was insane. I didn’t think I could stand it. The people in U-Bahn no longer had faces, they made these horrific grimaces instead. Which is to say, they kind of looked the same as always, the fucking squares. It was just that now you could see it even more clearly in their faces, the disgusting tedium of their lives. I imagined how these fat squares had come shuffling out some shitty corner bar, or from some shitty workplace. Later these pig faces would go to sleep and then back to work and then they watched some TV. I thought: You should be glad that you’re different. That you have your group. That you’re taking acid, that you’re seeing clearly what god-awful squares these people in the U-Bahn are. That’s pretty much what I thought.”

This is what is ultimately at stake in Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo: I’m not saying that this is what Christiane Felscherinow’s story means, or that this is what she told the two reporters who compiled the book from taped interviews with her. I’m saying that as the book took shape, this was the logic that clearly governed the material. Christiane starts the book thinking she is better than the “fucking squares”, and the end finds her face pressed desperately against the glass wanting a normalcy that her life can never again have. And that kind of storyline — independent of what happened, independent on what the two journalists intended — would have read in 1978 as a verdict of sorts. A verdict on “the student movement”, on “1968”, 'on “the 60s”.

In thinking about the phenomenon “Christiane F.” we’re really talking about three separate things. We are talking about a young woman, Christiane Felscherinow, born 1962 in northern Germany, who moved to Berlin in 1968. We are talking about a book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, written by Horst Rieck and Kai Hermann “based on a true story”. And we are talking about a media phenomenon — because unlike with many sensational drug stories in the US, not only did the “true story” turn out to pretty true. The press did a fairly thorough (though at times fairly exploitative) job interviewing the protagonists of the memoir after the fact. So we have Christiane’s boyfriend from the book sounding off about the book, we get follow-up with even the most minor protagonists years or even decades later. We get a film version on which Christiane Felscherinow served as an advisor, filmed on location with some of the same junkies in the background.

Here’s the thing though: in some way, because Wir Kinder hews pretty close to the facts, as best as I can tell, the shifts that do occur in each stage of the process can be harder to spot. Rieck met Christiane F. at court in 1976. She wasn’t there to talk about drugs at all, she was there as a child prostitute. A well-off West Berliner had been paying underage prostitutes with heroin for their services for years, and the police had finally tracked him down. Rieck asked to interview her, and Felscherinow said yes, explaining later that she thought it was basically cheaper therapy. Rieck, Hermann and Felscherinow met daily for months.

The book we got out of it is about 300 pages long, the audiobook is, I believe, 14 hours long. Meaning that there must be enormous quantities of tape on the cutting room floor. We also know that Rieck and Hermann (more on them soon) had real trouble placing the book. Eventually, the weekly newsmagazine Der Stern agreed to excerpt it in a series and then publish the book in its own imprint. The publishers clearly had some influence on what the final product looked like — Rieck and Hermann gave a few interviews where, in hindsight, they lamented that the magazine had made them dial down the theme of sexual violence, for instance. So we a particular version of this story that became the runaway success that it did.

For those readers unfamiliar with the book, it might be worth sketching out the stations of Christiane Felscherinow’s journey: she was born and grew up in a small town outside of Hamburg. In 1968, as the student movement in Berlin reached a fever pitch, the family relocated to the divided city. In her 2013 follow-up book Felscherinow says her parents likely did it for the subventions (the government subsidized various activities in Berlin, just to make sure the city didn’t lose all its population) — though the one she cites was a 70s creation. Still, her parents had a half-baked business idea (a dating portal of sorts) and some notion of the government helping them set it up. They moved to Paul Lincke Ufer in Kreuzberg, today tony as all hell, but back then an area dominated by Bohemians and immigrants. Christiane’s comments about immigrants throughout the book are pretty horrifying — her personal “rock bottom” doesn’t have to do with prostituting herself, it has to do with “going with” “Kanacken”, a word that was exactly as casually hateful then as it is today.

