Interview with playwright CJ Hopkins

On art, inspiration, censorship, Trump, Covid and our future

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”
—George Orwell

In his play The Extremists, the brilliant playwright and satirist CJ Hopkins presents his audience with a political talk show on which the host interviews a guest about his new book, Extremism in the 21st Century. At one point, it is suggested that instead of engaging in the destructive act of thinking, people should listen to facts as provided by the government and the media. This may seem like brainwashing, it is explained, but it would brainwashing people with the truth.

Extremism, censorship and disinformation are some of Hopkins’ favorite objects of satire—and he’s deadly good at it. Lyn Gardner, the theater critic for The Guardian, wrote that with his 1992 play Horse Country, Hopkins “brings the spirit of Godot to America’s bars and puts the bourbon in Beckett.”

But in our increasingly censorious age, satire has become a dangerous game. As

Matt Taibbi

recently reported:

Just when you may have thought things couldn’t get any crazier: American playwright and humorist C.J. Hopkins, profiled in this space on numerous occasions, has been sent a “punishment order” by a German judge, offering him a Sophie’s Choice of 60 days in jail or 3,600 euros.

His crime? Essentially, insulting the German health minister in a tweet, and using a scarcely-visible image of a Swastika on a mask in a book critical of the global pandemic response, The Rise of the New Normal Reich.

In this interview, Hopkins and I talk about his inspirations, his work, our current climate of censorship, the Trump years, the pandemic and more.

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DV: Who were some of your favorite writers and artists growing up and how have they influenced your work?

CJ: It depends on what you mean by “growing up,” but let’s go with Vonnegut, Heller, Orwell, Thompson, Ken Kesey, Henry Miller, Kafka, Kubrik, Coppola, Dostoevsky, Chayefsky, Polanski, Beckett, Brecht, Artaud, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Burroughs, the Beats, and most of the early- to mid-20th-Century poets. I have learned something (and have stolen) from most of them.

DV: What recent works of dissident art have you found particularly powerful?

CJ: Nothing recent comes to mind. I’m sure it’s out there, under the radar, but I don’t go hunting it down as much as I used to when I was younger. It’s virtually impossible to get truly dissident work produced or published where it’s going to have any serious cultural impact these days. The global-capitalist culture industry is rather anti-dissident.

DV: What are some of the key elements required for emerging totalitarianism in a democratic society?

CJ: There are no key elements. Any society can go totalitarian if the ruling establishment has the will and the tools to take it there, as we experienced in 2020-2021 in “democratic” societies all throughout the world, and are still experiencing, albeit a bit more gradually and subtly at the moment.

DV: As a dissident artist, have you ever had any of your work censored?

CJ: Not my artistic work. The global-capitalist culture industry doesn’t need to censor dissident art. It just ignores and marginalizes it to death. However, my latest book of essays, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), is banned by Amazon in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands, and more or less impossible to order in German bookstores, and I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art. Most of my social media output is censored and/or visibility-filtered by Twitter/X and Facebook. My interviews have been censored by YouTube. Google visibility-filters my search engine results. And so on.

DV: Your one-act play The Extremists sits somewhere between Kafka and Sartre in terms of dystopian absurdity. One of the more Kafkaesque aspects of the play is near the end where the two characters completely change their views and then do so again, and again. This reminded me of the radicalization of the political left in America today, where classic liberalism is now deemed bigoted and I even saw a book the other day by a leftist author that argued marital equality is a right-wing viewpoint and should be opposed. What events did you have in mind when you wrote this and, to cite the name of the show in the play, what major forms of extremism do you see in the 21st century?

CJ: The Extremists is difficult to describe succinctly. All my stage plays are. I described it this way in an interview in 2013: “basically, two Poetic Terrorists attempt to deprogram the minds of the audience, and ruin a perfectly good show in the process. That would be the logline, pretty much.” I was being cute, of course, because describing the dramaturgy of my plays gets really complicated. Live theater has an incredible power, a power that no other art form has, but it hardly ever gets unleashed. I spent about twenty years experimenting with that power. It’s quite amazing when it works, but you have to see the plays in action. You have to be in the room. The texts are just the maps for the performances.

As for the term “extremism,” it’s essentially meaningless, a purely strategic term used to delegitimize and demonize certain people, ideologies, political movements, etc. Calling someone an “extremist” is basically calling them an “apostate.” There are many such terms in use these days, e.g., “hate speech,” “malinformation,” “conspiracy theorist,” “science denier,” “terrrorist,” etc. These terms don’t actually mean anything. Their function is to stigmatize. We’re all conditioned to respond to them like Pavlov’s dog. Short-circuiting that conditioned response is part of what the play does, when it’s done right. All my plays do that in one way or another.

DV: I have previously written that totalitarianism is not total State power but total ideological influence, namely the politicization of every aspect of normal life. What role do you think dissident art plays in combating totalitarian power?

