The Sociopath, the recent anti-Trump documentary from Ben Howe, is a dreary, inept piece of propaganda. It also represents the extinction burst of American cuckservatism, as the alt-Right takes center stage in Western politics.
At some point, we’re going to have to stop calling the alternative Right “alternative,” because it’s not: it is the Right. With the ascent of Donald Trump, the alt-Right is now the driving force of Right-wing politics in the U.S. and so-called “mainstream” conservatives are a powerless fringe group. Nobody buys their books, nobody reads their websites, and half of them can’t even get re-Tweets from their Twitter followers. National Review, RedState, The Resurgent and their ilk are the last dust bunnies of cuckservatism, due to be swept away after the election regardless of who wins. As I joked to Richard Spencer at the last AmRen conference, if the cucks are saying the alt-Right can “have” the GOP, we’re happy to take it. Forney for Mayor: Make Chicago Habitable Again.
Trump has acted like a Gom Jabbar for the entire American body politic. He’s revealed the Left to be cynical tricksters bent on White genocide, revealed GenXers to be mopey faggots afraid of social change, and revealed Mormons to be degenerate cultists with an axe to grind against the Gentiles. But most importantly, Trump has revealed mainstream conservatives to be controlled opposition. From walking udder Erick Erickson to George “Captain Chinless” Will to the alcoholic Jim Jones that is Glenn Beck, cuckservatives’ sole reason for existing is to give the plebs the illusion that we exist in a two-party democracy. Their true enemy isn’t Leftists, but the alt-Right and any other Right-wingers who want to win.
Enter Ben Howe, RedState editor and living embodiment of conservatism’s failures. Howe is a cuck in the most literal sense: his wife publicly divorced him in a Starbucks several years ago, then wrote an article for the Huffington Post bragging about it. Her name was also found in the Ashley Madison database leak, suggesting that she was cheating on him long before she kicked his ass to the curb. And for all his opposition to Trump’s moral turpitude, Howe had no problem calling Melania Trump a “whore” or endorsing Hillary Clinton following the Donald’s victory in the Indiana primary in May. Gaze into Howe’s dull, bovine eyes and you can see the abyss of mediocrity staring back at you.
Ben Howe also fancies himself a filmmaker, and just in time for the election, he’s released a documentary called The Sociopath, on Trump’s supposed narcissism. The movie’s available for free on YouTube (because Howe’s such a loser that no distributor would touch him), so I watched it the other day hoping for some cringe laughs. Instead, I felt like I was attending the funeral of a relative I never liked. The Sociopath is a horribly directed mess that fails at being informative or as propaganda. Howe’s hit piece is nothing more than a giant log swirling the toilet bowl of cuckservative discourse.
The most immediate problem with The Sociopath is that it’s the ugliest documentary I’ve ever seen. The movie consists primarily of archival footage of news reports and YouTube videos blended with original interviews, but for some reason, all of Howe’s found footage is pixelated, blurry, and looks like he filmed it by using his iPhone to record his laptop screen. To make matters worse, much of the footage is interlaced with black scan lines and artifacting, making The Sociopath officially below the quality of a first-year film school project. And Howe demanded $30,000 from crowdfunders to make this bilge! My friend Davis Aurini makes better-looking documentaries for the price of rent in Kalamazoo.
Compounding Howe’s bush-league directing is The Sociopath’s thesis: namely, that there isn’t one. The film’s ostensibly about Trump’s sociopathy—I mean, it’s in the goddamn title—and why he’s a dangerous man, but aside from a couple of throwaway clips (such as a remark about how Trump was supposedly “angry” at Obama making fun of him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner), Howe doesn’t address the topic at all. This is the kind of failure that would get you booted out of a junior high remedial English class.
What The Sociopath actually consists of is a meandering rehash of recent history and cuckservative talking points. Howe tries to paint Trump as a master manipulator who leveraged popular anger against the Republican establishment in a self-serving quest for power. He buttresses his argument with interviews with well-known cuckservative rent-seekers such as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and GOP consultant Rick Wilson, a man so classy he once accused Ann Coulter of letting Trump sodomize her for money.
The most obvious flaw with The Sociopath is that it fails to depict Trump as a sociopath, a bad candidate, or even a bad person. Every story Howe uses as proof of Trump’s perfidy just manages to make him look more and more presidential. For example, early in the film, The Sociopath discusses Trump’s leading role in the birther movement, pointing out that the Donald forced President Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. Let me repeat that: Trump made Obama his bitch, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing? Remove Howe’s narcoleptic narration and cheesy royalty-free background music and The Sociopath almost feels like a Trump campaign ad.
