Counter-Currents
The Pornographers Who (Said They) Fought for Freedom of Expression
Beau Albrecht
Al Goldstein
4,942 words
The pioneering pornographer Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw and similar refined journals of onanistic art, was famous for many things. Foremost, he was a notorious culture-distorter. (I’ll credit him with at least being an honest one; he said very plainly what he was all about.) Also, he was so liberal that it hurts. In light of that, it’s quite odd that his interview in the April 1978 edition of Hustler, conducted by Larry Flynt, is remarkably politically incorrect. Leftists of the Current Year wouldn’t recognize Goldstein as one of their own. Instead, they’d take one look at the interview and scream like little girls at a slasher movie.
Also, the story of their life and times is of some interest. So are the thorny matters of law and culture brought to the forefront by their commercial activities, and that of similar characters. It’s led to certain unhelpful narratives about what freedom of speech is all about (in the opinion of some), and there’s been loss of clarity as to why it’s important. The discussion hinges on the categories of political expression, artistic expression, and obscenity. There is legitimate room to debate where the boundaries should lie, which takes a minimum quantity of operating brain cells. Therefore, not to put too fine a point on it, being unable to distinguish between these categories — or refusing to acknowledge any out of willful ignorance — is moronic.
Al Goldstein had much in common with Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler and the interviewer in the above video. The former can be considered as a predecessor to the latter, much as (to make a horribly inappropriate analogy) John the Baptist was a forerunner to Jesus Christ. The pair’s pornographic publications really put the “ass” in “crass”: unfit to line a birdcage lest it foul the fowl. Both were bipolar and also suffered from the hubris and narcissistic traits typical among people with too much money. Goldstein resembled a Der Stürmer caricature in both looks and behavior, and probably would’ve thanked anyone for saying so. Flynt appeared remarkably similar to the Murdoch Murdoch drawings of President Trump after it became clear that The Donald was a “glass half-empty” kind of guy. Still, these characters had their occasional moments.
Other than the usual material, Hustler typically included lots of irreverent cartoons, which actually were more interesting than the dreary photo shoots. Religion was their favorite subject, as it typically was for other pornographic periodicals of the era, and all the phony TV preachers deserved to be skewered. Other than that, Hustler put everyone on target. These cartoons often had jokes about blacks, which would be considered utter heresy lately. One example shows slaves picking cotton under the hot Sun, one remarking, “Lawdy, sho’ be glad when whitey discovers polyester!”
This doesn’t mean that Flynt was pro-white. (He wasn’t.) In recent times, the magazine has lost the amateurish look it had in the 1970s. The cartoons also became less irreverent and more compliant with Leftist sensibilities. This is one more example of creeping wokeness ruining liberal humor.
Although the two culture-distorters were competitors, and Goldstein considered Hustler to be a derivative of Screw, they maintained an amicable relationship. Flynt developed a small commercial empire which operates to this day. The flagship venture providing the bulk of the revenue is a chain of strip clubs. Hustler had evolved from a newsletter for their clientele. Meanwhile, despite the obvious ethnic stereotype, Goldstein wasn’t as good at business. For one thing, lack of diversification left him vulnerable. Plans to open a brothel in the Caribbean fell through, leaving him without any Third World sexual exploitation revenue to fall back on. He suffered a reversal of fortune in 2003 after Screw folded. Improvidence didn’t help; he kept spending money faster than a Congressman writing a budgetary bill.
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And so it came to pass that the next year brought exceeding woe. Goldstein became homeless; a tremendous fall from grace. He once had a very posh four-story Upper East Side townhouse and two condos elsewhere in Manhattan, an apartment in Amsterdam for smoking his favorite herb, and another place in Los Angeles. Surely the most painful blow was losing his 10,000-square foot Pompano Beach mansion, then valued at $2.5 million and adorned with an 11-foot tall middle finger statue saluting marine traffic on Florida’s Intracoastal Waterway. These stately pleasure domes were typically packed to the roof with high-end audiophile equipment, fine cigars, collectibles, gadgets, consumer electronics, and other treasures (including a wristwatch collection worth $1.5 million), but he lost everything except some Screw memorabilia salvaged from the office. Oy veh gevalt!
Penn Jillette, the stage magician, mercifully delivered his woebegone friend from Bellevue’s homeless shelter and got an apartment for the poor schnorrer. Still, Goldstein remained impoverished until his death in 2013. Furthermore, he was lonely after alienating most of the people in his life; quite a forlorn end for the man who had boasted of bedding 7,000 women. At times, he was reduced to touting bagels. (I promise, I’m not making this up.) That job seems pretty slim pickings for someone who had once had savings of $11 million. Still, looking at it another way, at least the Jewish community touchingly came through for one of their brethren after somebody moved his cheese.
Life wasn’t entirely unkind, since Goldstein did attain the ripe old age of 77. As for Flynt, he survived a shooting which left him in a gold-plated wheelchair.[1] He lived until he was 78, meeting his end last year. As for what fate awaited the pair in the afterlife, I can’t help wonder if Heavenly Father confined each of them to a peep show booth for eternity, without any quarters.
