Trump’s Fourth Reich of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, founded on a Russian spy and blackmail network hidden within the human trafficking syndicate of which Trump and his buddy Epstein were kingpins, offers us figures of the female co-conspirator in their loathsome and luridly perverse crimes, one of whom has yesterday fallen from power, Pam Bondi, apologist of the Abominable One’s child predation who weaponized the testimony of victims against them and not their abusers as was her sworn duty, concealed the identities of the patrons of the Trump-Epstein syndicate and shielded them from prosecution, and in doing so made the lives of every woman in America less safe.
As written by Shanley Hurt, co-author of Geddry’s Newsletter with her mother on Substack; “Pam Bondi’s Reward for Total Humiliation: She barked, fluffed, and publicly disgraced herself for Trump, only to watch him hand her chair to Todd Blanche.
First Kristi Noem got shoved aside and replaced by Markwayne Mullin. Then Pam Bondi got booted, and for now the man taking her chair is Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer. At a certain point, even people who are deeply invested in not noticing things have to notice things. In Trumpworld, the women keep getting cast as the emotional support henchmen. They are expected to go out there, smile through disaster, defend the indefensible, absorb the stink, and humiliate themselves with gusto. Then, once the job starts to smell too much like flop sweat and panic, a man materializes to inherit the office and play Serious Person.
Maybe that is not misogyny in the neat, textbook sense. Maybe it is just one of those magical coincidences that keeps happening to women around Donald Trump, where they get the public disgrace and some guy gets the title. Maybe the ladies are just incredibly unlucky, forever slipping on the exact same banana peel while the men keep landing upright in the leather chair.
And Pam Bondi really did commit herself to the bit. She did not merely defend Trump. She made herself into a kind of human leaf blower for his ego. At that House Judiciary hearing, while lawmakers were pressing her over the Epstein files, Bondi somehow found it in herself to start hollering about how amazing Donald Trump was, how transparent he was, how wonderful everything was going, as if she were not the attorney general of the United States but the final contestant in a contest called America’s Next Top Sycophant. It was one of those performances so undignified that it briefly circles back around to being impressive. Not morally impressive, obviously. More like the way a raccoon opening a locked cooler is impressive.
That is the part that makes her firing so deliciously embarrassing. She humiliated herself for him in public. She did the full-pageant version of loyalty. She barked, she boasted, she fluffed, she smiled through the flop. And in the end, he still replaced her with his own lawyer. Not just a man, which would already be insulting enough. His man. His former defense lawyer. The symbolism is so unsubtle it almost feels rude to point it out. You spend months turning yourself into a one-woman Trump infomercial and the reward is that the boss hands your job to a guy who used to stand next to him in court.
And honestly, that is what makes this version better than the usual palace intrigue story. We already know Bondi was not pushed out because she had some sudden attack of conscience. Nobody is confusing Pam Bondi with Elliot Richardson. She was perfectly willing to play the role. She was willing to degrade the Justice Department, willing to debase herself in public, willing to perform loyalty like she was trying to win a tiara and a timeshare. The problem was not that she refused to be awful. The problem was that being awful did not save her, because in Trumpworld women are often invited to do the shame work, not necessarily to keep the power.
That is the pattern here, and it is why Blanche matters. If Bondi had simply been replaced by another random hack, the story would still be ugly but ordinary. Instead she got replaced, at least for now, by Trump’s former defense lawyer, which makes the whole thing feel less like ordinary turnover and more like a little engraved plaque announcing who is trusted with real power when the performance phase is over. The women get sent out to stand in front of the burning building and insist that the smell is actually prosperity. The men come in later and get described as stabilizing.
It almost makes you feel bad for her. Almost. There is, I admit, a tiny flicker of pity in watching a woman discover that extreme public self-abasement is not, in fact, a durable professional strategy. It is the sort of revelation that might soften you for a second if you had never seen Pam Bondi’s whole deal before. Then you remember that she is not some innocent handmaiden who wandered into the wrong marble hallway and got eaten by wolves. She is a Regina George mean girl with a law degree, a television smile, and a deep commitment to using power like a hair straightener left plugged in on purpose. She helped build the ugliness. She fed it. She grinned through it. The pity does not last.
