ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered Renee Good, yesterday—shooting her after asking her to leave the vicinity of an ongoing ICE raid. Good* was recording said raid, well within her rights to do so; she died next to her wife, sitting in the passenger seat as the ICE agent fired, unprompted, into their car. He did so—a masked gunman, armed and armored versus an unarmed woman—as Good drove away from the officers; i.e., when she complied. She followed their order to leave and they killed her anyways, effectively martyring her (a concept we'll touch on sporadically throughout, but mainly in the preface and the footnotes). 

*Correction: her wife was recording ICE; Good was effectively a bystander without a camera. As of 1/25/2026, ICE have also killed Alex Pretti—a VA nurse who was coming to the aid of another unarmed woman who had just been pepper-sprayed. When he came to her defense in a non-violent fashion, Pretti was subsequently tackled by approximately six ICE agents, before being quickly beaten, disarmed (of a weapon he had not drawn but was registered to own and to carry) and ultimately shot to death—all under a minute; i.e., for practicing his first and second amendment rights (Persephone van der Waard's "Alex Pretti and the Important of Resisting Fascism as an Ongoing (and Endemic) Problem"). I would respond: "Yes, the 2A and 'free speech' crowd (of conservative Pax Americana) are oddly quiet, but establishment politics at large are complicit/unequipped to handle fascism" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: January 25th, 2026). It bears repeating that fascists kill anyone they disagree with, but especially those who resist them in non-violent ways; i.e., "pacifism is trafficking with the enemy," as Umberto Eco would put it (source: "Ur-Fascism," 1995). And while that sucks—meaning in ways that many more privileged people in American are just now coming to grips with (e.g., Legal Eagle's "The Execution of Alex Pretti Broke Me")—the sooner we realize it and fight back. Let the scales fall from your eyes!

(source: Paul Walsh and Jeff Day's "Mother identifies woman shot, killed by ICE agent," 2026)

Such is fascism-in-action, state corruption—a feature of capital, not a bug—hammering any who dare speak out, once decay routinely sets in: cops killing witnesses, whistleblowers, and activists by design. "The Wolf Is Loose" fights back, exploring the fascist ramifications to honor Good (and other victims/targets of state power, below): by revealing the state rot she exposed in death if not on purpose, while touching conversationally on historical and poetic examples, side-by-side (as the Gothic does, Gothic Communism being a holistic, intersectional discipline). In doing so, it examines state vampirism through a werewolf critical lens (with lycanthropy and vampirism being poetically similar out of the Renaissance, generally as markers of disease and criminal activity for playwrights to abject; e.g., Count Ferdinand, in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, 1614).

(exhibit 1: Subject, top-left: Renee Good; top-middle: Neil Morris; top-right: Mary Ann Vecchio and Jeffrey Miller; bottom-left: Keith Porter; bottom-middle: Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez and his children; bottom-left: Bay Ryan. Different victims and targets of fascism and imperialism [which fascism brings home to empire]. This extends not just to outright rape and murder but also generational trauma/stolen generations. Every voice matters—for white, black and brown people, of course, but also Indigenous Peoples pushed to the margins; i.e., both foreign examples [re: Bay being a Maori sex worker affected by British and Dutch colonialism] and local ones, speaking out in Minneapolis [e.g., The Red Nation's "Minneapolis vs. ICE w/ Indigenous Protector Movement," 2026]. The battle for civil rights, then, historically-materially demands equal rights for all—a war [of class, culture and race] that only intensifies demands for intersectional consciousness and solidarity: when and where fascism occurs, not "if." It also targets people systemically we don't explicitly focus on, here—namely the elderly and poor people as a whole, preyed upon by state power denying basic human necessities en masse: "When survival becomes illegal in your own city, displacement isn't a side effect; it becomes the policy," explains Offended Outcast ["WHERE DO THEY EXPECT US TO GO?" 2026]. There's also the struggle of trans people, at home and abroad; e.g., Tony Asik's recent murder in a British women's prison [Essence of Thought's "Prison Tortures Trans Man to Death," 2026]. All are victims, too; even when not targeted directly by fascist goons, fascism is still at play [and generally through neoliberal stratagems that lead to fascism, but I digress]. To it, the owner class are so alienated from workers as to view/treat them as numbers on a chart, not people. Land back means labor and bodies back, sex back, art back, and anything else the elite can possibly steal when furthering abjection.)

The front of this essay includes various paratexts, including an updates section covering the rapidly developing situation in Minnesota (and their food for thought) before the table of contents:

• Concerning State Vampirism
• Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose
• Essay Preface: Updates and General Food for Thought
  • Concerning Sex Work as Revolutionary Action (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM[1])
  • Concerning Cops, Good and Bad; or, the Time of Monsters
  • Updates "on the Ground"; or, Concerning Minnesota
  • Preface Conclusion; or, Caught the Middle: A Cryptonymy Reprise and Witchcraft Refrain before Cutting Myself off (from Further Addendums; feat. Angel Witch and Nya Blu)
• Essay Table of Contents

Concerning State Vampirism

(artist: Karen B.; cited: "The World Is a Vampire," 2024)

This piece (essay or otherwise) is part of a larger series on state vampirism. As I conceive it, state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection*, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist. These are largely questions of aesthetic, whose Promethean (self-destructive) function extends to other configurations "of Omelas"; e.g., Zionism. Furthermore, there's overlap between my anti-Zionist work and my work critiquing Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism alongside capital, so consider reading both.

*Which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism, through paid/unpaid labor (re: me, vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva). To that, abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) is one of four main Gothic theories my book series utilizes—the other three being hauntology (retro-future), cryptonymy (show/hide) and chronotopes (time-space) alongside smaller theories; e.g., Jerrold Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit† and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine (Gorgons and Amazonomachia, as I study it). As a queer sex worker and academic, I dialectically-materially prioritize abjection and vampirism through unpaid labor—chiefly sex work as exploited by Cartesian dualism and its harmful, maximalist binaries under Capitalist Realism, treating nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024)—but mention the other theories, too (access "Four Main Gothic Theories (the Four Gs)" in "Paratextual Documents" for their longer definitions). In essence, capital/the state rape by design, which unpaid labor prevents by breaking Capitalist Realism mid-abjection; i.e., reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM (rape play) when having the whore's revenge (which "State Vampirism" explores at length): "to break the profit [and productivity] motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes" (source: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

†Re: "Raising Awareness" (2025),  footnote 1.

Disclaimers/Concerning Censored Nudity and Its Educational Purpose

"Loose" 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. This piece doesn't focus on sex work itself, but widespread exploitation; i.e., in a shared predatory system, "whoring nature (and workers) out" in highly abject ways.

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

For the Visually Impaired: I read this essay on my YouTube channel, the initial "PSA" version and essay version.

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; murder, rape* and tokenism; vampirism/the Gothic (monsters and themes; e.g., werewolves, dragons and cannibalism); censored artistic nudes/some thongs and censored sex worker nudes/public nudism for education purposes (tied to the subject matter), one bare cartoon butt

*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). 

(artist: Lysippos; cited: Michael McClellan's "Professor Butter Beard and 'It's All About the Fig (Leaf)'")

Concerning This Pages' Censored Educational, Fig-Leaf-Style Nudity: This pages features censored, fig-leaf-style nudity* for purposes of sex and artistic education operating under the Miller Test/protected speech under American law (source: Justice.gov). For further info on my approach to censorship and sex education, kindly refer to exhibit -1 from "Raising Awareness" (which also discusses the hate campaign censors are currently waging against me and my friends' sex-ed work). All censored material is used elsewhere in my book series; i.e., as part of said series, and with permission from the models therein (re: my book series disclaimer). All models are over 18 and were when said material was produced. 

*Meaning no bare genitals, just bare butt cheeks, curves and sexual context (and lots and lots of pubic hair, below); i.e., within a sex-educational, art-meets-porn framework that follows the Miller Test—one performed by sex workers and their content being voluntarily part of a larger project I continuously invigilate; e.g., my partner Crow:

(artist: Crow)

Concerning Keywords: My arguments rely on various keywords I've previously coined, which here present in bold while color-coded (usually only once, while stressing their keyword status; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM, Metroidvania, or the palliative Numinous, etc). While some are given here, in abridged form, "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" (2024) provides all neologisms, in full.

Essay Preface: Updates and General Food for Thought

As stated, the situation in Minneapolis has rapidly progressed, becoming a focal point for the dos and don'ts of the state: the openly fascist wing playing bad cop and their "resistance," the Democrats (and social varieties of those Democrats), being good cop. I wish to give food for thought on that, prefacing the updates and examples in Minnesota with a broader historical-material reflection on fascism's return: coming back "to finish what it started" (commonly to kill excess men and rape/possess the women in highly binarized forms, below).

(artist: Francisco Goya)

As general food for thought (that gives different things to keep in mind, below), Gothic commonly fears the barbaric past, specifically one that returns to rape workers to death (above). By poetically reviving it, sex workers under Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism play with rape; i.e., during calculated risk to prevent said return outside of Gothic poetics—doing so paradoxically not in raw psychoanalytical or even Marxist-Leninist ways (re: "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist Leninism," 2025) but rather in anarchistic dialectical-material ways, during ludo-Gothic BDSM: fostering a rival Wisdom of the Ancients* to engender intersectional consciousness† (awareness), which occurs through emotional/Gothic intelligence raising class, culture and race awareness in solidarity/tactical unity (teamwork). Poetry = action as something to reinforce, the Gothic replete with poetry concerning rape-as-power-abuse harming labor since states first formed: tyranny is betrayal and cops are traitors to the people they pimp for bourgeois hegemony (crew expendable, but also necessary to exterminate something for profit: by "moving money through nature," as Patel and Moore‡ put it). They're bad actors sharing the same stages, bodies and costumes we do: state's rights vs worker rights, flow of power towards one or the other conducive to furthering or reversing abjection. Aesthetics merely color and conceal/reveal the proceedings, development a never-ending battle onstage and off. They play and perform with power and so do we; i.e., disguising our own antics as "mere play" yet having the very power our enemies wish to steal under false flags (more on this, deeper in).

*A cultural understanding of the imaginary past, one iconoclasts alter the Superstructure with to help reclaim the Base (re: "On Twin Trees," 2023). These aren't discrete ideas, then, matter shaping consciousness and consciousness maintaining matter to inform and guide rebellion (while camping Marx, below). Insofar as that goes, "seizing the means" requires understanding how we're fetishized, reclaiming the alien as a useful device; i.e., when counteracting the state's furthering of abjection/terminal feeding process; re ("Nancy Drew Syndrome," 2025):

"Capital alienates everything," argues Marx, in "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts" (1844; cited, 2011: Asher Horowitz' "Perspectives on Politics"); "capital sexualizes everything," I reply (source: "Thesis Statement," 2023)—meaning to fetishize the alien in dialectical-material ways workers can reclaim (the Base) through media (the Superstructure) extending from their bodies; i.e., "The collective, holistic idea is to break Capitalist Realism vis-à-vis the historical-material reality that capital not only alienates everything but sexualizes/fetishizes it, too. The latter idea is actually the subject of my PhD, which concerns various ways to challenge Capitalist Realism during ludo-Gothic BDSM" (source: "Raising Awareness"); e.g., queer folk as normally "pimped out": "Capital and state power historically alienate workers to pimp nature as monstrous-feminine, including queer folk" (ibid.).

(source: Rana Indrajit Singh's "Base and Superstructure Theory," 2013)

†"A neologism I coined, one meant to combat various forms of reductionism (class, culture and race); i.e., by building on Marx' notion of class consciousness: combining class with culture and race consciousness (awareness) to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence while synthesizing praxis" (abridged, source: "Paratextual Documents"). Anyone can fight for the cause provided they don't betray it. Conversely, anyone can betray the cause regardless of class, sex, gender or race; i.e., a cop's a cop to intersectional degrees; e.g., white women can police other women, said women can police themselves, and black men can police, thus betray other minorities during class, culture and race war as part of a larger ongoing struggle: through FOMO and FAFO, human rights become "resistance" become "terrorism" under Holocausts policed by those going into the furnace. To that, Judas pay becomes, "we'll save you for last," insofar as token out-group traitors are themselves eventually cannibalized, turned back into whores by in-group pimps; e.g., Irish-American thugs having "taken the soup," as Irish comedian Jake O'Kane explains (describing a historically pejorative phrase—one specifically applied to token Irish sellouts, who shamefully converted for a bowl of soup during a manufactured famine: made by the Protestant English demeaning the Irish Catholics as "racially inferior"). Betrayal is betrayal, class intersecting with culture and race (as a social construct) under criminogenic conditions; i.e., the state betrays everyone because capital demands it, the owner class routinely plying out-group members with scraps to betray their own (a similar tactic employed by Heyy Hott Pockett, a POC sex worker who ripped me off for $35 knowing I'd write about it; re: "Bad Reviews and Anonymous Models"). "Don't give them what they want," indeed!

(Potion Sword Run's "ICE Keeps Violating U.S. Constitution and Rights Of American Citizens!")

‡Re: Patel and Moore: "Neither commodities nor money is capital. This circuit becomes capital when money is sunk into commodity production in an ever-expanding cycle. Capitalism is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion [growth] within a finite web of life" (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, 2017). In short, states are rape machines and rape is ultimately a form of control; control—as something to abuse, concerning labor and land under unequal arrangements of power through state models—require the victim(s) to react, giving their abuser feelings of control: from little abusers to big abusers under state vampirism, lapdogs to masters. Profit/production = rape-by-design, abjection's furtherance under capital/state models both Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial, and which enjoy false monopolies over violence, terror and morphological expression (monsters)—all to police territory but also sex within territory through abject force (re: "The State: It's Key Tools" in "Paratextual Documents"). Put differently, these models = police violence committed against nature as monstrous-feminine, and generally out of pre-emptive, ethnocentric revenge; i.e., a cop's a pimp, granted imperial immunity through military action, push-comes-to-shove: rape the whore, then blame her for state "failings." Except, the state doesn't fail at its work; it needs these contradictions, only existing through them by exterminating nature through capital as a process: framing nature as weak/strong terrorist, doing so in highly toxic ways that lead many victims to tokenize under generational trauma; e.g., the Amazon pimping the Gorgon, the warrior maiden pimping the whore (re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome") or whores policing other whores out of relative convenience and/or desperation (re: "Policing the Whore," 2024). There's few things worse than a Nazi whore (e.g., Moxxy Sting—footnotes). Extermination = replacement inside an assigned order and its territories, one where workers with privilege who refuse to cooperate can become replaced; i.e., in ways not entirely unlike those without; e.g., white women being shot, shamed and/or unhoused (thus threatened with rape through an outdoor prison), soldiers being court-martialed or tried for treason, etc. The exact treatment isn't identical, per case, but similar within a structure of replacement that invades: "play ball or be replaced." Furthermore, as the state/capital enters crisis, they decay alongside the planet they're destroying for profit; i.e., assimilation is poor stewardship, those who do effectively betraying their own interests and people by scapegoating them during eco-fascism (e.g., "Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports," 2025). This means you can't scapegoat capital, only resist it/Capitalist Realism to prevent state shift (aka climate change; re: Patel and Moore); i.e., by dismantling the cause/the endless structure of invasion across space and time; re: "Toxic Schlock" vis-à-vis Patrick Wolfe's "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" (2006): there is always a "native" to eliminate, because capital—not authoritarianism—requires it as a mechanism of state power by design. As state shift gradually ramps up, capital pushes more and more people out—all while trying to continuously pimp nature in futility. Instead, power becomes increasingly illusory and Promethean as the planet enters state shift, nature fucking back. This makes "Medusa" effectively a death god, one for the colonizer to savagely punch while self-deceiving: that death even can be conquered by state forces, while thinking those responsible for state shift (the "rabid" status of the planet as Big Whore) won't be held accountable; i.e., after raping nature as monstrous-feminine to the point of no return (re: "Nature Is Food"). The Gorgon wins in the end, going "feral" to eat capital/the state (and its traitors) alive! And they'll happily push her to, as long as the elite get to hold the reins while riding into Hell. The same goes for those too cowardly to punch up, too complacent and/or complicit keeping mum. Silence is genocide, segregation no defense. And while the reality of trauma—especially complex/generational trauma—is both that abused people often go on to abuse others and there's no perfect victims (or abusers), we can try to become better people; we must, or things will never change. To that, systemic change starts with us; it also requires valuing the trauma others also experience and understanding how it informs their behaviors, not ranking rape in "trauma Olympics" by monopolizing oppression: we're all raped by capital, in some shape or form (whose prevention we'll touch on, as we go).

(artist: Doc Zenith)

That's the general "foodstuffs." During this preface to the essay itself, I'll underscore such grisly overtures with theory and practical solutions for resisting fascism, "on the Aegis" (mid-abjection); i.e., from a different perspective than normal: from unpaid labor/sex work, based on the years of work done by my friends and I. We'll consider sex work as revolutionary action; followed by cops, good and bad, during the time of monsters; and ultimately concluding with updates on the current situation in Minneapolis.

Concerning Sex Work as Revolutionary Action (re: Ludo-Gothic BDSM)

(artist: Nori Noir; cited: "Paid Labor," 2024)

Sex work is work, tipping sex workers giving all parties a useful, practical means: of vital revolutionary action reversing abjection to break Capitalist Realism, "on the Aegis"; i.e., simply by supporting someone the system normally pimps without safety or pay* (re: "Paid Labor")! Sex workers historically work from the margins—classically women but also disabled people, the poor, immigrants and racial minorities, etc. Any help given towards our rights as people goes a long way towards countering fascism to a stochastic degree: by humanizing alien things, thereby supporting care work (sex or otherwise) as a vital part of revolutionary action, sharing the same theatre; i.e., cops and robbers, camping the canon in duality during ludo-Gothic BDSM/rape play—the state effectively raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore (re: "Nature Is Food"), and doing so out of pimp-like revenge: to keep power right where it is/profits high since Antiquity and city-states into capital/nation-state models (meaning from Amazons†/the Medusa's armor-like and weapon-like sexuality to everyday modern examples—reclaiming their labor tied to land, sex, and monstrous things, sex-as-terror-weapon; e.g., anal sex; re: "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025).

*I.e., stable, above-the-table pay. Unpaid labor is commonly underpaid for their work/paid under the table and/or forced to surrender the money they receive to their employers (often unhousing and/or firing them, if they don't—pimps in everything but name).

†Again, the state hates sex, but needs it to exist/profit. In Ancient Athens, for example, women were second-class citizens cautioned by Amazon stories to not rebel (lest they be conquered). Then and now, many women, privileged and/or abused, would buy into the idea: surrender one's power dutifully and obediently to the state. Same goes for American democracy, also built on slavery but also genocide. The state decays, gaslighting women to surrender harder than ever to a so-called "natural order"—no different than Divine Right, the Great Chain of Being and/or Manifest Destiny save how these currently appear under capital; re: as simultaneously Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial.

First, sex work as revolutionary action, namely the prevention of rape through public nudism advertising labor struggles, housing disputes, reports of sexual abuse, and so on. In times of monsters, whores are monsters to reverse abjection with, thus are what cops/those acting like cops (traitors, including token traitors) to further abjection will police to varying degrees: scapegoating the whore as the initial and ultimate victim to blame for capital's woes. To that, class war is ass war, "on the Aegis"; i.e., class war via sex work (with intersections of culture and race), the whore's revenge occurring by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness to reduce rape on a societal level (re: intersectional consciousness during said revenge):

"The whore's revenge being "to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence [mid-abjection]—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with. We aggregate power differently than state forms, outlasting and outperforming them to dismantle their harvesting mechanisms, social and material, foreign and domestic. / Nature, then, is always a whore who punches up against state pimps to end profit as an endless structure of genocide. History more broadly could be described as whores vs pimps, hence workers vs the state; i.e., something the seemingly cannot die, but whose aforementioned whores are as imperishable as Medusa despite being beheaded" (source: "Rape Reprise").

In turn,

(artist: Puppy Bat)

[t]here isn't some final destination where things happen "at the end"; it develops over time in active, ongoing and incremental ways that happen through iconoclastic art, general creativity and Gothic imagination [and rebel counterculture; e.g., Puppy Bat, above]; i.e., a conjoined process of rising emotional intelligence within the larger community and their artistic output, whose sexual labor and Gothic negotiating power are adequately compensated. The elite hate unions for this very reason. Without workers constantly slaving to the grind, everything stops; the money stops insofar as infinite growth is challenged by basic human needs expressed in Gothic terms. / Capitalism frames the meeting of the latter as unthinkable through worker imaginations myopically centered around elite needs during recuperated Gothic nightmares; i.e., Mark Fisher's hauntologies, or cancelled futures, blaming past worker actions for what capitalist greed always leads to: violent rebellion when enough is enough. Teach people they have rights and military urbanism won't fly (source: "Paid Labor").

The paradox of rape isn't just that art, on its own, can't harm the audience; the whore, under their own paradox (that they are always a whore under Capitalism and state models), must punch up through paradoxical exposure; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM and calculated risk, being various buffers during revolutionary cryptonymy* ("ideas are bulletproof"). Sex, under capital, is alien as something to express alienation and fetishization with; i.e., capital sexualizes all workers: "Betrayal of one's interests—class, culture and race, alienated and fetishized/sexualized by state power (re: Marx and I, 1844 and 2023)—is to partake in state vampirism through assimilation: selling out to cheapen life for some" (source: "Sharing the Blame," 2025).

*Re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism" (2024 and 2025): workers are shielded behind the canvas, the phone screen, the polaroid, etc.

(artist: Eugène Delacroix; cited: "Paid Labor")

Reversing that, mid-abjection (above), occurs through the facilitating of sex work conducive to de facto counter education; i.e., in cryptonymic ways that send power back towards workers—through payment, of course, but also play in various theatrical ways conducive to abjection's reversal synthesizing praxis in various "creative successes" (re: "Abridged Manifesto Tree (of Oppositional Praxis)" from "Paratextual Documents"). One is simply describing our lived reality through those who respond to what they see: as something to pity or attack, but seldom help in a humanizing way privy to the alien as human. An open whore is always somewhat monstrous, insofar as other workers will see them as inherently stupid, automatically uneducated, and/or threatening to status-quo norms: the enslavement of nature through sex and force, itself a monopoly to break "on the Aegis" (and oft through beautiful lies, aka splendid mendax telling truth with lies; i.e., from Plato to us, in different poetic* forms; e.g., "the cake is a lie" something to embody in highly campy forms of "darkness visible," below).

*Our emphasis being the Gothic, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, of which I explore different aspects thereof across my book series: complex theory, simplified theory (manifesto) and instruction, poetic application, poetic history (of the undead/demons and animals), and praxis and its synthesis, world-wide. Gothic Communism is holistic, our subversion of monstrous norms always happening in duality. We're sex pirates, Halloween less a holiday and more a disguise for what we're doing upon ourselves: changing hearts and minds, undermining racism, sexism and other bigotries, old-and-new, using what we've got (e.g., trashy sex books, below)! We're the uncanny "meat" of an older time, getting loquacious to transform the planet in a better direction! Nudity is rebellion, and has been for as long as Civilization has been around (monopolizing it through the usual paradoxes; re: "Rape Reprise").

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

Capital hates and needs whores, which it loves to automatically criminalize, demonize and exploit as "homewrecker" enemies of the state/the nuclear model (cops are pimps, including paid labor routinely abjecting unpaid in whorephobic, SWERF-like ways; i.e., in revolutionary forms being bigoted as such; e.g., Stalin and Marxist-Leninism having their cake and eating it, too—next section). To challenge said exploitation (and its sinister replacement of workers with more dutiful forms; e.g., the Stepford Wives), make them something to humanize while confronting generational trauma on labor forms symbolizing the larger harm taking place (sex work being the oldest labor form, therefore struggle and exploitation)—doing so dialectically through fairly basic, socio-material means on the usual registers (often bodies); re: recognizing the whore's alien status/mighty power to humanize the alien in monstrous-feminine ways; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM's camping of canonical norms, onstage and off:

camp = rape play to reverse abjection, and 'we camp canon because we must' (from Colin Broadmoor to me, 2021 and 2023). This happens by enjoying taboo things, specifically by playing with them in subversive ways that liberate sex work (therefore all work): enjoy "harm" without endorsing its unironic forms, subversive play a necessary form of critique, during ludo-Gothic BDSM [rape play], regarding things normally played without thought (me vis-à-vis Anita Sarkeesian's famous adage) (source: "Sharing the Blame").

