The floofs want out!

I kind of also want out of this timeline. But alas…

I am going on vacation next week though, which means posting will be significantly reduced (though not abandoned entirely!)

And hey, here’s what I wrote this week.

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Politics

Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Trump’s clown cabinet. (Public Notice)

Dems must expand the Supreme Court first. (EIH)

Promoting false flag conspiracy theories helps fascists. (EIH)

An interview with Julia Azari and the racist history of the presidency. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

The psychedelic Persian fusion of Mehrnam Rastegari. (Chicago Reader)

Near Dark and the tyranny of toothsome pretty boys. (EIH)

Poetry

Sad monostitch poem. (Five Fleas)

All my enemies are doing well.

Compromise poem. (dadakuku)

Bipartisanship

sink sunk

From the archive

Track of the week

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The whole point of vampire films is that you get to watch irritating people being brutally murdered and damned for all eternity. Near Dark (1987) instead introduces us to a bland, worthless protagonist, and then spends an hour and a half gratuitously protecting him from the consequences of his own idiocy.

The protagonist in question is Caleb (Adrian Pasder) a pretty boy Oklahoma veterinarian’s son who hits on short-haired pixie cowgirl Mae (Jenny Wright.) Mae’s not just a pixie cowgirl though; she’s also a vampire. She bites Caleb, and her vampire clan buddies kidnap him and induct him into a life of auto theft, rambling, mass murder and blood sucking.

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Caleb is bad at the mass murder—he never kills, which is the behavior that makes him protagonisty. His refusal to slaughter, though, comes across less as a moral commitment than as squeamishness. Carlyle in Twilight resists his drive to kill because he has consciously and at great cost renounced murder and violence. Caleb just can’t bring himself to kill and drink a victim’s blood. But he’s willing enough to let Mae kill for him. Nor does he protest especially when the vampire gang brutally slaughters everyone in a rural Texas bar. He helps the vampires escape in a shoot out with the cops in which tons of law enforcement officials die. He never expresses remorse, or even mild consternation about the piles of bodies he’s left in his wake. Only when the vampires threaten his own family does he protest (largely ineffectually.)

In theory, Mae and Caleb are in the grip of a great passion—a complicated but deep love. In fact, Caleb’s treatment of Mae throughout the film borders on stalkerish. After the two meet, Caleb offers to drive her to her friends in the trailer park. Mae starts to behave erratically, babbling about the noises of the night and emphatically avoiding Caleb’s efforts to embrace her. She becomes terrified as dawn approaches and begs Caleb to hurry and get her home. Yet despite her obvious distress, probable mental illness, and repeated refusals of consent, Caleb stops his truck en route and tells her he won’t take her home unless she kisses him. It’s only then that Mae bites him—which seems like the least he deserves for being a shallow, manipulative, abusive shit.

Even after he’s bitten, Caleb continues to treat Mae like crap. Because he can’t bring himself to kill, Mae lets him drink blood from her arm. The second time she does this, Caleb drinks so greedily that Mae becomes frightened, and has to push him away. She tells him he could kill her, and he just lies back and grins. Maybe he’s high on the blood, but even so, he comes across as a selfish asshole.

Why does Mae fall for this hapless loser who will cheerfully suck her dry? Why does the movie lavish attention and care on a bland actor like Adrian Pasder, who vacillates between vaguely smug and vaguely nauseous? Especially when you could kill his character off in the first scene and focus instead on awesome actors like Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, and Jenette Goldstein, who use their fangs to enthusiastically chew up every bit of available scenery. Why derail your awesome cool as shit vampire flick with the sad story of some characterless shmuck?

You could argue it’s all about the pretty face. Adrian Pasder has regular features and an aw-shucks himbo self-assurance. That sways Mae—and perhaps sways director Katherine Bigelow as well. Male directors, from Hitchcock on down, often seem smitten with their female protagonists. It makes sense that female directors might occasionally be smitten with male ones.

It’s not just female directors who swoon over good looking heroes despite (or because of?) their worthlessness, though. As just one example, the recent film Passengers, directed by Morten Tyldum, who is a guy, is carefully constructed to forgive Chris Pratt for stalking Jennifer Lawrence and ruining her life—just as Near Dark is constructed to forgive Caleb for stalking Mae. Both dispense their forgiveness in similar ways as well; Pratt and Caleb get to do action-hero things towards the end of their films, erasing their creepiness in a rush of hearty hetero derring-do and special effects explosions. Caleb, who can’t bring himself to kill, manages to destroy a whole coven of deathless vampires who have survived for hundreds of years. Experience, ruthlessness, and super vampire powers are nothing compared to having the plot on your side.

All the evidence suggests that men and women alike have an inexplicable, Mae-like soft spot for useless men. Slacker Harry Potter is universally beloved, while the much more competent, determined, and intelligent Hermione has to play second banana; Luke Skywalker whines endlessly, but he’s cute so fate loves him. We’re always told that sexy women can wheedle their way into unearned advantages, but it’s good-looking guys who seem to provoke universal swoons. A rakish smile, a manly tilt to the hat, and everyone wants to put you at the center of the universe.

At the end of Near Dark, Caleb turns Mae back human by giving her blood transfusions—a simple cure that you’d think vampires would have discovered over the last several hundred years, but which it’s left for Caleb to stumble upon because oh why the hell not. There’s no indication that Caleb asked Mae if she wanted to be turned human again, and she awakes in some distress and confusion. Caleb embraces her enthusiastically as the credits role, but Mae, for her part, looks more frightened than ecstatic; her hands flap disjointedly as she stares, transfixed, at the daylight, which no longer burns her. Maybe they’ll live happily ever after. Or maybe Mae is realizing she’s sacrificed eternal life for a callous dipshit with a pretty face.

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This first ran on Splice Today some years back. The love of worthless guys onscreen is still with us, though.

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Trump is often discussed as if he and his presidency are unprecedented, unpredictable, and a shocking departure from American norms. But Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari sees Trump as part of an ugly but lineage.

Azari’s 2025 book Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History looks at three key presidents who oversaw racial transformation in US History—Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Obama. Each of these presidents upset the racial status quo and pointed the way to a more equal society. And each was followed by a backlash president—Andrew Johnson, Nixon, Trump, who seized authoritarian power in an effort to re-solidify white supremacy.

These backlash presidents, Azari argues, each engaged in Constitutional overreach. That overreach led to impeachment. But the impeachment did not beat back the backlash. Instead, the backlash presidents, and the movements they represented, managed to blunt and reverse racial transformation, ensuring that the US would continue as a nation with white supremacy somewhat battered, but ultimately intact.

This history obviously has some ominous lessons for our current moment. But Azari sees some hopeful signs as well. I talked to her about the presidency, racism, backlash, impeachment, and where we go from here. (I’d also urge you to check out her group newsletter, Good Politics/Bad Politics, which she writes with Jonathan Bernstein and David Bernstein.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Noah Berlatsky: People often think that there’s steady racial progress; each President does better than the last. And instead in your book you argue that we have long periods of presidents basically trying to find an acceptable compromise with white supremacy, and that’s interspersed with these moments of racial transformation followed by backlash.

Julia Azari: That’s accurate.

The idea that presidents mostly are racially cautious is not original to me. It doesn’t have nearly as much written on it as it should, but there are a couple of books from the 90s that go into this. There’s also a book called The Black Presidential Nightmare that lays out how each president was a nightmare for African Americans in their own way. But the angle where there’s a connection between racial transformation and then their successors getting impeached—it took longer to elucidate what exactly the connection was there.

When people talk about the current moment, they often argue that there’s too much partisanship, and we need more compromise. But you point out that “compromise” often means, “how can we continue some form of white supremacy?

Right. And the interesting thing about this is that you literally saw this in 2017 with this whole conversation around, “How can we move away from identity politics?” And, “Maybe the Democrats have gone too far.”

They’re still doing it right? “Oh no. The groups will get their way.” And it’s like, okay, who are the groups? Who are these nefarious groups?

Right. And it’s the same people making those arguments.

So the interesting thing about this is [the people they’re targeting] are essentially the same people that are Nixon’s enemies list. It’s the people that Nixon wants to get the FBI to spy on. I mean, the form changes somewhat, but it’s the same general idea of [targeting] people who want to criticize the hierarchy and the status quo.

So, going back to the intellectual kind of origins of this project around 2017, it’s very much a time where people are talking about, “We’ve lost the center!” And then what gets added to the conversation about polarization is this conversation about norms.

And I want to sort of give credit where credit is due. I was feeling sort of uneasy about some of the ways that people talked about norms as they pertain to American democracy. But Corey Robin wrote what I think is sort of the like definitive online piece about this saying, you know, actually norm violations are critical part of the democratizing process. And that was really important to my thinking.

What becomes clear is that there’s this through line where this conversation about, “Can’t we just moderate? Can’t we all just get along? Can’t we find the center?”—that has historically, explicitly been linked to fights about race.

There are important ways in which democratic norms underpin our system and in which we are dependent on informal practices. We are dependent on democratic values. So I don’t want to throw norms out. At the same time, in American politics, race tends to be at the center of the thing that we create norms around in order to avoid.

The angle of what presidential power means here is, I think, central. There’s a reason I wrote this book about the presidency and not the courts.

Could you talk about that more?

I think the power of the presidency is really crucial here. A number of people have asked me about the courts. What about Brown v Board?

And my answer is that the courts don’t exemplify power the same way the presidency does. And this has just increased over time. The President is not only the enforcer of the laws, the President is not only the person on top of the growing administrative state, not only the legislator in chief, not only the symbolic face of the nation, right?

It continues to build over time to the presidency that we have now. And that, I think makes for a good explanation for why Obama’s presidency was so racially explosive when the policy intervention of his presidency was so minimal compared to [Lincoln and Lyndon Johndon]. You have a fundamental reshaping of the country in the Civil War. You have landmark legislation and further growth of the power of the federal government in the 60s.

And then with Obama, you have someone who said that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin. Obama occasionally makes reference to the fact that race exists and it affects people’s lives, including his own. And we’ve now merged the power of the presidency with this anxiety that this means people of color are going to get more power, right? Specifically going to get power in a zero-sum game with white Americans.

The key impact of that is to make even some people who had actually voted for Obama really embrace racial backlash and racial threat. Other people have done more quantitative work to suggest that this is connected to identity and immigration attitudes.

As you say in the book, it’s obviously about a Black man being president. But also since Lyndon Johnson, there’s been a long Democratic realignment as white people have sorted themselves into the white identity party. And Democrats have spent 50 years trying to finesse that. That’s what Bill Clinton was about; signaling in various ways that he was a white identity politician. Even Obama made some of those gestures.

But at the point where you elect a Black man, it becomes clear that you have this coalition, which is basically everybody but white men, and it can win.

And that’s explicitly the issue with immigration. They’re saying none of these people really should be able to vote. You have a coalition of Hispanic people and Black people and queer people and women, that can win, and a coalition that is consistently not led by white men and not really centering white men. And I think the backlash is a final rear guard action to end democracy and prevent that coalition from ever winning again.

I think that’s a read of the situation. And I think that my book does less of trying to delineate the exact definition and boundaries of the situation that you’re describing and more trying to put it into this historical narrative. I was pointing out that actually, this is what we do, and then it plays out in these very specific ways that don’t necessarily look racialized on the surface, but are in fact racialized

So I’m looking less at cause and more at impact. And part of what that impact is, is that we have these impeachment crises that don’t necessarily look racialized but are very much the product of the racial politics of their time and are linked to racialized institutions.

And so when we talk about executive branch lawlessness, we should realize that that is a racial project. And one of the key implications for our life in 2026 is we can’t sit around talking about saving democracy and then throw unpopular minorities under the bus. Those two things are not compatible. So it’s a lot more normative than my previous work. But on the other hand, I think we’re at this moment, we need to talk about how things should be, or else we’re going to lose the thread even more than we already have.

One of the interesting things you say is that impeachment is often led by Black lawmakers, that Black lawmakers are often the people who are most too keyed into the fact that this is a crisis about race and are most eager to restrain a president who is pushing a supremacist agenda.

Basically yes, and I think that’s important.

There’s a debate about how much is impeachment legal? How much is it political? And my argument is there’s a two-step. You need this political foundation, and that tends to come from Black lawmakers and or their allies. And then you have the legal part where, once the political foundation has been established, they look for discrete charges, and those charges often are rooted in broadly racialized institutions, like elections and the FBI. (Though you could also make the case that, all institutions in the US are racialized.)

Do you think impeachment is the right thing to do now?

I think it’s tricky right now, because Democrats are obviously in the minority, and even when they win the majority, there are going to be coalitional challenges.

But I think Democrats need to push harder to reframe the politics of impeachment in general and really think about it in terms of obligation, and move it away from the Clinton framework of, “Is this really a high crime or misdemeanor?”

The presidency has certain obligations. Here’s what the President needs to do. You haven’t done it. And use it as a mechanism for accountability. If the President isn’t fulfilling the responsibilities of their job, if they are neglecting Article Two, if they’re neglecting the 14th Amendment and equal protection, then this isn’t going to work. And our country can’t go on under those conditions, right?

And as a result, we have to hold this President accountable. Because if there’s an unaccountable leader, everything else we might care about and you might want Congress to focus on is not going to work.

So you would like to see an impeachment that is more big picture.

I think you can still break those into specific charges. I just think that you want articles of impeachment linked up to constitutional obligation.

I also think that there’s been this discourse, as long as I can remember, which is back to the Clinton impeachment—that if we do this now, we’re going to have a parliamentary system, and every president is going to be impeached.

