Why They Race-Swap

Everyone is aware that Hollywood is obsessed with race swapping their characters. Baffling and unartistic and cultural capital. And yet, for some reason, the powers that be insist on setting fire to their own cultural legacy. So why are they doing it?

There are innumerable cases of race swapping in modern media, and one excellent example is the casting of Disney's 2025 live-action remake of Snow White, featuring Rachel Zgler, someone who was immediately criticized as not actually looking like Snow White. Moreover, Snow White wasn't going to be acting like Snow White either.

>> You said you were bringing a modern edge to it on stage. What do you mean by that?

>> I just mean that it's no longer 1937 and we absolutely wrote a Snow White that is

>> she's not going to be saved by the prince.

>> She's not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love. She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true. And so it's just a really incredible story for I think young people everywhere to see themselves in.

>> Snow White is running for president.

>> I'm launching my campaign. I am

>> instead of being a story about an evil queen who becomes jealous of the beautiful girl with skin as white as snow. The story was to be about political resistance to the evil queen. And as Zgler is proud to inform us, she isn't going to be waiting to be rescued by Prince Charming. I mean, you know, the the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. Um, there is a big focus on her love story um with a guy who literally stalks her.

>> Yeah.

>> Weird. Weird.

>> So, we didn't do that this time.

>> So, no. So, no prince or a different kind of prince.

>> We have a different approach to what I'm sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because like we cast a guy in the movie. Andrew Burn, great dude. Um, it's uh It's one of those things that I think everyone's going to have their assumptions about what it's actually going to be. But, uh, it's really not about the love story at all, which is really, really wonderful. And whether or not she finds love along the way is anybody's guess until 2024. Um, all of Andrew's scenes could get cut, who knows? It's Hollywood, baby.

This took the modern audience by surprise because they didn't seem to realize that they were now supposed to be supporting a political project rather than enjoying a retelling of a classic fairy tale. And the Snow White remake lost north of a hundred million dollars. It also created quite a backlash from more traditionalist-minded fans who expected Snow White to actually look like Snow White, described by the Brothers Grimm as having skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. Rachel Zgler does not meet this description. There is of course nothing wrong with not looking like Snow White unless you are specifically cast to play Snow White. Zegler was cast by Bernard Telsey and Tiffany Canfield after being given a glowing endorsement by none other than Steven Spielberg which eventually secured her the part. Apparently, Zgler didn't even know what film she was auditioning for, with the audition script apparently being called Untitled Disney live-action film and the characters she was reading being called Amber and Jeff. Zgler herself was confused by the casting backlash of the film and nobody responsible for these decisions appears to have come to her aid. Like most actors, Zgler became the face of the film. And instead of coaching or stewarding her through the concerns, she was just left to twist in the wind over it, making careless and ill-advised statements without understanding the scope of the eye that she was inciting. Indeed, she seems to have become quite widely reviled because of her attitude and the woke nonsense coming out of her public appearances probably damaged the film's earning potential. Disney eventually banned her and her co-stars from even doing red carpet interviews because they'd become so damaging to the brand. It's worth remembering that Zgler is only 24 years old and has been essentially thrown into a culture war not of her own making and clearly beyond her understanding. It seems she doesn't know what the problem is, what she is being used for, nor did anyone seem to prepare her for the kind of public hostility that she will likely be burdened with for the rest of her life. I don't feel that it's fair for the people who took advantage of Zgler's naivete on the political issues surrounding her casting to just throw her to the wolves. To be honest, the issue is that there is a struggle happening here to which Zgler is not really privy and seems to have been used as something of a pawn.

Snow White is a cultural possession of the Northwest Europeans. It is a 19th-century German fairy tale. Zgler herself is Eastern European and Colombian and it is a beloved story and people generally feel very attached to the popular myths that form a part of their cultural heritage. When they are misrepresented in such a heavy-handed and vindictive way, they tend to feel that their cultural heritage is attacked by subversive forces within the movie industry. And that's because it is against the traditional European culture of the West is set a leveling ideology which seeks to deconstruct the unexamined premises upon which our culture rests. This ideology uses a hostile critique to discredit, dismantle and disempower the stories that acted at once as both moral instruction and a bonding agent for our society. We will examine one aspect of this ideology in detail. Its philosophy of representation.

There is a long-standing view in philosophy that goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle that art is a representation of reality and therefore stories are bound by their own internal logic as a projection of the hypothetical reality they are intended to construct. A good story is many things: creative, entertaining, compelling, relatable, consistent. But one overlooked aspect of a good story is that it is didactic in that it instructs us on the practical and moral lessons of the story without us having to have lived through them. The premises of the story construct the artificial world we inhabit for its duration. And this representation can be used to inform us about aspects of the real world of which we would otherwise be unaware. In this way, stories become part of the diffusion of knowledge and time-tested wisdom throughout a culture. This is why classic stories persist and are beloved from generation to generation. The lessons they teach are perennial and unaffected by changes in time, place, or technology because they speak to the enduring character of the human soul and the proper nature of the relationships which bind us together, at least for our culture. It also leads us to become possessive of these formative narratives. We think of them in some way as core to who we are and we enjoy passing on the value that they held to us to future generations. This is usually an organic phenomenon. It was not by design that in Germany that Goethe's Faust or in England that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings became national cultural touchstones. These stories spoke to a shared set of pre-existing moral sentiments which resonated with the people who enjoyed them and became cherished cultural institutions as a result.

What we can derive from the theory behind storytelling and representation then is that stories contain power and have some influence over people individually and entire societies more broadly. It is not a direct hard power but more a persuasive soft power that unintrusively influences the worldview of a people and subtly informs their decisions. These cumulative choices help determine the character of the civilization and the people who carry it. The stories that we produce have the character that they have because they are a reflection of the people who tell and enjoy them and shape future generations in turn. Left-wing philosophers understand all of this and realized that if they could intercede in this natural course of events, then perhaps they could wield this soft power to change the world according to their own ideological disposition. I think that we can look at four different philosophers and tie their work together to properly understand why this is all happening. Why the left is obsessed with race swapping.

While under arrest by Mussolini's fascist government, Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci had papers smuggled into his cell. And to pass the time, he wrote down his reflections on politics, philosophy, and revolution. These papers were posthumously published under the name The Prison Notebooks. In them he makes many observations from the perspective of a failed communist revolutionary on intellectuals, philosophy, the problems of Marxism, power politics, Italian history and American ideology. But the point of particular interest for leftist intersectionalism are Gramsci's thoughts on the relationship between the state and civil society. He distinguished between two kinds of intellectuals in society that he called traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals are in some way a part of the structures of the state and therefore find themselves unconsciously aligned with its preservation and advancement. Priests, teachers, scholars, administrators, lawyers, anyone who works with their mind in an institution helps promote the ideological hegemony of the state. Hegemony is a key concept for Gramsci and he uses it to mean moral, cultural and intellectual leadership. It explains how the powers that be manufacture consent from the general population. The ideological dominion of the state determines what passes as common sense for society. The state maintains its hegemony by use of its traditional intellectuals. And in Gramsci's view, only the organic intellectuals, that is, intellectuals who arise from particular class circumstances without loyalty to the current hegemony, can find themselves able to resist it.