Note: I've written about these ideas constantly in my book series, but also in my series on state vampirism (which discusses abjection/sex work a ton while abbreviating my book series). So we won't have time to mention them here save in passing (see: footnotes and "camping the canon," aka "making it gay" to turn state power and poetics upside-down/anisotropically and apotropaically towards workers and nature). I'll try and unpack things as quickly as I can, but my approach remains semi-conversational—meaning we'll touch upon ideas we unpack as we go (the thesis work already done, elsewhere). As we do, I'll provide some censored examples of sex work, too; i.e., as performed by my friends and I in this manner (above and below): as the place/embodiment of the place where rebellion commonly occurs, between sex object and subject relaying such things in socio-psychosexual ways—dialectically-materially reclaiming anything alien, criminal, and ultimately abject, in the bargain. We're the black mirrors upon which your "inner whore" waits to wake up/punch up, in kind! We don't make people stupid, women-weaken-legs (and brains); in iconoclastic forms, we make workers smarter/more capable to empathize with their fellow oppressed—sex the centerpiece/unsung heroes of rebellion, keeping it all together! —Perse

(artist: Nerdy Nami)

Concerning Cops, Good and Bad; or, the Time of Monsters

Minnesota and elsewhere, capital requires cops to keep itself (and empire) in line. ACAB, both sides two wings of the same bird—with a variety of challengers to Capitalism noting as much, over a century ago; e.g., Stalin, calling "social democracy the moderate wing of fascism" (Socialism for All's "German Resistance to Nazism," 2026; timestamp: 12:12). Essentially the democratic socialists of yore let the foxes into the henhouse, in the hopes of compromising with them/outthinking people they were ultimately in cahoots with. Far be it from me to "hand it to Stalin" (re: "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist Leninism") but the guy's not wrong when it comes to the Nazis... who he ultimately worked alongside for a time, conducting Imperialism with Hitler to allegedly buy time before Operation Barbarossa; re: "Theirs was a friendship signed in blood," Stalin said of Hitler and himself after Poland's invasion (Real Time History's "Blitzkrieg Unleashed? World War 2 1939-1940," 2025; timestamp: 23:02; see: "Stalin's Kayfabe: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact" from "Notes on Lenin, Stalin, and Why Marxist-Leninism Historically Sucks" in "Raising Awareness"). It takes one to know one, I guess:

(source: Matt Whittaker's "What Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?" 2023)

More recently than Stalin (but in the same basic vein), Non-Compete writes, "[T]he same mistakes which many preceding liberals have made: the hubristic notion that fascism is a force which can be controlled through shrewd political maneuvering. This self-deception which liberals fall into, leading them to believe that they can manage fascism, has led to the downfall of many a liberal democracy. History provides numerous precedents where liberals enabled and empowered fascists under the mistaken belief that such brutal political currents could be contained" (source: "Third-Wayism and the Liberal-Fascist Bargain," 2025). They would add, "Fascism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with distinct political programs and institutions. They are not one in the same. They emerge from different material conditions and they serve different factions of the ruling class who have conflicting views about how best to rule over the workers of the world. But in terms of function they are one in the same [emphasis, me]. Both exist to serve and defend capital" (ibid.). I would respond myself, "Joy Under Fascism" (2025) dissecting Jill Suzanne Smith's Berlin Coquette (a book about Weimar's whores being shuttered and utterly destroyed by the Nazis, 2013):

And in reading that, do you really think there's any kind of place for Smith's "bourgeois cocotte" in fascism's American revival? We're in quite the pickle, one enforced historically by women against their own kind, but also other marginalized groups that pimp themselves (out of convenience and desperation). Resistance must be become, as it were, naked, thus voiced through nudity itself as monstrously cloaked and bare at the same time; re: "When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis." [...] "Th[e] solution is communism," Non-Compete writes, in their own Substack [re: "Third-Wayism"]. I would agree—albeit with a focus on the nude body language of whore-as-monster that Smith appears to abstain from. We're at the point where arguing about intent or to matters of degree doesn't really matter. Fascism is here and whores of all kinds will—like Samus in her suit of armor—be used to cage and betray their own class interests alongside cultural and racial ones that profit only abuses for itself, mid-abjection.

(source: "Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts (and Iconoclastic Vice Characters)," 2025; artist: Harmony Corrupted, commissioned by Persephone van der Waard)

The fact remains, Medusa's powers can reverse abjection (thus profit), but they won't work if she's forced to wear sunglasses, but also any clothing of a politer sort against her will. Respectability politics are merely a debate with capital's usual mercenaries, one where no one wins but the richest of the rich (the madames and the pimps). But more than anyone, the usual victims are the very people who need to weaponize their bodies (and nudity of said bodies) to serve worker needs over state needs: those who "look like whores," insofar as "looks like" really means "deviance and destitution"; i.e., per Smith's own arguments furthering abjection, itself meaning anyone capital assigns that unhappy status to; e.g., people of color, religious minorities, women, GNC or Indigenous persons, etc: as workers forced to fight for scraps while dividing themselves, as usual. How about we seize the means of production for all workers, instead? Communism fucks away from Omelas.

So enough with the veiled Red Scare tactics; make Marx gay [2024] and naked!

Ultimately, then, cops are pimps who police the populace in service to capital. Capital, in turn, is a form of the state but that is a conversation for another time (re: "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist Leninism"). "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters," once wrote Antonio Gramsci. Touching on Nietzsche, similar sentiments were echoed in Richard Matteson's I Am Legend (1954) and ensuing Body Snatchers franchise (1956), George Romero's subsequent of the Dead films, the Myth franchise and its own "men or monsters" pastiche (re: "A Lesson in Humility," 2024), etc—leading into the present state of affairs out from an older barbaric past; i.e., cops and victims, itself enacting under various moral panics and subsequent police brutalities defending capital's cheapening of nature: the site of abuse that workers reclaim through and upon itself. Ourselves as symbols and vectors of resistance, not mere protest: "My grandfather was ten when the Nazis occupied Holland. He joined the Dutch Underground and his country was liberated when he was a teen. You don't stop fascism by protesting but by actively resisting. There's a big difference / Peacefully protest all you like; the Nazis will take everything because that's their fucking job. People are peacefully protesting in #Minnesota and Trump is treating it like an insurrection and wants to send in the military. It's a false flag--the Nazi #MO" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: January 15th, 2025). "Little pigs, little pigs; let me in, little pigs!" They're vampires (of the state variety), bad actors seeking entrance.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; cited: On "'Anti-Semitism' versus 'Antisemitism,'" 2024)

As survivors of state harm, workers must join together and take a stand against both wings of the state—one actively harming us, and the other standing by to let it happen. So history repeats itself, "the time for monsters" once again upon us. We're the monsters, sharing the same monstrous-feminine language, bodies and stages the state uses to conduct its bloody work (with men like Stalin pimping whores [or those treated like whores] as much as open capitalists did; i.e., before, during and after his own imperial reign): the Aegis being where all wars ultimately transpire, cryptonymically for one side or the other. Like the Amazon and the Gorgon, we whores—actual or de facto—expose ourselves to paradoxically testify to our own rape but also power in resisting said rape sharing the same aforementioned spaces: a material dialectic of the alien* "in the flesh," our fortress to wage (cl)ass war from; i.e., while breaking the usual monopolies (of violence, terror and monsters) and speaking in the usual code (relaying sex and force in worker's favor). Freedom = the ability to resist, reminding the state of its own inability to exact total control; re: power is a theatrical performance as much as anything to take by force alone, the two overlapping through soft and hard forms (see: "Notes on Power" and "Darkness, Doubles and Paradox," 2023). This includes different class enemies; e.g., Gamergate bros (and token women) saying "FAFO" when brownnosing the state, slowly dropping the mask in ways our own code challenges, through stochastically revolutionary forms of cryptonymy: "mere play" (wink, wink), the incels allergic to sex suitably underestimating their would-be prey as avengers-in-disguise.

*As I write in "Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien" (2024):

In short, we want to hug the alien, therefore contribute to a pedagogy of the oppressed by synthesizing praxis, invoking the dialectic of the alien to confront and interrogate trauma (and power) as something to perform and play with; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a potent means of embodying likenesses among differences, its dark theatricalities ushering intersectional solidarity in by humanizing monsters as de facto (extracurricular) teaching devices: to be more creative and poetic as a means of attaining praxial catharsis, collectively illustrating mutual consent thereby raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, mid-struggle (source).

As something to illustrate, mutual consent becomes a matter of dialectical-material context during informed labor exchanges (re: the basis of me and my friends work, under Gothic Communism; see: "Illustrating Mutual Consent" from "Paratextual Documents," which also contains the full definition to "dialectic of the alien")

(artist: Hallie Cross; cited: "Joy Under Fascism")

Keep these ideas in mind. Next, we'll give some on-the-ground updates regarding the situation in Minnesota, looking at some examples of Gothic media, as well; re: George Romero's zombie films, Goya, and media we make while reversing abjection, ourselves (the examples I give coming from me and my friends' collaborations, through/as unpaid labor).

Updates "on the Ground"; or, Concerning Minnesota

Update, 1/10/2026: The shooter has since been identified as Jonathan Ross, a 10-year ICE veteran (source: Liz Sawyer, Andy Mannix and Sarah Nelson's "Star Tribune Identifies ICE Agent"). Also, Good's wife was actually outside their car when Ross approached Good, Good's wife entering the car as Ross fired into it, killing Good (Silent Middle Child's "New Footage of Renee Good Shooting from ICE Agent's Perspective" explains the event succinctly but in detail, including its context before, during and after the murder). Such men—as fascism demands—view themselves as superior to "other races" but white women, too: in-group police cleansing a given "kingdom" of "degenerate" out-group members or those cast into the out-group's state of exception (while enjoying various hypocritical standards, themselves; e.g., clearly non-white brides, below):

(source: Gergana Krasteva's "Everything we Know about ICE Agent, Jonathan Ross")

Update, 1/14/2026: There has been another ICE shooting in Minneapolis (source: Patrick Djordjevic and Ali Bradley). As I respond at the time, "Another shooting in Minneapolis. ICE want #fascist violence to become normal/will keep doing it until federalized police shootings become 'normal'; i.e., on par with shootings at schools or by state police. It's a terror tactic, one that must be resisted on all fronts" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: January 14th, 2026). As I've written previously on zombie apocalypses and police states, this is par for the course in ways horror media has predicted/monitored for decades upon centuries; e.g., Dawn of the Dead [1978] and its own infamous scene with gas-mask-wearing thugs killing non-white people/the poor without consequence; re (from "Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, part one: Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang," 2024):

As Ross Lockhart writes in "Attack of the Bourgeois Braineaters" (2004):

Dawn of the Dead is more than just a zombies-at-the-shopping-mall critique of consumer culture, as elements of racism and class war are also included within its framework. In one of its opening scenes, "a SWAT team clears out a tenement building in Pittsburgh. The residents are primarily Puerto Rican and Latino, kept captive by the undead both within and without the building" (Rider 7). Despite the abject poverty of these residents, one of the police officers makes a statement reflecting what Stephen Harper calls "the film's theme of material insecurity and envy" (5). "Shit man, this is better than I got." Harper further observes that the tenement sequence "invites the audience to consider zombiedom as a condition associated with both racial oppression and social abjection and, therefore, sanctions socio-political interpretations of the film as a whole" (6). The tenement sequence also introduces the audience to two members of the film's core quartet of protagonists, Ken Foree's Peter and Scott Reiniger's Roger, a pair of SWAT officers, one black, one white, who manage to remain civilized as their fellow officers "end up indiscriminately murdering residents and zombies, uttering racial epithets and generally being hysterical" (Rider 7).

Described by Roger as "going apeshit," there's a process of abjection to what seems like an off-hand statement: the vigilante cop he's critiquing as "acting like an animal" using the police raid (already a colonial tool) to escalate violence as a matter of extermination rhetoric. Said rhetoric is conspicuously guided by class-traitor (cop) resentment towards the government-housed poor as being non-white on its face; i.e., as a naked excuse to kill as many "zombies" as he can "while the getting's good." To that, there's no distinction between the living and the unliving but also the undead; to him, they're all roaches to squash, and he pushes door after door open, treating the layout (and its occupants) like a shooting gallery. The Imperial Boomerang has well-and truly-come home.

The Imperial Boomerang (and its harvest) always head to the imperial core; i.e., as already-rotten, alien, vampiric: home as alien, the home among the entropy (the dying Imperium as rotten to the core, offering fertile grounds for fresh change). In turn, the home-as-alien/monster—the Gothic trope of the haunted castle, mansion, or house as both forbidden and foreign—shares a confused ontological position with whores; i.e., as a potent vector/policed means of exchange, poetically expressed in architectural-morphological ways, mise-en-abyme (meaning "to place in abyss," and whose routinely circular/dark passage and re-inheritance in neo-medieval, "belly of the beast" language we'll touch on briefly during the preface conclusion: castles in the flesh).

(exhibit 2: Artist, top: Dead Domain's "POSSIBLE NEW ICE SHOOTING IN MN"; bottom-left: Andreas Marshall; bottom-right: George Romero—specifically a scene from Dawn of the Dead eerily similar to ICE acting presently and, in turn, the ways that cops have always acted towards state targets. When the state grows fascist, it eats its own citizens through give-and-receive state violence, terror and monsters; i.e., "when the Man comes around." The state plays White Indian/guerrilla in bad faith, cryptofascists going mask-off versus a local, often vulnerable population who—suitably kettled and threatened under reactive abuse in their own homes—will have no choice but to actually rebel, punching up in prison-like conditions; i.e., lockdowns and sieges enacted during de facto or actual martial law. Not all do, but the state will crackdown against actual and imaginary enemies through bullet, gas and bomb; i.e., to try [and historically fail; e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam] to hold onto colonial territories at home: "The harder you squeeze, the more star systems will slip through your fingers," as Princess Lea might put it. In short, violence doesn't "work"; it only prolongs the inevitable [all empires die and death is built into capital as fundamentally unstable]. But it remains violent, nonetheless, and in ways that harm people in its wake.)

(exhibit 3: Source skeet, Zooples: January 15th, 2026. Zooples writes: "ICE special accomplishment tokens for the most successful and sadistic Nazi terrorists." Or in Napoleon Bonaparte's words, "A man will die for ribbons." This extends to cereal-box decoders and other Nazi bullshit that make these sad lonely men feel cool, under Capitalist Realism. Except they're not cool, they're lame—Nazis basically pirate LARPers who never grow up/power-ranger "teenagers with attitude" killing enemies of the state for cheap swag [and war brides]: taking cool things and making them lame [the Gothic] for this very reason; i.e., as false pirates, Captain Hook and company actually serving the bourgeoisie, conducting assimilation through armed subservience and subjugation [class traitors with elements of culture and race]. Now that's lame. The state is both cop and victim, using whatever language—DARVO-and-obscurantism* during the abjection process—to dualistically blame the whore, thus justify and show/conceal violence against whore-like things while policing the usual things: sex/nature through force. Since Rome, the argument is essentially the "death river" approach: force the enemy to fight with their backs to a river, thus drown or die by the sword. Except fascists [the "Romans" of today] say they're the victims with their backs "against the wall"; i.e., while raping their chosen "whores" to death. It's a death cult, death before dishonor through one shot glory/final victory with Force of Will arguments enacted upon "lonely men": the promise of sex, land and all-around conquest, while playing the victim and deliberately cock-blocking themselves "for Daddy." Truth doesn't matter for them, reality something to bend to their will through posturing as strong [denying the historical-material fact that capital will eventually eat them, too]. Order and obedience matter more than challenging state hegemony.

*DARVO = Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender—a classic abuser's tactic that, alongside obscurantism (the theft of symbols and language; e.g., the crooked cross), fascists love to abuse; i.e., while infiltrating Communist circles, and any liberals/so-called "progressives" enabling them.

Addicted to violence/trained for it under menticidal conditions, the only way such persons get laid is through force; the only way they feel anything being while raping others ironically. In turn, the Nazis' actuals victims have no choice but to fight fire with fire, reversing abjection anisotropically and dualistically "on the Aegis": "They are coming. We cannot get out." / "Let them come! There is one dwarf yet in Moria who still draws breath!" We share the same stages, bodies and language; re: of sex and force—of violence, terror and monsters: born into castles built on genocide that decay back into their active imperial forms, and which workers must subvert and reverse, stand-and-deliver, to not only survive but retain their humanity versus those who gave theirs up [state ghouls, death knights, demons, etc]. Invasion of the imperial home remains anisotropic/diametrically inverted, because the state is asking colonizers to betray and eat their own; there will be precautions and hesitation. All the same, they will monopolize the usual things, including monsters, to accomplish their goals; re: according to capital/the state's Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial qualities. Nature is food to rape out of revenge, virgin/whore under the oldest labor struggles seeing paid/unpaid labor translating into modern forms of ancient language—state operatives effectively pimps policing and punching the alien versus hugging it; i.e., as something monstrous-feminine to optimistically defeat through a variety of poetic/cartographic refrains seeing military optimism and urbanism taken to the streets: the High Fantasy treasure map and shooter, aka Tolkien and Cameron's refrains; re [from "Concerning Venezuela and State Vampirism," 2026]: 

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

"Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion [...] Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force" (source: "Scouting the Field," 2023; cited: "A Note About Canonical Essentialism," 2024). In other words—and speaking as a Gothic ludologist commenting dialectically-materially on state vampirism at large—the Imperial Core has no limits; it monopolizes violence, terror and monsters, in media and out [...]: to move money through nature, ergo conduct state vampirism versus nature as monstrous-feminine with worker help.

By comparison, workers have the whore's revenge by reversing abjection "on the Aegis," with the same language:

"The whore's revenge being "to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence [mid-abjection]—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with" [source: "Rape Reprise"].

[artist: Harmony Corrupted; cited: "Thanking Harmony Corrupted Again," 2025]

Again, these are concepts my friends and I explore. So we won't have time to mention them here save in passing. The fact remains, we whores speak out through paradoxical exposure; i.e., as a disguise and means of controlling out-of-control scenes and actors through sex—chameleons trapped "at court" who work through brothel espionage, revolutionary cryptonymy a dualistic, liminal proposition . Sex is alien in ways the state hates and needs, which becomes a power they cannot control/take fully from nature, try as they might. It becomes something we not only own, up front/a priori, but can deny them with: "all war predicates on deception," including ass war! Whores live under a perpetual diaspora/are forced generally to use aliases and masks to survive while communicating in code—sex-ninja femme fatales, ready to be spies for the cause! To raise morale [and other things]! To trade information, resources and currencies [of different kinds]! To put the pussy on the chainwax [re: "Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters: Reclaiming Our Lost Power by Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax," 2023]!

[cited: "The Finale; or 'Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll!'" 2023]

What's more, it becomes an ancient means of trade that helps humanize whores in the eyes of other marginalized peoples, mid-abjection: a way of facilitating labor exchange with sex-as-labor to dismantle stereotypes and help build trust; i.e., concerning sex and force through labor divisions that holistically marry the two for holistic, intersectional aims. At the heart of every revolution is sex, including public nudism during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a coded, radicalizing means of advertising sex in a social way conducive to rebellion [with many sex workers being ace* in that respect, but still communicating through sex with other workers sexualized by capital; e.g., Blxxd Bunny and I, below]. Whores can betray like anyone, but also fight back using what they have: "do not obey!" as the pimp's idea of end-of-the-world, the whore making others unruly with their own "ballistics" and fortress-like bodies left behind, her-tits-were-there [re: "Castles in the Flesh," 2024]. She mighty mighty! A conduit of exchange, from the Gorgon to her awesome embodiments reversing abjection upon the colonizer!)

*Ace = asexual, or the social side of social-sexual relations. This doesn't preclude sexuality in Gothic poetics, nor enjoyment at large, but generally prioritizes performance in ways that don't guarantee erotic pleasure from the performer(s)-in-question: faking an orgasm, but also "death" in general; i.e., the memento mori. It's still fun, but enjoyed differently by different people having the fun being had (see: "Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality" [written 2022, published 2025] for an emphasis on general asexuality—meaning versus emphasizing "Gothic" [and its performers] as ace; re: "The Finale," above).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny; cited: ibid.)

The fact remains, the artwork of Andreas Marshall, and the zombie films of George Romero into modern whoredom, speak to a rising fascist threat playing out in real time—one that targets anyone in its way towards conquest of state cities by federal power (and their stupid, skull-badge insignias carried by Lost Boys looking for Indians, exhibit 3). This is the proverbial chickens come home, in some ways having never left. Either way, fascism is undeniably here at home, and it won't stop on its own; it will eat itself and everything around it alive unless direct collective action is immediately taken—not by the state but by workers organizing versus state actors, in the same zones of play. We are all terrorists in their eyes, for which we must resist them every way possible—not divided, but united as one; i.e., fascists sharing the same kayfabe areas, onstage and off, that Nazis do. Fascists want white people to betray black, and black and other minorities to tokenize to police whores (and whores policing whores, etc)—in effect, to fight amongst ourselves, divide-and-conquer, instead of recognize and meet the state as ultimate foe (and for as long as states have been around; e.g., Goya's Spain, below).

(artist: Francisco Goya)

To this, it's normal to be scared—to have mixed feelings, even—but we must unite, regardless of class, culture or race (which this essay will discuss, deeper in). Renee Good met her fate on the "tip of the spear"—essentially holocaust-by-bullet in a border skirmish in what is essentially the regime's early days. By comparison, the Nazis of Germany didn't have the ability to intern workers in their death camps until near the end of the war—and in a country many times smaller/with a population far lower than North America's (not to mention American streets being flooded with guns the state has no way of controlling; i.e., on par with Vietnam's use of American guns and bombs against foreign invaders). So there's still time, but that is running out. The sooner workers organize and euthanize Skynet (aborting some-such menace versus it aborting us, below), the better. We must, let the future refuse to change. Such things happen with the same tools, be those language, weapons, or some dualistic, terrorist/counterterrorist combination thereof: they are what they accuse us of—the ultimate parasitoids, destroyers, thieves, and alien impostors. In turn, we anisotropically reverse the binary "on the Aegis," aborting the cuckoo fetus of fascism in the bargain:

(source: "I'll See You in Hell," 2025)

Preface Conclusion; or, Caught the Middle: A Cryptonymy Reprise and Witchcraft Refrain before Cutting Myself off (from Further Addendums; feat. Angel Witch and Nya Blu)

I've covered the events in Minneapolis enough, I think. This conclusion to the preface reprises cryptonymy to "put a pin in things"; i.e., regarding problems I continue to work on, elsewhere; e.g., with Angel Witch and Nya Blu employing the whore-like language of "pirate" and "barbarian," doing so in monstrous-feminine ways conducive to revolutionary cryptonymy. So political action couches in play of a "Gothic" kind, teasing out state harm (force) through state targets (sex) as "hamming it up"; e.g., big-titty goth girlfriends being dream girls (of the "wet" variety), but also femme fatales bringing Puritan nightmares to life. Camp is cryptonymy—a concealed weapon, one anisotropically reversing the direction power normally flows, mid-abjection, but also a "concealer" agent protecting the performers apotropaically from harm. All share the same stages, mid-Amazonomachia, the same bodies as our enemies pimping us, "on the Aegis": "I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!"