And that is the same as the “we’ve lost the center” thinking. It’s the same faulty logic. It’s electability logic. It’s all the faulty logics of caution that have driven American politics into this place.

And maybe every president from here on out will be faced with bullshit impeachment, but the threshold for removal is 67 votes. So it’s not like that’s easy to achieve. And I think we should expect that majority parties in the house generally don’t perceive this to be worth their time. You have to lay out the case for why this is worth your time in a given moment.

You can’t argue, “We can’t do this because it could become a problem.” Every category of thing could become a problem. You have to commit to the specifics of this specific thing. Commit to the specifics of a specific situation and say, you know, whatever happens after this, it’s not our problem right now. We have to solve the problem that we actually have. We have to worry about the most important thing, rather than worrying about this hypothetical thing that might happen.

I feel like that about expanding the Supreme Court. The court will block everything if you don’t expand it—ideally by a lot, like I’d put fifty judges on there if I could.

And people sometimes say, well, if you do that, they’ll just add more judges. And my response is, “Fine!” Let them add more judges. At least we’ll have a reasonable court every so often, rather than a right-wing nightmare now and forever.

I think that’s exactly right. There’s a certain way you want to think about game and strategy and politics, and then there’s a certain way that it just becomes completely paralyzing.

And that’s my thinking on the politics of caution around impeachment. Should you do it because you don’t agree with someone? No, but I don’t think there’s any reasonable argument to be made that we have over-impeached.

And I think it’s quite telling that George W. Bush and Barack Obama were very polarizing and had very strong opposition. And in Bush’s case, he was quite unpopular for a period. But they were not impeached.

We’re living through the most violent backlash since Redemption in a lot of ways. Do you think we’ll end up in a better place than we did then? What are things that make you optimistic and what makes you pessimistic right now?

The thing that makes me the most optimistic right now is—you know, I tell my students I’m pro polarization, just to irritate them and provoke them. But I think that’s polarization is actually the most hopeful thing.

Typically in these periods—after the Civil War, and specifically after the end of Reconstruction; after the Civil Rights Movement— the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, respectively, in those eras, rolled over. They did as much as they could to distance themselves from the chaos of the past. And the backlash party doubled down, and while they may have lost the battle with a bruising impeachment, they each won the war as far as setting the tone for the subsequent 40 years or more.

And I don’t know that that is as likely now, because while there are people in the Democratic Party, certainly, who would like to moderate and move away from impeachment and move away from the groups, but there are also people who are not interested in letting that happen without a fight.

Right. And the reason they’re not willing to let it happen without a fight is because it’s LGBT people who are looking down the barrel of the government trying to exterminate them; it’s Black people who are looking at not being able to vote again. And the same with Hispanic populations. It’s people who don’t have room to back up.

Exactly. They don’t have any incentive to do that.

And also, these groups relative to 70 years ago or 170 years ago, are pretty well-organized and have some power. And so I think we’ve passed a certain threshold of distributing power where we’re not going to flip as easily.

And that’s really what gives me some hope, is that there are fewer mealy-mouthed moderates on these issues. So you know, sing it from the rooftops, sometimes polarization is valuable. Not always. But not every element of polarization is indicative of a problem. And I think that’s the most encouraging version of this.

I think the less encouraging version is that we have an authoritarian movement that is very determined to consolidate power and has been really successful in doing so in the executive branch, and we as a society have basically spent decades denigrating every other form of counter power. So whether it’s Congress, whether it’s political parties, whether it’s unions, whether it’s civil society organizations, now we don’t have a lot of centers of of power to counter the executive. We have a very atomized society.

The NAACP is quite organized and powerful, the Human Rights Campaign is quite organized and powerful. So these specific minority groups are still really motivated, organized and powerful. But your average person who’s not a member of those groups might have once been a member of a union or the Democratic Party. Or you might have had a member of Congress who saw themselves as sort of distinct from the president’s party. And none of those things are nearly as true anymore.

.It’s the up and downside of partisanship, right? I mean, on the one side, there are lots of people who are really committed to fighting. But anybody who’s in the Republican Party in any way is just reluctant to oppose him for any reason.

I guess I would distinguish partisanship from polarization here. Partisanship is unifying the team at the expense of Congress having their own institutional pride, and that makes this moment really different than previous backlash.

But on the other hand, polarization, or deep and uncompromisable division over the structure and values of society, is better than the alternative of just compromising on those values and being like, it’s okay, some people can be second class citizens. I would prefer that people put up a legitimate fight for equality rather than jettisoning equality for the sake of moderation and unity.

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cThis weekend, in a very much at this point precedented sequence of events, someone attempted to assassinate the president. They failed, and then a thousand conspiracy theories

Political scientist Seth Masket drily explains why these theories are all bosh. He makes what I think are three key points:

1. If Trump had plotted a secret false flag assassination, he would brag about it, the same way he bragged about Russian election interference. “My false flag was the best false flag! People are saying this is the greatest assassination plot of all time.”

2. People buy guns in the US and commit acts of political violence absolutely all the fucking time.

3. There’s zero evidence that past assassination attempts on Trump or his allies have benefited him electorally in any way.

In short, Trump has no motive to do this, no capacity to do it, and there is an obvious and convincing alternate explanation in a country awash in guns and political violence.

So, yes, the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner was what it looked like— misguided guy with weapons tried to assault the president and did not manage to get even close to doing that.

But! Lots of people (rightfully) hate Trump, and when you hate someone, you are often unwilling to believe that anything bad happened to them, because who wants to sympathize with that guy? In addition, Trump, of course, lies all the time.

So many people who don’t believe Trump and hate him are unwilling to credit the assassination attempt. And insofar as disbelieving Trump and hating him is good, why bother arguing with them? The lie, in this case, damages Trump’s political standing. Damaging Trump’s political standing benefits the country and democracy. Where’s the problem?

Let me point out a few ways in which crediting and disseminating false flag conspiracy theories is harmful.

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False flag theories are a major weapon of the right

The first problem with false flag theories is that they are a major tool of the right. Fascists target people for horrific violence on the grounds that those people “deserve” it. False flag theories—which argue that the targets of violence caused the violence against them—are a powerful tool to justify withdrawing sympathy from those who have been targeted. More, they’re a powerful tool for justifying further harassment.

Alex Jones’ use of false flag theories against the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is one particularly egregious example. Jones, as a violent far right ghoul, is rabidly pro firearms, and his audience disliked the way that school shootings made a powerful case for gun control. Jones, therefore, spent years insisting that the shooting was faked, going so far as to claim that no one died, and that the victims were “child actors.”

Jones’ horrific claims led to horrific harassment. The parents of Daniel Barden, a 7-year-old killed in the shooting, said they received one letter from a false-flag true believers who claimed to have urinated on Daniel’s grave; another threatened to dig up the grave to prove it contained no body. Another Sandy Hook mother who’s child died in the shooting said that the lies about Sandy Hook were so extensive that she was told she was a liar by another woman attending a support group for grieving parents.

Jones’ lies were so egregious that he was ordered to pay $1 billion to the families he defamed. His network, Infowars, will hopefully be controlled shortly by the satirical website The Onion, with proceeds going to the Sandy Hook families.

But Jones is hardly along in his use of false flag theories to discredit the enemies of the right. False flag theories regularly circulate about other shootings such as the 2022 school attack in Uvalde, TX or the 2019 attacks in El Paso and Dayton. Right-wing commenters claimed that the MAGA attacker who beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in 2022 was not a Trump supporter; they insisted (falsely) that his blog posts were faked.

You might say, well, if they do it to us, we should do it to them. The problem is that a lot of people are not hard-core partisans; they do not follow politics closely, and are often feel vaguely (or not so vaguely) alienated from political institutions.

The audience for a lot of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking, therefore, is not really on one side or another. It’s floating around somewhere in the disconnected middle. And when you validate conspiratorial thinking—when you tell people that false flags conspiracies are common and that victims are typically secret perpetrators of fraud—you aren’t just validating it for conspiracies that (supposedly) work to your advantage. You’re validating it in general and for everybody. Which helps fascists, since they are the ones who most often deploy conspiratorial thinking and most often blame victims.

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False flag theories empower and enrich bad actors

Conspiracy theories empower fascists by legitimizing and cosigning their worldview. But they also empower fascists in more direct ways—by funneling them money.

Alex Jones embraced false-flag conspiracy theories because he likes guns and wants to delegitimize gun control. But he also (and even primarily) pushed these theories because disseminating scandalous lies while positioning yourself as the sole truth teller on earth can be extremely lucrative. Once you are the one trusted voice, you can ask you followers for money, or sell them garbage supplements, or monetize your cult-like following in a whole range of ways.

Jones, and people like him, attack the mainstream media specifically to delegitimize it and encourage people to listen to them and only them. That keeps the dollars flowing, and it also allows you to cultivate an audience that will listen to and do whatever you tell them—which has a lot of obvious advantages for unethical people.

The right has used this playbook most, and it has empowered a range of extremely bad actors who love sadism and power for its own sake. But the dynamics exist on the (fuzzily-defined) left to some degree too, not least among people like Jimmy Dore and Chapo Trap House that more or less deliberately cultivate audiences that cross over with the right.

Anti-establishment figures in those spaces too can use conspiratorial thinking to funnel legitimacy and cash to themselves while responsible journalists and academics (like, say, Seth Masket) are hobbled by their quaint commitment to truth and evidence. That undermines trust in people who care for truth, and that in turn destroys the basis for good policy making. It also makes it hard to realistically assess fascism—and you need to realistically assess fascism to defeat it.

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False flag theories fundamentally misinterpret Trump

False flag theories make it hard to understand Trump because they attribute to him great cunning and intelligence when in fact he is a barely sentient toad. If the White House Correspondent’s Dinner plot was “fake,” then you have to assume that Trump not only arranged for dozens of people to stage the shooting; you have to also assume that he and his minions have amazing message discipline and the ability to hatch their schemes across weeks with no failure and little room for slip ups (we’re talking about live ammunition being fired in or around an event with much of the White House leadership in attendance.)

There is nothing that Trump has ever done that indicates that he or those around him have the capacity to do any of that. Trump literally just lost a war with Iran; there are currently reports that the Navy has fucked up logistics so badly that it can’t even feed US troops. Trump’s White House leaks like a sieve because everyone involves is incompetent and hates each other. Remember when Trump’s national security team accidentally invited a journalist to their super secret Signal group chat? Does that strike you as the work of brilliant conspirators who could successfully do…much of anything?

Trump is still dangerous even though he’s incompetent. In fact, he’s often more dangerous because he’s incompetent. He blunders ahead into coups that won’t work and into wars he’s going to lose, tearing up the Constitution and murdering people along the way.

But if you want to defeat Trump, it’s important to understand who he is and what you’re trying to defeat. The key to fighting Trump is not to out-think him and expose his plots; we’re not in some sort of high-stakes chess match where you need to think twelve moves in advance. What you need to do in general is to recognize he does not know what he’s doing, does not have a back-up plan, and just actually oppose him.

The clever fallacy with regards to Trump is dangerous because it leads people to think that the fight is intellectual rather than moral. Trump is a fool; when you try to defeat him in a game of wits, you just turn yourself into a fool too.

Telling ourselves that Trump’s constantly scheming and hiding his true motives is just an exercise in self-deception. Trump lies about everything, but in very straightforward ways. He wants to destroy the Constitution and steal all the money. You don’t defeat him by attributing to him massive powers of deviousness. You defeat him by telling the truth and standing up to him. False flag conspiracy theories have no part in that.

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The Trump regime has caused a terrible amount of damage to our democracy, our institutions of government, and out populace. A Democratic administration will face a huge number of urgent, desperate priorities as soon as it takes office—from holding Trump administration officials accountable, to dismantling ICE, to freeing those in concentration camps, to rebuilding public health infrastructure, to fixing health insurance markets, to breaking apart media oligopolies—and on and on and on. There are an almost infinite range of crucial challenges and they all need to be addressed as soon as possible.

Nonetheless, I think there is a clear priority. The very first thing that a Democratic President, Congress and Senate need to do is to eliminate the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.

The reasoning here is straightforward. The court is currently ruled by a brutal Christofascist majority; it sees itself as an all-powerful legislature. And as an all-powerful, Christofascist legislature, the court is determined to prevent any and all efforts to restore democracy and end Christian authoritarian. If you do not expand the court, virtually nothing is possible. If you do, everything is.

The Court will block Democratic priorities

The evidence that the Court can and will fight relentlessly against Democratic priorities is at this point overwhelming. The increasingly rabid and overwhelming Conservative majority kneecapped any government effort at gun control in 2008; it gutted campaign finance laws in 2010; it rushed to prevent the implementation of climate regulations in 2016; it declared an end to Constitutional abortion rights in 2022; it denied the president the ability to grant student loan relief in 2023.

These decisions were all highly partisan. Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett all dissembled and evaded when asked about abortion rights in their Congressional hearings, because they wanted to get on the court and destroy women’s reproductive rights and they worried that their real opinions, honestly stated, would hamper them in that goal.

Even more disturbing is the sloppy nonchalance with which the conservative judges twist law and even fact, to allow them to advance their agenda. Gorsuch, for example, claimed that the case Kennedy v Bremerton involved a coach who wanted to lead “a short, personal prayer.” In fact, the coach in question led regular, boisterous prayers on the football field, urging student athletes to join in. On the basis of his own lies, Gorsuch threw out decades of precedent banning school prayer as a violation of church and state.

