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Essays and Dramas: An Inquiry into Passions Engendered by the Idea of Reason
Paul C. Johnston
New Atlantic Media, 2025, 188 pages, $20.00 paperback

The work under review here seeks to offer models for understanding ourselves and the trajectory of our civilization. These are complicated matters, which is why models are necessary. A model is a simplification: in the author’s own words, “a simple story about a complex story.”

He begins from a simple model of human behavior: “narrative engenders emotion and emotion issues forth into action.” He begins with narrative because man learns more from example than from precept. Directly telling a child how to behave is less effective than setting him a good example. But since we cannot personally demonstrate all the behavior we would like to encourage, we resort to stories. These may concern real, legendary, or even fictional people. The author writes that “the stories we hear growing up form our sensibilities.” A sensibility is “a repertoire of emotional reactions to the world around us.” Each individual’s sensibility will reflect some combination of his own nature and the stories he has heard, especially during his formative years.

Many of these will be common across a society. Homer, for example, was called the teacher of Greece because the stories he told became the common possession of his people and shaped a characteristically Greek sensibility. The narrative lore of a people embodies its ideals and is one of the most important components of its culture. So although hardly a complete account of human behavior, the author’s model in which “narrative engenders emotion and emotion issues forth into action” captures an important truth.

Next he proceeds to an extremely condensed review of human history, the latter part of which focuses on Europeans in particular. This story commences around two hundred thousand generations ago when a species of ape somewhere in Africa, for reasons still not understood, descended from the trees and began exploring the surrounding grasslands on its hind feet. This freed its hands for making tools and weapons, which led to hunting: the basic way of life of the ground-dwelling apes from their origin until the agricultural revolution a mere five hundred generations ago. The industrial revolution only goes back twelve or fifteen generations. Because agriculture is still fairly new in evolutionary terms, we remain largely adapted through natural selection to the hunter-gatherer way of life we no longer practice. Language and intelligence, for example, are key factors in human life which probably originated as adaptations to hunting, since hunting is a type of cooperative problem-solving. Language brought story telling with it, enabling the shaping of behavior through the emotions aroused by narrative.

The author observes that there are certain areas of life about which we are especially quick to tell stories, where these stories are especially quick to rouse our emotions, and where those emotions are especially quick to issue forth into action. These three primary narrative themes are “us and them”, “high and low”, and “sex.”

One consequence of our long time as hunter-gatherers is that we had time to achieve a high degree of concordance between our emotions and our strategies for making a living. We did not then suffer from the evolutionary mismatch of having to live in an agricultural or industrial society with the instincts of hunters. On this subject, the author quotes from the book The Cave Painters by Gregory Curtis:

The culture that produced the painted caves lasted almost unchanged for more than 20,000 years. To last so long, [it] must have been deeply satisfying—emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and practically. It must have engendered and supported a social system that reliably produced and distributed material needs like food, clothing, and shelter. It must have fostered and protected the most basic human relations—friend to friend, man to woman, parent to child—or the society would not have been cohesive enough to survive.

Shamanism is probably the closest existing approximation to our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ approach to life, one in which “emotional connections to everything around them were deep” and “no sharp distinctions were made between animals, plants, people and the spirit world.”

A hunting way of life demands about three square miles per person to be sustainable, but the very adaptiveness of the stone age way of life meant that over time this became increasingly difficult to guarantee from incursions by rival bands. So instead of hunting animals and gathering plants, a few human groups began experimenting with raising animals and growing their own plants: the pastoral and agricultural revolutions. But

a man with emotions shaped over the millennia by the roaming life of a hunter was ill equipped to clear ground, scratch earth, plant seeds, pull weeds, harvest crops—then go through the same tedious process all over again the following year in the same place.

The first farmers succeeded in guaranteeing themselves a higher caloric intake, ensuring that the new way of life would spread. But they also faced an evolutionary mismatch, one from which we still suffer to some extent. The response to this dilemma was social stratification, which occurs in three stages. First, agriculture produces a surplus which permits a minority of men to impose themselves on everyone else and continue leading an adventurous fighting existence: history’s first ruling class. Of course, they also have to force the drudges who form their tax base to stick to their allotted task. In the second stage, a new narrative reflecting this new reality rises to dominance. Third, this narrative gradually “shapes the sensibilities of individuals in their various roles as lord, serf, priest, warrior, woman, and man.” Over the generations, this stabilizes the new way of life.

