Kevin Strange’s Thoughts on Election 2016

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Kevin Strange

A funny thing happened last week. As the political fervor whipped up all across social media, the gloves came off and authors, filmmakers, stand up comics, and people from all walks of life with Etsy stores, vitamin pyramid schemes, and yardsale facebook groups stopped acting like used car salesmen and went nuclear on each other.

And it was fucking glorious.

It was glorious because, for years, I’ve been criticized high and low for speaking my mind publicly, for always being honest and never playing politics in any group of people I’m associated with, be it filmmakers back when I was still making Hack Movies or in writer circles once I started writing Strange Fiction. I’ve ALWAYS taken shit for not being diplomatic and calling out douchebags for being douchebags.

Suddenly the whole fucking WORLD was acting like Kevin Strange across social media. Think about it. If half of this country voted for Hillary Clinton and half of them voted for Donald Trump, then it stands to reason that when someone publicly and vociferously took a side on their social media, they were going to alienate half of their coveted, precious, fragile little social connections.

Now, everyone knows, salesmanship 101 states NEVER talk politics or religion on social media. Indeed never take a controversial stand on any subject lest you alienate your audience. And your audience is ALL THAT MATTERS.

The only time it’s OK to even argue online is when you’re dogpiling a person marked with the dreaded social media pox: RACIST! SEXIST! MISOGYNIST!

And so, when Election 2016 rolled around and the gloves came off, I laughed as people who have, for years, sat back with their good-guy masks on, being good social media salesmen, never rocking the boat (except to ostracize a RACIST! SEXIST! MISOGYNIST! from the precious ranks) cast off their fake personas and went at each others’ throats in a way I’ve personally never witnessed.

Family went after family, old high school friends came to digital blows and yes even those precious, delicate literary connections went out the window as THE ENEMY AT THE GATES Donald Trump challenged Liberal stronghold Hillary Clinton for the most powerful job in the free world.

For weeks people stopped acting like their livelihoods (or full-time hobbies in most cases) were at stake every time they posted online. They were honest with each other. They were outwardly MEAN to each other, instead of keeping their vicious politics private and secretive.

The gauntlet was thrown down and people got HONEST and LOUD with each other! Then, when the smoke cleared and Donald Trump won the presidency, SHIT GOT EVEN LOUDER! I saw people lose publishing contracts and indie film companies split up because of how real shit got in the days after the election.

Amazing. Every rule had been broken for the sake of, I don’t know, trying to be virtuous and “ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY!” as the more melodramatic folks liked to frame it.

But in the end, a week after the election, life has, shockingly, gone on. We’re back at work, back at trying to sell our vitamins and our novels and our limited edition Blu Rays. People are trying to put their fake masks back on and pretend they weren’t calling their fathers and brother, neighbors and fellow artists LITERALLY RACISTS! or LIBERAL CRYBABIES!

This is all quite funny to me because I’m fucking immune to it. I don’t have to try to put a cat back in the bag or a genie back in a bottle because I’ve never worn a fucking fake mask to try to sell shit. I’m Kevin Fucking Strange. Have been since day 1 and will be until my dying day.

THIS is why it doesn’t pay to be a lying, sanctimonious fuckhead in public. Once you’ve exposed the “real” you to a knee jerk audience made of political and social cheerleaders who buck off anyone they deem controversial, there’s no going backward.

MY fans don’t give a single fuck what I post online. They’re here because they LIKE the fact that I speak my mind and give zero fucks. A lot of them don’t get to tell their boss to fuck off. They can’t talk back to their spouse. They don’t have the kind of voice I have so they live vicariously through me.

That’s a real fanbase. That’s why I can do this and outsell a lot indie filmmakers with distribution and small press authors with publishing contracts who only cater to trendy social groups. It’s why I can do it with virtually no support from any literary community.

For a few weeks, everyone acted like Kevin Strange on the internet. But me? I get to be this guy every fucking day of the year.

The End of MindCrime is Near

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Kevin Strange

thought_police_poster When I would express pro-free speech opinions back in 2012 (when I really started posting my personal views on social media) thru about midway into 2015, I received awful backlash from the writing community.

I was berated, ridiculed, mocked, blocked and black listed in some small press circles (none that are relevant or pay any kind of real money.)

I find it bizarre that today, as I continue the exact same arguments and viewpoints, I’m met with a TON of vocal support. I’ve been re-posting blogs from a year or two ago that got me absolutely burned alive at the time that are now being shared and celebrated.

The tide is truly turning. The end of the PC era of self-censorship in the arts is upon us and I for one hope we never see anything as ugly and oppressive toward art again. Damn the invisible prison of our minds and damn the social justice prison guards who seek to keep us in bondage.

There’s a psychic prison break happening and I’m proud as fuck to be a part of it.

I don’t think it was ever the ART itself that was censored, but the artist. More to the point, the artist’s ability to communicate and connect with a fan base through social media.

As I stated in my blog about the Stepford Wife syndrome, authors, artists, poets, musicians, (and non-artists as well) are constantly smothered by the social justice police and pressured to virtue signal and show endless guilt toward anyone and anything that isn’t us. (Yesterday’s Columbus Day embarrassment was a perfect example.)

Pick any hot social topic and there is a social justice warrior chomping at the bit to publicly shame you for taking the “wrong” stance on the subject on your personal social media. And the wrong stance is literally anything outside of the copy/paste Tumblr feminist blogs the social justice warriors hover around like gnats to a hog’s ass.

Any deviation from their hardcore extreme liberal viewpoint is met with unparalleled aggression in the digital age. (And I’ve ALWAYS been a moderate liberal, to be clear.)