Much of a hopeful Democratic agenda is predicated on the idea that Congress and the President can legislate its way around or over court decisions, either by overcoming the filibuster or overturning it. Democrats, once in power, hope to pass a national abortion rights law; they want to pass climate legislation; they want to increase taxes on the wealthy.

Given the court’s rabid partisanship and manifest bad faith, however, there is every reason to believe that, if Democrats were to pass their signature preferred policies, the court would simply find some pretext to strike them down. The court might dismiss that national abortion rights law on the ground that it violates the rights of fetuses. It could claim that an anti-gerrymandering law violated state control over elections or takes too much notice of race in apportionment. It could even throw out an increased minimum wage or higher taxes on the wealthy on some pretext, or on none.

The court has shown over and over that it is not restrained by facts or logic. It sees its role as the rightful enforcer of conservative policy, and it loves to thwart Democratic presidents and Democratic legislators. Democrats have a choice; they can enact policies they were elected to pass, or they can watch those policies die in the Christofascist court.

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The Court will destroy democracy

The Court’s antipathy to Democratic policy is bad enough. But what’s worse is that the Court hates democracy itself, and will, if not restrained, destroy it in order to hand permanent Christofascist control to a far-right minority.

The first, gruesome evidence here is Trump v. United States, in which the court granted a lawless, authoritarian president broad immunity from prosecution on the grounds that he was their guy, damn it, and he should rule as a king.

The court has reaffirmed the principle that Trump should rule over us as a king repeatedly in his second term. They have shrugged at Trump’s seizure of the power of the purse from Congress, gutting Congressional oversight as they rushed to gut judicial oversight. They allowed Trump to dismantle the Department of Education without Congressional approval; they allowed him to withhold foreign aid funding appropriated by Congress—cosigning the deaths of what will probably be millions of people in a casual act of genocide.

The Court’s belief that Trump should rule without interference from the courts or Congress (though maybe with an occasional check from capital) is part and parcel of its bone deep commitment to the white supremacy he represents. John Roberts is perhaps the most powerful and committed racist to serve as chief justice since Roger B. Taney, and he has made the destruction of the Voting Rights Act and of Black voting power into his life’s work. He and his white supremacist peers (not least Clarence Thomas) dream of rendering the 14^th Amendment a dead letter, disenfranchising Black people en masse, and ensuring the unencumbered subjugation of a poor, BIPOC, female underclass.

The Court, then, will not only block Democratic legislation. It will block and vitiate Democratic efforts to restore a small-d democracy. They will work to make sure fascists are not held accountable. They will throw out any initiative to reform institutions to give non white people a fair vote—very much including any effort to enfranchise DC. They will gut any new voting rights provision, including (again) anti gerrymander legislation. They will enforce a version of the Constitution under which only white rich men have rights. And they will do everything they can to ensure that the next Republican president is more fascist, less restrained, and more powerful than the one we’ve got.

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Don’t wait

The need to expand the court is obvious. But politicians worry about the electoral downsides. Many Americans do not think of themselves as partisans, and they find partisan radicalism distasteful. The ins and out of Supreme Court make-up are too complicated for most voters to follow, and they will not necessarily see how or why those ins and outs are important or how they will affect them. Better to do popular things that benefit people (middle class tax cuts!), win elections, and wait the court out, right?

This was Biden’s plan. And it dead-ended in our current fascist nightmare and the ongoing (quite successful) assault on the Constitution. So maybe we should try something different.

As the horrific first couple months of Trump’s administration demonstrated, even presidents who win by very narrow margins are granted great latitude in their first months for partisan projects, no matter how utterly corrupt, evil, and ill-advised. Compared to Trump’s rabid destruction of the entire federal government, expanding the court is small bore agenda. A Democratic president with a reasonable Congressional majority who demands, as the very first thing, an elimination of the filibuster and Supreme Court expansion, will have—in the wake of the disastrous Trump presidency—a decent chance of pushing it through.

Then, once the Court is no longer a Christofascist barrier, you can do all sorts of things. Enfranchise DC and help rebalance the Senate, at least around the edges. Tax the wealthy; raise the minimum wage; pass gun control; ensure abortion rights; pass voting rights reform. Put through all those good things that have been blocked for years, and decades, by the grotesque white supremacist imbalance of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Create a voting structure in which the Republicans can see clearly the benefits of deradicalizing.

Will that work? Unfortunately, we’re in a deep hole, and it’s hard to say if anything will work. But we know the Court is at least as dangerous a force for fascism as Trump is. To get rid of the second and ignore the first is to ensure failure and condemn us to decades, at least, of Christofascist rule.

I don’t know if we can defeat fascism. But we should at least make a good faith effort. And that means expanding the Court.

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So much for dignity. Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

The beginning of the end for Mike Johnson. (Public Notice)

—and hey, Heather Cox Richardson mentioned this piece! (Letters from an American)

Mamdani points the way to the future. (Ipaper)

Femicide is a political act of terror. (EIH)

The Democratic party is as good as it’s ever been. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Homelander vs. Trump: who is the most evil? (EIH)

Gen V fights the patriarchy…almost. (EIH)

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a disgrace to Mummy movies. (Chicago Reader)

Southern rock tries to throw off whiteness, with mixed success. (EIH)

The pleasurable pointlessness of Prisoners of the Ghostland. (EIH)

Poetry

Little brain poem. (smols)

the
anxious
zombie
eats
itself

Another little brain poem. (Five Fleas)

Migraine

darkness flashes first
before it hurts

And one more… (Five Fleas)

Time

I’m running out of

From the archives

Track of the week

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Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland is one of those retro future dystopias that makes you nostalgic for an earlier, more stylish totalitarianism than the one we’re currently living through. It helps, too, that the narrative is largely incoherent, robbing it of both ominousness and tragedy. Instead, you are just supposed to float through the grimy, spurting pomo signifiers—Sergio Leone, John Woo, Mad Max, westerns, samurai flicks, Nicolas Cage ranting pointlessly as his testicle is blown off. You know the drill.

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To the extent that there’s a plot, it seems to involve a notorious bank robber with a heart of gold, Hero (Cage), who is imprisoned in a frontier border town/Japanese village during a heist gone wrong, only to emerge into a post nuclear apocalypse. The ruler of what’s left of civilization, the white-clad Governor (Bill Moseley) orders Hero to find his “granddaughter” Bernice (Sofia Boutella) who has fled sexual servitude into the cryptically deadly Ghostlands. To ensure Hero’s compliance, the Governor outfits him with a leather ensemble which will blow his arm off if he attacks Bernice, blow his head off if he doesn’t return in time, and blow his testicles off if he attempts to sexually assault her.

The narrative summary is absurd in itself, but it doesn’t really get at the film’s determined, nonchalant strangeness. Sono only cares about the hero quest because it references other hero quests, or maybe because it gives him a melody to riff near and then abandon. Much of the film is given over to scenes of Hero having body bits blown off, falling over and experiencing long flashbacks before getting up and falling over again. Bernice is turned into a living mannikin, complete with plastic pieces stuck to her; the village leader who’s convinced that all is hopeless reads passages from Wuthering Heights; Ratmen scurry around with weird constructs taped to their shoulders. A phalanx of men strain at a rope as they attempt to keep a giant clock from advancing—which is maybe possibly related to the fact that the Governor’s minions sing “Grandfather Clock” and that he shrieks “tick tock!” as part of his general abusive creepiness.

The men at the rope say they want to stop time, and that’s perhaps the goal of Sono as well. This isn’t really a vision of a nightmare future, nor of an exciting adventurous past, Western or Eastern. Instead, Sono offers a series of tableaux deliberately set loose from chronology, narrative, and sense, though it casually references all three. Blood falls on a rose, nightmare, vaguely samurai-like figures rise from the mist; that clock rises against a purplish decaying industrial landscape, Nicolas Cage stands before a large group of women wearing very tight underwear to their delight and horror. And of course there’s a western shoot-out/samurai battle, including a machine gun massacre because someone left a machine-gun just standing there where anyone could use it.

It’s easy to dismiss this sort of thing as a decadent exercise in pointless and self-indulgent bricolage. And certainly I experienced at least a few moments of irritation while watching. But there’s also a pleasure in wandering around in a landscape, and a movie that is so deliberately refusing to go anywhere in particular, detached alike from its own heroism, its own destiny, and its own apocalypse. The prisoners of the Ghostland here are maybe the moviegoers themselves, trapped in that future-past that is aesthetics—romantic novels, people turning into mannikins, people trying to pull themselves outside of time.

Which is why, perhaps, Bernice keeps repeating “you’re free” over and over at the end with a certain desperation and why the last image is of her and Hero on a bench with another bloodied friend looking much more exhausted than joyful. The movie ends, and we’re liberated, which means and we’ve all got to go back to an unfortunately more coherent disaster. Part of the magic and beauty of movies, Sono seems to say, is that at least for a little bit they and you don’t need to make any sense.

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Eric Kripke’s superhero series The Boys started as a metaphor for American fascism during Trump’s first term. And now, in the middle of its fifth and final season, it, like our country, has embraced its bleak and final form.

Homelander (Antony Starr), an all-powerful messianic narcissist, has seized absolute power. He’s head of the uber-corporation Vought and also de facto ruler of the United States; he’s destroyed all opposition and sidelined anyone who would restrain him. Enemies of the state—from active dissidents to people who post irreverent social media jokes—are rounded up and thrown into concentration camps where they face extrajudicial execution. Universities, churches and media have all bent the knee to the regime in an orgy of patriotism, Christofascism, capitalist corruption, and power-lust.

It’s impossible to watch the show without wincing at its almost uncanny relevance; in the fourth episode, released yesterday, Homelander declared himself to be the messiah. That was about ten days after Trump posted a picture of himself as Jesus.

The ability to capture the zeitgeist is most impressive, though, in the way that the series imagines a dystopia which is not immediately or obviously less awful than the dystopia we are actually living through. In accurately reflecting how bad things can get—and how bad things are—the show manages to offer insights into where we’ve gone wrong, where we’ve maybe gone right, and where we can go even wronger if we really try.

Homelander and Trump: equally evil

Obviously, a big part of the reason that The Boys accurately represents our current nightmare is that the creators live in our current nightmare; they are reporting on what they see.

The thing is, though, that most dystopian narratives are not in fact willing to honestly or unflinchingly reflect on or represent the worst aspects of life under American fascism. For example, as I discussed recently, TV shows like Severance and movies like Superman present fascism as a kind of conspiracy, which can be defeated by exposing its mechanisms. When brave journalists show the people that Lex Luthor has a nefarious plot, people reject the plot en masse, and justice is served.

The Boys’ creators, though, have looked around them, and they know this is not how fascism works. Fascism doesn’t triumph because it is secret. It triumphs because people like fascism and find it an exciting and pleasurable way to shore up their status in the hierarchy and inflict pain on others. If they are fooled, it is often because they want to be, or because they simply don’t care that (for example) Trump was held liable for sexual abuse.

In that vein, in a past season, Homelander murders a protestor on live television, and his fans erupt in cheers, because they identify with his power and enjoy the rush of (supposedly) righteous violence. In season 5, the leader of the resistance, Starlighter/Annie (Erin Moriarty) manages to leak a tape showing Homelander callously leaving a plane full of people to die horribly. Vought’s PR flaks immediately declares the video a deep fake; it barely affects Homelander’s popularity (though it does lead him to make some strategic miscalculations.)

It’s also common for pop culture dystopias to treat oppression as universal—totalitarian governments on the screen are bizarrely less racist and/or sexist than the totalitarian government we have. The Handmaid’s Tale series, for example, portrays a patriarchal, misogynist Christofascist government which somehow does not see color. The recent Edgar Wright Running Man reboot features a vicious capitalist dystopia which is neither racist, sexist, nor homophobic.

In contrast, the authoritarian violence in The Boys is justified and advanced by hate, which is then directed at marginalized people. Homelander is (like Trump) not a systematic thinker with a worked out Hitlerian program. But he loathes what he sees as weakness and difference, and that makes him a natural ally of more rigorous fascists and of other misogynists, assholes, and bullies.

In one incident in an earlier season, Homelander physically assaulted a blind hero (a Daredevil analog) because he was disgusted at the idea of a disabled person being in the Seven. disabled hero because he hates disabled. Analagously, in the first season, one of the members of the Seven, the Deep (Chace Crawford), sexually assaults Starlighter when she first joins the team. Vought’s podcasts and publicity trumpet manosphere masculinity and attack trans people; in the spin off series, Gen V, the regime smears a genderfluid superhero by saying they assaulted a woman in a bathroom. For the people running the fascist regime, bigotry is, unsurprisingly, varied, pervasive, and routine.

The Boys also understands that prejudice doesn’t preclude tokenism. One of the most affecting character arcs in the series involves the superfast superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), who is explicitly brought onto the Seven to show that the team is colorblind. He understands why he’s been brought on, and feels it’s a reasonable price for fame and power. He’s a callous, cowardly jerk who likes power and the spotlight, and ends up murdering multiple people out of casual incompetence and/or a desire to cover his ass.

But, again, the Seven are racist. Eventually the micro-aggressions (and not so micro-aggressions when he’s insulted by an actual Nazi) alienate A-Train from the team and push him to help out Homelander’s enemies. Little by little, and with the help of his family, he begins to see the racism he faces not just as a personal insult, but as part of a hateful, unjust system, and to see heroism as not just a way to play for the cameras, but as an actual possibility for himself.

