The Chris Abraham Show

Date: June 29, 2025 Players: Sean D. (Sören Ironwood – Aasimar Paladin), Chris (Radley – Human Fighter), Carey (Traxidor – Half-Elf Cleric), Trip (Daermon Cobain – Half-Elf Rogue) Filed Under: Curse of Strahd, Gothic Horror, D&D Recaps Twelve days in Barovia and each dawn feels like dusk. At the Blue Water Inn, a messenger arrived with a letter sealed in wax — Strahd von Zarovich’s invitation to dine at Castle Ravenloft. Radley, their sardonic Eldritch Knight, joked about wine with the Devil. Traxidor, cleric and conscience, argued no. Sören, the Aasimar Paladin, nearly growled at the thought of bowing to Strahd’s civility. Daermon Cobain, rogue and blade, said little — his coin flicking through the shadows. They refused. There would be no supper with monsters — not yet. Morning brought nails hammering declarations into timber. Lady Fiona Wachter now called herself Burgomaster of Vallaki by the will of the mob that strung up the old Baron. Her orders stripped the last hope from the town: worship of the Morning Lord forbidden, a curfew enforced, all must bow to her Reeve. And every young woman? Inducted into her “Society of Vallaki’s Maidens” — loyalty by marriage or worse. They walked the scorched town to the crackle of funeral pyres, then turned into Blinsky’s Toys, where horrors wore porcelain smiles. Gadof Blinsky, a jester with a monkey named Piccolo, sang his eerie line: “Is no fun, is no Blinsky!” They found a doll identical to Ireena Kolyana — Strahd’s stolen love. Blinsky confessed he made dozens for Izek Strazni, the Baron’s monstrous enforcer, who always wanted more. The party left with the doll and an unease that clung like a damp shroud. At the looted manor, they found the Baron’s son Victor’s hidden attic lab. The door’s Glyph of Warding nearly dropped Sören, but inside they found more grim trophies: animated cat skeletons, mannequins facing the wall, and a broken teleportation circle — an escape gone wrong. A dead end — yet the footprints in the scorch marks said someone had tried. Next, they dug up Miloj’s grave and learned the bones of Saint Andral had been sold to Henrik van der Voort. At his coffin shop, they found the crates cracked open, dirt scattered — and Henrik himself, torn to ribbons, his entrails smeared across the walls and ceiling. They cut off his head like a butcher dressing a pig and took it as proof, though no bones remained. At dawn, they rode with the Martikovs’ wine wagon to Krezk. Sören, ever devout but unhinged, flayed the flesh from Henrik’s skull on the road. The Martikovs threatened to dump the barrels if the barbarity didn’t stop — until three peasants begged for silver to fight werewolves. In moments, they revealed their fur and fangs. The Martikovs fled with the wine, yelling for the party to run. But the adventurers stood their ground: blades flashed, holy power sparked, and two beasts fell before the last vanished into the mists. Saint Andral’s bones are lost. Lady Wachter rules in Strahd’s name. The Count’s invitation still waits on a table set for guests who haven’t yet come. And the mists? They watch everything. Subscribe to follow every step deeper into Barovia’s throat. 🦇

In “Will We Tolerate Concentration Camps and Slave Labor?”, Steven Beschloss warns that America may be on the verge of something monstrous: mass deportations, labor camps, and forced work that echoes the worst shadows of our history. But the real horror is simpler: these camps already exist. They never went away. And they’re not some accidental glitch of the system — they are the system. The truth is that the U.S. economy has always needed an underclass it could threaten, cage, or bind in debt. The plantation did not vanish in 1865; it changed its paperwork. The overseer’s whip became the convict lease, the sharecropper’s debt ledger, the prison time sheet, the coyote’s contract. Each new generation simply renamed what it could not live without. Today’s migrant laborer does not wear shackles — he carries a coyote’s debt and a cartel’s threat. She picks strawberries under the eye of a labor broker who knows she will never report wage theft, because ICE is more terrifying than any labor law. And when these families are caught, the children are separated not because cruelty is new, but because the state never keeps kids in cages with parents. This is not a glitch — it is the design. America’s “labor shortage” is the overseer’s confession. Half our farmworkers are undocumented. Most owe thousands for smuggling fees. They do work Americans can’t or won’t do at that wage. Remove them, and the fields rot. Legalize them, and the price of produce skyrockets. You don’t want to see the cage because the real cost of opening it is higher than you’re ready to pay. Beschloss calls for CEOs to pledge not to buy forced labor. But every grocery aisle already is. The real pledge would be to pay a wage that makes the debt chain break — to pay more for fruit, meat, roofs, and roads. We could do it. But we do not. And so the invisible camps persist: the fields, the processing plants, the basement kitchens, the prison workshops. Slavery by any other name. The “decent Americans” Beschloss invokes want to protest the visible camp — the fence, the cage, the children on the floor. But they do not protest the debt, the fear, the cartel’s hold, or the loophole in the 13th Amendment that lets prisoners work for pennies. The chain has never broken. It just runs deeper underground every time we promise we’ve outgrown it. The next time you hear that the deportations will cause a “labor crisis,” remember what that means: a plantation owner admitting he cannot run his fields without bondage. We can break it. We can pay the real price. But you have to say it out loud: cheap food, cheap labor, cheap freedom — these things cost someone else everything. The question is not “Will we tolerate the camps?” The real question is: What will you do when they’re gone? Will you pay the price you owe? Or will you rebuild them, behind new fences, with new names, and pretend again they are someone else’s problem? All your camps are belong to U.S. They always have been.

So much modern talk about policing rests on a wish: that the officer showing up at your worst moment is a hybrid — therapist, social worker, priest, and protector — who can fix every chaotic life story with infinite patience. But the reality is older, harsher, and simpler: the officer is a guard dog, not a Saint Bernard with a cask of mercy. The old “beat cop” we romanticize — the Irish Bobby tipping his hat on a city stoop — was never your confessor. He was there to keep the reckless few from turning your street into an alley no one trusted after dark. “Protect and Serve” never meant protect the one swinging fists at strangers; it meant protect everyone else from him. That basic truth is why every cop calls himself what the badge says: LEO — Law Enforcement Officer. Not Law Negotiation Officer. Not Neighborhood Mediation Officer. He carries the law the broader public agreed to — imperfect, sometimes unjust, but not your private code or your street’s whispered deals. Yet look closer and you’ll see the paradox. Pick up a battered police trade-in Glock: the slide and frame are scarred from thousands of holster draws — a sign that deterrence is the point. But inside, the bore is nearly pristine. Most officers fire fewer live rounds in training than a hobbyist does in a single weekend class. They are underfunded, undertrained, yet asked to stand as the last line between the quiet majority and the wolf at the door. In DC, accidental self-inflicted shots are so routine they have a name: “getting bit.” It’s not just sloppy — it’s the proof that we expect perfect control without paying for the discipline that makes it possible. If you want a softer response, remember this: the guard dog’s bark only works because the teeth are real. Take that away, and the wolf sniffs the fence and climbs right in. Even your comic book heroes get it: Spider-Man doesn’t chat up a purse-snatcher about childhood stress — he webs him up for the cops. Even in fiction, we know that law must draw a line. From the 1930s beat cop learning by rumor, through the riot-trained 1970s patrolman, to the post-9/11 “homeland security” officer, the role has always been the same: protect the majority from the chaos-makers when all else fails. Some places have improved. Many haven’t. The average American cop still trains fewer hours than a barber’s license requires. So be clear-eyed. A police officer is not your paladin or savior. He is not your redemption story. He is the state’s answer when the social fabric frays. If you want him to bark less, build a world that needs him less. Until then, do not be shocked that he carries a weapon he barely fires — or that when he does, the bite is real. Better to know what the guard dog is — and what he is not — than to stand unguarded when the fence gives way. Field note closed.

