Welcome to another installation of my extremely niche writing on four obscure themes: 

I) the Roman Mithraists who referred to one another as ‘Syndexioi’, as well as Mithraic antecedents and affiliated tendencies in Europe, Asia and North Africa

II) the self-described Western Chauvinist Proud Boys, the militia group with the most specific premeditated plan to attack the Capitol on January 6 2021, who I've referred to in Latin - the language of the Roman Empire that defined the West - as the ‘Pueri Superbi’

III) the MAGA regime which emancipated the Proud Boy rank & file and leadership and still appears headed on a horrible trajectory towards funding the group to the tune of $100 million and turning it into the paramilitary force referred to as “Trump's army”

IV) the tragic emergence and perseverance of fascism from the history and culture of the West, which ties all of this together

Seussyndexioi

In the fall and early winter of 1997 I was part of a group that travelled throughout western Canada in a converted school bus conducting a global geopolitics simulation game in schools, churches and community centres; the sort of thing that’s much easier to do in one's early twenties.  The project was created and run by a group of University of Manitoba students, and one of these students - whose family, incidentally, owned a station wagon that also doubled as a boat - was the niece of Theodor Geisel, better known by the pen name Dr. Seuss.

Aside from being mispronounced Dr. ‘Soos’, rhyming with ‘juice’ (it’s actually pronounced Dr. Soys, rhyming with ‘choice’), the “Doctor” is famous for his ubiquitous books, films, merchandise and other intellectual property.  Geisel was a committed anti-fascist while still expressing many of the xenophobic views representative of the era he lived in.  He was a prolific artist, creating works for children and adults alike, and as such, utilized many animals and related symbology in his works.

I have noticed that some of the imagery contained in Geisel’s illustrations run parallel to some of the more important Mithraic/Syndexioi symbols.  This is not to suggest that Geisel was a Mithraic initiate or fan, or even necessarily knowledgeable about Roman history and religion broadly speaking.  He probably did lots of formal art training which would have familiarized him with Greco-Roman sculpture, architecture and frescoes, but Geisel produced a lot of illustrations in his career, the Mithraic initiatory rites contained a myriad of imagery, so it’s simply a matter of statistical likelihood that there’d be overlaps between the two.

My reason for pointing this out is to emphasize how both apophenia (pattern-making out of randomness and perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated items) and confirmation bias (interpreting information in order to confirm prior beliefs) should be recognized and filtered out of assertions for them to be evidentiary and argumentatively valid.  That said, it's still fun looking at the Mithraic parallels to Geisel’s work:

The Seven Mithraic Initiatiatory Grades: 

There’s also Cautes and Cautopates:

and this reminds me of Dav Pilkey’s C&C variation which I discussed in my post this past July:

There’s the Petra Genetrix:

Mithras’ Phrygian Cap:

And finally, the Tauroctony (yeah, I know, this one’s a ridiculous stretch):

Again, just to make myself absolutely clear, Geisel (to the best of my knowledge) was no Mithras-worshipper, and no offence is intended to any practitioners of Roman Mithras worship. My point here is quite simply that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Judicial Substitution in Malicious Prosecution

On the same date as my last post, the U.S. District Judge Anne-Leigh Gaylord Moe was reassigned to replace Judge Wendy W. Berger in the Proud Boys’ $100 million 'malicious prosecution’ case.  Though both judges were appointed by Trump, the charge was welcomed by Proud Boys’ leader Enrique Tarrio, quote-tweeting the news and writing "Elections Have Consequences.”

According to Jon Lewis of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, if the Proud Boys win their lawsuit “this sends a message to every far-right extremist out there who, when push comes to shove, will be that much more willing to answer the call to arms next time because they know that they have the Department of Justice on their side.” 

The Gavin McInnes / Vice / Proud Boy origin saga got rehashed yet again in Jennifer Szalai’s Pop Culture Got Stale. Counterculture Went Right-Wing. How the rise and fall of the nihilist hipster gave us the cruel reactionaries of today: a review of W. David Marx’s “Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century.”  Though this was a well-written book review which contributes to explaining how things got to where they are now, I have nothing further to add to a story that keeps getting repeated for no progress or positive outcome.  McInnes was a manipulative and bad-faith actor, as were his VICE-founding collaborators with whom he has long-since fallen out.  He’s just found a much larger support community of grifters, the dominant faction of the ruling party of the United States, one which seems unlikely to relinquish power in any peaceful or democratic fashion.

