What is this thing of rapture and despair, wonderful and terrible like immersion in the Infinite, more precious and fundamental to our humanity than any other, more dread than hope as a gift and curse which offers redemption and healing when all else fails and also threatens with beautiful illusions from which we cannot escape, full of numinous powers of reimagination and transformation in the face of our nothingness, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world?
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?
We can parse the meaning of the word love in terms of its origins, as does Professor Babette Babich writing in The Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books; “I was trying to go beyond the four in question, to xenia, the rights of a guest, a key notion for a political theorist. It refers to the love of the stranger, which is crucial today in an age of migrant crises and which entails the hospitality we owe the guest. The principle of hospitality is important in the Bible, where Abraham hosts strangers who turn out to be Jehovah and his angels. It is also related in Greek myth, where an old couple, Philémon und Baucis, sacrifice all they have to host two vagabonds, offering kindness to gods in disguise: Zeus and Hermes, the god who mediates all encounters between the mortal and the divine.
The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. (One of the reasons we continue to find Alan Rickman’s betrayal of Emma Thompson in the 2003 Love, Actually so disquieting is that this is a compound betrayal of storgē/philia/eros.) — And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’
Thus, we’ve just gone through the holiday season dedicated to storgē, as also reflected in Love, Actually and the 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life. Philia, friendship, is included in marriage, as well as at school. Then, there is the theme of love matters at university, and eros—hence, the connection to St. Valentine’s day. Finally, some of us reach agapē, pure love, love for its own sake, love of god especially.
I emphasized, as Plato and Augustine do, that we all want love, and it is love that draws us upward as Goethe notes, improving everything about the world and about ourselves. I also pointed to the sharper, darker sides of love: that it can break us, or bend us down, to use Hölderlin’s language for love’s near and future danger to us.
Falling in erotic love is like falling into a maelstrom of intoxication, and there are always low points: the Greek poet, Anacreon compares it to being knocked flat by a blacksmith’s hammer, as Anne Carson cites him in her book, Eros, the Bittersweet. ‘Sweetbitter’ is the Greek glukúpikron in Sappho’s poem to Eros: a word order inverting our English convention and so much truer to life: glukú sweet, pikron, bitter. Thus, the Greeks emphasized the negativity or visceral disaster that is the impact of love. As Archilochus writes: it rips your lungs out. Actually.
And we’re all for it: we long for it, we want it. Eros undoes us, and the same lyric where we encountered the word, glukúpikron, we find lusimélēs, limbs dissolved, mingling one into another. The song originally recorded by the Big Bopper, Chantilly Lace in 1958, and featured in several films, including the 1973, American Graffiti, rhymes the intoxication effected by Chantilly, her walk, her laugh — the Greeks have the same enthusiasms — and the results that ‘make the world go round,’ transforming the singer, unhinging him, lusimélēs, the modern poet’s phrase make me feel real loose, indeed, make me act so funny, make me spend my money, punctuated. And that is the point of it: that’s what I like.
Eros is dangerous, Plato tells us. He is the oldest god, he is the youngest god, and everything about him is dyadic, despite, or more accurately, because of the dangers. Michel Foucault wrote about dietetics and strategies that might enhance the positive and reduce the negative, but, in the end, Cupid’s arrow is an engine of death, and talking of that takes us to Freud.
I looked to philia to highlight what love actually does, and I spoke of Nietzsche on love as a hermeneutic tactic along with one of Fordham’s teachers from a few decades before my time, Dietrich von Hildebrand, because, in addition to ideals closer to agapē, he spoke of intentio benevolentiae to highlight the generosity Nietzsche emphasized. This is the generosity we can bring to everything we want to understand whether books, events, or people.
When we love, we give the other the benefit of the doubt, cut them all kinds of breaks. When we fail to love, we lack generosity and what is more, we are prone to resentment, disdain, anger. Love is about generosity. It is about not minding faults, and the love of wisdom, philosophy, is or can be, beyond analytic anger, hermeneutically generous in the same way: faults and all.”
So classical philosophy teaches us, as we are reminded here by Professor Babich, and the origins of words and ideas are important as they reveal to us the hidden archeology of ourselves as embodiments of historical processes of consciousness. But functional definitions can tell us how such processes create us as shaping, informing, and motivating sources.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the forms of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
So we come to the final category of our interrogation of love, desire; its parallel and interdependent realm of human being and the dyadic counterforce of death as eros and thanos. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must 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, forgotten 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.
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation over vast epochs of time. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this schema three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to limit and deny our true nature; to love others regardless of their forms. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist, that we may as the primary human act become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience and disbelief, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
We saw each other, Genet and I; and when this is true nothing else matters.
I have been fortunate that this was far from the first or last of my true friendships, a category which subsumes everything from ephemeral moments which offer illumination, meeting others as equals in a free space of play as scholars questioning human being, meaning, and value, as allies in Resistance and revolutionary struggle, or simply finding joy in a universe which offers little to balance the terror of our nothingness, to sharing transformational Defining Moments as did Genet and I in the Siege of Beirut when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance and set me on my life path of liberation struggle, and finally to grand romance beyond the limits of time and our flesh, thinking of my partner Dolly in that last case.
Her words upon my mother setting me in her arms as a newborn baby on my first day home from the hospital; “Can I keep him?” And here we are sixty six years later, in our home we built together on a hill from where we can see the place we first kissed, on a hayride in the snow in a wagon with other children pulled by her father driving a tractor; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends and partners who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
As written by Alana Mohamed in The Atlantc, in an article entitled Where to Turn When You Feel ‘at Odds With Being Human’: Two recent books find, in the fluidity and endurance of marine life, respite from a world that expects conformity; “The sea has long tugged at the human imagination, inspiring stories of hubristic individuals seeking to tame the inhabitants of that seemingly endless expanse. The ocean has also borne the consequences of excessive modern consumption—commercial fishing, microplastics—paradoxically transforming many of its dwellers into martyrs, pet causes to be championed and protected.
Yet an emergent narrative complicates both these perspectives, positing instead a deep, co-equal bond between humans—particularly those who feel discomfort with rigid taxonomies, or who exist at the margins of society—and sea creatures of the deep. In the new essay collection Voice of the Fish, Lars Horn wonders “how common [it is] to feel completely at odds with being human,” and uses a long-standing fascination with marine life to reimagine the body’s potential. And in the 2020 book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, the poet and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs argues that the lives of marine mammals such as dolphins and whales offer helpful models for resisting exploitation. Aligning herself with these put-upon creatures, she writes, “I am related to all those in captivity.” Though the collections tackle their subjects differently, they would seem to be in conversation with each other, finding in the endurance and fluidity of sea life liberation from human control.
Voice of the Fish attempts to undo ideas of what is “normal” or “natural” by teasing out the expansiveness of marine life. As a child questioning not only their gender but also more existential matters of the body and soul, Horn found comfort in enumerating facts about fish—for example, that some fish species change their sex, or that a particular type of jellyfish can revert to earlier stages of development and reproduce asexually. “Science [has] so often reserved the animalistic for those who fall outside of a society’s dominant ideologies,” Horn notes, alluding to medical experiments on Black men and women, forced sterilization of women with disabilities, and the erasure of transness as a mental disorder. Studying the world of fish, they write, has “helped dissolve a world I found too hard, too strict in how it required me to live within it.”
Finding terms like dysphoria “too clinical, too sterile,” Horn instead seeks to understand their body (an “otherworldly” being) through mystical stories about fish across a variety of disciplines, including ancient myth, the Bible, and the work of classical taxonomists such as Pliny the Elder and Linneaus. In Naturalis historia, for example, Pliny describes sacred eels, adorned with jewelry, that were said to have oracular powers. In 19th-century Japan, watching goldfish in their bowls was thought to cool people down in summer. Tilapia were believed to be protectors of the sun god Ra. Taken by these ethereal tales, Horn wonders, “Maybe this is the nearest we come to the divine?”
Aquariums become, for Horn, both spaces of communion and, paradoxically, reminders of human cruelty. Waiting out a storm at the Georgia Aquarium one day, they find solace in the display of a lone eel. Its presence allows Horn to reflect on the morphological dexterity of the European eel (which changes color and features several times throughout its life) and its general refusal to conform to scientific knowledge. Only moments later, Horn, in turn, is put on display, deemed a “pervert” by a passing family.
The feeling of being exposed, for Horn, dates back to childhood, when their eccentric artist mother had them pose next to dead squids, or in full-body plaster casts. These activities compounded the physical unease Horn felt. But through these and other experiences, they become fascinated by the mutability of their body—as when their ailing foot is mysteriously healed by an animal breeder or when they, for a time, seem to lose the ability to speak, read, or write. Like the fish they admire, Horn observes their body appearing to adhere to a logic more ancient than science alone can explain.
While Horn finds affinity in the strangeness of sea creatures, Gumbs sees them as relatives of a sort, describing her subjects with a startling intimacy. Considering the resilience of family ties, she recounts the story of Tokitae, one of the last survivors of a group of orcas taken from their home in the Salish Sea.
Because orcas care for their young communally, Gumbs imagines Tokitae as a mother figure and wonders at her own response: “What does it mean to love someone who has seen her children taken and, at the risk of capture, stayed to witness and scream?” She then directly addresses both the reader and Tokitae: “I love you with a love of screams. I love you with a love of witness.”
Gumbs’s meditations are poetic and inquisitive, often diving beyond anecdotes to tease out what goes unsaid. A heartwarming story of a dolphin mother singing to her child, for example, leads Gumbs to ruminate on the hundreds of women who give birth per year in U.S. prisons. In stories of animal-human interaction, she reads a secret life of marine activism—or perhaps they’re simply acts of survival. As the population of endangered Hawaiian monk seals begins to rebound, including on two islands where U.S. military bases have closed, she optimistically deems their reappearance an act of reclamation. Similarly, when a tropical whale swallows a tour operator (“Not long enough to kill him, just long enough to change his outlook”), she wonders whether it’s an act of protest against human encroachment, rather than a simple accident, as it’s been widely reported to be (“I’m not saying you can’t trust those reports. I’m just saying that they come from the tourist industry, something we also know something about in the Caribbean”).
In the exploitation of these sea dwellers, Gumbs sees an eerie parallel with the transatlantic slave trade, which she argues produced not survivors but “the undrowned,” who breathe “in unbreathable circumstances.” The ability to survive underwater becomes, to Gumbs, a metaphor for human resistance to oppressive institutions, both past and present. The stories of baby seals whose mothers coax them into the ocean before they understand that they can survive in water, mirror, for her, the human potential to meet unexpected challenges. In the “gigantic breathing” of whales, she sees the power of the collective. She cites a 2010 study on whaling and the ocean carbon cycle, which estimated that if whale populations were restored to pre-whaling numbers, they’d be able to store as much carbon as 110,000 hectares of forest. She also uses the blacktip reef shark to push back on the myth of the lone predator that dominates capitalist societies. To Gumbs, their communal nature and sense of play show that “our survival need not make us into monsters.”
At one point, Gumbs addresses both sea creatures and readers with the passion of prayer: “Our kinship is the kind of salve that heals whole oceans.” Horn, too, feels this soulful connection, wondering at the ability of fish to swim “beyond” their body “into some other, mythic, imagined space.” As we continue to face the material consequences of our rising seas, both Horn and Gumbs ultimately turn to a different, more spiritual plane to reimagine the dichotomies between human and animal. In the process, they challenge us to think anew about the way our bodies can, or might be able to, move through the world.”
My Octopus Teacher film: love beyond the limits of our flesh
Of the quality of our humanity, the nightmares and dreams of our histories, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human yet undreamed; for each of us, faces of darkness and light.
For over forty years now I have lived as a maker of mischief for tyrants, myself a monster who is also a hunter of monsters, among the unknown spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value. Here also the shadows of my history which like all human beings I drag behind me like an invisible reptilian tail become negative spaces which threaten to subsume us or detach and act independently like the tulku I once practiced creating as a Vajrayana Buddhist monk of the Kagyu order of Dream Navigators, or like Dracula’s shadow which has a life of its own in the great film starring Anthony Hopkins and Winona Ryder; metaphors and allegories of our capture and falsification by the personae and identities we perform.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
I dream of the Jar of Eyes in Sarajevo, of the horrors of Mariupol, the Third Intifada, the defense of Panjshir in Afghanistan, and countless other Last Stands and forlorn hopes, as if dying and being reborn, or being destroyed and recreated as the line in David Cronenberg’s film The Fly has it, a reimagination of Frankenstein as an allegory of degradation and monstrosity in which I find reflection, more times now than I can remember, and each version of myself more distant from the original as I began; and of the sacred dead who inhabit my memories, literally as embodied history in the case of our DNA, who each represent a lost connection with a previous self.
As the line in The Fly of the mad scientist who has unwittingly transformed himself into a monster goes; “You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you’? You’re afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren’t you? I’ll bet you think you woke me up about the flesh, don’t you? But you only know society’s straight line about the flesh. You can’t penetrate beyond society’s sick, grave, fear of the flesh. Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring. Y’see what I’m sayin? And I’m not just talking about sex and penetration, I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh. A deep penetrating dive into the plasma pool.”
Herein is an echo and reflection of Nietzsche’s Toad he feared to swallow, passed to William S. Burroughs and from he to me, misshapen as it crosses bottomless chasms of darkness beyond the limits of the human, to find glorious and terrible forms in the unknown places on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons; where I have lived so very long, here among the dragons.
Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; our darkness whispers to us of such things, and we must find balance and the will to claw our way out of the ruins yet again, and make another Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival.
As Nietzsche warned I have looked too long into the darkness, and it has begun to look back at me.
During my many wonderful years as a debate coach and teaching Forensics at Sonoma Valley High School, I began the first day of class every year with a demonstration I call Becoming a Fulcrum. On my desk I would set a balance and say; “This is a fulcrum.” Across it I put a second object, saying; “It balances a lever. When your parents ask what you are learning in Forensics class, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
In this mad quest which is my life mission I must now also pursue the restoration of balance within myself, just as our nation and the world pursues the restoration of democracy and our universal human rights, battered by tidal forces of fascism and tyranny among fathomless chasms of darkness.
In moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
Long ago I lost count of Last Stands; these have become truths written in my flesh, and I bear such marks without number. How do we find the will to do these things?
The truth is we need nothing beyond ourselves and our moment of decision to do such things; no great universal principles, not even the negative space of a heroic figure to inhabit and perform before the stage of the world. All we need is this; that others who rely on us will die if we do not.
This is what makes us human, and its something we must continue to affirm no matter what the cost; our duty of care for others.
There may be one more thing that can help us in such moments of decision; if we remember who we are, and not how others imagine us.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
History, memory, identity; we are a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation across vast gulfs of time, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto describes this as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans; defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as “a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted.”
All true art defiles and exalts.
May we all of us find beauty to balance the brokenness of the world, hope in struggle with the legacies of our history and terror of our nothingness, vision with which to perform the reimagination and transformation of the world and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love to heal the flaws of our humanity.
References
Song: “Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
Postscript: If it is unclear, the previous essay is the first of my three part celebration of Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf, or Valentine’s Day as it is more commonly known.
During this liminal time, I question the idea, meaning, and value of Love, and its praxis in social and personal spheres, especially in terms of the relationships between intimacy and politics, and the interdependence of and titanic struggle between eros and thanos.
Sorry, this is as romantic as I get on this subject. To me, love is a defining and innate capacity which makes us human, and confers adaptive or survival value in the face of grief, horror, fear, loneliness, meaninglessness, and despair.
In a universe where these things define our imposed conditions of struggle, we need anything we can get which grants us survival and resilience.
Herein I interrogate the gap between the Ideal and the real, as both a boundary and an interface between self and others, in terms of my ideas about who I am and the personal history which shaped my self-construal and identity and the processes through which human create themselves as I wrote of in my previous post of this series regarding my new science of vestments, and who I truly am now in objective terms as measured and quantified by the clothes I actually have and use now.
At this juncture I signpost a guiding principle of my ars poetica as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth; in the words of Virginia Woolf during a lecture in 1940; “If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.” In this I am guided also by the example of the fearless Kenzaburo Oe, whose total transparency and self-revelatory willingness to publicly dissect his private life is terrifying and awesome in his homeland of Japan, and part of his myth. So yes, I will be creating a photographic archive of what’s in my closet, annotating it with stories from my personal history, and welcoming you into my private life.
In this project I follow the model of Peter Menzel’s foundational work Material World: a Global Family Portrait, which I taught for many years in high school as a context reading for the study of comparative world literature.
My assignment to the class was to study it as an example and a method from archeology and social anthropology which serves as a creative writing prompt; assemble everything in your room which is yours together, excluding only what may be inappropriate for class sharing, for one establishing shot photograph, then list and annotate the items. Why is this yours? What is its history? How does it help you construct and perform your identity?
The purpose of the project is to tell you who you are, always one of the most important questions for us as we grow up, create ourselves, and choose who we wish to become.
In ten class days you will present your project to the class.
Such were my directions to my students, and now I turn that lens on myself.
And I invite all of you to join me in this as a path of self discovery and becoming human; what we choose to wear will tell us much about our values, our roles in the performance of ourselves, our histories and our aspirations, and the material and social systems in which we do all of these things.