The Porn Wars
At the time of the interview, pornography had more or less gone mainstream. Some attribute one factor leading to X-rated films making a successful breakout to Goldstein’s glowing review for Deep Throat, generating much public attention at a key moment. Still, porn precariously persisted in a legal gray area all the way through the 1980s. An unusual coalition of cultural conservatives (more or less the “Religious Right”) and feminists like Andrea Dworkin lobbied to suppress it.
One of those landmark Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rulings had watered down the doctrine concerning obscenity, overturning federal law that had been on the books since the Grant administration. The 1973 Miller v. California case created the “Miller Test” which distinguished protected works — political and artistic expression — from obscenity, which could be regulated at discretion of the law. Although this has been subjected to some criticism, and isn’t a “bright line” standard, this is — according to my fascist opinion — about as good as it gets toward reasonably making such a distinction. Naturally, pornographers will differ on this point, disliking even the watered-down version of the obscenity doctrine. Ultimately the line has to get drawn somewhere, unless there are to be no lines at all, and there’s no position that will please everyone.
There was a compelling argument to be made that the previous Comstock law was too puritanical prior to the Miller standard. Novels such as Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer created frequent legal battles. Leaving matters of artistic expression aside for a moment, it was a waste of government resources to suppress such books. Also, the officials seemed like philistines with nothing better to do. Their efforts would’ve been better spent on catching some crooks.
If the SCOTUS rulings were meant as a correction, giving a nod to increasing worldliness and the obvious changing standards since the 1960s, things went much further than expected. Today the dialectic has shifted far in the other direction, and effectively almost “anything goes.” It’s uncertain as to whether even half of the romance novels in a contemporary bookstore could pass the Miller Test either on literary merits or propriety, but again, spicy books are hardly the end of the world. Pornography was the main beneficiary of the relaxed standards, and it’s been pushing the envelope ever since.
Effectively, the Miller standard did put manustupration magazines on the good side of the gray area, as long as they plausibly had “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” This is the reason they included interviews, such as the one described herein. Playboy had a much easier time meeting that standard and perhaps could’ve done so on artistic grounds alone, with their characteristic soft lens and focus on sublime beauty. Fare such as Hustler was considerably edgier, to put it mildly,[2] which sometimes put them in the legal crosshairs. Goldstein himself racked up 21 busts for obscenity, though won some key victories in court.
Surely back then, the Right-wing Neanderthal crazies were cooking up their usual slippery slope conspiracy theories about how we’d better scrap all of our hard-won progress, or else one day society will go to ruin! More seriously, mainstream conservatives alternate between two strategies: attempting to hold the line, and ignominious retreat. At that particular time, there actually was an effort to push back in this front of the culture war. As usual, all they could do is hold the line until giving up, which in this case was around the late 1990s.
Until then, pornographers had a field day portraying conservatives as blue-nosed prudes out to take away our cummies. They loved to pose as champions of the First Amendment. (To paraphrase Joseph Sobran, this is like the mafia claiming to be champions of the Fifth Amendment.) This sort of posturing tends to animate the Goldstein-Flynt duet. It’s certainly good for a laugh when pr0n peddlers pull a “Have you no decency?” shtick. They turned the topic into a big morality play, if you’ll pardon the expression.
Goldstein on politics
The interview begins with a long introduction, the last paragraph of which begins:
In the interest of free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment, and of the principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” embodied in the Declaration of Independence, HUSTLER’s own Larry Flynt and Executive Editor Bruce David conducted this interview with the irreverent Al Goldstein.
Break out the fife and drums, shall we?
When asked why Screw gets prosecuted so often, Goldstein says that it’s because of their irreverence, especially in regard to politics. One article in particular got him a lot of extra attention. This shows that government figures can get remarkably touchy about criticism, so let’s go Brandon!
For example, I recently obtained my FBI file. Early in 1969 the FBI wrote a memo stating its outrage that No. 11 of Screw contained an article entitled “Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?” The FBI was so offended it instructed a New York City morals squad to arrest us. It wasn’t incensed by the explicit nature of the photos — the close-ups of genitalia, the tits, the ass. The FBI was offended that Screw had the audacity to say J. Edgar Hoover was a faggot. Of course, we all know he was a faggot.
Really, the proposition is rather uncertain that J. Edgar Hoover knew the difference between teal and aqua. The case for it is built on circumstantial speculation and some very flimsy hearsay, deliberately spread by his opponents. Without incontrovertible proof one way or another, this will remain one of history’s mysteries, though not a particularly important item of antiquated gossip.
Be that as it may, things are different, according to Current Year liberal standards. Being a 175er is an extra intersectionality point and therefore a job qualification for federal office, and honi soit qui mal y pense. A magazine that outed such an official these days would likewise get in political trouble — not because it’s calumny, but for using the word “fag” and implying that there’s anything wrong with being one.
After that, there’s some further discussion of politics. Goldstein takes a rather skeptical view about democracy that is actually fairly on-point for a liberal weenie. He does have something sensible to say here:
The worst thing that any individual can do is to be resigned, to feel helpless and hopeless. When you do that, you’re like the 99 percent of the people around who are just waiting for death to take them away.
