Yes, dear reader, it’s still me, and yes, I’m fine, still writing into a playlist, like always, but this was not as close to home as I expected something like a global human trafficking ring to hit, around me, with one of my city council members acting not that surprised about a just-thwarted “ISIS attack” on my local gay bar (which has been getting, by the way, review bombed, and maybe attacked by a taser-wielding nutcase last year?). On top of that, I have been running around trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with Kash Patel, and then, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, all the direct mail that’s been flooding my house from the right wing stopped, except for letters from Turning Points USA, and the Kash Patel Foundation. Clean house at the FBI, Pam Bondi, and I will have so much more to share than is in this post.
Oh, and, FYI, I am sending this to the Wall Street Journal, and they are the only news room I will be talking to. I’m about 99.97% sure Jeff Bezos did the right thing by firing who he fired, but I have only been trusting what the WSJ has been saying since, like, 2022, and I know exactly what was wrong with them before that, but I don’t know what, exactly is the fuck wrong with the rest of this country’s media, let alone the UK’s. Otherwise, I mean, I still have a lot of questions, too – but at least Pam Bondi did finally ask for exactly the right one, at least for me to share what I know. But as I get into at the end, it’s looking like not even just Detroit, but Detroit and the suburb I live in, Ferndale, Michigan, has been being being turned into the epicenter of one of those Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, Waco, or Ruby Ridge-type situations, and I don’t know when they’ll be drinking the Kool Aid, or natural wine, but I fear that could be coming up soon, and I pray this post is able to stop at least some further damage – beyond what has already been done.
Google Doc link, for those who prefer to print or read on PDF: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDOUeBkROGHXYOU6jB1wgebc6Op7M7nM8c5e1sAfuCc/edit?usp=sharing
(And yes, this all exactly as true as Joan Didion’s writing.)
“Truisms are true! Hold onto that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth’s center. With the feeling [Winston] was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
From 1984 by George Orwell, first published 1949
“You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing – beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code – what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil.’ I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of ‘morality’ seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: They are all assigned these factitious moral burdens.”
Joan Didion, writing in “On Morality,” 1965
“Dear reader / When you aim at the devil / Make sure you don’t miss.”
Taylor Swift, “Dear Reader,” 2023
After a career in tech, the terrifying thing about writing into an American audience, as of 2026, is the reality that anyone using social media – TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid, Reddit, or Substack – has been algorithmically programmed to live in a prison of pre-selected belief.
Like, I’ve never not believed those “take the red pill and go clear” types you see in forums, but I also grew up in the 90s, around Detroit, and had access to life before social media fully consumed society, as Guy Debord saw this force projected into France in the 1960s, as what he called the spectacle. And though that spectacle, I witnessed recent historical events, like the genocidal massacre of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, a Buddhist on Muslim genocide, or the global COVID-19 pandemic, happen while I was working at Palantir or at Amazon – and what bothered me most was how much both my CEOs and my colleagues seemed to genuinely care about those events, compared to the cycles of resignation and rage churning in my social media feeds.
However, to assume the algorithm is doing all the work, at this point, would be wrong, naïve, and to tell yourself any of this is partisan is a false comfort, what they want you to think. They, I know, is such a vague term, but when I, Emi Ruff, use it, I quite literally mean my family, mostly the ones I don’t talk to, for obvious reasons, around the Florida Georgia Line, all over New England, in Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and all over Appalachia, then back overseas in the “Scots-Irish” territories. And as I’ve moved across this earth, I’ve had the fortunes and misfortunes of crossing paths, from London to Texas, Minnesota to Wyoming, Vietnam to Andalusia, all through New York and California, with some of the wonderful and devil-praising motherfuckers alike my family has been working with – and I wasn’t ever sure they were working together, or in competition, at least until they started tracking me down, not just on social media, but all over London, Glasgow, Ayrshire, and, at last, into Bushmills, County Antrim, and Belfast, between 2017 and 2022, [EDIT: it turns out, between 2016 and at least 2022, but only by MI5-aligned ones on purpose, if anyone is sketched out; welcome to Britain] slipping me hints about how to look around me as the future unfolded.