No, this is not government censorship. It’s actually much, much worse. It’s mindcrime and our own brothers, mothers and neighbors are our judges, jurors and reputation executioners.

It’s 1984 in 2016.

Their weapons are our own faces and our own words used against us to shame, harass and push us into hiding. Banished from social circles, jobs, and even our homes in some extreme cases.

It’s a calculated cultural drive to brainwash western civilization into believing one tiny, narrow, regressive world view without ever once having to enact a single page of legislation.

But we’re hip to it now. We’re done letting the pressures of social justice silence our voices. The walls of the mind prisons are crashing down all around us.

We are free to think again.

Social Media Pageantry and The Death of Weirdo Culture

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Kevin Strange

When I was a kid, my favorite comic book was The Maxx. Sam Kieth was my hero. Not only was he writing and drawing one of the weirdest mainstream comics I’d ever read, but the mail bag section at the end of each issue made me feel like I wasn’t alone in the world.

This was the early 90s, almost a decade before the internet would take off in earnest and unite strangers the world over. Being the outcast, the weirdo, the nerd, the dork, the loser in your community meant that you were isolated. Alone.

We all coped with this experience differently. For me, it was reading those letters to the editor in the back of The Maxx that made me feel connected to people. My people. Fellow weirdos.

I listened to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast radio and loved the call-in segments. I checked out serial killer books from the library. I read about cannibals. I watched John Waters movies and reveled in the interviews the Dreamlanders did talking about all of the drugs and weird sex they did/had with each other.

I rented movies like Eraserhead. Weird shit like The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow documentary after I saw his appearance on The X-Files and on the Closure video tape of the infamous Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral tour. Hated, the GG Allin documentary.

I read magazines like Bizarre. Relished the articles about alternative lifestyles. Scarification, branding, suspension, extreme piercing and tattooing. When the internet did go mainstrean, I hung out on sites like Rotten.com and BME.com.

I listened to bands like Skinny Puppy and the Genitorturers, Pigface and Ministry. Weird shit. Shit for weirdos.

What the fuck happened to weirdo culture?

Social Media happened. More importantly, social media pageantry. The first social networking websites were great places to connect with like-minded people. Whether you were a weirdo like me who could rattle off a bunch of random facts about Ed Gein or HH Holmes, or if you were a conservative Christian looking for bible study church groups. Those Yahoo chat rooms, Myspace, Livejournal, IRC and eventually Youtube. These were great places to connect with people all over the world with similar interests.

And then Twitter and Facebook happened. Hashtags happened. Trending topics. Social networks became Social Media. Social Media became corporatized. Monetized. Then it all became political.

When I got into weirdo fiction around 2010 it was already called Bizarro fiction. I fell in love with it instantly. This was people just like me. Sick weirdos expressing their subversive obsessions through fiction. I found titles like Adolph in Wonderland, Abortion Arcade, The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, Cripple Wolf, The Baby Jesus Buttplug.

This was my scene. This was where I belonged. Offensive literature that didn’t give a fuck who it pissed off. Didn’t pull punches and didn’t cater to mainstream publishing interests.

Only by then, Social Media had already taken hold. By the time I got my foot in the door in the weird fiction scene in 2012, everything had changed and the pageantry of social media was already in full force.

They weren’t called Social Justice Warriors yet, but they were already ripping through the internet subcultures enforcing rules and ruining the lives of anyone who didn’t meet their particular social agenda. Suddenly the same people with bright pink dreadlocks, dirty band shirts and facial piercings whom I’d grown up with and grown to love were spouting off the most intolerant, anti-free speech shit I’d ever heard.

From 2012 to now I’ve watched every deviant behavior performed by my heroes like Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, even GG Allin and Divine be condemned by the extreme left. I watched in horror as lynch mobs of angry social media users found the home addresses of people’s mothers and brothers. Found out where people worked who dared to express social or political values different from their own and get them fired.

Social media became a weaponized tool for so-called liberals. So-called feminists. The SJW culture is neither of those things but unfortunately many well-meaning people who grew up just like me, who were into the very same things I was into, who consider themselves social outcasts just like I do have labeled themselves liberals and feminists and whatever else the trendy hashtag of the moment is because Social Media Pageantry, because virtue signalling is a REQUIREMENT in today’s online culture.

We don’t have to fear right wing Christians anymore. They’re as scared as us. Corporate social media is run by their enemies and those enemies look for any reason they can to delete social media accounts, humiliate families and get those who don’t fall in line with their narrow view of their world fired from their jobs for expressing opinions that go against current trendy politics.

Gone are movies like Retardead. Gone are books like Ass Goblins. You don’t see that kind of boundary pushing subversive art anymore because people are SCARED. They’re scared of the social media weapon and the militarized mob of puritanical SJWs who police your social media and mine.

Those are the people who are going to share this link with you. Who screen-shot private messages and publicly humiliate their peers for the very same activities they held in reverence just a few short decades ago. The same activities that these people perform in the privacy of their bedrooms. They’re hypocrites cut from the very same virtuous cloth as child molesting priests and politicians who push anti-gay legislation and then get caught in glory holes. Bad people. The worst people. Modern inquisitors. Salem witch hunters.

Gone are personalities like GG Allin. You won’t see anyone like him. You won’t see a modern Divine. You won’t see brazenly offensive movies or literature because we live in a socially censored culture terrified of exposing the darker sides of ourselves for fear of being pulled from our virtual homes by the cyber mobs who get off on exposing our families and our workplaces to the very same behaviors that we expected from our idols before Social Media pageantry ruined everything.

Weirdo culture is dead. We live now in hiding. Waiting for the day that we can be free to be truly weird once again.