One Battle After Another doesn’t become a downer until you realize that the title holds true long after the credits stop rolling. In OBAA’s America, the fighting never ends.

Kneecap takes place in a similar world. Now on Netflix, this 2024 biopic of the hugely controversial Irish hip-hop trio stars members Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Provaí as themselves, like they’re the bloody lads from Liverpool or something. And guess what? They are! All three deliver performances so naturalistic and funny that I was fully convinced they were actors. I mean, come on, the guy who performs in the balaclava, you’re telling me that’s the actual guy? As they say in Belfast, fuck up.

But it’s true! These charming men tell their own story, partially fictionalized for drama and comedy of course, in a film that feels like a 24 Hour Party People for Belfast, or a Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping that actually happened and also has pointed criticisms for Michael Collins. All of it is set to music that both makes you want to go out clubbing and take on the Black and Tans.

I wrote about One Battle After Another, Kneecap the movie, Kneecap the group, the Troubles, and the trouble in which we presently find ourselves for Welcome to Hell World.

“…Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin…the evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying; Jordan Peterson, the psychologist and best-selling author; the conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and Douglas Murray; Maajid Nawaz, the former Islamist turned anti-extremist activist; and the feminists Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christina Hoff Summers.”

– Bari Weiss, “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” The New York Times, May 8, 2018

“I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher … but above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

– Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in The Master

These quotes introduce a new essay I wrote about The Master in the Intellectual Dark Age of Trump for Polygon. Special thanks to my editor Matt Patches for the inspiration.