Social justice warrior ricer gadget platform Gizmodo has called for censorship of the Discord chat client. Discord is rapidly replacing Skype and internet relay chat (IRC) among PC gamers, political junkies, and well-connected people due to the seamless integration between text and voice along with the collapse of Skype after being purchased by Microsoft. The social justice warriors and cultural Marxists will stop at nothing until every possible forum for dissent is reduced to singing hymns to a portrait of a dear supreme leader who would love to send anyone who annoys him, including antifa nags, to reeducation camps as work will set them free.
Way back in 2002, Take Two Entertainment released an extremely violent and controversial game called State of Emergency. It was similar to their Grand Theft Auto franchise because the character could roam freely and rampage, indulging in murder and mayhem.
State of Emergency increased the violence in Grand Theft Auto to the point where you could run through the mall killing everyone with a flamethrower or cut off heads with a Samurai sword and then beat other people up using the decapitated head as a club. Extra points are given for destroying windows. The entire game is basically a violent, destructive and nihilistic riot.
As it becomes clear that censorship is rampant on social media, Reddit is the latest company to stumble when its news channel censored all mention of the Orlando Pulse gay nightclub terrorist attack. According to users, the site removed all conversation about the event — including requests for a blood drive.
#Metalgate explodes in full bloom as the gloves are off: SJWs, who call themselves “Social Justice Warriors” but are more accurately referred to as “Safespace Jihad Worriers,” are using mass messages on Facebook — and secret, anonymous profiles — to coordinate to mass-complain about anti-censorship Facebook accounts.
During the last 48 hours, accounts belonging to Brett Stevens and Richard Corbin, founder of the Anti-Censorship group Make Baltimore – NO PLAY ZONE!, have been deleted by Facebook after receiving hundreds of complaints coordinated by Safespace Jihad Worriers (SJWs). The Baltimore group has been under a lesser form of attack as SJWs have swarmed it to post negative messages, memes and pornography in the hope of getting the group banned. Facebook, which itself vigorously supports certain kinds of censorship and nagging nanny content restrictions, has complied despite these accounts not having anti-immigrant speech at all.
In the meantime, rumors about as to who is the mystery “MAS” or “ALS” who coordinates the hidden group, which is reminiscent of both the JournoList scandal and the foundations of #metalgate. In the meantime, SJWs such as Mary Spiro, whose daughter reportedly dates Bestial Evil guitarist Shawn Rucker II and who book shows in Baltimore with rumored political intent, can be seen justifying the mass attacks via Facebook:
In the middle of #metalgate, we are familiar with regular outrages as SJWs attempt to silence anyone who does not agree with their narrow-minded, politically-motivated viewpoint which they use as a means to achieve personal power by delighting in the destruction of others. Before this creepy behavior moved into the spotlight, its roots could be seen in an early incident involving the black metal band Nyogthaeblisz:
In the build-up to the fest, the usual rush for the aspiring pretentious festival goer to research all of the bands playing so they wouldn’t get caught looking ignorant was on. Chaos In Tejas attracted a variety of types to the festival. One of the more unfortunate types are the “I still think punk is a platform to fight the good fight politically” PC punk type.
The 2012 edition featured anarchopunk legends The Mob & Antisect, so the festival promised to have more PC crust punks than usual in attendance. As kids started to research the lineup, they found “irregularities” in Nyogthaeblisz’s background. First, they were on the label Satanic Skinhead Propaganda. The label, run by the oft maligned Antichrist Kramer, had a reputation for releasing questionable / sketchy music. Second, Nyogthaeblisz’s lyrics made crushing commentary about the Jewish faith, though not specifically limited to it. The criticism / outcry from many parties quickly became deafening.
The height of this outcry was when The Mob / Antisect both threatened to walk out of the festival and drop if Nyogthaeblisz was not dropped. Eventually, the festival’s promoters made a tactical decision and relented. They dropped Nyogthaeblisz. For the PC types, this was seen as a victory. Defeating the evil that is intolerance and racism wherever they may find it.
Nowhere else has the problem been more clearly documented: invaders from the long-dead punk scene, where people buy bands for “the message” despite low musical quality for the past twenty-five years, muscled into a metal festival and used their media power to force removal of an act singing about a fairly middle-of-the-road black metal message, which is a critique of Abrahamic religions (Nyogthaeblisz targets Christianity, Judaism and Islam as being the same philosophy).
