What do bodycam footage of a hazing ritual at the University of Iowa, a lawsuit against seven fraternity brothers at Cornell, and the Epstein files all have in common?

Well, yes. “Men” is a correct answer.

But the real answer is something all of those men are looking for: a club. A place to belong to.

Men learn early that there are consequences to breaking ranks, to not being a team player. That there are costs to speaking your mind.

They get punished for it.

And they learn that nothing feels worse than being put out into the cold.

Put on the bench.

Shit.

It feels terrible. It makes you feel like less of a man.

You’re off the team. You’re out of the club, bro.

And all you had to do was keep your mouth shut.

And so they do.

From the pledge class to the presidential cabinet, men keep their mouths shut.

They keep the peace.

They wait their turn.

They don’t want to let the team down.

They don’t want to let Dad down.

They want to be a real man.

They’ll do anything just to prove they’re a man.

You don’t have to be in a frat to understand that every single carrot and stick in our twisted social order has been telling them that if they can’t prove that to other men, they have no value.

I never joined a fraternity, but the minute I stepped on campus, the message was loud and clear that if you wanted to get girls, to have fun, to build a network, and to find job after school, you need to join a frat.

And were they wrong? All the hot girls went to their parties. All their dads paid their rent and dues. They got the internships, the callbacks, the standing invitation into the old boys’ club. The got to run the social scene on campus, at least a large SEC school like the one I went to.

Every guy on campus dreamed of scoring a way into a frat party, because thats where the beautiful women were. Frats had the girls, the power, the network.

An aristocracy of degenerate hormonal teens and twenty-somethings ruling the social scene like gods in mansions paid for by their influential alumni.

Yeah, it all looked a little pathetic to a homeschooled kid like me who was basically scared of people anyway, but I quickly understood why it was so appealing to so many men.

Men live in constant fear of being culled by the group. They are chastened by it. And to be on the outside of it, unless you are highly independent or have a strong will, is the equivalent of social death. Because, millennia ago, it was often the equivalent of literal death.

And blackballing is not a recent phenomenon.

Our word ‘ostracize’ comes from the Greek ostraka, referring to the small stones and bits of chipped pottery that the (free male) citizens of Athens would use to cast their votes to exile men deemed dangerous to their society.

So they take the vow, they take a meeting with the New York financier, then book a flight on the Lolita Express, or stay quiet when a woman’s body is offered up for a communal feast in a group chat.

Boys will be boys, right?

Epstein Culture

Something that is immediately obvious from even a cursory review of the Epstein Files is that all of this was done with an assumption of insider secrecy. The men (and women, to be fair) in the files took almost no precautions and spoke openly of depraved references to sexual assault of children.

It is the type of thing that boggles the mind of anyone who doesn’t understand club dynamics.

Of course they all felt like they could talk about this stuff with each other. They all went to Harvard together, or Stanford, or Cornell. Their dads all helped their friends get a leg up in the working world, expecting the favor to be returned for their boys when the time came.

Junior gets to go to Yale on legacy, and Senior gets a library named after him. Senior got bored of Junior’s mom years ago. I happens to men of his age. But his new buddy Jeff promises to bring the sparkle back into his life.

Everyone seems to like and respect Jeff. Jeff gets invited to all the parties and knows everyone important. Everyone keeps Jeff’s secrets, why wouldn’t they keep mine?

Who’s gonna find out?

The absolute assurance of no consequences bleeds through the Epstein Files in a way that is unmistakable.

It is the same self-assurance that bleeds through every story about fraternity life that ends up in the news. Just the absolute confidence that wealthy, white young men feel that they will be insulated from their decisions.

What is to be done?

Some version of the Cornell 7 story breaks into the public consciousness every few months and everyone is shocked and horrified for a little while. Women demand that men speak up about it, say something, anything.

Men are often reluctant to do so because a) they are more acculturated to worrying about what men think of them than what women think of them and b) they assume (sometimes correctly) that whatever they say on the subject will be relentlessly attacked, mocked, and dismissed by women and men alike.

They worry that what they say will be too much. That it won’t be enough. That they’ll introduce too much nuance, or to little. So they cower. They are used to cowering. Cowering is how you stay in the club.

In reality, most women have no intention of being hypercritical of their statements on such things. They actually just wish men would say something.

If men actually understood–understood in their bones–the actual weight of assault carried by most of their female friends, relatives, or lovers, they would likely shatter beneath the weight of it.

That brings us to a pretty important conclusion.

This only ends when we truly understand the damage that patriarchy–a system of social organization and domination structured around male hierarchies–has done to each and every one of our psyches. It ends when we learn to seek forgiveness and accountability, rather than closing ranks around lesser men.

I truly think most women understand that will be an imperfect process. I think that, more than most men, they correctly identify much antisocial male behavior as a product of culture. And culture can be changed.

I am not against men. I am not against men being men. I don’t think masculinity is evil, nor fake, nor do I think it is toxic for men to think they can and should aspire to ideal forms of male behavior (Aragorn). I do believe that there is good in men. Maybe even in most men. But there is evil too. And men need to understand that these concepts of good and evil and socially negotiated.

They are scripts. Stories.

And until we can collectively tell a new story about what it means to “be a man,” we will continue to see the savage brutality, the excuses, and the lack of accountability that the Epstein culture brings out in men.

There are potential future Epsteins to be found in every boys’ club on Earth, from the pledge class to the Presidential cabinet.

The men who turn other men into lesser men. Who prey on their worst instincts, who tell them to live without fear of consequences, to indulge.

Like mold, they grow in darkness.

It’s time to bring them into the light.

I have seen a lot of terrible movies. Most of these viewings have been self inflicted, partially due to a bizarre love of really corny action films.

For instance, Battleship (2012) starring Taylor Kitsch, Liam Neeson and [checks notes] Rihanna is an objectively terrible film. It is also a subjectively amazing movie.

There is literally a scene where a WWII battleship piloted by Pearl Harbor veterans drops anchor and Tokyo Drifts into position to fire a broadside at an alien spaceship. It’s awesome.

I cannot lie, I love that shit. I love Kong: Skull Island (2019). I love Midway (2019). I really enjoy watching terribly written films with little-to-no character development, cohesive plot, or stand-out performances.

But when Isaac Zale and Chris Kunzler of the No Politic Here podcast invited me to watch Ben Shapiro’s new Zionist propoganda film Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels starring the award-winning actor Jonathan Majors, I finally met my match.

Holy shit, this was the worst movie I have ever seen.

It was genuinely a tremendously negative viewing experience in every possible way.

It was as if Ben Shapiro took a scan of the neural activity of the average Newsmax viewer and ran it through an AI video generator.

Speaking of which, there is literally a brief sequence in the film where the protagonists are watching an obviously AI generated video of a father comforting his child.

That comes right before a sequence where a Korean student disarms a bomb, and when asked how he did it, he replies “I’m Asian.”

This movie is the most virulently racist boomerslop I have ever seen in my natural godamn life. The characters are wooden and wholly devoid of charm. They literally onle serve to parrot conservative talking points at key moments, or die violently to fulfill some sort of Right Wing revenge fetish.

There is a unintentionally laughable scene where an Arab man–whom I guess we are supposed to assume is a sunni Islamist even though he declares his allegiance to the Twelfth Imam–kicks a gay student off the top of a building. This is obviously meant to evoke the derisive Zionist claim that ‘Queers for Palestine’ would be thrown off of rooftops in Gaza.1

I’m sure this really hit home to all six people who subscribe to Ben Shapiro’s streaming service, DailyWire+.