Still, there is something almost poetic in the efficiency of the insult. Bondi did everything asked of her except the one thing that matters in Trump’s world, which is never to become inconvenient. She could praise him, flatter him, throw herself in front of cameras for him, but once she started looking like a liability instead of an asset, none of that devotion meant a thing. Loyalty is lovely right up until usefulness expires. Then suddenly it is time for a transition, a thank you post, a pat on the head, and a man in your chair.
So yes, another one bites the dust. First Kristi Noem. Now Pam Bondi. Funny how often the women wind up carrying the embarrassment while the men collect the office. Funnier still that these women keep acting shocked when the arrangement turns out to be exactly as degrading as it looked from the start.”
How are true monsters like Pam Bondi and Ghislaine Maxwell created, and how may we prevent such disfigurement of the soul from ever happening again in the future?
The classic example of internalized oppression in a female overseer of systemic patriarchal oppression is Phyllis Schlafly, whose portrait as Serena in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is unforgettable and terrifying.
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2020, Strategies of Seizure of Power in Mrs America: Appeasement Versus Confrontation; FX’s brilliant and gorgeous series Mrs America tells the story of the battle for the soul of America and the struggle for equality of half of humankind, as it unfolded in the 1971 political Equal Rights Amendment. It is also the story of the beginning of the Fall of America as a democracy and the capture of the Republican Party by a cabal of Gideonite Pentecostal fundamentalists and Patriarchal misogynists led by the complex and mercurial Phyllis Schlafly, and the defenders of liberty and equality who opposed them, including Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem.
Of greatest interest to me are the references and framing of Mrs America as Shakespearean tragedy, and its portrayal of the conflict of strategies of seizure of power, appeasement versus confrontation. Confrontation fails here in the short term but cedes no ground to the enemy; whereas appeasement subverts its host like a colonizing virus but is also trapped and marginalized within it, as Schlafly herself became.
Slate has a superb historical analysis and fact checking of each episode which I have provided links to below; together with the show itself it is the best introductory history of women in modern America and of the ideological development of feminist theory yet written, and possibly the only such history accessible to an audience for whom it is an unknown subject. Unfortunately, this category seems to include everyone who didn’t live through it, a situation this show may remedy lest we are doomed in future to repeat the mistakes of the past.
As I wrote in my post of January 3 2022, Patriarchy and Sexual Terror: Case of the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial; Patriarchy and sexual terror are about power as expressed in the most atavistic way as subjugation and dehumanization of others; the power to turn people into things you can use. Patriarchy is about the theft of the soul.
Like the freaks in a carnival show, monsters define the limits of the human and help us establish normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue. But this othering also grants immunity and permission as well as vilification and dehumanization of that which is different, for it allows us to ignore systemic evils and inequalities through constructions of personal responsibility derived from the doctrine of original sin and its basis in law as the innate depravity of man; here be monsters, not ourselves.
In the case of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, serial predators whose crimes against humanity defy comprehension in the way that the Holocaust does as intrusive forces and atrocities beyond our frames of reference, the astounding scale and baroque abominations and perversions of their crimes offered concealment even as they were performed before a global audience of the wealthy and famous due to their manipulation of elite privilege and making their peers complicit as a strategy of blackmail.
This is how fascism operates, and its components patriarchy and racism; by making those who could bring them to justice complicit in their crimes. As Peter Carey said in regard to his novel A Long Way From Home; “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”
If we are to challenge and bring a reckoning to patriarchy as systemic unequal power and as sexual terror, we must avoid othering its agents and perpetrators, for this enables the restoration not of balance but of our comfort with our own privilege.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, the American and Napoleonic Empires, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real, as Thomas Mann taught us in Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov in his reimagination of it as Lolita; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
The trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, like those of their fellow sexual terrorists Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, are seizures of power as revolutionary struggle in which the victims refusal to be silenced has triumphed over the immunity of hegemonic elite wealth, power, and privilege; the Scarlet Letter has no power to shame women into submission through victim blaming in our society any longer, for in refusing to be silenced these courageous women have seized it as an instrument with which to dismantle the Patriarchy.
