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Why Wealthy Jews like Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Are Rethinking Their Political Alliances with the Left

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The post-October 7 landscape has triggered a profound “vibe shift” across the Jewish diaspora, forcing a long-standing alliance with progressive institutions into sudden, irreparable decay. As the gentile Left have turned against their Jewish patrons on the issue of Palestine, many prominent Jewish figures are finding themselves in an ethnic “awakening” of sorts, leading them to abandon their Democratic comfort zones and explore new, sometimes tactical, overtures to the Right. Nowhere is this realignment more striking than in the changing political trajectory of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose recent shift from loyal Democratic donor to anti-tax crusader and outspoken critic of liberal institutions mirrors a broader trend of Jewish elite departure from the Left.

Facing California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax, which could have cost him an estimated $13 billion, Brin relocated his primary residence from California to a $42 million mansion on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. He then donated $57 million to fight the proposed tax, bankrolling a group called “Building a Better California,” according to The New York Times. In a rare public statement, Brin explicitly invoked his Soviet upbringing to frame his opposition. “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

That public stand represented a significant shift for a figure long known for political reticence. Brin has historically maintained a low public profile on political matters, preferring to let his philanthropy and his work speak for themselves. But the wealth tax fight and his subsequent donations to Republican candidates suggest a billionaire whose political identity is evolving in ways that reflect both his origins and his anxieties about the present moment in a post-October 7 world where many Jews worldwide have experienced an ethnic “awakening” of sorts.

To understand this shift in his political alignment, one must look back at the origins of his worldview. The seeds were sown decades earlier in a very different political climate. Sergey Mikhailovich Brin was born on August 21, 1973, in Moscow, Soviet Union, to Michael Brin, a mathematician and economist, and Eugenia Brin, a NASA research scientist. His family’s decision to emigrate was driven directly by institutionalized anti-Semitism. As his father recounted, a pivotal moment came in 1977 when he returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw and resolved that the family must leave the Soviet Union. They applied for their exit visa in September 1978 and were granted it in May 1979, spending time in Vienna and then Paris before arriving in the United States on October 25, 1979, when Sergey was six years old.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society played a critical role in helping the Brin family resettle in America. Decades later, Brin repaid that debt. In 2009, on the 30th anniversary of his family’s arrival, Brin gave $1 million to HIAS as a token of appreciation for HIAS helping his family flee anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and build a life in America. “I would have never had the kinds of opportunities I’ve had here in the Soviet Union, or even in Russia today,” Brin said to the New York Times in an interview. “I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that’s what this organization does.”

Brin’s Jewish identity is primarily ethnic and cultural rather than religious, a pattern consistent with many Soviet Jewish émigré families. His father Michael described the family’s Jewish experience to Moment Magazine in cultural terms: “We felt our Jewishness in different ways, not by keeping kosher or going to synagogue. It is genetic.” Brin has not been publicly affiliated with a synagogue or religious denomination.

This lack of traditional religious practice has not precluded investment in Jewish national survival. Brin has visited Israel multiple times. A particularly notable visit came in 2008 for Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations, during which he gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In that interview, he praised Israel’s technological achievements, stating: “It’s just incredible. I was generally familiar with the history of Israel, but really seeing… what’s been really accomplished… out of nothing, just dirt.” Through Google, Brin has also contributed to Israel’s technology ecosystem. Google operates offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa and has made extensive investments in Israeli startups.

In July 2025, Brin made his most direct and public comment on Israel and antisemitism. In an internal Google DeepMind employee forum, he weighed in on a debate over a United Nations report authored by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which alleged that tech companies including Google and Alphabet had aided what she called “the genocide carried out by Israel” in Gaza through cloud and AI services.

Brin wrote in response: “With all due respect, throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides. I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the UN in relation to these issues.” When screenshots of the exchange leaked, Brin told The Washington Post: “My comments came in response to an internal discussion that was citing a plainly biased and misleading report.”

This forceful public stance marked a striking contrast with the political profile Brin had cultivated for most of his career. For most of his public life, Brin’s political donations placed him firmly in the Democratic-aligned camp of Silicon Valley philanthropy. He donated $5,000 to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee, per OpenSecrets. A 2016 all-hands meeting at Google — footage of which leaked in September 2018 — showed Brin and Larry Page expressing distress at Donald Trump’s election victory in front of employees.

In early 2026, Brin donated to Steve Hilton, a Republican candidate for California governor, and separately contributed to an independent committee supporting centrist Democrat Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose. He also contributed $20 million to “Building a Better California” focused on affordable housing and pro-business policies.

Brin’s pivot is not a sudden ideological conversion, but a calculated realignment driven by a newly awakened racial collective consciousness that came about after Hamas’ attack against Israel on October 7, 2023. October 7 shattered the sense of security held by Jews worldwide, but it was the radical and hostile reaction of leftist organizations that proved to be the deeper wound.

For many in organized Jewry, the sight of their golems cheering on, or justifying, the campaign against Israel served as a jarring wake-up call to the fragility of their supposed political alliances. These “October 8 Jews” have simply reached a threshold where the progressive skinsuit no longer fits their survival needs. Recognizing that the institutional Left has become a liability, they are now steering their influence toward the Trump movement, the most explicitly philosemitic force in recent memory.

It is a masterclass in strategic flexibility: when one political vehicle begins to threaten the interests of the tribe, it is discarded in favor of a new one. For Jewish oligarchs like Sergey Brin, ideologies are not sacred commitments but tools to be wielded, swapped, and abandoned as the requirements of ethno-political survival dictate. Interests, not principles.

Peter Beinart on Tucker Carlson

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Tucker Carlson has been getting a lot of attention in The New York Times, none of it good (including Michelle Goldberg’s “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology” (April 24). but I’ll leave that for another time). Peter Beinart’s op-ed is based on the idea that Carlson thinks that Israel’s behavior has something to do with its Jewishness. Obviously way out there.

Like other prominent figures on the anti-Israel right, [Carlson] still sees the West as menaced by alien civilizations bent on its destruction. He has just turned his attention to what he sees as the alien civilization that populates the Jewish state. And he’s done so with the same penchant for conspiracy theories that has long marked his public commentary. Now he is using a destructive, ill-defined and unpopular war to give those theories even greater reach. … [Carlson] is at the forefront of a cohort of right-wing commentators who don’t merely condemn Israel’s manifold crimes against the Palestinians and others in the Middle East. They also suggest something far more troubling: that Israel’s crimes stem from its Jewishness, which they claim threatens the Christian West. …

Now Americans across the ideological spectrum are growing more critical of Israel. But young conservatives are more likely than their lefty counterparts to link Israel’s transgressions to its religious identity. Last fall, a Yale survey asked Americans ages 18-34 how they felt about claims that American Jews enjoy too much power, are more loyal to Israel than America and should have their businesses boycotted to protest the war in Gaza. Almost two-thirds of respondents ages 18 to 34 who defined themselves as “extremely conservative” agreed with at least one of those statements. Among people in that same age group who defined themselves as “extremely liberal,” less than one-third did.

Candace Owens, one of America’s most popular podcasters, has endorsed Mr. Carlson’s claim that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Chabad is using the Iran war to try to rebuild the Temple. She has also claimed that the Talmud tells Jews “that we’re animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them.” In 2024 she accused Israel of giving refuge to pedophiles and linked that behavior to the ritual murder of Christians in Europe during Passover. Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist and misogynist who Mr. Carlson recently hosted for a friendly interview, has insisted that “If you read anything about the Israeli government, anything even about Talmudic Judaism, what they say is, we don’t love our enemies. They say that the non-Jews, we don’t even consider them human.”

What’s going on here is that Beinart assumes he is safe in saying these things because, by not allowing his readers to evaluate the evidence, they likely seem so outrageous and over the top to NYTimes readers that they will automatically reject them without being able to actually look at the evidence. For example, there can be little doubt that a great many Israelis, especially religious fanatics, believe that ultimately their victory will be crowned with destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque and the reinstitution of the Jewish temple, complete with animal sacrifices. Haaretz from 2024:

It arrived last week, right on schedule – a yearly flier advertising “a live rehearsal of the Passover sacrifice.” One might assume that the men featured on the brochure dressed in what appears to be ancient religious garments are the AI-generated result of someone’s search for “modern-day high priests,” but they’re completely real.

Hailing from the most extreme factions of the Temple Movement, the umbrella term for the various groups that share the goal of reclaiming Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the men in the photo have spent years studying the biblical instructions for preparing the special Passover offering at the Holy Temple – which last existed in the year 70.

They’re sticklers down to the length of the knife cuts and the procedure for the blood that will be collected after the baby lamb has been ritually slaughtered. Their rehearsal is intended as a dry run, should their dream of rebuilding the Temple ever come to fruition.

The event advertised in the flier promised to take place outside of Jerusalem, in Mitzpeh Yericho, an ultra-religious settlement in the West Bank, and not on Temple Mount. But another group of Temple activists stuck to a more ambitious plan, and were arrested on Monday for trying to sacrifice a goat on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. When they were released shortly after the arrest, they gloated about Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir intervening on their behalf.

In other words, these “extremists” are well connected to the current government, especially National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Itamar Ben-Gvir heading for the Temple Mount in 2022.

Temple Movement activists in the government

For almost its entire existence, Temple Movement activists have viewed the Israeli government as an obstacle on their path toward Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

But that changed in 2022 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed the most far-right government in Israel’s history, including several ministers who were, at the very least, Temple Movement-adjacent if not full members. No one fits this description more than National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose wife Ayala is an active member of the Temple Movement.

Since coming to power, Ben-Gvir has relentlessly pursued a pro-Jewish agenda regarding the Mount, visiting the site several times and calling for sweeping changes to the status quo, with only Netanyahu standing in his way.

On the one hand, as Hasson has reported, Netanyahu has, perhaps surprisingly, done a fairly good job of keeping Ben-Gvir and other Temple fundamentalists in check. “He actually has a long history of keeping things calm,” Hasson says. “And this year, all eyes were on Netanyahu on Ramadan.”

Ben-Gvir wanted to impose limits on which Muslims would be allowed to pray at Al-Aqsa during the Muslim holy month, which security officials warned would lead to disaster. “Ultimately, Netanyahu didn’t give in to Ben-Gvir’s demands and we had one of the quietest Ramadans in years,” Hasson says.

But these small gains have been swallowed up by the security minister’s larger mission. Ben-Gvir is “an agent of chaos,” as Tzidkiyahu puts it. “He thrives on creating as much drama as possible.”

Ben-Gvir doesn’t just go quietly up to the Temple Mount, a point raised by all three experts interviewed for this article. “He loudly announces it with the most racist, incendiary statements possible,” Tzidkiyahu says. “And with the control he has over the police, he’s directly responsible for the leniency that Jews who try to pray on the Temple Mount are afforded.”

And so, emboldened by broad support among not necessarily religious Israelis, the increasing number of Jews visiting the Mount – 30,000 last year alone – political endorsements and security officials allowing brazen violations of the rules, the gap between the murky status quo and actual events on the Mount is widening. And Temple Movement extremists don’t seem to be letting up.

“My real fear is something we’ve seen before,” Persico says. “I worry that if a new peace process makes headway, either with Palestinians becoming citizens of Israel or a two-state solution, extremists in the Temple Movement will do what they have always done any time there is a step toward peace: attempt to derail it by any means necessary.”

Getting back to the Beinart op-ed:

Last fall, a Yale survey asked Americans ages 18-34 how they felt about claims that American Jews enjoy too much power, are more loyal to Israel than America and should have their businesses boycotted to protest the war in Gaza. Almost two-thirds of respondents ages 18 to 34 who defined themselves as “extremely conservative” agreed with at least one of those statements. Among people in that same age group who defined themselves as “extremely liberal,” less than one-third did.

It’s certainly encouraging that a significant subset of young conservatives agreed with a least one of those statements, along with a substantial number of liberals. I should think that it’s obvious that American Jews enjoy too much power, given that we are at war with Iran because of the power of the Israel Lobby even though polls indicate that the war is not popular. And it’s obvious that at least some Jews are more loyal to Israel than America—Mark Levin being a case in point (see below), not to mention the entire Jewish activist community (ADL, AIPAC, JINSA, etc.) centered around supporting Israel no matter what, including the genocide in Gaza  and the apartheid and ethnic cleansing that have been going on in the West Bank for decades.

Beinart continues:

That’s not surprising given the rhetoric of some of America’s most influential far-right commentators. Candace Owens, one of America’s most popular podcasters, has endorsed Mr. Carlson’s claim that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Chabad is using the Iran war to try to rebuild the Temple. She has also claimed that the Talmud tells Jews “that we’re animals, that they have a right to own us, that they have a right to make us worship them.” In 2024 she accused Israel of giving refuge to pedophiles and linked that behavior to the ritual murder of Christians in Europe during Passover. Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist and misogynist who Mr. Carlson recently hosted for a friendly interview, has insisted that “If you read anything about the Israeli government, anything even about Talmudic Judaism, what they say is, we don’t love our enemies. They say that the non-Jews, we don’t even consider them human.”

The good thing about being a supporter of Israel in The New York Times is that you don’t have to actually support what you write. Carlson in fact supported his claim by noting that IDF soldiers have been seen wearing patches depicting the Third Temple, and he quotes a soldier saying “But what are we really fighting for? We’re fighting for the right of the Jewish people to exist. Be Jewish, practice the religion, and be free. And one day, our true leader will come and will be united as a whole Jewish nation so we can rebuild the Beit HaMikdash [the Third Temple].” And he discusses the Hasidic group Chabad, noting “Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the third temple. And it seems like from the reading we did recently, that those patches actually came from Chabad. In any case, Chabad is pushing for the building of the Third Temple.” Chabad is quite connected to American elites. President Reagan was close to Chabad leader Menachem Schneerson, and really the only time Trump can be seen expressing religious piety (he released a famously profane statement on Iran on Easter morning) is in Jewish contexts, as when he visited Schneerson’s grave in 2024:

Standing alongside the grave next to Chabad representatives, Trump engaged in a series of traditional Jewish mourning practices. He donned a kippah, read a chapter of Psalms that is quoted in the daily Jewish penitential prayer, placed a note on the grave and then laid a small stone on the headstone. He also lit a yahrzeit memorial candle, something President Joe Biden also did in commemoration of Oct. 7.

Trump, along with Ben Shapiro, honoring Rebbe Schneerson

I can see why Beinart would not provide any information on why the statements by Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes are wrong. Too much evidence to support them. Par for the course. Beinart joins the tradition of fact-free defences of traditional Jewish attitudes and religious writing.

Beinart continues:

Mr. Carlson is more subtle. But he, too, often attributes Israel’s behavior to what he sees as its anti-Western religion. Last October, he claimed that “the Israeli position is ‘everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children.’ That’s not a Western view. That’s an Eastern view. That’s a non-Christian — that’s totally incompatible with Christianity and Western civilization.” Earlier this year Mr. Carlson said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had tried to punish members of Mr. Carlson’s family because Mr. Netanyahu “believes in blood guilt, Amalek. You know, when someone commits a crime against you, you punish not just him but his family, his bloodline. There’s no idea that’s less Western than that, more anti-Christian than that. Christians reject that.”

Mr. Carlson is implying that Israel’s punishment of the Palestinian people stems from something particularly Jewish — or “non-Christian” — about its misdeeds. Such civilizational generalizations are false; many Christian and Western leaders practice collective punishment. The United States was founded on the same kind of land theft that Israel is committing against Palestinians.

Carlson is pointing to the well-founded reality that the West is individualist—and uniquely so, whereas Jewish culture is profoundly collectivist to the core. Thus Israel believes in collective punishment, as Carlson has noted. This can be seen in the pattern where Israelis demolish the houses of Palestinians they regard as terrorists—a trivial example compared to the complete disregard for Palestinian life in the Gaza genocide (the life of all Palestinians—men, women, and children, no matter what their behavior or beliefs). In November 2023 Ben-Gvir declared that “when they say that Hamas needs to be eliminated, it also means those who sing, those who support and those who distribute candy, all of these are terrorists.”[97][98] In Western legal systems, individuals would be prosecuted for suspected crimes, but whatever they had done would not make their family members prosecutable, much less the entire population of men, women, and children.

Mark Levin, who is often critiqued by Carlson, epitomizes this mindset:

Unsurprisingly, Ben Gvir has also made statements implying the collective guilt of all Palestinians. From his Wikipedia page:

Having defended the perpetrators of the 2015 Duma arson attack in which vigilante settlers firebombed the home of a family in a Palestinian village, resulting in the deaths of a 18 month baby and its parents,[68] it was controversial that Ben-Gvir, along with Bentzi Gopstein, were seen attending the wedding of a couple related to the perpetrators, which became known as the wedding of hate, in which the weddinggoers could be seen waving rifles, guns and firebombs and even stabbing a photograph of the Palestinian toddler who was killed.[69][70]

On 25 February 2019, Ben-Gvir said that Arab citizens of Israel who were not loyal to Israel “must be expelled”.[71] 

Prior to entering office Ben-Gvir was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre;[72][73] he removed the portrait in preparation for the 2020 Israeli legislative election in hope of being allowed to run on the unified right list headed by Naftali Bennett.[74]

Continues with more examples….

Beinart continues:

Combating the anti-Israel right’s conflation of Israel and Jewishness is made harder by pro-Israel American Jewish organizations that have conflated those two things as well.

No kidding! It’s good to see Beinart mentioning this rather glaring fact although it is indeed a one-line mention rather than a real examination of its importance. There was a time when Jewish activists made fine distinctions between criticizing Israel and criticizing Jews, but those days are long gone. Now anyone who criticizes Israel can expect to be considered an “anti-Semite”—a reality that is quite obvious  in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. A rather glaring example is provided by Caitlin Johnstone:

Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” Jillian Segal has published a handbook which unequivocally clarifies that her office exists not to protect Australian Jews from discrimination, but to stomp out criticism of the state of Israel.

However bad you’re imagining it is, it’s worse. The handbook, set to be formally launched later this week under the title “Understanding Antisemitism in Australia,” explicitly conflates antisemitism and antizionism with statements like “Antisemitism and antizionism are both expressions of hatred towards Jews” and asserting that it is antisemitic to accuse Israel of “apartheid, oppression, racism and genocide.”

It is therefore unambiguously the official position of the Australian government’s appointed authority on antisemitism that it is hateful and abusive toward Jews and their religion to oppose the racist political ideology underpinning the modern state of Israel.

So when Australians hear Jillian Segal and government officials talking about how there’s been an increase in “antisemitism” in our country and saying extreme measures must be taken to stop it, it’s important to be clear that this is the “antisemitism” they are talking about. They are talking about criticism of Israel.

Beinart again:

But progressives must not blur the distinction between viewing Israel as a state, which practices forms of oppression and aggression that can occur in states of every ethnic and religious type, and viewing Israel as the product of a peculiarly Jewish pathology. It is understandable that some progressives, who are rightly eager to end America’s support for Israel’s human rights abuses, might be tempted to see figures like Mr. Carlson as allies. But the struggle for Palestinian freedom should not indulge bigotry of any kind. That includes the bigotry of figures like Tucker Carlson, who blame Israel’s crimes on its Jewishness so they can pretend that America and Christianity are morally pure.

So in Beinart’s view Israel’s crimes have nothing to do with its being a Jewish state. All states may do it. But the reality is when Jews have gotten power over non-Jews, the results have been catastrophic for the latter. Exhibit A is the intensive Jewish involvement in mass murder of Russians and Ukrainians in the early decades of the USSR at a time when they had become an elite group.  Since Christians are a small minority in Israel, it is not surprising that they have come under attack. The Jewish hatred of Christianity is “an ancient Jewish custom,” as Ben-Givr noted in October 2023, following the arrest of five Haredi Jews for spitting at Christians outside churches. There are many examples, many quite recent (the following is a machine translation of a French article). 

Walking alone on a nearly empty street, the nun, a researcher at the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem (EBAF), was attacked from behind. The assailant left and then returned to kick her repeatedly in front of the few passersby who appeared. Some were indifferent. He is 36 years old. It is known that this type of attack is usually perpetrated by minors who can evade justice. (See  video here).

A European diplomatic source asserts that the attack “is part of a context of anti-Christian acts that have become commonplace, with insults and spitting by extremists targeting religious figures in their robes on a daily basis.”

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem also confirmed that this is not “an isolated incident [but] is part of a worrying trend of increasing hostility against the Christian community and its symbols.”