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But the scene was followed up by a grotesque throat slitting sequence of a young, blue-haired pro-Palestine activist–cast in the role of a ‘useful idiot’ for the ISIS-Hamas-Nazi grab bag villains.

Immediately following this, attractive female students are rounded up to go shower off their ‘uncleanness’ under the watchful eye of jihadists. The camera then lingers on their partially naked bodies, and heavily implies that their captors– deeply cartoonish depictions of Arab Muslims–have raped them, or intend to do so.

This parade of conservative anxieties culminates in the only genuinely chilling sequence in the film, a trans student is lynched, their lifeless body swinging from a flagpole below the ISIS flag.

What struck me about these moments is how they were explicitly designed not only to titillate the Right Wing imagination, but also to enact a kind of vengeful fantasy on these frequent targets of conservative ire. Feminists, gay men, trans people.

Everything that happens to these characters is not supposed to correspond to any likely fate they might experience at the hand of Hamas, or ISIS, or Hezbollah.

It is entirely meant to affirm and play act a conservative fantasy about what should happen to those people at the hands of Muslim extremists. Perhaps just what should happen to them, period.

My mind went to a dark place as I realized that decades of dehumanization of queer and trans folks, pro-Palestine protestors, Arabs, and Muslim men by the Right Wing had led Shapiro and Co. to comfortably assess that he could depict these violent revenge fantasy against his political enemies with zero consequences.

There is no mourning of their deaths. There is no purpose to their deaths, except to serve as a warning to the other students of the dangers of Islam. It is as if these characters, in the fevered imagination of the conservative mind, all just sort of get what they deserve.

The lack of empathy, the celebration of violence. It is a chilling assessment of the state of conservative discourse, and a good reminder of what a lot of these people actually think of all of us.

If you look at the reviews for Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, half of them are one star reviews pointing out the nonsensical plot, lack of character development, and general idiocy. The other half are earnest reviews from conservative viewers praising them films biting accuracy.

“Super entertaining movie” writes Carl O. “I t [sic] starts a bit slow, but it really captures you. People here can't get pass their bises [sic]… Also pretty important and true message.”

“This movie was absolutely amazing and such a good message” writes another reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes. “People should take this seriously. And I think the only reason people hated the script was because they took it word for word from actual protesters. I have watched hundreds of videos of real life protests where they said the exact same thing. So honestly, they should take it as a compliment. Very accurate. I definitely recommend for anyone who is actually smart.”

These people will be voting in November, btw.

Anyway… Oh god. While I was writing this I found out this movie is a sequel. They made more of them.

Then there’s Jonathan Majors.

After soaring to the heights of Hollywood A-list fame, Majors has been on a dramatic fall in recent years, following his 2023 arrest for physically assaulting his ex girlfriend.

This guy literally went from replacing Josh Brolin’s Thanos as the big bad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe–the most lucrative IP of all time–to starring in a low-budget MAGA propaganda film in less than three years.

And the worst part about it is that his downfall made him no less of a powerhouse as an actor. His delivery, his mannerism, and the gravity he brings to each scene so eclipses that of the other actors that the movie feels like watching a student film that happens to star a Hollywood A-lister.

It is deeply unnerving. Like watching that behind the scenes footage of Ian McKellan filming The Hobbit and it is just him acting alone in a greenscreen room with little plates featuring the faces of Bilbo and Thorin to show him where the actors heads will be superimposed.

And don’t even get me started on the tactical aspect. We are supposed to believe that Jonathan Majors’ character is Delta Force as he exhibits some of the worst on-screen tactical movement and discipline I have ever seen in a film. Not to mention the weapons, armor, and other gear is completely out of sync with what a television show like The Terminal List or a movie like 13 Hours can boast.

Sure, it is a small critique in light of movie’s various offenses, but it really took me out of the film at the very first scene where Majors brings an unsuppressed firearm and no night vision on a two-man a night raid on a leading ISIS figure’s compound.

Like come on, man. The MAGA movement is full of chud ‘sheepdog’ veterans who do this kind of consulting full time. You couldn’t find one guy?

Anyway, enjoy my review of this terrible movie.

Isaac, Chris, and I also talk about the recent Hasan Piker Axios debacle, the particularities of the Kurdish liberation struggle, and a variety of other interesting topics.

Give it a watch!

When I met Charlie Kirk in 2019 at a birthday party inside the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., I did not imagine that he’d be dead from an assassin’s bullet within the decade.

At the time, he was brimming with confidence, and flush with billionaire cash, staring down what looked to be a permanent consolidation of political power in the wake of a presum…

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Recently I have been accused of spreading “hopium.”

I suppose by hopium, my critics (derogatory) seem to mean my insistence that we must not despair in the face of what increasingly seems like an inevitable descent into fascism and collapse of our biosphere.

That there might still be time to save all the good that remain…

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Housekeeping: After being paralyzed about how to keep writing without my content being subjected to the insane tornado of the algorithm , I’ve decided I’m going to start writing more frequent and briefer reflections for my paying subscribers. The primary reason is that this newsletter is the only space remaining to me that is not subject to the algorithmic pressures that influence my content on every other app. There simply are some things that I want to say to you all first, and occasionally, alone. Mutual trust that has been earned in our community here leads me to believe I can anticipate good discussion without brigading, harassment, or my content reaching audiences stripped of necessary context.

I’ve really been trying these last few months.

Trying to see “reason” and find “common ground” with a group of people who claim to be Leftists, yet seem to take every opportunity to deny solidarity to working people. By “Leftist,” “Socialist,” “Marxist,” etc., they seem increasingly to mean merely cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes that oppose the Western “Liberal” order.

The character of these governments need not be socialist for them to attract the salivating praises of this particular brand of Leftist. A brand I’ve been calling “Alter-Imperialists,” or the “Collaborationist Left.” Leftists who exhibit what the Syrian human rights activist Leila al-Shami called the “anti-imperialism of idiots.”

The reason I have been “trying” is because the advance of fascism and climate catastrophe have thrown the global movement for solidarity and socialism so firmly on the back foot that it seems like emphasizing any of the myriad divisions between Leftists–no matter how important–would be counterproductive in this fragile moment.

That has not, of course, stopped these anti-imperialists of convenience from instantly branding anyone critical of them as a Liberal, a CIA asset, a useful idiot, or a Mossad stooge. They have so thoroughly inoculated themselves from reality that they cannot seem to play nice with others even when the boot is on their own neck.

Am I just being dramatic…

I am occasionally accused, at times mockingly, by Marxist-Leninists with Campist sympathies of making up this supposed ‘bullying’ of other Leftists by Campists in the digital agora.

“Where are all these ‘Russia-supporting’ Tankies? Are these IRGC-stans in the room with us right now? You are just paranoid and lashing out against comrades!”

I usually just reply to these people by showing them the threats in my DMs from people with hammer and sickle emojis and the flag of Palestine next to those of North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Russia, and Iran (they are never Palestinians, of course).

Or the comments Left on my page, or mentioning me in other pages, like the one from Jesse V., a self-described ‘man hating anti-imp’, vegan, and Russian expat in Germany who moved to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory a few years ago.

She left this comment on a genuinely useless, purely clout-farming video by a different Campist creator that flippantly described Ukraine as “the Israel of Europe.”

I’d never heard of this woman nor understood why she felt the need to jump into a comment thread that wasn’t even her own to say her piece.

One might think that a ‘man-hating anti-imp’ would be horrified by the well-documented, deliberate use of rape as a weapon of war during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Or the revanchist, expansionist positioning of the Russian state in regard to its neighbors.