Gramsci then took this understanding and applied it to the question of why communist revolutions have succeeded in the East but had failed in the West. He came to the conclusion that it is because civil society had different reactions to the state's institutions and ideological hegemony in each region. As he put it, in the East the state was everything. Civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the West, there was a proper relation between the state and civil society. And when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. If the organic intellectuals were going to conduct revolution in the West, it could not be done via a frontal attack. Whilst this might have worked in eastern countries where the people were oppressed by a tyrannical state and therefore would not render it aid in its time of need, this would not work here. The people of the West liked their countries and their institutions. They agreed with the ruling class's view of common sense and would spontaneously fight to defend the state against the revolutionaries. Gramsci realized then that a war of maneuver, a hot war where the revolutionaries take up arms against Western governments would not work. Instead, the revolutionaries would have to engage in what he called a war of position. In this new strategy, the revolutionaries would attempt to slowly build their strength over a prolonged period of time. Whilst they grew, they would attempt to seed civil society with their own views and at the same time critique the existing hegemony and its traditional intellectuals until their positions appeared untenable. Whereupon the existing hegemony would either collapse or could be overthrown and replaced with the radical hegemony of the revolutionaries without the general population coming to its aid.

Gramsci was deeply influential in 20th-century communist thought as its adherents struggled to understand how they had lost to the capitalist West. Kimberly Crenshaw, one of the original critical race theorists and the thinker who coined the term intersectionality, took great interest in his work. In the Harvard Law Review in 1988, Crenshaw published an essay called Race Reform and Retrenchment in which she adapted Gramsci's framework of a war of position to be applied to the contemporary conditions of black people in the United States. Her goal ultimately was the overthrow of the colorblind liberal view of civil rights to be replaced with racial privileges for blacks. She puts it quite plainly: "For blacks, the task at hand is to devise ways to age ideological and political struggle while minimizing the costs of engaging in an inherently legitimating discourse."

Following on from Gramsci's thoughts on this is the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in his landmark 1970 essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Althusser observed that examining the means of production was not enough and instead the means of reproduction were a key aspect of the hegemony of the state. The methods of cultural production and reproduction themselves had underlying assumptions which informed them and gave them their character. This is what he called their ideology. And they reproduced the means of production according to the way this ideology interpolated their subjects. That is, denoted and interpreted them according to its own system. Without the ability to do this, no system would be able to sustain itself over any significant period of time. Althusser theorized that each state consisted of repressive state apparatuses such as the police, courts, army and prisons which impose by force the regime of society, but also a series of ideological state apparatuses such as the family, schools, churches, the media, political parties and culture. The ideological state apparatuses function mainly by persuasion, that is, by ideology, and are the tools by which the state formats the minds of the citizens within its own civilization and makes real the ideology of the state in the brick-and-mortar structure of the civilization itself. The ideological state apparatuses explain why the repressive state apparatuses are there and why they act as they act. They tell the story that justifies the behavior of the entire civilization. Why is one person going to jail and another person being given an award? Because the ideology of the state interpolates them differently. It categorizes each according to certain characteristics and gives punishment and reward based on the standards the ideology has set out. Hollywood and any other industry of cultural production is by Althusser's standard an ideological state apparatus and tells the civilization's story of who is good and who is bad, who is deserving of praise and who is deserving of punishment. Therefore, gaining control of the future production of the legitimating stories is a core aim in the war of position against Western nations. The entertainment industry is of vital strategic importance to the revolutionaries and reveals why Gamergate left such a deep scar in their collective psyche. It could be that the people who exist beneath the influence of the institutions are not sufficiently demoralized as to roll over upon contact and will still put up a persistent fight against the critical theorists in defense of their institutions, as the gamers did in 2014. Though the gamers eventually lost that battle, it probably did set the stage for the coming war.

Next, we will examine why the revolutionaries are race swapping the characters rather than taking some other kind of action with the power that they've accumulated. In 1992, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor published his essay, The Politics of Recognition, in which he argued that our identities are fundamentally dialogical rather than monological and shaped by recognition, misrecognition, or non-recognition by others instead of being formed in isolation. In previous eras, social hierarchies assigned to each class a certain honor in the sense that it is used by Rousseau, in that it preferred some over others. Liberalism has destroyed this stratified and rarified notion of dignity and has attempted to distribute it to the widest possible constituency, all human beings, through the expansion of human rights. Taylor calls this kind of universal colorblindness the politics of equal dignity. And you will likely recognize it as the view of rights advanced by the 1960s civil rights liberals, which are actually the ones under attack by Kimberly Crenshaw. It is the perspective that holds that everyone should be treated the same because all people have equal moral worth. Against this, he distinguishes the politics of difference by which he holds that people and the groups to which they belong should not merely be treated as formally equal, but instead should be recognized in their particular collective identity and distinctiveness. The conceit of color-blind liberalism is that the system itself is neutral and deals with each group fairly and uniformly by dealing with each person as an atomic individual. Taylor argues that this is not sufficient to give equal recognition to each person as the dialogical nature of our identities ensures that each group has different needs to be met for its members to feel recognized. This cultural negotiation is essential to our own view of ourselves and can cause real harm if it is not addressed. A go the colorblind meritocratic system of rights becomes not only oppressive but a particular feature of a dominant ethnic group, which is why you have heard Western liberal democratic cultures described as being white supremacy. In a sense, they're not wrong here. What is being described is an outgrowth of northwestern European Protestant civilization and, in the particular case of America, the political and cultural inheritance of England. You will likely remember the Smithsonian's controversial infographic on whiteness, which explained the differences between Protestant European culture, specifically English culture, and other cultures around the world. Broadly speaking, this infographic is in fact correct. These are the cultural attributes which are held by the English-speaking world in this configuration. They are particular to it. That isn't to say that each individual attribute in isolation isn't shared by any other kind of people in the world, but it is that collectively these accurately describe the English heritage of white American culture. Indeed, it is known as WASP culture, as in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, for a reason. If liberalism itself actually is an ethnically particular phenomenon abstracted and exported as an ideology, then one can see why Taylor is pushing back on the cultural blender effect that liberalism has. He has recognized that if left unchecked, liberalism will homogenize all cultures into the same kind of commodified slurry which disconnects the other cultures from their authentic expression and renders them merely an aesthetic beneath which all rules, regulations, customs and habits become intrinsically liberal and individualistic, that is, intrinsically English. There is an ethnically particular inheritance that is being unknowingly championed by the colorblind liberal order which leaves other cultural inheritances sidelined and feel as if they are being oppressed because, in a way, they are. This is precisely the issue that Crenshaw is attempting to address in Race Reform and Retrenchment. And she concurs precisely with Taylor's thesis. This lack of recognition of non-Western cultures prevents the necessary cultural negotiation that would otherwise take place between them and us in order to make them feel their place in the world is respected. This is the dialogue that Taylor believes is such a necessary component in the formation of identity. The liberal overculture has decided that its identity is as absolute as its ideology. It's monological instead of dialogical and so imposes itself on non-Western cultures regardless of how they feel about it. As their boundaries and borders are not respected by the liberal culture, they are slowly but surely eroded until their cultures are hollowed out and reduced to a shell of their former selves. Additionally, the power of the hegemonic culture is felt in many ways which are indirect. So, it isn't entirely clear from where the acid is dripping and the subject culture is surrounded and slowly being dissolved in liberalism without any room to escape.

