But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.
There’s no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don’t get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.
This week on my podcast, I’m reading “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” my short story in Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions, commissioned by J. Michael Straczynski.
Margaret came into my office, breaking my unproductive clicktrance. She looked sheepish. “I got given one of those robots that follows you around,” she said. She took a step, revealing the waist-high reinforced cardboard box. “Want to help unbox?
I stood up and unkinked my spine and hips and shoulders with a sound like wringing out a sheet of bubble-wrap. “Oof.”
“Come on, old fella,” she said. She handed me a box-cutter.
I don’t know where we go from here. Neither does anyone else.
On the morning I wrote this I woke up groggy from my chemically assisted sleep to a barrage of horrors. Donald Trump signing anti-trans legislation into law. Donald Trump, attempting to end birthright citizenship. Donald Trump, saluting and dancing with the Village People. Proud Boys tramping through the streets of our nation’s capital reveling in their newfound impunity.
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The dark days have come again because they never really left. All the battles and street-fighting and organizing from 2017-2020 bought us four years of badly negotiated peace while the rot continued unabated.
Rot. It’s a term I see a lot these days. My colleague and friend Ed Zitron refers to the hell our tech Oligarchs continue to force upon us as the “rot economy”. Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian Parliament, used the term “rage rot” to refer to now-President Trump’s Christmas Day message suggesting Canada should become the 51st state. Over the last year I’ve seen a slew of articles bemoaning “democratic decay”, “the rot plaguing democracy” and the “deep rot” at the heart of our political system.
One thing I have done over the last four years is learn how to efficiently process the carcasses of wild animals. Some I hunt or raise and slaughter but many are roadkill, harvested from the side of the road. My family comes from rural Oklahoma so perhaps some epigenetic hillbilly memory makes this so satisfying it me. But it’s also changed the way I understand the word “rot”.
Rot starts from the bone. If you look at the back leg of an animal that’s been hit by a truck you’ll see it spreading, a deep black bruise, from the ball-and-socket joint out. If your goal is to preserve good meat then the key is to remove those limbs from the body and the meat from the bone, sooner rather than later. When I think of rot, and how to arrest it, I think of dismemberment.
This seems to be the one thing almost every political person in the country agrees with: the United States as it is must be dismembered, disassembled, sliced from the rotten bone and changed into something more palatable for whoever holds the knife. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party failed primarily because they refused to start cutting. Their successors will not make the same mistake.
On the opposing side of the aisle today I see a lot of angry people arguing about what the knife ought to be cutting, and how much better they’d use it if it passed into their hands. That doesn’t help any of us right now. Migrants are dying of thirst while vigilantes destroy water drops left by activists likely to be criminalized soon. Homeless Americans trying not to freeze to death at night may soon find themselves arrested, forced into camps where they’ll be made to labor for pennies. Neo-Nazis cheer as the billionaire behind the throne makes fascist salutes from the White House with smirking impunity.
The knife is so far away from our hands I find myself distrusting anyone who wastes time bemoaning how it ought to be used. Where does that leave us, though? Is there anything to do in this deep winter besides listen to the jackals howl outside our doors?
I have an answer to this question: Yes. Now is the time to try. To test the boundaries of our collective cage. Now is the time to experiment.
Since the time of the Founding Fathers, this country and its system have been referred to as “the American Experiment”. One could see the very term as narcissistic, yet another solipsistic gasp of American exceptionalism. But I tend to think the appellation is one we’ve earned. This country is and always has been a test tube for new, often bad, ideas about how a society ought to run. American civilization’s only core value is “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks”.
That also happens to be the only real way to fight back against authoritarianism.
There’s a scientific paper I often bring up, “The evolution of overconfidence”, which set out to explain why people so often badly over-estimate their own abilities. The authors pondered:
“…overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs.”
The conclusion they came to was that, when significant resources are contested between two organisms, the organism most willing to TRY to take said resources, even if it is not the strongest, tends to succeed often enough to make overconfidence evolutionarily beneficial. This is the most basic explanation for how fascist movements continue to arise and, improbably, take power.
Put simply, they always go for it.
January 6th provides us a fine example. It was a ludicrous, idiotic, reckless burst of stupidity mocked for years by everyone except the perpetrators, who four years later find themselves with ultimate power. They didn’t win because they were the strongest. They won because they kept trying. The people who should’ve stopped them feared bad press, the pushback of looking “unfair”, and so stood back while they made smaller grabs, gobbling up bits of the media, local school boards, narrative oxygen around issues like immigration.
And now we’re here.
The coming days will be ugly. Yet I feel it’s my job to remind you that, bad as this is, we are not Weimar Germany, and this is not 1933. Trump and his lieutenants aren’t battle-hardened trench fighters, they’re Elon Musk and a coterie of half-enthusiastic half-frightened billionaires who got rich gambling on apps to let you rate your classmate’s tits. Their foot soldiers are used car salesmen from Encino, not Freikorps. The United States is not starving to death and crippled by war, it’s irritated and anxious because its working people have been robbed blind by those same billionaires.
The one thing we do have in common with Weimar is that our fascists now find themselves at the head of a state that capitulated to them not out of enthusiastic consent but exhaustion, cowardice and above all a feeling that it didn’t really matter.
That last one, the feeling that nothing matters, the system is fucked, there’s no point in engaging or organizing- that is the most powerful weapon they have right now. Because that feeling stops you and everyone else from opposing them. From interrupting as they reach out, yet again, to take something you love or need.
But there’s a danger here too. In moments of stress and anger the desire to DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING can be intense. And when we’re swept up in that mood the natural tendency is defaulting to the things we know best. The things we’ve done before. The marches and chants and poster-boards we’ve been walking and shouting and carrying all century long. Going back to those old tactics without iteration or acknowledgement of their limitations is a road to failure.
I’ve been to a lot of protests, starting at Zuccotti Park in 2011 and ending last year in Chicago, at the DNC. One of the most dispiriting moments of my life was listening to young anti-genocide activists vow to shut down the DNC, to “make it great like ‘68”. This was a reference to the 1968 DNC. Mass protests were ignited when the preferred anti-war candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was rat-fucked by Democratic party insiders in favor of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The protests were quashed violently with tear gas and truncheons. Protesters chanted, “The whole world is watching.”
It may have been then. But the war went on. Nixon won election, then re-election, and then finally pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam after dropping enough bombs on South-East Asia to have ended several Third Reichs.
During one particularly bad night at the 2024 DNC, miles away from the event itself, a march of self-described “radical protesters” confronted the police while chanting “the whole world is watching” and I can say, unequivocally, it was not. The only people watching were me, several other journalists, and a handful of folks on Twitter. The police, as they kettled, maced and arrested members of the crowd, barely seemed to care. The DNC didn’t shut down. Kamala Harris was made the nominee. There wasn’t even a real anti-war candidate for party insiders to rat-fuck in her favor.
Garrison Davis, my colleague and friend, remarked to me afterwards that the DNC had been somehow much more depressing than its Republican counterpart a month earlier. He was right.
On the stage floor all the Democrats had to present were aging celebrities and Bill goddamn Clinton, drooling out the same platitudes that led us to the Trump era in the first place and doing their best to ignore delegates who walked out and slept in front of the convention center to protest the genocide in Gaza.
Meanwhile in the streets a lot of very nice, earnest people (alongside a handful of grifters) did the only thing they could think of doing after months of imbibing footage of war crimes. They walked around and shouted. The police and city largely let them, because they knew none of it was going to change a damn thing.
I’d felt tremendous optimism right after Joe Biden resigned, not because I loved Kamala but because it was something shocking, an upset, an experiment. Or at least it seemed that way at first. The DNC made it clear that Biden’s advisors and consiglieres, the powers behind the throne, still ran the show, and would not allow any real change. The rot had spread too far, spoiling the meat, spoiling everything.
It was my accurate belief in 2020 that the Democratic Party, broken as it was, had the numbers and organizational capacity to slow the spread of fascism for a short time. It was my inaccurate belief in 2024 that this might still be the case. I had hope because I’d lost any sense of actual productive optimism. We lean on hope when we have no ideas to brace ourselves against.
Hope, as George Miller reminded us, is a mistake. If you don’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go crazy. That’s where we are now, going crazy. Committed Democrats, the decent regular people who fill the party not the soulless shoggoths of capital who run things, are going crazy because they got what they thought they wanted for four years. We returned a “decent” normal politician to office, he kept the economy humming along, got us out of Afghanistan…and everyone still hated him.
Leftists are going crazy for different reasons. In 2020 this country saw the largest sustained uprising of its modern history and nothing, fundamentally, changed. In its aftermath, the oligarchs who control social media set to tweaking, buying or outright inverting their algorithms to ensure no similar movement would ever gain that kind of steam again. Their efforts have been largely successful.
And yet many organizers, be they progressive social democrats, communists, anarchists, whatever, are still stuck in the same loops. Behind each march to nowhere and tired chant is an equally tired hope. The social democrats dream of a giant, continent-sized Denmark, with cyclists replacing Ford Trucks, universal healthcare, good schools and a bevy of other lovely things both political parties will fight tooth and nail to prevent. The authoritarian Communists dream of a new October Revolution, but this one will work rather than just creating a new dictatorship that ages and dies within the space of a single human lifetime.
Anarchists tend to be very good at seeing the flaws in the logic and futility of the hopes of the previous two groups, but they are just as bereft of ideas for how to stop what’s coming. Some tendencies dream of collapse, of an end to industrial society and either living in the woods eating berries or some sort of solarpunk daydream, wildflowers sprouting from rubble. The latter is a nice dream but try offering either future to a single mom who can’t afford her 5-year-old’s insulin and see how she reacts.
Most of the anarchists I know define themselves as “helpers” before anything else. They’ll cheerfully admit they don’t know how to solve the big problem but they do know how to provide free eye exams to homeless people once a month, or do water drops down at the border so migrants don’t die of dehydration, or crowdsource insulin from their friends to help that single mom through a bad week or two.
If you are where we all are right now, bereft of ideas, staring down the barrel of a nightmare, those are good folks to know. Like everyone else, they’re defaulting to what they’ve been doing, but at least what they’ve been doing helps people.
The larger solutions to our common woes, if they ever arrive, will be something new. Something we haven’t tried yet. I feel very confident they won’t take the form of another march or involve everyone finally agreeing to be the same kind of communist/anarchist/whatever. Shawn Fain, chief of the United Auto Workers Union, has called for a General Strike in 2028, and that so far is the only clear plan I’ve heard anyone make that feels like it has a ghost of a chance.
It’s an audacious plan, and I recommend reading what Shawn’s laid out about it. But half of why I support the idea is because it IS audacious. The religious right got to where they are right now in this country by being bold. As I laid out earlier, fascists win because they always try, and this is something we need to copy.
Shit can be different, but not unless we’re willing to try different shit.
Many pundits and columnists were shocked and horrified by the massive and instant support for Luigi Mangione when he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare. Both the tutting gatekeepers of traditional media and the actually-sweating oligarchs characterized this as evidence of bloodthirstiness. Some leftists did the same and interpreted support for Mangione as proof that the body politic did, indeed, have energy for an uprising.
I saw something different. More than the actual killing itself I think people were excited to see someone try something new. Luigi adopted a novel tactic, carried it out in a novel way, and in doing so he did more to punish one of the oligarchs bleeding us dry than the entre Occupy movement.
Novelty is the one thing that ties Donald Trump and Luigi Mangione together. The enthusiastic public response to both men’s actions and the simultaneous revulsion of traditional elites are mirrors of themselves. In 2024, Trump still had enough novelty to convince people that he might upset the apple cart in some way that benefited them. He rode a global anti-incumbent wave back to the White House.