Instead, this creator routinely praises the Russian armed forces on her story, declaring them the saviors of Russia in much the same way as White Supremacists and Russian Duganites invoke Russia as the defender of Christendom.

It has always amused me that Russian chauvinism seems to appeal equally to certain Western fascists and Western Marxists.

Enough about that. It was really discouraging to see that several accounts I admire followed this creator, which I understand does not necessitate allignment, but does signal some form of solidarity.

My comrade did a deep dive on this individual recently, but its unavailable because RD has experienced so much mean-spirited bullying from campists that they routinely deactivate their Instagram account just for some reprieve.

Their Substack is still active and always insightful.

Anyway…

I am deeply worried that if the modern Left cannot mount a meaningful counter-propaganda effort in the face of such Campist idiocy, then we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the last century, and find ourselves no closer to achieving any sort of socialist future worthy of the name.

I have written three articles about Campism and the danger it poses to the international Left. I first expressed my thoughts on the subject (rather imperfectly, I might add) over two years ago in this article.

A year and a half later, I returned to the subject to more fully flesh out my critique of Campism after seeing a mounting fetishization of all things China meet a resurgence of support for the Islamic Republic of Iran, following wide-scale protests that enveloped the country, and an unprovoked American-Israeli assault.

“If you buy into the Axis of Resistance rhetoric,” I wrote. “If you decide to treat geopolitics as the Campist treats them, you are going to find yourself getting tangled in knots trying to remember which regime you’re supposed to support and which ones you’re supposed to condemn. You will get all mixed up with which protests you are supposed to call democratic uprisings and which ones you must dismiss as color revolutions.”

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In my third article, I proposed an alternate, anti-authoritarian vision for solidarity than what appears to me increasingly to be a sort of Campist mainstream on the Left.

I prefer to call these people Campists because the word “Tankie” is a bit imprecise and too frequently invoked by Liberals to be useful any longer as a meaningful epithet. Nevertheless, the origin of this term is highly instructive.

‘Tankie’ began not as a smear use by Liberals on Twitter against Leftists who oppose Western Imperialism, but as an intra-Left insult directed at hardline pro-Soviet communists, particularly those who prioritized loyalty to the USSR over criticism of its blatant authoritarianism or frequent military interventions.

The term was conventionally understood to find its point of origin in the power struggles within the Communist Party of Great Britain following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but its more likely provenance relates to the political fallout of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

It became an epithet for the members of the CPGB who supported Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev’s deployment of tanks to put down the Prague Spring. These ‘tankies’ were opposed to the anti-authoritarian wing of the CPGB who supported Alexander Dubček’s attempts to democratically reform the communist system from within, a movement Dubček described as “socialism with a human face.”

I have written thousands of words on the subject of Campism, but I think that this paragraph from this article sums up what I see as the mortal danger lurking within it.

I truly do think a lot of this is unconscious for some people. Especially newer Leftists.

Many campists don’t come into these discussion wanting to participate in genocide denial and whitewashing of internal repression and imperial crimes.

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American Remnant is a fictional retrospective documentary on the next American Civil War, told …

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Spoiler Warning: This not a review of the Odyssey, it is a mostly spoiler free discussion of the film’s themes in relation to Greek mythology and modern geopolitics. If you haven’t seen Nolan’s The Odyssey, you might want to check back here once you have. If you haven’t read Homer’s Odyssey, I can’t help you. You’ve only had 2,700 years.

When is a gift not a gift?

SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

I watched Nolan’s The Odyssey last week, like evidently most of the country. I got to see it in IMAX 70mm before opening day, at the Chinese Theater, thanks to the generosity of my film-obsessed friend Brian.

It was an overwhelming sensory experience, due in large part to the astonishing set pieces and Ludwig Göransson’s incredible musical score. Göransson is fast becoming one of my favorite composers working today, and with his last two Nolan collaborations, has cemented his reputation as one of the greatest film composers of all time.

The filmed opened to a jaw-dropping $264.1 million globally, marking the largest opening of Nolan’s already impressive career.

I knew enough about Christopher Nolan’s approach to filmmaking to anticipate that the controversies surrounding The Odyssey’s casting, costumes, and themes would largely be put to rest.

I was right.

The costumes look nothing like what Bronze Age Greeks would have worn, nor even what would have garbed their Iron Age descendants of Homer’s day.

The modern American accents are out of place with the Mediterranean backdrops. The appearance of Black suitors in the banquet halls of Ithaca or East Asian and South Asian crew members on Odysseus’ Greek penteconter would be distracting in a faithful Bronze Age historical epic.

But The Odyssey, is not an historical epic, and I strongly suspect that such choices were very deliberate.

After all, Nolan was the director who started the trend of giving us grounded superhero films, with superheroes themselves serving as the modern equivalent of the ancient epic heroes, changing slightly with each telling, transformed through the very act of remembering.

You see, The Odyssey is not a film about Ancient Greece.

It is a modern lesson about what happens to a civilization when it ceases to recognize its obligations toward strangers.

In this sense, it is very Homeric in character.

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Greeks Bearing Gifts

With all their manners, mindes and fashions,
He saw and knew; at Sea felt many woes,
Much care sustained, to save from overthrowes
Himselfe and friends in their retreate from home.

By receiving into its walls the gift of the Greeks, Troy was undone, and with it, an ancient code of conduct between men and nations.

The Wooden Horse not only enabled the Achaean sack of Troy, it violated the sacred bonds between strangers upon which peace and commerce are built.

When men and nations place their lust for power above all over considerations, they bring ruin and disaster upon everyone, including themselves.

This is the core contention of Nolan’s The Odyssey.

And it would be hard to imagine a more timely one.

It is the right of the artist to take creative liberties with his source material, and when it is done with respect for the spirit of that material, it demonstrates the relevance of that material to a contemporary audience.

Nolan bends The Odyssey like its protagonist bends his bow. He does so not with the intent to make a perfectly faithful adaptation of the poem, but to forge its lessons anew for an age of fear and collapse.

The film places a great deal of emphasis on what is invoked throughout the story as Zeus’ Law, a reference to ξενία (xenía), from the Greek ξένος (xénos), meaning stranger or foreigner, but also–somewhat paradoxically in the English–both ‘guest’ and ‘host.’

Xénos implies a reciprocal relationship, one of obligation. The obligation between strangers, guests, and hosts. It is occasionally translated as ‘guest-friend.’

Xenía was an ancient Greek code of sacred hospitality. Hosts were obliged to offer strangers food, shelter, protection, and respect, while guests were expected to honor the household and not abuse its generosity.

There are many pro-social benefits to such a code of honor, but the primary justification for it was that any stranger who comes to your door might be a god in disguise. To refuse hospitality to a stranger was to run the risk of spurning divinity.

Mythology aside, it created a culture in which an unknown traveler could become a protected guest through reciprocal obligation. Such a code facilitated commerce, safe travel, and peace.

Nolan’s Odyssey is about what happens when that code breaks down.

I need look no further than my own family history to learn that lesson.

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The Household and the Community

But not by will or valor could he save them
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.

As I sat in that dark theater watching Nolan’s latest triumph unfold in all its 70mm glory, I couldn’t stop thinking about the man next to me.

I met Brian nearly four years ago over a cob salad at the Beverly Hills hotel. He wanted to make a movie in Ukraine, and wanted to hire me to figure out how to do that safely.

Years later, he is one of my closest friends.

While we were in Ukraine, he was shocked to find out we had some shared family history. More than three hundred years ago, in the winter of 1692, his family invited my family into their banquet halls in Scotland under the law of hospitality.