The final thinker that we'll examine to understand why they race swap is Stuart Hall and his representation theory. In his 1997 essay, The Work of Representation, and in many of his lectures, Hall explains that the signs produced by our culture are closely tied to meaning, which is linked directly to our identity, representation, consumption, and regulation in what he called the circuit of culture. It is within this circuit of culture that identities are formed and meaning is found. And this is possible because our language itself is a representational system. Language is a holistic system which presents descriptions of reality which in turn shapes the way we alter reality because of our perception and the meaning we ascribe to what we have perceived. This connects him with Michel Foucault's concepts of discourse, power, and knowledge in relation to the subject. Hall describes this as the discursive formation which sustains a regime of truth. This regime of truth is the common sense orthodoxy of the civilization and it determines events whether the regime of truth represents something real or not. He extends this regime of truth to Foucault's circular conception of power. For Foucault, power circulates through society from top to bottom and then from bottom to top through a net-like organization, but never monopolized by only one place. Hall observes that power is not merely a repressive force, but also a productive one, and we are all bound up within it with no way to extract ourselves. Whilst we live in society, we are both the subject and object of power. Not only is representation of vital importance, but it is in the act of representation, discourse, and its expression that power is exercised. And this can change the shape of not only what each individual believes to be true about themselves, but about their own civilization and by extension reality itself. To put it in terms we have already been using, we could say that Hall is arguing that the common sense opinions that we hold about ourselves and the world around us and our position in it are all formed by the representative narratives that have been passed down through our ideological state apparatuses. And changing the narratives we receive changes the people that we are.

In summary then, the failed communist revolutionaries and their modern descendants, the intersectional critical race theorists, are still pursuing the old goal of overthrowing the state, but have realized that they must attack and demoralize the majority white society upon which it rests in order to not only emiserate the white population, but in turn create new conditions for the non-white population so they may be equalized. This desire for equality is the very bedrock of liberal ideology. Believing that all men are created isolated and equal, and the communist is using the subtle and soft power of representation in media to help bring this equality about. This is not done in a vacuum, of course. It is in tandem with all of the other aspects of the revolution which are constantly going on all around us. Calls for wealth taxes, increased welfare spending, and reparations are part of the economic war on a free people. Anti-discrimination legislation, hate speech laws, and suppression of free speech are all part of the legal war on a free people, and so on and so on. Representation is a part of the cultural dimension of this war. We can see, therefore, that the left approaches media not just critically, but also tactically. They view any engagement with media as an engagement with an enemy fortification, a power play, and a method by which to capture a generative engine of culture by which they might create the world anew. This is what media literacy is: the reinterpretation of traditional cultural artifacts in order to take them away from the people who feel they possess them. Engagement with any media is not neutral in their eyes. Controlling the production of media is controlling the things you're allowed to think, the kind of person that you are, and therefore the kind of actions that you will take. They are under the impression that they can soothe the poor behavior of certain minority communities through this kind of propaganda and balm any wounds through the projection of the world not as it is, but as they would like it to be. In this way, they will slowly but surely improve the lot of minority communities and reduce the power of the white community. Moreover, they will tell us this directly on the understanding that you don't know what to look for to properly understand their message. Watch this video from the BBC published in 2020 with all of what I have said so far in mind and see if you can now properly understand what they're talking about.

All over the world, in every country and every culture, storytelling has significant power. The stories that we are told via books, our screens, and advertising build identities, determine behaviors, and forge our dreams. American researchers found that stories repeated in our minds actually interact with our biology. Our brains need shortcuts to simplify and organize information and data constantly coming at us. They impact how we view the world and make meaning from what we perceive. The narrative we tell and are told has the potential to create and continue prejudiced beliefs by those few who dominate the storytelling sphere. So what dangerous ways has this materialized itself in the media and advertising? The British Film Institute found that between 2006 and 2016, of around 45,000 roles credited to actors in the UK, only 0.5% were played by black British actors. Not seeing yourself represented often leads to self-imposed limitations on what you can achieve and allows for negative perceptions to go unchallenged. And when black people are represented, there are many recurring racialized tropes, most of which can be traced back to colonialism, historic anti-blackness, and the legacy of slavery. 64% of UK crime films has featured roles for black actors, and 15% of all films featuring black actors between 2006 and 2016 focused on crime narratives. As of 2018, the average American spends over 11 hours a day watching, listening, reading, and interacting with media. Therefore, mass media has the power to challenge and change perceptions. The next time you see an ad, watch a film or a TV show, ask yourself whose voice is telling this story and who is it trying to represent? And for the storytellers amongst you, strive to give the same platform and voice for people to tell their own stories and shape their own identities so that in the future we can show endless possibilities of who black people can be and what we can dream.

As you doubtless noticed, that BBC video hit every beat that I have laid out here. The meritocratic colorblind liberal society of whiteness is interpolating black people in a particular way according to the common stereotypes and social roles with which they had been traditionally associated, which in turn reinforces those roles and reproduces them in the oppressed black community. The author argues that we should instead broaden the scope of what we believe to be the case so that further identities can be developed to help the black community break out of these stereotypes. The method of delivery of this message was through the ideological state apparatus of the BBC, which is attempting to overthrow the ideological hegemony of white British society to produce different results, not just in the minds of the storytellers, but in the black community itself, through the production of different narratives by which this community is expected to live their lives.

So why are they race swapping characters? The answer is that they think they are saving minority communities by using the power of representation in stories to change their fundamental nature while at the same time overthrowing the oppressive white overculture because they think that they are saving the world for minorities. It becomes evident why no cost is too great for them to bear and why they are prepared to just eat the financial losses for as long as they possibly can. They are revolutionaries on a moral mission and have captured the state apparatuses of the West, turning them from their actual stated purposes, whether that be education, entertainment, security, industry, or whatever, and have redirected them to the purpose of equality, which is why everything is getting worse while representation has never been better. We can pick almost any of these institutions at random and see them explain in the exact terms that I have laid out here why they are doing it. For example, let's pick Action for Children, a huge British charity that takes 150 million pounds a year, and let's hear them tell us why we need representation.

"In the past and to this day, portrayals of black, Asian, and minority ethnic people have often created or reinforced harmful stereotypes. Such stereotypes promote a narrow understanding of those communities. This has the knock-on effect of contributing to real-life racism and discrimination. Representation matters because what we see in the media doesn't just reflect reality, it also shapes it. On the other hand, positive representation can shift public opinion for the better and create greater understanding and appreciation between cultures and communities. UK media is not fully representative of the cultures and ethnicities that make up our population, especially at senior levels. Children and young people are still developing their sense of who they are. The media they consume plays a role in how they view themselves. A lack of representation can lead to children from ethnic minority backgrounds feeling invisible or unimportant."

We can hear the voices of Gramsci, Althusser, Taylor, and Hall coming through this short paragraph. They truly believe it.

Disney's 2023 live-action remake of The Little Mermaid was not quite the disaster that 2025's Snow White remake was, but it still wasn't a success. In 2024, over a year after the release, it was projected to have lost $5 million. In the grand scheme of things, this is actually quite a razor-thin margin that is likely to have been made up since then by streaming and merch sales and whatnot, but the film itself was subject to a large cultural backlash from the right against the race swapping of Ariel from being a traditionally white character to a black character. The Guardian published an article on the subject by freelance journalist Teao Barrow, who describes herself as a self-proclaimed foodie. She's also passionate about equity, inclusion, and making sure the people around her stay woke. In this article, Barrow explains exactly why she supports the race swapping of The Little Mermaid in precisely the terms we have covered so far.

"Audiences are possessive of cultural properties like Disney classics because they serve in many ways to reinforce the US national narrative. That in white worlds, all heroes are white. And when the heroes aren't white, they exist in their own worlds where the extent of their influence is limited to characters who look like them. More than just fodder for nostalgia, these classic stories are part of US myth-building about itself. Making a black woman the central figure in that myth disrupts the well-established hierarchies that have been embedded in that national narrative. The reaction to the film is crucial to understanding both why it's gotten so much hate and why it's so important that it was made. Much of the white supremacist pushback against the film is tied to the right-wing war against wokeness. Ironically though, the fact that some people can only imagine a black girl playing Ariel as the end result of some nefarious plot to force children to see more black people on screen is precisely why I'm glad that this Ariel is black. White society is clinging on to these cultural staples for dear life because they are an easy way to reinforce their ideals around what society should look like. And color-blind casting of these iconic characters is a necessary subversion of that. Even if we get nothing else out of these remakes, being racially nimble with how they are cast helps both old and young audiences reimagine what our cultural icons look like. Representation is important, but we also need to separate canon from whiteness and decolonize society's sense of who children should look up to."

