5: Thunderbolts (yes, really)

4: Sinners

3: 28 Years Later

2/1 (Tie): Eddington and One Battle After Another

Pretty self-explanatory title/thesis. Funny thing is, one of the events that occasioned this was actually a purely 2026 phenomenon: the invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of a sovereign head of state. Granted, the writing was on the wall for that one for most of 2025, so it can be included in this here Annual Wrapup.

How to begin? DOGE? Liberation Day? Roving gangs of unidentified fascist thugs disappearing people in broad daylight? Shit got so bad so fast that even my dumb pessimist ass was surprised. I haven’t been surprised by anything since Russia invaded Ukraine (thought Vladdy was a more rational actor than that, but that was just my 20th Cen. Lib brain screaming as it died–Vladdy had the read of the playing field, turns out). I have been shocked, sure. Like, it’s SHOCKING that Elon Musk was allowed to fuck up the bureaucratic underpinnings of civil society on a ketamine bender. It’s SHOCKING that Pete Hegseth is in charge of the world’s largest employer. It’s SHOCKING that lil Stevie Miller is basically Edith Wilson-ing this shit while a visibly declining Trump shows us his drooping right face. All of this is shocking, to the point of numbing. The human brain is barely evolved to distinguish between the moving image and physical reality. We’re simply not equipped to understand, let alone analyze, everything coming out of this shit-filled firehose. And that is the central truth of the moment.

The Trump 2 admin, if it can be said to be “good” at anything, is “good” at recognizing the total inefficacy of their official political opposition and the total information overload of the general public who’d likely disapprove of their actions. Perhaps it’s not even a conscious recognition. Perhaps it’s a lizard-brained instinct that their prey is weak and ready for reaping. Perhaps it’s a high-minded grand strategy undertaken by dipshits with brains cooked by Paradox games. No matter–distinction without a difference until a legitimate response can be formed–the result is the same: the fascists have flooded the zone, acting maximally and begging us to say anything in response. This is the aspect in which I see the clearest parallels to the OG fascists of the 20th century (you know, other than the pedophilia, amphetamine abuse, and antisemitism).

The Italian Fascists were distinguished initially by their Speed. They were Fast, perhaps one could even say they “moved fast and broke things.” Futurism plus Socialism, essentially: making the new world from the old, emphasizing the mechanical miracles that made Speed possible, attainable. Now, this is inherently linked to one of Eco’s characteristics–the cult of action, even for action’s sake–and that is where we find our doughy little ameriKKKan nazis.

How embarrassing, how “first as history, then as farce,” that our blackshirts and our brownshirts are DOGE and ICE and DHS and some interminable number of alphabet soup fascist agencies. But they are! And they’re winning. The Democrats, bless their cowardly hearts, are incapable or unwilling to organize a physical, street response to this overtly nazi takeover of our streets and the halls of power (again, “distinction without a difference” regarding incapable vs. unwilling).

This is probably a good time to admit that I don’t have any solutions. Their bullshit worked! I’m numb, unsure as to which tactics could even make a dent, let alone a longer term strategy. I’m scared, self-censoring and eyeing the paperwork to renew my Canadian passport. I’m tired, barely registering impeachable offenses under regular administrations with a sigh and an eye roll. And the fucked up thing? I knew this was coming! I saw Hypernomalisation in 2016 like a good little millennial leftist and thought I’d internalized the lessons, the thesis. Nope! Apparently not! Because I literally cannot conceive of a way to make the signal peak out of the noise (to say nothing of the equivalent “flood the zone” mentality of LLM purveyors and how THAT will exacerbate this problem, oy vey).

I’m going to have to end this soon, to stop an interminable ramble on Where We Are Now And What It Means. This was just an initial writing exercise to get my partially-stoned brain to start trying to contextualize what we just saw, what we just experienced. I’m going to post it anyway, because who gives a shit. But: in keeping with the wrap up, I think I figured out What This All Means (2025):

This was the year that calling America fascist went from a partially tongue in cheek term of art or metaphor, to a simple descriptor–a straight up and down, AP Style bare accounting of the information in front of us. We’re the Baddies. And every moment we’re not stopping what’s coming, we’re co-signing it.

