The Punisher

3,346 words

About a month ago, a friend suggested I check out The Punisher, Netflix’s 2017 series. Wary though I am of the Marvel Comics Universe and modern entertainment, I must say what he said about the series was rather appealing. So, I bit the bullet and watched the thing. Now, recently, Netflix announced that it would be canceling the show due to attempts by Disney (which apparently owns Marvel’s intellectual property) to build its own streaming platform. Read all about it here, if you so wish.

My concern is with the canceled show itself. We Rightists love our vigilantes, as the many pages devoted to Batman and the Death Wish movies on Counter-Counter-Currents. Now, I’ll have to come clean with you, friends — I’ve never read the Punisher comics, nor have I seen the previous two Punisher movies, not even the preceding show — the Daredevil, where this incarnation of the Punisher debuted in the MCU. In fact, I only know of the Punisher because he once appeared in the Spiderman animated series which I followed fanatically as a child. This, I believe, gives me a clearer perspective on the show, much like those Chinese Star Wars viewers who could tell that the new films were bullshit because they didn’t have the cultural attachment to the franchise.

The series finds us after Frank Castle, the eponymous Punisher, has punished (killed) those responsible for the death of his family — who are part of a plot to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan into the USA. He lies low, assuming the identity of Pete Castiglione — a construction worker. However, he has not eliminated every conspirator in the aforementioned criminal enterprise. Loose threads remain, and there’s no official conclusion to the investigation. Frank, however, seems content to break walls with a sledgehammer, look like a hipster with his gigantic beard, and take shit from the predictably white jerkasses who comprise the rest of his construction crew. But fear not, true believers — heroic persons of color are on the job!

Firstly, canon immigrant Dinah Madani, a DHS agent and strang, independant wahman of color is racking the muck at the New York DHS field office, chafing under the fascist boot of her white male alpha boss, Carson Wolf, who evils around with his big smile and privileged goatee like some white male privileged alpha Special-Agent-in-Charge. Her backstory is that she used to be the DHS liaison in Afghanistan and then an Afghan cop, one Ahmad Zubair was killed after uncovering the aforementioned heroin smuggling racket.

Heroic Dinah is however the favorite of the DHS for reasons relating to her race and gender, and she also has a powerful ally in the person of Rafael Hernandez, a fellow member of the POC ascendancy and a big shot in the DHS. This prevents evil fuck Wolf from firing her outright. As Morris V. de Camp recently mentioned with regard to one Ali Soufan, our enemies in the Globohomo have a desperate need for heroic g-men of color. Netflix and Marvel deliver a heroic g-woman of color.

She also has a degree in Islamic studies, but even moderate, booze-drinking Muslims I know would condemn her conduct and dress as slatternly and un-Islamic. Maybe I’m just hanging around the wrong kind of Muslim, and the prog orthodoxy has managed to synthesize a new kind of woke Muslim.

She is assisted in her endeavors by (((Sam Stein))), a fellow DHS agent who has the physical readiness and feminine disposition of the average bugman. Indeed, if a state relied on such specimens for its law enforcement needs, it would pretty soon find itself displaced by other violent actors, as demonstrated later on when Sam is killed by one of the bad guys in no small measure due to his own stupidity. He also serves as a beta shoulder for Madani to cry on when her feminine wiles are foiled by her main romantic interest — one of the show’s villains.

The second nonwhite hero fighting against the evil white men who conspire to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan to the USA is (((David Lieberman))), a.k.a. Micro — an NSA whistleblower who has been forced to go underground and is believed dead, thanks to evil white man Carson Wolf who is, we learn, in on the heroin smuggling conspiracy. He’s gone a little bit stir crazy after having been isolated from his family and human contact in general and is indeed a fine specimen of hebraic neuroticism. He is, of course, Frank Castle’s main hook into the plot of the show.

When Frank’s jerkass white co-workers at the construction site decide to augment their incomes by holding up a mob poker game, they cajole Frank’s nice guy coworker Donny Chavez, who is a good kid getting mixed up with the bad white crowd. And like a good kid, he’s very nervous while holding up the poker game, drops his wallet, allowing the mobster to see his ID and identify him. Realizing they have a serious security risk on their hands, the construction crew try to kill Donny at the construction site, but Frank’s there, and he kicks their asses and then proceeds to massacre the mob guys so they don’t harm Donny. His actions put him on Micro’s radar and the main plot is kicked off.