Similarly, Howe and his subjects manage to shoot themselves in the feet every time they open their mouths. Near the end of the film, Goldberg laments that Trump “has contempt for ideas and arguments that conservatives have been working on for generations.” Meanwhile, back in the real world, Republican presidential candidates have lost four out of the last six elections, and they would have lost five had Jeb Bush not rigged the Florida vote for his older bro in 2000.
Jonah, we have contempt for your ideas because your ideas suck. You’re losers. In fifty plus years, we’ve watched the Left transform America into a cesspit of multiculturalism and poz, all because you and your ideological forbears couldn’t even hold the line. Similarly, Wilson touts himself as a man with his finger on the pulse of the Right-wing, yet no candidate he’s consulted for has ever won an election. The only thing conservatives have ever actually conserved is their paychecks, and as Howe’s attitude shows, they’re happy to keep playing the Washington Nationals to the Left’s Harlem Globetrotters for all eternity.
Moreover, The Sociopath is willfully blind to every significant political development of the presidential campaign. Howe blithely repeats mainstream media lies about Trump, such as the bevy of sexual assault allegations against him that have been systematically debunked. Meanwhile, he doesn’t even pay lip service to the exposes on Democratic corruption and cheating coming from Wikileaks, Guccifer 2.0 or Project Veritas Action. But of course, reporting that the Democrats rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders or that Hillary was paying people to instigate violence at Trump’s rallies would require Howe to acknowledge Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson or the myriad of other alternative media journalists who broke those stories.
Howe does talk about the alt-Right midway through the film, in a montage of whiny Goldberg interview segments, stock footage of European nationalist marches, and clips from Milo Yiannopoulos’ Dangerous Faggot Tour. But even then, his attacks are toothless and glancing. Much in the same way that Hillary’s handlers rewrote her alt-Right speech at the eleventh hour and defanged it in the process, the film conspicuously refuses to go into detail about the alt-Right in an attempt to deny it oxygen. After all, if Howe name-dropped, say, Cernovich, his handful of viewers might Google Danger & Play and find out why the alt-Right is eating the cucks’ lunch.
The Sociopath rounds out its flaccid length with sneering, contemptuous interviews with Trump rally attendees. For all of Howe’s paeans to the Tea Party in the beginning of the film, it’s these segments that show his true feelings for the conservative base: he hates them. “How dare these peasants not listen to me!” This is the essence of cuckservatism laid bare: a degenerate aristocracy angry that the rabble don’t worship them anymore. Too bad, Ben. You had your chance to defeat the Left, and you blew it… over and over and over. We run this town now. We’re not locked in here with you: you’re locked in here with us.
The only truly entertaining thing about The Sociopath is that there is a widely-beloved Right-wing figure who fits the clinical definition of a sociopath. But here’s the rub: it’s the one figure that Ben Howe would never dare attack in a documentary or anywhere else. I’m talking about the Grand Poobah of “respectable” conservatism, William F. Buckley. Buckley was a malignant narcissist who enjoyed manipulating and tormenting his loved ones, from constantly changing the channel on them while they were watching TV to ruining Christmas one year by running his boat aground. Near the end of his life, Buckley even developed a habit of rolling down his limo’s window and pissing on cars while on the highway, with his son Christopher claiming that drivers should feel “honored” to have “Pup’s” urine splashing on their windows.
William F. Buckley is regarded as the father of modern conservatism, and he treated it the same way that Joe Jackson treated the Jackson family. Buckleyite conservatism is equal parts priggish and impotent, pedantic and ignorant, defined by its adherents’ obsession with being liked by their political enemies. Donald Trump offends cuckservatives because he lives to win, he doesn’t back down, and he’s not concerned with getting gold stars from people who want to see him dead and his movement buried. Trying to please the Left is like making love to a flat-chested woman: she may tell you she loves you, but she’ll just end up resenting you in the morning.
The Sociopath is the death rattle of mainstream conservatism. It’ll have less impact on the election than a seagull turd plopping on a trucker’s windshield. Ben Howe and his cohort are destined for unemployment, poverty and unending humiliation starting on November 9th, regardless of whether Trump or Hillary wins. If what’s falling needs to be pushed, the cowardly conservatism represented by The Sociopath needs to be run over with a bus.
I’ll see you on the campaign trail in 2019.
Is this a comedy website?