How America’s Godless Made a Thunder God Out of a Mortal Clown I saw someone on Reddit shrug: “The thing is, he’s actually responsible for stuff. He’s the president.” And that’s it, isn’t it? In a country that once thought presidents were just men in suits, we’ve built one who rains bunker-buster thunderbolts like Zeus. Not by accident — by hunger. By a god-shaped hole in a nation that told itself it didn’t need a god at all. It started as a joke. A clown descends the golden escalator — half Golem, half carnival barker — forged out of the flyover states’ raw clay. A tulpa of every grievance that polite America forgot about: open borders, closed factories, global wars fought by kids from nowhere towns. His people breathed him into being like villagers summon a protector. Not a god — just a hammer. But the other tribe, the self-anointed rationalists, the coastal priests of data and democracy, never understood that you don’t banish monsters by screaming at them. You feed them. Every headline, every effigy, every “literally Hitler” chant was fuel for the fire. The villagers marked their lintels and said, “At least he’s ours.” The priesthood went blind with eclipse fear. A scapegoat is a trickster until he grows too big to burn. Now it’s July 2025. He’s the 47th president — swing states by landslide, electoral and popular votes. He walks the West Wing like a man wronged, spending four years in exile plotting every bunker plan, every drone fleet sortie, every wall and raid and black budget operation. He doesn’t ask permission — he asks forgiveness later. Or never. He knows the fear in your bones, the one that says, “What if he really can smite me from 8,000 miles away?” And you’re not wrong. With the Patriot Act still humming, with post-9/11 tools still sharp, the Zeus we built can flick his wrist and the century trembles. It’s not just tulpa magic. It’s not just a paper god. This is a real empire with 800 bases, an 800-billion-dollar defense spigot, a thousand little Caesars running cover. And the “Never Trumpers” keep screaming, “He’s poopy pants! He’s senile!” while he stands there naked and radiant, thunderbolt in hand, saying, “You know exactly who I am.” Every mural, every “Never Forget” wall, every daily exorcism is supposed to shrink him back to mortal size. But old magic knows: burning an effigy keeps the flame alive. The villagers built a quarterback, a Champion — not a savior. They know he’s a clown. But they also know the crops grow behind the golem’s wall. And the other side? They keep howling that the sky god wants your firstborn. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they’re feeding him with every scream. When the plague hits or the flood comes, they point up at Olympus: “Trump did this. Trump killed them. Trump broke the world.” And so the trickster tulpa — the clown golem — ascends the storm clouds, pulling the old sun god’s mask over that famous hair. Zeus the Trump. Smiter of cities, ruler of the surveillance state, king of the village circus. Don’t misunderstand. He won’t live forever. Champions break. Golems crumble. But the villagers know how to bury their dead. The priesthood does not. They’ll keep the ritual alive long after he’s dust, waiting for the next eclipse. Amen.

When the Hill Country flood swept a Texas summer camp away this year, the headlines called it an “act of nature,” but the whispers blamed Trump. His staff cuts, the budget squeeze, the weakened weather service — suddenly, a man was responsible for a 30-foot wall of water. This is the raw human impulse that ancient villagers knew too well: when the sky goes dark, you find a face for the storm. People like to think they’ve outgrown the old eclipse fear. The urban, credentialed priesthood of modern America says they’re rational, godless, post-superstitious. They scoff at Christians who bury their dead believing they’re “called home.” But their God-shaped hole didn’t vanish; they just filled it with the only thing they fear more than chaos: Trump. Not the real man — but the mythic Trickster they conjure every time they blame him for plagues, floods, suicides, Gaza, Ukraine, all of it. Fear is worship, whether you admit it or not. That’s why, for eight years, they’ve built him in effigy: baby blimps, voodoo dolls, piñatas, dartboards. They swear they’re mocking him — but burning an effigy is not a joke. It’s a ritual as old as fire. If you do it long enough, you forget it’s about defiance and start feeding the Trickster instead. And when you lose track of that flame, you don’t purify the scapegoat — you scorch yourself. Meanwhile, the so-called “cultists” don’t worship him at all. They still have Christ, Allah, the Groom who waits after the worms. To them, he’s a golem — a crude battering ram they shaped out of gossip and gold toilets, too ugly to sanctify. He stands at the village gate so the robed inquisitors don’t burn the crops. When he’s done, they’ll scatter his clay. But the educated, secular priesthood can’t stop feeding him. They hold purity tests like Pharisees: who is clean, who is unclean, who wears the wrong hat. They call him “literal Hitler” and “poopy pants” in the same breath they blame him for the Texas flood. They’d never say they’re spiritual — but the eclipse fear still drives them. They have no Groom waiting for them, so the Trickster is all they have left to blame. In the end, your résumé won’t save you. Your tweets won’t fill the hole. If it punishes like a god, devours like a god, and lives in your head like a god — it’s a god. Not for the villagers who built a golem, but for the people who can’t stop burning his effigy. The Trump-shaped hole isn’t in their hearts; it’s in their heads, where the eclipse fear still lives. And they’ll keep the fire burning.

