Today's video essay* has me critiquing Heavy Metal Philosophy's good-faith response to Andrew Lee's essay on racism† in metal: "A Deep South Asian Metalhead Responds To Andrew Lee on Racism In Metal" and "How Heavy Metal Upholds White Supremacy" (2025), respectively. As a trans-woman Satanist, sex worker activist and PhD who enjoys and criticizes the Gothic, ergo fascism in heavy metal (alongside movies, books and videogames, etc; re: "Sex, Metal and Videogames," 2021), I'll be critiquing both men after introducing myself: as a white bitch who loves metal but hates racism (similar to Mary Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein and single-handedly launched the entire sci-fi genre; re: "Celebrating Mary Shelley's Immortal Legacy," 2025). This post is only the bibliography (and its addendums); click here to watch the full essay on YouTube. Also, Jon replied to my essay (11/3/2025), his response lengthy and thoughtful enough to merit an enthusiastic follow-through: "Replying to Jon Barbas: a Follow-Up to My 'Is Metal Racist?' Video" (2025).

*This particular essay is a new format I'm trying out—not a written essay or unscripted react video, but a video essay. Versus a written script, I record unscripted video footage and edit it, including citations that appear as footnotes in the video footage. This is an experimental format for me, one where I didn't start annotating in-video until over halfway through, though I did complete the bibliography post hoc. In the future, I will try to remember to annotate the entire video and number the sources (which I normally do with written essays; this video was off-the-cuff and unconcerned with length, focusing on a more "freestyle" approach). Said essay is ultimately conversational, but references academic material (and movies, e.g., Big Trouble in Little China [1986], above).

P.S., Update (10/29/2025): I've made a variety of changes to this essay—expanding it to demonstrate the many ways I combat bigotry in popular media as a whole, including racism.

†A good way to understand racism is function, not aesthetic (see: addendums).

Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose

This essay is part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers, all of whom I credit on my Acknowledgments pages and Sex Work page.

(artist, left: Bay Ryan; right: Persephone van der Waard)

Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my book series, Gothic Communism (2023). The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of (sex) education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation/obscenity laws (the Miller Test; source: Justice.gov). Click here for my entire series disclaimer. Lastly many of the links on this page lead to my age-gated 18+ website where my entire work on Gothic Communism is stored and exhibited.

CW: racism, genocide and fascism; transphobia, tokenism and various Gothic themes; rape*; some censored nudity (regarding the sex work I do alongside my writing and illustration work)

*Meaning (from my definition) "to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them," generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) […] Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024). 

Table of Contents

The original bibliography only had the timestamps and works cited. I added the addendums to explain many of the points in the essay itself, while also showing you how I operate based on my history with metal; i.e., as a trans woman an-Com who listened to metal long before she came out of the closet or was politically active versus racism, queerphobia and other bigotries.

• Video Essay Timestamps
• Addendums*
  • A Note on Tokenism
    • On Race
    • On Rape as a Theatrical Device (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM)
    • On Tokenism More Broadly
    • On Asian-American Tokenism (re: "bananas")
    • War Brides and Japanese-American Intermedial Relations after WWII (CW: censored nudity)
  • My Musical Tastes (and Corresponding Labor)
    • Corresponding Labor (e.g., Interviews and Investigative Journalism)
      • Interviews
      • Investigative Journalism (on Tokenism)
      • Combining Them (feat. Steam Powered Giraffe; CW: rape)
    • My Musical Tastes (and Sex Life and Sex Work Informing Said Tastes; CW: censored nudity)
      • My Metal Tastes
      • Other Music I Like (and External Stimuli)
      • Nerds Fuck (to Metal and Other Music They Pass onto Their Partners)
  • In Conclusion; or, in Charon's Canoe
• Works Cited (roughly in their order of appearance; CW: censored nudity)

*Addendums don't appear in the video essay itself, but have been added in this bibliography as food for thought.

Video Essay Timestamps

• 00:00 video opening and synopsis
• 1:14 Racism in metal and history of metal dating back centuries
• 2:53 focusing on the present (while keeping the past in mind); Andrew's use of historical examples (and mine)
• 4:32 racism in metal is not new (on YouTube)
• 5:23 about me and my history with metal (as a white trans woman)
• 6:18 my tendency to discuss racism in popular media (e.g., videogames, comic books, movies, and music)
• 6:42 giving my two cents (a history of that character)
• 10:42 being ostracized in the metal community for being queer (no two cents girl allowed)
• 11:54 white people can be marginalized; racism is modular but can intersect with other bigotries in metal
• 13:06 introducing Jon's video
• 13:37 video premise: Asian American from Deep South responding to Asian American from California—are they token?
• 14:35 video start; Jon's intro and good-faith gesture/a note about the size of the US and differences of opinion across its land
• 18:09 video body
• 2:36:12 Jon is Communist; I rejoice
• 2:36:36 video body resume
• 2:49:13 closing thoughts
• 2:49:38 outro

A Note on Tokenism (an Addendum)

To be holistic, there are several things I'll want to note: my usage of the words "racism" and "rape," but also "banana" in an academic context; i.e., when discussing tokenism, and the tradition of war brides (and other American-Asian exchanges) after WWII.

On Race

To start with, I combat bigotry in popular media as a whole, including racism but also sexism, queerphobia, Orientalism, and various other modularities that often intersect; i.e., my work is holistic and intersectional, focusing on racism tied to other poetic elements; re (from Volume Zero's "Pieces of the Camp Map," 2023):

Before the Enlightenment, Late Medieval stories and media from the Gothic/Renaissance period featured less persons of color because access to actual persons with dark or non-white skin was historically less common, thus more exotic (though it did happen; a pure-white medieval period is a fascist myth); as such, the pre-fascist destroyer persona was coded as black in relation to the "non-European" as Jewish, Germanic, or the broader "Eastern" (white-skinned: from Italy to Romania to Russia; non-white groups: China, the Middle East and Africa). Until the Enlightenment period began and started to orchestrate widespread settler colonialism (and modern nation-state formation), race-based slavery largely didn't exist; so the biases were less about skin color and more about general ethnicity and religion; e.g., evil Italian counts, but also Jewish people as go-to scapegoats for the Romans and the Christians. Then and now, these devils were seen as threats to the heteronormative order of things; i.e., returning to nature, to hell and chaos. As such, the devil became something that actively corrupts the youth and women as always running off with them into the night:

(artist: Ary Scheffer)

A good way to understand racism is function, not aesthetic i.e., capital is white supremacist insofar as its racial function moves power towards the state during the dialectic of the alien (aka Julia Kristeva's abjection process and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine [1993]; re: Persephone van der Waard's "Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien," 2024): framing nature and those "of it" as alien whores to pimp, per Cartesian thought (married to heteronormativity and settler colonialism). Themes of racism can be invoked in campy forms that liberate, mid-exploitation, but those require dialectical-material scrutiny to parse in duality: through a shared aesthetic with competing users working at cross purposes on multiple registers simultaneously. In layman's terms, this boils down to punching down vs punching up, which is anisotropic; i.e., the action/poetry means different things depending on the direction power flows/where and how the performance occurs and by whom "on the Aegis" (wherever power is played with during "ludo-Gothic BDSM" [as I call it, a fancy name for camp]—often manifesting as sex and force [the ancient languages of the state] but also heaven and hell, above).

For example, it's not "racist" to call metal "angry white people music," despite what HMP argues (timestamp: 10:05), because that comments historically-materially on metal's canonical dialectical-material function: serving bourgeois hegemony through bad actors policing labor more broadly. Good actors can challenge these infiltrators, but historically do so according to a terrorist/counterterrorist framework that classically demonizes activism; i.e., by undercover cops for profit, policing nature and Hell as monstrous-feminine per a Protestant ethic (re: Weber) guided by bad-faith arguments of revenge (re: "Rape Reprise," 2024). To it, these persecution modules can be camped (e.g., witchcraft, sodomy and blood libel; re: "Idle Hands," 2024), but doing so is by no means automatic; furthermore, they can be arbitrated as undead, demonic and/or animalistic—either separately (a vampire, werewolf or demon) or together (a xenomorph being undead, demonic and chimeric), and generally with poetic similarities despite their modular organization: "Poetically there's not much difference functionally-speaking between feeding and transformation [despite undead monsters focusing on feeding and demons on transformation]" (source: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024).