Note: The theme, here, is witchcraft—with me arbitrarily having fun while selecting different devices concerning witchcraft to make my point/close things out (as far as addendums go, the essay further down more concerned with witch hunts of a modern sort); i.e., there's lots here I poetically explore, "freestyle" versus "at length." Follow the links below to get more in-depth (with witchcraft not having a dedicated series, in my work, but appearing throughout my book series, breadcrumbs-in-a-fable; e.g., "What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why," "A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)" and "Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries," 2024 and 2025)! —Perse, 1/21/2026

(artist: Nya Blu and Angel Witch)

To that, a woman's work is never done, fascism (and its witch hunts) a problem to "solve" through the work whores like they and I conduct alongside others (above); re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, engendering intersectional consciousness—in the Gothic's persecuted language of alien things, yes, but also imbricating language of persecution (re: "Idle Hands," 2024): weaponized by out-group whores in naked disguise, the dreaded "homewrecker" endemic to state exploitation's "receiving end" as suddenly having the whore's revenge; re: on capital/the nuclear home demonizing "whore" as "homeless," "poor" and other out-group labels abjecting criminogenic conditions. It's cryptonymy-in-action, showing and hiding at once to achieve a specific socio-material goal: widespread universal liberation, which workers manifest in game-like ways; i.e., playing with Gothic and spaces of rape dating all the way back to Horace Walpole's imaginary medieval (re: "Prey as Liberators," 2024) but embodied by workers in fearful language equally unrestricted by historical events; e.g., the witch—classically a homewrecker whore and hag under state dogma—come back to life in highly seductive ways: "total chaos" wrapped in sheep's clothing (classically white, the rebellious heretical impostor eager to "raise Cain," mid-pastoral, while dressed in white, below). The chaos is a myth, but one our enemies will heap nevertheless upon our names; i.e., false preachers blaming the whore for state bullshit. May as well own it, the victim surviving the scapegoat to have the whore's revenge (while using whatever cosmetics a given aesthetic dualistically argues through performance): by reaping the whirlwind, the avenger holding the sickle for a change (or hiding it behind the brim of their impossibly wide hat, below)! As Radcliffe's "dreaded evil" (source: "On the Supernatural in Poetry," 1826), "pirate" becomes something to perform against state pearl-clutchers and Imperialism—a (counter)terrorist through playtime, those closer to death (as whores generally are) juxtaposing different oxymorons, mid-unheimlich (e.g., "marshmallow" and "death," below)!

(model and artist: Angel Witch and Persephone van der Waard)

Gothic Communism is playful, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM the solution I offer regarding what killed Renee Good and the others (re: fascism). Under Gothic Communism as a holistic movement, we aren't appealing to those mythical "better angels" of people's nature; we're appealing to their ability to learn and create using the half-real language of sin and barbarism as monstrous-feminine (the object of desire and state feeding vector): as two sides of the same poetic, dialectical-material coin—one turned cryptonymically against our foes fearing fatal homecoming (retribution), "on the Aegis" and in duality. The elite can't take that away/reduce people to perpetual slaves. And by virtue of that fact, we can change how people learn using what we got; i.e., with our creations, any and all "witchcraft" stemming from our bodies as black mirrors to stare-and-tremble upon—again, not as raw psychoanalysis (and its usual Freudian babble obscuring material critique), but to change the state as inherently predatory by using and encouraging dialectical-material an-Com forms (re: "Anarcho-Communism vs Marxist Leninism"). Wandering Womb grows murderous by transforming the state, a given wasp eating the caterpillar from inside by laying eggs in its prey (re: "The Caterpillar and the Wasp," 2024). Fucked with, some people fuck back; the monstrous-feminine, Gorgon or otherwise, "out cuckoos the cuckoo" with a ravenous appetite for revenge (so to speak; i.e., the would-be witch—historically accused of drinking blood and eating babies, but also of savagely killing her family from a presumed "maiden" position, a priori [one corrupted by "impure thoughts," namely desires of rebellion and freedom]—suddenly given, in the present, a terrifying lever passed down from older covens: one to fuck with current superstition of a Puritanical heirloom, which fed-up women [or those treated like women] happily set on fire).

To it, I'm gonna do it with my friends (and allies I disagree on smaller things, seeking tactical unity versus fascism/capital as a shared foe); you do it with yours: make the world a better place by seizing the means (the Base) through the Superstructure, "in the flesh." Make the alien human by humanizing its monstrous-feminine character (re: "Always a Victim" leading to "Our Sweet Revenge," 2025); i.e., as already fetishized by capital, turning the system itself through ludo-Gothic BDSM into a whore's space for-and-of concealment and revelation, lies and truth: reversing abjection through revolutionary cryptonymy that merges mystery and sin, romance and desire, as subversive teaching devices to Numinously "quest for" upon ourselves—at times veiled, cloaked and forbidden, even transgressively nude and ferocious (as abjection commonly is)! They're here, all the same; i.e., "in the flesh" as something to relay artistically through the miracle of technology "reviving the witch." Commonly placed in the hands of those closer to life and death receiving state abuse, new authors can speak to nature-as-food "fucking back." So does Galatea drop Pygmalion on his head, "forte" and "fatale" wedded to (monstrous-)feminine: human rights disguised as "diabolical plot" (the kinds that states normally accuse unruly women of taking part in, battle-of-the-sexes); i.e., Truth coming out from her usual haunt to imprison, then devour sarcophagus-style, the usual liars inside (or Pandora her Box, etc)! Get buried alive, nerds!

(artist: Elisabetta Sirani)

Cyborg gonna cyborg to "castrate" as needed; we're sex ninjas wearing Halloween costumes (and birthday suits)—tempting sex-and-force embodiments of sinful terror never far-removed from conquest, Cartesian dualism (virgin/whore) and colonial orders: "Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it [...] Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts" (source: Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows, 1975). I respond, "To interrogate power, you must go where it is"; i.e., by reifying it, danger-disco, the Numinous "chateau" to be/chase "turning the tables" anisotropically on the cop (re: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp," 2023). Everything happens "on the canvas," then, its proverbial Aegis a half-real enterprise occurring onstage and off. The flesh isn't "weak," then, but strong through paradoxical exposure; i.e., on technology as mirror-shield to hide within/upon (and alias upon alias, for those who don't show their faces cryptonymically behind buffers; e.g., Angel Witch)!

A "restless labyrinth" to lose ourselves in, whores convey in code the very things the elite (and their servants) treat as anathema, abject, alien: Eve's Apple, Medusa's peach, cake, what-have-you, as castles in the flesh: "hooker" a derelict pejorative to rediscover and magically reclaim, the slayer-in-question ironically gender-swapping Captain Hook, don't-fear-the-reaper (or Conan: "Crom, count the dead!")!  The Gothic loves its Great Destroyer personas, throwing the pimp's refrain back in their sorry faces; i.e., as alternate modes (and sites) of infernal worship, evoking ancient powers older than state models throwing a "man's world" into chaos—meaning one's right to exist in public while getting paid without shame: "To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism" (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things). Gothic is simultaneously trashy and rich, "building among the storms" to defy the usual witch hunters policing us (re: me vis-à-vis Porpentine and Silvia Federici; see: "Policing the Whore"). The strength lies in the message being cryptonymically exposed, rebellion and bravery coming in all shapes, sizes and styles; i.e., bearing an architectural-morphological but also archaeological character, ghost-of-the-counterfeit: a gargoyle or golem, etched with dark protective magics defending a bigger church than the current patriarchal ones sitting on top (the palimpsest charnel house): "In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, 'the middle class' often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it 'displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell' with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced" (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux's Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic," 2002). Witch = whore and whores classically "top from below" but "below" is a shaky proposition, in Gothic and BDSM (and which Gothic Communism plays with, witches-and-Puritans).

(artist: Nya Blu)

So are churches concealed castles in duality (as are the weapons, armor and feudalistic dogma, therein—what Bakhtin would describe, per the chronotope, as "historical reminders of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites" [source: The Dialogic Imagination, 1981]; i.e., that whores profane, "on the Aegis"). Language is language; eat from a harvest that plants better seeds than criminalizing nature—not cuckoo fruits from the bourgeoisie, but ours sharing the same stages, bodies and costumes. Camping the canon in Neo-Gothic forms, we "homewrecker" whores cease to be witchy terrorists who receive violence, alone, but who give "in kind" our own counterterrorism breaking Capitalist Realism: under dialectical-material scrutiny/context, achieving intersectional consciousness and solidarity through public nudism as armor and weapon, alike (the pit in the peach). The elite, as per the Radcliffean mystery (castle), steal with ghost-as-sham; so do we, but in reverse (re: abjection). The function is reversed, anisotropically mid-cryptonymy through angel/devil and virgin/whore (witch/waif, etc) used dialectically-materially as such: to flow power back towards those states steal from, as pimps always do—from whores, where power is stored in/upon mighty things, payback famously "a bitch." Her witchy bubble butt is both distraction, loudspeaker and camouflage, then: the "booty" (and amazing chest) of stolen plunder suddenly "in revolt," the hammer in the witch's hand. Cryptonymy portrays it all as game and serious business, but also abject strip tease: a walking vaso vagal penetrating more modest vision with paradoxical invasion eclipsing harmful ideas of order and reason. Let's 'em stare; all the easier to rob them blind, and generally with fearful ideas of "past" tempting them (often fairy-like wishes, granted within demonic modes of exchange/dark desire dressed up as witchcraft; re: "Of Darkness and the Forbidden," 2024)!

To it, castles become fig leaves (which bikini bottoms basically are), the naked force beyond them both written on the skin like ink (as Nya demonstrates) while able—like a vampire's cloak, at the same time—to turn inside-out as needed: the angel and the devil, yes, but also "grey area" hybrids; re: Angel Witch, shifting shape but also mood. Less as cheerful or rude and more as things to confuse by playing with them in cryptonymic ways, paradox is the point; i.e., "Gothic" (such as workers embody it) stressing aesthetic as a potent performative/poetic means to send power cryptonymically this-way-or-that, mid-abjection. Again, function = flow regardless of the costumes involved (e.g., naughty nuns, but also black witches being good by punching up, etc); nudity = strength, but only under the right context of cryptonymy that, all the same, denotes "weakness" as something to subvert. With their own language stolen by state actors (re: "Witch Cops and Victims," 2025), witches embody such things (and their Gothic "heavy weather") nicely—meaning when reenacted by iconoclastic good actors and their friends: the slutty clubber playing among dangerous things. They do so concerning matters beyond themselves, but nonetheless herald—in playfully wicked ways upon themselves—the means to their enemies' embarrassing destruction (as imperfect victims but also legitimately angry ones facing persecution, onstage and off; re: "Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts," 2025). "What dost thou want?" says one witch. "How 'bout some fire, Scarecrow?" says another one. The fire of the gods, per Promethean Quest, is stolen Numinously from the past to and fro (or things dressed up as "past," under fatal nostalgia; re: witches seeking fresh revenge for old crimes continuing under present orders, "over the rainbow").

(model and artist: Angel Witch and Persephone van der Waard)

Darkness visible, it's code to "switch" as needed—a lesson in disguise (as utter fabrication), and a fun one to boot when camping canon! The language is fuzzy in its usage (among other things; e.g., Angel Witch's "feral" backside riding "brooms," above). Matthew Lewis's Dark Madonna, Matilda's beauteous orbs convey cryptonymically the Gorgon-in-small; i.e., channeling "spectres" thereof (re: closer to Mary Shelley and gayer than Marx). Anisotropic and apotropaic, the harlot heretic—Numinously disinterred—plays with dead things while alive (re: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024); dead or alive, she weighs historically-materially "like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (source: "The Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852)! On the Aegis, and trapped hermeneutically between fiction and things that seem fictional but aren't, "it began with a whisper" (2025): the return of a dark mommy domme (or similar unequal arrangement) to bring the Western world (and Capitalism) to its knees. Witches, unicorns, and devils—so we "forces of darkness" hide among the self-professed "holy"; i.e., holier-than-thou but, in truth, little more than pimpish hypocrites hiding crimes of the state; re: while blaming the whore for her own rape under a Protestant ethic (and all capital's qualities, monopolies and usual trifectas)! Like abjection, cryptonymy goes both ways; i.e., pimps-vs-whores concerning the crypt as sacred hiding place to profane, a given witch finding the cracks therein to read between the lines. Allegory is allegory while "in the cave," the Gothic steeped in stigma, bias, and phobia, but also taboos concerning rape, death and madness—mainly of sex and force as things to regulate but also radically upend/alter towards new orders behind the Black Veil threatening this-or-that: chief among them nature come home to roost (the witch's so-called "Wandering Womb," fertilizing "orderly" spaces with hysteria; i.e., as used by Nazis and Commies alike, mid-kayfabe; e.g., TERFs and trans folk).

What's a girl to do but argue in kind? So do artist and muse work in tandem, all to cryptonymically upend Capitalist Realism/state feeding and disguise; re: by reversing abjection, sending the guilty-pleasure, tell-tale image of whore and witch backwards: backing up into our enemies, endlessly pimping us as "homewreckers." So does the Western world "testify to its own traumas by fabricating them" (source: "Healing from Rape," 2024)—a given detective (of the whorish sort) telling stories between workers conducting ludo-Gothic BDSM "in cahoots" (a cabal of witches). Rape and rapine are everywhere, in Gothic, cryptonymy a paradoxical means of speaking to unspeakable things like rape, "fire with fire"; i.e., classically relegated to shadowy zones of play "as the world turns," witches merging with pirates/whores of war to convey dated ideas of present theft cloaked in/as "past." The past repeats all the while, "first in tragedy and then in farce" (source: "The Eighteenth Brumaire") but then thirdly in camp (the focus of my work, especially my PhD); the clues are in the past as retold in the present: the dialectic of the alien rewriting what was, is, and shall be, a war of mirror-like asses fought paradoxically with truth and lies interwoven—ghostly doubles whose delightfully deceptive tapestries transform capital (and its moderate/reactionary elements) in the bargain. The cake is a lie, a fake with Faustian and Promethean potential; eat it to discern the truth among lies that, composed and consumed through the proper context, get cryptonymically at the Russian-doll secrets "at hand": fire of the gods, buried concentrically inside/concealed on the surface* of things—lies-in-lies, illusions-in-illusions during ass war—as dead conventions* constantly revive and whisper to and fro, "among the tombs" (what Hogle would call "the narrative of the crypt," restless and endlessly rediscovered; re: "The Restless Labyrinth," 1980): something to plunder and raid, cops-and-robbers, then shudder at the dreaded revenge threatening to return while steeped in legend as "badass." Ours.

*Re: Sedgwick's "Imagery of the Surface" (1980) and Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986) concerning "Gothic" as both liminal and libidinal, perfidious and prurient, etc.

(exhibit 11b1b [from Volume One's "Challenging the State's Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires; feat. Cuwu)," 2024]: Artist, right: Nya Blu.)

The ensuing "witchery" suitably realizes through dualistic make-believe; i.e., synthesizing praxis in opposition, dancing with state fakes "pimping the witch"; re: the ghost of the counterfeit. The Gorgon, the original witch, is the ghost of a dead whore we bring back to life; re: mid-abjection through cryptonymy (castle coochie somewhere in time; i.e., to rope in chronotopes and hauntologies, while we're at it): a hungry cave or tomb, "opening wide," belly-of-the-beast (from Medusa to Grendel's Mother to new Archaic Mothers/phallic women practicing "witchcraft"; e.g., Mother Brain and her space pirates and metroids for Samus to poach; re: "War Vaginas," 2021). It's a performance, you see—pirate-like whores, plundering in architectural morphologies the present order to undermine state disorders (above); i.e., by playing with power as "buried alive" in what the state can't control, meaning during its own obscurity and decay turned backwards: our power taken Numinously back, as witches do (as much for ourselves as for Satan). Doing so happens during cryptonymy—reversing abjection,  mise-en-abyme—in revolutionary function (whatever the aesthetic, witches or otherwise). The mystery to "solve," then, is what hides in plain sight the whole time: workers and the elite, grappling with the same splendidly mendacious tools, questing for Eve-as-Numinous, Original Sin. She can be your angel or your devil, palliative or Promethean, but generally stays caught between the two. In keeping with the parasocial nature of voyeur and exhibit, there's always room to imagine; i.e., what you're looking at, the Peeping Tom fantasizing the motives of a given Lady Godiva: "When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers" (source: Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

Such a being is generally liminal—a Venus-twin alter ego demonstrating the whore's paradox, meaning the witch every maiden threatens to become at any instant under virgin/whore and mirror syndrome: the terrifying prospect of wanton corruption, the bad-girl-in-a-bad-dream magically realizing unsanctioned desires (so-called "women of the night" and their prurient wish fulfillment exisiting outside/opposite the Church and its policed legitimacy/domain of marriage, aka "holy matrimony"). So often, too, power is taken, hoarded and "stashed" in naked disguise; i.e., as cryptonymy is ought to do, mid-abjection; re: Angel Witch, yes, but also similar dark oracles like Nya (and her "terrifying powers," above and below) portraying sex-as-abjection to demonstrate the circular past-future of those reacting to the whore 'on loop." So do said "baddies" tell the future, doing so through lies upon lies written, on the skin, like prison tattoos: the coded language of whores being criminal creatures, sex objects seeking liberation "from the harem" in cryptonymic ways—ostensibly as mere "party favors" that nonetheless "have their pick," and generally as false servants with their own goals taking others "for a ride"; i.e., on the (witch's) broom, such things being an improvised weapon/getaway vehicle taken from the local surroundings by guerilla actors (e.g., naughty maids "stealing the silverware" and the husband's attention, below): "cleaning house" a double entendre and pun about "the help" punching up, whore-in-disguise—a given witch's daughter turning house into whorehouse while triumphantly saying from in-doors (and on top of whomever their prey currently is), "Revenge is mine!" It's the whore's campy refrain—of the terrorist thief as witch, succubus, vampire, etc, slaking her thirst on state blood (often maidens of the nuclear order); i.e., for having eaten her babies, once-upon-a-time, but also hiding rape behind an "artificial wilderness" she joyously sets ablaze (or any gender and biology the performer wishes to impart; e.g., the deliciously trans, anti-Genesis conclusion to Matthew Lewis' The Monk [1794] rooted/steeped in cryptonymy throughout, staged by Matilda/the Devil as crossdressing and sex-changing avenger proudly deceiving the deceiver). Zoiks!

(artist: Nya Blu)

The elite gonna pearl-clutch (and Lewis knew no peace after writing The Monk). For unruly workers, though, it's scary because harm is—and fun because rebellion needs to be (while caught between the thrill of different misdeeds showcasing home-as-alien)—but abjection reverses roles while seeming "bare and exposed"; i.e., "helpless" a cryptonymic matter of perspective and dialectical-material context, caught red-handed. Burned "at the take," power takes many forms, nudity a form of power in the right hands; re: "putting the pussy on the chainwax!" the whore's refrain, insofar as camp is a vital staging point for iconoclastic liberation: actual rebellion sitting between erotic engagement and public nudism (with many sex workers, again, being "ace" to some degree, and Gothic historically discussing psychosexual trauma in social ways of power exchange; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM improvising "rape" but also murder and seduction, crime and punishment, as things to consume while subverting them). Whatever the form that witches and whores take, hysteria fucks back "on the Aegis"; i.e., not something to closet but trot out for the animalistic fear (and drives) it shamefully strikes in guilty onlooker hearts and minds: "throwing stones in glasses houses"; e.g., boner = "fear" in Puritanical (thus fascist) language, the black witch a "little Gorgon" hexing the viewer stone dead... with looks that kill (the binary cliché of femme fatales out of the ancient world into ours, the 1800s onwards; i.e., from the Amazons of yore—literally framed as sinister threats to Athenian democracy [and its master/slave argument]—into more recent revivals that whores Numinously camp under Capitalist Realism)! Rawr! Ka-boom! Your "soul" is mine (often semen and/or cash, data-is-data including "corruption" and so-called "Trojans*")!

*Bad puns about condoms and computers aside, the Trojan Horse was made by Odysseus with Athena's help; i.e., "Athena" and "Medusa" being one-in-the-same, a white witch and black: "Athena's aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa" (source: The Monstrous-Feminine). However abject witchcraft seems, it becomes an iconoclastic, "drug mule" means of organizing thought, speech and action around–a Satanic icon or symbol of disorder leading to dialectical-material scrutiny and change, under Gothic Communism inside ourselves/our daily lives (and whatever gaps those present). Consent is sexy and rebellion a means of seeking consent; i.e., by shedding the yoke of our pimp-like masters, doing so while paradoxically "in chains" (or jailed in various ways that appear safe while never fully "out of danger"). Numinous = "divinity" and the Gothic a chance to mingle with divine forces having come-hither abject elements; re: not some abstract thing in faraway lands and times, but the various people we encounter operatically in the here-and-now as actual witches: the whore's "sodomy castle" often being quite literal (e.g., anal sex and unreproductive sexual labor conducted by "dark" Amazons; i.e., during invasion and abduction/captive fantasies going both ways; re: "I'll See You in Hell" and "Our Sweet Revenge"). There's always another castle (and dark, rapturous, heart-stealing princess inside said castle, or vice versa); i.e., culture and Imperialism things to learn from, in "Gothic," storybook ways (a poetic, fetishized merger of the Ancient Romance and modern novel, lifting this-or-that from Walpole and Edward Said to historically combat unironic xenophobia with ironic, love-the-witch xenophilia; re: "Cornholing the Corn Lady" 2024). The vampire and the cannibal, the zombie, the werewolf or sex demon, etc—all convey the house-like whore as enticingly "off-limits," trading in sin by penetrating forbidden membranes; i.e., like witches do, comfortable in doing so. "Exit-only" is a lie, then; re: land back, labor back, sex back, bodies back, and home back as baby got back, waging ass war confidently as "mere play." From backside to broadside, all share the same shadowy zones of play across space and time: "no exit" a lie in quotes, one whose paradox of rape—the whore and her bewitching entrance/exit mirage—all sitting within biomechanical embodiments "playing with fire"; i.e., of the infernal concentric pattern's framed commentary through denial of resolution/easy victory concerning darkness visible: the fire of the gods frustratingly out of reach (while enjoying the circular nature of such things, mise-en-abyme—below). Sex remains a powerful means of control and one to control others with, a given "witch" (of the younger sort) notably wet-and-wild: as a proposition, one built on already "shaky" grounds.

(artist: Nya Blu)

To it, Gothic is generally cool for playing with taboo things, and who doesn't love the whore? Fear and loved by the state needing scapegoats far cooler than they are, witches embody nature as something to pimp and police; re: as monstrous-feminine, out of revenge going both ways. Force-of-nature, those like Medusa are the confessionals of the Black Penitents, the abjectly hurricane keepers-of-secrets handing Communism-in-Gothic forever forwards in naked disguise: as "mere play" haunting the opera, a poetic agent of witchcraft, blood libel and sodomy wailing orgasmically in rapturous "peril," hot blood, and pulsing desire (vengefully testifying to our own rape in various poetic forms of controlled chaos; re: "Policing the Whore"). "Think but this and all is mended." So the whore's revenge either destroys capital from inside itself, or allows the avenger to survive inside while fascism runs amok; i.e., the cryptonymy of the Gothic baddie cozy "among the tombstones," nature growing increasingly pissed-off as capital and the state pimp her to death. In turn, and while the Grim Harvest (and various meteorological portents given shape, above and below) once again "come home," so do the proverbial "phantoms," therein—the planet-as-dead entering its death throes, the fat lady "warming up" before state shift/the Capitalocene crystalizes beyond point-of-no-return. It's one Capitalist Realism can't entirely disguise/scapegoat, and which smaller Pagan doomsayers cry out to remind state power its hour is nigh:

Ride the rainbow

Crack the sky

Stormbringer coming

Time to die (Deep Purple's "Stormbringer," 1974).

(artist: Joe Garnett)

The harbingers of state shift announce the filling of older graveyards with fresh dead bodies; ignore us—and our own deathly omens' seemingly fantastical sex, drugs and rock 'n roll disguising them (and us)—at your own peril! Good girl and bad, Athena and Medusa—Dorothy and the Witch, in more modern, retro-future parlance—are guerilla oracles under siege; i.e., riding the same larger cyclone as cover to help hide them from capital-as-architect: of planetary disaster pimping the Earth towards cataclysm. Cryptonymy rocks (and loves bad puns), but it ain't mere play! The Numinous, as little whores portray it, is a prophecy—one to prevent cataclysm before it's too late (of the Big Whore, Mother Nature, having her revenge)! Otherwise, what's currently happening in Minneapolis/around America (already an inversion of imperial models of violence) will seem but a "drop in the bucket"; i.e., once Medusa's world-sized cunt fully breaks in! There's nothing to scapegoat, capital (and its defenders among the working class) largely responsible; i.e., while the natural scarcity of medieval village life—having long been replaced by manufactured scarcity bringing such doomsday about—returns entropically to the fore. We whores—already scapegoats for capital's usual bullshit—build among the storms, straddling tornados like broomsticks. White witches for fair weather and black witches for rough, two sides of the same devilish coin spent day and night. Whatever power workers have, then, use said coins to pay the ferryman, "one foot in Hell." Take flight and make mischief, (a)rousing the rabble Gregory-Maguire-style! 