Barrow might play coy here, pretending that there is not some sort of nefarious plot to replace white actors with black actors in order to intercept the white American mythologizing of its own culture. But that is precisely what is happening and she knows it, which is why she supports it. She is black. She is woke. She is completely in favor of taking cultural power for her preferred group against the white supremacists. The entire point is to decolonize our societies of whiteness, that is the traditional English culture of the Anglosphere countries, so that children can learn to look up to people of non-white racial backgrounds and rebalance the perceived racial hierarchy. The attempt to conduct a Gramscian attack on our culture is explicit here. Barrow is following precisely the strategy laid out and it really doesn't matter at all to her who is hurt in the process. Everything is instrumentalized in service of the revolution and the bodies which fall by the wayside are given no consideration.

As with Rachel Zgler's Snow White, Halle Bailey seems to have been basically left to fend for herself against the culture warriors who were upset at the casting decisions made for the film. She has since formed a friendship with Rachel Zgler because of the similar reception their films received, and as actresses have begun to develop a psychological coping mechanism to overcome the stress of it all. Bailey told Pearl and Dean that she learned to block out the noise. "As women, I think we form a little protective bubble around each other, especially when we see a peer going through lots of opinions. Rachel was definitively one of those people. I love her," she praised. "We all understand what a vulnerable place it is to be. And at the end of the day, we are young women. We're self-conscious. We're insecure. I'm insecure at times, and sometimes the opinions of people can muddy your own thoughts. So, it's special to have a community who's there to say, 'You're amazing. We are here for you.'" It seems that these young women are not receiving any support from the people who are using them as a political tool. I find myself becoming increasingly sympathetic to them, as I also have been in the eye of a culture war storm, and I can tell you that it's not a pleasant experience.

I looked up who had done the casting for the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid and wouldn't you know it, it was Bernard Telsey and Tiffany Canfield again. What are the odds? Well, pretty high. As it seems that Telsey's preference for casting is to race swap wherever possible. Telsey and Canfield have race swapped just about everything you could think of at this point, including a production of Little Orphan Annie and a stage play called 1776, which featured a cast entirely made up of gender-marginalized actors who were race and gender swapped in order to reclaim power historically denied them. But we will come back to that later. The point being is that the Telsey company's sole purpose as a casting agency appears to be the deliberate subversion of what they perceive to be stories which uphold the hegemony of the Anglo civilization in order to do their part in the long war against us. As the Guardian reported, Bernard Telsey is saying when discussing a race-swapped theater production of Hamilton in 2016, "This is what we live for." He says he wants more productions to think more imaginatively. Colorblind casting, he says, needs to happen much more, even in stories that are not written by people of color. We need to make more strides. He suggested that encouraging people to think this way is not as much of an uphill battle as it used to be.

It's interesting that Telsey describes this process as colorblind casting, as that would suggest it was almost entirely random, completely meritocratic, and unintentional in its representational results. If the casting was colorblind, we would expect to see a relatively random selection of unrepresentative castings such as an Asian Muhammad Ali or a white Martin Luther King. But of course we don't, because the philosophy behind this kind of casting and misrepresentation of reality is in fact entirely deliberate, political, and teleological. There is a purpose behind it, and it is driving towards a goal which grows closer every day. Despite clearly outlining his missionary attitude in the Guardian and how more strides must be taken in the uphill battle of race swapping and casting, Telsey also gave an interview to Playbill in 2016 in which he contradicted himself and claimed that essentially he had no real agency in any of the decision-making. "There has been a lot more diversity on Broadway this season, but casting directors don't get credit for that. It comes down to the writers. The credit for the diversity in Hamilton, for example, goes to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tom Kail who demanded it." Who knows what the actual reality is here? Although, of course, he is still completely in favor of the direction of travel, even if he isn't the sole author of it. Perhaps he is speaking of how things are done on Broadway as opposed to in Hollywood. Or perhaps the demand does come from the writers themselves and he merely fulfills their wishes. But it is also the attitude shared by the industry at large. As Gramsci would have advised, the counter-hegemony in the entertainment industry is for extreme left-wing ideology, and it has grown to become the hegemony to the point where right-wing actors and directors become pariahs, expelled from the functions of the industry. Many are now actually raising the alarm on social media. Here, the war of position has been won by the left, and the right had no idea it had even been under attack.

We've focused on productions that have removed white women from their place as the heroine of the narrative. But this of course applies to the white man too. Indeed, it was often done to the white man first by gender swapping them with women. There have been several examples of gender swapping of properties that were previously male-centered in recent years. But to take one prominent example, in 2016 it was announced that Paul Feige would direct a remake of the 1980s comedy Ghostbusters, but this time with an all-female cast. This was quite a surprise at the time, as there wasn't any particular reason to remake the original, which had become a cult classic over the years. Even Feige began in this position and seems to have been something of a bumbling idiot in this process. As The Atlantic tells us, when director Paul Feige was first approached about helming the new Ghostbusters movie, his initial response was that it would be impossible because both the original 1984 movie and its 1989 sequel were such enduring classics. "I love the first one so much. I don't want to do anything to ruin the memory of that," Feige told Entertainment Weekly. "So, it just felt like let's just restart it because then we can have new dynamics." The idea for an all-female cast came to him simply because he said, "My favorite thing to do is work with funny women."

Ghostbusters 2016 received a large push by progressive media to promote and defend the film, calling it a blast, despite the sympathetic reviews which confessed that in fact it wasn't particularly good. This of course didn't matter. What mattered is that it was a strike against the patriarchy, an advance of women against men under the same logic that characters are race swapped. Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian informed us at the time that "it's great to see a funny, entertaining film in which women triumph in spite of the sexist attitudes they encounter. And it's made all the more sweet by the fact that this film also represents something of a triumph against legions of entitled men in the real world who felt so threatened by the simple idea of women busting ghosts." This explicit attitude underpinned the entire project from start to finish. Ghostbusters 2016 wasn't a story to be told about the lives of four ghost busting ghosts. It was a culture war product designed to have a political effect on the current discourse and society because a feminist zeitgeist had taken hold in elite circles. Widest society was, by their standards, deeply conservative, reactionary in parts, which justified a revolutionary perversion of the beloved cultural products of this society in order to destabilize its very conception of the basic relationships which govern interactions. Somehow, Ghostbusters 2016 failed to capture the modern audience and lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. After its failure at the box office, progressive publications licked their wounds and led a rear-guard action against it. Before the film had even been released, Feige told an interview with Variety that "the biggest thing I've heard in for the last four months is, 'Thanks for ruining my childhood.' 'It's going to be on my tombstone when I die,' notes Feige. 'It's so dramatic. Honestly, the only way I could ruin your childhood is if I got into a time machine and went back and made you an orphan.'" A decade later, Feige commented on the response the film had received at the time.

>> Unnecessary outrage is is the biggest problem in our society right now. People get so outraged about stupid things.

>> Yes, exactly. And when there's all kinds of things to be outraged about, but getting out outraged about pop culture, trust me, I made Ghostbust the female Ghostbusters 10 years ago and you would have thought I did launched an invasion of Iraq.