The consequence of this is that he and his are now on their way to becoming the new establishment. This is an underappreciated downside of the fact that most legacy media outlets have started moderating their coverage of Trump, if not embracing him outright. He is being normalized. His toadies, Musk chief among them, are now our legitimate powers. What novelty remains will fade rapidly.
I suspect the same thing will be true of the copycats who follow in Luigi Mangione’s footsteps.
Most of his plagiarists won’t be good at what they do. At best newly heightened security will see Luigi’s plagiarists dropped before they can pull a trigger. At worse, innocent people will be killed or maimed by bullets and bombs that fail to hit their intended targets or do but with a lot of collateral damage.
I don’t know what the next new thing will be. But between Trump and Mangione there aren’t many old norms left to shatter. We are in a time of enormous potential. Many new things are about to be tried and as awful and bloody as the fallout from some of them will be we all have no choice but to strap in and roll some dice of our own.
The present is ugly, the future unwritten. The only way we’ll make it a better one is if we embrace boldness, creativity and, perhaps, a little overconfidence of our own.
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This week on my podcast, I’m reading “Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital,” the latest post from my Pluralistic.net blog. It’s about the new “Free Our Feeds” project and why I think the existence of Mastodon doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to making Bluesky as free as possible.
When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.
Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There’s very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?
If that’s what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck’s investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They’ve demanded every nickel since the start.
What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook’s walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the “good old days?”
I am getting ready to post my first multi-part series (!) but work has been severely curtailed by my child acquiring a movie-monster version of the flu that’s been going on for almost two weeks now. Tried school today and got sent home before noon because poor love is too weak to sit at their desk.
Aaaaaand my cat was sort of scarce over the weekend? Which is hard because he is a massive Maine Coon? So massive msall children have to ask if he IS a cat and not on loan from the zoo? Turned out the magnificent, majestic, and in all ways extraordinary feline Lord Byron, Stormageddon, was hiding and starving himself to death because he has a massive systemic infection that filled his ears with the most grotesque xenomorph pus-blood-foul-ichor fluids I’ve ever known about. Honestly I’m still traumatized from the vampiric theater bukkake of it all (the vet spread the ear open to look at it, the skin split, and pus flew all over her face and across the walls of the room. YEAH.)
Mondays, am I right?
In addition to that, my dryer broke, my 17 year old Facebook account was hacked and YOU CAN GUESS HOW EASY THAT IS TO FIX, you don’t even want to know about my water bill last month because I didn’t know a toilet was running for like five weeks due to SOMEONE who is SIX YEARS OLD but I would never SAY WHO, snapped off an Important Part and hid it), and I’m on a crushing novel deadline…with a sick kid and a sick animal both of whom basically need physical contact with me to continue existing at the moment.
IT’S ALL HAPPENING UP IN HERE. LIKE ALL AT ONCE.
So hold tight, I’ll be with everyone in a moment, I have way too much to say about literally everything that’s been happening. I just…am under several wailing bodies at the moment.
And, you know, awkward moment, but Lord Byron is in surgery as we speak, and cat surgery (not to mention dryers and apparently the gold-infused water a toilet produces when it is broken) is very not cheap, so if you were thinking or hemming and hawing over whether to sign up for a paid subscription (and get the extra spicy essays that accompany the main pieces), now would be an awesome time to do that, just saying, no big, totally idle comment you can feel free to ignore. That said, you know…we’re also 5 paid subs away from posting every two weeks on the reg.
Just giving you information. Definitely not feeling the cringe in every cell right now.
Anyway! I’ll see you Monday with part one of Move Fast and Break People: How the Internet Gave Us Everything and Then Took It All Away.
Lord Byron appreciates the support as he journeys through the mad dreams of morphine and wet food post surgery…
This glorious 12-year old gentleman is 24 pounds…and the doc wants him to gain some weight. Because he is a miniature panther and the love of my life.
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The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant–what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money–but for now he’s an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.
When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who’ve founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he’s on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Fidelity Computing without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Fidelity Computing out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they’re seeking to unroot or the risks they run.
In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.
Note: This is cross-posted from my Patreon, under a paywall here because it is under a paywall there. One must play fair. But at the end of the year, I wanted to share it, and what hope it has at the bottom of its particular well, with everyone who has helped me to live and support my family through these very rude and cruel times. Happy New Year. Thank you. The road is long. We will keep walking.
It is the hush at the close of the year.
It always feels hushed to me, even if it's full of noise. The Northern Hemisphere in me, I suppose. There is always some flavor of excess dark, some flavor of excess cold, some sense of putting things away for the long white road of January. Even though New Year's Day is meant to be all new beginnings, December 31st has always felt like an ending to me.
I don't know too terribly many people mourning the end of 2024. It's been a strange, sour time. But as I've thought so often lately, maybe that's because I'm in my 40s, also a strange and sour (and sweet, yes) time when things start to wobble, even for those who did pretty well with the first act or two. Family starts to die, friendships and marriages fray and tear and shred, children and houses are either a constant responsibility or a swiftly-retreating option. Your health starts to whine, if it doesn’t scream. If not your health, at least your strength. If alcohol or its assorted dirtbag friends are going to be a problem, they often start becoming one in the late 30s and early 40s. Careers stall more often than they take off or wither suddenly on the vine. We 40s folk are acutely aware of politics; if we weren't before, because we're now at the stage of life where we need to think about the future, and if we were aware before, the effects of the politics of our youth come home to roost in middle age.
And if the world outside our hearts starts to go seriously corkscrewed around the same time these very normal crumblings tumble through our personal lives, it all gets jumbled up together into a ball of discontent without beginning or end.
There's a reason Dane's Inferno begins: Midway through the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, the good and right road lost to me...
This guy has the worst cholesterol you’ve ever even heard about.
This article was written and researched by Garrison Davis and edited by Robert Evans.
Another Monday in America and another school shooting. On the morning of December 16th, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured 6 others before killing herself. Initially police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15 year old Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha or Sam.
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In the aftermath of this horrific event, rightwing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged “transgender terrorists.” But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is, sadly, ordinary for the United States.
In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of the band, KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was a fan of the band.
COLUMBINE COSPLAY
The bulk of the shooter’s online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the “TCC,” or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates her tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she “posted about school shooters all the time,” and “had school shooter leanings.”
Samanatha is hardly alone, there have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999.
A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024, and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack.
This male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers could not agree on whether she was female-to-male or male-to-female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her twitter profile picture.
The above post is, however, only proof that most of what gets passed off as “OSINT” online today is incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was 15 years old when he carried out his shooting.
FEMCEL HITLER
Hours after the shooting, while right wing accounts were still arguing what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo-Nazi twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her a “biological woman.” An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged twitter account posted a link to a google doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public. The shooter’s alleged Discord friend, Nitro, claimed to find what he believed to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat. Nitro is in the UK, and so if legitimate (big if) this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting.
Hopefully to most people this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary “feminist” screed about initiating a wave of male-targeted violence to cleanse the earth, with pepperings of “moids,” “foids,” (internet incel slang for male and female, respectively) racial slurs, and something called “radfem hitler.” The incel content would, if this excerpt is legitimate, mark her out as a “femcel”, or female incel.
“Radfem Hitler”, meanwhile, is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle @hollowearthterf (“Terf” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). Her content is a mix of trad-influenced rightwing feminism, advocating traditional gender roles for men and women, with anti-trans flourishes. Radfem Hitler supports a mass purge of “moids” (including trans women). She is derided by both those on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem women with trad or occult interests.
Nitro claimed the shooter “was a fan of RFH (radfem hitler),” and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed her interest was merely ironic. An anonymous twitter nazi is certainly not the most reliable source. Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, but they could be utilizing his newfound clout to troll a widely disliked twitter user. Though the fact that he’s been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims all together, just to hold them with a billion pounds of salt.
Allegations the shooter was a neo-nazi radfem certainly sent RFH into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been “e-dating,” with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the twitter radfem orbit. Through the alleged online boyfriend, the rightwing TERF ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the “full manifesto.”
This purported manifesto lacks the anti-male (moid) ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times evocative of Pekka Eric Auvinen’s manifesto (a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people). Auvinen considered himself a “natural selector” who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha’s purported manifesto he is mentioned by name as a “true inspiration.”
Over the course of 8 hours a radfem Twitter account released 6 pages of what appears to be Samantha’s writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being “scum.” The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists. Though it briefly references Terrorgram “saints,” the whole of it is much more reminiscent of old school Columbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.
The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters, and includes a paragraph on Vladislav Roslyakov, another Columbine copycat but from Crimea, who also cosplayed one of the shooters.
Though the Discord nazi and the reactionary radfems question the authenticity of the other’s alleged manifesto, what both sides of the incel war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting.
TRANSVESTIGATING SCHOOL SHOOTERS
Transvestigating is the practice of trying to determine if an individual is transgender. It’s often leveled against celebrities, athletes, and politicians. But in recent years there has been a new common subject of transvestigation: mass shooters. In particular school shooters.
Myself, Robert Evans, and James Stout previously reported on this trend back in 2023, right as it grew in prominence after the Nashville Covenant School shooting, which police say was committed by a trans man. We theorized that the online right was testing out a new strategy to attack trans people by associating them with mass shootings via the use of selective bias reporting and plain disinformation. That fear has come to pass. The modicum of believability provided by the Nashville shooting (as it is the only legitimate trans related incident that meets criteria for mainstream mass shooting databases) was enough to fuel this ongoing strategy for two years. Since then, conservative influencers have attempted to link nearly every viral mass/school shooting to trans people to create a false trend.
The strategy operates as follows: during the first few chaotic hours after a shooting, a small group of rightwing content creators weaponize the lack of verified information to make posts framing an alleged shooter as being transgender. This can be done through the use of out-of-context social media posts, doctored photographs, photos of other people, or simply pictures of long/dyed hair. All they need is a collection of loose evidence to affirm on social media that a mass shooter is really transgender.
(For more context listen to this episode of It Could Happen Here I wrote covering the rise of fake “trans terrorists.”)
The goal is to get as many of their followers to see and spread this claim as fast as possible.
Even if this is widely debunked the next day, many who heard the false claim won’t be aware of the verified correction. All these anti-trans influencers need is a brief window of time to plant the idea into people’s minds, and that becomes remembered history. If this strategy is repeated every few months when there’s a new mass shooting, then it’s pretty easy to create the false perception of a growing trend. In reality trans people per capita are actually less likely to commit a shooting compared to cis people, and much more likely to be the victim of gun violence.
But yesterday, conservative and anti-trans influencers tried once again to weaponize a tragedy for their own hateful agenda.
Just minutes after police responded to the shooting, the conservative influencer Matt Wallace posted that an unknown “witness” said that the shooter “looked to be transgender.” Wallace, who has over 2.2 million followers on twitter, provided no source or citation (he has since deleted the post). Others in the online MAGA orbit parroted this language before any identifying information was released.
The rightwing content creator Ryan Matta baselessly claimed the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy, calling the shooter “another mentally unstable psychopath who was prescribed puberty blocker, & hormones.” Matta hosts a show on the rightwing youtube alternative Rumble and has over 123,000 followers on twitter. His tweet claiming the shooter was on HRT racked up 1.6 million “views” and 17k likes in just 12 hours.
Larger accounts like Chaya Raichik’s @libsoftiktok fueled undue speculation about the gender identity of the suspect, seeding confusion into the growing discourse and weaponizing a tragedy for political gain.
A small group of conservative influencers has so successfully created an alternate reality in which nearly every new mass shooter is transgender that they don't even have to outright say it anymore. Accounts like Libs of TikTok and Malaysian blogger Ian Miles Cheong can merely gesture to this reality tunnel they've intentionally created, and now thousands of people will affirm this fake reality as the obvious truth, backed up by historical precedent of fabricated memory.