While many of us are sensitive about people who dislike Jews, remembering the horrors of Kristallnacht and The Holocaust, this does not insulate any religion from criticism no matter how minority its status. The whole point of religious toleration is to allow ideas to be compared, and this includes defense of those who are critical of religion or specific religions. “No gods, no masters” is OK in the PC world, but saying “not this god” is not.
Their use of the term irregularities brings to mind a group who, in the name of a Good ideology, killed over 100 million people, many of them in death camps. Their favorite tactic was to kill off the intellectuals and leaders in any field and then replace them with politically-obedient substitutes. This group was the Communists, whose idea of universal equality and ownership by the people of the means of wealth sounds good on paper, at least. You can just see a Commissar, in uniform with pistol at his side, saying “Comrade Nyogthaeblisz, vee haf found some… irregularities… in your papers. Please come with us now,” before the train to Siberia or the guillotine departs.
This mentality was described extremely well centuries ago by Fred “God is Dead” Nietzsche:
There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge.
Thus I speak to you in a parable—you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.
The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise. “What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge”—thus they speak to each other. “We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not”—thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. “And ‘will to equality’ shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!”
You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy—perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers—erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.
What was silent in the father speaks in the son; and often I found the son the unveiled secret of the father.
They are like enthusiasts, yet it is not the heart that fires them—but revenge. And when they become elegant and cold, it is not the spirit but envy that makes them elegant and cold. Their jealousy leads them even on the paths of thinkers; and this is the sign of their jealousy: they always go too far, till their weariness must in the end lie down to sleep in the snow. Out of every one of their complaints sounds revenge; in their praise there is always a sting, and to be a judge seems bliss to them.
But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.
The article adds a nice analysis of the situation from a neutral viewpoint:
What happened to Nyogthaeblisz was a textbook case of what people who are intolerant of intolerance do. You’ve heard stories about Antifa protests at shows over the years. Antifa members calling the police (the ultimate cardinal sin in the subculture) on shows they protest, intimidating attendees of shows they protest, and threatening promoters for their bookings of questionable acts. None of this is okay. This kind of Kristallnacht, lynch mob, seeing red mentality at the mere possibility of questionable content is not okay. Nyogthaeblisz was judged and attacked without even getting to issue a statement in their defense. The biggest tragedy of the anti-racist position is the claim of a higher understanding / intelligence that their racist opposition lacks. If this higher understanding / intelligence truly existed, the research on Nyogthaeblisz would not have stopped at Anti-Jewish, but arrived at Anti-Abrahamic. What happened to Nyogthaeblisz wasn’t the triumph of good over evil. It was one side becoming what they hated to root out an entity that they did not understand.
This is the face of the SJW: someone who has failed at life or at least is less important than they think they are, demanding to be made important through ideology and their ability to summon a hate-mob to destroy others who have achieved what the SJWs have not. Nyogthaeblisz’s real sin was not having the wrong views, but succeeding without having an SJW ideology and lifestyle. That is the face of the group that wants to take over metal, replace its leaders with SJWs, and forever turn it into a mediocrity like hardcore has been since SJWs took over there.
Despite being mostly in favor of the SJW infiltration of heavy metal, media sources sometimes reveal skepticism of this rigid mind-meld that is replacing quality metal with an inferior but politically-correct substitute. In fact, the political correctness is merely a method of inducing you to buy it because it has the right “message,” while ignoring the low artistic quality of the material as a whole.
But the SJWs don’t know that. They are not unique, having appeared first in the 1980s with a group that would not call itself politically-correct but acted the same way as today’s SJWs. As hardcore waned, local scenes arose in which people wanted to participate for social reasons: to be popular, find dates, have parties. Their music was not ground-breaking, so they took over with superior numbers, and used politics as a means of filtering out all other music. Thus they triumphed, and promptly made punk so boring it self-destructed in dissipation.
Today’s SJWs are not history students of hardcore punk or any other subject. Their goal is to make themselves important, and to seize control of a genre they think will give them social power, but they cannot replicate its greatness nor understand it, and so they are doomed to failure. What do they care, however — they will simply move on to the next genre, take it over, and have their five years of glory there too before covering up those tats and going to a cubicle job just like everyone else.
