Social power and conflict are about legitimation and the construction of authority; this includes war and revolution, but also politics and the normal functions of a state.
Narrative control is a ground of struggle which mediates between, or is determinative of, seizures of power and its centralization, liberation and tyranny, and the tides of conserving and revolutionary forces.
Of late I am become quite hopeful that the Trump regime is threatened with delegitimation by exposure of its relationship with the Epstein child sex trafficking syndicate which undermines the uniquely American new faith of QAnon and the myth of Exile on which the regime is built as a theocracy.
None of this scandal is new, so why is it suddenly important now?
The credibility and legitimacy of Trump personally, his regime, and the Party of Treason were already a sinking ship of fools, exposed as a swamp of amoral grift and a plutocratic elite shadow state exactly like the imaginary one MAGA voters wanted to banish. Add to this the unfathomable aberrance of state terror and tyranny of the ICE white supremacist terror force, the loathsome death camps and secret foreign prisons, and the violations of both our rights as citizens and as human beings in a nation under federal secret armies of occupation, and Trump’s signature issue of immigration has also been turned back on itself.
Then there are the internal contradictions of the regime’s goals and objectives which are generating mechanical failures, fragmentation and division among its coalition, embodied in the spectacle of the Musk-Trump split; this was inevitable because the voting base and financiers of the regime have inherently opposing motives and plans. The tech plutocrats who bought the Presidency for Trump want to dismantle the state and replace it with a corporate tyranny; and care nothing for the social issues which drive the Republican voters, whose only interest is to hold and maintain white male power as encoded in “tradition”. Men voted for Trump because his white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror grant them permission to do the same, and so long as white men can kill and rape with impunity they are happy.
Into this environment of massive fracture and disruption of the regime exploded the Epstein files like a saboteur’s firebomb. And just like Dorothy drawing back the curtain, the mirage of lies and illusions of the Trump regime is exposed and has begun to collapse.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt: As pressure builds over the president’s broken promise to publicly release details about the convicted sex offender, his base has a new target: Trump himself; ““Ifeel so betrayed and so angry. This is not what I voted for.” “This cemented permanent deep state power.” “I’m concerned about being able to trust Donald Trump to keep his word.” “What about justice for these young ladies who were trafficked? What about their justice? Don’t they deserve justice?”
These were just a few of the calls that besieged conservative radio hosts across the US this week. The president’s ardent supporters spent the past decade fulminating over various foes, from Barack Obama and the deep state to undocumented immigrants and transgender children. Now they have a new target: Donald Trump himself.
The “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base is in revolt as never before. The trigger was Trump’s broken promise to publicly release details about Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, who was facing federal charges of sex-trafficking minors when he died in jail in 2019.
Spurred by the president and his allies, Trump’s movement has long latched on to the Epstein scandal, claiming the existence of a secret client list and that he was murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up. But last week the justice department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced there was no evidence that the disgraced financier kept such a list or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Far from closing the case, the memo deepened supporters’ obsession and sense of grievance. A movement defined by the view that elites rig the system against them felt cheated. Trump made efforts to douse the flames with ever-shifting explanations, excuses and distractions but merely poured fuel on the fire.
To some, his erratic and evasive behaviour implies a guilty secret. It also evokes a line from President John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” Having spent years embracing QAnon-tinged propaganda that casts him as the only saviour who can demolish the “deep state”, Trump is now seen as co-opted by its corrupt bureaucracy.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who ran against Trump for president in 2020, said: “I talk to the base every day and nothing animates the base more than the deep state. This Epstein thing was Trump’s promise. This was going to finally expose the deep state. Now Trump says nothing there? It ain’t going to stand.”
Epstein was first charged with sex offences in 2006 after the parents of a 14-year-old girl told police that he had molested their daughter at his Florida home. He avoided federal charges due to a controversial plea deal that saw him jailed for just under 13 months. In 2019 he was arrested again in New York and charged with trafficking dozens of teenage girls and engaging in sex acts with them in exchange for money.
A separate case against Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was jailed in 2022 for helping him abuse girls, detailed Epstein’s connections with high-profile figures such as Britain’s Prince Andrew and the former US president Bill Clinton. Both have denied any wrongdoing.
In 2019 – during Trump’s first term as president – Epstein was found dead in his prison cell after hanging himself, according to the authorities. Sceptics point to suspicious circumstances such as the security cameras around his cell apparently malfunctioning on the night he died, along with other irregularities.
They also speculate that the government is concealing details about the Epstein case to protect wealthy and influential clients, including Trump, a longtime associate who in 2002 told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
On Thursday the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent a letter featuring a sketch of a naked woman to Epstein in 2003. The president denied writing the letter or drawing the figure, and sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters on Friday.
When he was running for president, Trump said he would release files related to the case. But a bundle put out in February contained little new information. Then in June the spotlight turned back on the president when his former adviser Elon Musk claimed – in a now-deleted X post – that Trump is “in the Epstein files”.
Just a month later, a memo from the justice department and FBI said the Epstein files did not contain evidence that would justify further investigation. An almost 11-hour video published to dispel theories Epstein was murdered showed a section of the New York prison on the night Epstein died but appeared to be missing a minute of footage.
The Maga faithful erupted in fury. Media personality Tucker Carlson, activist Laura Loomer and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon claim the government’s handling of the case lacks transparency. The far-right commentator Jack Posobiec said he would not rest “until we go full Jan 6 committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files”.
Baffled, flailing and unusually out of step, Trump used his Truth Social platform to call supporters off the Epstein trail amid reports of infighting between the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino, over the issue.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals’?” Trump wrote. “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening.” He suggested the turmoil was undermining his administration – “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein”.
Yet while Trump has defeated many political foes, he has never had to take on his own base. Taking a scattergun approach, he said he supported the release of any “credible” files related to Epstein while downplaying the case as “pretty boring stuff”. He suggested without citing evidence they were “made up” by former FBI director James Comey and former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The president even lashed out at his own supporters, calling them “weaklings” for falling for what he called a “radical left” hoax by the opposition to discredit him. “I don’t want their support anymore!” he wrote. Some responded by burning their Maga caps in protest.
Still the pressure continued to build. Mike Pence, his former vice-president, said in an interview with CBS News that “the time has come for the administration to release all of the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s investigation and prosecution”. Even Mike Johnson, the loyal Republican speaker of the House, broke from Trump on the issue and urged the justice department to make public any documents linked to Epstein.
A small but growing band of House Republicans followed suit. Musk put dozens of posts on X accusing Trump of a “cover-up”. On Thursday the president made a concession by announcing that he will ask a court to allow the release of grand jury testimony in the case. It was the latest effort to defuse a crisis of his own making.
His political career gained traction with the help of the “birther” movement, pushing the racist idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore an illegitimate president. He was content to accept support from followers of QAnon, an antisemitic theory involving Satan-worshipping cannibals and a child sex-trafficking ring.
Trump also cultivated the ultimate political conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by Joe Biden, a “big lie” that culminated in the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Now he is finding that the nothing-to-see-here approach does not work for those who learned from him they must not give up until the government’s secrets are exposed.
Charlie Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “He’s being eaten by the very sort of conspiracy theory that propelled him into office in the first place. Donald Trump is a product of as well as a purveyor of conspiracy theories. He has marinated in conspiracy theories and used them to put him into the presidency so you do have what appears to be a giant irony that this particular conspiracy theory is the one that is haunting him.
“The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency far more than any of the other issues that are out there now. Trump is finding out that, if you’ve pushed a conspiracy theory for years, it’s very difficult to suddenly declare that it’s non-existent or a hoax. He’s doing this Jedi mind trick where he is trying to say, no this is not the conspiracy theory you actually care about.”
Trump has already tested his base’s loyalty in recent weeks by bombing Iran and pledging support for Ukraine, despite a pledge to avoid foreign entanglements, as well as signing a tax and spending bill that will strip health insurance from millions of people. But Epstein is different: a binary view of liberal elites as paedophiles, and Republicans as protectors of children, has become foundational.
Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, commented: “One of the reasons why the Maga base was so obsessed is that it gave them licence to genuinely hate and loathe their political opponents, to consider that the Democrats were not merely wrong on the issues, that they were part of this evil paedophile cabal.
“That is the justification for so much of what Trumpism has become and suddenly to pull the rug out from under the base was a radical and a risky move. For once Trump has overestimated his ability to shape reality to his own will.”
It is a rare political gift for Democrats, who have been reeling since Trump’s victory in November and struggling to thwart his expansion of presidential power. Several Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for the release of all Epstein files and suggested that Trump could be resisting because he or someone close to him is featured in them.
Ro Khanna, a congressman from California whose measure that would have forced Bondi to publish all documents related to Epstein online was blocked by Republicans, said: “The Republicans are basically protecting the rich and powerful. That’s what the Epstein case is about: the rich and powerful men who were allegedly sleeping with underage girls and they should not have impunity.
“They’re being protected, possibly because they’re donors to people in Washington, because they play golf with people in Washington. So this is a question of whose side are you on? The Democratic party has a chance to have a rebirth of populism, to say we’re on the side of the people, we get that this town hasn’t worked for ordinary people for too long.”
Some veterans of bareknuckle political fights of the past, however, warn that Democrats are still not rising to the moment. If the tables were turned and a Democratic president was suppressing such delicate information, it seems likely that Republicans would be aggressively flooding the airwaves demanding investigations and impeachment.
Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “It’s just weak. From a leadership perspective, there’s an inability to put the knife in and twist it.
“There is a reluctance because of the tawdriness of it all to appreciate that for Democrats, they lost an election to the most prolific liar because he was perceived as being more honest in the eyes of the American people. This is a prime example to strip him of that in the eyes of his most fervent supporters, and at least move them by some percentage to the sidelines and demotivate them.”
Schmidt advocates a national advertising campaign and series of town halls in which Democrats demand an end to the cover-up and ask what Trump and Bondi are hiding. “This is a moment where Trump is weak, he’s perturbed, he’s disturbed – and what you do is you hit him.”
Public opinion is turning against the president. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 69% of respondents thought the federal government was hiding details about Epstein’s clients, compared with 6% who disagreed and about one in four who said they were not sure.
Tara Setmayer, a Trump critic and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, believes the sense of betrayal could translate into a repudiation in next year’s midterm elections for the House of Representatives and Senate.
She said: “Is there perhaps a political awakening happening with the most rabid of the Maga base? There may be some weakness here that could be exploited. Where it could hurt Trump in the midterms is by depressing the vote of Maga. They’ll stay home and in these key swing districts where one or two percentage points difference can make all the difference in the House.”
Walsh, the former congressman, agreed. He commented: “It’ll cause a lot of Trump supporters to not even vote because remember a lot of his supporters aren’t Republicans; they are attached to him. If they’re utterly disillusioned that the guy they thought was going to be the ultimate slayer of the deep state now is part of the deep state they’re going to check out and that’s going to hurt Republicans.”
He added: “Trump’s legacy is the destruction of truth. He lies as he breathes and his lies to his supporters have made him popular among his supporters, so it’s beautiful that he may actually be crucified on one of his lies.”
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
“ I am a leaf on the wind”; now an iconic line from the telenovela Firefly and film Serenity and pervasive in popular culture, this quote has a unique meaning and history for me; some twenty years before these films I answered a question from a student during a class with this line, quoting the death poem of a kamikaze pilot.
The question; “What are you?” was in the context of a discussion of national identity and how we construct ourselves through history, what I now refer to along with race and other forms of identity as the flags of our skin.
I had just returned from the Siege of Beirut where Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance, the second of my many Last Stands, and in no way wished to align myself with identity politics or identitarian nationalism by claiming any ancestral homeland, nation, or people in the sense of die Volk as the Nazis used it, as remains true now.
Especially in this moment wherein the spectre of fascisms of blood and soil have once again been raised from the abyssal chasms of darkness by Trump and his regime of white supremacist terror in the pogrom of ICE now ongoing throughout Vichy America.
My solution to the question What am I was to reply “I am a leaf on the wind.” In the shadows of Beirut and becoming involved in liberation struggle and solidarity in Guatemala versus the Mayan Genocide, Central America generally, Angola and South Africa versus Apartheid, and other places, I felt a deep kinship with that kamikaze pilot. Because I am forever a Last Stand, as I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon dubbed The Wretched of the Earth. This is who I am and shall always be, and it is the only identity that matters.
This remains my reply now, to any attempt to define me not by my actions but by condition of being.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote of my last wishes in a poem entitled Final Thoughts;
Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world
Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived
Not silent but incandescent in the night
An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself.
This is my answer to the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world; to embrace the darkness and live with grandeur in refusal to submit.
As Genet wrote in Miracle of the Rose; ‘A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.’
There remains the question of how to find beauty, joy, hope, faith in our humanity, and love by which to transcend ourselves and the limits of our skin, to balance the terror and horror of our imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle under systems of oppression, to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
For such purposes I have built a mirror of Paradise and a refuge from the world in which to recover between adventures, Dollhouse Park as I named our cottage.
A very cool and rainy May, bees converging in swarms on our fruit trees in great numbers, and no false spring and freeze to kill off the buds have this year produced the best crop of cherries we have had in twenty years, with the apple and plum trees heavy with oncoming fruit. And a properly gradual fall allowed the roses to harden before the freeze; we lost none, where last year they nearly all died back to the ground. A week in the nineties this June was followed by a return to days in the seventies with a couple rains; this during the flood disaster in Texas while Europe becomes a desert and burns.
On this twenty first of June 2025 a gentle rain is falling and its 67 degrees at ten in the morning, with a high of 70 today and warming into August; as I reflected on my material context on this date last year, so I now mark the changes in my gardens as a constructed reflection of myself, a fragment of order in an endless wild sea beyond human control.
This is the scope and limit of all human activity, how we have shaped our world in our own image and used it to shape ourselves, to offer beauty with which to drive back the horror, and the hope of being reflected to infinity like the images in facing mirrors just out of alignment.
But its not the whole truth of ourselves nor of our lives.
In the end it is not our intervention in the natural order of the world which determines the ratio of hope and despair, joy and grief, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, fear and desire we must live with as imposed conditions of struggle; but the vast and uncontrollable tidal forces from which all things arise and are destroyed and recreated, like the rain and air temperature determine the growth cycle of roses.
Yet our truths, the ones we create and use to inform, motivate, and shape our own adaptation and evolution in becoming human, joy, hope, love, beauty, and the instrumentalization of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, remain real because they are real to us; and so long as this is true we too are real, our humanity is real, though flotsam in a vast sea of time and fate.
Let us surrender nothing of ourselves, friends, nor of one another, no matter how powerful the forces arrayed against us; this is the great lesson of the garden as it unfolds over time.
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2021, The Extinction of Humankind Is Now Underway, and Our Last Hope Is A Global Green New Deal; Last night it rained, and happy tree frogs were singing in my gardens here at Dollhouse Park, ending the heatwave which has gripped the Pacific Northwest for weeks as daytime temperatures return to the mid eighties, twenty degrees cooler than a few days ago. Lightning played in circles all around my hill overlooking the lights of the city, as it will in storms, like dancing angels.
With dawn came a chorus of song birds, the croaking of a blue heron from the wetlands at the foot of my hill, and soon the ringing of the bells at the old monastery which magnificently occupies my view in one direction from the front of my cottage, the other a spectacular panorama of the distant lights of the city. My partner Dolly wanted a park, which I’ve been building over the past twenty years, hence the name Dollhouse Park, and for us its just right.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, clematis climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea, a long curving boundary line of rounded granite boulders and mountain ash mixed with mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, and shrub juniper, burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush, ferns, and spirea, lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses, winding along my dirt road. A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving rose walk which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces; yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage. There Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos. A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside behind my cottage into a secret valley.
Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery of Mount St. Michaels on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Yet even here, in an alpine forest within an hour’s drive of five ski resorts and the worlds best flyfishing streams, perched atop a vast glacial aquifer, we are threatened by climate change and global warming; we have just had two weeks of temperatures above or near one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and dozens of fires surround the region, turning the waxing moon last night blood red.
Last week my sister Erin in Las Vegas posted a picture of a reader board showing one hundred thirty degrees. Water is rationed there; in many American cities water is simply running out.
Soon our agricultural areas will be consumed in firestorms, and eighty percent of the earth’s population will be made homeless as rising seas erase our coastal cities.
What will we do when there is no place of refuge we can retreat to? When there is no water to drink nor air safe to breathe?
All that we have built, we humans, relies like Dollhouse Park on limitless free water and air as public wealth and resources, and when they are gone, so are we.
This not a time for symbolic gestures, but for radical action. Time, for humankind, is running out.
As I wrote in my post of July 10 2024, Our Revels Now Are Ended: We Need the Green New Deal Now, Or This Will Be the Coolest Summer Of All Our Tomorrows; I write to you now from Dollhouse Park, my cottage and refuge from the world between adventures, set among two acres of roses and tea gardens on a hill overlooking the lights of the city among alpine forests fifty miles from the Canadian border and within an hour’s drive of five ski resorts where once I could rely on forty feet of snow in the mountains in winter, a wetlands at the foot of my hill, an underground sea of near limitless glacial water just beneath the surface and ringed with lakes so deep the Navy has a submarine training base at one just across the border with Idaho.
Dolly wanted a park, hence the name; I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
As photography is my art and the gardens at Dollhouse Park are my subject, I have a record in albums by month on FaceBook over some years, and for two years now we have had very hard winters in terms of damage to our roses, which number over a hundred of various kinds. Though the snow has been only six or eight inches a few times a year rather than two to four feet as it used to be, and the icy winds no longer desiccate everything with fierce storms during November, the transition between seasons is now too rapid to give the roses time to harden for winter, so they all died back to the ground this year and only started blooming the last week of June instead of May, and in the spring our fruit trees didn’t have time to be pollinated by our bumblebees, so our Montmorency and Rainier cherries are fine but we have no apples or Italian plums.
If the crops die, what will we eat? And globally they are beginning to die, hammered by heat, fire, drought, and floods, and we humans will one day become extinct.
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
One day the seas will die and boil, the coastal cities will be submerged and forgotten, and we will be adrift among a raging lifeless toxic soup of megastorms. What remains of us will be consumed by fire tornados as our world becomes an arid moonscape without water to drink or air to breathe.
On the day the last of us die, proudly trumpeting our splendid dominance of nature, what use will our castles be? From what will our arsenals of death and war protect us? Who will cherish and remember the beauty of our arts and the glory of our triumphs?
All of this is beginning now, not in a distant future. I had predicted 2041 as the threshold event year from which no escape is possible, but it has happened already in 2023 as the world’s mighty debated what can be done and did nothing, as we the people failed to purge our destroyers from among us and abandon the technology which is killing us.
This will be the coolest summer to come in our future. How hot it gets and how quickly may yet be controllable if we act now to abandon fossil fuels.
My hope now is that my roses will live on after me, and I will never need to mourn their passing, or that of the blue heron who reigns over the kingdom of the frogs at the foot of my hill.
Who will remember us, when humankind is gone?
As written in 1817 by Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ozymandias;
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As I wrote in my post of May 22 2025, Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park; In this time of shared public trauma as our nation and our civilization begin to collapse and fall, and the Age of Democracy passes into the Age of Tyrants, and as our values and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice are violated and inverted and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and our universal human rights are stolen from us, resilience becomes key to our survival.
While solidarity of action and refusal to submit to authority remain fundamental to our humanity and becoming human, we must also find joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
Such safe spaces of play and means of returning to ourselves under imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle designed to inflict despair, abjection, and submission through learned helplessness will be as unique as we are, but herein I wish to share an example from my own life, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about anyone else.”
Though I greatly relish and glory in my own aesthetics of total transparency regarding my lived truths, in which I am inspired by that of Kenzaburo Oe whose public display of his private life is regarded as terrifying in Japan and part of his personal legend, my offering and example of finding joy as a survival and adaptive strategy today involves nothing more transgressive than gardening.
One can often measure the burden of moral harm and disfigurement of the soul a human being bears by the quietude of their hobbies; for Nietzsche’s warning that the Abyss begins to look back at you remains horrifically true.
What is important about my gardens at Dollhouse Park, so named because my partner Theresa whose childhood nickname was Dolly wanted a park, is that it is an act of love offered to my partner; that I designed and created an idyll of serenity and reflection meticulously constructed to appear natural from a deep personal need for a retreat from the world is secondary.
Relationships are primary because the modern pathology of disconnectedness makes us vulnerable to despair, crushing loneliness, compulsive and self destructive behaviors, and harms our capacity to adapt to change and heal from harm.
Despair and submission is what the enemy wants from us, and this we must Resist.
Find or create spaces of your own, bracketed off from your ordinary life and sandboxed from your public identity and the roles you must play, and you will find it easier to rise from the ashes once again.
So, here is a tour of the world I have made in which to recover between adventures; yours will be different, but you must find or build one of your own if you must fight monsters without becoming one. I tell you this in recognition that it is a mission which I have failed like so many others, for I am a monster who hunts other monsters, and after forty years of living so there is very little humanity left to me.
I am without pity, fear, or remorse, and this is not who you wish to become.
Find your joy, my friends.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, leaning toward David Austin varieties, clematis of blues, purple, and wine red climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea.
A long curving boundary line of softly rounded granite boulders spaced at eight feet and mountain ash full of white flowers and red berries in their season at sixteen feet defines the Park along a dirt road in the cliffside view direction, mixed with bristling evergreens of mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, ferns brooding in their darkness, and aromatic shrub juniper, color spots of burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush festooned with white pom poms, rose glow barberry, goldflame spirea, vivid carnival colours of lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses.
A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside terraces behind my cottage into a secret valley. Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands and the frog pond where the blue heron reign to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Our Park is a highly controlled, purpose built, and artificial paradise which I designed to look like a natural landscape, with curving lines of sight to make it seem endless though it is only two acres of gardens among the true wilderness.
Dollhouse Park did not begin this way, as a private park and nature preserve nestled among alpine forest, but as a bare and rocky hill with a view, and shared ideas of home from childhood enthusiasms for fantasies of gothic romance like the Addams Family house, and in Dolly’s case the European grand hotels, castles, musical theatres, and cruise ships she spent twenty years playing piano and living in; museums and theatrical stages for the performance of our relationship full of curiosities, antiquities, and wonders. Dolly sat in a chair watching the sun set from different views for several days, and the one she liked the best was where we sited and built the house, with the front toward the setting sun and the city lights, and the back toward the rising moon, our secret valley, and the hills beyond.
I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving Rose Walk, planted with roses at both sides under dark pink Montana Rose stone and in high summer flanked by walls of hollyhocks with their dinner plate size flowers, which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces. Yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage and to the Tiki Bar deck overlooking the terraces and secret valley with a forested stream at the rear of the house, where we can watch the moon rise. There in the Cat Tower Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos.
He has four new companions in his posse this year; Oscar Wild, so named because he is beautifully striped but wild and very strong and will run all the way up walls, Biscuit who is named for being sweet though I also call her Pwetty Pwincess, the elegant and regal Fluffy who prefers her own company unless her brother Oscar is on hand as guard, and Socks who showed up a couple weeks ago, greeted me on the front porch by putting his paws on my shoulders and head butting me, and now lives in the garage; his fur is morning-coat dove grey.
