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The Willing Dupes and Traitors of the Flowerman People: The Suicidal White War on Western Civilization

May 9, 2026/12 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Civilization, Western Culture/by Pierre Simon

He who permits himself to tell a lie once,
finds it much easier to do it a second and third time,
till at length it becomes habitual.
Thomas Jefferson

A major Jewish group evolutionary strategy used to weaken the competitiveness of a majority White society and on a larger scale, Western civilization, is cultural Marxism, a core mechanism that reduces anti-Semitism and enhances Jewish competitive success by breaking the collective resistance and viability of the White race, making it easier to control, exploit, or replace.[1]^{, [2]}

Its creators insisted on the need to hide the real purpose of their project under the cover of innocent and positive sounding words, respectability, and especially “science,” an indispensable universal method of inquiry, which they have hijacked and corrupted for their own needs.

This racial project is thus forced on the public in a stealth fashion by sophisticated social engineering techniques through education, books, mainstream media, movies, TV series, sitcoms, and government propaganda.

As summarized by archeologist Dr. Timothy Ives, this psychological weapon of mass destruction “was the outgrowth of the anti-empirical Frankfurt school that viewed the role of a scholar as a social critic without the need to validate any of his claims.”[3]

To break the spirit of the White race, in his article Mass Propaganda in the War Against Bigotry (1947),[4] Jewish American psychologist Samuel H. Flowerman recommends, and I quote, the “diminishment of cultural pride and self-esteem” and to do this dirty work, the sponsorship of “willing dupes or traitors.” [5],[6] But don’t be fooled by the intended “war on bigotry.” This is not a noble effort motivated by a sincere concern to fight racism. As shown in a previous article, Moses, the First “Führer” in History: Jewish Racial Consciousness and Supremacism, no one is more bigoted than this subset of Jews, aka the “Flowerman people” in this article.

Schools and universities, which are mostly staffed with White Flowerman-led cultural Marxist ideologues, with some teachers from the Third World, play a huge role in the spreading of this fake war on bigotry.[7] Even pre-school White children are being brainwashed; by the time they finish university, they hate themselves and their race to the point of wanting to destroy their own kind in the following spirit taken from an anonymous meme called “Meanwhile at a Random University.” A “Nazi” in this diatribe is a conservative who doesn’t want the future these ’Babel stooges” are preparing; he prefers meat to crickets, he’s for God, reason, freedom, law and order, family, and nation. On the other hand, leftists are programmed to say things like the following:

I hate Nazis, they can’t think for themselves!!! They’re just brainwashed sheep who follow racist dogmas and do everything their shepherd’s command!!! They’re also insensitive anti-Semites, misogynous, bigots, homophobic, fascists and should be all jailed!!!

Auschwitz, slavery, and colonialism are some of the better-known historical mischiefs that serve this purpose. What willing dupes and traitors are teaching in schools about European civilization and its accomplishments is another lesser-known evolutionary strategy used to diminish the cultural pride and self-esteem of the Flowerman people’s main competitors.

To break White man’s will for power and weaken his competitiveness, everything about his exceptional civilization is downplayed and demonized while non-Western achievements are elevated to nonsensical levels “in violation of the most basic protocols of scholarly research, evidence, and standards,” notes Dr. Ricardo Duchesne, former Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, the author of Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age.[8]

A Flowerman Derrida-type of postmodernist rhetoric is routinely used to “confuse, detract from, or avoid facing the overwhelming evidence standing in opposition to their absurd claims,” asserts Dr. Duchesne, “sources are misused, books are misread, the evidence is grossly misinterpreted, facts are concealed, the principles of historical objectivity and respect for scholarship are trashed in order to enhance the imagined merits of multiculturalism inside European created cultures.”[9]

Darwinian theory and evolutionary psychology are erased from the discourse in an effort to prove that there is only one race, the human race.[10] Egalitarianism being the sacred cow of the “Babel stooges,” obviously, they go to great lengths with this abuse of the historical profession in order to prove with their bogus ideas that all civilizations are equal and that European civilization was not exceptional. As noted by Dr. Duchesne,

What is going on here cannot be attributed to mere empirical incompleteness and understandable errors of judgment. Our students today may be said to be the targets of deep-seated educational efforts to impose a multicultural view of Europe’s history, that is heavily infused with fabrications and the mistreatment of scholarly sources.[11]