The author is reticent about the history of religion under the agricultural regime, contenting himself with noting that Christianity represents a continuation of this socially pacificatory function. The observed social order is willed by God, and living well consists in performing conscientiously the duties of one’s station within that order. But, of course, the faith was not simply a matter of dissuading the servants from stealing the silverware: “Much of the cultural material produced by Christians had the characteristics of a public good,” meaning that one person’s enjoyment of it did not prevent another’s. Cathedrals and sacred music were available to high and low. Manners, although originating among the higher orders, filtered down through the social order, facilitating complementary and workable relations between persons of various stations in life.

After several thousand years of learning to mitigate evolutionary mismatch in an agricultural economy, the industrial revolution through everything into confusion once again. The author defines industrialization as a product of technology and the exploitation of fossil fuels. Its initial effects were a massive increase in wealth among all strata of a population whose sensibilities and behavior were still informed by the Christian story. But under the new conditions, the Christian story lost its vitality over time and society became increasingly fragmented.

No one narrative has arisen to replace the Christian story, but the most important contestants for the succession, in the author’s view, have been various forms of contract theory: “rational human beings living in the state of nature meet, agree on a set of rules, and establish a government based on the agreed-upon rules.” He believes even Marxism failed to break decisively with the contract narrative.

The new society shaped by industrialization created an even starker evolutionary mismatch than existed in the preceding agricultural society. But the response followed the same pattern: first, a new ruling class imposes itself (the bourgeoisie, displacing the feudal aristocracy); second, the contract narrative achieves dominance; third, the sensibilities of new generations are shaped by the new narrative:

Six, seven, eight or more generations had to pas before contractarian stories altered, weakened, or washed out deeply ingrained Christian sensibilities, but it happened. The long-term effect was astonishing. Contract doctrine did NOT do what it purported to do, i.e., guide people out of a state of nature into civil society, but the opposite: take people living in a well-established, stage-three civil society back to nature, i.e., back to stage-one . . . a battle for dominance. Contract doctrine turned out to be a time bomb introduced into the heart of European civilization.

The author agrees with an old criticism of contract doctrine: that its “natural” men are really no such thing, but rational actors such as could only be produced by a highly evolved civilization. The founders of the American Republic, for example, were the products of such a civilization, and so

they were able to make a transition to a new form of government using civilized methods, i.e., debate, discourse, compromise, agreement, and ballot. They did not know—and it is hard to see how they could have known—that changing the rules, customs, and expectations of the game of politics would change the social conditions that produced men like themselves.

The result of this miscalculation is that we, their political and physical posterity, find ourselves in a raw struggle for dominance “being fought behind a façade of hollowed out stage three institutions.”

Today’s political scene in the West is, of course, a confusing and constantly shifting struggle between racial and sexual identity groups. As always, when faced with excessive complexity, we must resort to a model. Mr. Johnston takes his from the well-known lines of Yeats’ poem The Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

As previously noted, all men are inclined to respond emotionally and through action to stories about “us and them.” What defines the better sort of men in today’s political environment is that

their sense of who they are is formed by stories about family history, communal history, architecture, science, literature, art, philosophy, and religion. Commerce and politics, they think, have to occur within a framework of rules. Adherence to procedure, coalition-building, amendments to a constitution, reforms carried out within the rules, better candidates—such are the tactics that the Best bring to the battle for dominance.

Mentally, such men still inhabit the stage-three civilization of their forefathers. The worst men are formed by cruder, simpler stories. As a result, they have the sense of self of a mafioso or gang member. But this makes them more effective in a struggle for dominance.

They know what they want—money and power—and act accordingly. They coil themselves tightly around the interests of a leader. This leader demands control over the men under him, [but] they understand that [this] is the source of their power over everybody else. No laws of man or providence do the Worst scruple to break in order to achieve power and money. Murder, blackmail, ginned up war, bribery, strategies based on deliberate lies—such are the weapons they bring to what for them is a stage-one fight for dominance.

Such men gradually spread into political organizations such as the CIA, and eventually we end up with a government of criminals and psychopaths.

The only effective way to fight back against this development is by telling a different story. Contract theory’s idyllic narrative of rational men uniting in their own interest does not describe the world as it is but, at best, as it ought to be.

