Transcripts / Degeneracy

Hello boys. I get a lot of people on YouTube calling me “degenerate”, but I’m still not sure what that means. I try to be open to criticism, so I’ve decided that what I need is a glorious knight of wisdom to set me straight and I think I’ve found just the man. Some call him the "valiant champion of mother Europe", "the ever-chosen of the gods", "the radiant paladin of the Fourth Reich". But to this priestess of blasphemies he’ll always be: The Golden One.

“A young prince, chosen to take the mantle of the ages"

Oh my god. Look at his butt. Oh my god. Daddy, can I have some meat?

"Looks like meat’s back on the menu boys!"

Oh, Daddy. You know Lars, things have really changed since the last time we talked.

I’m a fair maiden now– to a certain extent– and I’ve been chaste since I started my transition. So, in a sense, I’m a virgin. And I don’t know about the rest of these decadent sluts, but I for one care about a little thing called purity. 

So, now that my decade of gender dysphoric, alcohol drenched debasement seems to be coming to a close, I think I’m really ready to begin the training, master. But first, let us fend off degeneracy by purifying ourselves in a bath of Swedish lakewater and pure absinthe. It’s time.

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What? Is this the bad kind of cultural appropriation? It is, isn’t it. Mmmm they're shiny and I want them. It's not my fault Black people have good ideas. What am I supposed to do, not steal them? I’ll pop it out. Alright thou resplendent champion of the north, hit me with your finest wisdom. 

“I’m going to go train some shoulders and admire myself in the mirror. That’s always a nice thing to do.” 

Well, at least we agree on something 

Abigail: Aha! Autogynephilic narcissist exposed!

Natalie: Abigail, isn’t not invading women’s bathrooms like your whole thing?

Abigail: Misogynistic mental illness confirmed!

Natalie: Abigail, what is your damage? Are you okay? How’s your mom doing? Is everything alright? 👁👄👁 You wanna get in the tub?

Abigail: Eww.

Natalie: It’s your loss babygirl, and your gain sweet prince.

He has an Instagram. And it’s just delectable. Meat’s back on the menu boys. He carries the Charles Atlas seal of approval. What ho ye jaunty lads! My captain, my King! Yaaaas! If the Golden One didn’t exist I would have to invent him. I need him. And maybe you need me too Lars, I’m the moon to your sun, the uh, Brünnhilde to your Siegfried. As you become more of a burly masc, I become more of a silky femme. 

But you know, I’m noticing that even though you’re straight, you don’t seem super interested in the bodies of the women in your life. Now, this is just a casual suggestion, but maybe what you want is a fair maiden like me. I’m not like the other girls, I’ve got the Ts and the D. On second thought, leave trans women alone. I don’t want that blood on my hands. Well, this is no longer a relaxing bath. And that’s why we never bathe with fascists. 🥛

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Well, I blocked my T, I popped my E, let’s talk about degeneracy. What are people talking about when they call something or someone “degenerate”? Well, let’s take a look at some examples from my YouTube comments section and see if we can figure it out from context. 

“Transgender communist degenerate”

 “KYS you fucking degenerate tranny freak"

“Degen tranny lel” 

“Trannies grow out of their degeneracy by the time they are senior citizens, or at least that’s what I would assume since you never see old dudes in dresses, lol what’s up with that?” 

“This is degeneracy. You ought to be slung from a tree.” 

“you little homos are future cannon fodder. A bunch of physically weak degenerate dogs. The End.” 

Aww, these people are trying so hard to upset me. They’ve only got one card in the deck though, alas. Anyway, what I’m gathering from that sumptuous sampling of the choicest fuckboys is that, like a burly Nord and his fair maiden, the accusation of “degeneracy” is usually paired with a loathing of queerness. 