Conspiracy theories spread that the police were intentionally withholding information about the shooter’s gender identity in service of some hidden “agenda.”
SAMANTHA HYDE
As early as 1:01pm EST the neo-nazi twitter user Nitro correctly identified the shooter as his online friend Sam/Samantha. As this name spread online the multi gendered nature of the name added to speculation that the shooter was trans.
Scarlett Johnson, an activist with the ultra conservative “parents rights” group Moms For Liberty, shared self admitted unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a “transgender teen” who went by “Samantha or Sam.”
As alleged pictures of the shooter started to spread online, courtesy of Nitro, the transvestigation of the shooter only intensified. An unfortunate coincidence is that the shooter’s given name matched the ancient Sam Hyde meme, in which extremely online people try to trick journalists into believing the culprit of a new mass shooting was American comedian Sam Hyde.
In recent years the meme has been used to falsely label mass shooters as trans women. One Hyde post from an unassuming boomer named Ed Massey racked up over 600k views, 4.5k likes, and 1.5k retweets. Massey posted “When you put disturbed children on hormone blockers and sexually mutilate them, you're not curing them, you're creating potential school shooters.” It should go without saying, but the use of puberty suppressing medication has no link to increased violence.
DOUBLE FLIPPER
The “we can always tell” crowd ended up transvestigating both directions, seemingly unsure of what assigned gender at birth the shooter must have had. Some believed the shooter was transfem, while others concluded they were transmasc.
A now deleted post from a TERF account attempted to pass off the shooter as a trans girl-
“Trans identified male” is usually a transphobic dogwhistle to refer to a trans woman, as in a male who identifies as a trans[woman]. but sometimes transphobes get confused by words and use the phrase to refer to trans people who “identify” as men.
One of the most widespread posts claiming the shooter was a trans guy came from an antisemitic doctor in Denmark with 1.4 million followers. She falsely claimed, with no evidence, that the shooter was taking testosterone.
As of Tuesday morning this post has 3 million views, 22k likes, and 8.3k retweets. In a following post she blamed “the jews” for inventing transgenderism. [Note: extremism researchers have argued that transphobia is structurally similar to antisemitism.]
A common piece of anti-trans memetic propaganda deployed in the wake of mass shootings is the “trans shooter collage.” This format spread after the Nashville school shooting in 2023, and this week Matt Wallace provided us with a brand new version.
Out of all those pictures only one person in this collage is actually reported to be transgender, the Nashville shooter in the upper left. The rest of the people pictured are not trans and have never claimed to be. The person with long hair in the lower half of the image is Colt Grey, who was falsely labeled as trans by far right influencers like End Wokeness and Mike Cernovitch. Grey’s Discord posts revealed he held transphobic beliefs.
A more classic version of the “trans shooter collage” format is pictured below, courtesy of Libs of TikTok admin Chaya Raichik.
But just as before, the majority of subjects in the meme aren’t actually trans. The Colorado Springs shooter who targeted a queer club is not really nonbinary, and simply tried to weaponize a false identity to get out of hate crime charges. The person labeled as the “Denver shooter” is not trans, has never claimed to be trans, he just has died hair. This individual did plan the shooting with a transgender male who is not pictured. Lastly, though the person pictured as the “Uvalde shooter” is trans, that is not the actual Uvalde shooter. It’s a random trans girl, who was one of two trans women whose photos were used to falsely label the shooter as transgender.
So after all that transvestigating what do we have? Just another columbiner with neo-nazi ties. The right has gotten so good at deploying the “trans shooter” as a smoke bomb. It obscures the reality of the over-availability of firearms, the dynamics of online radicalization and the social issues that fuel alienation and anger in youth. Instead of focusing on all that, on the victims of this epidemic of white supremacist violence, we instead have to spend a whole day debating the late shooter’s pronouns.
And that’s the point, that’s what they want us talking about. Those who delete their “trans terrorist” posts after being conclusively proven wrong will try the exact same schtick in a few months, after the next mass shooting goes viral. Others won’t even care that much; they’ll just leave up their post, secure in the stability of the reality tunnel they helped to create.
“Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
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This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series.
I’ve spent much of the last ten years reading manifestos and being a fly on the wall in different little online boltholes where extremists plan and seek to incite mass shootings. When Luigi Mangione, the suspected shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was arrested at a McDonald’s, it didn’t take long for digital sleuths to put together a comprehensive record of his online activity. I will tell you now that nothing he read or posted explains why he gunned down an insurance executive better than this single image in the background of his Twitter profile:
This is an X-ray showing four screws in someone’s lower base spine, apparently due to lumbar spinal fusion surgery. A reverse image search confirms that this is a representative example of someone who has gone through this surgery. It does not seem to show this exact picture being posted elsewhere before Luigi went viral. That does suggest may be his own x-ray.
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His friend RJ, who lived with him at an intentional community for digital workers in Honolulu starting in 2022, says that Luigi suffered an injury shortly into starting a basic surfing class after moving there. He spent about a week unable to move and his friends had to seek a special bed to help him deal with the pain. Other reports from his acquaintances seem to confirm he was injured surfing. RJ says he talked often about his fears around an upcoming surgery.
This is most of what we know about the health history of Luigi Mangione as of the evening of December 9th, 2024. As I write this a purported manifesto is making the rounds online which discusses health issues his mother faced but it is very unclear to me if that manifesto is real. So for this article, we’ll stick with what we can verify. And we can verify that Luigi Mangione suffered from chronic back pain.
If he is the shooter, than we can also confirm he chose to act out by targeting an insurance CEO. The New York Times has stated he was arrested with a 262-word manifesto that described the executives who run insurance companies as parasites who “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
In addition to all this we know Luigi came from a wealthy family, his grand-father made millions running a series of country clubs, nursing homes, office buildings and hospitals. One of his cousins is a Republican state legislator. It is unclear if Luigi had any access to the family money, but he was clearly financially comfortable enough to move to Hawaii and pay to join an intentional community. He had engineering degrees and a promising early employment history.
This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be. And the thing he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering a debilitating injury, was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare.
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
---
It is a well known fact that most terrorists tend to be radicalized in communities. Much of my career was spent watching 8chan turn from an image board dedicated to Gamergate into a machine for generating white nationalist mass shooters. These people often appeared as lone wolves to the untrained eye, but they were radicalized intentionally in a community.
Much will be made in the coming days and months about Luigi’s online footprint. I will go into some detail about where he spent his time and how to characterize it but I want to be clear at the outset that his intellectual diet does not seem to be what made him choose to take action, although it may have influenced the specific kind of action he took.
Luigi followed a lot of accounts on Twitter that are wildly popular with young men, like Joe Rogan. He listened to Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson but also had cogent criticisms of their arguments and presentation.
He expressed frustration with “wokeness” and expressed opinions common on the libertarian / tech influenced right, like a belief in the social benefits of Christianity without expressing particular religious belief himself.
Some of this took the form of memes typical to online discourse of this type. But we have an essay he wrote at age 15, discussing how Christianity persevered over Paganism in Ancient Rome, that shows a longstanding interest in this topic and a capacity to treat it with nuance. His paper is well-written, particularly for a 15-year-old, and while his conclusions are highly arguable this is not the work of someone hopelessly brainwashed by culture war bullshit. Luigi liked to read and think and come to his own conclusions.
He was interested in AI, in cryptocurrency, in life-extension and in a constellation of techbro adjacent attitudes and philosophies often described as “the gray tribe”.
The term “Gray Tribe” was coined by an influential rationalist blogger and psychiatrist named Scott Alexander Siskind. He used it to refer to an intersection of nerd culture with Silicon Valley-influenced ideology descended from the online rationalist movement. This community existed outside of traditional right-left ideology.
I have not found any evidence that Luigi was a specific fan of Scott, but he expressed appreciation for several figures associated with this big tent movement, including Peter Thiel.
If we describe Scott as representing the more liberal flank of the Grey Tribe, Luigi seemed to be drawn to folks closer to the right-wing side of things. The worst person to use this terminology would probably be Thiel-associate Balaji Srinivasan, who has used Gray Tribe framework to describe his ideal big tech takeover of San Francisco and purging of progressives.
However I must stress that Luigi Mangione never expressed any support for this end of the ideology that I can find. He was a young man of Libertarian inclinations who worked in Big Tech and had ties to San Francisco but was also clearly someone still making his mind up about the world.
As information about him has come out I have seen people on the left, who initially saw his acts as heroic, lament that he was a bigoted tech bro. Scott Alexander has been credibly described as a eugenics supporter, as have many other people adjacent to the strains of rationalism and big tech ideology in which Mangione dabbled.
Luigi’s Twitter account does indeed include weird posts from his time in Japan where he theorizes on how to solve “falling birthrates” by banning “pocket pussies” and video game cafes.
At other points he complains about Japanese citizens as acting like “NPCs”. But race science and eugenics doesn’t seem to have been a focus for him. And I would caution against being overly reductive about a 26-year-old’s beliefs based purely on a handful of posts that bare no relation to his actions.
The evidence we have of his online footprint suggests someone who was not unmoved by certain arguments rooted in social justice. He expressed admiration for a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five about the criminalization of poverty in the United States:
Luigi is certainly not the idealized leftist icon some had hoped. But he doesn’t easily fit into any other box we have. His interest in Gray Tribe-adjacent thinkers and self-help books written by productivity hackers like Tim Ferriss is incredibly common among young men. Much has been made of the four star review he gave Industrial Society and Its Future, the manifesto by Ted Kaczynski, but as with the rest of his media diet he did not view Ted through a simple lens of hero worship:
We know that these are not just words because we have seen the attack he (allegedly) chose to carry out. Not a series of bombings that killed and maimed innocent people with no real power in our society, but a surgical strike against a man at the very top of the system he hated, one that caused no collateral damage. He was capable of appreciating some of Kaczynski’s conclusions, but ultimately the quote he chose to highlight in his review came not from the manifesto but from a reddit post made by a guy with the username Bosspotatoness who otherwise mostly commented on the Grateful Dead.
The post praises Kaczynski for having “the balls” to realize that peaceful protest “has gotten us absolutely nowhere” and complains “economic protest isn’t possible in the current system”. As a result “violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense”.
“These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck. So why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?”
This is not the kind of radicalization pathway our media is good at discussing or analyzing. The things Luigi read and the people he interacted with online absolutely influenced what he did and how. But Bosspotatoness is not some Nazi on 8chan trying to provoke a shooting spree for the lulz. He’s a random dude angry about the same things 70% or more of the country is angry about and expressing a lack of faith in any peaceful way forward.
If you read this post in its entirety, as Luigi did, you can’t miss the pain there. Anxiety and horror at the inevitability of climate change, and the looming knowledge that everything good and green on this earth is being fed into the bloody maw of an industry concerned only with maximizing profit.
In more ways than one, Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
---
I know many people who suffer with chronic pain and ongoing medical issues. I will tell you that it is not uncommon in dark moments, after fruitless hours-long calls about dropped medications or receiving surprise bills, for them to joke about what they’d like to do to the executives who run these companies.
These are jokes, made in moments of despair and pain. No one I know would ever act on them, because they all have lives, people to care for and to whom they are responsible. They would never really do anything because the consequences to their own loved ones would be so severe.
In the months before the shooting, Luigi had cut off all contact with his family. He admitted to this in court and we have evidence friends tried to contact him on his family’s behalf via social media.