Such utopian thinking is the besetting weakness of what the author calls “the Second Synthesis.” (The First Synthesis was that of reason and faith in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.) The Second Synthesis emerged from contract theory and early modern philosophy. Here we shall skip over the philosophical details, although these are quite interesting, and go straight to the conclusion: Immanuel Kant’s doctrine of the autonomy of the moral will. Mr. Johnston explains this as follows:

Because knowledge of the moral law is rational, it is secure. Because it is secure it is possible to know with confidence what should be done. To know what should be done means that it is possible for me to know what you should do and what we together should do. [This] means that nothing stops us from making the human community the way it OUGHT TO BE.

Contract doctrine turned the human individual into a “fundamental unit of account” and a “court of last appeal” in the political realm.

Groups exist for the individual, not the other way around. Because the individual is the fundamental unit of account, no reason exists why one individual should count more than another. Privileges of birth, tradition, caste, class, race, religion or any other non-individual category have no inherent moral standing.

What the Second Synthesis did was change who has the authority to define ideals [i.e., to define what ought to be]. Under the old Christian dispensation this authority resided with the custodians of the word of God, i.e., the Church, and also with those elevated by God to positions of high degree, i.e., the king.

After the Second Synthesis, this authority shifts to the individual, which makes the political realm into a kind of town where anyone is free to declare himself sheriff. In practice, the relevant “individuals” are those who participate in the political arena, and authority devolves upon whoever wins the political struggle. The game is played, as always, by weak individuals coalescing into a more powerful “us” in order to compete against a “them.”

Politics in the age of the Second Synthesis is a matter of rallying “us” by means of stories about how the world ought to be. This is the kind of politics Michael Oakshott described as “teleocratic.” One of its advantages is that it allows men to pursue two seemingly contradictory goals, namely, to embrace ideas about equality and to establish the hierarchies necessary for playing the games of life and politics.

The author lists some of the ideals of how the world ought to be as follows:

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a classless society, careers open to talents, equal pay for equal work, from each according to his capacity and to each according to his need, equality under the law, men judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, a level playing field, one man/one vote, a tobacco-free society, no child left behind, etc.

So there is no shortage of competing ideas about how the world ought to be, and—with the possible exception of the tobacco-free society—all in the above list involve some form of equality.

Once an ideal has been defined, citizens (or possibly humanity as a whole) can be divided into good guys and bad guys, with the good being those who move society closer to the ideal and the bad being those who stand in the way. The task of the good guys is to form a coalition to capture state power in order to eliminate the influence of bad guys (possibly by eliminating the bad guys themselves) and make society the way it ought to be. Necessary to this process is the idea of the victim. Depending upon the ideal, these may be “Africans, women, poor people, people in other countries (victims of imperialism), cigarette smokers, homosexuals, children left behind, etc.” The job of “us,” the political faction or party, is to protect the victims from their victimizers: capitalists, racists, male chauvinists, the heteronormative, the rich, big tobacco, etc. The stories based upon a supposed rational and moral imperative to protect victims and fight powerful victimizers have proved astonishingly successful at motivating men for over two centuries now: these are the “passions engendered by the idea of reason” which the author refers to in his subtitle.

But perhaps it is time to notice that the Second Synthesis and the style of politics associated with it have only really characterized the modern West, i.e., persons of European descent. Elsewhere politics has remained closer to the original model of competing kinship groups, a pattern going back to the days of hunting and gathering. But increasing contact of non-Europeans with the West have introduced them to ideological, Second Synthesis politics. They quickly learned to adapt their natural kinship preferences to such politics by identifying European Man himself as the quintessential victimizer. This has now had profound negative consequences for the West:

So conditioned by Second Synthesis narratives are we men of and from Europe that we now are comfortable linking ourselves together politically only in the name of pursuing abstract goals such as democracy, equality, the greatest good of the greatest number, or in the name of helping victims (blacks, women, foreign victims of imperialism, etc.). Appeals made to us as “white men” arouse suspicion.

Mr. Johnston suggests that this White man’s disease be called “social lupus,” since lupus is a disorder of the auto-immune system in which a person becomes, in effect, allergic to himself. Our diseased state “leaves us passive as other people occupy our lands.”