But doubt is spreading already. In an editorial over at Stereogum, Michael Nelson launches into the usual SJW rhetoric, and then does something really interesting. The article is a top 50 of metal of the year, but as is typical these days, it must editorialize. So he makes an introduction and then cuts to the real topic on his mind:
But mostly, more than ever before, metal found its very character scrutinized by a hyper-aware, politically divided public — a public largely informed by metrics-focused media outlets eager to weigh in on the issues of the day. This was a carryover from late 2014, when popular blogs like Metal Injection and Metalsucks ran essays with titles like “The Problem With Heavy Metal Is Metalheads: Stop Calling Everyone A Faggot” and “Why Is It Okay To Be Racist And Misogynistic About Babymetal?” And in 2015, the takes arrived on an almost daily basis, via articles like “Racism And Sexism In Heavy Metal Highlighted In New Study” and “Why Is The Convicted Murderer Of A Gay Man Being Celebrated At A Major Metal Festival?“
This past July, renowned metal journalist (and occasional Stereogum contributor) Adrien Begrand wrote a piece for Pop Matters titled “Some Talk, No Action,” putting the entire metal community on blast for failing to effectively flush out certain musicians whose art and/or actions seemed to suggest some form of bigotry or separatist ideology. Begrand called out by name such bands as Cobalt, Inquisition, Lord Mantis, and Bölzer, but he extended the indictment to include countless participants — primarily the media and fans who support (or fail to condemn) any artists who support (or fail to condemn) intolerant worldviews.
This is actually a good (albeit incomplete, but give him a break, he had two paragraphs) history of the explosion of #metalgate. In the late 1990s, the underground fizzled because it had no more greats to offer, and the imitators surged in. Since that time, record labels and hipsters have been trying to find a way to make rock and punk rock — which, unlike metal, which emphasizes transcending the individual, emphasize the importance of individual desires over attention to consequences — into a “metal flavored” form. This is an ideal product for local mediocre bands to make and labels to hype since anyone can do it so there can be a steady stream of profits. SJW-metal is just their tool of forcing everyone else out and taking over.
Nelson goes on to look into the chaos that followed Disma being accused of being horrible Nazis, and he pretty much beats the SJW tin drum here, but then, something interesting happens:
The last thing any of us here wants to do is give additional exposure to artists who peddle or preach hatred or intolerance. The other last thing we want to do is act as some Orwellian thought police slowly sanitizing metal by doling out oxygen only to those artists whose views reflect our own, whose actions meet our personal standards of acceptability. It’s easy enough to treat Burzum’s Varg Vikernes as a pariah: The guy is an enthusiastic, unrepentant bigot and a convicted murderer. (It helps, too, that he hasn’t released a decent album since 2011.) I often wonder, though, how the world would react to “Angel Of Death” or “Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity” if those songs were released today. This is dark music! It’s not supposed to be safe! It can be safe, but nobody ever got into this shit because it was safe; we got into it because it was scary and transgressive and primal. Who are we to make it safe?
Then again, who are we to promote art or artists fostering unsafe environments?
I’m not winding up for some big, poignant conclusion here, sadly. I’m leaving this as an ellipsis.
There’s a certain subtle brilliance in this. The whole point of this lengthy introduction was to get himself SJW cred, then point out that censorship is just like the totalitarian ideologies that SJWs claim to dislike. In fact, Nelson writes that it is even worse, since it is done in the name of good, and points out that many of metal’s classics would not pass this test. Then he leaves the question up to us, since he obviously cannot directly contradict the herd or they will amass and ruin his life (or a least get Stereogum to fire him, and then mob his Facebook account!).
SJW is still a potent movement because it gives power to the unmemorable by allowing them to take down people better than themselves. It gives a voice to the mediocre and a reason why their mediocrity should jump the line ahead of artistic superiority. Like all mass movements, it is a revolt against quality, with the pleasant notion that everyone will be equally important concealing the reality, which is that when everyone is the same nothing good can rise. Metal stands against that, and this is why SJWs target it. But the tide is turning even now.
Tonight, on When SJWs Attack: a small metal distro finds itself in the crosshairs and crossfires of political controversy.
