Right-Wing Art Doesn't Exist

In which Kid Rock illuminates the vast immaculate nothing at the center of right-wing culture

I PULLED CÉLINE off the shelf.

“What’s that one,” Barfunk said. He was on the floor picking at the carpet.

“One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Written by a frothing fascist who wanted every Jew in France exterminated.”

“And the book is good?”

“The book is GREAT.”

Keep pile. Next.

“T.S. Eliot. Anti-Semite. Best poet in the English language since Keats died of tuberculosis.”

“Keep or kill?”

“Keep.”

Next.

“Borges. Backed a military junta that disappeared 30,000 people. Also blind. Also a genius.”

“Keep?”

“Keep.”

We were in my apartment in downtown Saint Paul — the apartment I was about to leave forever, my own personal Babel disemboweled across the floor — and I was sitting in the wreckage rendering judgment on everything I owned. Keep or kill. That’s what a move is : a tribunal you hold against your own accumulation.

bed frame : kill

kitchenware : kill

couch : kill

But the fascists were coming with me. The fascists were ESSENTIAL.

“They don’t make em like they used to,” Barfunk said, and went back to picking at the carpet.

That beautiful dullard. Whether he was eulogizing the bouquet of carpet fibers cradled in his palm or the dead fascists on my shelf — I cannot truly say — but the sentence escaped him like an involuntary prophecy : one of those dumb utterances that arrives innocent and then metastasizes.

They don’t make em like they used to.

I stood there in the wreckage trying to think of a film. A novel. A song. One honest thing from this wretched century that could share a shelf with these beautiful bastards. Something worth its weight. Something you’d put in the keep pile without hesitating. Something right-wing.

I couldn’t think of one.

“This one’s got red in it,” Barfunk said, holding a carpet fiber up to the light.

“Barfunk. You just gave me an idea for an essay.”

“About carpets?”

What followed was a kind of quest — an obsessive, fevered, week-long search through the bowels of America for contemporary right-wing art — and what I found was not gold nor scripture but a vast, IMMACULATE NOTHING.

And that nothing tells you everything.

❧

THE KID ROCK PROBLEM

Kid Rock in novelty anglerfish hat.

“THIS one’s right-wing,” Barfunk said, waving around a DVD copy of Hacksaw Ridge.

“How do you figure.”

“It’s got God and war and a guy being tough.”

“The guy’s a pacifist, Barfunk. He refuses to pick up a rifle. It’s an anti-war movie that Mel Gibson accidentally wrapped in enough God and guts for both sides to claim.”

“Kill?”

“Kill.”

We watched the Super Bowl that night on the floor because I’d killed the couch. A pizza box sat on a stack of books I hadn’t sentenced yet, bleeding grease through the cardboard onto a Dostoevsky and threatening the Faulkner beneath it. The first two quarters came and went and then Barfunk — who has a bloodhound’s nose for totally wretched shit — navigated us to TPUSA’s All American Halftime Show.

And there he was.

Kid Rock.

A rich kid from a six-acre Michigan estate who invented a trailer park persona, built a career on a genre invented by Black artists, and sings about strippers and coke and statutory rape.

This is their guy. This is the cultural champion of the movement that wants to SAVE WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

If you wanted to design a metaphor for the creative bankruptcy of the American right, you could not do better than Kid Rock. A fabricated person performing fabricated music at a fabricated halftime show, draped in the aesthetic of rebellion while genuflecting to the most powerful people on earth, screaming about FREEDOM and JESUS at a fake event conjured into existence because the real one wounded their pride.

“My uncle saw him at a gas station in 2004,” Barfunk said. “Said he smelled like a waterpark.”

❧

SO WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Every great author on my shelf was a BASTARD of some kind. Liars, womanizers, feudalists, fascists, junta-backers, bushwhackers, anti-Semites, sassy-Semites. Didn’t matter. They all went in the keep pile. Not because of their bastardry but because of what survived it — something in the pages that this wretched enterprise has bled out of itself entirely.

Art — the REAL stuff — demands a few things that are fundamentally incompatible with the current right-wing project.

☞ Art demands AMBIGUITY. Art lives in the space between certainties. It asks questions without providing clean answers. It holds contradictions in tension. Flannery O’Connor was a Catholic who wrote about grace arriving through grotesque violence. Coltrane played music that was simultaneously an act of devotion and an act of destruction. Tarkovsky made overtly spiritual, deeply conservative films about faith and still refused to give you a clean answer about any of it. This is what art does. It refuses to FLATTEN.

