One of the more prevalent stereotypes about Jews is that Jews hate themselves. The idea of Jewish self-hatred was popularized by Theodore Lessing’s 1930 book Jewish Self-Hatred which declared “There’s no person of Jewish blood in whom we couldn’t find at least signs of Jewish self-hatred.” Zionists or religious Jews have, for decades, painted assimilated Jews as touched by antisemitism, eschewing their faith because of their own loathing of their true Jewish essence. The charge has stuck in part because it resonates well with antisemitic tropes about Jewish inauthenticity, weakness, and rootlessness. Jews have no land; they are eternal refugees, lacking a core. It makes sense then that Jews would not even authentically embrace Judaism, but would instead be divided against themselves.

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The Believer (2001) takes the trope of Jewish self-hatred and goose steps vigorously with it. The movie, directed by Jewish screenwriter Henry Bean, is (very) loosely based on the life of Dan Burros, an American Nazi Party member who shot himself after a reporter revealed he was Jewish. The plot focuses on Daniel Balint, played by gentile Ryan Gosling. Daniel is a young, very intelligent, angry man whose struggle with God and his faith leads him to become a Nazi.

The film’s justification for Daniel’s Nazism is ingenious. We see scenes from Daniel’s childhood, in which he argues with his rabbi about the story of Isaac’s sacrifice. Actor Jacob Green, as young Daniel, utters a passionate repudiation of God as a “conceited bully”, a monstrous ogre-father who demands Abraham murder his own son simply because he is God, and because he can demand it. God’s arbitrariness and cruelty is, the film suggests, analogous to fascism. Daniel wants to be a Nazi because he wants to follow God’s example.

The film sets up an iron equation. Daniel is a believing Jew. God hates and torments the Jews. Therefore, to be true to his faith, Daniel must hate and torment Jews. Self-hatred is entwined in Jewish religious belief, and Nazis are presented as the truest Jewish believers. Daniel repeatedly praises Eichmann’s knowledge of the Torah.

At the end of the film, one of Daniel’s fascist mentors tells the press smugly that she’s not surprised that Daniel put a bomb in a synagogue (killing himself) since Jews are responsible for most antisemitism in the modern day. That’s a new twist on a standard Nazi argument—that Jews are responsible for antisemitism.

Daniel makes this point repeatedly and passionately; hating Jews is natural, because Jews are despicable—and more, Jews actually call to be hated and crushed. Jesus was crucified; Jews in Egypt were slaves—the Jew is a victim, and as such Jewish nature calls out for abuse. The disturbing opening of the film shows Daniel stalking and then beating a Jewish student (who looks quite a bit like me.) Daniel taunts the student for his weakness and then shouts at him, “Hit me! Hit me!” As a Nazi, Daniel is sneering at the student for his Jewish weakness. As a Jew, Daniel is calling out to be abused.

In The Believer, then, fascism is a kind of heretical offshoot of Judaism. Nazism is a potential at the core of Judaism, which means that Judaism innately hates itself. Believing Jews are Nazis and vice-versa.

But is this really what it means for a Jewish person to be a Nazi? Bryan Mark Rigg’s controversial book Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers is about people with Jewish heritage who joined the Nazi party. But for the most part these people weren’t conflicted Jews suffering a spiritual crisis of faith. They were people who considered themselves Germans. They tended to be baptized Christians with a Jewish grandparent somewhere in the family tree. Others were forced into the German army and concealed their Jewish identity. Others were traumatized when they learned late in the war of the full extent of the Final Solution and realized their relatives were being killed. For these people, Nazism wasn’t some sort of logical end point of Jewish faith. Rather, “Jews”, under Hitler were Nazis, when they were, because they did not consider themselves Jews. They only identified with, or were forced to identify, with Jews when Nazi racism backed them into a corner.

The concept of Jewish self-hatred assumes that there is some quintessential, inescapable authentic core of Jewish identity, and that if a Jewish person (defined by whom?) does not embrace that Jewish identity, then the person hates their truest self. But the fact is that people with Jewish heritage can have a whole range of relationships to that heritage, from passionate devotion to indifference. White Jews in the United States are generally seen as white, and they can make whiteness central to their identity if they want. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman, an all-American Christian kid named for Nietzsche’s German ideal. Did that mean they were self-hating Jews? Or did it just mean that many secular Jewish-Americans in the 1930s saw the “American” part of their identity as much more important than the “Jewish” part?

When Jews, however defined, are antisemitic, it’s generally not because Judaism is innately antisemitic, and Jews hate themselves. It’s because a lot of people hate Jews, and sometimes people who have a choice of identifies identify more strongly with the antisemites who are hating than with the Jewish people being hated.

Daniel is a stereotype of the self-hating Jew—but he’s also a particular kind of stereotypical fascist. Daniel is smart, articulate, and charismatically physical. He’s spiritually torn, and psychologically complicated. He is a case study; a pathological portrait. Nazis are odd, like Jews; they are different, like Jews; they must be explained, like Jews. The fascist circle that Daniel joins yearn for mainstream acceptance; they are (like Jews, supposedly) trying to assimilate. Fascists and Jews are marginalized together; it makes sense that you would study them together. It makes sense that they are the same person.

But it doesn’t, really. The thing about fascism and racism and antisemitism is that they’re not really all that unusual. As Trump has been eager to demonstrate, hatred of marginalized people is consistent with American history and with much mainstream American thought. If Jews sometimes hate Jewishness—if Clark Kent is an antisemitic caricature—it’s not because Jews are naturally consumed with self-hate. It’s just because there’s a lot of ambient hatred of Jews out there, and because Jewish people pick it up just like everybody else does.

It’s tempting to blame The Believer on Henry Bean’s own Jewish self-hatred. But it’s not like Jews are the only Americans who find fascists like Tucker Carlson fascinating and provocative and deep. Self-hatred assumes that the self which hates is the same as the self that is hated. But you don’t really need a self to do the hating when fascism, that poison cloud, can do it for you.

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This first ran in Splice Today. I’ve made some slight changes to update it.

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Can you create an enjoyable romcom in which the leads have no distinguishing characteristics of any sort? You’d think the answer would be obvious. But Martha Coolidge’s 1983 Valley Girl decided, for unclear reasons, to put it to the test anyway.

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The film is sort of kind of not really a Romeo and Julia riff, and sort of kind of not really a social satire. Julie (Deborah Foreman) is a privileged upper-middle class Valley Girl, like the title says. She is dating the vapid and selfish Tommy (Michael Bowen), but he bores her. She impulsively dumps him, and soon thereafter sparks fly at the beach with Randy (a shockingly young Nicolas Cage.) But Randy is poorer and sort of punk, so Julie’s friends pressure her to break up with him. Will they find true happiness?!

It is just really hard to care, since both of them are about as deep as a teaspoon. Julie is very pretty and very blond and that seems to be the extent of the character development. She has no hobbies, no dreams, no real interests, no thoughts, no discernible sense of humor. She is worried about what her friends will think of her, and kind of embarrassed by her permissive parents—whose hippie nostalgia is rote, but leaves them looking fully developed compared to their daughter.

Nicolas Cage for his part does his best with Randy—after his rejection when he bellows in mockery of Julie’s valley girl accent, he foreshadows much scene-chewing to come. Even he can’t overcome the script, though, which has him slouching around, staring soulfully, and occasionally making half-hearted declarations about how free he is. Unlike Julie, he does express a preference or two—he doesn’t like New Wave—but for him too there are no real plans and no interests. We never meet his parents or family and a drunken encounter with his ex-girlfriend doesn’t really count as backstory, just as his de rigeur stalking behavior doesn’t qualify as a personality.

Neither is the class gulf between the two clearly delineated, much less explored. Randy isn’t familiar with sushi; Julie isn’t used to packed rock bars. But there’s not much more to it than that. The claim that Randy is more dangerous or edgy is pretty thoroughly undermined by scenes of Julie’s friends partaking in sex and drugs and even in rock and roll. Randy and Julie never have intercourse, though it’s unclear whether that’s because Randy is a gentlemen or whether the script writers felt that Julie and Randy would be too interesting if they actually did the deed.

There are a couple moments where the film seems like it might be willing to have something to say or at least actual characters. Julie’s friend Loryn (E.G. Daily) has a heavy petting session with Tommy right after Julie dumps him. She asks him to be her boyfriend, and he slut shames her and rejects her. She struggles to process his cruelty, which is by far the most unpleasant thing he does in the film, validating Julie’s decision to break up with him, if she only knew about it. But Loryn never speaks about what he did to her, and the film never grapples with what it means that she’s silenced. The plot moves on to the nothing happening elsewhere, brushing Loryn off much as Tommy did.

The other suplot involves Julie’s friend Stacey (Heidi Holicker) whose step-mother Beth (Lee Purcell) tries to seduce her boyfriend. That’s an ugly betrayal of trust—but the film treats it simply as a question of who will win the guy, tricking you into thinking it’s the mom though it ends up being Stacey. There’s no recognition that having your mother try to steal your boyfriend might have implications beyond who ends up with the boyfriend, or that Stacey might need real help and face real challenges if her stepmother is willing to treat her in this way. Again, a more interesting and disturbing plotline is shelved in favor of following the romcom default to its banal conclusion.

In his contemporary review, Roger Ebert praises Valley Girl for being more realistic, and more true to teen experience, than Porky’s. I can’t really argue that point, and Ebert did not have John Hughes’ films as a point of comparison since they hadn’t been released in 1983. But we have now all seen Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink, and for all their weaknesses, glibness, racism and misogyny, they do nonetheless demonstrate that movies are a lot more entertaining when the filmmakers make some vague effort to give the people in them things like traits, motivations, and arcs. I’d even dare say that most teens do in fact have traits and motivations, and that robbing them of that makes them less realistic and less believable.

You could argue that Valley Girl paved the way for Hughes, and for much, much better than Hughes teens romcoms like Clueless or But I’m A Cheerleader. That may well be the case, but it’s still not a lot of fun to watch the tropes line themselves up with little panache and less purpose. It’s not hard to understand why this film has been largely forgotten.

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This piece was commissioned; I may offer opportunities for more commissioned reviews in the future. Watch this space!

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The 1956 novel Cop Hater is a groundbreaking police procedural—the origin point for Hill Street Blues, The Wire, Law & Order SVU, and endless other television cop dramas in which the ensemble cast, gritty competence and shoe leather are simultaneously the heroes and the narrative pleasures.

Cop Hater, though, is also a noir, complete with femme fatale and vindictive, panicked misogyny. This genre overlap is arguably just an indication of genre evolution. Author Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) was building a new kind of police crime novel, and he naturally used some of the materials of the old crime novel—masculine anxieties, female villains— to launch him on his way.

But I don’t think the overlap between policing and male panic is just a historical accident of development. Contemporary discussions of police generally focus—rightly—on racial disparities and racial hatred. But racism and misogyny are intertwined, and there’s good reason to believe that cops are charged with upholding gendered hierarchies as well as racial ones. Cop Hater in that context remains, 70 years later, a vivid account of who cops hate, and to what end.

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“A Conglomerate Hero”

In his retrospective introduction to Cop Hater from 1989, Hunter explains that as he was contemplating a new series of crime novels, he initially thought of using a policeman as a protagonist. “But then,” he says:

thinking it through further, it seemed to me that a single cop did not a series make, and it further seemed to me that something new in the annals of police procedurals (I don’t even know if they were called that back then) would be a squadroom full of cops, each with different traits, who—when put together—would form a conglomerate hero.

The hero of the 87^th precinct novels is not this cop or that cop. The hero is the police as a whole. The entire precinct—and occasionally cops from outside the precinct—represent a collective force for good, defending the city from not this evil or that evil, but from the collective amorphous forces of chaos. The goodness of the 87^th precinct does not rest with the goodness of one man (and indeed some 87^th precinct cops are very bad people.) Rather, the system itself is imbued with virtue, independent of any individual body that holds the gun.

Hunter plays with the collective identity of the protagonists in a number of ways. At times he emphasizes their unanimity, as in the following passage in which the two main characters of the novel, partners Steve Carella and Hank Bush, turn into a single efficient badge.

The doors slid open. Carella and Bush stepped into a sunlit corridor. Simultaneously, they reached for the leather cases to which their shields were pinned. Again, simultaneously, they pinned the tin to their collars and then walked toward the desk behind which another patrolman was seated.

In anticommunist horror of the period—like Invasion of the Body Snatchers—this kind of erasure of individuality might be seen as inhuman and nightmarish. But for McBain, the coordinated submersion in a corporate self is a way to signal efficiency, humility, and power. The cops are part of a machine of justice that is bigger than themselves. Law-abiding citizens should be comforted; law-breakers should fear.