As a further guide I suggest the works of Marvin Harris, founder of cultural materialism, all of whose books I have in my reference library and have read many times.
One of my purposes in this project now is to curate, throw out, replace, and fill holes in my wardrobe. Its like taking down all the stock from a store’s shelves to find zombie product, or a snake shedding its skin.
And the same with our souls, identities, personae, the masks we wear and which reshape us.
In this phase of renewal as wardrobe curation, replenishment, restoration, and reimagination, which I conduct as spring and fall wardrobe change normally but this year I am also doing to re-evaluate who I am now and wish to be in future during my retirement, when I no longer need to dress for work every morning, I ask Who am I now, and who do I wish to be this coming season and for the rest of my life in which all of my time is my own, to do and be as I wish? What would best serve me in this cause?
The fun part of all this is imagining and creating new identities to perform; some we cherish and restore or elaborate further, like baroque Venetian masks, some we outgrow and discard like the wise beings who leave their shells on the beach for us to discover and admire, some form in the empty spaces of our possibilities of becoming human we have not yet explored, some of our personae sing in harmony with others.
First we must inventory where we begin now, and interrogate its usefulness and the historical archeology of each of our belongings which serve as vestments and elements of self-construal and performance, itemizing each with notations of any personal memories and authentic experiences associated with it, for our purpose is to mine the emotional force of our memories in identity creation.
My list as follows refers to my Face Book photo album named Jay’s Wardrobe Organization January 2026, links provided.
Business Dress
Dress Shirts: total of 24 spread collar business dress shirts
My collection of business shirts mostly consists of what remains of my professional wardrobe from my final fourteen years of work, first as an Account Manager and then as a Systems Administrator through Xerox Corporation. This required travel and meetings with C level clients; my customers included universities, hospitals, military bases, major industries and private enterprise including 89 print shops. The level of formality I chose for this role was identical to that of Speech Tournament Dress, though it also required some social events which teaching did not, and for that I just fell back on my Yacht Club or Cocktail wear.
I also chose vivid colors for shirts which as a teacher I would not have worn, as I needed people to both notice and remember me, though the need to be seen both as an authority and trustworthy remained the same. And I added Winchester shirts to be worn with double breasted suits for occasions of utmost business level formality.
Here draped with their ties and coordinating pocket squares for jackets, and one never wears a jacket without a pocket square, my shirts are mostly Van Heusen Lux Sateen with has a gorgeous silken hand and sheen.
The leftmost in the photo of my first ten of 24 dress shirts is a bit of an odd fellow and deserves special mention, a madras print of soft pastels with a spread rather than a button down collar which excludes it from casual wear. Its for daytime Cocktail wear when something less fun just wouldn’t do.
These include a Winchester and a grey, both with ties which could be worn with formal Morning Dress though I would be wearing them mainly with a Midnight contrast texture stripe double breasted jacket rather than a costume from a century ago, two white shirts in very fine cotton which even I find I cannot escape, a black silk and black and light blue paisley shirts to be worn with a black velvet Cocktail jacket.
Eleven dress slacks. Slacks is the word for pants not worn as part of a suit of identical cloth; suit pants are called trousers especially when custom tailored. Slacks are worn with Odd Jackets.
First seven of fifteen total Odd Jackets; three tweeds (the checked is double breasted) two navy (a wool flannel and a worsted), a fine patterned wool, and a midnight double breasted shadow stripe for Cocktail Dress
Evening velvet and day Pendleton vests; the first worn with a navy blazer, the second with a tweed hacking jacket. Its very often cold enough to wear a midlayer of some kind under ones jacket here where I live.
The Pendleton I bought in Tucson when I worked as a counselor for teenage felons at Vision Quest, where we rode horses; each boy was given a wild mustang he had to break and learn to ride. I named mine Zeno, a savage beast of jet black like living fire, because we rode everywhere without ever arriving anywhere, endlessly. No, I did not break him; I moved into his imaginal space of wildness, not he into my domesticity, and we rode together as wild things, masterless and free. I credit this adventure with shaping me into a man who could be a good partner for an equally untamed woman, like my partner Dolly.
7 winter sweaters, and my Curious George ski cap bought for me by Dolly, who is always provoking me into being fun. The purple Donegal weed with yellow and red flecks is rather fine.
Shearling coat and liner for an old waxed cotton chore coat gone long ago, torn so entirely to shreds it became unusable. I intend to find a new Barbour jacket for it.
Bespoke handsewn Harris tweed deerstalker cloak, made by Deirdre McGrath, mother of a friend and kung fu student named Karisa, in the 80s. My cloak may serve as a postcard of my university life; we met at a café on Telegraph Avenue, where she overheard me listening to Irish harp and hammer dulcimer music. Some while later she and her then-partner moved to Sonoma for a year or so to study martial arts and revolutionary struggle with me, til fate called me away to distant shores.
Upon my return I found she had she married another friend of mine, Scott Penn, from my guild at the summer Renaissance Faire, St Anthony’s, where we dressed as bourgeois London Aldermen and used an all-day feast as our stage; the last I saw of either of them was at a dinner I held for them when she announced her pregnancy, as fate was again to take me elsewhere soon to make mischief for tyrants. Lost on the seas of time now, like much of my university years.
Perfect for foggy San Francisco nights, the cloak; I first wore it strolling through the UC Berkeley campus park to play a game of Go beneath the carved Chinese dragons at the Faculty Club, as the guest of a professor who was a brilliant player.
Dolly began this collection because she thought it made me more fun; I’m hoping I am much more fun now.
These are the first short sleeve shirts I ever wore; they are worn untucked over a t shirt in a coordinating color and with post World War Two era iconography. These are mainly Jamaica Jaxx, of Shantung silk. I wear them in rotation when we go adventuring on warm days, and put them back on the rack in last or leftmost order so I don’t wear the same one twice in a season.
First five pairs of shoes; left to right Clarks Bradley Walks, Belfry Arnold Palmer signatures, Italian wingtips in cognac, Bostonian cap toes, Rockport wingtip spectators in black with suede contrast panels
Fourth five shoes and boots; shearling slippers, leather gym shoes, second pair of Clarks Bradleys, Sketchers for summer house shoes, Smith & Wesson summer field boots.
My sister commented on this photo; “That is a lot of nice ties! I do see a few with similar colors, so if you want to pare down your collection you could probably eliminate ones with nearly identical color schemes. Why not start a project to wear each one this year and see how you relate to each of them? By the end of the year if you have not found an occasion to wear some of them, you might let go of those, unless they have sentimental value.”
To this I replied; Great idea. I really don’t need any of my old work clothes anymore. Certainly not for a full month, five days a week, without repeating an outfit. I intend to keep only what I will wear in public spaces on occasions like going out to dinner with Dolly or family celebrations to which no other men wear jacket and tie. If I need proper dress, I’m with a less intimate group and dressing with intent. I’m keeping some items which are particularly beautiful or nostalgic for public events or travel.
Spokane is informal even for America, but in much of the world assuming privilege grants privilege, and on a cruise or other luxury travel which I need to balance the fact that if I go somewhere it’s because something awful is happening, best dress is required. This is why my custom google maps all have top shelf hotels and restaurants on them, when most of my time will be where the revolution is.
Hats, total 17 plus extra sun hats
Four flat caps; light and dark brown tweed, cognac suede, steel grey and camel wool
Derby, with formal scarf and gloves, fragments of a full White Tie ensemble. From my wild nights as a young hellion, worn at Vampire the Masquerade live action theatre games in my personae as Dr Crescenti of Clan Tzimisce, and performing as a member of the notorious Berkeley live cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Indecent Exposure. And to actual formal events; balls, dinners, the opera and ballet, all of which were available in the San Francisco of my twenties.
Night and day glasses, both Ray Bans. The ovals have stippling which recalls that of fine guns. The Clubmasters, my favorite style from university, in blue tortoiseshell with custom blue mirror lenses I chose for tiki shirt party fun with Dolly.
The oak cane was made for me in the 80’s by Tim Hayford, one of my students to whom I awarded a black belt and a former US Naval Intelligence operative during the Vietnam War. The umbrella was a gift from my mother, identical to the first one used by Mycroft in the series Sherlock. I carry one when I’m not carrying the other.
I put myself through university teaching martial arts which I began studying when I was nine, also grew up as a saber fencer, and have carried a cane everywhere since my twenties. I can use it like a saber, katana, jian, assegai, or escrima and jodo fighting stick, and there are several advantages a walking cane or umbrella confers in a fight.
First, the best weapon is the one already in your hand.
Second, it buys reaction time and can be used to open the range and to draw and retain your gun.
Third, its versatile and can be used both to apply leverage in armbars and grappling and to achieve surprise in striking from unusual angles.
Four, it provides mechanical advantage and hits with three times more force than a punch.
Five, it has standoff or reach advantage and also lets you deflect knife attacks without risking getting cut.
Six, it doesn’t look like a weapon, can be carried anywhere, and allows you to achieve surprise.
A cane is a superb and ferociously lethal weapon with a bit of practice. And as a tool, a walking stick aids balance over rough ground and can probe pathways in the total darkness of tunnels.
So we arrive at the curation phase of our project, and there are many empty slots to fill in my wardrobe as well as things to edit out. The only difference between my working and retirement dress wardrobe is that I will be planning what fits in my flight cases or for special events, not daily wear.
Most of my time at home is spent reading and writing, gardening, or training, and I’m okay for casual wear for these purposes. Of these, things that go in my gym bag or for sports like rock climbing or trail hiking are the most specialized and technical, which I have described in general in the previous post of this series, and which I use daily and keep up with.
This gives me sets of wardrobe for two identities to perform; Country Gentleman for puttering about our Park or at town, and Epicurean At Large for sybaritic travel and grand events.
For this next step we go back through the items of each category and interrogate their usefulness in constructing these two personae.
First, keeping only what fits and is in my actual current size, is in flawless condition, and is both beautiful and of the best quality. My shirts are 16 neck and 32-33 arm, pants are 32 waist and 30 leg, jackets are 44 Regular.
Second, keeping what works for the two roles I have identified as my targets.
Third, adding replacements or filling gaps with useful instruments of identity creation and performance.
Under the discards category will also be multiples beyond reasonable need, and for myself this will include business dress shirts and slacks beyond two each in the same color group unless unique or unusual in some other way, and paring down the number of ties for each shirt color, because they are now for the occasional special evening out and not for every day public facing work. Any tie must not only be beautiful and unique, but must best represent the character we are casting ourselves as to others. It’s otherwise difficult to justify owning more than six or eight ties in the same base color. Nor do I need two near-identical jackets; each must be its own kind of beautiful.
In the casual category, knitted or figured ties do not count against your dress tie numbers, nor do khakis and cords count with dress slacks or button down shirts count with spread collar dress shirts; they belong to altogether different levels of formality. And for the moment, I’m not discarding any of my daily wear casual clothes unless they are damaged and unmendable.
Under the replace and expand category of curation, I need to find a car length coat to replace the black melton wool one whose cuffs are frayed and which I am donating as it will still keep someone warm. I must also find a new Barbour jacket shell for my liner, after wearing it to literal shreds clearing fallen fire hazard logs off the hills, twenty years of around twenty pickup loads of wood each fall which with we heated at no cost both our cottage and that of Dolly’s brother next door as we share a wood burning boiler that pumps hot water through underground lines to our houses where its converted to energy at the furnace, between both homes over ten thousand square feet of living space.
And I no longer have any cotton khakis I can wear with jackets in summer, only dress wool slacks and pants for yard work. A tweed or navy flannel jacket can dress up or down with different pants, shirts, and ties, and one wants two cords and two khakis minimum for the usual summer to fall switch.
I was startled to discover that I no longer have a fedora other than the Akubra field sports hat, and I’ll be looking for one Humphrey Bogart might have worn with his iconic trench coat from Casablanca. I also need to replace my Optimo Panama hat for Tropical Dress Whites, which I placed over the face of a dead man in a rowboat to fool pursuers before pushing it away from shore, and my dove grey Homburg business wear hat like Chauncy wears in Being There, lost like someone I loved in a shootout with the KGB in Berlin before we brought down the Wall.
Always the ties remain, beckoning; I must judge each and weigh it against possible replacements. I’m light on wool challis, linen, and Ancient Madder Silks, and except for my cherished Churchill dot I must rebuild entirely my palette of bow ties.
So the joy of possible futures balances the loss of our former selves as we change, grow, adapt, and dream ourselves anew.
In my following post of this series I will be creating my spring and fall wardrobes for luxury travel and special events from the information I have gathered here through the archeological excavation of my closets, in terms of ensembles for which I hope to find memorable names.
January 29 2026 Curating a Casual to Business Casual Wardrobe Built Around Odd Jackets: An Experiment Toward Scientia Vestiaria, a Science of Vestments As Artifacts of Material and Social Culture As Identity, Membership and Belonging, Power and Authority
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, a fictive reality which substitutes itself for that of nature; lies, illusions, conspiracy theories, propaganda, rewritten histories, authorized identities and alternate realities, and a schizophrenic humankind transformed from citizens into subjects through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Such is the siren song of madness from which we must escape; strategies of alienation and subjugation deployed to create and enforce hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege.
Is America in a covert war with Mexico? We now conclude a ten day no fly zone across the border region, which mysteriously shut down air travel to and from El Paso without explanation.
How if Trump tests his plans for invasion and conquest of Mexico? During the ten days of the special no fly zone, US Special Forces conducted operations in Ciudad Juarez in advance of a full military conquest which may or may not follow soon. This included an aerial drone battle versus crime syndicates actually in control of the region, and possibly also versus elements of Mexican state police and military forces in a second and parallel covert conflict.
Unknown if any of this has authorization or sanction by either US or Mexican national governments, or if they are even aware of it. Who is fighting whom? Elements of the Mexican state appear to be fighting each other, with cartel mercenary forces involved, and America doing what we historically do best, capitalizing on chaos. My worry is that this precedes invasion and war, and I am alarmed at the unintended consequences of a third operation versus the Mexican state itself ongoing in her capital and potentially directed toward regime change. When nations shoot at each other, shadow wars cannot long remain in the shadows.
What has happened?
As written by Oliver Holmes and Victoria Bekiempis in The Guardian, in an article entitled US officials lift 10-day closure of El Paso airspace after balloon mistaken for drone: FAA initially cited ‘security reasons’ for shutting off skies around Texas airport in area along border with Mexico; “The top US aviation agency has lifted a surprise 10-day closure of airspace above the US-Mexico border town of El Paso, Texas, just hours after it abruptly announced that it would close off the skies for “special security reasons”.
While some officials claimed that Mexican cartel drones invaded US airspace, in recent days a balloon was reportedly mistaken for a drone.
The initial, vague citation of security concerns prompted still more questions as conflicting narratives surrounding this surprising closure and its abrupt reversal have since emerged.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) posted the “temporary flight restriction” notice on its website late on Tuesday local time, stating that a 10-nautical-mile circle up to 18,000ft around the El Paso international airport in Texas would be off limits for all commercial, cargo and general aviation flights.
“No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered,” the FAA said. It said the closure would remain in place until 20 February, and the notice warned that the government “may use deadly force” against any pilot who did not comply with the instructions.
But by Wednesday morning, and after hours of mayhem in which both airlines, local politicians and tens of thousands of travelers were caught off-guard, the FAA wrote on X that the order had been lifted. “There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal,” it said.
Since then, officials have offered a range of narratives to explain the closure.
The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said on Twitter/X: “The FAA and DOW [“department of war”] acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion.
“The threat has been neutralized,” Duffy also said, “and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region.’”
The New York Times, citing a source familiar with this shutdown, said the airspace closure was due to testing of anti-drone technology.
Donald Trump signed an executive order in June to develop anti-drone capacity, and said drug cartels were using drones to smuggle fentanyl.
CBS News later added still more intriguing reporting that sources had said the closure was due to FAA and Pentagon disagreements over “drone-related tests” involving a high-energy laser. The Associated Press also reported the Pentagon allowed US Customs and Border Protection to use an anti-drone laser without first consulting the FAA.
CBS News reported that this technology was deployed earlier this week to shoot down what were thought to be foreign drones. But the airborne object was just a party balloon, sources told the outlet, indicating that one balloon was brought down.
But a Democratic Texas congresswoman for El Paso, Veronica Escobar, took issue with Trump officials’ drone claim, saying it was “not the information that we in Congress have been told”.
“There was not a threat, which is why the FAA lifted this restriction so quickly,” the Times quoted Escobar as saying. “The information coming from the administration does not add up.”
Asked about the allegations of cartel drone activity, Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said: “There is no information regarding drone use at the border. If the FAA or any other US government agency has any information, they can ask the Mexican government.
“Let’s not speculate. We will get the information and maintain what we have always maintained: constant communication.
“Mexico’s airspace wasn’t closed – Texas’s airspace was closed,” Sheinbaum added. “We’re going to find out exactly why.”
El Paso’s mayor, Renard Johnson, slammed the unexpected closure.
“I want to be very, very clear that this should’ve never happened,” the Times quoted him as saying. “You cannot restrict air space over a major city without coordinating with the city, the airport, the hospitals, the community leadership.