They housed, wined, and dined us as guest. We drank and played cards with our hosts late into the night.

At around five in the morning, we attacked and slew them all.

We shot their clan chief as he rose from bed to meet the men he regarded as his guests.

We killed thirty men. Our hosts. We were just following orders, passed down from the Scottish government. But the stain of that cold morning has followed my family ever since.

Out, damned spot!

To this day, there are signs across Scotland at inns and pubs that bear the words “No Dogs, or Campbells.”

The Scottish Highlands were a violent place, in the 17th and early 18th centuries. But it was not the violence of our crime that sullied our name. It was the conditions under which it we perpetrated it.

We broke an ancient code of diplomacy and in doing so, ushered in a more dangerous world. We broke Zeus’ Law (xenía), bringing shame to our household and to our social community.

When this lesson was delivered in a different context on-screen, I looked over at Brian to see if his mind was following the same track as my own, but he was mercifully distracted by the sonic assault of Ludwig Göransson’s epic score and Hoyte van Hoytema’s visual feast.

I was left to ruminate alone on my own family curse.

Like the sons of Atreus (yes, that is where we get ‘Atreides’), my own family name is marred by betrayal, kinslaying, and death.

Zeus’ Law cannot be understood without examining the particular approach the Ancient Greeks took toward social relations.

The Greeks believed that the ideal state of the household and the social community was αὐτονομία (autonomia), or ‘self-rule,’ combining autos (self) and nomos (law or custom).

The sociologist Murray Bookchin points out that this word does not mean ‘independence’ in the sense of a “free-wheeling, materialistic bourgeois ego,” but rather that it has a “rich ethical meaning in premarket eras.”1

Greek “selfhood” was intimately associated with rule, social rule, the capacity of the individual to directly participate in governing society even before he could manage his economic affairs.

The very term “economics,” in fact, denoted the management of the household — the oikos — rather than society, a somewhat inferior, even if necessary, activity by comparison with participation in the community or polis.2

Selfhood, for the Greeks, was not an egoic individuation, but was “associated with individual claims to power within society rather than [merely] the management of material life.”

“Hellenic selfhood found its fullest expression in the polis rather than the oikos, in the social community rather than the technical. Once we cross the threshold of history, self-management is the management of villages, neighbourhoods, towns, and cities.

The technical sphere of life is conspicuously secondary to the social.3

The Greeks believed that selfhood reached its fullest expression in a social context. Like the guest-host paradox of xenía, the very notion of Greek selfhood implied communal obligation, defying the English meaning of the terms, which increasingly serves as “little more than a euphemism for egotism.”4

Nolan’s Odyssey is a warning about what happens when autonomia collapses at the level of the household (oikos) and the social community (polis).

It plays out in the intimate banquet hall of Odysseus’ own household, and the broader social community of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

It even invokes the historically mysterious “sea peoples” as a harbinger of the Bronze Age collapse to drive this warning home.

When Agamemnon elevates his egoic lust for power–or Odysseus his own cunning–over the demands of xenía, they imperil not only their own ‘selfhood’ but that of the broader social community.

The breaking of Zeus’ Law becomes not the discarding of a useless custom, but the announcement of a more dangerous world to come.

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Omens of Collapse

Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

Seven months ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney climbed the stage at Davos to deliver an address that historians may one day use to definitively mark the end of the American-led post-WW2 global order:

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.

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Our Hemisphere’s Climate Refuge is Burning

Oh god, massive fucking wildfires are sweeping through Ontario as I write.

Wildfires are nothing new for Canada, but the severity of these fires is alarming. Residents of major cities like Toronto can no longer see the sun. Videos of apocalyptic smoke clouds choking out the horizon have flooded social media, and on top of weeks of heat waves, seem like omens of impending doom.

Climate catastrophe is here, and it’s here to stay.

Importantly, it is already ravaging one of the places that everyone assumed would be something of a climate refuge in the years to come.

With its cold climate, long winters, and massive freshwater reserves, Canada is remarkably well positioned to weather the storm of climate change in the coming century.

Or so we thought.

I can remember with grim recall the many times that Liberal friends have joked to me about fleeing to Canada if things get bad here in the States.

The assumption was always that it would be a safer bet than trying to survive the looming threat of ecofascism and civil conflict that our own nation seems rushing headlong towards.

But with Canada’s forests consumed by flames as temperatures around the world spike to extremes not expected until the mid 2070’s, it turns out that might be a more fraught proposition than previously believed.

You might avoid getting slimed out by some illiterate chud from Arkansas who thinks Gavin Newsom is the second coming of Stalin, but there’s no guarantee you won’t choke to death on wildfire smoke in a commune somewhere in Manitoba.

Still, prospects look less grim for Canada than they do for the United States, and there are some key reasons beyond relative climate resilience that explain why.

I myself have long wondered what it would be like to uproot my life and move North, as a refugee either from state terror, civil conflict, or climate hell.

So two weeks ago I flew to Toronto to meet with someone who did exactly that.

O’Hare of the Dog

July 3rd, 2026

I’ve been sitting on the Tarmac of the Chicago O’Hare airport drinking for six hours awaiting takeoff, so I figured I would write.

I’m en route to Los Angeles, coming home from Toronto.

O’Hare never fails to try my patience. Ten years of trying to route through this airport to reach various places that aren’t Chicago and nothing to show for it but weeping and gnashing of teeth. Every time.

I don’t know who O’Hare was, but I’m tired of his bs.1

I want to gnash his teeth. If I had a time machine, I’d have to make a stop at the O’Hare household shortly after kirk’ing Baby Hitler, among others I won’t name.

It would be a difficult conversation between me and Mrs. O’Hare, but I think she would understand that the future sanity of millions of travelers depended on as merciful a form of infanticide as I could manage.

But I need not pursue a program of O’Harebortion.

If I was a Catholic, I am sure that I could find a reasonable alternative, like encouraging the Senior O’Hares to engage in “natural family planning,” and providing contraceptives for them when that inevitable failed.

Sorry for letting that get so dark and horny.

Anyway, I am tired of living through the American Century of Humiliations.

That is actually why I was in Canada, which, up to this point, I had assumed was either a winter themed amusement park somewhere in North Dakota, or entirely fictional, or both.

Most people don’t take Canada all that seriously and that really aggravates Canadians.

But when your greatest cultural achievement is that gay hunk from the softcore hockey TV show Heated Rivalry, forgive me if I chuckle when your rosy little Canadian cheeks get all hot and bothered.

Americans can’t get enough of rosy Canadian cheeks.

Enough, I jest.

I love Canadians. Hearty folk, and true. Like the Midwesterners of the great Northeast, Northwest, and Midwest.

And anyway, I’d decided I wanted nothing to do with the ritual celebration of a New World settler-colonial experiment on July 4th, so I figured I’d go to Toronto for Canada Day, which I am sure is unproblematic.

To be honest, I didn’t look into what Canada Day actually is. I presume it is about a longshoreman named Tony Horton who died from poutine scurvy while trying to find the Northwest Passage.

That is what I gathered from the dozen or so Canadians with whom I spent July 1st drinking, watching “football,” and singing sea shanties.

I tend to walk the earth assuming that I alone among these myriad strangers know the secret delights of the shanty. I guard my sacred knowledge like the Biblical virgins who hid the Pearl of Great Price from King Herod in that reed basket.

The reason is that most Americans are loathe to find themselves in the presence of a real shantyman.