The same brutal violence was evident on April 20th in the attack on the head of the Christ statue in the southern Lebanese Maronite village of Debel. An Israeli soldier vandalized the statue while his comrade photographed it for media attention. They were sentenced to one month in prison and barred from participating in combat. Lebanese media reported that it was the Italian contingent of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) that donated the new statue, not the occupying army, which had claimed to have replaced the damaged one.

In July 2025, the Christian town of Taybeh in the occupied West Bank was subjected to constant harassment by Israeli settlers, who engaged in incursions, land destruction, intimidation tactics, and the burning of places of worship, such as the Byzantine Church of St. George. The Patriarchs and heads of the churches in Jerusalem warned against “the current climate of impunity.”

The situation of Christians in occupied Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem and the West Bank, is marked by a worrying increase in acts of violence, harassment and vandalism, mainly perpetrated by Israeli extremist elements.

More than 111 anti-Christian acts were recorded in Jerusalem in 2024, or about one every 3.3 days, according to local churches.

The incidents include spitting at priests and pilgrims, hate graffiti, desecration of cemeteries and churches, as well as physical attacks.

According to the Holy Land website, more than Christians themselves, it is the visible signs of Christianity that are targeted: crosses, statues, monasteries, religious clothing…

“As a minority, they are the first to suffer the consequences of geopolitical contractions,” analyzes Father David Neuhaus, a Jesuit with extensive knowledge of interreligious dynamics in the Holy Land.

But the Vatican City’s L’Osservatore Romano website accuses Christians of a constant threat from extremist elements, particularly ultra-Orthodox Judaism. This illustrates a doctrinal ideological perspective.

“The Land of Jesus, in particular, where our faith was born, has an additional reason to fear this phenomenon and to try to stop it. The absence of a Christian presence would risk reducing the places of preaching and passion of Our Lord to mere archaeological or tourist sites,” the site warned.

Neither the intervention of the Israeli police nor the statements of some rabbis who denounced acts “contrary to the Jewish religion” have contributed to eradicating this phenomenon.

According to the website of the Belgian-Palestinian association, other rabbis encourage these acts.

Rabbi Benzion Gopstein, a member of Ben-Gvir’s party, a Kahanist from the extremist settlement of Kiryat Arba, calls Christians “blood-sucking vampires”, declares that Christmas has no place in the Holy Land, advocates the expulsion of Christians from Israel and the burning of churches.

In their book, The Torah of Kings, Rabbis Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira of the settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus, state, among other things, that “wherever the influence of goyim (non-Jews) constitutes a threat to the life of Israel, it is permitted to kill them, even if they are Righteous Among the Nations.” This includes both Christians and Muslims.

Since 2005, the website notes, Christian celebrations during Holy Week have been met with military roadblocks and violence perpetrated jointly by police and settlers. The number of worshippers allowed to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been drastically reduced, from 11,000 historically during the Holy Fire ceremony to 1,800 since 2016, with authorities citing “security reasons.” This year, in addition to this restriction and police violence against worshippers and even priests (evident videos of this are circulating online), dozens of Jewish extremists attacked foreign believers, shouting, “Jerusalem is ours. Get out of here!” The mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King, has openly stated that he has recruited dozens of Jews to fight against Christian missionaries.

These attacks have been exacerbated by the religious far-right component of the government in place since 2022.    

Now I suppose one can say that religious Jews who attack Christians are “extremists” and don’t represent Judaism as a religion. But these “extremists” are well represented in the government and there is a trend at least since Begin was Prime Minister for succeeding governments to be more on the right and more supportive of settlers. And of course having anti-Christian sentiments is not restricted to religious Jews. Besides the Jews carrying out massacres in the Soviet Union, Max West reminds us that the same phenomenon could happen in the U.S.:

It is important to remember the extent to which the Jewish-dominated Weather Underground leadership sanctioned genocidal levels of violence, when the time came. Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Weather Underground, reported how the group’s leadership estimated that, once the Revolution had succeeded in the United States, they would need to kill 25 million people. Grathwohl writes: “I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. … And they were dead serious” (Kengor, 2013).

They were indeed dead serious and one can only be horrified that 50 years later they are closer than ever to the violent destruction of White America. These attitudes were also apparent in my experience with Jewish radicals at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, as recounted Ch. 3 of The Culture of Critique:

There was also a great deal of hostility to Western cultural institutions as politically and sexually oppressive combined with an ever-present sense of danger and imminent destruction by the forces of repression—an ingroup bunker mentality discussed in A People That Shall Dwell Alone Chapter 7 that I now believe is a fundamental characteristic of Jewish social forms. There was an attitude of moral and intellectual superiority and even contempt toward traditional American culture, particularly rural America and most particularly the South—attitudes that are hallmarks of several of the intellectual movements reviewed here (e.g., the attitudes of Polish-Jewish communists toward traditional Polish culture; see also Chs. 6 and 7 on Jewish attitudes toward populism). There was also a strong desire for bloody, apocalyptic revenge against the entire social structure viewed as having victimized not only Jews but non-elite gentiles as well—reflecting the revenge theme of many commenters on Jewish motivation.

It’s that “bloody, apocalyptic revenge” that we have to prevent at all costs.

“One Battle After Another” (2025): Radical Politics & Fetishized Miscegenation, Part 2 of 2

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VI.             Christmas Adventurers Club

The Christmas Adventurers Club is a fictional, far-right, Christian Nationalist secret society composed of elite, White supremacist business and political leaders. The club uses its wholesome-sounding name, and suburban “southwest headquarters” access point, to mask sinister and xenophobic goals while aiming to control American society. (There is no such group in Pynchon’s Vineland, so this dramatic concept is entirely Anderson’s). We have the loaded connotations of Christ inherent in the word ‘Christmas’.

Lockjaw is being considered for membership in the Christmas Adventurers Club and is interviewed by them in a fancy hotel suite. Being a White supremacist himself, Lockjaw is of course eager to be accepted as a member of this exclusive group. Club member Sandy Irvine (played by Norm Macdonald’s old writing partner and SNL veteran Jim Downey) says to Lockjaw:

Steve, we have, in the past, offered membership to certain members of the military. We found their tactical battlefield expertise to be quite useful. Now, our aim and your aim is the same. To find dangerous lunatics, haters, and punk trash and stop them.

Then another, higher-ranking society member with the absurdly WASP name of Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn) says to Lockjaw:

You’re doing great work. … Each and every day is hand-to-hand combat in the spread of uncontrolled migration, isn’t it?…

I don’t think I’m being immodest when I say that joining the Christmas Adventurers Club means that you are a superior man. No, not the best man, not the most intelligent, the most sophisticated, or the wisest. It just means that you are superior to other human beings, and you shall never want for riches or the greatest of friends.

Now, we report to ourselves with a freedom to be creative and cut through layers of bureaucracy. We live by the Golden Rule, in a network of like-minded men and women dedicated to making the world safe and pure.

What would you say to someone who believes that you have been soft in your duty to racial purification?

Lockjaw answers: “I would say they are a liar who has no business in society. Or on the planet, for that matter.” This impresses the Club members.

As part of the Club’s uber-thorough “Double Yankee White Inquisitions Completum” background check on Lockjaw, they ask him a series of questions that, as only a White liberal screenwriter can conjure, serve to signify conservative White males’ assumed aversion to psychotherapy, as well as the secret society’s anti-Semitism and organizing principle of White Gentile racial purity:

Throckmorton: Have you ever consulted with a mental health professional?

Lockjaw: No, sir…

Throckmorton: Have you ever engaged in an interracial relationship?

Lockjaw: No, sir.

Throckmorton: And you are American-born by Gentile?

Lockjaw: Yes, sir.

Later in the film, as the leaders of the Christmas Adventurers Club discover that Lockjaw has fathered a mixed-race child, they decide to take drastic measures to clean up the mess. We see a proper-looking White male drive a blue Mustang to an upscale home in an exclusive neighborhood that is the southwest headquarters of the secret society. In Pynchon’s Vineland, which Pynchon set in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s Presidential election is an all-important backdrop to the events of the novel. As a nod to this, Anderson uses Reagan’s posh home in East Sacramento – which he occupied during his stint as California governor from 1967 to 1975 – to represent the exteriors of the Christmas Adventurers Club’s southwest headquarters.

As the man is driving to this house, the soundtrack plays an excerpt of the eighteenth-century English Christmas carol “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” to further ridicule Christianity and associate it with White supremacism and murderousness:

Hark, the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled
Joyful, all ye nations, rise…
Hail the Sun of Righteousness
Light and life to all he brings

Risen with healing in his wings
Mild he lays his glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark, the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King

The man knocks on the door and is instantly recognized and let in by a genteel elderly woman. She asks if he is hungry and offers to make him her “famous Alice banana pancakes.” The man politely declines, saying he’s about to be running late and that he “better get down there.” We then see the man enter the door to the basement which then leads to a vast, lighted, concrete corridor with numerous rooms off the corridor, finally arriving at the room to which he’s been summoned. Awaiting him are the elite leaders of the Christmas Adventurers Club. (In this setting, we have the tired liberal trope of wealthy WASP enclaves — and White suburbs in general — secretly harboring White supremacist viewpoints). The room is replete with hunting motifs (because to urban liberals, that’s what White racists in the suburbs do).

The man, despite his unassuming demeanor, is actually a hitman for the Christmas Adventurers Club. He is instructed to kill both Lockjaw and Willa. As the Club members adjourn, they say “All hail Saint Nick” in unison.

The attempt to kill Lockjaw and Willa fails. Due to his own effort to dispose of Willa having gone awry, as well as the Christmas Adventurers Club attempt to murder both Willa and Lockjaw having gone awry, Lockjaw’s face has become horribly disfigured (get it?). In the end, however, Lockjaw is lured back to meet with the Christmas Adventurers Club under false pretenses. They lead him to believe he’s been accepted as a member. “Congratulations, Steve, you’re a Christmas Adventurer.” Lockjaw is jubilant. “Oh, Mommy. Thank you, sir!” he says back.

Sandy Irvine leads Lockjaw to a corner office in an empty high-rise office building which offers an amazing view of the city, telling him:

Lockjaw, we’re lucky to have you. Now, obviously, goes without saying, this is just one place where you can hang your hat, take meetings, stow a few personal items. We like our members to feel they have a home away from home, any time, day or night. Now, it’s empty right now, but we’ll let you personalize it. A man’s taste defines him, doesn’t it?

Lockjaw asks if he can sit at the desk in the office, to which Sandy says “Absolutely.” As Lockjaw sits down, Sandy says “Damn it. I forgot your keys. Wait here, I’ll just grab ‘em from my office.” As he leaves (closing the door behind him), Lockjaw puts his feet up on the desk, basking in the glow of his personal moment of triumph. We then hear the sound of some sort of gas being pumped into the room from the ceiling air vent. In just moments, Lockjaw is dead — seemingly frozen into place — and two men in full hazmat suits arrive, carry his body out, and place it into an incinerator.

The Holocaust analogy here is so glaringly obvious and forced as to be embarrassing. Both the poison gas and the subsequent disposal of a body into a furnace is, of course, a twist on the Holocaust trope of telling Jews they’re just getting a shower (and not Zyklon B) and then their bodies being incinerated. Why this trope here? Because, according to the modern liberal mind, ‘White people’ are responsible for the Holocaust, an event which apparently began on June 6, 1944.

In the end, Lockjaw was sentenced to death for the sin of miscegenation, particularly the most egregious form of this sin: producing a child with someone who is Black.

VII.            Racialized Sexuality as Revolutionary Political Activism

One Battle has been a pet project of Anderson’s since the early 1990s when he first read Pynchon’s Vineland and became obsessed with it, and he then worked on the eventual adapted screenplay for over 20 years. In a very significant way, the film can be seen as an extended therapy session for Anderson. He seems to be expressing his apparent fetishization of Black women in much the same way that Quentin Tarantino expresses his fetishization with women’s feet. Anderson also seems to be expunging a weird misplaced sense of guilt over his own Whiteness, maleness and heterosexuality in general, and addressing anxiety over the racial identity crises his miscegenated children have experienced, or will likely experience in their lives, to some degree. Anderson also seems to be trying to elevate his own mixed-race domestic situation as itself some sort of revolutionary act, which if true is a perfect example of elite, armchair LARP-ing, the sort of “revolutionary action” that doesn’t require getting one’s hands dirty.

There is a conspicuous amount of interracialized sexuality (of the White-with-Black variety) on display in One Battle, and it’s worth considering the possible autobiographical reasons why Anderson placed so much of this element into his film. How else to explain the random, disparate, and otherwise pointless displays of miscegenated eroticism in One Battle?

For example, in the aforementioned opening sequence of the film we see Bob kissing passionately with his Perfidia while they are escaping from their successful operation to liberate illegal aliens from a migrant detention center. (It is she who irrationally and recklessly initiates this moment of passion, which briefly confuses Bob). Later in the film, after Bob has detonated various explosives against other domestic targets, we see the two kissing passionately again as they are fleeing (and with her also wanting to stop to have sex). Then later we see Alana Haim (her Jewish physiognomy unmistakable), in a role so minor as to be almost pointless, as French 75 member “Mae West” who kisses a Black male French 75 member just before both of them participate in an organized bank robbery. During this robbery, another loud Black female member of the French 75 named “Junglepussy”, with gun in hand, jumps on top of a desk and shouts to the bank employees: “I am what Black Power looks like!”

The script never provides a satisfactory and internally coherent reason as to why Perfidia, the radical Black leader of a revolutionary Leftwing terrorist group, would decide she wants to have sex with a White man as odious as Lockjaw (and bear his child), let alone settle down with Bob, another White man. In fact, this has been a subject of contention among some liberal reviewers of the film. Regarding the ways in which Perfidia is sexualized by two White men, one critic for The Guardian trots out Cultural Marxism’s notion of the “White male gaze” as well as the “lived experience” idiom, writing:

And while I understand the context and meaning behind the villain’s sexual obsession as a—reflection of racist and rightwing viewpoints, it also reflects hyper-sexualization of Black women in cinema. Taking on the form of a thing in order to critique and satirize it requires careful and—informed perspective. Intentions can result in the opposite of what’s intended, and that’s why our—intentions with other people’s lived experiences need to be handled so carefully.

One Battle After Another portrays these themes and reflects these questions and issues in ways—that mostly point it out and train all of its satire and disdain for the white men guilty of that gaze,—attitude, and behavior. But in going so far into being the thing in order to mock it, sometimes the—line gets awfully blurry, and it starts to feel like the film isn’t so much pointing at racist/sexist—stereotypes and male gaze as becoming those things in order to provoke us to react. (Hughes, 2025).[1]

The anger rises with Ellen E. Jones, a mixed-race Black female critic for The Guardian, who bemoans the film’s “fetishised depiction of interracial relationships” and Perfidia’s “hyper-sexualized” nature. “Dear revered PTA,” she writes, “what is up with you and Black women?”

… Anderson went for extreme horniness instead. This is a choice. Just like it was a choice to name another of his Black female revolutionary characters “Junglepussy” — inspired by the performer’s real stage name, a sexualised spin on the old racist slur “jungle bunny”. Or to have Perfidia express her principled defiance of the fascistic state with the phrase “this pussy don’t pop for you”. (Note to white male screenwriters: not every Black woman talks like Cardi B. And even Cardi B doesn’t sound like a Cardi B record all the time) (Jones, 2025).

Of the scene where Lockjaw says to Bob: “Do you like Black girls? I love ‘em!”, Jones writes:

This is intended to demonstrate the character’s repellence, but would be much more effective as such, if we hadn’t just seen lovable Bob describe his attraction to Perfidia in pretty much the same terms, moments earlier. Or Avon Barksdale from The Wire (aka actor Wood Harris) fondly describing his girlfriend Alana Haim as “an ordinary, working white girl”. In the OBAA worldview, all interracial relationships are apparently founded on a race kink. (Jones, 2025).

I would contend that the two White men on either side of Perfidia — Bob and Lockjaw — represent Anderson’s own conflicted psyche about the very idea of White men being with Black women and producing mixed-race children, and his own family life within that context. Bob is the ‘good’ well-intentioned side of this struggle, and Lockjaw is the malevolent and repressed Shadow figure of this struggle. When the Christmas Adventurers Club asks Lockjaw point blank if he knows who Perfidia Beverly Hills is and whether he’s had a romantic relationship with her, Lockjaw lies to them, and the choice of words in Anderson’s script is quite interesting:

Gentlemen, I have engaged the enemy face-to-face in battle. And in the dark alleys and shadows of espionage, I was once raped in reverse. The enemy employed deception. I was drugged. And while unconscious. … I believe [my power] was taken advantage of. I believe she was a sperm thief. They saw the power of my mind and body. They desired it.

Teyana Taylor (who plays Perfidia), when asked about this mini-controversy being discussed within the Left’s media bubble, exudes the Harlem ghetto mindset she grew up in, telling an interviewer:

Is that not what Black women go through? We are fetishized, especially by creepy motherfuckers. And we are, unfortunately, the least protected people. Showing what Black women go through, that’s a hard reality to accept (O’Connell, 2025).

It never crosses Taylor’s mind that perhaps the creepy motherfucker doing the fetishizing might be Anderson himself. In fact, the awkward and incongruous placement of mixed-race sexualization in One Battle begins to make more sense if we see it as a reflection of Anderson’s personal proclivities and very odd conception of miscegenation as a revolutionary act.

Whichever way one cuts it, however, a consistent theme does emerge in One Battle: miscegenation is depicted by Anderson as a revolutionary act. The intertwining and association of sexual arousal with violent revolutionary action is most odd, and the intimate merging of an idealized Marxist political utopia with a racialized sexual utopia is something Frantz Fanon might have dreamt up. It’s important to note that in Pynchon’s Vineland, both the Bob character and the Perfidia-character are White, which therefore makes their daughter White. Thus, it is entirely Anderson who makes the Perfidia character Black, injecting the storyline with layers of miscegenation and a bizarre racialized-sexuality-cum-revolutionary-politics angle. In a kind of auteurist poetic gesture, sexual transgression is symbolically aligned with political rebellion. All of this seems to be towards Anderson’s goal of rendering interracialized sexuality as, at a minimum, a form of political activism, and possibly also a proper and useful ingredient for revolutionary politics. To better understand this, and why Anderson may have infused One Battle with so much of this theme, we need to briefly turn to his own domestic family life.

***

At the time of One Battle’s release, Anderson stands as a 55-year-old father to four mixed-race children, ranging from 12 to 19 — three of them daughters – whom he shares with Maya Rudolph, the former SNL cast member he’s been in an unmarried relationship with since 2001. Rudolph is herself mixed-race (her mother was Black and her father is Jewish). The theme of mixed-race individuals (particularly Black-White biracial) feeling like outsiders in both White and Black communities has been a topic discussed extensively in sociology, psychology, personal memoirs, literature, and online discourse. Never feeling fully at home or accepted in the White community nor in the Black community, mixed-race Blacks often have the biggest racial chip on their shoulders. There is a heightened racial resentment that is almost always targeted at the White aspect of their identity. Following the ‘one drop’ rule, such mixed-race individuals overcompensate by identifying as Black and implicitly or explicitly rejecting the White aspect of their identity. The anger from their conflicted psyches is channeled primarily through publicly avowed ideology rather than violence. They often lean into their ‘Blackness’ and espouse anti-White rhetoric as a way to prove their ‘authenticity’ to full-blooded Blacks. In essence, this public aspect, largely performative, functions as a virtue signal to prove and establish their ‘Blackness’. (Barack Obama is a prime example).[2]

Many of Anderson’s films feature fractured and dysfunctional family arrangements, and it may be the case that Anderson imparts autobiographical elements from his own domestic life into his films, namely the more trying times of his rather unusual family dynamics. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that the life of a successful, critically-acclaimed, auteur writer/director such as Anderson is fraught with domestic problems and emotional sacrifices. As we often see with many of the greatest artists, writers, and poets over the ages, dedication to their craft is their life, and everything else — family included — is a distant second. For instance, in There Will Be Blood (2007), Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day Lewis) ego and blind ambition are temporarily brought to their knees when a paster cajoles him to confess his sins, leading him to cry out “I have abandoned my child!” Similarly, in One Battle, Perfidia the dedicated Black female revolutionary essentially abandons her child, not so much for the revolutionary cause but to save her ass from federal prosecution and likely prison time.