To conclude, the Gothic routine of "melting the witch" parlays in open spells, hexes, and black magic. It also examines generational curses, poetically relaid by the usual suspects; i.e., by personifying them, starting with the giants and titans of yore to more modern, liminal, retro-future forms—the kinds of witch hunts whose warring hauntologies/ongoing states of unrest (and concealment) lift only by paradoxical blessings-in-disguise: the riddle of poison-was-the-cure, one whose infernal quantum medicine—inside the local vanishing point/eye of the storm—conceals/acts "harm" out where danger and uncertainty already exist, worldwide: the "blind peril" of Capitalist Realism, hiding rising entropy among the gaslights (and storm clouds). The bigger the problem, the more Numinous the solution expressing blindness; i.e., as paradoxical "way out" from inside by shaking things up, and which the Gothic translates through holistic abstraction witches famously delight in: preparing bitter medicine for public consumption while smashing different things together—not just Communism vs fascism but eco-fascism (and activism) spelling ecological disasters out, thus bringing calamity cryptonymically to a (thunder)head! An asylum for nature "gone mad," the forecast remains suitably grim—one of raining blood (and other Biblical disasters), showcasing the breaking of God's "Covenant of the Rainbow" by trading with new dark faiths: dealing in/with older devils as "over the rainbow," we gay Gothic an-Coms hiding ourselves (and our dialectical-material analysis) among the rock-opera glitter and theatrics. Who wants to be "grey rock" during a planetary crisis? As peacocks strutting our stuff, the secret of performance—that power through consent is a choice, one to make amid things beyond our control, mid-imprisonment—suddenly becomes ours again: to weigh in or sit upon by using one's full weight, we witches doing so regarding whatever secret meetings suddenly taking place, centerstage. They'll blame us, so eat our "apple" to learn a thing or two! It's not poisoned, I promise:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; cited: "Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp")

I digress. That's all big-picture stuff (and more than we have time to unpack, here). Onto the little picture; onto the essay about Renee Good and other victims of state violence!

Essay Table of Contents

Note: I've expanded "The Wolf Is Loose" greatly since first publishing it, including the preface and this table of contents; and while I've made numerous changes throughout the entire essay, the clear-and-obvious addendums are in bold and color-coded. —Perse, 1/11/2026

• A Word of Warning (from a White Woman's Perspective): Ill Omens and Facing Them (re: The Terminator [1984] and Police States)
• Concerning Privilege and Oppression while Seeking Intersectional Solidarity: Renee Good as White Victim versus Non-White Victims, and Tokenism
• Essay Body
• Conclusion, or Camping Rape: Fighting Back by Drawing State Fire Dualistically Away from Each Other during  Ludo-Gothic BDSM
• Footnotes

This essay, including its different addendums, concerns police brutality and the panic that sets in/survival mechanisms at play when brutality expands. Cops defend property with impunity through might makes right, the law on their side insofar as they are the law (treating unruly whores as "lippy merchandise," during Capitalist Realism). They defend the state's right to rape workers, doing so through intersections of class, culture and race: an intersectional problem with modules of oppression, therefore perspectives of oppression that divide or combine as needed; i.e., mid-abjection, the state forbidding a crossing of different boundaries it prescribes—meaning in stolen language that workers must reclaim despite their differences.

(artist: Soli; cited: "Our Sweet Revenge")

Throughout "The Wolf Is Loose," then, I supply different viewpoints concerning the receiving of state force—as something to witness, and not just directly but as terror weapon, after-the-fact; i.e., martyring classically a lesson "for the others," who are then forced to look on a corpse publicly displayed (which videos are, specifically Ross' video). Viewer and victim become one in the same. This includes white women alongside people of color and other minorities, whose aforementioned viewpoints I provide while focusing on Good (the centerpiece). The fact remains, capital and fascism are an intersectional problem, thus require intersectional solutions to dialectically-materially parse and solve: intersectional consciousness (awareness) and solidarity (teamwork), generally through artwork-as-labor giving perspective. Hence, why I'm holistically supplying these different viewpoints at all: to make us more aware and intelligent as a would-be team, versus capital/the state and fascism as a rising threat dividing all peoples. It's not just about race*, but race—while important—intersecting with these other variables I just mentioned; i.e., parallel to other scholars doing their own work (e.g., Kian Aspinall and John Duncan's "The 'Hidden Roots' of Neoliberal Fascism: Race, Gender and the Intensification of Neoliberal Hegemony," 2026). Capital decays; the cops invade empire to terrorize everyone inside/feed on them to maintain empire at worker expense (white or otherwise).

*And not just in my white woman's opinion, but one that some black people feel, as well; e.g., F.D. Signifier saying to his audience, "And that's what frustrates me about certain black folks right now beyond Dave Chapelle. We are severely lacking in our capacity to idolize the situation beyond a racial frame" ("Dave Chappelle Thinks We're Stupid," 2025; timestamp: 11:18). In other words, if all you have is a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. So expanding our education to include things alien to us—but that nonetheless affect us through other workers and situations we interact with—is important. I learn all kinds of useful things from listening to other minorities; i.e., when befriending and dating them while fighting for their rights alongside my own. Diversity is strength; radical friends radicalized me more than I already was, but this goes both ways. I might be a weird-ass white woman, then, but I still have useful things to offer in return. Nobody's perfect, but plenty of imperfect allies and situations have things we can take and built upon to improve; i.e., as we continue to exist in the world, side-by-side, making the world a better place for all; e.g., Marx offering tons of useful things, in this respect, but still being someone to critique and expand past his own homophobic blind spots (e.g., "Making Marx Gay"). Or as James Baldwin once wrote, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive."

We'll give several disclaimers, then start "with the devil you know"; i.e., from my perspective as a white trans woman seeing another white woman killed in the streets in ways not dissimilar to the horror media we so often consume (the shoe suddenly on the other foot): "[t]he Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse" (source: "Healing from Rape"). Fear is commonly a weapon used against white women to rape their minds, who experience physical and sexual violence domestically versus out in the streets; but it is present in ways that diametrically invert for those on the flipside of the coin. We want to marry the two. So after offering a word of warning to readers from my perspective/that of white women responding to this crisis, I want to remind people to remember the other victims killed by state power other than white women, and to consider their perspectives, too. We're all in the same boat, the same prison-like structure housing us differently. The last thing we want to do is tokenize, dividing ourselves into the very gangs the elite use to control us (and generally through relatively small differences); we want to unite, which requires understanding each other's differing perspectives being semi-alien: to find similarity/common ground amid difference, which intersectional consciousness amounts to; i.e., intersecting sight, not tunnel vision. Tactical unity is key to our survival as a species, those who betray the cause classically saved "for last."

A Word of Warning (from a White Woman's Perspective): Ill Omens and Facing Them (re: The Terminator and Police States)

Under a police state, abuse is everywhere but affects different parties differently. Reflecting on Good's death, I feel troubled in ways an oracle might: "The future, once so clear to me, had now become like a dark highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along." This isn't to supersede other victims and their perspectives, simply to give mine from my point of view (ergo privilege and oppression; re: as a white middle-class trans woman, one who studies Gothic media concerning police brutality against all peoples). The fact remains, stories are how we make sense of violence as a structure—a "castle," for all in intents and purposes, but one we're inside of or at least in its shadow that returns out of a fearsome imaginary past, bringing hell home to roost (aka military urbanism; re: "Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang"). Rape is paradoxically something to reenact through stories, making sense of it in ways we play with to learn from; e.g., me as a white woman but also a rape survivor* who sees the world through stories describing my own trauma as something to fabricate and relay to others (re: as Cuwu and I did, relating through stories like The Terminator through our own media; re: "Healing from Rape," 2024).

*Re: "I'm a Rape Survivor" from "Raising Awareness."

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; source: "Hailing Hellions Q&A Compendium: Interview Series - Sex Workers," 2025)

During ludo-Gothic BDSM, not everyone has the privilege to consume within a middle-class market (with written language), but the ability to tell ghost stories orally has been around since the dawn of time: speaking to others through fabrications of our own abuse, telling truth with lies. And if you want to garner support from people different than you ("when in Rome"), learn their language of oppression and why they might see you as a threat/risk; i.e., as a show of good faith/olive branch that shows you're seeing them as human when "hugging the alien." In turn, they can do the same, challenging stereotypes by learning taboo things (the discussion of unspeakable abuse) in ways both parties can subvert; i.e., as friends/strange bedfellows "making it gay" by camping canon, thus reversing abjection (see: footnotes). My perspective is that of the white woman fearing rape as something to subvert in Gothic language; we'll touch on that, here, then consider other marginalities groups (specifically racial minorities) in the next section: the language of fear a paradoxical means of making lifelong friends under crisis!

(artist: John Cordero; cited: "Healing from Rape")

To it—and from my perspective as a white middle-class trans woman—you hear stories about the fearsome, faraway past all the time; e.g., movies like The Terminator calming yourselves; i.e., through rape fantasies, meaning those of unequal power where control is seemingly absent: calculated risk (tied to home as alien, a common phobia for middle-class women*). Though here, it's more a roadmap to calm our nerves and provide guidance (which an oracle classically does): a police state is no joke—something that comes back around, ostensibly out from older times (a found document), and all to appear nightmarishly in stores alluding Gothically to present-day problems; i.e.,

*Then and now, insofar as white women—while relatively privileged in lieu of racist structures (the Enlightenment)—are kept within nuclear models that routinely see them brutalized through domestic violence; e.g., murder and rape, cops ignoring married women to favor their husbands raping them (the crux of many-a-Gothic plight). By comparison, cops brutalize people of color out in the open. Violence occurs for both but distributes differently in different areas of violence; e.g., black men generally don't experience sexism the way that white women do (though can be chattelized/called fetishizing names like "boy" and "buck"), and white women don't experience police violence the way that black men do (though domestic abuse commonly translates to gun violence comparable to open, gang-like forms: wars over territory and property, which women classically are). Both are oppressed in ways we don't want to monopolize/rank the trauma of, but acknowledge. Through different degrees and flavors, rape is rape—racial violence and domestic violence not inherently "greater" than each other but two sides of the same coin that exist paradoxically in a shared world trying to divide them; re: police brutality. We're stronger together than we are divided (and if anyone tells you otherwise, they're probably throwing someone under the bus).

the liminal hauntology of war (danger disco—abridged)

Another term of mine, one describing a half-real* poetic space to heroically move through, onstage and off, and one that concerns the hauntological presence and function of a Gothic chronotope (the castle or some other war-like alien double of the nuclear home); i.e., of the Imperial Boomerang bringing monsters (and their masters) home to roost, during fascism (source: "Paratextual Documents").

*"Meaning liminal; re: me, vis-à-vis Jesper Juul—not merely "between the fiction and the rules" (as Juul argues, 2007) but between stories and anything they attach to, onstage and off" (source: "Concerning Venezuela," footnote 1).

To that, I wish to give further words of warning to preface our essay with—an opening premise and extended quote from past research I've produced. Based on said research, but also my personal preference for Gothic stories about damsels-in-distress—i.e., the seemingly powerless kind facing state machinery threatening ubiquitous rape (as omnipresent-yet-obscure, which a "black knight"/giant suit of armor basically is, above and below)—the example I want to provide speaks, upon reflection, to Good's death and what it portends; re: The Terminator and all it implies having now tragically "come to light." Doing so, here, is a controlled environment, explained by me in ways we can play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM to make sense of things together after Good's death—specifically Cameron's infernal love triangle: one where heroine, hero, and imposter* reach all-too-late from a Numinous, seemingly imaginary "past" (re: the ghost of the counterfeit†). If only! That story had no happy ending to celebrate; neither does ours, and it's only just beginning—a Capitalocene nightmare whose apocalypse sees ordinary middle-class white women (the core Gothic readership from the late 1790s, onwards) horrifyingly marked for/put to death in places they're not normally killed: one the dashing hero from the past-future cannot stop, and all without Sarah Connor's savior/martyr complex!

(source: "Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2 — part two: Textual Elements in The Terminator," 2019)

*What Cynthia Wolff would call the "demon lover" vis-à-vis Ann Radcliffe, but I digress (re: "Radcliffean Refrain," 2025): fantasies of mutilative desire that, oddly enough, deal in confronting buried present realities dressed up as "past," mid-abjection (re: the ghost of the counterfeit, below)—things to conjure fearfully up, like werewolves, then banish just as quickly once the Black Veil is pulled aside (while turning a buck, of course). Except in this case, there is a monster behind the shroud: the police state and its endless, pimp-like supply of aforementioned "wolves" (a "black castle," in Gothic parlance)! Everything thing is code, abstracting state violence into communicable forms; i.e., ones relatively safe to display under despotic conditions: "mere stories," mid-cryptonymy (re: to show and hide at once; see: Volume One's "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Healing from Rape" to consider cryptonymy vis-à-vis the Terminator franchise). Its darkness visible offer a means to whisper to each other and scream to our enemies during calculated risk (re: "It Began with a Whisper"). They rape our minds; we bounce these gaslights back, "on the Aegis" (reversing abjection during "brothel espionage, playing with the language of pirates and whores, ravishing maidens in dark, Numinously spooky spaces of "rape": seeking power [usually generational trauma] out to paradoxically heal through playtime; e.g., as I do, but also many other white women relegated to domestic spheres where Gothic media is our only option—a kind of code accomplishing revolutionary aims, the pen versus the sword).

†Re: as Hogle writes, "In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, 'the middle class' often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it 'displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell' with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced" (source: "The Ghost of the Counterfeit: Leroux's Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic"). Now, the fantasies from Cameron's 1984 (and centuries back, to Radcliffe's Britain) rear their ugly head, once more; i.e., inside the same dying American empire: drawing closer to death as capital routinely enters crisis towards final decay (state shift, commonly expressed as climate change but that is a topic I've discussed elsewhere at length).

(source: Hawk's Podcasts / mdg650hawk⁩'s Community; artist: Geddi Nixan)

To that—and despite my initial assumptions about Good—she was not there "playing the hero." Her wife was recording ICE on her phone, but Good was merely driving her car away from her own house; i.e., when she was shot: by home invaders recolonizing stolen land, teaching the surviving widow (formerly married to a widow) a brutal lesson. "Nicole Good was not an activist," Geddi Nixan writes (summing things up, above). "She was not trying to change anything, challenge anyone, or make a statement. She simply wanted to leave the driveway of her home and live her everyday life. She did not enter a conflict—the conflict came to her..." Sound familiar? It's basically the plot to a horror movie—one awfully similar to Cameron's doomsday and police state it warned about, decades before Good was killed. Onscreen, Sarah lives to seize the day and overcome a seemingly impossible foe; in our world, "Sarah" is martyred too quick to blink, the hero nowhere in sight:

That's what ICE are—a conflict absent of obvious heroes, specifically a manufactured one that "blinks" into existence; re: a police state, one tied to AI, no less, and producing its own kind of "terminators." Like terminators, the cops who killed Good lack pity, fear or remorse. In a terrible, spontaneous show of force to let the locals know who's in charge, they killed Good—a white middle-class woman who might normally seem immune to such violence—in cold blood (again, with no hero to save her). Then, they released the evidence, whereupon J.D. Vance declared her killer immune and she the "terrorist."

Hence, these words of warning about police states building on Cameron's after Good's ignominious death: If state prosecution lets Vance's decree stand (and in a manner similar to the democratic socialists of the Weimar Republic), then Good is just the initiation—not of the already-lengthy series of non-white martyrs* predating Good, but an escalation extending to Americans of all stripes. In turn, these robotic "bulls on parade" bade poorly for all peoples, foreign and domestic; i.e., an acceleration of fascism, which is bad for everyone. Like Cameron's Skynet, the only way to survive is by coming together and pushing back; i.e., against the panopticon[6] before it "turns on" (originally a medieval tower observing lepers, but described by Foucault as constant surveillance under prison-like conditions). I repeat: hiding is a death trap because the police state, once activated, will hunt everyone down: a one-day pattern killer dressed up as "human," but lacking mid-cryptonymy any actual humanity. "Proud Boys, stand down and stand by."

(exhibit 33b2: "Artist, left: Reubens; bottom-left: Malcolm
Browne, of Thích Quảng Đức, 1963"; source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom")

*Martyr = victim—with Good being the first American white woman targeted, but many being brown immigrants, not African Americans (endeavorance's "Country Uses Lethal Force Against Protesting Civilians"; timestamp: 4:26). And yes, anger can be useful, provided it actually leads people to unify against capital—meaning in ways that challenge the status quo, not waste energy by lashing out at potential allies we can't afford to waste. I get why it happens, but pointing the finger alone doesn't "cut it" and time is short; e.g., African Americans declaring after Renee Good was shot, "white people made slavery" ...while conveniently ignoring that white abolitionists do exist (e.g., the North during the Civil War) and black people can (and have) tokenized repeatedly throughout history (see: footnotes). There's also FAFO and "this ain't our fight," which we'll address deeper in. Furthermore, (indented for emphasis):

It's not POCs who tokenize to reactionary and moderate degrees, but also Jewish people, women—anyone, really. Tokenization is a huge part of divide-and-conquer because it recuperates revolutionary action, transforming action into inaction but also sight vs blindness regarding state abuse. Worse, these betrayals lead to mistrust of these movements going forwards, whose ensuing scapegoats lead back around towards restoring faith in the original abuser while fortifying Capitalist Realism. There's nothing to debate, insofar as human rights aren't up for debate. The moment people start to entertain otherwise, our abusers and their enablers begin to force themselves upon us. They're the danger, the ones who knock—literally masked men black-bagging people and tossing them into unmarked vans to imprison, post-abduction, then rape, torture and kill, in different orders; i.e., rape is the norm, the rapist protected by the system since Antiquity into the present; e.g., David Courvelle in 2026 (Alex Woodward's "Ex-ICE officer pleads guilty to sexually abusing immigrant in custody"), John Jacobs Olivas in 2018 (on ICE's website for "professional responsibility," like that ever stopped anyone), Catholic priests past and present—all the way back to the Black Penitents of the Medieval Period and long before then, into Antiquity. Rape—as something to encourage by apologizing for it—isn't "new."

Keeping things in the present, ICE must be resisted on all fronts or they will take everything. It's literally their job and anyone who aids them, in any shape or form, is complicit. Crocodile tears for perfect victims afterwards won't work, because it doesn't prevent harm at any point; trying to "train" these men into complying with "law and order" (already a colonial dogwhistle) doesn't work, for much the same reason. Cops are criminals, good cops who follow the law aiding bad cops who don't follow the law abjecting workers through terrorist/counterterrorist arguments. ACAB, from older slave catchers to the gestapo to slaver-catcher American variants of the gestapo (a cop's a cop, a traitor a traitor). Concerning them, protest =/= resistance on its own, the latter only happening through consciously informed teamwork among workers; i.e., preventing rape systemically through praxial synthesis, waged in opposition across space and time while learning from the half-real past (re: "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis," 2024). There's no "half-measures" with rabid dogs and their handlers, no courtesy we extend to rapists like ICE; e.g., judges and governors, under electoral politics (already a sham meant to pacify labor), telling the lawbreakers to not break the law and expect that to stick, wave-a-magic-wand; re: rape is the law, which defends those who perpetrate it from those they victimize. Rape isn't some taboo to deny/cover up, then, but expose, condemn and prevent out in the open, during ludo-Gothic BDSM: confronting rape apologia as baked into the system, which can only change by altering how people view and discuss rape to start with.

To that, we gotta be constructive, holding each other accountable while recognizing white power structures: making people "white" through function, but whose actors consist of any gender and race under the sun betraying their class interests (and those of other workers they have more in common with than the ruling class) by turning a blind eye. Blind eyes still see, but only what the state wants them to see (and often in red, below):

To that, Trump's machine men are merely awaiting instructions, specifically for state governance (and police) to betray the people: "Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything—trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination." That's what this is: a command prompt for the federal machine to activate, the brownshirts we currently see—patrolling the streets ominously like tanks—merely the spear's head to the SS, gestapo and death squads of future, more efficient killer-infiltrators; i.e., "under the skin" but hidden in plain sight during military* urbanism (above): "patrol machines built in automated factories," as Kyle Reese might put it, rounding survivors into camps "for orderly disposal" (the settler colony extermination device turned on the colonists, specifically their descendants). He would add, "The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy. But these are new, they look human." This would not only mirror in Cameron's sequel—which borrowed uncannily from real life—but in my own writings on the franchise, one describing where we currently are, postmortem; re (from the Praxis Volume):

*Cops are paramilitary bodies, employing DARVO and obscurantism to cryptonymically conceal and signal America's half-hidden function as police state; i.e., they're the "enemy within" but also "at the gates." Beyond paramilitaries, the same ideas also apply to openly military forces—said forces, during military urbanism, swearing fealty to a decaying empire. Training isn't the issue, then, but service towards capital/the state. It decays into corrupt forms, "licking the boot" like anything. But the flow of power (master/slave, cop/victim, etc) remains the same: loyalty towards the state through various means of policing non-revolutionary action, mid-abjection. Flow determines function, mid-aesthetic, cops/the military preserving bourgeois hegemony by keeping power within themselves; i.e., versus dividing it among workers who don't serve state interests, ultimately policed by thugs, pimps and warlords "killing for ribbons."

As a genocidal structure, then, America, the West and Cartesian dualism were intentionally built around manufactured scarcity and conflict; fascism is the decay of said structure—one where perceived shortages as much as actual ones become "terminal"; i.e., by arguing for a glorious return to the status quo through force, reinstalling a false time of plenty for the privileged group: not enough work for this group, not enough women, enough space, etc. It must be enforced, generally by a "grim reaper" come to collect [...] Regardless, the normalized, gaslit presence of the grim reaper—as something attached to stochastic violence and state violence—remains an incredibly ill omen: blind force; collective punishment and genocide personified by canonical executioners, but also automated, worshipped, feared by those who look upon them. Forget if or when, the harvest and its reapers are already here, hiding and feeding in plain sight; pity those with a place at the table:

(exhibit 83b: Cops and victims. The Terminator franchise is a posthuman, hyperreal example of Foucault's Boomerang—where the image of the state enforcer has come alive with no actual human behind it. Hugging it equals death because death is what the state fears and worships; i.e., through its own infiltrators acting replacement out in bad faith [re: DARVO and obscurantism].)

With this Promethean iteration of the technological singularity in effect, the machine image—specifically in T2—can shapeshift into any surface-level image (that it touches). It is the maniac cop that rapes and murders its victims without any understanding of their feelings at all; it has no feelings. This stems from James Cameron's own poetics. From her 2010 book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, Rebecca Keegan writes:

During the writing process, he was in his living room excitedly explaining the T-1000 to his friend and collaborator Stan Winston when Winston raised a concern. "I don't know who the bad guy is," Winston said. "I need a specific character, a specific image." [...] "I've got it!" Cameron said. "He's a cop!" The form the T-1000 would take for most of the movie was a Los Angeles police officer. This solved the storytelling dilemma Winston had raised and also gave Cameron an opportunity to underline a central theme in both of the Terminator movies - how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. "The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They're about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other," he says. "Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job" (source).

Cameron's selection of a cop also makes sense within his home, the LAPD being recognized for decades as a corrupt police force that terrorizes its own populations, especially minorities (for current proof of this, consider how these two LAPD cops, unprovoked, shoot a double amputee hobbling away from them; The Rational National, 2023). They do this by mirroring and confusing policing language during the cryptonymy process to attack the alien; re: (from "Hugging the Alien"):

(exhibit 33b2b: There's far too many analogs for the alien as something to squeeze, but here's several fun ones to help you acclimate to the abjection process: the presence of death, decay and disintegration linked to an unheimlich—often a buried guilt, secret shame or some-such trauma-as-impostor overspilling generationally to overwhelm the present moment as trapped inside the home as alien… [source].