Force is brutal, terrible, but also fragile, for it fails at the point of defiance and disobedience. Enacting the role of the Jester of King Lear and the girl who cried “The king has no clothes”, parrhesia or what Foucault called truth telling, the witnesses of these iconic trials and of the historic turning of the tides of the #metoo movement have shown us all how to wage liberation and revolutionary struggle.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force; Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.
At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.
In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.
So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.
Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.
And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.
As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”
As written by Jonathan Freedland in his article in The Guardian entitled, The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises a question some may think naive: why?; “The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises so many questions, and yet scarcely discussed is the one that perhaps matters most. Naturally, there’s huge interest in whether Maxwell, convicted this week of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sex with her one-time boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, will seek to reduce her sentence by naming names – opening up the pair’s notorious little black book and telling prosecutors who else among the rich and powerful abused the vulnerable minors Maxwell trafficked for sex.
In Britain, much of that interest focuses on Epstein’s longtime pal, Prince Andrew, who was so close to the couple he invited them on visits to Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor: it’s lucky the prince doesn’t sweat, because if he did, he might be drenched now. So far he has refused to answer US investigators’ questions – not for his own sake, you understand, but according to multiple reports, to save the Queen from embarrassment. Because a 61-year-old man hiding behind his 95-year-old mother would not be in the least bit mortifying.
There are other questions, such as: how many others enabled the travelling child abuse ring that Epstein and Maxwell operated, turning a blind eye to what was surely obvious? Or: when else would the BBC respond to the conviction of a child sex offender by interviewing a brother of the offender who refused to accept the verdict of the court? And how come that Today programme interview with Ian Maxwell came so soon after the BBC had given a platform to one of Epstein’s lawyers, presenting him as if he were merely a neutral expert?
All those questions matter, and yet the one that preys on my mind is more timeless. It’s the question that arises in all such cases of human cruelty yet which one hesitates to ask, lest the inquiry seem naive: why?
The coverage of Maxwell has probed that a bit, suggesting for example that Ghislaine Maxwell was conditioned, as the daughter of the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, to cater to the whims of a monstrous man, and simply transferred her allegiance, and her service, from one monster to another. Growing up surrounded by wealth and power, where the deference of officialdom was taken for granted, would have had its effect too. Ghislaine Maxwell may well have assumed that people like her and Epstein were granted a special kind of impunity, that they could break the laws that restrained the appetites of lesser mortals, because for most of her life that had indeed been the case.
And yet, both those answers are unsatisfying as explanations. There are plenty of abusers who did not grow up with either a Maxwell-style father or Maxwell-level wealth and, conversely, there are people whose upbringings were comparable to Ghislaine Maxwell’s but who did not go on to commit terrible crimes.
So the why question lingers, just as it did in sharper and more horrific form at least twice in the last month alone. December 2021 began with convictions for the father and stepmother of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in a case so appalling, I confess at the time I could barely read accounts of it. The six-year-old was subjected to a regime of sustained torture which was, incredibly, filmed by those who inflicted it. The little boy was made to stand in isolation for up to 14 hours at a time, without anything to eat or drink. He was beaten. To punish him, his father took the football shirts he loved and cut them to shreds in front of him. Perhaps most unbearable of all, the jury was shown footage of a weak and frail Arthur shortly before his death saying: “No one loves me. No one is going to feed me.”
When the man and woman guilty of destroying Arthur’s brief life were found guilty, there was revulsion, of course – and on Friday their sentences were referred to the court of appeal for being too lenient – but the public conversation moved without pause for breath to the policy implications. There was intense debate about the state of children’s services, about the damage done by austerity, about target-driven culture, about the recruitment and retention of social workers and so on. But what was missing was a much less sophisticated question. Why would two people do such terrible things to a defenceless child? How could a father cause such pain to his own flesh and blood?
There was a similar reflex 11 days later, following the verdicts in the equally soul-draining case of Star Hobson, a child, a baby really, who died at just 16 months, having been punched to death by her mother’s partner as her mother did nothing to save her. Once again, the pair filmed their months of cruelty against the little girl, apparently finding the videos amusing enough to send to friends. And yet the immediate talk was not of how two people could do such a thing, but of a local “child safeguarding practice review” and whether control of children’s services should belong with the local council or the Department for Education.
