On today’s installment of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with the inimitable Owen Cox (AKA
), a performance artist and cultural critic who runs the heterodox right wing art circle alongside co-founder .You may recall the pod I recorded with them earlier this year. If not check it out.
Also both are frens, so show some white boy agency and subscribe to them now.
Topics include:
Owen’s adolescent exposure to transgressive aesthetics as a heavy metal musician
His stultifying Classics education / exposure to Nietzsche through a kindle bundle
How his youthful travels in India disenchanted him with modern liberalism
His collaboration with the provocative Swedish philosopher Alexander Bard
DR’s live events in 2024 featuring workshops and semi-scripted performance art
Owen’s plans to leverage intensive Soviet-style training of artists
Walt finally learns what a “burner” is
The viability of intensely cultivated and vertically upscaled performance art
The impact of AI art—Owen sees it as driving art back into physical spaces
Does IRL present an obstacle to scalability/security/fundraising?
Different approaches to financing/monetizing one’s art
Walt’s plan to use Tortuga to connect right wing artists with midsize patrons
Strained sex relations in Scandinavia (i.e. frivolous rape accusations post #MeToo) and the cutting-edge women’s work currently underway there
Impact of cold winters and Protestantism on Northern European sexual leveling
The linguistic significance of “Madonna”
Femininity and agency are seen as antithetical in Abrahamic (esp Protestant) societies but complementary in civilizations like India
Equality can only exist in an abstract disembodied framework
Is Hinduism the most authentic extant connection to european paganism?
Western occultists have been into Indian spirituality for over a century because of the lack of integrated occultism in Protestantism.
Walt is jealous of Hindus’ authentic ethnic paganism
The appeal of the Indian caste system
Are people self-segregating into distinct status hierarchies that resemble castes?
Elite tech bros find it important to attain status in warrior or priestly realms
Americans are more likely to optimize while Europeans are generalists
Walt wants social infrastructure to intermingle STEMcels and artistes
Owen’s long term plans to throw elaborate large-scale performances
Patrons of yesteryear had better taste because they were aristocrats
Walt’s plan to enrich liberal arts majors to create better patron class
The Anglo optimizing model degrades cultural sophistication
Geert Wilders and Pim Fortuyn
Bubbles and foam culture vs. mashed potatoes culture
The Muslim situation in the UK
People in Stockholm are conscientious about using their phone in public
Raven’s recent article The New Prohibition, which mentions her and Owen getting told to put away their laptops by a barista
The need to curate content in a post-scarcity AI-dominated environment; Owen compares this to a jungle vs. the premodern content desert
Europeans are better at curation vs. optimization where Americans excel
How Tortuga leverages a curation approach for our bootcamp curriculum
Owen’s article The Paglian Right, which separates right wing values (hierarchy, differentiation, etc.) from religious or social conservatism
The necessary dialectic between vulture capitalist and fibromyalgia mom
Owen sees the Right’s primary adversary as disembodiment and abstraction while Walt sees it as incompetence and conflict aversion
Elite jobs have gone from engineers/entrepreneurs to financiers/consultants
UK as a very wealthy city surrounded by very poor country
Keir Starmer’s demonization of the white working class
The UK’s best hope at the moment is based black girl Kemi Badenoch
It makes sense for right wing parties to nominate women and minorities more
What Nigel Farage has been up to with Reform UK
Brexiteer counter-signaling of Romanian/Polish immigrants as compared to American conservative based black guy worship
Check out Owen’s band Mikrokosmos
Esotericism, Embodiment, and Art Collectives