Now it’s not always just about queerness, in fact fascists and social conservatives use the word "degeneracy" as a catchall term for to refer to queers, non-whites, communists, “communists”, people with disabilities, basically anyone who gets killed when the fascists win. But where does the word degeneracy come from? Let’s watch an instructional video to learn more. 📺

Doctor: The word “degenerate” comes from the Latin prefix "de-" which means away from, and the Latin word “genus” which means race or kind. So to be degenerate is to no longer be of your race or kind. And if you think this already sounds pretty fashy, you’ve been paying attention. The current usage of the term “degenerate” crystallized in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Lamarckian proto-evolutionary biology, bourgeois disgust toward the urban working class, and a growing colonialist awareness of supposedly “inferior” ethnic groups, gave rise to “degeneration theory”, the idea that civilization is in decline due to biological devolution.

Natalie: Hold on, aren’t these the exact same dingbats responsible for scientific racism?

Doctor: The exact same dingbats, yes. And one of the chief dingbats was the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau, one of the intellectual grandfathers of Nazism. Gobineau wrote a book called "Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races", in which he developed the idea of the Aryan master race, warned that miscegenation would lead to social chaos, and gave the word “degenerate” its modern fashy definition. M’lord? 

"The word degenerate, when applied to a people, means that the people no longer has the same intrinsic value as it had before, because it has no longer the same blood in its veins, continual adulterations having gradually affected the quality of that blood....in fact, the man of a decadent time, the degenerate man properly so-called, is a different being from the racial point of view, from the heroes of the great ages....I think I am right in concluding that the human race in all its branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing of blood...." 

Doctor: Notice that the “degenerate man” is the product of a “decadent” time. And “decadence” is a concept closely related to degeneracy. “Decadence” literally means decay, which like degeneracy, implies a fall from a previous state of grace. By the late 19th century in Europe, concerns about decadence were everywhere in the European cultural imagination. During this period, German nationalist composer Richard Wagner wrote his essay condemning Jewishness in music, which he first published under the pseudonym “Freigedank” which literally means freethought. That’s right, he pulled the goddamn free speech card. 📣🚨📣🚨

Doctor: Then the Jewish doctor Max Nordau published a pseudo-medical book called "Degeneration", accusing Wagner and other contemporary artists of degeneracy. And around the same time a bunch of queer, absinthe-swilling artists reclaimed the word decadence as the title of their movement. Everyone was accusing everyone of degeneracy and decadence. It was 4chan writ large.

Natalie: So the idea that Western civilization has become decadent is not exactly new then.

Doctor: Not at all. The idea that European civilization is in some way suicidal or self-destructive goes back to the 18th century, when scholarship about the fall of the Roman Empire led to speculation about what causes civilizations to decline. And one of the hypotheses was that effeminate hedonistic emperors and general decadence left the Romans vulnerable to butch Visigoths and Vandals.

Natalie: Is there any truth to that?

Doctor: No. Its vulgar pseudo-history encouraged by social conservatives. The “decadent” emperors: Nero, Caligula, Elagabalus, reigned from the first to the third centuries. The empire didn’t collapse till the end of the fifth century, which leaves at least two hundred years between the decadence and the collapse, at which time the Empire was thoroughly Christian. And in any case, the eastern half of the Empire still survived for another thousand years.

Natalie: Well, hail Caligula! But you know, a lot of people still believe this story about ancient civilizations collapsing because of the queers. Here’s “feminist” Camille Paglia on how the transgenders destroy civilizations:

“This movement toward androgyny occurs in late phases of culture. As a civilization is starting to, uh, unravel.”

Hang on a second. I’m gonna need to shift up a gear for this. 🍾

“Okay, and you find again and again in history, in the Greek art, you can see it happening. All of a sudden there’s a kind of, uh, you know, the sculptures of um handsome nude young men athletes that used to be very robust, okay, in the archaic period, suddenly begin to seem like wet noodles toward the end, okay? People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan.”

