#Reagan Davidson

[lozeyart]

Heres a TON of art I’ve draw over the last couple of months that I’ve completely forgotten to post so instead of making a bunch of posts in a row, I’m just shoving it all in one.

More Cats actors!

Wilson Livingston and Reagan Davidson as Coricopat and Tantomile Cameron Schutza as Old Deuteronomy Marisa Paull Gorst as Victoria Brendan Moran as Tumblebrutus Allyson Duarte as Jellylorum Rachael Haber as Jennyanydots Yuka Notsuka as Victoria Sam Buchanan as Plato

[white-cat-of-doom]

Highlights from the last few shows in Monterrey, MX (29-30 April 2023) for US Tour 6.

Yuka Notsuka as Victoria received some fan art of "The Prettiest Cat" on top of it being her 200th show! Congratulations Yuka!

It was also Ibn Snell's 200th show on Saturday. Congratulations Ibn!

Kade Wright celebrated his birthday as a Cat yesterday, and was treated to a very excited audience member (aka someone like me).

Aside from the celebrations, Taylor James Rosenberger had some time covering Alonzo, and Luke Bernier shows off two friends, Reagan Davidson as Tantomile and John Zamborsky as Skimbleshanks.

[junkyard-gifs]

Nora DeGreen as Demeter and Erica Lee Cianciulli as Bombalurina; all others are first cast, except for Marisa Paull Gorst in her Victoria debut. US tour 6, October 2022.

[cryptidvoidwritings]

Tayler Harris does glamor portraits

Posted November 8, 2022

[itsmyregularcat]

Who gave the best performance at the show?

So not to cop out within the first sentence, but literally everyone brought their top game in my opinion. It was wholly more impressive than my previous time seeing the former non-equity cast (who were still great), and those who returned (aside from Michelle who was out as Jenny for the show), stepped up their performances as well.

Rather than choose one specific performer, I will go over those who I thought did well enough to be lauded directly, which is going to be most of them.

One of my favourite performers from the last time I saw Cats was Lexy as Cassandra, and she was even better this time around. Her higher energy and unique style as Cass is a good one to begin with, and it was all on full display. Her dancing and range of motion are remarkable. Plus, holy shit she is hot as Cassandra. My God.

Megan Arseneau did a really good job as Jenny during The Old Gumbie Cat, and maybe it was just me, but I feel like she went all out with the tap sequence, and added a bit of extra flair and attitude into it. Definitely would not have know she she was covering by the way she laid it out.

John Anker Bow was absolutely outstanding as Gus, and his vocal clarity still impresses me, even after seeing him twice before Sunday. His blood curdling noises were superb. Definitely the best ones I have heard. His foray as Rumpus Gus was also spectacular, and his Bustopher was amazing as well.

Nora played Demeter as very skittish, upset, and lowkey mad (particularly when Macavity is afoot), and they definitely got the characterization down pat. Their vocal style during Macavity was good, and the way they acted during the Macavity fight was really immersive.

I was not sure what expect from Erica as Bomba given her previous experience as part of the RCCL cast, but you can tell she has played the role it before. Specifically, her movements and mannerisms during Macavity were on the money. Her voice was interesting, and I cannot say it was a bad fit at all, so I am into it. I like when actors end up bringing their own self into a role. Also, definitely looked like how I imagine Bomba would look, so thumbs up for that.

Yuka as Victoria was a big highlight, and I already gushed about her here. I loved her performance, and she is probably my new favourite Victoria. Her smile 💕💕.

Cameron as Old Duet was quite good. You could appreciate that he has a classical training and history in opera. His voice and projection was impressive, and he peaked his mic during Old Deut for how powerful he was.

Taryn as Rumple was perfectly mischievous and bubbly, so she gets a good stamp of approval in my eyes. I do not have anything specific to really comment on, but noticed she liked being silly in background interactions with other cats.

Hank did very well as Tugger, and captured the spirit of the character much better than Zach did (sorry Zach). He played Tugger as sauve and boisterous rather than juvenile, and was the sexy cat he was supposed to be. Also, his energy during the time after the bows was awesome. He flew around that stage.