To do this dirty job of deconstruction and rewriting of world history in accordance with the interests of the Flowerman people, even though existing research does not validate their perspective, the willing dupes and traitors of this trickery are paid handsomely, covered with laurels and gifts, and awarded with generous research grants. In exchange for betraying their own race, they become the prominent professors at Ivy League universities in the U.S. and at prestigious universities throughout the West; they are given lucrative positions at prestigious think tanks and on the board of large corporations; their books and articles are spread far and wide by the mostly Flowerman-owned publishers and media; these evil dupes of the chosen people are highly praised by their peers who repeat blindly to their students every one of their obvious lies; their opinion is the accepted truth and almost no one dares challenge them without dire consequences for their career and advancement.[12]

Professor Duchesne, for example, a man highly esteemed by his students, the author of several scholarly books, was like all his like-minded colleagues in other universities and in other fields, dragged in the mud and ostracized by his weak and feeble-minded, willing-dupe, traitorous colleagues, and forced into early retirement for criticizing this farce disguised in science.[13]

Pseudoscience is the right term for the kind of science these willing dupes and traitors are professing. They have hijacked science to serve their miscreant needs. True to Lenin’s favourite saying, “The end justifies the means,” these useful idiots forcibly adjust reality to the ideas they want to impose on the world.

So, what is it then about European civilization they want people to believe?

For understandable reasons, from their point of view, they first divided history into two periods, before and after the Western Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century.

Before the Industrial Revolution

There was nothing exceptional about Europe, so they tell us. It did not possess any cultural attributes that could be contrasted to other world cultures. Many parts of Asia, especially China, had equal if not superior technologies in guns, ships, textiles, metallurgy, and agriculture. The world economy was in fact dominated by China.[14] Moreover, the science of Copernicus, Kepler, Laplace, Descartes, and Bacon had their equivalents in other civilizations — it was a global phenomenon. As for the intellectual movements of Ancient Greece, they originated from Africa and the Near East. In short, according to the “willing dupes and traitors” who profess this fantasy, “the Eurocentric claim that Europe with its exceptional culture and institutions created a higher level of technical and scientific proficiency is no more than a myopic perspective lacking a global vision. … The major transformations of history are due to world connections and two-way cultural influences.”[15]

Everything until then, so they tell us, was therefore fair and square, everyone had his word to say, and every civilization shared equally in the artistic, scientific, technical, economic, philosophical, and moral advances that were made. If any divergence existed, it was primarily due to different competitive and ecological pressures. From this perspective, what spoiled it all, what made the European civilization different than others happened after the Industrial Revolution.

After the Industrial Revolution

After this crucial turning point of history, so they tell us, Europeans, for some unexplainable reason, lost their mind and started exploring the world and forming colonies here and there in order to plunder the natural resources of these newly discovered territories. “Pale faces” killed, raped, and enslaved the peaceful and noble savages of these regions, aka, the Third World. That’s how they got rich and how they managed to get ahead in all aspects of life. They basically pounced on other cultures and stole everything they had.

In short, if today’s Third-World countries are going nowhere, it’s mainly because the White slave nations emptied it of its lifeblood before building their industrial revolutions on the profits of slavery and then plundering them through colonial exploitation. This is, of course, a fantasy as shown in Slavery and Colonialism. Are Whites responsible for the Stagnation of Africa and Blacks in General.

Races, which are cultural constructs, so they tell us, had absolutely nothing to do with it. There are no innate influences on behaviour, in other words, that could give one race an edge on the others. There is only one race, the human race, and we are all equal under the skin and in the head, according to the willing dupes and traitors of the Flowerman people: “This is so because we say so. There is no need to validate any of our claims. Science is what we choose it to be. And if you don’t like it, we’ll shame you, dox you, send our Antifa attack dogs against you, get you fired from your job, call you a racist, a bigot, an anti-Semite, a fascist, a Nazi, and a White supremacist.” This is, of course, fear-mongering, intimidation, and another fantasy.