“That failure to communicate is unacceptable.”
Before the FAA reversed its decision, Escobar had called on the agency to lift what she said was a highly consequential and unprecedented decision that “resulted in significant concern within the community”.
“From what my office and I have been able to gather overnight and early this morning there is no immediate threat to the community or surrounding areas,” she wrote on X. “There was no advance notice provided to my office, the City of El Paso, or anyone involved in airport operations.”
A large area west of El Paso, and along the border with Mexico, was also shut down for the same period. It is not clear if that airspace will reopen.
The restrictions came so suddenly, with the FAA providing only three hours’ notice, that radio communications from El Paso international airport revealed a dumbfounded pilot of a passenger plane being told that they would not be able to leave the next day.
An air traffic controller can be heard asking the arriving Southwest flight if they plan to depart again. “Nah, we’ll go to the hotel,” the pilot can be heard saying in audio captured by atc.com, a live air traffic radio company.
“Roger,” replied the controller. “Just be advised there is a [temporary flight restriction] going into effect … at 0630 for the next 10 days.”
“So the airport is totally closed?” the pilot asks with a chuckle, to which the controller responds: “Apparently, we just got informed about 30 minutes to an hour ago.”
Temporary flight restrictions are issued for natural disasters, such as wildfires and hurricanes, as well as major sporting events and emergency or national security situations.
While the ban was still in place overnight, the airport said on its Facebook page that all flights to and from the airport would be grounded and travelers should contact their airlines to get the most up-to-date flight status information.
An airspace closure would have had a significant impact on the city of nearly 700,000 people, which neighbors the city of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.
El Paso airport, through which nearly 3.5 million passengers transited last year, operates multiple direct flights across the US. Photos taken early on Wednesday showed the airport halls nearly deserted. Employees told local media they were unsure what prompted the halt of all flights.”
Like so many pivotal events in our history, I guarantee you we are not being told the whole story.
Which brings me back to the Wilderness of Mirrors as an allegory of our modern schizophrenia induced by information warfare.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred calling to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, 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.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and as systems in which we are embedded they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand and is not always iun our best interests.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
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?
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through control of the narratives and building solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us.
For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity and abandons not his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
When tyrants come to steal our souls with their web of lies, let them find a humankind not divided by fear or abject in despair and learned helplessness, but united in our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights and Unconquered in refusal to submit.
US officials lift 10-day closure of El Paso airspace after balloon mistaken for drone: FAA initially cited ‘security reasons’ for shutting off skies around Texas airport in area along border with Mexico
10 de febrero de 2026 ¿Está Estados Unidos en una guerra encubierta con México? El misterio de la zona de exclusión aérea de diez días en El Paso
Vagamos perdidos en un desierto de espejos, una realidad ficticia que sustituye a la de la naturaleza; mentiras, ilusiones, teorías conspirativas, propaganda, historias reescritas, identidades autorizadas y realidades alternativas, y una humanidad esquizofrénica transformada de ciudadanos en sujetos mediante la falsificación, la mercantilización y la deshumanización.
Tal es el canto de sirena de la locura del que debemos escapar: estrategias de alienación y subyugación desplegadas para crear e imponer élites hegemónicas de riqueza, poder y privilegio.
¿Está Estados Unidos en una guerra encubierta con México? Ahora concluimos una zona de exclusión aérea de diez días en la región fronteriza, que misteriosamente cerró los vuelos hacia y desde El Paso sin explicación alguna.
¿Qué pasaría si Trump pusiera a prueba sus planes de invasión y conquista de México? Durante los diez días de la zona especial de exclusión aérea, las Fuerzas Especiales de EE. UU. llevaron a cabo operaciones en Ciudad Juárez como preparación para una conquista militar total que podría o no ocurrir pronto. Esto incluyó una batalla aérea con drones contra organizaciones criminales que controlan la región, y posiblemente también contra elementos de la policía estatal y las fuerzas militares mexicanas en un segundo conflicto encubierto paralelo.
Se desconoce si algo de esto cuenta con la autorización o sanción de los gobiernos nacionales de EE. UU. o México, o si siquiera están al tanto de ello. ¿Quién lucha contra quién? Elementos del estado mexicano parecen estar combatiendo entre sí, con fuerzas mercenarias de cárteles involucradas, y Estados Unidos haciendo lo que históricamente hace mejor: capitalizar el caos. Me preocupa que esto preceda a una invasión y una guerra, y me alarman las consecuencias imprevistas de una tercera operación contra el propio estado mexicano en curso en su capital y potencialmente dirigida a un cambio de régimen. Cuando las naciones se disparan entre sí, las guerras en la sombra no pueden permanecer en la sombra por mucho tiempo.
¿Qué ha sucedido? Como escribieron Oliver Holmes y Victoria Bekiempis en The Guardian, en un artículo titulado “Funcionarios estadounidenses levantan el cierre de 10 días del espacio aéreo de El Paso luego de que un globo fuera confundido con un dron”: la FAA inicialmente citó “razones de seguridad” para cerrar los cielos alrededor del aeropuerto de Texas en el área a lo largo de la frontera con México; La principal agencia de aviación de EE. UU. levantó sorpresivamente el cierre del espacio aéreo de 10 días sobre la ciudad fronteriza de El Paso, Texas, entre Estados Unidos y México, apenas horas después de anunciar abruptamente el cierre por “razones especiales de seguridad”.
Si bien algunos funcionarios afirmaron que drones de un cártel mexicano invadieron el espacio aéreo estadounidense, en los últimos días se informó que un globo fue confundido con un dron.
La vaga mención inicial de preocupaciones de seguridad generó aún más preguntas, ya que han surgido narrativas contradictorias en torno a este cierre sorpresivo y su abrupta revocación.
La Administración Federal de Aviación (FAA) publicó el aviso de “restricción temporal de vuelos” en su sitio web a última hora del martes, hora local, indicando que un círculo de 10 millas náuticas hasta 18,000 pies alrededor del aeropuerto internacional de El Paso en Texas estaría prohibido para todos los vuelos comerciales, de carga y de aviación general.
“Ningún piloto podrá operar una aeronave en las áreas cubiertas”, declaró la FAA. Añadió que el cierre se mantendrá vigente hasta el 20 de febrero, y el aviso advirtió que el gobierno “podría usar fuerza letal” contra cualquier piloto que no cumpla con la normativa. Las instrucciones.
Pero el miércoles por la mañana, y tras horas de caos que sorprendieron a aerolíneas, políticos locales y decenas de miles de viajeros, la FAA escribió en X que la orden se había levantado. “No hay ninguna amenaza para la aviación comercial. Todos los vuelos se reanudarán con normalidad”, declaró.
Desde entonces, los funcionarios han ofrecido diversas explicaciones para explicar el cierre.
El secretario de Transporte de EE. UU., Sean Duffy, declaró en Twitter/X: “La FAA y el DOW [Departamento de Guerra] actuaron con rapidez para abordar una incursión de drones de un cártel.
“La amenaza ha sido neutralizada”, añadió Duffy, “y no hay peligro para los viajes comerciales en la región”.
El New York Times, citando a una fuente familiarizada con este cierre, afirmó que el cierre del espacio aéreo se debía a las pruebas de tecnología antidrones.
Donald Trump firmó una orden ejecutiva en junio para desarrollar capacidad antidrones y afirmó que los cárteles de la droga estaban utilizando drones para contrabandear fentanilo. CBS News añadió posteriormente información aún más intrigante: fuentes indicaban que el cierre se debía a desacuerdos entre la FAA y el Pentágono sobre “pruebas relacionadas con drones” con un láser de alta energía. Associated Press también informó que el Pentágono permitió a la Oficina de Aduanas y Protección Fronteriza de Estados Unidos utilizar un láser antidrones sin consultar primero a la FAA.
CBS News informó que esta tecnología se desplegó a principios de esta semana para derribar lo que se creía que eran drones extranjeros. Sin embargo, el objeto en el aire era solo un globo de fiesta, según informaron fuentes al medio, lo que indica que uno de los globos fue derribado.
Sin embargo, una congresista demócrata de Texas…
La representante de El Paso, Verónica Escobar, cuestionó la afirmación de los funcionarios de Trump sobre los drones, afirmando que “no era la información que nos habían dado en el Congreso”.
“No hubo ninguna amenaza, por eso la FAA levantó esta restricción tan rápidamente”, declaró Escobar, citada por el Times. “La información que proviene del gobierno no cuadra”.
Al ser preguntada sobre las acusaciones de actividad de drones por parte de cárteles, la presidenta de México, Claudia Sheinbaum, declaró: “No hay información sobre el uso de drones en la frontera. Si la FAA o cualquier otra agencia del gobierno estadounidense tiene alguna información, que se la pregunte al gobierno mexicano.
“No especulemos. Obtendremos la información y mantendremos lo que siempre hemos mantenido: comunicación constante.
“El espacio aéreo de México no fue cerrado, sino el de Texas”, añadió Sheinbaum. “Vamos a averiguar exactamente por qué”.
El alcalde de El Paso, Renard Johnson, criticó duramente el cierre inesperado. “Quiero ser muy claro: esto nunca debió haber sucedido”, dijo, según el Times. “No se puede restringir el espacio aéreo sobre una gran ciudad sin coordinarse con la ciudad, el aeropuerto, los hospitales y los líderes comunitarios.
“Esa falta de comunicación es inaceptable”.
Antes de que la FAA revocara su decisión, Escobar había solicitado a la agencia que levantara lo que, según ella, era una decisión de gran trascendencia y sin precedentes que “generó una gran preocupación en la comunidad”.
“Según lo que mi oficina y yo hemos podido recopilar durante la noche y esta mañana temprano, no existe una amenaza inmediata para la comunidad ni las áreas circundantes”, escribió en X. “No se notificó con antelación a mi oficina, a la ciudad de El Paso ni a nadie involucrado en las operaciones del aeropuerto”. Una amplia zona al oeste de El Paso, a lo largo de la frontera con México, también fue cerrada durante el mismo periodo. No está claro si ese espacio aéreo se reabrirá.
Las restricciones llegaron tan repentinamente, con solo tres horas de aviso por parte de la FAA, que las comunicaciones por radio desde el Aeropuerto Internacional de El Paso revelaron que un piloto de un avión de pasajeros, estupefacto, recibió la noticia de que no podrían despegar al día siguiente.
Se puede escuchar a un controlador de tráfico aéreo preguntando al vuelo de Southwest que llegaba si planeaban despegar de nuevo. “No, iremos al hotel”, se escucha decir al piloto en un audio grabado por atc.com, una compañía de radio de tráfico aéreo en vivo.
“Entendido”, respondió el controlador. “Solo les informo que hay una [restricción temporal de vuelo] que entra en vigor… a las 06:30 durante los próximos 10 días”.
“¿Entonces el aeropuerto está totalmente cerrado?”, pregunta el piloto con una risita, a lo que el controlador responde: “Al parecer, nos informaron hace entre 30 minutos y una hora”. Se emiten restricciones temporales de vuelo ante desastres naturales, como incendios forestales y huracanes, así como ante grandes eventos deportivos y situaciones de emergencia o de seguridad nacional.
Aunque la prohibición seguía vigente durante la noche, el aeropuerto anunció en su página de Facebook que todos los vuelos con origen y destino quedarían en tierra y que los viajeros debían contactar a sus aerolíneas para obtener la información más actualizada sobre el estado de sus vuelos.
Un cierre del espacio aéreo habría tenido un impacto significativo en la ciudad de casi 700,000 habitantes, vecina de Ciudad Juárez en México.
El aeropuerto de El Paso, por el que transitaron casi 3.5 millones de pasajeros el año pasado, opera múltiples vuelos directos a través de Estados Unidos. Las fotos tomadas la madrugada del miércoles mostraban los pasillos del aeropuerto casi desiertos. Los empleados declararon a los medios locales que no estaban seguros de qué provocó la suspensión de todos los vuelos.
Como ocurre con tantos acontecimientos cruciales de nuestra historia, les garantizo que no nos están contando toda la historia.
Esto me lleva de nuevo al Desierto de los Espejos como una alegoría de nuestra esquizofrenia moderna inducida por la guerra de la información. «Desierto de Espejos», una frase del Gerontin de T.S. Eliot, utilizo para describir la patología de la falsificación de nosotros mismos mediante la propaganda que devora verdades. La desambiguo comparándola con su opuesto, el periodismo y el testimonio de la historia como la vocación sagrada de buscar la verdad. Nos convertimos en falsificaciones de nosotros mismos por sistemas de poder hegemónico de élite como el patriarcado, el racismo y el capitalismo, y por quienes buscan esclavizarnos, mediante la captura de nuestras historias como robo del alma.
James Angleton, en quien John Le Carré basó su personaje de George Smiley, también usó la frase infamemente en este sentido, y se ha universalizado en toda la comunidad de inteligencia a la que moldeó e influyó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sus secuelas, la Guerra Fría. Al escribir en referencia a la biografía que David Martin escribió sobre sí mismo, titulada Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton la describió como una “miríada de estratagemas, engaños, artificios y todos los demás dispositivos de desinformación que el bloque soviético y sus servicios de inteligencia coordinados utilizan para confundir y dividir a Occidente… un paisaje siempre fluido donde los hechos y la ilusión se fusionan”. Y, por supuesto, todo
Lo que atribuía a los soviéticos también se aplicaba a sí mismo, a su propia agencia, a Estados Unidos y a todos los estados, pues todos son casas de ilusión.
La telenovela de Netflix, Operación Carne Picada, utiliza la frase en una historia sobre la creación de un oficial ficticio que porta documentos diseñados para engañar a los nazis y que se preparen para la invasión de Europa en algún lugar distinto de Sicilia. Una serie que vi con gran atención porque cada uno de nosotros es creado por nuestras historias, exactamente como esta falsa identidad unida al cuerpo de un vagabundo. Dentro de cada uno de nosotros, un equipo de autores crea nuestra personalidad a través de historias, una red de recuerdos, historias e identidad; y como sistemas en los que estamos insertos, lo hacen para sus propios fines, que no siempre entendemos y no siempre son en nuestro mejor interés. Como escribió T. S. Eliot en Gerontin: «Después de tal conocimiento, ¿qué perdón? Piensa ahora.
La historia tiene muchos pasajes astutos, pasillos artificiales,
y problemas, engaña con ambiciones susurrantes,
nos guía por vanidades».
Somos de la misma materia de la que están hechos los sueños, como nos enseña Shakespeare en el Acto IV, Escena 1 de La Tempestad, un verso pronunciado por Ariel. Porque si somos seres efímeros e insustanciales, construcciones de nuestras historias, esto también significa que la naturaleza ontológica del ser humano es un terreno de lucha que puede ser reclamado mediante la toma del poder.
La primera pregunta que debemos hacernos sobre una historia es: ¿de quién es esta historia?
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las historias que nos contamos sobre nosotros mismos y las que otros nos cuentan; las máscaras que nos fabricamos y las que otros nos fabrican.
Esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar: la lucha por la propiedad de nosotros mismos.
¿En quiénes nos convertiremos entonces? Interroga a nuestro yo sobre superficies, imágenes y máscaras que, a cada momento, negocian nuestros límites con los demás.
A lo que nuestro yo secreto, el yo de la oscuridad y la pasión, el yo que vive más allá del espejo y no conoce límites, libre de tiempo y espacio e infinito en posibilidades, responde: ¿En quién quieres convertirte?
Nuestro objetivo en la lucha revolucionaria es apoderarnos de la legitimidad y la autoridad del enemigo, tomar su poder, reclamando la superioridad moral, moldeando la opinión mediante el control de las narrativas y construyendo solidaridad al defender al pueblo contra quienes nos esclavizan.
Porque quien se mantiene solo, muere solo; y quien se solidariza y no abandona a sus semejantes se vuelve imparable como la marea.
Cuando los tiranos vengan a robarnos el alma con su red de mentiras, que encuentren una humanidad no dividida por el miedo ni sumida en la desesperación y la impotencia aprendida, sino unida en nuestra solidaridad y garantía de los derechos humanos universales de cada uno e invicta en la negativa a la sumisión
China subjugates Hong Kong like a crocodile relentlessly crushing its prey in terrible and merciless jaws, as the show trial of the world’s most famous political prisoner grinds to its horrific close and the cadaver of democracy and our universal human rights in Hong Kong is stuffed under a log in the darkness of abyssal depths to be consumed later by the exploitation cadre of the Chinese Communist Party.
Jimmy Lai became the celebrity figure of journalism as a calling to pursue the truth and to speak truth to power in the CCP’s campaign of repression of dissent against journalism and our universal human rights including those of information, and though he personally has been removed from the board of play the millions he has inspired in the cause of liberty will continue to fight on.
Our lives are like the seeds sown by the Phoenician prince Cadmus in the earth; from each arises legions.
Let us perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen which create and maintain our liberty and democracy; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority as Disbelief in its lies and Disobedience of its laws.
Thus we delegitimize authority, seize their power which they have stolen from us, and reclaim our humanity by solidarity of action.
Let us live such that our whole lives become an act of liberation.
