Pitiful Failed Artist Adam Lehrer: It’s True, But Not Even Funny
Perhaps the most pitiful figure in this milieu is failed artist Adam Lehrer, now cashing in writing embarrassing articles for American Greatness. It feels wrong to attack Lehrer; it’s too easy. The dopey, New York art hipster actually thinks that a rag like American Greatness publishes him because he has something of value to say and not because he flatters it and it finds his propaganda useful. His article, “A Marxist Defends the Great Reactionaries,” from the first line starts off with a glaring error that exposes this entire crowd as the pseudo intellectuals they are:
What’s Left? podcast host Aimee Terese recently tweeted, “Marx and Engels were friends with Balzac, noted reactionary monarchist who they perceived as far more insightful, and his work a much greater contribution to the socialist cause, despite his rank, than all the bourgeois economists, historians and writers of the day.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels never met Balzac, let alone counted him as a friend despite being enthusiastic fans of his work. It’s clear that American Greatness does not have a fact checker, but it doesn’t really matter when the point of your publication is to simply churn out vulgar propaganda. It does say something about what kind of an artist Lehrer must be, though, when he has so little pride in his work or self-respect that he doesn’t mind looking like an idiot from the start. I won’t go into much detail because the article is trivial. It starts off by attacking a straw man abstract “left” that is dismissive of right-wing artists because they are merely reflecting their class interests as members of the Professional Managerial Class and have an interest in dehumanizing right-wing artists to preserve their function as “neoliberalism’s ideological manufacturers.”
According to Lehrer, Balzac and hence reactionary artists are aesthetically superior because unlike liberals and socialists who mystify the exploitative nature of capital by working for reform, reactionaries are more revolutionary in seeking to abolish the existing order and return to an earlier one. Who does Lehrer cite to make this point? Michael Lind, of course.
Lehrer goes on to laud the works of writers like Nick Land and Michel Houllebecq, whom I am sure his patrons at American Greatness couldn’t give less of a fukk about. The point of their project is to lower taxes, cut Social Security and fund wars, not to pontificate on the state of French letters. After receiving heavy criticism for his piece, Lehrer gloated on Twitter that writing for American Greatness allowed him to make a living writing and doing his art. As far as I know he’s now writing a book about heroin and the avant-garde, which is a 15-year-old’s idea of what’s cool.
The aforementioned figures comparatively speaking are minnows in this ecosystem and exist to test out rhetoric and see what works. Most often they are ridiculed, but now and then they strike a nerve and are retweeted or promoted by some of the bigger fish, like Red Scare, Glenn Greenwald or Michael Tracey, who are very much part of this vile ecosystem and employ the same brand of trolling.
Fox News. Fair Use.
Michael Tracey: The “To Catch a Predator” Connection
Tracey is a journalist who is best known for his resemblance to Jeff Stacy, a convicted sex offender who surfaced in an investigation by Dateline NBC’s To Catch A Predator. With the persona of “Left Heretic,” Tracey has garnered a reputation for contrarian takes and poor personal hygiene. Seizing on the free-floating hostility and distrust many jaded ex-leftists feel for the Democratic Party and its disingenuous rhetoric on issues of identity and social justice, Tracey has built a following of nearly 200,000 Twitter followers railing against “wokeness” and casting doubt on the motives of the George Floyd demonstrations because Wendy’s once tweeted “Black Lives Matter.” He is a regular on Tucker Carlson, where he plays the role of the “left gadfly.” He cross-promotes and retweets content from Red Scare.
Jeff Stacy Fair Use.