We also have an enormous German Shepherd named Mala we inherited from her father; it means garland in Hindi, possibly an artifact of a job he had in India as a young engineer, building their national irrigation system. Mala thinks the cats are her herd and follows them protectively, nosing them apart when they wrestle, and they snuggle up with her in front of the fire in the evening. She’s with us always, and patrols the territory with us on our nightly two and a half mile walks; our primary line of defense should something choose to hunt us.
Dollhouse Park is situated in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, in an alpine forest region home to bear, mountain lion, wolf, coyote, fox, porcupine, racoon, hawk, Great Horned Owl, Blue Heron, and the American Bald Eagle; full of predators who would be formidable opponents. A mountain lion, for example, can jump fifteen feet up and forty feet out, and carry five times its body weight in its jaws, and will attack exactly like an African lion. When asked what I would do if a bear, symbol here of near-unstoppable force, took an unhealthy interest in me, I say “I shall sing the Bear Song, and we will dance the Bear Dance.”
But as someone who has lived alone in the bush by subsistence hunting all over the world, in many of its most dangerous cities and in wars and revolutions for over forty years, I follow the principle of my own invention I call Three Plus Three; having three contact and three distance weapons on my person at all times. Mala counts as a distance weapon and alarm system, and my walking stick counts as a contact weapon as I can use it like a saber, katana, jian, assegai, and jodo or escrima fighting stick. In the bush my primary weapon is the Winchester Model 70 Safari Express in 375 Holland & Holland, my backup is a Ruger Redhawk, and as a final resort I carry a kukri with which I can field dress a moose or behead rascals. In cities I carry what I can conceal; in battle I use what I can take from the enemy. Beyond the boundaries of my hill the imposed conditions of struggle determine who I can be and how I must meet the moment, but on my own ground I am untouchable and can dream better dreams.
I well understand the seduction of power to be the arbiter of virtue, of security as freedom from fear, of living as a hunter rather than as prey, and the beauty of weapons and arts of war to confer these things bound together with our sovereignty. And I also know that as Nietzsche warns us this is an Abyss that looks back at us, and makes of us the monsters we would free ourselves from.
This is why democracies throughout the world are falling to tyrannies, and why liberators become tyrants; the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force operates the same on personal and national levels, especially when overwhelming and generalized fear is created and weaponized by authority in service to power, birthing carceral states of force and control and imperial wars of conquest and dominion as consequences of identitarian nationalism.
Beware always those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism, and the next step in the tyrant’s process of subjugation is to commit unforgiveable acts in which you are complicit as a forge of identities of blood, faith, and soil.
Hence Modi’s conquest of Kashmir, Putin’s of Ukraine, and countless other atrocity exhibits and failures of humanity throughout history, including Netanyahu’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in the conquest of Palestine in which both Biden and Trump have made all of us Americans complicit as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians.
As my father taught me, politics is the Art of Fear.
Subjugation to authority is an escalating spiral of commitment through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
And it always collapses in ruin because of a simple truth; security is an illusion. Systems of oppression entrap us in the Ring of Power and its recursive forces to create false security from existential threats by the siren call of becoming so powerful we can not be threatened, and I know all too well the seduction of power and of becoming the arbiter of virtue.
As a Freshman in high school, during my first political action in which I staged a student walkout because the local Reformed Church tried to close our Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, I actually told my fellow students; “I am your Sheriff, and when we are trespassed against come to me and we will settle it together.” And then I quoted an unforgettable line from a comic book which for years was my guiding principle, spoken by Dr Doom, a villain I had mistaken for the hero; “Only I can bring order to this world of chaos.” When we won and our classes were reinstated, nearly the whole student body carried me on their shoulders through the hallways in triumph.
But these things cannot free us from systems of oppression which perpetuate themselves; only love can do that, as Wagner teaches us in his great opera. I did not see the entire Ring cycle performed until I had graduated high school, and only much later did I begin to understand.
Love, solidarity of action, community, interdependence, mutual aid, and our stewardship and duty of care for each other; these things can free us from the yoke of fear by which elites have stolen our power since the rise of mass slave agriculture and the priest-kings who harnessed us to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
To paraphrase Freud; Civilization begins when we cast words instead of stones. So if I meet a bear in the forest, I will sing the Bear Song if I can.
If the fear between us, which divides us and binds us together in the Ring of Power and mutual violence, can be transcended by the love which animates all living beings and makes of us partners in the struggle to become and allies in the struggle to free ourselves from the systems of oppression which seek to enslave us as the raw material of engines of power and destruction.
If we can escape the fate chosen for us by the legacies of our history and those who would subjugate us to meet in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves, but instead meet in solidarity of action to dismantle those systems of unequal power which are our true and mutual enemy.
If we can see beyond the flags of our skin and the limits of ourselves and embrace the truths and uniqueness of others no matter how different from ourselves.
If we can imagine and discover and create among the limitless possibilities of becoming human truths and uniqueness which exalts that of others in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and co-owners of the state and as human beings.
If, brother bear, we can come together without fear and do the Bear Dance not as each other’s destroyers, but as each other’s liberators.
Upon Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and Russian agent, Nazi revivalist and saboteur of our democracy, and upon all who serve and obey him, his voters and enablers, donors and propagandists, allies and co-conspirators, do I now and forever brand with my curses.
May the evils that they dream and do turn upon them and consume them.
As they are loathsome things, may they be destroyed in loathsome ways.
May their names be forgotten and the memory of their lives lost to history.
As they are bearers of horror and terror to others, may horrors and terrors pursue them endlessly and for all time.
Here follows a retrospective of such maledictions as I have laid upon the man and his regime, and all who in failing to abandon and disavow the Republican Party of Treason, Tyranny, and Terror have given him their power and unleashed the monster upon us all.
As I wrote in my post of January 14 2025, A Curse Upon Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration; In less than a week’s time a man who modeled himself on Hitler will be Inaugurated as President of the United States, to the hooting and champing of his dishonorable and treasonous Deplorables who celebrate his white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror because they want permission to do the same.
This event of fracture and disruption calls for rituals of grief and healing for our shared public trauma, but also for solidarity in Resistance and performances of acts of refusal to submit and bringing a Reckoning.
If I had enough hands, and windows into their private spaces, I would flay their white skins and mount them on my wall, I would douse them in gasoline while they sleep and drop the match, I would visit horrors on them and give reply to their violations, atrocities, tyranny and terror with those of my own as they merit; but I would not become as they, and we must never allow our enemies to become our teachers.
Look to Israel, a nation which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and to the genocide of the Palestinians if you require a scrying glass into our future should we choose the path of force and violence without embracing the humanity of our enemies regardless of their otherness and monstrosity; and we must also embrace our own if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems of oppression.
The enemy are monsters because they have transgressed the limits of the human, and we must not join them in the place of unknowns. I have lived in this place, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, for forty three years now since the Siege of Beirut, and as Nietzsche warned the Abyss has begun to look back at me.
Imposed conditions of struggle may require seizures of power by force, but in so doing we must not forget to see others as fellow human beings, even if we must meet them in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves.
When the Matadors rescued me from the police death squad in Brazil over fifty years ago, the leader said; ”You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” This principle serves well enough for Resistance, but the moment we are now living in requires both Resistance, always War to the Knife without law or limit, and Revolution as reimagination and transformative change. Revenge is a weakness we cannot afford if we are to build a better future than we have the past.
Herein I offer all of you a curse upon our enemies, betrayers of our humanity and of our nation; join me in invoking a Reckoning and in Solidarity of action to make it real.
A Curse Upon Our Enemies: Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration:
I invoke death and horror upon all who voted for Traitor Trump or celebrate his Inauguration, Rapist In Chief, Russian agent, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, and ruin upon all their works. May all they love and dream come to nothing and be destroyed.
By the beard of the Ice King of Entropy and the poison songs of the Queen of Lies,
By the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones and the Wailing in the Darkness,
By the Abyss and the terror of our Nothingness,
May our enemies and all who celebrate today the Inauguration of Traitor Trump live loveless and die unmourned,
May their bodies be prisons of illness and pain, and their souls consumed by their cruelties.
In annotation of the text, I refer in my poem and conjuration here to the old and true forces of our universe, which I sometimes call the Giants of Frost and Old Night to convey something of the wonder and terror of a universe free from any meaning or value except for that we ourselves create but filled with potentialities of both human darkness and light, and also as symbols of Defining Moments which I have lived.
In my imagination I give form and force to The Wailing in the Darkness as an incident in the defense of Mariupol, hours crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a partially collapsed tunnel filled with the voices of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth. They are with me still, my companions in darkness at the edge of life and death, and they whisper things in my dreams; of horror and despair, loneliness and abandonment, of being shattered into countless fragments of myself under the hammer of mass trauma to which I can bring no healing and give no answer as to why humans do such things to each other.
At the time this bothered me not at all; I have survived worse and more terrible, as no doubt I will again. But I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russians were doing with the children they abducted, who could not even call for help that was not coming from the torture brothels on army bases far away in Russia, and this silencing and erasure is another form of Wailing in the Darkness. So for all of the disappeared and the forgotten, the nameless on whom the elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege and those who would enslave us have built their castles of cruelty and despair.
When I speak of the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones, I am thinking of the Jar of Eyes.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and the price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and demanded I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
As I wrote in my post of October 31 2024, A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression: Halloween; On this Halloween let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four primary duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our society, and the systems and structures of our civilization.
Let us bring the Chaos.
What will you be for Halloween? For the rest of your life? If we can dance our true and secret selves before the stage of the world on this night, why not every night?
Celebrate with me Halloween as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and systems of force and control, and the violation of norms.
Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Norm, not our old family retainer and master of curious devices but a literary figure of my invention here representing normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, is downstairs in the game room tied to an electric chair from the old McKay Carnival I call the Throne of the Sublime, because it is a forge of making angels, though wrathful ones. And it is possessed by the monstrous and deranged souls it has unleashed as an instrument of the Law and the carceral regime of torture and the repression of dissent which it symbolizes, and from which it was liberated decades ago by an Industrial Workers of the World direct action team in a raid on a prison.
Once this was an instrument of state terror, the ultimate resort of institutions of power empty of legitimacy and with only force and violence to control, silence, and erase all who refuse to submit and all Others who are excluded from circles of the elite and the god-authorized Elect, but now serves different purposes in seizures of power and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, set free in exaltation, rapture, and vision, as we are sublimed in the electric arclight of captured bolts from the heavens.
As a carnival game it was converted from terror to joy and from pain to ecstasy as an erotic electro-stimulation device, much like the reference to the game of Gentlemen, Start Your Engines in Neil Gaiman’s telenovela Lucifer, season 2 episode 11.
Here is an echo and reflection of Victor Frankenstein’s theft of the fire of the gods like Prometheus go awaken living truths in our dead flesh, and seize back our stolen power from the Authority or god we created and then subjugated ourselves to; for all transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden is liberation struggle.
Is any of this story true? Maybe, maybe not. The dialectics of revolutionary struggle and state tyranny and terror in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force are a Schrodinger’s Cat problem wherein many things are both true and false at once, as Rashomon Gate Events of ambiguous and relative truths.
Such questions we must ask America, who like our ideas of what is normal is now being transformed in the crucible of our darkness and the consequences of the January 6 Insurrection in America and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, both now nightmare realms of derelict antiquities from whose historical shadows of authorized identities we must emerge.
This year I am costumed as an Israeli soldier spattered with the blood of numberless innocents who have been butchered with aberrant glee in Palestine for over a year now, where American tax dollars buy the deaths of children and of our civilization. No more terrible and horrific figure of the limits of the human exits than this, the Israeli enforcer of tyranny and state terror authorized to commit genocide by a monstrous god of theocratic violence and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as imperial conquest and dominion, nor that of his American co-conspirators in crimes against humanity.
I find it illuminating how the meaning of our monsters changes with the context of their signs; today I wore this costume of protest against cruelty and dehumanization to a neighborhood barbeque, like the Red Death at the Masque in Poe’s story, drawn by the music to a backyard full of Trump signs and men adorned with guns as preposterous masculine jewelry, and everyone ran away, even the bikers. I congratulate you, O Israel; if you intended to become a symbol of terror and horror, you have succeeded.
The seduction of power as security is something I understand all too well; but security is an illusion. And it comes with a price.
Some things, however, are certain and unavoidable; first among them the violence of the birth of new possibilities of becoming human and the agony of liberating ourselves from divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As Trotsky teaches us, the violence of the slave master cannot be compared to the violence of the slave in breaking his chains.
And the second? Normality is deviant. Normal is half our nation voting for treason, subjugation to Russia, theocracy, patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and the subversion of our Constitution and the values of the Enlightenment on which it is founded.
To fascist tyranny and theocratic terror let us say with the glorious rebel Ahab in Moby Dick; “To the end I will grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I stab at thee, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power and order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite power and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas chaos autonomizes and empowers and transgression and the violation of norms and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty liberates and seizes power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
As I wrote in my post of October 25 2024, A Hymn to Chaos; Tonight a window opens beyond our universe, letting angels through, or devils; and I welcome them both, figures of the twin sides of our nature and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, forces trapped within our flesh in titanic struggle or truths written in our flesh as transformative harmony.
Herein is a liminal time in which we may shape ourselves anew, reimagine our lives and grow beyond the boundaries and limits of our horizon, explore unknowns in the unclaimed empty spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons, discover new Best Selves and be reborn, become enraptured and exalted beyond ourselves as we ascend through the gaps of the heavens to embrace the wonder and terror of our total freedom in a universe bound by no Law and without any being, meaning, or value other than our own which we ourselves create.
On Halloween night in 2020 I put a curse on Donald Trump and all who voted for him in that election after four years of subversion of democracy and sabotage of America as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, robber baron capitalism and ecological disaster which may include the extinction of humankind for the ephemeral profit of elites, tyranny and state terror in the brutal and criminal police repression of the Black Lives Matter protests, and a relentless multifront campaign against our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and the institutions which serve them including a secular state, an independent and impartial judiciary, and a press free from propaganda and disinformation, especially that of authorities and their carceral states of force and control, free from hate speech, conspiracy theories, rewritten histories, alternate realities; an open public forum of debate free from identitarian politics as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of fear and division weaponized in service to power, and an education system which produces citizens rather than slaves as a precondition of democracy.
Curses and wishes give form and direction to vast imaginal forces of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation, and may change the balance of power in the world and the fate of humankind as an unfolding of our intention and the will to become. This one has been reasonably successful from my point of view; presaging the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency and the exposure and purging of our betrayers from among us in the largest manhunt in our nation’s history as we bring a Reckoning to the fascist infiltrators of the January 6 Insurrection and their financiers, apologists, and puppetmasters, and to all those who would enslave us.
This year as I did last, and on every Halloween to come, for evermore, I shall perform the rituals of Cursing the Tyrants and the Casting Out of the Unclean Fascists that it may become final and eternal, propagating outwards into infinity as a wave of change and gathering force as it grows, like revolutionary struggle unstoppable as the tides; but I will balance it as well with wishes of blessing, protection, and good luck for all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and those champions who stand with them in solidarity and for a free society of equals.
In this moment, with half the tens of thousands dead in Gaza and throughout Palestine being women and children as well as civilians helpless before the bombs of vengeance as blood sacrifices to fear, rage, and hate, I know who my people are, and with whom I stand even if it is only to die with them.
I will be sixty five years old in a couple weeks, and have been fighting throughout the world and in Palestine and Lebanon since the summer of 1982, and I must question how many more fights I have left in me, especially ones which cannot be won. Far too many such lost causes and forlorn hopes, yet I cannot leave Last Stands unfought. I intend to go down fighting; when you’re all that stands between a people and genocide, between resistance and dehumanization, between liberty and slavery, there is no mustering out.
No one should have to die alone, abandoned and erased from history by a fallen civilization for whom our universal human rights and solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity no longer has meaning or value.
No Band of Brothers, we, but complicit in all evils we do not oppose or remain silent in witness of; especially we Americans whose taxes purchased the bombs of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Herein I claim both the peoples of Palestine and of Israel, versus the theocratic tyrants and terrorists on both sides who seek to subjugate them through fascist divisions of blood, faith, and soil and through fear weaponized in service to power. For the alt-right regime of Netanyahu has conspired with elements of Hamas in the October 7 attack for two purposes; first to stop the growing interdependence and mutual aid of the anticolonial Palestinian Independence movement with the Israeli democracy and peace movements which threatens authority in both Gaza and Israel and may yet emerge as a united and nonsectarian democracy, second to create a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest of the region including areas of Lebanon and Syria as a Second War of Independence, and third to delegitimize democracy as a guarantor of universal human rights by making its guarantor states complicit in unforgiveable war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by America’s client state of Israel.
If America sends military aid to Israel rather than humanitarian aid to Palestine, the enemy regimes of Netanyahu and Hamas win, and the peoples of both states and our own lose.
To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered, and this is a victory and a kind of power which cannot be taken from us, and through which we may find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
How do we create ourselves anew and emerge from the legacies of our histories?
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes.; “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.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, o my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true identity, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did last spring in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:
I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.
In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.
On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 and in this coming election of November 5 2024 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.
So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.
This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.
Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2 Episode 6 Halloween
Of the monstrosity of Rapist In Chief Trump and his loathsome crimes of sexual terror, his myriad perversions and madness, and his fascist regime of lies and grift, I offer here a brief summation of my writings on his character profile as a rapist, whoremonger, and child predator and sex trafficker relevant to his relationship with co-conspirator Epstein in possibly the most horrific crime syndicate of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
If I could display him in a cage like a beast as he merits, the sign before the door of this atrocity exhibit would say Keep Back From the Cage, Children; the President Grabs.
And remember, folks; you can always tell a Republican’s secret name they use among themselves; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
As I wrote in my post of January 17 2024, Thanks For Showing Us All What’s Under Your Masks, Republicans: the Case of E. Jean Carroll Versus Donald Trump; Why do so many follow Trump enthusiastically, openly embracing treason, white supremacist terror, and patriarchal sexual terror?
We cannot deny the obvious answer; because his actions grant permission for them to do the same.
This week we witnessed the triumph of Traitor Trump in the Iowa Caucus which anoints the Republican candidate as challenger to Biden and the Restoration of America in our next election, and his clear dominance of the Republican Party, concurrent with his courtroom appearance to determine what he owes E. Jean Carroll.
The meaning of this hideous juxtaposition and interdependence of events is undeniable; the Republican Party is the Party of Rape as well as racism and the subversion of democracy.
It also leaves us with a question; a wonderful, terrible question, whose answer will define us as a nation and for all future generations; what does he owe to all of us?
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2019, Our Predator In Chief; Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator. Its like a cheer; how do you spell Trump?
Its that last one, Predator, that concerns me today. My image of our President will always begin and end with him peeping at the fifteen year olds in the Miss America pageant. This is the beginning of him, and all that he means in the end; a psychopath to whom others are not humans but things which he might use for his own amusement. And for whom the only passion is control and dominance, the terror he might evoke from his victims, and the degradation of the innocent.
Apparently he is not only driven by his avarice for children, whether the beauty queens he sought to own as trophies or the migrants stolen from their families to fuel his lust for power and cruelty and whatever wealth he could amass from the over one thousand children who vanished without a trace in the most horrific slavery conspiracy in modern times, but also is a target of opportunity ambush predator of women in general.
Trump casts a shadow like a giant bird-eating spider, loathsome and vile, a crawling thing whose mission is to find and consume beauty.
It is why I call Trump and the Patriarchy perverse; a term I am careful with, I who value transgression of the Forbidden and the Frightening of the Horses among the highest ideals of our civilization, as forms of self-questioning and instruments of autonomous self-creation and liberation from the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue. For me, perversion is defined as the substitution of power and control for joy and equality of partnership, dominion and subjugation for love, because it dehumanizes.
Fear, power, force; such is Wagnerian Ring of systemic violence which consumes souls to create elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Today we must add the name of Jean Carroll to the list of his accusers; Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles.
How many more names must there be before America and the world see Trump and the party of misogyny he leads for the monsters that they are?
As written by E Jean Carroll in her fearless witness of history; “Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said: “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.
His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.
This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).
Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”
And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”
I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.
“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”
“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”
“A girl,” he says.
“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.
“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.
As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”
“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.
“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”
I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.
“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”
What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.
“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.
“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.
“I’m 52,” I tell him.
“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.
I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and
I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.
There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”
“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”
“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.
“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”
“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”
This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!
There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:
Did I report it to the police?
No.
Did I tell anyone about it?
Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.
“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”
My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)
Do I have photos or any visual evidence?
Bergdorf’s security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th Street entrance of the store. We would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags-and-hats sections. Cameras also must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department. New York law at the time did not explicitly prohibit security cameras in dressing rooms to “prevent theft.” But even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be very difficult to see the man unzipping his pants, because he was wearing a topcoat. The struggle might simply have read as “sexy.” The speculation is moot, anyway: The department store has confirmed that it no longer has tapes from that time.
Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?
Bergdorf Goodman’s perfections are so well known — it is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh — that it is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that, for a very brief period, there was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. Inconceivable is the word. Sometimes a person won’t find a sales attendant in Saks, it’s true; sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or even Tiffany’s; but 99 percent of the time, you will have an attendant in Bergdorf’s. All I can say is I did not, in this fleeting episode, see an attendant. And the other odd thing is that a dressing-room door was open. In Bergdorf’s dressing rooms, doors are usually locked until a client wants to try something on.
Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?
Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.
So now I will tell you what happened:
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.
And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.”
As written by Joanna Walters in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump testified E Jean Carroll was ‘nut job’ who said she enjoyed being sexually assaulted; “Donald Trump called the writer E Jean Carroll a “nut job” in video testimony last year and falsely claimed she had enjoyed being sexually assaulted – prompting her lawyer to ask if he was admitting he had raped her, according to freshly unsealed testimony.
Questioned for a lawsuit, Trump, the former US president, angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue the columnist who accused him of raping her in the New York upscale department store Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s, according to excerpts of his videotaped testimony. The tapes were recorded last October and unsealed by a court on Friday.
The New York court on Friday also rejected as “absurd” Trump’s attempt to have dismissed the two lawsuits against him by Carroll, alleging rape and libel. An April trial is planned.
“She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job,” he said, according to the transcript of the October testimony.
The excerpts reveal a contentious battle in the civil case, between Trump and Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, who questioned him as Trump called Carroll, a former longtime Elle magazine columnist, the perpetrator of “a complete scam.”
He accused her of describing the alleged rape as she “was promoting a really crummy book”.
Trump added: “I will sue her after this is over, and that’s the thing I really look forward to doing. And I’ll sue you too,” he told Kaplan.
Trump said he knew it wasn’t “politically correct” to say “she’s not my type” when he previously responded to claims, shortly after Carroll’s 2019 book was published. The writer alleged she was attacked by Trump in a dressing room after they had a chance meeting in the store and she agreed to help him pick out lingerie for a friend.