I understand the impulse to concentrate on these institutional, bureaucratic issues. The assumption is that there will always be people capable of horrendous brutality, that that fact will never change, and so the sensible focus of our attention should be on prevention. I get that. And yet the sheer speed with which we move to technocratic answers, barely even asking the harder human questions, begins to look like displacement activity. It’s as if we can’t bring ourselves to contemplate the puzzle of what humans are capable of, because we have no idea what we’d say.
Earlier, God-fearing generations did not find this so difficult. Nor do those who still have traditional faith. They have recourse to a vocabulary that includes the notion of evil and wickedness and that allows them to talk about it. But those words don’t trip so easily off the secular tongue.
Instead, we look for explanations in psychology or economics, assuming, to adapt Stephen Sondheim’s lyric, that if people are depraved it’s because they’re deprived, whether of love or money. That view persists. There was an echo of it in the closing argument from Maxwell’s defence lawyer, when she asked “why an Oxford-educated, proper English woman would suddenly agree to facilitate sex abuse of minors”. Only the poor or poorly educated behave badly.
We can see the flaw in such reasoning, even before you get to the insult it delivers to all those who endured great privation, emotional or material, without becoming abusers. And yet, the absence of easy answers does not give us a licence to stop asking hard questions. We need to be able to stare wicked acts and evil deeds in the face, rather than to comfort ourselves that they exist solely as functions of failed systems, errors that could be eliminated given the right policy tweak.
This need not be a bleak endeavour. I think of Julie K Brown, the Miami Herald reporter without whose fearless pursuit of Epstein’s crimes this week’s reckoning might never have come. I think of the courage of the victims, who kept up the fight for justice at great cost. Unfathomable evil is part of the human story, but so too is unimaginable good.”
Next exhibit in our museum of private holocausts and gallery of monsters and fiends I offer the case of Melania Trump, like Pam Bondi and far too many others a co-conspirator in horrific crimes of sexual predation and terror.
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2026, Pigshit Princess, A Film: Melania’s Rise From Whore to Trophy Wife and Agent Handler For Putin of a Nazi Monster and Kingpin of a Sex Trafficking Syndicate Who Became America’s President; The central question of any inquiry into the story and figure of Melania Trump must be; How did a whore rise through the ranks of a global sex trafficking syndicate to become the trophy wife and agent handler for Putin of its kingpin, a Nazi monster, idiot, and lunatic who became our President, and how did she help him to seize power?
Amazon’s despicable fascist stooge and now propagandist Jeff Bezos has bankrolled a wretched vanity film which trails Melania through gilded palaces as she declaims “Let them eat tear gas” when passing a window beyond which can be seen the glorious and heroic mass protests which have now become a national revolt against the white supremacist terror force ICE and Trump’s criminal campaign of ethnic cleansing and the federal occupation of our sanctuary cities.
Who is Melania, how did she become a monster, and what use was and is she to Trump’s Fourth Reich?
Herein I offer an alternate version of the film Melania, no less fictive than the trappings of royalty she wears like a twenty first century Marie Antoinette.
Opening shot is a miserable village in Slovenia, in the black and white of a time and place which are liminal in the sense of a fairytale, followed by a series of images of its humans and beasts who mirror and reflect each other in their filthy and grotesque degeneracy.
We hear the chop, chop, chopping before Melania makes her entrance, carrying an empty bucket of slops for the hogs we see in the yard behind her through the door she has thrown open to enter the darkness of the butchery, straw pasted to her wild hair and her face smeared with pigshit.
A fierce bearded man grimaces in semblance of a smile though we know he has long forgotten how, scooping entrails from the table into her bucket as she holds it up, a human hand included, in a gradually illuminated hovel littered with human cadavers.
“Good eating tonight, Melania, for us and the pigs. Police raided a poetry reading of dissidents.” Camera moves to a close up of his face as he says; “Very wicked, I’m sure. But there is no good or evil, only power, who eats and who is eaten, and we are all meat.”