Those are our heroes. Now, let’s take a look at the side of the villains.

Aside from the aforementioned alpha jerk Carson Wolf, we also have William Rawlins, a.k.a. Agent Orange, the CIA Director of Covert Ops who is the ringleader of the heroin smuggling conspiracy and was in the past the handler of the covert death squad which included Frank Castle. Also, he is the one who executed, or rather ordered Frank to execute Ahmad Zubair, the Afghan cop who was working to uncover the heroin smuggling conspiracy. Also, he is shown, in flashbacks, to have no empathy for the US Marines who do his bidding for which Frank Castle punches his eye out. It happens.

Rawlins is the ultimate boogeyman of privilege. He’s not merely a white male. He’s a white male scion of Virginia gentry, that American caste which readers of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed will recognize as the descendants of the second sons of the English aristocracy — the Cavaliers who have for centuries been the commanders of America’s armies, men such as George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Rawlins probably has an ancestor whose statue the diversity brigades want torn down in the name of justice, the privileged fuck. He is, however, secretly weak and gets off on torturing people. Also, he lies to his very tough female boss — the Director of the CIA, Marion James.

In this old woman who displays inordinate amounts of wrinkly and liver-spotted cleavage, the showrunners want us to see a strong and stalwart strang, independant whaman who would be great at her job if not for those pesky and corrupt white men like Rawlins. Also, she has girl-talk moments with our heroic gynoPOC Dinah Madani and takes her under her wing, in a rare honest fictional portrayal of female and bioleninist entryism into the system of government.

Nipping around Rawlins’ ankles is colonel Morty Bennett. Despite having the first name of an aging Jewish comedian, this despicable specimen is pure white male. He assisted the heroin smuggling operation in his capacity as a mortician, by hiding the heroin inside the dead bodies of slain US servicemen in Afghanistan. Also, he enjoys being spanked by a dominatrix. Cowardly little fuck, easily dispatched.

The third bad guy of note in the conspiracy is another white guy. Billy Russo, a squadmate of Frank’s in the USMC and the deathsquad under Rawlins’ direction. He owns a private military company and is brought into the show’s plot when Dinah Madani patrons his training services as a ploy to get closer to him and therefore to Castle, while she’s still not wise to his involvement in the heroin conspiracy. They become romantically involved.

Oh and Billy Russo is actually the guy who killed Frank’s family. He also kills Sam Stein the scruffy-bearded, fat, and ineffective Jewish DHS agent. It’s really complicated — there are themes of betrayal that are alluded to, but we don’t really see how close Frank and Billy were before the show until much later, so the betrayal doesn’t quite sting the audience.

Also, the showrunners try to pass off the relationship between Russo and Madani as something more than casual bumping of various uglies, and it falls flat, so Russo’s contrived betrayal of Madani falls even flatter. Russo and his PMC [Private Military Contractor] goons serve as the main physical threat against the heroes. In the first season finale, Russo gets his face obliterated by Frank and becomes the villain Jigsaw, as in the comics.

Bonus: Billy Russo is the son of a single mother who was a meth head hooker. He’s given a bevy of freudian excuses for his criminality, but it’s clear to the astute observer not taken in by psycholophastry that whatever evils Russo commits are the result of greed and pride. But that would be just a wee bit too normal for our clownworld where criminality is the fault of society, not the criminal. Then again, absent an elder elephant, how’s a boy to control his pride and greed?

Season one has a subplot in the character arcs of Curtis Hoyle and Lewis Wilson. Curtis is a Navy Medic, squadmate to Frank Castle and Billy Russo. He’s a somewhat different, somewhat more believable Madani — a heroic g-man of color. Like Madani, he ticks two diversity boxes — he’s black and disabled — having had his leg blown off in an incident Frank blames himself for.

