War on Beauty: An Interview With Jack the Perfume Nationalist
Art by Tanzanian Wojak
Jack the Perfume Nationalist is the director of a popular podcast, The Perfume Nationalist, that pairs movies with perfumes. In a time when most aesthetic sensibilities are under assault by either end of the political spectrum, Jack is skilled at deftly underlining the ways in which neoliberal, far-left (or any left-wing) ideology lends itself to censorship, hypocrisy, and the death of art. Theoretical infiltration across the humanities seems to have wounded the process way worse than any Catholic League could ever dream of throughout their nastiest picketing, and even this perception of conservatives, Jack might point out, is mostly a media myth.
Perfume Nationalist’s raw podcast style has become an influential forum for expression. Guests are sent a sample of perfume to draw inspiration from, so they can provide ample, synesthetic descriptions of, and comparisons to, a movie or two—a paired theme. The smell fits the film. What the essences invoke as a scent, what nostalgias can be elicited by experiencing the aroma, lend themselves, like a pleasing solvent in the ear, to a new medium: the podcast as a continuing saga, an elite experience you have to train your senses to distinguish. Unfettered speech has evolved past being free and into a fine wine.
I spoke with Jack about all this and other touchy topics, including his class The War on Beauty in the 21st Century at Thaddeus Russell’s Renegade University, degrading lockdown turmoil, and 2010s liberalism.
Would you say that the dirtbag left has ridden on the heels of people like yourself (other anti-politically correct podcasts: Thot Topics, Ellroy Boys, I’m So Popular, Ghost Jail)—who push boundaries when the risk of censorship is at its worst—with their attempts to be daring in some safe, complacent way, using shitty, passive-aggressive tactics—this after-the-fact ineffectual political backsliding by those who are supposedly so socially empathetic, but are really a cadre of cake-baked revolutionaries?
They're always concealed and protected under the guise of being one of the good people. Bernie Sanders acted as this mask where people who were smart enough to recognize that something was deeply wrong with what was happening with mainstream liberalism, and the Democrat Party in the 2010s, could keep themselves out of the imaginary holding tank of the quote-unquote “alt-right” by claiming to be Bernie Sanders supporting socialists, so then they could critique liberalism, and make fun of Hillary Clinton while still differentiating themselves from the bad guys: the ones who just straightforwardly expressed their support of Trump. And now they all [use] Trump as a meme after it no longer matters.
This is the classic dirtbag left: a too-late quote Tweet where they're sharing their favorite Trump tweets and images, and it's like, you could have been on board the entire time supporting this when it was actually fun, before it got so dark, as I have been since May 2015 or whenever he announced that he was running and everyone just thought it was a joke. It's been so long, and the online right has been through so many iterations since then. People follow these flash in the pan embarrassing meme ideologies, most of which are deliberate site-paid psyops, like Andrew Yang, to sow chaos and make it seem not cool to like Trump anymore, and that worked, but just being honest and straightforward and speaking to the moment that you live in is something that most people find extremely difficult because you actually risk things.
COVID has tightened down everything. Regardless of how it originated, what it originated as, and at what point powerful people decided how to implement their plan. I feel like it was all in the works long before, maybe, but it's essentially an upward consolidation of wealth and power, a total reorganization of society, so that people are only allowed to live on their panopticon, monitoring-device phones, and everything is so simply connected. It's all done through apps and a social credit system. Politics, elections, can be controlled through falsified mail-in voting, and stigmatizing any questioning, or dissent, from any of this stuff, is sensationally branded as white supremacy and racism–as an emotional appeal, which works on everyone because racism is the number one term of excommunication now. It's just like being branded a witch.