Red Scare is a podcast hosted by Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan. The show is adjacent to what is sometimes called the dirtbag left, but is distinct in that it is explicitly socially conservative. They talk at length about their disdain for women, and any woman who works to them is a “girl boss” worthy of ridicule. The political content of the show revolves around aggressive anti-feminism and mild welfare state reforms. The cultural commentary takes aim at “neoliberalism,” which they can’t, unfortunately, define. Thinkers they reference include Mark Fisher, Slavoj Zizek, Camille Paglia and Christopher Lasch. Fisher for his doom and gloom end of history stuff, Zizek, who they’ve never apparently read, but like to roll out for anti-trans critiques, Paglia because she is a libertarian that believes in the “divine feminine,” and Lasch to talk about the family and alienation.
The “Red Scare” cretins. Fair Use.
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and owner of one of the creepiest tech firms around, Palantir Technologies, once quipped that the CIA is a front for Palantir. Thiel also is widely regarded as one of the chief financial patrons for neo-reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, better known as Mencius Moldbug. What’s more, his critiques of democracy have been a catalyst for what is often referred to as “the intellectual dark web.”
He’s also a fan of American Affairs and the National Conservative movement, helping them orchestrate the National Conservative Conference that featured Yarvin, Oren Cass and Tucker Carlson as a keynote speaker, as detailed in a recent piece from Harper’s, “Trumpism After Trump, by Thomas Meaney. Khachiyan appeared on The Portal with Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, to introduce her naïve, impressionable audience to a figure they would never have heard of otherwise.
Most alarmingly, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon appeared as a guest on Red Scare for a chummy, non-adversarial interview. The two frivolous, coked-up dilletantes let him spout his nonsense and come off as a loveable goofball. The whole thing was played for laughs. Bannon endorsed Bolsonaro for president of Brazil and upon his victory invited his son Eduardo to join “his movement in pursuit of a populist nationalist agenda for prosperity and sovereignty for citizens throughout the world.” Bannon also served as vice president of Cambridge Analytica, which “through its partnership with Sao Paulo-based consulting group A Ponte Estratégia Planejamento e Pesquisa LTDA, illegally used the data of millions of Brazilians to create psychographic profiles,” according to Reuters.
Their hero. Swoon. Also, were Steve Bannon and Michael Tracey separated at birth? Or was it Jeff Stacy? Fair Use?
Perhaps the most pitiful figure in this milieu is failed artist Adam Lehrer, now cashing in writing embarrassing articles for American Greatness. It feels wrong to attack Lehrer; it’s too easy. The dopey, New York art hipster actually thinks that a rag like American Greatness publishes him because he has something of value to say and not because he flatters it and it finds his propaganda useful. His article, “A Marxist Defends the Great Reactionaries,” from the first line starts off with a glaring error that exposes this entire crowd as the pseudo intellectuals they are:
What’s Left? podcast host Aimee Terese recently tweeted, “Marx and Engels were friends with Balzac, noted reactionary monarchist who they perceived as far more insightful, and his work a much greater contribution to the socialist cause, despite his rank, than all the bourgeois economists, historians and writers of the day.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels never met Balzac, let alone counted him as a friend despite being enthusiastic fans of his work. It’s clear that American Greatness does not have a fact checker, but it doesn’t really matter when the point of your publication is to simply churn out vulgar propaganda. It does say something about what kind of an artist Lehrer must be, though, when he has so little pride in his work or self-respect that he doesn’t mind looking like an idiot from the start. I won’t go into much detail because the article is trivial. It starts off by attacking a straw man abstract “left” that is dismissive of right-wing artists because they are merely reflecting their class interests as members of the Professional Managerial Class and have an interest in dehumanizing right-wing artists to preserve their function as “neoliberalism’s ideological manufacturers.”
According to Lehrer, Balzac and hence reactionary artists are aesthetically superior because unlike liberals and socialists who mystify the exploitative nature of capital by working for reform, reactionaries are more revolutionary in seeking to abolish the existing order and return to an earlier one. Who does Lehrer cite to make this point? Michael Lind, of course.