As was noted first by this Twitter account, Luigi Mangione expressed interest in the work of Paul Skallas, a tech lawyer, writer and prominent poster who writes about “the Lindy effect”, a concept that boils down to this: “The only effective judge of things is time.” Skallas is popular among the set of people Mangione found himself drawn towards, and writes about the wisdom of ideas from antiquity. It’s not hard to grasp what a man with an academic interest in ancient Rome might see in him.
On December 4th, 2024, Paul made this post:
It’s been suggested that this may have influenced Luigi and I think the timeline makes it clear that this cannot be the case. Luigi cut off contact with his family and most of his friends months ago. The evidence suggests he’d planned this attack for quite some time. He arrived in New York City on November 24th, on a bus bound from Atlanta, where he did not reside.
So I don’t think this post represents a piece of his radicalization journey. Nor was Skallas advocating for people to kill CEOs. But the situation and mind-set Skallas described does speak to a lot of young men like Luigi, young and educated but without intense responsibilities or much hope for the future. This subset of society has always overproduced terrorists, revolutionaries and, of course, mass shooters.
---
The United States has a mass shooter culture. Over the last several decades, since Columbine, we have grown used to the idea that people who are angry and no longer care if they live or die will sometimes choose to go down killing strangers. In most cases these shootings are utterly random, the victims chosen with no concern beyond maximum body count and maximum attention.
More recently, and especially since 2019, mass shootings have become increasingly politicized. Different extremists, nearly all right-wing, have used them to put theory into praxis and earn free PR for their causes. Most people abhor these actions but we have grown used to the idea that people will use such acts as a way to spread messages that might otherwise get ignored.
It is not coincidental that the white genocide conspiracy theories from Brenton Tarrant’s Christchurch Manifesto are now mainstream talking points in Conservative politics.
Luigi Mangione grew up with all this. He would have come to the same conclusions about the role shootings play in our society as any other reasonably aware person. What he did was, of course, not a mass shooting. But the assassination, his actions afterwards, and his possession of a manifesto were all clearly plotted out by someone who knew the social script for how this kinda thing goes in the USA.
In the wake of this shooting every media organization commenting on it has had to grapple with the waves of public enthusiasm for Luigi’s actions. Right-wing media figures condemning the left for celebrating this assassination have been criticized by their own readers and listeners. Insurance companies have pulled down lists of their executives from the Internet.
This is because they too understand the shooter culture of the United States. Like anyone else, they know that any mass shooting that meets with massive media coverage and interest will spawn copycats. The assassination Luigi is believed to have carried out was new and exciting; it demanded the public’s attention in a way most mass shootings don’t.
At almost the exact same time the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, a gunman walked into a religious school near Oroville California and shot two young children before killing himself. This shooting drew almost no national attention. It was entirely drowned out by the execution of an insurance industry CEO. The armed and disaffected young men who are most drawn to this sort of thing will not miss this fact.
I believe Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain. The shooters who follow him will all have their own reasons for what they do, their own journeys to that violent end. But ultimately, they’ll do what they’ll do because Luigi proved it’s what gets attention.
For now.
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This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
Note: Normally, the way this Substack works is each public post has a follow-up under a paywall in which I discuss the spicier things I wanted to say but didn’t want to deal with drive-by sealioning in the comments. Since merely relating that Trumpers were wilding on my local NextDoor has gifted me with daysof abuse from same over on the Hellsite Formerly Known As Twitter, I frankly have no more bandwidth for being yelled at by hordes of lesser Hutt cousins, with attendant Salacious B. Crumbs, about how stupid and bad and wrong I am. Consider this one a follow-up to the last four free posts about the Gravitron of Nightmares we could’ve not been stuck in forever. Paid subscriptions support and further this newsletter; if you want to see more essays here, subscribing is the best way to make it happen, as I have many folk to feed.
Well, that happened.
Followed by a simply wonderful fortnight of sifting through the ashes of the social contract looking for charred chunks of hope and decency and finding pretty much FUCK ALL. Also sifting through the WhAt WeNt WRonG hot takes of everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elon Musk’s ketamine dealer to the feral diaper-hunting meth-opossum prowling around behind my house who’s got all the answers.
It’s been a real treat.
There is a palpable, completely revolting sense excitement among the media. They got what they wanted—Hate Island is back on! All new episodes! Ooooh what hot little monster is Trump gonna couple up with this week? Time to get called heroes of the resistance for shitposting on the internet just like we were going to do anyway! But among regular goddamned people who didn’t want to actually set the world on fire to cook their horrible burgers and yuk it up with the other sadists in the Bad Uncle club, there’s a real well, fuck it vibe going around.
What else is anyone even supposed to say at this point? It’s gonna be real bad? Yeah, we’ve all been saying that. No one cared. Trump is going to fill the cabinet with whatever Spirit Halloween remote-controlled jump-scare ghouls he thinks will make out with him most enthusiastically or hurt the most people or piss off liberals or, hey, fingers crossed, all three? Yeah, apparently that was a plus. Nothing’s going to get fixed, rights will be lost, and every piece of the country that still works in any way is gonna get its teeth kicked in while a nation of aspiring Mad Max extras laughs and pretends it’s awesome? And all that’s assuming we don’t get into a war because Putin told his monkey to get dancing? I don’t know, man. Guess so.
I’m not a politician, I’m not an analyst, I’m not an economist—hell, I don’t even have a podcast, which means I’m barely a real person. I feel just as fucking defeated and cynical and scared and hopeless and holistically disgusted as everyone else who can define the word tariff without Google and doesn’t own a major newspaper.
But as the shock has begun to wear off, and the sadness numb, what’s left over?
Oh, Christ on a fully-fueled megayacht I am so fucking angry.
And finally, I get to say: IT’S BOTH SIDES, BABY.
And that’s why this particular primal scream of useless rage at the oncoming Snowpiercer baby-eating bug-train of the future is under a paywall, because EVERYBODY’S GONNA GET SOME today, and if you want me to fight with you about it, you gotta pay the troll toll.
I am actively seeking work as blogger, (ghost-) writer, speaker, researcher, popularizer... on all the topics in this and my other posts. Thanks for your attention, and support, by subscribing or in any other way.
First, just one comment about popular vote
As of November 10th, 2024 4pm CET, Trump got about 400K more votes than in 2020, and Harris more than TEN million votes less than Biden in 2020:
In other words, even IF every Trump voter of 2024 were, as many on the other side say or imply, nothing more than a misogynist/ sexist/ homophobe/ xenophobe/ ignorant fascist bigot with way below average IQ, which is surely wrong... America isn't more bigot etc... than in 2020, and above allTrump didn't win thanks to those voters, or to the Electoral College system as such.
Trump won because the U.S. of 2024 has 10.3 MILLION citizens more than four years ago who didn't think the only other candidate with a chance of winning could or would do anything better for them than whatever they'd get under Trump.
That is, more than a country of bigots, fascists etc... America seems (much like my own country, alas) a country with too many people who, for all the wrong reasons from despair or ignorance to loss of contact with reality or sheer snobism, just can't grasp the foundational concept that every vote is "one move in a chess game, NOT a way to express personal ideals":
Sleeping Voter, proudly waiting for centuries for Candidate Charming (source)
"for the most part, Americans don't really care about what chromosomes you have or what your skin tone is, they care about whether you are going to make their lives better. This is how our economy is designed to work."(source)
"economic sentiment doesn't always match up nicely with data that shows the economy is adding jobs, consumer spending is growing and gross domestic product - the broadest measure of the economy - continues to boom. When you pay through the nose for a cup of coffee or when you can't afford to buy a home, those data are meaningless: You feel shut out of the American Dream."(source)
In other words: maybe all the woke vs anti-woke culture wars accomplished was to "FREEZE" in their fanatism only the already fanatic minorities, while childification by consumerism +hustle culture + social media was "FREEZING" in everybody else the already mentioned delusion that a vote should be, instead of "ONE move in a chess game that never ends", something to give only to someone who agrees with you on everything, like friendship is for pre-teens. To know why I say "FREEZE" and what digitization of relationships has to do with it, please do read the real"dangerous impact on elections of AI-powered social media" that I described one year ago.
Then, some fears I have seen around
In this first week after the vote, I have seen, in no particular order, Americans saying that they would:
remove Pride flags or Mezzuzah from their porches
get house repairs done before Trump tariffs kick in
Of course, I hope that those fears will not materialize. Same goes for the serious concerns among American women. I've come across calls to "please, please... immediately stop using period and pregnancy trackers", rumors of many women seriously considering divorce now, just in case no-fault divorce is abolished, and increased interest in a "fringe South Korean movement to swear off men" altogether. None of this started on November 6th, or is limited to women, of course. In 2022, right after Roe v Wade was overturned, a U.S. fertility clinic had a 100pc increase in the number of vasectomies, and one year later they were still doing 50% more than before that ruling. Even the attendees of DNC convention in August 2024 in Chicago could get free abortion and vasectomies. More on this below.
On the digital communication front, I have also seen calls to "start thinking like a criminal", to avoid being spied, doxxed and harassed by Trump and its supporters. Paradoxically, this may be a good thing, because online privacy is important whoever rules. Fear after the fact is not the smartest motivation, but if this election prompts more people worldwide to follow relatively simple practices like these... better late than never (and while you learn that stuff, give my percloud a serious thought, already!
Believe it or not, this is a real greeting card you can buy on Amazon, which of course never “watches” you in any way!
Third, some BIGGER (eventually good???) things that may happen
Before the big things, there is something relatively small, but important, that should really happen immediately, and not just in the U.S.: get rid of continuous political polls, already! They just create hysteria and disengagement among voters, and false sense of security among candidates. One way or another, most analyses of the vote made these days seem excellent confirmations that "if you can learn to read culture... you won't need political polls". There, I said it.
Back to big things: Trump may force Europe to stop spending on NATO and go back to buying fossil fuels from Russia for less money, which incidentally would also be less polluting than getting the same fuels from across the Atlantic, and to partner with China for (among other things) batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles done right that would decrease Europe's need of fossil fuels. The hard part would be getting there without dooming Ukraine, of course.
At a less visible, but eventually even bigger level... After November 5th I have also seen claims that it's Time to Retire "Demographics is Destiny", but let's go back to that vasectomy boom, or to parenting in general, for a minute.
Forming a family and having kids are personal decisions that everybody must make freely, answering only to their own conscience. Having kids must never become an obligation, period.
This said... when childless men "fight" politicians or laws they don't like by sealing their own testicles rather than voting, things aren't good. And I can't help noting that, for society and individuals alike, it may be much easier to outlive a bad, even real bad presidency than a generation or two with a much higher percentage of elders than humans have ever had, or have ever known what to make of.
Some image search results for “cutting the branch you are sitting on”
On the same note, it will be "fun" (in all the wrong ways, of course) to see how the hell will the U.S. (and any other right-leaning "first world" country, of course, including mine) keep its economy going without migrants.
And this is where things could become really interesting. I've seen speculations that (my own personalized synthesis!) Trump will have to make the whole U.S. economy and healthcare "go full AI" much faster than it would have under Harris. Not because Musk owns his soul, mind you. Because that would be the only way to handle the deficit caused by tariffs, and the lack of manpower caused by expulsion of migrants first, and that perfect storm of "Peak Vasectomy + 4B" later.
Personally I do not know how realistic that "go full AI" hypothesis is. Looking forward to read your opinion in the comments. But if that hypothesis is right... Trump may end up doing, or more exactly causing, the Right Thing, that is: "get Universal Basic Income, AI and reality in the RIGHT order".
And here's another funny thing (again, in all the wrong ways): if Trump will do that, his fiercest opponents will include the Americans who just voted for him exactly to defend their right and duty to do the opposite, that is to live without decent healthcare, decent education, enough vacation days and so on.
