By David Futrelle
“Degenerate” was a favorite term of opprobrium for the Nazis, who used it to vilify everything in the culture that made them uneasy, from modern art to jazz music — all of which, naturally, they blamed on the Jews.
This ugly term, with all of its historical baggage, has been making a bit of a comeback in recent years, in large part due to the revival of Nazi-style bigotry associated with the alt-right and similar movements. If you’re unfortunate enough to get into an argument with a far-right culture warrior online, it’s only a matter of time before they call you a degenerate.
I thought it might be, well, revealing, to see exactly who and what these right-wing trolls consider degenerate these days. Scrolling through search results on Twitter, I found no shortage of tweets containing some version of the word “degenerate” — some with targets that looked oh-so-similar to the rhetoric of the original Nazis, alongside some that, well, took me a little by surprise.
Here are the Top 20 Things That Are Degenerate This Week, according to some of the worst people on the internet.
Halloween:
People trolling the #NoNutNovember hashtag:
Blow jobs:
Jews (but of course)
“Talmudic Jew morality”
Somehow also non-Jews:
Cuckold meme-makers:
“Bolshevik quota feminist rats”
People who don’t believe in God except for me:
Margaret Sanger and possibly the rest of the world’s women
The Daily Telegraph?
Deadspin?
“Race mixing”
The “Degeneracy Industry: (but of course):
The “Globo-Homo Agenda”
Drag queens reading stories to children at the library:
“F*gs”
The “delusional, perverted, baby-murdering, Christian-hating, economy-destroying, eco-terrorist, Islamic-supremest, Globalist far-left Liberal Party of Canada.”
The entire “human homo-sapiens specie”
Minus the wholesome white women:
If the alternative to degeneracy is to hang out with these people, I’m definitely sticking with the degenerates.
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But the really important question: do Bolshevik Quota Feminist Rats know how to drive?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/these-rats-learned-to-drive-tiny-cars-for-science/
Who will be eaten first, a splendid Jack Chick parody.
@numberobis:
People need to remember that there was, in fact, once an attempt to ban the celebration of Christmas in North America.
It was the Puritans who was the ones trying to ban it, centuries ago, as they considered Easter the only ‘true’ Christian High Holy Day, and Christmas far too intertwined with pagan rituals. Puritans were never interested in religious freedom for anybody but them, much like most of the louder American Christians to this day.
(Also, I remember a few years ago hearing that the Pope had spoken out against syncretism. Which I had to laugh at, because so much of the imagery of Christmas and Easter, along with a non-trivial number of the earliest Saints, are the result of syncretism as the expanding Catholic church made use of the same sort of absorption the Roman Empire had used to integrate local legends and celebrations into their own.)
The Chick Tract talk reminds me of this one coworker I had years ago, who converted to one of the local Fundamentalist churches. Besides becoming (more of) a self righteous jerk, he _really_ got into trying to distribute those Tracts to customers, going so far as to stuff them into the soda 12-packs the store sold.
One time I tried to get him to read C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, since I was being a secret devious beast at that time with the rest of my Fundamentalist coworkers with that book. He refused to even look at that book because the main characters were devils, and True Christians(c) wouldn’t/couldn’t read a sinful book like that.
Never mind that one of his venerated Chick Tracts had a similar story that also had a demon as the MC, and that the endings in both had their respective devils punished for failing to ‘win’ their assigned soul to Hell. Real Christian Fiction(c) did not have a devil as a MC, and that was that. End of story, so to speak. (Though that particular Tract had an…unusual way of distracting a demon trying to keep a young missionary-to-be from finding Jesus: leave out a gaming console to tempt the demon into playing it for the next several hours while their target is busy being converted to The One True Way(c). Hey, at least it was different, ya know?)
Though my main complaint with the Chick Tract philosophy is their idea that any and all problems you or your loved ones are currently enduring will just vanish the moment you accept their version of Jesus into your life. Have a critically ill child? Accept Jesus and *poof* your child is on the way to full recovery. Stone cold psychopath prisoner so hardened that even the other psychopath prisoners are afraid of you? Read the Tract about the abused little matchstick girl who accepted Jesus and went to Heaven when she died alone in a cardboard box, and let that crack open your own heart to Jesus. Then you will become the greatest prison reformer ever, and lead all your fellow prisoners to new lives as reformed men.
And so on. No acknowledgement that life is hard for everyone, regardless of what kind of truth is considered the One True Way(c). No belief is a 100% guarantee against bad things happening ever; teaching otherwise is dangerous, to say the least. And that is a major problem with these tracts, at least in my opinion. Others mileage may vary on that point.
ETA: rereading tweet #1, I wonder what that guy would think about churches adopting ‘trunk or treat’ parties on Halloween, as an alternative for their members who want to play dress-up along with everyone else outside their congregation.
It’s pretty to shocking to learn that C.S. Lewis wasn’t a Christian!
Well, by this guy’s lights, apparently not. Never asked if he thought Lewis himself was or wasn’t; didn’t occur to me back then to ask. Just that a book starring demons as the main characters wasn’t. Though Lewis did have an annoying (to a certain subset of believers) habit of using non-Christian mythological critters in his best-known works, so….
This guy was more of the type that thought that a True Christian(c) had to keep their minds 100% on God at all times. Stopping for a second to smell the roses, or even admiring the roses, was considered a distraction from worshiping God. If a thing wasn’t 100% concentrating on how good He was, it was counted as a derail from Satan, and to be avoided at all costs. After all, what are the odds of God asking a saved soul ‘Dude(tte), what did you think of my roses while you were living in the mortal world? I thought they were a pretty cool creation when I made the first one, if I say so myself.’
As an aside, my other two Fundamentalist coworkers enjoyed the book. They were thrilled to learn that Christian fiction actually existed, and was enjoyable to boot.
I can sort of see why a Christian of the fragile sort would be reluctant to read Screwtape. It does rather humanise the demons.
@Moggie,
That, and just how easy it can be for the beliefs of even a devout believer to be twisted into a 180 degree turn from what Jesus taught. One of Screwtape’s themes is that it’s quite easy to allow one’s beliefs to be corrupted like that, if one has no humility and self-awareness and similar things to watch out for that trap. Not everyone wants to think they’re vulnerable to that kind of manipulation; hurts the ego and pride too much to admit that possibility in themselves.
@Redsilkphoenix
*cough* The religious right *cough*
There was a particularly infamous Chick Tract where a man is molesting his little daughter, but Jesus makes him better. He doesn’t y’know, turn himself in or actually do ANYTHING other than stop molesting her, but he said the Sinner’s Prayer so that makes it all okay.
@Allandrel
Yeah… that and a lot of the sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, bigotry of non-Christians AND Catholics and some various degrees of Racism thrown in. And a long list of other stuff that’s just as fudged up on top of some of the stuff about Chick Tracts mentioned already.
It’s a big ol pile of Nope; no matter what specific angle your approaching it; and woe be to anyone who is fool enough to approach it from any angle at all to begin with.