It would seem that Paul Feige simply has no idea what the purpose of remaking Ghostbusters and replacing the male cast was. Why was he asked to do it? He doesn't know. He comes across actually as a well-meaning fool, completely unaware that he was part of an assault on the psychic landscape of a people who didn't want to see a cherished piece of nostalgia from their own culture torn down. His flippant comment about the only way he could ruin someone's childhood is to make them an orphan is quite telling, however, for Feige and people like him who are participants in this process that they do not fully understand. It seems that they have a cavalier attitude towards the cultural possessions that they've inherited. And in Feige's case, this is despite initially saying that he didn't want to do anything to ruin them. He did understand that there is something precious in it, but all too easily discards this concern. For a brief window of time, he was the steward of something that we collectively possess, and he bastardized it for his own pleasure. Intersectional feminists did see Ghostbusters 2016 as a vehicle to use white women as a wedge against white men, and the real mission still had a long way to go before it reaches its destination. Whilst a great deal of virtual ink was dedicated by progressive media to defending the film, some voices began to tentatively observe that the film was just one step on the road to proper representation because nothing is ever enough. As with all things, the lurking monster of inevitably increasing diversity swam beneath the surface, ever eager to snap its jaws at the white overculture wherever possible, exemplified by this article in The Guardian.

"The 2016 reboot has been hailed as a new feminist Ghostbusters, but praising white women's access to roles that challenge patriarchy, yet simultaneously harm black women through perpetuating racist tropes can only be feminist if the word has no meaning. Where white women stand on the backs of black women and other women of color to gain success and power, feminism is not present. And the claim that the film somehow represents the practice of feminist casting and characters can only hold true if you do the mental gymnastics necessary to deny the fact that black women are women, too."

This is how the film was used as a wedge. Yes, you should have a female version of Ghostbusters. And next time, we're going to have a black female version of Ghostbusters. Then we're going to have a black female transgender gay or gender non-conforming version of Ghostbusters in order to fully remove all of these predominant identities from the discourse. We can look at a review of that 1776 Broadway play to see the naked purpose revealed. As if it hasn't been clear enough so far, the New York Theater Guide commented on the race swapping of the characters of the play, saying, "Essentially, these marginalized performers are borrowing white men's power for 3 hours and using it to get their own stories heard." And that really is a good description of the essence of what is happening here. They think they are stealing power from white people.

Ghostbusters is a relatively trivial example of race and gender swapping as well. Like many others, I enjoyed the original Ghostbusters films just fine when I was young, but they don't hold any particularly special place in my heart. Looking back, they were just fun films about men doing something silly that in the story turned out to be more important than society had given it credit for. A fun story, but it probably wasn't a formative piece of media for my worldview or anyone else's. There is however a particular genre of entertainment that is a fundamental part of the formative experience for young people and the stories that they absorb: comic books. Comic books and their adaptations were considered a particularly fertile ground for the race swapping agenda, as comic books were an established and powerful ideological state apparatus that already commanded a large audience of young people. Indeed, comics were understood, even in their own day, to be influential in shaping the worldview of young people and often explicitly lent into their didactic powers. The themes of the most popular comic book stories were not to challenge the ideological status quo, but reinforce it. Batman upheld the legal order of Gotham City by working with Commissioner Gordon. X-Men promoted liberal tolerance of intrinsic and radical differences. Spider-Man helped young men come to terms with their changing bodies and place in the world. Captain America and Superman were self-conscious avatars of 20th-century American Cold War social and political norms, actively promoting truth, justice, and the American way. These five comics sold hundreds of millions of copies each, somewhere in the region of two billion in total. These stories taught the youth of America what right and wrong were from the position of the liberal morality of the state and society, what they could expect to see represented in the world as they went out into it, and the archetypes of people that they would encounter and have to deal with as an adult.

There have been far too many examples of race swapping in comic books to list, but one of the primary controversies came from the replacement of Peter Parker with Miles Morales as Spider-Man. As the Wikipedia entry for the character informs us, this race swap was straightforwardly because Spider-Man had previously been a white man, and the election of Obama was ushering in a new era in

Which white men would be replaced with non-white men, both in politics and in entertainment. The concept of an African-American Spider-Man was first discussed a few months before the November 2008 election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Marvel Comics then editor-in-chief Axel Alonzo describes the catalyst. When we were planning Ultimatum, we realized that we were standing at the brink of America electing its first African-American president, and we acknowledged that maybe it was time to take a good look at one of our icons. The Marvel comic books have since been adapted into a phenomenally successful universe of movies, and diversity is a core aspect of the ideological drive which underpins the reason that they're being made.

In a 2023 interview with The Wrap, Marvel Studios casting director Sarah Finn just tells us that there is no other motivation for it. "You know, there's that moment of 'wait, where do we go from here?' after Endgame? It felt so final. And then, of course, that impulse is, 'we go with more representation, more diversity. We go younger. There's a whole fresh wave to explore here.' And for me personally, that's really given me tremendous energy to kind of move forward." Finn is explicitly telling us, we are using these films as a method of delivering a message. She recognizes them as an ideological state apparatus that can reproduce the means of their production to recreate the world anew in a progressive mold. The revolution never ends.

It is a common left-wing complaint about Hollywood that it has engaged in whitewashing, that is, employing actors of European descent to play characters of non-European descent. This is demonstrably true and has happened many times over the years. The difference between whitewashing and progressive race-swapping is down to the matter of intent, even if the outcome does have the same kind of effect. Prior to the cultural success of critical race theory, questions of race and representation went largely unquestioned by the majority of white people. Indeed, white people existed in a state of blissful innocence on the subject. And as they formed the overwhelming demographic majorities of their countries, anything they made represented them through a kind of natural selection pressure. If a company wanted to make a movie, the chances are they'd hire a white actor because that would be from where the overwhelming supply was drawn. There was no great body of academic theory behind some of the more absurd casting choices from movie history, such as Christopher Lee playing a Chinese man, Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese man, or John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. For the most part, these were done for practical or prestige reasons. Either it was not possible to find a suitable actor to properly represent the role for logistical reasons, or a named actor's fame would be used as a draw in order to help the film's success. There was no self-conscious attempt to wrench a cultural product from minority societies and twist it towards untoward ends by denying the native people representation. Instead, what happened was a powerful culture flexed its creative muscles in the way most familiar to itself without even considering the effect it might have on foreign or minority communities.

Blackwashing is a leftist response to this phenomenon. Instead of an expansive culture producing the content it desires to see, the progressive rewriting of history is done in a calculating and vindictive manner designed to hurt others and emiserate what they perceive to be the white overculture. Anything that can be changed should be changed, no matter how preposterous the result. It does not matter how absurd the characterization becomes because offending the overculture and demeaning white men is the point. At the time of recording, Christopher Nolan's *The Odyssey* is the latest example of a race-swapping controversy. Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, is played by an African woman called Lupita Nyong'o. And it is rumored that Elliot Page, formerly Ellen Page, is to play Achilles. Aside from all of the other absurdities of Nolan's forthcoming adaptation, and there are many, these are the most absurd, but it isn't unprecedented. In 2018, Netflix produced a docu-drama called *Troy: Fall of the City*, which was a retelling of the events of the *Iliad*. In it, Achilles was played by a Ghanaian actor called David Gyasi, and various other Greek gods and heroes are played by black actors and actresses. This, of course, provoked a backlash from the public, which was itself attacked by progressive scholars who decided to inform the racists that they were, in fact, simply bad people for attempting to resist the hijacking of their own cultural inheritance. They were told by leftist scholars that the ancient Greeks considered darker skin to be more beautiful and a sign of physical and moral superiority, and that white skin was thought to mark a man as weak and effeminate. What is the message here? Your own ancestors would despise their descendants. So you ought to let go of your hold on what you have inherited and permit them to steal and pervert it.