(source: Kino Images—cited in "A Cruel Angel's Thesis")

On Rape as a Theatrical Device (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)

However, per the Gothic, rape is also something to play with (often through fears of the alien impostor [re: racism] and of replacement, mid-invasion; see: West, Hogle and Punter, in Works Cited); i.e., in ways that further or reverse* the abjection process: by standing up for state's rights vs worker rights, onstage and off, but just as often somewhere in between! Rebellion is liminal, ensconced within dialogs of power (and power abuse; re: rape), mid-rebellion; i.e., as metal is and has been for centuries—both controlled and uncontrolled opposition, mid-enterprise, depending on which spectres of Shelley and Marx we're talking about (the Gorgon a whore to fear and pimp, virgin/whore syndrome, but also reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM and Gothic Communism, below)!

*Persephone van der Waard's "Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty" (written 2023, released 2025)

(artist: Romantic Rose)

The oldest forms of exploitation are of the prostitute by the pimp; the oldest forms of worker revenge setting the Gorgon (the Big Whore and her hysteria) cryptomimetically free (often through paradox; i.e., while "in chains," playing out through calculated risk)! "After 10,000 years I am free! It's time to conquer Earth!" From Pandora to Wandering Womb to bicycle face, there's so many ways to blame, thus pimp the whore under capital for state atrocities (the liminal hauntology of war/traveling castle's Imperial Boomerang and its grim harvest) but also state shift* (stemming from Cartesian thought, Bacon and company "penetrating the womb of nature to torture nature's secrets out of her"; re: Patel and Moore): a peach to harvest but also black planet to fetishize and fear out of state revenge, keeping power right where it is and capital running smoothly (towards state decay—fascism).

*Also from Patel and Moore: "Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of 'abrupt and irreversible' changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. [...] The twenty-first century has an analogue: it's easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism [re: Fisher …] Today's human activity isn't exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene [than the Anthropocene]" (source). I call it Mother Nature's revenge during the whore's revenge (re: "Rape Reprise"); i.e., payback's a bitch, the biggest bitch being the gorgon who breaks Capitalist Realism/the profit motive on her Aegis during the whore's revenge (versus letting herself merely be pimped—the Medusa being my favorite monster but also offshoots of the Gorgon as a Communist Numinous: Commies and Nazis share the same stage, mid-kayfabe)!

The biggest fear the elite have is land back, ergo labor back, sex back (and all the language of the monstrous-feminine they normally gorge on; re: "Nature Is Food," 2024): as things the elite synonymize with rape during Capitalist Realism*; i.e., the whore of Babylon; e.g., the Countess from Castlevania: Nocturne (2023) being a classic case of state DARVO and obscurantism "blaming the whore" after handing her a knife, gun, what-have-you: a sacrificial lamb dressed up as "pirate queen"; re (from the Poetry Module's "Back to Necropolis"):

*From Mark Fisher's seminal 2009 book and what my entire book series focuses on: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism" (source).

(exhibit 34b3b3a3: Castlevania: Nocturne falls victim to the usual pitfalls of neoliberal hero escapism, but there remain lots of Gothic fetishes and clichés to consider for actual revolutionary purposes. Even so, these have to be rescued from the usual kill-the-Medusa dreck [fun dreck, but dreck nonetheless]: the Countess.

For one, the show's Great Destroyer—a "black Egyptian" spin [as Castlevania loves to do] on the Elizabeth Báthory legend—ties vampirism to a pre-Western regression; i.e., a 21st century hauntology demonizing Communism as state shift per Capitalist Realism: a vengeful Medusa as daughter-of-Ra, an equation of hysterical "terror" conjured up again. In other words, it's Joseph Crawford's invention of terrorism through French state decay vis-à-vis Napoleon letting British and American forces hold onto power in their own territories and power centers: through a counterfeit, girl-boss death god used to keep the elite in power now much as Radcliffe did [versus Matthew Lewis' queer camp] when the actual French Revolution was underway! In other words, bread and circus.

Fast-forward two centuries, and the so-called Devourer of Light [a black hole exemplified by the Apep-style eclipse eating Ra] is fascist DARVO on the state side of things; i.e., with a Japanese neoliberal [videogame] Shintoism ultimately defending the light, the sun, through a Western cop [our very own Richter Belmont] punching Nazis and Communists conflated per centrist dogma on the show's signature Medusa. This includes their rhetoric, aesthetic, costumes, masks, etc, as canonical monstrous-feminine she-wolves and fags [e.g., Orlock] as expendable bad bitches, their lieutenants, bosses and gods all wrapped up in the same anisotropic scheme for the state. Or as our resident queen's token black Mephistopheles, Doltra, delightfully says, "They're revolutionaries, father. We're here to crush them." She's literally a black Nazi, thus Afrocentrist by virtue of psychosexual, biomechanical decay—a gargoyle, an undead puppet to shock the masses with.

Corporations love to milk and tokenize Nazis through these kinds of paradoxical compromises....)

Except the state doesn't monopolize any of this. So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis! Survival is victory and victory is speech versus the pimp dressing the whore up, mid-genocide. Revolution reclaims the performance for workers, mid-aesthetic (versus a false rebellion using rebellious symbols; re: Parenti, Works Cited)! The historical fact remains: if we didn't have power, the state wouldn't police us; i.e., they fear us for what we have (and which they desperately want)! Use that to your advantage: play with power to bend it (thus the state) to your will, the whores of all dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living (me camping Marx' "18th Brumaire," 1852)! That's what ludo-Gothic BDSM is, babes, and Medusa was a baddie to emulate in good faith (the very forceful desegregation* Andrew Lee proposes [amid an ongoing extant† presence of racism] that HMP fears because he's tokenized; timestamp: 3:07).

*"'Peace' is a white man's word," I say, "the word coming out of Jon's mouth is 'peace'" (timestamp: 27:01). Our existence is violent, the whore's paradox requiring some degree of exposure (and force, even through the poetry of force) to convey the daily atrocities we survive: camping our own holocaust, speaking to the privileged in the language of the alien bringing the terrible truth to bear (our revenge the revenge of speech despite segregation, breaking the silence with Milton's "darkness visible")!

†Or, as I argue in the essay itself, "You can't just kill [and replace] the king"; you have to work against racism during class struggle, everyone racist to a certain degree including minorities (re: tokenism).

(artist: Grobi-Grafik)

On Tokenism More Broadly

Tokenism is betrayal of any kind done by minorities (whereas class betrayal is commonly done by white straight men, who aren't minorities); i.e., Man Box (re: Mark Greene) being something that tokens (male or not) emulate. Alongside racism and the poetics of rape tied to it (and class and culture), people with privilege betray out of convenience (with Lenin's notions of "entryism" and "opportunism" still occurring in the 2020s; e.g., Hasan Piker and other so-called "progressives" pushing for Democrat electoralism versus a third party politique; see: Socialism for All's "Do Socialists Run in Capitalist Political Parties?" 2025); people with less privilege betray out of desperation, and these can overlap depending on when and where you are—e.g., Bernie Sanders, a Jewish-American senator against the Vietnam War, can support Israel (GDF's "The Bernie Sanders Betrayal," 2025) whereas I, a Dutch trans girl from Michigan, am a fervent anti-Zionist (re: "Justice for Palestine," 2023): one who punches up alongside a variety of other sex workers versus Israeli proponents and the American settler-colonial legacy overseas and at home; re: "Abashed the Devil Stood," my NSFW sex worker solidarity exhibit serving that very purpose (from "White Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025); e.g., my partner Crow posing for it alongside a variety of other activists (with SWERFs, including some Marxist-Leninists only treating paid labor* as legitimate regarding revolutionary action):

(artist: Crow)

*With sex work (women's or otherwise) historically being unpaid, seen that way by MLs treating it as classically female/GNC and illegitimate; i.e., from Engels onwards: "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" from the original 1844 Manifesto ("Chapter Four") being quite sexist (a stance that would change over time, but remain homophobic till the end of his life; re: "Making Marx Gay," 2024).

Contrary to state logic, there is no prime evil to expunge and expiate—i.e., that will cleanse itself of its not-so-hidden sins and hypocrisies—but the dialogics of power and taboo frameworks that push power in one direction or the other nonetheless persist; re: racist-coded taboos that we can play with to be less racist. There's no monopoly on that (ergo violence, terror and monsters), despite however many people tokenize in service to state hegemony (e.g., non-white soldiers in Vietnam or other American wars). Being white and trans, I have privilege and minority status, hence endure political violence in ways similar to and different from other oppressed groups—all of us (and our enemies) utilizing the same Gothic zones of play that heavy metal emblematizes; e.g., Amazons, Orientalism, and Imperialism; re (from the Poetry Module):

(artist: Magion02)

My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn't so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray's creation of sexual difference). I'm hardly the first person to notice this:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng's "'The Most Powerful Weapon You Have': Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita," 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, "Commy-Mommy" means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the "rape" castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others. I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn't reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien (source: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024).