Another (eventually, after much pain, hopefully not more wars) Right Thing that Trump may cause by really screwing up "the economy" is to make the world finally accept that things like high speed trading and above all GDP are really cretin ways to build and judge any economy on.
Finally, Trump may end up causing those and other Right Things simply because of what he just did this time, that is (not my words, just my favourite sentence from a long post I saw somewhere) "linking the working class across racial (or other) lines".
Because that "linking" is something that, quoting from the same sentence, will offer "tremendous opportunities for the right person to do some good" next time, if:
that person (in the U.S., or anywhere else) just succeeds to preserve and redirect it, rather than focusing on niche issues, or any approach to bigger ones that pictures the "other" side as any kind lesser humans
his or her voters will vote that person, rather than waiting for their own personal Candidate Charming
In the next months and years, I will do my best to track and explain what these developments (especially their digital parts) will bring to families and society. Thanks in advance for all the comments, subscriptions and any other help I will get to do it.
Over the years, that one book became five. Five, and two short stories. And then, in 2016...well. I don't have to tell you. And back then, devastated, not knowing what to do, I got very political online very fast. And I had to deal with a lot of entirely manners-challenged people online who sailed in to tell me how stupid and wrong I was and how much they enjoyed my fear. Because that's a normal thing to feel and do, apparently--and apparently still. But these people would take one look at my profile, see the word "Fairyland," and instantly assume they knew everything about what a dumb, flighty, empty-headed girl I was. Inevitably, they'd screech GO BACK TO YOUR FAIRY TALES at me like they'd just won the argument.
So I did, and I wrote a standalone prequel story called The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End--and Further Still. As a way to process, and to help my friends and readers, perhaps, explain what happened to their kids.
In 2016, I didn't have a child of my own.
Now, I had to take that story down when the big anniversary Fairyland box set came out, Beasts was included in it. But several people contacted me this week to tell me how much the story helped them back then. And it would seem nothing matters and there are no rules anymore, so I don't really give a shit and I'm going to put it back up in case it might help someone else. It's not right for it to be unfindable right now without paying for a five-book set. (You do not have to have read Fairyland at all to read this story, it’s meant to be entirely standalone. The only trick is to know this all takes place long before the action of the novel, in which these forces are defeated by the usual rag-tag group of heroes. The big epic story everyone likes hadn’t even begun, and these characters couldn’t imagine something like that even being possible in their darkest hour.)
It's so fucking sad that, reading this story over this morning, eight years later, there wasn't any need to update it to speak to the present circumstances. Same as it ever was. We're stuck in a time loop, all of us. I was 36 when that man came down his golden escalator. I feel ever so much older than 45 now. And I'll be almost 50 by the time there's any path out. A sobering thought, to understate it rather dramatically.
Do I believe in the hope this story contains today, written when there was some possibility of believing it wouldn't be as bad as we feared, and that the country didn't actually want this? I'm not sure. I don't know what I believe right now.
Except that I do believe in stories. You gotta believe in something.
And I do think, even if you don't feel hopeful, maybe especially if you don't feel hopeful, you have to put on a good face and try to find it, and if you can't find it, fake it a bit, for those who need something to hold onto. We all have to give each other something to hold onto. And sometimes, if you fake it for a minute, it becomes real enough. A small magic the mind can do for itself.
So here is that story, and I dearly wish that it provides somebody out there with a little hope to lean on until their own homegrown is strong enough to stand tall.
What do you do when they don’t let you fly anymore? You walk. And breathe fire.
The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End—And Further Still
Once upon a time, three rather large and unusual creatures grew very tired indeed of fighting, day and night and day again, fighting the same overwhelming and unyielding enemies, fighting with all their large and scaly might, as well as their claws, teeth, flaming breath, and occasionally, walloping rune-carved giant’s hammers they found lying about where others had fallen. Because the sun was setting rosy in the sky, and because they could hardly bear to put one foot in front of the other, and because, at long last, their fates had been tucked firmly into bed and told to stay there or else, these three rather large and unusual beasts sat down upon a rather large and filthy hill in a country called Fairyland. The hill was filthy because a great battle had been fought there. Bronze and wicker and glass armor lay everywhere strewn about. Swords and axes and scissors and needles and a million thousand arrows turned that hill into a pincushion. Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea. The three creatures sat carefully on their haunches inside a prickly prison of blades and bows and bucklers.
One was a tall man all in green, armored in a battered green breastplate and a battered green helmet and a green carriage-driver’s cloak and hardy green boots. One was an enormous Leopard with a curling green saddle on her back. The man smoked a long green pipe, and wherever he went a fresh green wind followed. This was not surprising, for he was the Green Wind, and his cat was the Leopard of Little Breezes. Together they brought storms and sighs to all the six corners of the world. The third creature looked something like a dragon. But he could not be a dragon, surely not, for he had no forepaws. His body curved back against his powerful hind legs like a capital S. He was the color of the very last embers of the fire, and his belly was the color of old peaches. He was graceful and gallant and gregarious and grim. His huge claws were very black, their eyes were very orange, their horns were fierce and sharp, they had long whiskers hanging from long snouts, and enormous wings like bats, if bats were far bigger than houses, extremely bony, and not in the least blind.
If you have not guessed it already, this dear and daring beast was a Wyvern. A Wyverary, if we are to be taxonomically accurate, for though his mother was a proper Wyvern, his father was a library. That only sounds strange if both of your parents were precisely the same sort of animal, which hardly ever happens, when you really think about it. He had been named for the family business, for a library has ever so many encylcopedias, and the beast was called A-Through-L. He knew just everything about everything, so long as it began with the letters A through L.
They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. They had only just met today, having fought on the same side, and after today, they would not meet again for a very, very long time. But they had become fast friends, for that is what three people who have survived something dreadful together always do.
The Wyvern looked down from their pincushion hill of swords and arrows into a long, deep valley. It had been very pretty down there once. Lots of blue stones and violet flowers and rabbits and foxes and minks who realized long ago that they all had soft ears and moist noses and hated hunters, and so, rather than fight each other, formed a collective for the Betterment of Us Who Gets Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Our Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy, and lived in reasonable happiness. None of that was down there any longer. No flowers, no stones, no softness. A great battle had been fought in the Valley of Soft Ears. The last battle of the war, in fact. A stranger had come, an outsider, a mysterious girl with untold riches and untold fury. She had sent her armies screaming through the meadows and forests to seize Fairyland for herself.
It had been a ferocious fight, all against all. One side sent Witches and Magicians and Unicorns and Manticores and Gnomes, whoever would stand, whatever would serve, until, in the end, the last warriors had no more to hurl at one another but their shoes, and then they hurled those, too. The other side Pookas and Dragons and their own Witches and their own Manticores, but most of all they sent Redcaps, in wave after wave, some riding great beasts of the air, some charging on great beasts of the earth, stout and furious creatures who kept their hats red with the blood of those they hated. Stray flashes of spent magic still burbled and rumbled through the valley. Dragons, Wyverns, Sphinxes, Griffins and Harpies, the Flying Ace Corps, wheeled in long, exhausted circles, looking for stragglers to carry off. Below, the fallen lay where they had lost their last struggles against the army of Redcaps, and even the clouds had begun to weep.
“We lost,” said A-Through-L. His strong voice went all funny in his throat.
“Looks that way, Ell,” said the Green Wind. He did not sound very concerned. “May I call you Ell?”
Ell nodded and sniffed in the cold autumn wind. “The Marquess is going to rule over all of us forever and ever, and she is…she is…terrible.”
“Suppose so.” The Green Wind blew smoke out of both his purple nostrils. The Leopard purred and said nothing. Cats are not terribly talkative.
“But how could we lose, Mr. Green? It’s not possible. All the Sirens and the Witches said we’d win as easy as supper and twice as quick. They said no one so wicked and cruel and so awfully angry could ever rule Fairyland. They said that sort of thing only happens in other worlds that are not so full of magic and wonder as ours. All the prophecies agreed on it.”
“I think I see a Witch in that cage by the big oak tree,” the Green Wind noted, pointing with his pipe. “Being menaced by a lion.”
It was true—down deep in the Valley of Soft Ears, a gargantuan blue lion roared into a silver birdcage, where a young man all in black cowered with his arms curled protectively over his cauldron. Witches brew up the future in their cauldrons, you see. They take up a wooden Spoon and boil a soup out of everything you did today and everything you did yesterday and all the days before, and everything anyone you ever met did, too, and that is how you get a prophecy. This is very much like what statisticians and journalists do in our world, only with less tasty onions and mutton and incantations. Neither of the Wyverns could hear anything over the din of the battle’s end, but I am a Narrator, and my powers of hearing are extremely keen, for I must listen through every closed door, every secret meeting, every whisper in every corner of a tale. I shall tell you what the lion roared. It roared: you will make a new future in your stupid bowl, and it will say all the things we want it to say and none of the things we do not! The new future will say that everything good in Fairyland is down to us and everything that goes sideways is down to our enemies. It will say that we are the best people, with the best plans, and the best words, and the best rulers in the history of bestnesses. Make it say the old King and Queen are liars and villains but the Marquess is a truth-teller and a champion who has released the world from sorrow forever. Make it say she is the only one who can fix Fairyland and make it great.
And to this the Witch said: But none of that is true! Fairyland isn’t broken! The Marquess lies and steals and cheats and snatches folk up for her own use and hates a great many more people than is healthy for a growing girl. Our old King was marvelous! The Queen just wasn’t very good at parties, that’s all. The worst thing she did was accidentally burn up a book of spells one time.
The lion snarled: if you say it, if you boil it up in your bowl, it will become true. Everyone believes Witches. You will be rewarded with gold and jewels.
And when the Witch still refused, the lion thrust a paw through the bars of the cage and swiped away the young man’s wooden Spoon, the great emblem of a Witch’s power. Then we do not need you, laughed the lion. We control the Spoon! Everyone will believe us now!
“But we tried so hard,” whispered the red Wyvern on the hill.
“Why should that make any difference?” answered the Green Wind, who was somewhat older and therefore somewhat more accustomed to things not going his way.
Ell frowned and stared at the churned-up dirt of the ruined hill. He scrunched up his orange eyes so as not to cry.
“Well, because….because it’s a bad story! Stories aren’t supposed to end like this. They’re just not! Things are supposed to get better. Things are supposed to make sense.”
The man all in green lifted one emerald eyebrow. “Oh? Did you never find a story in all of your Papa’s bookshelves in which a wicked dark lord rose up and put a crown on his own head? In which the cruel tyrant covered the land in night and ravaged the countryside, destroying and devouring and devastating the lives of people both gentle and kind? Did you never find one single tale in the corner of your noble father’s stacks where folk banded together and rose up against this terrible King, standing back to back and crying out: we do not look to be ruled?”
“Well, of course I did, Mr. Green! But in all those stories, at the end of all those stories, the dark lord was cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheered and danced and had a party afterward. But the end of this story is that we lost and she gets to do whatever she wants to us forever. How shall we ever have parties again? How shall we cheer? How shall we dance? I don’t think the Marquess likes dancing. I think she only likes cheering if people are cheering her name and I think she only likes parties if they’re her own birthday and she gets all the presents.”
“Perhaps this is not the end of the story, then,” the Green Wind said kindly, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. It was important to say it to the brokenhearted, to the young, to everyone, even if he didn’t believe his own words. Especially if he didn’t believe it. If no one didn’t say it, it couldn’t even start being true.
“It feels like the end,” said A-Through-L with a strangled cry.
“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind took off his green helmet and laid it on the grass between two arrows. “But haven’t we had tyrants and fools and hobgoblins on the throne before? Haven’t we had rather a lot of hobgoblins? Aren’t hobgoblins rather more the rule than the exception?”