Hunter also uses his new idea of conglomerate hero to wrong-foot readers who might be expecting the usual singular protagonist. The novel opens with policeman Mike Reardon getting up to go to work on the midnight shift. He admires his sleeping wife, checks in on his kids, and starts out the door. In most novels of this type, this would be your main character. But instead, mere pages after he’s introduced, he’s gunned down. The cops who show up to investigate the murder take the main character role from him, like he’s passing the baton.

Hunter likes this trick so much he uses it again. Hank Bush is, as mentioned above, one of the two main characters in the book. But that doesn’t save him. Towards the end of the novel he is shot too.

Hank doesn’t just die though. He manages to shoot his murderer and claw at his face, giving the lab techs hair and skin samples. Hank is aware he is part of a collective entity and like a worker in an ant colony he sacrifices himself in such a way as to make that collective stronger. Or as the lab tech explains, Hank knew

“…he’d been shot two or three times already, and possibly knew he’d be a dead pigeon before this was over. Whatever the case, he knew we could use more information on the bastard doing the shooting.”

The murderer keeps shooting cops. But where one cop falls, the next rises up stronger. The long arm of the law will always grab hold of the wrongdoer, because there is not just one long arm. There are many.

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“A Cloying, Clinging Embrace”

Initially, all those arms in Cop Hater believe that they are reaching for a cop hater—someone who loathes the police and is targeting them for revenge or retribution.

Over the course of the novel, that theory becomes less tenable. Among other things, as Steve Carella argues, the cops are all shot while they are in plain clothes.

“We knew these men well; we worked with them every day. Cops. We knew them as cops. We didn’t know them as men. They may have been killed because they were men, and not because they were cops.”

“Men” there doesn’t just mean “civilians”. It is intentionally gendered. The dicks are, as it were, being murdered because they are dicks.

This is where the femme fatale comes in— Alice, Hank Bush’s too, too sexy wife.

The first thing we learn about Alice is that Hank checks up on her at home a little obsessively. Then we’re treated to a scene with the two of them at home, in which Alice strips in front of Hank but refuses to have sex with him—framed as a mean-spirited tease of both husband and reader.

“Come here,” he said.

“No. I don’t want to, Hank.”

“All right,” he said.

“Do you think it’ll cool off tonight?”

“I doubt it.” He watched her closely. He had the distinct impression that she was undressing for him, and yet she’d said…He tweaked his nose, puzzled. She turned from the window. Her skin was very white against the white of her underwear. Her breasts bulged over the edges of the inadequate bra.

“You need a haircut,” she said.

After Hank is murdered, Carella goes to question Alice, and the aura of sensual menace is ramped up even further.

She looked at him wide‐eyed. Her eyes were very brown, her hair was very blonde, her complexion was fair and unmarred. She was a beautiful woman, and he did not like considering her such. He wanted her to be dowdy and forlorn. He did not want her looking fresh and lovely. Goddamn it, what was there about this room that suffocated a man? He felt like the last male alive, surrounded by bare‐breasted beauties on a tropical island surrounded by man‐eating sharks. There was no place to run to. The island was called Amazonia or something, and the island was female to the core, and he was the last man alive.

The room and Alice Bush.

The femaleness reached out to envelop him in a cloying, clinging embrace.

Just as Hank passes on the investigation to his living colleagues, so he seems to have passed on his wife and his own sexual frustration to his partner. The upright, synchronized regimentation of order is enveloped in “femaleness”, a suffocating miasma of deviance which swamps duty and righteousness.

This is the terrain of noir, and Alice is the stereotypical oversexed villainness. She hates her husband for his upright, dutiful refusal to bend to her womanhood (“Cooped up in that goddamn apartment, waiting for him to come off some burglary or some knifing or some mugging? What kind of life is that for a woman?”) And so she seduces another man and convinces him to murder a string of cops in order to confuse the issue when he finally offs Hank.

Alice’s disordered, overbearing femininity is juxtaposed in the book with the demure subservience of Carella’s fiancé, Teddy. Alice is resentful of the demands made on her and withholds sex as a kind of revenge. Teddy’s whole personality and inner life is focused on Carella, with whom she is eager to leap into bed.

Alice is defined by her hectoring; Teddy, on the other hand, cannot speak. She is deaf. And while in real life of course deaf women have agency and their own inner lives and goals, in the novel Teddy’s lack of a voice is a symbol of and a guarantor of her passivity and subservience. The good woman is a woman who does not speak and who acts only in the interest of her man. She is not even angry when Carella gives a foolish interview to the press that leads the murderer to her and puts her life in dangers.

When one cop has an argument with his wife, the novel quips about controlling women and how men are “trapped in the labial folds of a society structure.” But as is the way of such things, the joke is meant to obscure the novel’s forceful assertion that good women bow to men, and bad women who do not are to be punished. The book pretends that men live under matriarchy because that’s one way you justify, and obfuscate, patriarchy.

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The 87^th Precinct Today

Cop Hater is not innovating when it imagines men joining forces to punish and discipline the femme fatale. As just one example, in Double Indemnity, insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) finally chooses his avuncular boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) over the seductive Phyllis (Barbara Stanwych). The patriarchal order closes ranks and the suffocating rot of femininity is lopped off and sterilized. Thus virtue is restored.

The fact that in Cop Hater male virtue is restored specifically by the police, though, has a queasy resonance outside the bounds of genre. It’s something of a joke among progressives that liberals want to fix policing by adding more women cops. The point is well taken—but it’s also worth noting that even seven decades after the all-male police force shown in Cop Hater hit bookstores, women still make up only about 12% of police officers.

The demographics reflect the mission. Police and the justice system enforced patriarchy in Cop Hater, and they still do so outside the pages of genre fiction. In her harrowing study, Unreasonable Women, researcher Justine van der Leun explains that police and judges regularly refuse to intervene when women are targeted for domestic and sexual violence. When women defend themselves against abuse, however, the full power of the state is unleashed against them.

Van der Leun highlights the cases of three women, all of whom were sexually abused as children and then abused brutally by intimate partners as adults. Law enforcement did nothing to help. One woman killed her abuser; another killed her mother’s abuser; another was forced at gunpoint to help with a crime. And only at that point did police and prosecutors take an interest, doing everything in their power to incarcerate them—up to and including breaking promises of immunity.

More, the prosecutorial arguments deployed against these women sound like something Ed McBain’s cops might have used in describing Alice. Van der Leun interviews Rachel White-Domain, a Chicago lawyer who represents imprisoned survivors of sexual and domestic violence. White-Domain explains that when her clients go to court, the state has a standard story for jurors.

Nuanced stories of complex human relationships and lives saturated with violence and chaos were expunged or reworked by government employees and agencies. In their place emerged a plainer and more popular tale: The defendant was simply a slut, a manipulator, a liar who snapped for no apparent reason, or a hysteric who overreacted when a more measured, appropriate response was called for. The violence enacted against her was diminished, or disregarded, or ignored. She made it up or exaggerated. She was no more than a murderer.

If you think about Cop Hater after reading this quote, you start to wonder how much you can trust the portrait of Alice drawn by Hank and Carella and the novel. Again, we know that Hank checks up on his wife constantly; he’s controlling. We also know that he and Carella see her sexuality as aggression and violence. And we know that police officers commit domestic violence at terrifying rates—one study suggested that 40 percent of officers perpetrated some form of intimate partner violence in a six month period.

In Cop Hater, Alice is “no more than a murderer”—her motive, as Alice herself puts it in the novel, is simply that “I wanted him dead.”

But perhaps the cops are lying, as cops often do. Maybe Hank Bush beat his wife. Maybe he sexually assaulted her. Maybe she didn’t ask him for a divorce not because she preferred to kill him and torment him, but because she knew that threatening to leave him would lead to a catastrophic escalation of violence, as it often does. The fact that she is sentenced to the electric chair by a jury including eight men is not, in this reading, a sign that her feminine wiles failed her. It’s merely the usual outcome for women who dare to defend themselves from male assault.

You’d like to think that we’d moved past the retrograde attitudes of 1956. But copaganda has only metastasized since Ed McBain’s innovations in the form, and the destructive misogyny of our justice system remains ubiquitous and violent. Alice never existed. But the fantasy of Alice still undergirds police handling of intimate partner violence. The 87^th precinct continues in its lockstep patriarchal trudge, grinding beneath their feet Alice’s story, her freedom, and her life.

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Kentucky Senator and former Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized for nebulous health issues for about six weeks, since June 14. Communication from McConnell has been sparse, and while his office has said he’s improving and released a picture on July 12 and a statement yesterday, people have inevitably insisted that he’s dead. That has led in turn to a slew of nonsense claims (on social media and even in regular media) that McConnell and/or the Republican party are lying about McConnell’s health in order to nefariously seize some sneaky advantage, which the Democrats could stop if only they would be sneakier themselves.

This is all nonsense. Currently in the Senate you have to actually be on the floor to vote. McConnell has not been able to be on the floor, which means the Republicans are down a vote. This is pretty much the best outcome Democrats can hope for in a deep red seat. Instead of having a 53-47 majority, the Republicans now have a 52-47 majority. This is a win! Why are people upset at a win?

I think people are upset at a win because doomerism is really satisfying. There’s empowerment in saying that you are in the know and understand the true power and cunning of the other side, and the true weakness and treachery of your supposed allies. Acknowledging that the other side can fuck up and that sometimes your side is playing it right means admitting that there is hope, and hope can be a vulnerable thing. Doomerism feels safer—even when it objectively makes you weaker and helps the fascists.

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No, there is no way to put a Democrat in that seat

As is the generally the case with conspiracy theories, the exact claims are vague and shifting and based on varying degrees of ignorance. But the broad claim is that if McConnell stepped down, somehow a Democrat, or at least a better Republican, would replace him, leaving us stronger than we are currently with Republicans down a vote in the Senate.

There is no credible version of this argument. Let’s go through some of the variations.

If McConnell steps down, Democratic governor Andy Beshear can appoint a Democrat.

This is false. A 2024 Kentucky law requires empty Senate seats to be filled by special election; the governor does not appoint a replacement.

But isn’t that law unconstitutional?

Yes, Beshear has suggested that the 2024 law may violate the state Constitution. So, if McConnell dies or steps down, Beshear could well try to appoint a replacement—at which point there would be a lot of legal back and forth, probably leaving the seat empty for a good while. Which is, again, the outcome we currently have.

In any case, Beshear can’t challenge the law until the seat is empty. And the seat is not empty.

Why doesn’t Beshear just declare the seat empty and appoint a Democrat then?!

Again, see above about why Beshear is almost certainly not going to be able to appoint a Democrat.

But in addition, Beshear has literally no power to declare the seat empty. Were he to say, “the seat is empty,” it would have exactly the same legal force as me saying the seat is empty and appointing a Democrat. Governors have zero say in when a Senate seat opens. The only one who has a say is the Senator in question—and/or the Senate as a whole, which can expel members with a two-third majority vote.

The seat is not vacant until McConnell dies or resigns. He hasn’t resigned. And, while I know conspiracy theorists will scoff, he’s almost certainly not dead. There would be a death certificate; the hospital would have a lot of incentives not to lie about it. He’s probably incapacitated. He may well not be able to return to the Senate this term (which, to be clear, would be ideal.) But he’s still breathing and he’s not willing to let go of the seat. (Which benefits Democrats!)

Isn’t McConnell stalling so there’s no special election and he can keep Thomas Massie out of the seat?

This is one of the most bizarre variations. People have decided that if McConnell vacates the seat before early August, there will be a special election, which somehow Thomas Massie will win. So Republicans are denying McConnell is dead to deny Massie the seat.

First of all, Massie got stomped when running for reelection in his own district earlier this year; his opposition to Trump has destroyed his standing in the party. There’s zero evidence that he could win a statewide primary race.

Second, the whole claim that there’s a deadline in the first place is gibberish. It seems to be based on the fact that after notification there is 63 days to hold an election, some garbled math, and the assumption that the election would have to be held by or before the general election.

But in fact, there’s no reason a special couldn’t be held in late November or December to fill the seat for a few weeks before the winner of the general election takes over. So there is no deadline. It’s nonsense.

Also, there’s no primary! According to CNBC, “Because of the compressed timeline, Kentucky’s political parties would choose their nominees for the special election.”

So Massie couldn’t run an insurgent campaign. *Nobody* could run an insurgent campaign. The parties would each pick a candidate, and in deep red Kentucky the Republican would almost certainly win the opportunity to hold a seat for a few months before another Republican (or more likely the same Republican) is seated for the new term.

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And the worst arguments

Shouldn’t Beshear fight anyway to show Democrats are fighting fighters?!

No. Fighting to hand the opposition a Senate seat does not show you’re a fighter. It shows you’re a foolish dipshit.