As written by Nathan Law in The Guardian, in an article entitled Jimmy Lai’s sentencing tells me this: democracy is dead in Hong Kong, and I escaped just in time: Who will speak out for values and rights and my fellow democracy activist now that opposition has been silenced in Hong Kong? I say Britain should; “Waking up on Monday morning to the news of the pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai’s 20-year prison sentence for national security offences felt surreal. I could have easily been in his position if I hadn’t fled Hong Kong right before the implementation of the notorious national security law (NSL), under which Lai has faced the harshest penalty ever given. In fact, Lai chose to stay and stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Hong Kong in the face of an uncertain and repressive future. Now his family fears that he will die in prison.
A mix of emotions filled my mind. I was immensely disgusted by the audacity and malevolence of such punishment. This sentence has a transparently political end, but the Hong Kong and Chinese governments make no bones about it. Their sole purpose is to silence critics, and they have succeeded: civil society and domestic media, which should be the watchdogs of individual rights and government overreach, are dead silent on criticising the trial.
The so-called neutral institutions no longer hold that status. Carefully handpicked NSL judges in the Hong Kong judiciary claim in their verdict that Lai has “rabid hatred” and “deep resentment” toward the Chinese Communist party (CCP), even though he repeated that he embraces the People’s Republic of China as a country. The court also accused Apple Daily, the newspaper that Lai founded and that was critical of the CCP’s human rights records, of “poisoning the minds of his readers” and spreading “venomous assertions”. These emotionally charged terms are rare in court documents; the verdict reads more like a political statement than a legal one.
The chief executive of Hong Kong, John Lee, celebrated the effective life sentencing and described Lai’s crimes as “heinous” and “utterly despicable”. Many branches of the civil servants union united to glorify the verdict as though it were a victory for Hong Kong against foreign intervention. There is no counter-voice in the legislature, as the latest election overhaul has eliminated the possibility of opposition in the council; the last pro-democracy party disbanded last year, leaving no Hong Kong-based political group to express concern over the judgment.
The one-sided celebration of Lai’s sentencing in Hong Kong reflects the importance of what he was fighting for: the right to express oneself and the right to conscience. The pervasive political violence against the people of Hong Kong has resulted in hundreds being jailed and has silenced millions. Political consciousness is dangerous in today’s Hong Kong; you can be charged with sedition even for creating children’s books that are metaphorically critical of the regime.
I feel immensely lucky that I can wake up in a place of my choosing and write freely. I still live with restrictions and intimidation: I face an active arrest warrant from Hong Kong, I have been disinvited from events due to fears of Beijing’s reprisal, I have been denied entry to some countries (despite holding a legal visa), and I have been spied on by the Hong Kong government. But these hurdles are trivial compared with the suffering of friends still in Hong Kong, who have served years behind bars.
The situation reflects the consequences of allowing an emboldened authoritarian regime to expand its influence globally. What happens when bad actors are unpunished or even welcomed? They tend to act more aggressively. And why wouldn’t they? If the rights of the persecuted in China are seen as secondary, or even trivial, and leaders of democratic countries prioritise “repairing relationships” to navigate between major powers, then why should the CCP feel compelled to change its actions?
It appears we have entered an era where discussions about values and rights have become cheap and obsolete. Power is seen as transactional, and international politics has devolved into pure “realpolitik”. It is compelling for the UK to follow suit, but I believe we can do better. I still believe that one of Britain’s strengths lies in its foundation of liberalism and democratic values. These principles set it apart from countries such as China and are embodied by individuals such as Lai.
Given Lai’s deteriorating health, time is running out for action. In the Sino-British joint declaration of 1984, the Chinese government was obliged to uphold the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong. The UK can safeguard this agreement by placing the argument for Lai’s release at the heart of UK-China relations and elevating his case to a matter of national importance. It is the strongest way for Britain to show its leadership in promoting freedom and democratic values on the world stage.”
As I wrote in my post of December 16 2025, The Silencing of Jimmy Lai: Tyranny and Terror in Occupied Hong Kong; With the end of the historic show trial of Jimmy Lai darkness swallows whole and entire the glittering beacon of hope for democracy in China which Hong Kong represents, like Leviathan swallows Jonah. Christian theology interprets this as a parallel and prefiguration of the descent of Jesus into Hell; but unlike the mythic and literary figures of Jonah and his reflection, it remains unlikely that Jimmy Lai will emerge from the depths in triumph.
This long collapse of liberty and our universal human rights under the regime of the Chinese Communist Party I have mourned in lamentations and in the witness and remembrance of her endless songs of woe, but also in Resistance to state tyranny and terror and celebration of the Unconquerable Chinese peoples both in Hong Kong and on the mainland who struggle beneath the heel of a brutal and anti-humanist regime of bizarre and flagrant grotesquery, a government spun of lies and illusions and like the Trump regime in America committed to Hitler’s idea of the state as political theatre and to a performative politics of fear aligned with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and to the principle of the state as embodied violence.
In regard to the fate of champion of the people and of our liberty Jimmy Lai, I recommend to you the example of the heroes of revolutionary struggle of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Coalition including Kuwasi Balagoon who broke Assata Shakur out of prison. Where is our Hong Kong Liberation Army?
To the tyrant Xi Jinping, his enforcers, collaborators, and Army of Occupation of Hong Kong, to all bureaucrats of fear and the state as embodied violence, to all carceral states of force and control where ever they may arise, I say with the Mockingjay; “If we burn, you burn with us.”
To all comrades in revolutionary and liberation struggle I say this with Nelson Mandela as he authorized direct action against the Apartheid regime of South Africa from his prison cell by underlining the line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; “Sic Semper Tyrannis”.
Who resists and refuses to be subjugated, who disbelieves and disobeys, become Unconquerable and cannot be defeated; this is our victory, and a power which cannot be taken from us. And the forward movement of history is inevitable, because the great secret of power is that it is brittle and hollow, and collapses into nothingness when met with refusal, disbelief, and disobedience.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by in The Guardian, in an article entitled The rise and fall of Jimmy Lai, whose trajectory mirrored that of Hong Kong itself: Progressing from child labourer to billionaire, Lai used his power and wealth to promote democracy, which ultimately pitted him against authorities in Beijing; “On Monday, a Hong Kong court convicted Jimmy Lai of national security offences, the end to a landmark trial for the city and its hobbled protest movement.
The verdict was expected. Long a thorn in the side of Beijing, Lai, a 78-year-old media tycoon and activist, was a primary target of the most recent and definitive crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Authorities cast him as a traitor and a criminal.
Lai’s trial was one of the last unfinished national security prosecutions of Hong Kong’s high profile activists, over their involvement in the 2019 protests. Hundreds of activists, lawyers, and politicians have been pursued and jailed, or chased into exile. But few have captured global attention like Lai, whose life and career has developed in tangent with Hong Kong’s sputtering walk towards democracy, and then its fall.
“The trajectory of his life reflects the history of Hong Kong itself,” said Kevin Yam, a Australian-Hong Kong lawyer, who is subject to a Hong Kong arrest warrant for his pro-democracy activism.
Lai had pleaded not guilty to the one count of conspiracy to publish seditious publications and two counts of conspiracy to foreign collusion. On Monday the court found him guilty of all charges, with the government-appointed judges saying he “had harboured his hatred and resentment for the [People’s Republic of China] for many of his adult years”, and sought the downfall of its ruling Communist party “even though the ultimate cost was the sacrifice of the people of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and HKSAR [Hong Kong Special Administrative Region].”
The trial stretched for nearly two years, beset by delays, legal challenges and government interventions. International rights groups had called it a politically motivated show trial, and an attack on press freedom.
Lai has been behind bars since 2020, either on remand or serving the five separate sentences he has been given for protest-related offences totalling almost 10 years, and a fraud allegation his supporters say was trumped up.
Monday’s convictions could see him given a life sentence. His family already fears he might not live to see freedom. In the weeks before the verdict, his children issued new alarming warnings over his health.
From child labourer to ‘Rupert Murdoch of Asia’
Lai’s rise to become one of the city’s most famous billionaires is a rags to riches tale. At 12 he left Mao’s China for Hong Kong, where he worked as a child labourer in garment factories, before building a business empire that included the retail chain Giordano, and then a media conglomerate that would see him nicknamed the “Rupert Murdoch of Asia”.
At the time of his first arrest in 2020, Lai was worth an estimated $1.2bn, according to a biography written by longtime friend and associate Mark Clifford. But he was one of the few of Hong Kong’s elite who used their power and wealth for activism, funding and participating in pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian efforts.
Many of Lai’s business milestones are tied to key events in the history of Hong Kong and China’s tug of war over democracy, although he wasn’t always political. His son Sebastien says his early business decisions were driven by ambition and boredom.
“I always remember growing up he talked about why he started Giordano, and he was like, look I just got bored,” said son Sebastien.
But after Chinese troops massacred student protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, Lai became politically radicalised, and he launched Next Magazine soon afterwards. The Apple Daily newspaper was established shortly before Hong Kong’s handover from UK rule to China, upending the city’s traditional media market with flashy tabloid reporting and gossip alongside fearless investigations.
“It kept Hong Kong honest in many ways,” says Yam. “We kind of forget that Jimmy Lai and his media businesses played an important role in Hong Kong as an international financial centre because it kept the free flow of information going about Hong Kong’s corporate underbelly.”
The outlets Next Magazine and Apple Daily, along with Lai, would become loud and unashamedly pro-democracy irritants to authorities. Lai himself would write columns, famously calling China’s premier Li Peng, known as the Butcher of Beijing for his role in the massacre, “a bastard with zero IQ” in 1994, drawing political and financial retribution from the Chinese state.
In 2003, the two outlets supported protests against a proposed national security law for Hong Kong, in 2014 they backed the Occupy Central movement, when Lai also joined the protest camp. He was attacked by assailants who poured pig offal over him, and anti-corruption police raided his home and that of his top aide, Mark Simon, after leaked documents revealed he’d donated millions to activists.
In 2019 the papers again backed mass protests, this time against a proposed extradition bill but later building into a major pro-democracy movement. Apple Daily published a cut-out letter to US president Donald Trump on its front page, which readers could send to Washington asking him to “help save Hong Kong”. It would become a key element of the prosecution’s national security case against Lai.
Lai again personally attended protest events, including a banned vigil for Tiananmen in June 2020, where he stood outside his car and held a lit candle, for which he was convicted and sentenced to 13 months in jail.
Throughout his adult life in Hong Kong he was often monitored, harassed and intimidated. The blowback from the Li Peng editorials ultimately led to Lai divesting from Giordano. His house and businesses were repeatedly firebombed, and his family followed by paparazzi. In 2008 he was the target of a foiled assassination plot.
“For them, I am a troublemaker,” he told Clifford. “It is hard for them not to clamp down on me and silence me.”
Sebastien, who now lives outside Hong Kong to lobby for his father’s freedom, says he wasn’t totally aware of the threats when he was young because his father never showed fear.
“I always had the knowledge that my dad was doing the right thing and not the easy thing” says Sebastien.
“You have someone who is, by all accounts, successful, but willing to give everything that he has for his beliefs. That in some sense would shame some people and therefore some people would not like him because of that.
“He always had the advantage that he came from nothing. He also had the advantage of knowing that even with nothing he’d be OK.”
Lai refused entreaties to get a bodyguard, saying he hadn’t done anything wrong. A bodyguard also couldn’t help against his biggest risk: arrest.
After 2019, that risk came to fruition multiple times. In August 2020, just weeks after the introduction of the Beijing-designed national security law (NSL), hundreds of police officers stormed the offices of Apple Daily. They arrested Lai along with several Apple Daily executives under the sweeping new law against dissent. His two eldest sons, Ian and Timothy, were also arrested. The company was ultimately forced to close the following year.
The closure of Apple Daily, yet another nail in the coffin of democratic Hong Kong, was splashed across front pages around the world. The paper was a controversial tabloid, publishing salacious stories and occasionally offensive opinion pieces about mainland Chinese people. Former employees, who testified against Lai as “accomplice witnesses”, alleged a working environment that was free but “within a bird cage”, under the close management and control of Lai, with editorials written with the understanding that they “had to follow the basic stance of the newspaper”.
But, Sebastien says, “in the end Apple is the only newspaper who stood up for democracy in Hong Kong, throughout the whole time, right?”
In defiance of Lai’s arrest and the paper’s closure, Hongkongers queued up to buy an estimated 1m copies of the paper’s final edition. China’s nationalistic Global Times paper praised the closure of the “secessionist tabloid”.
Friends and advisers had urged Lai to take advantage of his UK citizenship, wealth, and foreign residences and flee the country, like many others had. He refused, saying he wanted to stay and support his journalists, and to keep fighting for Hong Kong.
He told Clifford he preferred to go to jail than abandon the city that “gave me everything”.
While out on bail he gave interviews, and launched a livestreamed political talk show. Speaking to the Guardian during that time, Lai was cautiously optimistic, noting the NSL was yet to be fully tested in Hong Kong’s – at the time, still internationally lauded – court system.
“They just want to show the teeth of the national security law, but they haven’t bitten yet,” he said. “So let’s see what happens.”
They did bite. What happened was more than 200 NSL arrests; a mass prosecution of 47 politicians, activists and civil society workers who held an informal vote before city elections; appeals to Beijing when the courts didn’t toe the government line; and laws rewritten to limit bail rights and restrict foreign lawyers from defending Lai.
Lai was reportedly held in solitary, and denied communion as a devout Catholic. Authorities pushed back on such criticisms, saying it was a matter of logistics or even a request by Lai. When Lai was photographed looking gaunt in shorts and sandals in the yard at Stanley prison by an Associated Press photographer with a long lens, the jail built a new roof covering. The photographer, Louise Delmotte, was later barred from working in Hong Kong when her visa renewal application was rejected.
One fear that was never borne out for Lai was a clause in the NSL that the most serious cases could be transferred to the mainland for trial. If they were going to do it for anyone, it would be Lai, observers figured. He had already been treated like the city’s most dangerous criminal, taken to court in December 2023 by armoured convoy, with security “one would expect for a president or a high-profile terrorist”, Clifford’s biography notes.
The Trump connection
At the heart of the prosecution were Lai’s business and political connections, particularly with US officials.
Prosecutors wheeled out a crude Powerpoint-style presentation of “external political connections” with whom Lai had allegedly colluded. It included Trump, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and veteran Democrat legislator Nancy Pelosi. All were known China hawks and during Trump’s first term had toughened US policy towards China in a way that analysts said put real pressure on Beijing over human rights abuses.
Trump has repeatedly promised to lobby for Lai’s release and officials said the media mogul’s case was raised in the meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea in October. But in his second term, Trump’s America First agenda has become even more extreme, alienating allies, and his position on China more focused on “making a deal”.
Some have speculated that this may turn Lai into a bargaining chip in the US-China trade war.
After the South Korea meeting, Sebastien publicly thanked the US president and praised him as the “Liberator in Chief”, a moniker that conservatives bestowed on Trump after the release of hostages from Gaza.
Sebastien’s appeal to Trump stems in part from what he sees as the failure of the UK government to push hard enough for the release of his father, a British citizen.
The UK government has called for Lai’s release and says that his prosecution is politically motivated, but has not taken any economic action against Hong Kong. In the year to July, bilateral trade between the two territories reached £27.2bn, a nearly 10% increase on the previous 12 months. Many Lai supporters feel the UK has not done enough to secure the release of one of its most prominent citizens in its former colony.
Were Jimmy Lai released today, Hong Kong would look very different to what he last knew, says Sebastien.
“It’s obviously no longer the sort of Hong Kong that had all these freedoms that you could associate with,” he says, caveating that he’s not there either now, and can’t return.
“Obviously, I think he’d be quite sad about what’s happened but look, at the end of the day this is someone who’s done everything he can, right? I don’t think anybody looking at his life would think: well, he could have done more.”
As I wrote in my post of July 1 2025, This July, the 28th Anniversary of the Abandonment of Hong Kong to China and of Democracy to Tyranny; We mourn and organize resistance for the liberation of Hong Kong as a sovereign and independent nation from the imperial conquest and dominion of the loathsome Chinese Communist Party, throughout this July the twenty eighth anniversary of the abandonment of Hong Kong by Britain to a carceral state of force and control which was never a legitimate successor to the China with whom the original lease of 1898 was made, and the iconic fall of democracy to tyranny and state terror which it signifies.
On the first of July 2023 the despicable tyrant and criminal of violations of human rights Xi Jinping walked the streets of Hong Kong, an ambush predator wearing the face of a man which cannot conceal his intent to conquer and enslave the world, beginning with Hong Kong as a launching pad for the conquest of the Pacific Rim.
Why had he come to hold a triumphal march in imitation of Hitler in his 1940 visit to Paris; to terrify the people into submission, to claim it personally as a conqueror and imperial occupied territory, to reinforce an illusory legitimacy when all China has is fear and force? All of these things, and one thing more; this is also a marketing stunt aimed at the one partner in tyranny which can bring his regime down and liberate the peoples of both Hong Kong and China, the international business community. Send us your manufacturing jobs, he offers; we have slaves.