In an inversion of reality typical of TV show produced in the current year, this black man is given a caring and nurturing role as the leader of a support group for veterans suffering from PTSD. Portraying once again the yearning for a g-man of color, much of the support group is nonwhite and whaman, whereas in reality, the US military is overwhelmingly white, southern, and male.

There are two white guys of consequence in the group, though. One is O’Connor, a fat boomer who allegedly fought in Vietnam (later proven false) and an unstable young white man named Lewis Wilson who’s been on the business end a bad case of PTSD. O’Connor is portrayed here as a typical MAGApede, mouthing off about muh liberties, about gun rights, about outsourcing, and about immigrants taking our jobs, and he hangs Lewis out to dry when they have a run-in with a corrupt cop.

Lewis is taken in by this cowardly, silver-tongued liar and becomes a domestic terrorist, bombing government facilities all over New York with homemade bombs, and releasing a manifesto which might as well be topped off with MAGA.

Frank Castle has to put this loose cannon down, especially after he ties Curtis the disabled black medic hero to a bomb. Lewis gets a good death, though. He kills himself with a homemade bomb after trying to assassinate a gun-grabbing senator, dies on his own terms while reciting Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier.” Hey, it’s a little on the nose, but if it keeps the kids away from boomer conservatism and gets them reading Kipling, I ain’t against it.

The second season is even more on the nose. It kicks off with Frank trying to live some semblance of a normal life in Michigan, which apparently means having a one-night stand with a tattooed single mother who tends bar at some dive. Unfortunately, she is shot in a shootout where highly trained PMCs try to kidnap a teenage girl named Amy Bendix who has mysterious items of value. Oh, and she’s on the run after these PMCs killed her entire ersatz family, a multiethnic group of friends (with implied benefits) who all lived together, committing various petty crimes in Chicago under the auspices of a criminal matriarch, now dead.

Now, one would ask, where are their families, but from what I know about the life of triggerkin, big city millennials in the US, these weird living arrangements are not unusual. Oh, and she has another coalition of the fringes bona fide — aside from being whaman and having weird living arrangements with nonwhites, she’s also physically underwhelming — a 6 in good lighting, a 5 at best. Chunky and with those stupid googly eyes popping out above protruding cheeks. Amazing to see how a dumpy a 21-year-old woman with access to professional makeup and lighting can look, but I guess that’s what a culture gets when it tolerates, nay, promotes female ugliness.

Frank, naturally, protects this girl and flees with her to Larkville, Ohio, where they’re taken into custody by the local sheriff, a heroic black man (notice a pattern here), who presides over a sheriff’s department staffed by a sassy black guy (who bravely takes a bullet for the protagonists), a diminutive white woman (who holds her own in the firefight), and a very fat old white guy (who barely knows enough about weapons to keep him from blowing his foot off). The PMCs pursue Frank and Amy and besiege the sheriff’s office, but he calls on Madani who swoops in and whisks him and Amy to New York.

The PMCs pursuing our heroes are revealed to be in the employ of a pair of evangelo-cons named Anderson and Eliza Schultz, who, despite the misleading name, aren’t Jewish, but very, very Evangelical. They apparently have a gay son who is a US senator, and the mysterious item of value is a picture that Amy’s multiethnic gang of fuck-buddies took of him swapping spit with another man at a funeral. Oh, and the Schultzes are basically George Soros, but promoting the Alt Right. Yes, the showrunners have found us out. We’re 100% funded by aging evangelocons who hire PMCs to murder people who find out their son is a poof. As with season 1’s attempt to shoehorn MAGA populism into boomerite conservatism, we see here that Alt-Right White Nationalism is the domain of Bush-era Leftoid caricatures of the evangelical Right.

The Schultzes have as their attack dog a reformed white supremacist by the name of John Pilgrim. His 1488 and iron cross tattoos have been lasered off, and he has given himself to Jesus, but still has to kill and scheme for the Schultzes. Naturally, the Punisher punishes these evil Right-wingers for their evil Right-wingery. Needless to say, the homosexual son is not complicit in the plot, but is rather an upstanding, courageous, and honest man.