Another consequence of ideological politics is what Mr. Johnston calls the flat society. This happens because ideological politicians have every incentive to oppose all hierarchies other than their own. For example, if a traditional society permits slave-owning, slave-owners enjoy a certain amount of power independent of the state, and therefore not available to the politician.

How does the politician counter the power of the slave owner? By extending rights to everybody, including the slave. Second Synthesis ideology is the perfect vehicle for this endeavor. In the name of equality, the politician first eliminates the right of one man to own the labor of another. Next the politician weakens rich men and titled families via taxes, inheritance laws, and violence if necessary. Next, the politician makes gender roles grist for his mill. The politician’s ideal order is one in which NO links exist between individuals except for the links he controls. The landscape that reflects the politician’s ideal is a flat plain extending out in all directions, in the middle of which stands a single, tall mountain, the state, at the top of which he sits.

This is exactly what has happened to us, a story the author illustrates by considering the example of Thomas Jefferson.

He enjoyed a position of high standing which he did not have to fight to obtain. Social capital (narratives, habits, customs, laws, usages) guided him into the role of slave owner. The same inheritance of social capital guided other men into the role of slave. The existence of this social capital freed Mr. Jefferson from having to devote his energies to the task of beating other men into submission, one outcome of which was that he had the time and leisure to reflect, to explore topics of interest, to study political history, to play a key role in the construction of a new nation, to be the president of the new nation, to build Monticello, to found the University of Virginia, and much else.

One result of Jefferson’s leisured reflections was the conviction that the institution of slavery was unjust and should be abolished. He may have been correct about this, but if there had been no social capital in his Virginia, any man who wanted a slave

would have had to do the dirty work himself of beating another man into submission. Social capital established superordinate and subordinate categories of men, then conveyed these categories across the generations so brutal battles to establish stratification did not have to be refought in each generation.

Admittedly, Western civilization did not result from rational men designing a society the way it ought to be, as Second Synthesis stories would recommend.

But European peoples established their hierarchies so firmly that it was possible for those at the top to enjoy sufficient leisure and tranquility to create by talent and patronage an inventory of public goods of great value, e.g., delicate manners, beautiful architecture, a profound literature, mathematics, science, and an artistic tradition of beauty, depth and scope.

Egalitarian Second Synthesis politics will systematically destroy the conditions of such achievement—in addition to leaving us vulnerable to hostile outsiders. The White man’s lupus is clearly a sickness unto death. The author summarizes the development as follows:

People were confident that liberal values such as equality could be applied universally. This confidence was misplaced. This did not happen. Once the legacy of social capital that established rank peacefully lost vitality, what followed was not Mr. Jefferson’s liberal vision of society minus slavery. Rather, what followed was a raw fight for political power.

Namely, the fight between Yeats’ best and worst, in which the worst have all the advantages:

The problem with a flat society is that there are no men sitting at the top of their own montecelli—their own little mountains—with the education, resources, confidence networks, and discipline required to stop psychopaths, i.e., men of no scruples and no remorse, from reaching the top of the mountain and capturing the state.

And that, of course, is exactly what they have done. We are governed by an alliance between racial aliens and psychopaths which behaves like a criminal enterprise.

We noted above that the three principal themes of the stories people tell which engender emotions giving rise to actions are “us and them”, “high and low”, and “sex.” We have explained the effects of the Second Synthesis on the first two themes, but must not conclude without saying something about what it has done to sex. Nature assigns women the job of reproduction, and men that of dealing with the consequences of reproduction,

which, if unchecked, would soon lead to our extinguishing ourselves like yeast in a petri dish [through the overconsumption of finite resources]. The job of the male is to create space by confronting other males, by keeping them at bay, by showing them that our “us” is stronger than their “them,” by killing them if necessary.

This secures the territory necessary for the provisioning of women and children. So when the men of the European tribe contract social lupus and are left “passive as other people occupy our lands,” it represents a “failure in the most basic way that the males of any species can fail.” It is no wonder our females either forego procreation altogether or make themselves into the vehicles of an alien genetic heritage.

The industrial revolution and Second Synthesis, like all cultural achievements, were largely the work of men rather than women.

These men created wealth in the economy and in the political arena they created a decent approximation to the rule of law, both significant accomplishments, but achieved at a cost. In the past, boys were expected to defend themselves with their fists. [This was part of a male culture that] required of a man that he establish a reputation such that if you trenched upon him you could expect to trigger in him a strong response. With the rise of the rule of law among European peoples, life became easier for men. A man’s willingness to respond fiercely if trenched upon was no longer crucial to his maintaining his position in the community.

