Hipster Civil War
Political polarization, humiliation rituals, and the rise of the dissident hipster
New York City is far from a bastion of reactionary right-wing values. After all, two-thirds of the city votes Democrat. To much of America, the average New Yorker is a liberal hipster yuppie living in a bubble. There’s certainly some truth to this. But a burgeoning, dissident counterculture has come to life in New York’s downtown art scene, and its presence in an overwhelmingly liberal city has led to some entertaining clashes.
Mike Crumplar, leftist blogger and son of a wealthy deep state family, recently drew the ire of this dissident hipster crowd. After writing a few scathing reviews of films and plays created by this scene – one which he lambasted for “transphobia” – Crumplar was invited to a “filmed party” for what he was told would be a sixty-second interview.
Of his arrival at the party, Crumplar writes:
Then he told me what exactly they were supposed to be filming: the crowd of extras was to populate the house of the Daryl Roth Theatre and become an improvised IRL YouTube comments section/4chan message board. The special guests they had invited, which included myself, were to be dispersed through the crowd and contribute to the discussion as “Elite Trolls.”
Other so-called elite trolls include Cum Town’s Nick Mullen, Million Dollar Extreme’s Nick Rochefort, Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova, and Neoreactionary luminary Curtis Yarvin. As such, Crumplar expected to be attending as a VIP, despite whatever disagreements existed.
What happened next came as a complete surprise to him.
Crumplar sat down in front of the cameras, prepared for his sixty-second interview. That interview never came. Instead, he was subjected to what can only be described as a struggle session or a humiliation ritual.
Crumplar writes:
And then the conversation dropped about two standard deviations of IQ as the cameras and boom mics shifted throughout all the nobody background extras who were there to stand in for the intellectual peasantry of anonymous message boards. These people were encouraged to say whatever random edgelord vulgarities popped into their heads, which meant a lot of slurs, proclamations about how circumcision is worse than abortion, Holocaust jokes, and so on.
As far as art is concerned, emulating the chaotic, vitriolic nature of anonymous discussion forums – and capturing it on film no less – is a fascinating idea. I do hope that the footage of this filming – which, as you'll see, only gets stranger – is eventually released in some form.
With his interview concluded, Crumplar milled around, smoking cigarettes and watching the filming of other scenes. Just prior to leaving, however, the leftist blogger once again found himself in the crosshairs of the film’s producers and their friends.
They pressed him on his negative reviews of their previous work, including the film Actors, which he had blasted as transphobic. “I felt a visceral sense of horror that I hadn’t felt in the first session,” wrote Crumplar, “a weird uncomfortable gut feeling that was more a response to the sudden bodily sense of dislocation than any emotional distress.”
Brave stuff from the trust fund comrade.
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