Obviously, being descended from Presbyterian Covenanters and Jacobites is – well, like most things about being a Scot, it’s a mixed bag, a source of perpetual and perpetuating contradictions in our cultural antisyzygy, our collective refusal to simplify or reduce life down to its lowest common denominator. However, Charlie Kirk was one of us, as is Vice President JD Vance. Like, when I, a literal bloody aristocrat of White America, read about Vance’s wife, Usha, née, Chilukuri, preaching to her “husband” (or her white slave, if you ask me what he is to her, morally) about “the social decline of white America,” I don’t want to start a race war. No, I want to personally claw her, Amy Tan, Nick Land, and Sadie Plant’s eyes out with my press-on nails – until Jesus reminds me about the whole “eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” truth. I also don’t need to look very far for evidence that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” is not a truism, but the truth, because, as I saw on X on Wednesday, February 11, 2026, former Florida and current US Attorney General Pam Bondi is finally screaming at congress:
“Instead of talking about Ghisalene Maxwell, we should be talking about Iryna Zarutska.”
And fuck, I hate that she’s right. Like, thus far, in just this war between Russia and Ukraine, at least a million people have died, and we have no idea how many children were ripped from orphanages – or made into orphans – then brought to the West by the U.S. State Department and Department of Homeland Security.
And no, this is not the first time. By all accounts, back in 1993, the this was what the United States did in Somalia: The United States attacked the Somalis to create a nation of refugees, who could then be imported to Minnesota, raised up, trained into Perfect Citizens of Democracy, and, yes, to replace the Americans who’ve been here, chiefly the First Nations. Like, Michigan, where I live now, is another hot spot for this, and I assume DC, where I used to live, has to be, too, and probably South Carolina, just based on how corrupt it is down there – with the common thread here is all four of us are actually, fundamentally proud of our connexions with the people and cultures who were here before we showed up, or got shown up. And since only about two-fifths of my ancestors were involved in slave trading, while the other three-fifths got brought over, I’ve literally, as an American, never seen a problem with reverting back toward the First Nations way of doing things, since they seem to care about everyone having clean water to drink, even “the animals.”
Also, like, it also creeps me out, even as someone from the South, how invasive Northern American and European Culture has gotten into bloodline heritage stuff. And as someone who is actually gay, lesbian, bi / pan, trans, asexual, or intersex, part of that marginal population that is a genetic anomaly, 2-4% of us who break some genetic code, I’m incensed that the civil rights protection I need so I can’t get fired or evicted for falling in love with another woman (and God help us both if her pussy’s not the same color as mine) has been manipulated, by political actors, since the 1960s, it seems, to try and create “more of us.” It makes me tear up every time I think back to Red Scare hosts Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan’s voices, recounting how they saw Rene Nicole Good get shot killed, fucking killed, in Minneaopolis in January. Like, if what I am saying doesn’t sound right, let them tell it: https://redscarepodcast.libsyn.com/martyr-supreme
I’m also not making any of what I’m sharing here up, at all, and if I get a few details off, it’s just because I’m trying to make sense of it myself; this is a blog, not the court of law, and while I have stuff to share with the FBI, I’m not talking to them until Kash Patel, Daniel P. Driscoll, Dan Bongino, Andrew Tate, Kristi Noem, Usha Vance, Karlie Kloss, Scooter Braun, Ivanka Trump, Ivana Trump, Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, Sam Altman (dude, 5.2, that was too far, what the fuck), all of those Goldman Sachs-ass motherfuckers they brought in, Peter Navarro, and whoever Josh Kushner, who I assume has a lot to say here, has to add to the list, have all been cleared out. From there, it’s up to co-first ladies Marla Maples and Melania Trump to get consensus on whether “heads on stakes” is a good or bad thing for the future, because I am too involved here to make a decision, just share what I know with, yes, the color of opinion and a bit of speculation to tie the truth together. Because, to return to Red Scare, the reason Nekrasova and Khachiyan’s voices are wrecked with sorrow and steeled with resolve, it’s because they, like I, and not that many others of us, seem to know that:
Somewhere in the Anglo-Saxon House of Hanover era’s very literal definition of The West, there is a secret formula for a master race, called the Teutonics;