Violence came to be monopolized by the state, leaving men more concerned with “perks, salaries, and status based on money.” Male culture lost its vitality, and manipulation became more important for individual success than courage. And it is the resulting softer men who now find themselves faced with a stage-one struggle for dominance with ruthless psychopaths and hostile aliens from more primal cultures. We are going to need to rebuild our own male culture quickly. A necessary part of this will be foregoing familiar Second Synthesis stories in favor of narratives better attuned to the timeless requirements of evolutionary survival—and which will probably more closely resemble those of our stone age ancestors.

According to the brief biography on the back of the book, “Paul C. Johnston earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt University and a PhD in economics from George Mason University. This is his second book.”

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death
Laura Cumming (Chatto and Windus, 2023)

Reading is richer for racists. That’s on the good side. On the bad side, reading can be more regretful for racists too. You’ll find both the good side and the bad side of racist reading in Laura Cumming’s excellent book Thunderclap. It’s partly a study of art in the Dutch Golden Age and partly a memoir of how the author came to know and love that art. And to base part of her career on it: Cumming has been “chief art critic of the Observer since 1999.” That is, she’s a Guardianista (the Observer is the Sunday edition of the Guardian). And she wrote this book for other Guardianistas. But it isn’t Guardianistas who will get the most out of the book or the art it discusses and displays.

Thunderclap with a skilful skull, Vanitas by the Flemish master Hendrick Andriessen[1] (Wikipedia)

No, it will be racists and sexists like me. This is because Guardianistas won’t notice, or won’t dare to notice, some fascinating and important questions raised by the book. The Netherlands — the Low Countries comprising modern Holland, Belgium et al — is a small region whose population numbered perhaps two million by the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. And yet from the Middle Ages that small population turned out painters of astonishing subtlety and skill. They outcompeted in quality and quantity the far larger and more populous nations of France, Germany and Britain, and were matched or surpassed only by Italy. The Netherlands was the birthplace of Van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt and Vermeer, creators of immortal art whom we can justly call geniuses. Yet Cumming never asks why and how this could be so. How could such a small region produce so many world-conquering painters?[2] And such good painting in such quantity?

Holland in the hexagon: We owe “97% of human accomplishment” since the 1300s to White men in this region

If she had asked those questions, she would of course have confined her answers entirely to culture and invention. And yes, culture and invention — glass and lenses, for example — do undoubtedly explain some of the Dutch success in art before and during the Golden Age. But those things alone don’t and can’t explain all of it. Genetics played a central part too, because genetics was involved in all of it: the art, the culture, the invention. Those sublime skills arose within skulls of a particular kind. Dutch genius was a subset of White genius, of the evolved intelligence and inventiveness of White northern Europeans. Holland sits inside a hexagon of achievement identified by Charles Murray in his book Human Accomplishment (2003): “97% of human accomplishment since the 14th century occurred from men born in this region.” Among the men discussed by Murray are Rembrandt and Vermeer, two Dutch masters who are also discussed by Cumming in Thunderclap. But her book centers on a Dutch master whose art is now far better known than his name. Millions of people are familiar with this painting, for example:

The Goldfinch or Het puttertje (1654) (Wikipedia)

But who painted it? I knew the painting when I picked Thunderclap up earlier this year, but I couldn’t have told you the name of the painter. He was Carel Fabritius, born in 1622 and killed thirty-two years later in the huge accidental explosion from which Thunderclap takes its title. The Dutch town of Delft was deafened and part-destroyed in the mid-morning of 12th October 1654, when the carelessness of a government official ignited stocks of gunpowder held in a vault near the center of the town. This is how Cumming describes the disaster:

Trees are torn from their roots, bodies lifted into the air in a torrential uprush. It takes a while for the living to rise up from the ground, stunned and terrified of another blast. Which comes, as 90,000 pounds of black gunpowder stored in barrels in the vault detonate in a rapid bombing pattern of explosions that rip through Delft, exactly as happened in the present century when the port of Beirut exploded, the sound heard as far away as Cyprus. Some citizens are tormented by tinnitus for weeks. Others are permanently deafened. (“Three,” p. 223)