(artist: Bay Ryan)

To fight capital is to fight tokenism and to fight tokenism is to gaze into the abyss; as you do, it gazes into you and vice versa. The point isn't to abjure monsters outright, but use the dehumanizing language of monsters to humanize what the state pimps (and destroys) by design; i.e., through its built-in contradictions: requiring a whore to seek revenge against, fearing and fetishizing an invented enemy tied to real people, places and things, mid-Amazonomachia (what Descartes and his ilk call "thinking beings" vs "extended beings," per Patel and Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2017): as "whores" to brand and pimp, wherein tokenization is self-defeating (what I call "poor stewardship," as taught to me by my Maori partner Bay Ryan, above). Learn from the alien as a status to assign and reclaim, not reinforce (re: Patrick Wolfe's "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native*," 2006). Assimilation is poor stewardship to those the state historically betrays: "I am altering the terms of our agreement; pray I do not alter them further."

*Refer to "Toxic Schlock Syndrome" (2025) for an exploration on Wolfe, assimilation and token-vs-non-token Amazons.

On Asian-American Tokenism (re: "bananas")

To demonstrate HMP's tokenized* elements, I reference a racial slur used in an academic way: banana, or an Asian person who acts white in a tokenized way. The use of the language is not to cause harm, but rather demonstrate the word's existence in Asian culture—specifically Asian-American culture in ways I want to draw attention to; re: regarding HMP's tokenization; i.e., as a man who doesn't, by his own volition, identify as Asian-American, but as a "Southerner" or "an American" (a red flag in my opinion). The example being used among Asian Americans that I reference (and where I learned of the term) is Canto to Mando's "Why Becoming 'More American' Cost Me Everything as an Asian" (above, 2025).

*Token is just as much a commentary on privilege as it is any direct action punching down. These things, like most, operate on a spectrum (versus being bourgeois or not, as you either own capital or you don't).

War Brides and Japanese-American Intermedial Relations after WWII

A common phenomenon, from WWII onwards, is the American taking of "trophies" overseas, specifically "war brides"; i.e., male American soldiers going to Asia, meeting Asian women in occupied lands (which the Americans bombed to hell and back), taking said women back to America after marrying them (on an army base), and raising their children to essentially be white. It happened in my own family (one of my grandfather's cousins had a Japanese wife he met during the occupation of Japan, which he took back home to America).

To it, while many Asian Americans came to America as unskilled and skilled laborers at different points in US history (re: through the immigration process, as Andrew Lee points out), many more (specifically women) were war brides taken—if not by literal force—then by the prospect of going to America after America bombed their homeland to kingdom come (e.g., Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc). Many post-WWII Asian Americans, then, are army brats in military families of a given class (often middle)—with HMP both mentioning

• his father's side having served in American wars going back multiple generations (to his grandfather, which if said grandfather is similar in age to mine, would make him a WWII or Korean War vet)
• HMP having lived in Germany and speaking German as a second language (not Korean)

(source Instagram post: heavy_metal_philosophy)

All are markers of an Asian-American army brat. I could be wrong about that, and I apologize if so, but it bears repeating that Asian heritage in the US is shaped by American foreign policy... which bleeds back into domestic spheres; e.g., the Japanese internment camps and Yellow Peril, but also Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) applying just as well to Asians* as Arabs (or African Americans, below). The idea is intersectional solidarity and that is likewise a very old concept (one seen in older times more recent than Zinn's 1980 A People's History of the United States, also below); i.e., intersectional problems require intersectional solutions:

*Despite there being a fascist element in American allies like Japan (which we'll get to); i.e., versus a Communist one in American enemies; e.g., the Vietnamese, who "whooped yer hide real good!" (see: Luna Oi's "How to Think Like a Vietnamese Communist: Historical Materialism" [2025] for a good unpacking of the theory behind Vietnamese Communism).

(source skeet, Working Class History: October 28th, 2025)

Likewise, those solutions need to be mindful of intersectional axes of oppression/media forms conducive to oppression; i.e., when their function moves power towards the state (and its profit motive) versus towards workers. While this also happens in Korean media (e.g., K-Pop and slave contracts), here we're looking at the American-Japanese connection (there being no North/South [ergo Communism/fascist] division of Japan, as historically happened with Vietnam and Korea under American influence). To that, American cinema historically has bled into Japanese movies and vice versa—with Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) breaking Japanese Shintoist traditions by filming the sun directly (and marrying American Westerns to Japanese jidaigeki, or "sword films"); re (from Volume One):

(exhibit 27a2a [from "A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture," 2024]: Top-right and top-and-bottom-left: photos of Akira Kurosawa's seminal classic, Seven Samurai [1954]—the titular boys themselves and director "leading the charge" into a brave new world; artist, bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard. The American Western [a cryptonym for genocide] inspired Japanese shonen as intensely hyperbolic, romanticized and [eco]fascist [exhibits 17a, 24a, and 104b1/b2]. In turn, Japanese hauntology inspired American media during global conversations that supported or resisted the original, genocidal foundation. My response to Kurosawa operates on a creative, imaginary level [though not always consciously] through my own iconoclastic work; e.g., my take on Baiken, the "samurai warrior mommy," in a sex-positive manner through liminal expression during opposition praxis flirting with ludo-Gothic BDSM [as this entire volume has done, considering the term wasn't crystallized and in full production until Volume Two]. She's sexy and strong in ways that uphold and carry a rebellious sex positivity into the future.)

As the above exhibit shows (and the rest of the essay and citations will explore), this back-and-forth between America and Japan historically-materially bled out of cinema into videogames and metal—with the Guilty Gear franchise's weeb, "thirst trap" waifu bait combining all three for decades now (re: Baiken first appearing in the 1998 original). Such relations are meant to conceal fascism beneath the exchange; i.e., upon its surfaces and inside its thresholds through a constant, liminal, half-real exchange (on and offstage): the merger of fantasy and non-fiction (or the Ancient Romance and ordinary novel, in Gothic parlance) to canonically show/conceal fascist elements to defenders of Pax Americana—mid-cryptonymy*, furthering the abjection† process into the 21st century under Capitalist Realism.

*One of the four main Gothic theories, cited from Hogle's "The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonymy in the Gothic Novel" (1980) and used during Gothic Communism to achieve literary criticism and dialectical-material analysis: what Hogle calls a "double operation" in "Restless," or "showing and hiding [at the same time] (e.g., the Gothic castle is a big-ass shadow that, despite being a space of concealment, shows a presence of obscured trauma)" (source: "Straight Dog Water," 2025). Refer to "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" (2024) for summaries of (and sources on) all four theories (re: abjection, cryptonymy, hauntology and chronotopes); refer to Volume One's "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" (2024) and Volume Three's "Chapter Five: 'Rebellious Subterfuge'" (2025) for a good introduction/exploration of cryptonymy tied to heavy metal (and the stuff that heavy metal sings about).

†Us versus them, which profit fundamentally is; see: Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (translation, 1982); re (from the Demon Module): "Whores aren't inherently bad; the state makes them bad in ways it can police. While Medusa is alive and well under Capitalism—is arguably the most famous monster stemming from the ancient world, abbreviating nature as raped—it's important to remember she embodies death unto the victims "of nature" by civilization. She's the madwoman in the attic, smiling at the gods and their absurdity (sex work not for the faint of heart)!" (source: "Always a Victim").

My Musical Tastes (and Corresponding Labor—an Addendum)

This doesn't doesn't come up in the video, itself, but I thought I would include it; i.e., some hateful weirdo on YouTube said to me, "listen to better music" (above) without saying what I listen to, so I wanted to list some examples.

Corresponding Labor (e.g., Interviews and Investigative Journalism)

Keep in mind, I've listened to hundreds upon thousands of albums and artists, at this point; I've also been to music shows in the past and conducted interviews with crewmembers (e.g., Steam Powered Giraffe*, below) but I also treat my interviews and investigative journalism as two sides of the same activist coin.