We should remember the importance that Achilles plays in the Western mythos. The greatness of Achilles has been the inspiration for European leaders since the time of Alexander the Great, who reportedly slept with a copy of the *Iliad* beneath his pillow. Julius Caesar wept at the feet of a statue of Alexander that he might emulate his deeds. And Napoleon read and reread his copy of Plutarch's *Life of Caesar*, viewing him as the premier leader in all of history and writing extensively on his campaigns. This lineage of greatness is what is under attack with the deliberate misrepresentation of Achilles by leftist media, and they know it.

In 2023, Netflix decided to produce a documentary about the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, Cleopatra VII. Rather than portraying Cleopatra as the European, specifically Macedonian woman that she was, they instead portrayed her as the black African woman that she wasn't. Why choose Cleopatra then? Because she is an important character in the Western mythos of the fall of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire. And as Egypt is in Africa, it seemed like a plausible method of subverting a part of the story and misrepresenting the events in order to advance the representation of black people. As the director Tina Gavi informs us, "Why shouldn't Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians, it really seems to matter," the Persian director wrote, adding, "Perhaps it's not just that I've directed a series that portrays Cleopatra as black, but that I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that. I am okay with this." The level of threat that you must feel just on my skin tone to file a lawsuit against an entire streaming service, that to me is really extreme. And it's 100% fundamentally rooted in racism, which is a very modern ideology. The ancient Egyptians, they don't think about race the way we do. Maybe the ancient Egyptians didn't, but the modern Egyptians do. This blackwashing caused such an affront to the Egyptians that the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry published a statement arguing that experts agreed Cleopatra had pale skin because of her Macedonian heritage. And as referenced, one Egyptian lawyer attempted to sue Netflix over the issue. Clearly, representation is important. And we know that it's not a case of colorblind casting or out of any desire to actually represent black people. And not just because they straight-up told us this, but because if they actually had wanted to celebrate black rulers of Egypt in an authentic manner, it would have been perfectly possible. In the 8th to 7th centuries BC, Egypt was ruled by a Nubian line of pharaohs from the Kingdom of Kush, which is modern-day Sudan. These black pharaohs did indeed rule Egypt for a period of nearly a hundred years until Egypt was conquered by Assyria. If you had a good faith desire to make a documentary about the black rulers of Egypt, that's what you would cover. Instead, what they wanted to do is attack the mythos of European civilization. And so, the strategy is to remove white people from the media, history, and storytelling more broadly and replace them with people like themselves.

The example of race-swapping out the straight white men that I personally resent, though, is in Amazon's *Rings of Power*, the *Lord of the Rings* spin-off. As you can see from the film's promotional posters, *The Rings of Power* is gradually sidelining straight white men until eventually he doesn't even exist as a core component of the story at all. In this case, the white man is replaced by an actual orc. This desire to rehabilitate the beast in exchange for the heroic white man is a strange flight of fancy for the authors. Progressives have long claimed that orcs are a cipher for black people, and this has not been widely accepted as it is generally viewed as incredibly demeaning. It is likely that most left-wingers do not actually think this either, which makes replacing the straight white man in the story with a literal orc a particularly bizarre statement. No longer are we even trying to accomplish racial representation for minority communities. The desire is to use the power of storytelling to improve the lot of anything that isn't a straight white man. And this has become pathological, extending to things that do not even actually exist. This, of course, doesn't matter. Really, what matters is removing the straight white men.

*Lord of the Rings* is a particularly offensive example of race-swapping due to the cherished place it holds as a cultural touchstone in the heart of the English-speaking world. Tolkien, being a linguist, historian, and mythicist, realized that while all of the other cultures around England had their own mythological stories, England had none. His ultimate purpose in writing *Lord of the Rings* was to replace the mythology that England had lost. It seems that he had hit his mark, too. As in 2003, *Lord of the Rings* was voted Britain's favorite book of all time. Subverting *The Lord of the Rings*, therefore, is an attempt to strike at the best representation of the heroic morality of the English-speaking world. The protagonist of a mythological story is a representation of the protagonist of the civilization itself. Race-swapping in *Lord of the Rings* is an attack at the very root of our notion of positive masculinity and an attempt to deprive this vital cultural information from future generations of our young men. We can see that the ultimate purpose of all of this is the symbolic and then effectual dethroning of the straight white man as not only the hero of the Western mythos but the protagonist of Western civilization. If representation truly does have the power the left believes it to have, then what they are doing is nothing short of diabolical. What they are attempting here is the overthrow of white men from their own collective inheritance. Overturning them completely so that demographics who are not responsible for building our civilizations can claim ownership and dominion of something to which they otherwise would have no claim at all.

The most insidious use of race-swapping is when it is used to scapegoat straight white men. It is not enough to merely remove them from being represented in their own stories and leave us absent from our cultural narrative. No, the authors of this state of affairs have realized that they can kill two birds with one stone by instead race-swapping white men into becoming the villain of our civilization. This shifts the moral valence of the conversation from being neutral but dismissive to being openly hostile to straight white men, stigmatizing them as the source of society's problems. We see this often in public service announcements and adverts from the authorities.

"Bro, you need to lay down the ground rules straight away."

"Is that what you did with that girl you took out in Shoreditch?"

"Wow."

"No, no. She uh ghosted me. Probably wouldn't know a good thing if it slapped her in the face. Someone I'd gladly do if I saw her again."

"Mate, what did I do now?"

"Stop. Just stop, man."

"Instead of representing the more common kind of event, which might stigmatize minority communities for their behavior, the races are inverted to suggest that it is white people who are, for example, harassing women on public transport."

"She's a proper fit, bro."

"Sweetheart, you all right? You all right? Yeah. She listening, bro."

"Want a crisp? Go on, have a crisp. Go on, have a crisp. She's a bit the moody one. Is she a little bit rude, to be honest?"

"God. Jeez. Am I really that bad?"

"My taxi is nearly here."

"Taxi."

"Oh Jacob, you're not going to say anything."

"Just leave me alone, man."

"Bro, look at her."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are you going in such a hurry? All I've done is be nice. Nice. That's it. I'm trying to be nice. All right."

It should come as no surprise that this is the direction of travel. For many decades, popular movements begun by left-wing thinkers have characterized our societies as structures of oppression that are designed to provide an order which allows straight white men to succeed at the expense of women and minorities. Entire academic disciplines are built on the assumption that the West is a white supremacist colonial project designed from the outset to create a power structure that benefits only straight white men at the expense of everyone else. So there is no shame at demonizing white men because they intend to reverse this state of affairs. When straight white men are scapegoated as the source of bad behavior in entertainment media, not only does it unfairly condemn them in the social mind of the public, but it's also a deliberate concealing of the bad behavior of certain minority communities, protecting them from the negative stereotypes they earn through their actual behavior. Not only does this mean that it is more difficult for society to identify and correct this bad behavior, as it is being rendered willingly blind to the problem, but it also means that the victims of this behavior thus become a kind of sacrifice for the greater good of the progressive project with the promise that at some point in the future, the work of representation will succeed. The unspoken assumption is that the minority community will eventually become good, law-abiding citizens if we just represent them hard enough and hide their malfeasances until we arrive at that point.