The Teutnoic race has been perpetuating and supporting itself via a globalized slave trade, carried out by the mutually reinforcing process of empire-building and forever wars, and mercenaries and slaves and prisons from all over the world, starting in the British Isles and the remains of the Holy Roman Empire, but, from in the middle of the 1800s on, primarily enforced by Japanese, Romani, Dutch, French, Belgian, Chinese, American, Irish, Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iranian, Chechen, Iraqi, then, after the 1990s, Armenian, Russian, Romanian, ethnically Albanian, Ukranian, Saudi, Yemeni, and Israeli citizens as global mercenaries and slaves – a process that, to be clear, would have continued forever, until they fucked the whole world, were it not for the Celts (Scots, Welsh, Northumbrians, Manx, Cornish, and, we’ll get you all back in riverdancing with Sinead, RIP, and Beyoncé and Enya, the Gaels), and our refusal to participate in this, after various certain points, but for sure – for sure – 2024 was the end of that phase of it, thanks in no small part to the band Arab Strap, if some of you need “great men” to suck on the dick of, instead of all loving everyone and everything about the world, but we must continue unwinding them, me, us;
The master race used math and science, not language, as its primary method of control, in a practice known in the west as cybernetics and, since 2012, assembled into a cohesively balanced thermostat known as the metaverse, owned by Meta, which is now integrating, via “AI,” into Llama, OpenAI, Gemini (if it’s not careful), Reddit, XAI, TikTok, and Substack – and, as I will return to in Point 6, almost all of the dating apps;
Until the late 1990s, The World Trade Organization must have been the major epicenter of that slave trade, running through groups like the UNRWA, Marxist Internationalists, Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, Children’s International, The Heritage Foundation, The United States’ federalized State Department and diplomatic corps, Protestant missionaires, and breakaway sects of Jesuit and other “conservative” Catholics – until 9/11, after which point all that evidence was destroyed, Congress passed the AUMA and PATRIOT ACT, all that data was transferred from London, Belfast, and sects in the new, “independent” Irish nation-state, and straight into the freshly created U.S Department of Homeland Security, among other places, I’m sure;
In 2005, Anna Khachiyan’s dad, Soviet-born mathematician and Rutgers University professor Leonid Genrikhovich Khachiyan, died of a heart attack at age 52, which was shortly before my dad, Tom Wilkinson, then the head of the News Desk at General Motors, started getting symptoms of a bizarre, MS-seeming nerve disease no doctor could figure out the root cause of, but appears to have receded, which may have been why, based on a very strong bit of evidence from the Scottish military, it appears on my flight to onboarding at Palantir Technologies – a United-operated flight from IAD to SFO on July 5, 2015 – was supposed to blow up or somehow crash, because I, Emi Ruff, was on it, which I know sounds delusional, and I didn’t want to believe it either, but based on what I’ve thought and seen since 2022, it makes sense because, in addition to all of the above;
Separately, a different, ruthlessly competitive, attempt to build a new master race has been using The Match Group, Hostelworld, Facebook and, for sure, all of post-Sheryl Sandberg Meta, along with operators within all of the tech companies, to try and break up the old master race and reassemble itself into a new master caste – because Jews, Asians, and Negros were not allowed in the old master race, so they are trying to intermarry with, uh, well, people like me, my dad’s side of the family, as well as Vice President JD Vance, it seems, presumably before we found out we’re in the House of Hanover’s Master Race; and
All of this simply appears to have fallen apart because, back in the late 90s, when Hanover types (like Posh Spice’s parents, I’m guessing …) were freaking the fuck out about what was happening out in the Pacific Northwest, where Riot Grrl was articulating a political populism that, by all accounts, was on the edge of tearing this operation thing down – especially the part about the Marxists and “moral liberals” – because the State Department had relocated all those post-1920s “immigrants” (now known as “migrants” or “refugees” or “asylees”) to regions in America like California, Seattle, Phoenix and Arizona, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, literally all over Georgia, Grand Rapids, Michigan and, where I grew up and live now, Detroit, but they got really overconfident, or just sloppy, with their techniques –
and yet, it might be coming for me, again, outside of Detroit, where I literally live now, Ferndale, Michigan, because they couldn’t break Detroit, but they could break this little suburb down. Like, I am posting this so I can go outside again, and if I get shot or die strangely, you’ll know why. But it also has been alarming to go outside for other reasons because, suddenly, everyone is sick again, and this happened in 2020, so, like, help.