Things Happen to MAGA

Several fissures suggest that the MAGA coalition isn’t holding.  One such fracture has been the exit of the deranged, Jewish-space-laser-fearing and QAnon-addled Marjorie Taylor Greene over Trump being mentioned in 1,670 of the 2,324 Epstein email threads.  Trump himself has threatened the death penalty against Democrats and urged the military and National Guard to refuse illegal orders, and recently hosted a White House meeting with Zohran Mamdani in which he brushed off but also accepted being called a fascist.  I can only imagine that the term is not something that he perceives to be an insult, given how cozy he’s gotten to various foreign authoritarian rulers.  Case in point: his meeting with Mohammed Buzz Saw after which he stated that “things happen” in response to queries about MBS’ admitted role in the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.  

There’s also what appears to be a pending war in Venezuela and War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of dewy-eyed children’s cartoon turtle Franklin from the bankrupt / paused / restructuring Canadian animation company Nelvana in order to brag on X about shooting down boats carrying suspected drug dealers in the Caribbean.  Ironically, the opening song from the Franklin cartoon was written by Bruce Cockburn, perhaps most famous for his “If I had a Rocket Launcher”.  Speaking of stupid things on X, its November 23 location feature upgrade unintentionally revealed that thousands of high-engagement MAGA accounts representing hundreds of thousands of user accounts who are actually run from outside of the United States.  Though some of this can be explained by VPNs or even recent travel, even this highly publicized reveal did not stop Trump from boosting these accounts.

To top things off, Trump is using the killing of a National Guard troop by a former member of the Unit 03 Kandahar Strike Force death squad who received asylum this past April (during the Trump presidency) as a cover to implement an intensified anti-migrant stance beginning with the deportation of foreigners deemed “non-compatible with Western Civilization”, an act which certainly fulfills the wishes of the nationalist and anti-immigrant hard right in the United States.  The US Justice Department is also using the fact that European anti-fascists have protested against the neo-Nazi "Day of Honor" marches in Hungary as a pretense to support his conservative ally Viktor Orbán.  They also hope to both persecute and prosecute domestic anti-fascists by comparing them to jihadist and white supremacist terrorist groups under the false premise that the violence they have committed is commensurate with that of Islamists and the extreme-right, which is really quite the stretch.

Present Fear and Future Hope

The mainstreaming of discourse with the Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson dialogue received much analysis and made decent people feel sad without quite motivating them to do anything about the situation.  Both of these two pundits, representing gutter antisemitism and highbrow antisemitism respectively, are as popular as ever, gaining followers and continue spreading hatred unchallenged.  Even the U.S. Coast Guard appeared to temporarily de-list the swastika as a hate symbol, only backtracking and denying what they did after public outrage.  Meanwhile in Canada, the Exiles of the Golden Age white nationalist conference held in Vancouver this past July featured Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii painting for its promotional poster.  This 1784 Neoclassical painting features the three 7th-century BC Roman brothers of the Horatii family, all willing to fight and die in the conflict between Rome and Alba Longa, all three reaching for their swords held by their father, and in doing so gesturing with the Roman salute from which the Nazi sieg heil is derived.  This is yet another example of modern neo-fascism drawing from ancient Roman iconography, as I discussed in my original article last year.

See you next post if there is one; I would like to at least stick things out long enough until my original assertion that the Proud Boys’ $100 million lawsuit does in fact occur in order to prove my risky Cassandra-like thesis.  Or, if I'm happily proven wrong (my pride being less important than my empathy), the Proud Boys / Pueri Superbi lose or drop their case and then fade into a well-deserved obscurity and irrelevance, then that too would be a good time to quit this monthly rant.  Either way, I hope MAGA melts away through some combination of resignations, denunciations, schisms and infighting, that the majority of Americans collectively come to their senses to see that their cost of living is increasing while their quality of life is decreasing and more importantly that their neighbours, friends and family members are being unfairly and inhumanely deported, that all possible seats are democratically overturned come next year’s midterms, and that with added pressure from a vigorous but peaceful up-swelling of popular social movements people survive long enough to vote Trump and his coterie out at the next election, assuming that another election takes place.