Interviews

Followers of my work from the late-2010s will remember me as "two cents guy*," interviewing Metallica remixers and metalheads on YouTube (re: "Giving My Two Cents: A Metal Compendium," 2020). However, one of my proudest interviews is not of metalheads, per se, but the cast, crew, musicians and F/X team for Callie and Sam Spear's "Alien: Ore" short film; re: "'Alien: Ore' (2019) Q & A Project: Interview Compendium!" I also interview game developers and designers, Doom and Metroid speedrunners, and sex workers tied to my postgrad research (re: my PhD and subsequent book series, but also essays before and after said series concluded, on June 2025). My research, activism and lifestyle are holistic, sharing the same stage; e.g., Harmony Corrupted—one of my cover models and the first sex worker I interviewed for "Hailing Hellions" (2025)—is a giant metalhead (and Commie):

*Meaning before I came out of the closet, in August 2022 (re: "Coming Out as Trans").

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Investigative Journalism (on Tokenism)

While my specialty is tokenism (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025) and I historically began my investigative work emphasizing TERFs and SWERFs, I've combatted a variety of modular bigotries that often intersect; e.g., racism—exploring it not just among

• white moderate men like Solomon Nelson refusing to investigate race science in bodybuilding ("White Moderates Don't/Still Don't Challenge Fascism," 2025)
• and Karl Jobst in videogames ("Hot Karl," 2025)

but also people defending them who aren't white who are bigoted in a variety of ways (e.g., "Intraracial Bigotry from a Token Pimp! feat. ‪@GenXGamerYouTube‬ and ‪@PotionSwordRun" and ‬"Token Asian GNC Lawyer Defends Alt-Right Billionaire, feat. ‪@lus‬," 2025). I've also examined racism/race betrayal (tokenism tied to race) in my book series multiple times; e.g., Afrocentrism and token queer black Nazis in 2023's Castlevania: Nocturne (re: "Back to Necropolis"), token Amazons (re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"), and Indigenous betrayals/white Indians ("The Roots of Trauma, part one: Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal in Beloved, Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Terror: Infamy (feat., Toni Morrison and Howard Zinn),"2024). For minorities, activism and existence go hand-in-hand; as a white trans woman and sex worker bookworm challenging fascism (combing used books with metal, below), I've been excluded from heavy metal for being trans, but also for investigating different bigotries (e.g., "No Girls or Trans People Allowed" and "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning," 2020 and 2025): our existence is political (as HMP and Andrew Lee also argue) because profit (and its motive) politicize us for profit (thus genocide)—various genocides going hand-in-hand at differing speeds in different territories over space and time (e.g., representation in metal, videogames, etc; see: the problems of representation* and "cunning recognition," Works Cited).

*I.e., the arbitrary creation and enforcement of nation-state boundaries during "nation pastiche" (e.g., Capcom and the Street Fighter series), which fascism, aka "palingenetic ultranationalism," can police: in territorial ways that serve profit, not worker interests. Representation =/= the end all, be all; it's a tool for states and corporations to divide and conquer labor with (aka Rainbow Capitalism, which often has a race character).

(exhibit 1 [from "Joy Under Fascism," 2025]: Two different used bookstores, two different partners who bought me books after grad school—with various adventures tied to each; e.g., the Styrofoam containers in the take-out bag [from the second book store, bottom-right] accidentally overturned, spilling their contents into the bag and causing it to leak [and forcing me to throw out the food, much to my chagrin]. Deprived of prandial food thanks to my own absent-mindedness, I fed my mind on the usual "foodstuffs" academics often resort to—a house of leaves! Furthermore, when writing this section, I took my copy of George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality [1985] that Jadis bought me, in 2022 [the rightmost book, bottom-left], and combined it alongside my examining of a different book; re: Jill Smith's Berlin Coquette that a newer partner purchased for me, in a completely different city and state, three years later.)

Combining Them (feat. Steam Powered Giraffe)

Activism and minority status make it impossible to separate the art from the artist. However, combining activism and enjoyment vis-à-vis Anita Sarkeesian* is a lifelong process, and generally starts innocently enough. Over time, though, I would revisit said process (re: reversing abjection); i.e., because my work is holistic: "Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they're designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It's what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about" (source: "Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters: Reclaiming Our Lost Power by Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax," 2023).

*As Anita Sarkeesian explains, "It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects" (source: Facebook). What applies to Gamergate applies just as well to any moral panic and subsequent pogrom (and its neoliberal, Man Box thinking under Capitalism Realism).

(exhibit 75a [from "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"]: Photos from Monster Camp throughout; mid-right: Dr. Kahl and his robot from Cuphead [2017]; far-top-left-to-middle-left: photos of yours truly, mingling with other attendees—with my photo of David Bennett [top-left] showing him how to do the handshake from Predator [1987] and of which he had no idea what I was referring to [alas, I would eventually investigate Bennett and his band, Steam-Powered Giraffe, for sex crimes; re: "Ruling the Slum"].)

For example, I enjoyed Steam Powered Giraffe when I was still in the closet; i.e., by going to conventions (above and below), even featuring them on my old YouTube channel (Nicholas van der Waard's "David Bennett Interview: Prometheus/Prometheus 2 and Blade Runner 2," 2013). Years later when I was more politically active, I learned about the band's rape apologia (especially disappointing given its lead member, Bunny, is trans). Learning that, I "pulled a Beethoven*" (who decided to cross out Napoleon's name when the false revolutionary crowned himself emperor) and revisited the band, excoriating them; re (from Volume Two's Undead Module):

*"On May 18, 1804, the French council of State declared Napoleon Emperor of the French. Upon hearing the news, an angry Beethoven crossed off the Eroica's first inscription to Bonaparte. (11) 'So he too is nothing more than an ordinary man,' he cried out" (source: John Clubbe's "Beethoven, Bryon and Bonaparte").

(exhibit 40k2: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard, cosplaying as Eric Draven. At the time, I remained none-the-wiser about the person next to me and the sexual assaults they committed: Michael Red, former guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter still working for Steam Powered Giraffe at the time of the photo. Eleven years later, I would return to expose Michael in ways the band who hired him wouldn't. Part of the Gothic's proletarian utility, then, is suitably to dress up and mingle with people of interest, but also investigate them behind masks of different kinds [overt ones, but also general personas]. Doing so in order to hold celebrities like Reed accountable is, itself, an imperfect process. 

For starters, at the time of meeting Reed, I didn't know about his abuse at all, writing instead, "Awesome guy. Great guitar player!" I'd just met him and the band, but he seemed nice enough. Seven years later he would stop working with SPG and move to Europe, then be outted as a pedophile by fans of the band, not the band itself. / From what I understand, Reed's departure wasn't because he had been outted as a sex pest, but the truth of his sexual and racist abuse towards fans came to light shortly afterwards. While the original statements of abuse regarding Reed are still up on the band's subreddit, r/steampoweredgiraffe, the extended details concerning Reed attached to the original Patreon post appear to have been removed [dead link]. Those statements appeared on July 10th, 2020, followed by a Tumblr blog post several days later detailing Reed's abuses further than the band:

1. Michael is a pedophile who has a long history of actively and physically preying on minors and young women. Michael has preyed upon minors and young women, and has coerced minors (under the age of 17) into sexual activity—which is sexual assault and rape. He has calculatedly manipulated young women 5-10 years his junior to be his "friend," often treating them and implying they were in a relationship, and lying to other people involved, creating an extremely toxic social circle of gaslighted young people being manipulated and abused. He cyclically pulled from this group of individuals one at a time and withheld attention from the others to maintain control and silence of the entire group. This is sexual abuse, in any context. He has used his fame and social capital and his brand of charming and kind dude to make excuses for his behavior and seem like he would never be the type to commit it. When called out on this—he directly lies. Lying about his behavior even when presented with evidence is frequent. 

2. Michael is racist. He has made multiple racist comments to people of color who were close to him; over a number of years, he has sought out emotional support for his white guilt without addressing how he should personally fight against racism and white supremacy. He has fetishized people of color and fixated on them. Those who have gotten close enough to Michael know that despite his kindhearted exterior, he can be shockingly cold and lash out in very cruel ways unexpectedly. He has done this to every single one of his victims that I've known, including myself, and his victims are anticipating the potential that he will retaliate in response to being called out for his actions. Private and informal testimonies from sexual partners and friends of a variety of ages, forms of relationship, and gender indicate severe emotional abuse [source Tumblr post, mprjanedoe: July 13th, 2020].

The poster goes onto to add, "This post is formed by input from victims, occasionally about each other, and occasionally through observations about themselves directly, that occurred over a span of roughly 10 years, informally through text and private messaging, as well as casual conversation at parties and during socializing. His victims should not be subject to more retraumatizing or identification due to fear of retaliation. Along this vein, I also do not wish to identify myself. Frequently his victims of abuse are non-romantic partners" [ibid.]. In short, discretion and optics are central to such investigations, walking the tightrope between outing ourselves and our abusers—an act that generally goes hand-in-hand. This isn't just from the abusers, but those they work with also needing to be held accountable [with SPG hiring not just Reed, but Steven Negrete, who also took advantage of people through his position with the band].