Diabolic Force Distribution is a small, independent mail order wholesale price distributor or “distro,” participating in one of the institutions that forged the underground back when metal CDs were unavailable in all but dedicated specialty stores that often went bankrupt. Some time ago, this distro came under fire from “social justice warriors,” or SJWs, who are people who hang out on social media looking for people who are not politically correct enough. Driven by the thrill of subjugating others with political power and the need for self-importance, SJWs frequently destroy lives with their witch-hunting accusations of racism, sexism and other political constructs.
Upon hearing of this situation, I wrote to Diabolic Force Distribution and got the story in interview form. Read on for the latest outrages of the SJWs — the new censors — as they try to limit what you can hear and buy so they can in turn limit what you think.
How did this all start?
To the best of my knowledge this all began when the singer of Bestial Evil (Shawn Wright) suddenly became aware of a Facebook status I made approximately seven weeks ago from the time of this writing, about how the band should be dismissed by fans of metal, because in my opinion they aren’t any good. Simple as that! We got enough awful crap around here as it is. That being said I never accused them of anything other then being posers, no trigger warning required hahaha. I am not alone in this low opinion of the group either.
Apparently receiving criticism is not one of their strengths however, so they started a smear campaign complete with all the usual name-calling and threats. I want to point out that it was a private post that I made and only my friends could see it… so how exactly it came to the attention of the people in question is unknown to me, probably a screen shot or word of mouth. I don’t care. I wasn’t hiding it from anyone in the first place and I still stand by what I said too. Bad’s bad and good’s good, tough shit. This is Heavy Metal, not a reality TV show where you get a prize at the end from Carson Daly. There is already a band from Italy named Bestial Evil anyhow so that just goes to show you they didn’t even do their homework in the first place.
How did these guys try to rally an internet army?
Again, social media was involved, like always. Facebook to be specific. A concerned friend showed me a post made on Shawn Wright’s Facebook page inciting a “boot party” if anyone ever saw me out somewhere and proclaiming that I was to be “banned” from the city of Baltimore, that he was gonna come to my house, etc. This was based on accusations brought on by Shawn himself that I am a homophobic/neo-nazi or some other completely unfounded nonsense like that. One person even commented that I “infiltrate shows” to sell white power music, which is an outright lie.
People ask me to vend at shows very often, I never have to sneak in, let alone with the intent to slip some poor unsuspecting SJW a skinhead album or whatever. The whole thing is totally absurd. Anyhow, not long after this stuff was brought to my attention I started to receive threatening calls and texts to my phone from Shawn himself. None of which I ever replied to. The voicemails have been recorded and saved though, as well as any other evidence of threats against my home or person. So if anyone does do something stupid I have evidence of a conspiracy I guess. They have done some tidying up on the band page it seems, I think their attempt to raise an army has faltered for now.
Is there truth to their accusations that you run a white power friendly distro?
Absolutely not. While I personally do not believe in censorship of any kind, especially with regards to music and art… there’s just nothing in there that qualifies. The merchandise and albums that I sell span across multiple genres of extreme music, everything from black and death metal to harsh noise and grind, but there’s no “white power” bands… The thing they have accused me of is totally baseless and merely an attempt to incite a witch hunt against me to fulfill a personal vendetta and stir up trouble.
People of this SJW/hipster type of mindset seem to always invoke these things to try rally an angry mob as a means to carry out intimidation tactics or make it seem like they’re in the right because they got a couple hundred views on their webpage. You see it more and more as of late.
What have they threatened you with? Do you think they can accomplish it?
I was told multiple times that I would be visited at home, that they would kick down my door and “destroy my life,” and then there was the foolish claim that I was going to be sued for “defamation of character and distributing hate material.” Loads of ignorant threats and boasts were made. I welcome any legal action from them, as I am sure the courts would like to hear the voicemails that Shawn left on my phone, threatening me with home invasion. And as for the defamation of character thing, I am pretty sure they just did that to me so good luck getting that charge to stick. Personally, I do not think they can actually accomplish these things, especially the part about being sued, but I am not taking it for granted either. That’s not the sort of thing you joke about. I am prepared for all eventual outcomes of this retarded comedy.
First phone call
Second phone call
What are your distros/bands/projects that people can support?
