CIS: SVU

FOLKS, I AM NOT ONE TO ARMCHAIR PSYCHOANALYZE (ha ha!) but it does seem kind of weird that Elon Musk just had his third kid with Grimes (named “Tau Techno Mechanicus”; his 11th child with three women). When a non-white athlete (Antonio Cromartie, 14) or celebrity (Nick Cannon, 12) has a double-digit number of kids that they barely know with multiple women they barely see, this is considered an indictment of their race. But when a white billionaire does the same thing, we are invited to celebrate him as a hyper-masculine “pro-natalist” visionary who is trying to ensure the future of the human race; lest the wrong (e.g. non-white, poor) people flood the world with their spawn.

Here comes the master race!

Why else would Elon Musk have such a weird fetish about having kids, other than to save humanity? I dunno, maybe growing up in an Apartheid state where he and his family lived in constant fear that they would lose everything once the black-African majority took power might have something to do with it? That he might have some deeply held, irrational core belief that if he stops having white children he will somehow lose his fortune? Who can say?

CIS: SVU! Celebrity sex pests are in the news! First off, Danny Masterson was just sentenced to 30 years in prison for a pair of rapes he did a couple of decades ago, which were apparently an open secret in Hollywood until such point that he was long past being a bankable star, and not worth the effort of his handlers to protect.

Next up, Russell Brand, who now faces a number of charges about grooming and sexual assault going back a couple of decades, which was apparently an open secret in Hollywood until such point that he was long past being a bankable star and not worth the effort of his handlers to protect.

Actress Dannii Minogue called Brand a “vile predator” as early as 2006, and Brand offered his personal assistant as sexual currency to Jimmy Saville in 2007, but his fate was finally sealed after he publicly condemned the ‘technocratic globalist agenda’ in 2022.

And finally, our old friend Tim Ballard, inspiration for the Sound of Freedom QANON-adjacent movie starring Jim Caviezel. You may remember Ballard announcing that he was stepping away from his crooked, money-laundering ‘anti child-trafficking’ organization, OUR, at the height of the film’s popularity for ‘unspecified reasons’.

The non-ironic painting “The Underground Railroad” (2017) by Mormon reactionary Jim McNaughton, depicts historical abolitionists kneeling before Tim Ballard.

It may (or may not) shock you to learn, dear reader, that according to a recent VICE article, no fewer than seven women formerly affiliated with OUR are accusing Ballard of sexual harassment. All told a variation of the same story: that Ballard would invite them to ‘be his wife’ on his undercover sting operations to ‘save kids’, wherein he would pressure them into sexual acts in order to ‘fool the traffickers’; challenging them to see ‘how far they were willing to go to save the children’.

It seems that this was an open secret in the OUR community, which he got away with until such point that there was too much attention on him, and not worth the effort of his handlers to protect him. Truly, the arc of history bends towards justice.

Oh, also one of the Executive Producers of The Sound of Freedom has been accused of groping the breasts of an underaged girl he ‘rescued’ back in 2016. This is what happens when you go undercover and get too deep, you risk losing yourself in the sex pest mindset.

THAT SAID, HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS VERY REAL IN THE AMERICAS, but sometimes isn’t very salacious. Sometimes, it is as mundane as billionaires and their cronies exploiting the “H-2A” American Visa program to lure and trap migrants into brutally inhumane working conditions on all of the arable farmland that they have been conspicuously buying up across America over the last few years.

As journalist Sam Knight reports in his recent article for “The Lever”, foreign workers are expected to take on considerable debt when they come to America, often see their passports confiscated, have their freedom of movement restricted via physical threats and intimidation, are placed in substandard housing, and risk of deportation if they try to assert their human rights. H-2A Visa workers average 55% of the salary that American citizens make in the same role and, being bound to the land in a quasi-feudal arrangement, dwell in something akin to modern serfdom.

It’s worth noting that these are the exact same labor tactics (and resulting material conditions) that the West condemns in the Gulf State monarchies. But I guess that, whether you’re building stadiums for the Qatari World Cup or picking fruit in California, ‘best practices’ (for slavery) are universal.

And while rampant sexual abuse IS very much a reality for an estimated 80% of Mexican and Mexican-American migrant women working in the American agricultural industry, good Christian organizations like OUR don’t seem to get very worked up about it. One reason might be that migrant workers barely register as humans to most Americans. But the deeper, bedrock truth is economic: American agriculture is sustained by slave labor. Sexual abuse of faceless, abstract semi-persons is simply the cost of doing business, when strawberry season comes.

CULTURE CORNER!

MAYANS M.C.: (2018–2023)
Ok, so bear with me: I’m the only person I know who actually watched this thing from start to finish, and I must report that it underwent one of the most startling transformations of any TV show I have ever seen. It’s an interesting case study. Mayans M.C. began as Kurt Sutter and Elgin James’ spinoff to Sutter’s trashy biker show ‘Sons of Anarchy’, focusing on their cross-state Latino frenemies, “The Mayans M.C.”. The first two seasons of “The Mayans M.C.” followed its predecessor show’s life-on-the-margins fantasy tourism for the bourgeoisie, glorifying criminals as ‘honorable killers’ with hearts of gold, bound by bonds of friendship. For this reason the series was largely lost in the shuffle of sub-prestige cable programming of the late 10s/early 20s.

Showrunner Kurt Sutter’s departure at the end of season 2 (for allegedly being abusive on set, protected by the studio until such time that the show’s declining ratings made him no longer bankable and not worth the effort to protect), left it in the hands of Elgin James. James- once a member of the anti-fascist straight edge gang Friends Stand United- comes from poverty, has served time in jail, committed and suffered from severe acts of violence in his youth, and spent years living on the streets.

Main character E.Z. Reyes (JD Pardo) had a weird photographic memory superpower which vanished after season 2 and was never mentioned again.

With his more sober understanding of life on society’s fringes, he took the show in a wildly different direction and flipped the thesis on its head, going from “you’re not cool enough to live like these bad boys” to “maybe these doomed losers don’t have what it takes to live like normal people.” The remaining three seasons are comparatively somber, languid and much less fun. The once-witty, superpowered bikers engage in self-destructive behavior, emotional cowardice, and hare-brained criminal schemes that could never possibly succeed. They are man-children that are in over their heads, too afraid to form the social bonds needed to sustain a life that won’t destroy themselves and others. The show also casts a harsh light on the idea, often taken as a sacred truth in middle-brow entertainment, that your children can both justify and redeem all of your sins.

Sons of Anarchy protagonist Jax Teller goes out in a cinematic blaze of glory, but most of the characters on The Mayans meet far more ignominious ends. Lots of people on the Internet have been bitching about the show’s ending ever since. Maybe that was the whole point.

Sign-up for the Substack: https://joshuagoldfond.substack.com/