To this, the T-1000 is "blind pastiche," a chimeric embodiment of the hydra-esque reaper grimly performing its harvest (exhibit 33b2b, above). This includes interrogating Sarah (exhibit 83b) by unnecessarily torturing and raping her (rape being about power abuse and violence, not love and physical sex) and without understanding why—a "sadistic glitch" in its "code" that emulates the glitchy robot brains of real cops intimidating suspects, taken from an internalized database of disguises ("good cop, bad cop"). That's all it does. All of this happens according through a DARVO trick: the badge is good, anything else bad if the wearer kills what it sees as bad.

In this sense, it's the perfect simulacrum of the "Man with No Eyes," which historically would have been class traitors wearing one-way mirrors over their eyes to grant them a blinding surveillance and terrifying "camera stare" to freeze their victims with. The tragedy of this recon, seek-and-destroy persona is that it evolves through the state's monopoly on violence and desire to protect itself. To do so it will "widen the net" (of the state of exception) but also upgrade its hunters to genocidal extremes. In the first Terminator film, the HK "police lights" mirror the blue-and-red lights of sleek 1984 American cruisers—both being a material, phenomenological extension of America itself as the police state. Taken to its logical conclusion is Capitalism "run amok," colonizing and replicating everything in service of the state—all to preserve itself from revolutionaries bent on wiping out its existence, including victimized sex workers/sexualized workers (women, minorities, etc) defending themselves from more priviliged workers. The robot killer from the future is a death omen: the inhuman, ghostly will of vertical power and state tyrant come home.

As we'll see, deeper in, the solution to fascism lies not with the state (which is venal, cowardly and corrupt/programmed to self-destruct), but with its people living in the ruins of empire (and not just white Amazonian saviors for straight guys to fetishize). It's silly and serious, if only to reflect how fucked up things are. There's room for power fantasies, yes, but only if they recognize and instill solidarity among a polity of victims; re: with diverging levels of privilege, oppression, and betrayal, and whose tokenization we collectively avoid by setting our differences aside—doing so to overcome a common foe. "The goblins [and their wolf-like wargs] are upon us." To that, it can be useful to understand the white, female, middle-class perspective, because it showcases the reality of what it's like to live in a domestic sphere invaded by bad actors brutalizing labor for the state: "A restraining order is just a piece of paper"; i.e., says the housewife when the stalker wants inside. So is the Constitution, and so says anyone being stalked by the state. Cops are stalkers who want the right to stalk unsurveilled—whereupon they can watch us but we can't watch them save with our God-given eyes, which can be threatened: dead men tell no tales, but cameras can't be intimidated once the data is out there. It becomes a game of triage, "to let 'I dare' wait upon 'I would'" while people's survival mechanisms short-circuit; i.e., tunnel vision and blinders becoming a question of survival, when the chickens come home to roost.

This brings us to an ongoing proposition of visual calculus, including different vantage points to give us the necessary sight; i.e., to see through state illusions/the fascist fog of war—from a white woman's privileged perspective to those with less privilege/different oppression essentially "in the same boat."

Note: The following section is my attempt to critically engage with and include non-white perspectives; i.e., while preaching intersectionality as a means of shared praxis holding each other accountable. My doing so is imperfect—for one, insofar as no perfect victims exist, hence no perfect revolutionaries punching up. The same goes for anyone, intersectional solidarity occurring through critical engagement; i.e., while listening to the oppressed during a collective pedagogy thereof. In keeping with Paulo Freire's 1968 book, I strongly encourage engaging with oppressed perspectives, the ones included here merely "a taste"; i.e., of a much wider selection in a larger conversion that others have also added to (e.g., elliot sang again's "Black folks have been warning us," 2026). —Perse

Concerning Privilege and Oppression while Seeking Intersectional Solidarity: Renee Good as White Victim versus Non-White Victims, and Tokenism

For a white girl, rape (or fear of rape) is generally ubiquitous, but gun violence—meaning from someone other than a father, boyfriend or husband—notably less common, out-of-doors; for black people but especially black men, it's pretty much Tuesday (216 SCAINO From The Gutta News's "White America Had To FAFO[2], ICE Will Step On Y'all Too"). To it, while our focus here remains on Good, she's also a victim of relative privilege (with some oppression; re: as a lesbian widow). By standing up for Good's murder/martyring by state powers, we must also acknowledge and voice solidarity with/remembrance for others less fortunate/oppressed to different degrees and flavors; i.e., of relative oppression—those killed by ICE who won't receive the same kind of Christ-like attention; e.g., Keith Porter, a black man shot by ICE seven days before Good was killed (source skeet, Pixie Thinks: January 8th, 2025), and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez—killed by ICE on September 12th after dropping his kids off at school (source skeet, Emily L. Hauser: January 8th, 2025):

(artist, left: Keith Porter; right: Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez and his children)

A pedagogy of the oppressed recognizes ratios of privilege/oppression while seeking intersectional solidarity, mid-crisis. So while an absence of material conditions renders crisis invisible—and white middle-class people are where the spotlight tends to shine—we must take the time to recognize who we're standing against fascism with: our fellow oppressed, many kettled to different degrees and flavors of reactive abuse than ourselves; e.g., I'm a trans woman during trans genocide, but I'm still white, male, middle-class and "pass." Good herself is something of a "poster victim," too, being a middle-class white woman: with white privilege and class privilege despite the abuses faced by privileged women (queer or otherwise)—rape, first and foremost, but other forms of female violence, too; e.g., compelled pregnancies (rape or otherwise) and nadir-level mortality rates for the mother, medical/psychiatric abuse, the pay gap, etc. Chief among them is murder or murder/suicide; i.e., by a male abuser with a knife or gun against a female victim not only incredibly common, but what happened to Good: Jonathan Ross calling her a "fucking bitch" after murdering her with his gun, shooting her in the face multiple times (Hawk's Podcast's "Jonathan Ross Called Renee Good a F*cking B*tch After Shooting Her in the Head Three Times"). It's domestic abuse, which white people but especially white women can relate to: a desire to avenge patriarchal harm.

(artist: Caravaggio; cited: "A Note About Abjection and Reversing It during Rape Play (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM/rape play)" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome")

Except the current violence we're seeing against people like Renee Good—meaning those closer to the in-group, at long last seeing Jameson's class nightmare* come to pass—have been escalating previously for months, years, decades, and centuries against those capital and its benefactors historically suppress and ignore; e.g., token white women turning a blind eye; i.e., in favor of white women materially and socially having some degree of privilege over other victims of capital (re: race, gender and often class). It's possible, then, to be a rape victim and still have privilege (see: every Gothic heroine ever; e.g., Ellen Ripley, further down). What can gentrify can decay and capital alienates and fetishizes everything to serve profit.

But it can also weaponize to fight back against state gaslights, camping them in playfully "stealthy" forms (of "mere play") that subvert their normal direction of abjection, mid-cryptonymy (see: footnotes); e.g., the state hates and fears sex, which it needs to survive and polices through force/false copies abjecting state abuse they cannot monopolize (namely the Gorgon and things comparable to it, mid-abjection, above); i.e., I'm a rape survivor and my grandfather fought for the Dutch Resistance, neither which avoided total devastation without a fight (re: "I'm a Rape Survivor" from "Raising Awareness," "Discussing My Grandfather (a Dutch Holocaust Survivor) w/ My Work" [2025] vis-à-vis "On 'Anti-Semitism' versus 'Antisemitism" [2024] and "Justice for Palestine" and "Invincible Shield and Zionism," 2024). In my case, I wrote an entire book series to challenge capital's inherently rapacious function, having the whore's revenge versus the pimps/Capitalist Realism (the latter clouding the oldest labor struggle as "end of the world") while fighting fire with fire; re (from "Concerning Venezuela and State Vampirism"):

The whore's revenge being "to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence [mid-abjection]—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with" (source: "Rape Reprise"). "Her terrifying powers" (as Creed puts it) become our terrifying powers; i.e., "on the Aegis" during ludo-Gothic BDSM, our rape play (and its performative ironies) reminding the state/traitors to the cause where feeding [abjection] takes place: the revenge as had in either direction simultaneously. Monopolies are a myth, including sex-as-terror-weapon policing by/expressed through force in Gothic language. During the abjection process, we can shield ourselves and attack—freezing our pimps with castrating reminders of their own crimes but also historically inability to completely destroy us. They cannot; the state always needing someone to exploit/whore to pimp and rape in some shape or form (the oldest victim/struggle being a rape victim/the monstrous-feminine† organizing despite myths of total fragmentation (re: "Always a Victim" and "Our Sweet Revenge" vis-à-vis Elizabeth Hadley's "Medusa Misunderstood," 2024).

*I.e., masked gunmen working for a rogue state versus the usual benefactors: highway bandits pilfering the middle class, classically relatively privileged white women clutching at pearls. They'll threaten white women to tokenize them, killing one woman pimp-style as a martyr-like lesson: don't "make a bad decision" (iamblakeley's "ICE are Trying to Intimidate White Women from Protesting"). The cops say this, as do critics responding unempathetically to Good's martyring. These conversations, in turn, frequently lead to blows—battles not just over land, but worker hearts and minds tied to land, labor and sex subject to state force. Except debates had between friends[4] also include scholars from "all different walks"; e.g., Jameson's "boring and exhausted paradigm" comment disparaging Gothic in ways that I—a scholar of the Gothic and activist, myself—actively disliked; re: (from Volume One's "Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism," 2024):

Fred Botting and Frederic Jameson were/are apologists of science fiction as somehow "not Gothic" (re: Botting's silly arguments of "Gothic redundancy" as I tackle them [exhibit 1a1a1h2a3; re: "Origins and Lineage"] and Jameson's very-dumb 1991 declaration in Postmodernism, calling the Gothic "that boring and exhausted paradigm"†).

†The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link's "The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson's Gothic Plots" (2009) for a summary of it:

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly "boring and exhausted paradigm." The Gothic, he declares, is a mere "class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised" and it should not be mistaken for a "protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy" nor "a protopolitical protest against rape." [...] (source).

And yes, I know that sexism and queerphobia are as old as civilization—and that white women who betray their assigned owners will be treated like whores and martyred by vengeful, pimp-like men (e.g., iamblakeley's "Why Renee Good Being a White Woman Shouldn’t Surprise You," 2026)—but the current orderings of state power still prioritize preferential (mis)treatment, mid-abuse: in ways that categorically favor middle-class, queernormative aka "passing" white women, coverage-wise, versus racialized and/or overtly queer violence; i.e., said women, given the spotlight, "sucking up" coverage regarding domestic abuse as only discussed for certain women (with older forms of feminism historically fascist, making exclusionary struggles that benefit the status quo as white, straight, and male; e.g., TERFs and SWERFs acting white straight and male being my initial study group as a specialist in tokenism; re: "Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It," 2025).

All lives matter when challenging police violence, of course, but the problem (and solution) remain intersectional; re: when regarding how capital affects different lives differently relative to each other's privilege/oppression; i.e., as something the state feeds on/through as a vector of sight, mid-decay (one holocaust victim betraying the others for a few seconds longer before they're eaten, above). Such is abjection, which reverses only when parsing the painful realities said feeding devices extract, over time: that non-white lives systemically face racial violence in ways white lives do not; queer lives face gendered violence in ways that straight lives do not; unpaid labor (e.g., sex work) faces material violence paid labor does not; female/GNC folk face sexist violence male/straight lives do not; the Global South faces territorial violence the North does not; and so on. In fact, those who experience harm generally do so at the hands of those who don't—even if that means through willful ignorance from the privileged parties, including those who tokenize to betray their own/their allies shared struggle in different ways. "Privilege" = punching down as much as it does material conditions; i.e., the ability to punch down, then act upon it despite generational trauma (racial, gendered, etc). Assimilation is poor stewardship, an inability to learn from past betrayals that workers must avoid; re: by banding together despite not always wanting to (the struggle of tactical unity when facing tough choices).

Note: Some compare ICE not to the Gestapo, but American slavers/slave catchers. On one hand, I would caution against seeing these as "separate," given the Nazis were slavers emulating Americans. Furthermore, despite a race impetus under fascism, it is also guided by parallel bigotries affecting other minorities during their own simultaneous genocides; e.g., trans people, sex workers and Indigenous parties. It's not "just about race," but race intersecting with other qualities that invite racial violence regardless of ethnicity: to punch up is to be treated as non-white, and to be non-white is to likewise be treated as "queer" and so on. These are modules of oppression that, unto themselves, commonly intersect and have similar outcomes, namely police brutality. On the flip side, Tad Stoermer says, "Don't look to Nazi Germany and symbolic resistance; look to America" ("Whose Justice? America's Resistance History Has a Lesson for Stephen Miller and JD Vance"). In other words, to slavery and collective action—meaning intersectional action. This strikes a chord with me, because it presents a practical actionable plan; i.e., one that faces the current and ongoing problems America generates in ways historically met with success—at least concerning slavery as debated between individual states.

(source thumbnail: Persephone van der Waard's "Responding to Tad Stoermer: Words vs Action; Why Not Both? (a Gay An-Com's Antifacist Perspective)")

Ultimately I still posit symbolic gestures are important[5] (above), insofar as they challenge larger forces at work beyond the present moment: capital, Capitalist Realism, and the state model. To that, you can stop temporarily the tendrils of the octopus of racism, but not from existing as part of the state's endless demand for exploitation; i.e., unless symbolic gestures alter the Superstructure enough; re: hearts and minds, breaking Capitalist Realism to solidarize workers on all fronts across space and time. To me, combatting federal invasion, then, still feels symptomatic per a larger etiology—one that ultimately saw slavery never leave after the Civil War and its slave revolts (Atun Shei Film's "The Civil War Was A Slave Revolt," 2025): Reconstruction's blocking by state power in ways slaves/white abolitionists couldn't immediately fight, which ultimately required the Civil Rights Movement (and symbolic gestures), a century later under Jim Crow. Fascism doesn't have to "win the war"; it just has to protect capital, and does so namely by sacrificing itself: straw dogs, disposable within a last-ditch effort as capital dies an agonizingly slow death. Trump, then—and those who, alongside him, represent the state apparatus, "eating the cannibals (the colonizers)"—is Saturn devouring his son: hidden violence against various groups come hideously to the fore (often sex workers and racial minorities, but also women and children raped by state forces). "Who's the savage? Modern man!"

(artist: Francisco Goya)

Who says that visuals and words don't have power? Abstraction is useful as code and shorthand, dualistically subverting state propaganda through counter-insurgency action; i.e., without which revolutions are generally dead-on-arrival. And sure, challenging symptoms often takes priority in the present moment. Triage is triage. It boils down to short-term and long-term goals: dialectical-material and historical-material, the battle and the war, the sickness and the vector. Both are important and both can occur, side-by-side. They must, in fact, lest fascism return, postmortem; i.e., like the Nazis, who were not the first; re: they were emulating Americans on foreign soil, enslaving their own people and those of the Soviets. In short, vital lessons can be learned from American history and its (white and non-white) resistance fighters alongside German examples. Combine what is useful from both eras and areas to solve not just capital's decay but capital as a whole that decays; i.e., what will decay forever until workers hit upon the root of the problem, not the blossom. We can do both. Ultimately fascism—as something to combat—requires breaking the illusion of a quick-and-easy victory delivered by god-like supermen, post-betrayal. This happens not with words or action separately and alone, but conjoined; i.e., in ways people communicate, while addressing the nature of propaganda informing action for good or ill.

With Operation Barbarossa, for example, Hitler—a famous megalomaniac—insisted "kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down" (very much like a cop). But fascism = traitors defending the system as cowards do, eager to attack the helpless and hopelessly afraid should resistance meet them on the field. The Soviets fought back, proving the Nazis "mortal, after all." Same goes for ICE, who—despite appearing tough—aren't indestructible terminators (Hawk's Podcast's "Leaked Documents Reveal ICE Agents Refuse Minneapolis Deployment After Murder of Renee Good"). At the very least, they feel fear, and that for now is enough. The state fears those it silences, so listen to those groups when planning revolutionary action first and foremost (unpaid labor versus tokenism being my specialty; re: when reversing abjection; e.g., through my partner Bay's help, below, but also many other sex workers, besides); i.e., while treating straight straight guys with beards (so-called "Gandalf disease," minus the queer element): as a second source to a large pedagogy of the oppressed they're potential allies towards, not automatic—to supplement different minorities we're trying to befriend, platform, and radicalize with/from, when the usual privileged parties routinely kick the can down the road (white men suffering from main character syndrome; e.g., from Ozymandias to Pygmalion to Victor Frankenstein to Abraham Lincoln, etc; re: the Shadow of Pygmalion*, as I call it). Trust is earned, the usual infiltrators earning trust by demonstrably not speaking out those more oppressed/differently oppressed than them. —Perse

*Essentially white straight male privilege: "Another of my neologisms (from the thesis volume), the Shadow of Pygmalion or "Pygmalion effect" is the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better "kings" of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein "Pygmalion" means "from a male king's mind," but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as "of nature" for those reasons)" (source: "Paratextual Documents").

Lastly, such modules intersect in ways that efface those closer to the margins; i.e., during token violence, compound minorities rendered "alien" inside their own communities by their own communities, or by other communities "in the same boat" monopolizing oppression; re: "ranking rape"; e.g., queer and/or female POCs experiencing intraracial sexism and homophobia from token actors, or said POCs devaluing interracial minorities with similar oppression elsewhere—with some darker-skinned African Americans tokenizing to exclude non-white, non-American people with lighter skin, not just those in their own communities. This includes attacking my partner and co-writer, Bay Ryan—Bay being Irish-Maori, disabled and queer (above), yet experiencing shadism from American POCs monopolizing "Blackness," and who sometimes also treat/view "Blak" People (different from non-white) as "not Black" or "not oppressed," too: an alternate spelling of "Black," "Australia's Indigenous (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Peoples have long identified with the term Black; more specifically, as Blak (or Blackfullas)" (source: Cristina Verán's "Blak Lives Matter: Indigenous Australia's Solidarity with the U.S. Movement for Black Lives," 2020).

(model and photographer: Neil Morris and Snehargho Ghosh; ibid.)

Furthermore, such betrayals generally happen with the very platforms African Americans speak from, using them to exclude color-as-identity versus a visual marker of race; i.e., in ways that overlook racial violence not tied to skin color alone; e.g., the English genocided the Irish, who also had white skin: "Unlike previous invaders, the authors write, these British Protestants regarded the Catholic Irish as racially inferior. The newcomers rarely intermarried with the locals. In 1649, when Oliver Cromwell's forces arrived in Ireland, the result was a brutal genocidal campaign" (source: Livia Gershon's "Britain's Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland," 2022). Whatever the case, lionizing a particular kind of racial manifestation—meaning like it makes one group "more special" than other victims—only makes that group blind/a de facto cop (or aider of cops). To that, black people can be racist, too—are being racist (to an internalized degree) when saying "this isn't our fight" concerning Renee Good, insofar as sitting on the sidelines and segregating yourselves is exactly what the state wants you to do (216 SCAINO From The Gutta News's "The Black Panthers Are Not Coming To Save White America"). No offense, but it's going to become your fight when ICE prioritizes non-white people first (and already is). If you ignore fascism, fascism kills you. Also, not everyone is of the same mind about the Panthers and similar movements; e.g., that "Black Panthers only stand up for black people, that is a lie," says Chris Birdsong of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (source Instagram post: January 14th, 2026). But no perfect victims actually exist, blurring the line between victim and abuser among parties like the Panthers:

(exhibit 4: Source YouTube Community post, Persephone van der Waard: January 19th, 2026. Made in response to Former Black Panther Speaks' "Can America Be Saved?" [2026]: "Right, but what do we do when they call non-violence violence; e.g., shooting Renee Good, a non-protestor in the head? Also, you're a Vietnam vet. You think the Vietcong defeated America and pushed its occupying army out of their country by being non-violent? No, they organized violent action through asymmetrical warfare. Violence isn't automatically 'chaos'; it has a structure, which goes for the invader (re: Wolfe, invasion is a structure) but also the defender. 'Peace' is a white man's word, the absence of tension during negative peace a white moderate tactic employed by token parties.")

The fact remains, racism is ultimately a system of exclusion upheld by selective/opportunistic tokenism undermining solidarity—with oppression often being reductively tied to skin color (to center state relief around that quality and nothing else); e.g., despite how many non-white people with fair skin also experience racism in Australia, New Zealand, and the surrounding islands; re: token African Americans excluding non-American POCs and non-white persons from liberation efforts, or ignoring the genocide in Palestine (or elsewhere; e.g., Sudan). To exclude is to reduce, often prioritizing one group as "center" of something while excluding others in the bargain (a Faustian bargain); e.g., Afrocentrism; re (from the Poetry Module):

Dress it up however you want, then, but class and race betrayal are class and race betrayal, ipso facto. Flow of power determines function; we're talking about Afronormativity per Afrocentrism being used as a tokenized rotting mask pushing power towards the state, but it applies to any in-community policing by tokenized agents that—while they have legitimate grievances—choose to kiss up to state power and punch laterally against their own kind/comrades (or down, depending on their privilege); i.e., I experience as much discrimination by cis-to-GNC AFAB sex workers exuding trans misogyny[3b] as I do white cis-het men; but also from black actors calling me a "white theorist" as a means of discrediting my work as functionally non-white. I won't condone or defend that, but instead will out and express it as a form of decay that needs to be acknowledged and discussed in response to my work as a group effort, thus group to protect from class and race traitors/useful idiots serving capital:

(source: "Back to the Necropolis," 2024)

Tokenism is tokenism, especially if exclusion occurs (the Judas refrain of any normativity policing other minorities, above). The same goes for accusations of "anti-blackness" from other queer people; e.g., when I critiqued several straight black men, said men helping enable a white trans-woman co-worker's Liberal Zionism (re: "Sharing the Blame"). To solidarize to a fully intersectional degree, we have to unite while holding each other accountable without disdain or blind spot. American or not, black people are racist through exclusion (e.g., token cops being class traitors and race traitors) but especially when alienating people of different countries or identities experiencing their own genocides, diasporas, and/or moments of political violence; re: to a martyr-like degree that becomes dogmatic when someone turns a blind eye by reducing others to symbols of state apologia: "you're fucked."

By comparison, white people can legitimately criticize non-white people for different bigotries; e.g., for non-white racism, provided they aren't bigoted when doing so. Just as slurs aren't activism, neither are bigotry and exclusion as a whole (nor recuperation, insofar as BLM leaders compromised their values; i.e., in ways that enriched the leaders by commodifying the movement; e.g., MikeyNohMore's "Black Lives Matter | How to Burn Through Goodwill and $90,000,000," 2026). It goes both ways, but anisotropically insofar as bigoted/not bigoted applies differently per case; i.e., depending on who's doing what to whom concerning who has privilege and who doesn't relative to everyone involved; e.g., a straight black man having racial oppression but male privilege vis-à-vis a white trans woman, who has racial privilege but male oppression for not being straight (and class being a part of the equation, depending on who has money and status and who doesn't). All of these qualities can lead to betrayal or solidarity depending on how people behave; i.e., towards others regarding their oppression, too—in short, by punching up or punching down. Both all at once and across generations, many different factors (and players) are at play—good actors and bad, with shared language, land, bodies, props, costumes, etc; e.g., white actors with non-white bodies, which the policing of said bodies extends to black men towards white women:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Art is an extension of ourselves and our rights (to exist/self-express; e.g., whores, above). Something of a thesis statement—one to take with you, into the essay body—so do intersectional problems require intersectional solutions by combining this with that; re: intersectional consciousness dialectically-materially merging issues of class, culture and race through solidarity (teamwork); i.e., while playfully and poetically acknowledging the various historical-material inequalities experienced simultaneously by different groups seeking common ground, but often tokenizing to betray each other (through shared language; e.g., terror and sex). To humanize others harmed by the state to martyr-like degrees is to render them visible beyond simple dogmatic tools—meaning in ways that discourage tokenism, mid-synthesis, through daily habits that cultivate a means of praxis, therefore accountability (re: "The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis"). To do that, we must understand how we're all alien; i.e., through different degrees of privilege/oppression making us more visible (or less) under shadows of state-power-run-amok: learning from each other's unique experiences/relating to each other through media with target audiences while banding together as actual audience members (re: "Healing from Rape"). For white people (especially women), that means Gothic stories (re: The Terminator); for other people, it segues onto other canvases:

(model and photographer: Warraba Weatherall and Mick Richards; source: "Blak Lives Matter")

The example Heather Cox Richardson gives in "It's Time to Talk About Fascism" (responding to Good's martyring by the state) is Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), but really it could be any piece of media. This includes the stuff workers make ourselves but also friends we've never met in faraway places we've never been to (above)—meaning for workers different than the author to see and imperfectly relate to, back and forth. Doing so happens not as enemies with variable degrees and flavors of privilege/oppression, but as allies; i.e., those with relative privilege—a position that (non-token) white women commonly fill alongside other marginalities—seeking to find common ground with the less privileged, and doing so during shared struggle highlighting our relative privilege and oppression, ergo betrayals. Is it messy and unequal? Sure, but so is life. The point is to drive towards equality from unequal positions, not to tokenize and discard the value of each other's lives, mid-abjection. What harms those with privilege harms those without, making the prevention of state overreach a priority for all while reversing abjection through ourselves: as targets of state violence sharing the language of persecution, rebelling with said language in different ways (as something to wear and camp/perform "violence, terror and monsters" with, essentially communicating alienation/fetishization as a something to reclaim from our abusers—below)!