“Racism is the number one term of excommunication now. It’s just like being branded a witch. ”
This isn't new stuff, but it's so organized now, so they can just zap your apps and your bank accounts and make life so much harder for you and, while they pretend that social media is not the primary method of communication right now, obviously social media should be regulated as a public utility, because it's simply how people communicate, like the telephone, now. So it's a massive, massive operation that has so far worked really well because it's just deliberately fried people's brains and made a weak, superstitious, terrified, compliant populace, who only derive thrills from arguing on their phone over COVID lockdown propriety and masks.
Their big stroke of brilliance, as I always point out, was last year in the middle of the summer, at the beginning of COVID, there was sort of a feeling of: we're all in this together. And it was kind of fun. For a moment, wokeness was defeated and nobody was talking about any of the usual racial, social justice stuff. Everybody was just going to the store and buying toilet paper and as much food as they could, and it felt like a sleepover. Then Democrats realized how they could narrativize this and they unveiled, in the middle of the summer, that the real virus was white supremacy and racism. And this is not any kind of exaggeration on my part–that's what happened.
They said the virus was white supremacy. So they explicitly linked the virus in people's heads with all the unsavory, Middle American white identity, terrorist stuff that they've been brewing and falsifying through the media for the last five years. And COVID wouldn't have worked without a population that was sufficiently prepared and sufficiently brainwashed and gaslit for the prior 10 years, through all manner of Soviet language games, transgender ideology–which is a political mechanism of propaganda that's totally separate from the idea of gender affirmation or being a gender non-conforming person–COVID could not have been done without that, without creating this fear of publicly stating objective reality, biological reality.
[An Interview With Sam Hyde on His New Novel “Jaihoo’s Trip to the Future”]
Will there ever again be the possibility of art without what it has been politicized into? How much more insidious is the current state of affairs, than, say, Catholics protesting The Last Temptation of Christ in the 80s?
That's a myth that evangelicals at one point had the kind of unquestioned total authoritarian power that liberals do right now. A lot of Gen Xers and the recently redpilled say that, but it's another safety mechanism. It's another kind of safety bumper or swim floaty that people use, where they try to make the case that the liberal menace right now is just the same as the evangelical threat, and evangelical control of media, twenty years ago.
That's ridiculous, first off, because social media didn't exist then. This consolidation of everything into social media, and into smartphones, this fragmentation of media in all these different directions, was not something that existed then. Also, at the time liberals were controlling the media, they were playing up the evangelical threat. This is not to say that none of that stuff happened, but it was also Democrats doing it. They always bring up the Parental Advisory, PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), heavy metal, rap record stuff in the 80s–that was Tipper Gore, a Democrat. And the Clintons were doing that all through the 90s about video games and rap music, before gay men were disposed of because they were no longer politically useful to the left as a minority to fundraise.
Remember they used to do this big thing about the Westboro Baptist Church? They would pretend that it was a megachurch. What it is is a little house where a family essentially does scam lawsuits to make money because people sue them and they countersue. It's not this megachurch, it’s this sensational scam thing, but you would see that depicted everywhere, because it looks good on media with those posters that say “God hates fags” with the rainbow colors and everything. You got this idea that there was a vast network of Westboro Baptist Church people. It's just totally not true. Claiming that there has been a recent monopoly on media and power by Christians is something that people do to feel safe and seem less extreme when they're talking about the present moment.
“Claiming that there has been a recent monopoly on media and power by Christians is something that people do to feel safe and seem less extreme when they’re talking about the present moment.”
That's something essential to understanding the present media. It's always been like this. I wasn't around in the 70s, more in the 80s, as a child, so I can't really speak accurately about how it was, but there was more general trust in the media, even though it was biased, obviously, and controlled.
I call it plotline theory. You see it in real time. The media will plant these plotlines that are just abandoned in the manner of abandoned soap opera plotlines, and you get worked up. Kavanaugh was a big one. I remember the week of Kavanaugh I was in Salem, Massachusetts, the witch hunt city, by total coincidence, so it was a funny synchronicity. But that was the end-all be-all, end of the world thing. Then it was quickly abandoned and every single thing that they did to Trump, every new scandal–Stormy Daniels, the golden shower stuff, all of that–it's just abandoned the second it doesn't work.
