Kitsch vs. Kino: Which Way Western Man?

How do we navigate culture in a world increasingly bereft of meaning, where private capital functions as a parasitical and cynical instrument of Regime control over society?

A motto.

There is an uncomfortable truth about America and its worship of so-called “free market capitalism”. Beneath the mountains of trinkets and infinite distractions lies a rotten core of anti-human politics, exploitative profiteering, and a distinct spiritual void. Many on the right are beginning to come to terms with this truth as their society continues its downward spiral of degradation. Through the plainly obvious and the more shadowed betrayals of traditional values by large corporations, the exposure of that corruption is becoming more evident by the day. Whether it be the Bud Light or Target marketing fiascos which sparked highly effective and first of its kind national boycotts, or other companies’ nefarious tactics of inserting political machinery into their corporate structures through strategy pivots such as ESG, the iron grip of corporations over Americans has begun to show its first signs of cracking since the birth of national labor unions. Our duty in leading this awakening should be to continue educating our fellow countrymen of the dangers of our twisted economic system, which doesn’t even remotely resemble the supposed “free market” that politicians and talking heads of all stripes claim to be their most sacred totem. This is because the economic system we live under is a lie, designed for one purpose: keeping the current Regime in power.

Corporations operate more like cartels, or royal courts, than simple merchants goods and services. Every day there is a new story about how a company was found to be inserting the orthodoxy of progressive activism into its corporate structure, or trojan horsing wokeism into their supposedly “neutral” product offerings. Companies like Disney, once beloved by loyal customers, have damaged their brands in this manner so heavily that they can barely put together profitable material for their audiences anymore. Yet even despite these massive failures, and even after sustaining heavy financial losses, the corporate world continues its headlong pursuit of wokeism and progressive ideology. This is because showing loyalty to the Regime has become more important than any other business goal in our economy: in fact, showing loyalty to the Regime has become THE business goal for most of these corporations.

Our ruling Regime has utilized the government to clear the way for friendly corporations to become their vassals, aiding in the maintenance of their control over society. This transactional exchange yields long sought after prizes for those who bend the knee. Those who do will find their competition eliminated or gatekept through convoluted taxes, lobbying intricacies, loopholes, no-bid contracts, bailouts, and other various means of legalized corruption. Board members can freely move between other vassal corporations under the Regime’s protective umbrella, taking new jobs and obtaining increasingly pointless but harder to pronounce titles in furtherance of their own self-enrichment. This system provides the allure of elite power and decadence that so many in the world of capital crave, and crucially, the validation of their peers in high society. As a result, companies no longer vie for the approval of their customers or pleasing their audiences, but seek only the approval of their masters and their own self-aggrandizement.

CEOs and board members have utilized their influence to pursue political agendas in order to advance their corporate interests and maintain a stable stock price for shareholders and investment firms, making public political opposition to the ruling status quo nearly impossible. For example, if say, Boeing or Lockheed Martin refused to pay tribute to a favorite Regime protected class by say, simply not flying a rainbow flag during pride month, the Regime has a deep arsenal of damaging punishments they could levy against the company, to elevate its competitors and crash its stock price. As companies like Boeing have become increasingly beholden to investors, boards, and their HR department commissars, they have funneled corporate resources into political theater and administration budgets in order to steer into this skid and insulate themselves from Regime legal and reputational weaponry, such as activists and regulators. But this cycle is not a neutral phenomenon, especially when one side controls most of the institutions in the country: the progressive left. Soon everything is not just inching leftward, but lurching leftward. The change is incremental, until it isn’t. Now, it seems every leadership team, board room and HR department in the world is infected with activist rhetoric on race, gender, politics and more, serving as minarets for itinerant liberal preachers seeking to bring everything they touch under tight control. Always remember the words of political theorist Curtis Yarvin: “Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.”