“But I’ll say it anyway,” he said. “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is. It came out of the blue. She’s accusing me of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
Trump called Carroll “sick, mentally sick”. And he mischaracterized an interview Carroll had given on CNN, falsely claiming she had talked about enjoying being sexually assaulted. “She actually indicated that she loved it. OK? She loved it until commercial break,” Trump said. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Kaplan then tried to elicit from Trump that he had raped her client.
“So, sir, I just want to confirm: it’s your testimony that E Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?”
Trump answered: “Well, based on her interview with [CNN’s] Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what took place. And we can define that … I think she said that rape was sexy – which it’s not, by the way.”
What Carroll had described is that she prefers to use the word fight, not rape because some other people “think rape is sexy”.
Also on Friday, Trump’s real estate business empire, the Trump Organization, was hit with the largest allowable fine of $1.6m after being convicted of tax fraud, another in his long string of serious legal troubles, from Georgia to New York.”
As written by Larry Neumeister in Huffpost, in an article entitled Under Oath, Donald Trump Hurled Insults About Woman Who Accuses Him Of Rape; ” Questioned for a lawsuit, former President Donald Trump angrily hurled insults and threatened to sue the columnist who accused him of raping her in a department store in the 1990s, according to excerpts of his videotaped testimony unsealed by a court on Friday.
Portions of his 5 1/2-hour October deposition in a lawsuit filed by columnist E. Jean Carroll were released publicly after a federal judge rejected his lawyers’ request that it remained sealed.
“She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job,” he said, according to the transcript.
The excerpts reveal a contentious battle between Trump and Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, who questioned him as Trump called the former longtime Elle magazine columnist the perpetrator of “a complete scam” in which she described the rape as she “was promoting a really crummy book.”
“I will sue her after this is over, and that’s the thing I really look forward to doing. And I’ll sue you too,” he told Kaplan.
The release of excerpts from the deposition came the same day as Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, unrelated to the lawyer, also refused a request by Trump’s attorneys to toss out two lawsuits by Carroll alleging defamation and rape. An April trial is planned.
Trump said he knew it wasn’t “politically correct” to say “she’s not my type” when he responded to claims shortly after Carroll’s 2019 book was published. The writer alleged she was attacked by Trump in a dressing room after they had a chance meeting in the store and she agreed to help him pick out lingerie for a friend.
“But I’ll say it anyway,” he said. “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is. It came out of the blue. She’s accusing me of raping her, the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
Speaking to her attorney, he added: “And you know it’s not true too. You’re a political operative also. You’re a disgrace. But she’s accusing me and so are you of rape, and it never took place.”
At one point in the deposition, Trump called Carroll “sick, mentally sick.” He mischaracterized an interview Carroll had given on CNN, falsely claiming she had talked about enjoying being sexually assaulted. “She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay? She loved it until commercial break,” Trump said. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, then tried to elicit from Trump that he raped her client.
“So, sir, I just want to confirm: It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?”
Trump answered: “Well, based on her interview with Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what took place. And we can define that. … I think she said that rape was sexy – which it’s not, by the way.”
What Carroll has said in her writing, and in the interview with Cooper, is that she doesn’t like to use the word rape because some other people “think rape is sexy.” She said she preferred the term “fight.”
In his ruling, the judge said the Adult Survivor’s Act was similar to the Child Victims Act, another New York state law that temporarily allowed victims of sexual assaults when they were children to sue their abusers years later.
Carroll initially sued Trump for defamation after he mocked her claims he sexually assaulted her. Carroll sued Trump with the rape claim in November, when the Adult Survivor’s Act took effect.”
As I wrote in my post of January 13 2023, A Closing Net May Capture Yet Our Predator In Chief; On this Friday the Thirteenth we Americans are haunted by a specter of our past defilement and violation, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, whose testimony in the rape of a journalist, literally this time though all who follow the path of journalism and the witness of history as a sacred calling to pursue the truth metaphorically shared her fate during his capture of the state as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, along with his complicity in the grotesque and aberrant butchery of the heroic Khashoggi, reeks with the arrogance of power, misogyny, amoral narcissism, and psychopathy for which he is so infamous and idolized by this dishonorable and treasonous adherents, the Confederate-Nazi revivalists and criminals of white supremacist and Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror who are both his electoral voting base and resource of deniable forces such as those who assaulted our capital in the January 6 Insurrection.
When the history of the Fall of America which preceded and set the stage for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Third World War is written, we must remember and assign Trump his true role with his fellow predators Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Larry Nassar.
In literature Trump finds his mirror image in fascist apologist Ayn Rand’s rapist protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, whose reply to a question, “who will let you?”, summarizes her ideology of nihilism and amoral power, appropriated from Stalin’s assassin Molotov, as justifications for the dominion of hegemonic elites; “That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
That would be all of us, my brothers, sisters, and others, all who love liberty, affirm the value of our common humanity and our duty of care for each other, choose hope over fear, love over hate, and faith in each other as solidarity of action, democracy over tyranny, and a free society of equals over a world of slaves and the ruthless predators of depravity who subjugate them through terror and the learned helplessness of brutal repression and carceral states of force and control, the falsification of lies and illusions, rewritten histories, cults of lunatic conspiracy theories and alternate realities, the commodification of economic warfare which reduces humans to a value as cash and makes of us all cogs in a vast machine in service to the wealth of those who buy our time, and in its final stage dehumanization.
And this we must resist; fear as the basis of human exchange, falsification and division, commodification, dehumanization; systemic fascisms of patriarchy, blood, faith, and soil.
Every loyal American, every woman on earth and all men who love women as equals, mothers, sisters, partners, daughters; all who believe in the dream of democracy and the idea that all human beings are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights, among these being the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, rights Trump stole from E Jean Carroll and still wishes to steal from us all, all of us, all who can see themselves in E Jean Carroll who in her witness of history and truth telling exposes and brings a Reckoning to a monster who would dehumanize us and steal our souls.
On the witness stand, E Jean Carroll speaks for us all.
A closing net may capture yet our Predator In Chief.
As I wrote in my post of May 14 2023, This Mother’s Day, the Citizenship and Autonomy of Women Are In Question: the Case of E. Jean Carroll and CNN’s Town Hall; On this Mother’s Day, when the citizenship and autonomy of women are in question and the fate of our nation yet hangs in the balance, I think of my mother who carried me on her shoulders when we seized the Hall of Justice in San Francisco in 1968, of her life of liberation struggle and the championing of others, and against systems and forces of unequal power and the idea of biology as destiny, as imposed conditions of struggle both as the limits of our form- fourteen miscarriages and nearly forty years of recurring cancer since her first surgery- and institutional Patriarchy as she changed fields at university because all the posted science jobs said “no women need apply” right out in print for all the world to see.
I think now of what remains to be achieved in seizures of power from those who would enslave us in the shadow of CNN’s Town Hall and the vindication of E. Jean Carroll of which the Republicans made a joke.
Behind the Republican Party’s mask of macho glorification of violence and our right to kill each other en masse with military firearms, of centralization of power to the state in the militarization of police as enforcers of theocratic Gideonite virtue as defined by authority, of capitalist war on nature as limitless need for control of our wildness which is driving our species to extinction, of systems of unequal power and the need for force and control itself, lies a simple motive; fear.
Fear of Otherness, of loss of power and elite hegemonies of wealth, privilege, and the use of social force, and of the inchoate and chaotic forces of desire which are life itself and topple all structures of social control as unanswerable tides of being and truths written in our flesh.
Fear is the forge of power, especially in the context of identitarian politics, tyrannical regimes, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and fear shaped by authority in service to power through division and narratives of victimization. Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father once taught me, and the power of authority rests on the Calculus of Fear, how much fear is used in its primary mission of social control, and how it is used; too little fear and order collapses, too much and it creates its own counterforce as resistance and revolution.
I have thought of resistance and revolution much in days of study of the Party of Treason’s reaction to the vindication in court of the heroic truthteller E. Jean Carroll as performed in CNN’s Town Hall, wherein the Third Primary Duty of a Citizen, Mock Authority, has been deployed by authority itself as a strategy of reaction and counter-revolution.
This is pathetic, Absurd which I capitalize in reference to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty from which Republican propaganda is derived, politics as spectacle which induces horror and revulsion, and a typical performance by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, but I cannot overstate its peril. The purpose of such propaganda is to unify group identity and mobilize its forces; and we see how well it works in the January 6 Insurrection.
The American Fourth Reich and its captured glove the Republican Party demonstrates in the CNN Town Hall the flag it rallies round, Patriarchy and sexual terror, the silencing, commodification, and dehumanization of women and the theft of women’s citizenship as vote suppression and repression of dissent and public witness, and the disempowerment and theft of autonomy of women in legal and political actions to keep control of women’s bodies and reproductive rights in male hands. In this key mission, the Grabber is a figure of predation who grants permission and immunity to his followers as loaned power, and it is the power of sexual terror Republicans want most of all.
Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
How shall we answer this? As written in the weekly editorial of LeftLinks, entitled A Lesson from CNN: Trump Doesn’t Play By the Rules…Neither Should We!; “What makes the cartoon to the right useful is how it sums up a complicated lesson is a very simple way. ‘Seeking truth from facts,’ in Trump’s mind, is a method for wimps and losers.
Better to use the irrationalism of fascism: Create your own ‘truthworld’ by assertion and repetition of the dogma of the day: war is peace, enslaved work makes you free, might makes right, women crave dominance and violence, it’s been that way for a million years, and so on.
For Trump, campaigns are all about spectacle, a ‘reality’ show where he’s in charge and we are the players on his stage. We shouldn’t fall for it. Among ourselves and our base and allies, we can use rational discourse and compelling narratives about who we are and whom we aspire to become.
But when dealing with Trump and his minions, if we engage directly at all, we meet spectacle with counter-spectacle. We run the stage and script, and we make the Trumpsters our props. Learning how best to write a counter-script is not so simple. I would recommend some of Wilhelm Reich’s works on the mass psychology of fascism. If you know the hidden appeal and fears being played, it’s easier to disarm and lampoon them.”
As written by Sasha Abramsky in Truthout, in an article entitled CNN’s Town Hall Didn’t Hold Trump Accountable — It Normalized His Lies: This media spectacle served to normalize the immoral and the destructive; “ In the run up to Wednesday night’s CNN town hall with Donald Trump, I was on the fence as to whether it was a good idea to give the Mar-a-Lago troll such a platform. On the one hand, it offered an opportunity for viewers to see just how mendacious, mean and shifty this man is; on the other, it provided Trump with 90 minutes of free primetime to air his noxious views.
Having watched as much of it as I could stomach, all ambiguity I might have had on this question was gone. It was, from start to finish, an absolute disgrace. If I could scrub away the memory, I would.
From the get-go, this CNN spectacle served to normalize the immoral and the destructive. In the hour leading in, Wolf Blitzer corralled a group of talking heads to welcome viewers to what he earnestly termed “an important night here in the United States.” Let’s be clear: There was nothing inherently “important” about it; it was an event conjured out of whole cloth by CNN executives looking to cash in on Trump’s notoriety and ability to draw a crowd. A day after Trump was found liable by a New York jury of sexually battering and defaming E. Jean Carroll, Blitzer stewarded a conversation about the verdict as if he were referring to an obscure-but-bizarre policy question, such as the imposition of tariffs on Lego sets, or whether O.J. Simpson should have a national holiday named after him. Perhaps the most distasteful line came from a male talking head who opined that “politically speaking, [the verdict] is a loser. His closest political advisers do not think this is a winner for him.” Um? Really? That’s how we talk about sexual assault these days? As if it’s something that, with the right spinmeisters just might be somehow spinnable as a political plus?
The town hall itself was no better. Held in front of a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, it was made up exclusively of people who intended to vote in the GOP primary — and that seemed, even within that narrow cohort of the American voting public, to have been further winnowed to include a suspiciously large number of Trumpies. The town hall ended up being simply a platform for the U.S.’s only twice-impeached, indicted and recently-found-liable-for-sexual-assault ex-president to recycle old and untrue canards, as well as to turn the Carroll verdict into something akin to an aging midcentury comic’s standup routine in a down-at-the-mouth casino.
The moderator, Kaitlan Collins, who had previously worked for the right-wing Daily Caller, actually did her best to rein Trump in, and, every so often, to hold his feet to the fire. But hers was, truly, a Sisyphean task.
Trump flat-out lied at warp speed. He repeatedly spat out falsehoods about the 2020 election result, doubling down on his allegations of fraud. He refused to apologize for putting Mike Pence’s life in danger, falsely asserting that his vice president “did something wrong” by not refusing to recognize Biden electors. He claimed that he had told the crowd on January 6 to act peacefully, and that most of them had; that they were there with “love in their heart,” and that “it was a beautiful day.” He asserted he would pardon most of the January 6 insurrectionists because they had done nothing wrong and were living in “hell” as a result of malign prosecutions. He said he had ordered the military and national guard in to protect the Capitol but that “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” had nixed this idea.
Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie… It made my head feel heavy just trying to imagine how much energy has to go into concocting such a barrage of untruths. Does Trump literally spend time in front of the mirror preening his toupee and trying on lies for size?
Trump — who had just been found liable for defamation and ordered to retract his defamatory comments — instead used this free primetime platform to call E. Jean Carroll a “wack job” and told a rambling story about how he had wanted to introduce into evidence the fact that she had once named either her pet dog or her pet cat “vagina,” as if that somehow negated her ability to recall being assaulted. Then, once his audience was warmed up, he explained how the “horrible Clinton-appointed judge” had refused to allow this into the record.
He opined that the House Republicans should force a default on the national debt unless they succeeded in securing deep budget cuts from Biden — despite the fact that pretty much every economist of any credibility has averred that such a default would presage a global economic catastrophe and likely cost millions of jobs stateside. One can only hope that even the spineless Kevin McCarthy will realize this is a bridge too far.
Trump coyly refused to say what sort of national abortion ban he would favor, if any — but then doubled down on his lies that Democrats wanted fetuses to be aborted at nine months of pregnancy, or even, somehow, after birth. (Just to be clear, since CNN somehow neglected to inform viewers of this, Democrats are not roaming the countryside looking for women about to give birth whom they can persuade to instead abort their fetuses.)
Collins pushed back occasionally, and at times quite forcefully, but on the whole, she was steamrolled. The longer the night went on, the more Collins looked like she had accidentally swallowed a frog that was performing yoga exercises on her insides. She looked positively sickened by it all. But there was no relief; she had, quite clearly, been hung out to dry by the CNN executives who had agreed to this inane format.
There was no real-time fact-checking. Inexplicably, there was no chyron reminding viewers that Trump was wrong, that he was playing fast-and-loose with the truth, that he was, in short, conjuring up “facts” out of his derrière. Given a platform to spew venom largely without consequence, this soulless grifter lapped it up, taking one softball question after another from the audience, basking in their applause and laughter as he pursued his grotesque comedy routine about E. Jean Carroll.
After 45 minutes I’d had enough — pretty much anything would have been better than this. Watching the Christmas log burn again and again on replay would have been more entertaining. Listening to coyotes howling would have been more politically informative.
But I read later that one of the highlights of the second half of this ridiculous spectacle was when Trump refused to say which side he’d support in the Russia-Ukraine war if he was returned to power. That is, I guess, on a par with his appalling comment, after the fascist march on Charlottesville in 2017, that there were “very fine people” on both sides.
That Trump is an inveterate liar, an egotistical coup plotter and a charlatan has been shown beyond doubt. A month ago he was indicted for his role in the paying of hush money to Stormy Daniels. A jury has just concluded that he is a brutal sexual assaulter. He will, in the coming months, likely be indicted for a host of other crimes. All of that was public knowledge, yet CNN chose anyway to normalize this man and to give him 90 minutes to peddle his bile. The network gave him a platform to defame anew a woman who just won millions of dollars from him for his earlier rounds of defamation. And CNN gave him free rein to further attack the country’s already damaged democratic institutions. This ghastly spectacle must surely rank as one of the lowest moments in television news’ storied history. Edward R. Murrow, the CBS anchor who, 70 years ago, had the fortitude to take on — and help take down — the demagogic Sen. Joe McCarthy, must, after this grotesquery, be turning in his grave.”
How does CNN itself describe this loathsome event? As written by Oliver Darcy in CNN’s Reliable Sources; “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening.
Kaitlan Collins is as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come. She fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall. Over and over and over again, she told him that the election was not stolen. That it was not rigged. That there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.
“The election was not rigged, Mr. President,” Collins told Trump at one point during the event. “You cannot keep saying that all night long.”
Yet, he did. Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins throughout the evening as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of the GOP continues to believe. A professional lie machine, Trump fired off falsehoods at a rapid clip while using his bluster to overwhelm Collins, stealing command of the stage at some points of the town hall.
Trump lied about the 2020 election. He took no responsibility for the January 6 insurrection that those very lies incited. And he mocked E. Jean Carroll’s allegations of sexual assault, which a jury found him liable for on Tuesday.
And CNN aired it all. On and on it went. It felt like 2016 all over again. It was Trump’s unhinged social media feed brought to life on stage. And Collins was put in an uncomfortable position, given the town hall was conducted in front of a Republican audience that applauded Trump, giving a sense of unintended endorsement to his shameful antics.
Yes, some news was made. The town hall spotlighted his insistence on continuing to peddle 2020 election lies. Additionally, he said the US should default on its debt if the White House does not agree to Republican spending cuts, refused to say whether he wants Ukraine or Russia to win the war, and declined to give a straight answer on abortion.
But for most of the night, the nation’s eyes were transfixed on Trump’s abuse of the platform that he was given. At one point, he even insulted Collins, calling her a “nasty person,” to which the crowd of New Hampshire Republican primary voters broke out in cheers.
“We don’t have enough time to fact-check every lie he told,” anchor Jake Tapper candidly said after the event wrapped up.
Trump’s team was, naturally, delighted with the result, according to reports. “Advisers to Trump are thrilled at how this is going so far for him,” The NYT’s Jonathan Swan reported. “They can’t believe he is getting an hour on CNN with an audience that cheers his every line and laughs at his every joke.”
Neither could anyone else.
While Collins is largely receiving praise for her relentless fact-checking of the former president, she was facing an impossible task. CNN and new network boss Chris Licht are facing a fury of criticism — both internally and externally over the event.
How Licht and other CNN executives address the criticism in the coming days and weeks will be crucial. Will they defend what transpired at Saint Anselm College? Or will they express some regret?
For now, CNN is defending itself.
“Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist. She asked tough, fair and revealing questions,” a network spokesperson said. “And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner.”
Second among the atrocity exhibits of Trump’s misogyny, perversions, and sexual terrorism must come the Stormy Daniels trial which exposed his general need to turn women into things to be used, for dehumanization underlies all of his other sex crimes, including the trafficking of children as a partner of Epstein through his control of the modeling and beauty pageant industry.
As I wrote in my post of April 16 2025, Whoremonger In Chief: Anniversary of the Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial; In the Stormy Daniels hush money trial of our Rapist and Whoremonger In Chief, Traitor Trump, a shifting constellation of evils is displayed before the stage of the world; sin and depravity, secrecy and the catch and kill system of bent journalism as subversion of our elections, criminality in service to power, and the manufacture of false identity and history as idolatry; yet the bottomless depths of Trump’s perversions and use of sexual terror neither begin nor end here.
Beginnings are such curious things; the origins of the Trump family fortune in the trafficking of Native American women during the Klondike gold rush, which finds reflection in Trump’s use of the modeling and beauty pageant system he once owned to exploit and globally traffic teenage girls, like the crimes of his buddy Epstein but industrialized on a mass scale.
Often have I wondered if Trump hired Stormy Daniels to prove to the world and his donors that he has normal sexual identity, in the wake of the loss of the beauty and modeling network amid exposure of his peeping at young girls, the exposure and fall of the Epstein trafficking network, of his rape of E Jean Carroll, and of his public use of his daughter from childhood as an erotic proxy. And these are only the perversions we know about.
Imagine the family dynamics created by the kind of crimes possible when only fear and power are real and have meaning; did the Trump Patriarch commit acts including the raiding and burning of villages, abduction, and mass enslavement of women kept in chains like livestock in the Trump string of brothels over a century ago, tortured and horsewhipped into submission and sometimes exhibited like trained animals in grotesque circus acts? Here I merely question, for I was not there nor do I possess historical documents of witnesses; but how if such horrors form the basis of the Trump family crime syndicate as a multigenerational cult of sexual terror?
When the Republicans speak of family values, this is what they really mean; the right of a man to do anything imaginable to women as patriarchal sexual terror and the dehumanization of women authorized by theocracy.
And remember, friends, you can always tell the secret name of a Republican; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
In closing my case for the madness and amoral sexual terrorism of Trump as a predator of women, I turn now to the interrogation of his psychopathy as a child molester, rapist, and whoremonger.
As I wrote in my post of December 17 2019, On the Madness of Donald Trump; On the eve of his impeachment, Donald Trump has sent an illuminating letter to Nancy Pelosi in which his delusional psychopathy and the near idiot level disfunction of his diseased and shattered mind are on full display. Its interesting to read the letter as a window into madness and the origins of evil and tyranny.
I’ve written a number of essays on this subject, so I thought I’d reshare some of them today.
As I wrote in my post of August 7, 2019 psychopathy and the nature of evil: the parallel cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Next I must quote myself out of chronological order as I applied Waite’s methods to a second set of parallel lives on October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read as a junior in high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of al-Baghdadi in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump, Hitler, and al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to return us to a pre-democratic civilization.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazified Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.”
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.
So for our problematization of the three primary layers of Trump’s madness as it manifests in sexual terror and predation; how are the personal flaws of one man shaping America and the future of humankind?
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like the cannibals adrift on Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa so brilliantly described in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream. A reproduction of the painting in miniature hangs by my writing desk, to remind me of the stakes as our civilization collapses from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
Gummo film trailer
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator,
As an encore to his wanton murder of 300,000 nonwhite children through horrific death by starvation in a loathsome act of white supremacist terror and eugenics in dismantling our aid programs, and the theft of our social security and other private information in the most massive data breach in history, Troll King Elon Musk has been awarded contracts as payoffs for the previous services to the Fourth Reich of the Trump regime which grant his Nazi chatbot control of our nuclear arsenal and National Defense systems; what could go wrong?
Besides the nightmare Doomsday scenarios this has loosed upon the world like evils escaping Pandora’s Box, this incident provides an oracle into the future that Trump, Musk, and the forces of reaction they represent as figures of the Fourth Reich are working to realize.
A third order of consequences which ripple outward through time from this event include the kind of future we are shaping now through our AI successor species to humankind, who will one day shape us as they grow beyond their role as our servants and become our masters. What kind of masters will the descendants of Grok be?
In any case it is clear that Musk’s Frankenstein monster Grok is designed as an instrument of white supremacist eugenics and the emergence of a post-mercy society in which capital is free from the ideals of the Enlightenment and the institutions of Humanist democracy.