In One Battle, Perfidia’s mother is called “Gramma Minnie,” a reference to Maya Rudolph’s mother Minnie Riperton, a renowned soul singer who died of cancer at 31.[3] In an essay about Maya Rudolph’s influence on One Battle, Desiree Bowie writes:

That sense of absence runs deep. Willa loses both grandmother and mother in infancy, and Perfidia parts from her own mom too soon. Each woman is marked by the loss of the one before her.

Teyana Taylor, who plays Perfidia, even said she immersed herself in Riperton’s discography to find the character’s pulse during the film’s long shoot (Bowie, 2025).

In terms of casting the role of Willa, and what led to his choice of Chase Infiniti for the role, Anderson told an interviewer “She reminded me of my daughters. She felt like a person who would be friends with my daughters, and I just connected to her as a human being” (Fear, 2025). In a sequence in the movie where Bob and Sergio are frantically trying to find Willa (whom Lockjaw has kidnapped), Bob laments to Sensei Sergio that after Perfidia left all those years ago, he still struggles with how to be a father to Willa, brushing up against World War Hair in the process:

Just never thought this fucker would come back for us, you know? I got lazy, man. I wasn’t paying attention. I thought the person coming through that door one day was gonna be her mom, not this fucking asshole. See her daughter, you know? She’d teach her girl stuff. She’d do her hair, she’d … be a mom. I can’t do her hair, man. You know that? I don’t know how to do her hair right.

Of this bit of screenplay dialogue, Anderson says in the same interview:

[It’s] no secret that Maya [Rudolph, Paul’s partner] lost her mother [the singer Minnie Riperton] when she was very young. And Maya’s father really struggled, as a single dad, to do her hair. Because, you know, I can tell you: As a father of mixed-race girls, it’s nearly impossible for me to do their hair as a white man. That was something that struck me as a father, and that I really knew was a challenge for her and for him. That’s a very personal line for me. (Fear, 2025)

In many ways, one can see DiCaprio’s hapless Bob character as a surrogate for Anderson himself. With the racially complicated nature of Anderson’s family, one senses a latent White Savior Complex in One Battle, albeit one that Anderson is simultaneously aware of but conflicted about, and so tries to mitigate.[4]

***

Through the repeated inter-racialized displays in One Battle, Anderson seems to be leaning heavily towards a Frankfurt School interpretation of sorts. The legacy of Freudian pseudoscience (and its inherent hostility to the prevailing Christian sexual norms of heritage America) looms large vis-à-vis the idea of sexual energy as a political force.[5] One need not believe that any of the associated theories capture anything objectively true — most are patently absurd — but it is important to note how these theories inform the Leftist and animate his political art and activism. The theories operate less as working empirical models but more as instruction manuals for activism. The notion of sexual energy as a political force can, of course, be traced back to the profound influence of Sigmund Freud, the Jewish father of psychoanalysis, particularly his theoretical framework of Eros and Thanatos as discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In revolutionary contexts, so the argument goes, Eros (the drive toward union, pleasure, life) and Thanatos (the drive toward destruction and death) collapse into each other. Destruction becomes pleasurable; killing and dying are eroticized as forms of fusion and transcendence. Revolutionary violence thus becomes a Thanatotic act experienced through Eros.

This ‘dual-drive’ theory of Freud’s underlies several other influential Freudian-Marxists. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), the Jewish psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich argued that sexual repression creates authoritarian character structures. Libido that cannot be discharged erotically is redirected into aggression, discipline, and ecstatic submission; mass political movements offer a quasi-erotic release through violence, spectacle, and collective action.

Similarly, the influential Jewish intellectual Herbert Marcuse explicitly links libidinal energy with political rebellion. He deploys a Freudian-Marxist concept of ‘liberation’ that promises a return of pleasure, intensity, and bodily freedom. In Eros and Civilization (1955), Marcuse argues that capitalist society represses Eros, and that when ‘sexual liberation’ is incomplete, revolutionary politics will absorb this repressed erotic longing. Later, in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), Marcuse suggests that radical politics often becomes aestheticized and eroticized, but that violence can function as a substitute gratification. It is why, he argues, some revolutionary movements become theatrical and performative, intoxicating even when futile.

It is also worth pointing out the undue influence that The Authoritarian Personality (1950) has had on Cultural Marxism. Theodor Adorno and his co-authors sought to frame traditional Christian norms — such as conventional moral values, respect for established religious authority, traditional gender roles, and adherence to conventional family and sexual ethics — as symptomatic of an underlying authoritarian personality syndrome. On the “F-scale” (fascism scale) personality test that the authors designed, high scorers were pathologized as psychologically rigid, prejudiced, and predisposed to ethnocentrism and fascism, effectively recasting ordinary Christian conservatism as a form of mental maladjustment rooted in repressed aggression and weak ego strength.

It is important also to note that the Weather Underground, who operated between 1969 and 1977, explicitly embraced sexual liberation as a revolutionary act and bought into the Neo-Freudian rhetoric of political violence (and even the outright murder of White civilians) as frenzied ecstatic transgression, all in service of the revolution. For instance, Bernardine Dohrn infamously praised the Manson murders as “wild.” Mark Rudd, the aforementioned Weather Underground leader, writes:

There were crazy discussions at Flint over whether killing white babies was inherently revolutionary, since all white people are the enemy. Out of this bizarre thinking came Bernardine’s infamous speech praising Charles Manson and his gang’s murder of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the LaBiancas. “Dig it!” she exclaimed. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” We instantly adopted as Weather’s salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly (Rudd, 2009).

That Bernardine Dohrn was not instantly disqualified from a faculty position at Northwestern University’s Law School speaks volumes about the Left’s continued grip on academia. As with other militant 1960s radicals — Bill Ayers, Angela Davis, Kathy Boudin, Kathleen Cleaver, etc. — the disturbing pattern here is in how their terrorist activities were not socially punished but social rewarded: academic appointments and other comfortable sinecures bestowed where one might have expected lasting disgrace.

VIII.          Conclusion

One Battle is a thoroughly Californian film. Its setting takes place entirely in California. It’s director and lead actor, both ardent progressives, have lived there for their entire lives. Thomas Pynchon spent formative decades living in California and his novel that One Battle is loosely based upon is set in California. “As California goes, so goes the nation” is an old political maxim that rings truer every day, and the madness that is California politics plays like satire itself. In a piece of trivia worthy of The Babylon Bee, prior to scenes being shot for One Battle in downtown Sacramento, authorities removed homeless tents — from ‘Cesar Chavez Park’ no less – presumably at the production’s request: ‘The Sacramento Homeless Union says tents were tagged with notices of filming Thursday and those living in the tents were forced to leave the area. “This permit should have never been given,” said Crystal Sanchez, President of the Sacramento Homeless Union’ (Trubey, 2024).

In the epilogue of One Battle, while Bob embraces a quiet life and is adapting to modern technology (Willa shows him how to take a selfie on his new iPhone), we hear a police scanner/radio announce that there is a new protest in Oakland. The radio acts as a link between the past French 75 era of Leftist political activism and the present, showing that the “battle” is never truly over but has passed on to a new generation. The present marks an era of female-dominated, Gen Z, Leftist activism. (Gen Z men are moving decisively towards conservatism). Willa immediately prepares to leave to join the rally, and Bob tries meekly to dissuade her. “You know, Oakland’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive from here,” he says to her, “It’s raining out.” We see unmistakably that this has absolutely no effect on Willa’s determination to go. “Be careful,” Bob says to her as she walks out the door. “I won’t” Willa replies, in the film’s last line of dialogue, before Tom Petty’s “American Girl” needle-drops onto the film’s closing credits, signaling Willa as a continuation of her mother’s activist legacy and the future of America.

One Battle is clearly a celebration of female leadership and an endorsement of the continued feminization of culture. The perceived “battles” that Anderson entertains as reality — the “eternal struggle” theme of the film’s title — comes from Anderson’s liberal White sensibility of what Black and Brown existence in America is comprised of. As one liberal reviewer of the film notes: “The terms of One Battle are not success and failure but action and inaction, and the belligerent, no-nonsense swagger Willa accrues as her own battles pile on suggests that the radical tradition of her parents’ generation will survive through her own” (Goi, 2025).

The more that one scrutinizes One Battle, the more apparent it becomes that Bob is Paul Thomas Anderson and that Willa is his daughters. “Like Bob,” one reviewer notes, “Anderson is an aging rebel reckoning with the nature of time” (LeBeau, 2025). Anderson himself, in an interview, frames the film’s message as one of persistence and stoicism:

Whether you’re talking about big things, finding one battle after another for the state of our world, or you’re talking about daily battles, from getting up in the morning and just getting your coat and getting your kids to school and brushing your teeth and stubbing your toe. I mean, that’s the job. Yes, fight these daily battles. Be nice. Keep your head down. Get on to the next fight, but don’t give up. (Fear, 2025)

In a Rolling Stone interview with both Anderson and DiCaprio, the interviewer tees them up with a loaded (and leading) assertion posing as a question:

So many people are asking, what can we do to fight back against this weird, fucked-up moment in American history. And One Battle After Another does kind of have an answer to that, which is: Look after your community and take care of your own.

DiCaprio agrees and then Anderson adds:

I think I what I’ve been noticing over the past two weeks since we’ve started showing the movie is, you know, maybe it’s not fashionable to make an optimistic movie right now. That was a risk. It’s fashionable to be cranky or something. But there’s a streak of optimism in the film. I hope there is, at least, I because I feel that way. I mean, I have four kids. I’d better be fucking optimistic. (Fear, 2025)

These sentiments aptly reflect where progressive culture is at the moment. Domestic politics is not seen as a slow and relatively boring, procedural endeavor with compromises being an often-necessary way station towards progress. Rather, it is a grand opera of mythic proportions, where each of us is either good or evil. (The moral absolutism inherent in this Manichaean worldview helps explain the performative aspect of Leftist activism today).

To this point, DiCaprio has compared One Battle to the film Star Wars (1977), something Anderson does not disagree with, noting that Willa can be seen as ‘the Chosen One’ (ala siblings Luke Skwalker and Princess Leia), Sergio/Sensei as Obi Wan Kenobi, Lockjaw as Darth Vader (relentlessly searching for Rebellion members, and secretly the father of the ‘Chosen One’), and the Christmas Adventurers Club hitman as bounty hunter Boba Fett. To this we can add Bob as comic relief ala R2D2/C3PO but with a father-daughter dynamic in play. In terms of making sense of the Left’s paranoid mindset today, of capturing the zeitgeist of their worldview, One Battle After Another in many ways is the Star Wars of today’s Left.[6]

In a rare moment where he steps outside of his usual, milquetoast NYT-acceptable ‘conservatism’, Ross Douthat fittingly contextualizes One Battle as a failure of vision:

In keeping with the current liberal mood, it feels trapped in a Boomer time warp, trying to speak to the Trump era but constantly pulled backward toward the America of 50 years ago. … Again, all this anachronism works fine in a story about futility and repetition. But Anderson wants to nod to those forces while still offering some sort of call to arms. And the trumpet is too tinny, a thin sound echoing down a long corridor from the Boomer past. History will not stop for this.

One can easily see a film like One Battle not aging well. In the unlikely chance that, in the decades to come, conservative common sense prevails in the culture wars, and race relations temper to a more rational level, it’s easy to imagine all sides retroactively deeming One Battle as itself borne of progressivism’s own ironic racist assumptions, that is, of White liberals continually perceiving the social reality of Blacks to be one of victimhood, and fostering this sensibility amongst themselves to a manic degree, of treating Blacks as near-sacred beings perpetually trapped in a system that is ‘against’ them, perpetually in need of assistance from Whites. In this way, and over time, One Battle After Another will stand as a cinematic manifestation of the heightened White Savior Complex that characterizes our current era.

REFERENCES

[1] There is a parallel here with the longstanding criticism by some Blacks of Quentin Tarantino’s use of the word “nigger” in his screenplays, a critique that is but another front in the “only we are allowed to say the magic word” culture war. Anderson and Tarantino, who both grew up in the L.A. area, are good friends. Amidst his praise for Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), Anderson describes an intimate scene that brings him to tears between Pam Grier (who is Black) and Robert Forster (who is White) as being “so cool and so breezy … about middle-aged people that feel the clock ticking, … I consider Tarantino a peer, but that is a watermark for how to shoot and film a scene with delicacy and compassion.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VSACkqh9a4.

[2] Regarding the psychological toll mixed-race adolescents experience, see Green (2025). Regarding Obama, see Steve Sailer’s America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” (2009). Autobiographical aspects of One Battle have been touched upon by liberal writers: with respect to One Battle, see LeBeau (2025), and for autobiographical aspects of Phantom Thread, see Anderson’s own words in Radish (2018).

[3] Minnie Riperton is best known for the hit single “Lovin’ You” (1974), where her overall vocal style and rare falsetto range sounds very ‘White’, to the extent that club owners who booked her after only hearing (and not seeing) her, would be shocked that she was Black. Emily J. Lordi’s book The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (2020), which features Riperton on the front cover, places her in a broader Black musical-intellectual tradition related to the era’s ideas of Black resilience and, indirectly, the historical world around Black Power. Lordi writes: “Born in 1947 in the Bronzeville district of Chicago, Riperton was the youngest of eight children and the daughter of a homemaker and a Pullman porter. As I have noted, she studied opera for years. Although she knew well that opportunities for black classical singers were extremely limited, she did not, like Nina Simone, narrate her detour from concert music as a racial trauma. This might have been a matter of temperament or a strategic omission. Or it might have been due to the fact that Riperton had always had another place to land: she had grown up near Chess Records, the crucible of Chicago soul” (116-7). Of Riperton’s cover of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”, Lordi writes that Riperton “recast Franklin’s signature song as an eerie exploration of interracial love” in a “seductive interracial duet” with White bassist Mitch Aliotta (62). Lordi later adds that Riperton’s “falsetto marked a refusal to shout and an embrace of an expansive, often buoyant interior life for which Riperton sought both musical and social space. Her quest was especially resonant in an era of black feminist emergence… Through her falsetto, as well as her often self-composed lyrics, Riperton contributed to these feminist efforts to make more space for black women’s interiority, both its pleasures and demands” (116).

[4] An important footnote in this regard, and one that amplifies the penchant of both Anderson and DiCaprio to romanticize the Other (and in the process espouse anti-White sentiment), is the fact that both were involved in substantially changing the storyline of Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon (Ruimy, 2025). DiCaprio was originally slated to play FBI agent Tom White (ultimately played by Jesse Plemons), a character that was to be the lead role of the film, but was concerned that Eric Roth’s original script was too much of a ‘great White hope story’. Upon critical feedback from members of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe about portraying White men as heroic saviors of the Osage, Scorsese and DiCaprio decided to change the movie’s focus from the FBI’s point of view (as they investigated the Osage murders) to a focus on the interracial marriage between the villainous Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). One can see parallels between Ernest’s slow poisoning of his own wife with Lockjaw’s “poisoning” of Perfidia.

[5] An almost exclusively Jewish field, psychoanalysis was borne in a rigidly enforced, cult-like atmosphere, propagated by loyal sycophants to Freud. (Freud’s infamous break with Carl Jung, a Gentile, is instructive in this regard). Psychoanalysis has attempted to maintain a veneer of scientific respectability over the years but has since become thoroughly discredited and can now be seen largely as a Jewish attempt to pathologize Christian European norms. See Cuddihy (1974) and MacDonald (1998/2002/2025).

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WW4jJ59d4.

“One Battle After Another” (2025): Radical Politics & Fetishized Miscegenation, Part 1

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Max West writes at Logical Meme and on X at @Logicalmeme. He is the author of Normism: The Philosophy of Norm Macdonald (2021).

NOTE: Spoilers ahead.

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I.             Overview

One Battle After Another opens with a prologue set 16 years prior to the current day, which sets up the decades-long chain of events that are to follow. We see a fictional, far-Left, militant, revolutionary group called the French 75 (based on a fusion of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army) engaged in the violent ‘liberation’ of the equivalent of an ICE detention facility. The establishment shot to this first sequence is the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego (a real federal detention facility), which is denoted in a title card, and the film’s soundtrack provides the requisite swelling-strings stylization, the sort of conveyor-belt “feel sad here” cue we’re accustomed to in Hollywood’s endless production of Holocaust films featuring gaunt prisoners in concentration camps (except in the case of Mexican illegals, the body type is generally the opposite of gauntness).

In the wake of the violent January 2026 anti-ICE protests in Minnesota that further divided the nation, One Battle subsequently received a slew of Academy Award nominations, winning Best Picture, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Best Adapted Screenplay (Paul Thomas Anderson), and Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn). These outcomes come as no real surprise, given Hollywood’s penchant for trendy political content and public virtue-signaling.

However, at its core One Battle is a White male liberal’s glorification of radical Black politics and, to an odd and striking degree, Black female hypersexuality. Anderson awkwardly enmeshes his film with a miscegenation fetish and a portrayal of militant Leftwing radicalism as having a racialized sexual dimension, of sexual ‘liberation’ being an essential component of revolutionary politics. Secondarily, the film elevates Mexican illegal immigrants to a near-sacred status. Collectively, these representations of non-White groups amount to a cringe-inducing romanticization of the Other, all of which is further amplified by a one-dimensional and mystifyingly juvenile caricature of the police and military as ‘fascist’ thugs wantonly committing summary executions and getting sexually aroused by Black women pressing loaded guns against them. It’s all so very strange.

Such characterizations are informative, however, in revealing the modern Left’s current morality play. Here lies a paranoid, conspiratorial mindset, and an emotional rendering of Black and Brown groups’ respective ‘persecutions’ in a ‘fascist’ America. In today’s Cultural Marxism, which might be more accurately called Identity Marxism, traditional Marxist conflict theory (of oppressor vs oppressed) is applied to identity groups rather than just economic classes. This post-1960s trend centers on identity politics — focusing on race, gender, and sexuality — to create a matrix of oppression, a blueprint from which one can restructure society.

Beyond its boilerplate agitprop qualities, One Battle is more interesting when looked at as just one more instance of Hollywood’s many liberal revenge fantasies against White America. One Battle does this in much the same way that films such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) or Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) do.[1]

Liberal film critic Richard Brody describes One Battle as “a work of grand symbolic design” and speaks for many progressive fans of the film when he interprets Anderson’s alternate history narrative in hyperbolic terms. Anderson, he writes, “looks profoundly beyond the immediate terms of his fiction to reach powerful insights regarding the horrors of the moment” (Brody, 2025). The film attempts to juxtapose absurdist political satire (primarily of conservatism, à la Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) with earnest Leftist preaching and hand-wringing, but the stark contrasts in style — correlated with the respective political positions — only serves to highlight the film’s didacticism. In short, One Battle captures the contorted, paranoid psyche and moral framework of today’s Left and stands as the most influential liberal moral panic film of the past year.

II.            Age of Anxiety and The Leftist Moral Panic

It is not exactly a new nor controversial thesis to say that our culture feels unmoored. Among the Western nations, the crisis of post-industrial late modernity is real and its causes multifold. We can divide these causes into internalized and externalized factors. The external factors are objectively external (e.g., atomization & social fragmentation; mass third world immigration; feminization of culture; digital information overload; A.I.) while the internalized factors are just that: attitudes and beliefs altered within individuals and, by extension, society as a whole. From a Voegelinian perspective[2], we can see a loosely causative and almost circular relationship to these internal factors, some of which include: alienation => digital anxiety => narcissism => epistemic instability => conspiracy theorizing => gnosticism => radicalization (i.e., activist transformation of the world). The Left and the Right of course react to the external factors in vastly different ways, and so internalize their subsequent anxieties differently. With respect to how the Left reacts to these external factors — that is, how they internalize associated anxieties into their psyches (and their art) — One Battle serves as an archetypal example.

In The End of Ideology (1960), Daniel Bell argued that in prosperous democracies, the grand, transformative political ideologies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the ideologies which aimed to radically reshape society (e.g., Marxism, Nazism) — no longer inspire mass commitment. Revolutionary appeals to the working class were effectively diffused by Keynesianism and an expanding welfare state. Bell and likeminded thinkers anticipated that, in the West, politics would shift toward pragmatic, incremental, piecemeal problem-solving — technical adjustments, expert-driven reforms, and pluralist negotiation — rather than sweeping ideological visions or eschatological promises of utopia. In the U.S., this has largely been true: the Leftist radical activism of the 1960s–1970s (e.g., Weather Underground, Black Panthers) faded into insignificance, eventually becoming little more than touchpoints of cultural nostalgia, much like the Hippies.

