Vivian Kubrick, the reclusive daughter of legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and the director of a making-of documentary on his movie The Shining, has been accused of “spreading anti-Semitic conspiracies,” anti-vax propaganda, and violent far-right memes on Twitter.
Though notoriously uncommunicative with the press (a standard of the Kubrick family for decades), Kubrick is a vocal presence on the platform. In just the first two weeks of February, for example, she referred to Bill Gates as a “Bioterrorist,” railed against COVID-19 vaccines (as well as mask-wearing generally), and posted a link inviting readers to a private QAnon discussion group.
Such tweets are only the most recent of Kubrick’s public statements and appearances to come under scrutiny by fans of her celebrated father. The Daily Beast previously reported on her conversion to Scientology, saying that she had skipped her late sister Anya’s funeral in 2009 due to an enforced “disconnection” from her family, while in the same year The Guardian wrote that her mother, Christiane Kubrick, considered Vivian “lost” to the church.
Three years later, Kubrick resurfaced to discuss the “insanity of tyranny” of the Obama administration at a Dallas rally for JFK assassination truthers led by conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder Alex Jones. While she has since been wishy-washy toward the seditionist/radio host, in September 2020 she reiterated her long-standing support for Jones and his show, writing: “I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO ALEX JONES FOR MANY YEARS. I KNOW HOW ACCURATE HE HAS BEEN ABOUT WHAT’S GOING DOWN ON THIS PLANET.”
Most recently, Kubrick made international headlines when she vehemently disputed the frequent accusation that her father had helped the United States government fake the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. “There are many, very real conspiracies that have happened throughout our history, are happening presently,” she wrote in a popular tweet from July 2016. “But, claims that the moon landings were faked and filmed by my father? I just can’t understand it!!?”
Since that viral moment raised her public profile, Kubrick has used her expanded platform to address many of those conspiracies.
One frequent target of hers are the “Globalists,” a vague Hitlerian epithet commonly employed by the far right as an anti-Semitic slur. According to Kubrick, the COVID-19 virus that researchers at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine say has infected more than 100 million people worldwide is actually a hoax perpetrated on our civilization by “Globalists” like Susan Wojcicki and Bill Gates in collaboration with both the “New World Order” and major transnational corporations in an effort to “destroy world economies” and take “total control over every human beings [sic] lives.” Masks, she argues, are vectors for Globalist mind control, and she also has compared the distribution of the vaccine to Nazi sterilization experiments on Jews.
Perhaps contradictorily, Kubrick writes regularly of her disdain for prejudice against Jews, often noting that she is half-Jewish through her father and tagging her posts “#Christians #Jews #Muslims” in an apparent act of religious solidarity.
The late filmmaker Stanley Kubrick
GettyYet other comments tell a different story. On various occasions, she has referred to victims of the Holocaust as “hapless Jews”; spread a popular, though debunked conspiracy theory linking George Soros, a frequent target of anti-Semitic alt-right propaganda, to population control; and decried Lucasfilm’s recent firing of The Mandalorian actress Gina Carano (for Holocaust, QAnon, and various other shitposts) as “blacklisting.”
Further, despite regular backlash online, Kubrick has thrown her support publicly behind both the Boogaloo Bois and the Proud Boys, extremist hate groups with strong ties to both the deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally (in which attendees chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”) as well as the Jan. 6 Capitol siege.
“I heard a lot of negative stuff about the boogaloobois, but take a look” she commented earlier this month. “I’ll make a bet that 90% of Americans would agree with their aims.” Those aims were outlined in a digital pamphlet called “The Boogaloo and You” that Kubrick shared which threatens to overthrow the government: “Unfortunately, tyrannical governments are not known for willingly returning power to the people, and the more the people pressure them, the greater their escallation [sic] and backlash. For this we prepare. While we may not WANT war; if they do, we will oblidge. [sic]”
Kubrick has been even more explicit in championing the Proud Boys, which was recently declared a terrorist organization. In response to JPMorgan Chase closing Proud Boys head (and recently announced FBI informer) Enrique Tarrio’s bank account, she tweeted that while “my own prejudices & ignorances, made me think little of @ProudBoysUS...now I looked at it, I support it!”
Later, she wrote that “Proud Boys have as much right to exist as any #LGBTQ group,” and soon after concluded that Stanley Kubrick himself would have shared in her enthusiasm for the terror group.
“My father was from Bronx NYC, incredibly sophisticated man, but I know he would have dug PBs sentiments,” she wrote.
Stanley Kubrick’s life and work are frequently invoked in Vivian Kubrick’s politically themed tweets. Following the Capitol riot, she captioned an image of Jake Angeli, the QAnon-supporting “horn guy,” threatening to murder Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with an axe a la Jack Torrance in The Shining: “I FEEL IT’S MY PATRIOTIC DUTY TO RT THIS ONE [laughing emoji].”
She has also stated that her father would share her resentment of technocrats and “banksters.” In a tweet tagging the actor Randy Quaid alongside a picture captioned “Your DNA will be your data,” she proclaimed, “I have no doubt that my father would [be] against humanity enslaved!”
While Kubrick often posts private reminiscences and correspondences with her father, it remains unclear whether her Twitter account is managed by her alone or, at least in part, an outside entity. In 1999, she reportedly refused to attend her father’s funeral without a handler from the Church of Scientology, for instance. Then again in 2016, a fundraiser Kubrick held for The Shining star Shelley Duvall’s mental health costs was scrapped due to potential interference from the church.
Regardless, the account currently boasts more than 21,000 followers. Kubrick did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