If we do not free Hong Kong from his talons, we will be fighting for our survival in the streets of San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle, in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Kolkata, Bangkok, in Sydney and Melbourne, Tokyo and Yokohama, any city which is home to a community of Overseas Chinese, which the government of the Chinese Communist Party considers their own citizens, whether or not they consent to be governed by Beijing. The CCP is uninterested in consent; for a vision of the world they would bequeath to humankind, we need only look at the vast prison and slave labor camp of Xinjiang.
Let us stand in solidarity with the people of Hong Kong and of China in the cause of Liberty and a free society of equals.
When will the free nations of the world recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong and take action shoulder to shoulder with its people to throw off the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party?
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in Hong Kong, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and the veterans of the Paris Commune; freedom versus tyranny, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of the social use of force as a lever of unequal power.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by ourselves and no other.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of February 15 2022, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Love here means solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s humanity, with justice for all. Diversity, inclusion, and our duty of care for others are important aspects of love. Love is also a totalizing force which can free us from ossified forms and ways of being human together, and a vehicle of truth, both truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create and choose.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals and affirms the embodied truths of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confers authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and to delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Hong Kong; I do not like thee, Xi Jinping; and unlike Dr Fell in the beloved poem of 1680 by Tom Brown, I both know and can tell why as a truthteller and witness of history; state terror and tyranny, carceral states of force and thought control, disappearance and torture by police, universal surveillance, and the falsification of propaganda and alternate histories, imperial conquest and colonial exploitation, slave labor and genocidal ethnic cleansing, and fascisms of blood, ideology as a kind of authorized and enforced faith, and soil or national identity; of all this I accuse Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
These things I am able to say because of the freedom of access to information which I enjoy as an American citizen, because the transparency of the state in America and the legal protection and heroic stature in our society of whistleblowers and truthtellers is a firewall against secret power, and because the sacred calling to pursue the truth as both a right of citizens and a universal human right are among those parallel and interdependent sets of rights of which the common defense is the primary purpose of the state.
So are legitimacy, trust, and representation conferred to any state which is a guarantor of the rights of its citizens; the corollary of this is that any state whose primary purpose is not to guarantee the rights of individuals has no such legitimacy.
We must be a democracy and a free society of equals, or the slaves of tyrants.
And this we must resist.
As I wrote in my post of August 29 2025, Anniversary of the UN Bachelet Report on China’s Genocide of Minorities in Xinjiang, In the Shadow of the Jimmy Lai Trial; A victory for justice and the exposure of tyranny’s lies and falsifications was won two years ago this day with the United Nations declaration of the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang as genocide, slavery, and crimes against humanity.
We mark this anniversary today in the shadow of the Jimmy Lai trial in Hong Kong, as the occupation regime of the CCP wages lawfare as state terror, repression of dissent, and journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
It remains for the international community to bring a Reckoning to Xi Jinping’s regime of cruelty and dehumanization, and join together with the peoples of China in liberation struggle.
China’s horrific crimes in Xinjiang is a boundary which defines the limits of the human and the legitimacy of the state, and it is a line we must defend or surrender to states everywhere the principles of our universal human rights and democracy as a free society of equals wherein the state is co-owned by its citizens as a guarantor of their rights.
There is one and only one condition in which any state can be legitimate, and that is when it acts as a guarantor of the parallel and interdependent sets of rights of citizens and of human beings, and balances those rights so that none may infringe upon those of another.
For once we surrender our humanity to the state, and become things and not human beings, instruments of the power and profit of others through systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, subjugated by carceral states of force and control through abjection and learned helplessness, division and authorized identities of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, soil, and faith, we allow those who would enslave us to feed us into the machine of the state as psychopathy and embodied violence as the raw material of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us give to systems of oppression, to fascism, and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Jamey Keaten and Edith M. Lederer in Huffpost: “The office of U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet published its long-awaited report on alleged rights violations in China’s western Xinjiang region Wednesday, brushing aside Beijing’s demands to keep a lid on a report that fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region’s native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.
The report, which Western diplomats and U.N. officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet’s four-year term. The report was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years.
But Bachelet’s report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the member states that make it up. The run-up to its release fueled a debate over China’s influence at the world body and epitomized the on-and-off diplomatic chill between Beijing and the West over human rights, among other sore spots.
In the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called “training centers” but former detainees described as brutal detention centers.
Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges.”
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of July I 2020, An Empire of Terror and Racist Genocide: The Fall of Hong Kong and the Sterilization of the Uighur Ethnic Minority of Xinjiang; As the first wave of mass arrests and crimes against humanity by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime of state terror roll over Hong Kong on this anniversary of its handover by the British to their successor empire in the citadel of darkness which is Beijing, as the women of the Uighur ethnic and religious minority in Xinjiang are forcibly sterilized in a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide which parallels the campaign of erasure in the re- education prisons wherein their language, faith, history, and identity as a people are stolen, the world watches as yet another spectacle of inhumanity unfolds before us with stupefaction and the helpless surrender of civilization to atavistic barbarism.
And once again we do nothing when a predator arrives to cut the powerless and the dispossessed from the herd of humankind, for without a united front against tyrannies of force and control the most ruthless and amoral among us wins.
Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller spoke his famous condemnation of the complicity of silence in the face of evil in the context of the Holocaust, but it applies as a universal principle; “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2019, Vendetta Lives: Hong Kong Defies Tyranny and State Terror; I am one man, of limited understanding, though I have worn many masks in many places, and not all of my causes have been lost; through all my forlorn hopes and a lifetime of last stands I yet remain to defy and defend.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become better can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang; A year ago I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post and cited in my journal entry of November 17 2019; ”We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in Xinjiang. The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of detention or “reeducation” camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. They insist that the camps are actually job-training centers where amenable Xinjiang residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.
That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including President Xi Jinping. The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. And what we see is chilling.
It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in Xinjiang warned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”
Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern Xinjiang city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.
The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”
The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. China makes independent reporting in Xinjiang virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in Xinjiang in recent years. The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2022, Why I Write: A Manifesto of Art and Revolution At the Dawn of the South Asian Spring; We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations throughout South Asia, systems of alliances referred to as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing and other cities in China, Thailand, and Burma, which during the past year have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Sri Lanka, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Libya in one dominion and within Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen in another.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
How shall we write our witness of history and sacred calling to pursue the truth as what Foucault called truthtellers? In this crucial moment wherein the fate of humankind hangs between tyranny and liberty, how are we to perform an ars poetica of revolution?
One way to describe our experience of our time is to focus on externalities, much as Flaubert did in his attempt to remove his own authorial voice from his stories in service to Reason. Such an exercise yields narratives much like the daily current events briefing I gave to my Forensics classes during Extemp Prep, a team current events speaking competition. Perhaps the best example today is the newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes the most impartial and trustworthy daily news brief as current history. Its a unique approach to events unfolding around us in real time, and her references and contexts are authoritative and reliable.
To contrast and compare her art to mine as rhetoric, I write here in my daily political journal what may be described as strategy, intelligence, and policy guidance for the antifascist community and allied revolutionary, liberation, and democracy movements throughout the world and its Autonomous Zones and Abraham Lincoln Brigades. That the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty is “to incite, provoke, and disturb” should give warning that I make no pretense to impartial and nonpartisan writing.
My biases are defined first by my values, including liberty, equality, truth and justice, nonviolence and our universal human rights, and their praxis as causes, and secondly by the windmills against which I tilt; unequal power, authority and authorized identities, normality and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, tyrannies of force and control and carceral states of police terror and institutionalized violence, militarism and imperial conquest, dominion, and colonialism, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and their systemic and historical instruments patriarchy and racism, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which drives all of this.
In this revolutionary struggle I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. And if you are among them or their allies who refuse to submit to tyranny and terror, this I say to you; I am not a good man, but I may be someone who can help.
I hope to be more useful than a good man, whose scope of action is limited by the false morality of those who would enslave us among the imposed conditions of struggle and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, as Shaw teaches us through the figure of Eliza’s father in Pygmalion and the gorgeous film My Fair Lady.
We must resist division in service to power into the deserving and the undeserving by a moral burden of merit as a hierarchy of otherness and membership in hegemonic elites. Let us answer merit and caste with equality and universal human rights, and division, especially fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with solidarity.
Neither of us need to be good in order to help or receive help, merely in need or able to help where needed as a duty of care for others which honors our common humanity and recognizes our interdependence.
So I say again, I am not a good man, for I accept no limits and trust no authority, and I practice as sacred acts seizures of power, disruptions of order and bringing the Chaos, the transgression of the Forbidden, violation of normalities, subversions of authorized identities, the pursuit of truth, believing impossible things but only those I myself have created or chosen, and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
And if you are among the outcast, the broken and the lost, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, I am a bad man who is on your side.
As written by Julian Borger in The Guardian; “The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has said that China had committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province which may amount to crimes against humanity.
Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, rejected it as an anti-China smear, while Uyghur human rights groups hailed it as a turning point in the international response to the programme of mass incarceration.
The 45-page report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded: “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, said in an official response that it was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and that it “wantonly smears and slanders” China and interfered in the country’s internal affairs.
The Chinese response was accompanied by a 121-page counter-report, emphasising the threat of terrorism and the stability that the state programme of “de-radicalisation” and “vocational education and training centres” has brought to Xinjiang.
Human rights organisations welcomed the report. Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group said it was “a game-changer for the international response to the Uyghur crisis”.
“Despite the Chinese government’s strenuous denials, the UN has now officially recognized that horrific crimes are occurring,” Kanat said.
Over the past five years, China swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps which it termed training centres. Some of the centres have since been closed but there are still thought to be hundreds of thousands still incarcerated. In several hundred cases families had no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained.
Out of 26 former inmates interviewed by UN investigators, two-thirds “reported having been subjected to treatment that would amount to torture and/or other forms of ill-treatment”.
The abuses described included beatings with electric batons while being strapped in a “tiger chair” (to which inmates are strapped by their hands and feet), extended solitary confinement, as well as what appeared to be a form of waterboarding, “being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces”.
The US and some other countries have said the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, the destruction of mosques and communities and forced abortion and sterilisation, amount to genocide. The UN report does not mention genocide but says allegations of torture, including force medical procedures, as well as sexual violence were all “credible”.
It said that the authorities had deemed violations of the three-child official limit on family size to be an indicator of “extremism”, leading to internment.
“Several women interviewed by OHCHR raised allegations of forced birth control, in particular forced IUD [intrauterine device] placements and possible forced sterilisations with respect to Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women. Some women spoke of the risk of harsh punishments including “internment” or “imprisonment” for violations of the family planning policy,” the report said.
“Among these, OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy. These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible.”
In the report, Bachelet, a former Chilean president, noted that the average rate of sterilisation per 100,000 inhabitants in China as a whole was just over 32. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region it was 243.
“Serious human rights violations have been committed in [the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies,” the report said. “These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.”
The report calls on the Chinese government to “take prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” in Xinjiang and “urgently clarify the whereabouts of individuals whose families have been seeking information about their loved ones”.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The United Nations Human Rights Council should use the report to initiate a comprehensive investigation into the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity targeting the Uyghurs and others – and hold those responsible to account.”
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2020, Occupation and Exile: Hong Kong; As the iron talons of the Chinese Communist Party close upon their prize conquest of Hong Kong, eager to batten onto the legacy of wealth and influence generations of freedom has built, they begin to kill the thing they most desire, hammering dissent and a free market of ideas which they cannot swallow and survive with brutal repression, revealed before the world as a tyranny of state terror and thought control; for this is a golden egg which cannot be extracted from its goose without destroying it.
The unrivaled trading and financial power of Hong Kong emerges from its innovation and traditions of open intellectual research and debate; democracy and universal human rights, among them being the sacrosanct nature of pursuit of the truth and of scientific and academic discovery. Send forces of occupation and political control to repress freedom of thought and the self-ownership of autonomous individuals, and the state annihilates the conditions which made their conquest valuable. Let them continue, and that conquest will utterly transform its conqueror with its alien Enlightenment values and ideals. Such is the dilemma which now confronts the CCP; the one which confronts the world is that we must intervene to liberate Hong Kong now while our options still include those other than war.
Xi Jinping’s Communist government, which squats upon mainland China like a miasma of contagion and darkness, as xenophobic as any fascist military dictatorship, as authoritarian as any feudal monarchy of the divine right of kings, and eyeing its neighbors hungrily as an imperial power with designs upon the liberty of any Chinese person anywhere and on the cities which they inhabit as future conquests, remains a threat not only to Hong Kong, but to all humankind.
As I wrote in my post of February 3; In this the Chinese Communist Party follows the First Rule of Tyranny; When the state’s absolute monopoly on power is in doubt, kill everyone not personally loyal to you. This aphorism, not included in the public version of the Red Book, was put into practice by Mao when he seized totalitarian control of the CCP during the Jiangxi Soviet Massacre in 1935 by killing three out of four of its members, the true origin of the Chinese Communist Party as it exists today as a structure of state terror and thought control.
What then can we do? First America and the free world must recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong; second we and our allies must enact a total Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of all trade and manufacture with mainland China.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
“If we Burn, You Burn With Us”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, Mark L. Clifford
The rise and fall of Jimmy Lai, whose trajectory mirrored that of Hong Kong itself: Progressing from child labourer to billionaire, Lai used his power and wealth to promote democracy, which ultimately pitted him against authorities in Beijing
Why we fight: the stakes of the Hong Kong liberation struggle can be seen in the corpses of political prisoners which toured the world as the CCP’s threat of terror and atrocities to silence global dissent.
They are coming for us and for all democracy protestors with teams of assassins throughout the world, and we must come for them first and bring regime change to the Chinese Communist Party.
Governments and rights groups condemn conviction of Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai: UK, EU and Australia say guilty verdict against 78-year-old is further blow to democracy and press freedom in territory
Give the Devil his due; Trump makes performative noises of protest and objection to his collaborator in constructing a police state of surveillance and repression.
Trump urges Xi Jinping to free HK pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai
The Guardian view on a showtrial in Hong Kong: a new authoritarian low: The jailing of 45 pro-democracy activists testifies to the ruthless suppression of a once-vibrant civil society
A Puerto Rican singing in Spanish has given America our Edelweiss moment at the Superbowl, in glorious defiance of the Trump Fourth Reich regime which has captured and sabotaged the state, democracy, citizenship, and our universal human rights.
Bad Bunny’s unforgettable and historic performance as a truth teller and embodiment of what it means to be an American continues to echo throughout our streets and the world as we begin to awaken as a United Humankind.
Herein I write not of sport or of music, but of the role of truth telling in liberation struggle and democracy.
In this moment the tide of fascism may have turned with songs of liberation; in America we have chosen each other and solidarity in a diverse and inclusive free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity over divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, language, and authorized national identity, and refusal to submit to state tyranny and terror over fear, hate, and despair.
We declare to all who would enslave us, we belong to each other and will stand together as a band of brothers, sisters, and others, and as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows we cannot be broken if we stand united.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
When the enemies of our liberty come for us, as they always have and ever will, let them find not subjects but free and equal citizens, not a people broken by despair and abjection but united in our defense and Resistance.
And if we only do this, we cannot be defeated.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which a friend, a fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.
Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.
Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.
On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.
Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and f*** respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”
What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”
But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.
To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability with you, and their little dog normality too.
Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.
Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.
Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.
So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.
For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.
To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.
As written by Cruz Bonlarron Martínez in Jacobin Magazine, in an article entitled Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Show Was Political Art at Its Best: It’s no wonder Donald Trump was enraged by Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl. The Puerto Rican trap star has grown into the role of political artist, and the creativity of his music is an indictment of MAGA’s schlock-filled cultural wasteland; “On Sunday night, millions of people across the United States and throughout Latin America tuned in to watch the National Football League’s (NFL) Super Bowl LX. Many of them were less interested in the game itself than in the highly anticipated halftime show of Puerto Rican pop king Bad Bunny.
Bad Bunny is the stage name of Benito Martínez Ocasio, who won the Grammy for best album the previous week. He delivered a show that lived up to the hype, speaking exclusively in Spanish and went through the major hits of his 2025 album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), with an aesthetic evoking Puerto Rico and the island’s working-class New York diaspora.
Through the lyrics of his song “Lo Qué Le Pasó a Hawaii,” he used the platform to openly criticize US colonialism in Puerto Rico and he offered an ode to Puerto Rican working-class migrants with “NUEVAYoL.” Bad Bunny, surrounded by flags from throughout the continent, ended by saying “God Bless America” and then shouted out the names of every country in the Americas in true Bolivarian fashion.
The most political act was the performance in itself, a gesture of defiance toward the xenophobia of Donald Trump’s base and a US government that dehumanizes Latin Americans every chance it gets. Martínez Ocasio used the quintessential US sporting event to openly criticize an administration that has further militarized the US colony of Puerto Rico in order to attack other Latin American nations while continuing to deny Puerto Ricans the right to decide their future.
It’s no wonder that the halftime show enraged Trump, who took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to say that it was “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” The US president, whose name appears in recent Department of Justice emails related to the notorious pedophile Jeffery Epstein, claimed that the dancing was “disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the USA,” and described Bad Bunny’s performance as a “‘slap in the face’ to our Country.”
