I Fought a Nazi in 2003 Tom Ford-era YSL

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me

If you are in Los Angeles, tickets for my rescheduled screening and Q&A event at the Philosophical Research Society are now on sale! Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950), Sunday April 6th, 7pm. Be there or be square!

Bonjour à tous et à toutes,

I have said this in conversations with journalists, with friends, and with colleagues, but perhaps I have not said it enough here: I’m punk. And I come from a family of people who identify as such, to varying degrees, be it my mother, who spent her youth in and out of rock clubs catching punk shows; my uncle, who still gives me a classic punk album for the holidays each year, and who gave me a copy of A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn when I was 13 years old; or my grandfather, who lived by his ethos to ‘always throw the first punch,’ down to the fact that it landed him in a Parisian jail cell — in his sixties — for decking a rude patron at Les Deux Magots.

I always approach work, and life, with a punk’s ethos, be it conscious or unconscious, appropriate or wrongheaded. “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” is my personal mantra, for better or worse. It’s one of the (many) reasons why I have thus far opted not to pursue a master’s degree in art history, despite what many of my colleagues have advised. (Never say never, but a close friend of mine and I like to joke that we’ll get them in our golden years, when we can be brushed off as the horny elderly ladies in class.)

My “art is for everybody,” “Jean Cocteau is for everybody” philosophy has made others look down their noses at me; as recently as last week I was accused, by an entity that at this time I cannot name publicly, of not “demonstrating interest” in Jean Cocteau for reasons that I suspect have to do with my refusal to participate in the more exclusionary aspects of the art world at large. But these are my guns, and I am sticking to them.

Wundermans throw the first punch, and I unfortunately road-tested this family motto earlier this month, when I brawled with a white supremacist at a dive bar in Dallas, TX.

Looking cool a couple of hours before getting into it with a Nazi. Hot girls wear archive YSL to fight fascists!

Let me set the scene: it was 2am, I was wearing a vintage, c. 2003 Tom Ford-era YSL dress that came straight from the ad campaign, and I was very drunk. I was hanging out in the smoking section outside with a young Latin couple I’d befriended when this person joined us. We all made small talk, and the subject of children came up. The young couple was asked if they wanted them, and then this person — who, for ease of reading, I’ll refer to as The Nazi — looked at me and said the following: “I’d love to breed you.”

Because I wasn’t sober, it didn’t hit me at first. Breed me? What a weird, Elon Musk-incel-fan word choice.

“What the fuck do you mean, breed me?”

“Well, look at you. You’re so… white,” he responded.

“What the fuck kind of white supremacist bullshit is that? I’m Jewish, you fucking asshole,” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you’re a dirty little kike,” The Nazi replied. “You said you live in Paris and LA, right? Let me guess, you for Macron or Le Pen?” he continued.

Which is where my mind got right on lost.

“Are you fucking serious? You think I should side with Le Pen? Whose father was a Nazi and collaborateur? Do you think that shit is hypothetical to me?” I started screaming.

“You should be for Le Pen, she’s the only one that’s going to do something about the Muslims invading France. You’re going to get raped by one, you know!” The Nazi screamed back, at which point, my sister threw a drink at him. “Get the fuck out of MY state, you Californian retards!” he yelled as he retreated from the both of us.

“GLADLY,” we responded, as we both flashed him the middle finger.

The next day, as I nursed my hangover at Love Field airport, I called my sister and told her that we won’t get that lucky again. This guy was clearly unsafe, and he could have had a gun on him, or perhaps tried to follow us when we left the bar, or had more like-minded friends to back him up.

However, as I’ve told my friends about what happened, many of them have wondered about the fact that I said anything to him at all. And, while I (and my sister) were definitely amped on liquid courage, it does come back to an overall thought I’ve had in more recent times, which is that in the face of the rise of fascism — and where the current situation in the United States resembles more regime than administration — I think we need to bring bullying back. Fuck decorum, now is the time to throw drinks on fascists and call them out for being the weird little loser fan boys that they are.

Conformity is all the rage amongst the trend-obsessed teens and twentysomethings on TikTok and Instagram. I grew up in a time and in spaces where the least cool thing you could be was a follower, or wearing something that several other people owned. And yet, I was shocked to see young people wearing the exact same outfits all around downtown New York last week. (It appears Adidas Sambas, wide-legged jeans, and black bomber-cut leather jackets are in vogue right now.)

Fascism thrives on sameness and rule following, and seeks to harm those who refuse to fall in line. There’s a famous warning from the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (that I suggest you read NOW, before it’s removed from shelves or deleted from e-book archives): “Do Not Obey In Advance.” That Nazi I ran into in Dallas certainly would be someone to seek obeisance from women, but alas, he ran into a scrappy Jewish chick instead. If I’m being totally honest, my personal politics run so far into the territory of “live free or die” that I am categorically what most would consider Libertarian. (I am not registered to any party, however I would rather perish than vote Republican.) Unless it’s a sexy, BDSM-kink thing, I generally tend to find rule following and those who enjoy doing so deeply, vividly unappealing. Ew! There’s a reason why we remember the image of August Landmesser, scowling in a crowd full of Heil-ing drones.

I keep kicking myself for not being meaner to him (and, having survived middle and high school at one of the fanciest, all-girl’s private schools in the world, let me tell you: I can be MEAN.) I wish I had told him what I ultimately think most of these right-wing wimps in government and their loser voting base, which is this:

I think that being a genuine fan of any politician, or someone in government, makes you an unfuckable loser who needs to get a hobby.

Bow down before the one you serve,

You’re going to get what you deserve.

à très bientôt,

Chloë Helen America Cassens