When I try to send one or more of my five separate sea shanty playlists–curated for the more discriminating shantyman, but accessible to the novice–to friends or would-be suitors, their amusement tends to turn to alarm when they realize that this isn’t a bit for me, but actually a lifestyle.

To discover that I am a true Bully Boy, and that they are naught but a landlubber, a knave, a sniveling midshipman, still yearning for hearth, home, and the comfort of a Liverpool brothel… I can only imagine what it must do to their psyche.

But not so the Canadian!

The hearty Canuck knows every line of Stan Rogers’ Northwest Passage, and chokes back tears when he hears Gordon Lightfoot’s solemn voice sing the haunting melodies of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

At one point in the evening, when I worked up enough alcoholic courage to bark out lustily the opening verse of Barrett’s Privateers–

“Weeeeeelll, the year was Seventeen-Seventy-Eight…”

–I found a chorus of voices to meet my challenge, hollering back in raucous reply:

“HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOWWWW!”

What glee. What absolute delight. Even the girls chimed in, half-drunk syrens of impossible beauty, robust lungs, and and implausible politeness.

Was this Valhalla?

Had I arrived in that great Pirate Republic in the sky promised by David Graeber to all true anarchist Himbos?

No, I was still in a Toronto suburb, remembering why I love Canadians.

See, I’d wager I actually know more about Canada than the average American. It’s just that most of my knowledge of Canada sits around the period of 1763-1814.

For instance, I know that, somewhere in Toronto, I would find a monument featuring two toy soldiers, one silver, the other gold, with the silver soldier knocked over and the golden soldier standing tall and proud.

And I did find it! Right outside the airport.

Radiant in all its glory.

I also know that this statue commemorates the victory of the Canadians over the United States in the War of 1812.

Oh, you thought we won that war?

Not according to Canada, which we arrogantly invaded and were speedily ejected from by a vastly outnumbered but militarily superior Canadian force that would march its way straight to our capitol and burn it the fuck down.

You see, the reason Canada became the self-conscious butt of every American joke has more to do with American insecurity than Canadian weakness.

Canada survived that war. Their survival was its own kind of victory, one that ensured that the United States’ Manifest Destiny would drive its expansion West, rather than North.

The only time the United States tested the Canadian resolve, we were humbled, and sent home with our tail between our legs.

And in the fires of Châteauguay and Queenston Heights, a new Canadian identity was forged in direct opposition to its American neighbor.

If our 1775 Revolution united us around the idea that we were not British, 1812 united Canadians under the conviction that they were certainly not, and never would be, American.

This divergence was evident from the earliest day of the American experiment.

The American Revolution could more accurately be described as the First North American Civil War, with intense fighting between Loyalists and Patriots occurring throughout the colonies, and particularly in my native South Carolina which, in 1777, boasted more casualties than every other theater of the war combined.

When the war was over, these Loyalists were not viciously persecuted, but neither were they particularly welcome. Many returned to England, but some moved north, to British Canada. There they remained loyal subjects of the Crown, and found a new life among fellow Loyalists.

These included the so-called ‘Black Loyalists,’ escaped American slaves who fled their enslavers and headed North to cross British lines, a reminder that, from its very inception, the fledgeling American nation represented freedom to some, but bondage to others.

The Loyalists were led by men like John Graves Simcoe, the founder of the Queens Rangers, which terrorized Washington’s forces in the Hudson Valley by adopting indigenous ambush tactics and attacking American supply lines.

Simcoe was–and I cannot stress this enough–nothing like the depiction of him in the popular History Channel TV series Turn: Washington’s Spies.

He was, in reality, a devout Anglican and abolitionist who, in 1793 became the first colonial leader in North America to ban the slave trade outright. Yay!

He grounded his opposition to slavery in his Christian faith, declaring to legislative assembly of Upper Canada:

The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity condemns. The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America, or Europe.

It would be fifteen years until the enlightened republic of the United States would follow suit, and three-quarters-of-a century before it ended slavery entirely, and only then not through compromise, but through force of arms.

Last night I found myself at dinner with Jason Stanley, the prolific American academic who relocated his family from New Haven to Toronto last year, citing Trump’s re-election and rising fascism as the primary reasons.

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This was supposed to be a slightly different essay about Graham Platner.

It was supposed to be about my reluctance to get behind his brand of politics despite seeing the desperate need for the electoral Left to embrace working class white men in orde…

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The Fourth of July is a ritual celebration of American innocence.

It hearkens to the only time in our history where we could honestly claim to be a revolutionary people.

And ‘honestly’ there is doing a lot of work.

The holiday expects us to celebrate ‘liberty’ while obviously straddling…

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Happiness has always been an imperfect term to describe something closer to what is meant by ‘contentment.’ But amid a thousand reasons not to be, I find myself quite content. ‘At peace’ might be a stretch. But I am content.

I have made no secret that this year has been a tough one. A se…

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Beirut, Lebanon. April, 2024

Few Americans realize how truly limited are the number of political opinions allowed to them.

They exist within a society that has carefully circumscribed a small bubble of acceptable discourse outside of which it is nearly impossible to pronounce a strong political opinion, much less organize around one.

While we seem willing to allow the Overton Window of our political discourse to lurch dramatically rightward in recent years, it has still not reached the extremes that define the politics of places like, say, Brazil, or in recent years, El Salvador.

For better or worse, we do not yet have armed militia factions presenting a real threat to the state’s monopoly on violence, despite what the handwringing of NYT columnists over Proud Boys and Oathkeepers might indicate. These groups are entirely shot through with federal informants and represent little actual threat to the neoliberal social order.1

As for the Left, well, there’s not much of it left at all. A half-century of internal division and external infiltration all but ensured that. For decades, any sentiment to the Left of moderate Social Democracy has been ridiculed, and powerful forces have aligned to ensure it has no voice in the media nor representation in the major political parties.

Bernie Sanders came surprisingly close to clinching the Democratic nomination for President on two occasions, but was ultimately shut out by the Democratic machine, which of course answers to precisely the same corporate interests as the Republican one.

The fact that Sanders, a soft Democratic Socialist, supporter of Israel, and frequent ally of the worst type of neoliberal carrion fowl, was considered so far beyond the pale of acceptable political discourse that he triggered a massive realignment of reactionary forces to oppose him as well as a tremendous reactionary propaganda campaign around the question of socialism is indicative of how narrow the American political discourse truly is.

The phrase ‘beyond the pale’ is perhaps more relevant to this discussion than one might imagine. Although its etymology is contested, the phrase is often associated—perhaps too neatly—with the English Pale in Ireland: a colonial zone of English law and settlement surrounded by lands imagined by its rulers as unruly, hostile, and outside civilization.

It speaks to the anxieties of settler communities assailed by the constant threat of the indeterminate “other.” Who knows what dangers could lurk out there, in that wild place beyond the Pale?

Well, at least politically speaking, Lebanon knows.

Forensic Archaeology

From my vantage point in a bustling café in Beirut’s vibrant Hamra district, the intricate political landscape of Lebanon unfolds before me. Teeming with students, intellectuals, militants, and activists, this fractured, beautiful city serves as a microcosm of the nation’s wider political fabric. It is a country marked by a genuinely astonishing spectrum of factions and ideologies.

Beirut is less a time capsule than an archaeological dig. Layer upon layer of colonial bickering, geopolitical intrigue, and sectarian strife. A city of spies and counterspies, teeming with French businessmen, newly desperate arrivals from neighboring Syria, and wealthy Gulf Arabs descending on the famously permissive city to let their hair down and enjoy a more robust nightlife than they might find at home.