Working-Class Hero
While Bad Bunny’s voice can now be heard in every corner of the globe, from senior centers in China to nightclubs in Scandinavia, barely a decade ago, he was working as a grocery store bagger in the town of Vega Baja (the supermarket where he worked has now become a tourist destination). Around the same time, he began his music career in the field of Latin trap, a genre that reflected the realities of working-class life for Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States.
Bad Bunny’s mastery of wit and subtle cultural references set him apart, evoking memories of reggaeton’s golden age in the early 2000s.
Alternating between the hyperrealism of stories about quick money through drug dealing, crude sexual references, and fantasies of grandeur, Martínez Ocasio’s early lyrics were often similar to those of many others in the genre at the time like Anuel AA, Farruko, or Ñengo Flow. But his mastery of wit and subtle cultural references set him apart, evoking memories of reggaeton’s golden age in the early 2000s.
Bad Bunny’s rise in popularity also coincided with one of the most important events in recent Puerto Rican history, Hurricane Maria. The Category 5 hurricane touched down in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. It destroyed homes and infrastructure throughout the country, leaving the vast majority of the population without power for the weeks and months following. The incompetence of the delayed federal response to the hurricane, which left at least 4,645 people dead, exposed Puerto Rico’s colonial status to the world, including many US Americans who were unaware of their country’s colonial possession in the Caribbean.
Shortly after the hurricane, and Trump’s infamous visit to the island where he threw a roll of paper towels at a crowd, Bad Bunny made an appearance at a benefit concert wearing a T-shirt that said: “¿Tú eres tuitero o eres presidente?” (“Are you a Twitter troll or president?”). The font harkened back to the reggaetonero Residente’s multiple T-shirts calling for the independence of Puerto Rico and supporting progressive causes in Latin America a few years earlier.
This was a risky move for an artist who was just beginning to take off. It marked the start of the increasing politicization of Bad Bunny’s career. In July 2018, Martínez Ocasio released the song “Estamos Bien,” a ubiquitous anthem implicitly referring to Hurricane Maria. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and condemned the continued abandonment of Puerto Rico by the federal government and the administration of then-governor Ricky Rosselló.
The Organic Intellectual
Bad Bunny’s performance on Jimmy Fallon and his willingness to speak out against US colonialism marked a turning point in both his career and political development. It was a step in his conversion into what Antonio Gramsci called the organic intellectual, a thinker who emerges from the masses to challenge the hegemony of the ruling classes. In summer 2019, there was a scandal after a series of chat messages revealed that Rosselló and his administration had been making fun of those who died in the hurricane. This led Puerto Rico to erupt in protests. Bad Bunny was on the front lines, calling for the governor to resign.
In 2022, Martínez Ocasio released the song “El Apagón” (“The Blackout”) in his album Un Verano Sin Ti (“A Summer Without You”). It criticized the US response to Hurricane Maria, the ongoing gentrification of the island, and the privatization of the state power company, which has led to frequent blackouts on the island. The song was accompanied by a short documentary about the negative effects of gentrification featuring the independent Puerto Rican journalist Bianca Graulau.
With the release of his 2025 album DtMF, Bad Bunny solidified his role as an organic intellectual of the Caribbean and Latin American diaspora in the US.
With the release of his 2025 album, DtMF, Bad Bunny solidified his role as an organic intellectual of the Caribbean and Latin American diaspora in the United States. The album was explicitly political, with many of the songs incorporating anti-colonial themes.
In “LA MuDANZA,” for example, Martínez Ocasio shows his support for independence with the lyrics “Y pongan un tema mío el día que traigan a Hostos, en la caja, la bandera azul clarito” (“Put one of my songs on when they bring back Hostos, in the coffin, with a light-blue flag”). This is a reference to the Puerto Rican independence leader Eugenio María de Hostos, who is buried in the Dominican Republic. Before his death in 1903, he requested that his body be returned when Puerto Rico was free. The “light-blue flag” is the symbol of independence — the same one that Martínez Ocasio used at the Super Bowl.
Martínez Ocasio also took the opportunity to raise awareness about the threat posed by the relocation of US Americans to the island by including a short film, codirected with the Puerto Rican director Arí Maniel Cruz. The film presents a dystopian future where Puerto Ricans have turned into a minority in their own country, displaced by Anglo-Americans. Martínez Ocasio also released YouTube videos to accompany the album’s songs with information about Puerto Rican history created by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a Puerto Rican historian and author of the critically acclaimed book Puerto Rico: A National History.
With his Super Bowl performance, Martínez Ocasio has solidified his role as one of the primary figures opposing Trump’s agenda on the global stage. His unapologetic deployment of Pan-American nationalism, at a time when many are retreating into submission to the “Donroe Doctrine,” is a vital rallying cry for resistance. His popularity is also bringing new life to the independence movement in Puerto Rico and shows that despite the difficulties of the world’s current geopolitical environment, we may see independence and true liberation in our lifetimes.”
Best moments from the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show
Mass riots in the streets of Italy greet the ICE white supremacist terror force sent by our Rapist In Chief to intimidate the world as his emissary who has threatened to invade Greenland to steal her resources is met with jeers and boos at the stadium.
The Bearded Lady who renamed himself J.D. Vance to obscure his origins as a failed drag queen and the mail order bride-slave whom he keeps on a leash beside him represent the American Fourth Reich well as performative figures of lies and illusions, bearing threats of subjugation and conquest by a kleptocratic and racist regime.
This is a man who, along with all other members of the Trump regime and his co-conspirator Elon Musk, is guilty of murdering 800,000 human beings by designed starvation and illness in denial of food and medical aid. When you ride with Famine, Plague, and War, expect to be met with total Resistance.
Nothing less than a total denial of the ideas of mercy, compassion, and our duty of care for each other as guarantor’s of each other’s humanity was the meaning of the regime’s dismantling of USAID, a regime of amoral nihilism and vacuity which embraces the Dark Enlightenment theories of its plutocrat sponsors like Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel. And the world recoils in horror.
So while the Olympics offers us a glorious vision of world peace and harmony, and our athletes create beauty and hope in their heroic performances which change the boundaries of human possibilities, America sends darkness and despair.
May we all dream better futures than we have our moment now and the legacies of our past.
Ass written by Bryan Armen Graham in The Guardian, in an article entitled
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US: The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden; “The modern Olympics sell themselves on a simple premise: the whole world, watching the same moment, at the same time. On Friday night in Milan, that illusion fractured in real time.
When Team USA entered the San Siro during the parade of nations, the speed skater Erin Jackson led the delegation into a wall of cheers. Moments later, when cameras cut to US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, large sections of the crowd responded with boos. Not subtle ones, but audible and sustained ones. Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck, myself included, clearly heard them. But as I quickly realized from a groupchat with friends back home, American viewers watching NBC did not.
On its own, the situation might once have passed unnoticed. But the defining feature of the modern sports media landscape is that no single broadcaster controls the moment any more. CBC carried it. The BBC liveblogged it. Fans clipped it. Within minutes, multiple versions of the same happening were circulating online – some with boos, some without – turning what might once have been a routine production call into a case study in information asymmetry.
For its part, NBC has denied editing the crowd audio, although it is difficult to resolve why the boos so audible in the stadium and on other broadcasts were absent for US viewers. But in a broader sense, it is becoming harder, not easier, to curate reality when the rest of the world is holding up its own camera angles. And that raises an uncomfortable question as the United States moves toward hosting two of the largest sporting events on the planet: the 2026 men’s World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
If a US administration figure is booed at the Olympics in Los Angeles, or a World Cup match in New Jersey or Dallas, will American domestic broadcasts simply mute or avoid mentioning the crowd audio? If so, what happens when the world feed, or a foreign broadcaster, shows something else entirely? What happens when 40,000 phones in the stadium upload their own version in real time?
The risk is not just that viewers will see through it. It is that attempts to manage the narrative will make American broadcasters look less credible, not more. Because the audience now assumes there is always another angle. Every time a broadcaster makes that trade – credibility for insulation – it is a trade audiences eventually notice.
There is also a deeper structural pressure behind decisions like this. The Trump era has been defined in part by sustained hostility toward media institutions. Broadcasters do not operate in a vacuum; they operate inside regulatory environments, political climates and corporate risk calculations. When presidents and their allies openly threaten or target networks, it is naive to pretend that has no downstream effect on editorial choices – especially in high-stakes live broadcasts tied to billion-dollar rights deals.
But there is a difference between contextual pressure and visible reality distortion. When global audiences can compare feeds in real time, the latter begins to resemble something else entirely: not editorial judgment, but narrative management. Which is why comparisons to Soviet-style state-controlled broadcasting models – once breathless rhetorical exaggerations – are starting to feel less hyperbolic.
The irony is that the Olympics themselves are built around the idea that sport can exist alongside political tension without pretending it does not exist. The International Olympic Committee’s own language – athletes should not be punished for governments’ actions – implicitly acknowledges that governments are part of the Olympic theater whether organizers like it or not.
Friday night illustrated that perfectly. American athletes were cheered, their enormous contingent given one of the most full-throated receptions of the night. The political emissaries were not universally welcomed. Both things can be true at once. Crowd dissent is not a failure of the Olympic ideal. In open societies, it is part of how public sentiment is expressed. Attempting to erase one side of that equation risks flattening reality into something audiences no longer trust. And if Milan was a warning shot, Los Angeles is the main event.
Since Donald Trump’s first term, American political coverage around sport has fixated on the micro-moments: Was the president booed or cheered? Did the broadcast show it? Did he attend or skip events likely to produce hostile crowds? The discourse has often felt like a Rorschach test, filtered through partisan interpretation and selective clips.
The LA Olympics will be something else entirely. There is no hiding from an opening ceremony for Trump. No ducking a stadium when the Olympic Charter requires the host country’s head of state to officially declare the Games open. No controlling how 200 international broadcasters carry the moment.
If Trump is still in the White House on 14 July 2028, one month after his 82nd birthday and in the thick of another heated US presidential campaign, he will stand in front of a global television audience as a key part of the opening ceremony. He will do so in California, in a political environment far less friendly than many domestic sporting venues he has appeared in over the past decade. And he will do it in a city synonymous with the political opposition, potentially in the back yard of the Democratic presidential candidate.
There will be some cheers. There will almost certainly be boos. There will be everything in between. And there will be no way to make them disappear. The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden. In an era when trust in institutions is already fragile, that is a dangerous place to operate from.
The Olympics have always been political, whether through boycotts, protests, symbolic gestures or crowd reactions. What has changed is not the politics. It is the impossibility of containing the optics.
Milan may ultimately be remembered as a small moment – a few seconds of crowd noise during a long ceremony. But it also felt like a preview of the next phase of global sport broadcasting: one where narrative control is shared, contested and instantly verifiable. The world is watching. And this time, it is also recording.”
As I wrote in my post of 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; We rejoice in the glorious Resistance which arose yesterday in mass actions and protests throughout America, against Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and shuttering of US Aid, and against Musk the Troll King’s monkeywrenching and sabotage of our nation’s social security, medicare, tax, and other financial records, a federal bank heist, espionage, and information warfare performed by his troupe of fascist child soldiers.
In the space of a few days we organized marches on every state capital in America as well as key federal sites in Washington DC, a broad spectrum of alliances and interests which united in solidarity of action to challenge and confront the criminal seizure of our government by the Republican Party, front organization of the Fourth Reich, a liberation movement which parallels legislative and legal actions and theatres of war.
For war is precisely the word for what is now upon us.
America now faces her “fight them on the beaches” moment; though we have been a theatre of the Third World War since the Stolen Election of 2016. But we have never before fought a war of survival against our own captured state.
In this great cause of liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all, of the American Way as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state, I offer us all the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and terror; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He wrote it in Paris 1940 for the new Resistance, rephrased from the oath of the French Foreign Legion he took in 1928; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole. And we now find ourselves in a parallel situation to that of Vichy France, and must engage the imposed conditions of struggle by the same means and strategies as then; hopefully we have learned a few new tricks since then. But Solidarity is the keystone, with Disbelief and Disobedience on either side.
This, this, this.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
As written in The Guardian in an article entitled What is USAid and why does Trump dislike it so much?: The US agency distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid every year and is a key tool to promote soft power around the world; “Donald Trump’s administration has confirmed plans to merge the US international aid agency USAid into the state department in a major revamp that would shrink its workforce and align its spending with Trump’s priorities.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared himself the acting administrator of the agency and employees have been locked out of its Washington DC headquarters, while others have been suspended.
Trump has entrusted Elon Musk, the billionaire heading his drive to shrink the federal government, to oversee the project. On Sunday, Trump said USAid had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”, while Musk called it “a criminal organization” without providing any evidence and said it was “time for it to die”.
What is USAid and how is it funded?
USAid was established in 1961 by Democratic president John F Kennedy at the height of the cold war with the aim of better coordinating foreign assistance, already a key platform of US foreign policy in countering Soviet influence.
It now administers about 60% of US foreign assistance and disbursed $43.79bn in the 2023 fiscal year. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report this month, its workforce of 10,000, about two-thirds of whom serve overseas, assisted about 130 countries. USAid is funded by Congress, based on administration requests.
The CRS said USAid helps “strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads US efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists US commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade”.
Its top aid recipients in 2023 were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.
How much does the US spend on aid and how does it compare with other countries?
While the US gives more official government aid than any other country, its contribution as a percentage of national income is at the bottom of the list for wealthy countries in 2020, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In 2023, Norway topped the list at 1.09% of gross national income, while the US lagged at 0.24%, along with Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Spain.
In recent years, according to a Brookings Institution report from September, US aid spending has been about 0.33% of gross domestic product. It peaked at 3% of GDP in the 1950s with the Marshall plan program to rebuild Europe after the second world war. During the cold war, it ranged from 1% to a little less than 0.5%.
Nevertheless, in the 2023 fiscal year, the US as a whole disbursed a total of $72bn in assistance worldwide, and about 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024. The funds covered everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work.
Why does Trump oppose the agency’s work?
In an executive order on 20 January, Trump announced a 90-day pause in most of foreign aid, saying the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.
“They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” it said.
In a memo, the administration urged USAid workers to join the effort to transform how Washington allocates aid in line with Trump’s “America First” policy and threatened disciplinary action for ignoring the orders. The actions rang alarm bells from refugee camps in Thailand to Ukraine war zones with humanitarian organizations and UN agencies saying they could face drastic curbs on their ability to distribute food, shelter and healthcare.
A source with knowledge of USAid’s workings said folding it into the state department would be a big departure. USAid has in the past been able to provide humanitarian assistance to countries with which Washington has no diplomatic relations, including Iran and North Korea. This has sometimes helped build bridges, the source said, and the benefit could be lost if its operations were purely tied to political objectives.
Is support for foreign aid bipartisan?
According to Brookings, Democratic administrations and lawmakers have historically been more supportive than Republicans, but every postwar president, whether Democrat or Republican, has been a strong proponent of foreign aid – apart from Trump.
It noted that proposals by the first Trump administration to cut the US international affairs budget by a third were rejected, as were attempts to delay congressional consideration of supplemental foreign aid legislation in 2024. And in a bipartisan vote in June, 80% of the members of the Republican-led House of Representatives rejected an amendment to eliminate foreign assistance from the fiscal 2025 budget.”
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled Doge v USAid: how Elon Musk helped his acolytes infiltrate world’s biggest aid agency; “USAid security personnel were defending a secure room holding sensitive and classified data in a standoff with “department of government efficiency” employees when a message came directly from Elon Musk: give the Doge kids whatever they want.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, a posse of cocksure young engineers answering to Musk have stormed through Washington DC, gaining access to government computer systems as part of what Senator Chuck Schumer has called “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government”.
The young men, who are all under the age of 26 and have almost no government experience, have tapped into the treasury department’s federal payment system and vacuumed up employment histories at the office of personnel management (OPM). Roughly 20 Doge employees are now working out of the Department of Education, the Washington Post has reported, and have gained access to sensitive internal systems there too. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported they had infiltrated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and accessed key systems as well.
The young engineers, whose identities have been confirmed to the Guardian, wanted the same at USAid. One of them, Gavin Kliger, was a 25-year-old techie who has defended the failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz as a victim of the “deep state” and claimed he had left behind a seven-figure salary to join Doge and “save America”. Another, Luke Farritor, 23, was a former SpaceX intern who had been given top-level clearances to USAid systems and had requested similar to Medicare and Medicaid. A third, Jeremy Lewin, was an AI specialist also reportedly assigned to the General Services Administration. A superior planned to lobby the CIA for a clearance for him after he failed to gain access to a secure area.
Some US officials had begun calling the young engineers the “Muskovites” for their aggressive loyalty to the SpaceX owner. But some USAid staff used another word: the “incels”.
The Guardian has identified three calls by Musk to USAid’s political leadership and security officers in which he demanded the suspensions of dozens of the agency’s leading officials, and cajoled and threatened senior USAid officials to give his acolytes private data and access to restricted areas. At one point, he threatened to call in the US Marshals Service.
One USAid employee said that the calls by Musk, two of which have not been previously reported, showed he had effectively usurped power at the agency even from the Trump administration’s political leadership. “Who is in control of our government?” the person said. “[Doge] basically showed up and took over.”