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“'Homosexuality, heterosexuality, so what, anything goes’ and so on. But from the perspective of historical distance you can see that it’s a culture that no longer believes in itself, and then what you invariably get are people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity on the edges, whether the Vandals or Huns, or whether they’re the barbarians of ISIS, you see them starting to mass outside of the culture, and that’s what we have right now. There is a tremendous and rather terrifying disconnect between the infatuation with the transgender movement in our own culture and what’s going on out there, okay? That’s why I’m concerned, I feel it’s ominous, I question whether the transgender choice is indeed genuine in every single case.”

Natalie: Riley J. Dennis. Why did you destroy ancient Rome? 😠

So the idea is that our infatuation with effeminate decadence means we’re going to be destroyed by real men, you know, like ISIS. This doesn’t deserve a response, we’re moving on. Where does fucking Nietzsche fit into all this? 

Doctor: Oh god. Do we really have to do this?  So there’s this dead German asshole named Friedrich… who’s every 19 year old edgelord’s favorite philosopher– Hey baby, the ladies tell me I’m Apollonian in the streets, Dionysian in the streets– in the sh–

Doctor: Shhh go to sleep. Basically what he said is that the moral system of Western culture, especially Christianity, is “decadent”, in the sense that unlike pre-Socratic Greek society, we have all these hang ups about guilt and sin and the afterlife. And Nietzsche says these ideas originate with people who are weak and sick, and that they repress our basic biological instinct to value strength and beauty and worldly happiness. 

In practice this turns out to be a Rorschach test that everyone reads their own ideas into. There’s a fascist interpretation that says we need to cast off the slave morality idea of universal human equality to make way for the triumph of beefy Aryan studs. And then there’s the more progressive interpretation that says we need to stop worrying about like fucking Christian morality man and reinstate the cult of Dionysus, which okay, I’d be down to go to that party, especially if we don’t have to talk about Nietzsche.  📣🚨📣🚨

What all this is leading up to is simply the point that by the time 20th century fascism was really kicking into gear, European society was already primed with a couple centuries of degeneracy discourse. Racist pseudoscience was combined with degeneration theory and Wagnerian mysticism to produce the core ideas of National Socialism. Namely: 

One: The German people and nation are like a biological organism that is prone to infection and decay. Two: Jews, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, communists, and the disabled are degenerate elements that contribute to decay. And Three: The degenerate elements must be purged in order to secure the health and existence of the organism. So there you have it, the history of degeneration theory from Foppington to Fascism.

Natalie: Well, thanks for the history lesson doc. One particular thing I’ve noticed about modern fascists is they’re especially obsessed with breeding bountiful crops of white babies. Nazis call the Jews vermin, but it’s the white people they think should breed like rats. And they specifically loath anything that stands in the way of fit white reproduction, including, as they see it: being gay, being trans, being queer, being fat, being a beta male, being a slut, being a feminist, not getting married, not having kids, having kids that aren’t white, masturbating, looking at porn, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, using birth control, having abortions…

♪ Condoms and orgies and mass immigration ♪ Malt liquor 40s and miscegenation ♪ Boys who use dildos and girls with cock rings ♪ These are my favorite degenerate things ♪

Doctor: Very cute. But don’t you think they might have a point about the drugs and alcohol? 

Natalie: Oh goddamn, fine, we’ll talk about the alcohol thing. There’s like ContraPoints fans now who watch my videos and they look up to me, so I have to be responsible and I hate it. So look, if you’re gonna drink I’m certainly not gonna stop you, but don’t even think about driving okay? Drink lots of water, and pace yourself. There’s plenty of time to be blackout when you’re dead. And you’re gonna be if you don’t take it slow. Alcohol is dangerous, it’s unhealthy, it’s only fun in moderation, and it can put you in really vulnerable situations with really horrible people. So I would never recommend that anyone get involved with alcohol for any reason… I mean, unless you like having fun and feeling good. Where were we?