In any case, the large Altbau (19th century construction) apartment in Kreuzberg becomes unaffordable once the business plan comes to naught. So the young family (mom, dad, Christiane and a younger sister) move to the Gropiusstadt, a massive public housing development at the southern end of Neuköllin. Most of the high-rises were completed in the early 1960s, but Christiane describes the neighborhood as basically unfinished, poorly designed and absolutely hostile to children.

In this modernist hellscape, Christiane grows up with a father who beats her and a mother who seems, by her own acknowledgment, far too slow to stand up for her children. You can’t say that the DV-angle is underplayed in Wir Kinder, exactly, but it doesn’t seem to have played much of a role in the book’s reception. The fact that this is a story about a young woman, and about women in general, in postwar Germany, seems not to have occurred to the almost exclusively male journalists that helped write, promote and reflect on this book. Only once the movie comes out do some (again, almost all male) critics point out that clearly part of the fascination of the book was quasi-pornographic, an investment in seeing a young girl descend into prostitution and forcible sex. There’s some indication that the men who made the book happen were aware of this danger and tried to blunt it somewhat. But in the end this also distorts what is ultimately a story about patriarchal continuities even after the sexual revolution, into an implicit indictment of the sexual revolution.

Whatever the case: in the Gropiusstadt, Christiane falls in with some cool kids at a church-run community center, where she starts taking pills, smoking weed and taking some LSD. Her mother finally moves out and finds a new partner. Her sister decides to follow her father to his new home. Before long she finds her way to the SOUND, a club in Schöneberg. There she slowly loses touch with her own “clique” and falls in with a new crowd: young junkies who prostitute themselves for money and smack on nearby Kurfürstenstraße and — roll credits — Bahnhof Zoo. Before long, she has moved in with her new boyfriend Detlef, who turns tricks for both of them, and a few other heroin using friends. But as their addiction worsens, Christiane begins prostituting herself, and a long cycle of attempted therapies, failed tough love strategems, and endless relapses begins. At the end of the book she’s living with her aunts and grandma in a rural town near Hamburg, having — very 1978, that — substituted the thrills of nature for the gleaming lights and thumping beats of the Big City.

So Wir Kinder is a story about drugs, but it is emphatically a city about a broader societal shift. It connected with a public highly sensitized to the drug problem — and primed to read the drug problem as an import, as young and largely coterminous with public drug use. I went through the covers of Der Spiegel for the 1970s+, and it’s really a pretty remarkable drumbeat of cover stories:

Stephens thinks that the German fixation on the drug problem had to do with the unintended consequence of the modernization of the 1960s. But I think we can also think of it as the beginning of an honest-to-god backlash. Tes, it’s a hangover of the long 1960s, it was obsessively analyzed by German society as that: the boomerang effects of too much liberation. But in being analyzed this way, it also became a harbinger of the more austerity minded Kohl-era (1982-1998). The “tough love” approach you were supposed to show to your H-addicted offspring soon become the principle through which you were supposed to see all aspects of the social safety net. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo arrived at something of a fulcrum point in this trajectory: it arrived at a moment when pretty much anything was read as a verdict on “60s culture”, and when a conservative backlash was ready to position itself as a cure for those excesses.

There’s also this kind of left-wing self-interrogation: it may have carried some of the seeds of backlash politics in it, but Wir Kinder is not self-consciously a backlash text, far from it. The book does get around to the idea that tougher, more engaged parenting is the likely cure to the problem it describes (we’ll get to that); it has an implicit critique of the student movement and big government social programs. It has a critique of hedonism. But that critique seems to mostly come from the left. Der Stern was, back then, a pretty left-wing magazine, the first edition of the book appeared with a brief introduction by psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter, the writers let Christiane rhapsodize for several pages (!) about her newfound love for the work of Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.

