Leftists and (((journalists))) get triggered by Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho writer)

When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s world view become the lens through which we began to look at everything?” So begins Bret Easton Ellis’s take on, of all things, Barry Jenkins’s film “Moonlight,” which he describes as “an elegy to pain.” Ellis’s first work of nonfiction, “White,” is an interlocking set of essays, combining memoir, social commentary, and criticism, on America, in 2019; more specifically, it’s a sustained howl of displeasure aimed at liberal hand-wringers, people obsessively concerned with racism, and everyone who has not gotten over Donald Trump’s election. His targets range from the media to Michelle Obama to millennials (including his boyfriend). Ellis also defends less popular people, from Roseanne Barr to Kanye West, whom he perceives as having been given a raw deal by the mob.

For those who follow Ellis on Twitter, none of this will be particularly surprising. He has gotten involved in several online controversies, including one that stemmed from him calling the filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow “really overrated” because she is “a very hot woman.” The more interesting question is how much of a departure this material represents from his fiction. When Ellis was in his twenties, he published three novels—“Less Than Zero,” “The Rules of Attraction,” and “American Psycho”—that are considered some of the most biting and lasting satires of Ronald Reagan’s America. But their protagonists’ materialism, misogyny, and amorality, along with Ellis’s early Brat Pack persona, have persistently raised questions regarding the depth of his social critique. “American Psycho,” about an investment banker and serial killer (who happens to worship Donald Trump), has been described as a masterpiece of postmodern literature, but it’s also been condemned by prominent feminists.

In recent years, Ellis has continued to publish fiction while also writing screenplays, including for Paul Schrader’s “The Canyons,” which became notorious for its troubled production. Since 2013, he has hosted the “Bret Easton Ellis Podcast,” on Patreon. Ellis and I recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how people respond to allegations of sexual assault, whether the President is a racist, and why he finds liberal outrage so annoying.

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You have a section in your book where you talk about President Trump’s comment about Mexicans being rapists. And then you have another section where you talk about Michelle Obama being “breathlessly condescending” when she said, “When they go low, we go high.” I am trying to understand why one of those things sets you off and the other you seem kind of neutral about.

You know, I think “sets me off” suggests that I am enraged, and I think the voice in the book is pretty chill and neutral. And what I am talking about is all in context. With the Trump thing, that is true. He said that once, in his very first speech, and didn’t say it again, and there were people who had picked up on it and were still repeating it a year or two years later. Without putting that in context, yeah, I guess that bothered me.

O.K., but Trump says lots of racist things. We can all agree on that, right?

[Pauses] Sure.

So he says lots of racist things. This thing was only said once. Why does people being upset about it, or people being upset about the fact that we have a President who regularly says bigoted things, bother you?

No, no, no, no, no. That just twisted up what I meant.

Tell me what you meant.

You think I am defending a racist.

No, I asked why liberals repeating Trump’s remark about Mexican immigrants being rapists bothers you so much.

Because it didn’t seem to be truthful, and it seemed to be exaggerated and said over and over again. You think I am defending Trump somehow? I am bothered by people using that one thing two years later.

There are a lot of things to get angry about: children being separated from their parents, Trump saying nice things about marchers in Charlottesville. What is it that bothers you about this?

You do know that plenty of people don’t think that? You do understand that?

Don’t think what?

Don’t think all these things you are saying about Charlottesville. What does he have, a ninety-three-per-cent approval rating, or, let’s say, a hundred per cent, from his base? Let’s say it is, over-all, way up, from thirty-eight per cent to fifty per cent, or even higher. And let’s say Latinos are now fifty-per-cent approval for Trump.

That’s not true, but O.K.

Well, whatever.

I am looking at the FiveThirtyEight average. He is at forty-two per cent.

O.K., but whatever. There is another side of the aisle.

I am not arguing that people don’t support him. You aren’t denying Trump says racist things regularly. I am just trying to understand why liberal opposition to Trump bothers you so much.

I don’t know if he does think racist things so regularly. I am not sure if I do.

Oh, O.K. What did you think birtherism was?