Every protest you’ve ever attended, every chant you yelled, every sign you waved has already been scooped up and filed away. It doesn’t matter if you were arrested or not. Your pussy hat makes you a target, your hoodie makes you a target, your mask or your lack of a mask makes you a target. This country doesn’t need visible fences. It needs a shock collar. That’s the genius: walls are expensive and obvious, but an invisible fence works on livestock because the animal learns where the lines are, remembers the zap, and stays put. This is Pavlov at scale, a low-cost behavioral perimeter for a sprawling prison mansion you still call a democracy. Since 2020, America has become one giant bait house. Every unlocked door, every Rolex left out on the counter, every cash register you thought you could hop and never pay back — all of it was a test to see what you’d do when you thought you’d get away with it. The DA shrugs, the bond is waived, the papers blame some Soros judge, and you tell yourself you’re too small to matter. But you do matter. Because the file never closes. The system doesn’t need to arrest you now. It only needs to archive you, piece by piece, until the day your file becomes leverage. That’s the real shock collar: a pseudo-rap sheet that never shows up in court but will drop the moment you get dangerous enough to someone who matters. We pretend this is new. It’s not. COINTELPRO did it to King. Hoover tracked every affair, every rumor, every vulnerability. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t get arrested for sedition — they just let him speak until they needed to remind him they could bury him under his own private humiliations. Same playbook now, scaled up with digital tentacles. ECHELON scooped signals in the Cold War, PRISM did it after 9/11, and now the Utah Data Center stores a cathedral of metadata on who you are, who you know, what you want. Enemy of the State with Will Smith was an old cartoon warning about how real-time surveillance could ruin you. But real-time is just the show. The real power is the archive — the shock collar that buzzes when it’s convenient, decades after you thought you slipped the leash. It’s your entire teenage feed, your juvenile record, your ugly screenshots, your old deleted posts, your petty thefts, your drunken assaults — the crimes you thought you got away with because no one pressed charges. In the ‘50s, you’d get a paper rap sheet for those. Today, you get a pseudo-file that’s invisible, limitless, and infinitely more effective. The trap is that everyone wants it to exist, as long as it hunts their enemies. The Right wants it for looters, leftists, and migrants. The Left wants it for January 6th trespassers and internet trolls. Nobody wants the fence torn down. They just want to hold the controller. Donald Trump is the 45th and the 47th President of the United States, re-elected in a landslide, swing states flipped, supermajority in Congress, Supreme Court locked. And the same machine hums away, because no administration ever gives back that power once it learns how cheaply you can run a prison planet without fences. This is not some throwaway Alex Jones rant. It’s just how power works. A shock collar is always cheaper than a wall. A shadow rap sheet is more useful than a police record. An invisible fence is cleaner than a gulag. The only real test left is whether you know where the lines are before they zap you again — and whether you even remember you’re wearing the collar at all.

When Silicon Valley and the CCP Start Speaking the Same Language Let’s get real: the world’s two most powerful nations are building surveillance societies. The United States, under a new breed of techno-ideologues, is quietly constructing a digital control system that mirrors—sometimes eerily—the one perfected by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Pull back the curtain and you see the same machinery: data, algorithms, and the relentless drive to know, score, and shape every citizen. The difference? Only in branding and the stories we tell ourselves. Peter Thiel: Architect of America’s Surveil-and-Punish To understand this convergence, look at Peter Thiel—billionaire investor, PayPal co-founder, and intellectual godfather of the New Right. Thiel isn’t just a financier; he’s a philosopher-king for this era. His books, speeches, and investments have seeded a generation of politicians and policy architects who share his skepticism of democracy, faith in hierarchy, and obsession with managing human desire. Thiel’s fingerprints are everywhere: from his early Trump support to his funding of “anti-woke” candidates and investments in the backbone of the American surveillance state. He bridges Silicon Valley’s monopolists and the populist Right—a connector of memes, money, and power. Surveillance: The Water We Swim In What we once imagined was only the CCP’s playbook is now American standard. The same tech used to track Chinese dissidents now monitors gig workers, protestors, immigrants, and minorities. Since 2016, US surveillance has expanded dramatically—not just at borders but in cities and online. Trump’s executive orders empowered DHS to scrape any “publicly available information”—tweets, Facebook posts, even private messages. The chilling effect was immediate: people self-censored, deleted posts, and warned each other that “anything you say can be used against you.” The Memetic Engineering Complex Social media doesn’t just sell ads—it sells influence. Its algorithms maximize engagement by amplifying outrage, envy, and tribalism. Since 2016, these platforms have become tools for both state and mob enforcement of ideological conformity. Predictive policing powered by social media data has monitored protests and flagged “agitators”—an approach straight from the CCP’s dissent-control manual. State-Corporate Fusion In China, tech companies must share everything with the state. In the US, the state contracts it out, but the effect is similar: a seamless flow of data from your phone to power. The “public-private partnership” is the new Leviathan—and it’s bipartisan. Thiel’s investments in Palantir and Facebook are the logical extension of his belief in hierarchy and the management of desire. Trump’s circle sees these tools as the way to restore “order” and “greatness,” even while railing against “big tech.” Targeting the Outsiders The CCP’s surveillance of Uyghurs is notorious. In the US, ICE used social media monitoring to build deportation cases—even for US citizens with immigrant ties. The logic is the same: identify, isolate, neutralize. Only the branding differs. Harmony vs. Order The CCP talks about “harmony” and “national rejuvenation.” Trump and the New Right talk about “order” and “greatness.” Both are code for control—managing risk and channeling the violence of mimetic desire away from power. Thiel’s skepticism of democracy mirrors the CCP’s distrust of pluralism. Both see the crowd as dangerous, the individual as a threat. Denial and Camouflage The CCP is honest about its authoritarianism. The US cloaks it in “law & order” and “border security”—but the surveillance engine hums the same tune. No Place to Hide In the end, the line between “free” and “unfree” blurs. The only real question is who pulls the levers—and whether we can imagine a world where data empowers rather than imprisons.

TED Radio Hour: The State of Fashion TED Radio Hour: Supermodel Cameron Russell says she helped a 'grotesque industry' look beautiful I listened to Cameron Russell on NPR’s TED Radio Hour talking about her memoir — how she was scouted as a teenager, how she tolerated “grotesque” things: the S&M vibe, the creepy photographers, the being called “jailbait” at 16. She calls it what it is — an industry built to sell the male gaze, profit off young women’s bodies, and spit them out later. My first reaction? Rage. The same feeling I’ve had since I dated a woman with Elite Petite in NYC. She was tough, beautiful, wild — we’d be out with a motorcycle club, or she’d head to 12-step conferences alone, so brave it terrified me. I felt brother, boyfriend, father all rolled into one. Because when things go bad for me, maybe I get a black eye. When things go bad for a woman, she might end up dead in the dirt. So my gut says: Shut it down. Replace every real girl with a perfect AI avatar. They never starve, never get trafficked, never sue. Insurance companies would love it. The brands too. Problem solved. But it’s not. It’s easy to focus on the big runway names — Cindy, Naomi, Cameron. But modeling is a whole messy ecosystem. It’s showroom girls in Atlanta, local department store ads, cruise ship performers, Instagram micro-influencers, ring girls, OnlyFans, beauty pageants. There are actor-models, model-actors, TikTok stars selling bikinis from their bedrooms. You can’t “fix” that by swapping out the top layer with digital dolls. The hunger for beauty and attention just leaks sideways. Plus, we keep forgetting the real tension: agency. These girls are brave as hell. They choose it — and they often know the cost. The world claps for 14-year-old gymnasts starving to make weight, chess prodigies living alone at 15. But a teen model? Suddenly we treat her like a helpless baby lamb. Look at Sydney Sweeney. She’s one of the most objectified actresses alive — big boobs, big gaze, big deal. But she wasn’t groomed and clueless. She made a PowerPoint for her parents when she was a teen, explaining exactly how she’d become famous. Plan A, B, C. That’s a grown-ass woman in the making. Brave enough to out-hustle the wolves. That’s what I come back to every time: She’s not my daughter, and even if she was, she’s not my property. If a young woman’s smart enough, savvy enough, and wants it badly enough, who am I to bubble-wrap her? The real fix isn’t deleting the humans — it’s guardrails, real consequences for predators, and respect for the ones who walk in eyes wide open. AI won’t save girls from bad choices. It’ll just kill their shot at agency and earnings. Meanwhile, the same men cash the same checks. I believe Cameron’s story. The industry is cruel. But the solution isn’t to erase risk — it’s to trust the brave and fix the system. Because when you swap real humans for perfect avatars, you don’t just protect the vulnerable. You erase the ones who’d risk it anyway — and sometimes win. At the end of the day, that’s the messy, grown-ass truth. And I’d rather stand next to a brave woman with scars than a flawless doll that can’t say no — or yes.