For over ten years now I have been proactive with music in the Baltimore Maryland area in some way or another, although I do not reside in or claim the city. I was in a weird band a long time ago but I don’t play anymore, there’s too many bands and not enough fans anyhow, I would rather be a fan. I printed shirts for local bands and old school heavyweights like Blood Storm, Nunslaughter and Gravewurm for many many years… and I used to book concerts in Baltimore sometimes but I have taken a hiatus from organizing live events.
My label/distro is called Diabolic Force Distribution, the purpose of which has been and always will be to support underground bands and zines get out there to the maniacs that need it. Heavy Metal isn’t about fashion or climbing the social ladder, it’s a way of life. It’s outsider art and it’s meant to be challenging and dangerous. Diabolic Force likes to do things the old-fashioned way because I believe in the life force of the music itself and the people in the trenches fighting to keep it real. Diabolic Force will always offer support to those individuals and bands who hate posers and love Satan. Our motto is “Support the underground, bury yourself.”
Vox Day: SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police
Science fiction author and video game designer Vox Day has written a handbook for dealing with SJWs including who they are and how to identify them, how they think and act, and how to defend against them and counter-attack. His writing style is easily digestible, and the information he presents is conveniently organized into enumerated laws and steps, such as the three laws of SJWs (the first of which doubles as the book’s title), the stages in an SJW attack, and the points to keep in mind during an attack.
SJWs are bullies who wield social pressure as a weapon.
Since his intent is practical, he gives only a brief overview of the ideology and history of SJWs. In his words, “knowing everything there is to know about shark DNA or what fish grizzly bears prefer to eat doesn’t do you any good when you find yourself nose to nose with a hungry one.” This focus is a strong point, as the result is a succinct instruction manual.
In the universities, in the churches, in the corporations . . . free speech and free thought are under siege by a group of fanatics as self-righteous as Savonarola, as ruthless as Stalin, as ambitious as Napoleon, and as crazy as Caligula.
They are the Social Justice Warriors, the SJWs, the self-appointed thought police who have been running amok throughout the West since the dawn of the politically correct era in the 1990s. Their defining characteristics:
a philosophy of activism for activism’s sake
a dedication to rooting out behavior they deem problematic, offensive, or unacceptable in others
a custom of primarily identifying individuals by their sex, race, and sexual orientation
a hierarchy of intrinsic morality based on the identity politics of sex, race, and sexual orientation
a quasi religious belief in equality, diversity, and the inevitably of progress . . .
The information in this book will be useful to metal band members and concert organizers who are the targets of SJW attacks. Vox demonstrates, using numerous examples of attacks, that the worst thing these targets can do is apologise, as doing so simply hands the attackers “a confession to bolster their indictment.” In fact, if one learns only a single thing from this book, it should be that SJWs can’t be reasoned with at all: do not engage them in good faith, do not expect them to be honest in any way, and just plain do not take them seriously. This should come naturally to members of an artistic movement fascinated with aggression and violence. And yet, #metalgate has shown us that heavy metal is in the SJWs’ crosshairs.
The reason for this is that metal has been infiltrated by SJWs, whose primary allegiance is always the Narrative, which is the nebulous and frequently changing concept of social justice to which they all adhere, regardless of inherent contradictions and absurdities (see the First Law). To them, the goals of a movement or institution will always be secondary to this, though they mask this insincerity by wrapping themselves in its superficial trappings. When they look at a band like Disma, they ignore what would be most important to a metalhead — the musical, artistic and philosophical content — and instead search for anything about its members that violates their Narrative, then point and shriek hysterically until a crowd forms. Fundamentally, SJWs are bullies who wield social pressure as a weapon.
If you have any SJWs working under you, fire them.
For a work that deals with such bitter and unlikeable people, the tone of this book is surprisingly positive, and the message is hopeful. Referring to an organized campaign against SJW control of a Science Fiction award, Day says “the importance of Sad Puppies is that it shows how even in a field that has been dominated by SJWs for more than two decades, they are weaker and less numerous than most people believe.” If their weapon is social pressure then a successful resistance would consist of simply not bowing to it. Since they always lie, even to themselves, they operate with a false understanding of the world, which puts them at a disadvantage to those who are honest.
