What one failed painter can teach us about politics, history, and the right-wing

The connection between personal failure and the turn towards hate

I try to avoid AI for many reasons, but this particular image was just too necessary. Forgive me, artist friends.

There’s a pretty clear formula for people and history - failure leads to hate. I just came to this while reading David Walsh’s history of right-wing cooks in America and almost in passing, he notes something that we have been observing today, something that honestly might be at the heart of everything we have to deal with today. Writing about a book that came out at the time on the subject of antisemitism (again, nothing new under the sun here), he writes:

“The other missing factor was the relationship between political antisemitism and political failure. Leo Ribuffo, in his study of the careers of William Dudley Pelley, Gerald Winrod, and Gerald L. K. Smith in the 1930s and 1940s, emphasized how both personal psychological factors and personal and political failures helped to radicalize the three toward extreme antisemitism” (2004:81; emphasis mine).

Don’t worry about the names. He goes off to describe a few more people who, when they had a chance at winning, acted polite and note… you know… fascist… but once they started losing they decided to throw their hats fully into the ring.

Now think of today. Yes, on one hand, the right, the crazy right, has one. My personal opinion is it won’t last not because “good always prevails” or some shit like that but because these people are so goddamned stupid that the mass of professionals in every branch of government, military, intelligence, finance, law, etc. at some point simply won’t tolerate it any more. I don’t believe the CIA killed Kennedy. I think the CIA might… well… let’s get back to the topic.

Before we got to this weird moment of 2025 - think of how much being a loser radicalized the people we see today. Tucker Carlson went from being the host of the most popular show in America to doing a documentary about how a demon attacked him because he loves god too much. Yes, this is real, no he won’t show the scars he claims to have.

I cannot emphasize enough that this is real.

More broadly, look at the media sphere. There’s a term, I’m not sure if it was coined by anyone specific, but it’s the failed comedian to right-wing grifter pipeline. Think Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, even Ben Shapiro wanted to be a writer originally (please look at his recent reviews of musical theater; he is finally in his element and lord willing he stays there). These are the big names.

In researching for this, I found the names of slightly less famous, perhaps more annoying influencers who have undergone the same thing. From an article by Steffi Cao called Influencers are pandering to conservatives to salvage their post-cancellation careers, I learned about TikTokers I thankfully didn’t know about before but who are doing the same thing. Taylor Holden, who now “posts about Christianity, country music, and his love of assault rifles.” Brittany Dawn, after being sued in 2023 for deceptive marketing practices, quickly rebranded to become a Christianity influencer, selling meet-and-greet faith weekends.” Cao mentions a similar story with Meredith Foster. The list is long.

Now there are levels to this. These influencers are more grifters who latch on to trends that are more cultural than political. The more serious ones are the ones I mentioned first, like Crowder, Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and even more darkly, the world of explicitly conservative comedy, as detailed here in this article already from 2021 titled “The Comedy Industry Has a Big Alt-Right Problem,” where we see the process I’m describing here in direct effect: “Gavin McInnes created the Proud Boys on Compound Media, a subscriber-based digital network where he hosted a talk show from 2015 to 2017. Originally called the Anthony Cumia Network, Compound Media was created in 2014 by Cumia—the “Anthony” half of Opie & Anthony—after his firing from SiriusXM over a series of racist tweets.”(2021, emphasis mine).

Brings a new meaning to the comic’s line of “tough crowd, eh?” I’ll be here all day.

There’s more to say about this. I don’t know what to make of it. Have you yourself thought of the ultimate factoid/joke concerning this topic, the one that stands above all others in history?

Perhaps… a failed painter?

We can do this forever. My point now is just to open the eyes of those who haven’t thought about it to how failure, specifically in the realms of personal expression, creativity, and artistry, has led to a kind of hate that is not only dangerous, it is now strong enough we can say it is close to leading the world.

And one last note. While I can’t say Elon Musk is a failed comic, any psychosocial digging on that man - I think it’s fair to say that he wants nothing more than to be in the same place and feel the same adoration as the likes of Dave Chapelle, Bill Burr, and so on. His tweets, his public comments, they all reek of wanting to be funny. And as we know (having read this article together now), nothing is more dangerous than a comic scorned.

Sources:

Walsh, D. A. (2024). Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. Yale University Press.

https://medium.com/@CKava/the-problem-with-jp-sears-2c5d1b8664fd