The end of his story, in the first episode of season five, is one of the few actually convincing and moving redemption arcs on television—a careful, step-by-step portrayal of how a weak and evil man finds a path to solidarity and antifascist resistance. And, again, it’s a narrative that’s only possible because The Boys understands that any American dystopia is going to be racist.

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Homelander more evil

A-Train’s courageous defiance of Homelander is especially gallant because resistance in The Boys is rare. Homelander and his superhero allies have the kind of power that Stephen Miller can only dream of; a couple of superheroes can do a lot more damage than a whole cityful of ICE agents. The fact that superheroes are celebrities in addition to their other abilities has allowed for more effective propaganda, too—it’s as if every leading figure in Hollywood turned into J.K. Rowling.

With greater approval numbers and more raw force, Homelander doesn’t face anything like the unified resistance in Minneapolis or Chicago. There are no mass No Kings protests; there are no spontaneous, effective boycotts like the one which saved Jimmie Kimmel. There also appears to be no opposition party and no opposition from courts. Without broad popular opposition and without institutional levers, resistance is essentially limited to guerrilla cells, which use violence because they have few other options.

The narrative incentives here are obvious enough. The Boys is a superhero show, so you want to watch superhero action. People are not tuning in to watch a bunch of people cancelling their Disney+ subscriptions or following ICE agents around Minneapolis.

The alternate universe in which a Trump analog has truly broad-based public support and/or has access to overwhelming force is clarifying though. First it underlines just how limited Trump’s repressive resources actually are; even with his bloated ICE budgets and even with present day surveillance tech, his reach remains quite limited. And second, it shows the importance of those nose-diving poll numbers.

Widespread resistance makes it much harder for Trump to rig elections, to terrorize his enemies, to make people believe his bullshit. He wants to be Homelander, but he is not there yet—and there is reason to hope he never will be. The Boys shows us that things could be worse, and in doing so highlights the tactics and strategies that—not uniformly, not enough, but in important ways—have limited Trump’s power.

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Trump more evil

The Boys shows a bigoted fascist totalitarian state with a wide base of support, unlimited resources for violence, and a desperate and largely ineffectual resistance. And yet, there are some ways in which that evil, sweeping, apparently all-powerful regime is still not as bad as the one we’ve managed to install in power.

The main issue here is foreign policy. The Boys focuses almost entirely on domestic affairs. But many of the worst depredations of the Trump administration have been overseas. The cuts to USAID are believed to have killed more than 750,000 people , including more than 500,000 children. Total number dead is expected to reach 14 million, by 2030—making this the worst genocide committed by a single US president in history by a significant margin.

There is also no analogy in The Boys for the Iran war, with the US slaughter of schoolgirls, or for US withdrawal of aid from Ukraine, or of our complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The US is a global power, and in many ways its leaders’ capacity to sow misery and violence is greatest beyond its own borders, where democratic checks are lessened and politicians don’t have to worry about the possible downsides of harming their own constituents.

The Boys in an earlier season dabbled a bit with the idea of Homelander interfering in international affairs. But mostly it stays within American borders. That’s not unreasonable; you can’t do everything, and there’s certainly enough misery in the US itself to power five season and more of antifascist television.

It is telling, though, that the USAID atrocity—which is, again, unquestionably the single worst thing the Trump administration has done—isn’t addressed on The Boys for the same reason it isn’t a major story every day in the news. Americans care about America; the suffering of children far away doesn’t concentrate the minds of US viewers.

This circumscribed solidarity isn’t fascist in itself. It is, however, part of the soil in which fascism can grow. Homelander thrives when people only care about the homeland; Trump thrives when only Americans (narrowly defined) are seen as worthy of rights and freedom. As The Boys insists, with A-Train and throughout the series, the only way to fight the power is to realize that your struggle is your neighbor’s struggle and to understand that your liberty depends on your neighbor being free. When we forget that, or ignore it, we are all diminished—not least those who die offscreen because we don’t know how to fit them into our stories.

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Just after she graduated from the Naval Academy, one of my high school friends, Kerry O’Neill was murdered by her ex-firancée. He also killed another student and then himself.

News accounts described the murder as a kind of tragedy with no perpetrator (“3 Friends Die As Dream Turns to Nightmare” “3 Promising Naval Officers Leave Tears and Disbelief”) or as a “lover’s quarrel.” Another friend—closer to Kerry than I was—said that he had suspected she was having trouble in her relationship but that he “thought she could handle herself.”

This mix of instant expiation, victim-blaming, and romanticization was common thirty years ago in cases of intimate partner violence. And it’s still common today. After former Virginia Lt Gov Justin Fairfax murdered his wife Cerina and then himself, Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis described the crime as “a fall from grace for a relatively high-profile family that seemingly had a lot of things going in their favor”. That suggests that the family as a whole was at fault, rather than condemning the one person in the family who murdered the other. The story has also been framed as one about mental health and depression among men in general or among Black men specifically.

There is, though, a feminist analysis of domestic violence and femicide which is rarely referenced in mainstream accounts of these murders. That feminist analysis argues that when men murder intimate partners, they are committing a political act, motivated, not by love or depression or internal stresses, but by a desire to publicly and violently assert their status as patriarchs in a patriarchal system. Femicide, in this framework, is an act of terrorism, meant to solidify dominance and keep women, as a class, in their place.

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Femicide is not an aberration

Accounts of intimate partner murders usually present them as aberrations, accidents, or incomprehensible tragedies, rooted in individual psychology and circumstances.

But there’s solid evidence that femicide is not an accident, but a pattern. Globally, the UN estimated that in 2020, a woman or girl was killed by someone in their family every 11 minutes. In the US, more than 55% of female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners or ex-intimate partners—which means that women who are murdered are more likely to have been killed by intimate partners than not.

Femicide is also part of a larger pattern of domestic violence and intimate partner violence which can include sexual violence, physical violence, and stalking. In the US, more than a third of women experience intimate partner violence during their lifetimes (as compared to 1 in 6 men.)

There are clear patterns which explain and predict when domestic violence escalates to murder. According to a 2002 report, one major danger sign is when the perpetrator has access to a gun. Another is when women become pregnant—and start to prioritize the coming child over their partners. And a third is when the victim has taken steps to escape the relationship. A yearly analysis of femicide deaths, found in 2022 that, “For over 14 years Femicide Census research has reported that leaving a relationship is one of the most dangerous times for a woman.”

Given that conclusion, it’s not a surprise the Cerina Fairfax was in the middle of divorce proceedings and that my friend Kerry had broken off her engagement when their abusers murdered them.

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Femicide is entitlement

Again, feminists have a clear, compelling explanation for this dynamic. Francis Dupuis-Déri explains the outlines of this analysis in his short book on the murder of sociologist Hélène Rytmann by her husband, French Marxist philosopher Althusser. “A man decides to kill his spouse or ex-spouse rather than accept that she will leave him and emancipate herself from the relationship,” Dupuis-Déri writes. He quotes Julie Lefebvre and Suzanne Léveillée: “the most common reason given by men who have committed spousal homicide is the inability to accept marital separation.”

Here is Althusser’s explanation of why he murdered his wife. (Note that Althusser believes that this is as a sympathetic account which justifies his actions.)

I do not know what exactly I put Hélène through (I do know, however, that I was truly capable of the most terrible things), but she told me with a determination that terrified me that she could no longer live with me, that in her eyes I was a monster and that she wanted to leave me for good. She began quite openly to look for a flat, but did not find one immediately. She then made practical arrangements which I found unbearable; totally ignoring me, though I was still there, in our own flat. She got up before me and disappeared for the whole day. If she happened to stay at home, she refused to talk to me and even to come face to face with me … I was consumed with anguish. As you know, I always experienced intense anguish at being abandoned and especially by her, but being totally ignored, though I was still there, in our own home, was the most unbearable thing of all.

Rytmann acted as if she had her own life, as if she was no longer under Althusser’s control, as if she owed him nothing, as if she did not have to pay attention to him. Althusser found this intolerable. So he murdered her.

Femicide is not driven by love or depression or mental illness. It is driven by a sense of political entitlement. Feminist scholar Kate Manne argues in her book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women that entitlement—a belief that men deserve power over and fealty from women—is the core driving force of misogyny. “When a woman fails to give a man what he’s supposedly owed,” Manne writes, “she will often face punishment and reprisal.”

Patriarchy says that women in intimate relationships owe their partner’s domestic labor, sex, and deference. When a woman ceases to provide the emotional and physical labor to which men feel entitled, men will punish her—up to and including killing her.

More, that punishment will be seen as understandable and reasonable by a lot of people who buy into patriarchal institutions. Althusser’s friends rushed to his aid and got him declared mentally incompetent; academics and philosophers today still treat Rytmann’s murder—when they mention it at all—as an unfortunate, accidental blemish on an unquestionably great and just man.

That’s an extreme version, but you see the same impulse in the way that writers and cops and commenters blame femicide on mental illness, or love, or treat it like a natural disaster. Kate Manne calls this “himpathy”—the excessive empathy or sympathy directed at abusive men and away from their victims. Himpathy thrives because patriarchal entitlement says that men’s right to feel good about themselves is at least as important as women’s right to live.

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Femicide is political

Men, and people who himpathize with men (which is a lot of people under patriarchy), even unto femicide, do so because they assent to, or agree with, a vision of the world in which men are entitled to power. A belief in a certain righteous distribution of power is not just an internal feeling; it is a politics. And femicide—which is committed to enforce power over an individual women and over women as a class—is a political act.

Jim Crow violence and lynchings in the South were directed against Black men who slept (often consensually) with white women; against Black people who had successful businesses; against Black people (like Ida B. Wells) who criticized white people in print; against Black people who insisted on sitting on the “wrong” bus seats. When white men horrifically murdered Emmett Till, they did not do so because they were mentally ill; they did not do so because they were motivated by understandable love for the woman who falsely accused him of whistling at her; they did not do it because they were swept along by natural tragic forces. They murdered him because they believed they were entitled to do so, because they thought he had personally insulted them by not behaving with sufficient deference, and because they wanted to keep other Black people in their place.

Similarly, when men commit femicide, they are motivated by their sense that they have been insulted as men, because they want to punish the woman for not behaving with sufficient deference, and because they want to warn other women to stay in their place. When men kill themselves following a femicide, they are perhaps attempting to escape accountability, but they are also deliberately laying down their lives for a cause they believe in—male supremacy. Femicides are not just directed at a single woman; they are part of systemic violence directed at women as a class, and they are meant as a warning. Do not defy your partner, do not leave an abusive relationship, do not withdraw your affection without permission, or we will do this to you.

Women hear this message and understand it. They stay in abusive relationships because they fear that they or their children will be killed if they don’t. They make jokes about how they’d rather be alone in the woods with a bear than with a man. They leave jobs when they are sexually harassed because they understand that confronting men rarely leads to justice and often leads to escalating violence and reprisals.

Men, though, and mainstream media, and patriarchal institutions, pretend that they do not know what femicide is, or how it is used. They deflect and treat it as an individual blip or mistake—much as racist terror still today is often treated as a personal failure or an aberration, rather than the deliberate use of violence to advance a political program of white supremacy.

The denial of the misogynist politics of femicide is part of those misogynist politics, since that denial allows people to blandly distance themselves from violence without examining the ideologies that enable and demand that violence. To erase the politics of femicide is to sidestep discussions of how guns are seen as an essential expression of masculinity. It enables a discourse in which violence against women inevitably leads to calls for more resources for men rather than to a demand for more support for women.

Kerry O’Neill wasn’t killed in a “lover’s quarrel”; Cerina Fairfax wasn’t killed by her husband’s mental illness. They were both murdered by men enforcing patriarchy—a violent ideology of hate. As long as that ideology is allowed to fester, more women will die. Defeating patriarchy isn’t easy. But the first step is naming it.

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“It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders thundered following Trump’s 2024 victory.

This is a common theme for Sanders and for the left in general—and it is often framed, as Sanders does, with a kind of nostalgic tinge. To say that the party has “abandoned” working people suggests, after all, that Democrats at one point, in the past, were a working-class party, who rebuked billionaires and fought for workers, laborers and the underclass. The Democrats used to be Bernie’s party; they have fallen from grace and from class politics.

The problem with this analysis is that it is not true. The current Democratic party—the one we have right now, this minute—is as close to a party for working people as the United States has ever had. That is inextricable from the fact that the Democrats are as close to a multi-racial coalition as the United States has ever had.

When people on the left—and not just on the left—hark back to an earlier period of class solidarity, they are, in fact, harking back to a period of white racial solidarity, when white cishet men (of every social class) felt represented in large part because they were validated in their political ascension over Black people, Native people, Hispanic people, Asian people, immigrants, women, LGBT people, and everyone else. Making the history of white power into a class power idyll is the politics of MAGA. It leads nowhere good.

Black working people never had a party

The US was founded as a nation which enslaved Black people. That means Black people have always been (extremely oppressed) workers in the US, and it means that the working class has always been multi-racial. When we say that the Democratic party “abandoned” the working class, therefore we have to ask, during which period did Democrats, or any party, speak for all workers, of every race?

Reading Jullia Azari’s 2025 study Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History it quickly becomes clear that the answer to that question is a resounding “never.”

Azari’s study is an examination of presidential politics from the founding to the present, looking at how the politics of race have vacillated from white supremacist status quo to brief moments of racial progress to periods of violent backlash—and back to a white supremacist status quo.