Whether the lady and the tramp or the pauper and the prince (of any class, gender and race combination)—we all experience "hell" differently insofar as it's both a positive and negative phenomenon; i.e., one canon relegates theatrically to zones of unholy play that, camped by iconoclasts liberating all workers, concern harm but also fatal attraction/forbidden love as rebellion (re: "I'll See You In Hell," 2025). If the above examples show, anyone can be a rebel/potential-to-actual martyr—if only for others to rally behind while pushing towards universal liberation, thus preventing martyrdom in the process (and having different disagreements about; see: footnotes): through what was lost and found again, "inside Omelas." Intersectionality is a weapon because empathy is a weapon, which intersectionality encourages; i.e., if cruelty is the point, then empathy is the counterpoint—knowledge-as-power integrating empathetically into intersectional action, mid-consciousness. To that, intersectionality matters because fascism has always been international, a dying empire feeding desperately on everything in sight to preserve itself. It's extant, as are racism, sexism, etc, and their persecutorial accompaniment. To avoid blind panic and outrage, ourselves, we—meaning all workers, white or not—should look to solidarity-amid-oppression in all its forms; i.e., past or present, local or distant, borrowing this from that in any direction: a vital, powerful ability to reflect on our own place in things, whoever we are, as tied to larger ongoing issues (Signified B Sides' "These Are NOT Unprecedented Times," 2026).

(artist: Rick Smimms; source: Trauma Team Media's "Wicked Witch - Unreleased lp 1978") 

That's all we have time for, here! Keep all of this in mind as we examine Good, herself, then talk about camping rape (which martyrdom essentially is) towards the end (and refer to "Rockstars: From Rock 'n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix' Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects" [written 2022, published 2025] if you want even more interracial examples).

Essay Body

(source: Emily Mae Czachor's "Renee Good [... was] a mom and widow," 2026)

Renee Good was murdered by state-sponsored Nazis while defending her rights, the state martyring her to serve their aims (making her a terrorist but also the one impudent white woman they "just had to kill"; i.e., as something like Christ for Christofascists to idolize, in this case, to vice-like degrees: a "fucking bitch" sick with "hysteria," diagnosed by a de facto surgeon prescribing capital punishment). To it, we honor Good's courage—though she had no plans to die when she did—by fighting back against state power, ourselves. The wolf is loose, the call coming from inside the house. Specifically, the White House is currently and falsely calling Good a "domestic terrorist." As cops always say, the ICE agents "feared for their lives"; i.e., the gunman-in-question apparently "run over" by Good's car as it drove away from them, using these fabrications to justify shooting her twice in the head—and all with presidential backing, post hoc. Trump didn't "give" the order, but he covered it up and paid those directly responsible tied to policies he (and his cronies*) enacted; re: ICE: "The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer" (source: KIRO 7 News' "President Trump Responds," 2026).

*Women included; e.g., Kristi Noem. Eugenics, race science, crime waves/drug wars through non-stop police crackdowns—Nazi women are fucking brutal, generally trading general systemic brutality for the chance to punch down for strongmen who abuse them less provided they betray their own (re: Red Pen's "Women at War: Fascism," 2025). What goes for the past goes for the present; i.e., where history repeats, Trump's White House "Nazi" by another name (aka fascism): women policing women, witches policing witches, whores policing whores insofar as "to police" = "to betray" (re: me vis-à-vis Porpentine and Silvia Federici; see: "Policing the Whore").

(source: Jay Jay Legal's "A Pivot Point Moment: Why This ICE Killing Could Change Everything")

Except, this wasn't the kind of "sucks to be them" violence the middle class, in whole or in part, can just ignore; e.g., an immigrant deputy killing a white woman, or white police sergeant "gone rogue" killing a black man. Instead, yesterday's stochastic terrorism—an out-and-out execution that martyred Good in front of the entire city—was demonstrably paid for by the state, hence robs the usual fence-sitters of easy excuses: intraracial violence of the same class "at odds," a middle-aged and middle-class white man killing a middle-class white woman* on the other side of the fence. There's no one left to blame, save the victims or their killers. So the state lies, doing so to everyone's faces before closing ranks; i.e., a defense of themselves, shamelessly pillaging the interior by projecting state terrorism onto "all removeable aliens." Vae victis, everyone a threat but those responsible, J.D. Vance giving Ross blanket immunity (no honor among thieves). In short, it won't be long before ICE goes door-to-door with that kind of government support, requiring workers to either submit, die or resist. This includes American citizens, ICE demonstrating they're not afraid to kill white middle-class women; re: because the state apparatus—notably the federal government—has their back. They'll target open dissidents, first, but frankly are targeting the entire population at once; i.e., as "livestock," "culling the herd" during the apocalypse (a revelation unveiling state predation in force).

*What Jay Jay Legal (above) calls "a pivot point": "The victim has broader sympathy. She was not the target of the enforcement activity. She did not have a weapon. She was not accused of a crime. She was not resisting arrest/was not being actively arrested. She was not fleeing police custody necessarily. And then, she was actually helping people" (ibid.; timestamp: 0:46).

Still think Blue Lives Matter? Minneapolis—a queer metropolis historically visited from outside and within by encroaching fascism—is America's Weimar Berlin. Guess what that makes Trump:

(ibid.)

Trump's words, here, are a bald-faced lie—one committed by a convicted felon/rapist and war criminal with immunity from criminal prosecution. In short, it's DARVO and obscurantism as power aggregates—conducted by tin-star bandits-with-badges, performing counter-revolutionary action on home soil (versus overseas, in Venezuela; re: "Concerning Venezuela and State Vampirism"). Predation is predation—a chain of state vampirism, its subsequent "lycanthropy" (re: fascism and [were]wolves* but also rabies) flowing straight to the top from all corners of the empire.

*Fascism and wolves go hand-in-hand with state predation (and older blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft accusations besides just vampires, but I digress). Ian Harvey writes,

By late 1944, even Hitler and his top men, including Joseph Goebbels, knew the war would soon be over. They realized that they couldn't pull victory from the jaws of defeat. Instead, they chose to delay the inevitable in the hope that they could devise a more favorable scenario for Germany. Historian Perry Biddiscombe explains in his book, Werewolf! The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946 that Goebbels came up with the idea to exploit the werewolf legend. In early 1945, Biddiscombe notes, broadcasts began nationwide urging citizens to join the "werewolf movement." He describes one broadcast in which a woman, posing as a werewolf, says, "Lily the werewolf is my name. I bite, I eat, I am not tame. My werewolf teeth bite the enemy" (source: "Nazi Werewolves? The Secret Nazi Guerrilla Organization," 2018).

Again, it's stochastic—something to enact without direct orders per case but felt, shock-and-awe, throughout the system; i.e., while overwhelming its sensibilities through bald-faced lie and naked force. Imagine a domestic abuser—battering his housewife on a macro scale without pause—and you essentially "get the picture": total authority to act with impunity against a local populace; i.e., assigned "victim" by federal police, capital violence versus state/local authorities. They're in conflict, zombie bureaucrats and paramilitaries tugging back and forth while state Imperialism sails home (re: military urbanism). However, instead of targeting one minority—say, George Floyd and other POCs in inner-city environments (redlining and racial violence)—now cops (class traitors) are attacking white middle-class activists in suburban neighborhoods (with a cultural character tied to identity politics; re: Good was a queer abolitionist killed by white supremacists). It's Kent State but taken to the streets; i.e., to kill "you meddling kids," without irony and open season, through maximalist outcomes: the proverbial "end of the line," capital-in-decay (corruption) merging conflicts of class, culture and race to target anyone who resists.

This is how fascism ultimately works; i.e., Imperialism come home to empire, gradually expanding crackdowns mid-decay while preparing for war abroad; re: "the growth of fascist tendencies is a sign of the weakening of the rule of finance capital. It is a sign of the deepening of the crisis, a sign that finance capital can no longer rule in the old forms. It must turn to the more open and more brutal and terroristic methods, not as the exception but as the rule, for the oppression of the population at home and preparation for war abroad. It is preventive counter-revolution, an attempt to head off the rise of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses" (source: "Why an Open Letter to Our Party Membership"). Earl Browder wrote this for the Extraordinary Party Conference in New York, 1933; i.e., Nazis occupied America, back then, and still do (with America historically founded on slavery and genocide, thieving land and labor side-by-side*). However, they only "come back" insofar as they never left, only waiting to go mask-off once more: the white castle turning black, boom-or-bust.

*"This country has never been great for everybody," says Paul Lance; "it was designed to benefit white people, specifically 21-year-old, land-owning white men. Full stop" (source: "Trump Exposed What America Always Was," 2026). Such observations predate America's settler-colonial project; i.e., tied to capital's Enlightenment-era apologia regarding genocide under Cartesian thought, abjecting nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food"). As Patel and Moore write:

The inventors of Nature were philosophers as well as conquerors and profiteers [...] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was "gyn/ecological" from the outset. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that allowed for the ethical and economic cheapening of life. Cartesian dualism was and remains far more than a descriptive statement: it is a normative statement of how to best organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized. Although the credit (and blame) is shared by many, it makes sense to call this a Cartesian revolution. Here was an intellectual movement that shaped not only ways of thinking but also ways of conquering, commodifying and living [... that] made thinking, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. [...] The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest (source: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things [2017]—a book and concept I explore far more thoroughly in previously essays [on state vampirism] tied to my larger book series; e.g., "Raising Awareness," "Nancy Drew Syndrome" and "Sharing the Blame," 2025).

So it has; i.e., minus any irony/camp while the grim harvest rears its ugly head, once more: "When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn't spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics' endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains" (source: "Prey as Liberators"). To honor Renee Good and her martyring at state hands, become what the state fears: what it (and its court jesters) can't control, even through lethal force (and performative, centrist heroism—above)! The liminal hauntology of war is a moment of reckoning that—in keeping with our Terminator preface—while it seems doomed, is not wholly ordained.

Not for lack of trying. Inherently divisive (thus conducive to rape through unequal power abuse), capital—during state's rights vs worker rights—pimps workers, raping them by design through the abjection process; re: "Capitalism has no use for people who see each other as human; it wants us dehumanizing ourselves so capital can function as normal, moving money through nature at the cost of human life. Capitalism needs us to die, so we need to remember and honor Nex' humanity" (source: "Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict," 2024). The same goes for Good, Floyd, and anyone else; i.e., "in the same boat," martyred or waiting to be martyred: those the state/capital destroys on purpose, grist-for-the-mill. So do workers render into feed by givers of state violence, cops the false-hero suppliers kettling capital's usual victims before mopping up their "blood" (a metaphor describing wealth and power as much as the actual stuff, flowing in our veins). Some people push back, no matter how badly outgunned, outmanned or outfunded (with ICE currently having billions of dollars in state funding thanks to bipartisan refusals to defund the police, after George Floyd's murder).

(source: Squid Tips' "ICE killed Renee Nicole Good: So what do we do about it?")

To it, asymmetrical warfare is paramount/our only recourse, when staring down false flags; i.e., dialectically-materially reversing abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) to bounce ours abusers' weaponry back at them. Namely psychological warfare, but really any kind of war—class, culture and race tying first to each other and then to monopolies of violence, terror and bodily expression (re: Weber, Asprey and me; see: "The State: Its Key Tools" from "Paratextual Documents")—we're all "Gorgons to behead." They want us to fight so they can kill us, but really are itching to kill people, devil-may-care. Peace is never and option because fascism is built on slavery and genocide through systemic inequality. We might seem fucked. And yet, fascists are also giant pussies who hate/fear everything in sight. This means that pre-/mid-/post-decapitation, we become a vital means of poetically reminding our attackers: how mortal, venal and frankly cruel and stupid* they truly are (their true colors)! Despite all their armor, money and weapons, fascists are cowards scared of their own shadows/the shadows of their own crimes:

*A byproduct of poor education (apart from violence) and non-existent hiring standards: "'This isn't the department of baking cookies,' one source said. 'This is the Department of Homeland Security, where you can be deported from the country. And we're now employing people who are not equipped to tie their own shoelaces. This whole thing is a complete disaster from beginning to end'" (source: Daniel Hampton's "ICE shooting comes after bombshell probe finds new recruits 'can barely read or write,'" 2026). They're trained to be violent, of course. To it, they'll target women and children, having the audacity to call it "protection"; i.e., said "protectors" (and their victims) toxifying "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" and "boundaries for me, not for thee"; e.g., reactionaries defending Charlie Kirk from ridicule but ridiculing Renee Good, postmortem (The Humanist Report's "The Right's Charlie Kirk Rules Don't Apply to Renee Good, Apparently")—all while labeling minorities and whistleblowers "lunatics" to concentrate and exterminate: the preservation of the "natural order" but also capital as a whole, targeting the next generation per Aristotle's poisonous "give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man" except it also applies to racial minorities and tomboys (re: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome"). Punching down is punching down, whether you're doing it directly or helping others further abjection. The fact remains, fascism makes you dumb on purpose, and domestic abusers aren't brave; they're cowards who prey on the vulnerable (re: women and children, but also various minorities). They're bullies who don't fight fair because capital/the state never do; they only follow the same territorial, ethnocentric models of control (for productivity and profit) lifted directly from older imperial orders (from city-states to nation-states). Capital, a deeply unnatural system, divides by design, generally through manufactured hate, anger and revulsion (re: furthering abjection). The more workers normalize this system and its process under Capitalist Realism, the harder they are to fight. Despite its infiltrator's gimmick, you must view fascism both as endemic to capital and foreign and invasive to workers; i.e., to both camouflage yourself against it while simultaneously pushing it out of yourself, your communities, your socio-material use of language, mid-dialectic.

(artist: Caravaggio; cited: "A Note About Abjection and Reversing It during Rape Play (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM)" from "Nancy Drew Syndrome")

Freudian/monstrous-feminine symbolism aside, this happens logistically by spreading resistance out—meaning over such a large area, concerning such a massive population, across such a prolonged window of time and headspace—as to expose state illusions: that our jailors cannot hold such positions, dooming their actions "from the start." In short, their power is largely false, insofar as they posture as "friend" to bolster the perception of total control alongside perceived order/disorder friendly to some (re: us versus them, mid-abjection) but ultimately dishonest: "I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts: I am no orator, as Brutus is." Speechmakers, then, classically had silver tongues and force to back their words up (the paradox of the charming thug or charmer with thugs). While mythical, such states of emergency* (and their terror dialogs abjecting labor) escalate by design. Even so, these monopolies remain impossible; e.g., terror/counterterror in a given direction; re: "Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it" (source: War in the Shadows). Furthermore, the mechanisms "at work" remain forever "at play"; i.e., in ways that not only demand but grant leverage for labor to use: versus state composites, our own aggregate "sharing the stage."

*And exception; i.e., the state-of-emergency applied to recipients of state violence, mid-exception; or as Giorgio Agamben writes in State of Exception (2005): "A special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis" (source).

(artist: Magasin Pittoresque; cited: Paul Krause's "The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, Part II: Of Man, Knowledge, and 'Science,'" 2020)

Furthermore, such things cannot be passed off to other places; e.g., Tad Stoermer—while espousing Cold War myths about the Soviets/scapegoating them for capital-at-large—writes, "What Happens When America Exports Abusive Authority? Europe is Finding Out" (2025). With all due respect, Ted, but we're finding out, too. What "we've been shipping [to] Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia for generations," Americans are receiving now (and always have; i.e., owing to America's perennial function, both as settler colony and police state). As I respond:

America's been exporting fascism since its inception. The Nazis borrowed their ideas from Jefferson. NATO's peace through strength is, itself, just Western Liberalism and capitalist hegemony dressed up as "defensive weapons." It's always been a lie with a short shelf life. Also, Locke's a jerk as are all Enlightenment thinkers, a government built on Cartesian thought/nuclear models serving state interests, not workers. Always. The middle class (historically white straight men) decay when threatened to fascistically defend capital, given expanded rights to defend capital (re: Zinn) and whose rights are simultaneously threatened through decay into false rebellion (re: Dutt and Lenin/Parenti, 1935 and 1997). Capital decays by design. Fascism isn't a glitch of capital and state power but a feature. In turn, the "end of history" after the Cold War carried on into the same old decay from Western powers: Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin, defending and expanding capital under Capitalist Realism. Any alternative to capital was simply the end of the world. Yet, here we are (source YouTube Community post: January 8th, 2026).

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I digress. These "wolves" are frightened bullies given licence to kill; i.e., men like Good's killer (above), greedily exchanging humanity for chances to kill, thus become arbitrary and temporary (expendable) givers of state-corporate* skullduggery (the state's replacements, feeding through disorder as capital decays to exterminate all parties faster and faster). Stopping them (and their cloak-and-dagger bullshit) demands immediate action, specifically intersectional solidarity/tactical unity† exposing state lies; re: that their victim, Good, was somehow an aggressor "fleeing the scene." The state lies by design, every utterance a confession under Capitalist Realism enacted by secret police enslaving the populace (re: DARVO and obscurantism). Imagine every villain in every novel, movie or videogame, then make it real; imagine the perpetrators of every America-backed regime overseas, then apply it to wherever you are, mid-panic (Red Scare or otherwise). It's Israel vs Hamas come home to roost, and this is only the beginning (the FBI and White House already shutting local authorities out of investing Good's murder, reports Chris Noland). They've "crossed the Rubicon" sacking "Rome" from inside itself (the Gothic pirates actually insiders blaming "outsiders" while fleecing the locals). Fascism is like cancer—one that, if left unchecked, will only grow and spread; i.e., to tolerate ICE's presence anywhere is to help them to grow and spread (ergo fascism through stolen government); e.g., Bad Empanada saying "Go to town, Donald" while celebrating accelerationism (source YouTube community post, Socialism for All: October 2025; cited: "Raising Awareness," 2025). To do so invites disaster en masse, loosing the wolf to feed. Indeed, while its hunger knows no bounds, neither does the cowardice of traitors.

*As Mussolini (the founder of modern fascism) writes, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power" (source: Chip Berlet's "Mussolini on the Corporate State," 2005). Trump and his tech bros—the pirates of Silicon Valley—fit Mussolini's description to a tee.

†During intersectional consciousness. "Simply put, Gothic has that mood, that cool factor to do the trick; i.e., by subverting monstrous language, which normally dehumanizes workers and nature through popular stories furthering abjection (us versus them): to suitably humanize the harvest, which capital (and its Realism) can only pimp out when vengefully raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore. The whore's revenge against profit, then, is to fuck back on the same Aegis; i.e., when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis [...] Medusa demonstrates there is power in what they try to control; take it back by using it in ways they can't steal from you! Become the Gorgon!" (source: "Abstract" for "My Book: Gothic Communism"). Segregation is no defense; to fight back is to paradoxically expose ourselves/put ourselves at risk, essentially terrifying state actors into acts of mounting aggression: the rapist, enraged by the word "no," giving chase before ultimately tiring out the means to continue.

Now is not the time for fearful inaction; it's time for revolutionary optimism. The state is the enemy who fears worker unity because their power over workers—meaning "total power," as they're selling it—is a bluff, a fiction woven while empire is weak (and susceptible to guerilla action). Yes, force factors in, but only for state actors to mask how weak/vampiric they really are. Cuckoos, they will push others to death rivers (concentration camps), and all while acting "Indigenous" themselves. They're impostors of the highest order. Meanwhile, every mechanism of foreign policy will come home, guided by every dogma and stereotype the state can draft; i.e., Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism (re: "The State: Its Key Tools")—any and all pushing myths about "goblins and vampires," etc, as "imbricating language of persecution" (re: "Idle Hands"): onto state prey when state predators (cops) are the guilty ones, eating the populace in broad daylight (the cats who ate the canary in the coalmine). The state will call us "enemy at the gate," "useless eater" and "terrorist," etc—doing so in front of others to encourage tokenism (the more, the merrier). To resist them is to take our power back, paid/unpaid forms reversing the flow of power anisotropically in duality "on the Aegis"; i.e., while sharing the same spaces, bodies, and language the state does; e.g., illustrators and sex workers, disrupting the state apparatus by reminding others we're still human, mid-alienization: common ground in common language, healing from rape "when in Rome." This paradoxically requires exposure, and exposure is always, to some degree, an act of naked resistance:

(model and artist: Alliesha Bay and Darling; commissioner: Persephone van der Waard)

To use a less literal example, the unity of the locals chasing ICE off (all clothed, as far as I know) is encouraging: while trying to help their fallen neighbor versus turning tail; i.e., in a deadly game of chicken, both sides showing their asses (so to speak). Retreat is weakness for fascists, their "Roman fool's" desire to return and give 'em hell only dooming them and theirs: to a war they cannot win—with "death before dishonor" being the state's swansong refrain; i.e., while gobbling ICE up for fodder (usually convicts owing Trump a pardon, pushing the death spiral all the harder into an early grave). You don't defeat such things by being peaceful; you defeat them by fighting back, and in a variety of ways. Exposing fascism for fascism is one such way, denuding the Gothic villain as a hardened, unscrupulous killer—one haunting our own inheritance anxieties and fears of systemic barbarities, suddenly materializing during state collapse (re: the ghost of the counterfeit). These things feel far-off and close-by, the proverbial "stuff of legends." But they belong to real people, however fictitious the Gothic makes them seem; re: "[t]he Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse" (source: "Healing from Rape"). Gothic media explodes alongside state force.

What's more, such things historically-materially repeat everywhere. This means the same choice we face—dialectically-materially subverting state predation to fatal degrees, as Good did once killed by the state but dying with dignity—were once faced, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."; e.g., by German teenagers, in WWII, seemingly ghost-like when facing the perennial rise of a new Dark Age (and its werewolves) they could object to but not prevent: 

Nothing is more dishonourable for a civilized people than to let itself be "governed" without resistance by an irresponsible clique of rulers devoted to dark instincts. Is it not true that every honest German today is ashamed of his government? And who among us can sense the dimensions of the dishonor that will lie upon us and our children once the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrid and extravagant crimes come to light? If German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in the lawful order of history; if they surrender man's highest principle, that which raises him above all other God's creatures, his free will; if they abandon the determination to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road to turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass – then they clearly deserve their downfall (source: "Leaflets of the White Rose I," 1942).

Alas, all states die and die the same basic way. Ergo, the same statements Scholl and her friends made apply to America—meaning before, during and after the White Rose came and went (all of the above martyred by state power): Nazi Germany purporting local lies, which continue unfolding unto global reckonings. Both inspired by and inherited from/reabsorbed into the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" (the mantle of empire), so do feckless old men send others to fight (and die) in their endless, unwinnable wars: "Most blokes only think about the fight, itself; they don't think about what comes next [...] and that lack of thinking ruins lives" (Gary Comer's "It Doesn't End — What Violence Really Costs Men"; timestamp: 0:32). Same idea with military recruitment and, in effect, fascism hidden behind and upon Western Liberalism and Pax Americana. In turn, "peace through strength" is bullshit: a recruitment tactic against an enemy the state will always reinvent to further abjection, ergo profit and all that entails.