Again, Democrats have a major win as long as McConnell squats in the seat and can’t vote. The Republicans have unilaterally abandoned a deep red Senate seat. If Beshear does nothing, Republicans are down a seat. If Beshear declares the seat empty, he gives the Republican supermajority an excuse to impeach him because he doesn’t have the power to declare the seat empty—and in fact the McConnell will just stay in the seat, because Beshear has no power to remove him..

Democrats often fail to fight. They should be criticized when they don’t fight. But this is like saying, “Chuck Schumer must put on his green lantern power ring and give Republicans an additional seat in the Senate!” First of all, that is impossible. Second of all, this would hurt Democrats! What are we even doing here?

Okay, but what about the principle that voters should have Senate representation?

Voters in Kentucky have again and again elected McConnell, one of the most evil and destructive figures to ever serve in the Senate, which is saying something. He has repaid them by trying to destroy democracy and install a judicial Christofascist oligarchy. He sort of kind of doesn’t like Trump, but that doesn’t make up for his decades of work on behalf of white supremacy and authoritarianism.

I think everyone should have representation. I do not think we owe it to Republican voters in Kentucky to bend over backwards to help them with their long-term efforts to impose fascism on the rest of us. And as for Democrats in Kentucky, who have been deliberately and brutally denied representation and power, I think that the best way to give them some level of voice in the Senate is to sit back and let McConnell’s seat sit empty for as long as possible.

Demanding a fight when there is no reason to fight is boneheaded. Demanding we fight to help the fascists is somehow even more boneheaded than that. The Republicans are punching themselves in the face. We do not have a moral imperative to stop them. We have a moral imperative to get out of the way.

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People want Republicans to be powerful

If Chuck Schumer were sick and not voting for weeks, Democrats would be able to do the math and would be enraged that Schumer was damaging the party by refusing to step down. Why is it then so hard to see that McConnell is fucking over Republicans? If you abandon your seat and won’t let anyone else fill it, you are hurting your party. This is not rocket science.

I think the confusion is based in a kind of doomerism. People see McConnell specifically, and Republicans in general, as scheming cheaters who are always laser-focused on destroying the republic and crushing their enemies. Didn’t McConnell refuse to seat Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland? Didn’t he rush through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett? Hasn’t he enabled Trump at (almost) every turn? He’s a malevolent genius; there’s no way he would refuse to step down unless he knew he was helping Republican’s fascist goals. Right?

Again, McConnell is a deeply evil figure. But that doesn’t mean he’s a genius, and it doesn’t mean that his particular evil always advances the goals of his evil party. We all know that Trump is an incompetent fool who regularly does things like launch and lose pointless wars and launch failed coups. But his opponents are reluctant to extrapolate even a little bit.

Why is McConnell sitting in the hospital, weakening his party? Probably because he’s an entitled asshole who thinks he deserves to serve out his term. Also he likes being a powerful Senator and doesn’t want to give it up, or admit that he’s replaceable—even though there’s going to be a general election to replace him in November. People who have held power for decades in a death grip are loath to give it up, even if that ends up damaging the causes they devoted their lives to (see Ginsburg, Ruth.)

But the fact that Republican iniquity and entitlement can sometimes bite them in the ass doesn’t fit well with our need for undefeatable foes. Taking the win means accepting that McConnell was maybe always just kind of a stubborn asshole who didn’t have any great plan, but just mulishly leveraged the systemic advantage our system gives rural white voters.

Attributing great skill and cleverness to McConnell doesn’t make us clever and savvy; it mostly just makes us unable to make smart choices to oppose him. Similarly, dumping on Beshear is satisfying because it feels like we could easily win if only our leaders weren’t so feckless. And sometimes our leaders are feckless. But the main problem is that a lot of people just like fascism—and to beat them we need, not green lantern leaders, but a long slow slog in which we build on wins, cut losses, and refuse to give up.

Conspiratorial thinking can feel empowering because it allows us to see ourselves as possessed of secret knowledge. We understand the true fearsomeness of the enemy; we understand the secret lever of victory which the spineless refuse to pull.

The problem is that conspiratorial thinking is built on lies and nonsense, and as such is a bad basis on which to defeat very real and dangerous opponents. When you demand Democrats take steps to help Republicans obtain an extra Senate seat, you’ve very much lost the plot. Not least because when you make those demands you invalidate yourself and your allies and movements. We desperately need to push Democrats to be better and to oppose fascism in every way they can. But if you keep demanding they do impossible and counterproductive things in the name of garbled nonsense and supposed fightiness, they are going to feel justified in ignoring you.

If the fascist threat is real (it is!) we have a responsibility to defeat it. That means putting forward aggressive but real strategies for change. And it also means recognizing when you have an advantage and building on it rather than going into a rage spiral over nonsense. There is no easy path to victory. But if Mitch McConnell insists on tripping over his withered dick, for god’s sake, let him.

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It sometimes seems like the left is afraid of speech.

No, people on the left are not totalitarians who want to stifle dissent; that characterization is a right wing fantasy. But the left does often express a distrust of speech as inauthentic, false, and deceptive. People, the left worries, may express left opinions to impress others, or to show they’re part of a particular group. They say what others want to hear, rather than what they really think. They make easy claims to righteousness, rather than doing the hard work of fighting injustice. Feminist and anti-racist writers don’t actually want to change the world, is the worry. Instead, they just want to people to cheer for them, and to build their careers. Speech, as a goal in itself, may be undermining the movement.

There’s no shortage of speech about the inauthenticity, self-indulgence, and danger of speech acts. Jia Tolentino at Jezebel, for example, wrote a popular post denouncing the genre of essays in which authors boast about avoiding media by white men. Reading and buying books by women and people of color is a good goal, Tolentino says, but it can quickly turn into (white, male) people patting themselves on the back for being awesome, rather than actually promoting books by diverse authors. Or, as Freddie deBoer puts it in somewhat self-contradictorily jargony prose, “I think that there is a habituated vocabulary of progressive derision that has come unglued from actual progressive practice.” For deBoer, much left speech is not about the hard work of changing the world, but is instead about “signaling your progressive virtuousness to the already convinced.”

You can see deBoer and Tolentino’s point — talk is cheap. How does saying, “I’m only reading books by women!” help women in any concrete way? Shouldn’t you be out there protesting, or contributing to Planned Parenthood instead? Speech is a distraction, and can even cause harm, when the privileged get paid to flaunt their virtue at the expense of those who are actually marginalized and suffering.

But doesn’t this argument cut both ways? Yes; boasting about reading non-white authors can be self-indulgent signaling. But what about boasting about seeing through the self-indulgent signaling? When Freddie deBoer declares that other progressives are signaling their progressive virtuousness, isn’t he in turn signaling his own virtuous superiority to those other progressive’s faux virtuousness? And when I point out deBoer’s signaling, then I too am signaling, and on and on.

Speech; it signals. When you speak, you aren’t just speaking about what you’re speaking about; you’re saying something about yourself. To say, “racism is bad” is to say, “I am the type of person who thinks racism is bad.” Speech is about identity and community as well as about denotation. We are all already corrupted as soon as we open our mouths or hit the keyboard. Even Jezebel and Freddie deBoer are tainted. The world is corrupt, and we have no recourse but to fall silent and weep.

Before we despair, though, it seems like it’s worth asking: why are we afraid of identity and community? What’s wrong with signaling, anyway? Political movements are in part about convincing those you disagree with, through lobbying, protest, and argument. But they’re also about creating consensus and norms among those who do agree with you. Yes, deBoer is engaged in self-vaunting when he runs around telling everyone that they’re not focused on the cause like he is. But he’s also engaged in trying to build a community consensus around the idea that people should be focused on the cause. Signaling doesn’t just say, “Hey, I, Freddie deBoer (or Noah Berlatsky) am great!” It also says, “This is how you go about being a good person.”

Political movements need community, which means that they need signaling. It’s true that bad actors can use elaborate declarations of virtue to obscure their own wrongdoing, and you want to watch out for that. But knee-jerk accusations of hypocrisy and bad faith can also be corrosive. The fact that people on the left use language to signal that they belong to the left is not a cause for hand-wringing. It’s an inevitable part of any effort to create, disseminate, and codify a common set of values. You can’t build a progressive movement on fear of community—which means you can’t build a progressive movement on fear of the ways in which people signal to each other that they belong.

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This first ran at Splice Today some years back, but I think the point is still relevant! (some links are now dead, but left in out of stubbornness.)

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Here’s what I published this week.

Politics

Trump is the orange, sagging face of explosive diarrhea. (Public Notice)

Talked to Stephen Robinson about Platner, El-Sayed, and the problem with attacking the left. (PlayTyperGuy)

MAGA’s vision of progress and its roots in liberalism. (EIH)

Democrats oppose Israel because Israel supports Trump. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Her Private Hell is a triumphantly plotless exercise in style over substance. (Splice Today)

The Thomas Crown Affair and empowerment for rich white male assholes. (EIH)

Dust Bunny and empowerment you know is a fantasy. (EIH)

Trading Places vs. the myth of meritocracy. (EIH)

Poetry

Two poems. (Five Fleas)

After Jean Valentine

footprints
slowly
fill with snow

write a different poem
slowly
not about snow

Purity

I do not read poetry.

I do not want it to affect

my voice.

The struggle is real. (smols)

don’t

want

to

do

list

From the archives

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Track of the week

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Yesterday I wrote about The Thomas Crown Affair, a tedious rich white male empowerment fantasy which trudged stolidly through the predictable tropes while (per the tropes) loudly trumpeting its innovation and unpredictability. Today, in contrast, I’m going to write about Bryan Fuller’s Dust Bunny, an empowerment fantasy that grabs every trope in sight and dumps it into the mouth of a giant fanged bunny.

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Part of what’s so wonderful about the (weird, ravenous, adorably fuzzy) empowerment fantasy offered by Dust Bunny is that it’s so upfront about the fact that it’s a fantasy. The film starts out in the same kind of space of magic children’s logic as Alice in Wonderland, Time Bandits or Labyrinth. Eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is terrified of a monster living under her New York apartment bed; she fears it will eat her if she touches the floor.

Aurora’s parents understandably doubt the existence of said monster, and we aren’t sure what to believe either. The camera catches shadows and rumbling and floorboards rising disturbingly. But are we supposed to understand those hints as real in the film or just as a fantasy within a fantasy? We know anything can happen in a movie, but we don’t know what level of anything we’re dealing with here. Director Fuller, by forcing you to constantly try to figure out how much disbelief to suspend, makes you constantly aware you’re suspending disbelief, even as it forces you into the position of a child who hasn’t quite figured out which parts of the world are real and which parts are in her head.

The movie eventually does explain itself—but almost always in ways which preserve the dream-like improbability. Parents are devoured offscreen as Aurora hides under the covers. She follows her neighbor in 5B (Mads Mikkelsen) into Chinatown, where she dons a stylized bunny mask and watches him fight a Chinese dragon, or maybe men who make up a Chinese dragon. She steals money from the collection plate at a rock and roll hip-swinging Church service as surreal as anything else in the film, and then offers to hire 5B to kill her monster. It turns out he’s an assassin, and thinks her parents were killed by people trying to get him. Threats on her life, and his, escalate from there, culminating in a extended, improbable assassins vs. FBI vs. tunneling bunny monster free-for-all, in which everyone tries, with more or less success, to stay off the floor.

Is an assassin as your next-door neighbor really more feasible than a creature under the bed? Would the FBI really be investigating a child protection issue? Even when the film is “real” it’s not especially real. And yet, the core of the film, around which the varying levels of nonsense swirl, is Aurora’s trauma, and the way that trauma bonds her to 5B. Which feels very real indeed.

Aurora’s monster came into being, she says, when she wished for it to appear and devour her parents because they were not being nice. We never learn exactly how they were not nice, but her lack of affect when discussing them, and the refusal of details, suggest grim possibilities. The monster which eats her parents is both her salvation in this case and a metaphor for her parents themselves—and perhaps for the foster families who have adopted her and disappeared in turn.

Aurora is a solemn, stubborn child, courageous in pursuing safety and affection even as she remains firm in her belief in horrors. So firm that she makes you remember, amidst all the improbabilities, that there re in fact horrors visited upon children, not infrequently by their own parents.

(Spoilers coming if you care about that sort of thing.)

Mikkelson plays 5B as a soft-spoken skeptic of certain monsters and a weary believer in others, not least his own boss Laverne (Sigourney Weaver) who is also his mother. Her interactions with him are annoying and hectoring rather than abusive—except for the part where she tries to have Aurora murdered because the child has seen 5B’s face. Oh and she also starts snarking at one point about how she thinks it’s a bad idea for 5B to try to heal his childhood trauma by adopting a daughter.