“Yes…”
“And haven’t we always patched up their mischief and gotten back to more or less living how we want to live and loving who we want love and making what we want to make and being who we want to be?”
“Yes…”
“Perhaps Fairyland is stronger than her goblins, my ravishing reptile. Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.”
“But this is different! Oh, I feel it in my bones! She is menacing the Witches and hunting down the Stregas who heal our wounds and she told the foxes and rabbits and minks that they deserved to be Stalked and Shot At Just for Minding Their Own Business Whilst Being Fuzzy and I have heard…I have heard she even wants to outlaw the study of Queer Physicks. How will we have magic without the queerest of all the sciences? Oh, I know all about Different, Mr. Green, for it begins with D. And this feels different.”
“It always does, when you lose.” The Green Wind stroked the Leopard of Little Breezes’ spotted head. Far below, a Griffin cried out in pain and ran terrified from the ruined battlefield, the ruined valley which once held so many soft ears. “But perhaps you are right. I have heard worse still, Ell. I have heard the Marquess longs to build a wall between Fairyland and the human world, so that no human children may ever come here and have adventures again. Though I may have some small thing to say about that, myself. The Marquess is certainly deplorable, and she lusts after deplorable things.”
“But if she is so deplorable, why did all those noble Dragons and Griffins and Gnomes and Centaurs and Glashtyn and Pixies fight for her? She has an army of dreadful, sneering Redcaps who love her desperately and want nothing more than to stain their caps even redder with the blood of her enemies. I suppose I understand the Redcaps. It’s their nature to hurt things. But the others? There must be something wonderful about her if they love her desperately. You cannot love anything desperately that does not have some tiny wonder buried inside it.”
The Green Wind stared into the darkening sky for a long time. “There is a dreadful sort of spell that certain people can cast, Ell. It is a very ancient and powerful spell, but difficult to pull off. All the circumstances must be just right. If you fall under the spell, you hear a story every night when you fall asleep and every morning when you wake up and you hear it twice at lunchtime. It is a story about yourself, a story that sounds so good and true that you fall in love with it. You want to hear it again and again. You snuggle up to it for warmth. You set a place for it at the dinner table. The story tells you that the world is an easy and simple place, and you—yes, you!—are the very center of it. You are a hero, the hero, and nothing beastly that has ever happened to you is your fault. Very soon you will be loved and treasured and celebrated the way you ought to be, the way you always should have been. Very soon indeed…if only those wretched…oh, let us say Satyrs. If only those wretched Satyrs were not taking all the good bits of everything for themselves and keeping your cupboards empty.”
“Why would the Satyrs steal from me?” breathed Ell, wide-eyed. “What have I ever done to them? Are all these frightful battles their doing? Let’s go and talk very sternly to them, at once! Anything, if only I might feel safe and warm and hopeful again!”
The Green Wind laughed sourly. He shook his head. Starlight reflected in his eyes. “No, my woebegone Wyvern. You don’t understand. The Satyrs have done nothing to you. They live in the forest and eat mulberries and moonbeams and dance at their Sabbats. What has that to do with your sorrows? It’s only the story. You see what a good story it is! Why, it’s the story everyone and their auntie wants to hear! It’s the best story, the softest and coziest story every told! You began to believe it at once, and you have never had a quarrel with a Satyr in all your life. But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not? And once people hear this story, once this spell is cast…they get lost inside of it. They cannot see anything but the story, and if anything comes along that might tear the tiniest hole in the story, they will hate it like a fanged toad, for the story has become more important than even themselves. That is what the Marquess did, only she used the foxes and rabbits and minks instead of Satyrs to finish her spell. And all those Redcaps and all those Dragons would rather die for her than let any harm come to the story that sings them to bed at night. Because the world is not easy or simple, and it is very, very hard to get to sleep when the dark is so deep and the cold is so sharp.”
The Wyverary twisted his claws together. “Maybe it won’t be so bad, then. If it’s only a story. If she only wants frightened people to sleep well and sleep soft. Maybe she doesn’t really mean any of it, and once she has her crown, she will be kind and good. People do all kinds of fearsome things for the sake of crowns. I’ve never understood it. Crowns itch.”
They looked down into the gruesome battlefield, now pale with mist and full of the sounds of weeping. A throng of Redcaps were stalking the wreckage, looking for anyone with wings. Whenever they found some poor half-dead Harpy or Ifrit, they pulled a long bronze chain out of a great rough sack and fastened down their wings, one to the other, with an extremely serious looking lock. Ell’s wings prickled with gooseflesh. The Green Wind said nothing. The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned, showing her teeth.
“I suppose you’re right,” Ell sighed. “It is rather silly to think the best of someone whose done all this to us already. I hadn’t much hope. But…” A-Through-L’s eyes grew very big in the dark, two enormous pumpkin-lanterns floating in the shadows. “But…oh, I know it’s a ghastly thing to say, but perhaps I might be safe, at least? You and I and your Leopard? We are not foxes or rabbits or minks, after all.”
“The spell grows and grows as people fall under its power. And to grow, it must always have new food. I cannot promise that the story will not start whispering in certain ears that Wyverns are lazy criminals who ruin the radiant city of Pandemonium with their dirty nests and fiery breath and loud crowing.”
“I’m not a criminal! I’ve never even been to Pandemonium!”
“It’s the story, my dulcet dragonkin. The story doesn’t care what is true. It only cares what feels true. And you are big and frightening to people who are neither reptilian nor capable of flight. Who knows? Perhaps the Marquess will even find a way to banish the Winds and we will be exiled, too.”
“Oh, I am so afraid! I am so sad I can hardly stand staying inside my skin! What are we going to do, Green? How are we meant to live? Is the Marquess’s story so strong that it can just stomp all over my story forever? They’re going to chain my wings and if I can’t fly, what am I? Who am I?”
The Leopard of Little Breezes lifted her spotted black-and-gold head and rested it on the Wyvern’s great red toe.
“Do you remember the first magic you ever learned, Beast?” The Leopard’s voice was soft and rumbly and rough as a mother cat’s tongue.
Ell did not think he knew any particular magic even now, except for the magic of being who he was. Yes, who he was was a very large, very red, fire-breathing lizard who could fly, which was a bit magical, but nothing out of the ordinary.
“The first magic anyone learns is saying No,” purred the Leopard of Little Breezes. “It’s how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their magic at everything to see what it’ll stick to. And if they say No loud enough, and often enough, and to the right person, strange things will happen. The nasty supper is taken away. The light is left on at night instead of turned out. The toy comes out of the shop window. It is such old magic, such basic magic, that most folk don’t even know it’s magic anymore.” The Leopard of Little Breezes rubbed her paw over her ear. “You can say No to that story. You can say No to the spell, to the Marquess, to the lions, to all of it. And if you say it loud enough, and often enough, strange things will begin to happen.”
“But that’s easy. I can say No all day long!”
The Leopard growled. “It’s very much harder to say No to a tyrant than to say No to a plate of beans or a dark bedroom. Harder still to do it while your wings are tied down and blistered. And you cannot stop saying it, even if it would feel so marvelous, so easy, so much less work to just be silent and hope it all comes out right somehow.”
Ell’s eyes filled with turquoise tears. “It does sound hard. So terribly hard. I don’t want to live through this sort of story. I want to live through one of the nice tales, the ones that take place between hobgoblins, the ones where you don’t have to spend every day blistering and saying No to horrors. Why couldn’t we just not have horrors at all? Then no one would have to say No.”
Oh, my dear, darling Wyverary. So do we all. But so few of us get to. Not even a silly narrator like me. The only comfort there can be is that very few sagas of bravery and wonder occur in the space between hobgoblins. Perhaps, my most beloved lizard, one will even happen to you. But that is not much comfort, I know.
“But then, of course, there is the other side of the apple. There is Yes Magic,” the Green Wind said gently.
“I like the sound of that better, even if it begins with Y,” nodded the Wyverary.
The Leopard of Little Breezes looked up at the Wyvern with enormous black eyes. She spoke in a very soft, very serious voice, the voice any cat uses when the time for yarn and nip is past and there is only the cold night coming.
“Every time you say Yes to anything, to anyone, you change the shape of your world. You agree to supper with a stranger, and now you have a friend. You say that you would certainly like to take a journey to the ocean, and now the ocean is in your heart forever. The Redcaps said Yes to the Marquess, and the world is very much changed. But we…we must say Yes to each other. We must say Yes to the needful, to the suffering, to the lonely, to those the Marquess punishes for saying No to her. We must band together, back to back, and say Yes to everyone who lost today, for we are all family now, and our loss is our new last name. If we must hide, we will hide. If we must flee, we will flee. If we must fight all of this all over again, we will do it and complain the whole time. We must say Yes to the story where, after a long battle, the dark lord is cast down into infinite nothingness or burnt to a crisp or at the very least sent to bed without supper, and everyone cheers and dances and has a party afterward. But most of all, we must say Yes to the truth and the speaking of it. We must say No to silence. And perhaps, one day, a long time from now, something new and extraordinary will happen and the Marquess will defeated, and she will blow away on the wind, no heavier than a memory.”
A-Through-L looked down into the Valley of Soft Ears. He could see the Marquess there, strutting through the ruined earth with a crown on her head and a smile on her lips, knighting her gloating generals and showering them with jewels and titles and kisses. He could see her men fastening bronze chains round anything that flew. He could see the trees drooping down in sorrow, their leaves just barely tinged with red, with autumn, with the coming of September.
“I understand what you mean,” Ell said finally. His whiskers whipped in the sour wind. He straightened his back and his scarlet tail. “You mean defiance. I know all about Defiance. It begins with D.”
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I know it's my job to be one of the people who Says Something About It.
I know it's my job to be one of the people who says something comforting, or at least insightful, or at a minimum cathartic. I'll try soon. I promise.
But I just don't have anything right now. I can't even look at the analysis, or the internet at all. Not yet. I don't even know how to describe what I feel. I would have to actually cheer up to climb my way through to plain old nihilism right now.
And when the post-mortems are all said and done and the numbers are crunched, that's what I think happened here. I'm not sure what Democrats could have done differently. In 2016 this country was fucking around thrill-seeking and wrecked the family car. I think now we're just openly self-harming and seeking the void.
But what the fuck do I know. I hope the media's happy. They got what they wanted and can pretend to be concerned while calling themselves heroes of democracy.
It all hits over and over, different angles of how dark this truly is. I didn' t have a child in 2016. I don't even know how to look at them now. I am so afraid. I feel so helpless and empty.
I don't know what's going to happen next. Neither do you. Neither does anyone, especially those who tell you they do. I know most of us are stuck dealing with whatever it turns out to be. Most of us don't have anywhere realistic to go, and there's no escaping America's reach, anyway.
So the only way out is through. This is the challenge of our lifetimes. How to resist and how to live. It fucking sucks. I have no answers. Not today. But I keep thinking about the old zen proverb.
Master, what do I do before enlightenment?
Chop wood, carry water.
Master, what do I do after enlightenment?
Chop wood, carry water.
So I suppose that's all I have in the way of comfort. So far. For myself or you.
What do we do before disaster?
Chop wood, carry water.
What do we do after disaster?
Chop wood, carry water.
We have to try. We can't give up. We have to take care of each other as best we can. We can't let ourselves be silenced. We have to circle up, backs to backs, and protect one another, especially those who are most vulnerable to this oncoming future. We have to find a way to hold on to whatever is nailed down well enough in America that they cannot steal it, whatever structures and bulwarks can take our weight. There will be some.
But for now, in these last three months of the era, we chop wood and we carry water. We hold our children and our loved ones. We try. Because there isn't anything else we can do.
We still have each other. We are going to have to make that enough.