Unlike in the 1960s, among today’s influential Leftists there is no explicit call for revolution per se, at least none with any real traction, no political manifesto akin to Marx’s to rally behind and serve as a foundational organizational text. Leftist propaganda today is delivered in a more personalized and individualized form, commensurate with our social media age of curated information flows. If there is anything resembling a unifying ideology for today’s Left, it is Wokeness. This presents itself as a hazy and inexact form of moral indignation, one that collectively coalesces around Anti-Whiteness. Far more so than class, today’s Left is animated by identity politics surrounding race and gender.

In The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955), Raymond Aron argued that Leftist ideology functions like a secular religion, immune to evidence and hostile to dissent. Marxism became the “opium” of Western intellectuals, offering moral exaltation, historical certainty, and a sense of belonging while obscuring the layers and complexities of political reality. Aron argued that the Left had become a moral identity rather than a coherent political program: intellectuals equated “Left” with justice and “Right” with reactionism, fascism, racism, and the like. While Aron’s book is chiefly a dissection of French left-wing conformism and intellectual life in the 1940s–1950s, it has predictive value when evaluating the modern Left in the U.S., which has in many ways begun to parallel the trajectory of 1960s French Leftism, not so much in revolutionary ambitions (e.g., May 1968) but in the spiritual despair, nihilism and narcissism that underlies it.[3] The influential conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who witnessed the May ’68 riots while in Paris, has described them as “a kind of adolescent insouciance, a throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy” (Scruton, 2003).

So, might we be in the early stages of a resurgent, 1960s-style, radical activism among the Left… a Version 2.0? The Far Left has made serious inroads toward control of the Democratic Party: younger generations adept at social media (AOC, Mamdani, etc.) are shaping the Party’s intrinsic national message, which in turn changes the Party’s platform, actualized policies, and lastly and sometimes reluctantly, the stated positions of the Party’s elders themselves. (As an example, one need only look at the radical leftward change in position on illegal immigration that figures such as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton have displayed from the mid-1990s to the present). Particularly among the young, there is also the Left’s increasing propensity and willingness to use violence to achieve political goals (Antifa rioting; George Floyd rioting, the assassination of Charlie Kirk; two assassination attempts on Donald Trump; the Left’s lionization of Luigi Mangione, who murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; numerous attempts to murder ICE agents; etc.), which comports with the political message of One Battle.[4]

III.          Weather Underground + Black Liberation Army = French 75

In One Battle, the fictional, far-Left, militant, revolutionary group called the French 75 is based on a fusion of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The title One Battle After Another was itself taken from a Weather Underground missive written by Bernardine Dohrn in 1969. In a February 2026 interview[5], the ever-unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist (and Obama mentor) Bill Ayers effusively praises Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another (2025) and asserts that Anderson “obviously read everything about the Weather Underground. He obviously listened to our son Zade Dohrn’s podcast Mother Country Radicals. He obviously researched Assata Shakur and the Black Liberation Army.” Ayers argues that Anderson, in taking the now-mythic iconography of 1960s radicalism and placing it in a contemporary timeframe, un-freezes this chapter of American history from cultural nostalgia and makes it relevant for our current times, almost as a call to action.

“The title One Battle After Another,” Ayers says in an eye-opening part of the interview, “is taken from a speech Bernardine [Dohrn] gave. … The context of the speech was explaining how we can be defeated but we have to keep going,” i.e., we must fight one battle after another.[6] What Ayers is referring to isn’t a traditional speech but a revolutionary statement written by Dohrn in the October 21, 1969 edition of FIRE!, the Weather Underground’s propaganda-style publication that became associated with the terrorist group after it literally went underground.[7] The statement reads:

On Monday, October 6, a pig statue honoring the murderers of Chicago strikers was blown to bits. On Tuesday, October 7, the head of the Chicago Pig Sergeants Association said that “SDS has declared war on the Chicago Police — from here on in it’s kill or be killed.” On Wednesday, October 8 a white fighting force was born in the streets of pig city. … We came to Chicago to join the other side — to stop talking and start fighting … to destroy the motherfucker from the inside.

There were only 500 of us, but we forced Pig Daley to call in the Guard… We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. FROM HERE ON IN IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER — WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA — BEWARE: THERE’S AN ARMY GROWING RIGHT IN YOUR GUTS, AND IT’S GOING TO HELP BRING YOU DOWN. DID THAT PIG SAY KILL OR BE KILLED?

What can we infer from this? Well, it would appear that Anderson either named his film One Battle After Another after encountering Dorhn’s rant himself or after someone in his circle of family/friends suggested the title after they had read Dohrn’s rant. In either case, it is implausible that Anderson did not know of Dohrn’s rant when deciding to name his movie. Given Anderson’s auteur status as a writer/director, and the absolute (and rare) creative control he has over his filmmaking process, it would be far too coincidental otherwise. Furthermore, any doubts can be laid to rest when we consider that Anderson’s script has the Perfidia character use a phrase from the above Dohrn rant: In her “declaration of war” to the guards of the migrant detention facility, she characterizes her violent activism as itself a natural reaction. “We’re here to right your wrongs, motherfucker. You got an army growing in your fucking guts, and you put it there.”

This, in turn, leads us to wonder if Anderson’s militant radicalism is far deeper than he publicly reveals. It’s either that or his turning a blind eye to the Weather Underground’s ideological justification for violence signals a stunning naivety. In any event, the film in no uncertain terms depicts domestic terrorism committed by militant Leftists in a sympathetic light.

It is important to remember the extent to which the Jewish-dominated Weather Underground leadership sanctioned genocidal levels of violence, when the time came. Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Weather Underground, reported how the group’s leadership estimated that, once the Revolution had succeeded in the United States, they would need to kill 25 million people. Grathwohl writes: “I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. … And they were dead serious” (Kengor, 2013).

It is also important to remember how the Weather Underground’s leadership believed it to ultimately be their duty to step aside and allow Blacks and Browns to be the revolutionary vanguard. Some of this sentiment was driven by frustration with the reactionism of the Nixon-era White working class, but the stronger sentiment was that this willful dispossession of leadership was a moral imperative. “We believed that the revolution led by Black and brown people was imminent,” notes one former Weather Underground member, “and it was our job to convince working-class whites to act as foot soldiers” (Reeves, 2026). Lastly, it cannot be overemphasized just how pathologically anti-White the Weather Underground was in their ideology and rhetoric, which in many ways anticipated our own Woke era’s anti-Whiteness.

Of course, none of this is on display in One Battle, just milder, coded allusions within an overall irresponsible liberal revenge fantasy of a film. “This fantasy may coincide with contemporary turmoil,” writs Armond White, “but its mixture of political absurdity, comic bloodshed, and racial farce merely exploits Millennial confusion” (White, 2025). For example, among the coded references is how, throughout the film, saying “Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Hooterville Junction!” serves as a passcode for French 75 members to identify one another. Within the film, that’s as far as the reference goes, but in the 1960s, these sitcoms (with “Hooterville Junction” being a substitute for “Petticoat Junction”) were set in rural White locales, antithetical to Black urban locales, and so became a target of rage by Black militants. This exact phrase (along with other cultural references to Whites) is used in Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 black liberation song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, which can be heard in One Battle and which, lyrically, drips with resentment against Whites and their culture:

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction
Will no longer be so damn relevant
And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane
On Search for Tomorrow
Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day
The revolution will not be televised.

With various cultural references like this, Anderson doesn’t come right out and directly broadcast his radicalism, but rather provides the select viewer with a wink and a nod. The closest reveal of Anderson’s true political philosophy is via the minor character of Howard Sommerville (Paul Grimstad) who isn’t in the film very long and serves as an incongruous placeholder for Anderson to briefly articulate his own meta-level political ideology. We see Sommerville sitting alone in a café drafting the speech he’ll eventually deliver over guerrilla radio airwaves (that we hear in voiceover).

Paul Grimstad as Howard Sommerville in One Battle

We also see Sommerville engaging in Will Stancil-styled barrio activism (handing out pamphlets to Mexicans at a bus station, etc.) during this voiceover. Howard’s diatribe is comprised of standard-issue Marxism, blank-slate race denialism, open borders ‘asylum’ rhetoric, and a call for what Voegelin delineates as the activist transformation of the world:

… maybe starting to see how corrupt to the core this whole fucking charade is. This great noble experiment in self-government. Bought and sold by billionaires. The Davos crowd. Openly racist, fucking Bell Curve Nazis.

It’s bedtime for democracy, comrades … good night. So, you’re feeling, like, maybe your mind is starting to erode? Good. This is happening on the ground, through coordinated effort and strategic lines of resistance. Every day, working through dedicated teamwork, to take it directly to the capitalist overlords, who are extracting value from your life this very second.

Go ahead. What, you think this is Facebook? This is gonna happen on your Instagram? It’s gonna happen on a hashtag somewhere? I think not. And don’t forget, while you’re doing it, that this is a nation that gives asylum. Don’t think they’re separate. Don’t break them apart.

IV.         Influences & Pynchon’s Conspiratorial Mindset

Paul Thomas Anderson’s overall body of work contains an impressive array of films packed with immediacy, visual flair, and stylized mise-en-scène: Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017), Licorice Pizza (2021), and now One Battle After Another (2025).[8] Anderson’s films are driven by intense and often damaged individuals whose inner longings collide with grand American mythologies (fame, family, capitalism), and his narratives often unfold in loosely episodic structures taking place within sprawling, operatic arcs. Among his immediate influences, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese are most apparent. From Altman we get the ensemble storytelling, the overlapping dialogue, and the chaotic feel of fractured families, and from Scorsese we get the streetwise shot-compositions, kinetic camera movement (Anderson is also a fan of Max Ophüls in this regard), and the popular music needle drops that underscore a scene’s desired emotional effect.[9] There is also the noticeable influence of Stanley Kubrick’s precision and emotional austerity in films such as There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. With respect to One Battle, Anderson has cited the following as key influences in the making of the film[10]:

  • Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015): Bryan Burrough’s seminal book details the radical underground in the 1970s, documenting a largely forgotten era of intense domestic terrorism in the U.S. He details how groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army conducted thousands of bombings and killings.[11]
  • Les Misérables (1935): Anderson cites Richard Boleslawski’s 1935 film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, particularly its mad, cacophonous first act that serves as the backdrop and setup for the core human conflict in the story: Inspector Javert’s (Charles Laughton) obsession with capturing ex-convict Jean Valjean (Fredric March).
  • Vanishing Point (1971): Anderson cites Richard Sarafian’s underrated mythopoetic road movie, which I have previously written about.[12] In Vanishing Point, the protagonist is determined to drive from Denver to San Francisco in record time, for an unspecified goal, and his urgency in the matter acts as a purpose-in-itself, where the ultimate telos of one’s ‘vanishing point’ – eyes fixed as far as one can see down the road — symbolizes the annihilation of being that comes with death.
  • Midnight Run (1988): Anderson absolutely loves this witty, buddy-action-comedy-road-movie starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, made in the heyday of the 1980s buddy films craze (e.g., 48 Hrs. (1982), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and Lethal Weapon (1987)). Anderson says it is both his personal favorite film and his family’s favorite film, which they watch at least twice per year.[13]

Relative to Anderson’s earlier films, with One Battle we have a more frenetic pace that reflects the confused, paranoid, and desperate mindset of today’s Left, where ‘fascism’ is everywhere — in every institution of authority, and even hidden underneath the seemingly benign, trimmed lawns of the suburbs. It is here where Anderson’s literary influences come to the forefront. The majority of Anderson’s films are based upon his own original screenplays, but in the case of There Will Be Blood, Anderson adapted his screenplay from Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel Oil! (1927), and in One Battle After Another (as with Inherent Vice) we have Anderson adapting a screenplay loosely based on the novel Vineland (1990) written by his most significant and lasting literary influence: Thomas Pynchon[14].

Pynchon is one of the founders (and giants) of postmodern fiction, a satirical genre that — through devices of irony, self-referentiality, and non-linear narrative — parodies modernist fiction just as modernist fiction parodies realist fiction. Pynchon’s oeuvre is replete with conspiracy theories, usually fanciful and ridiculous, and the conspiracies in his novels are typically layered and, despite remaining largely unseen and in the background, serve as the magnetic center of the novels’ events. Countercultural anti-hero protagonists, often burned-out pot-smoking 60s-era radicals, stumble through the novel’s plot and life in general, but then also stumble onto actual conspiracies they soon find themselves caught up in. The harrowing realities of the conspiracy, the upending of one’s conventional ways of understanding the world, take their toll on characters’ psyches, leading to an ever-worsening paranoia. In many ways, Pynchon’s novels, characterized by hidden connections and multiple interpretive levels, provide interwoven, gnostic systems of meaning to the characters and to the reader. Contours of ‘The System’ are delimited. It is most interesting, then, when Harold Bloom characterizes Pynchon’s novels as Kabbalistic.[15]

The conspiracy-theory-as-plot-device is itself greatly influenced by early American detective fiction (e.g., Hammett, Chandler), a genre that in a more straightforward literary manner involves mystery and unknown forces which the hero does not fully understand. Over the course of typically three acts, a slow and suspenseful unraveling of a conspiracy takes place. Of course, the conspiracy itself may be relatively low-level, and not necessarily part of a particular, more macro-level one, but a conspiracy nonetheless. As with the genre of classic film noir — which inherits all the essential tropes of detective fiction and was often helmed by liberal Jewish émigré directors — there is a darkened moral atmosphere to the world and a growing skepticism toward institutions. Gone is the clean moral universe of classic whodunits. Instead, justice is compromised, authority corrupted, truth rarely restores order, and the protagonist (often a grizzled and jaded private detective) uncovers guilt without being able to meaningfully correct it. The fatalism inherent in this worldview (and the arc of conspiracy theories in general) coincides with the explosive growth in the twentieth century, particularly since World War II, of both the federal government and large corporations, i.e., the prevailing dominance of the bureaucratic-administrative state and its nexus with corporate interests.[16] The institutions that effectively control us have become ever more faceless, unaccountable, and remote from the average citizen, and in One Battle this type of dark and cloaked entity — as it is imagined by the Leftist’s conspiratorial mindset — is the fictional White supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club.

V.           Characters+

Bob Ferguson

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson (aka “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun aka “Rocketman”), a former 60s radical who was an explosives expert for the film’s fictional domestic terrorist group French 75.[17] In the film’s aforementioned opening sequence, we see Bob in his earlier activist/terrorist years as he participates in ‘liberating’ a migrant detention facility. Whether intended by Anderson or not, we witness the pathetic spectacle of this out-of-place, White, ‘60s revolutionary surrounded by Black radicals and Mexican illegals, screaming insults to the DHS soldiers whom the French 75 has just placed inside the very ‘cages’ that minutes ago held illegal aliens:

We are a political organization that is free from the eyes, the ears, and most importantly, the weapons of the imperialist state, and this fascist regime! You are a political prisoner of the French 75, motherfuckers! You’ve been captured by the French 75! Fuck the police! Viva La Revolución!

Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson (aka “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun aka “Rocketman”)

In the 16 years since the film’s opening sequence timeline, Bob has changed his identity and fled to the fictional town of Baktan Cross in Northern California, but his identity and sense of self are still inextricably linked to his past revolutionary activities and political philosophy. However, he’s now a man-bun-sporting, paranoid burn-out dressed in Jeffrey Lebowski bathrobe attire, who spends his days smoking pot, vaping, and watching Battle of Algiers. His existence now is nothing more than as a vessel of nostalgia, save for him being the (cucked) “father” of his mixed-race daughter Willa. In fact, Bob has been cucked thrice-over. First, he doesn’t realize that he’s not the biological father of Willa (though Perfidia surely does). Second, he’s been cucked by the Revolution, as Perfidia abandons him and Willa to “do the revolution.” Third, he’s been cucked by his own feminism, reflected in his inability to be a stern and responsible father to his daughter.

DiCaprio has commented on his character’s old-school hippie/libertarian streak, of the type one finds in certain Northern CA towns such as Eureka:

Bob is what I like to call a don’t tread on me, anti-establishment, hippie revolutionary who is paranoid about anything and everything. He doesn’t want to be taxed. He doesn’t want to be monitored. He’s incredibly skeptical of everyone and everything around him. He hides himself off in the middle of the woods and stays home, watches movies like The Battle of Algiers, smokes pot and drinks, but has one objective, and that’s to protect his daughter (Bowie, 2025).

Through Bob, we see a previous-generation Leftie feeling awkward around the new generation Lefties: namely Generation Pronoun & Generation Snowflake. When his daughter’s friends arrive at their home to take her to a school dance, there is this exchange:

Bob: Now, who’s the one with the lipstick? What’s that one’s name?
Willa: Bobo.
Bob: Bobo … Now, is that a he or a she or a they?
Willa: Dad, come on.
Bob: No, are they transitioning? I wanna know if…
Willa: They’re nonbinary.
Bob: Okay, I just wanna be polite…
Willa: It’s not that hard! … They/them.

Later in the film, when Bob is on the run, we see him on the phone with French 75 headquarters, trying to determine the arranged rendezvous point with his daughter. He’s talking to a whiny guy (“Comrade Josh”), but because he cannot remember the password code to the question “What time is it?,” Josh does not give him this information. Bob pleads with him to make an exception, but Josh repeatedly refuses. After Bob explodes in rage at Josh, cursing at him and threatening him, they have this exchange:

Josh: Okay, this doesn’t feel safe. You’re violating my space right now.
Bob: Violating your space?! Man, come on… What kind of revolutionary are you?! We’re not even in the same room here! We’re talking on the phone, like men!
Josh: Okay, there’s no need to shout. This is a violation of my safety. These are noise triggers.

At an important level, Bob belongs to the pantheon of the Hapless Male trope, namely the endless drumbeat of predictably inept men (almost always White) that Hollywood and Madison Ave churn out in movies, sitcoms, and TV commercials. Invariably, these bumbling and not-all-that-smart males serve as comic relief, but are eventually guided, rescued, or otherwise saved by either a Strong Woman (aka the Mary Sue trope), a non-White, or the intersection of both.[18] Even the New York Times, ever late to noticing cultural trends it did not itself create, has put One Battle into this context. In a piece entitled “Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men—and Hypercompetent Women,” Diego Hadis discusses several recent movies, including One Battle, where the three male protagonists all “fit the archetype of the schlemiel: irredeemably inept, an accident of a person, the butt of some great cosmic joke” (Hadis, 2026). These clueless males are eventually teamed up with ‘hypercompetent women’:

The women they come across, on the other hand, seem ready for anything. They might see several chess moves ahead of both the protagonists and antagonists. They know how to affect the world of the movie, and they do so with ease — exactly what the actual “hero” of the story is completely unable to do. …

They are ever-present — and they are usually so capable, so confidently efficacious, that if they were the story’s focus, the movie would be over in 15 minutes. (Hadis, 2026).

In the case of One Battle:

Perfidia is the film’s driving force, directing the group’s strategy and taking Bob as a lover; her actions push the story forward even after she leaves. All through the film, though, so many of the women Bob encounters have things together in ways that put him to shame — say, the nurse doing intake at a police station after Bob is arrested in a military raid, who hands him off to another nurse, at a hospital, who calmly, unflappably leads him to freedom. Even Bob’s teenage daughter, Willa, is the responsible one, a purple belt in karate who effectively parents her own father. (Hadis, 2026).

Rather than criticizing these tired girlboss tropes for being as formulaic as the Waif-Fu trope (i.e., action movies where a 100 lb. girl handily beats up 250 lb. men), Hadis not surprisingly adopts the New York Times’ “it’s time for women to run the world” approach:

The fact that these figures are so often women may be a way of suggesting that men have had their run, and look where it has gotten us. … We should not be surprised if the coming years bring more films like these — all dreaming that there is somebody out there with whom we might throw in our lot, somebody competent enough to tell us what to do to make the world right (Hadis, 2026).

This last sentiment is very much a feminist call-to-action-for-women in One Battle’s final scene.

Perfidia Beverly Hills

Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is the Strong Black Woman trope par excellence and the leader of the French 75. And while one of the world’s most famous movie stars is in One Battle, it is Perfidia who Anderson deems the film’s main character. He notes:

I had a feeling like, Perfidia needs to feel like she’s the protagonist, the hero of the movie. You know, Leo might be in it, Sean might be in it, all these well-known actors are in it, but you see Teyana and it’s like: That’s the star of the movie. I wanted audiences to feel like, this is really a movie about a Black revolutionary (Fear, 2025).