However, if you are not a resident of Ferndale, Michigan, or somewhere like Chicago, Minneapolis, or Portland that has been in it already, I am not here to tell you the end of the world has arrived, or that you have any reason to worry. Because what is breaking is communities like Belfast, Havana, Glasgow, Dublin, Belgrade, București, Bangkok, Hanoi, Savannah, Tacoma, WA, Washington, DC, Detroit, and the Isle of Man, and Detroit saw what was happening around us, then said fuck no. Not again, never again. And, I mean, it hurts to see nations like Slovenia (or my neighbors around here in Ferndale) being driven mad, on purpose, for no moral reason, obviously – just to butter them up, make it easy to take them as slaves for whenever their time was supposed to have come up. I mean, if you needed someone from the master race to go on the record as saying that Slavoj Žižek came up with more innovative ideas about a new political economy in 1991, the year I was born, than I ever have, then I am, right now. Furthermore, three Anishinaabe-speaking tribes (the Ojibwa / Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi) managed Michigan as Michilimackinac under the model of the Council of the Three Fires for, like, a thousand years before the British dissolved it into then-Canada, and provided they don’t expect me to become fluent in Anishinaabe language, as it’s really complicated, I’d personally prefer the Council over anyone other of the other nations known to have come through this place – especially Betsy DeVos and that whole Amway cult.
Because a lot of what I’ve been wrestling with is, in reflecting on the list of responsible actors, it’s easier to imagine “saving” the actors who’ve been programmed just through Christianity, as there has already been a moral abolition movement to make us believe everyone deserved the liberty of owning their own labor. Like, as betrayal-inducing as it must be to find out all of those missionary groups a born-again Christian has been giving their money to were, all along, running a massive slave trade out of various war zones, there’s a place for those enemies to go when they die. But in post-internet progressive circles, this bastardized formula based on Karl Marx’s work – which was, and I am inferring here, but still, this looks to have been very, very intentionally mixed up the 1990s at a program out of the University of Warwick called the Cybernetic Culture and Research Unit (the CCU), which broke off from the University and dissolved at some point “in the early 2000s” (so, you know, right around 9/11) – works, really well. Also, someone out of that program, like Nick Land, finding a gentleman like Peter Thiel, who might be terrified to have himself outed, and in exchange for getting that out of him, tell him 9/11 is coming – then, separately, have Mark Fisher, the only one who seems not to have known exactly what was going on, tell someone like Slavoj Žižek something to watch out for, while Sadie Plant comes to America to tell someone like Jodi Dean what’s coming, and to get in touch with these Hamas people if she wants to “fight back,” then Plant herself heads back to England, and starts work on a plan to get all the women and all the gays on the same team. Or, if Cornell had already been an epicenter of the “progressive / decolonial labor policy,” Plant may not have even had to leave the UK, and just headed straight into the EU.
However, before I dig into the Progressives and Marxist Internationalist Left, who devised this evil playbook back in the Victorian era, I want to jump over to the so-called Libertarian, Anarchist, and Jesuit or other “conservative” Catholic movements. Because what Ferndale, MI’s city council has been doing – and was trying to do, based on what has come out of the 2025 city council race, as of at least 2000 – is following The Manhattan Institute and their local subsidiary, City Journal, on a playbook on how to pre-drain a municipality of all its nightlife, things that might make someone like me want to stay; bring in a bunch of people who just want “peace and quiet;” trap them into geofenced metaverse-based mind control prisons on their phones; re-zone all the surrounding land for high-density residential; let the old housing stock die out; tear it down, and replace it with prison barracks. Ferndale, Traverse City, Grand Rapids, and the East Side of Detroit all appear to be major hubs of this, and as someone who is legally sapphic (meaning, biologically, I only tend to feel romantic attraction to women, but some men do it for me, weirdly, idk), the way that I have had to watch people I know, their bodies and minds, get manipulated by this utter monstrosity of a system is disgusting. Like, all of that research into transitioning children started in 1998, and so much of it reads like the work of one British philosopher, Sadie Plant, as done on the bodies of all these innocent, real children, just like you and I once were, dear reader, trying to turn them all into the human equivalent of those USB-C ports … But I’ll work up to that, because there really isn’t the level of depravity to prepare you for what this looks like when it’s done to adults – out in the open – on Instagram, as an advertisement.