♪ Absinthe and coffee and bitchy sarcasm ♪ Estrogen crying and fruitless orgasms ♪ Antifa furries and enby drag kings ♪ These are my favorite degenerate things ♪

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 Hi there. I hope you’re having a soothing degenerate bath. What I want you to do is just lie back and try to relax. And I’m just going to slowly start to drip hot candle wax all over— 

So for fascists and identitarians, everything that doesn’t directly contribute to the greater cause of white procreation is degenerate. And individual fascists differ on what those things are. Most of them agree that homosexuality is degenerate, because apparently gay people can’t raise children. Fascists venerate nuclear families of one dominant white man and one subservient white woman, because they view this situation as the perfect factory for churning out clean-cut heterosexual white kids. And if you soften the emphasis on whiteness, you get basic social conservatism. So this really isn’t just about fascism, though I do like to talk about the fascists because they have the biggest muscles.

Speaking of which, a lot of rightists have realized that in the 21st century the social conservative position is not very cool. So what what they do is they say of course they have no problem with individual homosexuals, what they have a problem with is “the gay agenda”. What they have a problem with essentially, is queerness. Now, what is queerness? Well, people have all kinds of scholastic debates about this. But in its most generic sense, queer means that you have some kind of weird sex thing. So, either your gender’s all fucked up or you have creative taste in sexual partners. But unlike the words “homosexual” or “transgender”, “queer” is tinged with a connotation of rebellion, often rebellion against the hetero-normative commandments of marriage, monogamy, procreation, and productivity. 

So social conservatives and even a few fascists claim that they’re willing to tolerate gay and transgender people, but only as long as you shut up about it, conform to straight society, and try to act as normal as possible. What they can’t stand is loud, non-conformist queerness, because think of the children. We’re talking pride parades, activists, leather daddies, genderfucks, kinksters, polyamorists, sing it with me ♪ These are my favorite degenerate things ♪

To fascists, the pursuit of individual happiness must be subservient to the health and success of the race. So in a sense traditionalism is a much more collectivistic philosophy than even communism, which only demands communal ownership of the means of production. At least in theory, communism doesn’t tell you what gender to be or who and how to fuck.

In practice though, there’s not a single position on the political spectrum that’s immune to complaining about degeneracy. While I was researching this video I randomly came across an article from an American communist newspaper from 1976 that claims:

“While we Communists oppose attacks on anyone by the bourgeoisie, including homosexuals, we do not uphold homosexuality as a democratic right. Homosexuality is a form of social sickness, a form of social perversion. It is a form of bourgeois ideology which appeals especially to the petty bourgeoisie because of its appearance as sexual freedom. Homosexuality arose from class oppression and the oppression of women” 

Jeez, fellow degenerates, we’re kind of short on allies out here huh? We’ve got the fascists calling us sexual Bolshevists, and meanwhile the communists are calling us bourgeois decadents. Why does everyone hate decadence so much? Is pleasure really so wrong?

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Listen, I don’t want my position to be misunderstood. I know that most people will probably always be straight, cis, monogamous, and procreative. And you know, that’s probably for the best. Someone needs to have the babies and keep society running. All we gentle decadents ask is to be allowed to enjoy our special delights in peace. My goal is not to purge masculinity from society or anything of the kind. In the perfect society created by me, there’d be plenty of beefy studs around so don’t you worry about that.

And that’s the difference between me and the fascists. I want a society where people like me are simply allowed to exist, and– this is the important part– where people who are not like me are simply allowed to exist. Fascists want a society where only people like them are allowed to exist. The queer quest is to survive, the fascist quest is to be the only survivor. 

So if society can tolerate for thousands of years the existence of priests, which is to say bejeweled men in dresses who have no children and are a giant tax-exempt drain on the economy, well, you can certainly tolerate queer people, who crack Nazi codes, and write you musicals, and sing you songs. So if you think the meaning of life is to create as many white babies as possible, you know what, fine. Go make white babies. But I really must insist upon my right, and the right of all degenerates, to coexist alongside you in our own decadent communities of race-mixing, sexual anarchy, and rock 'n roll. Rock 'n roll! 

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♪ "Gold Dust Woman" by Fleetwood Mac ♪