The Regime’s ideological control of national media alone has made it nearly impossible for corporations to even hint about going against them. Throw in their control of the bureaucratic agencies which allocate funding grants and regulations, along with the academic institutions which control educational, research and development opportunities, and it seems logical that most of these creatures of profit would simply swim in the direction of the current to avoid upsetting their own petty fiefdoms. Companies like Lockheed Martin (which you would assume would be focused solely on finding more efficient ways to blow people up) instead focus heavily on proselytizing their workforce to ensure lockstep ideological compliance rather than making sure their planes get off the ground. This has resulted in the so-called “free market” becoming perhaps the most powerful tool in the Regime’s belt to control society and punish their enemies. They can alter culture at will, instituting vast social changes without the consent of the governed by limiting choices in the private sphere through influence. In exchange for their loyalty, corporations are protected from investigations, given handsome payoffs, and even bailed out by tax dollars when they fly too close to the sun and collapse. It is a disgustingly toxic, albeit quite symbiotic arrangement which has served both the corporations and politicians for years.

But there is always a cost to power. By laying with dogs, the corporations themselves have contracted the same fleas that bite such political animals. Controversy follows them like a specter wherever they go, and they have lost their creative edge and connection to their customers and audiences as a result. Products begin to fail, and inexplicable incompetence begins to run amok, creating bloat and reducing productivity. The entire economies of western nations are experiencing this decline in real time, as evidenced by recent trends and measurements, and they can only manipulate economic numbers to cover it up for so long. While this is bad enough on its own and portends potential disaster in the future, there is an even more perfidious effect the economic system has had on our culture.

An image of corruption from an article on the subject in Chicago Booth Review

America's over-corporatized culture has become shockingly hollow, wasteful, uncreative, and poisonous. Pointless products flood our marketplaces, incessant advertisements clutter our vision, endless whirlpools of self-indulgence seek to perpetually siphon away our wealth. It is also liberal in its societal impact, by design, in its devaluing of the humanity of its audience for exploitative profiteering and solidifying Regime control over our lives. This deprioritizes positive values like authentic beauty, liberty, productivity, merit, virtue, or advancement. It elevates nostalgia, distraction, lust, envy, and other base methods of emotional manipulation, buttons to be pressed for a treat to wipe away the devastation wrought on our lives. This slowly corrupts the public’s perception of positive values, such as beauty, by lowering their standards for a quick high. It is ultimately the selling of the soul of society and of the individual for temporary pleasure, which degrades us to the point of having no standards at all. Quality worsens, so people expect less, creating a harmful cycle that eventually flips the value system and destroys it completely. That’s how ugliness goes from being a taboo to a celebrated replacement value.

This furthers Regime control over society by numbing the public to its nefarious designs and making them incapable of distinguishing between better alternatives to their rule. Somehow, things become less useful, more fragile, shorter-lived, and more expensive all at once, deadening your standards and turning people into addicts at the slot machine of consumerism, perpetually chasing a false high that remains elusively out of reach. People lose their sense of truth, of goodness, of reality itself. This debases people into interchangeable parts in a vast machine of compliance, control, exploitation, and profiteering: single nodes of economic value to be used up and thrown away at the leisure of megacorporations doing the bidding of a Regime that despises the public. Products shift from necessary tools or instruments of self-betterment into humiliation rituals, mere distractions, and wealth-extracting waste. Take a look at your “free market” and witness what it has become.

While it is easy to blame the left, our time would be better served by taking a good look in the mirror. A fox will always lust after the henhouse, but it is the job of the farmer to protect his flock. How could we have allowed this dire corruption to occur? The largest offenders are often conservatives themselves, especially conservative politicians who gladly sold their nation’s future for a pat on the head from their enemies, and consumers who seem incapable of recognizing when they’re being milked. The “free market” so proudly vaunted by conservatives has mutated beyond recognition. Like a parent whose child has committed a heinous crime, many conservatives continuously refuse to recognize the dangers of this new paradigm. Snakes in our midst like Nikki Haley imbibe deeply from the very cup of corruption we asked them to destroy and tell us not to worry. They lie reflexively to their constituents and insist on keeping faith in a system that despises everything they pretend to stand for and works actively to humiliate the people they supposedly represent.