Fabritius was carried severely injured from the ruins of his house and died shortly afterwards. It was the final tragedy of a tragic life, for he had lost his first wife in childbirth and three children to disease by then. Death came early and often in those days, but Cumming understands only the tragedy of that, not the implications for human evolution. Fabritius seems to have left no descendants: he failed genetically. But he triumphed memetically, because one thing survived from his shattered house. As Cumming describes on the final page of Thunderclap, modern scanning has revealed that his most famous painting was there on that thunderous day. But the fragments driven against it by the blast “did not split or shatter” its surface “because it was not dry.” No, “The Goldfinch was still wet, still drying, a work in progress like its maker, a living thing in the studio when Fabritius was dying.” (p. 256)

That’s a memorable image to end a memorable book, a celebration of some of the world’s greatest art and greatest artists in one of the world’s smallest and least geographically fortunate nations. Vermeer is celebrated in Thunderclap, of course, and Cumming casts a skilful and appreciative eye over masterpieces like View of Delft (c. 1660):

Zicht op Delft or View of Delft by Johannes Vermeer (c. 1660) (Wikipedia)

But she centers the book on Fabritius and does her best to give him some of Vermeer’s stature. I don’t think she succeeds. Yes, The Goldfinch is a masterpiece, but not at Vermeer’s level and I wouldn’t apply the same label to the rest of what has survived of Fabritius’s art. Instead, I’d call it strange and interesting. Perhaps if he had lived longer or painted more, his name would be better known today. But he was neither prolific nor fortunate, and it was obviously the tragedy and mystery of his life that drew Cumming to him. He’s a tragic hero, bereaved early and often before dying young and suddenly, having just created what would become a world-conquering piece of avian art. But I think a piece of vegetable art included in the book is greater than almost anything that has survived by Fabritius. It’s Still Life of Asparagus by Adriaen Coorte (c. 1665–c. 1707):

Coorte, Adriaen; Still Life of Asparagus; The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/still-life-of-asparagus-141862

Still Life of Asparagus or Stilleven met asperges by Adriaen Coorte (version in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

To invest a face or a finch or a flower with sublimity is high achievement for an artist. But higher still is to invest vegetables with sublimity. That’s what Coorte did in the still-life above. And in Laura Cumming’s own life, his painting would be a leap to the sublime from the ridiculous. How so? Well, she describes how she was studying literature at Oxford and went to see the “French philosopher Derrida” speak at the Modern Languages Faculty. But Derrida was delivering his “impeccably difficult lecture” in French and she felt ashamed not to follow it well. To console herself afterwards, she visited the Ashmolean Museum next door. It was there that she “saw a small painting glowing in a gallery dim with shadows.” It was her first encounter with the art of Coorte, whom she would come to regard as “the greatest” of “Dutch still-life painters”:

It showed a bunch of asparagus lying on a shelf, perhaps a dozen spears, running from white to silvery-green at the tips. This humble sheaf, tied up with string, is positioned at a curious tilt. But what strikes first and last is the black and white thunderclap — the obliterating darkness from which these stalks stand out in a light so bright it appears to come from within as well as from without. Young asparagus has that pale metallic sheen, as if it had stored up some internal power from growing up out of darkness. But this light was almost supernaturally bright, darting along the edge of the stone shelf like a laser, igniting the nubs and tips and woody root where the blade has sliced right through — such modest vegetables held in such glory. (“Two,” p. 139)

Those seven final words are an excellent summary of the appeal of Dutch art in the Golden Age: “such modest vegetables held in such glory.” The Protestantism of Vermeer and Rembrandt had replaced the Catholicism of Bosch and Van Eyck, the mundane had replaced the Madonna, but Dutch art was still celebrating miracles. Indeed, paintings like Coorte’s still-life make a miracle out of the mundane and the material. In a sense, he sanctified the bunch of asparagus, investing its color and shape and fleeting presence with an awe that escapes any hint of incongruity. Yes, the painting tells you, matter is miraculous and the modesty of Still Life of Asparagus multiplies the miracle.