Sam as Sillabub and Reagan as Tanto were both great, and I was impressed by Sam's voice during the Moments Of Happiness. Much richer than I was expecting.

I guess that is it? Anyone else who performed that I did not mention were exceptional too do not get me wrong. There is SO MUCH going on during the show to pay good attention to everything and everyone.

[ame-in-the-rain]

love its what makes a subaru a subaru

(reblogs encouraged)

[dandylion240]

The writer drabble for Halia. (please and thank you)

Halia slammed the door behind hard enough to rattle the windows. She stomped across the room, her roommate looked up as she passed and wisely kept his thoughts to himself. Reaching her bedroom she slammed that door behind her as well. Tossing the offending magazine on her bed she paced in front of her mirror.

Calming enough to stop her restless pacing she stood in front of her bed the magazine open to the article that had caused all this fury in the first place. "No one watching the beautiful, graceful, green-eyed ballerina dance would know she's hiding a tragic childhood."

Tragic? It was anything but tragic. She had her papa and Auntie Himari and her brother. Her grandparents too. She'd never lacked for anything in her life.

Her eyes skimmed the magazine article coming to a stop at an unwelcome but familiar name, "Raelyn Reagan, mother of Halia Davidson. " Mystery solved. The journalist hadn't bothered to check his facts in his haste to write an eye catching, sensationalized article.

"I had a happy childhood," she told the offending article. "If you had asked me I would have told you about how Papa never missed a dance recital, a practice or play I was in. How he always made sure Arion and I had what we needed. We knew we were loved."

"I have to call Papa," her voice was low and regretful wishing she didn't have to tell him that once again Raelyn was raising her ugly head and making their lives difficult. No doubt this was her mother's way of getting a piece of the action and attention she craved so much. "Why can't she just leave us alone?" she wondered aloud knowing there was no answer.

[totesarchives]

TREVOR MOORE

The Whitest Kid You Know

As ringleader of The Whitest Kids U’ Know, Trevor Moore spent the last two years working a deliciously twisted flavor of humor into the palate of American comedy. When Hollywood handed him the keys to the big-screen machine this spring, he churned out Miss March—one of the most aggressively bizarre comedies in years. DJ Pangburn visited Los Angeles’s Griffith Observatory with Moore to explore otherworldly phenomena and seek out where the jokes come from.

By DJ Pangburn • Photos by Ray Lego • Styling by Carmel Lobello & Jill Breare

Trevor Moore and I are to meet at the Griffith Observatory in the evening. That’s what I’ve been told. As I walk towards the entrance, I notice a sticker on a sign that reads “Captain Gaylord.” In a place of public science, a bust of James Dean lords over the place. After all, this is Hollywood, and no public place would be complete without Dean’s brooding presence. The smog of Los Angeles is like a rainforest, and I wonder if it’s possible to observe anything in this sky. Pluto is no longer a planet, but the observatory is disregarding this astronomical ruling. Pluto still orbits the Sun out on the front lawn. Griffith J. Griffith was something of a madman, and the land he bequeathed to Los Angeles today still seems to suffer some otherworldly spell.

Trevor arrives wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket. But, as he will tell you, he does not have a bike and this confuses everyone he meets. After determining how much we weigh on each of the planets, we talk briefly about the masterpiece of nonsense that is Pootie Tang, which leads us straight down the absurdist trail to Freddie Got Fingered…

How do such movies make it through the Hollywood machine? Freddie Got Fingered is one of the most amazing feats ever!

[Tom Green] just had complete creative control over the thing. I enjoy watching it. But Pootie Tang—I remember I rented that in college and I watched it and thought, I don’t like that. But then I kept thinking about it the next day and telling people about it. So I watched it again, and it was a completely different movie. The second time I watched I was like, I love this movie.

Would you ever try making something like Freddie Got Fingered?