The Trickster as 47th President by Chris Abraham Donald Trump was always easy to sneer at. He was a tabloid punchline long before he was the gold-plated game show boss my mother adored. The Apprentice was her favorite. I rolled my eyes. He was tacky, vulgar — a human golden toilet. We told ourselves he’d never be more than that. Yet here we are: he’s the 47th President of the United States. The only non-consecutive two-termer since Grover Cleveland. But Cleveland never danced to the Village People’s YMCA more often than the cover bands. Trump does it at every rally. He does the stiff-hipped monkey dance, gives you the same punchlines, the same nicknames, the same red meat, and when the haters turn it into an obscene meme — he grins and does it again. Most presidents beg you to respect them. They want the hush when they walk in. They correct you if you use the wrong honorific. They bristle when mocked. Hillary carried her résumé like a holy relic: “Respect me, I’ve earned this.” Biden snaps “Come on, man!” every time the mask slips. Obama, the professorial jazzman, stayed cool until the press poked too deep. Bush Sr. was so polite he looked weak next to Bubba’s sax. Nixon taped his own paranoia. Carter lectured the country into a mood swing. Ford fell, Chevy Chase made him fall forever. But Trump? He lives for your laughter. He wants the jeers. He wants you to call him Donnie, DJT, a clown — because then you’re in the tent. He’s the trickster who cannot be shamed. He turns every insult into merch. Every meme is another ticket sold. This is the piece the Beltway never got. They think “dangerous demagogue” means barbed wire camps and midnight helicopters. But America doesn’t do Pinochet. Trump’s coup was the vacuum: the working middle he stole while the party of labor became the party of brunch. The union dads who went from FDR to Lock Her Up. The old Dixiecrats who realized they’d rather be insulted by a clown than scolded by the class valedictorian. He didn’t bring tanks — he brought the carnival. They call him a “wannabe dictator” because he never quite becomes one. Four years in office, and no mass roundups. Now he’s back — pushing 80 — constitutionally capped at one final term. They insist the sequel will be the real nightmare. But here he stands, arms wide, the same routine, the same golden hat. The same monkey dance. If he were truly the next Mussolini, he’s the worst at it in modern history. People want a trickster who won’t flinch. The whole country is a hazing ritual: your tribe tests if you can be mocked, if you crumble. The presidents who survive know how to laugh it off. The ones who can’t — they fade. Trump is the bar comic who never breaks under hecklers. He keeps selling you the same show. He knows the final trick is mortal — the lights go out in 3.5 years. But until then, the moral is the same: Never underestimate the man who never asks you to respect him. In America, that’s the oldest magic trick there is.

What We Forget When We Remember Ourselves Every Fourth of July I get this itch — not to dunk on the country I love, but to scratch at the paint and see what’s underneath. To lift the floorboards, find the roaches, and point out that this grand old house we celebrate didn’t get built by one guy with a hammer. The American story is the greatest solo act ever told. Lone hero, lone cowboy, lone genius. We love it. We teach it in schools, we wrap it around our boots and our beers. Independence Day itself is practically a national tattoo that says: “We did it alone.” But the truth is that independence was born out of interdependence. You don’t have to be a cynic to admit it — just an adult. Start with the Revolution. The French didn’t show up with baguettes and hot air balloons; they showed up with a navy that made Yorktown possible. The decisive siege that ended the war? French ships blocked the British from getting supplies or reinforcements. Admiral de Grasse’s fleet outnumbered the Royal Navy at the Chesapeake. Rochambeau’s 5,000 troops fought alongside Washington’s. And yet how many stars-and-stripes parties this week will have a single French flag? We remember the ragtag farmers; we forget the ships and the loans and the French sailors buried far from home. Move forward to WWII. Our national myth goes something like: we parachuted into Europe, kicked Hitler in the teeth, handed out chocolate bars, and went home heroes. Did we matter? Of course we did — but the Soviet Union lost upwards of 20 million people grinding the Nazi war machine to a pulp on the Eastern Front long before we waded onto the beaches at Normandy. Stalingrad alone saw two million casualties. Eighty percent of German military deaths happened over there, not over here. The Red Army did the bleeding; we did the liberating — and the remembering, mostly just of ourselves. And what about the ideas we cling to? Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — the French didn’t just send ships, they sent the Enlightenment. Franklin didn’t hole up in London when he wanted revolutionary inspiration; he lived in Paris. Jefferson, Adams, the whole founding crowd were drinking deep from Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire. Our DNA is part Parisian salon, part colonial farm. But we tell the story like we invented the ideals out of thin New England air. This is not about tearing down the Fourth of July. I’ll watch the fireworks too, maybe get misty when the rockets glare. But while we’re celebrating our freedom, I’d like to remember who else paid the bill. Because the American experiment, the thing that survived King George, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and whatever comes next — it never stands alone. It never did. Civil wars, revolutions, world wars — none of them happen in a vacuum. They’re proxy fights, alliance fights, dirty trades of blood and treasure. America stuck its toe in Afghanistan to break the Soviets. France stuck its whole boot in our revolution to break the British. Someday, if we ever break ourselves in another civil mess, do you think the world won’t come poking around? Mexico, China, Russia, Europe — everyone will have a stake. History is not a lone genius with a patent. It’s a crowded lab. It’s the professor taking credit for the breakthrough while the grad students wash the beakers. And if we keep forgetting the beaker-washers, the next time we need a partner, they might just stay home. So raise your flag. Cheer the myth. But spare a thought for the French sailor in the Chesapeake, the Soviet grunt at Stalingrad, the philosopher in a Paris café who gave our founders their slogans. A Declaration of Independence, sure — but one signed with borrowed ink.