Conservatives and the right more broadly must decouple themselves from the worship of private industry and capital. Companies are not your friends. Often, they are the enemy by their very structure. Even “conservative” companies are inundated by the leftward push over time by the very nature of corporate structure, such as when James O’Keefe was forced out of his own media company by board members who cared more about their personal reputations than the company and its mission. Sometimes they feign loyalty to “our side”, playing to caricatures of our people in order to make a quick buck rather than fighting honestly for our values, and betraying them at crucial moments. The "free market" is not a neutral institution: it never has been.

Corporate shills and progressive parasites have had it too easy for too long under this assumption and as a result they are weaker than they appear. This is why most products are made with cheap plastic, most appliances fail after 5 years, most cars last less than a decade on the road, and movies are merely copies of reboots of remakes, etc. Their hungry duplicity has caused them to lose their edge. We must continue pushing their downfall further, revealing their schemes to the public not only to the tune of individual product or brand boycotts, but to eventually dismantle entirely rotten corporations down to the studs in order to weaken Regime power. Chris Rufo and others have done incredible work in furthering this cause, which you can read more about here. While this transformation in understanding is in its infancy, it is quite difficult to deprogram the bulk of consumers who are deeply entrenched in this propagandistic process of exploitation. Even within legitimate reactionary movements you see merchant parasites leeching onto them to exploit and sell, sell, sell like locusts attacking a crop field.

Often you will even see so-called “conservative” companies doing this because they seek profits above promoting the values of their audience, such as in the recent Ultra Right beer calendar fiasco playing out this week. We should not be debasing our values for the sake of profits, as liberal companies would, just because we seek alternative markets. This is what I refer to simply as "bad" cultural capital. The bulk of cultural capital in the West is “bad” and can take a few different forms.

• Explicit: it exists only to further itself and the Regime that has enable it to reach its bloated state.

• Camouflaged: it is a “conservative” imitator, wearing the camouflage of a right-wing cultural presence while either explicitly deceiving its customers.

• Jestered: humiliating the subject or customers values and caricaturing them for profit.

There can be "good" cultural capital, but it must come from the movement directly and be trained aggressively to respond to our values, not humiliate them. We need to teach people to recognize which is good/authentic, and which is bad/snake oil. In more succinct terms, we should adhere to Robert Conquest’s infamous laws of politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

This ultimately boils down to the war over aesthetics. Specifically, the tug of war over kitsch (pointless) vs. kino (inspiring). Like so many other artifacts of modern culture, the Ultra Right beer calendar it is very obviously kitsch. It feels born of the purely exploitative and deracinated perspective of liberalism's obsession with reducing human beings to atomized nodes of profit and reducing their enemies to offensive caricatures. It is skinsuited in the offensive camouflage of a liberal's perception of "chud appeal". In this way, companies, even supposedly “conservative” ones, operate on the basis of imagining what a snobby Yale law professor thinks of a Trump voter, then applying it to their products to make a buck. They do this because they know it works and the profit margins are there, and because it is the only approved form of capitalist enterprise allowed by the Regime that even hints at the possibility of the existence of the political right in their midst.

When this gravy train is threatened (such as during the Bud Light boycott) liberal forces summon armies of MBAs, marketers, researchers, accountants, sponsors, and spokespersons to restart the machine and "obtain the chud's cash". They will appeal to the most effective forms of emotional manipulation: they will infiltrate and destroy truly conservative organizations from within: they will pay off influencers to give up crucial boycotts when the moment of victory is just over the horizon: they will wear the costume of a conservative to reach an audience that no longer trusts them just to extract more wealth: they will pretend to apologize and reform while making no true intention to do so with a peace offering product in a friendly disguise, such as nostalgia or sex. “Hey, you’re a red-blooded CONSERVATIVE, you like women in tacky outfits, selling their bodies to be ogled for profit in the free market, right?”. It sounds crass and vulgar because it is crass and vulgar. Such cynical offerings are designed solely for profit and continued manipulation of their audiences. These products are obvious and overbearing in their attempted programing, heavy-handed in their aims. The resulting offering is typically cringe, tacky, offensive, crass, vulgar, simple, and exploitative: kitsch. It provides no higher meaning and keeps us distracted by the desperate chase for earthly pleasure. You will see through this charade only when you decide you’ve had enough of it.