I do think birtherism was racist and the Tea Party was an abomination. The hysteria over Trump is what I am talking about. It’s not about his policies or supposed racism. It’s about what I see as an overreaction to Trump.

Sorry, you keep going back and forth here between racism and supposed racism. Do you think he is racist or not?

Yeah, probably he is. Because when I was doing research on him, way back in the nineteen-eighties, during “American Psycho,” the policies he and his father were talking about—in terms of not letting people live in certain buildings, and the overreaction to the Central Park jogging case—was annoying enough to make him a figure in “American Psycho,” where Patrick Bateman sees him as the father he never had.

The animating feature of the book is that you are frustrated and annoyed with the liberal consensus, which is “shrilly” and “condescendingly” looks down on Trump voters. Would that be a fair way of putting it?

I would say that’s a fair way to put it, sure.

Is it that you think there are terrible things going on but we should all take a deep breath, or is it that you don’t think there are a lot of terrible things going on?

I just think that there is a man that got elected President. He is in the White House. He has vast support from his base. He was elected fairly and legally. And I think what happened is that the left is so hurt by this that they have overreacted to the Presidency. Now, look, I live with a Democratic, socialist-bordering-on-communist millennial. I hear it every day.

He’s a character in the book.

He is in the next room right now. And I do put myself in his shoes, and I do look at the world through his lens, because I have to. I live with him, and I love him. And I do hear this, and some of it changes my mind, and some of it doesn’t. I am certainly much more of a centrist than he is. I do listen, and I think that [lack of a] sense of neutrality—of standing in the other side’s shoes and looking at this from the other side—has bothered me among a lot of my friends and from the media.

What would looking at some of the issues that we have been facing from the perspective of Trump voters look like in practice?

I don’t know. I am not that interested in politics. I am not that interested in policy. What I was interested in was the coverage. Especially in Hollywood, there was an immense overreaction. I don’t care really about Trump that much, and I don’t care about politics. I was forced to care based on how it was covered and how people have reacted. Sure, you can be hysterical, or you can wait and vote him out of office.

People did show up at the polls in 2018.

They might very well vote him out. I hope they do, so we have some sense of normalcy in this household.

Big picture.

But I don’t really care.

When I think of when people have freaked out during the past couple of years, I think of the Muslim ban, child separation, and the President saying that there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. What, as a citizen, do you think would have been appropriate responses?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

Did it bother you when people showed up at airports or said child separation was terrible?

No, not at all. I’m not really bothered by that one way or the other.

But you don’t think people should complain about [those policies]?

No, I feel that whoever has been elected can do whatever they set out to do and what their party wants them to do and what their base wants them to do, and you might not like it, Todd [Ellis’s boyfriend] might not like it, I might not even like it, but this is the reality. It is not some made-up fantasy. This is happening.

There are plenty of people who like what he is doing, so what are we saying?

There were plenty of people in favor of segregation. I am not sure how far that gets us.

There are plenty of people who like Donald Trump.

There are plenty of people who like all kinds of things.

No, I know.

You don’t have anything to add on that?

I think you are leading me into things I am not particularly that interested in.

Which is what, everything you wrote your book about?

No, just in terms of policy, in terms of Trump the man. It is more or less the coverage and the reaction to him.

In an interview with the T.L.S., you said that progressive movements become “as authoritarian as what they’re protesting,” and that “it’s happened to a degree with the #MeToo movement. The idea of sexual assault and violence against women is reprehensible. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t accept that.” Can—

Agreed. Agreed.

Well, you said it—of course you agree. So what you are saying is that everyone can agree assault is wrong, but maybe we are going too far?

I think what happened this week, with Joe Biden, has really alienated my boyfriend from his party, in a way. My boyfriend was extremely upset about how the media was treating Joe Biden and how they were putting that under the umbrella of #MeToo. That can happen, and I think we can all agree on that.

In the same interview, you said, “Look, this is the big, dirty secret: I don’t live in a bubble. I knew about 55 percent of people voting for Clinton and 45 percent voting for Trump. 20 percent of those voting for Trump had voted for Obama. They wanted a change person and they did not care that he grabbed the pussy, or that he said Mexicans were rapists. It was about the economy and job creation, with political correctness coming in second.” What do you think these voters were saying?