As the camera withdraws to take them both in, Melania repeats the mantra which is the controlling metaphor of her world; “Yes, father, we are all meat.”
In Scene Two we move from her historical origins in a family of butchers who served both the Tito regime and the Nazis before him, and back into the mists of history; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleon, the Republic of Venice, Hapsburgs again, the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolinians, Bavaria, and before the migrations from which Slovenes emerged the Roman Empire. All states are embodied violence, and all require enforcers and those who disappear their victims.
Always there are scavengers like Melania, who loot the corpses and live from the misery of others; the scuttling dark things whose survival is in service to power, finding tasty morsels among the offal after the inquisitions and the crusades.
Though before Melania herself became a kind of remora riding sharks through abyssal depths, she was a simple though stupid and cruel village girl caught up in the system of human trafficking because of the leverage offered by a crime to predators operating with the authority of the state, a crime ambiguous in its intention but catastrophic and unforgiveable in its consequences, by which she gained the name she was known by before coming to America, Pigshit Princess.
In sepia tones like a hand colored postcard from long ago Scene Two opens, to two girls squabbling in the pigsty.
“Give me!” demands Melania, grabbing the glittery plastic tiara on the other girl’s head.
“No! I’m the princess! You’re the Pigshit Princess!”
Moments from the fight are intercut with black and white scenes and images of her childhood of brutality, squalor, and exclusion as the daughter of man who makes inconvenient truths disappear for the state. Herein she is not a champion of other untouchables or a class warrior of any kind, but a feral and malign predator who terrorizes here own, studying their weaknesses for leverage with brooding menace and trapping fellow children in horrific games of power. This is the backstory and origins of all overseers of the carceral state and its slaves, unchanged from the dawn of history and the rise of priest-kings and empires from the wealth of mass slave labor of agriculture, for this requires enforcers and informers from within slave populations, as Melania was to become.
They thrash about, tumble, and Melania pushes her rival’s face into the pigshit until she is dead. Then she takes the tiara and crowns herself with it.
So begins the legend of the Pigshit Princess.
In full color Scene Three opens, marking the transition to historical time and a shared world we all live in; Melania, now a teenage girl or young adult, and a man in a dark suit are facing each other across a table in a cell, she in chains and without a trace of concern, remote and fearless.
“You’re a lot of trouble for a little thing,” he says. “I’m told it takes three men to get you into those chains.”
“Come closer and find out.”
He moves ever so slightly into range, and she unleashes a furious attack which finds its limits in the length of her chains, snarling like a savage animal; and when he withdraws laughing she resumes her motionless calm.
Her inquisitor speaks next, disturbing the silence; “I’m here to offer you a way out of here, as our eyes and ears in places we can’t go. Someone who can kill without mercy, and looks like you do, maybe even will be a great beauty one day, our enemies won’t see you coming. And one day you can live like a real princess, with beautiful things, if you choose to help us. For now, if you agree I will unlock your chains and have food brought, and later you will be brought from this place to a very special school in a castle, where you will want for nothing, and be under the protection of the state which includes immunity from prosecution for any crimes in your past or your future. And you will be well paid. Would you like that, Melania? Or would you rather remain the Pigshit Princess for the rest of your life, ruling a four by six cell in solitary confinement?”
“Show me this food. And I’ll take the first month’s pay now, and three days free on my own to decide.”
And so Melania became a spy and whore for the secret police under the cover of her modeling and escort career, working her way up to being the elite KGB/FSB influence agent she remains, now directly under Putin’s command, as she was maneuvered into Trump’s orbit after his 1987 visit to the Kremlin, and became his handler and his trophy wife.
In terms of her service to the regime from Trump’s perspective, she provides cover for his predation of children and as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate launched by his modeling and beauty pageant monopoly and interdependent with his partner Epstein’s blackmail empire also built on sex trafficking. Melania provides the illusion of normal sexual desires and identity to the most prolific serial sex predator in all of history.