I don’t know. The critics were after us for the movie we just made [Miss March]—but yeah, if you really believe in it. You want those movies to happen. I’m glad Freddie Got Fingered got made. When it first came out I thought it was retarded. But now I rent it every now and then because it’s fun to watch.

“I dabble in conspiracy theory”

Someone noted, and I agree, that it was a Dada or Surrealist masterpiece, or it’s at least in the tradition of Dada. Let’s talk about the Abraham Lincoln sketch, which is quite inventive. It’s like alternate history, in a way.

We do a lot of that alternate history stuff. It started a tradition we have now about presidents’ assassinations. The first season we had four or five very dark political sketches—we had two Abraham Lincoln sketches, we had another sketch where we say it’s illegal to talk about assassinating a president. It was kind of like a theme. I’m obsessed with the President Kennedy assassination. It’s a hobby of mine. I collect Kennedy memorabilia. I wanted to do this sketch where we say President Johnson is behind it, which, you know, he pretty much was—or a lot of people think he was. We did this sketch where I’m Oswald and Sam [Brown] is Lyndon Johnson and we’re sitting up in the Book Depository Building having this argument. This season we do a sketch about the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt that’s like pop-up video, with those factoids popping up. It’s all this stuff that they don’t talk about. Reagan did some good things, but he’s canonized now—as soon as he died he became this saint and historical figure. He did some good things but he also armed everybody that we’re fighting now. He got us in Rwanda.

“I’m obsessed with the President Kennedy assassination. It’s a hobby of mine.”

He armed the Contras.

He ignored AIDS for a decade and let it become a full-blown epidemic. So during this Reagan sketch, all these effects pop up with these odd facts—like, let’s slow our roll on this patron saint that is Ronald Reagan. But we’re kind of out of people now. [Laughs]

Were there any repercussions to the “It’s Illegal to Talk About Assassinating the President” sketch?

No. I checked it with my lawyer and he didn’t know. I was a little nervous about it, so I called the ACLU and they wouldn’t tell me if I could say it or not. I ended up asking them, “If I got in trouble for this, would you pick up the case?” They said, “Yeah.” But I still took part of it out. I don’t think I would have thought that sketch was as interesting or funny now. Most of the people my age that grew up during the Bush years hated him. He was our Nixon. If I came up with an idea like that during the Obama administration, I would be like, Eh, no, I don’t want to. And it’s not like you can’t make jokes with Obama, but he’s a different guy and there are different connotations.

At this point a most horrific cacophony of dog cries erupts from the hills below. Trevor looks in the direction from which the noise is coming and says, “What is that?” I say, “Holy shit… it could be a cougar, or a snake.” Trevor jumps down from the ledge on which he had perched himself and states unequivocally, “We’ve gotta go look at this.” I’m not quite sure how he intends to get us down to the crying dogs, but I play along, “You really want to go down there?” Trevor nods, “We gotta go down there.” We descend the steps of the observatory and toward the melee down slope. “It’s like flying dogs in a bat swarm,” Trevor says of the noise, and I try to make sense of what flying dogs in a bat swarm might look like. We encounter a couple Armenians smoking cigarettes and Trevor asks their opinion on the matter. One replies, “Wolves.” they smile at us and then look back out to the horizon, smoking ravenously. It’s fairly clear we aren’t going to make any headway into the crying dog matter. So we continue with our interview.

What books or films were influential to your comedic style?

All the Kings Men was always a book I really liked. It’s about backroom politics and how everyone is corrupt. And about how good people who go into politics with the best intentions ultimately become what they hate. But my big influence was always Monty Python. I grew up in a very conservative house and I wasn’t allowed to watch Smurfs, because it had witchcraft and magic in it. I was able to watch Letterman, who was my other big influence. I’d set the VCR, when I was a little kid, to tape Letterman after Carson and I’d watch it when I got home from school the next day. Also, Weird Al. I think he was one of the first people where I realized that he’s a musician, but all he does are funny songs. Lord of the Flies, too. One of the few books I’ve read more than once. In high school I was really into Hunter Thompson. The book I really liked was called Better Than Sex, which really wasn’t one of his better books. It was about the 1992 election. It’s basically about him sitting in his apartment, watching all these different televisions and filing off faxes to people, telling them what they should do. All these people you’d see on TV, he would write a fax to them because he had everybody’s numbers. And because it’s Hunter S. Thompson, everybody writes him back. A lot of the book is just basically him sending off angry faxes to people and then responding.