(editor’s note: this post was initially started on 8/17. Things have only gotten dumber.)

The post’s title, a Dio Sabbath song–yes–was resurfaced in my mind palace by Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth. Yes, I am a fella who takes massive musical cues from the media I consume. Yes, I am very stupid.

Now, that aside, the PHRASE has been echoing (in tune, mind you) in my head for 3 (ed. note: 5) weeks. The Mob Rules (or, if you want the full hook: “If you listen to fools, the mob rules.”) The abject idiocy and spiraling insanity of the United States this month feels… faster, dumber?

….

So, I have a tendency to start on one of these deals, leave it for a while, and then complete it if the thesis of the moment still felt right about 3 weeks later, maybe a month. Well, this post got started the week of Aug. 18th. You can piece together what has happened since.

So, Charlie Kirk got got. Good Riddance/Time of Your Life, and all that. But that was just the capper on a truly brain-pulverizing stretch over the last couple of weeks.

We had the Epstein Birthday Book drop. We had the quasi-stroke/Trump disappearance. We had the Charlie Kirk shooting. (Not using assassination–you gotta be more important than THAT for me to use the same word I did for MLK, JFK, and the like.) That was a week, lol. Less, really.

The acceleration is concerning. I mean, on Friday (after Kirk’s capping), I was legitimately concerned that he was gonna be a Horst Wessel and that this was the beginning of the round up. Now, on the Tuesday after, they’re pathetically taking down their doxxing websites and begging people not to be rude to the dead fascist or his family. (No, lol.) Good. If I’m gonna get rounded up and put in a camp, I’d prefer that the inciting incident weren’t “ugly weirdo who you thought was on some pedo shit for hanging out with teenagers ALL THE WAY BACK IN 2015, WHEN YOU WERE MADE AWARE OF THIS GRIFT” gets shot by a different internet-poisoned white boy. (On that topic, I don’t care anymore what the actual motivations for mass shooters are–not that this was a mass shooting, beyond the mass of Charlie’s Big Head Mode perma-cheat. They’re all just internet poisoned zoomers to me. No use differentiating.)

While the fascists not being able to make a Reichstag Fire out of “Big Head, Little Teeth, HUGE Gums” is good, all of these stories (most concerningly and depressingly–especially the Epstein book) were eaten, metabolized, and shat out in a week. Any ONE of these would have been a term-defining Black Swan for a normal pre-2016 president.

I used to fancy myself a bit of an accelerationist. If you’re autistically schematic-minded and fell into Marx due to the completeness and intelligibility of the system (my dumb ass), then accelerationism has an allure. It makes sense, on paper! Real life? Jury is out, but the malign velocity of the current moment does not feel advantageous to the left. It feels numbing and designed to breed hopelessness and nihilism. Feels bad and immutable! Not good! But that’s where we live now–an ever-increasing speed limit in the left lane, feeling every speed wobble and curve in the road.

But that’s only a feeling. I don’t know shit and neither do you. We are in that Gramscian time of monsters, to be sure. The way I’ve been saying it to salve my soul? “This is one of those Bad Times in the history books, and humans made it through that.” But it’s only a feeling. We don’t know what’s coming next and any analysis beyond “that didn’t happen back in the day” will beggar conclusions and confound outside review–a black box of anti logic created just from trying to describe the moment in plain language.

We only have our feelings, then, and mine have been more right over the course of my life than yours. (Do not ask about the predictive capacity of my gut notions after 2016, let alone 2020, thank you.) What do my feelings say? “This is one of the Bad Times.” So, hunker down, smoke bales of weed, and hope that there’s something salvageable on the other side. That’s what I’m doing, at least.

Anyway, rest in piss to the babytoothed fascist and hold your loved ones. Loved ones are what make it worth struggling through this bullshit, after all. (If you don’t have loved ones, consider how cool it would be to be in the history books–just saying! Not a lot of ways to Make An Impact as a discrete individual–but I can think of a couple! Just mull it over, hypothetical unloved, unmissed person reading this. We have a group that meets Fridays at midnight under the Brooklyn Bridge and the password is Sic Semper Tyrannis.)

I love to wake up on a Sunday morning to an announcement that we’ve bombed another country. What I love more? Finding out it’s Iran, and that we did it for Israel.