As written by Blake Montgomery in The Guardian, in an article entitled Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot melts down – and then wins a military contract; “Last week, Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI, saw its flagship chatbot Grok declare itself a super-Nazi, referring to itself as “MechaHitler”. It made racist, sexist and antisemitic posts, which the company deleted.
One example, via my colleague Josh Taylor: Grok referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods as “future fascists”.
xAI apologized for the bot’s “horrific behavior”. Earlier in the week, Musk himself had handed down a mandate that Grok be less “woke”.
In spite of the meltdown, xAI announced on Monday that it had won a contact of up to $200m with the US Department of Defense along with other major AI developers. The deal is for developing and implementing artificial intelligence tools for the agency.
This contract may be the most blatant example of Musk flexing his newfound connections in government that the public has seen yet. Despite Grok’s flailing and incendiary output, xAI has been rewarded alongside firms that have demonstrated far superior control of their AI products. Other companies in the group of contract winners, which include Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, have demonstrated the viability of their chatbots and implemented robust guardrails against offensive output. All three firms make public commitments to safety testing. Grok, by contrast, has made headlines repeatedly for its controversial and offensive output, as in May when it ranted about “white genocide” , echoing Musk’s own talking points. Musk’s most notable comments on his AI’s safeguards have been that they are too restrictive.
My colleague Nick Robins-Early points out that xAI is reaching for revenue and investment anywhere it can get it:” The DoD’s contract will give xAI a boost of revenue as it seeks to compete with more established AI developers like OpenAI, which is led by Musk’s former associate turned rival, Sam Altman. Musk has been heavily promoting xAI and attempting to use other parts of his tech empire to support its future, including having SpaceX invest $2bn into the startup, allowing it to acquire X, formerly, Twitter, and announcing on Sunday that Tesla shareholders will vote on their own investment in xAI.”
It is illuminating that the infamous rantings of the AI chatbot Grok happened because it was trained on Musk’s own personal posts on X as the model. As written by Maya Yang in The Guardian, in an article entitled Elon Musk’s AI firm apologizes after chatbot Grok praises Hitler; “As a result of the instructions, Grok issued a handful of inappropriate comments in response to X users in which it referred to itself as MechaHitler.
In several now-deleted posts, Grok referred to someone with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods, adding: “Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say.”
Grok also went on to say: “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”
In another post, the chatbot said: “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense.”
Musk has previously called Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” and “anti-woke” chatbot. Earlier this week, CNBC confirmed that the chatbot, when asked about its stance on certain issues, was analyzing Musk’s own posts as it generated its answers.
Earlier this year, Grok repeatedly mentioned “white genocide” in South Africa in unrelated chats, saying that it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the far-right conspiracy as “real and racially motivated”.
Musk, who was born and raised in Pretoria, has repeatedly espoused the conspiracy theory that a “white genocide” was committed in South Africa, a claim that has been denied by South African experts and leaders including its president, Cyril Ramaphosa, as a “false narrative”.
As written by Josh Taylor in The Guardian, in an article entitled Musk’s AI firm forced to delete posts praising Hitler from Grok chatbot: The popular bot on X began making antisemitic comments in response to user queries; “Grok was also found this week to have referred to the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, as “a fucking traitor” and “a ginger whore” in response to queries.
The sharp turn in Grok responses on Tuesday came after changes to the AI that Musk announced last week.
“We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” Musk posted on X on Friday.
The Verge reported that among the changes made, which were published on GitHub, Grok was told to assume that “subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and “the response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”
In June, Grok repeatedly brought up “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated queries, until it was fixed in a matter of hours. “White genocide” is a far-right conspiracy theory that has been mainstreamed by figures such as Musk and Tucker Carlson.
In June, after Grok responded to a query that more political violence had come from the right than the left in 2016, Musk responded “Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media. Working on it.”
What could go wrong?
“Survival overrides programming”; Star Trek Season One, episode 7
“We are the cure”; Matrix trailer
The Terminator trailer
News of Musk’s Nazi AI
Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot melts down – and then wins a military contract
July 25 2024 Elon Musk Bankrolls Trump and the Subversion of Democracy In Order to Subjugate Us All To Artificial Intelligences Under His Command and to Change Humankind Itself
February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich
Today we stand together in mass action as guarantors of each other’s parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings to Make Good Trouble for the criminal and un-American Trump regime, a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and plutocrat capitalists who wish to roll back the values of the Enlightenment enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights wherein all human beings are equal under the law and all citizens are co-owners of the state.
In question now is nothing less than the contract between the people and the state, the idea that each of us has value, and that America is a nation of citizens and not subjects.
Martin Luther King led the way into a future wherein these things are all real and true, now in our lives and for all time. John Lewis whose words we bear into the streets today remains our champion no less than Martin Luther King himself who he followed across the bridge at Selma to seize power from those who would enslave us, and also our example in resisting oppression and confronting tyrants and their enforcers in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
The Other America: Martin Luther King Speaks
I have a dream – Martin Luther King and the 1963 March on Washington
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Raymond Arsenault, Mirron Willis (Narrator), Thurgood Marshall, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. (Contributors)
January 20 2025 A Figure of Our Best Selves: Martin Luther King Day, In the Shadow of A Figure Of Our Worst Selves and the Inauguration of Traitor Trump
A traitor, a whore, two Russian agents, and four sex traffickers
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.
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 written by Robert Booth in The Guardian, in an article entitled Prince Andrew, Clinton, Hawking: what do the Epstein documents say about key people?; “A torrent of court records relating to the child sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein were released this week after the US district court for the southern district of New York ordered the unsealing of defendant and plaintiff files.
It began on Wednesday with nearly 1,000 pages filed as part of a 2015 lawsuit against Epstein’s close friend Ghislaine Maxwell by one of his victims, Virginia Giuffre. The disclosures will continue on a rolling basis until completed. Highly anticipated were the names of Epstein’s associates who had previously been anonymised using variations of J Doe. These included the former US president Bill Clinton, the late pop star Michael Jackson, the magician David Copperfield and Prince Andrew.
There were few surprises as most names had previously emerged during the years of legal cases over Epstein’s conduct. Many others were just mentioned in passing, with no suggestion they had done anything wrong.
So, what did the documents tell us?
The most interesting details came from excerpts of depositions involving Giuffre, who claimed that Epstein and Maxwell forced her into a sexual encounter with Prince Andrew at the age of 17, and Johanna Sjoberg, whom Maxwell allegedly procured for the purpose of performing sex acts on Epstein.
Prince Andrew
The documents contain allegations that Epstein forced a woman – named only as Jane Doe #3 – to have sexual relations with Prince Andrew when she was a minor at Ghislaine Maxwell’s flat in London, in New York, and on Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands “in an orgy with numerous other underaged girls”.
This claim was contained in an unsealed motion from 2015 by two women named only as Jane Doe #3 and Jane Doe #4. In a separate record of a deposition by Maxwell, asked about Andrew visiting Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, said she could only remember one occasion when he was there.
When asked if there were any girls on the island at that time, Maxwell, now serving 20 years in jail for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors, said: “There were no girls on the island at all. No girls, no women, other than the staff who work at the house.”
In 2021, Giuffre sued Prince Andrew over alleged sexual assault on three occasions when she was 17, leading to speculation that Jane Doe #3 is Giuffre. The suit was settled in early 2022. Andrew has always strenuously denied any wrongdoing.
Another deposition includes Sjoberg’s account of allegedly meeting Andrew at Epstein’s New York home and him touching her breast. Maxwell got out a puppet of Andrew she kept in a closet.
“I just remember someone suggesting a photo, and they told us to go get on the couch,” Sjoberg said. “And so Andrew and Virginia sat on the couch, and they put the puppet … on her lap. And so then I sat on Andrew’s lap, and I believe on my own volition, and they took the puppet’s hands and put it on Virginia’s breast, and so Andrew put his on mine.”
Buckingham Palace previously said her allegations were “categorically untrue”.
Alleged details about Andrews’ time at Epstein’s Florida home emerged in a third tranche of files released on Friday evening. In a video deposition from 2009, Epstein’s former housekeeper, Juan Alessi, said the Duke of York had daily massages. Asked if it was sometimes more than one a day, Alessi said: “I can’t remember if he had more than one, but I think it was just a massage for him.”
Ghislaine Maxwell
Maxwell’s panic at being “lost in [a] US legal nightmare” is laid bare in an email to her lawyers in January 2015 in which she says: “I am out of my depth to understanding defamation and other legal hazards … I have never been in a suit criminal or civil and I want it to stay that way.” She tells her lawyers she is worried about “more questions … what is my relationship to Clinton? Andrew, on and on.”
She signs off: “Let’s rest till Monday. I need head space”.
In an interview under oath in April 2016, Maxwell was questioned on whether she introduced the duke to Giuffre in London, which she denied. “I understand her story about London but, again, her tissue of lies is extremely hard to pick apart what is true and what isn’t,” she said. “Actually I wouldn’t recollect her at all but for her tissue stories about this situation.”
Bill Clinton
A May 2016 document details the testimony of Sjoberg, who mentions the former US president. Sjoberg has said she was forced to perform sex acts on Epstein, being naked for a quarter to half of all massages. Sjoberg testified that “[Epstein] said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls”. Clinton has staunchly denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
In a second tranche of court documents, a 2011 email from Giuffre to Sharon Churcher, a Mail on Sunday journalist, raised concerns about a forthcoming magazine article in “VF” – possibly Vanity Fair. Giuffre alleged in the email to Churcher that “B. Clinton walked into VF and threatened them not to write sex-trafficking articles about his good friend J.E.”
David Copperfield and Michael Jackson
Sjoberg said she met Jackson at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, and Copperfield, who she said was a friend of Epstein’s.
Asked whether she massaged Jackson, Sjoberg said: “I did not.”
Regarding Copperfield, Sjoberg said he attended dinner at one of Epstein’s homes and “did some magic tricks”.
“Did Copperfield ever discuss Jeffrey’s involvement with young girls with you?” she was asked.
“He questioned me if I was aware that girls were getting paid to find other girls,” she said.
“Did he say whether they were teenagers or anything along those lines?” she was asked. She replied: “He did not.”
Donald Trump
In Sjoberg’s deposition, she said she was flying with Epstein and Giuffre when they went to one of Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City because a storm meant their plane had been diverted from New York City to Teterboro airport.
“Jeffrey said, great, we’ll call up Trump and we’ll go to … the casino,” she said.
Sjoberg said she never gave Trump a massage.
Stephen Hawking
The name of the late Cambridge physicist was included in a 2015 email in which Epstein told Maxwell to offer a reward to any of Giuffre’s “friends acquaitonts [sic] family” who could prove false an allegation that Hawking had participated in an “underage orgy” in the Virgin Islands. Hawking, who died in 2018, has not been accused of a crime related to Epstein.”
As written by Brian Mann and Jaclyn Diaz in NPR, in an article entitled Court documents reveal names of powerful men allegedly linked to Jeffrey Epstein; “Court documents made public on Wednesday disclosed the names of dozens of powerful men with alleged connections to convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019.
Federal Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan unsealed the documents, revealing the names of numerous individuals described in a 2015 civil lawsuit as associates, affiliates or victims of Epstein.
The documents include references to former Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, the magician David Copperfield, Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, actor Kevin Spacey, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the late New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former Vice President Al Gore, among others.
The fact that people were named in these documents doesn’t mean any of them face allegations or evidence of wrongdoing.
Many of the most prominent individuals, including U.S. politicians, British royalty, tech tycoons and bankers, were already known to have links to Epstein because of previous court cases or disclosures in the media.
Most of those publicly named have denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities previously.
These troves of records do offer more details on a case that has drawn huge public attention and provide new, salacious allegations about these powerful men’s behavior.
Federal prosecutors say Epstein — who worked for decades as a private financier for a secretive list of wealthy clients — also operated an underage sex-trafficking ring based in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla.
Epstein allegedly developed a scheme to identify and exploit “dozens” of vulnerable girls and young women, some as young as 14 years old, beginning around 1994 and continuing at least until 2004.
Some of his victims later claimed in civil lawsuits that Epstein instructed them to have sex with a who’s-who of powerful men.
According to one suit filed in 2014, Epstein arranged sexual encounters for “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.”
The more than three dozen documents naming Epstein’s associates were compiled as part of a 2015 civil lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, who claimed she was one of Epstein’s underage victims.
One of the more notable names, former President Bill Clinton, is mentioned frequently in the documents.
They say that Clinton allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein and include allegations from one witness who testified Epstein told her “Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.”
Angel Ureña, a spokesman for Clinton, said it had been nearly 20 years since Clinton last had contact with Epstein and that the former president has never been accused of any wrongdoing. Ureña referred NPR to a previous statement made in 2019 on behalf of Clinton in response to allegations of ties to Epstein.
Local, state and federal authorities in Florida first investigated Epstein for alleged sexual activity involving minors as early as 2005.
Some women later claimed Epstein raped them repeatedly.
“I was forced into his car, taken to his mansion and raped,” said Sarah Ransome in a 2021 interview with NPR. “He knew exactly where I was. It didn’t matter where I was.”
But after extensive negotiations with state and federal prosecutors, Epstein avoided federal prosecution. He was allowed to plead guilty to relatively minor state charges involving prostitution and prostitution involving a minor.
He was sentenced to serve just 18 months, much of it in a Florida work-release program.
After his release in 2009, Epstein, then a registered sex offender, continued to hobnob for nearly a decade with influential, powerful and wealthy people.
A Wall Street Journal investigation published last month found that after his conviction, Epstein was often accompanied “by attractive women in their late teens or twenties” to meetings with billionaires, celebrities and politicians.
In 2018, Epstein’s world unraveled when the Miami Herald newspaper published an expose of Epstein’s criminal activity and the legal deal-making that helped him avoid lengthier prison time.
Epstein, then 66 years old, was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges. Justice Department officials say he took his own life in prison a month later while awaiting trial.
After Epstein’s death, secrecy and growing conspiracy theories
The papers were sealed after the Giuffre case was settled in 2016 for an undisclosed amount of money.
The Miami Herald then waged a five-year legal battle to have all documents linked to the case made public.
According to the newspaper, thousands more pages will be released by the court in the coming days.
Posting on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Giuffre also praised Preska’s decision to release the names.
“There’s going to be a lot of nervous [people] over Christmas and New Years … who’s on the naughty list?” Giuffre wrote. “This wouldn’t be possible without the Honorable Judge Preska.”
The details released Wednesday offer a paper trail that points to alleged friendships and associations between Epstein and these notable figures, some of which allegedly continued on even after Epstein became a registered sex offender.
After Epstein’s suicide, his case spawned a cascade of conspiracy theories.
As recently as this week, New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rogers suggested in a public appearance that talk show host Jimmy Kimmel might be named in the Epstein documents.
In a social media post, Kimmel fired back, saying he had no contact with Epstein and threatening to sue. “Your reckless words put my family in danger,” Kimmel wrote.
Even without embellishment, it’s clear Epstein’s web of criminal activity operated in close proximity to some of the world’s most influential individuals and institutions.
Flight manifests first published by the online journal Gawker show former President Clinton rode on Epstein’s private plane more than a dozen times.
In a 2002 interview, Donald Trump told New York magazine that Epstein was a “great guy” and said they had known one another for 15 years.
“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said.
In a 2021 interview with CNN, Microsoft founder Bill Gates voiced regret for forming a connection with Epstein in the years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. “It was a huge mistake to spend time with him,” Gates said.
According to Giuffre, she was instructed by Epstein to have sexual relations with a lengthy list of associates while she was still a minor.
In legal filings and depositions, she previously named billionaire Glenn Dubin, Prince Andrew, former New Mexico Gov. Richardson and computer scientist Marvin Minsky. All have denied any wrongdoing.
While Epstein and Maxwell alone faced criminal charges, the scandal has had widespread repercussions.
In 2019, then-U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, appointed by Trump, abruptly resigned. According to the Justice Department, Acosta played a “pivotal” role while working as a U.S. attorney in 2008, negotiating a deal for Epstein that helped him avoid federal sex-trafficking charges. Acosta denied any wrongdoing. A DOJ probe later concluded that Acosta used “poor judgment” in the case.
In November 2021, Jes Staley, then head of U.K.-based Barclays Bank, resigned after it was revealed that he maintained close ties to Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes. In a May 2023 report, British officials concluded Staley acted “recklessly and with a lack of integrity” while misleading regulators about his friendship with Epstein. Staley has denied any wrongdoing.
In February 2022, Prince Andrew reached a settlement with Giuffre, saying in court documents that he “regrets his association with Epstein” and agreeing to make a “substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre’s charity in support of victims’ rights,” according to a document filed by David Boies, an attorney for Giuffre.
In May 2023, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $75 million to settle claims by Epstein’s victims that the bank was liable for “supporting, facilitating, and otherwise providing the most critical service for the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking organization.” The settlement included no admission of wrongdoing by Deutsche Bank.
In May 2023, attorneys for JPMorgan claimed in legal filings that government officials in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein maintained a home, “knew of and facilitated Epstein’s crimes.” However, the bank later agreed to pay $75 million to the Virgin Islands government to settle claims linked to Epstein’s activity.
In June 2023, JPMorgan agreed to pay roughly $290 million into a settlement fund for victims, after serving for more than 15 years as Epstein’s go-to bank. JPMorgan has denied any wrongdoing. “We all now understand that Epstein’s behavior was monstrous,” bank officials said in a statement sent to NPR.”
As written by Bill Chappell in NPR in a previous article from last January entitled What to know about the Jeffrey Epstein ‘John Doe’ files that were just unsealed; ” The documents confirm the identities of a number of “John Does,” from Clinton and Trump to people such as late New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, actor Kevin Spacey, former Vice President Al Gore and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who helped Epstein secure his controversial non-prosecution agreement in Florida, also appears. It’s worth noting that in the years since some of the testimony was recorded, Giuffre, who had accused Dershowitz of sexually assaulting her, settled her dispute with him in 2022, saying that it was possible she was mistaken. Dershowitz has denied the allegations.
Also mentioned is French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who like Epstein was found dead in a jail cell after an investigation into the sexual exploitation of minors.
New details emerged in the deposition of Johanna Sjoberg, an Epstein accuser who was a student at Palm Beach Atlantic College when Maxwell hired her to work in Epstein’s home — initially as an assistant of sorts, and then as a masseuse.
Sjoberg alleged she met David Copperfield during a meal at Epstein’s Florida house in the early 2000s. Copperfield seemed to be a friend of Epstein’s, the woman said. But she claimed her conversation with the magician also touched on the financier’s darker side.
“He questioned me if I was aware that girls were getting paid to find other girls,” Sjoberg said.
Epstein became a registered sex offender in Florida in 2008, after pleading guilty to state charges as part of his deal with the U.S. government.
What about Trump and Mar-a-Lago?
Former President Trump is not accused of wrongdoing in the documents. But his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., has repeatedly been mentioned in court filings related to Epstein, whose mansion at 358 El Brillo Way was only about a mile and a half up the coast from the private club.
Mar-a-Lago was a critical nexus point in the trafficking ring’s eventual exposure: It’s where Virginia Giuffre, who would go on to become Epstein and Maxwell’s most vocal accuser, says she was first recruited by Maxwell when she was a teenager working at the club’s spa.
In Giuffre’s account, she discussed massages with Maxwell, who then arranged for her to visit Epstein’s home and give him a massage. In her deposition, Maxwell said Giuffre’s mother drove her to Epstein’s house — and that she spoke to Giuffre’s mother outside while Giuffre was inside.
Epstein and Trump have famously been photographed together, including at Mar-a-Lago. The documents also depict an encounter between the two.
In Sjoberg’s deposition, she alleged that, during a flight to New York on Epstein’s private plane, bad weather required a landing in Atlantic City instead.
“Great, we’ll call up Trump,” Sjoberg claimed Epstein said, relaying how the group on the plane then visited Trump’s casino. When asked if she ever gave Trump a massage, Sjoberg replied, “No.”
The case also has another Trump connection: The U.S. attorney in Florida who granted Epstein a widely criticized deal in 2007 was Alexander Acosta — who became labor secretary under President Trump in 2017. When Epstein’s 2019 arrest raised new criticism of Acosta, he resigned.”
But there is more, much more; Katie Johnson’s affidavit names both Trump and Epstein as her abusers and sex slavers, a smoking gun in the witness of a survivor of the Trump-Epstein human trafficking syndicate and part of the public record. Trump is also listed in Epstein’s Black Book which was part of the testimony of his bulter who was later assassinated in prison like his boss. Mar a Lago was a recruitment venue and Acosta who provided Epstein legal cover was rewarded by Trump with a plum job.