Aurora stands up to Laverne more consistently and effectively than 5B does—not least when her monster rises from the subconscious repressed space under the floorboards and devours the evil mother. That’s the empowerment part; Aurora realizes that the monster she wished for is hers; facing her fears gives her power over them and over those who would hurt her. She’s a superhero, and her superpower is a giant slavering (though also kind of cute when it comes out into the light) subterranean underbed bunny.

You could see Aurora’s power as a metaphor for her determination and resilience. You could also see it as a metaphor for her growing relationship of love and care with 5B. But perhaps the most poignant reading is that her superpower is not a metaphor at all, but a fantasy. This is a film. It’s telling you things are all right, but that’s what films do. It’s not real. There are no monsters under the bed and no noble assassins to save kids from the monstrously powerful people who can ruin their lives.

The frolicking demon bunny shadow running along beside the car that takes Aurora and 5B into the sunset is simultaneously a cute victory lap and a reminder that monsters are not so easily evaded as Hollywood often likes to suggest. You can leave the apartment and find a new home, but trauma will be under that bed too. Dust Bunny follows the script at least insofar as everything turns out okay. But its power is that it knows it can only maintain that fiction by not looking too hard at what’s under the floor.

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This was commissioned by a film professor who thought it would be fun to share with their students. It’s therefore for people who have seen it already—which means I get to dispense with worrying about spoilers. Yay!

Also I hate this movie,and it should be spoiled.

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Women rarely get to give chase, art thief Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) smugly tells insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) in John McTiernan’s The Thomas Crown Affair. Later, after their sparring has progressed to sex and then to breakfast afterwards, she sighs, “I hate being a foregone conclusion.”

Catherine wants to get to do the things women don’t; she does not want to be in the standard narrative position of being the one pursued and falling gracefully into the bed of her pursuer. And yet, even as the movie touts its edgy suave flouting of the rules and the status quo, it ends up doing the most boring thing possible, wearily reproducing the standard gender scripts of heterosexual heterosexing, admirably omniscient men, and women as expensive and admiring prize. Mastery of crime is mastery of masculinity and femininity, in the movie’s simplistic formulation—complicated only by the stodgy insistence that there is no crime.

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Before he is an art thief, Crown is a fabulously wealthy finance asshole who gets off on the thrill of swindling other finance assholes, wrecking sailboats, and plotting incredibly intricate crimes. After he steals a fabulously expensive Monet with his excessively tricksy tricks, Catherine is sent by the insurance company to find the culprit and avoid the $100 million payout.

Catherine is presented initially (a la Trinity in the Matrix) as a hypercompetent investigator and observer; she identifies Crown as the criminal by simply scoping him out (with the sexual connotations very much in place.) In the terms of Laura Mulvey’s famous essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Catherine is taking the place of the iconically male viewer, who both enjoys the sensual pleasure of the bodies spread out before him and identifies with the protagonist, whose all-seeing gaze controls plot and action. Catherine’s fetishy high heeled lace up boots and her comfort with toplessness figure her as powerful and deviant, as does her refusal to pursue the expected romance arc offered to her by nice guy Detective Michael McCann (Denis Leary).

But this flipping of gendered scripts is, like the heist itself, all feint and no payoff. The Thomas Crown Affair is not Bound or Femme Fatale, or Drive Away Dolls where the creators are genuinely amused and exhilarated by the possibilities of castration, lesbianism, and seizing the gaze and/or the phallus from the patriarch. On the contrary, Thomas Crown merely raises those criminal and unsavory possibilities in order to reject and discipline them.

That discipline consists in large part of reiterating, over and over, that it is not Catherine who sees effectively, but Thomas. Catherine believes that she is the mistress of the gaze, but after she makes some initial impressive deductions, the movie relentlessly, monotonously, and not a little sadistically insists that it is not her, but the guy with the crown who sees all. When Catherine thinks she’s found the Monet, it turns out to be a fake painted on top of a picture of dogs playing poker—a personal taunt, since we’ve been told that her brothers didn’t let her play poker with them.

Similarly, Thomas makes Catherine think that his sexy young associate Anna (Esther Cañadas) is his mistress rather than his forger in order to manipulate her into a position of vulnerability. He substitutes a Pisarro for a Monet, he substitutes a tropical island for New York after they get on his private plane, he constantly anticipates and misleads her, in ways big and small, friendly and much less so. She has no agency; she has no will; he moves her around with nonchalant ease. It is like Pretty Woman, except for the part where Julia Roberts remakes Richard Gere as he remakes her.

Crown makes a few pro forma comments about how Catherine is the only one and how she’s transformed him. But it’s all abstract and half-hearted, especially when compared to the way that Catherine completely surrenders to his masterful machinations by the denoument.

The climactic scene of the film (double entendre intended) is back in the museum, where Crown has promised to return the Monet, and Catherine (who believes he has cheated on her) warns the police to catch him in the act. Thomas, wearing a bowler hat in honor of the famous Magritte painting, has paid tons of other bowler-hatted doggelganger’s to wander through the halls with him, baffling the cops.

Catherine, almost weeping with relief and excitement she watches on the video monitor. She is no longer in control of the gaze—she doesn’t even know which Thomas she is looking at. Instead, she is reveling in her disempowerment before his masterful orchestration of image and pleasure. Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” plays in the background, a song by a Black woman about (among other things) racial oppression which is here manipulated by Hollywood so that it turns into a tribute to the utterly contentless “rebellion” of a massively wealthy white jerk.

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Catherine’s humiliation isn’t done though. Having learned that Thomas was not unfaithful, she rushes to their rendezvous only to be met by another bowler-hat wearing double who hands her another stolen painting (one she particularly loves) as a kind of punishment for her lack of trust in Thomas—a lack of trust which he anticipated, as he anticipates virtually all of her actions. He knows her better than she knows herself. When he at last reveals himself to her, having deceived and tormented her for his own amusement, she can do nothing but wipe her tears away and leap into his arms. She whispers to him that if he pulls such a stunt again she will break his arms, but the castration threat is by this point simply a further restatement of her impotence and acquiescence—a sign that she is the kind of expensive, interesting, edgy acquisition that it is worth his while to acquire.

In his bemused review, Roger Ebert wonders at the patness of it all:

Despite the cleverness of the caper and the beauty of the lush locations, the wit in the dialogue and the neat twists and turns, it never seems to risk anything. There’s something odd about a caper romance where you never believe anyone is really ever going to go to jail or bed.

But the lack of risk—or specifically the way that the movie mimes risk in order to present an absolutely riskless two hours of Hollywood boilerplate—is undoubtedly the point. The film is about restoring and reasserting truths of gender, of class, of hierarchy by reappropriating and taming the challenge posed by career women—or really the challenge posed by women with autonomy of any kind. Women try to assert their ability to see and to control their own narratives, but a masterful man—armed with vast wealth and a suitably banal taste in art—can mold them to his whims and plots. The Thomas Crown Affair is disguised as a caper romance, but beneath that overpainting, it’s really yet another dreary exercise in anxious male competence porn.

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The US bipartisan consensus on Zionism is dying. Last week almost half of the House Democratic caucus voted to end military aid to Israel; that followed a vote in May in which almost the entire Senate Democratic caucus did the same.

Candidates who oppose Israel aid, and Israel’s wars and genocides, have been winning stunning upsets. Over Trump’s term, Analilia Mejia and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, Daniel Biss in Illinois, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier have all defeated Democratic incumbents or won open seats against AIPAC opposition. Currently Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is doing well in primary polls against Haley Stevens, despite the fact that AIPAC has spent a record-breaking $30 million to defeat him.

This political transformation is often presented by centrist Democrats as a kind of betrayal of Democratic principles and/or as a left insurgent takeover. Neocon James Kirchick sums up this analysis in his Atlantic article titled, “The DSA is a parasite: the left-wing faction is hijacking the Democratic party.” If you poke around social media you’ll also see people declaring that the left hates Democrats, or (more than) implying that these candidates are not really Democrats and therefore cannot really represent the party.

These arguments are confused in a range of ways. I think in particular, Zionist Democrats fail to see that left candidates are winning in part because normie Democrats see AIPAC and Israel as categorically and deliberately opposed to the Democratic party and its values. Politicians who take money from AIPAC, or who endorse Israel without caveats are, in the eyes of primary voters, betraying Democrats.

More, this position is going to be difficult to argue people out of largely because it is true.

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Israel is opposed to Democratic party values

Over the last couple decades, it has slowly dawned on Democratic party voters that Israel’s government and is very right wing. Netanyahu—a far right warmonger, ethnonationalist, and racist—has been the dominant force in Israeli politics for at least 15 years, and arguably for 30. During that same period, under Obama and Biden, Democrats have seen themselves more and more clearly as a party of multi-racial democracy defined by their opposition to an openly racist and fascist movement. You’d have to be pretty dense not to look at Netanyahu and say, “wait, why are we giving this guy guns?”

Democratic voters are not, as it turns out, completely dense. As I discussed here, the party base has been increasingly skeptical of Israel and Zionism. In 2016, 43% of Democrats sympathized more with Israel compared to only 29% saying they sympathized more with Palestinians; in 2018, that number had slipped to 27% of Democrats who said they sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians vs. 25% who said they sympathized with the Palestinians. in 2026, after this most recent horrific stage of Israel’s genocidal policies, only`17% of Democratic voters sympathize with Israelis while 67% of Democrats sympathize with the Palestinians. Over a decade, supporting Israel went from a +14 issue for Democrats to -50.

Again as I’ve mentioned before, progressives sometimes talk about AIPAC as if its power comes from its money and its ability to bribe representatives. But this is not in fact how AIPAC’s power has worked in the past. The org has a lot of resources because there are a lot of rich people (many of them Republicans, by no means all of them Jewish) who find Zionism congenial. But those resources were so effective because Democratic primary voters wanted to elect pro-Israel candidates. AIPAC could run an ad identifying its preferred candidate, and that candidate would cruise to victory because when people knew who AIPAC supported, they wanted to support that candidate too.

Things are very different now after a 64-point swing. AIPAC support is now an anchor because people oppose its goal of funneling more weapons to Israel and fighting for Netanyahu. Democratic voters see Israel as opposed to principles of equality, freedom and antiracism which Democrats (however imperfectly) see as important to their party.

In desperation AIPAC has taken to trying to funnel money through deceptively-named PACS so people don’t realize its backing the candidates it’s backing. But this just makes voters even angrier when reporters unearth the connections (no one likes being played for a fool). And it doesn’t get at the underlying problem, which is not AIPAC itself, but the fact that advocating for unlimited arms so Israel can murder more Palestinians is extremely unpopular with a Democratic electorate that thinks racist mass murder is bad.

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Israel is opposed to Democrats

It’s not just that Israel and AIPAC are opposed to the values of Democratic voters. Netanyahu and those who support him have made it increasingly clear that they also flat out oppose Democrats, want the party to lose, and want the US turned over to the fascists.

There was a time when AIPAC and Israel were very careful to avoid partisanship precisely because they wanted both parties onside and did not want Israel policy to be at the whims of the US electorate. Bipartisan advocacy has become more difficult though as the two parties have become more polarized on basically everything. So Netanyahu just shrugged and embraced the GOP.

In 2012 Netanyahu walked up to formally endorsing Mitt Romney; after Obama’s reelection he bypassed the president to lobby Congress against the Iran nuclear deal at the request of then House Speaker John Boehner. His relationship with Trump in his first term was famously enthusiastic. In contrast, he could barely bring himself to congratulate Joe Biden when Democrat’s most ardent Zionist won in 2020. In Trump’s second term, Netanyahu called his fellow fascist thug “the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House”—and then worked with him to start the incredibly ill-conceived and illegal Iran war, which is at 92% disapproval with Democrats.

Israel’s embrace of the fascist GOP doesn’t stop with Netanyahu. Trump is hated across the world, with Israel (at least before the Iran war loss) being just about the only exception—in February he had 76% approval there. And in the US, AIPAC draws huge amounts of funding from Republican sources. It is the biggest source of GOP money going into competitive GOP primaries.

AIPAC claims its nonpartisan and simply takes its donors money and hands them to people on both sides of the aisle who support Israel. But when those who support Israel include those who supported the January 6 insurrection, Democrats can reasonably ask, as many have, what the fuck?

The Republican party is currently attempting, with a good deal of success, to end democracy and impose a fascist authoritarian regime. AIPAC and Israel clearly prefer Republican governance and are trying to boost candidates who want to disenfranchise Democratic voters and end free and fair elections. When they pour money into Democratic primaries, is that really just supporting Israel? Or are they trying to advance their fascist agenda with ratfucking?