And in service to both Trump’s puppetmaster and hers, Vladimir Putin, she provides an intimate source of intelligence, influence, and control of America to Russia as Trump’s control agent. Putin’s initial goal in putting Trump in the White House was simply to take America off the board to give him a free hand in the conquest of Ukraine, and though this goal has expanded horrifically he has clearly been successful beyond any imaginable dreams in isolating Ukraine from NATO support and in the capture of the American state as a vichy government of the Russian Empire and of the Fourth Reich.
Melania’s story and that of many girls like her has been told in the film and telenovela series La Femme Nikita, which I watched with rapt attention for its documentary-like realism in the portrayal of actual intelligence operations, and the historical film Red Sparrow; but never of a sparrow who becomes the First Lady of the United States as she did.
We must remember always that in so doing she also enabled unspeakable and countless crimes against humanity of whom Trump and Epstein’s victims were girls exactly like herself, who she betrayed to ruin and horrors.
This is how Melania became the person who once visited a concentration camp for migrants on our border wearing a trenchcoat with the words “I really don’t care; do you?” hand painted on the back like a living billboard for amoral nihilist Dark Enlightenment theorists and partisans of Apartheid like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance who believe that mercy is a weakness that should be abandoned on the trash heap of history along with democracy and universal human rights.
Our final scene in my conceptual film includes documentary newsreel footage of that day, June 21 2020, when Melania wore the infamous jacket to gloat over the misery of the fifty five stolen nonwhite children huddled into animal pens at the New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Texas, victims of her husband’s Theatre of Cruelty and campaign of ethnic cleansing. These are the steps history must remember, not the prancing high heels whose clicks on the marble floors of gilded palaces signal the death of democracy like a metronome.
She never truly left the pigsty, nor shed her identity as the Pigshit Princess.
As I wrote I my post of July 16 2025, The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power; Among the weapons of Authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as patriarchy, our most ancient system of oppression and institutionalized inequality and dehumanization as theocratic tyranny, few are more terrible than the silencing and erasure of its victims as immunity in service to power.
The QAnon cult, which has recast our Rapist In Chief as Cyrus in a new myth of Exile and as our state religion mobilized voters aligned with the Christian Identity form of white supremacist terror promulgated through the Pentecostal Church to elect Trump, began as a deflection propaganda operation by two operators of the 4Chan child pornography platform, and was rapidly weaponized by the Fourth Reich as deflection from Trump’s vast and multigenerational sex trafficking syndicate and sexual terror cult founded with the family fortune by his grandfather in the brothels he owned during the Klondike Gold Rush. This has recently turned around to set its fangs in the monster himself, as the MAGA-QAnon true believers are confronted with the Trump regime’s cover up of the Epstein files.
The unraveling of the cult of Trump has begun.
As written by Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled How the Jeffrey Epstein row plunged Maga world into turmoil – a timeline: Saga has pitted Trump against his base, with the president pleading with supporters to ‘not waste time’ on Epstein; “The Department of Justice’s announcement that it did not have a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged clients, and that the convicted sex offender was not murdered, has plunged the rightwing world into turmoil.
Conservative commentators and media figures, some of whom spent years pushing conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death, have accused the government of covering up the hedge fund manager’s crimes, with calls growing for Pam Bondi, the attorney general, to resign.
The saga has pitted Donald Trump, who was friends with Epstein for many years before later disowning the financier, against his base, with the president pleading over the weekend for his supporters to “not waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein”.
This is a scandal unlike any Trump has faced in a history made of nothing but scandals and lies, for it strikes at the heart of his legitimacy and manufactured authority within his own base.
Rapist and sex trafficker Trump says pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This is exactly what we must do, for in the words of Dorothy he’s “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of January 5 2024, Exposing Authority: Case of the Epstein Blackmail Files; Secret power is among the most terrible of all forms of unequal power, for it silences the witness of history by the powerless because they will not be believed. This is the true test of democracy and equality in any society; who has authority to bear witness?
And now a Pandora’s Box of evils and the hungry ghosts of the silenced and erased return to give us warning; a monster who defines the limits of the human has been exposed and his head mounted on our wall, but the systems of unequal power as Patriarchy and sexual terror of which he was a figure and apex predator remain to be deconstructed and transformed, and until that day of liberation we must unite in seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
The first benefit of an open society is the right to be heard. Without this and other rights of freedom of information, there is no freedom for anyone, for we are all captives of power and authority.