“[P]residents rely on the kinds of compromises that have kept race off the political agenda or accommodated the most racially conservative forces,” Azari writes. In the period between the revolution and the Civil WAr, presidents (and political leaders in general) worked to avoid confronting slavery; in the period after Reconstruction, leaders worked to avoid confronting Jim Crow; in the period after the Civil Rights Movmeent, leaders worked to maintain a “color blind” approach to racism and to avoid seeing, or rectifying, ongoing inequities.

Different presidents and parties at different times did attempt to appeal to workers or less wealthy interests. But these gestures towards class politics were all, more or less explicitly, predicated on the fact that the workers being helped were only, or predominantly, white.

Andrew Jackson, presented himself as a populist fighting for the little guy against big banks and the elite. Part of fighting for the little (white) guy was committing a genocide against Native Americans so white people could get their land. Another part was allowing violent mobs to attack abolitionists with little rebuke. A hundred years later FDR positioned himself as a champion of workers—and passed much of his New Deal program by excluding Black people from them and backing Jim Crow in exchange for votes from southern Democrats.

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Racial transformation and racial backlash

Azari highlights a few moments when presidents, parties, and the political system as a whole embraced racial transformation. After the Civil War, during the Civil Rights Movement, and with Obama’s presidency, the white supremacist status quo was shaken, and there was, to one degree or another, a new birth of freedom.

What generally happens in these cases, though, Azari shows, is a powerful backlash, and a swift effort by the political system to domesticate freedom into the more acceptable and familiar politics of everyday tyranny.

Following the Civil War, Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer and Andrew Johnson immediately rushed to try to restore the racist status quo in the south. He was stalemated by what I think it is fair to refer to as actively antiracist Republicans in Congress. But the legislation they passed to protect Black people—the most oppressed working people in the country—was almost immediately nullified by the usual compromises and indifference.

Ulysses S. Grant has sometimes been portrayed as a champion of Black rights, but Azari notes that his “willingness and ability” to address white Southern violence was limited. Even during his administration, “Republicans nervously began to suspect that being identified as the party of African Americans was a liability at the ballot box.” By 1876, the Matt Yglesiases of the day had won, and Republicans joined Democrats in open oppression of Black people.

The 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, were, like the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment, a major, transformative watershed. But (again) like the Amendments, the party that passed them soon retreated in the face of backlash.

Johnson himself, as historian Elizabeth Hinton argues, embraced the idea that urban insurrections were an expression of irrational criminality rather than a response to injustice—an argument that Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and more picked up in their politics of law and order and mass incarceration. The next Democratic president, Carter, largely avoided ambitious civil rights initiatives and arguably “laid some of the groundwork for the colorblind ideology adopted by subsequent presidents,” Azari writes. And of course, then came Reagan and Bush and the Clintonian policy of triangulation—which meant betraying the multi-racial working class on mass incarceration and the social safety net, but doing so with somewhat less enthusiasm than the Republicans.

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Maybe hope, maybe change

These compromises didn’t come easily. On the contrary, Azari’s argument is that racially transformative moments led to the enormously disruptive and painful backlash presidencies of Andrew Johnson and Nixon—and, of course, of Trump.

In many ways, Obama’s presidency seems less transformative than those of Reconstruction or Lyndon Johnson. Obama passed no major civil rights legislation and did not in general center racial issues during his presidency, though his signature legislation, the ACA, did help working people across the board. But existing as a Black man in the White House, and existing as the visible vanguard of a multi-racial coalition, was seen as a mortal insult to white supremacy.

The white people on the right reacted to their brief decentering with a massive paroxysm of rage, throwing the country into its most thoroughgoing Constitutional crisis since the Civil War. We’re still in that crisis, obviously, and it’s difficult to know where we’ll come out.

Still, at least in some respects, the Democratic response to the racist backlash this time looks different. There have certainly been many Rahms and Yglesiases in the Democratic coalition urging the party to respond to the politics of white supremacy as it has in the past—with surrender, compromise and appeasement. Throw trans people under wheeled conveyances, get tougher on immigrants than Trump, kick Palestinians, nominate white men and more white men. Find members of the multi-racial coalition to abandon.

But, as Toby Buckle writes in the Prospect, this approach has not been winning out. Instead, as he writes, “ordinary US liberals have rallied.” The Democratic base believes in a “pluralistic society” and “individual rights” and they believe those virtues “can only be saved through a knockdown, dragout fight across all levels of society and that the opportunity for an easy compromise has come and gone.”

This mass, bottom-up rejection of compromise is key. Biden’s presidency, which backed away from accountability and procedural radicalism, can be seen as an effort to return to a less divisive status quo of slow and perhaps wavering progress. Early in Trump’s term, it was clear that elite institutions—media, education, tech—wanted to abandon justice, and even democracy, and get back to the business of white supremacy, as they had after Reconstruction and after the CRM.

These equivocating impulses, however, have been steamrolled by the righteous rage of a Democratic base passionately committed not just to working-class politics, but to multi-racial politics. The stunning, courageous, mass, ongoing resistance in Minneapolis is a resistance, specifically, to a fascist attack on non-white people. The election of Mamdani in New York was an embrace of a vision of New York as a multi-racial democracy which includes and embraces, crucially, Muslims and Palestinians.

There’s no better party to go back to

This is not to say that the Democratic party is perfect, nor am I arguing that victory is assured. On the contrary, the Democratic party is very often dogshit and—in part as a result—fascism may well win. Like the title of the newsletter says, everything is horrible and there’s every reason to believe that, even in the best possible scenario, we are going to see numerous nightmarish atrocities and further destruction of our democracy before we manage any change for the better.

It’s important to recognize, though, that while the current Democrats are an imperfect vessel for working class politics, they are as good a vessel as we have ever had in this country by a significant margin. For most of Amerian history, political parties have put the interests of white people first—which means that the most oppressed workers, who were not white, were ignored when they weren’t actively targeted. In rare instances when a party did align itself with multi-racial workers, it quickly retreated in the face of backlash.

The current sustained antifascist multi-racial coalition, with its demands for justice and equality for all, its support for rights for immigrants and Palestinians and all people, is virtually unprecedented in the breadth of its solidarity, its rejection of compromise, and its ability to sustain itself in the face of determined backlash and opposition. Again, that doesn’t mean it will win. It doesn’t mean its adequate, and it doesn’t mean that it will be able to stiffen the spines of feckless and timid party leaders.

But it does mean that the only way forward is forward. Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, LBJ—there is no moment in history when a political party was as committed to the entirety of the working-class the way that the current Democratic party is committed to the entirety of the working-class.

That is in part because of Bernie Sanders himself. And yet, for all of Sanders’ valiant and righteous efforts, he’s wrong when he suggests that there was at one point a better working-class party. When people say that the Democrats have abandoned the working class, what they mean, whether they know it or not, is that the Democrats have abandoned white people. The dream of a working-class party past is always a dream of a white party past, because within mainstream political parties, working-class politics of the past were only ever white.

It isn’t true that Democrats have abandoned white people either, of course. The core of our current antifascist liberal/left coalition—a core which the Democrats, with much whining and shirking, fitfully embody—is the idea that all working people, and all people, benefit when the multi-racial working class topples tyrants and seizes equality and liberty.

That’s a radical idea in politics, not least because no party has truly embraced it. Getting the Democrats there is one of the most important tasks of our moment. There is no blueprint for it, and nostalgia will not help us. Again, the only way forward is forward.

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“I didn’t have any choice. My parents put a drug in me. They decided that for me…You just stood there and said I massacred them. You don’t know anything. I was a girl who got her period. That is it. And you make me feel like a monster for it. And you let my sister believe that I’m a monster. You let her believe that it’s my fault. I loved my parents. But they did this. Not me.”

That’s probably the most powerful monologue in GEN V season 2. The speaker, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) is talking to her aunt about the most traumatic moment of her childhood. Marie was injected with Compound V, a super serum created by the Vought company, when she was very young. On the day she got her period, she discovered she had the power to control blood—and, in a panic, without control over her power, she struck out with the blood from her own body and killed her parents.

The scene in which Marie’s powers render her an orphan is the opener of the first season of the show. The second season speech—in which Marie powerfully insists that the damage then was committed not by her deviance, but by her parents making choices about her future without her input—should be the thematic center of the series.

But Gen V never quite manages to connect its story about control, eugenics, and fascism, to the patriarchal, hierarchical treatment of the children and young adults who are its main characters. The show is still entertaining and occasionally insightful. But it’s difficult for a show that doesn’t quite understand what it’s about to achieve the kind of greatness that occasionally—in that first horrifying scene in Marie’s house, in her excoriation of Pam—seems just out of reach.

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Super discipline of super children

As you’d expect from a superhero spin-off serial, the plot (which intertwines with the five seasons of The Boys) is extremely intricate and almost impossible to summarize. But in very brief outline, the nativist Trum- analogue/Superman-analogue hero/psychotic murderer Homelander has gained control of the United States, and resistors are in hiding. Marie and her friends are students at God U, a school for superhumans, where they cooperate with the administration and the regime while looking for ways to resist. The new head of the school is a mysterious bearded scientist named Cipher (Hamish Linklater), who, we eventually learn, is a crazed eugenicist with impressively terrifying mind control powers.

The set-up parallels that of the first season of Jessica Jones, in which Killgrave, a mind-manipulator, becomes a metaphor for patriarchal control, whose insidious commands enforce hierarchies of gender, race, class, and abuse. Jessica Jones season 1 had some bloat, for sure, but it came back obsessively, terrifyingly, to the core metaphor of patriarchy as violation of consent, and—even worse—of patriarchy as enforcing such thoroughgoing self-betrayal that it is often impossible to tell where consent begins and violation ends. The season was as close to horror as superhero narratives get.

The patriarchal control of and abuse of women is more discussed and more recognized, but not so different from the patriarchal control of and abuse of children. Both are, moreover, core to the fascist politics that The Boys has portrayed and satirized. There are moments in Gen V when the writers come close to making these connections.

Cipher flatters Marie and tells her she is a powerful chosen one in order to manipulate her; a kind of super-grooming, to which Linklater brings just the right amount of condescension and oily tough-love. The villain also inhabits different students at various times to make them fight each other in a form of gladiatorial combat for his amusement and as a way to put his eugenic survival-of-the-fittest theories into practice. Most disturbingly, perhaps, Cipher describes his manipulation of the kids as putting his hand up their ass—a reference to puppeteering, but also to rape.

The elements, then, are all there; this could be a show about how adults use flattery, bullying, and raw power to rob young people of their own choices, their own dreams, their own bodily autonomy. But…it never quite is.

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Good parents, bad parents

Part of the issue is that the writers at crucial moments appear to lose their nerve. In the first season, we’re told that Marie’s parents gave her compound V because they liked the idea of having a superhero daughter. They essentially exposed her to an experimental drug out of vanity. Similarly, one of Marie’s friends, Sam (Asa Germann), believes that his mental health issues were caused by his parents injecting him with Compound V. Another, Andrei (Chance Perdomo) is pushed to use his magnetic powers by his father Polarity (Sean Patrick Thomas), even though said father knows that the powers cause seizures and could kill him.

In all these cases, the storylines provide disturbing parallels with Cipher’s plots and mind control ability. Parents (like Cipher) have power over children; parents (like Cipher) prioritize their own vision of who they want their child to be over their child’s own wishes and agency. As Marie says to her aunt, she loves her parents and they loved her; they brief glimpse of their lives we get suggests that they were in most respects a happy family. But, the show chillingly suggests, even loving parents sometimes treat their children as a means, rather than as an end in themselves.

Or it could suggest that. But the narrative goes out of its way to vitiate them. Sam learns that his mental health problems are hereditary; his mom says she injected him with V because they hoped it would protect him. Marie learns that her parents gave her V in order to solve their fertility problems—or something like that?

Marie’s parents’ motivation doesn’t, ultimately, make a whole lot of sense. And why would Sam’s family think it was a good idea to give someone with hallucinations and anger-management issues a super formula? The weakness of these explanations highlights, perhaps, the extent to which they function not as explanations, but as excuses for Gen V to back away from some of its own insights.

Cipher, the writers insist, is not a metaphor for the power adults have over children under patriarchy, or for the ways in which that power enables a whole range of abuses, and not just by supervillains. Instead, he’s just a single bad parental substitute; an aberration. It’s like all those cop shows in which the problem is one or two corrupt officers. There is no systemic problem—which is why Polarity is given the whole season as a redemption arc. (Perdomo died in a motorcycle accident before shooting began, and so does not appear.)

While these good-parent storylines seem like cowardice—especially all stacked one on top of the other—some of the series’ other choices just feel unmotivated or careless. Marie enables her blood powers by cutting herself; Emma (Lizzie Broadway) shrinks by making herself throw up. These acts of self-harm seem like they could be related to the way adults diminish, control, or simply put great stress on young people. And there are gestures at that. Emma’s mother in season 1 is hyper-controlling—but she largely disappears in season 2. Cipher pokes at Marie about cutting herself—but it never becomes a major plot point. Instead it’s buried in the labyrinthine narrative with its nested revelations and twists and vacillating allegiances.

Those revelations and twists and vacillations are fun. The actors are appealing and talented. The hero is a Black woman and her allies are multi-racial, queer, disabled, all committed to kicking the shit out of fascists. There’s a lot to like in Gen V, and I binged the second season as happily as I’d binged the first.

But the show almost, almost spoke to how fascism treats young people and young people’s protest specifically—and to how fascism and standard issue disempowerment of young people are mutually enabling. And then it didn’t “I loved my parents. But they did this. Not me,” is the kind of truth you rarely get from a television show. It’s disappointing, though not really a surprise, that the rest of the series spends so much time not confronting that truth, but flying away.