This isn’t some bizarre conspiracy theory. J.B. Pritzker, the Jewish billionaire governor of Illinois, used to be an AIPAC donor. But, he says, “It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump.” He added, “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”

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Normie Democrats vote left because the left seems like the normie D choice

So, to sum up, Israel is ruled by a far-right asshole who loves Donald Trump. Its populace supports Donald Trump. The group that lobbies for its interests in the US supports Donald Trump and his goons. And all of these—Trump, Israel, AIPAC—embrace a genocide that the Democratic base despises and a brutal illegal war which is the signature policy of the Republican administration. Which Democrats hate.

For normie Democrats who identify as Democrats, it is at this point very clear that supporting Israel means supporting Donald Trump. And normie Democrats absolutely fucking hate Donald Trump. When you, as a Democratic primary candidate, pop up and say you are taking money from Republican donors in order to advance the Israel policies of Donald Trump, Democratic primary voters are going to be pissed off. They are going to feel like you have betrayed them. Even if they support you on other issues, they are going to be tempted to support your opponent, because (again) you are aligning yourself with Donald Trump, and most Democratic primary voters believe (correctly) that Donald Trump is a corrupt genocidal fascist who wants to kill them.

Israel isn’t the only issue in Democratic primaries, obviously, nor is it the most important one. But Zionists in primaries often seem bafflingly eager to raise its salience. Stevens talks a lot about Israel and seems eager to attack El-Sayed on the issue and boast about taking AIPAC money, even though it’s an issue that at this point almost surely damages her.

Stevens does that, presumably, because she believes that the left wing of the party is hated by normie Democrats, and because she thinks that support for Israel is core to normie Democrat identity. Once that was true. But those days are long gone. Right now, normie Democrats think (correctly) that Israel is in league with Trump and Republicans. Normie Democrats vote for candidates opposed to AIPAC not because normie Democrats are committed socialist antizionists (most are not) but because they hate Trump and AIPAC is a partisan Republican org.

No Democrat would run in a Democratic primary touting support from the NRA and opposition to an assault weapon ban because that would be a way to lose. Similarly, support from AIPAC and for unrestricted military aid to Israel is now a serious problem for Democrats in primaries. Stevens and others may win despite this. But Democratic leaders would do well to listen to Demcratic voters, who are sick of being told they need to support the human rights atrocities of a government that has made it clear over and over again that it loves Trump and wants him to rule over us as a king.

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The slogan Make America Great Again is generally discussed as a nostalgic return to a whiter, more bigoted past. As such, it functions as a conservative antithesis of liberalism’s orientation towards an ever more just and enlightened future. Kamala Harris’s slogan, “We are not going back” neatly summarized the fault lines—one party wants to go forward, one party does not.

The sharp division between MAGA yesterday and liberal tomorrow is a little too neat, though. Because while “Make America Great Again” touts a utopian past, it also looks towards a millenarian restitution; its yesterday is the basis for a tomorrow which is better than today. In that sense, MAGA is arguing not (just) that we should go backwards, but that we have actually gone sideways. The problem is that time has gone out of joint; someone has hijacked the rocket ship to the future and sent it off down a blind alley of chaos and despair. The goal is to recapture, not the past, per se, but the past’s trajectory—to set time back on track.

From this perspective, MAGA isn’t exactly a contrast with liberalism. Instead, it’s an adaptation, or subversion or a certain kind of fulfillment of liberal ideas of how politics function in time. That’s why you will sometimes see people who consider themselves liberal cosigning Trumpism. And it’s why if we’re going to beat the fascists, we need to rethink some liberal preconceptions about where we are now and where we’re going.

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Journey to the past

Though it’s often memory-holed, liberal views of time in the past were inseparable from liberal investment in colonialism. Specifically, liberal discourses of progress were organized around the belief that the past was geographically present; to journey to the dark ages, all you had to do was get on a boat and sail to where there were dark people. For Europeans, the passage to Africa, or the Americas, or the Middle East, or the South Pacific, was not just measured in miles, but in centuries. Or as scholar John Rieder puts it, “the other’s present is the colonizer’s own past.”

Rieder makes his comment in a discussion of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. Wells staged the Martian invasion as a parallel to the European invasion of Tasmania; they were doing to us what we had done to them. The Martians in England (like the English in Tasmania) is “a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts of different times.” This, Rieder says, was a typical attitude derived from anthropological thinkers of the time. According to intellectual historian George Stocking, anthropologists in Wells’ day saw the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age” whose “extinction was simply a matter of…placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged.”

The anthropological hierarchy of time was a liberal, enlightened discourse, often tied explicitly to ideologies of progress and reform. John Stuart Mill infamously defended the subjugation of India on the grounds that the people there were “in an infantine, or a semi-barbarous state.”

Similarly, the kidnapping of indigenous children in North America was part of a (supposedly) civilizing project; native children were to be saved from their (supposedly) backwards cultures and brought into the present through liberal Christian intervention. This (supposed) progress was illustrated through before and after school photos, in which children who arrived at the school dusty, tired and wearing beads, long hair, and the clothes of their people were photographed a year or so later in Western clothes and short hair. These dramatic images were used to show donors how the school had miraculously dragged the children into the present. (The beatings, diseases, loneliness, cruelty and condescension the students experienced did not make it into the pictures.)

Per the liberal narrative of progress, we like to think that we’ve moves beyond this kind of simplistic racism. But have we? The 1979 film Apocalypse Now features a famous scene, lifted wholesale from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the Viet Cong attack American soldiers with spears and arrows, staging a dramatic confrontation between the dim past and the invading present. Yet as Linh Dinh argues

The phoniness of this is breathtaking. The NVA and Viet Cong did not win a modern war with arrows and spears. But a scene from a 1901 book has to be shoehorned into a 1979 movie because of Coppola’s fascination with savages.

Conrad in 1901 was obsessed with the idea of the past existing in the colonized present. Coppola in 1979 was obsessed with the same thing. And how different are we? As I’ve written before, the velociraptors in the Jurassic Park series are often presented as crafty fighters skilled in jungle ambush. They call back to Vietnam War tropes, which means that the Viet Cong have moved back from the stone age all the way to the Cretaceous.

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MAGA and the ideology of progress

You don’t need to go to the movies to see these past-is-present-over-there tropes deployed. They are a staple conceit of MAGA rhetoric and racism.

Trump himself, a la John Stuart Mill, constantly talks about immigrants and non-white people as representatives of an earlier, uglier, (supposedly) less advanced time. In 2019 he referred to Jewish Representatives Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, and POC representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush as “Do Nothing Democratic Savages.” This year he said that Somali immigrants come from “the worst country in the world, backward.”

MAGA’s golden past is, then, golden because it is, paradoxically, more advanced than the present. For MAGA, the American past was the future because it was white and therefore of the enlightened tomorrow. The American present is filled with nonwhite people and has therefore devolved into the benighted past.

This thinking, again, resonates with the history of liberal progress narratives, and as such it appeals to a range of people who in various ways consider themselves to broadly be liberals. Zionists—including both right-wing Zionists and liberal Zionists, and for that matter left Zionists like W.E.B. Du Bois—find common ground in framing Palestinians as barbaric or backwards. Biden’s insistence that Israel is a democracy even as it went about committing genocide underlines the point; some nations and some people are seen as in the vanguard of history, preserving the liberal democratic tradition. Those people are, therefore, justified in exterminating (supposedly) less advanced people who (like the Tasmanians) are really already extinct if you think about it.

Ilan Wurman, a liberal law professor who has embraced vile anti-immigrant sentiment illuminates the common ground even more starkly. On social media he wrote a post that read in part:

1. It can take 1,000 years to develop habits of thought and culture that make liberal democracy and constitutional government possible.

2. You can’t import millions of people without assimilation *today* and expect them to share those important habits.

On the face of it this is nonsensical; no one lives for 1000 years, and no one inherits constitutional government in their genes. Everybody alive today is alive today; virtually all of them are aware of democratic principles and traditions. In fact, people who grow up under authoritarian regimes are not infrequently more passionate about democracy, freedom, and equality than those who grow up in the US (a nation that is in any case not exactly a healthy democracy at the moment.)

You don’t need logic when you have discourse, though. Wurman is simply channeling the views of lots of liberal racist when he says that the people over there live in a perpetual unenlightened past. We can maybe pull some of them into the light, but also maybe we have a responsibility to just move forward, kicking the muck of yesterday off our boots with more or less genocidal force and enthusiasm. For Wurman, it’s MAGA which recognizes the racial realities of progress, and so it’s MAGA which better embodies the liberal vision of a teleological temporality.

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Better liberalism through nowness

Trump and John Stuart Mill and Joe Biden and Ilan Wurman all agree that the future and the past are spread out before them on the surface of the globe, and that the way forward is to impose the second on the first. We know where we’re going (forward!) and we know where we do not want to go (backward!). And so we know which people are the vanguard of civilization and which are detritus to ignore or obstacles to sweep aside.

If we actually want a better world for all, then, we need a different view of time and a different view of progress. No one people or place is or can be a vanguard of liberalism. We all live now. We all have to fight for freedom and equality and justice now or else we will fight for them never. Relegating certain people to the past does not protect or advance liberal or left ideas; it does not boost us into the future. It merely becomes an excuse to entrench the violence and the hierarchies of fascism.

The past does not exist on the globe. the past is past. We have not taken a detour in our progress, because there are no detours—what happens is what happened, and where we are is where we are. The people over there are not atavistic remnants of a lesser and more dangerous time. They are our neighbors, and we need their help to make a better world, just as they need ours. We need to dream of a better future right now. But we also need to recognize that that future is not embodied in any one person or any one group. Otherwise, we will just be making liberalism great again, in the worst possible way.

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The myth of meritocracy is a basic building block of most Hollywood films. Protagonists who win are possessed of moral virtue and relevant competence; villains who lose are evil and not as strong or tough or skilled as the good guys. This is always the case in action movies, but it’s even generally true by default in comedies. Mr. Green ends Clue for the final time with a shockingly skillful pistol shot, so competent even the recipient is dazzled. In Beetlejuice Barbara’s purity and niceness is such that the sandworms take her side against the evil titular ghost. An undeserving victory isn’t very satisfying, so Hollywood always makes sure it’s deserved.

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Trading Places (1983), though, doesn’t share the Hollywood consensus—or at least, it expresses caveats. Director John Landis’ film is a cheerfully pointed parable about the fundamental unfairness of the capitalist system, which it presents as built on luck, prejudice and corruption, not necessarily in that order. The wealthy in Trading Places are bloated incompetent assholes, who conspire to push the losers further into degradation and despair.

The film centers on Louis Winthorpe (Dan Aykroyd) a wealthy manager who runs the brokerage business of Randolph and Mortimer Duke (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche). The Duke brothers have an ongoing argument about the relative infuence of nature and nurture. Randolph thinks circumstances make the man, Mortimer thinks people are shaped by breeding. They place a bet of $1 to see if they can push Louis into a life of crime while transforming homeless con man Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) into a respectable broker. Hijinks ensue.

Those hijinks mostly show that neither Randolph nor Mortimer are right. In the film, nature and nurture don’t shape people; rather, privilege does. Before the Dukes start their meddling, Billy Ray is accused of trying to steal the payroll simply because he bumps into Louis on the street. The Duke’s pick him to transform because they believe he’s a thief corrupted by nature or nurture. But the truth is he didn’t do anything; he’s thrown in prison because he’s poor and black, not because of any moral failure on his part.

Similarly, Louis doesn’t slide into crime and despair because his environment changes. He slides into crime and despair because the Duke’s orchestrate a conspiracy against him. Their thuggish operative Clarence Beeks (Paul Gleason) frames Louis for theft, then frames him for dealing PCP, then pays Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis), a prostitute, to proposition him, ruining his relationship with his fiancée. They even pay Louis’ butler, Coleman (Denholm Elliott), to pretend not to recognize him.

Poverty is less an accident of circumstance than a deliberate plot. The wealthy have minions—including the police—who work ceaselessly to make sure that those without are kept without. Louis was on the side of the powerful; then he was ground underfoot. “Just be yourself, sir. Whatever happens they can’t take that away from you,” Coleman tells Billy Ray. But the whole point of the plot is that the self is something the rich can buy and sell. Merit doesn’t make you who you are; someone else’s money does.

If you give Billy Ray a house and responsibility and no reason to steal, he won’t steal. If you take Louis’ house and job and fiancée, he’ll put on a Santa suit, steal slabs of meat from the Christmas party, and drink himself into a belching, gun-waving stupor. Prejudice and a malevolent social structure push people into different boxes.

That’s the obvious critique of meritocracy. But even more telling, perhaps, is the portrait of Randolph and Mortimer Duke, two of the great villains of the 80s.

Evil rich people are often portrayed with a mixture of loathing and fascination. The wealthy bad guys in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) or in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) or for that matter in Goodfellas (1980) are appealingly violent and oversexed; they have a badness that swaggers, and a lifestyle to envy.