That thread continues, though he doesn’t get around to saying what would work better than democracy. (I can’t fault him for it. After all, it’s not easy to develop political theory that works in the real world and that isn’t some utopian pipe dream that would make things worse if anyone tried it.) The discussion goes to SCOTUS, and what he says about it still holds true:
The Supreme Court is a political instrument composed of malleable political creatures. It’s not some august body of intellectuals and cerebral types who are going to maximize fidelity to the Constitution. Today’s Court is frightening in its stupidity.
Score another one for the culture-distorter! He particularly had it in for the Nixon appointees (ironically including the ones who turned out to be shitlibs), as well as a couple of his unsuccessful nominees.
Good examples of the type of people that he attempted to get on the Court are G. Harrold Carswell and Clement F. Haynsworth. Luckily, both men were rejected by a very courageous vote in the Senate. Within the last two years Carswell has been exposed as a closet faggot; he tried to suck someone off in a rest room. He was also an advocate of racial segregation.
Hey, wait a minute — you’re not suggesting that there’s something wrong with “cottaging,” now, are you? These days, it’s far better for one’s reputation to get caught giving BJs in the bathroom than it is to get caught criticizing those who do so.
If the Larry Flynts and Al Goldsteins of this world don’t look out for the rights of the people, who will? The Nixon Supreme Court?
I can’t praise enough these intrepid defenders of our liberty! Nobody ever had to worry about blacklisting, silencing, or cancel culture while these guys were around, right? I’m forever grateful that the pornographers prevented Big Tech from turning into a Left Coast echo chamber, where you could get a lifetime ban for posting an opinion that their censoring munchkins don’t like. They kept cyberspace a free marketplace of ideas, didn’t they? They held the digital book burners at bay, too. Boy howdy, they also made sure that nobody got hounded out of a job or lost a bank account for expressing political beliefs. When those smelly “watchdog” outfits were smearing people for unorthodox opinions, the pornographers defended freedom of expression and fought back like lions! Great googly moogly, online ideological censorship totally wasn’t even being considered until they put a toe tag on Larry Flynt last year, now was it?
Lèse majésté
Flynt tries to get Goldstein to talk about his fantasies, but the latter isn’t taking it seriously. The discussion turns to the women’s movement. (I’ll add that this is a misnomer, for one thing because most women don’t identify as feminists.) He’s asked why Screw gets the greatest amount of criticism from them. Goldstein doesn’t answer that directly, but he takes off on an entertaining tangent which becomes wildly politically incorrect by today’s standards:
I actually think Screw is less vulnerable simply because we exploit men and women equally. But I also feel that the feminist movement is full of shit. It is supposed to be this classless group of women, but in reality it’s elitist. It’s supposed to be protecting secretaries and barhops, but there are no secretaries, no housewives in most feminist groups. Instead, the groups consist of people who earn their living by writing. The more they disseminate feminism, the more they get for sale of their articles.
Frankly, I think these women are exploiting the movement. Also, I refuse to be made the “heavy” for the women’s movement. I’m as exploited by conditioning as women are, and yet I’m blamed for being unfair to women. That’s as stupid as blaming me for the sins of slavery. I never owned a black, and as long as I haven’t owned a black and no one can show by my own actions that I am mean to blacks, I refuse to feel guilty.
They don’t make liberal weenies like they used to! If he said that nowadays he would be subjected to a struggle session, or maybe forced to flog himself while kneeling on rice grains and chanting passages from a Robin DiAngelo book.
Flynt asks, “Do you support equal rights for women as well as blacks?” Goldstein replies:
Absolutely. Equal rights is a totally reasonable position. It’s the exploiters of the women’s movement that piss me off, not the question of women’s rights. The biggest phonies are the Susan Brownmillers and the Gloria Steinems. They bullshit about women’s lib, but if you don’t give them a seat on the subway, they get crazed and start menstruating prematurely.
Back then, Leftists who imagined they were struggling for equal rights surely would have been in for a surprise if they had been told what was ahead in the coming decades! For one thing, feminism still specializes in having their cake and eating it, as it always has. For that matter, since every single demand in the exhaustive Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls convention had been granted carte blanche long before, how much liberation did women really need in the 1970s?
As for blacks, after their demands were granted and de jure segregation ended during the 1960s, it took about five minutes before demands for equal rights switched to demands for equal results. Half a century later, they’re still moaning about it. Nothing ever will make them happy, so why even try? Let them forge their destiny in their own country.
Then the discussion turns to gays, a conversation that would make heads explode today.
GOLDSTEIN: Faggots are sissies. And I like sissies — they know their place.
HUSTLER: You don’t really believe they’re sick, do you?
GOLDSTEIN: When I’m angry at somebody I say, “You no-good faggot.” I use it as a pejorative term to put people down. I know I shouldn’t feel that way, but I have the same liberal guilt that many people have. Ultimately, we should all really be emancipated. But I think you’ve got a few marbles loose if you go around sucking cocks. Unless you’re a woman — then I think it’s appropriate.
HUSTLER: Does Screw, editorially, discriminate against homosexuals?
GOLDSTEIN: We abuse homosexuals in the pages of Screw just as we abuse everybody else. From an employment point of view I am somewhat prejudiced against faggots. Although my key administrative assistant is gay, I don’t believe gay editors belong in the men’s magazine field, but I will take a faggot over a woman every day. At least when a faggot works late at night, you don’t have to provide somebody to protect him on his way home. Faggots take their beatings like men. Women cry a lot. With that joke I’ve just buried myself with the gays and the feminists.