Like, I just want to be clear, this is not casual to me. There was an ISIS attack, directed at the local gay bar in Ferndale, thwarted by the FBI on Halloween of 2025. While the Police Department has taken it all very seriously, the designated queen bee of Ferndale’s city council, Laura Mikulski, put a Facebook post out that, uh, I’m just giving my opinion, FWIW, sounded like she didn’t want us to be scared, but also didn’t want to make it sound like she wasn’t. Oh, and Mikulski only posts in the “alternative” forum, The Fabulous Ferndale Forum, while the Original Ferndale Forum put up a flag on their pages and seems to have kicked me out for looking too dykey. I’m also not at all mad at them for doing so, because my Facebook photo was from right as I was quitting Amazon, in one of those “cut off all my hair” stages of my life, which the (public) caption reflects. Also, like, I’m really not at all sure how common it is for a woman, like me, to always know she was bisexual, but to think she was only capable of experiencing romantic feelings toward women, until, like, 33 or 34, when I started in love with one man, then another. My psychologist talked me through all of this when it freaked me out, after finally working up the courage to come out, in public, as a lesbian, to have to go back to being bisexual, and anyway, I’m excited to get back to work on the novel I was working on, which many agents and editors at publishing houses did not want to me to keep working on, and I can see why now. You can read the first 4500 words of it here, btw – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cOwBxtc0yZg6xZp1mrOWM1-XweXkAbzH_VijMKv_m08/edit?usp=sharing – I’m still working on this latest draft, but I told my writing group they’d get the next draft before it goes back to (normal, not slave-trading) agents by EOY. While I’m working on that, however, I’ll be moving to a town where I might not have to witness a Jonestown situation at Pride this year, or, based on the post I just got sent to my feed, down in Detroit over at Vesper Wine and Books.
Anyway, since it seems the Oakland County Sheriff might be stepping in around me right now, it’s just really fucking unnerving to be living and hanging out in this super specific place, then reading the London and New York City papers, and to have so much information about how all of this was all supposed to be working, and to know the publishers, editors, and writers of n+1, Jacobin, The Washington Post (until Jeff Bezos stepped in), New York Times’ Opinion Section, The Guardian, The London Review of Book (who the fuck is this Adam Shatz guy, and, like, why are he and Becca Rothfeld the only Americans they seem to print anymore?), after 2023, WIRED, and, if he doesn’t realize what he’s doing (although Nina Turner was on him so fast, thank God), Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs, are still running the script to at least try and send everyone to Detroit at some point – in the near future – not for a riot, but for a literal fucking Jonestown situation. Oh, and, just based on Zohran’s coronation interview with WIRED, the Church of Scientology (who, like, just bought the band Linkin Park back in 2021, after the original lead singer, Chester Bennington, killed himself) is super involved here, so yeah, of course this is working. Leah Remini, praise – praise.
American cult-breakings, however, also, historically, have not gone well, as it has always seemed to me that Waco and Ruby Ridge were legitimate child trafficking hubs – and it also should be remembered that Congressman Leo Ryan was shot the moment he touched down in Jonestown, Guyana, a place all those Americans, of all colors and creeds, were, somehow, just able to, like, move to. Peter Thiel himself may even not fully realize that’s why everyone around him is actively misleading him about how crypto works, but that’s why Sam Altman seems to be really buying up all of the tropical land down in Honduras: Mass graves.
Like, by all accounts, Noel Parmenter loved Joan Didion so much, they had an affair that never ended, and he just told her everything, and eventually he and Joan told Quintana Roo (who, like, by all accounts, might have been adopted, or might have been born from a surrogate in early IVF, who knows), what was going on, and she wrote a mythological version of this in her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Kurt Vonnegut also clearly got the codes, too, as in Cat’s Cradle (1963). I can absolutely see why, for so many reasons, both Altman and “Project Jacobin” Founder Bhaskar Sunkara, have been instructing their devoted followers not to read too many of the wrong books, especially not, if ever, novels. Once Grok confirmed shipping us all to die on Mars was not possible (which, based on a conversation I had with Grok 4.1 Thinking in November of 2025, Grok still “thought” was achievable, an opportunity to ignite “Global Innovation and Unity”), it’s Honduras, Greenland, or the East Side of Detroit.
And if you don’t believe me, come to see for yourself. Someone is really spiffing up the city’s private-serving airport, hopefully for the people who live and work here, not to make the final moments luxurious. Ideally, it would be because Detroit gets to keep being what it is, which is The Black Paris, everyone and their mother’s Hollywood, one of the nation’s (one hopes, soon to be many) modular urban agriculture labs, an international athletics capital, and a super fun place for anyone to come live and work as part of its culture. Detroit also does have a historically very well-defined culture, something of a mixture of First Nations and Roman Catholic, and then a lot of the post-1967 investment has been pretty centered around making Detroit into a northern hub of the post-Ottoman diaspora and a northern hub for Black-centric Intellectualism, with weird gothic-y hick types – like MC5, Patti Smith, the White Stripes, and me, aspirationally, but it’s very weird to watch a lot of you turn into a fake version of who I learned to want to be from growing up here, just from the capitalist realist internet, and yes I have had a hard, strange time adjusting to being back – hanging out on the side, doing our thing.