Flowers in an Ornamental Vase or Bloemen in een siervaas by Maria van Oosterwijck (1670) (Wikipedia)

A couple of pages before that, there’s a fiery and flamboyant still-life of flowers by the female artist Maria van Oosterwijck (1630-93). It’s an excellent painting, full of color, detail and what Cumming rightly calls joie de vivre. But it isn’t full of genius in the way that Coorte’s “modest vegetables” are. And that raises another question that Guardianistas like Cumming do not like to ask or even acknowledge. Why is genius so much a male phenomenon? Why do men invent and innovate on a scale and over a range far beyond women?

More particularly — and more unspeakably still for Guardianistas — why do White men have such a disproportionate share of genius? As Charles Murray said, “97% of human accomplishment since the 14th century occurred from men born” in that north European hexagon with its corners over lowland Scotland, Denmark, central Europe, central Italy, southern France and southern England. It’s a hexagon of White male genius: there has been no female Vermeer just as there has been no female Mozart or female Newton.[3] Guardianistas would of course attribute that over-achievement of White men entirely to culture, contingency and male evil, because their leftist dogmas state that all human groups, men and women, Whites and Blacks, gays and straights, are the same under the skin and should therefore succeed or fail at exactly the same rates.

“A team of brilliant women”

That isn’t true and leftists don’t in fact behave as though it’s true. That’s why they believe that male evil explains male success and White evil explains White success. While leftists preach equality, they practise hierarchy, because they believe in privilege for their pets, like women and Muslims, and punishment for their enemies, like men and Christians. That’s why they’re concerned about unequal outcomes only when their favorites are on the losing side. When their favorites are on the winning side, inequality ceases to matter. You can see that double standard in the book under review. In the acknowledgements, Cumming thanks “a team of brilliant women” at her publisher Chatto & Windus, which is now dominated by women like most big publishers in the English-speaking world. Is that female domination a good thing? Of course it is! Does it represent prejudice against men and self-centered scheming by women? Of course it doesn’t! Unlike men, women dominate on merit, not malevolence. Those are the answers you’d get from leftists. But female domination of modern publishing isn’t a good thing. For a start, women are less adventurous and more censorious than men. I don’t think Thunderclap would have been as lyrical or as emotionally rich if it had written by Edward Dutton, but it would have been far more insightful, far more thought-provoking and far readier to ask uncomfortable questions about the racial, sexual and cultural patterns in the art it addresses.

Brilliant Female Publishing: Europe becomes the Black Continent for these travel-guides by Dorling Kindersley

But Dutton’s iconoclasm and intellectual buccaneering are  precisely why the “team of brilliant women” at Chatto would reject any book by him about any aspect of European art or culture. Dutton is a racist, sexist and homophobe with, for leftists, unspeakably wicked ideas about genetics, psychology and racial difference. He belongs to a thoroughly unfavored group, that of the White Heterosexual Able-bodied Male or WHAM. So we have the irony of a modern publishing world where it’s women deciding what can be said about the work of White male geniuses like Vermeer and Rembrandt. But I need to give Cumming her due: she isn’t hostile to WHAMs in this book. She doesn’t belong to the Culture of Critique and she doesn’t shoehorn slavery or colonialism anywhere into her analysis. She celebrates Dutch culture and the Dutch throughout rather than denigrating or deconstructing them.

No risk of wrath

And the book is, in part, a celebration of the WHAM responsible for her own existence: her father James Cumming (1922-91), a Scottish modernist painter who helped waken her love of art and of Dutch art in particular. I don’t like the paintings by him reproduced here, but I did like the irony of the final image in the book being a detail from his colorful painting Chromosomes II. Cumming muses on the painting and its title earlier in the book:  “Chroma: colour. Soma: body.” (p. 108) But she doesn’t acknowledge and would never admit that real chromosomes underlie what is celebrated in her book: the embodied genius of White men who could capture color and shape so skilfully on canvas.

The color of chromosomes: how race is obvious in genetic geometry

Her father wasn’t a genius, but it’s perfectly understandable that she should seek to celebrate him and make his art more widely known. He’s family and leftists don’t condemn Whites who celebrate and defend their own family. But they do condemn Whites who celebrate and defend their super-family, that is, their race. Cumming runs no risk of leftist wrath in Thunderclap. She doesn’t celebrate her own race or even acknowledge its existence. She presents Dutch artistic genius as though it emerged ex nihilo and owed nothing to genetics or evolution. That’s why she doesn’t write as richly as Dutton might have done. It’s also why her book won’t be read as richly by Guardianistas as it is by racists and sexists like me.