When Nixon left office, Hunter S. Thompson no longer had the anti-human to attack. We no longer have Bush. For the comedian, how does that affect the work? I know there is never a loss for material, but when the politics have changed—

—Well I don’t think the politics change that much. All the guys behind the scenes are still there.

But when the face of it all isn’t so abrasive and devilish…

That’s when you’re really in trouble. [Laughs] The optimist in me wants to believe it’s different. [The Whitest Kids U Know] performed at benefits to send money to Obama. I was in Grant Park election night. I flew down to the inauguration and I was on the lawn. I was swept up in it, you know. At the same time, I still think it’s the same guys smoking cigars behind the scenes. It’s still the Bilderbergers. It’s still the World Bank.

I read this book called Rule by Secrecy by Jim Marrs. And that’s where I was introduced to all those groups and theories, which came out by way of The Da Vinci Code. Ultimately, it led to aliens.

[Laughs] It usually does. I dabble in conspiracy theory. There’s a lot of it in our show because I’m very interested in it. I don’t believe all of it. But I think there’s truth in a lot of it. The problem with it is that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater a lot. The CIA killed Kennedy. For me, all the evidence is there, or at least the reason for them to do it is there. The witnesses that died—you watch the Zapruder film, he didn’t get shot from the back. He got hit in the front!

Here’s a fact I can’t reconcile with anything: Oswald goes over to the Soviet Union… and he gets back into the United States? No way. How was he not thrown in a prison the minute he stepped foot on American soil?

Yeah—during the Red Scare. I don’t think that these people who are CIA are eventually not CIA. “Oswald was CIA a while ago, but not when he did that!” [Laughs] “Bin Laden was CIA a while back, but not when he did that!”

And you can’t prove anything because it’s the CIA, they can deny anything.

Yes! It’s the CIA! [Whispers covertly] That’s why we have to talk about this in wide-open spaces like this where there’s no microphone.

I tell him about a book called The Men Who Stare at Goats, which details New Age techniques adopted by highly placed U.S. Army intelligence officials in the seventies and early eighties. Officials who believed they could walk through walls, stare goats to death, achieve Jedi-like mental powers, astral project and remote view, amongst other select things. Moore mentions that he himself has tried to astral project.

Explain how you were going about astral projecting.

I used to work for an Asian television network and I was in charge of documentaries. I had this guy who was very into New Age and kind of out there. He talked about how he astral projected all the time, and he had crystals that protected him from the spirits that tried to get him. I was kind of into it for a while and trying to do it. It never really worked. It got to the point where I also talked to people who said they had done it, and some of the stories I kind of believed. I don’t know if I believe it now, but at the time it scared me a bit. The guy I co-wrote with for years was the voice for those commercials that would go, “SEGA!” And he swears he used to do it. But he went the wrong way and bad stuff happened. I’m not sure I want to go and mess around in that world.

You might not make it back! [Laughs]

Right, yeah! I was also doing a documentary-comedy show. I did a pilot for the Asian network. We’d take a topic and make sketches about it, but then also look into it, investigate it. We were doing alien abductions, and we got interviews with people who had been abducted by aliens. These were people abducted by aliens in famous cases. The most absurd alien abduction on American soil—I got an interview with that woman. By the end of that interview I was like, I don’t think alien abductions are real. Then there’s neurolingustic programming…

Which is?

Ever heard of The Game? That book where guys go around hitting on girls?

Yes, the book by Neil Strauss.

That is a lot of neurologistic programming, in those methods. It was a big fad in the seventies. All the books are out of print, though. But it’s a fascinating, weird, almost dark art.

It’s a bit like hypnosis, really.