(artist: James Montgomery Flagg, 1917)

In keeping with our domestic abuse motif, "you can't fix him." The wolf is loose, lying through his teeth while eating you alive. He wants you to fight back (re: kettling and reactive abuse), and if you give him what he what he wants, he still wants you. Indeed, he's paid to eat you, doing so "with a smile"; re: happily defending capital from workers exercising their rights in times of crisis—versus little wolves of armed subservience*, "fighting for scraps" while starving and sated with blood: from kill-to-kill while capital's top dogs glut themselves on truckloads of carrion. Likewise, it's the fox's job to turn a blind eye/appease tyranny as it starts to blossom; e.g., American Democrats and token moderates of all kinds†: aiding the posturing strongman acting "strong, strong, strong!" and who "kills when he wishes and none dare resist!" The dragon—a rarefied symbol of power and greed (e.g., Vlad the Impaler but also Smaug the Stupendous, below)—doesn't "pork up" on his own; he has help, if only stealing empire from older criminals (e.g., Tolkien's "pale enchanted gold," below, neatly symbolizing the cutthroat nature of American politics borrowed from British empire and even older democracies built on slavery and conquest, Athens-onwards):

*Armed subservience: under tyranny freedom becomes unimaginable, Capitalist Realism applying backwards to older times reaching forwards; i.e., through fascism reenacting "past" as great alongside educators doing so for their own reasons; e.g., the actual Hessian mercenaries (or those playing them out to teach lessons, as Survive History do), and present-day ICE operating soldiers of fortune/privatized shock troops teaching their own lessons, mid-banditry; i.e., to any hopefuls who dare "rebel" by clinging to dreams of a better world than gods, kings and masters: might makes right, armed subservience versus armed resistance during state's rights vs worker rights, onstage and off. One side—small of mind and loyal to the state attacking the mind as much as the body or the land—shrinks awareness, intelligence and imagination through menticide (re: "The Nation-State" and "Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Oppositional Praxis," 2024); the other grows them, essentially committing thought crimes they must disguise. To that, those who survive abuse often use reenactment as a tool—one to picture a better world through calculated risk. Weird-attracts-weird, it becomes a game—a form of disguise/code presenting as "mere play" but also threat (re: revolutionary cryptonymy and nudity-as-weapon; see: "Transgressive Nudism" and "Chapter Five: 'Rebellious Subterfuge,'" 2025).

†Re: me vis-à-vis Malcolm X (1963; see: "Sharing the Blame").

(artist: the Brothers Hildebrandt; cited: "Policing the Whore")

Dragons, wolves, or vampires—the state cannot monopolize animal metaphors, anymore than own "vampirism" to tokenize upstarts; i.e., the means of production (the Base*, per Marx: "Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (source: "Limits of the Working-Day," 1867). All the same, the state is currently recuperating and foisting former struggles—of older social movements and poetics (the Superstructure*)—onto the middle class, demanding loyalty through blood; i.e., by acting like a wolf in ways that further abjection, the ensuing blackguards sending power vampirically towards the bourgeoisie. Giving them what they want means surrendering your land, labor and lives, the usual traitors (re: cops) "playing soldier" in the hands of state puppeteers dreaming of total power through vicarious rape.

(source skeet, Mark Popham: January 10th, 2026)

Cops are not your friends, any more than states protect workers. Preserving property (order) through negative justice (an absence of tension), good cops defend bad cops (e.g., the Minneapolis police, above). In turn, "law enforcement is often just another gang*" (In Range TV, 2026). During the Imperial Boomerang, moderate law enforcement become bad, watching their outwardly reactionary counterparts radicalize for state hegemony to enact formerly private horrors suddenly in public (the jail and its abject, cops-and-robbers refrain turning inside-out). The state requires rape to to survive, treating the fearful return/fatal portrait of the barbarian, pirate Nazi stand-in as "alien invasion," yet paradoxically endemic in its unheimlich revivals: a bloodthirsty black knight whose own conspicuous heraldry ties suspiciously to a formerly white chateau. "Peace" is a white man's word, a defense of empire routinely whitewashed in innocent blood. Clowns, sadly, can still kill people. In fact, Ross seemed genuinely furious with Good for not respecting him, not fearing him "as a woman should." So he killed her for it, doing so as if to say to her and the world: "Who's laughing now?"

*See: Dr. Rana Indrajit Singh's "Base and Superstructure Theory" (2013).

†Incredibly important to bear in mind, today. ICE are a gang but so are local cops/state police alongside federal authorities; i.e., American is a composite police state, one whose cops fight amongst themselves and with the populace (who also fight among themselves) for territory.

(source: Associated Press' "New video shows shooting of Renee Good from perspective of ICE officer")

Doing so in ways that end catastrophically for all, smaller scapegoats lead to bigger ones, ergo betrayals; re: Good wasn't just killed but ruthlessly and cowardly mocked by state reactionary defenders complicit in her rape: condemning the victim, blame-the-whore, as "asking for it"; i.e., despite saying "I'm not mad at you" to the men threatening her (above)—one of whom would martyr her moments later and resentfully call her a "fucking a bitch." As Silent Middle Child explains, "There is no reasonable interpretation where the agent could feel like he was in danger" ("New Footage of Renee Good Shooting from ICE Agent's Perspective"; timestamp: 1:39).

Yet, they released the footage and lie about it, anyways. In fascist terms, doing so is an act of strength; i.e., bending reality to one's will through sheer force thereof. The agent, acting suspicious, looks even guiltier afterwards; in appearing guilty like he does, he and his defenders double down. Good little Nazis, they're proud of what they did—seeing it not as "murder" at all but extermination of another "useless eater," an "enemy within" to snuff out/take out like trash while following the leader (thereby enacting Trump's fantasy of murder in broad daylight by doing his dirty work for him). It's a dogwhistle, a call to arms by those who don't fact about facts; they care about strength, leveraged against "the rabble" to protect their masters from on high: by "bravely" raping a woman to death before calling themselves "the victims." Divorced from empathy and connection, it's the only time that Ross (and men like him) feel anything at all. They're gargoyles defending Rome—walking-corpse death fetishizes seeking blood (for the master) through combat, the alien Nazi dead come home to roost (reiterating the Neo-Gothic fear of the barbaric retro-future past): "Garbage day!"

(artist: Darek Zabrocki; cited: "The Nation-State," 2024)

The state not only demands such abject violence, DARVO-and-obscurantism; it demands the usual toadies lie about the victims martyred by state abuse, lies and force going hand-in-hand in bald-faced ways. It's Holocaust behavior—the formation of different gangs throwing different scapegoats to the wolves, mid-abjection. The state gets hungry by design; it "releases the hounds," who—realizing they suddenly have free reign to loot and murder, unabated—enter a feeding frenzy that spills the blood of all workers at home, mid-harvest. This is what the state and capital do, enacting their vampire terrorism as a historical-material matter of routine eventually coming home: "Take what you can when you can!" You think such give-and-receive medieval violence—of people with a taste for power suddenly treating people without power like animals, predator/prey—is purely the cartoon stuff of Gothic legend and fairytale? It's Omelas, demanding its pound of flesh time and time again, the brute waylaying any who bar his way towards quick-and-dirty conquest (with Jenner, below, being especially short-sighted once seizing power, but I digress). Nazis and liberals are LARPers who kill people, Nazis killing liberals when push comes to shove. The allegory isn't always subtle; it's in-your-face, rude: darkness visible applying dualistically to us and our enemies, devils to give and receive form in different ways. What we camp, the state uses to rape labor without irony!

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"First in tragedy then in farce," wrote Marx (source: "The Eighteenth Brumaire," 1852). Fascism is a death cult and the state is fascist; fascism defends capital, which demands death cults raping a protesting populace into submission, time and time again. Even retreat is death; re: as Good shows us; i.e., as the noose starts to close, the hangman throttling those who resist alongside those who don't. So is "pacifism trafficking with the enemy" and "the enemy always strong and weak" (source: Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism," 1995). A cop's a cop, a pimp's a pimp—judge, jury and executioner lacking imagination and seeing brute force as the solution for all the state's "problems"; re: state sponsored rape, the rapists-in-question seeking revenge versus workers who, damned regardless, dare punch up against state predation; i.e., fostering imagination beyond state domination/the glory of "Rome" raping them under nuclear models. For the abusers (who lack imagination), service to the state is "reward enough" (whose pimp/whore dichotomy and sex = bad-but-necessary contradiction historically favors the abuser in systems of preferential mistreatment: cage the slaves, then rattle the cage to justify capital's usual motions through nature); for the victims and those who survive them, enough eventually becomes enough but not always "in time." We must fight back before it's too late!

In keeping with revolutionary optimism, let's consider some different ways to do that before closing things out—camping our abusers in dialectical-material ways during ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Conclusion, or Camping Rape: Fighting Back by Drawing State Fire Dualistically Away from Each Other during Ludo-Gothic BDSM

(source skeet, Chris Steller: January 8th, 2026)

Little doomsdays precede and beget bigger ones (above). Sadly that hour isn't "nigh," it's already here. With it, we cannot afford to stay still/freeze, fish-in-a-barrel, and hope they magically ignore us (e.g., like Spielberg's T-Rex, below); re: for the state rapes by design, happy to make the headlines provided no one fights back in ways that challenge state canon/positions. The rapist will only take advantage/revel in the fight its prey puts up; the only way to stop them is to fight back, no compromise—re: I am a rape survivor and my grandfather fought for the Dutch Resistance, neither which avoided total devastation without a fight. Or in the words of Frederick Douglass, "There must be struggle and demands" (1857); the assigned servants and slaves must call the state's bluff, collectively disobeying purported masters: arm-in-arm, mid-dialectic—lest the wolf eat everything in sight (the Big Bad one). "If you prick us, do we not bleed? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Retribution is a two-way street, total power tilting at windmills; i.e., during semi-staged events where outcomes (rape or otherwise) aren't certain, onstage and off.

Canon = rape, and ACAB, ASAB by the actual murders and black-bag kidnappers projecting their abuses onto us (re: DARVO and obscurantism); so do we camp our own rapes during ludo-Gothic BDSM, drawing state fire away from each other in the process (of abjection). By overwhelming a larger predator with multiple laser pointers during asymmetrical warfare, it's a game to play and story to tell using stolen language taken back dualistically upon itself: the marriage of poetry to praxis for dialectical-material aims. Poetry = praxis if it informs the actions we take in real life. Let's conclude by unpacking that a little, then tie it all to Renee Good and honoring her memory (alongside other victims, too).

First, said "nuptial" happens by breaking monopolies, playing danger-disco with darkly chaotic things (from monsters to sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, back then and now). To do so, we must "wake up" while inside the labyrinth (re: Aguirre's infernal concentric pattern a place to camp the state with; i.e., what cannot be escaped, only transformed during ludo-Gothic BDSM). So read the room; it's kennel—one caging cop and victim, side-by-side, during reactive abusive! Street violence graduates to shooting into cars; from there, home invasions by what are essentially the American secret police. Sooner or later, we'll have to fight fire with fire: "Thou calledst me a dog before thou hadst a cause, / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs!" Or in more modern language, "If they don't, then we must" (as Angry Met Vet puts it); i.e., lest the state exercise its monopolies with impunity. "That's how they're going to treat us" (ibid.), profit-over-people policing the state's "right" to rape, torture and kill whoever it wants.

"Impunity is the apex of privilege," I once wrote (source: "Valorizing the Idiot Hero," 2020); these men see it as a God-given right to rape others with impunity—to exterminate whoever they like, treat people like toys to break and guns (and other killing tools) toys to break others with, and ultimately be praised for it while killing the bad guy and getting the girl (often Quixotically as "just a joke" during the apocalypse, above): "While a king can be mocked, he remains beyond reproach. Though unfit for the position, Ash knows he is also beyond reproach, and quickly becomes obnoxious" (ibid.). These men (and token parties) aren't heroes of the people, but villains treated like heroes by state bread and circus/Capitalist Realism. Accountability* = consequence and in the absence of consequence (re: negative freedom), rape happens; "arrest" becomes synonymous with murder and "house" becomes synonymous with arrest: a "joy division†" place of death, of feeding and rape under police brutality conducive to state hegemony, feeding and death warrants (the Holocaust, Nanking and similar massacres employed by bureaucratic engines, the banal paperwork thereof nevertheless sending heinous mercenary force and lies in all directions; re: the trifectas of capital from "The State: It's Key Tools").

*Accountability is important/should be recognized wherever it occurs; e.g., YouTube, with Skallagrim's "When a Youtuber Needs a Reality Check..." (2026) versus F.D. Signifier's "No your favorite lefty youtuber is NOT holding anyone 'accountable'" (2026). Anyone who refuses to hold themselves and others accountable—especially by making excuses to prevent this from happening while blowing their own horn—needs to their privilege (which, yes, includes "bougie" black men like F.D.; re: "Sharing the Blame"). Matter shapes consciousness; consciousness maintains matter (re: the Base and the Superstructure, leading to genocide under bourgeois application of such things, which workers camp; see: "On Twin Trees").

†Brothels in concentration camps (or conquered cities treated like concentration camps, below).

The state and its goons walk a tightrope, classically conducting genocide away from the homeland in open-secret ways. In turn, "see no evil" becomes normal despite being everywhere—the mind contained through Pavlovian abuse/menticide to accept the cage holding it, ergo whatever "food" is slid through invisible bars: other workers classified simply as "enemies," those turning blind eyes conditioned like slow-boiled frogs into state surveillance. Man-eaters addicted to blood through sight (the vampiric gaze), no one is immune to such trickery—not in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan (above), or North America. We're all animals, which can be conditioned to tolerate but also administer great cruelty as something to witness: through the indifferent camera lens being the feeding vector/cyborg's police mechanism (a cage for prey predators use to hunt with), the feeder ultimately expendable while chasing the dragon. It's both genuinely terrifying and incredibly sad, The-Dark-Crystal-meets-the-JO-crystal: high on prescribed ideas of godhood that are, themselves, completely stupid yet intensely harmful. It's also Promethean—stealing power from the once-great past in ways that uses the stormtrooper up, post-high (the Nazis crossing the Ardennes while high as kites).

(source; cited: "White Moderates Don’t Challenge Fascism," 2025)

In doing so, these addicts aren't gods in Pantheons; they become a part of the state eating them (an ignominious death—e.g., Charlie Kirk). The house always wins, the state (and Capitalist Realism) the ultimate foe policing "Hell" as an idea—one rebellious workers can subvert; i.e., as denizens of the underworld (and its routine gallows), wielding such "Gothic" (monstrous) language as something to scare the usual bad actors with: "you're little more than straw dogs." Objects of ridicule can't scare anyone, and death before dishonor only sees the usual fearmongers prematurely dropping their masks. There's nothing they fear more than workers who don't respond predictably to fear (or ideas of fear, scary or not—above). In turn, bullies mask their own fear behind symbols thereof, which rebels can weaponize "on the Aegis": bending and breaking rules to reverse abjection. Laughter becomes medicine we turn against the people laughing at us; re: being harmed, like Good was (and so many others, besides). There's a big difference between fearing someone outright and respecting the violence they're capable of; i.e., to fear them is to give them power, which we can subvert through the same basic language; re: the Gothic (commonly reducing to sex and force, in some shape or form).

In doing so, we expose our would-be killers' power to be largely false—not the Great Destroyers they so often posture as, but tragically embarrassing dupes who bite off more than they can chew while also looking stupid; e.g., known sex trafficker and domestic abuser Andrew Tate calling himself "the Cobra," only to get beat up by an underwear model wearing pink gloves (Regular Eyepatch Wolf's "Andrew Tate is an Embarrassing Loser," 2026). Might does make right, but it also can backfire in the eyes of the audience: the paradox of rape being victory is not certain "in play," power essentially meaningless (re: through feelings of control/strength) unless levied against people who can fight back. In fact, capital not only allows it; it demands it to circulate money through nature. Nature is never completely powerless; it has all the power states want, making those "of it" (rooting for an upset, below) a force to be reckoned with when things don't pan out: "when in Rome," the clown vs the fairy (not that Tate's opponent is exactly a "champion of the people," but became one "for a day" if only for kicking Tate's sorry ass seven ways from Sunday).

(source Instagram post, cablgram: December 21st, 2025)

To it, power is a performance where good actors and bad share the same stage, toys, and cameras exposing their flaws, crimes and refusal to play nice; i.e., violence going both ways, mid-abjection, through the performance of power and rebellion as things to view and view with—kayfabe, in a word, and where Nazis and Commies classically "share the stage." Tyrants are bread-and-circus conmen, relying on dated ideas of strength to posture an "absolute authority" through cops; i.e., which pimps like Tate are (above), and whose perceived invincibility calls instantly into question the instant anyone fights back (which the state admittedly wants, but only if they control the outcome; e.g., God "controlling" Lucifier in Paradise Lost, 1667—below). "Ideas are bulletproof," one masked man put it; they're also highly flexible and transformative ("infinite power, infinite form")—the campy actor putting "rebellion" in quotes to show/conceal its revolutionary character in highly contested, fantastical language (a statuesque past telling splendid lies, below): shared by our enemies acting simultaneously high-and-mighty and betrayed/cast-out. "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven," Milton's Satan a shapeshifting rebellious figure in the right hands (ours): angels and demons (or any binary, ratio or gradient, really) things to theatrically assign dualistically for workers vs the state, less "taking turns" and more paradoxically "sharing costumes," friend/foe and victory/defeat, during canon vs camp (and land, labor and bodies; re: "Notes on Power" and "Darkness, Doubles and Paradox").

(artist: Gustave Doré)

To reify power is to navigate power—a skill we pick up by placing "rape" in quotes, risk something to calculate by threading state illusions; i.e., demonstrating how misdirection goes both ways, whatever the illusion/performance of strength taking place: the cake is a lie, and lies aren't monopolized strictly for canon. Instead, lies are part of war that includes class war married to culture, race and sexuality/the Gothic*; re: camp = rape play to reverse abjection. It's monstrous code, disguise and instruction, all-in-one: in-group and out-group making similar arguments at cross purposes, ergo a cryptonymic, aesthetic arbitration of good and evil in language without fixed meaning (thus function, below). This isn't exclusively a "weakness," but special chance to shake things up by "topping from below." Context matters, of course—flow of power parsed through dialectical-material scrutiny and performance, mid-abjection: nothing sacred under Gothic Communism except universal liberation changing material conditions through monsters, myths and legends, ergo lies mixed with truth mid-allegory (e.g., of the cave—using any and all means at our disposal, including Numinous† phrasings showcasing awesome power as "up for grabs" but also "shady"; i.e., spectres of Marx, Mary Shelly, Milton, Medusa vs Caesar and Rome, God/church and state under Capitalist Realism's umbrella). Furthermore, such statements should challenge our views, insofar as they break Capitalist Realism inside ourselves: altering how we see ourselves tied to the world around us (and vice versa) as having already shaped us into potential abusers. Rebellion challenges the function of that, but keeps the aesthetic and its mask-like utility among good-and bad actors/players, alike:

(cited: "Accommodated/Assimilated Minorities, part two: Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses (feat. Natalie Wynn)")

*Re: "ass war" waged by sex workers.

†Re: Something to chasing during ludo-Gothic BDSM/the Promethean Quest: that which "playfully attains what I call 'the palliative Numinous,' or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp" (source: "Paratextual Documents"). The crux of my PhD arguments on camping canon mid-abjection (re: "The Camp Map," 2023), these ideas are explored throughout my series on state vampirism.

Now take everything we just discussed and apply it to ICE; i.e., as cops but also clownish men, insofar as their loyalty to the state is incredibly easy to parody (similar to Arnold, above). Beyond words, "Abolish ICE" needs to be a call to action/actionable demands (not lip service) that challenge state vampirism in duality—exorcizing the very idea of the invaders of our hearts and minds, lest the apocalypse continue to expand on all registers (discos or otherwise, above). If it does, you ain't seen nothing yet. They'll paint the town red (or pink, below, but I digress); we will, in effect by turning a blind eye that lets the impostors into our homes! They must become foreign to us—a perfidious, silly-serious threat to reject in every possible way, while also humanizing ourselves being alienized by bad actors sharing the cell: "evil demands compliance, evil rewards obedience" (Accented Cinema's "Dead to Rights: How Morality Erodes," 2026; timestamp: 8:37) but in the end, will go down with the ship. Until then, targets are alien to receive violence; traitors to give it under terrorist/counterterrorist refrains entitling them the "right" (through state mandates) to feed on workers—i.e., through zombie-like narratives, mid-crisis: dog-eat-dog. We must reverse that, too, speaking out Satanically* "on the Aegis." Doing so happens through paradoxical exposure to those we ignore at our own peril. Instead, show our abusers how stupid, spoiled and doomed they are (the Gorgon specialty)!

*From Medusa to Mary Shelley's Miltonic satire to us—camp upending canon (re: "Celebrating Mary Shelley's Immortal Legacy," 2025).

(source: Brooklyn Museum's "SILENCE=DEATH," 1987; artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

Surrounded by martyrs like Good, "we live in Gothic times." Honor her sacrifice by fighting back—not just for her or yourselves, but for all our yesterdays into the future. Survive, solidarize, speak out; get informed and document injustice by speaking out, playing with forbidden things at cross, dialectical-material purposes ("fire," in Promethean terms; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM, as I conceive it, putting "rape" in quotes to subvert state dogma, warn of state dangers, and let off steam: raising awareness and intelligence through play as a dualistic, intersectional form of power flow towards us*). Without justice there can be no peace, and state gangs mid-abjection will call us illegal, violent, criminal and/or terrorist even when we comply. So we must not comply but reverse abjection, ourselves. ICE killing Good was a trial run, radicalizing to defend capital/the state from workers; abolish ICE and transform capital, dismantling state capacity for harm by recording these clowns every chance you get (they hate it for a reason: it makes them look stupid, culpable, imperfect—all in the eyes of an audience who doesn't fear them/give them what they so desperately want). Speak out, for silence is death; the state is death, regarding state violence against workers, nature, and the world at large! Don't just struggle, then; make demands that simultaneously alter how we see the world, ergo capital and its dogs feeding on us. Fighting back means feeding back on them, for a change! When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!

*Re: Flow of power mid-abjection determines function, not aesthetic (of rebellion, in this case). See the other essays on state vampirism to have this concept unpacked at length.

Footnotes

[1] As I define it (from "Paratextual Documents"):

ludo-gothic BDSM (rape play)

My 2023 combining of an older academic term, "ludic-Gothic" (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp—specifically rape play by placing "rape" in quotes, mid-Gothic (where rape [and playing with it] is ubiquitous). The emphasis is less about "how can videogames be Gothic" and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed with any kind of Gothic poetics, ludo-Gothic BDSM playfully attains what I call "the palliative Numinous," or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp (the Numinous, per Rudolph Otto, being a divine force or numen tied less to the natural world [the Sublime] and more to civilization as derelict, dead and alien; re: the mysterium tremendum): a Communist Numinous/the Medusa per Barbara Creed, but not tokenized (re: the Amazon) while dancing with Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit to reverse abjection (thus profit) and shrink the state!

For further information on ludo-Gothic BDSM and its rape play elements, refer to my new webpage cataloging the subject and its history/extended definition(s), everything coined and synthesized by me. —Perse

(source YouTube comments: "White America Had To FAFO")

[2] To be frank, this feels a bit callous, but first (and to be good-faith) let me frontload things with my response to the author of the video:

Thank you for sharing your voice, comrade! As a white trans woman, I wish other victims got nearly as much attention as Good has. Not that her death shouldn't be covered, but there's been hundreds of murders and thousands of disappearances of non-white people, yet white middle-class America they won't pay attention until one of their own is killed. I understand the alarm somewhat, insofar as executing an in-group member represents a gaslighting of said group to weaponize them against out-group members (who will suffer even more under fascist aggression); but we wouldn't even be in this mess if the same people reacted anywhere near as strongly to the aforementioned murders, kidnappings and torture of non-white people before Good's death (source YouTube comments, ibid.)