Target the enemy at every opportunity. Hit them wherever they show themselves vulnerable. Play as dirty as your conscience will permit. Undermine them, sabotage them, and discredit them. Be ruthless and show them absolutely no mercy. This is not the time for Christian forgiveness because these are people who have not repented, these are people who are trying to destroy you and are quite willing to harm your family and your children in the process. Take them down and take them out without hesitation. If you have any SJWs working under you, fire them.
The truth is that SJWs care so much about the institutions they control that they will destroy them rather than relinquish control over them. They will consume metal, video games anything else by using their crazy ideology in order to assert individual self-importance. When confronted by them, don’t apologise, but instead counterattack by ruthlessly pursuing and defending truth. In other words,
When issues arise like those of ideological fascists in metal, whether of the SJW or far-right types, the inevitable division between art and propaganda arises. Having written about this for over two decades, I make the following distinction: art has artistic purpose, which is to reveal; propaganda has dogmatic purpose, which is to condition and manipulate the mind through projecting a sense of self-congratulatory correctness onto the perceiver.
Luckily, others have written about this topic, and well. From Canadian author Robertson Davies writing at First Things comes this cogent analysis:
When I was a boy, I was a voracious reader. My home had plenty of moral literature on its shelves, and I was urged to read it for my betterment. There was lots of other literature, as well, but I was not forbidden, only discouraged, from reading it as it was said to be “beyond me,” which I quickly discovered meant that it dealt with life pretty much as life was, and not as the determinedly moral writers wanted me to think.
…I could not stomach Little Lord Fauntleroy, who presented me with a political puzzle especially hard for a Canadian: What was that boy, and what did he do? He was an American, but by chance he inherited a title and went to England and became a Lord, and thereafter was remorselessly democratic toward anyone who kept it firmly in mind that he was a Lord, and behaved accordingly. The Little Lord existed to hammer home two things that were presented as mighty truths: We must be democratic and we must recognize the moral superiority that goes with poverty. It was easy, I thought, to be a democrat if everybody toadied to you, and I wished that the Little Lord could spend a few days at the school I went to, where to be known as a tireless reader (for I could not conceal it) was to be an outcast. Many of my persecutors enjoyed the blessing of poverty, but it did not seem to improve their characters. They were savage, jealous, and without bowels of compassion.
My sanity was saved by the books I read on the sly. Dickens, where evil people were plentiful and often rich, successful, and attractive. Thackeray, where snobbery seemed to be the mainspring of much of the action. Thomas Hardy, where life was complicated by opposed moralities and the uncontrollable workings of Destiny, and where God was decidedly not a loving Father. I did not know it at the time, but of course these were the works of literary artists who observed life with keen eyes and wrote about what they saw, as their widely varying temperaments enabled them to see. When I myself became a writer, it was these whom I chose to follow, as best I could, and not the aggressive moralists.
SJW is a form of aggressive moralism. Nazism, which is an attempt to mold far-right values to a Leftist-style ideological structure, makes that same error (which became fatal for it). Similarly Communism and Socialism are moral appeals, meaning that they base themselves not on practical reasoning — “this works” — but on what should be, based on the feelings of individuals united into large angry groups dedicated to tearing down all people above them. Similarly, Christianity in metal attempts to be a dogmatic ideology, and so we get ludicrous songs about fighting for the Lord which like the propaganda above, present the world in black/white distinctions: one side all is goodness and purity, and the other is bad, stupid, rich and horrible.
When approaching these types in metal it is essential to see this distinction. The victimhood music of indie-rock bands for example presents us perfect, innocent, suffering victims of the type that appeared in moralist Christian literature, opposed by equally dark, evil and cruel forces of large corporations and right-wing tyrants. These overly-simplified moral models exist to make people want to be the good, and to polarize against the bad, without digging into any of the complexity of life that a realistic perspective provides. They are baby food for the brain, as manipulative as television commercials, and as deceptive as the seductions of a whore.
Art will always be better than propaganda, but people like propaganda because it makes them feel good about themselves. When you are presented with absolutes like good and evil, and those are put into simple terms of intent rather than achievement of goals, it makes every idiot shuffling in off the street into a hero just by wanting to be like the good guy in the propaganda. This is why propaganda is easily recognizable through its extreme polarization between the bad enemy scapegoat and the good virtuous long-suffering victim who is secretly a hero, just like the average person with a half-failed life wants himself to be, but will never take steps to be alone and can only do so in a large angry mob.