Randolph and Mortimer, in contrast, are not appealing or enviable in any way. They have no sex lives, and indeed no apparent desires save for money and “scientific experiments” which involve ruining the lives of friends for no reason. They are parodically stingy; the enormously wealthy Randolph gives his butler five dollars as a Christmas bonus, prompting the man to quip “I can go to the movies, by myself.” (Randolph misses the irony.) They are also viciously racist; despite Billy Ray’s success in his new job, they both agree that they have to “send him back to the ghetto” eventually because they can’t have a “n***** run our family business.” Destroying Louis’ life was unusual for them only in that Louis is white; the wealthy conspire against black people as a matter of course.

Furthermore, and importantly, Randolph and Mortimer aren’t especially good at being bad. They aren’t efficiently vicious or even moderately perspicacious; they just have lots of money and can pay people to make them more. The Dukes have spent their whole lives as Wall Street brokers, but Billy Ray is better at reading the market than they are with about five minutes of instruction. Their big money-making gambit in the film involves straightforward, rudimentary corruption; they pay Beeks to steal an agriculture report on orange juice so they can engage in insider trading. Nothing about their fortune is earned; they inherited wealth, and then they cheat to expand it.

Trading Places ultimately can’t follow through on these bleak insights, of course, or it wouldn’t be a comedy. After establishing that merit and success have little to do with each other, it has to somehow get to a conclusion in which the virtuous and talented are rewarded and the rich parasites get what’s coming to them. After they’ve stolen the agriculture report and given the Dukes a false one, Louis gives Billy Ray a pep talk about mental toughness and taking no prisoners on the pit floor. Their success in trading is thus framed as a matter of competence, boldness, and skill, even though it’s really, again, a matter of inside information.

The Dukes were wealthy assholes who didn’t deserve their money. Billy Ray and Louis take their place because they are better at the all-important game of acquiring assets. The race ultimately goes to the swift, who are also the most virtuous. Order is restored.

Similarly, even as the film identifies and condemns structures of racism, it rather helplessly reproduces them. Eddie Murphy is a much, much more interesting and charismatic actor than Dan Aykroyd. He dominates every scene he’s in, sometimes just by looking deadpan at the camera. Aykroyd’s Louis, though never convincingly evolves beyond the smug, whiney prat from the beginning of the film—not even when, in a very poor directorial choice, he spends a scene in blackface.

Yet, it’s Louis who gets the leading role. Ophelia falls in love with him, for reasons which are entirely unclear, and at the end in the pit he’s the one teaching, with Billy Ray as his mentee. The film knows that Mortimer and Randolph are rich white jerks who don’t deserve their fortune. But it can’t quite grasp the fact that being briefly poor doesn’t make Louis any better.

When Ophelia, Billy Ray, and Coleman become wealthy at the end of the film, it shows that wealth and poverty are structural positions, not moral states. Working people, sex workers, black people, and the homeless are different from the wealthy in that they have less money, not because they have less virtue or skill.

But at the same time, moving people from one place to another on the game board doesn’t change the board. Trading Places ends happily because the bad people have become poor and the good people have become rich. Coleman the butler now has his own butler to order around. The new boss is, supposedly, more meritocratic than the old boss. But as Trading Places shows, the rich lie a lot, not least when they claim that they are rich by merit.

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This first ran on Splice Today some time back. It’s still relevant, alas.

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I just love this picture of Eustacia’s giant paws. She is a large but appealing kitty.

If you want to help me keep Eustacia and her paws in food, and me scribbling, consider becoming a subscriber?! It’s $5/month, $50/year; I could really use your support this month.

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Politics

Trump’s Greenland threats are why we have no allies. (Public Notice)

It doesn’t matter what was in Graham Platner’s heart. (Sojourner’s)

Does Dem messaging even matter? w/Toby Buckle (politicalphilosophypod)

Lindsey Graham, opportunist or fascist? (EIH)

ICE’s mission is murder. (EIH)

Cultural criticism

On Nature Matters, a great anthology of global majority nature poetry. (Splice Today)

Son of Saul and a Holocaust without sense. (EIH)

Aaron Lee Tasjan’s new album celebrates the underdog. (No Depression)

Women vs. the USS Callister. (EIH)

Poetry

Timely epistle. (dadakuku)

Dead Graham

Cracker broke.

Less timely epistle. (Five Fleas)

After Liu Tsung-yüan

The birds don’t fly in these mountains now.
No footprints mark the road.

One boat, one man, one straw hat
and fish beneath river snow.

From the archive

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László Nemes’ Son of Saul (2015) is often praised as a harrowing depiction of the horrors of the Holocaust. I don’t disagree—but at the same time, one of its most striking, and harrowing, features is its refusal to provide the beats we expect in horror, or war films, or Holocaust films. The movie’s bleak accomplishment is to refuse to place the Holocaust in a comforting, or even coherent, narrative frame. It is a film which refuses not just sentimentality, but sense.

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Son of Saul is set in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where its protagonist, Hungarian Jew Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) is a member of the Sonderkommando work unit. In the initial scenes, Saul’s unit is preparing new arrivals for the gas chamber and cleaning up after their death. One boy survives the gas, however; a Nazi doctor has to personally strangle him to death and then orders an autopsy to find out why he was more resistant. Saul spends the rest of the film trying to steal the corpse and find a rabbi who will say prayers over the child and help to bury him.

At various points in the film Saul insists that the dead boy is his son. But no one seems to believe him, and he barely seems to believe himself; he never says the boys’ name, or seems to know it. While his motives may be obscure, however, they are overwhelmingly powerful. His quest leads to a at least one death directly; it also distracts him from his own crucial role in a camp rebellion. He has, as one of his exasperated fellow prisoners says, chosen the dead over the living.

While some of his companions condemn Saul, the film itself does not. Indeed, Nemes constructs the movie so that there is no distance from which it is possible to judge Saul. Throughout the runtime the camera is either in extreme close-up on his face or positioned behind his head. The viewer is looking at Röhrig angular, worn features, largely unexpressive through exhaustion and shockor is trying to peer around him to try to figure out what is happening. The events and action that would usually keep you invested in Hollywood narrative—murders, rescues, rebellion, clandestine meetings—have to be interpolated or caught in obscured glimpses. In one intensely unpleasant scene, Saul is swimming with the body and the camera sits at water level, staring into his face as he gasps, sinks, and struggles. Nothing else is visible—not his body, not the shore, not anyone else. Drowning is all there is on earth.

If the filmmaking is frustrating, Saul is perhaps even more so. There are suggestions that he was at one point a more satisfying lead character: he appears to have been actively involved in the resistance, and there are vague suggestions of a romantic arc. But by the time we meet him he seems utterly divorced from most recognizable drives, including self-preservation. The horrors around him barely register; appeals to help others or consider their desperate circumstances are similarly ignored—Saul has no compunction about taking advantage of the prisoner-doctor who pities him and tries to help him within limits. There is a flicker of guilt when his rash actions lead to the death of one rabbi, but then he’s immediately back to searching for another willing to risk all to bury this one child while the corpses mount around them.

More than once viewers are going to be tempted to shake Saul or give him a swift punch in the gut, as one exasperated plotter does. But his inert recalcitrance—his grim dedication to an idiosyncratic, meaningless, and even harmful sense of decency and right—functions as a refusal of Nazi dehumanization and of Hollywood’s confused collaboration in that dehumanization alike. Saul isn’t a grateful bystander who expresses gratitude to gentile saviors on cue. Nor is he a brave survivor and resistor embodying a vengeful heroism a la Tarantino’s Bear Jew. He doesn’t even express solidarity—except towards one boy, who he probably does not know, but whose dignity he decides, for spontaneous and mysterious reasons, is the most important thing in the world.

It’s not really a spoiler to say that the movie does not have a happy ending. How could it, when it begins with the mass murder of naked people shoved into a gas chamber, with Saul standing outside waiting for their screams to die down so he can get in and clean the floor? Yet many Holocaust films are framed as uplifting moral messages—focusing on the few gentiles who were heroes and the few Jews they saved. You’re supposed to walk away from Schindler’s List or The Zookeeper’s Daughter feeling good about humanity, secure in the knowledge that you would do the right thing in extremis, just like the photogenic people on screen.

There are no such reassurances in Son of Saul. No one shows up to help the victims, and their efforts to help themselves are mostly futile. As in the actual Holocaust, the vast majority of Jews in this world are brutalized and then die. Nor is Saul decorous, or noble, or heroic as the worst happens around him and to him. He is broken; he is cruel, he is petty; he disregards the safety and lives of others; he betrays others love and friendship and trust.

And yet, stripped of dignity and hope, Saul continues to insist that he is a moral actor, and that his sense of right and wrong, and the family he claims, through blood or whim, matters. That’s not inspirational; it’s not inspiring. It is a reminder, though of what we lose with the death of every son and of every human being.

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Analyst and writer Toby Buckle had me on his podcast where we talked forever! (If you missed the first part of the convo, it’s here.)

In the second half of the discussion, we talked about whether focusing on messaging nuances is really helpful, or whether we should maybe focus instead on changing the playing field. (You can probably guess which side I took!)

You can also find a transcript here.

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Yesterday ICE agents shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old man for whom ICE did not even have an arrest warrant. A few days earlier, ICE shot and murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who has lived in the US for decades. In both cases, ICE agents claimed that the men they killed were threatening to ram them with their cars. ICE has used this excuse before, and been caught lying. In Araujo’s case, witness testimony already contradicts ICE accounts. Immigration agents have now killed at least eleven people during enforcement activities; at least another 54 have died in ICE custody.

Every one of those deaths should be investigated; every one of the perpetrators should be tried and held accountable. It’s also important to realize, though, that these deaths are not accidental, nor are they best understood as failures to follow sober, professional law enforcement procedure. ICE agents who murder immigrants, or brown people, or those standing near immigrants and brown people, are deliberately and dutifully following the clear directives of the president and his fascist goons. Said goons have made it clear, over and over, that they want immigrants (and brown people, and Black people) ethnically cleansed, either through removal or extermination.

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Genocidal rhetoric

Trump and those around him have regularly put forward sweeping, terrifying proposals for the mass elimination of immigrants and those associated with immigrants. In 2024, Trump said he would target 18 million undocumented immigrants. Other officials in his administration said the number might actually be 30 million undocumented immigrants. This is more than twice the actual number of undocumented people, which is around 11 million.

This inflation was not a misstatement. It was deliberate hyperbole intended to frighten and motivate voters, and to justify huge funding increases (Congress has given ICE and CBP around $145 billion in Trump’s term so far.)

The ridiculous 30 million figure was also meant to facilitate the mass removal and targeting of individuals who Trump wants to declare illegitimate no matter what their status. Those individuals again including (just for a start) undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, brown people, Black people, and Democrats. The population of the US is about 340 million; when Trump talks about deporting 30 million people, he is laying the groundwork for seizing one in every 10 people in the country. As a comparison, the Armenian genocide only involved the expulsion of some 2 million people.

The Armenian genocide was, as the name indicates, a genocide; the expulsion was accompanied by 1.3 to 1.5 million deaths. This linkage of ethnic cleansing and genocide is inevitable. Mass expulsions are built on the devaluation of the lives of the people expelled; targeted people are pushed out because they are viewed as other or innately traitorous or innately degraded. States that have decided that a population is other, or traitorous, or degraded are not going to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that that population is treated kindly or humanely. The goal is elimination, and everyone understands that sometimes the easiest form of elimination is murder. (See also the Trail of Tears.)

You don’t have to extrapolate the dehumanization from Trump’s program and priorities, though. He and those around him have made their disdain for the humanity and lives of immigrants very clear.

During the presidential campaign, Vice-President J.D. Vance enthusiastically endorsed false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets—a form of blood libel that (as intended) led to a spate of death and bomb threats against city and school buildings and relentless harassment by neo-Nazis. Trump has said that Somali immigrants turned Minnesota into a “hellhole” and ranted, “They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain.” Trump has also said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Stephen Miller, the White House policy advisor and malignant racist who has driven Trump’s immigration policy, has said that birthright citizenship—the Constitutional provision that means that children of immigrants born in the US are US citizens—is tantamount to “national self-obliteration.”

When national leaders say that a particular group is murdering innocents, that they are a threat to the nation, that they are an infection, that they are ungrateful and undeserving and will destroy us—those words are not just words. They are a call for discrimination, for violence, and ultimately for genocide.

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ICE agents understand the message

Those tasked with ICE immigration and enforcement understand the message and embrace it.