In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, USAid had been presented as a pilot test for a large-scale overhaul of the federal government that would downsize agencies and arbitrarily move federal employees to looser contracts that made them easier to fire.
“If the Trump administration is successful here, they’re going to try this everywhere else,” said Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, a former USAid employee who came to protest alongside fired and furloughed workers outside the agency’s headquarters on Monday. “This is just the beginning.”
But it has also been a primer on how Doge operatives have inserted themselves into federal agencies and cajoled and bullied their way to access their most sensitive systems. This account of Doge’s infiltration of USAid is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former USAid, state department and other officials briefed on the events of the last week.
Security staff initially rebuffed the engineers’ efforts to talk their way into the secure rooms, called sensitive compartmented information facilities (Scifs), because they didn’t have the necessary security clearances. But that evening, Musk phoned a senior official at USAid to demand access for his subordinates, the first of numerous calls to officials and employees of Doge at USAid that have continued into this week.
Inside the building, chaos reigned. Areas that were once declared restricted, with limitations on electronics such as phones and watches, suddenly loosened their security protocols to allow in uncredentialed outsiders. Doge employees were said to obscure their identities to prevent online harassment, a tactic that was repeated at other agencies. And Peter Marocco, the controversial new director of foreign assistance at the state department, was stalking the halls and meeting in private with the Doge employees.
By Friday, things had gone further downhill. After a tense all-hands meeting with senior staff, and outsiders in the sixth-floor conference room, the young engineers rushed around the offices with their laptops, plugging cords into computers and other electronics as they gathered data from the agency.
After the meeting, Matt Hopson, a Trump appointee for USAid chief of staff, abruptly resigned. Jason Gray, the acting administrator, was removed from his position. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was soon to announce that he was the new administrator of USAid and appoint Marocco as his deputy. Musk was closing in on his goal.
The Doge employees had open access to rooms throughout the sixth floor, including the offices of the administrator’s suite. But the Scifs were still off limits.
At USAid, a newly installed leadership was formally in charge. But the real power lay with Marocco and Doge, which was plotting how to wind down the agency, a plan that Trump endorsed on Tuesday afternoon as he confirmed that teams were backed by the White House. That evening, USAid announced it would put all its direct-hire personnel around the world on administrative leave, a decision that would affect thousands of employees and their families.
Inside of USAid, the operation to shut down the decades-old operation was being run by Marocco, four engineers in their early 20s and the Doge leadership that contacted them by phone.
“It’s all being driven through Doge right now,” said a current USAid official, adding that Doge engineers in USAid headquarters continued to field calls from Musk and Marocco on Monday. “The folks in the building are turning the system off for [USAid employees], they’ve kept a small number of people from the different bureaus to help understand what programs will be kept and not kept, what the footprint will look like.”
The tension at USAid headquarters came to a head on Saturday evening, when Doge employees demanded access to the Scif on the agency’s sixth floor. They were stopped by the agency’s top security officer, John Voorhees.
Among those present was Steve Davis, according to one current and one former USAid official. Davis, a Musk deputy, has worked with the billionaire for more than 20 years at SpaceX and the Boring Company. He reportedly sometimes slept in the Twitter offices to help Musk slash costs there after he acquired it in 2022.
The argument over access to the Scif had grown verbally heated and senior Doge staff threatened to call in US marshals to gain access to it. During that standoff, according to one account made to the Guardian, a call was again made to Musk, who, as Bloomberg first reported, repeated the threat to involve the US Marshals Service.
Shortly after, Voorhees was placed on administrative leave and the Doge staffers entered the Scif. They took over the access control system and employee records. Within hours, the USAid website went down. Hundreds of employees were locked out of the system that weekend, and many still don’t know their status. (The Guardian has seen emails in which USAid administrators admit they do not know the employment states of current USAid officials.)
“I’ve been furloughed, I guess?” said one contractor with 15 years of experience for the bureau for humanitarian assistance, where she had helped coordinate urgent responses in Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia and Latin America. “I don’t know what my status is but I don’t think I work here right now.”
By Monday, Kliger wrote an email to all staff at 12.42am to tell them not to bother coming into the building that day.
The incident has illustrated how Doge employees with Musk’s backing were able to override USAid leadership and bypass government procedures for accessing restricted areas with classified materials, fueling criticism that his agency is a national security risk.
“Did Secretary Rubio allow this kind of access by Musk’s employees?” asked Kim. “It worries me about USAid but if it’s happening here, I’m guessing it’s probably happening at all these other national security agencies.”
Formally, Rubio has delegated responsibility to Marocco, who has been pressed by congressional staffers to give details of the changes affecting USAid and the $40bn in foreign aid it manages each year.
“The question at hand is: who’s in charge of the state department?” Senator Brian Schatz told the Guardian. “So far the answer has been Pete Marocco.”
Doge did not respond to questions about what security clearances, if any, the engineers held. “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” wrote Katie Miller, a Doge spokesperson, on social media.
But Scifs are regulated by a strict protocol and it is unclear who could have verified the Doge employees’ credentials and filed the necessary paperwork to allow them to enter.
Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.”
As written by Glenn David in reference to the podcast Lights On With Jessica Denson; “Dear Congressman, I am so disappointed in you and the rest of your colleagues for not speaking up doing the right thing on January 6 and making sure that the worst domestic terrorist in the history of our country would not occupy our White House. I hope you know by now that it is clear that the election was a fraud. I hope you know by now that Kamala Harris actually won the election. I’m not sure why you continue to attempt to think that we have a democracy at this point. Our democracy ended on January 6, 2021. The coup attempt on that day came to a successful completion on January 6, 2025. You had a hand in that successful coup. Everything that has happened since the phony inauguration day for an illegally occupying president was so predictable and so avoidable had you done the right thing. Now we are looking at a complete fascist takeover and a complete dissolution of our constitution. There have been so many impeachable offenses in the last two weeks and still no action from you or your colleagues to the point where it makes a difference. Talk is cheap and actions speak volumes. What has to happen before you actually do something of value for this country? Please listen to the attached video as I hope that you have heeded all of the information I have sent you previously. The people of this country do not want an insurrectionist, malignant narcissist, pathological lying dictator who wants to take everything from the bottom 98% and give it to the already sickeningly wealthy. We are doing our part to resist fascism and defend our constitution, I think it is time our elected officials do so as well.”
Milan Versus the American Fourth Reich at the Olympic Village
“What, no kiss-kiss?”
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US
Lights on! Americans answered the call for a 50-state 50-protest (50501), and are flooding the streets to demand action against the hostile takeover by illegitimate president Trump and his foreign national controller Elon Musk. Jessica Denson, who spearheaded the #14thNOW movement to block Trump’s illegal presidency, is joined by friends and activists across the country, as well as former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter to discuss the criminal and civil actions that must be taken now. Jessica reports, LIVE.
An image from the propaganda mill of the Confederacy was sent to America by the multigenerational KKK white supremacist terrorist who squats in the White House and sends forth ICE stormtroopers to brutalize, abduct, torture, and murder us in a criminal and savage campaign of ethnic cleansing, one among myriads of spurious diversionary ploys in a futile and increasingly unhinged attempt to misdirect attention from the central fact of who he is, a child predator and kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate who is also a Russian agent and whose mission is to sabotage and dismantle democracy and enact the Fall of America into tyranny and state terror.
What has happened?
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s toxic, racist video surpasses previous levels of debasement: Video deleted by White House breaks through numbness barrier and raises further questions about fitness for office; “It is a singular if highly dubious distinction of Donald Trump’s pungent contribution to the political discourse to have essentially bankrupted the English language’s capacity for outrage.
So unremitting and extreme have been the avalanche of affronts since Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to declare his presidential candidacy that even his most ardent critics have become desensitized, leading to a level of shock fatigue.
Yet Trump’s highly racist and offensive late-night Truth Social post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes broke through the numbness barrier to register on the political Richter scale at a level few of his many previous insults ever achieved.
That Trump succeeded in surpassing his own previous levels of debased standards was only emphasized by the decision, taken under fire, to delete the post hours after the White House had initially defended it.
That rare climbdown and the attempts to pin the blame on an anonymous White House staffer are unlikely to prevent the episode from illuminating a topic that much of the media has seemed reluctant to confront head on; that Trump’s behavior, online and in public, has been growing more reckless and raises serious questions about his mental acuity and his fitness for office.
On social media, whisperings that Trump is displaying signs of cognitive decline have increased in recent weeks.
Such chatter has been fed, rather than silenced, by the president’s frequent invocations of multiple cognitive examinations that he claims to have “aced” – boasts that have merely triggered questions as to why he is undergoing such tests in the first place.
Providing further grist have been the increasing volume of nocturnal social media posts from a president who appears frequently unrestrained and frantic, even if falling short of the racist toxicity of the Obama video.
On several nights in the past two months, Trump has fired off scores of social media posts in the night hours, including vitriolic attacks on his opponents. On one night in December, he fired off more than 150 posts in a few hours.
At the same time, the president has been observed apparently falling asleep in cabinet meetings and other public forums.
Against that backdrop, Friday’s initial rebuke from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, to reporters to “stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public” missed the point by a wide margin – as the later reversal only confirmed.
Critics may feel entitled to respond that such advice might be better directed to Trump, as polls show rising disapproval over his administration’s performance on affordability issues and the violent actions of ICE agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
More sentient – and ominous for Trump – was the response of the South Carolina Republican senator, Tim Scott, who is Black, and usually one of the president’s most reliable allies. Calling the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”, Scott wrote: “The president should remove it.”
Given Trump’s known trait for doubling down – a lesson absorbed from his pugilistic mentor, Roy Cohn – the fact that he did just that represents an unlikely display of weakness, if not exactly contrition.
Yet it is unlikely to be a template for future conduct.
More probable are further indiscretions that could lead to increased calls for invoking the 25th amendment, a constitutional device with provisions for removing a president from office if he is deemed unable to perform his duties.
Indeed, the Obama post may have already crossed that threshold, given the US’s painful history of racism and the human costs borne in trying to overcome them.
Invoking the amendment’s section 4 – needed to remove a president – would be complicated and seems a far-fetched possibility.
It would need the vice-president, JD Vance, and a majority of the cabinet to declare Trump unfit, a hard-to-imagine scenario considering the obsequious displays of fealty the president demands of cabinet members. Even if that hurdle were to be overcome, support from two-thirds of both the houses of Congress would be required if Trump were to contest an effort to remove him – as seems likely.
And to Democrats, comparisons with Joe Biden may be jarring.
Speculation about Biden’s supposed cognitive decline increased during the last year of his presidency, although evidence was limited as his White House handlers sought to cocoon him and restrict his public appearances.
It was only after the president’s disastrous televised debate with Trump in Atlanta in June 2024, when he seemed lost and unable to complete cogent thoughts, that doubts about his ability to serve as president for another four years reached boiling point – ultimately forcing him to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Kamala Harris.
But at no point did Biden issue racist or insulting social media posts, or appear to threaten Nato allies, as Trump has done over Greenland. Nor did he demonize entire ethnic groups, something Trump has done repeatedly in calling the Somali community in Minnesota “garbage”.
He did not assail female journalists in press briefings in nakedly vindictive and misogynistic tones, as Trump has done several times lately.
Racially abusing his Democratic predecessor on Truth Social may be an insufficient catalyst to trigger Republicans into immediate thoughts of removing a president they have bent over backwards to submit to and accommodate.
But some may be beginning to wonder how much longer they can trust what Lyndon Johnson called “the awesome duties” of being president to a man who spends his twilight hours posting memes that threaten to reopen wounds which the country spent generations and much treasure trying to heal.”
As written by Robert Reich in his Substack newletter, in an essay entitled Is it unkind to describe our president as a racist pig?; “Friends,
I try to ignore Trump’s posts because every one of them is filled with his noxious bloviation.
But sometimes his posts are so revolting that I can’t just let them pass. The loathsome sociopath in the Oval Office has to be held accountable.
Late last night — which happened to be the fifth day of Black History Month — at exactly 11:44 pm, Trump posted a video that included a depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
Now, we all know Trump is a loathsome human being. His insults have become an odious staple of his presidency. You may remember his AI-generated video of himself as a fighter pilot dumping excrement on No Kings Day protesters. Or his AI-generated video of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries as mariachi performers.
This morning, the White House press secretary hurried into the White House press room with her usual pooper-scooper to clean up from last night’s racist post — calling it nothing but “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” and adding, for good measure: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Well, it turns out that plenty of Republican members of Congress were outraged, too — and they didn’t fake it. “The most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” posted South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate. “A reasonable person sees the racist context in this,” posted Nebraska Republican Senator Pete Ricketts. “Totally unacceptable,” posted Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker. “Wrong and incredibly offensive,” posted New York Republican congressman Mike Lawler. “Offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable,” posted Ohio Republican congressman Mike Turner.
What happened then? Just before noon today, Eastern Time — some 12 hours after Trump posted his piece of sh*t — the White House said the post had been deleted.
No apology offered, of course. The White House blamed an unnamed “White House staffer” for it.
But you and I and anyone who has paid attention to Trump’s outbursts of bigoted offal over the past months knows it came from him.
Four observations.
First, you know Trump is going to unload his vitriol whenever he feels upstaged by Obama (or Biden) or any other prominent critic. Last weekend, at the same time “Melania” was released, Netflix views of Michelle Obama’s 2020 documentary “Becoming” surged by more than 13,000 percent.
Second, even Republican senators and representatives are now unafraid to publicly accuse Trump of being a bigot. That’s progress.
Third, when congressional Republicans make a ruckus, Trump backs down.
Fourth, this incident adds to the accumulating evidence that Trump is losing his mind.”
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such very different consequences?
Herein Trump reminds us all who the enemy is and his regime’s goal of dehumanization, the re-enslavement of Black people, and turning citizens Into subjects in a totalitarian white ethnostate, as Black History Month begins.
This we must Resist, By Any Means Necessary.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.
Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness.
A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
Trump’s toxic, racist video surpasses previous levels of debasement
Celebrate with me today the works of a pivotal figure of my youth and that of many others who found in him a figure of transgression of the Forbidden, the ownership of ourselves in struggle against authorized identities and systems of oppression, and the freedom to explore and perform those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh as well as those we ourselves create, the glorious William S. Burroughs.
Who was he to me? One of my father’s Beatnik friends who among the writers, artists, musicians, and film and theatre people he collected was all of those as well as a magician and scholar of the occult, and a wise and kindly mentor. He taught me storytelling by telling stories, by the fireplace after dinner at our home, and magic by witness of rituals he and my father wrote and staged together as theatrical performances. I was between ten and twelve during this time; young enough to internalize and imagine myself into his fireside versions of Grimm’s fairytales as family history and origin stories, and find wonder and beauty in his reimaginations of Lovecraft, Crowley, traditional medieval ceremonial magic, and his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche, Acephale; and too young to be aware of or understand his homosexuality or its crucial role as a driving force of his identity as an Outsider and outlaw of sex and gender in his struggle through writing to free himself from Authority which he allegorized as possession. I was in high school before I read his books, by which time he was no longer a figure in our family, though his strange fairytales, ideas regarding Nietzsche whose Thus Spake Zarathustra became a counter text to the Bible for me in eighth grade, and practice of writing and magic as poetic vision remained with me.
What does William S. Burroughs teach us about the value of transgression in bringing change to authorized identities and systems of oppression, the violation of normalities, the role of vision in the reimagination and transformation of imposed orders of being and meaning, and revolutionary struggle to seize ownership of ourselves from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue?
An encyclopedic and phantasmagorical body of work, full of dark satire, science fiction tropes, chaos, magic, songs of anarchy and freedom, and a beautiful unbounded transgression, William S. Burroughs wove revolutionary socio-political insights together with the glorious madness of Dionysian ecstatic vision and psychedelic trance.
Combining in his person Existentialism and Surrealism, his work is driven by two great themes; rebellion against Authority and the dreamquest of a magician to become a god.
The first of these themes being Sartrean Authenticity and a Promethean rebellion versus Control, a personification of all forms of thought control and normalcy, referential to Camus, Genet, Nietzsche, the English Romantics, de Sade, and most of all Georges Bataille, whose post-Freudian analysis of sociocultural forces and institutions, developed within the theoretical framework of Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, indict Authority as a means of dehumanizing and shaping us into the tools of our own governmental, religious, and economic enslavement. The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated, and he remains a bridge to Foucault.
His second major theme is ecstatic vision and transcendence as a path of liberation from the material world, a sublimity achieved through the derangement of the senses; sex, drugs, violence, all things aberrant and the pursuit of the extreme and the bizarre. As in the early novels of his direct model Jean Genet, a major theme in this is the seizure of power and authenticity through transgression of the Forbidden.
This includes the many magical subterfuges and arcane disciplines he practiced and codified as Chaos Magic, first among them being the cut-up method of randomization to reveal hidden truths invented with Brion Gysin and intended as a ritual of prophecy derived from the I Ching, the inspiration for which Burroughs once told me was Leibniz’s famous claim to have invented binary mathematics when reading the I Ching in his hunting lodge in Bavaria when he had the primary insight that the whole universe can be constructed of combinations of one and zero.