This morning I walked down the rue Kantari in search of coffee. I walked right past the apartment where the MI6 double agent Kim Philby lived in 1963 with his third wife Eleanor, right before he fled to Moscow, in one of the most dramatic vignettes in the history of Cold War espionage. Philby was an eccentric character, who spoke with a lisp and kept a pet fox, which met a tragic end when it fell–or was pushed–from the balcony of this same apartment. His father–the renowned Arabist St. John Philby–is buried in the Bashoura cemetery, not far from the now shuttered apartment complex.2

I wonder if Philby would have recognized the Beirut of 2024. It is, as much as ever, a city of spies. But the Great Game that unfolded across its broad avenues and narrow alleyways was no longer between the Americans and the Russians, but between Israel and its Iranian foil.

Everyone knows that the city is overrun with Mossad intelligence assets. But no one seems to care. The attitude of Beirut’s population seems to be one of defiant resignation. Resignation to the reality that they are mostly at the mercy of a corrupt, non-functioning political system and the adventurism of a far more powerful neighbor. Defiance to the idea of accepting that neighbor’s designs for their country.3

Buy Me A Coffee

Lebanon has historically acted as the great melting pot of numerous political movements.

A Lebanese friend of mine recently referred to it as the ‘Supermarket of Extremism,’ and from a certain perspective, it is a very apt description.

From separatism and Marxist radicalism to intense Christian fascism and political Islamism, one can find a truly dizzying variety of political extremisms all jockeying for dominance in this tiny country.

To start with, Lebanon has a higher percentage of Christians than any other country in in the Arab world. Following its independence from France, Lebanese politics were long dominated by a (mostly Maronite) Christian majority.

While the Maronites are still a powerful bloc, they have not formed a majority for many decades. This is part of the reason why Lebanon has not had an official census since 1932. Doing so would shatter the sectarian political system that guarantees power to the Maronites based on their share of the population, a share that was likely overcounted to result in a power-sharing arrangement that was more agreeable to the French administration.

Following the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine in 1948, Lebanon absorbed a large number of refugees—mostly Sunni Muslims—into the fabric of its political life. I say ‘absorbed,’ but in reality, Lebanon worked harder than most of its neighbors to ensure that Palestinians could not fully integrate into Lebanese society, a decision which has had significant political ramifications to this day.

This influx would bring about irrevocable changes to the pattern of political life in Lebanon. In the 1970s, the multi-party Palestinian Liberation Organization, was kicked out of Jordan and relocated its headquarters to Lebanon. The rise of militant Palestinian organizations like Fatah and the PFLP would transform Lebanon into the primary base for armed struggle against the Israeli Occupation. For a while, this struggle was a pan-Arab, pan-religious one. But not all Lebanese sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, and when sectarian strife gripped the country in the 1970s, the Palestinians would once again find themselves victimized by circumstance.

On the morning of September 16th, 1982, members of the Christian militia known as the Lebanese Forces entered the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp with Israeli weapons and Jeeps supplied by the IDF. What followed was a brutal massacre perpetrated against Palestinians and Shia Muslims inside the camp and the surrounding Sabra neighborhood. Between 1,300 and 3,500 people were killed, the great majority of whom were civilians. Hundreds of young men were found bound and executed, and far too few weapons were found in the camp to justify the Israeli-LF cover of ‘counter-terror operations.’

Yesterday, I took a taxi to the site of this camp to interview a survivor of the massacre, the owner of a chess club for students at the local UNRWA school. The camp is still occasionally contested between rival factions, and deep within Beirut suburbs that had not, for some time, been under the control of the Lebanese government. Our driver was nervous to take us into the camp and ended up leaving us near its outer edge, after asking us to pay double for the risk incurred.

Nevertheless, my videographer and I experienced a rather warm welcome, all things considered. After rendezvousing with our guide, we quickly felt at ease amid the hustle and bustle of the camp, and were able to conduct all of our interviews without incident. The only trouble we had was upon trying to leave the camp, when a dozen or so men, some of them armed, surrounded us at the camp entrance demanding to know our intentions and affiliations.

Without knowing any Arabic, I tried my best to ease the tensions for the interminably long half hour or so until our guide could return and smooth things over. I did this by smoking cigarettes with the men and showing them the videos I had made about Palestine, with Arabic subtitles. This went a long way toward getting them to let down their guard. By the time our guide returned, they were showing me videos of their family homes in the Beqaa Valley which, only that morning, had been bombed by Israeli forces.

In the end, they wished me luck and invited me to return soon for coffee.

The Valley Between the Snows

The Lebanese Civil War shattered the country, but it also turned Lebanon into global spectacle, and a playground for militants of all stripes.

Throughout the 1980s, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a prominent Kurdish Marxist-Leninist militant group founded by Abdullah Öcalan and based within Turkey’s declared borders, strategically established its training camps in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The region was then under the control of the Syrian Arab Republic under Hafez al-Assad. These camps enabled the PKK to discreetly train militants, focusing on guerrilla warfare, the manufacture of primitive munitions, and ideological indoctrination, far from the surveillance of Turkish security forces.

The Beqaa Valley proved highly conducive to militant undertakings. Not only did it help facilitate the PKK’s military training, it also served as a crucially strategic base for planning operations against Turkish interests, advancing their cause for Kurdish autonomy and rights while relatively insulated from Turkish state reprisals. It also allowed them to form alliances with the PLO and unite, if only temporarily, the twin causes of Kurdish and Palestinian liberation.

In June of 1982, the PLO and the PKK would fight and die together against invading Israeli forces at the Battle of Beaufort Castle. Ten Kurds would give their lives for the cause of Palestine, and become the first Şehîd (martyrs) of the PKK.

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Rest assured, Dear Reader. I would not pass up the opportunity to remark on the inclusion of Tolkien in any prominent aspect of cultural discourse.

As you might have guessed, it was initially my hope to write a broader article exploring the literary significance of Herbert and Tolkien’s work to conversations about AI, technology, and domination. Alas, I am far too much a nerd about both series to limit my analysis to a single article.

So fortunately for you, you get two!

There is something about the whole spirit of Magnifica Humanitas that feels very Tolkienian. Perhaps it would be more accurate to remark that the literary spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien feels very Catholic.

I have written extensively about the political imagination of Tolkien and how it was informed by his devout Roman Catholicism, his Englishness, and his paradoxical and simultaneous attraction to the twin poles of anarchy and monarchy. He also believed in setting proper limits on the rapid forward progress of technology.

This latter conviction was derived not from a reactionary Luddism but from an understanding of technology as useful only insofar as it promotes human flourishing. Tolkien believed that technological progress should never be seen as an end unto itself, merely as a means to promoting a more humane and integrated society.

While we might be entranced by the wonders of technology as an imaginative exercise in futurism, the reality is that it might arrive with a bang but quickly becomes a whimper. There is something rather curious about the human disposition that it quickly normalizes and adapts itself to new technologies. We live amongst a garden of modern miracles, from PayPal to penicillin, but we hardly seem to notice them unless the break or go missing.

As the protagonist of Aldous Huxley’s novel in Eyeless in Gaza remarks: **

“Men don’t spend their time thanking God for cars; they only curse when the carburetor is choked.”

The best science fiction acknowledges this odd human tendency. Returning to Frank Herbert’s Dune, we see evidence of this. It is not incidental that, when the various factions of the Dune universe discover the life-extending and conscious-altering spice Melange, they primarily employ it to hurl the galactic equivalent of oil tankers through the known universe at faster-than-light speeds.