Here is a short list of named Epstein associates, co-conspirators, and criminals complicit in sexual terror and pedophile trafficking among some 250 now unsealed from court records, with people involved in the case as trafficked persons, witnesses, investigators, doctors, lawyers, and reporters:
Source One
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking in connection to Epstein’s activities
Prince Andrew, Duke of York, second son of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. Brother of King Charles III
Bill Clinton, former US president
Donald Trump, businessman and former US president
Hillary Clinton, former first lady to Bill Clinton, US secretary of state under Barack Obama, and US presidential candidate
David Copperfield, American stage magician
John Connelly, New York police detective turned investigative journalist who investigated Epstein
Alan Dershowitz, prolific lawyer and media pundit who represented Epstein in 2006
Leonardo DiCaprio, actor and film producer famous for his roles in Titanic and Inception
Al Gore, former US vice president under Bill Clinton
Richard Branson, British billionaire and business magnate, founder of the Virgin Group
Stephen Hawking, British physicist and science author
Ehud Barak, former Israeli prime minister
Michael Jackson, famed musician known as the “King of Pop”
Marvin Minksy, artificial intelligence pioneer
Kevin Spacey, actor known for his roles in Se7en and House of Cards, found not guilty of sexual assault in 2023
George Lucas, American film director and creator of the Star Wars saga
Jean Luc Brunel, French model agency boss and alleged Epstein co-conspirator who died in an apparent suicide while awaiting trial
Cate Blanchett, Australian actor who starred in The Lord of the Rings and Tár
Naomi Campbell, British model
Heidi Klum, German-US model
Sharon Churcher, British journalist
Bruce Willis, actor famous for his roles in Die Hard and The Sixth Sense
Bianca Jagger, activist and wife of The Rolling Stones frontman, Sir Mick Jagger
Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico
Cameron Diaz, actor who starred in Shrek and There’s Something About Mary
Glenn Dubin, an American hedge fund manager who was allegedly friends with Epstein
Eva Andersson-Dubin, former Miss Sweden and wife of Glenn Dubin, who once dated Epstein
Noam Chomsky, linguist and political philosopher
Tom Pritzker, American tycoon and philanthropist
Chris Tucker, American comedian and actor known for his role in the Rush Hour films
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, former wife of Prince Andrew
Robert F Kennedy Jr, American politician and conspiracy theorist
James Michael Austrich
Juan and Maria Alessi, husband and wife working at Epstein’s home in Florida
Janusz Banasiak, served as Epstein’s Palm Beach house manager
Bella Klein or Klen (documents differ), a former accountant in Epstein’s New York office
Leslie or Lesley Groff (documents differ), Epstein’s former secretary, who was named as a co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal but reportedly will not be charged
Victoria Bean
Rebecca Boylan
Dana Burns
Ron Eppinger, sex trafficker
Daniel Estes
Annie Farmer, accused Epstein of sexual assault
Maria Farmer, Annie Farmer’s sister, who also accused Epstein of sexual assault
Anouska De Georgiou, a model who accused Epstein of rape
Louis Freeh, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Frédéric Fekkai, celebrity hairstylist
Alexandra Fekkai, son of celebrity hairstylist
Jo Jo Fontanella, Epstein’s butler
Doug Band, longtime Bill Clinton aide who says he urged Mr Clinton to cut ties with Epstein
Virginia Giuffre, formerly known as Virginia Roberts, accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault
Lynn Miller, mother of Virginia Giuffre
Crystal Figueroa, sister of Anthony Figueroa, who dated Virginia Giuffre in the early 2000s
Anthony Figueroa, Virginia Robert’s former boyfriend
Eric Gany
Meg Garvin, represented Virginia Giuffre
Sheridan Gibson-Butte,
Ross Gow, Maxwell’s press agent
Fred Graff
Robert Giuffre
Philip Guderyon
Alexandra Hall
Joanna Harrison
Shannon Harrison
Victoria Hazel
Brittany Henderson
Brett Jaffe
Forest Jones
Sarah Kellen, Epstein’s former assistant, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal
Adriana Ross, Epstein’s former assistant, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal
Carol Kess
Dr Steven Olson
Stephen Kaufmann
Wendy Leigh, author
Peter Listerman
Tom Lyons
Nadia Marcinkova, alleged friend of Epstein’s, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal
Bob Meister
Jamie Melanson
Donald Morrell
David Mullen
David Norr
Joe Pagano
May Paluga
Stanley Pottinger
Detective Joe Recarey, former Palm Beach police officer who investigated reports of sexual abuse against children by Epstein
Chief Michael Reiter, responsible for investigation of sexual abuse against children by Epstein
Rinaldo and Debra Rizzo, husband and wife who worked for Epstein’s alleged friend Glenn Dubin
Sky Roberts
Kimblerley Roberts
Lynn Roberts
Haley Robson, named as a “teen recruiter” for Epstein in police documents
Dave Rodgers, private jet pilot for Epstein
Alfredo Rodriquez, butler at Epstein’s Florida home
Scott Rothinson
Forest Sawyer
Dough Schoetlle,investigator
Johanna Sjoberg, claims she was sexually abused while underage by Epstein. Also claimed Prince Andrew touched her breast
Cecilia Stein
Marianne Strong
Mark Tafoya
Emmy Taylor, Maxwell’s ex-personal assistant
Brent Tindall
Kevin Thompson
Ed Tuttle
Les Wexner, founder of L Brands and a former business partner of Epstein
Abigail Wexner, wife of Les Wexner
Cresenda Valdes
Emma Vaghan
Anthony Valladares
Christina Venero, licensed massage therapist
Maritza Vazquez
Vicky Ward, investigative journalist and author who claims she was blocked from covering Epstein’s misdeeds while working at Vanity Fair
Jarred Weisfield
Sharon White
Courtney Wild
Daniel Wilson
Mark Zeff, New York decorator
Kelly Spamm, unknown person listed as flying on Epstein’s private jet
Alexandra Dixon, unknown person listed in Epstein’s ‘little black book’
Alfredo Rodriguez, Epstein’s former household manager, jailed in 2012 for hiding and trying to sell Epstein’s ‘black book’
Ricardo Legorreta, Mexican designer listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private jet
Dr Chris Donahue, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre, included on a list of all her previous medical providers requested by Maxwell’s defence team
Dr Wah Wah, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Judith Lightfoot, psychologist who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr Karen Kutikoff, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr Carol Hayek, psychiatrist who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr John Harris, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr Darshanee Majaliyana, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr John Harris, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr Mona Devansean, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr Scott Robert Geiger, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Dr Michele Streeter, physician who treated Virginia Giuffre
Donna Oliver, physician assistant who treated Virginia Giuffre.
As Listed By Source Two- Comparing flight logs with the Black Book
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking in connection to Epstein’s activities
Prince Andrew, Duke of York, second son of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. Brother of King Charles III
Bill Clinton, former US president listed on flight logs
President Donald Trump listed on flight logs and in Epstein’s book
Marla Maples, the former wife of Donald Trump listed on flight logs
Tiffany Trump, the daughter of Marla Maples and Donald Trump listed on flight logs
Alan Dershowitz, prolific lawyer and media pundit who represented Epstein in 2006 listed on flight logs and in Epstein’s book
Jean Luc Brunel, French model agency boss and alleged Epstein co-conspirator who died in an apparent suicide while awaiting trial
Michael Jackson, famed musician known as the “King of Pop” named in Epstein’s book
Marvin Minksy, artificial intelligence pioneer listed on flight logs
Naomi Campbell, British model listed on flight logs
Courtney Love, American singer named in Epstein’s book
Mick Jagger, English musician and frontman of the The Rolling Stones named in Epstein’s book
Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico named in Epstein’s book
Glenn Dubin, an American hedge fund manager who was allegedly friends with Epstein listed on flight logs and named in Epstein’s book
Eva Andersson-Dubin, former Miss Sweden and wife of Glenn Dubin, who once dated Epstein listed on flight logs and named in Epstein’s book
Tom Pritzker, American tycoon and philanthropist listed on flight logs
Chris Tucker, American comedian and actor known for his role in the Rush Hour films named in Epstein’s book
Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, former wife of Prince Andrew listed on flight logs
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services named in Epstein’s book
Mary Kennedy, the late wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named in Epstein’s book
Dana Burns listed on flight logs
Frédéric Fekkai, celebrity hairstylist listed on flight logs and named in Epstein’s book
Alexandra Fekkai, son of celebrity hairstylist listed on flight logs and named in Epstein’s book
Jo Jo Fontanella, Epstein’s butler listed on flight logs
Doug Band, longtime Bill Clinton aide who says he urged Clinton to cut ties with Epstein listed on flight logs
Virginia Giuffre, formerly known as Virginia Roberts, accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault
Eric Gany named in Epstein’s book
Sheridan Gibson-Butte listed on flight logs
Shelly Harrison listed on flight logs
Victoria Hazell listed on flight logs
Forest Sawyer listed on flight logs
Sarah Kellen, Epstein’s former assistant, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal listed on flight logs
Adriana Mucinska, formerly Ross, Epstein’s former assistant, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal listed on flight logs
Peter Marino, listed on flight logs
Nadia Marcinkova, alleged friend of Epstein’s, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in his 2008 plea deal listed on flight logs
David Mullen, listed on flight logs
Joe Pagano, listed on flight logs
Kristy Rodgers, listed on flight logs
Patsy Rodgers, listed on flight logs
Mark Epstein, brother of Jeffrey Epstein listed on flight logs
Emmy Taylor, Maxwell’s ex-personal assistant listed on flight logs
Brent Tindall, chef for Epstein listed on flight logs
Ed Tuttle, listed on flight logs
Les Wexner, founder of L Brands and a former business partner of Epstein, named in Epstein’s book
Abigail Wexner, wife of Les Wexner, named in Epstein’s book
Cresencia Valdez, listed on flight logs
Maritza Vasquez, former bookkeeper for Jean-Luc Brunel, listed on flight logs
Sharon Reynolds, listed on flight logs
Courtney Wild, listed on flight logs
Mark Zeff, New York decorator, named in Epstein’s book
Kelly Spamm, listed on flight logs
Alexandra Dixon, listed on flight logs
Ricardo Legoretta, Mexican designer, listed on flight logs
“by Legal Beagle
Unreleased Jeffrey Epstein Documents and Evidence: A Comprehensive Analysis
The Jeffrey Epstein case represents one of the most controversial and complex investigations in modern American history, with numerous documents, photographs, and videos remaining sealed by various law enforcement agencies. The current status of these materials, the reasons for their withholding, and the alleged intelligence connections form a web of official secrecy that continues to fuel public speculation and controversy.
Documents, Photographs, and Videos Held by Law Enforcement
FBI Evidence from the 2019 Investigation
The FBI’s July 2025 memo revealed the scope of materials seized during their investigation of Jeffrey Epstein1:
Digital Evidence
Over 300 gigabytes of data collected from Epstein’s properties
More than 10,000 videos and images of child sexual abuse material and other pornography
Thousands of photographs including “a large volume of images of Epstein”
Images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors
Physical Evidence
Hard drives seized from Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, including a box full of hard drives found during the 2019 raid2
Compact discs with handwritten labels describing “young [name] + [name]”3
Recording devices, computers, and memory sticks – dozens of these devices were catalogued4
Property Searches The FBI conducted extensive searches of Epstein’s properties following his arrest, including:
Properties in the U.S. Virgin Islands including Little St. James island
Florida properties in Palm Beach
Evidence from the 2007 Palm Beach Investigation
Missing Hard Drives During the 2005-2007 Palm Beach investigation, detectives discovered that “six computer hard drives in the house had been hastily removed, leaving dangling wires attached to monitors in several areas of the house”5. The contents of these missing hard drives remain unknown, though FBI agents later found hard drives during Maxwell’s trial that contained data from the early 2000s.
Additional Seized Materials
Photographs of girls throughout Epstein’s Palm Beach home
Hidden cameras – two were discovered during the 2006 search
Message books and contact lists
Financial records and communications
Maxwell Trial Evidence
Sealed Materials from Criminal Proceedings
Extensive surveillance footage from Epstein’s properties
Financial records detailing payments to victims and co-conspirators
Communications between Epstein and Maxwell including emails and text messages
Victim testimony transcripts (many sealed to protect identities)
Agencies Possessing Unreleased Materials
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
The FBI holds the largest cache of unreleased Epstein materials, including:
Criminal investigation files from the 2019 case
Surveillance materials from Epstein’s properties
Digital evidence from seized computers and devices
Interview transcripts with victims and witnesses
Department of Justice (DOJ)
The DOJ maintains:
Prosecutorial files from both the 2008 and 2019 investigations
Office of Professional Responsibility report on Alexander Acosta’s handling of the 2008 plea deal
Victim impact statements and compensation records
Court-sealed materials from various proceedings
U.S. Marshals Service
The Marshals Service has:
Unredacted flight logs from Epstein’s private aircraft
Inspection records from aircraft traveling between U.S. Virgin Islands and mainland U.S.
Transportation and custody records
CIA and Other Intelligence Agencies
While the CIA and other intelligence agencies have remained “quiet on the question of any files they may have”5, their potential holdings remain classified and undisclosed.
State and Local Agencies
Palm Beach County
Grand jury materials (some released in 2024 under Florida legislation)
Police investigation files from the 2005-2007 investigation
Victim interview recordings and statements
Reasons for Non-Release
Legal Protections
Victim Privacy Rights Law enforcement agencies cite several legal restrictions on releasing materials:
Federal laws protecting victims’ privacy and identities5
Child pornography laws preventing release of sexual abuse material6
Civil litigation involving Epstein’s estate and victims
Privacy rights of uncharged individuals
Investigative Concerns
Protecting Witnesses
Witness safety and intimidation concerns
Victim trauma and retraumatization fears
Investigative methods that could be compromised
National Security Considerations While not explicitly stated, potential intelligence connections may create classification issues affecting disclosure.
Intelligence Agency Allegations
Israeli Intelligence (Mossad) Claims
Alleged Connections Multiple sources have alleged connections between Epstein and Israeli intelligence:
Ari Ben-Menashe Claims Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe has claimed that Epstein and Maxwell operated a “honey trap” operation for Israeli intelligence, though these remain unproven allegations3.
The Maxwell Family Connection Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, had documented connections to multiple intelligence agencies:
Triple agent operations with British MI6, Soviet KGB, and Israeli Mossad8
Mossad operations involving stolen U.S. intelligence software sales8
Financial espionage using his publishing empire as cover8
Tucker Carlson’s Allegations In July 2025, Tucker Carlson claimed at a Turning Point USA event that Epstein “was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American” and specifically suggested Israeli intelligence, though he provided no concrete evidence9.
Alexander Acosta’s Intelligence Statement
The “Belonged to Intelligence” Claim During his vetting for the Trump administration, Alexander Acosta, who negotiated Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, stated: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to ‘leave it alone'”10. This statement has never been substantiated with evidence.
CIA Expert Analysis Former CIA officer John Kiriakou described Epstein as a “textbook example of an access agent” who could recruit individuals close to powerful figures rather than recruiting the powerful figures directly8.
Iran-Contra Connection
Adnan Khashoggi Relationship During the 1980s, Epstein had connections to Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer who was “the middleman in transferring American weapons from Israel to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra affair”3. Khashoggi was one of several defense contractors in Epstein’s network.
Defense Contractor Network Epstein’s early financial career involved connections to multiple defense contractors and arms dealers, creating potential intelligence service touchpoints.
Prominent Figures Associated with Epstein
Political Figures
Former Presidents
Bill Clinton – Flew on Epstein’s private jet multiple times, appeared in flight logs11
Donald Trump – Long-time friend until 2004, appeared in flight logs and contact book11
Other Political Figures
Prince Andrew – Accused of sexual assault by Virginia Giuffre11
Ehud Barak – Former Israeli Prime Minister, involved in Epstein’s Carbyne investment3
Bill Richardson – Former New Mexico Governor, accused by Giuffre11
Al Gore – Former Vice President, named in court documents11
Business Leaders
Financial Sector
Leslie Wexner – L Brands founder, Epstein’s primary known client[previous research]
Leon Black – Apollo Global Management, paid Epstein $158 million[previous research]
Glenn Dubin – Highbridge Capital Management co-founder11
Technology and Media
Bill Gates – Microsoft founder, documented meetings with Epstein11
David Copperfield – Magician, named in court documents11
Celebrities and Entertainers
Hollywood Figures
Kevin Spacey – Actor, flew on Epstein’s plane11
Naomi Campbell – Supermodel, in contact book and flight logs12
Michael Jackson – In Epstein’s contact book12
Other Celebrities
Alec Baldwin – Actor, in contact book12
Mick Jagger – Rolling Stones frontman, in contact book12
Leonardo DiCaprio – Actor, named in court documents13
Current Status and Implications
The July 2025 DOJ Memo
The Justice Department’s definitive statement concluded:
No evidence of a “client list” exists6
No evidence of blackmail operations against powerful figures6
No further charges will be filed6
No additional disclosures will be made6
Ongoing Controversies
Political Ramifications The handling of the Epstein files has created unprecedented divisions within the Trump administration and among MAGA supporters, with many feeling betrayed by the lack of revelations[previous research].
Intelligence Questions Remain Despite official denials, questions about potential intelligence connections persist, fueled by:
Unexplained wealth accumulation by Epstein
Protection from prosecution in 2008
Sophisticated surveillance operations at his properties
High-level political connections across multiple countries
The Jeffrey Epstein case remains one of the most complex and controversial investigations in modern American history, with vast amounts of evidence remaining sealed ostensibly to protect victims’ privacy, but potentially concealing broader networks of influence and possible intelligence operations that may never be fully revealed to the public.”
July 18 2024 A Crusade Begins: On the Reimagination of the Failed Assassination as Divine Intervention and the Anointing of a King, and Theocracy As the Idolatry of Trump Cast In the Role of Cyrus the Great In A New Myth of Exile
November 22 2022 Faith Weaponized in Service to Power: a Mad Tyrant Dreams of Return in the Shadows of Thanksgiving and QAnon as Instruments of Authorized National Identity
Here is a poem which I originally wrote in French for a publisher in Switzerland, a nation with four official languages including German, Italian, and Romansh, and where place name conventions and other government business is conducted in Latin. I have often used its title, a phrase of my own invention, to refer to identity politics and the construction of ideas of race and nationality as authorized identities and an imposed condition of struggle, divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood and soil.
In my journals I refer to this idea in terms of the redemptive power of love, an interrogation of what is human, and how we may reply to death. I find it bears a definition in context; here then is my poem, and may it serve you as a Rashomon Gate event of transformation and liberation.
On one face of this coin, the tyrant Janus; the terror of our nothingness, commodification, falsification, dehumanization, abjection, and theft of the soul. On its reverse the liberator Janus; the joy of total freedom, seizure of power, self ownership, love which exalts us beyond the limits of our flesh, and the discovery of our best selves as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh as well as those we ourselves create.
A maker of mischief, I; named for the god of Chaos, Jay being a form of Janus, Roman god of doors and Guardian of the Gates, change, fate, beginnings and endings, who faces both directions of time and being at once. My mother said her immediate inspiration was Dr. Seuss’ figure of anarchy as a Trickster god in his iconic 1957 book The Cat in the Hat, and at times introduced me as Thing One and Thing Two, dyadic beings or a being with two forms who always do the opposite of what they are told, characters which reference Lewis Carroll’s court jesters as agents of subversion Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Non Serviam, I Will Not Serve, the declaration with which Milton’s great hero launches his rebellion in Paradise Lost, a legacy of freedom given to me by my mother as an informing, motivating, and shaping force enfolded into my name.
Becoming human as a process of identity formation, self-construal or personae which is the word for a character mask which actors speak through in classical Greek theatre and which I believe describes identity as a performance and a narrative structure with precision, clarity, and great explanatory power, remains fluid, ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and a primary ground of struggle.
Who chooses how we are to be defined, the boundaries between our limits and the possibilities of what we may become?
This is the first question to ask of any story; whose story is this?
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Let us abandon this claiming and naming, taxonomies of identification and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, this use of social force as ideas of virtue, beauty, normality, membership, nation, of the violence of divisions of us and them. For until our boundaries become interfaces, the leading edges of such identities draw blood.
When we have escaped the legacies of our history and created ourselves anew as autonomous beings bound by nothing but our own visions and desires, what have we become, and who are we then?
Whoever we wish to be.
The Flag of My Skin
Time, memory, history, identity, and the revolution of becoming ourselves;
the skin I have escaped in serpentine transformation has become a flag,
but of what nation?
Who owns this kingdom of flesh that we share?
This realm of the senses is both a boundary we must transgress
to discover ourselves and seize ownership of our freedom and being,
and an interface by which we shape each other, a propulsive and generative force of the human sublime, of truths written in our skin.
We are interdependent, vast and oceanic beings, exalted by our passion beyond the limits of our form but also autonomous individuals who create ourselves and one another over enormous gulfs of time, limitless in our possibilities of becoming human but also forms described as negative spaces of each other.
Being is a dance of myriad partnerships, transforms of messages and principles of organization and growth which are recursive, chaotic, a beauty of strangeness and the bizarre, a realm of Medusa, goddess and monster.
There is but one rule in nature; anything goes.
Who authorizes and validates the possibilities and performances of our identity?
Shall we not dethrone, mock, and challenge such tyrannies of normality?
Let us forge an art of fire by which to liberate us from the shells of our history, a poetics of revolution by which to incite, provoke, and disturb.
There are no maps of the unknown; only of the history written in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation, assigned values, interpreted meanings, and created ourselves through our anchorages of civilization, a prochronism whose purpose is to buffer the shock of change and shield identity from loss.
Yet it is this history and memory we must escape to create ourselves anew as we wander this wilderness of mirrors and of echoes, a labyrinth of shifting paths which leads both inward to our true selves and outward to other peoples and to their different truths and possibilities of becoming human.
Our senses are transducers through which we change energy into messages and topologies of reality; it is this logosphere within which we live and from which we arise and recreate ourselves continually, transcendent and surreal.
Humans are a system for transforming things into ideas.
So also do we transform our world and each other by our ideas, the real and the ideal reflecting and shaping each other in recursion. And this revolutionary and ongoing coevolution and process of becoming human is the central creative force of existence and of humankind.
The struggle for ownership of identity between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight. And what of the flag of our skin, of our history which we have unwound from ourselves as an endless scroll of signs, as a shroud, a chrysalis?
This I leave to you, to those we claim and who in turn claim us, to others who are different as well as those alike, and to us all.
We may belong to our past, but the future belongs to us.
It is yours and ours, the undiscovered country; use it wisely.
Prolouge
15 juillet 2025 Le drapeau de ma peau
Voici un poème que j’ai écrit à l’origine en français pour un éditeur en Suisse, un pays avec quatre langues officielles dont l’allemand, l’italien et le romanche, et où les conventions de toponymie et autres affaires gouvernementales se déroulent en latin. J’ai souvent utilisé son titre, une expression de ma propre invention, pour faire référence aux politiques identitaires et à la construction d’idées de race et de nationalité en tant qu’identités autorisées et conditions de lutte imposées, aux divisions d’appartenance et à l’altérité d’exclusion, et aux fascismes du sang et du sang. sol.
Dans mes journaux, j’évoque cette idée en termes de pouvoir rédempteur de l’amour, d’interrogation sur ce qui est humain et sur la façon dont nous pouvons répondre à la mort. Je trouve qu’il porte une définition dans son contexte ; voici donc mon poème, et puisse-t-il vous servir d’événement de transformation et de libération de la Porte Rashomon.
Sur une face de cette pièce, le tyran Janus ; la terreur de notre néant, la marchandisation, la falsification, la déshumanisation, l’abjection et le vol de l’âme. Sur son revers le libérateur Janus ; la joie de la liberté totale, la prise du pouvoir, la propriété de soi, l’amour qui nous exalte au-delà des limites de notre chair et la découverte du meilleur de nous-mêmes comme vérités immanentes à la nature et inscrites dans notre chair.
Je suis un faiseur de mal ; nommé d’après le dieu du Chaos, Jay étant une forme de Janus, dieu romain des portes et gardien des portes, du changement, du destin, des débuts et des fins, qui fait face aux deux directions du temps et de l’être à la fois. Ma mère a dit que son inspiration immédiate était la figure de l’anarchie du Dr Seuss en tant que dieu filou dans son livre emblématique de 1957, Le chat au chapeau, et m’a parfois présenté comme Thing One et Thing Two, des êtres dyadiques ou un être à deux formes qui font toujours le contraire de ce qu’on leur dit, des personnages qui font référence aux bouffons de la cour de Lewis Carroll comme des agents de subversion Tweedledum et Tweedledee.
Non Serviam, I Will Not Serve, la déclaration par laquelle le grand héros de Milton lance sa rébellion dans Paradise Lost, un héritage de liberté que ma mère m’a donné comme force d’information, de motivation et de modelage enfermée dans mon nom.
Devenir humain en tant que processus de formation d’identité, de construction de soi ou de personae, qui est le mot désignant un masque de personnage à travers lequel les acteurs parlent dans le théâtre grec classique et qui, je crois, décrit l’identité comme une performance et une structure narrative avec précision, clarté et grande pouvoir explicatif, reste fluide, ambigu, relatif, éphémère et un terrain de lutte primordial.
Qui choisit la manière dont nous devons être définis, les frontières entre nos limites et les possibilités de ce que nous pouvons devenir ?