A couple of things about our stenographers: they’re both longtime Berlin journalists who bring considerable baggage to the drug question. Rieck had been a critic of hard left groups, and had in fact made headlines when the members of a West Berlin Far Left group (the “hashish rebels”, later Tupamaru Berlin) beat him up for coverage critical of them. Kai Hermann meanwhile got canned by Die Zeit for writing critically about the assassination of student leader Rudi Dutschke, ended up writing for konkret, the magazine that was once edited by Ulrike Meinhoff. I don’t want to overanalyze this, but the two writers are clearly trying to understand the drug problem in light of the social upheaval of the 1960s. For Rieck, just biographically, it seems the drug culture was about the excesses of the 1960s, of student protestors, etc. For Hermann, the drugs were part of this hedonistic turn in left wing movements that had watered down their emancipatory potential. This is the overall framing of the book: Richter, Fromm, Rieck, Hermann: they all position the young junkies as a wrong turn in subversive, left-wing politics. And they see it as their role to get them back on track.

You can sense that some of this is projected onto the story Christiane is telling them: there are counselors and social workers at the youth hangout in Gropiusstadt who turn a blind eye to the kids smoking dope, or even smoking dope themselves. And in the occasional chapters where Christiane’s mom explains her side of the story (in a voice that is stultifying and rote in all the ways her daughters is not), she keeps castiagtions for her own “permissive” parenting. But it’s very important that her parents are not presented as stereotypical 1968ers. They are children of privilege, but not of the intelligentsia – more like a lower provincial industrial gentry. Christiane’s father is completely status obsessed, driving “the only Porsche in Gropiusstadt, certainly the only Porsche driven by an unemployed guy.” The family, we learn, lost all of its wealth during the expropriations in what was then East Germany, and they’ve been desperate to get back the sort of status and class trappings they feel they are entitled to.

And look at the way the book ends, with Christiane discovering that it was the big moloch Berlin all along and finding peace and contentment in Mother Nature:

“In our group everyone thinks they have their drug thing under control. And, honestly, a lot is different from three, four years ago in Gropiusstadt. It’s a different kind of freedom that we’re getting from drugs here. We don’t need the SOUND to get completed anaesthetized while the music is thumping. For my friends in the group, the idea of trying to find freedom under the advertising and the neon lights of the Kurfürstendamm seems absurd. We hate the city. We’re on an absolute nature kick.

The coolest part of that is our lime pit. It’s basically just a hole in the landscape, about a kilometer in length, 200 meters across and maybe 100 meters deep. The walls are basically cliffs. It’s oddly warm down there. No wind. Down there, we find plants that we haven’t seen elsewhere. Super clear little streams run through this valley, there are small waterfalls coming out of the walls. The water colors the white walls rust red. There are these massive boulders everywhere, which looks like the bones of prehistoric animals – and for all I know maybe there are mammoth bones down there. The giant excavator and the conveyor belts make an insane racket during the day, but on the weekends they look like they’ve been derelict for centuries. The limestone has made them fully white.

We are completely on our own in this incredible valley. Separated from the rest of the world by these sheer white cliffs. No noise comes in from the outside, in fact the only noise comes from the little waterfalls.

We like to imagine we’ll buy the lime pit when they’re done mining it. We’ll build little cabins at the bottom, plant a massive garden and keep animals. We’d have everything you need to live. As for the only path down the valley floor, we think we might just blow it up. We wouldn’t want to go back up again anyway.”

I joked above that it’s a “very 1978” sort of denoument. Christiane discovers simplicity, nature, community. That may strike us today as pretty trad-wifey, but that’s not what this is, I think. It is positioned as a kind of leftist, environmentalist solution to a deeply sick society.