It’s the Fourth of July and Congress just crammed through the Big Beautiful Bunker Buster Bill — 870 pages of fences and tax cuts, border walls and missile domes, detention dollars and pork for the same contractors that keep the monster fed. Some people scream it’s our Declaration of Independence from decline. Others swear it’s Auschwitz 2.0 with better branding. Maybe it’s both, maybe it’s neither. Because none of this started with Trump — he’s just the cold sore on America’s lip. The infection was always there: the old gag reflex that kicks in when people sense the melting pot is being replaced by a stone soup no one wants to stir. I stand outside the gas station at one in the morning, Virginia blacktop still warm, Budweiser 40 in hand. This is my classroom. The drywall kings gather here, the guys who taught me Spanish because they never needed my English. They don’t want the flag or the anthem. They want the hustle: twelve-hour days, cash under the table, eighty percent wired home so a mother can pour a concrete floor, buy a motorbike, build a block house on a farm that gave them nothing. They know the deal. They know if they slip out before ICE comes, they can sneak back when the White House flips. They know America needs them invisible — cheap labor to keep the fruit cheap, the lawns clipped, the lettuce crisp. It’s not freedom. It’s not a cage either. It’s the same old handshake: your sweat for our cheap comfort. Meanwhile the polite kids on social media rage about fascism and concentration camps, but they never show up in the parking lot. They never see the wire transfer slip through Western Union, the way it props up whole villages better than any World Bank loan. They don’t see that for every real refugee, there’s ten who are hustlers, opportunists, or just poor bastards dropped off at the gates when some country empties its prison or asylum ward to keep the homeland clean. I love these guys. I love that they’d marry me off to a cousin in Huehuetenango if I asked. I love that they’ll stand in the lot and laugh about drywall dust in their lungs and the cousin’s boat they’re gonna buy when they go home kings. They’re not here for the American dream. They’re here for the ten-year lifeguard gig. It’s the Bulgarian pool boy hustle all over again, just longer, dirtier, and no one’s honest about it. The monster that eats this labor calls it liberty. The monster that locks the door calls it security. It’s the same monster. And so the fireworks explode over the Capitol dome while the remittance pipeline hums south. The fence stands half-finished, half-forgotten. The soup keeps boiling. Some bring their stones. Some just drain the broth. The gag reflex comes and goes. The cold sore flares. Trump didn’t invent this. He just shows you where it hurts. There’s no fix in this. No “No Kings” chant makes the parking lot vanish. No shiny bunker-buster bill makes the drywall king plant his kids here for good. This is America’s liminal edge: a place where you stand barefoot on warm blacktop, Bud heavy in your fist, Spanish on your tongue because you needed it more than they needed yours. No solution, no ending, no plan. Just the yawp. Toro bien. Todo bien. Happy Independence Day.

The Secret Safety Net We Pretend Doesn’t Exist You can live in this country your whole life without noticing the creak in the floorboards at 2 AM — the hush of the fridge door in the basement, the folded twenty pressed into your palm by a mother who doesn’t want the father to know she’s keeping you alive. That’s the hidden sound of America’s black market of democratic socialism: the workaround we claim doesn’t exist but that half the country depends on every day. The father — call him Strict Dad, Iron Dad, or the real landlord if you’re honest — keeps the rules taped to the fridge: “No free rides. Sink or swim. Tax is theft.” The mother keeps the soft power, the workaround, the hush money under the floorboards. That’s SNAP, USAID, the Peace Corps, food pantries, “private” clinics funded 80% by federal money but labeled “charity” to keep the father from stomping down the stairs. The 30% sees that basement as roses — a moral garden that keeps the place humane. The 70% sees it as black mold — moral decay that rots the beams. Same fridge, same leftovers, same hidden cousins on the futon. One side wants to prune the vines into a front-yard promise; the other wants the inspector to gut the whole crawlspace and bleach it to code. Trump didn’t invent the mold. Reagan smelled it, Bush ignored it, Clinton papered over it, Obama painted the basement and called it Hope. But Trump 47 is Iron Dad who finally said: “Enough. Tear it down to the studs. Be grateful I’m not bulldozing the lot.” And the kicker is, he can — because the people are the landlord. The lease never made the workaround permanent. The people never voted to codify Mom’s purse or the Peace Corps fridge. They liked the secret. They liked pretending they’d never touch the mold even while they ate the roses it kept alive. What Zohran Mamdani wants is to admit it: bring the fridge upstairs, pass the permit, vote for the roses instead of pretending you’re cowboys. But the landlord sees taxes as theft. The mother’s purse is empty. The inspector has the crowbar. And the floorboards will creak until the day someone tells the truth: you can’t keep a black market safety net alive forever without paying for the fence. Roses or mold — that’s your choice now. You can tear down the workaround and freeze on the lot. Or you can stand with the mother, twenty in hand, and say: “We’ll pay. We want this. We admit it. It’s ours.” The next tear-down won’t stop at the basement. Sleep tight. And listen for the fridge humming in the dark.

Foreign aid is dead — long live foreign aid. On July 1st, 2025, the U.S. Agency for International Development — USAID — shut its doors for good. An institution born under Kennedy to be America’s moral halo and Cold War firewall, it fed, healed, and built half the Global South for 60 years. Some say it saved 91 million lives; The Lancet says its closure could mean 14 million more deaths by 2030, a third of them kids. Bush calls that a tragedy. Obama calls it a colossal mistake. Bono writes a poem and cries. But the truth is harder to swallow: aid is a lifeline — but it’s also a leash. And America just yanked it. This is realpolitik with a humanitarian face. Kennedy made foreign aid a Trojan Horse of goodwill and soft control. You keep kids alive, you keep regimes in your orbit. Bush knew it — PEPFAR, his AIDS relief plan, was moral triage and evangelical diplomacy. Obama, ever the grown-up, saw it as soft power’s last best card: stabilizing failed states while creating new markets. But even he knew it was a moral leasehold — borrowed time for the world’s poorest, funded by taxpayers whose mercy has an expiration date. And then came the burn-it-down populists. Reagan once said the scariest words in the English language were: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Elon Musk put that on a T-shirt, ran USAID through his “Department of Government Efficiency,” and called it fraud. Trump shrugged and told the base: why send 17 cents a day to Sudan when you can buy votes at home? Musk called it a criminal racket. And the landlord foreclosed. So here’s the raw question: is it better to live forever on a drip of pity — or drown free? AID is like AIDS meds: once you start, you can’t stop, or you die. In Sudan, five million lose healthcare overnight. In sub-Saharan Africa, PEPFAR’s cut means HIV deaths could spike again, kids orphaned by a policy pivot. Some will say America murdered them. But maybe they were already living on borrowed time. You can rage at the empire’s moral hypocrisy. You should. But also ask: would you build your family’s survival on the grace of someone else’s Congress, someone else’s donor mood, someone else’s tax politics? Would you build your castle on soft ground? In Hawaii, they’d say: never build on leased land owned by a Queen’s trust. Because the trust can pull the ground out any day. This is a story about the hard edge under the soft empire. It’s about the village that was saved — but never finished its own well. It’s about the landlord with the mercy kill switch. It’s about the moment the halo flickered out and the people left holding the bag realized they’d always been on the moral leash. So if I sound like an asshole for saying it — AITA? Probably. But the ground is still soft. And pity, like funding, always expires. Listen, think, argue — but ask yourself: what do you build when the lifeline’s gone?