Former *Doctor Who* actor Christopher Eccleston noticed that this process has happened in the entertainment industry and that it is having an effect. In an interview with the *Radio Times*, he objected to how white middle-aged men are being represented as the villains in movies and television. He has noticed the corrosive effect that this kind of misrepresentation is having on white men of all ages and has spoken out against it. He is correct when he says masculinity is in crisis, and it seems it's particularly white working-class boys who are being neglected, left to rot by governments and targeted by the far right. Eccleston, who is in every other way a run-of-the-mill bleeding-heart liberal on political issues, has identified that there is real damage being done to young white men in particular by their misrepresentation in the media, but white men more generally. Unsurprisingly, if they are not accepted and nurtured by society as they develop, they become resentful and head in increasing numbers to internet subcultures which have emerged because of this lack of respect for men and masculinity.

Netflix's *Adolescence* is a 2025, four-episode short series which follows Eddie Miller, a regular English father whose son Jaime Miller is arrested for the alleged murder of a classmate after she rejected his romantic advances. The series takes us through a disturbingly accurate representation of modern British society, showing us the impersonal legal and educational systems, revealing them to be soulless and the people occupying them cold and bureaucratic. The teachers in the school have no control. The children lack discipline, which makes the entire second episode feel like a journey through a madhouse. Jaime's encounter with the psychologist was particularly striking, as was his father's descent into an emotional abyss upon discovering that Jaime had in fact murdered his classmate. This series had a profound impact on the progressive overculture of the United Kingdom. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was personally affected by the series, calling it "hard to watch as a dad" and arranging for *Adolescence* to be shown in schools across the country.

Co-writer Steven Graham explained the inspiration behind *Adolescence* in various interviews. As a father of two himself, he read about numerous examples of youth crime involving knives and became disturbed at this evident and growing trend among teenagers. As he told the *Radio Times*, "Where it came from for me is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why? Then there was another young girl in South London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. Then there was this thing up north where that young girl, Brianna Gey, was lured into the park by two teenagers and they stabbed her. I just thought, 'What's going on? Why is this happening?'" Graham refers to three particular examples of killings here. The first is a reference to the murder of Ava White in Liverpool, which bears the strongest resemblance to the story of *Adolescence*. In 2021, 12-year-old Ava White, a white English girl, and her friends had an encounter with a group of unnamed delinquent boys who remain unidentified but were presumably white English, who were annoying them by filming them and posting videos on Snapchat. Ava asked them to stop and delete the recordings, and the boys refused. Ava and her friends ran at the boys, and a 14-year-old boy stabbed her in the neck with a knife. The boy then laughed and ran away. Afterwards, he told a series of lies about his own movements on the day, claiming that he was playing video games at a friend's house. At the trial, the boy claimed he was scared Ava was going to jump him after she came towards him. "And I heard someone say, 'Delete the effing video now, lad.' He claimed he wanted to frighten her away and did not intend to cause any injury. 'I was just trying to get her away because I was scared. I promise I didn't mean to hit her.'"

The second example given by Graham was the murder of 15-year-old Ilan Adem by 17-year-old Hassan Sentamu in Croydon in 2023. Adem was the friend of Sentamu's ex-girlfriend, and they had arranged to meet after the breakup to exchange personal belongings. Sentamu was known to have a short temper and aggressive tendencies and had deliberately brought the knife, presumably because he intended to murder his ex-girlfriend. But when Adem stood up for her during an altercation, Sentamu chased Adem down and stabbed her to death in the street. Nobody involved in this encounter was white British.

The third example that is given as the inspiration for *Adolescence* was the murder of Brianna Gey, who was 16 in 2023, by Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, both 15. This murder seems to have been the product of a scheme by Jenkinson, who seems to have had a fascination with serial killers and a personal obsession with Gey. In 2022, Jenkinson had been moved from her previous school for attempting to murder a young classmate by spiking her food with drugs. After being moved to her new school, which was not informed about Jenkinson's previous act, she began a friendship with and developed an obsession about Brianna Gey, as evidenced by her text messages to Ratcliffe. Prior to the murder, Jenkinson had already attempted to murder Gey through an ibuprofen overdose. This had left Gey writhing around in agony, holding her stomach, saying that she felt like she was going to die. She had told Ratcliffe on WhatsApp, "You know that girl I mentioned, Brianna? I'm still trying to kill her and the easiest way is pill overdose." The actual murder of Gey took place after Jenkinson persuaded her to meet her at a park with Ratcliffe, where they would allegedly meet a drug dealer to get cannabis. Gey was stabbed 28 times, though it's not clear who committed the actual murder, whether it was both Jenkinson or Ratcliffe. During the trial, both claimed the other had committed the murder. As the Wikipedia article tells us, Jenkinson claimed that while she may have lured Gey into the park where she was stabbed and come up with the plan in question, it was only done so as part of a fantasy and that it was Ratcliffe who carried out the stabbing to Jenkinson's shock. She described herself as not stopping the act, despite her surprise, due to being afraid of Ratcliffe, describing him as a sociopath. Jenkinson's defense also pointed out how an excessive amount of Gey's blood was later found on Ratcliffe's clothing, while none was found on Jenkinson's. Were I to speculate, it seems that Jenkinson had a particular fascination with murder and admired or was attracted to Gey and manipulated Ratcliffe into committing the actual murder. As the court heard, psychiatrists found that Jenkinson had antisocial personality disorder and Ratcliffe had a mild form of autism spectrum disorder.

These cases are many things, all of them horrific and tragic. But a commentary on the relationship between young white English boys and English girls because of incel ideology, they appear not to be. The murder of Brianna Gey is clearly an example of a psychopathic girl who, for her own insane reasons, wanted to murder someone. The murder of Ilan Adem seems to be the consequence of a breakup gone wrong and the excessive anger and low impulse control of her killer. The murder of Ava White seems to be the product of a hostile youth culture rather than targeted misogynistic hatred towards girls from young boys. I don't see any evidence of incel ideology as a driving or even tangential factor in any of these murders. There is indeed a problem with knife crime among young people in Britain, and this is disproportionately represented in the culture and behavior of black urban youths. What does *Adolescence* do to address this issue? Nothing. One cannot watch *Adolescence* and come to believe that this is a problem regarding non-white communities in Britain, despite this being far more true to life. It is not to say that there is no problem with knife crime in the white community in Britain, but it diverts attention away from the true proportion of the crime and where the hot spots of it are actually committed. Fears of racial sensitivity driven by political correctness force the show's writers to avoid singling out any minority community, even if the issue is far more prevalent there. Indeed, when asked about the issue of *Adolescence*'s race-swapping its characters, writers Graham and Thorne go to great lengths to deny that they had done this and to affirm that they had in fact deliberately obscured the racial disparities and the frequency of this kind of crime and sought to make white fathers suspicious of their own sons without putting any similar pressure on minority communities. Like Christopher Eccleston, the moral pressure of *Adolescence* is placed upon the nondescript concept of masculinity and nothing else. As they said, they've claimed that Steven and I based it on a story so that we've ended up race-swapping it because we're basically here and then ended up there and everything else and nothing is further from the truth. He also described the idea that such crimes depicted in the show are only perpetrated by black boys as absurd, noting that history shows a lot of cases of kids from all races committing these crimes. "We're not making a point about race with this. We're making a point about masculinity. We're trying to get inside the problem. We're not saying it is one thing or another. We are saying this is about boys. It's just about boys, apparently." Nondescript universal boys, which is why they represented a white boy stabbing a white girl because of incel ideology, even though this appears to have nothing to do with any of the cases they predicated the series upon, nor the actual data which is available to us.