In the film’s opening illegal-immigration-liberation scene, when she first encounters Lockjaw and has a gun pointed at him, she declares her aforementioned political mission, which Anderson has clumsily written to shoehorn in a pro-abortion sentiment:

My name is Perfidia Beverly Hills, and this is a declaration of war. We’re here to right your wrongs, motherfucker. … You didn’t count on me. You didn’t count on my fight. The message is clear: free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from fuckin’ fear!

Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills

The very name ‘Perfidia’ literally means betrayal, which is apropos in this case: Ultimately, she betrays Bob by being attracted to, and having sex with, Lockjaw. She betrays the French 75 in a plea deal with authorities that involves her ratting out their names and locations. And she betrays her daughter by abandoning her. (Naturally, despite all of this irresponsibility and dysfunction, her daughter Willa still ‘relates’ to her in the film’s ending). Her middle and last name of “Beverly Hills” should not be overlooked either: this is Anderson situating one front of the revolutionary vanguard (at least nominally) within the manicured lawns of Beverly Hills, and perhaps giving Hollywood liberals a jab for not being sufficiently committed to Leftist causes and the associated ‘direct action’.

Anderson writes Perfidia as experiencing post-partum depression, and she abnegates her maternal role to her newborn infant Willa as a result, with Bob carrying the load. When Bob scolds her, reminding her that they “are a family now,” Perfidia uses her revolutionary politics to justify her abandonment of the mother role: “This is a new consciousness. I’m not your udder buddy. I’m not your mother. You want your power over me, the same reason you want your power over the world. You and your crumbling male ego will never do this revolution like me.”

Anderson no doubt based Perfidia on Assata Shakur, who joined the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s before becoming involved with the Black Liberation Army. She gained notoriety after a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in the death of a state trooper. She was convicted of murder in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison, but in 1979 escaped with the help of supporters. She then lived in the underground until 1984 when she was granted asylum in Cuba, where she lived until her death in 2025 at age 78. As an example of the standard hagiography heaped on Shakur by the Left, Nikole Hannah-Jones (of the ‘1619 Project’ infamy) was granted a New York Times op-ed slot to celebrate Shakur. The piece is full of gems, including this quote from Angela Davis, the more famously feted Black Female Revolutionary:

Angela Davis, the activist who was wrongly imprisoned during that same tumultuous period, told me women were the backbone of Black radical movements and “the government probably recognized more than even our own people did the power of Black women. (Hannah-Jones, 2025)

In One Battle, after a bank heist goes awry, and which involves Perfidia killing a bank guard, she is apprehended by the police. (Anderson cowardly casts a Black male to play the murdered bank guard, so as to deflect attention from the prevailing Black-on-White nature of violent crime in America). We then see an all-White gaggle of cops cheering and flipping her off while taking selfies.

Lockjaw, thoroughly smitten with her, arranges for her to get a witness protection plea deal, in exchange for beginning an illicit affair. She puts up with this for a certain duration before fleeing (ironically through an official border crossing into Mexico) for a destination that, we learn later in the film, is either Cuba or Algiers, both being locations that actual 1960s Black radicals fled to when U.S. authorities were on their tail.

Willa Ferguson

The progeny of Perfidia and (shockingly) Lockjaw, Willa (Chase Infiniti) is nonetheless raised by Bob alone, given that Perfidia abandoned the family when Willa was an infant. As the film fast-forwards sixteen years later, we see Willa now sixteen herself, receiving karate instruction from Sergio St. Carlos. Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” is playing on the soundtrack, which lyrically signifies the degradation of Bob and Perfidia’s revolutionary romance into a domestic aftermath where Bob is the sole parent, having ‘cleaned up’ Perfidia’s mess. (Bob once imagined himself as part of History; now he’s an exhausted man left holding the child, the guilt, the secrets, and the consequences).

Chase Infiniti as Willa Ferguson

Willa is now a rather typical American teen female. She has a cell phone that she hides from Bob (who has forbidden them), They/Them friends, and Girl Power attitude. In terms of both cultural attitudes and Leftist political strategies, Willa represents the notable generation gap relative to Bob’s generation. She is described to Bob as a natural ‘leader’ by her high school history teacher, which leads Bob to cry tears of pride.

In terms of plot, Willa is the aforementioned hyper-competent female forced to deal with Bob’s rather inept ‘dumb White guy’ persona. (The father-daughter dynamic between Bob and Willa is a central aspect of One Battle, no doubt partly a function of Anderson’s own relationship with his three biracial daughters).

Signifying where her future will lead after the movie ends, and with Lockjaw and his men searching for her, Willa is offered protection by a group of young, Black, radical, pot-smoking, ghetto-speaking, machine-gun-toting nuns called the “Sisters of the Brave Beaver” (inspired by Sisters of the Valley, an actual hippie convent), the name of which is yet another of Anderson’s bizarre sexualization of radical politics. At this ‘convent’ Willa learns how to shoot. (It’s significant then that Anderson cast both Maya Rudolph and one of his daughters to play members of this Sisterhood).

Willa at the Sisters of the Brave Beaver

After narrowly averting death at the hands of both Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurer Club’s hitman, when Bob finally finds her on a remote California desert highway, Willa (having recently learned who her biological father is) screams “Who are you?!” to Bob, who replies to her plaintively by saying “It’s your dad,” which reconciles the two of them. (There may be an undercurrent here of Anderson’s own biracial daughters possibly questioning aspects of their racial identity as well as their father’s). Of this sequence, Anderson has said: “Coming up with the situation for Willa, where she is finally able to take agency over a situation — to turn the tables, be the aggressor, take the high ground — this became very exciting for us” (Fear, 2025).

In One Battle’s final sequence, Bob and Willa are back home safe and sound. Bob decides to finally give Willa a letter that Perfidia had written to her years ago, but that Bob has kept hidden from her. “I wanted to protect you,” he tells Willa, “From all your mom’s shit, from all my shit. I suppose I wanted to be the one that you came to for help. … The cool dad that you could say anything to, even though I know that’s impossible.” Bob gives her the letter and as Willa reads it in her bedroom, we hear the letter’s content being read in voiceover by Perfidia. The letter contains some verbatim lines from an actual letter a Weather Underground member wrote to their family, as shown in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground.[19] At the 1:16:19 marker of this documentary, we similarly hear one of these letters being read in voiceover: “Hello from the other side of the shadows. I don’t mean to shock you, but I have been contemplating writing you for a long time. … Often I wake up and find it completely inexplicable how and why I am where I am today and disconnected from my family.”

Sergio St. Carlos

A secondary character to One Battle, Sergio St. Carlos (played by Benicio del Toro) — aka “Sensei” — acts as a calm balance to Bob’s frantic and paranoid nature. “Ocean waves,” he often says as a mantra during tense moments. Sergio is both a karate sensei and a ‘coyote’ of sorts for Mexican illegals in the fictional sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. “I’ve got a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going on at my place,” he tells Bob.[20] With Lockjaw in pursuit of both him and Willa, Bob has reached out to Sergio for help in rescuing Willa. Sergio agrees and, along the way, introduces Bob to his family as the “Gringo Zapata.”

In one rather creepy moment, as Sergio and Bob and driving through a downtown Baktan Cross that is undergoing a fiery battle between protesters, police, and Lockjaw’s forces, Sergio pauses next to a dozen or so Mexican kids on skateboards. “Bee Gee,” he says to one of them he recognizes, “what’s the word?.” With a gloating smile on his face, the kid tells Sergio “It’s fuckin’ World War III out there, yo!”

One Battle has several digs at contemporary cell phone culture, one of which is when Sergio — almost out of character — takes a selfie with Bob. In another scene, when Sergio has to rush the illegals temporarily hiding above a Mexican-operated corner store to a sanctuary church, he yells several times at a Mexican teen minding the store to get off his phone, after Sergio has told him to watch the front door. Soon after, in Sergio’s ramshackle apartment above the store, he tells one of his daughters to get off her phone. In yet another room, we see two more Mexican teen girls on a couch not talking to each other but both staring at their phones. In all these instances, there is a blank look upon each teen’s face as they are staring at their phone.

Del Toro’s most memorable line in the movie takes place after he’s distracted the police away from Bob. Both had been drinking beers earlier. When the police pull Sergio over, they ask him if he’s been drinking. “I’ve had a few,” he says. “A few what?” asks one of the cops. “Few small beers” Sergio replies.

Benicio del Toro as Sergio St. Carlos

Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn)

The film’s one-dimensional villain is Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). A military man who dutifully follows orders, Lockjaw is nonetheless a corrupt military officer without scruples. He stands as a cartoonish representation of White Christian society, White supremacism, and reactionary politics — all rolled into one. He is depicted as perpetually angry and violent. His surname is, of course, meant to convey a clenched jaw and Penn portrays Lockjaw with a stilted, tight-ass gait, as well as an undercut ‘fash’ hairstyle that — when he meets with the Christmas Adventurers Club, a White supremacist secret society — is combed to be Hitler-like. (There isn’t much in the way of subtleties with One Battle). Sean Penn’s rumored years on steroids serves the role’s physicality well, although he seems to overact here (but in his defense the script probably called for an over-the-top military racist).[21]

Sean Penn as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw

Reflecting how the Left often sees all uniformed law enforcement entities as one monolithic army of ‘fascism,’ One Battle blurs the lines between police, traditional military, and paramilitary law enforcement roles. Lockjaw is the commanding officer of a fictional paramilitary group called the “MKU” (Mankind United). While his role involves overseeing an immigration detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border, MKU functions as a distinct, specialized government organization rather than a traditional branch of the military.[22]

At one point in the film, we see what appears to be the FBI or some other element of the DOJ awarding Lockjaw with the ‘Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor’ for his work hunting down members of the French 75. (Forrest was a Confederate general during the American Civil War who later served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

Despite his White supremacism bona fides, Lockjaw secretly harbors a largely repressed sexual obsession with Black women, so a miscegenation element also becomes crucial to the motivations of the film’s villain. Early in the film, Lockjaw is sexually humiliated by Perfidia but depicted as enjoying it, as it leads to his sexual arousal and then his “reverse rape” (as he later describes it). This display of a conservative White alpha male enjoying sadomasochistic submission to an angry, armed Black woman (complete with a gun pointed at his crotch) serves as a caricature of Second Amendment gun rights advocates and, more importantly, as a humiliation ritual for White males. If there is one grand metanarrative to One Battle, it is as a liberal revenge fantasy against conservative White men. Lockjaw symbolizes this class, first through his depicted arrogance and coldness, then later through ritual humiliation, disfigurement, and death.

In the film’s only scene between him and Bob, we see Lockjaw use very few words to indirectly articulate his jealousy that Bob has Perfidia and not him. “You like Black girls?” he asks Bob. “I love ‘em. … I LOVE ‘EM!” One X user has aptly memed this exchange as emblematic of how poorly drawn Lockjaw is from the standpoint of character depth:

In yet another tired trope of Leftist ‘explanations’ of conservatism, the film makes implications that Lockjaw is a closeted homosexual.[23] In one exchange — after Lockjaw has abducted Willa and deploys a DNA test to prove (or disprove) that she is, in fact, his biological daughter — it’s implied that Lockjaw is a repressed homosexual:

Willa: Why is your shirt so tight?
Lockjaw: I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re saying.
Willa: I didn’t say that.
Lockjaw: I’m not a homosexual.
Willa: I did not say that … but I see the lifts in your shoes.

Such is the sort of dialogue that wins the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In this same scene between Lockjaw and Willa, he says to her at one point, in an over-the-top display of White-against-Black racial hostility: “You shut up! JUST SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING MUTT!!”. In addition to being a racial insult, this dialogue also serves to express the Left’s absurd notion that Blacks are being held in silence by the ‘institutional racism’ of White society. One can only wonder if Anderson is conveying his own daughters’ real (or, more likely, imagined) experiences, his own fears about what his daughters may face in the future, or whether through the character of Lockjaw he’s clumsily articulating his own inner demons on his daughters’ mixed-race status.

Having determined through a DNA test which he’s administered to Willa that she is in fact his biological daughter, and hence a threat to his acceptance into the Christmas Adventurers Club, Lockjaw decides to kill her, but not before mocking and insulting her further:

I am a Christmas Adventurer! Do you know what that is? I have a higher calling. It is a higher honor than having you. I loved her, in case you were wondering. Best goddamn-looking witch I ever saw. Yeah, she was possessed. … She was insane. Like you. You have it in you. I smelled it from within her, and I can smell it from within you.

Lockjaw binds Willa’s hands and drives her out to a remote canyon location where he meets Avanti (Eric Schweig), whom from their exchange we easily infer has done this sort of contract-killing work for Lockjaw numerous times in the past. “I don’t do kids,” Avanti says, even after Lockjaw offers to double his rate. Lockjaw then tells Avanti to instead take Willa to a remote private militia actually called…. drumroll… “1776,” fully confident that they will have no compunction in killing Willa. And, in case the didactic allegory here isn’t yet clear, we have Avanti the American Indian ultimately deciding to sacrifice himself by killing all the 1776 members and saving Willa, before dying himself in the gun exchange. (We know that Avanti is Indian not only from his physiognomy, but because one of the evil 1776 members derisively refers to him as “Wagon-burner”).

In a myriad of ways, and from absolutely every angle, Lockjaw is the bogeyman that a Jewish-dominated Hollywood fear most. Thus, despite Lockjaw being a comically one-dimensional character (and Sean Penn’s performance being almost camp), what Lockjaw represents resonates with Hollywood’s political imagination. It isn’t surprising then that One Battle wins a bunch of Oscars, including Sean Penn winning for Best Supporting Actor.

End of Part 1.

[1] With the 2026 Academy Awards, Sinners laughably received the most Oscar nominations of any film in history. Coogler, who is Black and is best known for the Black Panther movies which inspired the emergent Wakanda mythos, constructs Sinners with a Black-centric orientation and a didactic plot involving White vampires who prey upon Blacks, ‘turning’ these Black victims into vampires themselves. In a racialized variation of From Dusk till Dawn (1996), the social-justice messaging in Sinners is hilariously heavy-handed.

[2] Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952) provides a useful lens for understanding the political implications of widening conspiracy theories and totalizing ideologies. Voegelin views the ideological pathologies of modernity to be gnostic in structure. Such ideologies often claim access to special knowledge (gnōsis) which reveals the hidden truth of history, and promises that salvation can be achieved within the world rather than beyond it.

[3] We can see this despair and self-absorption in such films as the Maoist director Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and being satirized by Wes Anderson in The French Dispatch (2021).

[4] For empirical data on the Left’s growing willingness to use violence, see Rufo (2025) and Dulberg & Horder (2025).

[5] Bill Ayers interview, AirGo podcast Episode 386 (“One Battle After Another, Fascism, and Activism During the 60s”), https://youtu.be/XbB40aRz8bg?si=cqUkawiHyESaQbE7, uploaded to YouTube on February 12, 2026 by Respair Production & Media.

[6] Bernardine Dohrn (born Bernardine Rae Ohrnstein) was a leader of the Weather Underground and is the wife of Bill Ayers. Her son Zayd Ayers Dohrn also asserts that the movie title One Battle After Another comes from his mother. See Dohrn (2026).

[7] See Varon (2004), pp. 107–108. Mark Rudd, a prominent SDS leader at Columbia in 1968 who went on to become one of the original leaders of the Weatherman / Weather Underground, and who is himself Jewish, has written about the significant overrepresentation of Jews in the New Left, particularly in leadership positions (Rudd, 2005). Lichter & Rothman (1981) estimate that Jews accounted for approximately 60% of the New Left in the mid-1960s. See also MacDonald (1998, Ch. 3 “Jews and the Left”) and Rudd (2009).

[8] Magnolia (1999) was already on the pulse of where our culture has been drifting for quite some time. The randomness and contingency of life is explored through a series of rather sad and lonely characters, almost all of them male, desperately seeking love and connection. One outlet for this state of affairs is the charismatic and cultish self-help guru Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), who preaches a misogynous ethos (ala Andrew Tate) which teaches men how to “Seduce and Destroy” and whose manosphere seminar’s intro music is Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

[9] As with Scorsese, music is central for Anderson. In One Battle, this is accomplished through existing songs such as Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl”, as well as through original sountrack compositions. Jon Brion’s anxious, percussive experimentation and Jonny Greenwood’s jarring modernist score (solo piano doing staccato drone patterns and then dissonant passages aurally representing a character’s paranoia) deepen a scene’s psychological tension.

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Q35vXE9bI.

[11] For a brief summary of Burrough’s book, see Van de Camp (2020).

[12] Max West, Vanishing Point (1971). https://logicalmeme.com/vanishing-point-1971/

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WW4jJ59d4.

[14] Development of a Vineland adaptation has been a pet project of Anderson’s since the early 90s when he first read and became obsessed with the novel. Anderson’s film Inherent Vice (2014) is a relatively faithful adaptation of Pynchon’s novel of the same name, and The Master (2012) contains elements based on Pynchon’s novel V (1963), such as the protagonist being a discharged sailor who connects with a cult-like group of individuals. (See Arblaster, 2022).

[15] Bloom shares Pynchon’s liberal paranoia that White Christian Fascists lurk behind every tree and every lawn ornament, aligning him with the pronounced history of Jewish antagonism to Christianity and Gentilism. “The not unimpressive polemic of Norman Mailer — that Fascism always lurks where plastic dominates — is in Pynchon not a polemic but a total vision” (Bloom, 2003, p. 2). Jews love Pynchon, not only because of his radical Leftwing idealism but also because of these Kabbalistic-style attempts to placate a lingering paranoia and persecution complex with elaborate gnostic conspiracy theories. See, for example, Mendelson, Edward (ed.). Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978). Pynchon is not himself Jewish but was raised both Catholic and Episcopalian.

[16] See, for example, James Burnham on the managerial–bureaucratic class and the writings of Samuel Francis and Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug).

[17] DiCaprio notes that his own father was a 1960s counterculture radical and bombmaker who “hung out with Abbie Hoffman.” In preparation for his role, DiCaprio cites as influences the book Days of Rage, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Al Pacino’s nervous Sonny Wortzik character in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), about a couple who are continually on the move with assumed identities, after having committed terrorist acts as part of a Weather Underground-like group. (As noted in Tom Wolfe’s fascinating Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), Lumet hosted a high-end party for the Black Panthers before Leonard Bernstein’s soiree for the Black terrorist group, the latter being the focus of Wolfe’s essay). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_cV9ciktoQ.

[18] The ‘White Men Are Stupid In Commercials’ account on X (@StupidWhiteAds) catalogs some of the countless TV commercials that adopt this trope.

[19] http://www.theweatherunderground.info/

[20] It was Del Toro’s idea to have Sergio be a ‘protector’ of Mexican illegals. The scenes with Del Toro were shot almost entirely in El Paso, TX, a city that is today a de facto satellite of Mexico. Anderson “adores” this city and its people. “Being in El Paso, at the center of immigration,” Anderson says, “gave us so much material and local talent to work with. It became the centerpiece of the film and certainly the best time I’ve ever had going to work” (Abramovitch, 2026). Del Toro has said that he and Anderson visited a church in El Paso that serves as a sanctuary for illegals until they get their “paperwork processed”.

[21] Like many on the Left, Anderson seems to equate extreme physical fitness with Rightwing politics and, childishly, homoeroticism. In the film’s opening sequence, many of the soldiers under Lockjaw’s command are physically buff and shown with their shirts off.

[22] MKU is likely modeled after the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), an elite, highly trained special operations unit within the U.S. Border Patrol Special Operations Group. Established in 1984, BORTAC provides national/international response to high-risk incidents, including counter-narcotics, hostage rescue, and riot control. One Battle’s closing credits confirm that MKU stands for Mankind United.