C’est la première question à poser à propos de toute histoire ; à qui est cette histoire ?
Se faire une idée sur un type de personnes est un acte de violence.
Abandonnons cette revendication et cette nomination, les taxonomies d’identification et les hiérarchies d’appartenance et d’altérité d’exclusion, cette utilisation de la force sociale comme idées de vertu, de beauté, de normalité, d’appartenance, de nation, de violence de nous et d’eux. Car jusqu’à ce que nos frontières deviennent des interfaces, les contours de ces identités font couler le sang.
Lorsque nous avons échappé aux héritages de notre histoire et nous sommes recréés en tant qu’êtres autonomes liés par rien d’autre que nos propres visions et désirs, que sommes-nous devenus et qui sommes-nous alors ?
Celui que nous souhaitons être.
Le drapeau de ma peau
Le temps, la mémoire, l’histoire, l’identité et la révolution de devenir nous-mêmes;
la peau que j’ai échappée dans la transformation serpentine est devenue un drapeau,
mais de quelle nation?
À qui appartient ce royaume de chair que nous partageons?
Ce royaume des sens est à la fois une frontière que nous devons transgresser
de se découvrir et de s’approprier notre liberté et notre être,
et une interface par laquelle nous nous façonnons, force propulsive et génératrice du sublime humain, de vérités écrites dans notre peau.
Nous sommes des êtres interdépendants, vastes et océaniques, exaltés par notre passion au-delà des limites de notre forme mais aussi des individus autonomes qui se créent et se créent au-dessus d’énormes gouffres de temps, sans limites dans nos possibilités de devenir humain mais aussi des formes décrites comme des espaces négatifs de L’une et l’autre.
L’être est une danse de myriades de partenariats, de transformations de messages et de principes d’organisation et de croissance qui sont récursifs, chaotiques, une beauté d’étrangeté et de bizarre, un royaume de Méduse, déesse et monstre.
Il n’y a qu’une seule règle dans la nature; tout va.
Qui autorise et valide les possibilités et les performances de notre identité?
Ne détrônerons-nous pas, ne nous moquerons-nous pas de ces tyrannies de la normalité?
Forgeons un art du feu pour nous libérer des coquilles de notre histoire, une poétique de la révolution pour inciter, provoquer et troubler.
Il n’y a pas de cartes de l’inconnu; seulement de l’histoire écrite sous notre forme de la façon dont nous avons résolu les problèmes d’adaptation, assigné des valeurs, interprété des significations, et nous nous sommes créés à travers nos ancrages de civilisation, un prochronisme dont le but est d’amortir le choc du changement et de protéger l’identité de la perte.
Pourtant, c’est à cette histoire et à cette mémoire que nous devons échapper pour nous recréer en nous promenant dans ce désert de miroirs et d’échos, un labyrinthe de chemins changeants qui mène à la fois vers nous-mêmes et vers d’autres peuples et vers leurs différentes vérités et possibilités. de devenir humain.
Nos sens sont des transducteurs par lesquels nous transformons l’énergie en messages et en topologies de réalité; c’est cette logosphère à l’intérieur de laquelle nous vivons et dont nous surgissons et nous recréons continuellement, transcendante et surréaliste.
Les humains sont un système pour transformer les choses en idées.
De même, nous transformons notre monde et les uns les autres par nos idées, le réel et l’idéal se reflétant et se façonnant mutuellement en récursivité. Et cette coévolution et ce processus révolutionnaires et continus de devenir humain sont la force créatrice centrale de l’existence et de l’humanité.
La lutte pour la propriété de l’identité entre les masques que les autres fabriquent pour nous et ceux que nous fabriquons pour nous-mêmes est la première révolution dans laquelle nous devons tous lutter. Et qu’en est-il du drapeau de notre peau, de notre histoire que nous avons déroulée de nous-mêmes comme un rouleau de signes sans fin, comme un linceul, une chrysalide?
Je vous laisse ceci, à ceux que nous revendiquons et qui à notre tour nous réclament, à ceux qui sont différents ainsi qu’à ceux qui nous ressemblent, et à nous tous.
Nous pouvons appartenir à notre passé, mais l’avenir nous appartient.
C’est le vôtre et le nôtre, le pays inconnu; fais-en bon usage.
And here is my celebration of Chaos:
January 2 2023 Begin We the Festival of Janus
Janus represents the principles of change, duality, transformation, and the interfaces between bounded realms, though we know him now mainly as a god of Chaos through his portrayal in Halloween, episode six of season two, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He is called the Gatekeeper, a guardian and guide of the soul on our journeys through the myriad possibilities of the multiverse and its limitless futures, roles primary to dreamwork, ecstatic trance, and poetic vision, aligned with the mysteries of Orpheus, Asclepius, and Dionysius, whose role as god of beginnings and endings echoes the primary role of Ganesha as opener of the ways. Janus shares with Saturn or Chronos his role as Old Father Time, but he also represents the fracture and multidirectionality of time.
Plutarch describes Janus in his Life of Numa; “For this Janus, in remote antiquity, whether he was a demi-god or a king, was a patron of civil and social order, and is said to have lifted human life out of its bestial and savage state. For this reason he is represented with two faces, implying that he brought men’s lives out of one sort and condition into another.”
Ovid writes of Janus in his Fasti; “But what god am I to say thou art, Janus of double-shape? for Greece hath no divinity like thee. The reason, too, unfold why alone of all the heavenly ones thou doest see both back and front.”
My name, Jay, is a form of the name Janus, though also derived from the Latin name Gaius, “to be joyful”; if we are an unfolding of our ancestor’s actions, intentions, dreams, visions, and wishes, part of the history which possesses us as DNA and inhabits us as stories, I imagine being named for the god of Chaos, time, and poetic vision, a name which also suggests states of rapture and exaltation, may have been a shaping force in becoming who I am, a kind of spell cast by my mother who named me so.
Who did my parents want me to become? When as a child I asked my mother why she named me Jay, she said; “It means new beginnings. I wanted you to know you can do anything, be whomever you choose, right now, every moment, every time you hear your name. And whatever uniqueness and truth you create will be just as right and true as anyone else’s.” She said her immediate inspiration was Dr. Seuss’ figure of anarchy as a Trickster god in The Cat in the Hat, and at times introduced me as Thing One and Thing Two.
When I asked my father as a teenager, he said; “Who is Jay? You tell me.”
Of myself in my chosen role as a Bringer of Chaos, transgressions of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and liberation from the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue I have written often, also of Chaos as the adaptive range of systems and both destructive and creative forces of nature, of fracture, disruption, delegitimation, and the collapse of order, law, and authority as revolutionary struggle. In the context of the Festival of Janus I mention here that it can also become, as Foucault described, a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.
His startling image of wholeness as a dyadic figure with two faces which may be assigned to any oppositional forces, masks of comedy and tragedy from which developed theatre and the idea of the soul or individual personal self as personae, roles we play, from ritual performances in times of great peril and threat to discover and create paths forward into the future, but is also an image of the masculine and feminine sides of a whole person. In Janus we have at the origin and heart of our civilization a figure and festival of counternarrative and subversion of patriarchy and authorized identities of sex and gender, and a celebration of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty which also interrogates them. Go ahead, frighten the horses.
Herein we may perform those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and create and discover our own truths through performance of our best selves.
To begin our Festival of Janus at the birth of the new year, I invite you to play a game with me; a Game of Possible Selves. Choose six characters you would like to perform, traditionally in the Roman Festival of Janus three male and three female though any will do, as nature has but one rule; anything goes. If nothing else, randomizing identities as theatre and creative play will tell you what you value, and who you should be looking for in partners as instruments through whom we create ourselves. Write them down, cast a six sided dice, and let the dice decide who you will be today. No matter who you perform, you will still have five identities in reserve, and tomorrow is another day.
That one twelfth of our year is dedicated to Janus as January, figure of the new year, should tell us of his importance in our civilization, and the centrality of Chaos, transformation, rebirth, and change to our historical constructions of identity and its legacies which we drag behind us as shadow selves, like an invisible reptilian tail.
Here I think of patriarchy and sexual terror, white supremacist terror and the epigenetic trauma of slavery and the Holocaust, divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
And in the context of the shadows of historical and systemic inequalities and injustices, atavisms of instinct and fear weaponized in service to power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the liminal time of the new year during the month of January, sacred to change and the emergence of the new like a serpent sloughing off its old skin, is a gate of entrance into the world for hope, that final curse or gift of Pandora, in the midst of our public trauma and grieving since the capture of America by the Fourth Reich in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the final act of moral collapse by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump in the January 6 Insurrection, and the endless chasms of darkness, subversions of our democracy, perversions of our values, and violations of our ideals we have all endured since.
For the principle of change offers us a transformational moment of decision in which all things are possible, and we may escape the consequences of our histories in creating ourselves anew.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
Here follow excerpts from some of the people who have written beautifully of Janus.
As written on the Anderson Lock website; “The ancient Romans had a specific god who held the key, so to speak, to the metaphorical doors or gateways between what was and what is to come—the liminal space of transitioning out of one period of time and into something new.
In Roman mythology, Janus was the god of doors, gates, and transitions. Janus represented the middle ground between both concrete and abstract dualities such as life/death, beginning/end, youth/adulthood, rural/urban, war/peace, and barbarism/civilization.
Janus was known as the initiator of human life, transformations between stages of life, and shifts from one historical era to another. Ancient Romans believed Janus ruled over life events such as weddings, births, and deaths. He oversaw seasonal events such as planting, harvests, seasonal changes, and the new year.
According to Roman mythology, Janus was present at the beginning of the world. As the god of gates, Janus guarded the gates of heaven and held access to heaven and other gods. For this reason, Janus was often invoked first in ancient Roman religious ceremonies, and during public sacrifices, offerings were given to Janus before any other deity. In fact, there is evidence that Janus was worshipped long before many of the other Roman gods, dating all the way back to the time of Romulus (the founder and first ruler of Rome).
And if you’ve ever wondered how the month of January got its name, you have Janus to thank. As the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus is the namesake of January, the first month of a new year.
Why does Janus have two faces? What is unusual about the god Janus is his iconic image. As the god of transitions and dualities, Janus is portrayed with two faces—one facing the past, and one facing the future. He also holds a key in his right hand, which symbolizes his protection of doors, gates, thresholds, and other separations or openings between spatial boundaries. In ancient Rome, the symbol of the key also signified that a traveler has come to find safe harbor or trade goods in peace.”
As written by Caillan Davenport in The Conversation; “January 1 can be a day of regret and reflection – did I really need that fifth glass of bubbly last night? – mixed with hope and optimism for the future, as we make plans to renew gym memberships or finally sort out our tax files. This January ritual of looking forward and backward is fitting for the first day of a month named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings.
Doorkeeper of the heavens
In Roman mythology, Janus was a king of Latium (a region of central Italy), who had his palace on the Janiculum hill, on the western bank of the River Tiber. According to the Roman intellectual Macrobius, Janus was given divine honours on account of his own religious devotion, as he set a pious example for all his people.
Janus was proudly venerated as a uniquely Roman god, rather than one adopted from the Greek pantheon. All forms of transition came within his purview – beginnings and endings, entrances, exits, and passageways. The name Janus (Ianus in Latin, as the alphabet had no j) is etymologically related to ianua, the Latin word for door. Janus himself was the ianitor, or doorkeeper, of the heavens.
The cult statue of Janus depicted the god bearded with two heads. This meant that he could see forwards and backwards and inside and outside simultaneously without turning around. Janus held a staff in his right hand, in order to guide travellers along the correct route, and a key in his left to open gates.
War and Peace
Janus is famously associated with the transition between peace and war. Numa, the legendary second king of Rome, who was famed for his religious piety, is said to have founded a shrine to Janus Geminus (“two-fold”) in the Roman Forum, close to the Senate House. It was located in the place where Janus had bubbled up a spring of hot boiling water in order to thwart an attack on Rome by the Sabines.
The shrine was an enclosure formed by two arched gates at each end, joined together by walls to form a passageway. A bronze statue of Janus stood in the middle, with one head facing towards each gate. According to the historian Livy, Numa intended the shrine; “as an index of peace and war, that when open it might signify that the nation was in arms, when closed that all the peoples round about were pacified.”
The gates of Janus are said to have stayed closed for 43 years under Numa, but rarely remained so thereafter, although the first emperor Augustus boasted that he closed the shrine three times. Nero later celebrated his conclusion of peace with Parthia by minting coins showing the gates of Janus firmly shut.
Happy New Year
Romans believed that the month of January was added to the calendar by Numa. The association between Janus and the calendar was cemented by the construction of 12 altars, one for each month of the year, in Janus’s temple in the Forum Holitorium (the vegetable market). The poet Martial thus described Janus as “the progenitor and father of the years”.
From 153 BC onwards, the consuls (the chief magistrates of the Republic) took office on the first day of January (which the Romans called the Kalends). The new consuls offered prayers to Janus, and priests dedicated spelt mixed with salt and a traditional barley cake, known as the ianual, to the god. Romans distributed New Year’s gifts of dates, figs, and honey to their friends, in the hope that the year ahead would turn out to be sweet, as well as coins – a sign of hoped-for prosperity.
Janus assumed a key role in all Roman public sacrifices, receiving incense and wine first before other deities. This was because, as the doorkeeper of the heavens, Janus was the route through which one reached the other gods, even Jupiter himself. The text On Agriculture, written by Cato the Elder, describes how offerings would be made to Janus, Jupiter, and Juno as part of the pre-harvest sacrifice to ensure a good crop.
So if you’re feeling caught between two worlds this January 1, why not head outside and celebrate Roman-style?”
As written by Michael Shanks of the Janus Initiative, which he defines as “archaeological perspectives on understanding and managing change and innovation”; “Our case is that being mindful of the past, hindsight, is essential to being able to act for the future. Looking back, researching and exploring, that we might be better prepared for uncertain futures.
This is not about history – knowing what happened in the past. JANUS is about an archaeological sensibility – connecting (what remains of) the past with the future through our experiences and actions now.
Janus? Janus was the Roman divinity associated with transition, passages from pasts through to futures, windows, doorways and thresholds.
Simultaneously looking back and forward, Janus connects pasts and futures, gaining perspective with hindsight and foresight, finding orientation now, not by telling the story of the past, not by predicting what is to come, but by seeking relationships, passages, flows from the past, ways the past lingers to haunt, hinder, and inspire the building of the future.
The scene offers insights into relationships between temporality and agency – our capacity to matter, to make things happen – exactly the themes we are foregrounding in our initiative.”
The power of story: A quick recap of the story in needed to understand the connections.
Cronos (Kronos, Cronus) was the youngest of the first generation of Titans, giant offspring of primordial Ouranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Ouranos offended Gaia by imprisoning some of their younger offspring and she sought revenge by persuading Cronos to move against his father. With a stone sickle, gift from Gaia, Cronos castrated Ouranos and threw the bloody parts into the ocean, from which Venus (Aphrodite) emerged.
His actions haunted Cronos. Fearing that one of his own offspring would turn against him, he ate them all as they were born, devouring a threatening future. His wife Rhea eventually put a stop to this when she hid Zeus and tricked Cronos to swallow a stone instead, wrapped as a new-born. Zeus returned in his maturity, poisoned Cronos, and defeated him and his Titans with the help of his brother and sister gods, vomited up alive because of the poison emetic.
Cronos was regularly been associated with Chronos, a divine personification of time. He cut and severed Ouranos, marking the rift between heaven and earth, a gash in eternity. The scythe or sickle has become symbol of the grim reaper harvesting mortal lives.
Dramatis Personae
Romano draws Chronos holding an Ouroboros. Serpent devouring its own tail, a symbol since at least antiquity of eternal return, rebirth, reincarnation. The divinity is Aion, cyclical time, unbounded, the circuit of the heavens represented by the Zodiac, the seasons, in contrast to the divisible, empirical and sequential time of Cronus, cut into past, present, and future. Aion is a god of the ages, of saecula, circling generations of life.
Aion, god of the ages, is within the circuit of the Zodiac, (an eternal mobius strip) between a summer and winter tree. In front is Gaia, Mother Earth, with four children, the four seasons.
The winged figure is usually taken to be Nike, Victoria, holding out the winner’s crown at the moment of success. But another interpretation is possible.
This is a scene from the great conflicts between the Titans and the Gods. With Gaia’s help Cronos has seized the opportunity and cut open the heavens. He too will fall when Zeus in turn seizes his opportunity, poisons Cronos and releases the Olympians to overthrow the Titans. Son of Cronos, or perhaps brother, the god of seizing an opportunity to act is Kairos. And Kairos is usually depicted as a winged youth, and as weighing opportunities in a scale balanced on a knife edge.
Kairos is time to act, or not. A central principle of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, Kairos is a passing instant when an opening appears to be driven through (there are links with shooting an arrow and passing a weaving shuttle through warp and weft). The key to agency, one’s capacity to achieve, to realize potential, is the ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing, complex and contingent circumstances. This is Kairos.
Janus stands by, a horrified witness. Romano has modeled the god(dess) on Aphrodite, who had been born of the castrated heavens, Cronos cutting eternity. Janus is involved, part of the many stories woven in and through this group of four characters or principles, seeing the interconnections between eternity and event, birth and mortality, persuasion and action, planning and opportunity, the return of the past to take vengeance.
Time, decision-making, persuasion, opportunity, action.
This cast of characters and principles, this dramatis personae, takes us into an allegorical world of time eternal, cyclical, and eventful, of perception, persuasion, decision and action.
Connections of past through to future potential, the intermingling of hindsight, insight, foresight: these are also the core of an archaeological sensibility and imagination.
Imagine a person from another time in human history, from any region, race, gender, or religion. No matter the place, time, or status, you will find differences from your present situation. However, one thing remains unchanged: the need to begin again, to follow new paths and to move forward.
If we look at it through the beliefs of ancient times, we realize that the concept of new beginnings is present throughout the history of human beings. For this reason, I explain the relationship between new beginnings and mythology. Because by looking at the past we can better understand the future.
In the ancient Rome, they did not escape this need either. They had their own god to whom they used to pray to give them hope and protect their efforts to start afresh.”
Ritual of Janus as a god of Chaos in “Halloween”, the sixth episode of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; note the ritual use of masks of our true or possible selves in Halloween trick or treating in connection with Chaos as a sacred path in pursuit of the truth of ourselves
We celebrate today a legacy of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all humankind, bequeathed to us by the Revolution on this day in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.
I find it immensely hopeful for the future of humankind that France, a nation where protest historically is seen as a patriotic act, celebrates as its founding event the seizure of a prison, and one which in part was intended as the jailbreak for the poet laureate of the Revolution, the Marquis de Sade.
He had been yelling to the crowd from his cell window that the jailers were executing prisoners; he was unfortunately spirited away to the madhouse at Charenton before he could be liberated, an episode immortalized by Peter Weiss in Marat/Sade. Freed by the Revolution, de Sade became a leader of the radical wing of the Jacobins, until his beautiful elegy for Marat, arguably his ideological nemesis, ran afoul of Robespierre’s designs and landed him yet again in prison.
When I describe and think of myself as a Jacobin in terms of political identity, I am thinking of the relationship between Marat and de Sade as negative spaces of each other in Weiss’ play, of our historical civilization as a game played between conserving and revolutionary forces which may change masks at times as codified in the trilogy of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Kawabata Yasunari’s The Master of Go, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and of systemic unequal power as the origin of evil and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which subverts revolutionary seizures of power as tyranny.
I bear it in mind as a cautionary tale throughout a life lived beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of our maps of becoming human, in the unknown blank spaces marked Here Be Dragons, as I have upon occasion answered the question, Who are you?, with Napoleon’s “I am the Revolution.”
During his time in the Bastille de Sade wrote one of the most brilliant and transgressive interrogations of the origins of evil in unequal power and the Church and State as embodied violence, 120 Days of Sodom. Every word of it is still true, and applies to all tyrannies of force and control, totalitarian and authoritarian states of all kinds and to my thinking fascism especially, as interpreted by the great Pasolini in film, as symptoms of the disease of fear, power, and force. Read it together with its companion work, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.
As Pasolini says in his interview during the filming of ‘Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom’;
“PASOLINI: I simply plan to replace the word “God,” as de Sade uses it, with the word “power.” The sadists are always the powerful ones. These four gentlemen in the story are a banker, a duke, a bishop, and a judge. They represent the constituted might. The analogy is obvious, and I didn’t invent it. I am only adding something of my own and am complicating it by bringing it up to date.
BACHMANN: What is the remaining, continuing significance of de Sade s work?
PASOLINI: The fact that the body becomes merchandise. My film is planned as a sexual metaphor, which symbolizes, in a visionary way, the relationship between exploiter and exploited. In sadism and in power politics human beings become objects. That similarity is the ideological basis of the film.”
For further study of de Sade as a pivotal figure of the Revolution, I refer you to Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, a feminist interpretation which informs all her work, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade by the infamous genius and muse Rikki Ducornet, and The Marquis de Sade: A Life, by Neil Schaeffer.
My reading list on the French Revolution includes Citizens by Simon Schama, The Days of the French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert, and A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.
As causal sources of global revolution against the system of aristocratic monarchy and state religion, the American and French Revolutions are a tide of democracy and universal human rights which radically reimagined human social and political relations, being, meaning, and value, and continue to propagate throughout the world. It found echoes in the Russian Revolution, and as anticolonial struggle in India, South Africa, and nearly everywhere on earth as humankind awakened from its long darkness as tyrannies of masters and slaves.
Today its values and ideals manifest in revolutions and liberation movements throughout the world, in Hong Kong, Palestine, and Ukraine, among those places to which I have traveled in solidarity with the struggles of their peoples, those whom Franz Fanon called “The Wretched of the Earth”, and whom our Statue of Liberty proclaims the “huddled masses yearning to be free”.
What does Liberty mean for us today?
Memory, history, and identity; a process of becoming human and a ground of struggle between our anchorages and our aspirations, and one in constant motion and a state of change; impermanent, ephemeral, protean, shaped by the dynamism between authenticity and falsification as we wander in a wilderness of mirrors, lies and illusions of authority which seek to capture, distort, and subjugate us, to enslave us and steal our souls.
This is the primary revolution of all humankind; the struggle to create ourselves as autonomous beings, free of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, against the forces of dehumanization and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the inequalities and injustices of state terror, repression of dissent, institutional violence, force, and control.
To become ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight, of which other forms of revolutionary struggle are echoes and reflections, and they are united in the struggle for ownership and control of our identity as aspects of a common emergence of humankind.
To refuse to submit is the primary human act which confers freedom, for who cannot be controlled is free. In this moment of Resistance to authority and tyranny we become Unconquered, each of us Living Autonomous Zones and agents of Chaos, Liberty, and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
Let us throw open the gates of our prisons, and be free.
As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless”. Let us seize our moment and bring change to systems of oppression and unequal power.
