Are you screaming or laughing? One third of the way through 2025 and the stench is starting to overwhelm. This is true at least if you’re an American, but I suspect others are getting more than a whiff as well. It’s certainly difficult to dream about writing about anything abstract or interesting when the train of thought is so frequently brought back to the anti-human horrors of each hour. Not even Hannah Arendt, who coined the idea of the banality of evil in covering the post-WWII trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann (viz. “just following orders”), could imagine the complete intellectual vacuousness with which it could be carried out—though I bet she wouldn’t blink at the news that the fascists had taken America, that pure and shining top-billed Good Guy of the 20th Century. I imagine her saying bluntly, “it happens anywhere.”
The fascist playbook is so old, obvious, and simple that arguing over whether the present American moment warrants such alarmist branding is as frivolous as arguing whether the tune is “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or “The Alphabet Song.” It just is exactly what it is. The antifascist argument starts from this position of absolute truth (“if it quacks like a duck…”), and that’s before having to mention the forced deportations to extra-territorial concentration camps in El Salvador and Guantanamo Bay. But if you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to go that far to convince you. If you’re not reading this, it’s more than half as likely (54% to be exact) that you have less than a 6th-grade reading level anyway, and when I was in school they didn’t teach the Holocaust until the 8th grade.
But it’s—we’re—just so stupid that the door is wide open, not just for being taken advantage of but for being grossly mocked while it’s happening. For example, take Executive Order 14188, or the “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” I assure you they don’t really expect us to believe that it’s a complete coincidence that their prosaic commitment to anti-Semitism shares the exact numbers with a decades-old dogwhistle that holds great significance to Hitler-worshiping white nationalist domestic terrorists—in a word, anti-Semites. What they do expect is for a majority of people not to notice, and to wink and laugh at the rest of us that do. Look around, nobody cares anyway—if you can’t take a joke, that’s your problem. Where’s that old playbook… Of course, it’s all right here, next to “whataboutism,” “bothsidesism,” and every other bullshit piece of anti-rhetoric that subtly degrades rationality, fact, and truth under the auspices of good faith. The lack of sincerity is revolting.
Make no mistake, any rare spotting of the old-style American centrist is merely a right-wing wolf in sheep’s clothing. With the State openly flouting its monopoly on corporeal violence without even making an attempt to so much as stage a school play’s worth of due process, the only appropriate and moral position to take in 2025 is anti-right—and that’s before what little flopping and gasping economic self-interest washes up. Let me emphasize this in light of the selfish capitalists and tech industry leaders who all lined up at the inauguration, the pundits and celebrities and musicians and comedians who ostensibly don’t have “a dog in the fight” but who are casting that net, looking for that money—the only moral position to take in America, in this moment is anti-right. Let us not forget the names of those who are today bending the knee, who will tomorrow try to convince the rest of us that they were just stooping to tie their laces.
The only moral position in America is anti-right.
And we know this to be true because 80 years ago, the traumatized, emaciated, nuked out survivors of the last great fascist tidal wave wrote it all down and told us, word for word, how to stop it from happening again. Well, in a country that runs elections based on simple majorities, we just had to wait for 54% of you to stop reading, or being able to.
This time it’s all been supercharged by the ironic (and frequently anonymous) nature of our modern town square, that is, our online spaces. Digital life runs constantly in parallel to real life—there’s the awkward conversation you have at the grocery store, and there’s the performative online version of that conversation, which happens more often than not with strangers posing as strawmen, sometimes just for the fun of it, and always with the confidence of the keyboard separating them from the person on the other side. Whether you’re looking at the world through your phone or not, we have abdicated the responsibility for imposing any real social consequences for rabble-rousing, lying, veiling bigotry with comedy, bullying—read: fucking around. The quaint liberal schadenfreude of watching a bigot that you’ve never met (supposedly) lose their job over a Twitter post only ever resembled “justice” through a lens of pixels and fiberoptic communications wire, and now it’s obsolete anyway. It’s 2025, and the least mature (and imaginative) of us can say “retarded” again because a fascist apologist and known-to-be idiot says so on the country’s most-listened podcast, calling it a “cultural victory.” “Don’t feed the trolls,” they say. But what we’ve gotten in return for turning away is instead just a massive, distributed oppression that pushes down on everything, including the ones that feel tickled by it at the moment.
Meanwhile, with our attention on the circus, the ghouls have moved in. No longer beholden to anonymity, these goblins (including people like Dallas-based ICE prosecutor James Rodden, who spends his free time (and court time) posting from a white supremacist social media account) frolic and shit in the mainstream. Most of the right-wing, Christianesque elected elite are stupid enough to be scared of ghosts, so they just keep rolling over for truly heinous misappropriations of power and violence.