We always thought the real cultural coup would come from the ivory tower, the professors, the think tanks. Or maybe from the so-called “gay agenda” — whispered about by people who never once sat cross-legged in a high school hallway while the real conspirators held each other’s faces and wept over a monologue. But the truth is, it was never the tweedy wonks or the closeted cabal that would rewrite how we think about men, sexy, or strong. It was the theater kids — the first to “hold space” before it was a therapy buzzword, the ones who touched shoulders, played trees, sobbed backstage, and built the soft rebellion that is slowly, persistently, shaping what we want and who we want to be. This episode is my love letter and open-eyed critique of how “theater kid culture” gave birth to what I now call the flitty floof: a neologism for the soft-edged, touch-positive, self-aware energy that lives somewhere between a rock band peacock and your favorite protective dad. From Prince in purple lace and the hair bands of the ‘80s to the heroin chic boys of the ‘90s and today’s boulder-shouldered superheroes — it’s all part of the same swirl. Why does Pedro Pascal calling himself your “slutty daddy” break the internet? Why do we keep trying to “make fetch happen” with safe Zaddies like Stephen Colbert? And why does our idea of the masculine ideal keep bouncing between the bear hug dad bod, the thick-glasses sexy nerd, the stoic Bud Light dad, and the hyper-jacked Hemsworth with a body that was once coded gay? None of this is accidental. The flitty floof isn’t a slur — it’s my invented shorthand for the theater kid grown up, still holding space, still rewriting the script on what strong, soft, and sexy can look like. The point isn’t to force everyone into crop tops and massage circles in the cafeteria. The point is to remember that the soft permission the theater kids carved out — the freedom to flit, to floof, to drop the mask or wear it proudly — is an option, not a new closet. From the tree people who auditioned for the wind to the boulder shoulder heroes who now must starve themselves into superhero suits — every version of manhood has always been a costume and a stage direction. The only thing that lasts is the courage to stand under the lights and decide which lines are yours. Listen to hear me riff through Prince, hair bands, heroin chic, Zaddies, the old stoics, the metrosexual phase, the “male gaze” (and the “male gays”) — and how our hunger for what’s sexy and safe is always shaped by the kids backstage. This is not a takedown. It’s a thank you, a mirror, and a reminder: the theater kids still hold the pen, but your mouth is your own. Curtain.

How old ghosts, new lines, and our hungry machines keep us replaying the same pain Some family stories hum so loudly through the floorboards you never need to tell them out loud. My pop-pop thought he could outrun a ghost when he moved my nana to the end of a dead-end road in Spring Lake, New Jersey — hoping she’d stop drinking if she couldn’t walk to the bar. But the bottle came anyway. The phone line was always there. She’d drink and call people she thought were betraying the family. That’s how ghosts work: you can trap the body, but the pain finds the switchboard. I grew up with the soundtrack of ice cubes knocking against cheap glasses. Gin, whiskey, hush. My parents carried their ghosts the way their parents did — from Ireland, Budapest, Prague, the Atlantic — each migration another attempt to bury the coal seam deeper. But buried carbon never disappears. It waits. And someone always knows how to stoke it when they need the heat. This is what I mean by manufactured dissent. It’s not a conspiracy theory about trolls. It’s older than any algorithm. It’s the trick of pulling old grief — real, legitimate grief — back to the surface when it suits a bigger agenda. The trauma is genuine. The switchboard is what makes it dangerous. Look at Ukraine: the Holodomor — Stalin’s forced famine that starved millions — never went cold. It shaped a whole nation’s suspicion of Moscow. That wound was waiting. The West didn’t invent it, but knew exactly how to stoke it: promise “Never Again,” promise safety, promise revenge. And the carbon burns twice — once when it happens, again when it’s hooked up to a pipeline. Same story in Hawaii. The kingdom was stolen, the lands seized, the monarchy overthrown — real, raw memory buried under generations who mostly carried it in uncle-and-auntie stories, quiet anger, backyard beers. Now, that old coal seam is stoked again. Hashtags, TED talks, Duolingo lessons. Meanwhile, the rent climbs, the kids move away, and the ghost sells nicely for soft power points while the real problem festers. This isn’t blame. It’s confession. I quit drinking in 2020, but the hum never left my house. It just moved from glass to fridge to late-night scrolling. The ghost wants you to dial out. Someone always wants to pick up the other line. It’s the same with the Shoah. The Holocaust didn’t just scar history — it etched a commandment: Never Again. That moral line holds. But it’s also stoked, sometimes by the same people who’ll sell fear like fuel: politicians, arms dealers, settlers, true believers. The wound stays open because the machine needs it. None of this means the grief should be forgotten. It means you need to see the switchboard. Not every ghost wants to be a billboard. Some want a grave. Some want a witness. Some want silence. The hinge is knowing the difference before someone sells you to yourself. May you watch your floorboards. May you guard your line out. May you drink your own story, not the cheap boxed wine your enemies would brand for you. The ghost never dies — but you don’t have to keep stoking it for someone else’s war.