I think that the girls I know, the women I know, who were voting for Trump—the pussy comment did not bother them, because they grew up with the reality that they had three brothers, or they had two brothers, and this locker-room talk was a reality, and whether Trump really did it or not was not going to decide whether they voted for him or not. I thought that was interesting.

I am trying to synthesize this with your comment about sexual assault being “reprehensible” and you not knowing “anyone who doesn’t accept that.”

Yes, agreed.

So, on one hand, everyone is completely unaccepting of sexual assault, and, on the other, “they wanted a change person” and did not care that he sexually assaulted people. Is there no contradiction there?

Bragging about something? I don’t know.

There have been many women who have come forward. So maybe people don’t always care about that?

Oh, I don’t know. It didn’t really matter in terms of getting him elected, in terms of the women who did vote for him.

Do you understand what I am asking here? You were saying that everyone was saying sexual assault is reprehensible, and also that people don’t care about bragging over sexual assault.

I think he was bragging. No one said he actually did it. I don’t know if any women have come forward and said, “Yes, Trump grabbed my pussy.”

Many, many women have said—

They said he brushed against them at a ballet, or—

No, pushed them against walls—

Of course. I don’t know. What does that say? What do you think?

You came to the defense of Roseanne Barr, saying that she denied, after tweeting racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, knowing Valerie Jarrett was black.

Did she say that? That she didn’t know she was black?

You say it in the book.

Yeah, right, I quoted her.

It seems like you want to give some people the benefit of the doubt, but not others. Would that be fair?

I would like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

So when she tweets about Valerie Jarrett being the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes”?

Yeah, that’s a tweet. I don’t know. It’s whatever. It’s whatever you think it is and whatever she says she meant by it. It is her word against ours.

It seems like you want to give Roseanne Barr the benefit of the doubt, but not people who think Trump is a racist.

I don’t really feel that. I don’t feel that way, O.K.? It is not what I want to do at all.

This idea keeps coming up that a lot of people support Trump. Let’s grant that that is the case. How should that change how we respond to him?

I don’t think at all. What should we do about that? Change people’s minds? What can you do about a Trump supporter? But they do exist, and I don’t think all of them are crazy, insane racists. Do you?

All of them, no. When you think back to these couple of years, is your large takeaway that the left was too critical of Trump?

It’s not just the left. There seems to have been this hysterical overreaction that can be solved with voting him out of office. And I don’t know whether this pain and turmoil people have inflicted on themselves have gotten them anything. I just see a lot of people who have turned themselves inside out.

It seems to have caused a lot of people self-harm, and I don’t know where it gets anybody.

You are a novelist. You write about the human condition. Do you worry about the self-harm of people who see things like child separation and have no emotional response?

I think I am an absurdist. I think politics are ridiculous.

Maybe don’t write a book about it. Would that be the solution?

I think the problem is that I don’t necessarily see this as interesting as fiction.

Yeah, I could tell.

It was much more interesting to me to write this as a nonfiction book, in terms of pulling this stuff from my podcast.

Thanks so much for talking.

It’s interesting to have that back-and-forth pull in an interview. The only problem, however, is that I am not that political, and so, when we have this conversation, and you confront me with certain things like this, I really am, I have to say, at a loss.

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>supporting (((trump or liberals)))
This has got to be the worst shilling I've ever seen, saged and reproted

Read it to see how these fucks go after anyone that does not support their leftist mental illness.

>(((No, I asked why liberals repeating Trump’s remark about Mexican immigrants being rapists bothers you so much.)))

>(((Sorry, you keep going back and forth here between racism and supposed racism. Do you think he is racist or not?)))

>(((Is it that you think there are terrible things going on but we should all take a deep breath, or is it that you don’t think there are a lot of terrible things going on?)))

>(((In an interview with the T.L.S., you said that progressive movements become “as authoritarian as what they’re protesting,” and that “it’s happened to a degree with the #MeToo movement. The idea of sexual assault and violence against women is reprehensible. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t accept that.” Can—)))