The book was a huge success, but it was an odd one. It was part of a society starting to feel bad about itself in really interesting ways. Idk how much you know about postwar German history, but the overriding vibe of the first three decades of the new Federal German Republic was the “economic miracle” – and pretty much since then there’s been this nostalgia for a simpler time, Rhenish capitalism, suburban sprawl, full employment, etc. But there was this undertow of malaise even in the midst of all this wealth and global success – two authors, Frank Witzel and Philipp Felsch have called it FRG Noir. And the late 70s was pretty much the turning point where the stuff that the FRG had sort of latently felt bad about came out into the open. I’ll get into that in Part II of the essay.

Back in early February, news broke that the National Science Foundation (NSF) would flag for rejection any proposal that contained words from a (long!) list of disfavored terms. The list includes some obvious candidates — “bipoc”, “black and latinx”, “hate speech” and “lgbt” —, some thats seem just absolutely puzzling — apparently you’re getting flagged for “equality”, “historically”, “prejudice” and “victim”. But the vast majority of the list consists of terms where you can see how they got there, they just didn’t think about it hard enough: “advocate”? “Barrier”? “Biased”? “Cultural heritage”? "Gender”? “Female”? “Excluded”? Sure, it’s obvious that some proposals with those terms will fit the bill of what they’re looking to eliminate. I’d wager that the huge majority of them won’t! People had a field day pointing out that, once again, people who had lost their damn minds over any perceived “ban” on words (which was almost always nothing of the kind) at individual colleges, seemed perfectly happy with the national government clamping down on research on [checks list]: “diversity”, “female”, “genders”, “political” and “trauma”.

My brilliant Stanford colleague Arghavan Salles recorded a quick Instagram reel about the likely impact of these lists, where she also pointed out how many of these terms seem proscriptive of entire fields that have nothing to with what the authors of the list ostensibly had in mind. Part of that effect probably emerges from a serious myopia when it comes to the way these words are actually used in various fields — the kinds of people who come up with these sorts of things for the Trump administration are ideologues first, and if they have a day job in science or scholarship they’ve long stopped actually doing it. Arghavan’s point isn’t that it’s wrong not to research “diversity” (though she and I both think that’s true); it’s also completely bananas to screen for the word, given all the false positives you’d capture. When she, a trained surgeon, hears “trauma”, she’s not necessarily thinking historical trauma, she’s thinking something that happens after an accident. If the “trauma” is bad enough, she might think of “disability”, another term on the list. When she uses the term “bias”, it’s about statistical bias and eliminating it in study design — not about racism or anything of the kind. So even as an attack on what it thinks its attacking, a list like this is incoherent.

Her video drove something home for me that I had immediately intuited, but that it took for my very confused surgeon colleague expressing her bafflement to bring into focus: this list was very much designed by someone fixated on the humanities and social sciences. We in the humanities often feel invisible, as though the university sort of lacked object permanence when it came to us — in this case, it seemed that the authors of the list momentarily forgot that universities have hospitals and that university faculties include surgeons, for instance. In fact, much of the anti-”DEI” crusade (which I think we ought to just call neo-segregation, because why not call things by their name?) represents an extension of the logic of the campus panic to broader and broader swaths of society and the government.

Now, you might ask, is that perhaps because the NSF mostly funds research in the humanities and certain disfavored social sciences? Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Humanities research seems absolutely marginal in the NSF’s portfolio. And while the NSF is definitely important in some social science disciplines, those disciplines make up a very small part of the NSF’s remit. Fields in which NSF is the majority source of federal funding include mathematics, computer science and economics. The NSF has seven “directorates” (with an eighth one being in the process of being spun up before Trump got to power) — one for “Biological Sciences”, one for “Computer and Information Science and Engineering”, one for “Engineering”, one for “Geosciences”, “Mathematical and Physical Sciences”, and one for “STEM Education”. It has one directorate for “Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences”, whose remit includes neuroscience, management, psychology, science policy, economics, as well as sociology and anthropology.

