Recently, two forthcoming pop culture works were announced. One is Run Hide Fight: Infidels, the new movie from Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. The second is Bait Dog Boy, a memoir by Henry Rollins that’s slated for next year. Run Hide Fight is Die Hard at a college with jihadis as the enemy. Bait Dog Boy is described by Random House as "a searing memoir of a broken childhood and the hope of escaping it" and as "a coming-of-age story with the teeth and truth of a great punk anthem.”
Run Hide Fight: Infidels looks mediocre. Bait Dog Boy sounds great.
For the past several decades, conservatives have floated on a sea of mediocrity. The extremes of wokeness have made it easy for those on the right to coast, lecturing college sophomores and posting reaction videos to the latest Marxist stupidity. Because the targets were slow moving, conservatives didn’t have to create or innovate. They didn’t have to be excellent, only mediocre. Everything was about reaction and owning the libs. Making matters worse, conservatives hired via nepotism or the buddy system. Conservative movies are mediocre, as are conservative movie reviewers. Conservative journalism is mediocre, and conservative “intellectuals” are mediocre.
Last year I launched the Anti-Communist Film Festival. I was tired of plowing through dull conservative movies, and finally figured out that the old ones are great. We don’t have the greatness to make The Lives of Others. It doesn’t help that the right shuts out even those who want to risk greatness.
Unlike Megyn Kelly, Jeane Kirkpatrick wasn’t mediocre. Unlike Ben Shapiro, James Burnham was not mediocre. Phyllis Schlafly wasn’t mediocre. Candace Owens is—as well as evil. Nobody on the right even breaks through with true greatness, the way Christopher Nolan, Zadie Smith or U2 do. Even conservative hit pieces are mediocre, penned by mediocre writers. Country music, loved by conservatives, may have gone beyond mere mediocrity into actual suckage.
Rush Limbaugh was great. Erick Erickson is mediocre. Hugh Hewitt is, to quote a phrase once used by the great, non-mediocre TV critic Tom Shales, “ravingly mediocre.”
The new Henry Rollins memoir, like Rollins himself, won’t be mediocre. Rollins appreciates how capitalism can promote excellence better than people at the Heritage Foundation—which in recent years has become mediocre. “Capitalism is fantastic,” Rollins once said in an interview, “as long as it’s regulated. It rewards me for my ambition. I don’t want communism. I’ve been in communist countries, and they suck. Capitalism rewards me for working hard, which is what I like to do.” In another interview he put it this way: “I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave—it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.”
To those of us who grew up in D.C. and its suburbs, Rollins is a local legend. He attended Bullis, a private school about two miles from where I grew up in Maryland. A summary of the Bait Dog Boy reads: "What happens when a child grows up in an almost total vacuum of love? That was the reality for Henry Rollins, pioneering punk frontman of the seminal groups Black Flag and Rollins Band, who came of age in an environment seemingly determined to break him. For the first time, Rollins tells the story he spent most of his life trying to avoid, taking us through his childhood and adolescence—from a volatile Washington, D.C., childhood spent shuffling between indifferent parents, to his encounters with a seemingly endless parade of abusive adults, to his eventual meeting with Ian MacKaye, and their ultimate discovery of punk rock, which would become a lifeline. Rollins tells what it was like to live a life colored by the experience of constantly absorbing pain, like a bait dog.”
According to Random House, Bait Dog Boy contains this line: "I have no desire to be a survivor. I’d rather accept, absorb, adapt, fight and break that which seeks to break me—to be that which remains.” Awesome.
Like Rollins, I went to a private prep school in Maryland in the 1980s. Georgetown Prep was not, and never will be, mediocre. When we sensed mediocrity coming from the official school paper, we started our own. Prep has produced two Supreme Court Justices and countless other athletes, scholars, Jesuits and fathers who are in every way not mediocre.
When my Prep years exploded in the media in 2018, people assured me that if I lived, I’d be hired by a conservative outlet, the way William F. Buckley helped Whittaker Chambers. It was a time of peril but also of great, non-average men like Buckley and Chambers. Then a veteran of right-wing politics gave me good advice, “Start a GoFundMe,” he said. “You’re not mediocre enough for the celebrity right."