This is the true crime of Epstein and of all such monsters; theft of the soul.
If we consider the principle that Silence Is Complicity together with its interdependent forces of falsification as kinds of unequal power, which include denial by forces of repression of the sacred calling to pursue the truth, of the right of witness as autonomy, of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen to Question, Expose, Mock, and Challenge Authority, and of the dangers of division and the modern pathology of disconnectedness in isolating dissent, we see that regardless of the enormity and atrocities of gender unequality itself, it is part of a larger system of dehumanization by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Herein we wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors; a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, which I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was also true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
How does this help us understand the horrors, violence, and sexual terror of the Epstein Blackmail Files as examples of systemic oppression?
Secret power; secrets which can destroy a target or win leverage over him as a strategy of power, and which can be manufactured from trivial or spurious sources; Epstein used simple association with and compromise of the wealthy and powerful to create enormous wealth and power for himself. In this he was not simply the crime lord of a human trafficking syndicate, like his buddy Traitor Trump’s modeling agency-beauty pageant organized crime network, which both exploited teenage girls, but also had the services of Ghislaine Maxwell who succeeded her father in masterminding honeytrap operations for the KGB and Mossad among other customers. Epstein was a blackmailer who modeled his business on intelligence services, and this made him a very special kind of monster, a pedophile and sadist who had refined sexual terror to a science.
And all of that wealth and power, stolen from the lives of impoverished and vulnerable young girls, reveals to us the inherent unequal power of the system he typified; falsification in service to power and the patriarchal subjugation of women.
As I wrote in my post of September 6 2019, #metoo: the Crimes of Secret Power Require Broad and Systemic Collusion; Three interesting events which provide motivating and informing sources for the #metoo cultural and social transformation which is reshaping our civilization and ourselves are happening at about the same time; the start of a series of podcasts investigating the Jeffrey Epstein case, the release of Margaret Atwood’s new novel The Testaments, sequel to her visionary classic The Handmaid’s Tale, and the publication of a memoir by Chanel Miller, whose victim impact statement, read out in Congress and in a 60 minutes interview which will be broadcast on the 22nd of this month, was among the initial testimonies that broke the silence of sexual terror and opened the door for others to seek justice.
Power asymmetry alone cannot account for the regime of sexual terror which has enabled the patriarchy to hold a hegemony of power and privilege for most of human history; for this we must look to the inversion of moral values perpetrated by traditional religion as a tool of control. Shame, shunning, and the force of authorized public will, of the social ownership of identities of sex and gender; we have never really left the world of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.
Secrecy is the key precondition of abuse of power, and the crimes of secret power require broad and systemic collusion. This is especially true of sexual violence against women, which is only a crime under the rules of Patriarchy when it trespasses another man’s power of control, ownership, and territory, and is otherwise regarded as a means of control which maintains existing hierarchies of power. It is among a class of crimes which exist only when the values context of our social system is abrogated and at risk; and its meaning can change with shifting contexts from diversionary illusion to lynch mob rallying cry with serpentine swiftness. As with so many inequalities, the truth will set us free.
Set us free; I imagine we can spend a lot of time parsing that phrase. By the term us I do include both men and women, for the equality of relationships liberates both masters and slaves- and we must be clear that this is precisely the social order which the Patriarchy authorizes and maintains- from their former categories of being. Democracy requires equality of its citizens; how else can we function as co-owners of our government than as a free society of equals? How can we be free in our personal lives to forge authentic relationships if we do not possess the autonomy to choose our own identity and be whatever we discover to be our own best selves?
Men have been changed into swine not by the spell of Circe, whose magic revealed truths, but by the same disfigurement of the soul which has caught and dehumanized women; it is the system as social force and structural inequality which has robbed us of our humanity, and must be resisted. We are beasts, we humans, but we need not remain wholly so.
And herein lies the special magic and liberation of #metoo as a seizure of power; it confers the casting aside of masks others have made for us, and the claiming of those we choose for ourselves.