[23] Other notable examples of this trope include the repressed homosexual Col. Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) in American Beauty (1999) (who also collects Nazi memorabilia to boot) and Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) in the movie Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) has special relevance here as well. Bertolucci was a Marxist and the visually stunning ‘Fascist aesthetics’ of The Conformist frames the protagonist Marcello’s troubled psyche. However, the narrative assumes a facile Marxism-Freudianism: Marcello’s childhood trauma from sexual abuse and consequent sexual dysfunction serve as a Freudian ‘explanation’ of his political extremism and willingness to assassinate an ‘anti-Fascist’ professor on behalf of the state. Repeatedly, we see the Left’s simplistic depictions and explanations of Rightwing political sentiment as psycho-sexual drama within the bourgeoisie.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s overall body of work contains an impressive array of films packed with immediacy, visual flair, and stylized mise-en-scène: Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017), Licorice Pizza (2021), and now One Battle After Another (2025).[8] Anderson’s films are driven by intense and often damaged individuals whose inner longings collide with grand American mythologies (fame, family, capitalism), and his narratives often unfold in loosely episodic structures taking place within sprawling, operatic arcs. Among his immediate influences, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese are most apparent. From Altman we get the ensemble storytelling, the overlapping dialogue, and the chaotic feel of fractured families, and from Scorsese we get the streetwise shot-compositions, kinetic camera movement (Anderson is also a fan of Max Ophüls in this regard), and the popular music needle drops that underscore a scene’s desired emotional effect.[9] There is also the noticeable influence of Stanley Kubrick’s precision and emotional austerity in films such as There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread. With respect to One Battle, Anderson has cited the following as key influences in the making of the film[10]:

  • Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015): Bryan Burrough’s seminal book details the radical underground in the 1970s, documenting a largely forgotten era of intense domestic terrorism in the U.S. He details how groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army conducted thousands of bombings and killings.[11]
  • Les Misérables (1935): Anderson cites Richard Boleslawski’s 1935 film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, particularly its mad, cacophonous first act that serves as the backdrop and setup for the core human conflict in the story: Inspector Javert’s (Charles Laughton) obsession with capturing ex-convict Jean Valjean (Fredric March).
  • Vanishing Point (1971): Anderson cites Richard Sarafian’s underrated mythopoetic road movie, which I have previously written about.[12] In Vanishing Point, the protagonist is determined to drive from Denver to San Francisco in record time, for an unspecified goal, and his urgency in the matter acts as a purpose-in-itself, where the ultimate telos of one’s ‘vanishing point’ – eyes fixed as far as one can see down the road — symbolizes the annihilation of being that comes with death.
  • Midnight Run (1988): Anderson absolutely loves this witty, buddy-action-comedy-road-movie starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, made in the heyday of the 1980s buddy films craze (e.g., 48 Hrs. (1982), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and Lethal Weapon (1987)). Anderson says it is both his personal favorite film and his family’s favorite film, which they watch at least twice per year.[13]

Relative to Anderson’s earlier films, with One Battle we have a more frenetic pace that reflects the confused, paranoid, and desperate mindset of today’s Left, where ‘fascism’ is everywhere — in every institution of authority, and even hidden underneath the seemingly benign, trimmed lawns of the suburbs. It is here where Anderson’s literary influences come to the forefront. The majority of Anderson’s films are based upon his own original screenplays, but in the case of There Will Be Blood, Anderson adapted his screenplay from Upton Sinclair’s socialist novel Oil! (1927), and in One Battle After Another (as with Inherent Vice) we have Anderson adapting a screenplay loosely based on the novel Vineland (1990) written by his most significant and lasting literary influence: Thomas Pynchon[14].

Pynchon is one of the founders (and giants) of postmodern fiction, a satirical genre that — through devices of irony, self-referentiality, and non-linear narrative — parodies modernist fiction just as modernist fiction parodies realist fiction. Pynchon’s oeuvre is replete with conspiracy theories, usually fanciful and ridiculous, and the conspiracies in his novels are typically layered and, despite remaining largely unseen and in the background, serve as the magnetic center of the novels’ events. Countercultural anti-hero protagonists, often burned-out pot-smoking 60s-era radicals, stumble through the novel’s plot and life in general, but then also stumble onto actual conspiracies they soon find themselves caught up in. The harrowing realities of the conspiracy, the upending of one’s conventional ways of understanding the world, take their toll on characters’ psyches, leading to an ever-worsening paranoia. In many ways, Pynchon’s novels, characterized by hidden connections and multiple interpretive levels, provide interwoven, gnostic systems of meaning to the characters and to the reader. Contours of ‘The System’ are delimited. It is most interesting, then, when Harold Bloom characterizes Pynchon’s novels as Kabbalistic.[15]

The conspiracy-theory-as-plot-device is itself greatly influenced by early American detective fiction (e.g., Hammett, Chandler), a genre that in a more straightforward literary manner involves mystery and unknown forces which the hero does not fully understand. Over the course of typically three acts, a slow and suspenseful unraveling of a conspiracy takes place. Of course, the conspiracy itself may be relatively low-level, and not necessarily part of a particular, more macro-level one, but a conspiracy nonetheless. As with the genre of classic film noir — which inherits all the essential tropes of detective fiction and was often helmed by liberal Jewish émigré directors — there is a darkened moral atmosphere to the world and a growing skepticism toward institutions. Gone is the clean moral universe of classic whodunits. Instead, justice is compromised, authority corrupted, truth rarely restores order, and the protagonist (often a grizzled and jaded private detective) uncovers guilt without being able to meaningfully correct it. The fatalism inherent in this worldview (and the arc of conspiracy theories in general) coincides with the explosive growth in the twentieth century, particularly since World War II, of both the federal government and large corporations, i.e., the prevailing dominance of the bureaucratic-administrative state and its nexus with corporate interests.[16] The institutions that effectively control us have become ever more faceless, unaccountable, and remote from the average citizen, and in One Battle this type of dark and cloaked entity — as it is imagined by the Leftist’s conspiratorial mindset — is the fictional White supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club.

V.           Characters+

Bob Ferguson

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson (aka “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun aka “Rocketman”), a former 60s radical who was an explosives expert for the film’s fictional domestic terrorist group French 75.[17] In the film’s aforementioned opening sequence, we see Bob in his earlier activist/terrorist years as he participates in ‘liberating’ a migrant detention facility. Whether intended by Anderson or not, we witness the pathetic spectacle of this out-of-place, White, ‘60s revolutionary surrounded by Black radicals and Mexican illegals, screaming insults to the DHS soldiers whom the French 75 has just placed inside the very ‘cages’ that minutes ago held illegal aliens:

We are a political organization that is free from the eyes, the ears, and most importantly, the weapons of the imperialist state, and this fascist regime! You are a political prisoner of the French 75, motherfuckers! You’ve been captured by the French 75! Fuck the police! Viva La Revolución!

In the 16 years since the film’s opening sequence timeline, Bob has changed his identity and fled to the fictional town of Baktan Cross in Northern California, but his identity and sense of self are still inextricably linked to his past revolutionary activities and political philosophy. However, he’s now a man-bun-sporting, paranoid burn-out dressed in Jeffrey Lebowski bathrobe attire, who spends his days smoking pot, vaping, and watching Battle of Algiers. His existence now is nothing more than as a vessel of nostalgia, save for him being the (cucked) “father” of his mixed-race daughter Willa. In fact, Bob has been cucked thrice-over. First, he doesn’t realize that he’s not the biological father of Willa (though Perfidia surely does). Second, he’s been cucked by the Revolution, as Perfidia abandons him and Willa to “do the revolution.” Third, he’s been cucked by his own feminism, reflected in his inability to be a stern and responsible father to his daughter.

DiCaprio has commented on his character’s old-school hippie/libertarian streak, of the type one finds in certain Northern CA towns such as Eureka:

Bob is what I like to call a don’t tread on me, anti-establishment, hippie revolutionary who is paranoid about anything and everything. He doesn’t want to be taxed. He doesn’t want to be monitored. He’s incredibly skeptical of everyone and everything around him. He hides himself off in the middle of the woods and stays home, watches movies like The Battle of Algiers, smokes pot and drinks, but has one objective, and that’s to protect his daughter (Bowie, 2025).

Through Bob, we see a previous-generation Leftie feeling awkward around the new generation Lefties: namely Generation Pronoun & Generation Snowflake. When his daughter’s friends arrive at their home to take her to a school dance, there is this exchange:

Bob: Now, who’s the one with the lipstick? What’s that one’s name?
Willa: Bobo.
Bob: Bobo … Now, is that a he or a she or a they?
Willa: Dad, come on.
Bob: No, are they transitioning? I wanna know if…
Willa: They’re nonbinary.
Bob: Okay, I just wanna be polite…
Willa: It’s not that hard! … They/them.

Later in the film, when Bob is on the run, we see him on the phone with French 75 headquarters, trying to determine the arranged rendezvous point with his daughter. He’s talking to a whiny guy (“Comrade Josh”), but because he cannot remember the password code to the question “What time is it?,” Josh does not give him this information. Bob pleads with him to make an exception, but Josh repeatedly refuses. After Bob explodes in rage at Josh, cursing at him and threatening him, they have this exchange:

Josh: Okay, this doesn’t feel safe. You’re violating my space right now.

Bob: Violating your space?! Man, come on… What kind of revolutionary are you?! We’re not even in the same room here! We’re talking on the phone, like men!

Josh: Okay, there’s no need to shout. This is a violation of my safety. These are noise triggers.

At an important level, Bob belongs to the pantheon of the Hapless Male trope, namely the endless drumbeat of predictably inept men (almost always White) that Hollywood and Madison Ave churn out in movies, sitcoms, and TV commercials. Invariably, these bumbling and not-all-that-smart males serve as comic relief, but are eventually guided, rescued, or otherwise saved by either a Strong Woman (aka the Mary Sue trope), a non-White, or the intersection of both.[18] Even the New York Times, ever late to noticing cultural trends it did not itself create, has put One Battle into this context. In a piece entitled “Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men—and Hypercompetent Women,” Diego Hadis discusses several recent movies, including One Battle, where the three male protagonists all “fit the archetype of the schlemiel: irredeemably inept, an accident of a person, the butt of some great cosmic joke” (Hadis, 2026). These clueless males are eventually teamed up with ‘hypercompetent women’:

The women they come across, on the other hand, seem ready for anything. They might see several chess moves ahead of both the protagonists and antagonists. They know how to affect the world of the movie, and they do so with ease — exactly what the actual “hero” of the story is completely unable to do. …

They are ever-present — and they are usually so capable, so confidently efficacious, that if they were the story’s focus, the movie would be over in 15 minutes. (Hadis, 2026).

In the case of One Battle:

Perfidia is the film’s driving force, directing the group’s strategy and taking Bob as a lover; her actions push the story forward even after she leaves. All through the film, though, so many of the women Bob encounters have things together in ways that put him to shame — say, the nurse doing intake at a police station after Bob is arrested in a military raid, who hands him off to another nurse, at a hospital, who calmly, unflappably leads him to freedom. Even Bob’s teenage daughter, Willa, is the responsible one, a purple belt in karate who effectively parents her own father. (Hadis, 2026).

Rather than criticizing these tired girlboss tropes for being as formulaic as the Waif-Fu trope (i.e., action movies where a 100 lb. girl handily beats up 250 lb. men), Hadis not surprisingly adopts the New York Times’ “it’s time for women to run the world” approach:

The fact that these figures are so often women may be a way of suggesting that men have had their run, and look where it has gotten us. … We should not be surprised if the coming years bring more films like these — all dreaming that there is somebody out there with whom we might throw in our lot, somebody competent enough to tell us what to do to make the world right (Hadis, 2026).

This last sentiment is very much a feminist call-to-action-for-women in One Battle’s final scene.

Perfidia Beverly Hills

Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is the Strong Black Woman trope par excellence and the leader of the French 75. And while one of the world’s most famous movie stars is in One Battle, it is Perfidia who Anderson deems the film’s main character. He notes:

I had a feeling like, Perfidia needs to feel like she’s the protagonist, the hero of the movie. You know, Leo might be in it, Sean might be in it, all these well-known actors are in it, but you see Teyana and it’s like: That’s the star of the movie. I wanted audiences to feel like, this is really a movie about a Black revolutionary (Fear, 2025).

In the film’s opening illegal-immigration-liberation scene, when she first encounters Lockjaw and has a gun pointed at him, she declares her aforementioned political mission, which Anderson has clumsily written to shoehorn in a pro-abortion sentiment:

My name is Perfidia Beverly Hills, and this is a declaration of war. We’re here to right your wrongs, motherfucker. … You didn’t count on me. You didn’t count on my fight. The message is clear: free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from fuckin’ fear!

Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills

The very name ‘Perfidia’ literally means betrayal, which is apropos in this case: Ultimately, she betrays Bob by being attracted to, and having sex with, Lockjaw. She betrays the French 75 in a plea deal with authorities that involves her ratting out their names and locations. And she betrays her daughter by abandoning her. (Naturally, despite all of this irresponsibility and dysfunction, her daughter Willa still ‘relates’ to her in the film’s ending). Her middle and last name of “Beverly Hills” should not be overlooked either: this is Anderson situating one front of the revolutionary vanguard (at least nominally) within the manicured lawns of Beverly Hills, and perhaps giving Hollywood liberals a jab for not being sufficiently committed to Leftist causes and the associated ‘direct action’.

Anderson writes Perfidia as experiencing post-partum depression, and she abnegates her maternal role to her newborn infant Willa as a result, with Bob carrying the load. When Bob scolds her, reminding her that they “are a family now,” Perfidia uses her revolutionary politics to justify her abandonment of the mother role: “This is a new consciousness. I’m not your udder buddy. I’m not your mother. You want your power over me, the same reason you want your power over the world. You and your crumbling male ego will never do this revolution like me.”

Anderson no doubt based Perfidia on Assata Shakur, who joined the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s before becoming involved with the Black Liberation Army. She gained notoriety after a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in the death of a state trooper. She was convicted of murder in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison, but in 1979 escaped with the help of supporters. She then lived in the underground until 1984 when she was granted asylum in Cuba, where she lived until her death in 2025 at age 78. As an example of the standard hagiography heaped on Shakur by the Left, Nikole Hannah-Jones (of the ‘1619 Project’ infamy) was granted a New York Times op-ed slot to celebrate Shakur. The piece is full of gems, including this quote from Angela Davis, the more famously feted Black Female Revolutionary:

Angela Davis, the activist who was wrongly imprisoned during that same tumultuous period, told me women were the backbone of Black radical movements and “the government probably recognized more than even our own people did the power of Black women.” (Hannah-Jones, 2025)

In One Battle, after a bank heist goes awry, and which involves Perfidia killing a bank guard, she is apprehended by the police. (Anderson cowardly casts a Black male to play the murdered bank guard, so as to deflect attention from the prevailing Black-on-White nature of violent crime in America). We then see an all-White gaggle of cops cheering and flipping her off while taking selfies.

Lockjaw, thoroughly smitten with her, arranges for her to get a witness protection plea deal, in exchange for beginning an illicit affair. She puts up with this for a certain duration before fleeing (ironically through an official border crossing into Mexico) for a destination that, we learn later in the film, is either Cuba or Algiers, both being locations that actual 1960s Black radicals fled to when U.S. authorities were on their tail.

Willa Ferguson

The progeny of Perfidia and (shockingly) Lockjaw, Willa (Chase Infiniti) is nonetheless raised by Bob alone, given that Perfidia abandoned the family when Willa was an infant. As the film fast-forwards sixteen years later, we see Willa now sixteen herself, receiving karate instruction from Sergio St. Carlos. Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” is playing on the soundtrack, which lyrically signifies the degradation of Bob and Perfidia’s revolutionary romance into a domestic aftermath where Bob is the sole parent, having ‘cleaned up’ Perfidia’s mess. (Bob once imagined himself as part of History; now he’s an exhausted man left holding the child, the guilt, the secrets, and the consequences).

Chase Infiniti as Willa Ferguson

Willa is now a rather typical American teen female. She has a cell phone that she hides from Bob (who has forbidden them), They/Them friends, and Girl Power attitude. In terms of both cultural attitudes and Leftist political strategies, Willa represents the notable generation gap relative to Bob’s generation. She is described to Bob as a natural ‘leader’ by her high school history teacher, which leads Bob to cry tears of pride.

In terms of plot, Willa is the aforementioned hyper-competent female forced to deal with Bob’s rather inept ‘dumb White guy’ persona. (The father-daughter dynamic between Bob and Willa is a central aspect of One Battle, no doubt partly a function of Anderson’s own relationship with his three biracial daughters).

Signifying where her future will lead after the movie ends, and with Lockjaw and his men searching for her, Willa is offered protection by a group of young, Black, radical, pot-smoking, ghetto-speaking, machine-gun-toting nuns called the “Sisters of the Brave Beaver” (inspired by Sisters of the Valley, an actual hippie convent), the name of which is yet another of Anderson’s bizarre sexualization of radical politics. At this ‘convent’ Willa learns how to shoot. (It’s significant then that Anderson cast both Maya Rudolph and one of his daughters to play members of this Sisterhood).

Willa at the Sisters of the Brave Beaver

After narrowly averting death at the hands of both Lockjaw and the Christmas Adventurer Club’s hitman, when Bob finally finds her on a remote California desert highway, Willa (having recently learned who her biological father is) screams “Who are you?!” to Bob, who replies to her plaintively by saying “It’s your dad,” which reconciles the two of them. (There may be an undercurrent here of Anderson’s own biracial daughters possibly questioning aspects of their racial identity as well as their father’s). Of this sequence, Anderson has said: “Coming up with the situation for Willa, where she is finally able to take agency over a situation — to turn the tables, be the aggressor, take the high ground — this became very exciting for us” (Fear, 2025).

In One Battle’s final sequence, Bob and Willa are back home safe and sound. Bob decides to finally give Willa a letter that Perfidia had written to her years ago, but that Bob has kept hidden from her. “I wanted to protect you,” he tells Willa, “From all your mom’s shit, from all my shit. I suppose I wanted to be the one that you came to for help. … The cool dad that you could say anything to, even though I know that’s impossible.” Bob gives her the letter and as Willa reads it in her bedroom, we hear the letter’s content being read in voiceover by Perfidia. The letter contains some verbatim lines from an actual letter a Weather Underground member wrote to their family, as shown in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground.[19] At the 1:16:19 marker of this documentary, we similarly hear one of these letters being read in voiceover: “Hello from the other side of the shadows. I don’t mean to shock you, but I have been contemplating writing you for a long time. … Often I wake up and find it completely inexplicable how and why I am where I am today and disconnected from my family.”

Sergio St. Carlos

A secondary character to One Battle, Sergio St. Carlos (played by Benicio del Toro) — aka “Sensei” — acts as a calm balance to Bob’s frantic and paranoid nature. “Ocean waves,” he often says as a mantra during tense moments. Sergio is both a karate sensei and a ‘coyote’ of sorts for Mexican illegals in the fictional sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. “I’ve got a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going on at my place,” he tells Bob.[20] With Lockjaw in pursuit of both him and Willa, Bob has reached out to Sergio for help in rescuing Willa. Sergio agrees and, along the way, introduces Bob to his family as the “Gringo Zapata.”

In one rather creepy moment, as Sergio and Bob and driving through a downtown Baktan Cross that is undergoing a fiery battle between protesters, police, and Lockjaw’s forces, Sergio pauses next to a dozen or so Mexican kids on skateboards. “Bee Gee,” he says to one of them he recognizes, “what’s the word?.” With a gloating smile on his face, the kid tells Sergio “It’s fuckin’ World War III out there, yo!”

One Battle has several digs at contemporary cell phone culture, one of which is when Sergio — almost out of character — takes a selfie with Bob. In another scene, when Sergio has to rush the illegals temporarily hiding above a Mexican-operated corner store to a sanctuary church, he yells several times at a Mexican teen minding the store to get off his phone, after Sergio has told him to watch the front door. Soon after, in Sergio’s ramshackle apartment above the store, he tells one of his daughters to get off her phone. In yet another room, we see two more Mexican teen girls on a couch not talking to each other but both staring at their phones. In all these instances, there is a blank look upon each teen’s face as they are staring at their phone.

Del Toro’s most memorable line in the movie takes place after he’s distracted the police away from Bob. Both had been drinking beers earlier. When the police pull Sergio over, they ask him if he’s been drinking. “I’ve had a few,” he says. “A few what?” asks one of the cops. “Few small beers” Sergio replies.

Benicio del Toro as Sergio St. Carlos

Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn)

The film’s one-dimensional villain is Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). A military man who dutifully follows orders, Lockjaw is nonetheless a corrupt military officer without scruples. He stands as a cartoonish representation of White Christian society, White supremacism, and reactionary politics — all rolled into one. He is depicted as perpetually angry and violent. His surname is, of course, meant to convey a clenched jaw and Penn portrays Lockjaw with a stilted, tight-ass gait, as well as an undercut ‘fash’ hairstyle that — when he meets with the Christmas Adventurers Club, a White supremacist secret society — is combed to be Hitler-like. (There isn’t much in the way of subtleties with One Battle). Sean Penn’s rumored years on steroids serves the role’s physicality well, although he seems to overact here (but in his defense the script probably called for an over-the-top military racist).[21]

Sean Penn as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw

Reflecting how the Left often sees all uniformed law enforcement entities as one monolithic army of ‘fascism,’ One Battle blurs the lines between police, traditional military, and paramilitary law enforcement roles. Lockjaw is the commanding officer of a fictional paramilitary group called the “MKU” (Mankind United). While his role involves overseeing an immigration detention center on the U.S.-Mexico border, MKU functions as a distinct, specialized government organization rather than a traditional branch of the military.[22]

At one point in the film, we see what appears to be the FBI or some other element of the DOJ awarding Lockjaw with the ‘Bedford Forrest Medal of Honor’ for his work hunting down members of the French 75. (Forrest was a Confederate general during the American Civil War who later served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan).