Yeah, and people who know how to use it can almost apply it to anything. It’s pretty amazing.

Arianna Huffington may have studied neurolinguistic programming—she’s known to be quite hypnotic.

I’m not sure if it’s a skill or if it’s something you’re born with, but if you can get it down, it basically seems like being a Jedi. [Laughs]

According to The Men Who Stare at Goats, within the army there’s three levels of awareness, and level three is “Jedi Master.” These men are fuckin’ crazy!

I’m going to find it.

We joked about our conversation being overheard by the CIA or some other cloak and dagger operation, and how we’d both end up in an interrogation room and neither of us would be surprised to see each other. And with that we departed the observatory—me back to my apartment and Trevor, well, perhaps he went in pursuit of the flying dogs in a bat swarm. ⇼

__________

This article appeared in Issue 19 of Death+Taxes, published on April 8, 2009. Death+Taxes (2008-2010) is a defunct music and men's lifestyle print magazine; it relaunched as a website in 2010 and was eventually acquired by SpinMedia in 2014, where it remains a culture and politics vertical of Spin.

Text and spread screenshots taken from Issuu.

[fleece-and-feltical-cats]

Victoria I made over the weekend to celebrate Reagan Davidson’s Vic debut yesterday on the US Tour! <3 I was so honoured to have been able to see her debut, and Vic doesn’t take much time to make so I whipped this one up between a couple shows to have in time for yesterday. 

And that’s it for US Tour cast stuff (for now!) I’ll be finishing up a few things this week and next week and then comms will be open again. Stay tuned for all that!

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

An inkling of the Republican Party’s shocking underperformance in the midterms could be seen in a literal, not figurative, crusade. Allen West, former congressman and Texas Republican Party chairman, decided in September that the time was ripe to join the Knights Templar, the infamous sect of medieval soldier-monks. Photographed standing in a white robe emblazoned with a red cross draped jauntily over his tuxedo, West—a close ally of Donald Trump—tweeted that he had taken “an oath to protect the Christians in the Holy Land.”

The real Knights Templar, of course, were dissolved in 1312. The organization West joined is an American-based “chivalric order” that grants its members “knighthood” and, aside from its name, shares nothing with the actual Knights Templar.

West’s bizarre fascination with the imagery of medieval Europe does not exist in a vacuum: The right is getting weirder. That might begin to cost Republicans elections in years to come and undermine their own appeals to American patriotism in a way policy extremism alone could not. American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself. Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites, there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.

This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.

The ascendant weird right will likely struggle to sell its deeply anti-patriotic vision to many voters. In these segments of the mostly young, online-influenced American right, the optimistic vision espoused by Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” has been discarded. The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s “American carnage”—now disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms. Today, the right has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”

As we can now see—with even greater clarity—in the wake of the election, American voters respond poorly to a toxic brew of pessimism; the promise of radical cultural transformation; and the imposition of foreign ideas, values, and aesthetics. Nine in 10 Americans believe that being “truly American” involves respecting “American political institutions and laws,” the Public Religion Research Institute found last year. Americans consistently affirm that liberty, equality, and progress—the core values of republicanism and the Enlightenment—are ones they try to live by. While the content and meaning of those values have always been contested terrain, opposing them is a nonstarter.

The weird elite right risks losing these “normie” (as it calls them) Americans as it embraces what is fundamentally a niche subculture. The toxic far-right ideas that percolate in online youth communities and among cloistered college-educated young Republicans have not remained there—increasingly they have spilled out to influence policy and may have been deciding factors in close races this year.

John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat, founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The country, he said, had “suffered” from women’s suffrage. He narrowly lost his bid. Blake Masters and J.D. Vance—two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin Peter Thiel—have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the “weird right.” Vance has questioned whether women should leave violent marriages; Masters has praised domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, argued against legal access to contraception, and openly said that democracy is a smokescreen for the masses “stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.” (Americans on balance like democracy; legal contraception is almost universally popular; and Kaczynski’s unpopularity is so widely assumed that pollsters rarely ask about him.) Masters, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his bid to unseat Mark Kelly, and Vance badly underperformed in his blood-red home state.