This would be like if Richard Nixon actually listened to Timothy Leary and–instead of Turning On, Tuning In, and Dropping Out–decided to start dosing the helmsmen of America’s nuclear submarine fleet with heroic doses of LSD so that they could see the communists through the walls.

Anyway…

Reclaiming Tolkien

I think what I loved most about Pius XIV’s encyclical is that it sought to deliberately reclaim Tolkien from the forces of evil for the forces of good. By good, I don’t really mean the Roman Catholic Church, what with its… somewhat fraught institutional history.

I mean that in a world where the legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien is constantly twisted and bastardized by tech bro failsons to create vast machines of inhumanity–gnostic archons lurking in sprawling digital cages–it is nice to see him invoked in defense of the humane.

Many Tolkien fans have been dismayed to see words like Palantir, Anduril, Mithril, Valar, and Erebor take on meanings more closely associated with defense tech and stock tickers than their literary associations.

I think of my friend Rawan Khatib, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Lebanon, herself a huge Tolkien fan. Rawan guided me through her home in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut two years ago to proudly show me her complete set of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and her Legolas action figure.

A few months later, Israel invaded Lebanon and bombed her neighborhood. Those bombs were guided by AI systems developed by companies run by self-described Tolkien superfans with names like ‘Palantir’ and ‘Anduril.’ Her neighborhood was destroyed and she was forced to evacuate. But she managed to rescue her The Lord of the Rings box set. And the Legolas action figure. She then proceeded to gather hundreds of displaced children in a church in Zahle, and provided blankets and warm clothing for them to survive the winter weather.

She spent her last birthday helping her relatives–knife attack victims of a horrific armed robbery–navigate the perilous Lebanese healthcare system and bring justice to their attackers.

Far be it from me to say what Tolkien would or would not have supported, but something tells me he would have seen much more heroism in this plucky Palestinian girl taking up the mantle to care for her community than in the fawning owners of companies like Rivendell One LLC, Lembas Capital, and (yes) Sauron Systems.

Perhaps he would have written a story about her, or woven her story into his broader myth.

Rawan the Brave. I want to hear more about Rawan! Charles would not have got very far on his documentary without Rawan.

The Palantir Is A Dangerous Tool

Like Saruman the White, men like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, and J.D. Vance are enthralled by the Spirit of Isengard, that of “gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning.” They chew up men and growing things from afar with cold precision, betraying fidelity to mankind simply for the chance to rule over it.

Instead of using their power to oppose the Dark Lord, they have looked long into their Palantíri, succumbed to fear, and decided it would be wise to join with him.

They imagine themselves as the valiant defenders of the West, but they are far closer to the aging Lords of Gondor that Faramir, son of Gondor’s steward, described to the Hobbits Frodo and Sam:

“Death was ever present, because the Númenóreans still, as they had in their old kingdom, and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars.”1

As Musk, Thiel, and others sit in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars, the rest of us walk the living earth, which is perhaps even now in more peril than at any point in its history.

Climate change. Nuclear proliferation. Wars and rumors of wars. And now the threat of the thinking machines. It is into this terrifying matrix that Magnifica Humanitas speaks with great clarity, reminding us that it is not great power that keeps evil in check, but rather the ordinary deeds of everyday folk that keep the darkness at bay.

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They were all so dark!

Expressions of frustrations of indignation and rage of a kind at times worthy and at others, self-indulgent.

Sure, my friend died, the world kind of went to shit, and I’ve spent most of the year suffering from various ailments because I have the constitution of an…

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I want to be an old man. I want to sit and watch my grandchildren gather apples in the North Carolina mountains. Feel the light nip of the Southern autumn breeze, which seems to arrive later and later each year. I wonder, when I am an old man, if it will arrive at all.

Last night I dreamed of death.

I could not tell if it was my own or another’s.

I dreamed I was the wife or perhaps the sister of a partisan in the Second World War. Disparate scenes of my life played out before me. I was hiding people from the Reich. Cooking for them in hushed moments. Laughing with them. Protecting them.

There was a man there, my brother or my husband, I wasn’t sure which. The final scene took place in a small avenue next to our home, hiding from armed patrols. There was a sense of anticipation, as if we were about to pull off some long-laid plan. Then I noticed him rising next to me. Rising into the sky. There were guards behind us that we hadn’t noticed. We’d been found out. Now he was being lifted into the sky by a wire noose.

My point of view changed. I was no longer a part of this scene, but instead watching it unfold from a short distance away. The wife too was lifted. She was his wife, I could see that now. She was lifted alongside him in death. No struggle. It seemed as if they were already dead. That they were being lifted as an example to others. To the people in the crowd watching. To me.

They had rifles in their hands, even as they were lifted. Frozen, in one final act of defiance.

In the moment I felt lucid, and chose to wake up, rather than endure the sight of them any longer. Tears formed at the edges of my waking sight. I reached for my phone and began to type.

Hanged Gods

I’ve always hated hanging scenes in movies. The gruesome snap of the neck, or worse yet, the brief struggle for air. I always hated that when they rescue hanging victims in action movies, they always show a few people being hanged before the rescue.

I think about my Lord hanging from a tree on Calvary, on a hillside I’ve seen only from a third story window.

A divine sacrifice of Himself, to Himself.

Not unlike the Allfather, worshipped by my Norse kin of old, who was himself hanged, not for love, but for knowledge.

I ween that I hung on the windy tree,

Hung there for nights full nine;

With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was

To Odin, myself to myself,

On the tree that none may ever know

What root beneath it runs.

But these Hanged Gods shared no noose. They hung from trees and crosses, not thin wires. Not like the men and women who defied the Reich and paid the ultimate price for it.

I try not to dwell overmuch on dreams of death. I dream of it only rarely. Dreams may be messages from the deep, but the message is rarely clear.

When I entered Ukraine a few weeks after the Russian invasion, I began to dream about being hunted by Russian soldiers through a house. Always found out. Always seeing the knife or the bayonet about to pierce me as I awoke in a panic, my heart pounding. Sweat pouring from my brow.

Now I dream of Nazis. Of a sudden knock on the door, of agents in the night. Of hasty tribunals and wire nooses and grim futures.

It all makes me think about The Cost.

I am too close a student of history to imagine that my political activity is innocent, or at least that it will be considered so for long.

Our futures grow dark. The gentler timelines seem to get pruned away the further we accelerate this course toward perfect technological surveillance, climate ruin, and cultural fascism.

The vision of our future being spun by our unelected elites is one of austerity and compliance. There is so much going on, so much to do, and all of it happening so quickly. The pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it, that’s the real trick of the Imperial thought machine.

Increasingly, it does not feel like idle fantasy to imagine that some of us may pay for our dissent with our lives. After all, some of us already have. In Minneapolis. In Gaza. In the mud-slicked trenches of Ukraine’s far east.

More still will pay with their freedom. Marwan Barghouti rots behind bars in an Israeli prison. Abdullah Öcalan, in a Turkish one.

I think often, lately, of Martin Niemöller’s words:

First they came for the Communists, and I said nothing, for I was not a communist.

Well, I don’t really have that excuse. Do you think the Burger Reich goons will believe me if I clarify that I’m not actually a communist but more of a Libertarian Municipalist seeking to build social ecology through federated councils?

No. I very much doubt it. While the Left obsesses over such distinctions, the Right couldn’t care less. We are all dirty commies to them.

But while Niemöller’s words ring through my ears as both a charge and a warning, it is another German pastor that occupies my thoughts.

Buy Me A Coffee

The Cost of Discipleship

It would be difficult to overstate how devout of a Christian I was as a child. That is not meant to be a testament to my moral character, but rather to my moral conditioning.