Gregory Bovino, the former CBP commander-at-large who led the disastrous enforcement operation in Minnesota has referred to immigrants as “scum,” “trash,” and “filth” and has said his goal was to “dominate the border.” ICE agent Jonathan Ross called Renee Good—a legal ICE observer in Minneapolis—a “fucking bitch” after he shot and killed her. Other officers in Minneapolis used Good’s death as a threat, telling protestors, “‘Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!” Brian Palaricos, an ICE agent who murdered Keith Porter, a Black Los Angeles man, has a history of using racial slurs against Black and Latino people. An agent in Chicago shouted “do something, bitch” at Marimar Martinez, before CBP agent Charles Exum shot her five times in the arm.

Again, this kind of rhetoric, accompanied by violence, indicates that immigration management and immigration gestapo troops all understand that they are to view immigrants, non-white people, and anyone aiding immigrants and non-white people as an infection to be eliminated, rather than as individuals with moral standing to be served or protected.

These actions and attitudes are consistent with (as just one example) the treatment of people in ICE’s concentration camps, where people are denied adequate food, clothing, water, and medical care. “We’re treating these people like animals, not like human beings,” California Representative Ro Khanna told local outlet KQED after inspecting one ICE detention facility. “Whatever you think about the consequences for people who are undocumented, we should all agree that you treat people with dignity.”

Obviously, though, we do not all agree that you should treat people with dignity. The Trump administration has made their views very clear, not least by repeatedly attempting to prevent Congress members from inspecting the detention centers. The villains for Trump are not the people who dehumanize immigrants, but those who attempt to treat immigrants as neighbors worthy of respect and care.

Similarly, after CBP agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Stephen Miller rushed to social media to lie that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” This immediate demonization of agents’ victims is a clear, loud signal to those agents that they are doing their job when they terrorize and kill immigrants and those who stand with immigrants.

So, to sum up, the Trump administration has said that it wants to commit mass ethnic cleansing and has made it clear it views immigrants as refuse and debris; immigration agents have acted on these orders by dehumanizing and terrorizing immigrants; administration officials have backed them up and reiterated their support. In this context, acts of murderous violence are not aberrations or accidents. They are a considered and deliberate policy.

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Abolish ICE

Trump’s genocidal plans are very unpopular, and that has meant that he and Miller and Vance have sometimes had to back off and disavow their intentions. Bovino was removed from command; DHS secretary Kristi Noem was fired after failing to defend Trump policies adequately before Congress; the horrific Minneapolis ICE surge in which Pretti and Goode were killed was drawn down. For the last few months ICE activity has been quieter.

But the recent upsurge in kidnappings, detentions, and murders is a reminder that these strategic retreats did not change the fundamental genocidal commitments of the administration. New supposedly kinder gentler DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is not in fact kinder and gentler; he is defending the agents responsible for the killings in Maine just as administration officials have knee-jerked defended other murderous ICE agents because they all believe that murder is an accepted and even encouraged part of the job.

ICE and CBP act as, and are intended to act as, a terrorist gestapo eliminating targeted populations and any political enemies who happen to get in the way. You cannot reform a fascist gestapo by demanding that its agents identify themselves, or by demanding they wear body cameras or by giving them better training in how to handle people in cars. A fascist gestapo is not making an error when it tortures and murders non-white people and political opponents. A fascist gestapo murdering non-white people and political opponents is fulfilling its purpose—a purpose, again, clearly articulated by Trump and his loathsome henchthugs.

If ICE and CBP continue in any form, they will function the way local police departments function—as unaccountable political actors with guns who work to increase their own power and to deliberately destabilize regimes which are not sufficiently brutal and racist. There is no path out of fascism that involves the continued funding and empowerment of a massive, bloated fascist state militia. ICE is a violent, racist, genocidal institution. It needs to be abolished and its funding used to provide reparations to its victims—those victims including, at this point, every immigrant community in the US.

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South Carolina Senator Linsdey Graham, who died suddenly this weekend, was a figure of evil contradictions. On the one hand, he was a consistent proponent of vicious American colonial power, advocating across the decades for war, war, and more war, especially in the Middle East. On the other hand, the last decade of his life was defined by his personal and political attachment to Donald Trump, a man who entered Republican politics by denouncing forever wars and despicably fawning over Putin’s Russia, one of the many foreign nations whose people Graham fantasized about obliterating.

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The apparent dissonance here has led Graham’s antagonists to accuse him simultaneously of monomania and lack of principles. Critics justifiably pillory him as a “warmongerer, someone eager to spill blood on behalf of foreign interests,” in the words of NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie. But they also point out how he went from a harsh Trump critic in 2016 to an enthusiastic Trump ally and sycophant—leading Steve Schmidt to famously characterize him as “a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators.”

So which is it? Was Graham someone who had evil principles and stuck to them, no matter what? Or was he someone who, in Schmidt’s words, “knew better”, but was at bottom an opportunist who initially attached himself to the orbit of media darling Arizona Senator John McCain, and later to the orbit of media darling Donald Trump?

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A consistent Graham-first ethos

As the subhead of this post indicates, I don’t think there needs to be a contradiction here. Graham supported endless war and supported Trump for essentially the same reason—a faith in the righteousness of Lindsey Graham and in the virtue of whatever Lindsay Graham does in the name of advancing Lindsey Graham. Opportunism and fascism fit perfectly together because both are based on a bottomless narcissism and fevered empowerment fantasies. Fascists are convinced that their own advancement and their own prejudices are indistinguishable from the path of God.

Graham was relentlessly, rabidly hawkish and bloodthirsty; he was a leading proponent of the Iraq War, and he’s been trying to get someone, anyone, to bomb Iran for decades. This February, when Trump launched his obviously ill-prepared and ill-considered war in Iran, Graham was ecstatic. “The end of the largest state sponsor of terrorism is upon us. God bless President Trump, our military and our allies in Israel. Freedom for the long suffering Iranian people,” he burbled. The delusional claim to be speaking for the people whose horrific deaths he was cosigning and the messianic rhetoric paint a familiar picture. Graham saw himself as a bloody prophet striding across history, leading the way to glory and death.

You can see a similar dynamic of self-aggrandizement and self-mythification in Graham’s behavior at the confirmation hearing of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was credibly accused of rape by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. The GOP in general responded with a disgusting barrage of rape apology and denialism, but Graham went above and beyond in claiming that the accusation as a personal attack. “To my friends on the other side, I would never have done this to one of your nominees, you should be ashamed,” he said in an appearance on Fox. [italics added] For Graham, it’s clear, rape is a minor concern. The real crime is interfering with the plans and preferences of one Lindsey Graham.

In this context, Graham’s famous warning about Trump: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it”—seems less like a prescient statement of principle, and more like another example of Graham indulging in his usual apocalyptic self-aggrandizement and self-pity. Graham ran for president in 2016 himself; he was angry that Trump won instead of him; he thought he would lose status if Trump took the nomination.

In short, Graham didn’t have a moment of moral clarity. He just said some shit. Once Trump became President, Graham was happy to reverse himself and devote himself to their mutual benefit. So much so that Graham attempted to help Trump steal the 2020 election in Georgia—and then attempted to get the American people to pay him reparations after the Justice Department dared to investigate his treasonous bullshit.

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Fascists see their own power as a moral goal

“Venal or sincerely evil” is a question that comes up with most fascists at one point or another. Does Trump really want to subjugate non-white people or is that just a convenient way to get power so he can gorge himself and his family at the public trough? Is he a sincere Nazi or is he just a grifter?

Fascists don’t make these distinctions, though. Trump believes he has the right to rule and enrich himself because he is white and wealthy. Part of being the rightful leader of the volk is subjugating non-white people and women and trans people and anyone he sees as lesser. Part of being the rightful leader of the volk is stealing all the money because it is your money anyway and you deserve it..

Similarly, Graham sees no contradiction between bombing Muslims, smearing rape victims, and sucking up to Trump. It’s all part of the soaring progress and glory of Lindsey Graham, destroying nations to save them, seating Supreme Court justices, golfing with the president. Graham is the hero, and so whatever he does is heroic—especially when it involves defeating or subjugating ideological and partisan enemies like Muslims, women, or Democrats.

The big difference between Graham and Trump is that Trump wants to be the dear leader and only the dear leader, whereas Graham is happy enough to see himself as the handmaiden of God, a la Goebbels. And just as Goebbels abasement before Hitler was a sign of his opportunism and his sincere commitment to a program of evil, so too has Graham more fully embraced his own core hatefulness and megalomania by knuckling under to the megalomania of someone else.

Few people can dedicate themselves so fully to the emptiness in their own soul as Trump can, and Graham has over the years stumbled into doing a decent thing or two. He pushed for accountability in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal even as he tried to repress the most graphic photos; he supported the DREAM ACT before abandoning it; he supported Ukrainian aid consistently, though with the occasional time out to insult President Zelenskyy for not being sufficiently deferential to the Orange One.

None of this means that Graham was betraying his principles. It sometimes just took him a little bit to figure out where his one true principle of ‘power for Lindsey Graham’ led him—and a little bit to figure out that the best path to power for Lindsey Graham was to always embrace the fascist option.

Again, Graham is someone who loves imagining himself as a powerful scourge to his enemies and the enemies of God, between whom he makes no distinction. Briefly he thought Trump would stand in the way of his ambitions, his hates, and his self-regard. Then he realized that Trump could teach him depths of self-regard and hate that he had been unable to plumb on his own. That’s why he said Trump was “not far behind God.” It’s why he died adoring him. Trump helped Lindsey Graham embrace the despicable fascist he always wanted to be. Opportunism and fascism; they go together.

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In the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister”, science-fiction and gaming fandoms belong to sadistic white guy nerds. The show is an indictment of toxic masculinity. But it’s also, helplessly, a validation of it. Captain Robert Daly ( Jesse Piemons) is an evil sexist, racist megalomaniac. But he’s also the person with the greatest knowledge of, and the greatest appreciation for, the Star Trek-like show Space Fleet. Black Mirror hates that Space Fleet fandom is for white men—but, nonetheless, it believes in the myth that fandoms, originally, were for white men.

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The basic conceit of “USS Calister” is that brilliant tech coder Robert Daly has designed his own computer game based on the old Star Trek-like show, Space Fleet. In his real life, Daly is a bitter, quiet nerd, who has been sidelined in his own company by his partner Walton (Jimmi Simpson). He spends most of his days stewing in resentment and creepily staring at his female colleagues. In the evening, he enters his game world as Captain Daly, commanding a ship’s crew made up of sentient clones of his coworkers.

Daly has godlike control over the Space Fleet world and entertains himself by turning his crew into insect monsters or erasing their faces when they refuse to suck up to him sufficiently. Daly’s reign of retro-terror ends when he clones Nannette Cole (Cristin Miloti), a new tech engineer who figures out how to turn his program against him. She traps him in his own nightmare while allowing the crew to escape to a less totalitarian space game.

“USS Callister” is brilliant at teasing out the sexist and racist assumptions of the original Star Trek series. Daly swaggers about the ship giving his best William Shatner impersonation while his crew, composed largely of POC, praise his every trivial decision and half-assed stratagem. The women prance about in mini-skirts and kiss him at the end of each episode, while first-officer Walton literally licks his boots. Daly is the conquering colonial white man hero living out his empowerment fantasy in a universe literally made for him.

But while Star Trek had elements of white male fantasy, it was also beloved from the very beginning by people who were not white men. The cast of the show included POC at a time when that was quite rare. Martin Luther King, Jr., was famously a fan, and convinced Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) to stay on the show when she was considering leaving.

Star Trek fandom was also, and even somewhat notoriously, female dominated. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) may have been the putative star of the franchise, but the repressed alien Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) became the show’s heartthrob sex symbol. The “USS Callister” fandom is supposed to be sexless; Daly is awkward and terrified of women in the real world, and onboard ship he actually designs his clone crew without genitals. But the real female-led fandom of Star Trek is anything but sexless. Kirk/Spock fan fiction invented the whole genre of slash, in which female fans script torrid homosexual romances between their favorite canonically heterosexual stars.

Star Trek fandom was so thoroughly associated with women, in fact, that it was often the target of misogynist bile. A 1973 short story, “A Trekkie’s Tale“ parodied female oriented Trek fan fiction, in which a wonderful woman appears aboard the Enterprise, saves the world, and dies beautifully. While the original story was arguably at least somewhat affectionate, it coined the term “Mary Sue”, which is often now used to sneer at female characters who are supposedly too good to be true. Star Trek fandom was colonized by women from the beginning—which is why Star Trek fandom, in particular, is often singled out for scorn.

This misogynist scorn arguably inflects the Black Mirror episode itself. Daly is presented as being evil in part because he’s not manly enough. He’s awkward with women, and his curdled sexual desire leads him to overcompensate with his Space Fleet fantasy. Walton, the CEO who flirts with women smoothly, ends up getting to be a hero, sacrificing himself in noble upright male fashion. Daly is a bad guy in part because Space Fleet/Star Trek isn’t a pastime for a real man.