The Role of Biology

Whites are endowed with unique characteristics that demoralized and subdued Whites who think of themselves as the scum of the earth should consider before depreciating themselves and bowing down to Third-World invaders and the willing dupes and traitors of the Flowerman people.[16]

Truth be told, Whites “originated and developed all the disciplinary fields of knowledge taught in our universities: archeology, botany, economics, sociology, anthropology, history, biology, chemistry, genetics, physics, geology, philosophy, geography—all of them including theology,” as Dr. Duchesne shows in his most recent book, Greatness and Ruin.[17]

According to Dr. Charles Murray, the author of Human Accomplishments: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950:

97% of accomplishments in science, whether measured in people or events, occurred in Europe and North America from 800 BC to 1950. The sheer number of significant figures in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilizations. In literature, the number in the West is 835; whereas in India the Arab world, China and Japan combined, the number is 293. In the visual arts, it is 477 for the West as compared to 192 for China and Japan combined (with no significant figures listed for India and the Arab World). In music, the lack of a tradition of named composers in non-Western civilizations means that the Western total of 522 significant figures has no real competition at all.[18]

As Joseph Sobran said in 1997:

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel no hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call “minorities.”[19]

These are facts you are not allowed to state in universities and schools.[20] The willing dupes and traitors of the Flowerman people will not allow it. Why? Stuck on their mantra “race is a social construct,” they cannot admit that the European civilization is the greatest civilization the world has ever known precisely because of one word: biology. Races are real, and they are not equal in aptitudes. As shown in the following articles, some races such as the White race are in fact more intelligent, more adventurous, and more creative than others.[21]^, [22]

Race is Real

DeepSeek on Race, Egalitarianism, Jews, the Rulers of the World and the Solution to the Problems They Cause.)

“We are indeed,” laments Dr. Duchesne, “in the midst of one of the most paradoxical phenomena ever witnessed: the very civilization that insisted more than any other that truthfulness requires impartial reasoning and a ‘weight of evidence’ approach is now fabricating facts to fit with an ideological agenda.”[23]

In the end, you could say, as Dr. Duchesne states in his book, Greatness and Ruin, that this fabrication of facts is a “deeply embedded expression of the emancipatory project of Western liberalism itself,” [24] and you wouldn’t be wrong either, if you added, as stated by Dr. Kevin MacDonald and others,[25]^{, [26]} that the emancipatory project of liberalism, which came to fruition in the 1960s, was deeply imbued with cultural Marxism and decisively promoted by its Jewish overlords as Jews rose to elite status throughout the West. They are the “Flowerman people” as described in this article.

[1] Kerry Bolton, PhD, The Perversion of Normality. From the Marquis de Sade to Cyborgs, Arktos, 2021.

[2] Kevin MacDonald, PhD, The Culture of Critique. An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, 3^rd Edition, Antelope Hill Publishing, 2025.

[3] Cited by Bruce Gilley, PhD, The Case for Colonialism, New English Review Press2023, p. 256.

[4] Samuel H. Flowerman, PhD, “Mass Propaganda and the War Against Bigotry,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 42 (4), Oct 1977, pp. 429-439.

[5] Andrew Joyce, PhD, “Modify the standards of the in-group: On Jews and Mass Communications,” The Occidental Observer, January 14, 2020/24.

[6] Kevin MacDonald, PhD, “Samuel H. Flowerman: Pathologizing White Ethnocentrism in the Mass Media,” Culture of Critique, work cited, p. 386 to 393.

[7] Kerry Bolton, PhD, Revolution from Above. Manufacturing “Dissent” in the New World Order, Arktos, 2011.

[8] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, Arktos, 2019, p. 103.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Kevin MacDonald, PhD, work cited.

[11] Ibid., p.104.

[12] Kerry Bolton, PhD, Revolution from Above. Manufacturing ‘Dissent’ in the New World Order, Arktos, 2011.

[13] Kerry Bolton, PhD, The Tyranny of Human Rights. From Jacobinism to the United Nations, Antelope Publishers, 2022, p. 379-381.

[14] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, Faustian Man, work cited, p. 75.

[15] Ibid., p. 105.

[16] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Brill, 2011; see also his latest book, Greatness and Ruin: Self-Reflection and Universalism within European Civilization, Antelope Hill, March 28, 2025.

[17] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, Greatness and Ruin. Self-Reflexion and Universalism Within European Civilization, Antelope Hill Publishing, 2025, p. 263.

[18] Charles Murray, PhD, Human accomplishments: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950, Harper Collins, 2003.