Despite his White supremacism bona fides, Lockjaw secretly harbors a largely repressed sexual obsession with Black women, so a miscegenation element also becomes crucial to the motivations of the film’s villain. Early in the film, Lockjaw is sexually humiliated by Perfidia but depicted as enjoying it, as it leads to his sexual arousal and then his “reverse rape” (as he later describes it). This display of a conservative White alpha male enjoying sadomasochistic submission to an angry, armed Black woman (complete with a gun pointed at his crotch) serves as a caricature of Second Amendment gun rights advocates and, more importantly, as a humiliation ritual for White males. If there is one grand metanarrative to One Battle, it is as a liberal revenge fantasy against conservative White men. Lockjaw symbolizes this class, first through his depicted arrogance and coldness, then later through ritual humiliation, disfigurement, and death.

In the film’s only scene between him and Bob, we see Lockjaw use very few words to indirectly articulate his jealousy that Bob has Perfidia and not him. “You like Black girls?” he asks Bob. “I love ‘em. … I LOVE ‘EM!” One X user has aptly memed this exchange as emblematic of how poorly drawn Lockjaw is from the standpoint of character depth:

In yet another tired trope of Leftist ‘explanations’ of conservatism, the film makes implications that Lockjaw is a closeted homosexual.[23] In one exchange — after Lockjaw has abducted Willa and deploys a DNA test to prove (or disprove) that she is, in fact, his biological daughter — it’s implied that Lockjaw is a repressed homosexual:

Willa: Why is your shirt so tight?
Lockjaw: I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re saying.
Willa: I didn’t say that.
Lockjaw: I’m not a homosexual.
Willa: I did not say that … but I see the lifts in your shoes.

Such is the sort of dialogue that wins the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

In this same scene between Lockjaw and Willa, he says to her at one point, in an over-the-top display of White-against-Black racial hostility: “You shut up! JUST SHUT UP, YOU FUCKING MUTT!!”. In addition to being a racial insult, this dialogue also serves to express the Left’s absurd notion that Blacks are being held in silence by the ‘institutional racism’ of White society. One can only wonder if Anderson is conveying his own daughters’ real (or, more likely, imagined) experiences, his own fears about what his daughters may face in the future, or whether through the character of Lockjaw he’s clumsily articulating his own inner demons on his daughters’ mixed-race status.

Having determined through a DNA test which he’s administered to Willa that she is in fact his biological daughter, and hence a threat to his acceptance into the Christmas Adventurers Club, Lockjaw decides to kill her, but not before mocking and insulting her further:

I am a Christmas Adventurer! Do you know what that is? I have a higher calling. It is a higher honor than having you. I loved her, in case you were wondering. Best goddamn-looking witch I ever saw. Yeah, she was possessed. … She was insane. Like you. You have it in you. I smelled it from within her, and I can smell it from within you.

Lockjaw binds Willa’s hands and drives her out to a remote canyon location where he meets Avanti (Eric Schweig), whom from their exchange we easily infer has done this sort of contract-killing work for Lockjaw numerous times in the past. “I don’t do kids,” Avanti says, even after Lockjaw offers to double his rate. Lockjaw then tells Avanti to instead take Willa to a remote private militia actually called…. drumroll… “1776,” fully confident that they will have no compunction in killing Willa. And, in case the didactic allegory here isn’t yet clear, we have Avanti the American Indian ultimately deciding to sacrifice himself by killing all the 1776 members and saving Willa, before dying himself in the gun exchange. (We know that Avanti is Indian not only from his physiognomy, but because one of the evil 1776 members derisively refers to him as “Wagon-burner”).

In a myriad of ways, and from absolutely every angle, Lockjaw is the bogeyman that a Jewish-dominated Hollywood fear most. Thus, despite Lockjaw being a comically one-dimensional character (and Sean Penn’s performance being almost camp), what Lockjaw represents resonates with Hollywood’s political imagination. It isn’t surprising then that One Battle wins a bunch of Oscars, including Sean Penn winning for Best Supporting Actor.

Go to Part 2.

[1] With the 2026 Academy Awards, Sinners laughably received the most Oscar nominations of any film in history. Coogler, who is Black and is best known for the Black Panther movies which inspired the emergent Wakanda mythos, constructs Sinners with a Black-centric orientation and a didactic plot involving White vampires who prey upon Blacks, ‘turning’ these Black victims into vampires themselves. In a racialized variation of From Dusk till Dawn (1996), the social-justice messaging in Sinners is hilariously heavy-handed.

[2] Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952) provides a useful lens for understanding the political implications of widening conspiracy theories and totalizing ideologies. Voegelin views the ideological pathologies of modernity to be gnostic in structure. Such ideologies often claim access to special knowledge (gnōsis) which reveals the hidden truth of history, and promises that salvation can be achieved within the world rather than beyond it.

[3] We can see this despair and self-absorption in such films as the Maoist director Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and being satirized by Wes Anderson in The French Dispatch (2021).

[4] For empirical data on the Left’s growing willingness to use violence, see Rufo (2025) and Dulberg & Horder (2025).

[5] Bill Ayers interview, AirGo podcast Episode 386 (“One Battle After Another, Fascism, and Activism During the 60s”), https://youtu.be/XbB40aRz8bg?si=cqUkawiHyESaQbE7, uploaded to YouTube on February 12, 2026 by Respair Production & Media.

[6] Bernardine Dohrn (born Bernardine Rae Ohrnstein) was a leader of the Weather Underground and is the wife of Bill Ayers. Her son Zayd Ayers Dohrn also asserts that the movie title One Battle After Another comes from his mother. See Dohrn (2026).

[7] See Varon (2004), pp. 107–108. Mark Rudd, a prominent SDS leader at Columbia in 1968 who went on to become one of the original leaders of the Weatherman / Weather Underground, and who is himself Jewish, has written about the significant overrepresentation of Jews in the New Left, particularly in leadership positions (Rudd, 2005). Lichter & Rothman (1981) estimate that Jews accounted for approximately 60% of the New Left in the mid-1960s. See also MacDonald (1998, Ch. 3 “Jews and the Left”) and Rudd (2009).

[8] Magnolia (1999) was already on the pulse of where our culture has been drifting for quite some time. The randomness and contingency of life is explored through a series of rather sad and lonely characters, almost all of them male, desperately seeking love and connection. One outlet for this state of affairs is the charismatic and cultish self-help guru Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise), who preaches a misogynous ethos (ala Andrew Tate) which teaches men how to “Seduce and Destroy” and whose manosphere seminar’s intro music is Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

[9] As with Scorsese, music is central for Anderson. In One Battle, this is accomplished through existing songs such as Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl”, as well as through original sountrack compositions. Jon Brion’s anxious, percussive experimentation and Jonny Greenwood’s jarring modernist score (solo piano doing staccato drone patterns and then dissonant passages aurally representing a character’s paranoia) deepen a scene’s psychological tension.

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Q35vXE9bI.

[11] For a brief summary of Burrough’s book, see Van de Camp (2020).

[12] Max West, Vanishing Point (1971). https://logicalmeme.com/vanishing-point-1971/

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WW4jJ59d4.

[14] Development of a Vineland adaptation has been a pet project of Anderson’s since the early 90s when he first read and became obsessed with the novel. Anderson’s film Inherent Vice (2014) is a relatively faithful adaptation of Pynchon’s novel of the same name, and The Master (2012) contains elements based on Pynchon’s novel V (1963), such as the protagonist being a discharged sailor who connects with a cult-like group of individuals. (See Arblaster, 2022).

[15] Bloom shares Pynchon’s liberal paranoia that White Christian Fascists lurk behind every tree and every lawn ornament, aligning him with the pronounced history of Jewish antagonism to Christianity and Gentilism. “The not unimpressive polemic of Norman Mailer — that Fascism always lurks where plastic dominates — is in Pynchon not a polemic but a total vision” (Bloom, 2003, p. 2). Jews love Pynchon, not only because of his radical Leftwing idealism but also because of these Kabbalistic-style attempts to placate a lingering paranoia and persecution complex with elaborate gnostic conspiracy theories. See, for example, Mendelson, Edward (ed.). Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978). Pynchon is not himself Jewish but was raised both Catholic and Episcopalian.

[16] See, for example, James Burnham on the managerial–bureaucratic class and the writings of Samuel Francis and Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug).

[17] DiCaprio notes that his own father was a 1960s counterculture radical and bombmaker who “hung out with Abbie Hoffman.” In preparation for his role, DiCaprio cites as influences the book Days of Rage, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Al Pacino’s nervous Sonny Wortzik character in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988), about a couple who are continually on the move with assumed identities, after having committed terrorist acts as part of a Weather Underground-like group. (As noted in Tom Wolfe’s fascinating Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), Lumet hosted a high-end party for the Black Panthers before Leonard Bernstein’s soiree for the Black terrorist group, the latter being the focus of Wolfe’s essay). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_cV9ciktoQ.

[18] The ‘White Men Are Stupid In Commercials’ account on X (@StupidWhiteAds) catalogs some of the countless TV commercials that adopt this trope.

[19] http://www.theweatherunderground.info/

[20] It was Del Toro’s idea to have Sergio be a ‘protector’ of Mexican illegals. The scenes with Del Toro were shot almost entirely in El Paso, TX, a city that is today a de facto satellite of Mexico. Anderson “adores” this city and its people. “Being in El Paso, at the center of immigration,” Anderson says, “gave us so much material and local talent to work with. It became the centerpiece of the film and certainly the best time I’ve ever had going to work” (Abramovitch, 2026). Del Toro has said that he and Anderson visited a church in El Paso that serves as a sanctuary for illegals until they get their “paperwork processed”.

[21] Like many on the Left, Anderson seems to equate extreme physical fitness with Rightwing politics and, childishly, homoeroticism. In the film’s opening sequence, many of the soldiers under Lockjaw’s command are physically buff and shown with their shirts off.

[22] MKU is likely modeled after the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC), an elite, highly trained special operations unit within the U.S. Border Patrol Special Operations Group. Established in 1984, BORTAC provides national/international response to high-risk incidents, including counter-narcotics, hostage rescue, and riot control. One Battle’s closing credits confirm that MKU stands for Mankind United.

[23] Other notable examples of this trope include the repressed homosexual Col. Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) in American Beauty (1999) (who also collects Nazi memorabilia to boot) and Major Weldon Penderton (Marlon Brando) in the movie Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) has special relevance here as well. Bertolucci was a Marxist and the visually stunning ‘Fascist aesthetics’ of The Conformist frames the protagonist Marcello’s troubled psyche. However, the narrative assumes a facile Marxism-Freudianism: Marcello’s childhood trauma from sexual abuse and consequent sexual dysfunction serve as a Freudian ‘explanation’ of his political extremism and willingness to assassinate an ‘anti-Fascist’ professor on behalf of the state. Repeatedly, we see the Left’s simplistic depictions and explanations of Rightwing political sentiment as psycho-sexual drama within the bourgeoisie.

What’s Worst for Whites? The Jewish Principle That Explains Stabby Somalis and the Mud-Flood

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Its night-life. That’s what London used to be known for. Nowadays, London is known for its knife-life. In October 2025, a White man called Wayne Broadhurst was stabbed to death in London by an Afghan Muslim. His murder was completely ignored by Britain’s political elite and provoked no anguished commentary in the mainstream media. In April 2026, two Jewish men have been stabbed but not killed in London by someone reported to be a Somali Muslim. Britain’s political elite have immediately responded with outrage and the mainstream media are full of anguished commentary about poor persecuted Jews. The Jewish law minister Sarah Sackman has portentously intoned that “An attack on British Jews is an attack on Britain itself.”

A Hebrew hammers the White West: Jews hate Christianity because it represents White Europe (image from the Guardian)

In fact, an attack on Jews is an attack on dedicated enemies of Britain. And Sackman knows that perfectly well. Her close colleague Lord Hermer, Britain’s “anti-fascist” Jewish attorney-general, enthusiastically participated in lawfare against British soldiers that was later exposed as based entirely on lies. Hermer and Sackman are still overseeing lawfare against soldiers in the Special Forces. In other words, they hate Britain and have always sought to undermine the welfare of British Whites.

There’s an irony in the knife-attack on the two Jews in London that will go completely unremarked in the mainstream. The attack was created by Jews themselves, because they are directly responsible for the flooding of Western nations with alien and unassimilable groups like Somalis, Afghans and Pakistanis. Those three groups are both non-White and Muslim, so what’s not to like for Jews?

White costumes for an anti-White legal elite: Sarah Sackman, Shabana Mahmood and Richard Hermer (image from Wikipedia)

As enemies of Britain, Jews have imported non-White Muslims as footsoldiers in the Jewish war against the White West. In other words, Jews imported Muslims to harm the White and historically Christian majority whose ancestors they blame for millennia of undeserved persecution. And you don’t have to take my word for that. No, take the word of Jews themselves. Here’s the Jewish “peace activist” Uri Avnery explaining why Jews love Muslim immigration:

As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the “spreading of the faith by the sword”?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi (“Spanish”) Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust. […]

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times “by the sword” to get them to abandon their faith. (“Muhammad’s Sword,” Scoop, 23rd October 2006)

Avnery’s pro-Muslim, anti-Christian attitudes have been completely mainstream among Jews for many decades:

But the central Jewish role in Muslim migration will not be discussed in the anguished commentary about that stabby Somali in London. Whilst slathering Jews with sympathy and sycophancy, the mainstream media will not ask why Britain has so many Somalis. That very interesting question has a very simple answer. Britain has so many Somalis thanks to the little-known Barbara Roche, an intensely ethnocentric Jew who served as minister of immigration under the dedicated shabbos-goy Tony Blair:

A Semitic supporter of stabby Somalis: the migration-maven Barbara Roche unfolds the “British story of migration” in 2011

The most incredible revelations [about New Labour’s conspiracy to open Britain’s borders] concern Barbara Roche, a little-known MP who was immigration minister between 1999 and 2001. During this period, she quietly adopted policies — with Mr Blair’s approval — that changed the face of the UK. […] Like [Jack] Straw, Blair was careful never publicly to mention the rising number of immigrants from India and Pakistan who could now enter Britain. Nor did he consider how to provide housing, schools and healthcare for an additional 300,000 people arriving a year.

Least of all did either of them question whether the immigrants would have any effect on the lives of the British working class. (Nine years later, a report by the Migration Advisory Committee found that 23 British workers had been displaced for every 100 foreign-born workers employed here.)

Could this chicanery get any worse? It did — with the appointment of Barbara Roche as Junior Immigration Minister. Blair’s only instruction to her was to deport bogus asylum seekers. But Roche wasn’t playing. In her first conversation with a senior immigration official, she was candid: ‘I think asylum seekers should be allowed to stay. Removal takes too long, and it’s emotional.’ Even the word ‘bogus,’ she maintained, created a negative feeling.

‘It was clear Roche wanted more immigrants to come to Britain,’ recalled Stephen Boys-Smith, the new head of the immigration directorate. ‘She didn’t see her job as controlling entry, but by looking at the wider picture “in a holistic way” she wanted us to see the benefit of a multicultural society.’ Jack Straw never openly contradicted Roche — it simply wasn’t worth the risk of alienating the Labour Party. So she set to work on a speech, in which she outlined the advantages of reducing controls to immigration and portrayed asylum seekers as skilled labour. She didn’t discuss what she was going to say with Straw. […]

‘Well done, Barbara,’ Blair told Roche soon [after the speech]. Despite its controversial content, her speech passed relatively unnoticed. But migrants quickly grasped its importance and passed the news on to their friends and family across the world. Labour was letting more people in, they told them, and — unlike other European countries — Britain would provide benefits and state housing. […]

One of Roche’s legacies was hundreds more migrants camped in squalor in Sangatte, outside Calais, where they tried to smuggle themselves onto lorries. News about the new liberalism — and in particular the welfare benefits — now began attracting Somalis who’d previously settled in other EU countries. Although there was no historic or cultural link between Somalia and Britain, more than 200,000 came. Since most were untrained and would be dependent on welfare, the Home Office could have refused them entry. But they were granted ‘exceptional leave to remain’. (Conman Blair’s cynical conspiracy to deceive the British people and let in 2million migrants against the rules, The Daily Mail, 26th February 2016)

The man arrested for stabbing the two Jews in London is reported to be a 45-year-old “born in Somalia who came to the UK ‘lawfully as a child.’” In other words, he’s one of the Somalis imported into Britain without any kind of democratic mandate or any kind of consent by the White majority. Since his arrival, he has enriched Britain in a typically Somali way: he has a “history of serious violence and mental health issues.”

Two sides of the same Cohen

Barbara Roche flooded Britain with low-IQ, high-criminality Somalis like him because she thought it would be good for Jews. She didn’t want to help Somalis: she wanted to harm Whites. In short, she wanted revenge on Whites. And again, you don’t have to take my word for that. No, take the word of Roche herself. In 2001, she told a Guardian interview that her “parents were part Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Russian [Jews], and she had entered politics — she still emphasises this today — to combat anti-semitism and xenophobia in general.” In one speech in 2000 she was clearly gloating about her ability to open Britain’s borders and harm the White majority. She was the proud descendant of Jews who had been insulted more than a century ago by a xenophobic White Briton. Note how she begins this section of her speech with a blatant lie:

Britain has always been a nation of migrants. There were in practice almost no immigration controls prior to the beginning of the 20th century. The 1905 Aliens Act was a direct response to Jewish immigration and it is difficult to deny that it was motivated in part by anti-Semitism. Major [William] Evans-Gordon, an MP, speaking in support of the legislation, said: “It is the poorest and least fit of these people who move, and it is the residuum of these again who come to and are let in this country[…] Hon[ourable] Members [of Parliament] opposite do not live in daily terror of being turned into the street to make room for an unsavoury Pole [i.e. Polish Jew].”

I expect Major Evans Gordon would be spinning in his grave if he knew that their descendant would not only be Immigration Minister but would be standing before you today making this speech. (“UK migration in a global economy,” Draft Speech by Barbara Roche MP, Immigration Minister, London, 11th September 2000)

Roche’s Jewish lie about Britain being a “nation of migrants” echoed an older Jewish lie about America being a “nation of immigrants.” But Jews don’t smoke their own supply: those lies aren’t peddled in Israel, whose firmly closed borders and determinedly Judeocentric laws reflect the true meaning of “nation.” The word comes from the Latin verb nasci, meaning “to be born,” because a nation is bonded by blood, by shared ancestry, religion, culture and language. In that sense, Britain, America, France, Australia and many other Western countries have ceased to be true nations, because they have been flooded with alien and unassimilable non-Whites by their treacherous, Jewish-controlled elites. Israeli politics is governed by the principle of “What’s best for Jews?” Western politics is governed by the principle of “What’s worst for Whites?” But those two principles are in fact two sides of the same Cohen: Jews like Barbara Roche believe that what’s worst for Whites is simultaneously what’s best for Jews.

22 Dead Goyim vs Two Dead Jews: the mud-flood matters only when it harms Jews

That explains why Jews have imported millions of Muslims and other non-Whites into the West against the will of the White majority. Even as they imported those “natural allies,” Jews demonized White opposition as racist and xenophobic, drafting and imposing harsh laws to suppress White resistance and intimidate Whites into silence. Non-Whites have been murdering, raping and exploiting Whites for decades, but that was seen by Jews as a feature, not a bug, of non-White migration. Now that their “natural allies” are turning on them too, Jews are posing as innocent victims and demanding more power and privilege. They’re also pumping out risible lies. Here is the proudly homosexual and intensely ethnocentric Jew Jonathan Sacerdoti addressing gullible goyim in the cuckservative Spectator:

Jews represent the freedoms and values of the West, not because we exist freely thanks to them, but because many of those values are actually ours, embraced and adopted by Christianity and wider secular society. That is why these enemies of civilisation hate us so much, and why their attacks on us are actually just one small part of their broader attacks on the entire West. (“Why Can’t the West Defend Jews?”, The Spectator, 15th December 2025)

Jonathan Sacerdoti, a proudly homosexual and intensely ethnocentric Jew

In fact, the true “values” of Jews are ethnocentrism and authoritarianism. That’s why Jews have attacked and undermined Western “freedoms” like free speech, free enquiry and free association. The hugely celebrated — and highly over-rated — Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza would have been murdered for blasphemy by his fellow Jews if he had been unable to seek refuge among gentiles in seventeenth-century Holland. In the twenty-first century, Holland is like the rest of the West: Whites there have the freedom to consume the most revolting forms of pornography, but not the freedom to investigate and speak the truth about racial differences. Realism about race is “hate speech,” you see. And who invented the concept of “hate speech”? That very interesting question was answered more than seventy years ago by a clear-sighted Catholic priest called Father Leonard Feeney:

SHOULD HATE BE OUTLAWED?