The works of William S. Burroughs may first be read as an interrogation of the four principles of Leibniz, Non-Contradiction, the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the Principle of Bivalence, as illuminated in the conversations of Aristotle, al Farabi, Avicenna, Aquinas, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carroll, and Korzybski, and playing the other side of the board Heraclitus, Nagarjuna, al Ghazali, and Hui Shi.
Second is the technique of juxtaposition developed from Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Monet’s principle; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, and the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world that we see.”
Herein juxtaposition is a praxis of his values in the second dimension of Burrough’s thought, his context within the lineage of Romantic Idealism; Prometheus and Milton’s rebel angel, Shakespeare in The Tempest, Byron and his sources Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller, then Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Keats, Blake, and Coleridge, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Third we must recognize that William S. Burroughs is primarily a mystic and Surrealist, obsessed with experiments with telepathy, precognition, shapeshifting, out of body travel to other dimensions and times, curses and psychic conflicts with malign and alien forces which reflect those of H.P. Lovecraft, and a unique and personal spiritism akin to that of voodoo which I would call Jungian shadow work. In this aspect he resembles Philip K Dick, prophet of the transhuman, Carl Gustave Jung, Vladimir Nabokov in Ada, and all of his fellow Surrealists.
Of direct influences among Surrealists we must count Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, Ionesco’s Rhinoceroses, Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, Reverdy’s The Thief of Talant, Michel Leiris‘ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
As to his language and style we must trace his origins in the Surrealist poets and their influences and references; Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, de Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Phillip Lamantia.
All of William S. Burroughs’ works may be read as conceptual art representing surrealist films in the tradition of Cocteau, Artaud, Dali, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Guillermo del Toro.
He began along this path as a child when he became the avatar of a chthonic being conjured by his Welsh nanny in the rite of Calling the Toad; and thereafter sought transformation and transcendence in forms ever more strange. This he claimed was the toad that Nietzsche feared he must swallow, whom he addressed using the name Tsathoggua invented by Clark Ashton Smith and used by Lovecraft in The Whisperer in Darkness and other stories, which was transferred to him as a spirit guardian and oracle of wisdom, a succession of bearership as a mystery initiation into which he inducted me through storytelling and ritual. Upon conclusion of such performances we would recite together Prospero’s line in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. Thus did he make me his successor and Nietzsche’s as was he.
This canon of stories, possibly invented on the spot and told over some time intermixed with fabulous and strange versions of Grimm’s Fairytales, now seems to me similar in intent to Ted Hughes’ reimaginations of mythology attempting to construct and reawaken a lost faith. He never wrote them down, unfortunate as unlike his books they were suitable for young adults if not children and coherent in a way his novels, constructed of theatrical episodes he called turns as in vaudeville acts, are not. One day I may do so for him, and the same with his system of magic.
I wrote my first story, Dream of the Toad, when I was twelve and immersed in Frazier’s Golden Bough and other myths, folklore, and fairytales, inspired by the wonderful stories he told of growing up stepping back and forth between our world and a parallel, magical one, filled with living figures from fairytales and myths in delightfully bent and off-center versions of their stories, as he and my father played chess of an evening and the coals of the fire burned low, enveloping us in the gathering darkness.
To me, William S. Burroughs will always be a kindly and urbane but tormented gentleman, a Trickster figure and Guide of the Soul, bearer of hidden signs and wounds, a charming rascal and unofficial uncle steeped in classical literature he could recite from memory, full of mischief and secrets and whom you could trust with your own.
Years after his time as a figure in our home, I first read his books as a teenager immersed in the grimoires of medieval magic, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as guides to universal principles of creating ourselves through language, when I discovered the stunning vistas of his transgression and disruption of gender, as he had never said or signaled anything of the kind within my sight or hearing as a child. So also with his anarchism and reimagination of Marx in fiction as the Algebra of Need.
He always liked my Dream Labyrinth wall, a floor to ceiling collage of Hieronymus Bosch and other strange images opposite my bed which I changed and elaborated constantly throughout my teenage years. Bizarre drawings like cinematic storyboards would be found added after his mysterious arrivals and departures. He loved illusions, grand entrances and ghostly exits, and above all humor, by which to keep the world off balance and step nimbly by its obstacles.
His books are also a Dream Labyrinth, which together form maps of the unknown and of possibilities of human meaning and being, as well as topologies of transformation as an anarchist Hall of Mirrors in a surreal and Absurd universe; one which is the reverse face of C.I.A. Director of Counter-Intelligence Angleton’s controlling metaphor of intelligence work as falsification and thought control as a Wilderness of Mirrors. This chiaroscuro was intentional on the part of Burroughs, who cast himself as a nemesis of Authority; liberation to counter balance tyranny. And all of this laden with dense symbolism and multilayered historical references, especially from suppressed paradigms and antique systems of myth.
William S. Burroughs remains an important vehicle of transmission of the whole western mystery tradition, indebted as he is to Philippe Soupault for his interpretation of William Blake and to Georges Bataille for his interpretation of Nietzsche and Freud.
One can also speak of Burroughs the magician of poetic vision and ecstatic trance in terms of Dionysius and Orpheus, and the literature of ceremonial magic as was Jung, immersed in Gnosticism, Theosophy, Rosicrucian occultism, Egyptian mythology, shamanism, tarot as he gave me my first deck of cards which I have to this day and taught me their use, I Ching, Kabbalah, alchemy, and all of this through Aleister Crowley whom he claimed as a source of discipleship and interpreted through his direct model, H.P. Lovecraft, of whom he once said; ”I wish Lovecraft wrote fiction. Some truths are too terrible to invoke by their names.”
He and Lovecraft were alike as authors trying to write their way out of madness; he from possession, Lovecraft from the trauma of childhood abuse and the madness which killed both his parents and which he feared would claim him. This places them both in the literary genre of journals of madness, with Akutagawa, Philip K. Dick, and Leonora Carrington.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and the heroic Jacques DeMolay, and of seizure of power against unanswerable forces of oppression.
As the character of John Constantine says in Legends of Tomorrow, season 6 episode 10 Bad Blood; “You know, where I’m from, being normal is being crushed by the boot of capitalism and then blaming it on anyone with brown skin. It’s being told that only degenerates can fancy men and women. It’s your old man coming home drunk every night and beating you to a pulp because that’s what his old man done to him. But magic, Spooner, the ability to break the rules, to stick it to the rich and the powerful, that’s who I am. And I’m nothing without it, Spooner. I’m nothing. Magic lets you break the rules.”
Naked Lunch is a masterpiece and classic of literature; Junky and Queer are among his other autobiographical novels modeled on those of Jean Genet. Like those of Genet, his stories are parodies and subversions of sacred rituals intended to liberate us from authority and free the creative imagination to forge an authentic humankind.
The Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, further explores addiction as a metaphor of social control and the destructive nature of capitalism. His idea of the Ugly American as a malign intrusive alien entity and force which must be exorcised parallels and is referenced by Malcolm X’s personification of heroin addiction as a possessing White Man who must be cast out.
One of the most accessible of his works is his book on the gangster Dutch Schultz, a dialectical journal in the classical form of a Jesuit report recording the actual last words of the gangster in one column and Burroughs’s commentary in the other- complete with cinematography notes.
America, a trilogy including Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands which reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a triumph of Surrealism in epic form and a masterpiece, has a clarity of prose and the imprint of a master artist at the summit of his powers. As a prank I once switched them for the actual American History textbooks in a high school class; strangely no one objected and I had to go right on teaching through the semester with it as myths of national identity. I think we had more fun with this subject than is usual.
The Revised Boy Scout Manual is a brilliant parody and a manual of anarchist revolt and the overthrowing of governments. Along with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom it is among the finest classics of direct action and guerrilla warfare one might consult. The actual Boy Scouts, of which I was a member as a youth, were founded in battle when the British defenders during the Siege of Mafeking in the Boer War, 1899-1900 South Africa, ran out of men and sent twelve year olds into the bush versus ferocious Dutch commandos. In reimagining the Boy Scouts as a revolutionary cadre for asymmetrical warfare against systems of oppression and tyrannies, Burroughs was restoring its original purpose. Certainly my teenage enthusiasms for martial arts, survivalism, and various forms of making mischief found inspiration in the idea of the scout-sniper and saboteur who can live off the land and operate independently; and later became my usual role in conflicts which pulled me into the maelstrom.
The Cat Inside is a delightful and precious allegory of freedom and rebellion, a meditation on values which extends Nietzsche’s analysis of master- slave psychology to a philosophy of anarchist liberation, which references Nietzsche’s interpreters Karl Jaspers, Nikos Kazantzakis, Maurice Blanchot, C.G. Jung, and Gilles Deleuze.
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil. As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He began writing it during the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. It is also filled with episodes from the glory days of his youth and set in Mexico and Morocco as imaginal realms he named Interzone, boundaries and interfaces between our world and those stranger still, places and states of being one may reach only through the Gates of Dreams.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or thereabouts, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine.
The Black Rider: the casting of the magic bullets, a theatrical collaboration with director Robert Wilson & the magnificent Tom Waits, is a can’t miss.
Exterminators collects thirty short stories, the Collected Interviews 1960-1997 edited by Lotringer are fascinating, as is The Adding Machine: essays.
Interzone is a travel journal, but only on the surface to the Marrakesh of Beatnik glory, as it also recounts the Lovecraftian plot to enslave humanity through heroin by fascist insects from Venus.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of Anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Go ahead; swallow the toad.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, 1972-3 UK tour
William S. Burroughs: 100 Years film with Barry Miles
John Giorno Interview: Inside William S. Burroughs’ Bunker
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burrough (three parts)
William S. Burroughs, the Life Thereof
William S. Burroughs: The Possessed
“The Cat Inside” film narrated by WSB
WSB Lecture on Writing and the paranormal at Naropa University June 1986
WSB lecture July 20,1976
William S. Burroughs, a reading list
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan, William S. Burroughs
The central question of any inquiry into the story and figure of Melania Trump must be; How did a whore rise through the ranks of a global sex trafficking syndicate to become the trophy wife and agent handler for Putin of its kingpin, a Nazi monster, idiot, and lunatic who became our President, and how did she help him to seize power?
Amazon’s despicable fascist stooge and now propagandist Jeff Bezos has bankrolled a wretched vanity film which trails Melania through gilded palaces as she declaims “Let them eat tear gas” when passing a window beyond which can be seen the glorious and heroic mass protests which have now become a national revolt against the white supremacist terror force ICE and Trump’s criminal campaign of ethnic cleansing and the federal occupation of our sanctuary cities.
Who is Melania, how did she become a monster, and what use was and is she to Trump’s Fourth Reich?
Herein I offer an alternate version of the film Melania, no less fictive than the trappings of royalty she wears like a twenty first century Marie Antoinette.
Opening shot is a miserable village in Slovenia, in the black and white of a time and place which are liminal in the sense of a fairytale, followed by a series of images of its humans and beasts who mirror and reflect each other in their filthy and grotesque degeneracy.
We hear the chop, chop, chopping before Melania makes her entrance, carrying an empty bucket of slops for the hogs we see in the yard behind her through the door she has thrown open to enter the darkness of the butchery, straw pasted to her wild hair and her face smeared with pigshit.
A fierce bearded man grimaces in semblance of a smile though we know he has long forgotten how, scooping entrails from the table into her bucket as she holds it up, a human hand included, in a gradually illuminated hovel littered with human cadavers.
“Good eating tonight, Melania, for us and the pigs. Police raided a poetry reading of dissidents.” Camera moves to a close up of his face as he says; “Very wicked, I’m sure. But there is no good or evil, only power, who eats and who is eaten, and we are all meat.”
As the camera withdraws to take them both in, Melania repeats the mantra which is the controlling metaphor of her world; “Yes, father, we are all meat.”
In Scene Two we move from her historical origins in a family of butchers who served both the Tito regime and the Nazis before him, and back into the mists of history; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleon, the Republic of Venice, Hapsburgs again, the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolinians, Bavaria, and before the migrations from which Slovenes emerged the Roman Empire. All states are embodied violence, and all require enforcers and those who disappear their victims.
Always there are scavengers like Melania, who loot the corpses and live from the misery of others; the scuttling dark things whose survival is in service to power, finding tasty morsels among the offal after the inquisitions and the crusades.
Though before Melania herself became a kind of remora riding sharks through abyssal depths, she was a simple though stupid and cruel village girl caught up in the system of human trafficking because of the leverage offered by a crime to predators operating with the authority of the state, a crime ambiguous in its intention but catastrophic and unforgiveable in its consequences, by which she gained the name she was known by before coming to America, Pigshit Princess.
In sepia tones like a hand colored postcard from long ago Scene Two opens, to two girls squabbling in the pigsty.
“Give me!” demands Melania, grabbing the glittery plastic tiara on the other girl’s head.
“No! I’m the princess! You’re the Pigshit Princess!”
Moments from the fight are intercut with black and white scenes and images of her childhood of brutality, squalor, and exclusion as the daughter of man who makes inconvenient truths disappear for the state. Herein she is not a champion of other untouchables or a class warrior of any kind, but a feral and malign predator who terrorizes here own, studying their weaknesses for leverage with brooding menace and trapping fellow children in horrific games of power. This is the backstory and origins of all overseers of the carceral state and its slaves, unchanged from the dawn of history and the rise of priest-kings and empires from the wealth of mass slave labor of agriculture, for this requires enforcers and informers from within slave populations, as Melania was to become.
They thrash about, tumble, and Melania pushes her rival’s face into the pigshit until she is dead. Then she takes the tiara and crowns herself with it. So begins the legend of the Pigshit Princess.
In full color Scene Three opens, marking the transition to historical time and a shared world we all live in; Melania, now a teenage girl or young adult, and a man in a dark suit are facing each other across a table in a cell, she in chains and without a trace of concern, remote and fearless.
“You’re a lot of trouble for a little thing,” he says. “I’m told it takes three men to get you into those chains.”
“Come closer and find out.”
He moves ever so slightly into range, and she unleashes a furious attack which finds its limits in the length of her chains, snarling like a savage animal; and when he withdraws laughing she resumes her motionless calm.
Her inquisitor speaks next, disturbing the silence; “I’m here to offer you a way out of here, as our eyes and ears in places we can’t go. Someone who can kill without mercy, and looks like you do, maybe even will be a great beauty one day, our enemies won’t see you coming. And one day you can live like a real princess, with beautiful things, if you choose to help us. For now, if you agree I will unlock your chains and have food brought, and later you will be brought from this place to a very special school in a castle, where you will want for nothing, and be under the protection of the state which includes immunity from prosecution for any crimes in your past or your future. And you will be well paid. Would you like that, Melania? Or would you rather remain the Pigshit Princess for the rest of your life, ruling a four by six cell in solitary confinement?”
“Show me this food. And I’ll take the first month’s pay now, and three days free on my own to decide.”
And so Melania became a spy and whore for the secret police under the cover of her modeling and escort career, working her way up to being the elite KGB/FSB influence agent she remains, now directly under Putin’s command, as she was maneuvered into Trump’s orbit after his 1987 visit to the Kremlin, and became his handler and his trophy wife.
In terms of her service to the regime from Trump’s perspective, she provides cover for his predation of children and as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate launched by his modeling and beauty pageant monopoly and interdependent with his partner Epstein’s blackmail empire also built on sex trafficking. Melania provides the illusion of normal sexual desires and identity to the most prolific serial sex predator in all of history.
And in service to both Trump’s puppetmaster and hers, Vladimir Putin, she provides an intimate source of intelligence, influence, and control of America to Russia as Trump’s control agent. Putin’s initial goal in putting Trump in the White House was simply to take America off the board to give him a free hand in the conquest of Ukraine, and though this goal has expanded horrifically he has clearly been successful beyond any imaginable dreams in isolating Ukraine from NATO support and in the capture of the American state as a vichy government of the Russian Empire and of the Fourth Reich.
Melania’s story and that of many girls like her has been told in the film and telenovela series La Femme Nikita, which I watched with rapt attention for its documentary-like realism in the portrayal of actual intelligence operations, and the historical film Red Sparrow; but never of a sparrow who becomes the First Lady of the United States as she did.
We must remember always that in so doing she also enabled unspeakable and countless crimes against humanity of whom Trump and Epstein’s victims were girls exactly like herself, who she betrayed to ruin and horrors.
This is how Melania became the person who once visited a concentration camp for migrants on our border wearing a trenchcoat with the words “I really don’t care; do you?” hand painted on the back like a living billboard for amoral nihilist Dark Enlightenment theorists and partisans of Apartheid like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance who believe that mercy is a weakness that should be abandoned on the trash heap of history along with democracy and universal human rights.
Our final scene in my conceptual film includes documentary newsreel footage of that day, June 21 2020, when Melania wore the infamous jacket to gloat over the misery of the fifty five stolen nonwhite children huddled into animal pens at the New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Texas, victims of her husband’s Theatre of Cruelty and campaign of ethnic cleansing. These are the steps history must remember, not the prancing high heels whose clicks on the marble floors of gilded palaces signal the death of democracy like a metronome.
She never truly left the pigsty, nor shed her identity as the Pigshit Princess.
Torch of Liberty 