Lehrer goes on to laud the works of writers like Nick Land and Michel Houllebecq, whom I am sure his patrons at American Greatness couldn’t give less of a fukk about. The point of their project is to lower taxes, cut Social Security and fund wars, not to pontificate on the state of French letters. After receiving heavy criticism for his piece, Lehrer gloated on Twitter that writing for American Greatness allowed him to make a living writing and doing his art. As far as I know he’s now writing a book about heroin and the avant-garde, which is a 15-year-old’s idea of what’s cool.
The aforementioned figures comparatively speaking are minnows in this ecosystem and exist to test out rhetoric and see what works. Most often they are ridiculed, but now and then they strike a nerve and are retweeted or promoted by some of the bigger fish, like Red Scare, Glenn Greenwald or Michael Tracey, who are very much part of this vile ecosystem and employ the same brand of trolling.
Fox News. Fair Use.
Michael Tracey: The “To Catch a Predator” Connection
Tracey is a journalist who is best known for his resemblance to Jeff Stacy, a convicted sex offender who surfaced in an investigation by Dateline NBC’s To Catch A Predator. With the persona of “Left Heretic,” Tracey has garnered a reputation for contrarian takes and poor personal hygiene. Seizing on the free-floating hostility and distrust many jaded ex-leftists feel for the Democratic Party and its disingenuous rhetoric on issues of identity and social justice, Tracey has built a following of nearly 200,000 Twitter followers railing against “wokeness” and casting doubt on the motives of the George Floyd demonstrations because Wendy’s once tweeted “Black Lives Matter.” He is a regular on Tucker Carlson, where he plays the role of the “left gadfly.” He cross-promotes and retweets content from Red Scare.
Jeff Stacy Fair Use.
Red Scare is a podcast hosted by Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan. The show is adjacent to what is sometimes called the dirtbag left, but is distinct in that it is explicitly socially conservative. They talk at length about their disdain for women, and any woman who works to them is a “girl boss” worthy of ridicule. The political content of the show revolves around aggressive anti-feminism and mild welfare state reforms. The cultural commentary takes aim at “neoliberalism,” which they can’t, unfortunately, define. Thinkers they reference include Mark Fisher, Slavoj Zizek, Camille Paglia and Christopher Lasch. Fisher for his doom and gloom end of history stuff, Zizek, who they’ve never apparently read, but like to roll out for anti-trans critiques, Paglia because she is a libertarian that believes in the “divine feminine,” and Lasch to talk about the family and alienation.
The “Red Scare” cretins. Fair Use.
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and owner of one of the creepiest tech firms around, Palantir Technologies, once quipped that the CIA is a front for Palantir. Thiel also is widely regarded as one of the chief financial patrons for neo-reactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, better known as Mencius Moldbug. What’s more, his critiques of democracy have been a catalyst for what is often referred to as “the intellectual dark web.”
He’s also a fan of American Affairs and the National Conservative movement, helping them orchestrate the National Conservative Conference that featured Yarvin, Oren Cass and Tucker Carlson as a keynote speaker, as detailed in a recent piece from Harper’s, “Trumpism After Trump, by Thomas Meaney. Khachiyan appeared on The Portal with Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, to introduce her naïve, impressionable audience to a figure they would never have heard of otherwise.
Most alarmingly, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon appeared as a guest on Red Scare for a chummy, non-adversarial interview. The two frivolous, coked-up dilletantes let him spout his nonsense and come off as a loveable goofball. The whole thing was played for laughs. Bannon endorsed Bolsonaro for president of Brazil and upon his victory invited his son Eduardo to join “his movement in pursuit of a populist nationalist agenda for prosperity and sovereignty for citizens throughout the world.” Bannon also served as vice president of Cambridge Analytica, which “through its partnership with Sao Paulo-based consulting group A Ponte Estratégia Planejamento e Pesquisa LTDA, illegally used the data of millions of Brazilians to create psychographic profiles,” according to Reuters.
Their hero. Swoon. Also, were Steve Bannon and Michael Tracey separated at birth? Or was it Jeff Stacy? Fair Use?