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Much of the best American music has been the offspring of miscegenation. Whether it’s African-Americans in New Orleans repurposing white band instruments ;or Elvis Presley combining country and R&B just as his hillbilly forbearers had been doing for generations; or mashup artists deliriously bunging together white and Black; segregation has traditionally, and gloriously ended at the borders of the recording studio.

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SoulJazz’s two disc compilation Delta Swamp Rock: Sounds of the South, At the Crossroads of Rock, Country and Soul provides another satisfying instance of musical cross-breeding. Expected country rockers are represented — Lynyrd Skynrd and the Allman Brothers show up on several tracks apiece.

But the comp spreads its net wider, too, focusing especially on the scene around the famous session players at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but also reaching out to Memphis and Nashville, with some surprising results. Cher, of all people, delivers a soul-soaked, down and dirty vocal for “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” recorded in Muscle Shoals. Area Code 615, a group of Nashville session musicians, provide “Stone Fox Chase,” a bluegrass-meets-blues-funk rave-up that was later sampled by Kool G. Rap and others. Dan Penn, known for writing hits for James Carr and Aretha Franklin, here sings his own Stax-ready, Memphis-recorded “If Love Was Money.” Linda Ronstadt on “I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” is encouraged by a chorus that seems to have strolled out of a black church; Waylon Jennings’ “Big D” sidles up to funk, and the whole album is soaked in soul.

SoulJazz’s eclectic, thoughtful choices throughout the two discs nicely emphasize the oft-ignored fact that the South, at least as much as the north, has been a locus of racial integration and racial borrowing. This comp makes sense of the fact that the couple who won the case for racial intermarriage in the Supreme Court, the Lovings, came, not from New York or LA, but from rural Virginia. It’s a reminder that some of the first integrated sessions ever were Jimmie Rodgers recordings.

And yet. While SoulJazz has provided a testament to the South’s proud and little-known history of color-blindness, it’s also highlighted the South’s much better known, and sadder, history of segregation. In its extensive liner notes, SoulJazz mentions several times that the Muscle Shoals scene, steeped as it was in soul music, nevertheless represented a step back in terms of race. The Memphis-based Stax, where so many soul hits were recorded, had as its house band Booker T. and the MGs, an integrated band. Muscle Shoals was inspired by Stax’s example, but it’s musicians were all white.

The Allman Brothers band did have a black drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. But the other pillar of the southern rock movement, Lynyrd Skynrd, was not only all white, but flirted with segregationist rhetoric, unfurling a Confederate Flag during their live performances and giving a shout out to George Wallace on their hit “Sweet Home Alabama” (not included on the comp.) The fact that African-American Merry Clayton sang back-up on that track intensifies the cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t exactly excuse it. As SoulJazz says, “walking the line between southern working-class pride and simply reinforcing southern stereotypical bigotry could be a tricky business.”

The sad part about Delta Swamp Rock is that it chronicles a moment when maybe, almost, possibly, the South could have figured out how to separate bigotry and working-class pride once and for all. There is no doubt that the musicians represented on this comp, and the scene they were part of, loved Black music—and indeed, no doubt that they saw it, not as Black music, but as Southern music, an integrated tradition that was simply theirs, without the painful fetishization and authenticity-mongering that has so often marred work by non-Southern musicians, from Janis Joplin to the Rolling Stones. Bobbie Gentry’s rough vocals drip, not with Black accents, but with Southern accents. She sounds like a Black singer, at times, not because she needs Black vocal tics to validate her, but because she comes from the same part of the world.

But then there’s the question — if you come from the same part of the world, if this is your tradition, and if that tradition is color-blind, why are the people you surround yourselves with so overwhelmingly pale? The tradition SoulJazz chronicles here was eager to integrate music, but it’s willingness to integrate musicians was much more nervous . A drummer here, a backup singer there, but overall blue-eyed soul remained separate from just-plain soul. American R&B attained its current, not insubstantial level of integration through the urban bricolage of hip hop, rather than through the rural byways of country. White Southern identity remains, to this day, white — defined by a sideways avowal of a rebel segregationist past, rather than by an embrace of its rich and honorable integrated culture. Delta Swamp Rock makes the case that things could have been different, and points to some of the painful reasons why they weren’t.

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This essay ran years ago at Splice Today. It still seems relevant though, so I am resharing.

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Fierce kitten guarding power outlets says, “week done!”

Why is he guarding power outlets? I don’t know cats are mysterious.

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Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

We lost the war with Iran. (Public Notice)

Orban concedes; the GOP often does too. (EIH)

Why Swalwell but not Trump? (EIH)

The twilight of Chuck Schumer (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Critic Megan O’Grady writes about art as a reason for being alive. (Observer.com)

Send Help and the joy of power reversals. (EIH)

Poetry

A translation/adaptation of a Rilke sonnet. (Synchronized Chaos)

Archaic Torso of Apollo

After Rilke

He has no head. He has no eyes
to pin us with his godhead. But his torso
is itself a gaze in which there grows
from inside, like a covered lamp, a fire.

Without that rising surge, divinity
would not ravish you, nor would a lip
trace the gentle curve of thigh and hip
to the shadowed center of fertility.

Without it, the stone would seem a broken thing,
chipped, cracked, dead, a stone,
and would not glisten like a wolf’s dark mane,

and would not from its remnants blaze and singe
you like a god. Of all its parts, there is not one
that does not see you. Your life must change.

From the archives

Track of the week

Read more

This week, led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, 40 Democratic Senators out of 47 voted to freeze shipments of bulldozers to Israel. Then 36 Democratic Senators voted to block shipments of bombs to Israel.

This is a major milestone in US Israel policy; before this vote, unquestioning, bottomless aid to Israel, whatever Israel’s policies, no matter its violation of US human rights law, has been the bipartisan consensus. While this is still the official stance of the Republican party, the majority of Democrats are no longer onboard.

As I’ve discussed here before, this change has been underway for some time. Democratic voters have swung powerfully against Israel as its policies have become more openly genocidal and reckless in the last years. Anti-Zionists like Zohran Mamdani (as NY mayor) and Analilia Mejia (in a NJ House race) have begun to win high profile primaries and special elections. Democratic presidential hopefuls have distanced themselves from hard-core Zionism—as witnessed in this Senate vote, in which Mark Kelly and Ruben Gellego—both moderate Arizona Senators with presidential ambitions—voted to condition aid.

For Palestine, and for the world, the fact that Democrats are moving to detach itself from Israel’s grim colonial project is very good news. Also good news: this vote suggests that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is going to be ousted from his position sooner rather than later.

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Schumer fails to keep up

Schumer’s approval ratings have been flashing danger signs for a while. Democrats were so angry when he led his caucus to a humiliating government funding backdown in early 2025 that he had to cancel a book tour. Democrats in the House urged left standard bearer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to primary him in 2028. Since then he’s been floating below 40% in his home state of New York; if Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t challenge him, someone is going to.

To some degree, leaders are supposed to take the blame for ugly choices in order to protect their members. But—as the anger in the House indicates—Schumer hasn’t been popular with his colleagues either. His centrism, caution, and reflexive bi-partisanship seem ill-suited to the current moment. And so does is Zionism.

Schumer, like President Joe Biden, has been an enthusiastic Zionist for decades. This year at a gathering of Jewish Zionists, he said that one of his key jobs as leader was to “fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs.” Last year he told New York Times Zionist columnist Bret Stephens that “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel.”

Obviously, politicians tailor their words to their audience, and it’s not surprising that Schumer emphasized his own Zionism while talking to other Zionists. But Zionists are, also obviously, not the only audience, and Schumer (again like Biden) has shown himself to be uniquely unable to navigate the changing politics of his base on this issue.

Last year Schumer shockingly refused to say if he had voted for Zohran Mamdani, even though he was running against Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, two corrupt hacks with ugly connections to Trump himself. In contrast, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is also a Zionist, bowed to party pressure and endorsed Mamdani with a show of enthusiasm. Jeffries notably also does not keep saying that his job is to advance Zionism, rather than to serve his constituents and his caucus.

Schumer’s weakness—and the way that weakness is tied to his Zionism—has been highlighted in the current Democratic primary in Maine. Schumer recruited Governor Janet Mills, a pro-Israel politician in her late 70s, to run for the seat. Bernie Sanders backed political neophyte, Graham Platner, who opposes unconditional military aid to Israel. Platner has said homophobic, sexist, and racist things in the past, and last week used the r word slur; I am not a fan.

Nonetheless he has pulled away in polls, and other Senators have endorsed him, including Elizabeth Warren, who has been low-key calling for Schumer’s ouster. Chris Murphy, one plausible Schumer replacement, has also spoken enthusiastically about Platner. The Maine primary is, in other words, functioning as a proxy fight for Senate leadership. It’s a fight Schumer is losing.

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Schumer can no longer represent his caucus

As I’ve discussed above, there are a range of reasons that Schumer is flailing, and, for that matter, failing. He could, in theory, recover in popularity, especially if Democrats regain Senate control in the midterms and he is able to take some credit (and he certainly deserves some credit for recruiting Mary Peltola in Alaska, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Roy Cooper in North Carolina.)

But the bombs and bulldozers vote is not so easily finessed. Schumer was one of only 7 Democrats who bucked the party and voted to put no conditions or restrictions on any aid to Israel. Purple state, centrist Senators like Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly, Jean Shaheen, and Angus King all voted for restrictions. And the trend is clear; if another such vote is held in 2028, it seems likely that Schumer will be even more isolated—to say nothing of what happens if Democrats win the presidency. Virtually every candidate now running, up to and including the flaming asshole that is Rahm Emanuel, have said that they want more restrictions on military aid.

Schumer is ideologically committed to a position opposite that of the majority of his caucus and the majority of his voters. And this isn’t some marginal issue; it’s one of the key foreign policy questions of the moment, intertwined with a major partisan war which has defined Trump’s presidency and to which Democrats are rightly, wholeheartedly, and all-but-unanimously opposed.

It is not feasible, in the long term, or even really in the short term, to have the Democratic leader of the Senate caucus so opposed to the policy of that caucus on a core issue that he will not endorse or vote for candidates like Mamdani who espouse it, and will not vote with his colleagues on key measures. It’s not as unworkable as having a pro-life Democrat as Majority Leader, but it’s starting to get there. And it looks like the disconnect will get worse and worse as the war continues and Democratic sentiment continues to shift against Israel.

Schumer is 75 and (especially given his polling) may well be thinking of retiring rather than seeking another term. But I think this vote is another indication that his standing is rapidly eroding. I don’t know if he can win a speakership battle in 2027. I don’t think he knows either. But I suspect he’s less confident after this week’s vote than ever before.

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After a series of women accused him of horrific acts of harassment, rape, and sexual misconduct, Eric Swalwell suspended his bid for California Governor and resigned his seat in Congress.

It’s hard to avoid the comparison with Donald Trump, who has also been held liable by a jury for sexual assault and who has been accused of assault and sexual misconduct by at least 28 women. Swalwell was out of politics days after accusations went public. Trump remains the leader of his party and the country more than a decade after many of his accusers came forward.

Why did Swalwell face accountability so swiftly while Trump has barely faced accountability at all? It’s not a mystery; Swalwell is gone because his party demanded he go, and Trump is not gone because his party did not. It’s worth looking at the differences a little more closely, though, if we want to see what real pressure on Trump would look like—and who is in the best position to apply it.

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Everybody says Swalwell must go

A week ago, Swalwell was solidifying his position as the leading Democratic candidate in the California primary. He had numerous endorsements from Congressional colleagues and state level politicians, and close ties to state power brokers like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Adam Schiff.

When the accusations were made public last Friday, however, Swalwell’s support swiftly and uniformly abandoned him. Within days every one of his 21 colleagues in Congress—House and Senate—unendorsed him. House leadership called for him to end his campaign. The California Democratic Party Chair did as well. Swalwell’s campaign staff and congressional staff condemned him and resigned en masse.

Some random Democratic commenters on social media have defended Swalwell. That’s disheartening, but probably inevitable; you can always find someone to say something foolish and ugly. As far as Democratic elected officials go, however, he did not have a single supporter. Everybody agreed he had to go.

Swalwell’s public statements, and his continued insistence that the worst of the charges against him are false, make it clear that he would have preferred to maintain his campaign and to hold onto his seat. Faced with unanimous condemnation, though, he had little choice but to step down. With the entire party counter-endorsing him, he had no path forward in the governor’s race, no way to continue to attract voters, no way to fundraise. Without staff, he also couldn’t even pretend to continue on in Congress.

Swalwell faced other mechanisms of accountability. The House had begun the process to potentially expel him, and the Manhattan DA’s office has begun an investigation into accusations that he sexually assaulted a woman in New York in 2024. These moves are important, and they may have helped encourage Democrats to abandon him.

But as we’ve seen with Trump, criminal charges do not necessarily end a career, and condemnation from partisan foes, and partisan foes alone, can solidify one’s position in the party. It was not the beginning of often slow formal institutional methods of accountability which forced Swalwell to resign. It was the fact that the Democratic party informally, but forcefully and unanimously, ejected him.

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Republicans don’t want Trump gone

The contrast with Trump is stark. There have been moments when Trump has faced significant pushback from Republicans in the last decade plus—when the Access Hollywood tape was released; after his coup attempt; even this week when he posted a picture of himself as Jesus.