Parallel to that, Billy Russo rises out of the ashes as Jigsaw. He falls in love with his strang, independant, wahman of color therapist, breaks out of the prison hospital where he’s treated for the injuries and amnesia that Frank inflicted on him at the end of season 1, and forms a band of brothers from former military personnel who are likewise dissatisfied with the way society treats them. While they have their token POCs and one whaman, this band of brothers is mostly white and male.

Their first move is to rob a cash and carry joint. Pretty soon, they draw the attention of the Punisher, who has to punish them and Billy Russo. In a rare moment of sanity, the series realistically portrays the life of a gang of men with the means and tools to wreak havoc. Russo is a gang leader and a cult leader at the same time — the group has a primitive set of rituals and the beginnings of a mythology.

This is perhaps what globohomo fears the most about white men — especially those who know their way around a combat zone — that we organize into groups capable of violence, or in Nietzschean terms, groups whose purpose is the violent imposition of our will and realization of our will-to-power.

That the leader is someone who in the past was driven primarily by greed and pride, but has been humbled by defeat and is now redeeming himself on a quest for truth — Russo rediscovering his self in the wake of his amnesia — makes them all the more dangerous. Recognizing the danger, Frank and Madani work in concert to destroy them.

So, what have we learned? Well, we have learned that government corruption is only a problem when white men do it. When heroic whamen in government lie to the public, let dangerous criminals walk free, or have sex with men guilty of multiple murders, that’s not corruption. We’ve also learned that white veterans are either ticking time bombs (who make ticking time bombs) or one step removed from criminals, whereas POC veterans are nurturing, pure, and honorable men. And the only way to be a good white man is to do the bidding of the heroic whamen of color, Jewish leakers, fat millennials and POC veterans — in other words, to be a golem for globohomo.

And we’ve also learned that rightism is orthogonal to vigilantism. While we like to think that the very existence of the vigilante has grave implications for the liberal world order, the reality is that liberals can just as easily claim the opposite. They live in a world where the government is really full of Rawlinses and Schultzes and that the liberal utopia can be achieved if these evil, reactionary white men are removed from the government and that the immense power of these white men must be countered by vigilantism of either white golems like Frank Castle, heroic g-wahmen of color like Madani or the motley crew at the FBI that has been trying to stage a coup against president Trump in our own universe. As my good friend the Thain of Shire pointed out in an article some time ago, the globohomo leftists LARP as underdogs and this LARPing is a tenet of their religion — a hierophanic mystery of the ruling class. They really think they’re the ones sticking it to the man and therefore consider all vigilantes to be their own.

To clarify, I still consider Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies to be essentially Right-wing movies, but for other reasons. Nolan’s Batman cannot be anything but Right-wing, but Batman as such is a vessel for whoever feels wronged by corruption and inaction on the part of the state.

There’s enough shootouts, blood, gore, and intrigue in the series to make up for the Leftoid morality play in the series, thank God. It’s not as cartoonish as the Avenger films, but it’s not exactly realistic either. I’ve known a few combat veterans in my time — not one of them would just walk up to five armed men with nothing but a pistol in his hands and hope he’s fast and accurate enough to shoot all five of them in about a second. The series has this gritty and “real” aesthetic, which I guess appeals to a civilization in decline which has lost its capacity to dream, conceptualize, and watch a TV show without having the gory details of a gut shot showed in its face.

Being new to The Punisher has freed me from attachments which would cloud my vision with nostalgia. But I didn’t know before writing this article that not being American would give me even clearer vision. I do not have the reverence which patriotic Americans have for US military personnel and veterans. Neither am I isolated from manly men in the way a modern bugman is, so I do not stand awed by anyone who shows up with a furrowed brow and bulging biceps.

Yes, Castle is a Marine. Yes, he’s very manly and tough, and his strength deserves respect. But he’s a golem, a mindless puppet for the forces of globohomo LARPing as oppressed victims of corruption and inaction. He crushes white resistance to the POC ascendancy, whether haphazard as with Lewis Wilson, or organized, as with Billy Russo’s gang of warriors. Unlike Nolan’s Batman who uses violence to impose his princely order upon the forces of chaos, Frank Castle uses violence to stamp out resistance to the chaos of the nonwhite, antinomian assault on the West. He’s not /ourguy/.