Meaning, I think: that the vast majority of disciplines submitting grant applications to the NSF will use “bias”, “female”, “diversity”, “systemic”, and “trauma” in a very different sense than the people who compiled the list have in mind. Probably, I might add, in multiple, different senses none of which are the one the people who compiled the list had in mind. That’s not to say that these scientists can’t or don’t think of “bias” in its other sense as well. But there was a curious inability to see a range of applications, a range of disciplines, a range of conversations at work in academia, and a shocking readiness to assume that a word can only mean one thing and that that thing is either obviously valid or obviously nugatory. I don’t think it’s an accident that this synecdoche resembles the way people love condensing the many different things US universities and colleges are, do and comprise into a single discursive object “the campus”. As Samuel Catlin wrote in his excellent piece “The Campus Does not Exist” last year:

“Anecdotally, I find it exasperatingly difficult to get non-stakeholders to care very much about “the university,” a social institution which is, in fact, suffering an ongoing polycrisis (albeit not the one narrated in the discourse of campus panic). Yet some of the same people who could not care less about ‘the university’ get alarmingly excited about ‘the campus’.”

“The campus” is not the thousands of actually existing institutions of higher learning in this country. “The campus” is imagined as a leafy quad, not a brutalist urban campus. Talk of “the campus” imagines the university mostly consisting of departments in the humanities and sciences. Talk of “the campus” focuses on the humanities, and within the humanities on a handful of disciplines (English, history, usually not philosophy, unless a feminist is teaching it). And it focuses on the most elite colleges, the one that the writer (and reader) of such stories didn’t get into, though they feel like maybe they should have.

I make the point in the book that this is a statistical problem: not only are these descriptors true for a small slice of actual US campuses, they are becoming less true with every passing year. Leafy quads? Well, a lot of rural liberal arts schools have been closing down, as of late, the 2010s boom in for-profit colleges seemed to take place mostly in suburban business parks that don’t look like Animal House at all. Humanities and Sciences? Everyone talks about the dying humanities, but in fact fields across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences are shrinking in terms of both enrollments and majors. And universities are busy downsizing their requirements in order to allow student to learn to code more, since that was the solution to everything 10 years ago, and university administrators only update their talking points every 15. As for English, History and what-not? These majors have shrunk significantly, their academic job markets are collapsing. As for the share of elite colleges as part of the total number of enrolled students, just look at Harvard’s or Stanford’s admissions rates over time.

But here’s the thing: our cultural warriors are not at war with actual existing universities. They depend on the imaginary campus of their Fox News cloak-and-dagger stories, their dumb Heritage Foundation anecdotes, or College Republican attention play. Funnily enough: it’s not just that the targets of these kinds of stories are usually historians or literary scholars; so are many, many of their purveyors. What do you imagine the Fox News host studied in college? How about the Heritage intern making some money before going to law school? What about the College Republican hoping to be the next Brown Haired Guy Who’s Not Steve Doocy?

In my book The Cancel Culture Panic I pointed out that anti-campus screeds for the last forty years (and beyond, really) disproportionately come from people with humanities degrees. On one level, that’s not super surprising: for one thing, writing books is baked into humanities scholarship far more than into, say, computer science research; for another, in an age where humanities scholarship is increasingly marginalized in legacy media, writing an angry attack on “the university” is a pretty good way to get broader noticed.

But while some of these books were written by professors — certainly some of the most famous ones were — most were not. Many were instead written by people who had clearly hated their time at university — where most of them had studied either the humanities or political science. David Horowitz, who’s been warning against “PC” culture for longer than I’ve been alive? English B.A. and M.A., baby! Richard Prager, who’s been riding attack after attack against the university since the 1990s and who started his YouTube scam school PragerU in 2009, was a history major. Peter Thiel? Philosophy major. Charlie Sykes, author of Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education (1988), The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education (1990), Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add (1995) and Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education (2016) was an English major.