More, Daly is presented as the person who knows and loves the Space Fleet show. Nannette has barely heard of it, and is unfamiliar with its tropes. To overthrow it, she actually has to learn to behave, and become, a white guy like Daly. Part of her plot to overthrow him involves blackmailing her self in the real world by threatening to release her own nudes from her own phone. Defeating the white guy involves beating the white guy in his own universe at his own game.

This doesn’t contradict misogynist fan lore; it fulfills it. The master narrative of male fandoms is always, adamantly, that male fandoms existed first. Women and POC are interlopers like Nannette, infiltrating the bridge and turning the helm towards sentimentality or weak womanly yuckiness. Gamergate was fueled by gamer rage at women who dared to make or criticize games. Men accuse women who like comics or science-fiction of being “fake geek girls” who can’t tell Earth 616 from Earth 2. Male fandoms came first; women come along later and ruin everything. That’s the story that male fans tell themselves; it’s also the plot of “USS Callister.”

The conclusion of the episode imagines a Space Fleet adventure without the white guy. Nanette and the crew comprised mostly of men and women of color find themselves in control of the spaceship, ready to set off on new adventures. Fandoms, the episode concludes, aren’t just for white guys anymore. But that “anymore” strikes a sour note. Star Trek was never for white guys in the first place. Black Mirror thinks it’s overthrowing Daly, but it gives him too much power.

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This first ran in Playboy some years back. It’s no longer online, so I thought I would reshare.

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Wrote a bunch about Platner this week, but also about other things.

As always, if you would like to keep me scribbling. and feeding the floofs, consider becoming a subscriber! And/or, I have added a venmo option if you would like to tip me/pay for cat food.

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Okay, here’s what I published this week.

Politics

We have dictatorship by and for petty spite. (Public Notice)

Survivors, not the establishment, ended Platner’s campaign. (EIH)

Ds finally have a real chance to defeat Collins. (EIH)

Demand that candidates say “expand the court.” (EIH)

Cultural criticism

Poet Madhur Anand listens to birdsong and meaning’s decay in Parasitic Oscillations. (Splice Today)

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a white savior melodrama. (EIH)

Romero’s smaller than life horror. (EIH)

Poetry

Sort of haiku. (Five Fleas)

You know you are a real poet
when you would rather pay bills
than write a poem.

Two word poem. (smols)

nothing

between

From the archive

Track of the week

Read more

“They’re us, that’s all,” Peter (Ken Foree) says of the zombie attackers in George Romero’s masterpiece, the 1978 original Dawn of the Dead.

That’s a succinct summary of the horror and allure of the zombie genre, which has overrun and consumed much of the media landscape in the last 20 years. George Romero, created something new in horror with his first zombie film, 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Rather than powerful monsters, terrifying in their difference, Romero’s zombies were simply people, shuffling around doing people things, like shopping, grunting, and eating each other. The greatest horror, Romero realized, was just human beings.

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The “just” is important there. Horror before Romero was fascinated with the terror of human beings turned into evil, dead, nightmare others. Fear of what people might become after death and of the uncanny otherness of corpses is a staple of horror practically since the genre’s inception. The staggering, awkwardly bent, groaning zombie who wander across the graveyard at the opening of Night of the Living Dead recalls—no doubt intentionally—the staggering, awkward, groaning Boris Karloff, assembled from mismatched body parts and sent out to wreak havoc in James Whale’s classic 1931 Frankenstein. And Romero got the vision of an entire population transformed into the living dead from Richard Matheson’s 1951 novel I Am Legend, in which one loan human survivor stands against a world given over to the rising vampire hordes.

Whale’s monster may have been inarticulate, but he had massive strength—the human corpse, reanimated, returned to life with supernatural potency. Matheson’s vampires don’t have the fiendish invincibility of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but they are as capable and smart as their former human selves. If Matheson’s vampires are just human, then humans are fairly competent.

Romero’s innovation was to present “just humans” as almost comically inept and clumsy, devoid of reason or any higher brain function beyond appetite. The zombies in Romero films are, as single adversaries, shockingly unformidable foes. They move slowly, do not communicate or plan, and can use only the most rudimentary tools. Once you know to shoot them in the head (information helpfully provided by the remarkably calm newscasters in Night of the Living Dead), they’re not hard to dispatch. In fact, in most later Romero films, humans murder the zombies for sport. Vampires are sexy, hypnotic, fascinating sophisticates; werewolves are virile, animalistic, uncontrollable beasts. Both are fearsome predators. Zombies are just decaying doofuses. Humans should be able to handle them easily.

The catch here is that, in Romero films, humans are decaying doofuses too. If zombies are dumb and can’t figure out how to work together—well, humans are the same way. In Night of the Living Dead, the human characters bumble and stagger towards defeat. Barbara (Judith O’Dea) spends most of the film in catatonic shock, little more responsive than the zombie attackers. Harry (Karl Hardman) and Ben (Duane Jones) attack each other with repetitive, senseless aggression, tearing at each other like they’re already risen corpses.

And of course, famously, in Dawn of the Dead, the human protagonists and the zombies are equally drawn by the consumerist charms of the shopping mall. “Why do they come here?” Francine (Gaylen Ross) asks. “Some kind of instinct.” Peter responds. “Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” That could apply just as well to Peter and Fran, racing around the mall filling shopping carts with goodies, as to the zombies, staggering into the mall fountains as tinny Muzak plays over the speakers.

Dawn of the Dead presented brainless, consuming mall-going zombies as a metaphor for capitalism. And that metaphor has only gotten more relevant as mall themselves have been consumed by Amazon and the rampaging Internet forces of toothy-mawed creative destruction. As late capitalism shambles on, and commodification of everything becomes ever more omnipresent, abstract, and clickable, zombies have become increasingly inescapable. Edgar Wright’s brilliant 2004 Romero tribute/parody Shaun of the Dead captures the banal zombie present perfectly. Lazy, useless slackers stuck in dead-end jobs wander from video-game console to the corner bar. It’s a world in which human beings are so unmotivated and uninteresting that you can’t even tell when the zombie apocalypse starts.

Death by demon or witch or alien is generally exciting, suspenseful, different—humans are possessed, assaulted, annihilated by beings of great power and purpose. In The Exorcist or Predator, some monstrous, terrible something finds humans interesting enough to want to destroy us. It’s a compliment of sorts. The genius of the Romero zombies, though, is that they conquer through sheer indifferent inertia. The zombies that walk through The Walking Dead or Colson Whitehead’s Zone One are blandly unmotivated losers, with barely enough energy to keep their eyes in their sockets. They defeat humans through sheer shuffling weight—and because humans are blandly unmotivated losers, too.

Romero’s zombies aren’t about the persistence of life after death. They aren’t even, really, ghosts haunting the present, or a return of a terrifying buried past. Rather, Romero’s zombies embody the awfulness of nothing special. They don’t mean anything because we don’t mean anything. Romero’s is a horror not of dramatic, apocalyptic change, but of inescapable, slogging slow-motion decay—a modern world that shambles purposelessly nowhere, with ugly skin suits devouring themselves as they go.

Romero’s legacy continues to walk and groan and rock across multiple media properties. But it’s not quite true to his legacy to say he’ll live on forever. Rather, the director might say, we live in a world where no one lives. Those Romero leaves behind are all just hungry, disgusting, ridiculous corpses, waiting to fall over.

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This first ran at Playboy on Romero’s death some years back. It’s no longer online, so I thought I would re-share.

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Disgraced Democratic nominee Graham Platner finally dropped out of the Maine Senate race. As I discussed yesterday, he had been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults and a domestic assault.

The Maine Democratic party now has about three weeks, till July 27, to choose a replacement. They have voted to hold a 600-person nominating convention.

Platner’s (conspiratorial, whiney, absolutely graceless) exit, and the fact that there simply isn’t time or money to hold a full-scale election, has understandably led various party actors and commenters to express concerns about how legitimate the replacement will be, and about whether the new nominee will have the mandate to beat Collins. Policy fights—on military aid to Israel, for example—are also being compressed into an accelerated timeline, without a chance to work them out over a standard election cycle.

There is of course, reason to be concerned. The ugly failures that led to Platner’s nomination—failures by the state party, by the national party, by progressives, by centrists, and by voters too— have left Maine, and Democrats, with a limited range of options. This is not a scenario anyone wanted. This is not how anyone wants to be choosing a candidate.

Having said that, I do not think we should despair. On the contrary, Platner was a terrible loser of a candidate, and we now have a better chance at beating Collins than we’ve had since Bernie Sanders and a bunch of insider bumblefucks decided to elevate the Nazi-tattooed turd.

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The manly magic

This is not exactly the conventional wisdom. Many Democrats believed for many months that Platner—as a mustached, burly, white male veteran with progressive views and an oyster-fishing company—spoke to something primal and ineffable and working-class in the Maine soul, and that he was therefore uniquely suited to defeat Collins. A few good early polls, and his defeat of Janet Mills’ largely inert campaign, solidified the view that he had special Maine magic testosterone that could be duplicated by no one else.

The mystical resonance that a lot of men attribute to their hormones is bullshit, though, and Platner’s self-mythologized goop was already looking to be similarly uninspired. In two polls before the rape allegation destroyed his campaign, he was trailing among working-class voters—supposedly his base—by 37-58 and an even more brutal 41-56.

Platner did well enough with college-educated voters that he was about two points ahead of Collins among the electorate overall. But as analyst G. Elliott Morris points out, based on Maine’s 2024 results and the current electoral shift, we should expect Democrats to be ahead in the Senate race by 15 points. That means Platner was already underperforming by 13 points before the rape allegations.

Of course, Platner had at that point been damaged by domestic violence allegations. And by the Nazi tattoo revelation. And by his sexist, racist, homophobic reddit posts. And by revelations about sexting with other women while he was married. And so forth. I think some Democrats (not least Platner himself) believe that if only the evil journalists and eviler establishment hadn’t subjected Platner to such cruel, unfair scrutiny, he would have cruised to victory and redemption, leaving those pesky tattoos and reddit posts and assault survivors behind in the past where they belonged.

The thing is, though, that there is no Platner without the scandals. There is not some way to separate the Platner policies and the Platner testosterone affect from the actual things that Graham Platner said and did with his life up to the point where he started to run for Senate. People vote on the whole package—and that is as it should be, because if a candidate has shown horrible judgement in the past, if a candidate has hideously abused their power to harm those who trusted them, if a candidate has lied remorselessly throughout a campaign—then that candidate is not someone you want making life and death decisions. It is not someone you should trust with power.

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The Platner we always had

This is who Platner is. It is who he has always been. And if you think that there were not more potential revelations—more ugly reddit posts, more sexts, and yes, more accusers—then you are naïve.

Eight months ago, after the first revelations about the tattoo and reddit posts came out, I published a prescient article titled “Graham Platner Is Not Going to Be a Senator.” At the time I said:

You can’t ask marginalized people—Black people, LGBT people, Jews, women—to vote for a guy with a history of saying ugly shit and with a literal Nazi tattoo on his chest. Nor can you expect Susan Collins to ignore these glaring weaknesses in her election opponent. If Platner were to win the primary, Collins would talk about that Nazi tattoo every day in a (probably successful) effort to drive down D turnout.

More, we still don’t know what else is out there in Platner’s past.

This was true eight months ago. And it’s still true! People are going to be put off by bigotry and misogyny. And we still don’t know what other ugly things Platner did in his past. We don’t know what determined GOP opposition could turn up. I have been saying, “there’s probably more out there” for eight months. I have not been wrong once.

Platner was a horrifically unfit candidate from the beginning in extremely flagrant, easy to discover ways that were going to come out in a high-profile Senate race. As I said eight months ago, he was never going to win this race; Collins was going to have him for lunch. The only question was whether Democratic politicians, orgs, and voters would come out of their testosterone-induced trance before they could replace him, or whether they’d realize their horrible fuck up too late.

Thanks to some very brave women and good journalism, the answer is just barely, barely before. We dodged a bullet in the form of an abusive, lying, loser narcissist.

I’m not saying we will win. Collins is a strong candidate, and—while I’m sure she wishes she could run against the walking black hole of scandal that is Platner—she will regroup and probably outperform most of her Republican peers. And obviously we don’t know who is going to be the Democratic contender (though I’d guess not Mills, given that the primary demonstrated that she was not up for a hard fought campaign.)

But while victory is not guaranteed, it is at least possible—which it was not as long as the party was in the grip of its Platner delusion. So, I would urge people who care about this Senate race and about beating fascism to count our collective blessings and prepare to support our no doubt imperfect candidate secure in the knowledge that said candidate, whatever their faults, cannot be worse than the guy who came within a week of losing the seat, and maybe the Senate and our democracy along with it.

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