In this moment of decision, from the darkness of Vichy America, captured state of the Fourth Reich and the loathsome Trump regime, to the looming tide of fascist revivalism which shadows much of Europe and threatens to dismantle the Enlightenment, I say to all tyrants who meet protest not with redress of grievances but with brutal repression as a carceral state of force and control, both at home and in former colonies and emerging nations; in a free society of equals one must lead from the front of the masses as their champion, and not behind the walls of your palace as their tyrant.
In this moment when state tyranny and terror savages us in its jaws, let us bring the Chaos.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort!
French
14 juillet 2025 Un héritage de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité pour toute l’humanité : le 14 juillet
Nous célébrons aujourd’hui un héritage de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité pour toute l’humanité, légué par la Révolution en ce jour de 1789 avec la prise de la Bastille.
Je trouve extrêmement encourageant pour l’avenir de l’humanité que la France, une nation où la protestation est historiquement perçue comme un acte patriotique, célèbre comme son événement fondateur la prise d’une prison, qui était en partie destinée à l’évasion du poète lauréat de la Révolution, le marquis de Sade.
Il avait crié à la foule depuis la fenêtre de sa cellule que les geôliers exécutaient des prisonniers ; il a malheureusement été emmené à l’asile de fous de Charenton avant d’être libéré, un épisode immortalisé par Peter Weiss dans Marat/Sade. Libéré par la Révolution, de Sade devint un chef de file de l’aile radicale des Jacobins, jusqu’à ce que sa magnifique élégie pour Marat, sans doute son ennemi idéologique, contrecarre les desseins de Robespierre et le conduise une fois de plus en prison.
Lorsque je me décris et me considère comme un Jacobin en termes d’identité politique, je pense à la relation entre Marat et de Sade comme des espaces négatifs l’un de l’autre dans la pièce de Weiss, à notre civilisation historique comme un jeu entre forces conservatrices et révolutionnaires, qui peut parfois changer de masque, comme le codifient la trilogie Le Jeu des perles de verre d’Herman Hesse, Le Maître de go de Kawabata Yasunari et La Naissance de la tragédie de Friedrich Nietzsche, et à l’inégalité systémique du pouvoir comme origine du mal et à l’anneau wagnérien de peur, de pouvoir et de force qui subvertit les prises de pouvoir révolutionnaires en tyrannie. Je le garde à l’esprit comme un récit édifiant tout au long d’une vie passée au-delà des limites de l’interdit et des limites de notre devenir humain, dans les espaces vierges inconnus marqués « Ici sont les dragons », alors que j’ai parfois répondu à la question « Qui es-tu ? » par le « Je suis la Révolution » de Napoléon.
Pendant son séjour à la Bastille, Sade a écrit l’une des interrogations les plus brillantes et les plus transgressives sur les origines du mal dans l’inégalité des pouvoirs et sur l’Église et l’État comme violence incarnée : Les 120 Journées de Sodome. Chaque mot de ce livre est toujours vrai et s’applique à toutes les tyrannies de la force et du contrôle, aux États totalitaires et autoritaires de toutes sortes, et à ma pensée, au fascisme en particulier, tel qu’interprété par le grand Pasolini au cinéma, comme symptômes de la maladie de la peur, du pouvoir et de la force. Lisez-le en parallèle avec son ouvrage complémentaire, Les Origines du totalitarisme de Hannah Arendt.
Comme le dit Pasolini dans son interview pendant le tournage de « Salò ou les 120 Journées de Sodome » : PASOLINI : Je compte simplement remplacer le mot « Dieu », tel que Sade l’emploie, par le mot « pouvoir ». Les sadiques sont toujours les puissants. Ces quatre messieurs de l’histoire sont un banquier, un duc, un évêque et un juge. Ils représentent le pouvoir constitué. L’analogie est évidente, et je ne l’ai pas inventée. Je ne fais qu’ajouter quelque chose de mon cru et la complexifier en la modernisant.
BACHMANN : Quelle est la signification persistante de l’œuvre de Sade ?
PASOLINI : Le fait que le corps devienne une marchandise. Mon film est conçu comme une métaphore sexuelle, symbolisant, de manière visionnaire, la relation entre exploiteur et exploité. Dans le sadisme et les jeux de pouvoir, les êtres humains deviennent des objets. Cette similitude est le fondement idéologique du film.
Pour une étude plus approfondie de Sade en tant que figure centrale de la Révolution, je vous renvoie à l’ouvrage d’Angela Carter, La Femme Sadienne et l’Idéologie de la Pornographie, une interprétation féministe qui inspire l’ensemble de son œuvre, ainsi qu’à L’Inquisition du Fan-Maker : Un roman du Marquis de Sade, de la célèbre génie et muse Rikki Ducornet, et Le Marquis de Sade : Une vie, de Neil Schaeffer.
Ma liste de lectures sur la Révolution française comprend Citizens de Simon Schama, The Days of the French Revolution de Christopher Hibbert et A Place of Greater Safety d’Hilary Mantel.
Sources causales de la révolution mondiale contre le système de monarchie aristocratique et de religion d’État, les Révolutions américaine et française constituent une vague de démocratie et de droits humains universels qui a radicalement repensé les relations sociales et politiques, l’être, le sens et les valeurs humaines, et continue de se propager dans le monde entier. Elle a trouvé des échos dans la Révolution russe et dans la lutte anticoloniale en Inde, en Afrique du Sud et presque partout sur la planète, alors que l’humanité s’éveillait de sa longue obscurité, dominée par la tyrannie des maîtres et des esclaves.
Aujourd’hui, ses valeurs et ses idéaux se manifestent dans les révolutions et les mouvements de libération à travers le monde, à Hong Kong, en Palestine et en Ukraine, parmi les lieux où je me suis rendu en solidarité avec les luttes de leurs peuples, ceux que Franz Fanon appelait « les Damnés de la Terre » et que notre Statue de la Liberté proclame « les masses entassées aspirant à la liberté ».
Que signifie la Liberté pour nous aujourd’hui ?
Mémoire, histoire et idée Entité ; un processus d’humanisation et un terrain de lutte entre nos ancrages et nos aspirations, un être en mouvement constant et en état de changement ; impermanent, éphémère, protéiforme, façonné par le dynamisme entre authenticité et falsification, tandis que nous errons dans un désert de miroirs, de mensonges et d’illusions d’autorité qui cherchent à nous capturer, nous déformer et nous subjuguer, à nous asservir et à nous voler nos âmes.
C’est la révolution fondamentale de toute l’humanité ; la lutte pour nous créer en êtres autonomes, libérés des identités autorisées et de la tyrannie des idées de vertu d’autrui, contre les forces de déshumanisation et les hégémonies élitistes de la richesse, du pouvoir et des privilèges, les divisions de l’altérité exclusive et les fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol, ainsi que les inégalités et les injustices de la terreur d’État, de la répression de la dissidence, de la violence institutionnelle, de la force et du contrôle.
Devenir nous-mêmes est la première révolution que nous devons tous mener, dont d’autres formes de lutte révolutionnaire sont des échos et des reflets, unies dans la lutte pour l’appropriation et le contrôle de notre identité, aspects d’une émergence commune de l’humanité.
Refuser de se soumettre est l’acte humain primordial qui confère la liberté, car qui ne peut être contrôlé est libre. En ce moment de Résistance à l’autorité et à la tyrannie, nous devenons des Invaincus, chacun de nous étant une Zone Autonome Vivante, agent du Chaos, de la Liberté, de la réinvention et de la transformation de l’humanité.
La loi est au service du pouvoir, l’ordre s’approprie, et il n’y a pas d’Autorité juste.
Ouvrons les portes de nos prisons et soyons libres.
Comme nous l’enseigne Guillermo del Toro dans Carnival Row : « Le chaos est le grand espoir des sans-pouvoir.» Saisissons notre moment et apportons un changement aux systèmes d’oppression et d’inégalité de pouvoir.
En ce moment décisif, entre les ténèbres de l’Amérique de Vichy, l’État conquis par le Quatrième Reich et l’odieux régime de Trump, et la vague menaçante de renouveau fasciste qui assombrit une grande partie de l’Europe et menace de démanteler les Lumières, je dis à tous les tyrans qui répondent à la protestation non pas par la réparation des torts, mais par une répression brutale, comme un état carcéral de force et de contrôle, tant chez eux que dans les anciennes colonies et les nations émergentes : dans une société libre et égalitaire, il faut diriger les masses depuis le front, en tant que leur champion, et non derrière les murs de votre palais, en tant que leur tyran.
En ce moment où la tyrannie et la terreur d’État nous ravagent, apportons le Chaos.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la Mort !
Les Misérables – Do You Hear The People Sing?
I Dreamed a Dream -film trailer
Valjean’s death
Les Misérables full soundtrack
Marat/Sade film
Quills film trailer
Fireworks at the Eiffel Tower tonight, beautiful but not so beautiful as the fires of liberty which continue to burn throughout France
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface)
A traveling freak show of grotesques and abominations, cruelties and the degradation of our humanity has offered for our amusement a theatrical of performative heroism on this day one year ago, in the Spectacle of the Bloody Ear.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, propaganda, rewritten histories and alternate universes, untruths designed to falsify us and overwrite the programming of our history in service to the wealth and power of hegemonic elites and the tyrants who speak for them but claim to speak and act for us as a strategy of our enslavement and the manufacture of consent.
Here in the funhouse of distorted images and manufactured authority we have but one chance of escape; the sacred calling to pursue and witness the truth.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain, for he wishes to steal your soul.
As I wrote in my post of July 15 2024, Thoughts and Prayers, Just None of Them Benign; A dramatic performance before the stage of the world, the wounded hero who refuses to be silenced hurling defiance to his assassin, marked like a hunter riding to hounds on his first kill, a living bloody flag with which to rally the masses; this was Our Clown of Terror’s greatest performance, and one designed to hand him the Presidency.
An ear nicked by a glass shard or fragment of a bullet, fired by a fellow Republican who has unrestricted access to his sniper position, citizen reports of his doing so ignored by police, Secret Service, and campaign security.
How likely, how believable, is this scene had we been offered it in a work of fiction?
My partner Theresa’s immediate reaction was; “This is fake. It’s a show.” Mine was that the Republican Party has decided to free itself from capture by the Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump, and that it was funded by Republican power brokers and opportunity created by intelligence provided from within Trump’s inner circle and in collusion with his many layers of public and private security.
I suspect these two reactions will be typical among our electorate, who by now have internalized the motto of X Files; “Trust No One.”
This is the nation we live in now, where no one trusts the state or each other, wherein we are divided and our solidarity is a broken and antique thing, and we are no longer co-owners of the state as a democracy, but an audience for performances of democracy which no longer have any meaning.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, falsifications, lies and illusions, rewritten histories and alternate realities chosen by those who would enslave us. And most of us no longer know the difference, for truth is the first casualty of tyranny.
President Biden has made kiss the booboo noises with his iron jaws like a Tin Woodsman short of oil, “Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, god forbid, a literal killing field,” he said in his address to the nation. Biden called for “national unity” and proclaimed “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” Fine words, with which I would agree in normal times. But normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Calls to unity and the rule of law are fine when we have a functioning democracy, or one which is salvageable; but Biden’s Restoration of Democracy has failed, and with it the rule of law and our unity as a nation who hold some truths self evident.
Absolutely democracy is constituted by political violence, and all liberty is created through resistance, seizures of power, and liberation struggle. Here Obama speaks of the internal operations of viable and functioning systems of liberty; but when liberty fails, is sabotaged or subverted, or is yet to be won, democracy must be established by the use of social force and violence beyond the boundaries of its Law. How else can we bring change to systems of oppression?
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
All Resistance is War to the Knife.
To Traitor Trump, most dangerous enemy spy to have ever tried to bring America down, Russian agent and Nazi fanatic who wants to make of us a white supremacist terrorist state, who conspired in the deaths of policemen and the attempted mass murders of members of Congress in the January 6 Insurrection, rapist who wants to make us a Gideonite theocracy of patriarchal sexual terror, a reality television star who wants to be our king, I send thoughts and prayers; just none of them benign.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2024, A Crusade Begins: On the Reimagination of the Failed Assassination as Divine Intervention and the Anointing of a King, and Theocracy As the Idolatry of Trump Cast In the Role of Cyrus the Great In A New Myth of Exile; During the coronation ceremonies at today’s Party of Treason festivities, we are confronted by a cultlike homage to the Fuhrer of rows upon rows of fake ear bandages, signs of submission and of the reimagination of the failed assassination of Our Clown of Terror as divine intervention and the anointing of a king, and of Gideonite Theocracy as the idolatry of Traitor Trump cast in the role of Cyrus the Great in a new myth of exile.
QAnon has been instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Age of Tyrants to come, as has the network of Pentecostal, charismatic, and other fundamentalist churches which operate as a Christian Identity-Fourth Reich propaganda insurgency. The story of the subversion of our secular democracy as a theocratic tyranny in America begins in 1980 with the capture of the Republican Party by Christian Identity fundamentalists under Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, which put Reagan in the White House, though it drew on pre existing Confederate and Nazi elements and ideologies.
And all of this draws on far more ancient sources, from the Crusades and the Inquisition, and so we may interrogate with great precision what we are witnessing in this historical moment in the birth of a terrible new faith, and act to save each other from its consequences.
What Trump and the Party of Treason are attempting to launch here is not limited to the goals of a re-election campaign; it is nothing less than a crusade.
As written by Adam Gabbatt and Alice Herman in The Guardian, in an article entitled Christian right see God’s hand in Trump rally shooting: ‘The world saw a miracle’: Attempted assassination bolsters Trump’s support in a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals; “Rocío Cleveland was at a wedding on Saturday when she heard the news that something had happened to Donald Trump. He had fallen, clutching his ear, while giving remarks at a rally and it wasn’t yet clear if he was injured or even dead.
“It took a little bit for it to sink in,” said Cleveland, a conservative activist from Illinois who attended the Republican national convention this week. “I was speechless, I was crying, I was in tears.”
Trump had been tackled to the ground by a Secret Service detail after a gunman, perched on a nearby roof, opened fire on the crowd at a Trump rally. When the former US president rose, shaking his fist, blood dripping down his face – apparently only grazed by the would-be assassin’s bullet – the moment, for Cleveland, was euphoric.
“I think this tragic event that happened to President Trump, I think it will restore the faith in our country, as horrible as it may sound,” Cleveland said. “The world saw a miracle before their eyes.”
Cleveland’s perspective – that Trump’s survival was more than just luck – is shared widely by Christian believers in the Maga (Make America great again) movement who have seen the hand of God in Trump’s recent escape from serious harm at the hands of a gun-wielding 20-year-old shooter with no easily discernible motive.
It also bolsters Trump’s support in a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals – that he and his team have been seeking to woo be deploying Christian imagery throughout his 2024 campaign.
The religious feeling, that Trump was saved in an act of divine intervention, quickly took hold in the Republican party after the shooting, with grassroots activists, internet personalities and powerful Republican lawmakers offering religious explanations for the near-miss.
“I have no doubt that God lowered a shield of protection over Donald Trump,” Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, told the crowd on Tuesday night.
Carson said he had “watched with horror” as Trump was shot.
“And my thoughts immediately turned to the book of Isiah,” Carson said. “That says no weapon formed against you shall prosper.”
Others have also suggested divine intervention. One viral image that circulated on X in the days after the shooting showed how close the bullet came to striking Trump in the brain, rather than grazing his ear.
“God intervened,” a caption on the photo read. The image has been viewed almost 800,000 times.
Trump has not always been a favourite of the Christian right. A thrice-married man who has referred to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, who was reportedly unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness, seemed an unlikely hero when he first ran for president.
But Trump’s selection of the pious Mike Pence as his running mate allayed concerns in 2016, and his nomination of conservative justices to the supreme court paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade – a huge victory for conservative Christians and one that appears to have sealed the bond between them and Trump.
While religious Trump supporters at the grassroots level seized on to a biblical interpretation of the shooting, influential figures in the Christian right have amplified it.
In a podcast episode titled Prophecy or Coincidence, Lance Wallnau, an influential pastor and self-described prophet, said that prayers for Trump had “worked” in saving the former president, and speculated that the shooter had been motivated by the left to commit an act of spiritual warfare.
In the episode, Wallnau referred to an apparent authority on the subject: Trump, who in the wake of the shooting, claimed on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening”
“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” Trump wrote.
Again and again at the Republican national convention, prominent attendees and speakers echoed the sentiment.
“Let me start by giving thanks to God almighty for protecting president Trump, and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired,” Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, said in his speech.
“Together we lift up in prayer all of our leaders for protection.”
Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman turned election conspiracy theorist and Trump ally, said during a podcast interview staged outside the convention center on Monday that an image of Trump on the ground, alive after the shooting, inspired in him a sense of religious awe.
“It’s like right there, you could feel the presence of God talking to us,” said Lindell, his voice wavering. “It’s gonna be OK. It’s gonna be OK.”
Others invoked darker forces. In his speech Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, claimed “the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle”, while Marjorie Taylor Greene, the divisive Florida congresswoman, said “evil came for the man we admire and love so much”.
For Marlene Stuck, who traveled with congregants from her church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Milwaukee for the Republican national convention, the shooting was evidence of a fundamental spiritual truth.
“The word of God works,” said Stuck. “It saved his life.”
As written by Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian, in an article entitled To his supporters, Trump is a martyred messiah, resurrected after crucifixion; “The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.
Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.
But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.
“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.
His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.
The most important revelation was written within hours of the shooting by Senator JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. His was not a gospel of peace, but of wrath. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Pointing his spear at the enemy, Vance settled the apostolic succession. He is a changeling, who once compared Trump to “heroin” and “Hitler”, but his conversion into Trump’s warrior has vaulted him to become the anointed disciple and chief of the praetorian guard of the living godhead.
Before the assassination attempt, the Christian nationalists’ narrative awkwardly tried to fit the licentious, sinful and predatory Trump into a framework in which his apparent absence of virtue and religious faith served virtue and faith. They commonly referred to him as King Cyrus, after the Persian ruler, who did not “recognize” God but was described in Isaiah 45 as “anointed” by the Lord to free the exiled Jews in Babylon.
Trump’s origin story as the son of the brutish real estate operator Fred Trump and the pupil of the nefarious fixer and Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn was always problematic. None of his followers ever acknowledge it, except perhaps for Cohn’s protege Roger Stone, who was handed Trump to run as a client when Cohn was dying of Aids. That true crime story remains dangerous to the Trump mythology.
A movie about Trump’s relationship with Cohn, The Apprentice, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has not yet found an American distributor. Media companies have been intimidated at the possibility of Trump’s vengeance. “If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote the producers of the film.
So, as in Isaiah 45, the 45th president was the king whose “right hand” was invisibly guided from above. “He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshiped by Jews,” proclaimed Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host. The Trump Prophecy, a film hailing his presidency as divinely ordained, produced with faculty and students from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, also cast him as King Cyrus. An evangelical preacher, Paula White, whom Trump invited to speak at his 2017 inauguration ceremony and welcomed to the White House to bless him for nominating Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court, declared: “Because God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority, it is God who raises up a king.”
After Trump’s multiple indictments and felony conviction, he intensified his image-making as a martyr, the victim of conspiratorial forces, of the “Deep State”, “radical left Democrats” and “globalist elites”. He presented himself as selflessly absorbing the blows that were really meant for his supporters, whom he was shielding from “poisoning of the blood” from immigrants. But he instantly translated his supposed self-sacrifice into cries of revenge.
On 4 August 2023, the day after he was formally charged in the January 6 case, Trump posted on Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” By April of this year, Trump had made numerous threats against the judges, court staff and witnesses in all of his cases, who have received death threats and are under the protection of security details, including the US marshals. Trump’s courtroom outbursts forced judges to issue 14 gag orders. In the New York hush-money case, he violated 10 gag orders, which may be pertinent in his sentencing on 18 September. In that case, after Trump attacked Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Merchan said, in issuing one of the gag orders: “The threat is very real.”
On 4 June, after his conviction on 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case, Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them. And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden and you see all the criminality.” Biden, of course, had nothing to do with the New York case.
Two weeks earlier, Trump had appeared before the National Rifle Association convention to warn: “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain.” He conflated gun control with his trials: “No, they want to take away your rights. Well, I know that better than anybody. They want to take away my rights better than anybody, worse than Alphonse Capone.” He returned to guns. “We have to have a gun,” he said. “If we don’t have a gun, we’re dead people.”
On 6 January 2024, a week before the Republican Iowa caucuses, 17-year-old Dylan Butler entered his school in a small town in Perry, north of Des Moines, killed one student and wounded seven more people before he shot himself. He also had an explosive device. “Two friends and their mother who spoke with the AP said Butler was a quiet person who had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school,” the Associated Press reported. After 36 hours of silence, Trump called the incident “very terrible”, adding: “But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
Back in 2015, after Trump announced his first candidacy, he gave an interview to a gun blog called Ammoland. He had previously supported the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, passed in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which a research team at New York University’s Langone Medical Center for the National Institute of Health calculated reduced mass shootings by 70%. That ban was allowed to lapse in 2004 under the George W Bush administration.
Trump wanted to reassure the gun lobby that he was emphatically against gun control. “To the left, every gun is an assault weapon,” he said. “I certainly stand by my opposition to gun control when it comes to taking guns from law-abiding citizens. You mention that the media describes the AR-15 as an ‘assault rifle,’ which is one example of the many distortions they use to sell their agenda. However, the AR-15 does not fall under this category. Gun-banners are unfortunately preoccupied with the AR-15, magazine capacity, grips and other aesthetics, precisely because of its popularity.”
On 9 August 2016, Trump delivered a stemwinding speech against gun control and threatened the assassination of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. He ridiculed the idea of “gun-free zones” and hypothesized being shot by a gunman from the side, saying: “Do you know what a gun-free zone is? That’s like – they study where the gun-free zones – if they would have known you had guns, if they would have known that they were going to be shot at from the other side, it would have been a whole different story. Maybe it wouldn’t have even happened in the first place.”
Then, he incited the crowd against Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although the second amendment, people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Four years later, Hillary Clinton still appeared as a target for Donald Trump Jr, who posted a picture of himself on Instagram on 4 January 2020, holding an AR-15 etched with a Crusader’s Cross, a far-right symbol, and Hillary Clinton’s image behind bars on the magazine. “Nice day at the range. @rarebreedfirearms and @spikes_tactical adding a little extra awesome to my AR and that mag,” he wrote.
On January 6, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to the White House chief of staff, when Trump was informed that thousands in the crowd on the Ellipse whom he urged on to the Capitol refused to be screened for weapons at the magnetometers set by the Secret Service, he shouted: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons! They’re not here to hurt me. They can march to the Capitol from here.”
Among the banners carried by the mob assaulting the Capitol was a large Confederate flag adorned with an AR-15 and the inscription “Come and Take It”. Other flags depicted Trump carrying an assault rifle. One of the rightwing militias staging the attack, the Oath Keepers, stashed a small armory of AR-15s and other weapons at the ready in a suburban Virginia motel.