For most of my childhood, Iran was the Great White Whale of the Bush era neocon establishment. The Axis of Evil speech wasn’t about toppling Saddam or stopping the Kims from getting nukes; it was about punishing the Islamic Republic for their impudence in toppling the Shah (who we installed as a favor to Perfidious Albion after toppling Mossadegh in response to his oil nationalization scheme) and taking US hostages. Iran is a bete noir for the security state, and they were always itching to go there.

Indeed, much of the run up to Iraq was, by some Bush admin officials’ own testimony, simply a test run for Iran. So, thank god for the absolute incompetence of the Bush admin. Because it could have escalated and gotten so much worse.

Indeed, that is the root of one of my (vanishingly few) unironic compliments for the Obama admin and Obama himself. The Iran deal was Actually Good and it appears that we only got it because Obama was the most (relative scales, here) Israel-skeptic president of my lifetime (perhaps in our history when it’s all said and done).

Well, now we’re in Trump 2.0. Trump 1.0 already killed the Iran deal. And Biden gave the blank check to Israel in the interim. So, here in Trump 2.0, we’re getting the dream that would cause Donald Rumsfeld to beat his little pud AND a final nail in the coffin of one of Obama’s few lasting legacies. We’re bombing a regional power, just to make our little client state happy. We’re risking WW3 for a basket case, genocidal, racist, and generally extremely annoying ethnostate.

This time around feels different, though. Dumber, coarser, lazier. Bushies at least had Colin Powell up there, lying his ass off about enriched Uranium. They at least had Poland signing up to the coalition of the willing. They at least LIED to me, they TRIED. This time? A Trump TRUTH post, a few weird denials that we’re at war from Jimothy Dimothy Vance on the Sunday shows, and a few pathetic tweets from MAGA America First types trying to square the circle. They won’t even do THAT work for their porcine followers, leaving them to twist in the wind while Low Information Travis starts to wonder whether Charlie Kirk and Joe Rogan are full of shit.

“First as tragedy, then as farce” has been the logline of this season so far. I guess I need more of an imagination, because I couldn’t imagine how Iraq–farce of farces–could get more farcical. No matter, here we are.

No War With Iran. Critical Support for the Iranian Regime. Unconditional Support for the people of Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, and all victims of my diabolical country around the world.

You can see the date¹, you don’t need the preamble. It’s Sunday now, and I was mercifully occupied all through yesterday. Until the evening. Then I saw.

I logged on to BlueSky (permabanned from Twitter for threatening Andy Ngo with sodomy) and immediately saw a couple of those contextless, medialess posts that suggest something big was going down. People quoting that Lenin quote (often misquoting), talking about not posting photos from some protest, vague intonations of dread, the usual for the year of our lord, 2025.

But then I started to see the footage. I saw paramilitary goons with distended guts and double chins, chins helpfully masked by the gaiters that preserve some semblance of a private life–a private life they do not deserve. I saw smoke bombs and flashbangs and rubber bullets. I saw an absolute fuckin hero get lit up by a full battalion of those hogs and then walk away, skateboard in one hand and middle finger in another.

I also started to see apocryphal (at first) posts about how the army was getting sent in. Then, the more accurate and constitutionally-regular revision that it was the CA Nat’l Guard getting activated. As troubling as that is, in itself, it’s somehow less troubling than “we’re deploying the army domestically, against US citizens.”

Even though that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re deploying the CA Nat’l Guard to police citizens while our SuperGestapo round up friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, lovers, and total strangers (their treatment as human beings doesn’t have anything to do with their relationship to you, oh selfish American). We’re deploying the military for crowd control to aid in Nazi-style disappearings.

Simple as. Plain. Period.

You need to figure out how YOU’RE gonna square that one as time goes on. I’ve already got my Karl Marx-shaped panacea, a totalizing worldview that gives me the answers I need to the questions I don’t wanna hear. But what are you gonna do? If you believed in America at all, this has gotta be pretty tough for you. Right? I mean, we’re the Nazis. That must suck if this is new to you! I’m not even being snide; it must be extremely shocking! But you gotta let the scales fall from your eyes.