All that being said, debates aren't one-sided, and "keepin' it real" goes both ways. To it, Good was literally killed in front of her own house while complying with the officers; i.e., she didn't "fuck around," at least not by obviously interfering with ICE to stop them from targeting whomever they normally profile. If anything she was leaving as directed, then shot for driving away. "Fuck around, find out" really doesn't fit, in her case; i.e., she was killed regardless of what she did, so acting like she "did anything" to justify her own demise feels a tad sexist: "If she'd only been inside, where it's 'safe'" (an attitude that also applies to white men, I might add; e.g., Legal Eagle, in "ICE Shot and Killed Her," noting that Good's snarkiness fueled* her demise, below). Presumptions of safety aside, it's also not a good idea to "rank rape" or automatically treat the grass as "greener on the other side." Black men, for example, don't tend to get raped by white men like white women do (at least, not outside of prison environments).

*While technically true, objective statements of fact overlap with subjective reality: "Miss Good appears quite calm as a driver, arguably snarky... which might have been her undoing" (re: timestamp: 6:10). At least at a glance, it puts some degree of onus onto the victim; i.e., in ways that women have faced for generations: stay quiet and let men protect you, lest men kill you. It's a subtler kind of sexism, one exhibited by white and black men alike bearing an underlying class character—that privileged women who speak out/stand up for themselves are playing "stupid games, winning stupid prizes." It's literally blaming the victim who, to be fair, was a privileged member of society (until she wasn't). I would counter that keeping quiet is far dumber in the long run, but that's just my opinion; re: as someone who studies fascism holistically and not from the racial component, alone. Be constructive, instead: "keep your head down for now, planning together through safety in numbers and armed resistance, later." But that's not what exclusionary arguments are actually saying (re: "this ain't our fight"); i.e., they're not banding together with women of privilege, but blaming them before turning tail: as both "of the enemy" and responsible for their own deaths/the entire structure. There's kernels of truth, to be sure, but those giving them also aren't removed from accountability insofar as solutions go. Pointing fingers =/= solidarity and to scapegoat is to point fingers to a matter of degree across all manner of media forms, onstage and off (e.g., Muhammad Ali, a wealthy black man, famously treating white women as sex objects to abstain from†, and which I discuss next to heavy metal; i.e., sex, drugs and rock 'n roll; re: "Is Metal Racist? Yes, It Is; or, a Trans Woman Critiquing Heavy Metal Philosophy's Good-Faith Response to Andrew Lee," 2025). You can't scapegoat capital, only ask for accountability as something to perform from all parties—white and black, alike (re: "The Roots of Trauma," 2024).

†"Playboy Interview: Muhammad Ali" (1975).

Furthermore, saying "this ain't our fight" feels a tad rich—especially given the interracial protests that happened over George Floyd's death, meaning in the same city during BLM; i.e., white people aren't a monolith anymore than black people are; e.g., poor white trash, but also trans people: "It's hard. This city is beautiful and the people in it are my favorite people in the world" (they should make larger fruits' "What It's Like Living in Minneapolis Recently," 2026). So it feels a bit counterproductive/petty to say "your turn," sit back and watch, then call it "bein' real" when you revise things to suit a preferred reality: that you're all alone because "'they' voted for Trump" (as if some non-white people didn't do the same/some white people didn't do the same). Yeah, generational trauma's a bitch, but African Americans are not the only ones to experience it (my white mother was raped by a black man when she was homeless and he wasn't, for example*); and yeah, I can understand fortress mentality after BLM sold out (due in no small part to its leaders compromising with state powers, for what that's worth) and some white people (especially men) voted for Trump. But even so, segregation and scapegoating are no defense, in the long run.

*Re (from "Replying to Jon Barbas," 2025):

Like, yeah, my ass is white, and I've had to work pretty hard to overcome my own privilege, but also my own racism; e.g., my mother was not only beaten by her black neighbors as a child/teenager, but also raped when she was homeless by the one friend she had in her late teens; i.e., who just so happened to be black, who she trusted and who, in turn, betrayed her trust in the worst possible way. And while I'm certainly mad at the people who abused my mom (no means no, you creeps), I wouldn't scapegoat them for the criminogenic conditions that led to such things. In short, I wouldn't act racist towards them, because doing only causes the abuse my mom suffered to repeat (source).

Call me crazy, but "the devil you know" will only get you so far when fascism begins to crack down, in earnest. Solidarity needs to intersect, because otherwise it's just reductionism/prison gang mentality dividing and conquering in some shape or form; i.e., internalized racism. People with privilege betray out of convenience, and those with oppression out of desperation. Betrayal is still betrayal—of a shared struggle that won't end when one group "gets got" (a bloodlust to sate by the oppressed settling for petty revenge: one that, unto itself, solving nothing on its own but venting and, at times, gloating in self-righteous ways). It's not just about race, alone, but inequality through class, culture and race:

(source YouTube comments: "White America Had To FAFO")

Even so, if the writing's on the wall and you're "once bitten," then battening down the hatches is to be expected. Again, police brutality isn't something for poor non-white people to clutch pearls about; it's bad weather on a Tuesday—at least, that's how some POCs are treating this situation; e.g., that "white people made racism" (above). And I'm not going to tell them they're wrong about that (even though the bourgeoisie made racism, which includes token black people)—just how this particular storm has the potential to become completely impossible to weather. Buying time isn't clemency but a reprieve delaying the inevitable: betrayal for everyone by the usual stormtrooper dickheads (and their bosses, the bosses of those bosses, all the way up to the Emperor from on high).

To that, survival mechanisms easily become maladaptive; i.e., while reaching into larger inaction, regarding something that requires a unified front to survive. Fascism isn't going to redline you and leave it at that; it will invade what little space you have left, apartheid-style, and hunt you down (or get you to tokenize, like that's any better—above). Yes, minorities will be courted and coerced for a time, but by and large face the same existential threat: one fascism extends to everyone, then betrays afterwards; i.e., "This deal's gettin' worse all the time!" FOMO is FAFO. Better to do face fascism together without selling out your friends (even to simply buy time for one group that won't survive on its own) then hide as expected and hope for mercy/magical victory by one's self—a kind of "know your place" mentality that, while it isn't exactly assimilation, remains subjugating to anyone inside/outside a single community or group. Don't buy into your own hype as supermen; that shit only works in the movies*, which fascists classically abuse to get what they want (their own volk fantasies). Don't give them it, however academic all of this sounds (or lopsided the sexism and white-savior racism that Lucas—like Cameron after him—famously sold for profit). Learn the right lessons from the past (onstage and off, real or fake): the ones that don't get everyone killed!

*And not just black slave rebellions. Take the Chinese vs Japanese; i.e., singular (and badass) Chinese folk heroes like Bruce Lee's Chen Zhen (above), Jet Li's Wong Fei Hung, Donnie Yen's Ip Man, and their various reenactments (e.g., Martial Club's "Kung Fu Master vs 10 Karate Black Belts," 2026): cultural exports selling false power packaged as "hope" magically "winning" in traded narratives expressing wish fulfillment versus effective resistance, offscreen (on par with the Western, noir or space opera). Stories like these aren't problematic to consume on their own, of course, but become problematic when viewed as revolutionary action unto themselves. Instead, they should inform action, not substitute it; i.e., to a performative degree that renders rebellion praxially inert when consumed uncritically/divorced from effective action. Bread and circus =/= rebellion; it's controlled opposition that becomes rebellion when synthesized through good praxis. "Be like water, friend."

[4] Debates commonly center around state's rights vs worker rights, ergo police brutality on par with Ross killing Good in a martyr-like way. For starters, it's domestic abuse taken to the streets, employed as counter-revolutionary action versus the usual recipients of Athenian propaganda carried forwards: "don't be a [non-token] Amazon; know your place by being seen but not heard." Cops rape women, and compelled silence and rape go hand-in-hand, pimps-and-whores. In turn, the bravery of women (white or not) classically means not being afraid; i.e., of those who have the power to rape you whenever they want—husbands, actual or de facto: "They're gonna rape us anyways, ladies; might as well retain our dignity to send the wider public a larger message!" In turn, kill enough women and kids and the local populace will start killing the occupiers; i.e., when the Imperial Boomerang sails home, so do insurgency countermeasures to state brutality pimping labor (verminizing the populace, who bites back in different ways—including collaboration through sex, disagreeing on smaller things but agreeing on bigger things, below):

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

So don't condemn or devalue white women for standing up to cops, but realize you have more in common with them than the ruling class their abusers serve; i.e., cops are pimps and pimps serve the state by occupying stolen land they repeatedly steal, one generation to the next; e.g., Moxxy Sting, a model and friend of mine (above), saying "Don't get in ICE's way, you're gonna get shot" (source: "Venezuela and Minneapolis. I hate the world"), and me saying in response as part of a smaller conversation (ours) insider a bigger one (surrounding Good's murder/Capitalism at large): "Except, they'll shoot people anyways (and are). Appeasement doesn't prevent gun violence; it encourages it. When my grandfather's country appeased the Nazis, for example, the Nazis came in to loot and murder—to occupy, in other words. So the Dutch fought back, the Vietnamese fought back, the Palestinians, etc. Occupiers waving false flags are gonna rape regardless. Sooner or later, workers gotta fight back. This includes white women versus cops (which ICE are)" (source YouTube community post: January 11th, 2026).

Solidarity takes many different forms, divide and conquer a state maxim demanding we browbeat ourselves (and others) into silence. Silence is death, is rape, and segregation no defense. Resisting isn't a luxury but a basic human right, which the state will take away if we let them: a fight that never ends, one where workers fight for a world they won't live to see. This includes resistance armed with guns, emulating the Black Panthers' use of numbers and firearms (Hawk's Podcasts' "What Can White People Do? Arm Yourselves. NOW. State Violence and Lessons From the Black Panthers," 2026); it also, as I posit, includes media and sexuality (unpaid labor) making their own modular statements, ideally in ways that intersect: as friends in a shared struggle, not enemies dividing ourselves. Furthermore, with something as heated and unpleasant as martyrdom, debate among friends is a way to unite despite state attempts at division; re: with Moxxy and I both being artists, sex workers and activists having worked together in the past (re: "Hailing Hellions: An Interview with Moxxy Sting," 2025) and not always agreeing on smaller issues tied to bigger ones (tactical unity be like that); e.g.,  martyrdom and what it means for rebellion.

As food for thought, here's our full conversation on Renee Good's martyrdom; re: from the YouTube comments to Moxxy's video, "Venezuela and Minneapolis. I hate the world," shared in one community post:

Me: "Don't get in ICE's way, you're gonna get shot." Except, they'll shoot people anyways (and are). Appeasement doesn't prevent gun violence; it encourages it. When my grandfather's country appeased the Nazis, for example, the Nazis came in to loot and murder—to occupy, in other words. So the Dutch fought back, the Vietnamese fought back, the Palestinians, etc. Occupiers waving false flags are gonna rape regardless. Sooner or later, workers gotta fight back. This includes white women versus cops (which ICE are).

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Moxxy: Well meaning citizens didn't fight the Nazis just collapsed in on themselves plus they'll just fight again the point is it's a fucking snake eating itself it doesn't go anywhere I'm in a nihilist this is human nature spot with it now there will always be oppression because people can't think for themselves and give power to people who promise answers I’m not defending ICE. Obviously. / I’m saying putting an unarmed civilian directly in front of an armed state apparatus isn't resistance—it’s self-sacrifice with no strategic value. I don’t think people should be encouraged to step into lethal situations that don’t materially disrupt power or protect others. / Martyrdom is not resistance it's feeding the machine a free body and a usable headline. It doesn't stop because citizens prove moral superiority. It stops because it runs out of legitimacy, money, labor and compliance.

Me: Capital is a snake eating itself, yes. But it can change if workers make it change. In the case of the Nazis, early collaborations were ruthlessly kettled and targeted by state violence in 1918 (the German Revolution) and in the 1920s and 1930s, after Weimar was handed over to Hitler to appease him (who assassinated even more of his enemies, afterwards). People fought, but not enough. The same goes for the Dutch, whose ruling (and middle class) sold their fellows down the river (and paid the price, the Germans betraying them in the process by occupying their country). And I agree there will always be oppression—at least as long as states exist, and even then, abuse will still happen. The point is to minimize harm, pushing towards a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Will that ever happen? "Happen" is something to work towards, fighting for a victory neither of us will live to see. But if no fighting is done, the state will take it all and then some.

Moxxy: I don't disagree that power only changes under pressure. I disagree that individual, uncoordinated self-sacrifice is pressure. History shows states adapt easily to martyrdom. They struggle with labor withdrawal, legitimacy loss, and mass noncompliance. Encouraging people to step into violence without those conditions isn't resistance—it's waste.

Me: I absolutely agree, which is why workers should organize. And a common to organize (at least to start with) is martyrdom—not as something to encourage, but value the lives lost in ways that fuel the beginnings of a larger movement that seeks to avoid martyrdom through organized resistance. Even so, there will always be a stochastic element. "Pressure," here, applies through people responding to killings, occurring in a variety of forms organized or otherwise. The more we can organize, the better, but must internalize values and principles that can survive if a given module is destroyed.

Moxxy: I don't think martyrdom should be treated as an organizing tool at all—inevitable or otherwise. Once death becomes a "fuel" instead of a failure condition, people stop asking how to protect lives in the present. I'm not interested in movements that justify harm as abstract pressure rather than preventing it. Moral theater is naïve and hopeful. This whole disease in team colors syndrome. We're disorganized because narcissism has been industrialized. Performance is rewarded over comprehension. Nobody fantasizes being a zoning lawyer. They fancy themselves Tiananmen square groceries or cosplaying Che Guevara. People performing their reaction and outrage for an audience is prioritized over legitimate resistance. Authoritarianism cant exist without an enemy. Throwing yourself in a line of fire might be a cool Michael Bay movie one day but you can't fight the disease with a SYMPTOM OF THE DISEASE.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Me: I'm not sure I follow: death isn't a "failure condition" of workers, but a consequence of state abuse to rally around and prevent in the future by remember those who died—again, martyrs. To that, and as far as "People performing their reaction and outrage for an audience [over] legitimate resistance" goes, what is legitimate? Resistance is legitimate unto itself, and takes many forms. Calling that "a symptom of the disease" (aka quixotic) isn't new, but it also isn't helpful. Good wasn't crazy for getting shot, because no one expected her to get shot; i.e., for complying with these pigs. She didn't do anything wrong/to deserve what happened; her death wasn't "a failure condition," unless you consider existing in public being the condition. She wasn't performing or asking to get shot/wasn't a regular troublemaker. She was executed randomly by a sexist pig. There's no disease to combat here except fascism, which killed Good to martyr her. It's no different than stoning a whore in the street.

My point being, Good wasn't a disease/didn't do anything wrong, here; she was martyred by the state in ways we want to prevent at all points in time. To that, remembrance isn't the same thing as dogma if it applies material pressure through social forms to prevent harm in the future. This includes performance; re: "moral theatre" not something that is ever fully divorced from material conditions. No different than you and your guitar, no [or Woody Guthrie's "Tear the Fascists Down," 1944]? Per Marx unto us, such things go hand in hand. By comparison, treating people as "cosplayers" to blame for "team colors syndrome" feels immensely reductive. It's workers vs the state, wherein the romancing thereof commonly colors the labor action taking place: not as "movements that justify harm as abstract pressure rather than preventing it," but conceptualizing harm as something to prevent through socio-material forms; re: Good being martyred, which we communicate through media as much as bodies in the street (or anywhere else).

Again, these aren't mutually exclusive, symbols and abstraction not "mere" escape from material oppression but code for it transmitting data between forms of resistance. There's always going to be an audience, an element of theatre to that; i.e., revolutionary optimism as something to perform through labor action including a social and yes, abstract, character.

There is a teamwork component to solidarity that rebellion requires, and teammates often bicker/debate about current events; i.e., what they signify regarding larger struggles. Moxxy and I are teammates, conversing about such things in good faith. I don't think anyone should be martyred, but if it happens it should be recognized as something that will become a tool—of the state, but also of workers learning from/teaching their own lessons with about Good's death. As a form of violence, martyrs can't be monopolized either.

Note: Moxxy has sadly joined the Dark Side, viciously condemning me for sharing our public conversation on her public YouTube video; i.e., playing the TERF and SWERF card: specifically "when I cited our conversation in my 'Wolf Is Loose' essay a year later—calling for solidarity among sex workers versus ICE—Moxxy subsequently misgendered me, called me a 'dog person'(?) while accusing me of being 'a Marxist exploiting women,' and so on" (source: "Moxxy Sting Bad Review," 2026). Yikes. To that, "TERFs and SWERFs suck, and there's nothing more embarrassing than a Nazi whore sucking capital's cock. Abolish ICE" (ibid.). We can't just blame our conquerors, then, but need to hold ourselves and conquered peoples accountable, too; i.e., if-and-when they make (white) liberal arguments like "don't give them what they want" (source skeet, Rebecca Cohen: January 16th, 2026); e.g., Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, but also Moxxy against me by saying "don't get in ICE's way." Betrayal is betrayal even when perceived as self-preservation by the subjugated parties who, in Moxxy's case, went on to police me. Tokenism is tokenism, which we need to recognize alongside different forms/strains thereof; e.g., there's turning tail and there's turning coat. In Moxxy's case, she accused me of exploiting her/not actually platforming her when, in reality, I offer many things of value: paid exposure, protection from censorship, brand association/worker solidarity and the ability for marginalized workers to voice their labor struggles, my own art notwithstanding—on top of venerating them and funneling customers towards their revenue streams. Moxxy devalued that while defending ICE, who are basically a federalized form of "swatting" at this point; i.e., enacted by an occupying army/rogue nation-within-a-nation. Know your rights but also your enemies and those who defend them, appease-the-abuser-and-blame-the-victim. ACAB, including good cops and bad, but also stochastic and de facto cops/cops, ipso facto. Cops betray workers by raping them in pimp-like ways, by design; re: for capital/the state. —Perse, 1/17/2026

(Squid Tips' "ICE Escalates in Minneapolis and Cops Are Joining Them")

[5] The description to said video:

I saw a video of  @Tad.Stoermer 's ["Whose Justice? America's Resistance History Has a Lesson for Stephen Miller and JD Vance"] stressing action over words/symbolic protest, and I wanted to weigh in; i.e., conversationally as a queer sex worker, academic and activist who—like so many other queer folk and unpaid laborers (sex or otherwise)—is historically excluded from revolutionary action; i.e., by paid labor/capital as a whole, the state and heteronormativity denying us the ability to organize and fight back save through symbolic (often theatrical) means.

[source: "Persephone's Silksong Symposium," 2025]

In particular, Tad's video says "don't look to Nazi Germany and its history, look to America and what works." I would argue that "what works" is ultimately a question of short-term vs long-term, insofar as fascism in America is capital in decay. You can't defeat capital without some degree of words and symbolism, insofar as Capitalist Realism is ultimately a question of imagination guiding action; i.e., from theatre into real life, back and forth. Abolition "happened" through resistance, followed by Jim Crow, which required the Civil Rights Movement and its own combination of words and action. This is an ongoing battle, one workers can learn from black history but also queer history (of all ethnicities and genders): to overcome matters of class struggle over time; i.e., I'm an anarcho-Communist and Tad is not, but I still agree with much of what he says. I also think we can learn from German history and American history together (re: "Joy Under Fascism," 2025). Learn what Germany did wrong versus its victims, and what their victims did; i.e., to retain their dignity (the queer existence) in dying when no one helped them. Learn what America also did wrong—i.e., after Abolition and the Civil War—to combat fascism not just in the present, but to prevent it from repeatedly taking root: by including queer voices and theatre as a long-term solution heeded in the short-term (which many black parties don't do, outside of the Black Panthers). The pedagogy of the oppressed includes different peoples listening to each other about a shared struggle; i.e., mid-engagement encouraging critical thought, words and actions of different parties cooperating. There's no "one savior" in this situation, and the state/capital are ultimately the enemy. By ignoring queer and POC history in Germany (which had POCs living in interwar Germany after the collapse of their WWI colonies), it's possible to also ignore these things (and tokenism) having happened, and happening in, America.

(source: Hugh Ryan's "Five Gay Activists in Search of the Black Panther Party," 2021)

[6] Gothic fears home as alien, as prison-in-disguise. The panopticon was a prison, the blind eye a cell within said prison—one that extends inwards and outwards to the mind, the body and the spirit, but also the people/their labor and the land being policed in media and out. Segregation is no defense; unity and clear vision are, surveilling our foes a means of defending against them by discouraging open violence by otherwise secret-police forces.

Fear of one-way surveillance is also not new—with Foucault not just alluding to its medieval usage updated for 20th century prison systems, in Discipline and Punish (1977), but also Orwell's far-more-famous 1984 (1949) and Tolkien's LotR series/dark fortress Barad-dûr abjecting state overreach by fetishizing ethnocentric captivity fears that scapegoat different races (e.g., orcs and goblins) and those who house them (alluded to by actual American Nazis/the AI surveillance company, Palantir, targeting minorities among the entire populace: turning the latter's eyes and ears into the state's through corporate technology with secret, non-consensual surveillance devices): the enemy within and "at the gates" confused in both/all directions, a form of puppetry famously concerned with "dark vision" as everywhere and nowhere (a terror weapon/gaslight). It's code, an outlet that goes both ways when speaking on/with Great Destroyer tropes warning of alien imposters and invasion:

You likewise see allusions to it in colonial American history (InRangeTV's "The Racist history of Surveillance," 2026), in the Bible, and in ancient history with the Spartan city-state's Crypteia (a secret police operating within state territory concerning escaped slaves); and of course, you see it in Gothic literature's obsession with barbarity dressed up as "past," in their own hauntological present/retro-future dystopias (also called "cancelled futures") carried forwards:

Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century (source: Nick Groom, "Introduction" to the Oxford World's Classics of The Italian, 2017).

Aguirre would comment on this in "Geometries of Terror" (2008), noting an infernal concentric pattern:

[this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [... It is like a Mandelbrot set:] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves "down" instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).

It's a playground—one to camp rape by describing our present realities in phenomological ways (through the lens of experience): a Numinous maze or labyrinth that, utterly restless, speaks to spaces of concealment concerning the menace of state power gone awry but also come home to roost; re: the Gothic castle, Romero's zombie mall, etc, as alienating workers, which workers can camp to reverse abjection, ergo Capitalist Realism. My book series—but especially my PhD work on Metroidvania, ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous (re: "Camping the Canon," 2023)—are all based on it, as are extending these ideas into all forms of praxis to synthesize intersectional consciousness; re (from "Concerning Venezuela and State Vampirism, footnote 1):

In other words, the state hates what it needs to exist, controlling sex through fear, mid-abjection; during the same process in reverse, workers reclaim sex-as-terror-weapon to expose and subvert state predation. We share the same aesthetics—the same bodies, props, costumes and spheres, onstage and off—that our enemies do, the Gothic a liminal exercise enamoured with castles and castle-like things as monstrous code bearing out historically a dialectical-material function. (e.g., Creature Commandos, 2024—above); i.e., flow of power determines function, regardless of aesthetic. Who uses what to send power where/for whom (workers or the state). Monopolies are myth, the only certainty that such things are fought over using themselves: canon-vs-camp. "Camp = rape play to reverse abjection, and 'we camp canon because we must' (from Colin Broadmoor to me, 2021 and 2023). This happens by enjoying taboo things, specifically by playing with them in subversive ways that liberate sex work (therefore all work): enjoy "harm" without endorsing its unironic forms, subversive play a necessary form of critique, during ludo-Gothic BDSM [rape play], regarding things normally played without thought (me vis-à-vis Anita Sarkeesian's famous adage)" (source: "Sharing the Blame");

i.e., manifesting Capitalist Realism as something to understand through play and unequal power exchange: camp and revolutionary cryptonymy dressed up as trashy literature women and gay men wrote in secret and sold for money (and classically called "terrorist literature" by the status quo; re: Groom, but also Crawford; see: "Radcliffe's Refrain" [2024] vis-à-vis Crawford's "Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism," 2013).

These are all ideas I've explored at length in different bodies of research: my work on Metroidvania, Tolkien, Amazons, fascism, Zionism, and state vampirism, but also the assorted neologisms I've coined to holistically help synthesize and apply these ideas, day-to-day (re: "Paratextual Documents"): "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," 2023). Plunge repeatedly into the abyss, bringing back forbidden knowledge "on the Aegis," each-and-every time! "Mere play" and escape into such realms becomes a powerful means of passing secret knowledge and power towards ourselves (to smuggle the fire of the gods our way while anisotropically reversing terror/counterterror).