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.