Now middle-aged, the enfant terrible novelist Bret Easton Ellis, has turned to nonfiction to mock the "childlike fascism" and "demented narcissism" of American liberals that helped put President Trump in the White House and left them facing "mental and emotional collapse."
For good measure, Ellis, 55, also denounces the "legacy media" in his new book "White" — originally due to be called "White Privileged Male" — describing it as "a moral disaster for the country" that had covered Trump in the 2016 with such bias and "absolute cluelessness" that it assisted him.
Already facing a backlash from the liberal intelligentsia he disdains — a Q&A with the New Yorker was intensely hostile — Ellis has also been praised for his devil-may-care contrarianism. Interview Magazine described "White" as containing "searing points about how the national obsession with being liked at all costs and the silencing of opposing voices under the banner of inclusivity can create its own American hellscape."
As the author of the 1991 dystopian novel American Psycho, in which the Wall Street banker — and serial killer — protagonist Patrick Bateman venerates Manhattan real estate mogul Donald Trump, Ellis has a unique perspective on the 45th president of the United States.
He places Trump's 2016 victory and what he sees as the Left's continued refusal to accept his legitimacy squarely in the context of millennials — those who reached adulthood around the start of the 21st century. He brands them"Generation Wuss" and laments their "oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive possibility."
This, he argues, has been fostered by "overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move" while "smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life's hardships … people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it's hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you're not talented, people suffer, people grow older, people die."
"Generation Wuss," he writes, became consumed by "victim narratives" and "anxiety and neediness." More darkly, and with the help of social media, Ellis diagnoses a growing inability to accept or even listen to viewpoints that differ from a "woke" status quo.
"This is an age that judges everybody so harshly through the lens of identity politics that if you resist the threatening groupthink of 'progressive ideology,' which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions, you’re somehow fucked," Ellis writes. "Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist."
Ellis identifies disgust with this as one of the factors behind the rise of Trump. Born in Los Angeles and now living there again after decamping from New York, Ellis found himself as an almost lone voice in the "Hollywood bubble" who believed Trump could defeat Hillary Clinton.
In the summer of 2015, he began to feel that "legacy institutions like The New York Times and CNN [were not] tracking what seemed to me a shifting reality … the media became so freaked out that they abandoned the hallmarks of neutrality and perspective."
Trump insulted everyone, Ellis argues, "and white men got it first and far more than anyone else, yet as the national press corps explained it, this was not the case."
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[–] 18087943? ago
jews don't claim him
https://jewishjournal.com/uncategorized/78817/