Culture, Digested: Whatever Happened to....?
On Red Scare, Predators, and The Conformist
I was listening to this podcast episode of In Bed with the Russians, about what happened to the Red Scare hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova. As in, how did a couple hot, funny, smart women start doing Nazi trolling, hanging out with Alex Jones, and fangirling Donald Trump? But you can put any number of people in that “Whatever happened to X” question, there are a lot of pundits, podcasters, gurus, thought leaders, influencers who seem to have gone off the deep end, either selling meme coins or taking a hard rightward political turn or just getting their brains trapped in TERFy or fascist or conspiratorial intellectual cul de sacs.
The episode is better than most speculative projects about these figures — it doesn’t just land at “Thiel bucks” or “they were always like this.” There is a combination of factors, from the positive reinforcement of money, followers, and likes that come when you say something offensive and stupid to the profound disappointment and disillusionment that followed the scuttling of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. But also hosts Evgenia and Yasha Levine don’t get entranced by the fascist glamour of Red Scare, they rightly put their opinions and insights in the category of “Soviet auntie” — the same kind of suburban, conservative thinking that anyone middle-aged and unsophisticated is likely to come up with. Oh, is the nuclear family truly the most important thing? How avant garde of you.
But ultimately I’m wondering how much of a waste of time a project like this is, trying to gain insight into someone’s descent. I mean, we really could go one by one for the next twenty years, trying to pinpoint the exact moment Matt Taibbi got like this, or Glenn Greenwald, or whoever else. Contrapoints did that 90 minute video about JK Rowling’s increasing obsession with transwomen. There is one specific figure I’m deathly fixated on, trying to figure out what happened you were so smart and good what happened, but since she’s extremely litigious I’ll be keeping that one private. And yes I think we can all take some important lessons from these figures about intellectual arrogance, audience capture, indoctrination, and how self-delusional we all are about our ability to resist cultish thinking. Beyond that, I think these motivations remain mysterious, even to the people themselves.
It made me think of the documentary Predators, which is currently doing the rounds in festivals. Tracking the influence and aftermath of the TV show To Catch a Predator, the doc recaps what we have learned about sexual violence after several seasons of luring, trapping, and interrogating “predators” who intended to meet up with underage teens. The answer: not very much.
Despite grilling one man after another, asking them why they’re like this, how did they get to be this way, ultimately even the men themselves don’t seem to know. They shrug and fidget, several of them ask Chris Hansen, the host of the original program, if he’s a therapist and if maybe he can explain why they do these things.
Predators director David Osit explains that he used to watch the show with tremendous interest, as he too was looking for reasons. As a survivor of sexual molestation, he thought the show could provide answers about why his abuser did what he did, and he wonders why it didn’t.
Now of course there are many amateur versions of To Catch a Predator on YouTube, guys creating vigilante gangs to lure people to motel rooms with the promise of sex with an underage boy or girl. Instead they stick a camera in their face, call the cops, almost certainly unlawfully detain these guys, and question them for the likes and subscribes. And these are the semi-professional ones — there are plenty of “content creators” doing the same thing to commit assault and attack the potential offenders.
To Catch a Predator of course ended in tragedy, as was probably inevitable. When a man they had attempted to lure to the house where the team had all the cameras and cops set up didn’t show up, the police and the show decided to go to his house. When the police entered the house, the man shot himself in the head. And before you start to think, well the show was canceled, media ethics for the win — Hansen still has a show where he reveals predators and offenders, it’s just called something else now.
There’s a very uncomfortable interview with Chris Hansen in Predators — he, too, is asked to account for himself, explain why he does this, come to terms with the harm the show has done and the tragedy of the lives destroyed. He resists self-inquiry, relying on press team-approved language and cliches to demonstrate that the show has done more good than harm.
Why are you like this? They don’t know.
At the end of Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of the Alberto Moravia novel about fascism in Italy, The Conformist, the political tides have turned. We’ve been watching Marcello as he gets more deeply involved with the Fascists, including being tasked with an assassination. The film does the usual hunting through the past for clues for why he’s like this, including an addicted mother, a horrifying event in the past, and a father in an insane asylum. But the film remains pitiless — a lot of bad things happen to a lot of bad people.