The assault on metal has taken many forms. During its early days, it was rock bands pretending to be metal to try to capture the authentic feel and thus the bourgeois rebel audience. Later the Christians came in, feeling that a message of evil needed to be replaced with a good one. The white power types have tried for years, often with sympathy from legitimate metal bands, but have never taken ground because metal emphasizes realism over politics. Now the SJWs — who are more similar to Communists than Nazis, but use the same methods — are trying to exact same approach. It helps to see this, recognize it as the attempted mind control that it is, and show it the door.
The metal community has always defended itself against poseurs, with most of us realizing that hipsters, scenesters and other groups are varieties of poseur.
What is a poseur? Someone who pretends for the social status of being seen in a hip group. Metal, as it turns out, has authenticity because we are actual rebels, not rock ‘n’ rollers singing protest songs to give legitimacy to their pursuit of hedonism.
Hipsters, poseurs and scenesters are threatening because they are insincere. They adopt a musical genre to make themselves look cool, and in the process sabotaging it by bring it to a lowest common denominator of attention-getting behavior.
This guts the genre from within. The spirit that made it authentic has been replaced with the same trashy plastic advertising that covers everything else. The genre then becomes absorbed by the same old stuff, which is itself a mishmash of whatever has sold records over the past five generations.
Perhaps the best definition of hipster — the mishmash left over when a civilization fails — comes to us from AdBusters magazine:
Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.
But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.”
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
But even that captures what hipsters are now, not the simple fact that they are an old archetype going back to The Enlightenment. The Bohemians of the 1900s, the rebels of the 1600s, and the giggin’ hipsters of the 2010s have some things in common: deliberately unconventional behavior, focus on ironism and uniqueness at an aesthetic level, and hedonistic lifestyles at the expense of the rest of us.
The hipster, however, was someone else already. Specifically, he was a black subcultural figure of the late forties, best anatomized by Anatole Broyard in an essay for the Partisan Review called “A Portrait of the Hipster.” A decade later, the hipster had evolved into a white subcultural figure. This hipster—and the reference here is to Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” essay for Dissent in 1957—was explicitly defined by the desire of a white avant-garde to disaffiliate itself from whiteness, with its stain of Eisenhower, the bomb, and the corporation, and achieve the “cool” knowledge and exoticized energy, lust, and violence of black Americans. (Hippie itself was originally an insulting diminutive of hipster, a jab at the sloppy kids who hung around North Beach or Greenwich Village after 1960 and didn’t care about jazz or poetry, only drugs and fun.)
The hipster, in both black and white incarnations, in his essence had been about superior knowledge—what Broyard called “a priorism.” He insisted that hipsterism was developed from a sense that minorities in America were subject to decisions made about their lives by conspiracies of power they could never possibly know. The hip reaction was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge that they possessed before anyone else, indeed before the creation of positive knowledge—a priori.
This leads us to wonder: why are hipsters so omnipresent, if they are transparent? Hipsters seek others who are either clueless or equally dependent on not mentioning the fakeness of hipsterism. Like drug addicts clustering, or cult members in their caverns, hipsters seek out people they can manipulate, control and influence.
All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world. Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because they feel the weakness of everyone’s position — including their own. Proving that someone is trying desperately to boost himself instantly undoes him as an opponent. He’s a fake, while you are a natural aristocrat of taste. That’s why “He’s not for real, he’s just a hipster” is a potent insult among all the people identifiable as hipsters themselves.
With all that being said, would you want this self-important psychology and fake social scene to invade your genre? This question weighs heavily on metalheads as SJWs emerge as the newest form of hipster, combining the demands for personal hedonism with a Communist-derived insistence that others subsidize it through tolerance and, ultimately, actual subsidies. It’s not surprising that many hipsters exist on an equal diet of trust funds and food stamps.
SJWs want to have the hipster psychology take over heavy metal, and while they claim it is for political reasons, the real reason is much simpler: they want to fill the room with people they can control, manipulate and influence by excluding anyone who is a realist, or has a complex worldview, or adheres to traditional heavy metal ideals. SJWs want to destroy our standards and replace them with their own so that, in the new chaos, they can keep the genre filled with clueless people who won’t point out the obvious.