The contemporary right has no tolerance for ambiguity. Their entire psychological architecture is built on false certainty — what we might call the masque, a performed reality held together by pillars that cannot be questioned. The masque requires things be clear : good guys, bad guys, woke mob, brave truth-tellers. You can’t produce a great film, write a great novel, or blow a single honest note inside a masque. You can only produce propaganda. And propaganda is NOT ART, no matter how expensive the production value.

☞ Art demands EMPATHY. Not sentimentality — empathy. The ability to see from inside another consciousness. To render a character who is not you and make them FULLY HUMAN. Even villains. Even people you disagree with. Every great novel does this. Even the cruelest satire requires understanding the people it satirizes.

The right in 2026 has explicitly rejected empathy as weakness. Caring about other people’s experience is WOKE. Emotional intelligence is a PSYOP. Understanding why someone might see the world differently is CAPITULATION.

☞ Art demands SELF-AWARENESS. Artists must examine their own contradictions. Artists must turn the lens INWARD, sometimes brutally. The right doesn’t do this. Can’t do it. Self-examination threatens the very pillars of the masque. Start honestly interrogating your own beliefs and the whole edifice shakes.

❧

THE INVERSION

Barfunk came with me to Austin once. Months ago. We pilgrimaged south in his reeking automobile, slept on the floor of an acquaintance of an acquaintance, gorged ourselves on brisket so fatty it could’ve lubricated a cathedral door, and then on the second night we stormed the Comedy Mothership — the place where American comedy had supposedly made its last stand — because we’d be damned if we were going to miss the siege.

Comedy is supposed to be the right’s great stronghold — their bastion, their citadel. They’ve been proclaiming for years that they are the last defenders of free speech, the brave truth-tellers, the jesters who alone dare speak what everyone’s thinking. The whole Austin comedy toilet was erected on this premise.

So where’s the ART?

This machine has been operating for years now. Hundreds of comics cycling through. Netflix deals. Spotify money. The largest podcast audience on earth funneling attention into this scene. ALL THE RESOURCES IN THE WORLD.

Name one special that will be remembered in twenty years. Name one bit that changed how people think. Name one joke — just one — that has the density and craft and surprise of a great piece of writing.

“I liked the one about the ████ who ████ ████ and then ████ ████ a dog ████ ████,” Barfunk said.

“I can’t put that in my essay.”

They built a comedy empire with no comedy in it. A hundred-million-dollar masque of a comedy scene that produces nothing of VALUE. It’s a strip mall with a cathedral’s stained glass windows glued to the facade.

And this is the same pattern everywhere on the right. They have the infrastructure. They have the money. They have the platforms. They have the audience. What they don’t have — and what money CANNOT BUY : — is a single genuine artistic vision.

Because artistic vision requires the very things they’ve killed in themselves through philosophical suicide : honest inquiry, tolerance for uncertainty, the willingness to sit with DISCOMFORT rather than retreating into a cope.

❧

THE VALUES VOID

Back in the apartment. Wreckage everywhere. Barfunk was fisting handfuls of habanero chickpeas I’d bought in bulk a few weeks before I knew I was fleeing this state — a dozen bags of baked legume I would now have to either transport across state lines or abandon — and a voice that was not Barfunk’s and was not mine said :

They have no values, and their art — or lack of it — reflects that.

This is it. This is the WHOLE THING.

What does the American right actually value in 2026? Not in their rhetoric — in their behavior. They value dominance. They value owning the libs. They value the feeling of WINNING. They value the spectacle of strength even when it’s performed by the weakest, softest men imaginable.

But these are not values you can build art from. These are the values of a football fan, not an artist. They are values that can only survive inside the masque. You can build a rally around them. You can build a media ecosystem. You can build a political movement. But you CANNOT BUILD A POEM.

Art requires values that hold up when you’re alone in a room with yourself and the work. When there’s no audience to perform for. When the dopamine of the dunk has worn off and you’re sitting there with a blank page and the question : what do I actually believe about being alive‽

The right has no answer to this question. Or rather, their answer is : I believe I should be winning. Which is not an answer. It’s a hunger. And hunger doesn’t make art. Hunger makes CONTENT. It makes engagement. It makes rage-bait and reaction videos and viral podcast clips.