HUSTLER: Do you feel gays will ever be able to achieve equal rights?
GOLDSTEIN: Not in the next 50 years. But I think we can learn from homosexuals. They have gotten more acceptance than straights, by politicizing the right of faggots. They are much less prosecuted and persecuted than straight people. Homosexuals really have done a beautiful job of lobbying, and if you fuck around with a homosexual today, you’re going to have pickets tomorrow. On the other hand nobody wants to actively fight for the sexual rights of straight people.
These things are what someone who was so liberal it hurts could get away with saying in 1978, and he was willing to be quoted in print. These days, careers have been ruined over far milder expressions of thoughtcrime. I should add that Flynt became known as an LGBT advocate in more recent times, but he’s not choking on the heresy too hard at this point.
The last word
The rest of the interview discusses sex and society, the role of pornography, and so forth. It’s about what one might expect, given their occupation. (Wilhelm Reich covered approximately some of the same ground.) Unexpectedly, there’s a bright glimmer here and there. For example, Goldstein’s ending quotation was rather impressive. Flynt asks him if he’s ever considered giving up, and here’s the reply:
I remember getting letters from readers as far back as ’68, ’69 — five years before HUSTLER first appeared — stating “I can’t believe a newspaper like yours is around. How long will they let you get away with it?”
I used to write these people, or call them, saying “They’re not letting me get away with anything; I have a right to do it.”
It’s a point well taken. Ayn Rand had something similar to say in The Fountainhead. Howard Roark was asked, “My dear fellow, who will let you?” He replied, “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
I corroborated for these people their validity to exist. Whether they were into swinging or nocturnal cocksucking in a theater or just masturbating or even paying for their sex, suddenly here was somebody saying “Hey, I do what you do and I do it publicly.” The readers felt less frightened.
There, he does make a good point in general about how being vocal will counteract feelings of isolation in those who are like-minded but afraid to speak out. This also applies to much more than cummies, of course, and the point should be pretty obvious.
The main thing that keeps me going is rage. Rage and anger. I am competitive. I do not want to be defeated. I do not want to lose. I do not want to be emasculated. It’s me against them. It’s high noon every day of my life, and I think I’ve been shot in the balls a few times, but I’m still able to draw my gun. If I’m going to be thought of as a bear, I want to be thought of as a grizzly.
I’ll only stop when pornography is legalized, when the Supreme Court finally grows up and legalizes what we’re doing. Then I’ll feel that the battle’s over and that we’ve won.
Imagine what such focused determination could do toward a better cause than choking the chicken!
The rhinestone rebels
From 1791 to 1973, it was more or less taken for granted that the First Amendment primarily protected political speech (useful for safeguarding against tyranny) and secondarily artistic expression (useful for cultural achievements), but didn’t protect obscenity (useful for spanking the monkey). After the Miller v. California ruling, obscenity still wasn’t protected but there was more wiggle room in defining what was protected. Pornographers got filthy rich by exploiting the newly-created loopholes, but they still weren’t happy. They asserted petitio principi that obscenity was indeed protected, too, and is no different from political speech or artistic expression.
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Although I find the Miller decision to be reasonable, I’ll grant that there are plausible counterarguments. No SCOTUS lineup — no matter how enlightened or benighted — has agreed that obscenity is protected, but court rulings aren’t exactly bestowed with papal infallibility. Luckily for the pornographers and their allies, stating their case about it wasn’t illegal! It certainly would’ve been unjust if they’d faced severe consequences simply for trying to make their point. (That’s what the First Amendment is for, hint hint.) Flynt and Goldstein certainly did speak their minds about all that. No matter their personal foibles, of course they were within their rights to advocate for their radical position.
It was for continuing to mass-distribute obscene periodicals that The System tried in vain to crush them under the full weight of its prosecutorial apparatus and secret police. It does make for a comedic underdog story, if one overlooks the degradation of our society in which this pair played a pioneering part. Proverbially, one can’t fight City Hall, but these wankers survived mooning Washington and Quantico. Epic! (Surely it helps that they had an astronomical legal budget while their businesses were flourishing.) In fact, I’d almost raise a glass to the memory of these culture-distorters, especially now that there’s so little to love about the glowies. The government made itself look stupid by losing a protracted and highly asymmetric cat-and-mouse battle against a couple of mentally unstable coomers peddling amateurish smutty zines.
Still, they and other pornographers were hardly the heroic freedom fighters they pretended to be. In their early days, while carving out their economic niche at the bleeding edge of Constitutional Law, they suffered frequent legal woes. They surely were happy for any rhetorical support they could get from civil libertarians, as well as legal aid from lawfare foundations. When ideological conformity became an increasing problem in recent times (for example, censorship by gigantic tech monopolies), however, the porn moguls were AWOL from the battleground. Resisting globalism is the struggle to preserve and recover what’s left of our culture, sovereignty, and freedom. Surely that’s more important than beating the meat.
If the pornographers really were interested in freedom of expression, they would realize that the globalists and their radical Leftist stooges have the mentality of medieval inquisitors. They could’ve melted these special snowflakes with the same kind of withering satire they once used on the fundamentalists. They could’ve fashioned their magazines into a masculine refuge against political correctness and feminist fruit bats. Instead, the pornographers have mostly been resting on their laurels.