I think the most instructional thing–enlightening thing–that you can do to understand present media is watch Dallas Season 9, the dream season, where an entire season of 30 episodes is done after Bobby Ewing dies, and then, famously, they retcon it as Pam's dream and Bobby appears in the shower. None of it ever happened and that's exactly what the media is like right now, but people think it's real. They think that being invested in current news media is part of being an educated, with-it person who knows what's going on when you're, if anything, worse off. I piece it together from what I gather on the Twitter timeline, but I don't actively watch any of it or think that any of the social panics they stir up are anything but totally inauthentic and meant to get a rise out of people's emotions.
You just really have to tune it out and, honestly, read fiction. People don't read enough fiction. Instead of watching the news, instead of keeping up with current events–including Fox News, which is just as bad about COVID and everything, and abuses the elderly with their news reporting–instead of watching that, read Scruples by Judith Krantz and you will learn a lot more about humanity, and you will feel much better about everything.
If you were to write a novel, would it be something along those lines or along the lines of a Samuel Richardson maximalist work?
I can't say. In theory, obviously, since I love that stuff…I would like to be like Ayn Rand and just get a prescription for speed and pump out The Fountainhead: my mission statement, thesis, whatever. I have been trying to put together a book of some sort, ever since we started the podcast. No excuse, but the fact that I actually have to show up somewhere and work full-time and also keep the show running and do all this other stuff has prevented me from doing that, but, ideally, I would love to have a giant maximalist doorstop type novel that represented my entire schizo theory about what's going on.
Your podcast acts as a novel, unfolding like a saga, as you say…
[The podcast] is a serialized story. And that's something that I've always tried to drive home. Some people think that's really funny, that I'm like: you should listen to the entire thing from start to finish, but this is just common sense for me. That's what I do with podcasts that I get into, because otherwise you don't understand the building references and the evolving subtle plotline. This current crop of “art podcasts,” as I call them–which people always used to laugh at, but now they kind of get it. The intersection of people's real lives and the radio show that they're doing, and the various characters that come and go: it naturally creates its own kind of story arc. I have chosen the topics that we talked about every time and choose the guests, but you only get the full scope of it when you hear the entire thing.
People who have listened to all of it always give me positive feedback about it. It just makes sense that way. Obviously, this is not a practical thing, because the podcast is, like, 200 hours, but it's not practical to read Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which is 1,500 pages of phonebook-size text where nothing happens, but I did, and it was an immensely rewarding experience that took me six months that I'll never forget.
Jack the Perfume Nationalist.
I think a large part of my message that I'm trying to convey—with people's fried attention spans and endless customization of today's Netflix, Hulu menus, where you hop around and watch 15 minutes of different things and don't commit to anything–is people should learn to be productively bored and to just commit to something and see it through from start to finish. Soap operas, the ones that are still running—Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital—have been going since the early 60s, early 70s. So it's like 15,000-something episodes, it's impossible that you would see the entire thing, but that kind of boredom allows it to enter your mind in a more magical way than fast-paced, exciting Scorsese editing with constant action and events and plot.
I find it hard to understand things that are really plot-heavy. I just don't have the brain for it. I have this female brain that's designed to passively absorb soap operas, and I think it's really beautiful that women who watch those for half a century just have this vast, vast memory and knowledge of these byzantine family trees and everything that ever happened, and this fake, alternate reality just keeps evolving alongside everyday life. And it's all for nothing, but it's beautiful. It's a beautiful waste of time.
Right now no one is explicitly stating what the left has done, their reckoning with all “problematic art.” A lot of people will become redpilled a little bit and then they'll get ratioed and attacked online for the first time and then they pull back and they're like: actually, I don't believe in politics. Okay, you can not believe in politics and not believe in watching the news and keeping up with the day-to-day plotlines, as I do, but you cannot honestly talk about art or history without explicitly stating what the left has done to those things for the last ten years, and continues to do, because they seek to erase everything. They cannot understand the concept of art.