CJ: I would go a bit further and say that totalitarianism is not just total ideological uniformity, but that it generates a “reality,” or at least it aspires to. Dissident art has to attack that “reality” such that people experience it as constructed, which is extremely hard to do. Otherwise you’re just making statements. Most dissident art is just making statements. Take John Heartfield, whose work I adore, aesthetically, for example. His work during the Nazi era spoke to audiences outside the “reality” of Nazi Germany, not to those within it. That’s what most dissident art does. And that’s effective in terms of generating awareness and resistance to a totalitarian system as long as there is still an “outside” to speak to. The challenge dissident artists face today is that there is no “outside.” It’s one big global-capitalist world. The “reality” is global. Ideology only looks like ideology when you are outside of it, or in hindsight. When you’re inside of it, it’s just “the way things are.” OK, I’m getting a bit beyond the definition of “dissident” now, but that has been my goal as a dissident artist under global capitalism, i.e., to short-circuit the ideological conditioning that we don’t recognize as ideological conditioning.

DV: With regard to the dystopian developments we saw during the Trump years, do you think this was intentional or collateral? Is Trump a hapless numbskull or is there something more coordinated and sinister to his provocations?

CJ: I think Trump is a narcissistic ass-clown. He’s not interesting as an individual. He’s interesting as a figurehead, a symbol of the “populist” resistance to global capitalism and its ideology (or “reality”). Trump, the individual, isn’t a threat to the system. It’s that “populist” resistance, which is primarily reactionary, that the global-capitalist ruling establishment needs to crush, and has been relentlessly crushing since 2016. It’s not just a US phenomenon. Same thing in Europe. The gilets jaunes or the more recent riots in France. Reactionary “populist” parties on the rise in various countries. Here in Germany, for example, that reactionary resistance has coalesced around Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD). So the German parliament is discussing banning the party. I’ve written a lot about this since 2016. It’s mostly in my first two books of essays, Trumpocalypse and The War on Populism. I don’t mean “reactionary” as a pejorative in this context. I’m just describing the relationship of forces.

DV: What do you say to the charge that you are a “Covid denier” and what do you think of the current national discourse on the Covid pandemic?

CJ: As I said, these epithets, i.e., “Covid denier,” “conspiracy theorist,” etc., are meaningless, strategic terms designed to delegitimize and silence dissent. As for the current state of the official Covid-19 narrative, I’ve been writing a lot about that, too much to summarize. Basically, we’re in the classic mistakes-were-made/limited-hangout phase, like 2004 to 2008, after the US invasion of Iraq. The official narrative is being enshrined as official history. The actual history is being memory-holed.

DV: Your 2017 dystopian sci-fi novel Zone 23 imagines a future that is far more woke than our present. For readers who haven't picked it up yet, can you give us a glimpse of this future and tell us how close you think we are to realizing it? Also, what can we do to prevent it?

CJ: We are a lot closer to realizing it than I expected when I wrote it. I often jokingly apologize to my readers on social media for providing the establishment with a blueprint. The world of the book is basically a corporate-dominated, pathologized, and, yes, “woke” dystopia, where the population is divided into three classes, the Normals, the Anti-Socials, and the Clears. Due to an “error” in our genetic code, all non-genetically-modified humans have “Anti-Social Disease.” The Normals can manage it with medication. The Anti-Socials are “resistant to medication,” and so are confined in walled quarantine zones. The Clears are the younger, genetically-modified generation. It is about human nature, and rebellion, and babies, and a lot of other things. It is a big, fat book, 500 pages. Amazingly, it’s still selling very well, after six years, with no publicity budget and no reviews by establishment book reviewers. I don’t know how to prevent it, the pathologization of everything. Perhaps it’s a stage we have to go through, rather than prevent. After all, it is already happening.

DV: What are some of the most dangerous technocratic structures we see in society today?

CJ: “Technocracy” doesn't accurately describe what we are dealing with. My focus is on the global-capitalist system as an ideological system, which only came into being about 30 years ago. It is evolving toward a new form of totalitarianism, and phasing out “democracy,” not because of its technocratic structural elements, or a technocratic class, but because it has nothing else to do. It occupies the entire territory of the planet. It has no external adversaries. So it is doing what any occupying force does in that situation. It is conducting a clear-and hold op, eliminating internal resistance and establishing its ideology as the new “reality” throughout the occupied territory.

DV: Are you generally pessimistic or optimistic about our future, and why?

CJ: Pessimistic in the short-term, I guess, but I have this crazy faith in people, and in the life-force generally. So, optimistic in the longer-term. Then pessimistic again, then optimistic, and so on. Basically, I understand life, and art, as a never-ending cycle of creation/destruction/creation ad infinitum. But, you know, I’m a “science denier” and a “conspiracy theorist,” and a purveyor of “disinformation,” or “malinformation,” or whatever. So, I wouldn’t take that view too seriously. According to the experts, we are all going to be dead from all the global boiling soon. Then the universe is going to implode, or get sucked back up into some timeless void, or nothingness, or something along those lines. I don’t know. I was never very good at science.