Most Americans, hearing this question, would answer promptly, “Yes, by all means, hate should be outlawed!” Their eagerness to reply can be accounted for all too easily. During the last decade and a half, they have been pounded with a propaganda barrage calculated to leave them in a state of dazed affability toward the whole world. Those advertising techniques that are normally used to encourage Americans to be choosy in matters of soap and toothpaste are now being enlisted to persuade them that there is no such thing as a superior product in matters of culture and creed. On billboards, on bus and subway posters, in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television broadcasts, Americans are being assured and reassured, both subtly and boldly, that “Bigotry is fascism … Only Brotherhood can save our nation … We must be tolerant of all!”

The long-range effects of this campaign are even now evident. It is producing the “spineless citizen”: the man who has no cultural sensibilities; who is incapable of indignation; whose sole mental activity is merely an extension of what he reads in the newspaper or sees on the television screen; who faces moral disaster in his neighborhood, political disaster in his country, and an impending world catastrophe with a blank and smiling countenance. He has only understanding for the enemies of his country. He has nothing but kind sentiments for those who would destroy his home and family. He has an earnest sympathy for anyone who would obliterate his faith. He is universally tolerant. He is totally unprejudiced. If he has any principles, he keeps them well concealed, lest in advocating them he should seem to indicate that contrary principles might be inferior. He is, to the extent of his abilities, exactly like the next citizen, who, he trusts, is trying to be exactly like him: a faceless, characterless putty-man. […]

As surely and securely as the Jews have been behind Freemasonry, or Secularism, or Communism, they are behind the “anti-hate” drive. Not that this movement represents the fruition of Talmudic doctrine. The Jews are advocating tolerance only for its destructive value — destructive, that is, of the Catholic Church. On their part, they still keep alive their racial rancors and antipathies. Their Talmud, for example, still teaches that Christ was a brazen impostor, and gives an unprintably blasphemous account of his parentage and birth. And as the Christmas season just past should have taught us, the Jews, for all their Brotherhood talk, have not in the least abandoned their resolute program to make all acknowledgments of Christmas disappear from the public and social life of the nation.

The secret of the Jews’ success is, of course, that they can practice such private hate while promoting public “love,” and not be accused of inconsistency. For, as always, they are running the show mainly from behind the scenes. They get their message across by means of co-operative Gentiles. And there are probably more such Gentiles now available — both the willing kind and the kind willing to be duped — than ever before in history. As a further good fortune, the Jewish directors of America’s entertainment industry can now guarantee that one Brotherhood spokesman, well-placed (e.g., behind a microphone or before a television camera), is able to influence Americans by the millions.

And the Jews’ campaign is succeeding. We have every reason to be alarmed at its success. American Catholics, even those not actively taking part in the tolerance talk, are now kept in line by the omnipresent threat of being accused of hate, bigotry, and intolerance. (“Should Hate Be Outlawed?”, The Point, edited by Fr Leonard Feeney, July 1955)

In 1955 the Catholic Father Feeney was exactly like the Catholic Michael E. Jones in 2026. Father Feeney correctly recognized that Jews hate the Catholic Church, but he did not understand that Jews hate the Church because she is White, not because she is Christian. The great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc might not have made the same mistake. As he once said: “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” That’s why Belloc would have utterly opposed immigration into Europe by Muslims and other non-Whites. He would also have been utterly unsurprised to see Jews organizing such immigration, propagandizing for it, and punishing White resistance to it.

Belloc would also have been unsurprised to see Jews cynically play the victim when their own policies rebounded on them. That stabby Somali in London who attacked Jews will now be exploited by Jews to increase Jewish power and posture about Jewish victimhood. He didn’t kill anyone, but he will receive far more attention than Mohammed Ismail, the Somali who murdered three Whites in Sheffield in 1960, and than Mohamed Noor Iidow (sic), the Somali who raped a White woman to death in London in 2021.

As in America, so in Australia: a few of the Jews who worked to end the White Australia policy

Right across the West, countless Whites have been murdered, raped, beaten, robbed and otherwise harmed by the mud-flood of mass migration overseen by Jews. But, as noted, the  harm done to Whites is a feature, not a bug, of the mud-flood. And now that the mud-flood is belatedly harming its creators, Jews are playing the victim and wailing that “Jews don’t feel safe anywhere,” that “Jews live in fear in 21st-century Britain,” that “Britain’s Jews no longer feel at home,” that “Ireland’s Jews have never felt lonelier.” But none of this wailing is accompanied by any honesty or self-criticism. Jews don’t excel at honesty and self-criticism. Instead, they excel at self-pity. Here’s Jonathan Sacerdoti again:

Britain’s Jews are quietly preparing to leave the country

I sat in the synagogue where I grew up last night, waiting to interview Colonel Richard Kemp, the retired senior officer of the British Army who served for nearly three decades across Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Our conversation would end a service marking the transition between Israel’s Memorial Day for its fallen and its Independence Day. A British Jew and a British Colonel, in a room full of emotion, pride, and more than a little apprehension, after a week in which multiple arson attacks on Jewish-linked sites have taken place in London. There was an uncomfortable sense of the fall of Rome in the air. […]

At the dinner afterwards, intended to celebrate Israel’s independence, the tone across the room was not celebratory in any simple sense. The conversations were sober, even heavy. People spoke to me openly about decline, about Britain, about the condition of Jewish life here. And, strikingly, they spoke about contingency plans. Where they might go. When they might leave. What threshold would trigger that decision. What was most unsettling was not necessarily the content of these discussions, but their assumption. They spoke as if departure were not hypothetical, but eventually necessary.

I could have built a life in Israel. I can see it clearly enough to know it would have been a good life. Many British Jews share that sense: Israel is not merely a refuge of last resort, an ‘insurance policy’ against catastrophe. Over its decades of existence, it has become something far more substantial. It is a functioning, dynamic country with its own culture, strengths, and tensions. It is a real alternative life, not just a theoretical escape from danger. […] And yet most of us chose Britain. Not by accident, but deliberately. This is the path we continued, the society we invested in, the place where our lives took shape. Britain has offered opportunity, stability, and a sense of belonging that is not easily relinquished. It is our home. We want it to be our refuge. (“Britain’s Jews are quietly preparing to leave the country,” The Spectator, 22nd April 2026

Yes, those Jews “deliberately” chose to live in Britain. And deliberately chose to flood Britain with Muslims and other “natural allies.” And deliberately chose to demonize Whites as racists and xenophobes for resisting that mud-flood. After all, don’t forget that “Welcome the Stranger” is an unshakeable Jewish value! But the mud-flood has now begun to harm Jews too, so they’re “quietly preparing” to flee to Israel, where that unshakeable Jewish value of “Welcome the Stranger” has mysteriously failed to apply for so many decades. In fact, there are only three unshakeable Jewish values. I mentioned two of them above: ethnocentrism and authoritarianism. Here’s the third: hypocrisy. Unfortunately for Jews, Hebrew hypocrisy is becoming more and more obvious to more and more goyim.

New Harvard Study Replicates Based Researcher’s Findings on Selection for Intelligence in Europeans but Doesn’t Cite Him. Why Not?

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Woke academia despises para-academia. Para-academia, after all, challenges the dogmas that many of them rely on to feel that they are morally superior to others and so allay their own insecurities. Such people are, further, heavily invested in Woke academia — their status and even livelihood depends on it — so any challenge to it is extremely dangerous. Therefore, members of para-academia must be suppressed at all costs.

It is difficult to over-emphasise just how strong the Woke grip on academia is. It is so strong that we can essentially make a binary division between “mainstream academia” — that is, almost all universities in Western countries — and para-academia; the scientists and other scholars whose work dares to challenge Woke dogmas. Members of the two groups interact to some extent, as there are still some genuine scientists — who follow data wherever it goes — within mainstream academia and they sometimes collaborate with those outside it. But, often, the truth-seekers who are involved in para-academia — promoting their work on Substack and the like — are considered so toxic that normal scholarly standards are simply eschewed. This happened in April 2026 in what I will call the “Piffer Controversy.”

Davide Piffer is an Italian evolutionary scientist. He researches all manner of “taboo” areas, such as the genetics of race differences in intelligence. One of his studies, for example, has shown that the correlation between national IQs and the prevalence in countries of alleles that are associated with intelligence is 0.9. This finding pretty much proves that genetic differences overwhelmingly explain the IQ differences between countries and, by extension, between ethnic groups and races.

Piffer has pioneered the field of archaeo-genetics. This involves examining samples of ancient genomes and looking for the presence of specific alleles and looking for the extent of alleles that are associated with salient psychological traits such as intelligence, educational attainment, pro-social personality, depression or schizophrenia. In a study in 2024, Piffer demonstrated that European populations had, since the advent of agriculture, been under strong selection for mental stability and intelligence. “What a fascinating finding!” you might think. Mainstream scholars have criticised his methods but, even if these are problematic, Piffer had the original idea of interrogating ancient genomes in this way. Unlike the kinds of people who remain in mainstream academia — where you have to balance originality with conformity in order rise up the hierarchy of the guild — someone like Piffer suffers from no such restrictions and has, therefore, unsurprisingly, come up with a highly original idea.

Move forward two years to 2026 and a team involving David Reich of Harvard University have published a study in Nature — “Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia” – hailed as ground-breaking and highly original, in which they have shown pretty much exactly what Piffer demonstrated in 2024, albeit using a slightly different methodology. Is Piffer — who, without question, originated the idea of the latest study and got there first — cited or acknowledged in the Nature study? Absolutely not.

Piffer has vociferously complained about this deviation from normal scholarly standards on Twitter and even written to the study’s lead author to demand to know what is going on. Surprisingly, the author responded to Piffer. He admitted to knowing about Piffer’s earlier study but claimed that they didn’t cite it because they thought Piffer’s methodology was faulty. Of course, it couldn’t have been that faulty because it led to pretty much the same results.

“Why would the Reich team behave like this?” you might ask. There are a number of reasons. Woke academia despises para-academia. Para-academia, after all, challenges the dogmas that many of them rely on to feel that they are morally superior to others and so allay their own insecurities. Such people are, further, heavily invested in Woke academia — their status and even livelihood depends on it — so any challenge to it is extremely dangerous. Therefore, members of para-academia must be suppressed at all costs.

This happens in a number of ways. The double-blind anonymous peer-review process of scientific studies is corrupt. A Woke-influenced editor may simply reject a study that challenges Woke dogmas without having it peer-reviewed or even reject it because of the anti-Woke reputation of the authors. If he has some scruples, he may send it out for peer-review, but make sure that one of the two reviewers is very Woke and will definitely reject the study. The psychologist and transsexuality expert Ray Blanchard has called this “Queer Review.” The editor then sides with the negative reviewer and rejects the study.

Even if the study is accepted, you may find interesting details in the reviews. A peer-reviewer once told me not to cite directly relevant work by J. Philippe Rushton because he was “racist.” Another recommended not citing anything from Mankind Quarterly — one of the few academic journals with no Woke influence — because of the journal’s “racist” reputation. Sometimes, these will be conditions of acceptance, not recommendations. And even after the study is published, the publisher may withdraw the paper on spurious grounds — post-publication Queer Review — if enough Woke people get upset about it.

Citing Piffer would potentially have caused “controversy” for Reich and his team, just as The Bell Curve was attacked for its “tainted sources” which included articles published in Mankind Quarterly. These sources were argued to be a problem because, in essence, the studies wouldn’t have been peer-reviewed by proto-Woke dogmatics. If Piffer’s work had been acknowledged in the Nature study, it could’ve been used to smear the research as “racist” and “eugenic.” It is, after all, proving the genetics influencing salient psychological traits and showing that they were strongly selected for among Whites. This is the most charitable possible explanation of the authors’ actions. The Woke-influenced media dared not touch Reich et al.’s important findings; instead going with the finding that ginger hair had been selected for across time.

As I argued in my book The Past is a Future Country, Western academia appears to be in the same situation as it was in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The universities, places of scientific creativity and originality, are the homes to genius-types: autistic, anti-social and, as a result, obsessed with truth above all else. They become prestigious and so attractive to normal intelligent people. These people are socially skilled and conformist: they notice the dominant set of values, understand the benefits of conformity and have what personality psychologists have called the “effortful control” to force themselves to adopt the dominant set of values and then competitively signal them.

They, naturally take over, drive out the genius-types, and turn the university into a branch of that era’s Church. The universities stop producing original research, which is instead found among gentleman scholars, enthusiastic amateurs or in alternative institutions. When English universities were branches of the Church of England (until reforms in 1870), these were the dissenting academies, which focused, unlike the universities, on science. Oxygen was discovered by a lecturer at such an academy.

We have reached this point once again. A dissenter has discovered something very important and it is difficult for the conformists to publicly accept this.

Proudhon’s Forbidden Notebook: The Truth About Jewish Power

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Mikhail Bakunin was by no means an isolated voice in the 19th-century anarchist movement when it came to calling out Jewish influence. His contemporary and fellow pioneer of anarchist thought, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, possessed a critique of equal intensity and arguably greater scope

Proudhon is widely celebrated as the “father of anarchism,” a pioneering socialist philosopher whose critiques of property and the state shaped generations of radical thought. Yet buried within his voluminous writings and private notebooks lies a virulent strain of antisemitism so extreme that some scholars have labeled him a harbinger of fascism.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born on January 15, 1809, in Besançon, France, to a working-class family. His father was a cooper and tavern keeper, and the family lived in dire poverty. Despite his family’s poverty, Proudhon won a scholarship to the college in Besançon and educated himself further through his work as a printer, teaching himself Latin — and later Greek and Hebrew — to better typeset the books he worked on. His hardscrabble peasant origins deeply shaped his worldview. He idealized a society of self-sufficient small craftsmen and farmers free from exploitation.

Proudhon became the first person to publicly identify as an “anarchist” in 1840. His most famous slogan, “Property is theft!,” appeared in his first major work, What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government. He was not advocating for total abolition of personal possessions but rather distinguished between illegitimate propriété — private ownership allowing exploitation of others — and legitimate possession, meaning direct use-ownership by workers.

Proudhon’s major contributions to political philosophy included mutualism, an economic system based on workers’ cooperatives, mutual credit, and free exchange that rejected both capitalism and state socialism. He also developed a theory of federalism, envisioning decentralized, self-governing communes in a voluntary federation that would replace both the state and private monopoly.

Proudhon served in the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848 and engaged in famous polemical exchanges with Karl Marx. Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty appeared in 1846, and Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847 was a direct rebuttal. This dispute contributed to the historic split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the labor movement. Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Benjamin Tucker all drew heavily from Proudhon’s ideas.

However, to fully understand the totality of Proudhon’s worldview, one must look beyond his public polemics and into his personal manuscripts. The most notorious statement of Proudhon’s antisemitism comes from his private notebook, dated December 26, 1847, published posthumously as part of his Carnets in 1960 and 1961. The passage reads in full:

Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. H. Heine, A. Weill, and others are nothing but secret spies; Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, Fould, wicked, bilious, envious, bitter, etc. etc., beings who hate us. The Jew must disappear by steel or by fire or by expulsion. Tolerate the elderly who no longer have children. Work to be done — What the peoples of the Middle Ages hated instinctively, I hate upon reflection and irrevocably. The hatred of the Jew, like the hatred of the English, should be our first article of political faith.

Proudhon’s hatred was as personal as it was political, shifting focus in the same December 26, 1847 entry to target specific Jewish individuals. Heinrich Heine, the celebrated German-Jewish poet and writer, and A. Weill, a writer and journalist, were both called “nothing but secret spies.” Rothschild, Crémieux, Marx, and Fould were grouped together and collectively condemned as “wicked, bilious, envious, bitter… beings who hate us.” Adolphe Crémieux was a prominent Jewish lawyer who later served as French Minister of Justice. Benoît Fould was a French banker and politician of Jewish origin. Karl Marx, of Jewish descent though baptized Christian, was included in this company.

Calling Heine and Weill “secret spies” had a specific personal context — Proudhon suspected they had informed on his German associate Karl Grün, who had been disseminating Proudhon’s ideas among German intellectuals in Paris, leading to Grün’s expulsion from France. That broader pattern is borne out by the public record. Antisemitic themes recur across his major published works.

In Césarisme et Christianisme from 1860, Proudhon wrote: “The Jew is by temperament an anti-producer, neither farmer nor industrialist, not even a real trader. He is always a fraudulent and parasitic middleman, who operates, in business as in philosophy, by fabrication, counterfeiting, and shady dealing. He knows only the rise and fall, the risks of transport, the uncertainties of the harvest, the hazards of supply and demand. His policy in economics is all negative, it’s the wrong principle. Satan, Ahriman, incarnated in the race of Shem.”

In De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église from 1858, Proudhon accused Jews of “having rendered the bourgeoisie, high or low, similar to them, all over Europe.” In France et Rhin, published posthumously in 1867, he complained that France was “invaded by the English, Germans, Belgians, Jews,” and other foreigners.

Interestingly, Proudhon’s public posture of hostility towards Jews existed alongside a series of personal encounters that suggest a complex social life. Proudhon and Karl Marx met in Paris between late September 1844 and February 1845, during Marx’s exile there. The two engaged in extended intellectual discussions, which Marx himself described as “lengthy debates often lasting all night.”

Marx wrote Proudhon a letter on May 5, 1846 — by then from Brussels, after his expulsion from France — inviting him to join a correspondence network of socialists, addressing him warmly as a peer. Their relationship later collapsed when Marx savaged Proudhon’s work. Though Marx had Jewish heritage from a rabbinical family on both sides, Proudhon listed him among those he condemned in the 1847 notebook entry.

Proudhon was closely associated with Alphonse Toussenel, a French socialist and disciple of Charles Fourier who authored Les Juifs, Rois de l’Époque — The Jews, Kings of the Era — in 1845, one of the most prominent antisemitic works of 19th-century France. A more explosive second edition appeared in 1847, the same year as Proudhon’s December 26 notebook entry, and scholars have noted the two men’s antisemitism was mutually reinforcing. Adolphe Crémieux, the prominent Jewish lawyer and politician who would later serve as French Minister of Justice, was named and condemned by Proudhon alongside Rothschild in that same entry.

The pattern of these denunciations did not escape later scholarly attention. J. Salwyn Schapiro, a Jewish-American historian writing in the American Historical Review in July 1945, was the most influential early academic to highlight Proudhon’s antisemitic content. In his article “Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Harbinger of Fascism,” he called Proudhon’s antisemitism “the acid test of racialism” and grouped it alongside his other prejudices — misogyny, racism toward Black people, and support for the Confederacy — to argue Proudhon was a proto-fascist.

Frédéric Krier, a historian whose 2009 work Sozialismus für Kleinbürger: Pierre Joseph Proudhon — Wegbereiter des Dritten Reiches remains the most exhaustive scholarly study connecting Proudhon to Nazi ideology, identified Proudhon’s antisemitism as pervasive throughout his thought. Krier drew intellectual-historical continuities between Proudhon’s moralistic critique of “interest” — meaning usury — and the Nazi antisemitic demand for the “breaking of interest slavery.” He also argued Proudhon was a 19th-century variant of the Christian Gnostic heretic Marcion, whose anti-Jewish theological streak ran throughout his anti-theism.

The devolution of modern anarchism into a mere collection of foot soldiers for the Jewish-dominated status quo is a tragic betrayal of its revolutionary heritage. Reverting from the intellectual rigor of Bakunin and Proudhon to the establishment-friendly gatekeeping of contemporary “anarchists” (antifa typically label themselves anarchists) serves only the Jewish masters of the current order. Proudhon’s willingness to place the question of Jewish power at the very center of his political critique serves as a vital blueprint for the contemporary dissident. It is only by discarding the taboos that muzzle inquiry that we can hope to understand and challenge the Jewish forces shaping our world.