Kino is the exact opposite: it inspires us to our designed purpose, our spiritual need for greatness and wonder, celebrating things like human achievement, God, family, positive values, truth, exploration, or amazement. This is typically easily distinguishable by its aesthetics, especially as the aesthetic gulf between society’s mainstream left-center and reactionary-right cultures continues to widen. Ask yourself, when you look at modern art, made solely for profit and self-aggrandizement, can you tell how kitsch it is when compared to previous eras, something made with good intentions - something kino? Trevi is obviously beautiful, exalting, reaching, spiritual, honors its people’s heritage: it is kino. The other is obviously disgusting, offends its people, is wasteful, disturbing, pointless: it is kitsch.

Left: the timeless Trevi Fountain. Right: a $2 million waste of taxpayer funds to ruin a public space with ugliness.

So, how do we get “conservative” companies to go from kitsch to kino, and how do we get the wider market to respond to us instead of their Regime masters? Such a shift requires adjusting how capital changes hands in our society. That means teaching the parasites infesting private capital and our culture that their free pass at the feeding trough of our bank accounts is no longer guaranteed, and that we now see through their hollow offerings for what they truly are. The emerging new reactionary movement must emphatically reject cringe exploitative corporatism - kitsch - and embrace the values that extoll true beauty, grace, and human greatness - kino.

We must also look at our own cultural legacy and examine how it has been infected by the disease of liberalism over the years, controlled by proxy. How do we truly reject the kitsch we have been trained for years to accept as “good enough”? We must have higher standards for ourselves, and not settle for the leftovers maliciously tossed our way for exploitative profiteering by our enemies. You can make a calendar; you can celebrate feminine beauty - but it must be done in a way that is kino. It must be done in a way that inspires, respects positive values, and furthers them in society.

There are many great people working on this puzzle, like the amazing folks over at IM-1776 (if you can, I highly recommend purchasing their Issues for their incredible insights on culture, art, politics, lifestyles, and more: they make for an excellent addition to a truly kino bookshelf). Such work proves how deeply and effectively we will ultimately win, but we must be willing to sacrifice to do so. We must also convince others that the time for holding onto things like pride, convenience, and temporary pleasure is over. We must move forward into a new cultural paradigm, embracing true beauty, objective standards, and positive values. Whether it be in a painting, a sculpture, architecture, a photo, a film, AI generated art, public spaces, music, or even our own homes, we should look to consume things that are good. It is something you can innately feel, just at a glance, regardless of style (though Romanticism, Classical, Gothic, and Vaporwave are a few of my personal favorites).

Kino.

Aesthetics will always be inherently right-wing because the right believes in humanity, in the human spirit, and in positive human values. The left, in its never-ending quest for power, has discarded everything positive and true about our species and replaced it with their own vapid and empty promises of earthly pleasure and self-worship. These false promises lead only to the tortured existence of addictive distraction and enrichment. They have made their bed upon the weight of idolatry, and it will drag them to the very depths. We must ensure we are not handcuffed to them when they hit rock bottom.

Creating things that are inherently and aesthetically good will not only save us from this destructive end but will also provide long-overdue sustenance for a society that is desperately withering on the vine, ultimately yielding more political power than a thousand philosophical treatises. Aesthetics will protect our people against the degenerate forces that have infected our once glorious and vibrant culture. Aesthetics will set us free.

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new.” - St. Augustine