The Urban Dictionary defines a “wedgie” as
…the condition when someones underwear gets stuck up their ass naturally, or by someone pulling it up there. Wedgies are done usually to nerds who wear tighty whities. However it can be done to people who wear boxers to, and of all ages. Wedgies are done as an act of dominance, to torture somone, for sibling rivalry, or just friends messing around.
I hereby add to this definition. A “wedgie” also means an artistic performance that is woke and edgy done as an act of dominance over the audience, which is presumed to consist of white, straight, cisgender, bourgeois, uptight people – tighty-whities, one might call them – who will be shocked but who will not dare to object. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which took place a year ago today, was a wedgie.
Now jump back another three years. Four years and ten days ago, I was excited to post about a series of thirty-five tweets from a then-unknown podcaster called Darryl Cooper, a.k.a. “MartyrMade”. The title of my post was a phrase from one of the tweets that I thought then, and still think now, exactly captured the nature of the loss of trust in institutions that divides my political life into the time before and the time after it happened. Here is the post: “Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were”.
So perfectly did that series of tweets resonate with the spirit of the moment that, unknown to me, while I was writing my post about them Samizdata Illuminatus was posting about the same topic.
Time moves on. I have recently added the following note to my post from 2021:
Another edit, four years later (July 2025): After posting this in 2021, I enthusiastically clicked Darryl Cooper’s “Follow” button on Twitter. As the next four years went by, he passed from being someone I followed because I admired them to being someone I followed because I despised them. Cooper is not quite out of the closet as a fan of Hitler. Read “The Case against Darryl Cooper” by John William Sherrod.
I still think this series of 35 tweets that Cooper posted in 2021 went viral for good reason. As I have said before with regard to the far right, if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.
What has this got to do with a tedious LGBT-whatever parody of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”?
Because the thing that made it finally sink into my consciousness that Darryl Cooper is a Nazi fanboi was this now-deleted tweet from him about that opening ceremony:
No, it wasn’t, you weirdo.
I took the screenshot of the tweet from this post on Instapundit in which Ed Driscoll discusses the “woke Right”.
In case the picture succumbs to link-rot, in the essay to which I link above, John William Sherrod describes it thus:
In yet another post, he posted two pictures. On the right was the blasphemous “Last Supper” depiction from the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On the left was a photo of Hitler and his entourage with the Eiffel Tower behind them after France fell to the Nazis. Along with those two photos, Cooper posted:
“This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
Mr Cooper is not a good historian.
As for thinking some weird sexual display (mocking the Last Supper as some sort of homosexual thing) is worse than Mr Hitler and the National Socialists conquering Paris – I would ask Mr Cooper if he has ever seen a dead body, and I mean that as serious question.
Most people, including myself, have seen a few people die – lots of people were killed when the forces of Mr Hitler conquered France, and lots more people were killed under the Occupation.
Yes the “drag” sexual display of the Paris Olympics was both perverted and blasphemous (but blasphemy must be allowed – and sexual perversion must also be allowed, although NOT at the expense of the taxpayers), but it did NOT involve murdering people – although the murder of Queen Marie Antoinette was also mocked (with a pretend severed head waved about) – none of this is “art”, it is pretentious leftist nonsense (sadly typical of “official France” – the enemy of the real France of farm, village and church), but, again, it did NOT involve murdering people.
The moral compass of Mr Cooper is totally twisted – he thinks that silly antics is worse than murdering people.
I am reminded of the antics of “Pussy Riot” – although they did NOT get taxpayer funding.
Going into a church in wrong-way-round balaclava helmets and “bover boots” and dancing about screaming some “feminist” song (calling upon the Virgin Mary to be a “feminist”) is not good – and people who do it should not be celebrated, they need, measured – not severe, punishment to remind them not to go on to the property of others and mess them about (disrupting other people in their religious worship).
All this would be acceptable in a comedy club (Mr Putin would not allow that – and he should be condemned for not allowing it) – or in their own homes, but NOT invading a church. It is not their property.
But to pretend they are worse, or anything like as bad, as Mr Putin – who-murders-people, is absurd.
“…the audience, which is presumed to consist of white, straight, cisgender, bourgeois, uptight people – tighty-whities one might call them – who will be shocked but who will not dare to object.”
I think that I fit pretty well into that particular pigeon hole but I’m pretty unlikely to be shocked. My parents probably would but I don’t get fazed by much nowadays. Judging by various other comment threads, it seems to be younger people who are delicate flowers who are outraged by the most trivial things.
As usual, some interesting insights from Natalie.
My following remarks are comparatively less interesting.
First, i feel that the Paris Olympics wedgie was (or: should have been) more offensive to Leonardo than to Jesus. (See also the Last Supper scene in History of the World: Part 1.)
Second, there is at least one obvious aspect in which the picture on the right is preferable to the picture on the left: the color.
The greys on the left capture the grimness of the Nazi occupation.
The picture of the right captures the dusk-light brilliantly.
Hitler was responsible for millions of white people deaths and white people wealth destruction opening the way for a Marxist take over of a lot of cultural space in Western Europe and full take over in the East so laugh to those kind of posts.
lucklucky
It is indeed grimly amusing that some white racialists admire Mr Hitler – when he killed many millions of white people.
Mr Hitler also claimed that Germans and Slavs were a different biological race – with the former being superior and the latter fit only to be slaves.
Science shows that Germans and Slavs are, basically, the same race – with differences being those of historic culture rather than DNA.
Mr Hitler’s position towards Jews was also deeply confused – one minute it was that Jews should be destroyed because they were supposedly subhuman, the next minute it was that Jews should be destroyed because they were somehow Superhuman, so much so that they could exploit and oppress other groups of people.
The only constant was his obsession that Jews should be destroyed – his “why” reasons were contradictory and confused.
By the way, Franklin Roosevelt quoted, as truth, National Socialist claims about the Jewish domination of the professions in Germany – these claims, the statistics the National Socialists presented, were FALSE – see Paul Johnson “A History of the Jews”.
This was in the context of Franklin Roosevelt rejecting Winston Churchill’s suggestion that the death camps be bombed (yes some Jews would be killed – but the chaos would give others the chance to escape, and the mechanism for mass killing would be destroyed) or that, at least, the railways leading to the death camps should be bombed.
Franklin Roosevelt, in his conversation with staff, cited the alleged Jewish domination of the professions in Germany in 1933 as a reason for inaction in the early 1940s.
Even if the false National Socialist statistics had been accurate (in reality they were a false as the Soviet Marxist economic and social statistics that the fool “great historian” E.H. Carr believed) – hey were morally irrelevant.
“FDR” is presented as some sort of saint – in reality he was not a good man, to put the matter mildly.
The National Socialists even banned the works of Mendelssohn, such a German composer – even working himself to death, on the grounds of his Jewish origins – as so often with the National Socialists one is torn between anger and bewilderment.
By the way, reaction to the work of Mendelssohn is a good indication of moral character.
For example, he was the favorite composer of Queen Victoria (a decent person) and hated by George Bernard Shaw – that would-be mass murderer.
I remember last year’s rain-soaked Paris Olympics. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight it was a signpost that the woke phenomenon had peaked, although I might be optimistic.
At least it rained on Macron’s parade. One can never celebrate such a thing enough.
Johnathan Pearce – yes indeed Sir.