What *Adolescence* did was to conceal the problems facing the youth of Britain. Instead of correctly representing the concrete issue in a specific case, the writers of *Adolescence* invented a fictionalized account of something that hasn't happened. This might fit neatly into the ideological discourse that feminists and progressives want to have against any kind of reactionary masculine ideology, but it does not speak to the actual issues faced by young people today. And this is the charitable interpretation of what they have done here. A less charitable interpretation could be to observe that while non-white people are being brought into our civilization to replace us due to our low birth rates, their crimes are being transferred onto the white population through misrepresentation in entertainment. Not only does this hide the true nature of what is being done to us, but it frames us as somehow deserving of what is happening.

Is there anything to the left-wing view of representation here? Well, undoubtedly yes, there is something to it. There is no doubt that representation matters, which is why they're so adamant for it and why people push back against what they perceive as the odious subversion and perversion of the stories that are important to our culture. If it didn't sting, it wouldn't provoke a hostile response. As we have seen, misrepresentation in cultural products does elicit an indignant national response from people and nations which are not used to this kind of attack on their collective sense of self. I suppose we in the West don't push back against it as hard as we ought because we are used to it. In many ways, the left has magnificently outplayed us in this regard. We can see everything about their ideological project as bearing fruit. They have fought Gramsci's war of position to outmaneuver us and gain control of Althusser's ideological state apparatus through which they're attempting to reproduce a new means of cultural production informed by Taylor's dialogical identities to impose a new version of Hall's circuit of culture so that the revolution against our civilization can finally succeed.

So why does the left-wing project of representation fail? Why are we here talking about it now and are not simply true believers in what they have told us about ourselves? I don't have an easy answer for that. I suspect that it's because the left tends to believe that each layer of a human life is separate from the rest. It is assumed in Judith Butler fashion that there is no essential connection to the corporeal infrastructure of a person and their cultural superstructure. Their behavior, the identity they carry, their relationship to the rest of the world, and the way that they act have nothing to do with their biology. Leftism has become entirely theoretical, recognizing only the sovereignty of the mind over the body, the rational over the habitual, and the individual over society, and has determined that these things always and forever predominate over the other. I am not sure this is true. I think people are not simply empty vessels to be filled by state propaganda, no matter what form it takes, and regardless of the propaganda's relation to reality. Not only do we have natural impulses and predispositions, we are also guided by our sensory inputs to form logical conclusions about the world from our own experiences and identify patterns from this data. Regardless of what mystic conclusions esoteric leftist philosophers come to about the nature of man, systems of power, and arcane moral imperatives that they intend to impose. I think that on a subconscious level, most people recognize the fundamental untruths of the founding precepts of liberal ideology that people are not equals in moral, social, or physical ways and instead exist in a thick web of interconnected relationships that themselves are hierarchical, connective, possessive, ethical, and persistent. They exist across time and space. And it is in these that the real good of human life is found. Liberation from them is the purpose of left-wing ideology and is actually a terrible thing if fully realized. So there is a natural reactionary response from wider society when they do come under attack.

So what should we do? Well, in the immediate, we must be conscious of the motivations of the people who are attacking our culture. But we must also think about what representation means for us and why it is important. We must think laterally about who around us might actually benefit from the positive traditional representation of what we had unconsciously been the beneficiaries of and promote that representation as we progress forward. We want future generations to have the opportunity to reap the benefits that we have enjoyed instead of being deprived of them by resentful cabals of ethnic minorities who seek the overthrow of our culture. We are going to have to become mindful of what is lost when these people gain power and seek to ensure that our own culture is properly represented. It's worth remembering that in our civilization, there are ideological systems around us that perform concrete functions, and we must begin to look at these anew, reconsider their purposes, and if we find them to be good, think about what we can do to uphold them rather than deconstruct them. Moreover, we must also demand that we consider our own identities as a precious inheritance of these systems and our wider civilization and take more care with what we have received from the past. If we think of ourselves as good people, it is because the civilization that we bear has made us so. We ought to show our gratitude by taking our place in the world where we belong and doing what we can to shape our world into the form we wish future generations to receive it, so that they too can be proud of us as we are proud of our forebears for the same reasons.

Hi folks. So, I thought I'd add a bit of an afterward at the end of this because this was a pretty heavy video. And as you can imagine, it took an awful lot of work to get this together. And it took months, basically, for me to do, which is why content on this particular channel has been so slow because this is what I've been working on. Just as a reflection on the video after spending days editing it, I would say that it's actually not as black-pilling as it might seem. I think these are all just things we have to be aware of. We should be cognizant of how we are represented and the kind of representation that we are getting, not just politically, which of course is one of the reasons that everyone is supporting REL Restore Britain, but also in the media, in the news. I mean, this is one of the reasons I think that people are so desperate and insistent on knowing the ethnicity of a perpetrator of whatever the atrocity of the day is because I think there is a sense that they feel that whatever's happening actually, of course, does not represent them and the people they belong to, and is a representation of another group of people that's committing the atrocity against us. And so I think it's actually become a very salient and important issue that we don't let the media and the powers that be characterize the current state of the country as essentially the native British people going mad and committing terrible crimes against the poor minorities who have been brought here for our own good. It's insanely perverse. It's just so demented that that is the way that the powers that be try to characterize this, and we absolutely should not let that go. But conversely, we shouldn't fall into the assumption that, oh, that means that our group of people never does anything wrong and there are no innocents on the other side of the question. Of course, that's not true either. And so I don't want to give that impression. But again, I don't want people to feel despondent about any of this because remember, being aware of the problem is the first stage on the road to solving the problem. And all of this is completely fixable. It's all just a matter of willpower. It's all just a matter of knowing why this has all happened and choosing otherwise. And we do still have the power to choose. So we can use those powers as and when we are able.

I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who supports me and lotusers.com. If you want to support me, then I would definitely recommend signing up to lotusers.com. If it wasn't for the conversations I was able to have with everyone at the office on a daily basis about this just whole raft of different issues that are all bundled into this one issue and are concealed by it, subsumed into it, and have to be thought out and pulled apart at great length, if it wasn't for the conversations I was able to have there, I really don't think any of the good work I do here would actually be possible. So, please do come over, support us over there. And it's only £5 a month. And I think it's, you know, the best £5 you'll ever spend because of course we've got loads of content on the site that is much more intellectual, much more cerebral, and well, not always cerebral, but most of it's more cerebral. And I think everyone's just doing a really good job, and I really appreciate everyone there. I get a lot of people asking me when is the next issue of *Islander* coming out. Well, soon is the answer. Um, it actually is coming soon. I've written my article for it. All of the articles are ready. I believe that it's been prepared and it's going to print very, very soon. So, it will be up on the shop.lotusers.com very soon. So, you will be able to get your copy of the next edition. I don't know if I have to say it, but of course, this one is incredible. Everyone works so hard, and we get, we're so lucky to have such a stable of genuinely brilliant intellects and writers who are people who are genuinely good writers to contribute to the work. And I'm honestly, I'm so, so grateful for it. So grateful for it.

But anyway, I, I've been doing this for hours at this point. When I, it's very late in the evening. Um, you'll probably get this video the next day. Um, this is what I spent my Saturday evening. Well, not just this Saturday, but like I'd spent a couple of days prior, um, not consecutively editing this video. And then about 7:00, all my kids went to bed, and I was like, "Right, okay, darling. I've got to edit a video. Well, finish editing a video." Uh, and I knew it'd be a long one, but I didn't know how long this was going to be. Did not know how long this video was going to be. Um, but here we are, and thankfully it's complete by the time you're listening to this. So, like I said, if you want to support me, please do follow the link in the description, and a new *Islander* is coming soon, and I will see you in the next video.