[19] Gregory Hood, “Resentment and Race,” American Renaissance, April 13, 2022.

[20] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, Greatness and Ruin. Self-reflection and Universalism Within European Civilization, Antelope Hill Publishing, 2024, p. 264.

[21] Charles Murray, PhD, Human Diversity. The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, TWELVE, 2020, cited by Ricardo Duchesne in Faustian Man, p. 193.

[22] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, Brill, 2011; see also his latest book, Greatness and Ruin: Self-Reflection and Universalism within European Civilization, Antelope Hill, March 28, 2025.

[23] Ricardo Duchesne, PhD, Greatness and Ruin. Self-reflection and Universalism Within European Civilization, Antelope Hill Publishing, 2024, p. 264.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Kevin MacDonald, PhD, The Culture of Critique. An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, 3^rd Edition, Antelope Hill Publishing, 2025.

[26] Kerry Bolton, PhD, The Perversion of Normality. From the Marquis de Sade to Cyborgs, Arktos, 2021.

Such Skill Beneath the Skull: Celebrating the White Genius of Dutch Art

May 8, 2026/14 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Tobias Langdon

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.”

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

May 3, 2026/8 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Max West

6075 words

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VI. Christmas Adventurers Club

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lockjaw: No, sir…

Throckmorton: Have you ever engaged in an interracial relationship?

Lockjaw: No, sir.

Throckmorton: And you are American-born by Gentile?

Lockjaw: Yes, sir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. Racialized Sexuality as Revolutionary Political Activism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DiCaprio agrees and then Anderson adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