To this, there's a parasocial element to bands/theatre gigs, and values they brand vs values they stand by when profit is threatened [i.e., by us, grappling with them using the same aesthetics, above]. Throw in the desire of victims wanting to maintain some sense of control over their lives by handling things privately and you're left with the sad, complicated reality that many won't come forward for fear of reprisals [... source: "'Ruling the Slum'; or, Crime Lords, Police Tokenism and Sell-Outs (feat. The Crow and Steam Powered Giraffe)," 2024)

Such behavior is to effectively "kill your darlings," a process necessary when reversing abjection, and one taught to me (on purpose or not) by imperfect instructors.

My Musical Tastes (and Sex Life and Sex Work Informing Said Tastes)

Everyone's racist, including me (read: white girl from Michigan); I was also queer and whorephobic growing up, unlearning those bigotries (and my racism) by dating partners with progressive elements that shaped my musical tastes (ergo activism and sex work); i.e., "material shapes consciousness" and vice versa (re: Marx's Base and Superstructure), the brain neuroplastic and people more than statues that can nonetheless fetishize for different aims (to objectify but also grant power towards). This explanation focuses on metal, and even then it's just the tip. "Giving My Two Cents: A Metal Compendium" (2020) gives some examples of music I like, including metal. For a good YouTube channel that recommends all sorts of great obscure bands, I highly recommend NWOTHM Full Albums (2016) or New Wave of Old School Thrash Metal (2016); e.g., Venator's Echoes from the Gutter (2022) being an absolutely stellar album, as well as Witchtrap's Vengeance Is My Name (2012), Black Absinthe's On Earth or In Hell (2024), Saturday Night Satan's All Things Black (2024), Hell Fire's Metal Masses (2016), etc. One of my favorite obscure bands from '80s America is Manilla Road's classic three (especially The Deluge, 1986) or Ashbury's Endless Skies (1983—the later emulated nicely by Wytch Hazel; e.g., "Dry Bones," 2020), but I love many more I found specifically from those YouTube channels.

My Metal Tastes

(artist: Andreas Marschall)

Metal and rock-wise, some of my standard favorites include Coroner's Mental Vortex (1991), Atheist's Unquestionable Presence (1991), Death's Human (1991), Sodom's Agent Orange (1986), Judas Priest's Stained Class (1978—or any of their '70s work), Metallica's early albums (especially Ride the Lightning, 1984), a lot of Megadeth (especially Peace Sells but also Endgame and other latter-day albums, 1986 and 2009), old Pantera (mainly Power Metal, Cowboys, and Vulgar Display of Power—1988, 1989 and 1992), AC/DC's Back in Black (1980), Def Leppard's High and Dry (1981), Thin Lizzy's Black Rose (1979), Van Halen (until 1984), Iron Maiden (anything from their 1980 debut to Seventh Son, 1987), early Mercyful Fate and King Diamond (Abigail [1987] is amazeballs), Deep Purple's Machine Head (1972), early Iced Earth (e.g., Burnt Offerings, 1995), '80s and '90s Annihilator, Kings X' Out of the Silent Planet and Gretchen Goes to Nebraska (1988 and 1989), early Zeppelin and Sabbath (and really just about anything Sabbath, including the Martin and Dio-era albums but also Born Again, 1983), Dio-era Rainbow (e.g., Rising, 1976), Savatage's Mountain King, Gutter Ballet and Streets (1987, 1989, 1991), White Lion's Pride and Big Game (1987 and 1989), Sanctuary's Into the Mirror Black (1990), Overkill's Horrorscope (1991), The Scorpions* (from In Trance [1975] onwards), early Tool (mostly Undertow and Ænima, 1993 and 1996), anything by Dance with the Dead (e.g., Near Dark, 2014), Pat Benatar's '70s and '80s work (e.g., Crimes of Passion, 1980), Uriah Heep's Abominog (1982), basically Blue Öyster Cult's entire career (Secret Treaties is their best, 1974), System of a Down's Toxicity and Mesmerize (2001 and 2005) and many, many more.

*I love The Scorpions so much I decided to include them in my PhD; re: "The Finale; or "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll!" (Ludo-Gothic BDSM in practice, feat. Blxxd Bunny and The Scorpions)," 2023):

(source)

Other Music I Like (and External Stimuli)

I don't just consume metal (and its myriad subgenres) but also:

• videogame music (covers and chiptunes; e.g., old school The Minibosses [their 2000 bootlegs] and the OST to Shadow of the Beast II or Hotline Miami, 1990 and 2012)
• camp (e.g., Meatloaf or Spinal Tap)
• jazz (classic to fusion; e.g., Jeff Beck, Weather Report, Jaco Pastorius, Return to Forever, Miles Davis, Pat Methany's Bright Size Life [1976], etc)
• classical (from the Baroque, Classical to Romantic eras and beyond; e.g., Vivaldi and Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to Mussorgsky to Holst to Aaron Copland, etc)
• and Vaporwave (and Synthwave, Darkwave, etc—benefits of dating a music nerd* in the 2010s)
• house music (e.g., Susumu Yokota's Acid Mt. Fuji, 1994)
• movie scores and soundtracks (e.g., Graeme Revell's 1994 Crow score and soundtrack, or the 1995 Mortal Kombat soundtrack)
• vintage disco and club/party music from different periods (e.g., Tahnee Cain & The Tryanglz, Angie Gold, Trans-X, Suzie Q or Taylor Dayne, etc)
• postpunk, goth rock and industrial (e.g., Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, The Cure's Disintegration or NIN's "Closer" music video, 1979, 1989, 1994)
• and many other genres and styles that often cross over into metal

We're products of our environments but also compose our environment, too!

Nerds Fuck (to Metal and Other Music They Pass onto Their Partners)

*Nerds and whores aren't mutually exclusive; i.e., nerds fuck—often to metal, but also Emerald Web—and if you want to learn more about music, date a baddie (the YouTube algorithm will only get you so far); e.g., Cuwu and I, but really any of my exes teaching me through metal and sex: Lindsay taught me about Industrial and Tool; Zeuhl about, well, zeuhl, drone, Vaporwave and a gazillion other weird genres on RYM (where I used to write reviews); and Cuwu showed me bands and artists like Slush Puppy, Neutral Milk Hotel, Billy Ellish, FKA twigs, etc:

(exhibit: Image material from "Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM" [2025]. Top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; top-left, exhibit 6b2a1: "My exes and I: Zeuhl [top] and Jadis [bottom]. I've written about both extensively in this book series, but each has their own respective exposé: 'Non-Magical Detectives' and 'Showing Jadis' Face.' As explained in those pieces, Zeuhl's face continues to be mildly censored because they're more neurotic, vindictive and marginalized than Jadis. Both harmed me greatly but through said harm inspired me; i.e., to write and illustrate Sex Positivity to heal from said harm, thus ultimately meet Cuwu [and those who came after Cuwu]. For every useful idiot, you have accidental allies!")

I also learned similar lessons from the people I dated afterwards: my partner Bay Ryan is Maori, non-binary and disabled; Crow is non-binary and into monster fucking and horror stories; and Victoria is intersex and rape survivor like I am (all above). None of us are perfect victims, nor were those who harmed us perfect abusers. Instead, we're all part of the same pedagogy of the oppressed*, approaching abuse from different vantage points (re: "Healing from Rape," 2024). This includes the music each of them showed me, but also Gothic media more broadly (e.g., Crow loves werewolves, Victoria loves Angel Dust from Haz-bin Hotel [2021] and Bay loves drag queens and kings; e.g., Eartha Kitt); i.e., the more you play in consciously intersectional and rebellious ways makes you more active in your ability to rebel: learning from sluts (even the closeted ones), meaning while capital relegates us to the bed room for white straight men (and tokens) to enjoy!

*From Paulo Freire's 1970 book of the same name.