America’s exhausted — and not just from inflation, rent, or the nine-to-five that turned into a nine-to-nine. There’s another kind of exhaustion we don’t name out loud: the fatigue of paying for people you don’t trust, programs you think don’t work, neighbors you swear game the system. It’s called poverty fatigue. Not the poverty itself — the fatigue of living shoulder-to-shoulder with it, funding it, hearing the stories: the lobster on EBT, the Cadillac Queen, the able-bodied guy who says he’s too sick to work but somehow does odd jobs for cash. Some of it’s myth. Some of it’s real. All of it sits in your gut when you see your taxes go up and your block stay the same. This is not new. Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a fable with a shred of truth. It became moral fuel for a generation who felt they were scraping while others schemed. The resentment stuck. I’ve lived in Germany and England. There, the safety net is a hammock. If you fall, you bounce gently — unemployment benefits, housing, healthcare, all catch you before you crack your teeth. In America, the net is a frayed fishing line six inches off the pavement. Fall, break your nose, then maybe the line snags your ankle before you hit rock bottom. COVID gave Americans a glimpse of a higher net — stimulus checks, beefed-up unemployment. It didn’t last. But that brief taste burned the question in people’s heads: Why can’t it feel like this all the time? Meanwhile, the Left drifted deeper into temple-and-lepers politics: defending the most marginalized, the truly destitute, the moral symbols of the kingdom of heaven. And that’s good — but they forgot about the plumbers, the line cooks, the Uber dads. They forgot the working class is the real populist block: huge in number, deeply skeptical, and always aware of who’s actually scraping and who’s skating. Now enter Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Massive tax cuts for the rich and the working class: no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime. Does it mostly help billionaires? Absolutely. Does the deficit explode? Sure. But it’s also the only bone tossed to the middle — the people who think they’ll never get a European hammock and are tired of carrying someone else’s weight. The new wave — folks like Zohran Mamdani in New York — have made it explicit: democracy means democratic socialism. More programs. More net. More taxes. And the Right knows it, which is why you hear: “We’re a republic, not a democracy!” It’s not pedantry; it’s a gut check. They see the variable change — and they push back. This is the part the Left misses: fatigue mutates. It turns into blame. Blame turns into votes. Poverty fatigue is real — and it votes. The same people who say blessed are the poor on Sunday want their streets back on Monday. They want to believe in the safety net — but they don’t trust Caesar to hold it up. So when Trump stands there and says, “I see you — here’s something for you, too,” it lands. Because they’d rather be thrown a bone now than told the hammock is coming later. Poverty fatigue is bigger than the budget line. It’s deeper than the think tank numbers. It’s moral, primal, petty, and American as hell. And it’s not going away. Chris Abraham writes about the psychic costs of the safety net, the kingdom of heaven, and the busted street math we all do when nobody’s looking.

Reference Source: NPR Code Switch: Dispatches from the living memory of trans people of color Identity, Stealth, and Staying Submarine When the Wolves Come Out I heard a line on Code Switch that stuck with me: “I’m staying in my lane. I can’t speak for you.” This is my lane. I’m not your hero or blueprint. I’m just a man with a few stories — potatoes in a rock soup — about how identity can be sanctuary, then trap, then survival trick when the world turns mean. I first learned what I call the vampire door in Norwich, England, 1990. By day it was farmers and muddy boots. By night some of those same men slipped through the door of the town’s lone gay disco. A pint in hand, glitter on the collar, nod to the bouncer. An orbit under Donna Summer. Then cloak back up before sunrise. It was a door you stepped through when you needed to be seen — and stepped back out when you needed to be safe. I carried that logic home with me: the door always swings both ways. But I’d felt that door long before England. At GW in 1988, I was living blocks from Dupont Circle — one of the loudest, bravest queer neighborhoods in America. Back then D.C. was neon and sweat: drag races on 17th, basement bars, whole blocks that felt like portals. My friends and I — queer, straight, shape-shifters — learned fast: the bar at seven is family, the bar at eleven is the pack. If you don’t feel the shift, you don’t make it home. Later I saw the same logic online. The WELL, The MetaNetwork — early “walled gardens” that needed a password, a vouch. Small. Sacred. Not because they hid treasure, but because meaning leaks when the wrong eyes peek in. That’s why I still love my Freemason lodge. Anyone can see the charity dinner — but when the doors close, there’s a man with a sword. Context is fragile. Leak the lodge, salt the garden. People hear stealth and think it’s fear. Sometimes stealth is just strategy. Like a concealed-carry instructor once told me: “The best weapon is the one nobody knows you have.” Same for your identity. Don’t print it on a flag when you know the street outside is still 1950. Sometimes staying submarine is how you get to YAWP again tomorrow. Walt Whitman’s YAWP is America’s big queer shout — but this country loves it embalmed. The living version it fears. The louder you glow, the more antibodies you summon. You become uranium: radiant, potent, and a perfect fuel for the machine that’ll spin you up and point you back at yourself. That’s how the pack does it now. Not clubs or chains, but money and legal twists. Look at Skrmetti: SCOTUS upholds Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Or Planned Parenthood: the Court says states can block Medicaid for everything — contraception, cancer checks, not just abortion. Sanctions turned inward. The message is simple: amputate the piece that makes us squirm, or starve. The bar at seven is your found family. The bar at eleven is the werewolves. And the pack is bigger than a club — it’s donors, lawyers, ghost rules from 1950 still sitting in the court. You can’t extrapolate the sweaty Pride float to the rest of the country. The vibe shift is real. The pack is always circling. So here’s my lane. I was never the hero. I was the shape-shifter who knew when to slip back through the vampire door before the vibe turned. Pretty enough to drink your Absolut — smart enough to leave before you asked me to explain. I’m not telling you to hide forever. I’m telling you: visibility is power if you understand how the pack moves. Stealth is not shame — it’s strategy. Context is a garden. Spill it for clout, and you salt the soil. Your YAWP is holy. So is your cloak. Stay submarine when you need to. Always gone before eleven.

Enlightenment Isn’t Loud. It Mops Floors. There’s a saying in Zen: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” It sounds violent, but it isn’t. It’s a warning — against false idols, against ego, against brandishing your enlightenment like a badge. Because the real Buddha doesn’t announce himself. He doesn’t post about it. He certainly doesn’t go on speaking tours. The real Buddha might be mopping the floors after the high school prom. She might be your mother, quietly cooking soup for the neighbor with cancer. He might be the hospice nurse who holds your father's hand when the morphine finally wins. No livestream. No accolades. Just presence. Just grace. I’ve seen them. Not the floating monks — though I do believe some can levitate — but the ones who hover just above despair. The ones who carry the weight with silence and kindness. My teachers in Hawaii, Mrs. Kai and Mrs. Sakai, were Buddhas. They didn’t teach Buddhism. They taught everything that matters. With chalk. With laughter. With patience for a kid who didn’t always deserve it. In Nepal in the ‘90s, I met a monk who tapped me on the shoulder and asked for the International Herald Tribune. It was folded in my back pocket, under a jumper — completely invisible. He hadn’t seen it. He knew. You don’t forget moments like that. You just tuck them away, like seeds, until they bloom. The truth is: we miss most of the Buddhas. We’re too distracted. We expect enlightenment to glow like Times Square. But it doesn’t. It whispers. It blends in. You can sit next to it on the bus and never know. Our brains filter out the miraculous — and maybe that’s part of the mercy. When I got my concealed carry permit in Arlington, the chief made me promise three things: Don’t announce it. Don’t let it print. And never, ever brandish. That’s how I think about real spiritual power. If it’s loud, it’s probably not real. If it demands attention, it’s probably ego. The Buddha doesn’t brandish. The Christ doesn’t post. The Tao doesn’t demand followers. They serve. But that’s the problem today. Everyone wants to be the vanguard. No one wants to be the janitor. Everyone wants to “lead the revolution” — once they finish their speaking engagement. Everyone wants to speak “for the trees,” as if the trees filed a request. But when it’s time to wash dishes, sit with the dying, or change a stranger’s wound dressing — they’re suddenly busy. It’s all mañana. Once the utopia arrives. Once the revolution is over. Once the equity audits are done and the right words are found — then we’ll help. Then we’ll serve. Then we’ll be kind. But never now. Never dirty. Never humbled. Never barefoot in a borrowed kitchen, ladling stew for someone who smells like regret. I don’t want that kind of progress. Buddha nature is not theoretical. It’s incarnate. And it lives in the ones who do — not the ones who preach. It glows faintly behind the eyes of the ones who carry burdens and never mention it. It stirs in the hospice volunteers, the sandwich makers, the unknown caregivers, and yes, the sons who sleep on couches for a year while their mothers die slowly from cancer. That doesn’t make me a Buddha. Far from it. But I’ve seen the ones who are. And they don’t need followers. They don’t need blogs. They don’t even need credit. They just cut wood, carry water, and vanish before the applause.