The son of a pastor in the Deep South, I was raised with the heady faith of the Westminster Divines, the celestial courtroom of Augustine’s justification theology, and the witness of the martyrs.

Among the latter, two stood out to me as major inspirations: Jim Elliot, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Jim Elliot was a missionary who got himself speared to death by an uncontacted indigenous tribe in the Amazon. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who got himself killed by getting involved in a plot to kill Hitler. They hanged him from a wire noose from a gallows with no platform, causing death by strangulation rather than a quick neck break.

He was executed just days before American troops liberated Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, where he had been interred since his arrest in association with the assassination plot.

That noose was the detail I always remembered. It seemed such a brutal way to be killed. How chilling it was, then, to see it reappear in my dream last night.

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I read about that detail in a biography of Bonhoeffer by the evangelical author and radio host Eric Metaxas, a work later criticized by historians for reshaping Bonhoeffer into a more modern evangelical figure.

I was so inspired by Bonhoeffer’s courage in the face of fascism that I resolved that, should it ever come to it, I had to be willing to suffer the same fate for what I believed.

Bonhoeffer himself wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship. I read that too, wondering if Bonhoeffer had the foresight to realize that his discipleship would cost him his own life.

I was deeply saddened, years later, to learn that Eric Metaxas, the author whose close study of Bonhoeffer made me admire the man, became fully radicalized into MAGA, amplified narratives about a stolen election in 2020, and used his platform to argue that officials who certified the results were complicit in wrongdoing.

He wrote children’s books titled Donald Builds the Wall and Donald Drains the Swamp. Like so many of those with whom I was raised who called themselves Christians, the lure of fascism was too strong for him. He took the Devil’s bargain, the one offered by the Accuser to Jesus in the wilderness, choosing dominion over the earth above submission to the God of Fallen Sparrows.

It was the same decision Martin Niemöller made, in the early days of the Reich. Unlike Bonhoeffer, Niemöller was initially a supporter of Hitler. A traditional conservative, he was not a fascist, per se, but like most conservatives, was more afraid of the specter of “Judeo-Bolshevism” than he was of the growing Nazi terror. After all, that terror was designed to protect people like him. Christians. Germans. Antisemites. At least at first.

Unlike Niemöller, Bonhoeffer never yielded to Nazi pressures on his faith. He never allowed his congregation to be absorbed by the sycophantic state religion of the Reich that thousands of German Christians flocked to, regarding their status as Germans more essential than their status as Christians.

Unlike Niemöller, Bonhoeffer paid the cost of discipleship in full. Niemöller was arrested, but was ultimately freed and got to live out his days regretting his early support of the Nazis, and warning the world of the costs of war and fascism.

He never had to suffer the consequences of unflagging opposition to Nazism, but was haunted by regret to the end of his days. He retired to the town of Wiesbaden, and got to watch his grandchildren pick apples in the crisp autumn air.

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They are going to think that you are a commie bastard anyway, so you might as well become one.

This is the great lesson of how fascism took hold of places like Germany and Italy and why it always manifested as a…

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It’s 2:00PM, Tuesday, April 7th, and I get a Signal message saying that American B52 bombers have departed an air base in the United Kingdom.

It’s 8:00 and I awake to the news that the President has promised to destroy an entire civilization. Its three hours later and I am watching the Secretary of War celebrate the rescue of a downed pilot on Easter Sunday with the words “God is good.”

One week prior, I am holding my friend as she grieves the loss of her closest companion. I fumble through her kitchen cabinet looking for tea bags. Something without caffeine. Don’t want to keep her up. She already has trouble sleeping. Her dog rests its chin on my thigh and looks straight into my eyes. It knows something is wrong with me. Someone calls and tells me God is good.

It’s four years earlier and I am standing on top of a mass grave outside the Church of St. Andrew in Bucha, Ukraine. A single shoe appears above the hastily plowed black earth mound. My new friend Chris points out that there is a dead dog in the corner of the churchyard. The Cyrillic writing on the church proclaims God is good.

It’s ten months later and Chris is killed by a Russian tank in Chasiv Yar while evacuating old people who don’t want to be evacuated. I go to his funeral in Kyiv. The priest reassures everyone that war is tragic, but that God is good.

One month later, I am in a village in Western Kurdistan. I place a heater in the hastily constructed tent on the ruins of her home. She thanks me, and then she thanks God, reminding me that earthquakes are terrible, but He is good.

It’s August, 2024, and I’m in Palestine asking a man about his son who was killed in an Israeli drone strike. A row of cinderblocks outlines the place where they found his son’s body. Dried blood stains the sidewalk where he had been sitting, next to a hollow crater where the munition landed. The man tells me he misses his son. He also tells me God is good. Two days later I meet my friend Lour at a restaurant in Ramallah.

It’s yesterday evening after dinner, Lour is in LA. She takes a long drag from a thin cigarette and explains how the world is going to end. Her elegant mouth twitches in a smile as she explains, wryly, that Palestinians have always known the world is going to end soon. Probably in 2033, maybe sooner.

She says that Westerners don’t understand this because Westerners don’t read Arabic, and all the best apocalyptic literature is written only in Arabic.

I suppose that to be a Palestinian means the world is always ending. Or at least always ending soon.

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It has been a lonely week.

It began with the news that I had lost a friend. A woman from my own country,1 who went to my school and has, for the last few years, been a part of the fabric of my life in Los Angeles.

She was tall and funny, and had gigantic hair like an ‘80’s movie star. Her world was filled with pain. A few people knew the extent of it. Most did not.

Last night I sat in the Church and watched the old priests perform the stations of the Cross and I asked God to save my friend’s soul.

I have had occasion in recent years to question which God it is to whom I am asking such questions, and why the hell anyone calls this particular Friday “Good.”

Perhaps its Good because a Jewish man in Palestine was willing to die for what he believed on a Friday 2,000 years ago. Perhaps it was Good because what that Man believed was that He was the Son of God, or God himself, or rather both.

What did Saint Athanasius of Alexandria mean when he declared that "God became man so that man might become God?”

Was it a mistake? A momentary heretical lapse, perhaps? Unlikely from Athanasius, that great doctor of the Church, who wielded the torch of Trinitarianism through the early councils thus to brand Arianism forever with the mark of heresy.

Of course, Arius was a heretic.

He believed that Jesus was created by God and thus distinct from God. Anyone who has lost their footing when circling the void of religious mysticism knows why this is a heresy: not because Jesus cannot be distinct from God, but because nothing can.

The ultimate assertion of monotheism remains that all gods are One, but the primary contention of mysticism is that all Ones are, in fact, God.

So was that Friday “Good” because Jesus of Nazareth died to prove He was God, or because He died to prove we all were?

And what does it mean for God to kill Himself?

A Sparrow Falls to the Ground

I am a lousy gardener, but at least I try.

Last year I was a victim of my own early success. After a year of restoring the soil in my yard, it was finally ready for planting. I restored the dilapidated raised beds in my garden, planting artichokes, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and a collection of herbs.

The plants flourished, but so did the pests. My garden became a home for a host of beautiful pollinators. It also became a refuge for squirrels, and increasingly, birds. Among the latter was an increasingly frequent visitor, the North American Song Sparrow (Melospiza melodia).

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Today is International Trans Day of Visibility, which in 2026, feels more meaningful than usual, as everyone from the US Passport Office to the Democratic Party seems intent on making Trans people invisible.

Two weeks ago, the Lemkin Institute For Genocide Prevention and Human Security issued its third Red Flag alert warning of a geno…

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