In Conclusion; or, in Charon's Canoe

To conclude these addendums, metal been a lifelong quest for me (chasing the Numinous, in my case). I started in the closet—unsure of myself while feeling hopelessly afraid of sex workers, queer folk, non-white persons, etc—eventually going into Hell to learn from them ("fire of the gods"); I emerged from "outside" Plato's cave while still inside it: a newborn queer free to help others learn, as I had learned. For me, this started with analog before living through Napster, LimeWire, and VGmix, segueing into iTunes and YouTube, then Bandcamp, Spotify and beyond; i.e., nerdily conducting my journalism, interviews, and all-around sex work, hand-in-hand: to slowly but steadily learn about racism, sexism, queer/whorephobia, etc; re: from other sluts, then combat oppression (and the Protestant ethic) as best we collectively can from Charon's canoe (a poetic way of saying "the Gothic mode," which the whores and bastards in heavy metal occupy on and offstage).

(exhibit 43d [from the Undead Module's "Seeing Dead People," 2024]: Models and artist: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard. Jadis and I, re-envisioned as a knight and her femboy ward through their encouragement/coercion [they would pull my funding and threaten me when angered, becoming a cycle of reactive abuse]. Doing so has transformed the past in ways that reflect on my abuse while also offering up a better hypothetical in the same Gothic language: what could have been and what could actually be in future love stories should workers [and BDSM contracts] actually be respected, post-negotiation—not a memory of the past, but a rememory focused on remembering the essence of what was lost and, if not forgetting the horrifying abuse suffered at the same time, then at least not letting it rule me; i.e., me feeding on something I could rearrange and draw strength from—to not have it drain me all the time.

Sometimes—and in keeping with heavy metal's fixation with a hyphenation of underworld-overworld—this battle is fought with the ghosts of those we loved fighting by our side; re: with those I dated, lived with, escaped from, and supported at conventions being "undertakers"; i.e., equally-human workers with healthy appetites seeing little-ol' me, saying "me likey!" before taking me to Hell and back (not a wholly toxic procedure, but one I had to consciously salvage all the same; e.g., Lindsay and I*, above): learning from whores, heavy metal home to whores of all walks (strict or otherwise). Music should be free, but support your local artists serving as Charon's canoe! Make it not an opiate for the masses to enslave you, but a potent, Numinous drug that sets your mind (and body) free "on the Aegis" (what Mark Fisher called "acid Communism," and which I explore in "Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit," 2025).

*With me being a rape victim who survived her rape by turning her abuser into something of an effigy, post-escape (re: "Escaping Jadis, or Running up that Hill," 2024).

Works Cited (roughly in their order of appearance)

My extensive work on Gothic Communism (six books, from 2023-2025) is holistic and tends to conversationally combine seemingly disparate topics into a single train of thought; i.e., within the Gothic mode as something that I regularly write about. Again, a specialty of mine is tokenism (re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It"), made alongside a variety of artists and sex workers; e.g., Nyx, someone I've worked with repeatedly in the past:

(model and artist: Nyx and Persephone van der Waard)

To that, this essay was produced off-the-cuff, with me gathering my sources while watching HMP's video. Here's all of them:

Note: While this page is SFW, my sources—specifically the ones from me as the author—sometimes lead to my 18+ website. All the sources have been added, but I will add some visual aids tomorrow (after I rest my eyeballs). —Perse

• Re: Persephone van der Waard's "Giving My Two Cents: A Metal Compendium"
• Kristy Turnquist's "40 Years Later, Can We Sill Stomach Animal House?" (2018)
• Tim Gilmore's "Lynyrd Skynyrd and Confederate Flags and the Allman Brothers Band" (2020)
• SpectreSoundStudios' "Racism in Metal: A very bad idea" (concerning Metallica's fascist past, 2016)
• MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
• Weber's maxim: "a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate" (source).
• Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows: the Guerilla in History (regarding the "paradox/monopoly of terror," 1975)
• Persephone van der Waard's "monopoly of monsters" concept vis-à-vis the other monopolies (and qualities of capital; re: Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative): "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual Documents" (2024)
• Dave West's "Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit" (2023) vis-à-vis Jerrold E. Hogle's "The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection" (concerning Punter's notion of inheritance anxiety* that middle-class Westerners fear/fascinate themselves with, pimping it [as I argue in response to Hogle†] to further abjection, 2012)

*The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980).

†I.e., regarding nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food"); e.g., Medusa ("Always a Victim," 2025) or similar boss-like beings; e.g., Grand Mother Silk aping Cameron's Archaic Mother in Hollow Knight: Silksong (re: "Persephone's Silksong Symposium," 2025).

• FSC v. Paxton June 27th SCOTUS ruling (regarding media censorship [not just of porn in Texas, but anything "obscene"] and the elimination of the Miller Test, 2025)
• Essence of Thoughts "US Bill Threatens to Ban Trans People Online" (regarding Michigan's Puritanical House Bill 4938 and the treatment of trans people as inherently pornographic/obscene in ways that bypass the Miller Test, 2025)
• Persephone van der Waard's "React No.24: Prohibition and Genocide Are Here; Fight Back No Matter What!" (concerning the "FSC v. Paxton June 27th SCOTUS" ruling, 2025)

• Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (above, 1952)
• Glenn Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks (2014)
• re: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States 
• Howard Zinn's "Private Ryan Saves War" (not mentioned in the essay, per se, but an important read concerning an ongoing pro-war sentiment in metal; i.e., one that echoes cryptomimetically in other forms of popular media, including videogames, war movies, and comic books, 1998)
• Joseph Parrott's "Captain America: Changing [the] Conscience of a Nation" (2015, commenting on America's neutrality until 1941—with characters like Wonder Woman* but also Captain America designed to get American citizens involved in the war effort [versus just selling foreign nations supplies at cutthroat interest; e.g., the Marshall Plan]: so America would be in place come the Nazis inevitably losing the Western Front, Stalin being unable to claim those lands if the Americans were already there)

*With Wonder Woman herself written by a poly man who thought women would rule the world, William Marston coding BDSM (specifically bondage) directly into his stories but also white feminism and 1940s sex appeal:

(source)

The monomyth and Heracles are as old as Western civilization, as are their female counterparts for or against the state; e.g., Wonder Woman as walking the bondage-to-cop tightrope in ways that skirt the boundaries of canon and camp, of such a character as ever fitting successfully into a heteronormative scheme despite wearing the American colors. As Jesse Kinos-Goodin writes in "From a Sex Cult to the UN" (2017):

There are a lot of mixed feelings around Wonder Woman, mainly due to this feminist figure/male sexual fantasy dichotomy that has followed the character since her inception in 1941. This complexity has a lot to do with the character's creator, psychologist William Marston, a self-described feminist who also lived in a polyamorous relationship with at least two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, who both bore children by him. Byrne was a direct inspiration for Wonder Woman's physical appearance. Another woman, Marjorie W. Huntley, was also in a romantic relationship with the Marstons, and even helped with the inking and lettering of the Wonder Woman comics in the 1940s (source).

Like all Amazons, Wonder Woman is pinned between her dutiful place in a man's world, the symbol of rebellion likewise defined through her body and gender identity/performance as "like a (straight) man's" or not. The same problem extends to queer men and any other monstrous-feminine, of course, and frankly to any soldier period [...]: to serve the state or serve workers (source: "'Cruisin' for a Bruisin'!': From Herbos to Himbos, part one," 2024).

Amazons are the original warrior witches of the West, therefore its tokens to emulate in the 20th and 21st centuries. Today, Wonder Woman remains a character canonically serving global US hegemony just like Captain American and Superman. This means genocide apologia—with Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman being an Israeli symbol (Gadot having served in the GDF):

The Lasso of Truth, for example, isn't purely a torture device (though Marston did invent the polygraph machine, a device he later disowned), but a highly playful mode of allegory (exquisite "torture") sold to a wider audience minus de Sade's particular mil spec uniforms (the Amazon has her own style, in this respect): release from illusion through feminist bondage! It's the whore's paradox in action, both a cop and a victim, a hero and villain on the same Aegis.

The problem is, feminism, BDSM and Amazons gentrify and decay under capital like all heroes (thus monsters) do. To it, Amazons paradoxically portray a herbo maternal side they try to assimilate with (or otherwise humanize through); i.e., as demonic whores/witches coming from a vengeful, mythical warrior half of nature the state can use to tokenize Amazons into Spartan-esque (rapacious) police agents; re: prostitutes and herbos becoming a particular kind of witch cop during blood libel (the grim harvest): whores policing whores on a spectrum of preferential mistreatment that took time to install, as did its mirrors; e.g., Gal Gadot (above) being a member of the IDF before she played Wonder Woman, basically making her "Nazi" by another name (source: "On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim," 2024).