The most outwardly visible element of the extremely online weird right is its often nonsensical lifestyle and consumption habits. The subculture has not only embraced vaccine hesitancy—once primarily a creature of the left—but also fringe health and dietary practices that recall the wildest excesses of 1960s new age spiritualism. The claims are varied and, to differing degrees, absurd: Real men don’t eat soybeans; seed oils are dangerous; meat substitutes will turn men into women and also are made from bugs (they aren’t); the best diet is all-meat. This is no mere online phenomenon: Representative Robbie Jackson of Texas has stated that if one eats artificially cultured meat, “you’ll turn into a SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT.”

These trends are partly the result of declining social trust among conservatives. Loss of trust, in this case, manifests as hardening the body as a site of personal control. Health, arguably, is not the point—rather, expressing gender identity is. This is certainly true of “testicular tanning,” the belief that exposing the testicles to direct sunlight boosts testosterone (and therefore “manliness”), an idea that blends pseudoscience, tantric spiritualism, and self-help. Even this has not remained confined to the internet: Tucker Carlson has discussed it seriously.

Perhaps the most pernicious element of right-wing weirdness occurs at the intersection of standard traditionalist opposition to equal gender roles and an online youth subculture that has sought to make women’s disempowerment trendy. The idea of the “trad wife”—women who embrace subservient roles as homemakers and mothers, eschewing political leadership and careers—stands, like many of the weird right’s shibboleths, at the crossroads of internet meme, sociological critique, and political program. Trad wives are a pastiche of the idyll of the 1950s housewife and the imagined premodern agrarian mother, realities that only fully existed in advertisements and storybooks. They usually espouse complete submissiveness to husbands and a totalizing dedication to raising children.

By removing women from the labor market and circumscribing women’s social roles, the movement offers the illusion of sanctuary from modern woes and economic demands. It goes beyond simply reacting to perceived leftist excesses and embraces a sociopolitical program that would, if enacted, essentially remove the ability of American women to determine the course of their own lives—making them, once again, primarily subservient to and dependent upon male breadwinners. Millions of Americans are stay-at-home parents; most would likely be ill suited to the trad wife’s world. The aesthetics of trad wives are intertwined with darker impulses on the activist right toward a state that legally mandates specific gender roles—a form of recontainment that traps women in marriages and bars them from basic autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Women’s and reproductive rights are areas where meme-infused weirdness and actual policy align to set the right against most American voters. When right-wing writers like National Review’s Nate Hochman argue that no-fault divorce was “a tragic mistake” (a view shared by numerous other far-right figures), he is not only embracing a position outside the bounds of conventional American life but one that is deeply politically unpopular, opposed by at least four-fifths of Americans. The activist right’s legal alternative is “covenant marriage,” which allows divorce only under extreme circumstances like felony conviction or child abuse. Covenant marriage has recently made its way into the Texas Republican Party’s official platform as a replacement for existing marriage law.

Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.

The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in. Mr. West may still make the usual overtures to Americana in press releases, but the Knights Templar (so far as I know) never made it to Texas.

That idealization of the European right has led not just to the fetishization of historical monarchism—cheerled by figures like the reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—but to more immediate fascination with contemporary autocrats, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

One such admirer is Nick Fuentes, a prominent activist among college Republicans and also a white supremacist and antisemite who has become cozy with some congressional Republicans. Fuentes has praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “We continue to support czar Putin in the war effort,” Fuentes said, saying Putin would “liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States.” In this narrative, Putin’s invasion is a component of a broader war against American influence and democratic values—a goal shared by Orbán’s government, which has promoted “illiberal democracy,” decried “race-mixing,” crushed freedom of speech, and curtailed LGBTQ rights. Naturally, the Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Hungary earlier this year.

Among Americans more generally, the right-wing embrace of Putin is dismally unpopular: Just 6% U.S. adults have a positive opinion of the Russian president, the Pew Research Center found this year. Meanwhile, the “MAGACommunism” movement has combined American nationalism with praise for another authoritarian leader despised by most Americans, China’s Xi Jinping.