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public post has a paywalled follow-up with the spicier opinions either I didn’t have space for or energy to argue about with the internet at large. The follow up to PR Problems is coming, maybe even today, but it’s too close to the election for (hopefully) entertaining and perceptive posts about what might happen tomorrow to be behind barriers right now, sohere we go.
It’s almost over. One way or the other.
I think I’ve aged ten years since the first primary. Twenty since 2020.
A century since 2016.
And I do feel cautiously optimistic about tomorrow. Cautiously. Because I have SOME VERY REAL PTSD ABOUT 2016. When we were so sure. When, even with everything going on, we thought there was no way America would elect that guy. That we were on the verge of the first female President. When we were excited to see the oh-so-cocky MAGA camp meltdown in defeat. I painted my nails red, white, and blue. I wore suffragette white to vote, and a jewelry-version of RBG’s dissent collar.
And I will never forget watching everything slowly fall apart at the Democratic Party’s official event
And I’m…not real thrilled to see this same sort of sentiment floating around the day before this election.
Yeah, that Selzer poll was crazy surprising and injected hopium into everybody all at once like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Yeah, the early voting demographics and numbers look pretty good. Yeah, the vibe you and I feel, in our bubbles online and in real life, is that this is maybe probably gonna happen. Yeah, it should happen because voting against micro
I DO NOT TRUST THAT SHIT.
You know what I trust?
I trust Democrats’ deep, passionate, and powerful longing to not vote. I don’t understand it, but it’s as reliable as sunrise and the tide and white male comics complaining that their warmed-over take my wife, please jokes are being silenced to millions of views and dollars. Democrats FUCKING LOVE not voting. At the drop of the smallest and most irrelevant novelty hat, Dems seem to start celebrating, throw up our hands and joyfully not the fuck vote because…blue state so it doesn’t matter (yes it does, downballot dingus)/I got stuff to do and it’s a done deal (it isn’t, and we will all have a lot more shit to do if Elon Musk gets to Twitter our economy while RFK leaves the rotting carcass of public health in a park for fun and Trump sells the entire country to Putin for $599 and a kiss)/electoralism doesn’t work (oh my god hold my earrings)/my not voting sends a message to the establishment (they have no way of knowing why you didn’t vote, it could have been because Chipotle had a BOGO deal that day, your message is just a blank, subjectless email sent to no one)if Trump gets in it will accelerate us toward the revolution and people will rise up (he was already in power and there was no glorious leftist revolution, just the breakdown of society and suffering, also a revolution would not turn out with gentle loving progressives in charge)/the candidate isn’t perfect and will win anyway so I can stay pure (they won’t necessarily win anyway and not doing the bare minimum of saying please not fascism though is literally the opposite of political purity) or whatever reason seems fun that day.
It’s absolutely galling. And I’m so afraid we’re about to coast on vibes into another brick wall of assholes who get visibly excited talking about daddy punishing America for being such a bad girl. (And by the way, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, guys) running our entire lives directly into the core of the fucking earth.
The white-hot boiling heart of American exceptionalism is thinking it’ll always be fine without any effort on our part
I’m hoping, too. But it’s very easy to forget how much of this country doesn’t pay attention at all, how much of this country hates women and POC and have no reason to be shy about that anymore, how much of this country went through their most formative years before the Civil Rights Act, Roe, or women being allowed their own bank accounts, how much of this country was so traumatized by COVID they have just aggressively memory-holed the entire thing plus everything else we went through from 16-20, and how much of this country literally just doesn’t give a shit, wants to watch the world (just not their cute lil house) burn, and profoundly enjoys watching others suffer.
And that part of the country? Never miss an election. They turn out every time to vote for pain and anger and fear and repression of others. They fucking love voting, because they fully understand it’s how they can get their way whether there’s more of them or not, while the rest of us seem to have a real tough time with that lesson.
I live on a small island. I moved here on November 1st, 2008. A few days later, we elected Obama in a landslide, and it was one of the most special nights of my life. Everyone crammed into the local bar, watching it happen. We’d voted in Ohio before moving so that it would count more, and when Ohio went blue, you’d have thought my ex and I had done it just the two of us. We didn’t pay for a single drink that night. The joy in the air was so intense and wonderful.
All those people, so happy, feeling like we’d accomplished something real. That the world was about to change.
AND THEN TWO YEARS LATER NOBODY FUCKING SHOWED UP AND THE WORST REPUBLICANS MOVED ON INTO CONGRESS. And we were all surprised! I’m not exempt from this at all, either. I was young and dumb as a broken fencepost and I didn’t vote in the midterms. Have I learned my lesson? Yes. Has everyone else? I MEAN MAYBE BUT WHAT ARE THE CHANCES. Democrats just hate voting regularly. If all registered Dems voted, even Texas would be blue. But we don’t. We just refuse. Someone else will do the work, right? Someone else will make it okay. Someone else will fix it so we don’t have to pay attention.
And then we’re all shocked when SCOTUS is made up of out of three decent people, two out-of-touch old men, a seething frathouse rapist, a corporate lich, Serena Joy, and Clayton fucking Bigsby.
Clarence Thomas I swear to fucking god
You can’t be shocked. We have to turn out, and at best, we seem to be able to manage it about once every other Presidential cycle. People keep whining that Democrats have been calling Republicans fascists for too many cycles, but we’ve been doing that because it’s literally just the same people over and over again. Reagan’s administration was half Nixon men, the first Bush’s was half Nixon and Reagan men, the second Bush’s was whoever was still breathing out of that ring of hell, Trump’s was half bonkers right-wing grifters and half whoever was left standing by the 2010s out of Roger Stone’s ancient shrieking goblin tribe of well-dressed national vampires. Who had mostly also been around since Nixon, plotting revenge. It’s been the same gang of Pennywise understudies slurping out of the public trough while starving the rest of us since my parents were kids, and yes, they are fascists. They just think it’s not fascism when they do it. It’s just the way things oughtta be, don’t you know?
THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT ALL FASCISTS THINK BUT FINE WHATEVER.
The point is, my heart is full of hope but my guts are full of dread. Not because of them, because of us. Because we have failed to protect ourselves and our neighbor so many times by giving up our voice and choosing not to vote. Because so many of us still want to vote for Jill Stein even though I’ve never met one single person who genuinely loves her and wants her in (funny how her not being perfect is fine with protest voters but the candidate with an actual chance not being perfect is intolerable), only those who want to use their vote to punish someone else. Because when optimism abounds, Democrats stay home.
Yes, it can be hard to get time off of work. It is also hard for Republicans to get time off, and early or mail-in voting is available in all but three states, only one of which is even close to a swing state (New Hampshire, because New Hampshire just HAS to do their own thing). Yes, voter suppression is everywhere, so yes, we have to try a little harder in some places. But we have to try. Please try. No, voting for Kamala isn’t going to end capitalism or fix Gaza or even make your groceries cheaper tomorrow, but what it does is make those things even remotely possible in the future.
The Democrats have been begging people to vote for 18 months now. I’m begging. Please don’t sell us to that creature and his rogues’ gallery. Please let us just try to get a little better every year, to fix more problems, to end more injustices, as best we can, within the law, as best we know how, within contemporary mores, as best we are able, given that America doesn’t actually rule the world. And if you aren’t voting because you think America is an evil empire—hold onto your fucking hats if MAGA wins.
Nothing is perfect. Everything sucks to a greater or lesser degree, most of the time. But that doesn’t mean we get to just nihilistically lie down and let these weirdos tell us who we are or how we can be allowed to exist. They don’t get to do that.
Everything hinges on tomorrow. Go. Vote. Speak. Say no to the last nine years of having to hear that man absorb and curdle every single part of daily life into his own stew of narcissism and sadism. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the rest of us, who want to determine our own lives and have a political party in power who can be persuaded to act for the people. Who, most of the time, try to all on their own.
Or do it for the next generation who cannot speak for themselves yet, but deserve to grow up to be whatever they can be, and not punished for not conforming to Gilead’s latest decree.
I don’t care who you do it for. I hope you do it for yourself. Just vote.
And if Kamala wins, if we escape this particular bad timeline, you have to keep voting. It isn’t ever over, because this push-me-pull-you between conservative control and liberal freedom has been going on for centuries. It does not end. Don’t you dare leave her hanging out to dry in the midterms. There is no permanent victory. And yeah, victory tomorrow doesn’t fix much right away. That work is hard and unlovely and takes so many years and so much arguing, so much compromise. But the needle does move. Toward something more open, something brighter. The first step is just not literally electing a supervillain.
There is and can never be any final repudiation of conservatism. You have to show up every time, forever, or there is no progress, on any cause you or I care about. And some progress is always better than losing progress.
It’s just one action a year. If my generation can finally learn to do that, maybe there is a future ahead that has room for all of us, and not just a few rich men full of hatred who think love, mercy, peace, kindness, and diversity are mortal sins.
Don’t get cocky. We can lose so easily tomorrow. Fill in the little bubble next to: I and my loved ones would rather not descend into a ravenous maelstrom of suffering today.
We don’t ever get to tune out again. Let’s get this done and start arguing over how to fix things rather than arguing over our right to continue existing with people who never wanted us to in the first place.
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That means that every single policy question related to the internet will have:
a) A free expression dimension, and
b) A national sovereignty dimension.
With that out of the way….
Late last August, Pavel Durov – the billionaire owner of the Telegram app – was arrested by French authorities after he landed his private ...Read More
Was I surprised Donald “Art of the Happy Meal” Trump decided to round off an election bid that has been echoing through the last four years like a long, wet, deafening Dadaist fart in the fascist fucking wind machine by utterly mat-assing the dismount via one big ol’ Madison Square Garden Nazi struggle session full of ids let off the chain, smug gloating over their unstoppable supervillain plans, and absolutely crusted racist, sexist, and homophobic mouth-vuvuzelaing with a side of murderous rhetoric?
Come on. Not even a little bit. Last week he sad he wanted to be a whale psychiatrist super bad, you guys. It’s his passion. Can you even imagine how excited the staffer who got to book THE American Nazi venue for THE new American Nazis? (After making double sure it wasn’t Madison Square Garden & Lawn Care Emporium?) Oh, I bet he could hardly wait to send the dork army out to infest the media cycle telling everyone how stupid they are for making that very simple connection anyone would make, and that the Trump campaign 100% wants everyone to make.
This fucking clown-van full of wannabe Pennywises cannot hide their hideous flag-swaddled erections whenever they feel like they’re getting close to being able to kill everyone they don’t like and laugh about it on TV to thunderous applause. (That last part is key, though. Wholesale slaughter is just no fun if no one tells you you’re an awesome big strong handsome boy for doing it and throws you a big party to celebrate your achievement!) They giggle like schoolboys every time they say something naughty, coquettishly twirl their hair and wag their fingers at us, daring themselves to go a little further every time, then gasping at the audacity of normal fucking humans to…you know…take them at their word.
Was I surprised everyone got BIG MAD about a comedian calling Puerto Rico an island of garbage in the middle of a set that had far more vile and revolting racist-ass jokes lined up with which to bukkake that hungry audience Gallagher-style, opening for people who not only had worse and uglier shit to say, but people who are actually, publicly, loudly planning to liquefy our future and sell it back to us in leaky plastic bin-bags for millions a pop?
And that the media cycle hasn’t instantly buried that for them? (Don’t worry, they’re working on it. Very busy at the moment pretending Biden called all Trump supporters garbage, which he didn’t, and also it really wouldn’t be the same if he had, he called their comments on Latinos garbage, but no reason not to try to pull a Mortal Kombat fatality on democracy at the 11th hour, right, Fourth Estate? Honestly it’s so predictable and I’m so exhausted pitching myself into the cold and unforgiving sea is starting to sound pretty all right.)