What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results?
As I wrote in my post of April 28 2025, Patriarchal Sexual Terror As A System of Oppression: Case of Virginia Giuffre; We mourn a hero in the death of Virginia Giuffre, and it is important that she be remembered not as a victim defined by her abuser, but as a hero whose witness of history was a seizure of power which liberated others, at great cost as is often true for those who choose to bear burdens for us all.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts written in horrors and atrocities which define the limits of the human and which I hope you cannot imagine, but there is nothing unique, special, or remarkable in this; in fact our suffering is the common condition of humankind, one which should bind us together in solidarity, interdependence, and universal principles of human being, meaning, and value rather than drive us apart as is so often the case, especially when fear is weaponized in service to power by authority.
Let us celebrate the defiance of authority and refusal to submit in the face of impossible odds and overwhelming force of Virginia Giuffre, whose glorious triumph over a monster and tyrant of patriarchal systems of oppression, commodification, and dehumanization will hold open a door of liberation struggle for so long as we remember.
Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
Margaret Atwood on the True History on which her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is built
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34454589-the-handmaid-s-tale?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18
Handmaid’s Tale starring Kate Moss telenovella
Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, Sharon Rose Wilson
November 18 2025 Margaret Atwood, On Her Birthday: A Celebration
Mrs America telenovella
Geddry’s Newsletter
https://substack.com/@shanleyh
February 4 2026 Pigshit Princess, A Film: Melania’s Rise From Whore to Trophy Wife and Agent Handler For Putin of a Nazi Monster and Kingpin of a Sex Trafficking Syndicate Who Became America’s President
July 16 2025 The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power
January 3 2022 Patriarchy and Sexual Terror: Case of the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial
April 28 2025 Patriarchal Sexual Terror As A System of Oppression: Case of Virginia Giuffre
March 6 2026 How Revolution Works By Control of the Narrative and Delegitimation of Authority: Case of the Fall of the Dogkiller, Kristi Noem
News of the Fall of Pam Bondi
Pam Bondi’s firing won’t have the effect Trump desires
Moira Donegan
Epstein accusations and pressure from the boss: Bondi’s time as Trump’s chief enforcer
Analysis
Bondi firing a reminder that even ultra-loyalists get dumped by Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/02/why-pam-bondi-fired
Democrats cheer Trump’s firing of Pam Bondi and attack Epstein files ‘cover-up’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/02/trump-pam-bondi-reaction
‘A subversion of the justice system’: DoJ shifts into Trump’s ‘political wing’ as criminal investigations accelerate
President has ‘succeeded in completely politicizing’ justice department, experts say, using it to punish his enemies
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/trump-justice-department-politicization
Democrats walk out in protest over ‘outrageous fake’ Epstein briefing from Pam Bondi
Lawmakers leave closed-door meeting after AG refuses to commit to honoring subpoena to testify under oath
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/18/pam-bondi-epstein-briefing-democrats
Democrats accuse DoJ of not releasing millions of Epstein files despite legal requirement
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/31/democrats-justice-department-epstein-files
Bondi out, Blanche in: what will a new justice department head mean for the Epstein investigation?
Trump accused of running ‘misogynistic administration’ after Bondi dismissal
Bondi and Kristi Noem the only two cabinet members to be removed despite string of scandals involving male officials
Slate’s Fact Checking of the Mrs America Telenovella
https://slate.com/culture/2020/04/mrs-america-accuracy-fact-fiction-fx-hulu-miniseries.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/04/mrs-america-episode-4-accuracy-betty-friedan-schlafly-debate.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/04/mrs-america-episode-5-accuracy-brenda-couples-debate.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/mrs-america-episode-6-accuracy-jill-ruckelshaus.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/mrs-america-episode-7-accuracy-phyllis-schlafly-klan.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/mrs-america-episode-8-accuracy-national-womens-conference.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/mrs-america-finale-accuracy-fact-fiction-reagan.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/mrs-america-finale-jeanne-dielman-homage-ending-meaning.html
https://slate.com/culture/2020/05/mrs-america-finale-dahvi-waller-showrunner-interview.html
Torch of Liberty 