There’s also a lot of space for more people, as many in the post Soviet diaspora have been doing, along with immigrants from literally, just, like, all over Asia, but what I notice is that a lot of these new “resettlers” (which is what they are, to me) do not appreciate the fact that Detroit tends to be religiously conservative, or at least highly tolerant of the fact that people are religious, as well as showing respect for their religion being an important part of who they are. Like, the fact that there are legally allowed to be goat slaughters in Hamtramck doesn’t bother me at all, because so long as the Yemeni immigrants feel at home in this mess, I’m happy for them. I also don’t know if it’s respectful for me, as a non Muslim, to then ask to share in with the goat, or if the more respectful thing would be to hang out on my porch with a beer and vibe, but I live in Ferndale right now, not Hamtramck, so this is just me speculating, out loud, about where I might settle down some day.
It does strike me as unsettling, to that end, how frequently accounts seem to pop in the r/Detroit subreddit to say we’re so friendly, because I see my welcoming of the Yemenis and their goats as one of morality, first. That I happen to be the kind of person who would ask if it was appropriate to join in on the goat slaughter is just, like, me; my dad wouldn’t think to ask, or want to eat goat in other situations, but would gladly hang out on his porch while everyone has their ceremony, or go inside and read a book of his choice, watch a movie, whatever. Obviously, in turn, if I were to host a hypothetical Highland Games in Hamtramck, the Yemenis and Poles and literally everyone else would be more than welcome to join in, although they might find out bagpipes are more annoying, or at least more disruptive, than goat slaughters. Don’t worry, there’s a playlist at the bottom, like I have been doing; nothing has really changed, the world just gets to make more sense now.
But it’s important that we don’t have people literally die in a Jonestown 2.0 situation here in Detroit, or in Sam Altman’s parts of Honduras, or in Elon Musk’s parts of El Salvador, or, based on what Tucker Carlson has been pleading with Mike Huckabee to pay attention to over on X, in Israel. And hey Tucker, that Pro-Life Charity App sponsoring you is part of the problem here, too, but you and the Huckabees and Chris Christie go fucking shred them. Also, Casey DeSantis, neé Black, may need to go (also, what, that makeup is always so bad, and now I see what Canadce Owens has been suggesting in her lawsuits), but Ron might actually be fine after he realizes Bret Easton Ellis’ perfect novel, American Psycho, was written to be an anti-psyop for dudes like him.
Also, uhm, as unhinged as it is to say, I think all the times the Turks have been trying to “corrupt” our politicians, like Eric Adams, they have been trying to tell us something, like, idk, something like Salman Rushdie was never who we believed he was, at all, just another crisis actor. I mean, had I had the misfortune of living in New York City, by September of the Zohran campaign, I would have been organizing to get Curtis Sliwa into office. But it’s just as well that Zohran has to get held up as a poster child for what, I think, might be the single most inhumane play the British Empire has ever forced the world to act in. It’s also terrifying to realize a magazine like The London Review of Books can get so easily blinded to the truth of what they’re writing about, letting whoever the fuck this Adam Schatz guy is preach about “Visions from America,” when I have been screaming at the top of my lungs since September, for what it’s worth, the playbook being run over here is leading to nothing but death and destruction and burnings of us all. Furthermore, it’s actually terrifying to think back on the hot British “queer” book of last summer, Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna, which was heavily promoted at the Ferndale Library, and realize what the script to my real life looks like to someone in London:
A disaster they’re utterly convinced won’t hit them.