Deliberate disaster

But her book won’t be read as regretfully by Guardianistas either. I both relished and regretted the celebration of Dutch artistic genius in Thunderclap. What did I regret? I regretted what I knew lay ahead for the nation of Vermeer, Rembrandt and Fabritius. A much slower and much more insidious disaster awaited Holland than that accidental detonation of gunpowder stocks in 1654. And it wasn’t an accidental disaster. No, it was the deliberate opening of Holland’s borders to the Third World. Laura Cumming can feel the tragedy of Carel Fabritius losing his wife and children in the seventeenth century. Why can she not feel the tragedy of the native White Dutch losing their nation in the twentieth-first century?

And not just losing their nation: losing it to groups of far lower intelligence and far less achievement. Non-White groups like Moroccan Muslims didn’t give the world sublime art when they lived in their homelands and the magic dirt of Holland hasn’t enabled them to do so after they moved there. What they excel at is not art or invention, but violent crime, welfare dependency, fraud and political corruption. Like Britain, Holland has Muslim rape-gangs and, like Britain again, Holland has leftists enabling and excusing the rape-gangs. Cumming discusses and praises female artists like Maria van Oosterwijck and Rachel Ruysch in her book. But what about the female descendants of those Dutch female greats? Those descendants are at risk and under attack in ways that their ancestress-artists could never have foreseen. Because who could have foreseen in the Dutch Golden Age that the civilized Christian Netherlands, newly liberated from Catholic Spain, would open its borders to Muslim barbarians?

Genius and genetic pacification

Cumming regrets vanished art again and again in Thunderclap, like “the treasury of Golden Age art lost [aboard ship] off Finland in 1771 on its way to Catherine the Great in Russia.” (p. 129) She laments that “Dutch painters are always in debt, verging on destitution: Van Goyen, De Hooch, Fabritius, Vermeer, Rembrandt above all.” (p. 191) But she doesn’t regret or lament what is happening to the whole of Holland in the twenty-first century: submersion beneath a mud-flood and the conversion of what could have been a golden future into something quite different. Now Holland’s future, like Britain’s, threatens to be a bloody chaos of civil war and ethnic cleansing.

But perhaps the atrocities of Holland’s future were predictable from the art of Holland’s past. The art discussed and displayed in Thunderclap is sublime, subtle, spiritual. But it could also be described as subdued and even subjugated. It occasionally contains soldiers but it isn’t martial or militant. It has genius but also gentleness, because it expresses the psychology of a genetically pacified people who had lived for many centuries under a strong state that executed criminals and protected the law-abiding. That’s genetic pacification: a strong state removes genes for violence, sensation-seeking and criminality even as it protects genes for self-control, industry and resistance to boredom. So was this painting by Carel Fabritius an unintended prophecy of Holland’s future?

The Sentry or De poort bewaker by Carel Fabritius (1654) (Wikipedia)

What does The Sentry mean? Art-critics are still arguing about that: as Cumming says, it “is the most enigmatic of Fabritius’s scant few works.” (p. 159) But it could be read as an unintentional allegory of Holland asleep as traitors prepared to release the mud-flood of unassimilable and under-achieving tribalists from the non-White regions like Turkey, Morocco and the Moluccas (a former Dutch colony today part of Indonesia). Those non-White homelands have never produced a Vermeer or a Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist who also appears in Thunderclap. He’ll remind some readers that Holland has oversized achievements in science and technology too. Holland’s heritage is mighty and worth fighting for.

And it will be fought for, because the true White Dutch are not dead. The genius of Vermeer, Van Eyck, Rembrandt and the rest now has to be seen not as ars gratia artis, “art for the sake of art,” but as ars gratia Martis, “art for the sake of Mars.” If the White Dutch want to retain their nation and the glories of its art, they will have to fight. And I think they will fight. When I read Thunderclap, I found it impossible to believe that a nation capable of such greatness would ever be defeated by enemies of such inferiority. That’s the final of the racist messages in Thunderclap that its Guardianista author never intended to put there.

[1]  This painting doesn’t appear in Thunderclap, but I needed something both skilful and skullful.

[2]  Vermeer was not properly recognized outside the Netherlands until long after his day, but his art has now conquered the world.

[3]  As the provocateur Camille Paglia once put it: “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

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.

9023 words

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.