Alienating mainstream voters by embracing fringe values and off-putting aesthetics is not a new folly—on the left or the right. In the early twentieth century, French voters regularly elected left-leaning governments despite numerous crises that beset the nation. One socialist essayist, Charles Péguy, argued that the right was actually “far less conservative” than the left—while the right pushed radical transformation, reorganizing France around the Catholic Church and reestablishing a powerful monarchy, the left—in Péguy’s view—sought to preserve hard-fought but deeply held French values like the separation of church and state, equitable citizenship, and republican liberty.

In the U.S., the “cultural left” of the late twentieth century managed to alienate many voters through its pessimistic belief that America could not be reformed by material policy, only transformed through a shift in social consciousness. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, while a reformist left gained popularity with a multiracial, multiclass electoral coalition in the early twentieth century by painting an optimistic image of what America could be, the later—educated and mostly well-off—“cultural left” chose as its enemy “a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements,” removing itself from what voters actually cared about and instead defining itself by its cultural consumption and outlandish aesthetic preferences. The cultural left saw material political conditions as a downstream afterthought from culture and so tacitly abandoned both politics and culture—and got weird. The decades of backlash, from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, were inevitable.

While many Republicans are embracing the fringe cultural positions emerging from this radical and elite milieu, pushing the view that America is a degenerate society that cannot be saved, elements of the left may have learned their lesson. Eschewing what the writer Sam Adler-Bell has called “insular language that alienates those who haven’t stewed in the same activist cultural milieu,” some Democratic Socialists of America chapters have become more involved in recent unionization drives, fights for workers’ rights, and campaigns against monopolistic corporate power. It’s a focus not on posting but on materially supporting the working class—and embracing core American values to do it.

The right is learning the opposite lesson. Far-right YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson suggested in 2020 that the right is “the new punk rock.” But that may not be to the right wing’s electoral advantage. Subcultures, by their very nature, exclude or look down on the bulk of the public and tend not to win electoral power, a lesson the left learned the hard way. Far-right billionaires can pump money into New York film festivals and sceney parties, but in doing so, they are unlearning the language of American majoritarian values. Even as the left—in fits and starts—relearns normalcy, the right is abandoning it.

[jerimystoltzcreations]

September 26, 2022 The Creative Multiverse presents: #scifitember #scifitember2022 Day 26 Overcome The Greatest American Hero is an American comedy-drama superhero television series that aired on ABC. Created by producer Stephen J. Cannell, it premiered as a two-hour pilot movie on March 18, 1981, and ran until February 2, 1983. The series features William Katt as teacher Ralph Hinkley, Robert Culp as FBI agent Bill Maxwell, and Connie Sellecca as lawyer Pam Davidson. The lead character's surname was changed from "Hinkley" to "Hanley" for the latter part of the first season, immediately after President Ronald Reagan and three others were shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981. The character's name was reverted to "Hinkley" after a few months had passed. #CreativeMultiverse #GreatestAmericanHero #art #artwork #artistofinstagram #artist #artistforhire #Custom #create #drawing #drawingaday #draweveryday #illustration #pencil #sketch #ink #colordrawing #fabercastell #copic #twitchstreamer #blickartmaterials https://www.instagram.com/p/CjzVo-bM0vm/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[sinistercity]

Here is the current running list of taken face claims in our discord role-play server.

Admins hold more face claims to help drive key plot points in the role-play. We encourage players to take on only as many characters as they feel comfortable managing, with a recommended maximum of 5.

For every one caucasian/white face claim, one POC is required for diversity.