Republicans rebuking Trump, however, have rarely demanded his effective ejection from the party—and, perhaps more importantly, they have never turned on him uniformly. Even after the coup, when Trump’s mob literally threatened the lives of everyone in Congress, Republican and Democrat, more than 130 Republicans in House and Senate continued to support him, refusing to certify election results at his behest. There has certainly not been a moment when Trump’s staffers abandoned him or issued a joint letter condemning him.

In the absence of coordinated and sustained Republican opposition, GOP critics —from Justin Amash to Liz Cheney to Mitt Romney to Marjorie Taylor Greene—have been isolated and easy to target and eliminate. Essentially, Trump opponents have been treated like Swalwell; they have been de facto expelled from the party. There is no wrongdoing for Republicans, it sometimes seems, other than opposing Trump.

This may be changing to some extent; Thomas Massie, a Kentucky GOP congressman who has opposed Trump on key votes, looks like he may retain his seat despite a Trump-backed primary challenge. Media figures like contemptible far right bigots Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Candace Owens have been more willing to speak against him. But sporadic acceptable criticism from non-electeds is still a long way from uniform rejection by the party.

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What it takes

The point here is not to suggest that Democrats are always unproblematically righteous and that Republicans never in any circumstances have any red lines. Rumors about Swalwell had circulated for some time, which raises the question of why his allies and colleagues did not force a reckoning much sooner. Many elected Democrats have embraced Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine, despite his history of ugly statements, including his use last week of the r word in an interview. And Republicans joined with Democrats this week to force Representative Tony Gonzales to resign; he, like Swalwell, has been accused of sexual impropriety.

Party actors are influenced by both the seriousness of the charges and by the power of the person accused of wrongdoing. Platner’s comments on reddit are ugly, but the accusations against Swalwell are inarguably, unambiguously much, much more disqualifying. Republicans are willing to eject Tony Gonzales, a single congressman, at the same time as Swalwell so that they don’t lose their margin in the House. Ejecting Trump, the president and leader of the party—a move that would almost certainly lead to chaos and election losses—is another story.

Politicians balance their own sense of what is unacceptable with their own sense of how to maintain and advance their political power and political agenda. Elected leaders always have at least one eye on their own power and influence. Nonetheless, the key takeaway from Swalwell’s swift fall, though, is that parties have the power to discipline their members if they are forceful and unified.

Political scientist Julia Azari points out that neither impeachment nor the 25^th Amendment is well suited to removing Trump. She’s correct. But it’s also important to recognize that Swalwell wasn’t removed through any formal or institutional method. His party simply withdrew its support in a decisive and effective way. If Republicans did the same for Trump, he would also be isolated and would also face enormous pressure to resign.

Of course, Republians aren’t going to do that because they are a fascist, pro-abuser party and they like their fascist abusive president. But GOP support for Trump is not some sort of permanent, transcendent truth. It’s a choice, and they have the power, every one of them, to choose differently. Lisa Murkowski could switch parties; Marco Rubio could resign; John Kennedy could refuse to approve judges. They all have agency and they all have real power.

Trump is a collective Republican phenomenon. His individual bad actions are tacitly or less tacitly endorsed and enabled by his party as a whole. The GOP has backed Trump for more than a decade. It is unlikely that they will stop. But they could. And if they did, he, like Eric Swalwell, would be gone.

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Sam Raimi’s Send Help crosses the power reversals of the slasher with the power reversals of reverse colonization narratives. The result is a gloriously mean-spirited demonstration of the ways in which hierarchies of gender, class, and race are all intertwined with the same paranoid fears of rebellion and catastrophic status collapse. Revenge fantasies and terror of meeting one’s comeuppance are, it turns out, the same story seen from a slightly different terra firma.

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The hero/villain of the parable is Linda Liddle, played by a joyfully mercurial Rachel McAdams. Linda is a mousy, brilliant, poorly groomed strategist at a financial management company, and she has been promised a life-changing promotion. Before said promotion can go through, though, the CEO dies, and his hot, vapid son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) gives the job to a frat buddy. As a sort of consolation he brings Linda along on a business trip—only for the jet to crash into the ocean somewhere in Southeast Asia

Linda and Bradley are the only ones who make it to a deserted tropical island—which is fine with Linda, who is a survivalist enthusiast. She cares for the injured Bradley, builds a shelter, and generally seems to be having a great time. So much so that when Bradley pushes to get them off the island, she starts to get bossy in a rather terrifying manner herself.

The fun of the narrative is in part about the comeuppance. As in 9 to 5, the sympathetic office underdog gets her revenge on the patriarchal asshole boss who doesn’t appreciate her or respect her. When injured Bradley tells Linda on the island that she’s being disrespectful and he’s going to fire her, she just laughs and walks away, leaving him unable to get water or food for hours. It’s cruel—but is it that much crueler than Bradley ruining her life to give a perk to a golf buddy?

In a moment of introspection Bradley calls himself a monster, and he’s not wrong. The dynamic here is similar to that in slashers, where the ugly daddy-thing murders his way through a couple hours of corpses until the final girl takes the ax away and inflicts some damage and some women’s lib. Turnabout is fair play, and who doesn’t enjoy seeing a little vindictive Marxism/feminism on screen?

Eventually of course it becomes obvious that the vindictive Marxism/feminism on display is not well characterized as “little.” Linda escalates past simply absenting herself and on into true nightmare boss territory—including sexual harassment, murder, and literal castration. Bradley gets his own back to some extent as he tries to poison her, but Linda is clearly much more suited to the environment they find themselves in. Her ecstatic slaughter of a wild boar, complete with gouts of blood and triumphant howl, positions her as a primal force of destruction. Bradley, despite his biceps and his golf game, lacks her atavistic oomph.

That oomph associates Linda with tropes around colonized people, and the movie with the reverse colonization genre. Reverse colonization stories, like The War of the Worlds or Red Dawn imagine a world in which they do to us what we’ve always done to them—invasion, genocide, slavery, torture, inflicted by the periphery on the center, rather than the other way around.

Linda—making fire, catching fish, hunting that boar—is a kind of Tarzan, adapting herself to jungle ways. Bradley is associated not just with patriarchal and class hierarchies, but with the “civilized” colonizers. Linda’s transformation into a lying, murdering, enslaving psychopath is a paranoid Great Replacement nightmare, in which those who should be at the bottom of the hierarchy—women, subordinates, colonized people—take up the fire and incinerate their (supposed) betters.

Reverse colonization stories may sometimes look like anti-colonial stories; they ask viewers to identify with the victims of imperialism, after all. But identifying with the colonized in this way doesn’t necessarily mean you end up opposing colonialism. Sometimes it can mean that you decide you really don’t want to be in the footwear of the colonized, and that you’d better keep oppressing those people over there lest they gain enough power to turn the tables on you.

Send Help plays with that ambiguity. Early on you root for Linda because Bradley is an entitled sexist ass who is treating her like shit. But as the body count mounts—and as Rachel McAdams morphs from awkward social misfit to gleefully cackling sadist—you have to start to sympathize at least a bit with Bradley, whose sins, however unpleasant, don’t include a single murder. And even those sins, in retrospect, start to look justified; as we get to know Linda, it becomes pretty clear that you would not, in fact, want to make her a vice-president, even if she is good with numbers. Bradley’s apparently sexist intuition that she is a creep is, yes, still sexist, but also kind of on the money.

That’s not to say that the film is a reactionary screed against upturning hierarchies. Nor is it to argue that it’s a chronicle of feminist or anti-colonial triumph. Rather, the movie is playing with the crossover between those two possibilities, shuffling your sympathies and allegiances between characters and between politicized hierarchical perspectives. Resentment of the injustice of being on the bottom and the terror of losing one’s position on the top mirror each other, which means that they are both opposed and the same. Raimi encourages you to enter each emotion in turn and simultaneously, luxuriating in hate, fear, vengeance, vaunting power and terrifying castration. Linda’s dead-eyed stare at the end of the film, when she has fully inhabited and usurped Bradley’s position of wealth and status and golf, is both threat and promise, the sex and dread of unearned power, wielded with casual violence and/or clawed down from its perch.

One of the films many twisty reveals is that Linda and Bradley were never really stranded; rescue was just over the outcropping the whole time, and Linda knew it. This illustrates Linda’s duplicitousness and her evil abuse of power. But it also puts her in the position of the director, and/or of the film; she has staged an unnecessary conflict for her own amusement, just as Raimi has staged this movie for you. The violent fantasies of hierarchy (bullying, revolution, justified sadism, unjustified sadism) are pleasurable and self-validating. Patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism—no help for them is coming, Send Help suggests, not because no help is possible, but because, like Linda, we like it here.

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Yesterday, Hungarians voted overwhelmingly to unseat the fascist government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose regime has been in power for 16 years. Orban had rigged the election system, crushed freedom of the press, and targeted opposition leaders. But thanks to sustained resistance he had not been able to entirely gut democracy, and in the end democracy got him.

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Not only did it get him, but he had to admit it got him. Orban is a key Trump ally, and there was some worry that, like Trump in 2020, he might deny the election results or try to stage a coup and remain in power by force. But the regime’s collapse was so thoroughgoing that he had little ability or will to contest the results. As international relations professor Nicholas Grossman explained,

In competitive authoritarianism, leaders abuse state power to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor, manipulate the media environment and minimize opposition voices, maybe even steal close elections by lying about fraud. But they usually can’t overcome a large majority voting against them.

One possible conclusion here is that, to defeat Trump and to avoid a repeat of January 6, we need to win in 2026 and 2028 by huge margins. But while that sounds reasonable, I don’t think it’s the whole story. In particular, we have in the US a lot of evidence from elections since 2020 that election denial is not a default for MAGA and the GOP. That’s reason for hope—within limits.

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The GOP generally concedes when it loses

In 2020, we all know, Trump refused to accept his election defeat, attempted to invalidate it through the courts, and eventually staged a violent insurrection in which he encouraged a mob to murder his own Vice President and threaten the lives of lawmakers. Trump still refuses to admit that he lost that election; his cronies and nominees regularly lie about, or dissimulate near, the election results in order to curry his favor.

Trump’s coup was a violent attack on the Constitution and on democracy—an attack which resulted in multiple deaths, and which is in many ways ongoing.

It’s also worth noting, though, that that particular attack has not exactly been repeated in the six years since it occurred. Republicans continue to attempt to steal elections and subvert democracy through gerrymandering, through voter suppression, and through other tactics. But by and large they have not attempted to deny or contest election results. When GOP candidates lose, they routinely concede.

Just looking at recent elections, for example, the high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race of 2025 was trumpeted as an existential cause by Elon Musk, who spent more than $25 million to boost the campaign of conservative Brad Schimel. Nonetheless, Schimel lost to liberal Susan Crawford by 10 points. He did not contest the election.

In Florida last month, Emily Gregory flipped the state legislative seat that includes Trump’s Mar-a-lago resort. She won by less than 3 points, or around 800 votes. Despite the high-profile nature of the race, and despite the relatively narrow win, Gregory’s opponent did not contest (though Palm Beach County conducted an audit of the results anyway to forestall any controversy.)

You could multiply examples almost indefinitely, because, again, the GOP continues to concede elections when they lose as a matter of course—even when they lose by a narrow margin, even in elections that the right has singled out as particularly important.

When the GOP doesn’t concede

There have been a few elections since 2020 where the GOP tried to undermine democracy and block election results. The first and most obvious is in 2024 where Trump (once again) refused to commit to accepting election results unless he won. It seems clear that if he had lost he would have tried to challenge the outcome—definitely in the media, probably in court, possibly with violence.

One candidate who did refuse to concede in 2024 was Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate for the North Carolina Supreme Court. Griffin lost a very close race to Democrat Allison Riggs; Riggs won by 734 votes out of more than 5.2 million cast. Griffin launched a lengthy challenge, attempting to invalidate absentee ballots in Democratic-voting counties, claiming those voters had incomplete registration information. The case dragged on for six months until a federal judge finally threw it out and ordered the election certified. Riggs held her seat, maintaining the court’s 5-2 Republican majority.

The other high-profile example of Republicans obstructing election results occurred in the US House. Democrat Adelita Grijalva won a special election to AZ-7 in September 2025. Her opponent did not attempt to overturn the results. But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson did not want her to be the last vote needed to secure a discharge petition for the release of the Epstein files. He therefore refused to seat her for 50 days, an unprecedented stalling tactic. You could argue about the definition, but I think it’s at least arguable that Johnson was in effect refusing to concede the election on behalf of his party.

It’s difficult to draw generalizations from a very small data set. But to go out on a limb, it seems like the GOP contests elections when, (a) Trump is on the ballot (b) Trump is personally committed to blocking the election or (c) the results are extremely close.

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Why doesn’t the GOP contest more elections?

One other takeaway here is that when the GOP does contest elections, they tend to lose. Grijalva was eventually seated and signed the Epstein petition; Griffin lost his challenge; Trump did not stay in office in 2021. The 2000 election of George Bush is the grim and very consequential counterexample, but that is a quarter century ago now.

Contesting elections is difficult, time-consuming, and often fails, or worse, backfires. Journalist Zack Beauchamp points out that Orban didn’t concede out of the goodness of his heart. He conceded because his competitive authoritarian election rigging had failed and he didn’t have the capacity or the security forces to annul results and end elections altogether in the face of massive popular revolt.

Beauchamp argues that Orbán’s best bet for regime survival — for returning to power — wasn’t staging a doomed January 6-style putsch in the face of overwhelming defeat.” Instead, his best bet, “was retreating, and doing everything he can to preserve regime elements that would allow for a return to competitive authoritarianism in the future.”