If anything, they bent like reeds in the frigid wind while the political climate blew in a tempest of Leftist totalitarianism. For one thing, Playboy ran a transsexual Playmate while the dirt was still fresh on Hugh Hefner’s grave. Showcasing a ladyboy so they could virtue-signal about radical gender theory is hardly speaking truth to power. On the contrary, they stuck a thumb in their audience’s collective eye.
What happened to these fair-weather friends of liberty, and especially the lofty principles they espoused? Whenever their own ox was being gored, the porn moguls postured as if imagining they were parading down Main Street past endless bleachers draped in red, white, and blue bunting, underneath a shower of tickertape and confetti while tooting “Yankee Doodle” on fifes, banging drums, and twirling batons while draped in American flags. If these jokers had thought of it, surely they would’ve conducted a big séance to try to get endorsements from the Declaration of Independence’s signatories. After they’d made their fortunes, and their income streams stopped receiving threats from legal challenges, however, they strangely forgot their ardent zeal for freedom of expression in its broadest possibilities. Apparently their only interest was keeping the judicial loopholes open that allow them to sell jerk-off material.
Changing times
Courtesy of Stonetoss
There’s been a certain aftermath to the Porn Wars. The Miller Test standard technically remains on the books, but is largely unenforced. The Porn Wars were lost long ago. Part of this was lawfare wearing down the opposition. As I recall, one municipal official remarked that keeping an X-rated theater from operating near a school meant having to fight the entire Harvard Law faculty in court. That might not have been much of an exaggeration; certain powerful legal foundations specialize in this kind of barratry for unfathomable reasons.
Aside from attrition, another factor was the emergence of high-speed streaming sites proliferating in cyberspace like toadstools. They also bankrupted Screw and cut into the profit margins of other print magazines. That’s because they can deliver an unlimited supply of stronger fare for free, and for every conceivable (or not) taste (or lack thereof), some of which makes Hustler itself seem cute and innocent in comparison. With the obscenity doctrine a dead letter by then, there was no legal check to keep the deluge of free hardcore material from disrupting the market. Thereby the old periodicals became victims of their own success.
The pornography genie is now out of the bottle, and it kind of is what it is. This is unfortunate, since it turns out that this stuff isn’t as harmless as once assumed. Is there a way to discourage bad taste without coming across like Attila the Hun? I’m drawing a blank for practical answers short of changing the culture dramatically. We have quite a few fish to fry already as it is.
There’s an odd legacy left by all the rhetoric and the legal battles that emerged from the Porn Wars. A sizeable fraction of the public seems to now assume the First Amendment is all about cummies. (Whether it does protect obscenity at all still remains a highly debatable proposition, of course.) Worse, they forgot that it has anything to do with protecting political expression — as well as freedom of religion and assembly. There’s a technical term for someone who can’t tell the difference between John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the Venus de Milo, and a taco shot from Hustler. Again, this term is “moron.” Would it be expedient to hold our nose collectively about pornography in order to argue for freedom of political expression? It would be a rough compromise to make — but there are a lot of morons out there.
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Notes
[1] Flynt got a serious case of ballistic lead poisoning after someone got offended by an interracial photo shoot in Hustler. Since violence is bad and stuff, I’ll have to say that it wasn’t very nice to do that.
[2] I’m hardly prudish or easily shocked, but I find its typical content to be painfully tasteless. Sex isn’t dirty unless someone makes it that way, and here’s a prime example. (Flynt might’ve taken all this as a compliment.) Still, Hustler has remained commercially viable after all these years, so someone likes that crap.
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24 comments
Excellent essay Mr. Albrecht. Well worth the time. You should have included a link to Al Goldstein’s obituary. It was amusing to say the least.
There’s a transcription at the end of the following:
https://pleasekillme.com/al-goldstein/
O no. Not Kurt Vonnegut. Thank you so much for the link Beau. Not the obituary I remember reading but hilarious nonetheless.
A thought that just occurred to me: Isn’t it strange that paranoid so-called “truther” like Alex Jones believe in a “globalist elite” that is “only out to deceive” – but at the same time consider the “Holocaust” to be “unquestionable reality”? They will probably advise their terminally ill relatives against any medical treatment, because doctors are after all also “all in cahoots with Bill Gates and the WHO”.
The way I see it, Alex Jones is sort of a present-day Art Bell. That sort of thing is his stock and trade. Some of it is pretty on-point, actually, though as a whole one should take the rest with a pretty big grain of salt. There have been those who say that Alex Jones is a stage name, but I couldn’t say for certain one way or another. He does look a bit like a Member of the Tribe, which might explain why he avoids discussing Zionism.
Now that you mention it, it strikes me too.
Interesting and frequently funny.
I can’t say I feel even grudging respect for Goldstein, Flynt, Hefner, or the rest of them. More like complete contempt. Add the judiciary in for good measure. None of them cared two hoots for freedom of speech.
When porn went mainstream in the early ’70s there was a certain urban area where two Lebanese brothers controlled the trade–movie theaters, magazine distribution, etc.