And that this, this, of all the Tales from Beyond Cthulhu bonkers blood-drenched psychotically cruel 6000 pounds of hate and darkness in a 2.5 pound bag screeching murdershit Trump and his frathouse of D-list demons who failed to launch out of hell have pumped into this nation and the minds of all of us, this is what is making Latinos question whether to vote for him?
Whale psychiatrist.
YEAH I’M PRETTY SURPRISED.
AND I WROTE AN ENTIRE BOOK ABOUT AN ISLAND OF GARBAGE FLOATING IN THE SEA.
Honestly, maybe I just don’t actually understand politics that well. Maybe I should scuttle this whole political essay thing entirely. I don’t get it. What? Why this? Because this isn’t even the worst thing Trump himself has said about Puerto Rico. My friends, he has hated you from the minute someone managed to get it through his hot buttered brain scramble that Puerto Rico wasn’t a fantastical land invented to flesh out the worldbuilding in West Side Story like Middle fucking Earth. This illiterate cousin’s uncle, who turns up every year to an intensely awkward Harkonnen Thanksgiving table cranked out of his diaper on ornithopter wiper-fluid has never said the words Puerto Rico without sounding like he just wiped something off his shoe.
It’s so hard to keep track of what I’m actually allowed to be angry about versus what I am commanded to instantly forget and not make a big deal of because FOONIE JOAKES.
I know remembering recent events is not exactly on trend these days, but…I mean…remember when he withheld aid because he though the mayor of San Juan was too mean to him? And threw paper towels at people after a hurricane? And repeatedly, repeatedly, as in, every single time the subject comes up, phrases his sentences in such a way that it’s completely clear that he either doesn’t know PR is part of America, doesn’t consider it to be despite reality, or thinks it should immediately stop? A guy who can’t put sentences together any better than he can put his shitty Spirit Halloween makeup on, but somehow, on the subject of this one place, is fully capable of cleverly crafting implicit rhetoric without slipping up and accidentally knowing the basic factual geography of the nation he wants to rule?
NOW we’re mad?
I don’t even want to get into whether it was funny, because that’s not even the point of conservatives saying it was a joke. I can’t express how disappointed I am in Jon Stewart for siding with his comedian-soul rather than his decency-soul and getting wrapped up in that part of the (barf) “discourse.”
Look: it wasn’t funny, it was stupid, tired, pointless, and even the set up revolves tightly around bringing up something important, that normal people care about, to a group of people the speaker knows don’t give one lonely windswept fuck, and only even understand the reference in the first place because it’s hysterical to them when normal people care about things other than themselves. It’s not even a joke, because that’s just what conservative edgelords actually think about Puerto Rico and the environment.
Have you ever seen one of this ding-dongs actually try to tell a joke? First, there’s only one punchline: I’m amazing, you’re a piece of human filth, and you deserve suffering while I deserve to watch. They almost always fall directly onto their faces and then blame liberals for not laughing. Dennis Miller, one of the funniest people ever, sent himself off to the hinterlands because even he couldn’t make conservative thoughts funny and relatable.
They also never say it was a joke when their attempts to comprehend comedy, an art form about catharsis, shared experience, speaking truth to power, and upending expectations to make people look at life in a different way, thus entirely antithetical to conservative ideals and goals, fail to get a callback. That would mean acknowledging their joke didn’t land and they’re the bestest at everything.
Hilarious
No, conservatives only bleat it was a joke when they’ve just said exactly what they mean and think, with a straight goddamned face, direct to camera, and a dim, flickering notion that they might get in trouble for it this time crosses their rage-dessicated brainpan.
(Ha ha they won’t.)
A joke relies on an unexpected reversal of expectations or upending of the audience’s everyday assumptions somewhere between the set-up and the punchline. But this specific audience never expected or assumed a set-up about a floating island of garbage in the sea was going to actually be about how we fucking created a floating island of garbage in the sea with all our consumerist hog-snorfling and short-sighted maritime policy. They assumed and expected it was gonna turn into some kind of insult at the expense of some group of people, because that’s their fetish, and no one turned up to Madison Square Fucking Garden on Discount Nazi Night to NOT get their fetishes seen to. They got what they expected, they just didn’t know which group of people, and were maybe mildly surprised it wasn’t Haitians, probably. That makes it a shit joke; the equivalent of yelling WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD in someone’s face and then blarfing back WE ALL FUCKING HATE CHICKENS AM I RIGHT FRIEND before they can say anything back, then expecting a Mark Twain Prize for it.
CHICKENS DID 9/11 WAKE UP CHEEPLE
But hey, for once, I guess, we’re only sort of blaming the comic who said it, and mostly, correctly, pointing out that it’s all on the guy whose name is so grossly and obnoxiously in giant letters on everything. And it’s really no better to not vet what speakers plan to say at the biggest event of your campaign, in a place where SUPER-SPECIFIC PEOPLE HAVE SUPER NOTABLY SAID SOME SUPER-SPECIFIC TOP-TIER EVIL SHIT RIGHT BEFORE DOING EVERY LAST BIT OF IT?
Wait, what’s that? Oh, Hinchcliffe’s (which seriously sounds like Andy Kaufman’s new alter ego) set was absolutely vetted, because he planned to call Kamala Harris a cunt, and some poor intern squeaked out hey maybe not? Americans get pretty weird about that word? But A++ to taking a shit on Puerto Rico, bro! The part where you made everyone think you were gonna say something about the very real and very bad news great Pacific garbage patch but instead you switched it up and made a flaccid racist joke about your own country? Fuckin’ hilarious, bro.
I mean, first of all, at this point, why not call her the “c-word,” as the media is helpfully using despite being happy to print any other profanity these days, so that the right can pretend it stands for “communist” while, again, giggling and blushing and winking like a kid with a crush, and that crush is emphatically not on us. They might as well. The media would’ve laundered it for them with a smile and a backrub. They all think it. We all know it. If whatever gremlin-handlers are left doing actual campaign work were smart enough to balk at that, I’m not sure why “Latinos love having babies, they don’t care, they just come inside” was A-OK fun for the…well. Whole fuckin’ family, I guess. Maybe I just lived in Scotland too long, where cunt is a friendly greeting AND a floor cleaner, so I don’t care about that word anymore, but I can’t really see a comedian getting up there and being a misogynist prick moving anyone’s needle much. It’s kind of their brand.
BUT MAYBE I DON’T KNOW SHIT ABOUT SHIT BECAUSE APPARENTLY THIS IS STICKING WHEN “YES I WILL TURN THE AMERICAN MILITARY AGAINST AMERICAN CITIZENS IF THEY DON’T AGREE WITH ME AND IF YOU THINK I MISSPOKE HERE IT COMES AGAIN, WITH GUSTO” DIDN’T.
Is this actually finally generating the kind of rage every single thing Trump has ever said since sailing down a golden escalator with Resting Mussolini Face should have? Is it actually making Latino voters notice that this toad-souled witch’s curse we’ve all suffered with for a decade specifically, violently, and really, really openly loathes Latinos in particular?
Maybe? There had been some new endorsements and a lot of think-pieces, but the shock and unexpected attention span with which the media is treating this seems all out of proportion given the rest of what happened at that exact rally and also since 2015. No part of the media landscape seems to be able to focus on the detailed horror, privation, fear, and mayhem Trump and Musk are promising to deliver for more than two seconds after the third Betterhelp.com commercial break. But this one they’re holding onto. Not the part where Elon “I Am Good At Many Business” Musk is Trump’s new running mate, not the part where these two billionaires have apparently agreed between them to Thelma & Louise the economy straight into the screaming void, leaving all of the Americas as an island of trash floating in the sea, and certainly not that both of them have acknowledged on the record that their plans will do exactly that and they’re looking forward to it omg so fun guys!
Obviously threatening to kill anyone who disagrees with a guy who can’t remember what he said an hour ago didn’t even make a fucking blip.
Is the media finally peering into next week and realizing how holistically they done fucked up?
Great job, everyone, now line up for the nice men with guns because they have some “subscriptions” to “cancel”
Maybe? But why? Scrambling to distract from that whole festive arrangement of broligarchs suddenly caring so deeply and authentically about journalistic neutrality that they just can’t endorse a candidate this year. And only this year. For reasons. Really good, double plus neutral journalism reasons. They don’t even seem to care much about the rest of the technicolor Nazi floorshow on display that night. They opened by playing fucking Dixie, for god’s sake. It’s all out in the open.
I’m not trying to make light of what a nasty fuckdumb thing to say about an American territory that’s been treated unfathomably poorly by us for pretty much always. I understand how big the PR diaspora is. It could make a difference. Many things could that haven’t gotten this oxygen.
Quite literally, two days ago, Trump got his carcass up on TV and said he and the Republican Speaker of the House had a “little secret” plan to secure the election for him no matter what the voting shows, and then, a few hours later, that same Republican Speaker of the House also went on TV and agreed that it was a super cool secret plan and he wasn’t gonna tell because you don’t tell secrets and as far as I can tell no one gives a fuck beyond lol what lovable scamps!
Is that it? Better to blanket the news with feigned pearl-clutching over a douchebag comedian with an inevitably douchebag podcast saying exactly what Republicans happily admit they think about Puerto Rico any old day, when they can be bothered to think about it at all, and pretend it’s some kind of October surprise that Trump is a huge racist who likes racists and hangs out with racists and is basically a make-work programs for racists everywhere, than to deal seriously with one political party has become a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames nodding along and agreeing that yes, indeed, they are a gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames GET IN THIS GIBBERING HELLJAW, AMERICA, while the very part of our society that’s supposed to be in charge of revealing the truth and pointing out when the government is getting too twitchy did virtually nothing to stop them?
That’s really all I’ve got. Because this country seems to still think it’s some kind of FUCKING JOKE that we’re all voting between a future with problems, but more or less normal problems normal people can try solving, and the gargantuan blood-spattered all-devouring skull of flames, and the skull of flames is doing pretty well in the polls once the media gets done saying they just don’t know Kamala well enough yet.
We have the opportunity to say no to that, to that terrible future where JD Vance gets to decide what happens to our bodies, Elon Musk gets to decide what happens to our money, RFK Jr and his purple Thanos face gets to decide what happens to our food and medicine, Stephen Miller gets to decide what happens to our neighbors, and Donald “Your Favorite Monster’s Favorite Monster” Trump gets to decide what happens to everyone else. AND WE MIGHT NOT. BECAUSE EW LADIES I GUESS.
I can’t comprehend why anyone is still laughing. Why anyone thinks life will just continue normally after Tuesday if these carrion-eaters get back into power. Yeah, conservatives think Puerto Rico is trash. They think we’re all trash. Just compost to feed their growth. I will never understand why it’s just so much fun to hate and harm other people than it is to just…be rich in an advanced technological society full of comfort, entertainment, and possibility where anything you want can be had in a moment. Or not be rich but still be pretty okay plus same, as most Trump supporters are.
But this is a bad world getting ready to shoot its shot, telling us it’s bad and will feel bad, and we’re still sitting around making jokes. The millisecond Biden said the word garbage, legacy media informed us all Trump was fine now and it’s basically the same. Normal, often shitty, but still functional, life, or a vast hellscape of pain? BASICALLY THE SAME.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next week. I wish I even had a guess. So many things seem to be happening that we can’t see but the media could, if they tried, yet won’t. Please vote. Please do the minimum to not let us become the new Reich. Please see through all this noise to a signal we can hold onto. Please don’t let these goblin men write the history of this century. They’re not even offering anything in exchange for our everything.
See, the thing about carrion-eaters is that something pretty big has to die in order for them to feast.
If we don’t literally lay down and die for them, they will starve, and we will go on.
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