Or, to put it another way, Orban—and most Republicans—are better strategic thinkers than Donald Trump. Trump has very little interest in calculating risks or in stepping back to fight another day. He just blunders ahead, insisting that he never loses, staging a coup with virtually no chance of success because he’s convinced of his own genius and impunity.

Of course, Democrats and civil society didn’t take advantage of that blunder to crush Trump once and for all, and now we’re in hell. But the point remains that January 6 was a serious and consequential failure for Trump, and one that at least many Republicans are not eager to repeat on a large scale. They will occasionally attempt to undermine results when there is plausible deniability of good faith (as in the extremely close NC SC race). But in most cases, unless Trump himself is goading them to expose themselves (as with 2020, 2024 and Grijalva) they are aware that they, like Orban, do not have the capacity or the mandate to nullify elections.

This is obviously good news. The Republicans are generally not contesting elections or attempting to nullify elections because they can’t, and/or because they feel that doing so would end in defeat and perhaps in major setbacks for their authoritarian program. Hungary defeated Orban; the US has been defeating Republican candidates in off year elections. Those defeats stick because the authoritarians do not have the power to unstick them, which indicates that we (and Hungary too) can make future defeats stick as well.

The less great news, as Beauchamp says re Orban, is that a fascist loss, or even a number of fascist losses, do not mean that end of fascism. Orban conceded this election because he believes doing so will give him a chance to win in the future. Republicans concede because they have longer term plans for fascist success—plans which depend, for instance, on the permanent, almighty Christofascist Supreme Court.

And of course there’s always the fact that Trump has shown repeatedly in various contexts—most recently in the Iran negotiations—that he doesn’t know enough to concede when it would be in his interests. That often means worse defeats for him and his lackies. But along the way to those defeats, he can do a lot of damage, including ruining people’s lives and killing them.

Worse, if you aren’t willing to forcefully take advantage of his failures, if you lose your nerve—as I believe Joe Biden and Merrick Garland did, fascism can get back on the horse and into the presidency. Hungary now has to crush Orban. When we get the chance—if we get the chance—we need to do the same with Trump and Trumpism.

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Another week older, and deeper in derp. Published a lot this week, though didn’t get many subscriptions, alas. If you like my writing and want me to keep scribbling, consider becoming a paid subscriber! It’s $50/yr, $5/month. Help me feed the dog. Look at that dog!

(Also, paid subscribers get access to my music picks of the week down at the bottom. So what are you waiting for?!)

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Okay, here’s what I published:

Politics

Trump’s total war budget. (Public Notice)

John Stoehr interviewed me about media elites who believe their own bullshit. (Editorial Board)

Actions change minds, not the other way around. (EIH)

Democrats shouldn’t deny the Gaza genocide. (EIH)

An interview with MN Senate candidate David Costello. (EIH)

Why aren’t Republicans fleeing Trump? (EIH)

Cultural criticism

The Girl With All the Gifts vs. Brexit. (EIH)

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a shallow satire of media. (Splice Today)

Unsheathed Glory transports you to the peaceful depths of dungeon synth. (Chicago Reader)

The lovely new album by folk rock sort-of supergroup Fantastic Cat. (No Depression)

Resident Evil and crappy corporate zombies critiquing crappy corporate zombies. (EIH)

Poetry

Download my free new chapbook, Someone Else. (EIH)

Nice short reviews of a bunch of chapbooks, including my Spamtoum. (above/ground)

Tempt me not, AI. (dadakuku)

Help Me Copilot

[insert someone else’s poem here]

Aging, bleh. (Five Fleas)

The older you get
the more each new moment
recalls an old
humiliation.

Insomnia, also bleh. (Five Fleas)

Insomnia

I cannot dream
so I write poetry

From the archives

Track of the week

Read more

Earlier this week I wrote about The Girl With All the Gifts, a lyrical, melancholy exercise in bittersweet hope which gracefully extended the zombie film’s emotional and thematic range. The walking dead, it showed, do not have to be brainless.

So as a pallet cleanser, I figured I’d watch Resident Evil (2002) a movie which resurrects the old flesh but dumber and less nuanced than ever before. Still, there is a certain blunt honesty in the film’s remorseless self-consumption, as it blankly chews up its own soul, leaving its dead eyes reflecting the impressive vacuousness of bland corporate anti corporate default.

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The plot, if you want to call it that, is a bunged together collection of old tropes arranged loosely around stale video game challenges. The evil Umbrella corporation developed a T-virus which turns people into zombies. Someone stole it and released it in the underground laboratory, the Hive, prompting the semi-evil security AI to murder everyone down there in order to prevent infection. A security team is sent in to figure out what went wrong; into this highly dangerous situation they decide to drag along a random prisoner (what? why would you do that?) and also a couple of superspies who have amnesia caused by nerve gas .

“Wouldn’t you leave the injured behind?” you might ask. Or at least dress the woman superspy in something a bit more practical than a cocktail dress? And how can nerve gas cause amnesia anyway?

Good questions which will never be answered. Instead, our intrepid heroes, led by amnesia-and-cocktail-dress-wearing Alice (Milla Jovovich) traipse through the Hive dodging AI traps, zombies, mutants, double-agents, and plot holes, not necessarily in that order. The moral is supposed to be that corporations are inhumane and evil soul-suckers which consume and drive us all to consume. But it all feels more than a little hollow given the utter genericness of the supposed protagonists. That especially applies to Jovovich, who has less expressive range than your average corpse. But it also, alas, includes actors Michelle Rodriguez and Martin Crewes, who struggle valiantly but futilely against the fatal plague that is the script.

If that doesn’t sound much fun to watch—well, yeah, it’s not a lot of fun to watch, even if you just go in to see some grotesque kills and root for everyone to die. There is, though, a kind of empty, tedious poetry in watching empty, tedious protagonists fight empty, tedious antagonists inside the great empty, tedious bowels of the Hive and of the film itself.

Alice—without memory, without expression, without motivation, without character—wanders through vaguely pulsing hallways, registering a minimal flicker of surprise whenever the plot pushes her in predictable directions by throwing zombie Dobermans at her to reawaken her kick-fighting skills or reminding her with mini-flashbacks of her nobility so she can do heroic stuff. The corporate conspiracy in the film makes no sense because the corporate conspiracy that is big-budget Hollywood couldn’t be bothered to come up with a consistent rationale or narrative.

The anti-establishment anti-corporate dialogue is as disconnected from meaning or principle as the anti-establishment T&A, or the anti-establishment gore. Romero’s zombie films were actually critiques of racism, consumerism, and militarism; but this is a zombie critique of capitalism, staggering through catacombs and bumping into walls with its cortex fried and wearing the skin and skull of something vaguely living. The Umbrella Corporation’s cynicism and carelessness is the cynicism and carelessness of Resident Evil itself.

The fact that the film can be read as a metaphor for its own callous lobotomized greed doesn’t change the fact that it is a vacuous cash-grab. It’s difficult to believe this beginning spawned a whole series of sequels—but then again, zombies do not need much in the way of beauty or even sentience in order to proliferate. Resident Evil is a reminder that corporations rarely require super-secret conspiracies to spread their filth. All you need is inattention, low standards, and bad actors to set that shuffling, brainless apocalypse on its way.

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This week Trump threatened a genocide, lost an extremely unpopular war, and then Republicans got absolutely shellacked in elections Tuesday night as they have been getting absolutely shellacked in elections since Trump took office.

And yet. Barely any Republicans criticized Trump for threatening genocide; almost none of them criticized him for losing an incredibly unpopular war. Instead, as congressional reporter Steven T. Dennis noted, virtually the entire Republican Congressional caucus chose to respond to Trump’s horrific threats and incompetent defeat with silence.

Republicans who stand with Trump are getting crushed in polls and at the ballot. But their uniform reaction is to…just keep standing with Trump and hope that things get better somehow.

To put it mildly, this is not how politics is supposed to work. Usually, when the president’s approval is spiraling down towards the mid-30s and he keeps doubling down on unpopular policies, people in his party make some effort to distance themselves from the president in an effort to overperform him and keep their seats. There are always strong incentives not to criticize your own president because you don’t want to lose primaries, and also because criticizing the president can drive down his approval even more, damaging the party. But at some point—and that would be now!—self-preservation is supposed to kick in, and people in tough districts are supposed to start heading for the exits.

So—why isn’t that happening?

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One useful way to answer that question is to look at the two most exposed Republicans in Congress; Juan Ciscomani in AZ-06, and Brian Fitzpatrick in PA-01.

According to analyst G. Elliott Morris, Ciscomani’s district was Trump +1 in 2024; Trump’s approval there is now a shocking -24. Fitzpatrick’s district was Harris+0; Trump’s approval there is now -23.

You’d expect Ciscomani and Fitzpatrick to be working to distance themselves from Trump so that some of those people in their district who hate Trump will maybe vote for them.

Fitzpatrick

And Fitzpatrick is in fact doing just that. He is consistently ranked the most bipartisan member of Congress. In 2021, he was one of ten GOP members to vote to strip Marjorie Taylor Green of her committee assignments in response to comments in which she called for executing leading Democrats. In 2025 he was one of only two Congresspeople to vote against Trump’s Big Ugly Piece of Shit Bill, citing his opposition to the legislation’s Medicaid cuts. At the end of that year he was one of three Republicans to force a discharge petition to bring the extension of ACA subsidies to a vote. This January he gave an interview in which he said he had written in Nikki Haley for the 2024 election and criticized Trump’s “lack of moral clarity”.

Critics of Fitzpatrick have pointed out that his efforts to distance himself from Trump are largely performative. He regularly votes with Republicans, and tends to vote against them only when the party has enough of a margin to do what it wants without him. He portrays himself as an independent, but when the chips are down, he is a reliable vote for fascism.

The critics aren’t wrong. But the performance still matters. Fitzpatrick is doing what you expect Congresspeople in swing seats to do. He supports his party because a weak and divided party hurts him, but he takes independent votes where he can because a reputation for independence helps him in his district. He is not a hero of the republic. On the contrary, he is a fascist cog destroying the republic. But he is also a member of congress reacting fairly rationally to his electoral incentives.

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Ciscomani

In contrast, Juan Ciscomani—in a district even more anti Trump right now than Fitzpatrick’s—is doing much, much less to establish a reputation for independence. He’s said he opposes a nationwide abortion ban; he’s said he opposes cutting Medicaid. But he has voted with Trump literally 100% of the time.

Ciscomani didn’t join Fitzpatrick in opposing the piece of shit budget; he didn’t join Fitzpatrick in the discharge petition to prevent the end of ACA subsidies; he doesn’t criticize Trump’s moral character. Instead, he vomits out sycophantic pro Trump babble that you’d expect from a member in a deep red bulwark, rather than from a guy who’s constituents overwhelmingly loathe their president.

So, what gives? Why does Fitzpatrick behave like a repulsive Republican who knows he’s in a difficult district, while Ciscomani behaves like a repulsive Republican who can’t tell his deity from Trump’s ass?

Part of the issue is probably down to differences in temperament and intelligence. But I think you also have to look at the fact that the Arizona GOP is deeply broken. It continually nominates conspiratorial freaks and weird Nazis to contest winnable statewide elections which they then lose.

In 2021 the state GOP censured their own governor and John McCain’s widow for not being sufficiently rabid and awful. The party is on its way to nominating rabid whacko Andy Biggs to run for governor, and the Maricopa County GOP attacked his primary opponent for pointing out that Biggs has ties to antisemites and Nazis.

Now, I’m not saying that the Pennsylvania GOP is a model of health and decorum. They nominated antisemitic fuckhead Doug Mastriano to run for governor in 2022 and comically inept toad Dr. Oz to run for Senate and then watched both of them get crushed in (again) winnable races.

But in 2024 the party managed to settle on the merely odious Dave McCormick for Senate, who narrowly won the seat—and one victory in a major statewide race is more than the Arizona GOP has been able to do in the Trump era despite Arizona being a redder state. Nor has the Pennsylvania GOP censured Fitpatrick for his votes or for talking shit about Trump, presumably because they know he’s in a close seat and they would like him to keep holding it.

In short, the guy from the state where the GOP is completely divorced from reality is unable to figure out how to respond to electoral incentives; the guy from the state where the GOP is still tenuously tethered to reality behaves more or less as you’d expect a politician to behave. The logical conclusion is that Republicans who are not responding to electoral incentives are being influenced by a rabid authoritarian party that no longer know how or cares to do democracy.

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The party is broken

I don’t think this is a shocking revelation or anything. But I do think it’s at least somewhat controversial, and therefore worth thinking through.

You’ll often see people arguing, for example, that Republicans—in office and out—do not defy Trump because he has some sort of personal, charismatic hold over them. Or people will suggest that Republican electeds are physically afraid of Trump’s followers—as they well might be given January 6 and the way he deliberately targets them for death threats.

But Fitzpatrick shows that some Republicans do in fact run against Trump when it makes sense to run against Trump. Others like Ciscomani, do not. The difference doesn’t seem to be charisma or death threats. It seems to be the kind of state party they are associated with.

Some state GOP parties are more broken, and more openly fascist, than others. But the truth is that the Republican party as a whole is quite broken and quite fascist at this point. And that means the problem we’re facing isn’t just Trump. It’s an authoritarian party that no longer responds to democratic incentives because it hates democracy.

When elected leaders don’t respond to democratic incentives, they are easier to beat at the ballot box. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we have not just one fascist, but an entire fascist party to deal with. And that means Democrats need to do more than win elections. They need to crush the fascist party after they win.

Are they willing to do that? I hope so. But I am not as certain as I’d like to be.

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