“And it’s all for nothing, but it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful waste of time.”
Art, to me, is something that articulates an indescribable truth about the human experience, a difficult truth about the human experience. Something that oftentimes you absolutely just can't say straight-out. But, to liberals, art always has to be propaganda. All of the critical theory that they've trained you with in college, about going through, as Paglia says, with a red pen and pointing out everything wrong about all the representation of minorities and gays and women, and saying “how can this be corrected” to create a utopian future that's constantly out of reach.
You see the results of their work in movies and TV shows today, which fully have the diversity-tokenized initiative implemented, so that it makes no sense and doesn't reflect any kind of experienced reality with any viewer. It's always reminding you, this Brechtian alienation technique, that we're doing the opposite of a stereotype.
I was watching this one Hulu show, Cruel Summer, and it just seems like it was an idea for a script where a council of diverse writers went through and changed every single character to be the opposite of what would be considered a stereotype or problematic depiction of each character’s race, so that it just makes no sense. It's supposed to take place in 1995 and you can't even decipher what's happening because of the constellation of interracial marriages, and everything is just so artificial. This is doing a disservice to everyone.
Liberals, since the early 2010s, have always gone on with this idea, this ridiculous idea, that complex women have never been depicted in media, which is funny because complicated female characters have existed, more fully fleshed out, at every point in history, before the last ten years. Now you have a female character, they can't have an interest in romance. They can't have any conventionally feminine qualities. They have to be just a careerist interested in science. They never cry. They can never feel remorse about not having children. They always have to be in a relationship with a goofy, subservient, Chris Pratt, Seth Rogen, whatever-type male that's just here to support them and their career. It's so hollow and so lame compared to something as brutal and self-searching as Looking for Mr. Goodbar from 1977.
It's this global initiative to make everyone the same race and erase all culture, which is so strange because one of the first kind of rules they implemented in social panics that they conducted in the genesis of woke liberalism in the early 2010s was cultural appropriation. In 2011, or 2012, there started to be this rash of constant Jezebel, Gawker, Salon articles about white people wearing Indian headdresses, and you would think that this was the most important and devastating thing that had ever happened in history. What this did was make everyone scared of interacting with any culture that was different from their own, or appreciating anything cool about any other culture. The natural genesis of good art and music and everything is a careless, intuitive cross-pollution of all influences. That's how things happen. That's how art evolves, and humanity evolves.
Now what we see is this total leveling of everything into this gray gloop where race doesn't exist, except for white people, who are constantly paying for Original Sin, and everyone is the same kind of Target-ad, professional, genderless being in gray sweatpants. It's also just profitable and convenient and cheap. So you can control, and suck money from, and endlessly exploit a population of genderless beings who are always looking for self-actualization through therapy, drugs, psychiatry, word games, gender ideology…it's profitable for all of them, rather than just accepting an eclectic group of people and appreciating them for how they are and accepting that people are different.
Are Gen Xers, generally, good at fighting this sort of shit?
Jack the Perfume Nationalist: I'm a cusp millennial-Gen Xer, a “classic millennial.” I have two older siblings who are culturally more Gen X…The main problem I see with people around Gen X age is just this kind of entitled refusal to speak to their own time. They can't comprehend that the paradigm has shifted to such a degree that liberals and this thing selling itself as colorful Democrat identity politics is just straight up censorious authoritarianism, because all Gen X media was about the evil of the suburbs and the conformity of the suburbs. Everything was about this Edward Scissorhands, twisted suburbia that you have to escape, and you go to the city and self-actualize by going to the coffee shop and doing poetry and music.