“One Battle After Another FYC — Paul Thomas Anderson in conversation,” YouTube, uploaded by Nolan Archives, December 31, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8Q35vXE9bI.
“Paul Thomas Anderson on Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown,” YouTube, uploaded by Xixax TV, January 6, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VSACkqh9a4.
“We talked real cinema with Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson,” YouTube, uploaded by Konbini, December 8, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8WW4jJ59d4.
Abramovitch, Seth. “Benicio Del Toro on Bonding With Leo, Rewriting PTA and His First Oscar Nom in Decades,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 23, 2026, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/benicio-del-toro-interview-one-battle-after-another-oscars-1236510776/.
Arblaster, Jeremy. 2022. “The Romantic Listlessness of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.” Little White Lies, September 1, 2022. https://lwlies.com/in-praise-of/the-master-10
Aron, Raymond (1957). The Opium of the Intellectuals. Translated by Terence Kilmartin. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Bell, Daniel (1960). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Thomas Pynchon. Chelsea House, 2003.
Bowie, Desiree. “Maya Rudolph’s Influence on ‘One Battle After Another’ – Plus 10 Fun Facts You Might’ve Missed,” Danger Bowie, September 30, 2025, https://dangerbowie.com/2025/09/30/one-battle-after-another-fun-facts/.
Brody, Richard. “The Real Battle of “One Battle After Another,” The New Yorker, October 7, 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-real-battle-of-one-battle-after-another.
Burrough, Bryan (2015). Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. New York: Penguin Books.
Cuddihy, John Murray (1974). The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity. New York: Harper & Row.
Dohrn, Zayd Ayers. “My Childhood in the Weather Underground,” The New Yorker, March 28, 2026, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/my-childhood-in-the-weather-underground.
Douthat, Ross. “One Battle After Another Fails the Urgency Test,” National Review, October 23, 2025, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/12/one-battle-after-another-fails-the-urgency-test/.
Dulberg, Zack & Max Horder. “Why Progressives Increasingly Support Violence,” City Journal, April 14 2025, https://www.city-journal.org/article/progressives-political-violence-donald-trump-assassination-attempt.
Fear, David. “How Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio Made ‘One Battle After Another’,” Rolling Stone, September 27, 2025, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/paul-thomas-anderson-leonardo-di-caprio-one-battle-after-another-interview-1235425735/.
Goi, Leonardo. “In Sunny Southland: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon’s California,” Mubi, November 24, 2025, https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/in-sunny-southland-paul-thomas-anderson-and-thomas-pynchon-s-california.
Green, McKenzie N. (2025). “Examining racial identity invalidation and well-being among Biracial adolescents using the identity capital model,” Journal of Research on Adolescence, 35, e70084, https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.70084.
Green, Sam, and Bill Siegel, dirs. The Weather Underground. United States: The Free History Project, 2002.
Hadis, Diego. “Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men — and Hypercompetent Women,” New York Times, 1/14/2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/magazine/movies-hapless-men-hypercompetent-women.html.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Assata Shakur,” New York Times, December 16, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/16/magazine/assata-shakur-activist.html.
Hughes, Mark. “Review: ‘One Battle After Another’ Enters The Oscar Race As Mixed Bag,” Forbes, September 27, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2025/09/27/review-one-battle-after-another-enters-the-oscar-race-as-mixed-bag.
Jones, Ellen E. “Jezebels, race kink and Cardi B: in One Battle After Another, Black women are still stereotypes,” The Guardian, September 29, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/29/jezebels-race-kink-and-cardi-b-in-one-battle-after-another-black-women-are-still-stereotypes-paul-thomas-anderson.
Kengor, Paul. “RIP Larry Grathwohl, Weather Underground Infiltrator,” The American Spectator, July 26, 2013, https://spectator.org/55174_rip-larry-grathwohl-weather-underground-infiltrator/.
LeBeau, Ariel. “One Battle After Another Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Most Personal Film,” GQ, September 23, 2025, https://www.gq.com/story/one-battle-after-another-is-paul-thomas-andersons-most-personal-film.
Lichter, S. Robert & Stanley Rothman. “Jews on the Left: The Student Movement Reconsidered”, Polity, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Winter, 1981), pp. 347-366.
Lordi, Emily J. (2020). The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
MacDonald, Kevin (1998). The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Westport, CT:
Mendelson, Edward (ed.). Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978).
O’Connell, Mikey. “Teyana Taylor Takes Over,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 5, 2025, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/teyana-taylor-interview-alls-fair-one-battle-after-another-1236417835/.
Phillips, Maya. “The Politics of ‘One Battle After Another’ Are Clear on One Point,” New York Times, March 16, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/movies/one-battle-after-another-black-sexuality.html.
Radish, Christina. “Paul Thomas Anderson on Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis,” Collider, February 9, 2018, https://collider.com/paul-thomas-anderson-interview-phantom-thread-daniel-day-lewis/.
Reeves, Hope. “The Popcorn Resistance of ‘One Battle After Another’,” New York Times, March 8, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/opinion/one-battle-after-another-weathermen.html.
Rudd, Mark (2009). Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. HarperCollins.
Rudd, Mark. “Why Were There So Many Jews In SDS? (Or, The Ordeal Of Civility),” talk presented at the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society, November 2005, https://www.markrudd.com/indexcd39.html?about-mark-rudd/why-were-there-so-many-jews-in-sds-or-the-ordeal-of-civility.html
Rufo, Christopher F. “The Left-Wing Terror Memeplex,” City Journal, September 30, 2025, https://www.city-journal.org/article/left-wing-political-violence-terror.
Ruimy, Jordan. “PTA Confirms He Did Rewrites on ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ and ‘Napoleon’,” World of Reel, September 24, 2025, https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2025/9/24/pta-confirms-he-did-rewrites-on-killers-of-the-flower-moon-and-napoleon.
Sailer, Steve. America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance”. VDARE Foundation, 2009.
Scruton, Roger. “Why I became a conservative,” The New Criterion, Vol. 21, No. 6, February 2003, https://newcriterion.com/article/why-i-became-a-conservative/.
Trubey, David. “Tents cleared from park ahead of movie filming, Sacramento Homeless Union says,” ABC10, February 10, 2024, https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/sacramento/sacramento-movie-super-bowl-festivities/103-3c15a421-4cc8-4385-b303-aacb7212898c.
Van de Camp, Morris. “The Terrorist Left of the 1970s,” Counter-Currents, October 20, 2020, https://counter-currents.com/2020/10/the-terrorist-left-of-the-1970s/
Varon, Jeremy (2004). Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California.
Voegelin, Eric (1952). The New Science of Politics: An Introduction.The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
White, Armond. “There Will Be Bloodlust in One Battle After Another,” National Review, September 26, 2025, https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/there-will-be-bloodlust-in-one-battle-after-another/.
Wolfe, Tom (1970). Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 2, 2026/4 Comments/in Featured Articles, Western Culture/by Max West

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.

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]