When I started “The Perfume Nationalist” in February 2019, it was out of rage and helplessness at the ideological, authoritarian evil I saw taking over my country.
At that time it was de facto illegal to publicly support Trump. Left-wing media demanded that employers fire Trump supporters, and there was always the risk of deplatforming and having one’s bank account or payment services canceled. People would be unpersoned for something as minor as liking an image of Pepe the Frog, viewed as part of a vast and objectively nonexistent “Nazi” subculture lurking just beneath the surface of America.
I made my show look as frightening as possible, discussing every possible unspeakable topic right up front, including platforming people with views I didn’t agree with.
The words “Nazi” and “fascist” were stripped of all objective meaning and used to ruin the reputations and Google results of anyone who questioned the Democrat Party’s escalating authoritarianism.
A deliberate provocation
What was then called the “alt-right” had a strong, edgy, and aesthetically forward presence. It comprised all sorts of different people from liberal, normal Republicans to unstable, viscerally repellent, and hateful people protected by the culture of mandatory anonymity. Its unifying values were spreading information suppressed by liberals and extreme transgressive humor.
My show emerged from this scene out of necessity and found its first audience there. Its title was a deliberate provocation and commentary on the fact that anyone who stood for freedom and basic liberal American values was now called a Nazi.
I’m also a nationalist. You should be a nationalist too.
Dirtbag cowardice
At the time, dirtbag leftism and Bernie Sanders acted as a cover for public figures who dared to lightly criticize the Democrat Party. You could mock liberal piety and wokeness in safe, surface-level ways and maintain a degree of protection from your promotion of socialism. Shows would begin as left-presenting and gradually incorporate laundered RW content after a safe delay.
I took the opposite approach and made my show look as frightening as possible, discussing every possible unspeakable topic right up front, including platforming people with views I didn’t agree with. I had to start like this and confront these topics to gain the trust of my audience.
Letting people speak
The joke is that it was also all about perfume. The unspeakable bogeymen of society — alienated young white men who dared to defend themselves against a culture that demonized and hated them — would also be listening to a gay culture show about perfume.
My belief is that if you let people speak and don’t censor it, extreme and antisocial views hold less mystique and can be examined for what they actually are. If they’re presented as a forbidden treasure chest of secret knowledge, it gives everything suppressed an aura of glittering truth.
As the years have gone by, those antisocial views have become what mainstream liberals say and think every day. Extreme anti-Semitism is a dominant value on the far left and the anti-Trump far right today. They find roundabout ways to excuse it or say that isn’t what’s happening. It is exactly what’s happening, and this is what it looks like.
Who is the ‘Nazi’?
The mainstream lib of today is more ideologically a “Nazi” than I have ever been. But does the word lose its power? No. It persists in its 2010s witch-hunt meaning, being used to dehumanize anyone who stands up for free speech, American values, and the right to live a safe life where criminals and murderers are punished and decent citizens protected.
The cultural atmosphere has changed for the better thanks to the bravery of people who used their faces and names and took the consequences. It wasn’t “the RW anons” who accomplished any of this, though this myth persists to this day, with conservative talking heads falling over themselves to pay lip service to this subculture that has proven to be rotten, nebulous, and ideologically aligned with Democrats in every important way.
Shut up and suffer
“TPN” continued and gained a much wider audience. When online leftists became aware of me due to more high-profile people coming on my show, the fatwa was put out on me. I have been crucified and canceled over and over again to a degree that would make your head spin. I have been stalked and harassed in the most personal and disturbing ways.
The worst of it has come from people ostensibly on the right, who agree with my views in many ways. You don’t just get it from liberals; you get it from everyone. When it’s happening to you, you’re expected not to talk about it. It’s described as “undignified” and “beneath you” to give it attention or explain what’s happening. It makes everyone uncomfortable, and any public figure viewed as provocative or controversial is thought by most people to be deserving of whatever happens to him, especially if he’s successful or admired.
People who have had it happen to them understand how bad it gets and the loneliness of being stuck with it. Most people quit after their first taste of it. I didn’t and kept going because my life had led me here, and for all the negativity, kind, beautiful, smart people would tell me my work had changed their lives. The show became simply an extension of my life, to talk about whatever I wanted with whoever I wanted.
Lots of people I thought of as friends have disavowed and stabbed me in the back over the years. It doesn’t matter; the story keeps going, and the pain is part of it, just as the joy is. “TPN” has influenced mainstream culture in some pretty undeniable ways. I’m copied a lot but rarely given credit, because even to those close to me, my name carries a certain stigma. The Perfume Nazi.
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Rebecca Noble / Stringer via Getty Images
‘I’m not reading all that’
Still that word, Nazi. I suppose it’s cool in some ways to be a cult thing that still has an edge, but the hypocrisy is frustrating and never-ending.
As President Trump said, Charlie Kirk’s assassination was the result of years of ideological conditioning by the left to view anyone critical of it as a Nazi. The word dehumanizes sane, liberal, accepting people — liberal not in the sense of woke Democrat but liberal in its actual meaning — people who oppose censorship, promote freedom, and want the highest quality of life for everyone around them.
It’s viewed as distasteful for anyone to tell his story when something atrocious happens. “Way to make it about yourself.” “I’m not reading all that.” “He’s whining,” etc. The responses write themselves, and if you’ve seen them before, you know what they’ll be.
The thing is that I don’t care any more. I’ve been proven right about things over and over. I have a body of work to be proud of, and those who listen to it know it goes so far beyond politics and wokeness and news stories. I don’t care about appearing above it all and unfazed. What these people do and the evil they’re capable of has to be described, and it has to stop. They’re terrorists and murderers. Everything they’ve said about us is true about themselves.