The elite—who own film studios and printing houses, which they leverage to cultivate the Superstructure through the Base—have baked the function of cops and robbers during the abjection process; i.e., into profit/state continuation, doing so through the usual monstrous-feminine aesthetic achieving mirror syndrome (a black mirror having labor attack itself and nature as monstrous-feminine). This applies to comics following a similar poetic direction (and weaponization) that heavy metal achieves within the Gothic mode: sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll; monsters and heroes; damsels and whores, Amazons and knights, etc. One side—cops, meaning traitors for the state—can legally play with such things provided they betray their class interests; i.e., what I call "witch cops†"; re (from Volume Three):

†An idea I arrived at independently from Silvia Federici's own extensive work on witches and witch hunts, but which I would apply to Creed's monstrous-feminine; i.e., in videogames, not just movies (re: "Policing the Whore," 2024), but really any form of media to camp, therefore have the whore's revenge versus the pimp (re: "Rape Reprise").

(exhibit 98a4 [from "'What is a Witch?' part two," 2025]: Artist: J. Scott Campbell. Witches and goblins are classic symbols of persecution, Elphaba the monstrous-feminine [witchcraft] merged with blood libel and sodomy tropes [the Maguire version, Wicked onwards, is trans; see: "Sexist Ire"]. The Wicked Witch of the West can be a symbol of proletarian revolt, but can just as easily be reduced to a neo-conservative sexpot who gets mired down in incremental, equality-through-convenience disputes—e.g., about nudism—instead of actually critiquing power. Just as power and resistance share the same space, the aesthetics of death and power as badass can be employed by bourgeois and proletarian forces in cryptonymic opposition; the context must be gleaned through dialectical-material scrutiny as a matter of "oppression disguise" to worn, in good faith and bad as Witch™ mid-Amazonomachia. Tokens look like the oppressed, green skin or not...)

The same goes for race and culture, the three commonly intersecting mid-abjection and cryptonymy—"pimping the Gorgon," as I call it; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit haunting popular media to hint at universal liberation behind a Black Veil (from Radcliffe, onwards; re: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2024). This means whatever workers bring forwards by camping state media to rescue witches (and similar beings) from tokenization; i.e., as tied to state structures of power and play promoting the Judas among the oppressed; e.g., the nuclear household policed by out-group recruits: "Capitalism sexualizes everything" ("Thesis Body," 2023); "we camp canon because we must" ("The Map Is a Lie," 2023). Be it exploitation or liberation—all share the same space, onstage and off, caught curiously between ongoing struggles of class, culture and race as awake or asleep to varying degrees: a witch is a witch, but not all witches are pimps; some set you free, mid-"peril," by playing with power and performance conducive to liberation (ludo-Gothic BDSM in a nutshell). Rawr!

(source: Eartha Kitt's "I Don't Care," 1984)

• Non-Compete's "The Dark Truth About America's Founding Fathers" (sharing Michael Parenti's lecture on the American ruling class conceding the Bill of Rights to middle-class American workers, 2025)
• Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds (1997)
• Atun-Shei Film's "Holy Horror: A New History of John Brown's Raid" (2024)
• Frederick Douglass' "If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress" (1857)
• GDF's "There Was a Genocide in Korea and Nobody Cares" (regarding the fact that HMP's father and grandfathers fought in American wars, including [I would assume] the Korean War despite HMP being half-Korean [ostensibly on his mother's side], 2022)
• Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception (regarding "the state of exception," 2005)
• Stephen Graham's "Foucault's Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism" (regarding "the Imperial Boomerang," 2013)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang" (2024)

• Ward Churchill's "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" (2001) vis-à-vis Malcolm X's 1963 speech using the same phrase
• Persephone van der Waard's view on "intersectional consciousness" building on Marx' class consciousness; i.e., "the oldest form of worker revenge is the whore's against profit, which sex workers (and by extension all workers) attain through collective protest raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness on all registers" (source: "Non-Profit and Funding" from Gothic Communism promo page, 2023)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Rape Reprise" (concerning the whore's revenge against profit/the pimp's revenge, wherein "profit = rape")
• David Forbes' "The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction" (regarding American Red Scare in the 1950s [re: Truman relieving McArthur] and wanting to nuke the Reds, including China and Korea, 2015)
• Carl Posey's "How the Korean War Almost Went Nuclear" (2015)
• Navin's birthday scene from The Jerk (regarding a white child raising among a black family to the degree that he thinks he's black, 1979)
• the bully scene from Dragon (where Bruce Lee says, "Sorry about your father; that was Koreans, I'm an American," 1993)

• Dr. Rana Indrajit Singh's "Base and Superstructure Theory" (above, 2013)
• Juliana Kim's "World Chess Just Placed Restrictions on Both Trans Women and Trans Men" (2023)
• Behind the Bastard's "Part One: Bobby Fischer: Chess Nazi" (2023)
• Brooklyn Museum's "SILENCE=DEATH" exhibit (below, originally 1987)

(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

• John the Duncan's "The Cunning Recognition of Palestine" (regarding the term "cunning recognition," 2025)
• Malcolm X's "foxes and wolves" speech (critiquing white moderates similar to MLK, 1963)
• Terry Gross' "A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America" (concerning "redlining" as I mention it, 2017)
• Nazish Dholakia's "Fifty Years Ago Today, President Nixon Declared the War on Drugs" (2021)
• The National Archives' "Hong Kong and the Opium Wars"
• Persephone van der Waard's "The World Is a Vampire" (concerning Plato's famous allegory of the cave [from Book VII of Republic, 375 BC] vis-à-vis metal, movies and the Gothic, but especially The Matrix [1999] and similar stories, 2024)
• EvBoxing's "The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Favourite Boxers" (regarding Muhammad Ali's* refusal to sleep with white women and history of domestic abuse alongside other non-white boxers, 2025)

*"Black men with white women just don't feel right. [...] A black man should be killed if he's messing with a white woman" (source: "Playboy Interview: Muhammad Ali," 1975)

• Dream Deceivers Documentary - The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest (1992)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism" (2024)

• Jim Crow Stories' "D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915)" (regarding Woodrow Wilson screening the movie at the White House)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Anti-Semitism vs Antisemitism: Discussing My Grandfather (a Dutch Holocaust Survivor) w/ My Work" (2025)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Hot Karl: Karl Jobst Still Racist (and Fash), in 2025"
• aini's "The Nanjing Massacre: The Holocaust you've never heard about" (2025)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Modularity and Class" (regarding Japanese neoliberal exports, chiefly videogames, 2024); re:

Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early 80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic's usual haunt: among middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn't exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: television's as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.

From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—about twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda's harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic's man-cave walls.

In turn, the American middle class (so called "gamer culture") would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (source).

• Asia Society's "Manny Pacquiao, 2024": "As a child in the Philippines, Manny Pacquiao’s family was so poor that he had to drop out of school at age 14 and move to Manila in hopes of making money to support his mother and five siblings. He spent time living on the streets, but eventually found his way onto the Philippine national amateur boxing team. Within two years he went pro. Within another decade, he was a national hero, worth millions, and arguably the most famous Filipino in the world. Pacquiao literally changed the game of boxing, and challenged perceptions of Asians the world over. [...] Over the years, he's directed a large chunk of his boxing fortune toward hundreds of student scholarships, farming equipment in poor areas, churches, hospitals, disaster relief, environmental causes, and numerous international charities. In recent years, he's also become a major figurehead in the fight against human trafficking, using his stature, political power, and finances to help combat the practice in the Philippines" (source).
• Persephone van der Waard's "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning: A Trans Woman's Experiences Researching (and Abuse Suffered from) the Speedrunning Community" (2025)
• Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (regarding manufactured competition, scarcity and consent as I group them; re: the manufacture trifecta from "Paratextual Documents," 1988)
• Foucault's A History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1980)
• Persephone van der Waard's "A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards (feat. Bad Empanada, Rob Halford, Anne Rice, Foucault, Judith Butler, and more)" (regarding Foucault and A History of Sexuality when considering "sodomy" aka "problematic love," 2024)

(exhibit 41g1a1b [from "Leaving the Closet," 2024]: Left: Rob Halford of Judas Priest; right: Chappell Roan and Magical Katrina. Sex symbols under Capitalism inherit prior divisions and binaries that are codified and resold back into a hungry market. The queer man is often framed as guilty and self-hating, flagellating himself in methods tied both to medieval penance, worship and religious experience [e.g., "Donner and Blitzen," 2019]; implements of death and torture under heteronormative power structures [the "leather daddy/gay biker" BDSM schtick]; but also punk and "cruising" bar culture as occupied by outcasts on either side of the political spectrum decaying into undead: Nazis and Communists...)