Their only “competitor” was a Jewish family that ran a small chain of retail stores that sold (mainstream) paperback books, magazines, newspapers, and comic books of all kinds. They’d begun with newsstands in the 1920s, but by then had only one outdoor stand left, near the university.
In the stores was a walled off area customers entered by pushing a swinging plywood door. “Must be 21 years old to enter.” The proprietors and everybody else could see the customers who went into these dirty book/magazine sections because the walls were only a little over waist high, and there was a circular curved mirror in the corner next to the ceiling. That way no one could swipe the Jews’ merchandise by sticking it under his coat or concealing it in a shopping bag. I suspect that a substantial amount of their revenue flowed from those sections.
The Lebanese were more brazen than the local Jewish family, and not being Jewish were legally targeted, which they deserved. It’s almost inconceivable that they weren’t involved, even if only peripherally, with organized crime. Anyway, they endured a constant stream of legal challenges, which–magically!–city hall and the Feds never seemed to win. Perhaps they weren’t trying. They sure made quick work of “white racists.”
The state chapter of the ACLU got something like 80%-90% of its annual budget from “donations” by the two brothers–who they also defended.
As for J. Edgar Hoover, I don’t believe he was a homosexual or crossdresser. (Strangely, racket buster Rudolph Giuliani enjoys the latter practice.) I believe the major source–not the original, but the “authoritative” one–for the story is Establishment British writer Anthony Summers.
I trust Whitney Webb more than Summers, and she believes the story. But I haven’t seen her source, which might well be the statements of the Rosenstiel woman.
The Hoover defamation has been repeated in a snide, ridiculing manner many times by Jews like Goldstein and Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Clinton, and God knows who else. I always think, “If that’s the case, he should be better than normal people according to your standards.” But never look to liars for consistency.
Another alleged “eyewitness”–not to any sexual act, but to Hoover’s supposed arrival in a limousine in Hollywood for a private homosexual assignation–is Scotty Bowers (“with Lionel Friedberg”), Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood (Grove Press, 2012). Bowers says he was a homosexual pimp (and prostitute) to Hollywood stars.
Bowers is a writer you can’t fully trust. Some of what he says is doubtless true, other things, like the Hoover story, he apparently made up.
For example, he repeats the old Cary Grant-Randolph Scott rumor as if it were true.
But then he’ll spring a surprise by saying something you’ve always thought but never heard anyone say.
An example is the supposed great “love story” between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Bowers claimed he had a homosexual tryst with Tracy, and that Hepburn, who he (and many others) disliked, was a lesbian (with bad skin, if I recall). He said the Hepburn-Tracy love story was entirely made up.
If you’re an average person (or less) and want to make a huge amount of money you probably have to be at least somewhat liberal — which is a different thing than being driven by liberalism.
Liberalism was definitely not what drove Flynt and Goldstein. They just wanted to make money and rub it in the faces of polite society. It’s funny how closely related liberalism and capitalism are.
That’s some great writing.
Goldstein looked as bad as a person could get in the early 00s, I think it was, when I had the misfortune to see him on TV news leaving court after a hearing on his arrest for trying to bring a gun on a plane. He stumbled down the court steps unaccompanied by lawyers and wearing only a soiled T shirt and what seemed to be boxers, not shorts. His obese flesh was slipping and sliding and oozing and bouncing in an unusual way, unlike any other “normal” obese flesh I’d seen. If I’d had some acid nearby I might have used it as eyewash.
Fascinating piece. W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) includes a behind-the-scenes look at Screw magazine, in which editor Jim Buckley is seen at work surrounded by nude models. Someone should produce a coffee-table book sampling content from the many underground magazines of the 1960s/70s. They shine a light on the crazy, disorientating zeitgeist.
How it’s possible for a Goldstein to go from being fabulously wealthy to living in a homeless shelter is beyond me. Always put something aside for a rainy day.
$11mil would be nice for me to have, but it’s not “fabulously wealthy”. I did, however, have the same thought. How can anyone with that much money end up literally homeless? I would love for Beau or others to offer any answers, as I know little about Goldstein (and don’t care very much).
I do know Goldstein was a real POS who hated Christianity and Middle Americans. Flynt was a sleazy greedmonger. I still remember that Hollywood whitewash The People vs. Larry Flynt (I think that was the title; yeah, I could Google, but don’t feel like it), trying to pretend this civic degrader was some heroic Constitutionalist. Only in the sick minds of liberals (though the days of leftists being 1st Am absolutists are long over; it was really all a power trip whose ulterior purpose was to destroy the Christian morals of Western Civilization).
In the Racial State, pornography will of course be banned (and feminism uprooted). Individual rights were only originally meant to apply to responsible persons – “the right kind of men”, “men of standing and property”. Not every moron or n’er-do-well, let alone women. Collective society has its prerogatives, too, the first one being the reproduction and correct (“ethnoperpetuationist”) nurturance of children. Censoring whatever harms society’s ability to endure and flourish ought to take precedence over radical individual autonomy.