This narrative ran through everything. So those liberal apologetics, where they pretend that evangelicals had as much power as liberals currently do, comes from that. And they cherry pick stories. The people who hate their parents–which is completely beyond me, because I absolutely love my parents–but the people who hate their parents usually become liberals. They can be like: my parents made me go to church, they hated me for being gay in 1995. They can always give you a little list of evidence. All the Gen X musicians, all the punk-type people, were the first ones, not the first ones, but very, very vocal celebrities in support of endless COVID mask, surreal lockdown stuff.
I don't know. It's not their fault. It's no one's fault for the time that you live in, or grow up in, and how that shapes your mindset. But the fact that no one sees through COVID, no one sees through masks, no one sees what that plainly is—that the masks are, well, a demoralizing measure to make you feel like an idiot. It's also to actively harm men, because men look more ridiculous in the masks; women, they can look a little more natural, because they have a history of covering their faces, whatever, but the mask became an explicit signal to say: “I'm a Democrat, I'm one of the good guys and I do whatever I'm told, for the good of everyone, because I have empathy…” No one saw through that.
What is the class you teach at Renegade University about?
Jack the Perfume Nationalist: Basically, I'm just trying to distill the major themes of The Perfume Nationalist into a class that's three different little webinar–what I originally called “The Revolt Against the 2010s,” but that was too specific–on the war against beauty in the 21st century. I always talk about the 2010s as the worst decade in American history. I truly believe that. It’s worse than anything that has ever come before in terms of the draconian politics and brainwashing and the censorship and the anti-sex, puritan sentiment that's unlike any sex panic that's ever taken place in human history. People are more afraid of sex now than they've ever been since humans evolved from monkeys.
The aesthetics of the 2010s are uniquely demoralizing and cheap and awful. Everything has been slimmed down: fast food restaurants, beloved corporate logos, apartments, everything all around you has been painted gunmetal gray. Everything that's plush or comfortable or evokes family or warmth has been stripped and eliminated and branded as problematic, dated, old, gross…people really hate carpet. They have this performative hatred of carpet, which used to be in everyone's home, and you would lay on it and watch TV and play, and it was really fun. And now you have these horrible laminate floors that seem designed to mop up vomit with sawdust.
“Everything that’s plush or comfortable or evokes family or warmth has been branded as problematic, dated, old, gross.”
The end of cinema, the drastic decline in the quality of art, of movies, of music...basically everything ended because of what is called “woke liberalism.” I don't think that’s a serious enough term. I think it works, but it makes it sound like a joke. It's 2010s liberalism, political correctness, whatever it is–this giant, nihilistic black cloud moving through the sky, eliminating everything in its path, calling for the total erasure of the past and erasure of all art that came before and reframing it all as a problem, as bad, and creating a weak, stupid, compliant, superstitious population.
All of this is tied together. It can really be illustrated by the renovations of fast food restaurants. You look at a McDonald's ad from the 80s and it's this wonderland of Fry Kids and Ronald McDonald heralded as a special occasion, a warm place where families go–it's red and yellow and brown and all these fun colors. Advertising used to be good, used to be aspirational, and show you an idealized form of the product. Now, advertising is political scolding without any care for the product. McDonald's now, and all fast food restaurants, have been stripped of any reference to the family, or age, or gender, or phases of life. Everyone is this eternal, weird, millennial child-adult, and it's extremely sad to see that.
[This Is the Last Arthur Treacher’s in America]
No one likes this. People have been told that they like this, and that prior eras were all rooted in evil, in Original Sin of some sort. But it's this utilitarian dumbing down of everything, making life cheap and awful and controlling you. It’s just to consolidate power upwards, and deprive you of the richness of life that people once had.
I'm just trying to tie all these things together in my class. Basically, I want to describe the current situation as fully as I can. I want to describe how learning to be productively bored, and engaging with maximalist works of art, can be spiritually enriching. And I want to provide a kind of introductory course to the appreciation of scent, which is the most magical sense that most people have never thought about.
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