Zzy’s Faceclaims (admin)

Tom Holland - Douglas Folkvar [Born Werewolf]

Lupita Nyong'o - Asha Dubhan [Original Witch]

Nicholas Galitzine - Theodore (Theo) Black [Vampire]

Auli'i Cravaho - Frankie (Francesca) Keli'i [Witch]

Pete Davidson - Leo [Familiar]

Donald Glover - Elias Kane [Human]

Howl's Faceclaims (admin)

Hugh Dancy - Arthur Folkvar [Werewolf]

Idris Elba - Ambrose Myrrdin [Original Witch]

Keanu Reeves - Victor Lynch [Hunter]

Ricky Whittle - Quinn Eldritch [Witch]

Coulson Baker - Jamie Reed [Druid/Werewolf]

Simu Liu - Reagan Longwei [Human]

Josh Brolin - Matthew McLaughlin [Werewolf]

Alan Ritchson - Jack McLaughlin [Werewolf]

Alberto Rosende - James Caradawc [Vampire]

Ben Barnes - Lance Darling [Vampire]

JD Pardo - Mateo Garcia [Werewolf]

Brittany’s Faceclaims

Michele Morrone - Desi Zucchero [Born Werewolf]

Luke Evans - Everett Wentworth [Original Vampire]

Henry Golding - Xiaolin Zhao [Hellhound]

Ed Quinn - Carrick "Vegas" Vaughan [Original Hellhound]

Dicki’s Faceclaims

Tomer Capone - Kerry Mor [Familiar]

Pedro Pascal - Joaquin Araya [Hunter (Former)]

Benicio del Toro - Alejandro Ximénez [Born Werewolf]

Hale Appleman - Cecil Destry [Unicorn]

Val's Faceclaims

Matthew Daddario - Damien Ardeleanu [Original Vampire]

Brittany O'Grady - Sabine Dunbar [Familiar]

Florence Pugh - Alecto Sterling [Human]

Ranger’s Faceclaims

Jack O’Connell - Eric de Lucca [Bitten Werewolf]

Boyd Holbrook - Riley Strickland [Eidolon]

Alex Meraz - Santiago Osório [Born Werewolf]

G’s Faceclaims

Casey Deidrick - Connor Evans [Hellhound]

Harry Shum Jr. - Maddox Zhu [Witch]

Chess's Faceclaims

Aaron Taylor Johnson - Myls "Scarlet" Taylor [Hunter]

Norman Reedus - Jean Luc "Luke" Lamotte [Hunter (Retired)]

Storm Reid - Nimh Dorlan [Original Familiar]

Red's Faceclaims

Drew Ray Tanner - Franco Del Rio [Human]

Beetle's Faceclaims

Tati Gabrielle - Verena Hortensia [Hellhound]

Cas' Faceclaims

Steven Ogg - Henry Lyons [Turned Werewolf]

Casey's Faceclaims

Maya Hawke - Cameron White [Human]

Elena's Faceclaims

Elizabeth Olsen - Gia Woods [Witch]

Jeffrey Dean Morgan - Hunter Wills [Hellhound]

Ally's Faceclaims

Taylor Zakhar Perez - Jorah Najjar Sanz [Familiar]

Bee’s Faceclaims

Nolan Funk - Alec Hargrove [Witch]

[white-cat-of-doom]

Sunday (and the last day) in Thousand Oaks, CA (14 May 2023) for US Tour 6 was another fun day of covers.

Reagan Davidson covered Victoria for the time since late January (I believe).

Megan Arseneau covered Rumpleteazer again after a lengthy break, here with Sammy Fossum covering Mungojerrie, days after his debut in the cover role.

Hank Santos provides a crisp (and uncommon) full face of makeup before the show starts.

[junkyard-gifs]

Ellie Chancellor covering Demeter and Reagan Davidson as Tantomile; 2022 US tour (X).

[cryptidvoidwritings]

plot twist sillabub was the chaos agent all along

source

and Gus had something to say about it

[themfp1]

The High Art of Virtue Signaling

By: Jeff Davidson Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan penned a quite insightful opinion piece years back in the Wall Street Journal. She discussed how it was de rigueur for Democrats to always drop into their rhetoric the deep concern they have for the poor; you know, the huddled masses yearning to be free. The phrase “virtue signaling” had not come into full vogue at that time, but that’s…