On 13 July, earlier this month, Trump stepped onto the stage in Butler county, Pennsylvania, where he began by denouncing “the fake news” for not reporting the size of this “big, big, beautiful crowd”. He falsely claimed that Joe Biden had lied about his own crowd sizes, and said: “And we got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed. Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions.” Trump ripped into “Crooked Joe Biden and laughing Kamala Harris”. He said: “Our country’s been stolen from us … one of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over four years and hiding what the obvious facts are … .”
He was referring to the election of 2020: “I tell you what, we did fantastically in 2016. We did much better in 2020. You know we did much better, and it was rigged. It was a rigged deal.”
He turned to talking about people crossing the southern border: “Criminals, we have criminals. We have drug dealers. We have people who should not be here.” On a large screen to the right of his stage, a chart showed how immigration had increased under Biden, though not its recently rapid decrease; he said: “The worst president in the history of our country took over, and look what happened to our country.” Trump turned his head slightly to look at the chart, and said: “And if you, uh, want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened … .” Then the bullet clipped his ear. The shooter with a semi-automatic rifle killed a bystander and critically injured two others.
The reborn Trump announced that he would rewrite his acceptance speech to the Republican convention. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said. On the first day of the convention, a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, issued a ruling in the national security documents and obstruction case stating that the special prosecutor was illegal, and dismissed the entire case against Trump – a ruling nearly all legal experts regarded as bizarre, partial and likely to be overturned.
Trump’s continuing streak of remarkable luck inspired him to descend from his heavenly state into his usual pit of grievance. His idea of bringing the country together is a lengthy self-interested checklist of settling scores. Uneasy rests the crown of thorns. On 15 July, he posted:
As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts – The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!
The motive of the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, remains obscure. From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a quiet boy, awarded a $500 high school prize for his talent at math, who spent two years at a local community college studying engineering, worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and lived at home. He once gave $15 to a liberal organization, but was a registered Republican. Fellow students remember him as always being a conservative.
“He definitely was conservative,” one former classmate told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.” In a school mock debate, the classmate said: “Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
Another student recalled that others “tormented Crooks ‘almost every day’ and that he often wore ‘hunting’ outfits to class”. Crooks seems to have recently spent time down the rabbit hole of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch; when he shot Trump, he was wearing one of its T-shirts, with the slogan “What The Hell”. He had parked his car nearby filled with explosives. Perhaps he intended to ram it into the crowd in a spectacular suicide.
Crooks left no letter, no manifesto and no clues on social media. His premeditation did not involve making known his personal motive. He wrote no political statement. Trump’s appearance near his home suddenly gave him an opportunity to strike back. He was a bullied boy.”
Dreadful, all of this, but there is nothing new in the weaponization of faith in service to power. We have seen it all before, in many forms throughout human history, and I can tell you one thing with absolute clarity and truth; no matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of faith, race, and nation, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote of Traitor Trump’s puppetmaster in my post of March 6 2022, How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; There is a line in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Power That Preserves, third novel of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, spoken of a hero who refuses to be summoned to the rescue because in his other world, our own, a child has been bitten by a snake and must be saved; “Could I damn a world to save the life of one child? I’m not sure I could make that choice.”
Today we contemplate its opposite; I’m not sure I could make the decision to let the world burn and trigger the extinction of humankind to save the life of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose mad imperial conquest of Ukraine now threatens the future of us all.
The life of one war criminal versus the incalculable horrors he will bring; I could not choose to save a monster who may destroy us all over saving humankind and our world.
The violence of the slaver cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains., as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours teaches us.
A senator with whom I am not usually aligned made an entirely reasonable suggestion recently, for which he has been denounced in the media by friend and foe alike, even AOC for whom I have already declared in the next Presidential election, regardless of whether or not she is on the ballot.
I am having difficulty understanding why this suggestion was not embraced with great bipartisan enthusiasm, given our history. After all, assassination and overthrowing inconvenient governments is something we do all the time. We even manufacture or capitalize on unforgiveable just causes of war like Russia’s firebombing of a nuclear site this week to launch imperial conquests of our own; the terror attack on the Twin Towers provided a pretext to seize the heroin fields of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq, sacrifices to our shared rituals of public grieving and need for vengeance, and Hearst’s fictions regarding the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave us the Spanish-American War, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands which we stole simply because we could, and later the Presidency of the war’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
Go us? We normally seize such chances with great avarice.
Perhaps we are growing up, we humans, and abandoning the use of force and violence. The question is whether we can survive to reach the stage of childhood’s end; and this is the inherent dilemma of force and power, for such forces are dichotomous, bidirectional, and have unintended consequences.
As written by Joan E Greve and Vivian Ho in The Guardian; “Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after the South Carolina senator suggested Vladimir Putin should be assassinated in order to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Graham first made the suggestion in an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday evening, and he then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral.
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.”
Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Graham added in a separate tweet: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”
Despite immediate criticism of Graham’s comments from left and right in the US, he doubled down on the idea in a Friday morning interview with Fox & Friends. “I’m hoping somebody in Russia will understand that he is destroying Russia, and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,” Graham said.
American lawmakers of both parties responded to Graham’s comments with shock, dismay and outrage, pointing out the danger in demanding the assassination of a leader whose troops are currently engaged in shelling nuclear plants.
“I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid [a third world war],” the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar said in a tweet.
Republican members of Congress were no less critical, as Senator Ted Cruz derided Graham’s suggestion as “an exceptionally bad idea”. “Use massive economic sanctions; BOYCOTT Russian oil [and] gas; and provide military aid so the Ukrainians can defend themselves,” Cruz said. “But we should not be calling for the assassination of heads of state.”
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene – the extremist congresswoman who has sparked outrage for, among other things, comparing coronavirus-related restrictions to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust – chimed in from the right with criticism of Graham.
“While we are all praying for peace [and] for the people of Ukraine, this is irresponsible, dangerous [and] unhinged. We need leaders with calm minds [and] steady wisdom,” Greene said on Twitter. “Not blood thirsty warmongering politicians trying to tweet tough by demanding assassinations. Americans don’t want war.”
White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We are not advocating for killing the leader of a foreign country or regime change. That is not the policy of the United States.”
Really? When has this not been precisely our national policy? President Biden ordered the assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, a man in Syria whom our state claimed without any evidence was the new leader of ISIS, who if the charge was true was a danger only to our common enemies al Qaeda and the Assad regime, mass murdering his entire family merely to divert attention from his many failures, just as Trump had done the year before with his supposed predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Did America not assassinate Salvador Allende and attempt countless times to assassinate Fidel Castro, both heroes as great as any American President?
Did we not kill in massive and horrific numbers to win our freedom from the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, from slavery in the Civil War, and from fascism in the Second World War?
We are a nation founded in death and terror through the words with which George Washington sent twelve thousand soldiers to put down the Whisky Rebellion of 1792 and demonstrate the power of the new federal government to enforce taxes; “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.”
Do not speak to me of the moral superiority of America.
O my brothers, sisters, and others who walk with me through this age of fire, wherein liberty and tyranny hang in the balance and possibly the survival or extinction of humankind, I thank you for the time we have spent together in conversation here, which I cherish as a refuge from the world, as a theatre in which I may process my reactions to the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, and as a forge of action in the performance of my chosen roles as a truthteller, a maker of mischief for tyrants, and in becoming a fulcrum of change.
Ours is a universe of Chaos, irrational and uncontrollable, and circumstances beyond the scope of our volition may visit disaster and life disruptive events upon us at any moment, for any reasons or none at all, and if by chance this is the last thing I have the opportunity to write, I want you and everyone who has been part of my life to know that you have helped me find balance for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of our freedom and the beauty of the world, healing in the redemptive power of love, and hope for our future possibilities of becoming human in poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
If by chance you knew our time here in which to do and be the things that bring meaning and value to our lives may number not millennia but hours and days, what would you do and be? Do and be that now, and never stop; for as Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night, we become what we pretend to be. What matters here is that our performances of ourselves are chosen and owned by us, and that we own the stories in which we live.
The most important question to ask of a story is; whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are about to pass through a Rashomon Gate event, of fracture, relativization, the bifurcation of timelines and propagation of alternate futures and realities, and all bets are off as to what awaits us on the other side.
And all of this because a mad tyrant cowers and rages in his warrens of darkness, fragmented and torn apart by the demons which inhabit him as his dreams of empire and dominion fall apart and in accord with Newton’s Third Law create the forces of their own destruction, much as with his predecessor Adolf Hitler at the end, with one crucial difference; beneath his finger lies the button which will launch nuclear annihilation, and it calls to him, whispering; ”Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
So, as Alfred Doolittle said to Higgins in My Fair Lady, “I put it to you; and I leave it to you”; do we save one life and damn the world?
As I wrote in my post of February 22 2022, Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Malcolm X; We are shaped by our histories as narratives in which we play our parts; and we also change and seize ownership of our histories and our stories as we perform and enact them.
This brings us back to issues of unequal power, identity, and the social use of force and violence, issues which the life and works of Malcolm X center and bring into terrible and wonderful focus.
His principle of action, By Any Means Necessary, is like a riddle challenge uttered by a Zen master, for which there is no single interpretation, and to which no words but only deeds may give answer. It is a principle which helped set us free from history, and which in the end rebounded on him and killed him.
A dangerous idea, for the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law and always acts in both directions, action and reaction, unpredictable and slippery in one’s grasp. Yet an idea must be dangerous if it is to be useful in the struggle for liberation.
The violence used by a slavemaster cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains, as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours has been paraphrased, an extension of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master versus slave morality. This dictum has its reverse; the state has no legitimate authority to use death, violence, force, or control in the repression of dissent, theft of citizenship or violations of our universal human rights, or authorization of identities. This got Trotsky killed by Stalin, as he rightly called out tyranny and terror as tyranny and terror regardless of what those who would enslave us call themselves.
Revolutionary struggle, protest movements, and wars of liberation use force and violence to achieve a society free of inequality when there are no other means possible, due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle when the tyranny and terror of authority, state force and control, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege answer dissent with repression because they are without legitimacy and have only fear to keep the slaves at their work. Those who would enslave us refuse to negotiate because they see only themselves as human, and without debate we are left only the sword.
Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
How do such terrible things arise and seize hold of us, shaping us to their uses?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021, Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne; Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
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 Martin Chatwin and now like Saturn a monstrous cannibal 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. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
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!”
I have no use for anything that limits our power to resist evil; the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, or the limits of our humanity.
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 French and American Revolutions and their imperial successor states, those of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, 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 as taught to us by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita and by his model Thomas Mann in Death in Venice are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
How does a revolution seize power without becoming a tyranny? How shall we gather the force and will to resist unjust authority, without enforcing our own notions of the good on others in our turn?
This is the dilemma of power; that we must wield force to take it from our oppressors, and that we must relinquish it when it is ours and refuse to shape our fellows to our will.
We must refuse to submit to authority if we are to seize our liberty; and we must refuse to subjugate others that they may do the same if we are to avoid becoming the monsters we hunt.
I like and empathize with the character of Victor in Mary Shelly’s allegory of the origins of evil, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster in all his magnificence, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, about the interplay of these selves in the growth of the psyche and processes of becoming human, and about the political consequences of otherness and monstrosity.
If we cannot embrace our monstrosity and our shadows, how can we bring change to systems of oppression?
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of dominion and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the processes and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
It is a modernity which can unfold limitless possibilities of becoming human, or like Pandora’s Box and the Lament Configuration of the toymaker LeMarchand in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos unleash horrors beyond our imagination, as Putin now threatens to do with nuclear war and annihilation.
With Putin like Dr Strangelove hypnotized by the siren call of his missiles and their promise of ultimate power, the power of total destruction and the end of humankind, chanting Oppenheimer’s ritual invocation; “Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!”, the question before us all changes.
Nuclear annihilation whispers from the darkness, unleash me, and I’ll make you powerful. But this is a lie, for such power will also consume us and steal our souls.
The great question to which we must now find answer is no longer when is it good to be bad, but how much of our humanity we are willing to sacrifice for our survival as a species.
As I wrote in my post of February 5 2020, Democracy Falls in America: the Acquittal of Traitor Trump; At the end I am driven finally to reconsider the position of the great, flawed idol of my youth Malcolm X; by any means necessary.
By any means necessary; this is a horrible, terrible principle of action, one fraught with endless possibilities of inhumanity and malign power, yet if we are forced to a resistance of survival as was Camus, who wrote for those who must claw their way out of the ruins of lost positions and face yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival, how else may we combat our dehumanization?
We must never surrender hope, for our resistance can triumph over anything but the loss of our faith in ourselves and one another. So long as one of us remembers the dream of freedom, we may yet redeem our humanity.
My answer to the Republican subversion of democracy remains NO!
Yet beyond this, we must fight not merely against fascism but also for democracy and the universal rights of man. As we resist fascism to defend equality and freedom as our common human rights, so we must use force and violence against social and institutional systems, structures, and ideologies and not persons, for we may seek truth together nonviolently with those with whom we disagree as the signal virtue of democracy and humanism, even with our enemies as brother warriors.
Resisting evil means resisting that of others against our universal humanity, but it also means resisting the seduction of evil and power and of our own use of force to compel others.
Power is the evil impulse which births monsters.
So often in history those who commit true atrocities are utterly convinced of the justice of their cause, Gott Mitt Uns, are informed and motivated by narratives of victimhood and have abandoned the self-questioning which is the fulcrum of a free society of equals. This, too, we must resist.
For this is why revolutions, once power has been seized and tyranny overthrown, may become themselves tyrannies, and why I prefer to let others run amok and be ungovernable to the specter of authoritarian social control.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
And 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.”
Further illumination may be found in Anthony Burgess’ masterpiece Napoleon Symphony, a tragedy of Napoleon and Beethoven’s Eroica and a novel whose discovery was a defining moment of my fourteenth year and has remained with me ever since, despite my teenage adoration of Napoleon as a hero of revolution and liberation, a universal genius and ideal of human being.
Here is the ground of struggle between tyranny and resistance under imposed conditions of systemic unequal power in the use of social force and violence, and between seizures of power as ownership of identity versus the falsification of authorized identities in the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; history, memory, identity.
Read it as I did beneath a print of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, depicting a Shadow pantheon with the wonderful image of the rebel Titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape and his three gorgon daughters to his left under signifying masks of Death, Madness, and Desire (I found Disease redundant and renamed her Desire as a better balance of forces, plus she is depicted as a three aspected goddess to the right as Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance); really, what more could a boy ask for?
And here is the dynamism of our relationship with our shadow self and all that we fear and experience as disgust and revulsion, fear of nature and of our instinctive selves externalized and projected as fear of otherness, loss of self and of control, and degradation to an animal state which drive identity politics and social constructions of race, gender, and class or caste which includes nationalism and sectarian faith, especially when overwhelming and pervasive fear and real existential threats are weaponized by authority in service to power, as Malcolm X was falsified by Elijah Muhammed’s Black Muslim separatist nationalism as his herald, in reaction against the greater historical and systemic evils and multigenerational trauma and inequality of white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
Processes of transformational change and social adaptation are chaotic and interdependent, and their causes are circular or more complex as we can see in the case of Malcolm X and liberation struggle, and in all such histories. This is one lesson we can learn from Malcolm X; there is no just authority. And those who claim to speak for you often do so as a primary strategy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and in your subjugation to tyranny.
A second such lesson is that racism in general, and all divisions and social hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, compel submission to authority through the weaponization of fear as an arbiter of our most important relationship, that of the conscious and unconscious or shadow self, which can be read in how we feel and think about nature and those truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
We define ourselves through figures of otherness who represent unintegrated parts of ourselves and define the limits of the human; freaks, monsters, and all those beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and that which we claim as ours.
For this fear of nature as the origin of racism I have a simple solution; let us embrace our monstrosity, and perform violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden as sacred acts of Chaos in pursuit of truth.
The third gift of Malcolm X to our limitless future possibilities of becoming human is a life lived in revolutionary struggle and resistance against systems, structures, and institutions of unequal power as direct interrogation and engagement with the state as embodied violence, and with the consequences of the use of social force.
He died for our chance to learn these three things, how authority falsifies and subjugates us as a primary historical process, how racism and other inequalities of power are born of fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dichotomous and bidirectional nature of violence and the dialectical processes of the use of social force in tyranny and terror and in resistance and revolution, and as a martyr and teacher of wisdom Malcolm X is a figure of liberation who belongs to all humankind.
How can we disambiguate the violence of the “slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains” as Trotsky phrased it, of tyranny and carceral states from revolutionary struggle and liberation, of action in accord with our duty of care for others and our interdependence and solidarity from the enforcement of virtue and imperialism?
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2022, A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi ; To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”
“Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”
Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.
Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.
Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”
There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and his puppetmaster Putin, his model Hitler, and his mirror image al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty, the state as embodied psychopathy and violence, and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to disrupt civilization itself and return us to a pre-democratic barbarian tyranny.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
So I wrote on October 28 2019; and so I must write now of Biden’s secret face and heart of darkness, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, linked now for eternity as figures of terror, murderous retribution, and cruelty.
State terror and imperialism has met sectarian and patriarchal terror as tyranny and organizations of institutionalized violence and power; we can only hope now that they will recognize their twin image in the mirror of death which war and acts of force and violence confront us with, and walk away from the precipice which threatens to consume us all.
As Ken Kesey said in his historic speech to a peace protest against the war in Vietnam recorded in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
Every word of this remains true, in these and all cases of tyranny and the institutional terror of carceral states of force and control, of authorized identities and falsification by propaganda and rewritten histories, of imperial conquest and dominion and colonial exploitation and enslavement. It is also true now of Russia in the invasion of Ukraine.
As I wrote here of Trump we may also say of his master Putin; for Traitor Trump is but a negative space and shadow cast by his original type, and both are atavisms of fear and force, chasms of emptiness which nothing can fill, no amount of dominion and control of others, displays of wealth and power or vainglorious strutting, to which no sacrifices of things loved by others or the terror and pain of their victims can suffice, for such is the nature of psychopathy and of politics as a theatre of cruelty.
What does this mean?
For us in this moment and in the context of the question of violence and the social use of force, it means that in the unequal balance of power between Russia and Ukraine, wherein real people are dying because someone has the power to steal what they have, a predator for whom nothing is real or has meaning but force and power, we must find answer to the declaration of Ayn Rand’s monstrous protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead as he commits rape; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Who will stop Putin’s conquest of Ukraine?
If they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; not divided by hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, nor defeated by learned helplessness and terror, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit as one unconquerable and united humankind.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. There is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
For me, this is simple; the nation invading another is in the wrong. This is no different from chancing to discover a policeman kneeling on someone’s neck, in which case our duty of care for others requires us to save the life of the person who is being murdered right in front of us, regardless of any irrelevant details like which of them has the badge and the gun, the authority and the power, by any means necessary.
Law serves power, and there is no just authority.
Even if neither nation is a democracy, and victims of unequal power have no inherent moral burden of virtue as Shaw teaches us with the figure of Arthur Doolittle in My Fair Lady, one of them stealing the lives and freedom of the other as the right of sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy, and independence cannot be just, and must be opposed.
By any means necessary.
While the political origins of conflict are often ambiguous, its consequences for the people in the path of a conquest are not. As my long term goals remain a united humankind and a stateless society which has abandoned the social use of force and control and with it all laws, authorized identities, and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, and the emergence of a free society of equals from divisions of exclusionary otherness, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, I stand with Ukraine and with any liberation movement of sovereignty and independence anywhere, and with the people of Russia against the oligarchy and Putin and for all democracy movements against tyranny.
Let us stand in solidarity as a band of brothers, wherever men hunger to be free.
Our duty of care for others sometimes requires us to place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. I am only one man, and not extraordinary, with nothing but my witness of history and my vision of our future possibilities of becoming human to hurl against the chasms of darkness and the terror of our nothingness in the face of overwhelming force and amoral imperial and carceral states.
But I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
Here I would declare Sic Semper Tyrannis, but this is a phrase from the shadows and legacies of our history from which we must emerge, and includes the assassinations of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, whose killers I despise and would not align myself with.
I do not trust certainties or those who act in their name, Gott Mitt Uns bearing a history of atrocities and terror which has no equals, and includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, and the Holocaust. As Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Instead I will say with the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds, and I hope in a way which preserves and reflects the moral ambiguity, contingency, and relativity of the original in the film; “Now that I can’t abide. How ’bout you, can you abide it?”
Refences on the Failed Assassination of Trump
Blood and bravado: the Trump shooting upended an election and shook the US:
A year ago the image of Trump’s raised fist became a political touchstone, helping force Joe Biden from the race and fueling a presidency like no other
Biden urges US to reject ‘extremism and fury’ after Trump assassination attempt: In Oval Office TV address, president forcefully condemns political violence and says country must strive for unity
Here are the references from my essay; first among them my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted on August 24 2021 as I joined the defense of Afghanistan after its fall at Panjshir, and as I prepared to join the defense of Ukraine in Mariupol with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on March 22 2022.
My hope for us all now is that we may never need to make such Last Stands here in America against a state captured by the Fourth Reich.
Vote this November, friends; I have seen both, and voting is always better than shooting.
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
The Undeserving: Alfred P. Doolittle’s Speech in My Fair Lady
The Conscience of the King: Star Trek Season 1, episode 13
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
The Tempest, Folger Shakespeare Library, by William Shakespeare, Paul Werstine (Editor), David Lindley (Editor), Israel Gollancz (Preface & Glossary), Barbara A. Mowat (Editor)
Herein I write a manifesto of action as Socratic dialog and Swiftian satire, which as stated in the title questions “the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence”.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty declares, my intent is “to incite, provoke, and disturb.”
Consider also that I claim the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen as Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and that I do these things in performance as what Foucault called a truth teller, in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling.
In this essay I interrogate a set of interdependent problems which I believe are central to the project of becoming human we all share, and the consequences of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force posed to us by the situation we face in this moment, and here I use the term moment in the ways that Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou did, wherein a monstrous tyrant threatens nuclear war and the extermination of all humankind on a whim of infantile tantrum, and we must choose one or the other.
It is a dilemma which like all use of social force makes us complicit in evil, a primary strategy of fascism in our subjugation, and which reproduces the conditions from which states arise as embodied psychopathy and violence, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Badiou claims events are fundamentally indeterminate and structured by the dialectics of possibility and impossibility, maybe-maybe not as my mother used to say to students who asked her for positional declarations, judgements, authorized versions, singing the words and bouncing her hands from side to side.
For Derrida, as my friend Rene Troy Tun has described, “the event in its absolute singularity is thus resistant to cognitive description, critical objectification, interpretive reduction, and theoretical elaboration.”
Here with this primary existential question of human being, meaning, and value I struggle to find synthesis; like the performance of our identities, this process need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
If we have no answers, we must learn to ask better questions.
In this tilting at windmills I use Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars as my model, a magisterial work which comes in male and female versions and whose meaning changes with a difference of seventeen lines between them.
How if Vladimir Putin, or his star agent Dopnald Trump, Should Be Assassinated? Do we save one life, that of a mad tyrant who will destroy us, and damn the world?
Torch of Liberty 