I Am Whatever Kind of Commie Kurt Vonnegut Was Am I a commie? Yes—but not the kind they warned you about. Not the doctrinaire type. Not the utopian. Not the bureaucrat. I don’t want to flatten everyone to the same mediocrity. I don’t want to abolish excellence, or demand purity tests, or see the world through the lens of enforcement and compliance. I believe in decency, not dogma. I believe no one should suffer for being poor. I believe cruelty should never be efficient. I believe dignity is a right, not a commodity. That’s the kind of commie I am—and that’s exactly the kind of commie Kurt Vonnegut was. Vonnegut’s politics weren’t ideological in the party-platform sense. He was a moralist, a satirist, and a deeply wounded humanist. His experience in World War II, especially surviving the firebombing of Dresden, left him with a permanent allergy to patriotic lies and institutional violence. In fiction and in life, he exposed systems that grind people into pulp—and mocked the bureaucrats who call that “order.” But satire was just the method. The message was always moral. And his lodestar was Eugene V. Debs: American socialist, labor organizer, and five-time presidential candidate, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for saying working men shouldn’t be forced to kill other working men for the benefit of bankers. Vonnegut quoted Debs constantly. Not as a nostalgic nod, but with spiritual seriousness. If Vonnegut ever built a shrine, Debs would have been on it. Not Marx. Not Lenin. Debs. The man who said, “While there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” That’s not just a line. That’s the whole faith. I came to see myself that way slowly. I didn’t grow up red. I wasn’t raised a socialist. I grew up American—meaning I was taught to believe that if you worked hard and followed the rules, you’d be okay. Then I saw what happened to the people who did everything right and still got buried. I watched friends lose jobs, homes, and futures. I watched war after war justified by noble slogans. I watched the language of justice get captured, repackaged, and sold back to us by corporate consultants. By 2016, something had snapped. I didn’t become pro-Trump. I became anti-anti-Trump. Because the people yelling loudest about decency and democracy didn’t seem to care about wages, rent, insulin, or war. They cared about manners. About terminology. About signaling their virtue, not exercising it. I didn’t see a populist Left—I saw a managerial class obsessed with optics and terrified of the poor. What I believe has never changed: healthcare is a right. Housing is a right. War is obscene. Empire is a scam. People matter. The working class matters. We should measure a society not by its rhetoric but by how it treats the weakest person in the room. If your politics can’t start there, I don’t care what team you’re on. That’s not my Left. That’s not my communism. My kind of communism says: feed the hungry, house the vulnerable, end the wars, tell the truth, and don’t pretend cruelty is neutral. That’s not ideology. That’s human decency. So yes, I’m a commie. A Vonnegut commie. A Debs commie. A plainspoken, anti-cruelty, anti-bullshit, solidarity-over-slogans, material-reality-first kind of commie. I don’t want your revolution. I want your empathy. I want to make things less brutal, and I want to start now. Amen.

We act like the missiles decide their targets. As if the Hellfire drone strike has free will. But in modern warfare—and in modern narrative warfare—the target isn’t a target until someone paints it. Laser-guided munitions don’t wake up one day and say, “That guy.” They wait. For a signal. A beam. A blinking beacon hidden under the floorboards. The ordnance doesn’t think. It follows. And in our endless info-war of vibes and virality, it’s the same. Redditors, TikTok rage reels, MeidasTouch-style echo chambers—those are just the munitions. They’re not autonomous. They’re reactive. What matters is: Who painted the target? Was it a whisper campaign? A blue-checked influencer who switched lanes? Was it a newsletter, a leak, a leak about a newsletter? Who snuck past the perimeter and aimed the dot? This is the essay. We don’t talk enough about the targeting package. The long-range recon patrol who slips behind lines to mark something—someone—as worthy of outrage. Maybe they parachuted in. Maybe they’re already embedded. Either way, their job is to illuminate. Then comes the kill chain: Think tank report (intel) Atlantic op-ed (authorization) Twitter thread (delivery) TikTok (warhead) You never even saw the spotter. One day, Trump is the darling of Manhattan media, a beloved caricature. The next, he’s worse than Hitler. Bin Laden? Our Cold War asset. Saddam? Our oil-stabilizing friend. Gaddafi? Photographed with Condi Rice’s mixtape on his nightstand. Then: all painted. All vaporized. Even Putin was “New Russia” once—mining nickel, flirting with NATO. Now he’s an eternal villain, an ex-KGB fascist oligarch. We changed the noun from industrialist to oligarch and thought we’d done analysis. Narrative paints. Facts arrive later. Ask yourself: Why wasn’t Obama painted? Or Biden? Or even Bush, in his second term? Naomi Wolf tried in 2007—she practically screamed “authoritarian creep!”—but her dot never caught the beam. Because the paint has to stick. The actor must be ready. The story must allow it. Trump? He welcomed the role. Signed the casting contract. Took the heel heat and ran with it like it was WrestleMania. “Make America Great Again” was a catchphrase, not a policy. It was kayfabe all the way down. He turned politics into wrestling. But who booked the match? It’s tempting to believe these men write their own roles. But come on. This is Stanford/Oxbridge season 6: Global Civics. These leaders come out of the same boarding schools, the same land-grant universities, the same think tanks and G20 mixers. Bad actors are cast. Sometimes they audition. Sometimes they’re just… available. And when their arc is up? Witness protection, or a tombstone with a question mark. Epstein. Elvis. Tupac. “Is he dead, or just reassigned?” The script demands turnover. You’re not going to understand power through a fascism bingo card. Power doesn’t yell its name. It whispers. It points. It paints. So stop obsessing over the missiles. The real question is: Who’s behind the brush? The Kill Chain of Public NarrativeThe Fickleness of TargetsTarget Painting Is The Real PowerThe Actor Doesn’t Write the ScriptRetire the Checklist, Follow the Laser