The way in which the porn issue was originally framed was totally off-base. Rhetorically, it was seen to pit defenders of radical individual rights – libertarians – against those who felt that “government ought to legislate morality” – moral authoritarians. But what about those who didn’t agree that government policy should seek to make men virtuous (let alone save their souls), but who recognized that moral degradation and enervation would have negative tribal/civilizational-survivalist consequences, and sought to ban porn for that reason? The whole debate back then was individual liberty vs moral authority, with with neither the utilitarian nor ethnocommunitarian and patriotic cases against legalized porn ever mentioned (except, wrt the former, sometimes in the context of porn’s allegedly “increasing violence against women”).
The story of the normalization of porn in the second half of the 20th century is another aspect of the dispossession of the white, Christian, American majority (as Wilmot Robertson long ago recognized).
As for why Goldstein went broke, it looks like there are several reasons. First, he was bipolar, which may have played a part in his improvidence. He wasn’t very good at managing money. He maintained several expensive residences. (We know how much the Florida waterfront mansion cost, beyond the budget of mere mortals, yet a pretty good deal all things considered. Manhattan real estate is NOT cheap, particularly the upper east side where his 4-story unit was. Amsterdam is hella expensive even for rentals, and so is LA.) One nice house and a vacation cottage would’ve been quite adequate.
Other than that, they were crammed with finery, so obviously he liked to go on spending sprees. IIRC, he lost some of the property in a divorce, and the belongings were sold for pennies on the dollar. That’s what prenups are for… One of his employees sued him too.
Generally millionaires don’t blow the stack on ostentatious stuff. They’ll keep a large part of their fortune in relatively stable investments. There are some exceptions, of course. I understand that about half of lottery winners burn through their windfall in a couple of years, maybe ending up worse off than before and regretting they got the winning ticket. (I think they should require people to go through a financial management class before they get the big check, advising to avoid scams, flaky investments, and @$$hole “friends” coming out of the woodwork asking for a “loan”, but all that’s another matter.) Old Money is New Money that hung onto it, after all.
Other than that, Screw was basically Goldstein’s only income stream. Internet pr0n took the wind out of his sales. Also, the hookers started advertising in Craigslist back then, cutting far back on Screw’s advertising revenue. When the income started dwindling, that would’ve been a great opportunity to put his financial house in order, and also look into a profitable side racket, but that’s not how it happened.
Individual rights were only originally meant to apply to responsible persons – “the right kind of men”, “men of standing and property”. Not every moron or n’er-do-well, let alone women.
You’re not going to “uproot feminism” nor are you going to disenfranchise women. Try it and you’ll end up right back where we were when White men, tired of watching their mothers, sisters, and daughters suffer, embraced feminism in the first place. The arrogant reactionary, as ever, believes he knows better than our ancestors who were there to see the consequences of the policies they endorse.
I note there is no attempt here to actually justify your desire to disenfranchise women, just an appeal to “we’ve always done it that way.”
They bullshit about women’s lib, but if you don’t give them a seat on the subway, they get crazed and start menstruating prematurely.
Women are equal. We can walk and stand on a subway in heels as well as any man – not very well. But nevermind, I’m going to be more charitable than antifeminists and assume that the men who want to have their cake are not the same ones who want to eat it. Hopefully, those men who criticize women for sporting sneakers and packing their pumps aren’t the same ones who call women hypocrites for expecting priority seating on the subway. For my own part, I never expected priority seating unless I was pregnant, because I always made it a point to wear shoes I could walk in without risking a nasty ankle sprain.
For that matter, since every single demand in the exhaustive Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls convention had been granted carte blanche long before, how much liberation did women really need in the 1970s?
Insofar as underachievement relative to ability reflects oppression, apparently women in the 70s really did need a great deal of liberation.
https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/100-years-women-ysm/page/growing-numbers–changing-time
It’s supposed to be protecting secretaries and barhops, but there are no secretaries, no housewives in most feminist groups. Instead, the groups consist of people who earn their living by writing. The more they disseminate feminism, the more they get for sale of their articles.
This is idiotic. As if people who earn a living by writing can’t genuinely care for and advocate for people who don’t. Barhops and secretaries disproportionately benefitted from feminist efforts to deal with domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment, and birth control dissemination. It’s probably true that the already-privileged women of the middle and upper classes gained more from feminism, but so what? That doesn’t make the movement elitist.
Your reply quoted three separate people, including Goldstein’s own bombastic remarks. I can answer for what I wrote. That is, I’m unsure what you mean by underachievement. That much is a breezy generalization, for one thing, and I can’t really evaluate its merits. If you do wish to discuss it, we may do so, as long as you stipulate that you’ll objectively consider evidence contrary to your worldview. That is to say, I’ll engage in a dialogue, but I’m not up for a sermon.
BTW, I mean none of this harshly. You do have my kind regards despite any differences in opinion. I hope that one day you’ll come to see that Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, and so forth have some agendas and are not really your friends.
Your reply quoted three separate people, including Goldstein’s own bombastic remarks.
Indeed. I actually meant to reply to Lord Shang, though of course I commented on the substance of your article as well, including Goldstein’s remarks, though I certainly do not attribute those to you, nor do I hold you responsible for them in any way.
You do have my kind regards despite any differences in opinion.
Likewise.
If you do wish to discuss it, we may do so, as long as you stipulate that you’ll objectively consider evidence contrary to your worldview. That is to say, I’ll engage in a dialogue, but I’m not up for a sermon.
I’ll do my best.