Speaking of violence, it has unfortunately left its signature on nearly all historical movements of consequence. Violence at all is a “nuclear” option, which is to say that once one side raises even the specter thereof—much less its extrajudicial corporeal enactment, as is happening in America today, at the very moment you’re reading these words—the only option is counter-violence. It is, eponymously and to be sure, Mutually Assured Destruction, but perhaps also the only way to stop a rapidly snowballing New Dark Age.
In revolutionary France, the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest was smaller than it is in today’s America, and they were hauling people out of doors and beheading them in protest. In medieval Europe in general, on the backside of the actual Dark Ages, serfs and peasants had more leisure time than today’s workers in today’s America. Across thousands of years of human activity, in all parts of the world, conditions have pushed the abused, deceived, and over-milked cows of society to inevitably turn around and murder the pigs. And by “inevitably,” I mean literally unavoidably, with no other option. The fact that this happens time and time again, even though the W-L record for peasant’s revolts is dismal, well illustrates the motivational quality of a fate worse than death. Even in their suppression, many historical revolts did lead to some reform and tangibly meaningful things like debt forgiveness.
The Trial. Foma 100 with Rolleiflex 3.5A and Rolleinar close-up adapter.
The sort of burly and petulant isolationism that is represented by as stupid a policy as blanket tariffs does not lead to wealth and prosperity, fairness or respect. What it leads to, if someone doesn’t get in the way and turn it around, is empty grocery stores, the likes of which, though hard for almost any living American to imagine, can be seen (in dazzling color) in photographs from the last years of the Soviet Union just 35 years ago. The global food supply chain is not so robust a machine that it doesn’t demand daily service, because human beings eat every day, and it is decidedly an international trade. I’m convinced that in America, we are closer not just to higher grocery prices but to empty shelves, and faster than anyone is able to predict because it has almost never happened in this wealthiest of all empires to have ever suckled on this planet.
The overwhelming majority of people on the planet are closer to having zero dollars than they are to having a billion dollars, and all of us—billionaires and the rest—are closer to death at present than we have ever been to living. Despite this fragile truth, we live in denial and ignorance of our own fate, and most of us in the West have not really experienced anything close to dying a slow, avoidable death.
When you can’t buy whatever you want at the grocery store, what then? What about when you can only buy what they say you can buy? What about when you can’t buy anything at all? Will you scream, or will you laugh?
What Am I Watching?
Having broken my soft promise not to get political on this newsletter, you better believe I’m watching something escapist. Thundercrack! (1975) is the most bizarre and fascinating independent production that I have seen in a long time, and to be totally up front, it also features un-simulated, hardcore pornography that is intended(?) to arouse. It’s not just any porno though, as its 2h38m runtime might suggest. Six strangers seeking shelter from a biblical thunderstorm descend on a dilapidated mansion inhabited by a widowed alcoholic, where threads—of sanity, clothes—start to unravel quickly. The housewife, wearing a vomit-soaked wig and black Sharpie eyebrows, repeatedly clarifies that while her husband has died, her son no longer exists. These are not the same. One of the guests explains constantly that he’s on his way to Waco to blow up the girdle factory that made the flammable girdle that killed his wife (who was also the heiress to said factory). Another guest frequently reminds the group that she is the wife of an up-and-coming country rock singer.
In fact, this film has some of the most outrageous dialog and line-reading ever committed to 16mm film. When a seventh stranger shows up on the heels of an accident involving a truck transporting mammals for the circus, the already nonsensical plot shits a brick and the dialog follows: “You mean a bunch of bananas is the only thing that can distract that gorilla from rape and murder?”
And yet for nearly three hours, it’s never not entertaining. Shot in ultra-low-budget high contrast black and white with actors who basically never appeared in anything else, the best available BluRay release actually comes from a heavily beaten-up theatrical print, one of only five said to have been struck in 1975. Hailing from the so-called “Golden Era” of adult filmmaking, it is unique in its independence from that industry. It does in fact represent an attempt at narrative filmmaking, and it encompasses qualities of the tasteless and grotesque (think John Waters on research drugs no one has even heard of) that elevate it beyond the bland grossness of typical hardcore porn. With a decidedly pansexual approach to pleasure that finds all members of the cast engaging in hetero- and homosexual behavior, and real-life weirdness that outstrips even the content of the film (one of the actresses is the sister of the director, who was himself queer), it seems to me transgressive in ways that our modern, greatly smoothing Puritanism has more or less snuffed out.
See this with an open mind and with open-minded people, and you will have a riot. There is nudity, penetration, and ejaculate, yes—but there are also wigs, pickled organs, horrible punning, and a man in a gorilla suit. “Well, hell yes.”