• Persephone van der Waard's "Chapter Four: Bad Faith (opening and "Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion" (discussing TERFs and fascist feminism, from Sex Positivity Volume Three, 2025)
• Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990)
• overzealot's "Every CURRENT Zionist Talking Point, Destroyed" (regarding Palestinians living in Palestine before the Israelis came and stole their land, 2025)
• Edward Said's "Reflections on Exile" (regarding diasporic [and musical] qualities to people without a land, 1985)
• F.D. Signifier's "The Bougie Negro* Tier List" (2025)

*Regarding MLK being "bougie," which means (from a non-white American perspective) middle-class or relatively (compared to non-white folk) well-to-do; e.g., "King's $8,000-a-year salary as a preacher is the equivalent of roughly $58,000 in 2018 dollars, according to GOBankingRates" (source: "Martin Luther King Jr.'s Net Worth," 2020).

• MLK's "The Other America" speech (regarding "rioting is the language of the unheard," 1968)
• Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle's "Obama's Covert Drone War" (2017)
• Goldenbell Training's "The Untold Details of Bruce Lee's Early Life" (concerning his middle-class "theatre kid" origins, 2024)
• Emily Murray's "Bruce Lee Letters and Young Celebrity Substance Use" (specifically cocaine, 2025)
• Cheyenne Linn's "Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right" (concerning the issue of "getting the girl" and sexism/white girls often being a promise to men, including non-white men in popular media, 2023)
• Persephone van der Waard's "'I'll See You in Hell': Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies" (concerning the idea of forbidden/courtly love between white girls and non-white entities, 2024)
• Haley Hulan's "Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context" (2017)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman's Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love (feat. Anne Rice, Chelyabinsk-40, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Castlevania, and more)" (on Brotherhood of the Wolf and Mark Dacascos, 2024)

*Not being Native American, but being Hawaiian/Filipino and Irish/Japanese; and who, in his own words regarding his multicultural appearance: "Well, I guess the advantage is that it's enabled me to play a lot of different characters. The disadvantage, I suppose, is that sometimes I'm not enough of anything to play what they're looking for"  (source: Melissa Slaughter's "Mark Dacascos Can't Cook, But He Can Kick A** in the Reboot of Iron Chef," 2022). Bear in mind, this goes both ways. My partner, Bay Ryan, has white skin; they're still Maori. But just as Indigenous people can betray in ways Westerns think of as "native," this applies to Japan as an ethnostate bombed into armed subjugation by American profiteers: "Twink death, amirite?"

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

• Zachary Fairbrother's "Fascist Femininity in Japanese Pop-Culture" (2024)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports" (written 2023, released 2025)
• Mari Yamaguchi's "Japan raises the age of sexual consent to 16 from 13, which was among the world's lowest" (2023)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Room for Both: Horror and Social Commentary in Three Japanese Classics" (regarding queerness and horror in Japanese culture after WWII, 2018)
• Fat Little Asian Man's "Asian Racism is Built Different than your Average Racism" (regarding Japanese fascism* and covering up of its war crimes post-WWII through allyship with America, 2025)

*I've had people (weebs) straight-up tell me that Japan "isn't fascist" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: October 9th, 2025). For anyone who thinks Japan isn't fascist/doesn't have any kind of fascist history after WWII, please consult this photo:

"Seventeen-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi uses a foot-long sword to kill Japan Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma, on a public stage in Tokyo, 12 October 1960. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive" (source: The Guardian, 2016)

• Jack Saint's "Woke War Mario" (concerning reactionaries calling Mario woke, demanding a more traditional [sexist] approach within the monomythic formula, 2023)
• Great Big Story's "'It's-a Me, Mario!'" (concerning Mario's "Italian" voice origin story, 2017)
• The Leftist Cooks' "Are Americans Irish?" (regarding Hibernophilia, 2025)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Rockstars: From Rock 'n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix' Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects (feat. Cynthia Plastercaster)" (regarding metal having political commentary, 2025)
• Tom Taylor's "Steely Dan vs John Lennon" (regarding The Beatles selling out, below, 2021)

• The About section for Genius' Black Sabbath's "Faeries Wear Boots" (1970): "This song is about Skinheads. At the time in England, Skinheads were not racists, but punks and anarchists. They usually wore boots, which is how Sabbath got the title. / The lyrics were inspired by an incident after a Sabbath concert in 1970. The band was attacked by a bunch of Skinheads after the show, injuring Tony Iommi and forcing them to cancel their next performance" (source).
• re: Persephone van der Waard's "Radcliffe's Refrain" (concerning famous 18th-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe and her "Scooby Doo" School of Terror approach to Gothic that survived into the 20th [e.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975] and 21st centuries within metal culture under Pax Americana)
• Persephone van der Waard's "Forbidden Sight, part two: Making Demons (Prometheus and Frankenstein)" (2025)
• Joseph Crawford's introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (concerning Radcliffe per her aforementioned terror refrain surviving in the larger Gothic mode, 2013)
• TOI staff's "Ozzy Osbourne stood against anti-Israel bias and antisemitism" (regarding Ozzy being a Zionist*, 2025):

*And those who defend himself/shamelessly make money off his b(r)and/name (e.g., this dickhead).

(source: zionist.in.music)

• Persephone van der Waard's "React #25: Black Sabbath—Reflecting on Their Legacy in Final Send-Off" (and which I didn't learn about his Zionism [above] until after he died, 2025)
• Persephone van der Waard's "'Dragon Sickness': The Problem of Greed" (regarding HMP's comment about dragons being "apolitical," 2015)
• Rob York's "Slayer's Music Was Anti-Authoritarian and Anti-War" (regarding Slayer being pro-life, 2020): "Last hint: the band also wrote songs that were anti-abortion and tough on crime. Okay, okay, it's Slayer. And if you didn't know that it's hard to blame you." Anti-abortion is classically framed by weirdo libertarians as "small government" but who abolished Roe v. Wade? Pro-life stances are about controlling women's bodies, not respecting their rights; i.e., a classically pro-state position that polices (thus pimps) women "for their own good" (while making money off the media promoting these ideas, like Slayer did).
• Tasting History's "Dracula's Paprika Hendl from Bram Stoker's 1897 Novel" (on the historical eating of horses tied to industry, 2025)
• Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play" (translation, 1970)
• Behind the Bastard's "Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates" (concerning Gates being a billionaire, monopolist and pedophile, 2023)
• The Kavernacle's "We Need to Talk about Leftists Defending a Democrat with a Fascist Tattoo" (regarding Graham Platner's "accidental" Nazi tattoo and deliberately serving in Blackwater in 2018, 2025)

(artist: Alex Ahad)

"At a presentation level, Gothic Communism reduces to one central goal: illustrating mutual consent as an educational device—i.e., one that makes rape of the alien impossible on a cultural level; but doing so requires humanizing the alien through iconoclastic engagement with dogma as something to break (and along with it, Capitalist Realism)" (source: "Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien")

• re: Persephone van der Waard's "Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien"
• re: Persephone van der Waard's "Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty"
• re: Persephone van der Waard's "Making Marx Gay"
• Persephone van der Waard's "React No.28: Bad Empanada Calls for Political Violence Against Critic Calling Him Fascist" (2025):

• Dr Uncola's "The USSR under Lenin was the world leader in gay rights* and gender corrective surgery for more than a decade" tweet (2023)

*Not mentioned in the video, but I strongly recommend revolutionaryth0t's "Why did the USSR (re-)criminalize homosexuality?" and "What was life like for trans people in the Soviet Union?" (2025); see, also: my "Understanding Vampires" chapter (which discusses Marxist-Leninism and queerphobia, 2024). In other words, all bigotries are extant, endemic to a struggle that occurs across all registers. We must push for intersectional solidarity (and consciousness) versus these internal/external factors; re: while synthesizing praxis that makes workers collectively more intelligent and aware of necessary struggle—a pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape by systemically reducing systemic capacities for harm.

• Chip Berlet's "Mussolini on the Corporate State" (concerning his definition of fascism, 2005)
• Bad Empanada's "How the USA Inspired the Nazis - From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum" (2021)
• Bad Mouse's "The Molotov Ribbentrop Pact | Marxist-Leninist Myths 1" (and Soviet hypocrisy versus the West, 2025)
• re: Persephone van der Waard's "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It"
• William Blum's Killing Hope: A History of US Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II (concerning America wanting the fascists to destroy Communism before, during and after WWII, 2003)

(artist: Frank Frazetta)