As always, there are specific grievances and anecdotes that circulate through the Right Wing Rage Machine that are now finding their expression in these sorts of misbegotten policy. The overall problem is made up, but individual data points are real. Just as the MP in the UK who can’t seem to lay off the absolutely lovely João Florêncio, just because she thinks the research project he supervises — “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000” — and which was funded by the UK’s Art & Humanities Research Council, is somehow inherently illegitimate. She’s not lying, she’s just not showing her work: what’s the problem supposed to be? How much of a problem is this? Similar kind of fishing expeditions, where right wing staffers or journalists (or their centrist handmaidens) sift through hundreds of line item until they emerge, muddy but happy, with the one shiny pearl they think they’ve found, were of course targeted at the NSF over the years. For instance, right wing media in 2016 picked out a ($400,000) research grant which included a single sub-study on gender in glaciological research, and beat up on the NSF using it.

Some of the NSF list exists in response to these kind of anecdotal critiques, based on research consisting of — let’s be honest — control+F’ing a list of grantees and then picking out the strangest or least-intuitive sounding thing that pops up. But what we’re seeing here is something more, I think. It’s what makes this optic so pernicious: for years now, we have found our institutions of higher education increasingly at the mercy of people who see everything on campus — law schools, medical schools, schools of education, particle colliders, nuclear reactors, etc. etc. — through the prism of the most annoying interaction they had in a humanities class. And they’re expanding the fantastical and frankly delusional way they’ve looked at “the campus” to broader and broader swathes of US society.

I know a lot of people worry about DOGE’s little freaks using AI to generate firing lists, and there’s some suggestion that some of this is indeed something they are trying. But I think the hilarious kerfuffle at Social Security — where DOGE was unfamiliar with the coding language and assumed a bunch of social security recipients were dead — and the lists of forbidden words both suggest that DOGE’s approach is far less granular, but instead has not moved on from the right wing’s favorite form of critiquing institutions: search for a term that you don’t like or that strikes you, a non-expert, as ridiculous, then complain about the presence of that term. It’s a coup by control+F.

Is that an effective way to do a purge? Having never conducted a purge myself, I could not possibly say. Is this the way historic purges were conducted? Again, not my field of expertise. What I can say is that as a “research method” (and in the most formal fashion imaginable, it is one) this comes out of two discursive fields: “government waste” and “campus critique”. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember “fiscal responsibility” hawks who’d sort of cherry-pick vaguely gratuitous-sounding program involving, I don’t know, spotted owls or Inuit poetry. It was never anything defense or health-related, and almost always implicated a racial or ethnic minority rather than their white base. The amounts were piddling, but allegedly it represented everything that was wrong with government spending. It was the polite way of saying what the neo-segregationists’ quest against what they call “DEI” comes out and just says flat-out: that spending money on Black, brown, queer or female Americans is waste. Whatever the case, the main weapon of the opinion writers, K Street hacks, congresspeople engaged in this discourse was: Ctrl+F. They sought a buzzy phrase, the hilarious-sounding detail. The less context (such as how tiny the position in the budget, whether it had been approved or not, whether there were good reasons for it) the better.

In the language game around “government waste”, it had been about tax payer money. But around the same time Heritage, Olin and its brood turned the same logic loose on university bulletins. From the late 1980s onward, the habit of searching for articles/courses/books to spotlight in whatever anti-academic jeremiads you’re cooking up has become a shorthand in American discourse, irrespective of the fact that it’s unclear what, if anything, it proves. Think of the New York Times’s bizarre obsession with scouring the conference proceedings of the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting for the perviest thing they could find. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” is both an instance of, and an elegant reflection on this dynamic. When I was in grad school, my colleagues sometimes proposed panels with outré titles just hoping to make it into the Times. As I point out in The Cancel Culture Panic, why Times readers should care was super unclear even at the time — the MLA doesn’t use tax dollars for any of the conference proceedings, and a professional meeting, which, at the time, was still mostly a job fair for literary scholars, seems like a weird place to insist that it’s bad for academics to only talk to other academics. At the MLA, you literally were only surrounded by other academics and talking to them. There were people who asked for your badge as you walked in!