That is, I’m unsure what you mean by underachievement. That much is a breezy generalization, for one thing, and I can’t really evaluate its merits.
There is a tendency in these circles to accuse women of being perpetual malcontents who can never be satisfied. This is, in my opinion, contrary to the weight of the evidence. My point is that women were still underachieving in the professions in the 70s, presumably because of private discrimination. Their subsequent success suggests, at the very least, that they were being artificially held back by this before the second wave.
I don’t know how much affirmative action had to do with their immediate success in the mid-70s and shortly thereafter, but it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with it now. Female matriculants are every bit as qualified as their male peers. The facts being what they are, I don’t understand why you questioned whether women needed any more liberating in the 70s.
I also disagree with your claim that feminism is all about having your cake and eating it, too. As I said, these kinds of generalized claims are not particularly illuminating. It’s much better to consider specific claims of hypocrisy. For example, I will say that I find it very unfair that feminists consider the underrepresentation of women in traditionally masculine occupations to be a problem, but see no problem with the underrepresentation of men in traditionally (or increasingly) feminine occupations, such as teaching or veterinary medicine.
Of course, any advocacy movement is going to be susceptible to this kind of bias, and I don’t see feminism as any worse in this regard than any other identity-based movement. I am not impressed with Roosh’s other claimed examples of feminist hypocrisy, though his laundry list is too extensive for me to deal with here. If you would like me to address something in particular, I will do so.
I hope that one day you’ll come to see that Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, and so forth have some agendas and are not really your friends.
I don’t consider them my friends. I particularly disagree with Betty Friedan’s characterization of stay-at-home motherhood as a burdensome, dull, and unfulfilling life. I love being a stay-at-home mom. I do wish there were more opportunities for women to work more flexible hours, with the understanding that this will probably mean that men will dominate the most demanding, influential, and lucrative fields and positions in the economy. I personally don’t see a problem with this, so long as women subordinates are protected from men who would abuse their authority.
Apologies for the late reply. Looks like I can’t answer directly since there’s a limit on comment depth.
Anyway, I’m ancient enough to remember those days. Women were getting some notable “firsts” back then in apex positions. That much seemed to me as the result of careers coming to fruition. Otherwise, women were continuing to enter the workforce, but that wasn’t for the fun of it. Rather, it was for economic necessity. Wages became stagnant since the early 1970s, and since then, dual income households started becoming necessary just to keep from falling behind.
As for the feminists of the time, lots of prominent ones were engaging in some very antagonistic rhetoric. That sort of thing still hasn’t fallen out of fashion. This is unfortunate, since it makes sense that women and men should get along in the same society.
I miss those lurid 80’s cartoons in Hustler magazine.
Being the unsophisticated type who sees what is right in front of me, I admit I don’t see the point of this article–or what it has to do with White Advocacy (no mental gymnastics allowed.) Is it to praise the moral destruction of our society, destroy the family, and all public decency without seeming to? It can’t have escaped you the sewer we are all forced to exist in today, nowhere to hide, which does nothing for civilization, particularly White civilization, nothing except destroy the families that would transmit our cultural and racial pride, along with killing many of our unborn offspring through abortion. It also serves to destroy the moral authority of parents to instruct their children in cultural matters. We get rebellion and race mixing instead. Where do you think the authority to transmit traditional values comes from–the family. Which widespread obscenity helps to destroy. Why are you afraid to condemn this poison instead of wrapping it in an intellectual bow?
Read it again.
The point, essentially, is to satirize Flynt, Goldstein, and others like them. They held themselves up as champions of freedom of expression, while engaging in sophistry that missed the point and muddied the waters about it. I did say I wouldn’t line a birdcage with Hustler.
One of my sisters boyfriends actually kept a little binder of his favorite Hustler cartoons on his coffee table. He was a mechanic/pusher. This was their clientele at the time. Porn is ubiquitous today. For this they should be condemned for the damage its rendered to society. We can see anything we want now for free. Supply has a difficult time keeping up with demand. It has been a long game of normalization of the abnormal. Would an ethnocentric state allow homosexuals and pornographers? I think it’s a challenging question.
No, it wouldn’t tolerate porn (see my comment above), and the arts would come under some degree of morals censorship. As for LGBTQs, I suspect we’d see a return to the “traditional American” approach – ie, society would be rigorously formally heteronormative, while the authorities would mostly turn a blind eye towards the queers as long as the latter kept to themselves and in the “closet”. They would be at liberty to do their thing, and they’d have their quiet hangouts (I suspect gay bathhouses would get shut down, however, in the interests of public health and hygiene), but some professions (like teaching minors) would be off-limits, and public displays of affection between same sex persons would likely be redescribed as “lewdness”, and policed accordingly. No “gender reassignment surgeries” would be performed; no one would get to “choose his pronouns”; and transvestitism would frowned upon, if not banned outside of rare theatrical productions.
Don’t ask, don’t tell was an effective solution for inclusion in the military. Gays on average are fairly above middle class income and educational attainment so it’s not outrageous to think they could add to the society as a whole. I don’t see how they would want their own dedicated space either because of their tendency to mix racially. Well on second thought maybe their own multi color space would be best and they could be as open as they want with no worries about privacy law. I can’t see all the letter groups getting along in this scenario.
Outstanding piece.
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