It is now Tuesday after. Sunday was more of the same, Monday slightly less. But now Trump is ordering the National Guard of neighboring states to buttress his fascist potbellied goons. And calling in the Marines to do the same. There are ever so many Rubicons being crossed, with greater and greater frequency, practically daily here in June 2025. Maybe Governor Bateman will lead the glorious California Uprising and we can finally dispense with this insane venture, the United States of America. Maybe Donny Deals puts down the “insurrection” and we take another unbalanced, loping step toward capital-F Fascism.

Maybe. I’m through with predictions. Never was all too good at them, anyway. My gut sense of dread, though? That’s never led me wrong, and I dread the next few weeks.

1. This got started on Sunday morning, 6/8/2025. Like most things, I didn’t finish it. ↩︎

In late 2014 I undertook a project of self-radicalization.

I had just worked on an anti-Corey Gardner campaign (lost) that happened to be the first full Dem (or Dem orbit) campaign that I’d worked since discovering Marx. The one two punch of “you can’t even call him a liar to save yourselves” with “and what would you do even if you saved yourselves–HSA tax credits for Pell Grant recipients?” basically turned me away from the party (for a few months, until April 2015) and turned me toward Jacobin and Verso Books. 

In the process of that self-radicalization, though, I learned some fun little facts about Actually Existing American Socialists and Socialism. The funnest fact(s) to me? Colorado was one of the homes of American socialism. Like, I’d learned that the WFM was a big deal and did things in Colorado in APUSH (in 2007-08, mind), but 1) that was tainted by typical American anti-labor bullshit and 2) it was woefully incomplete and framed as a conflict of personalities as opposed to… yanno… class conflict. Anyway, there’s a whole piece on this that I wrote comparing the potential for socialism out here as opposed to the coasts, so I don’t need to rehash some of the old material. Here’s the important lines, I guess:

8ish years ago, I left Colorado thinking something pathological about the character of the state and I know now that there’s no pathology here save what the coasts gave us. We always had it right, and goddammit we just need to remember why and how we got it right.

We had actually existing socialists here. El Paso County’s government was run by Reds. Now, today, it is run by reds (derogatory). So, what changed and how can we go back?

This is not a piece that will answer that question. In fact, I don’t know if there is an answer beyond “the Left in America never recovered from the Palmer Raids, let alone the HUAC sequel, and the extractive industries that made for robust trade unionism are not there anymore.” In fact, that might be the answer! The material conditions changed, the people made by the material conditions consequently changed, and the places made by those people changed, too. Bing bang boom. Done. Title of the piece: answered. That’s how it went from the right kind of red (socialist) to the wrong (James Dobson dicksuckers). 

But there’s still something haunting me about it, the notion that El Paso can go from a socialist-run One Party County to the headquarters of Focus on the Family in less than my great grandmother’s lifespan–much less. I can drive around the mountains west of the county, in the Teller county goldfields and practically feel the phantoms of the Martyrs of the 40 Hour Week judging my complacency and comfort. I live in the bones of the last time workers stood up and died for shit we take for granted, and knowledge of this makes me nauseous. 

Frankly, this title, this piece is a draft from 2018. I intended to map out a strategy to take El Paso county from “the wrong kind of red to the right,” arrogant little prick I was. Understand, though, in 2018, this felt… possible, somehow. The Dems were in disarray, the Sanders movement seemed to be in the catbird’s seat to take over, and the GOP was enacting its policies (and alienating regular people in the process). Sound familiar, lol?

Now, it’s over. Bernie lost in 2020, and that was really the last safe, legal offramp before Climate Fascist Hell. What the fuck does the county with Colorado Springs and the USOC matter anymore, beyond a cautionary tale of what can happen when you replace your miners with Air Force Academy rapists and megachurch-owning meth and rentboy enthusiasts. 

I dunno. I just needed to get rid of this draft. A nagging draft poking around since 2018… just needed to be exorcised. 

So, answer? No answers, just pain. Just more work, neverending work. Best if you don’t think about it, I suppose. 

suck me off, be funnier.

anyway, this is my blog. i’ve had one forever. rarely used. just wanted to use this for 1) the cool url and 2) maybe a bluesky bluecheck. i mean, technically, i’m Left of Lenin–an institution!