But now, at the end, Mussolini is out, the people on the street are on the hunt for secret fascists. And Marcello, sensing the vibe shift, adapts. He joins the anti-fascists and denounces those who know the truth about him. He easily disappears into the new collective, conforming to its expectations and behaviors.
Why is he like this? Are you sure that even matters?
Recommended:
Thank you to Michael Rushton for reminding me to rewatch The Conformist. You should watch The Conformist and also check out Rushton’s Substack, I find it very useful for thinking about policy around the arts in this weird political moment.
Heidi Matthews writes about the IDF’s TikTok videos of soldiers parading around in the underwear and lingerie of the Palestinian women they’ve arrested or run out of their homes.
I kind of wish Predators had been better. It’s one of these kind of rushed, throw a lot of ideas out there and see what happens, kind of docs, where it’s not so much about the film itself but about the think pieces that will be written about the subject.
This Doomer Optimism episode with a conversation between journalist James Pogue and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez about the right to repair movement, the overreach of environmental protections, and why China owns so much land in the United States is very interesting.
In case you missed it, Robert Long Foreman wrote a wonderful piece for us about Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, filicide, and our new age of American gothic:
Leftie podcasts I like (TCWD, Champagne Sharks, Escape From Plan A) will occasionally mention the likes of Red Scare/Cum Town/Chapo Trap House. It’s like a passing nod to a different end of the indie podcast ecosystem. But I’ve yet to hear them describe these edgy, super-popular shows as being smart or particularly useful, so I’ve never felt the urge to investigate further.
That entire fiefdom just seems like an internet-accelerated version of asking comedians and performance artists to define our political thinking.
Was the Red Scare podcast ever really "left wing"? Or even about "Soviet immigration" (neither host is really old enough to remember much about the Soviet Union from whence they immigrated as very young children)? I thought they kind of sold themselves as "anti-woke" coming out of the gate, and were in fact some of the first content creators to explicitly try capitalizing on being so. Their entire brand, from jump, was, "We call people gay and retarded". In the New York media sphere I think this made them novel and edgy. Outside of it, this made them what they are: Mean girls. The Red Scare podcast is not hugely popular outside of cities with large media industries for this reason and their trajectory into overt right wing punditry doesn't confuse me at all.
The Conformist is a movie I often contrast with another movie, which is Mr. Klein - they're both about completely amoral (and honestly, bad) men, there's a sort of Euro-existential idea behind both of these films in that the motivations of these fascist collaborators and opportunists is hidden from you. Except Marcello ends up actively murdering a woman he allegedly loves for being a communist, and Robert Klein passively resigns himself to the fate of the concentration camps for not-totally-clear reasons. With the "anti-woke" grift and pandering to Trump supporters, I am not sure I am able to think of it as a form of more-or-less passive resignation and opportunism. Someone who lives in a conservative middle class suburb may be surrounded by Trump supporters that think like them, but in a city, this is less the case, which is why that "mean kids' table" article was full of rich young urban conservatives trying to insist they were "normal" - because they aren't actually "the norm" where they happen to live, they're "the norm" somewhere they find wholly unfashionable and beneath them, and even though Trump soundly won the election, they still think of themselves as some persecuted minority opinion because they share neighborhoods with the exact sort of people who have mutual hostility to the Trump regime & all its grifters & enablers. What I sense is the tension of status anxiety - the desire to be glamorous and urban, while holding beliefs that are roughly exactly similar to uncool, unglamorous suburban parents, and that all of this is an active play to preserve one's cultural capital credentials.
I think Howard Stern (circa 1990s, he's sort of calmed down a bit these days) might actually be a better comparison to this phenomenon. Except there was nothing "haute" about Howard Stern - he very much represented this sort of lower middle class New York milieu and with him the crassness was the point of the spectacle, more than any particular ideology around it. Stern was also a better interviewer and had strong rhetorical ability to lead his guests into answering deeply personal questions or participating in goofy stunts they might otherwise avoid answering - when these "alt right" podcasters or whatever interview Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, they mostly just let them bloviate all their usual talking points.