The same was true for course lists: people would scour course catalogues for course title and hold them up as … well, some sort of evidence. They’d never exactly have to say how it was evidence — “the phrase itself is already evidence,” as Sedgwick writes. Every book about the supposed rot in “higher education” had to have these lists. They were never pulled from across the university, but just the course offerings of one or two departments. Often it was nothing more than that the course title used the word “queer” that motivated their inclusion (sound familiar, perhaps from the NSF list?), or a mention of women. Arts courses were popular on such lists — think of the old joke about “majoring in basket weaving” in college —, even though they were then usually adduced to make fun of the humanities which, let’s face it, would never be caught teaching something as hands-on as basket weaving!

Here are two noted intellectual forebears of the current DOGE coup — Peter Thiel and David Sacks — writing about such courses at Stanford. The passage is from their 1995 book The Diversity Myth:

“Representing Sappho” is not some anomaly on the margins of an otherwise terrific Stanford education. At least three other classes explored similar themes—Feminist Studies 295, subtitled “How Tasty Were My French Sisters”; Comparative Literature 110, “The Politics of Desire: Representations of Gay and Lesbian Sexuality”; and Law 587, “The History and Politics of Sexual Orientation: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives.”

Together with Hana/Connor Yankowitz I am currently conducting a research project where we analyze all of the Stanford course catalogues Thiel and Sacks drew on for this assessment. We’re after something else, but the dataset was pretty useful for contextualizing their list here. You’ll be shocked to learn that (1) these courses were absolutely not representative of what was being taught at Stanford at the time, (2) these courses weren’t even representative of what was taught in (i) the humanities, (ii) literary studies or even (iii) feminist studies. That’s to say nothing of the fact that these are perfectly fine courses taught by absolutely stellar scholars, but even as a piece of analysis, even if we were to assume that there were something wrong with “Representing Sappho” (isn’t Thiel all about the Western Canon? Why doesn’t Sappho fit? Is it the two X chromosomes?), his framing is literally untrue. “Representing Sappho” was a highly unusual course (a small seminar taught twice, in 1991 and 1993 by the amazing Terry Castle). Admittedly, it was perhaps not as anomalous as “How Tasty Were My French Sisters”, which we have not been able to find in any course catalogues, or in our 4718-entry dataset of every feminist studies cross-list ever done at Stanford University. Yep, there’s every chance someone made this up.

The point here is: Thiel and Sacks’s method was not to go to these classes and observe; it wasn’t to ask for the syllabus and then interrogate it. It was to go through the Stanford Bulletin and underline anything that could serve as a “lol, get a load of these freaks”. Or — as the Tasty French Sisters thing suggests — pluck out misunderstood, mistranscribed or rumored course titles that sounded plausible enough. We’ve become inured to this deictic use of evidence, whereby a simple phrase becomes, as Sedgwick puts it, a smoking gun and every pundit Perry Mason. These lists do not operate with evidence, they presume self-evidence. Obviously, a class with that title is ridiculous on its face! Obviously, any project proposal with this word is woke nonsense!

What it does is: shift the locus of seriousness. It levels a fundamentally unserious critique (imagine if I told you I didn’t think a book’s argument passed muster, because I spotted two split infinitives). But it puts those who want to play defense in a position to likewise reach for Ctrl+F: rather than defend the whole they are stuck swatting away an endless list of tiny little details. Surely you must admit that this one is troubling, surely you must admit that goes too far, well, I did have questions about that one. Which is part of the problem: the problematic narratives about our universities, and frankly our institutions in general, are by now bipartisan affairs. Many centrists, many democrats, many university professors have signed on to them over the years. Whether it’s congressmen like Ritchie Torres, ostensibly liberal commentators fulminating about course titles they learned from a Heritage mailer, or major publications not bothering to contextualizing the anecdotes they devote disproportionate column inches to: I am afraid that this is the historic juncture at which these idiots will find out their uses.