The White Lotus and Why is there No Right Wing Art?
Is it true that right wing art is instinct?
Peter Thiel was asked at his most recent speech at the Oxford Union, “Where is the right wing art?” Thiel struggled to explain why right wing art is lacking, seemingly accepting the premise that there’s a shortage of right wing art.
I finished binge watching a gay vegan liberal’s TV show (The White Lotus, Season 2), which was loaded with right wing themes. Even so, The White Lotus was celebrated by critics and liberals alike.
What is Right Wing or Left Wing Art?
In a special on the making of Dirty Dancing, the director admits the abortion subplot was a deliberate choice. She said her rule is to always find a way to insert political propaganda into her work.
Almost no one watching Dirty Dancing would have called it left wing art. It was art on its own. The themes were inherently left wing, as the audience passively absorbed the message that abortion is good, as if under a state of hypnosis.
Was White Lotus Right Wing Art?
Politics today is largely divided by identity. Some groups are good, others are evil. (You can see this reflected in Sam Altman’s Antichristian hate bot.)
Properly defined, left wing art would depict avatars of the right as bumbling fools or neo-Nazis, and right wing art would depict left wing figures as craven figures performing ritual human sacrifices.
White Lotus depicts people as we really are in the Current Age.
The Stanford graduate shitlib son is a pathetic simp who gets Tinder Swindled. His love interest, consistent with modern dating reality, finds him boring, and ditches him for a drunken lout.
The white couple includes a financial adviser and Pilates wife who may have cucked her husband via the personal trainer. (“Eighteen years, eighteen years / And on the 18th birthday, he found out it wasn't his?”)
While this may not put upper crust white Americans in the best light, it’s true that high finance type people are usually manipulative and one-dimensional. We supported Trump in 2016 to push these kind of people out of power.
The tech entrepreneur and his “human rights lawyer” wife, like most of the people you’d met in San Francisco, are bland conformists.
The vapid life of the shitlib overlaps with that of the country club Republicans. You wake up, have brunch, and lack the vitality it takes to have a powerful sex life.
Plot twist (Spoiler: skip this if you haven’t see the show).
In White Lotus (spoiler alert), the gay guys are the bad guys! I was talking to my wife about this. We couldn’t think of any other show that depicted gay people as villains (the Jeffrey Dahmer documentary did highlight his homosexuality as it was central to how he acquired victims), even though, like everyone else, gay people commit crimes.
If that isn’t right wing art, then what is?
As with Game of Thrones, White Lotus’s sexual scenes were too prevalent and graphic for my liking. However anti-nudity isn’t right wing. But Christians may want to pass on this show or be prepared to hit fast forward.
Left wing art does get funded by taxpayers.
If you believe that there’s a shortage of right wing art, and wonder why left wing art is more likely to be made, you can thank yourself (if you pay taxes).
During the ridiculous so-called Covid relief bills, Nancy Pelosi smuggled $25 million in taxpayer funding to the far left wing Kennedy Center. (The Kennedy Center denies that it was given this money as part of Covid relief, and that it was instead a general giveaway of taxpayer funds to an extreme left wing media center.)
$75 million (at least) in taxpayer dollars was given to fund left wing artistic causes, as NRP reported:
NPR also receives taxpayer funding, even as they traffic in left wing disinformation, falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Isn’t that a nice scam?
If you’re wondering why right wing art doesn’t get funded, the issue is simple. Democrats and Republicans give tax dollars to left wing foundations. Republicans will not give money to right wing foundations, as that wouldn’t be very free market capitalism of them. (Don’t you find it interesting that the GOP is only free market supporting when they justify not giving conservatives money, but they always find exceptions to these rules when liberals want money?)
What do you think right wing art is?
When watching White Lotus, you’d be left with the sense that the Stanford kid’s dad and grandfather are the more interesting, complex characters. The women were beautiful. The young man in the “nephew scene” would qualify for Handsome Thursday.
Is that right wing propaganda, or is it the case that right wing art will inherently reflect the truth of the world today?
I’ll open up comments for discussion below.
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Fiction writer here. Good storytelling boils down to one important principle that Stephen King discusses in his book "On Writing": Tell the truth. You can't always know going into a story what that truth is going to be, because the characters really do take on a life and personality of their own (it's a wild thing to have happen, but ask fiction writers, and they'll tell you it's real). Imposing your personal political beliefs on each character (including imposing the inverse on the anti-heroes) almost always sets the story up for bad, cliched writing, and one-dimensional characters. Unfortunately, a lot of writers think they have to do this, because they are given this bad advice by editors and other writers. Really great novelists, in my view, don't get caught up in quotidian politics. They're aiming higher, trying to uncover the deeper truths about human life and what existence means.
This comment from almost 17 years ago has stuck with me:
To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/09/so-what-exactly-did-scorsese-do.html#c112792822975605103