Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)
speaker
140 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's always trying to tell you a self-consciously conservative message. It's overly sentimental. And then there's also this nostalgia thing. It's always looking backwards. And conservative art is always looking to the past because it's familiar. It's something that's already been established. It's something for which they already know what they're supposed to like, what's good and what's not good.
So there's no risk in trying anything new. And then the third thing I'll say here is that it's grievance-oriented. And this comes in two forms. It's either we're owning the libs or here's a story about all of the ways the libs are making our lives unbearable.
Sure. No country for old men as an example. But but it's not self-consciously right wing. Right. Right. Absolutely. You know, the Coen brothers would call themselves on the right. And I don't even know if Cormac McCarthy would who wrote the book it's based on. But to my mind, it is precisely right wing art or, you know, David Lynch.
Pretty much everything David Lynch touches, I think, has a certain kind of right wing coding to it. Certainly his major works.
You know, okay, because I like it, it's good, and therefore I want it to share my sort of political preferences. But beyond that, you know, and this is where there would be some points of disagreement. By the way, I'd also call something like Girls, the TV show Girls, is a right-wing... Oh, yeah. Well, well, that now you're just pandering to me because that was my that was my view.
All right. So then so then we might share the premise here that what constitutes, quote unquote, right wing art, which is, by the way, some labeling we're grafting onto this thing after the fact. And so it's actually like a very flimsy kind of labeling. But
what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.
I suppose. Yeah. But I'll say this. Like, I think it depends. You know, I understand your point that it's highly reductive to just simply say if I like it, therefore, it's right wing art or if it tells the truth. Tells the truth is what you're saying. But OK, so what I mean by that, though, is a point of clarification is there are certain at least modern left wing premises that.
that support their worldview and their political agenda that I think are belied by someone telling the truth about the world. And here's an example of this. The left sort of takes as a foundational principle of its politics, the idea of equality.
that there's a kind of flattening of people and that through carefully managed social engineering, we can produce a society that either levels out any kind of natural hierarchy
or produce a system that somehow can wrangle these natural, almost supernatural sort of entropic forces that, you know, are constantly creating chaos and constantly requiring our maintenance and management and authority to deal with.
So that's what I was looking for.
Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't contest that basic summary I don't want to overdo like how we're thinking about this word vitality for the purposes of this conversation. It's enough to say it's something like, you know, a thymus, OK, spiritedness, a self-will, a liveness or or a.
Also, I want to say that there's a certain kind of eroticism to vitality that's very important and has often been missing from sort of the conservative view of the world. And I think that's a mistake. I think you're leaving something very important on the table by not –
grappling with this notion of eroticism and what that means and why it might be valuable, especially, and here's the premise we're starting from. And I think, Ross, we share this view that we're reaching this phase, whether it's cyclical or there's sort of this longer term linear path of kind of civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence. That's a word I know you've used a lot.
And this all requires rebirth. And the process of rebirth is not gentle. It can be violent and difficult. So I would say that vitality serves these two basic functions right now and why it's valuable for us to take on board. One, it attracts young people. Young people, I think men in particular, women too, though, are naturally attracted to this sort of notion of vitality.
They see it, they know it, and they want to be around it. The right has failed for a long time to attract young people. This is finally changing over the last few years. It's also... a way of overcoming a kind of defeatism of this sort of idea that things are past the point of saving, that we can't do anything, that all there is left for us in the 21st century is to, on the one hand, merely manage
playing out this end of history period. This sense of vitality, I think, offers something else. It offers the human subject the opportunity to advance positively and affirmatively into the future. So that's my defense of vitalism.
Yes.
Okay, so I wrote this essay called What is the Long House for First Things Magazine. So you can answer the question. Yes. I would encourage anybody who wants to know the precise details to go read that article because I spell out what I mean by it. And here I'm going to talk and
Showing 21–40 of 140 · page 2 of 7
← Previous
Next →