This is why their cultural output is entirely parasitic. Kid Rock headlining a fake halftime show. Comics stealing Norm MacDonald’s jokes. Podcasters interviewing CIA guys and Epstein associates. The whole movement feeding on the carcass of a culture it didn’t build and can’t sustain.

❧

WHAT ART REQUIRES

I was trying to cram Don Quixote into a suitcase stuffed beyond all reason with the remnants of a life I was abandoning at speed. The spine was too fat. Nine hundred pages of Cervantes refusing to yield.

“Just buy another one in LA,” Barfunk said.

“There’s marginalia in here, Barfunk. I bled in these margins. You can’t replace marginalia.”

Cervantes wrote the first great novel in a PRISON CELL. Michelangelo painted God on a ceiling for a pope he DESPISED. Caravaggio painted saints using drunks and prostitutes as models because he REFUSED to paint the world as anything other than what he saw.

These guys shared something and it wasn't political alignment. It was the willingness to sit with reality — messy, contradictory, painful reality — and render it HONESTLY. No flinching. No retreating into a fantasy where they're the hero. No needing the work to confirm what they already believed.

That’s what art is. That's all it's EVER been. Some honest person in a room, trying to say something true about what it's like to be alive. And it doesn’t matter if that person is conservative or liberal or apolitical or a monarchist or an anarchist or a dentist. What matters is the HONESTY. The willingness to LOOK.

O’Connor was conservative. T.S. Eliot was conservative. Borges was conservative. Céline was a frothing fascist and still wrote one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The ideology doesn’t disqualify you. What disqualifies you is the refusal to look honestly at the world and at yourself.

And that refusal is now the defining feature of the American right. Not conservatism — plenty of conservatives have made great art. But whatever this thing is. This anti-reality project. This masque. This kayfabe. You can’t make art from inside it because art, by definition, is the opposite of kayfabe.

Art is the moment the mask comes off.

❧

THE TWILIGHT ZONE

The apartment was almost empty now. The bookshelves looked like mouths with all their teeth pulled. The carpet was showing its full face for the first time — every stain, every bald patch, every fiber Barfunk had been picking at for weeks finally visible in the naked light of a room with nothing left to hide behind. Everything I owned was in my suitcase or in the kill pile or in Barfunk’s stomach.

The right has no art because they’ve committed the philosophical suicide. They killed the part of themselves that inquires, that doubts, that holds two contradictory ideas in tension without reaching for the cope. They filled the hole with culture war grievance and strongman worship.

And now they’re standing in the ruins of their own cultural project — a movement that controls the government, dominates the media landscape, has more money and reach than any political faction in HISTORY — and they have produced exactly zero works of lasting artistic merit. Nothing that will outlive the news cycle. Nothing that a human being in fifty years will pick up and FEEL something real.

They built a civilization with no culture. A movement with no art. A comedy scene with no comedy.

And the wildest part? They don’t even seem to NOTICE. They’re too busy inside the masque, inside some godawful Twilight Zone where Kid Rock is a musician and other people’s art is secretly theirs and EVERYTHING IS FINE and the fake halftime show was actually better than the real one and the paid audience was genuinely moved and the bots in the replies are real patriots and the engagement was organic and the culture is thriving, actually, if you’d just OPEN YOUR EYES.

Barfunk was asleep on the carpet. He’d been asleep for probably an hour. I don’t know when it happened because the transition between Barfunk awake and Barfunk asleep is basically imperceptible.

I sat down next to him. Tomorrow I was flying to LA with one suitcase and a carry-on stuffed with Cervantes and Céline and Borges and every other magnificent bastard who’d survived the tribunal — the fascists, the pirates, the sodomites, the syphilitic debt-dodgers, the laudanum-lickers, the whole wretched canon crammed between socks and phone chargers — everything I owned reduced to what a man can carry through an X-ray machine.

By morning I’d land and open the bag and find the same margin notes, the same dog-eared pages, the same handwriting from a version of myself I no longer recognized but refused to kill.

Barfunk opened his eyes. Looked at the suitcase. Looked at me. “You crying?”

“No.”

“You made a sound.”

“It was a sound of contemplation.”

Meanwhile, out beyond the masque, there are still those who aspire to make something HONEST. Something that might LAST. Something worth the paper it’s printed on or the breath it takes to read aloud.

That’s the difference. That’s always been the difference.

Art doesn’t care about your politics. But it does require you to be REAL. And these guys gave up on real a long time ago.

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Episode 2 : In which Andrew Tate and Clavicular expose the energy crisis at the center of literary culture