I’m also not trying to blow up London or anything like that, and the only reason I have so many big opinions on the United Kingdom is that I have gone back and forth as Scotland has gotten more and more starved out of anything it didn’t create itself. Some of these Londoners also need to see how foolish it is to treat the aristocracy and crown as if it doesn’t matter anymore, when they own so much of the land, and quite intentionally married into so much of the world’s industry. And, uh, should it matter, unlike Lana Del Rey, I did not retain any of the monetary privilege that comes with being from a mid-century American marriage between a bunch of evil lines, starting with what may be the most brutal English aristocrats who’ve ever lived, the Gibbs of Warwickshire, then going on to include at least the Maxwells, Sullivans, and Orrs, those old white slave traders, aristocratic “Scots”-Irish; at least two or three of the founding families of Florida, the Davises, the Willards, and maybe the Wyches, at least by marriage; and the Diebolds, the German industrialists who own most of the ATMs and other banking security firms, who, I am sure, back in Germany, are pretty embarrassed by their / our cousins. But I don’t have any kind of a personal opinion on them, because my grandparents, well, after WWII, they thought they could start over, but whatever, my Pop eventually told me where to start looking, before he passed away (of, like, being 96, which is something I would like to clarify, given … all this).
Meanwhile, on my mom’s side, I’m descended from mostly Scottish Covenantors, probably some Jacobites, the ones who got super intense over in Belfast and North Carolina, and then a line of English abolitionists who were against this from the jump, like, I think 15th century from the jump, who, after the Scots fled out of Scotland, then Ireland, at least began marrying them into their lines and saving them (me, us?) from, well, inbreeding. Also, like, just thinking back to one of my all-time favorite actors, Jim Carey, and how he’s been acting since he did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, uhm, if the increase in “autistic” people has been part of a long-term scheme to either re-inbreed the most hardcore Scots, or otherwise tell them their inbred DNA is a disease, instead of just the consequence of being backed into peat bog for 1000 years, land owned by the Maxwells, refusing to marry each other until they came to America, what the fuck.
I also feel less crazy about this after reading a recent study in evolutionary anthropology called The WEIRDest People in the World, which is about all Anglo-Saxons, but I want to know what’s been going on out of the University of Haifa, too, because otherwise, I think these breeding charts are supposed to have stayed within just Warwick and Johns Hopkins, not even AU. Like, how far back in the history of America was new master and slave castes come up with, 1861? And Isabelle Wilkerson had to figure this out from having been driven, like Fisher and Žižek, so mad, she revealed the formula in her own notes? Obviously, I love my dad, and my Pop, my Wilkinsons, but I can really see now why I was not introduced to that side of the extended family, at all. What monsters they must be in real life!
Like, I’m sorry, I’m never going to be “okay” with how bad this is.
I also, obviously, have far more to share with the DOJ, FBI, ATF – after AG Pam Bondi has strung Kash Patel and Daniel P. Driscoll up out of reach of children – including a heap of direct mail showing all of the different organizations money to fund this operation could have been sent to. That said, very few of those groups have sent me anything since Charlie Kirk died, except for Turning Points USA and The Kash Patel Foundation – including a plea from Eric Trump to buy his book, because, in a list of grievances on his father’s behalf, addition to trying to impeach Donald, bankrupting him, charging him with 91 counts of doing absolutely nothing wrong, and pulling him off ballot in Colorado, “they’re” trying to kill Eric’s father.
Recall, during the 2025 election, there were two different attempts made on then-candidate Donald Trump’s life: A very close call in Pennsylvania, then a less close call in Florida. However, unlike the ballot removal, there is no state listed in this letter – and I assume what Bondi has cracked down in Florida is that Ivana (right? Or Ivanka?) put that hit out on Donald as part of their script, which runs in and out of Israel, but cannot spy on the United Kingdom itself, a jurisdiction that still includes Northern Ireland. And my hunch is that the compelling reason for Secret Service shooting Thomas Crooks, immediately, is that they knew exactly, exactly, what the plan was, who authorized it, and why, as well as who the rumored second shooter (who, as far as we all know, remains at large) is or was, because, during the set-up of DHS, that whole friendly pre-clearance where, when you fly back from Ireland to the US, and you don’t have to go through U.S. customs here in the U.S. when you land, must be horrifying on the inside. That said, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Peter Navarro, Usha Vance, Jared Kushner, Kristi Noem, Karlie Kloss – all of them need to talk, but again, based on what I saw him trying to invest in back in the day, Josh might flip, if he hasn’t already. Also, JD Vance walks around like Usha has him on mind control pills, and like he has no idea how serious any of this is; please help him, everyone, as JD must be such a decent guy for everyone to manipulate him like this, yet for him to still be so loyal to all of them. It’s hard to watch, truly. Oh and, obviously, I cannot wait to hear what Chris Christie’s sides to all this are, when the time comes.
In addition, the actual Irish government, which is run by the Sinn Féin, must also be livid to know all of this is going on, because this did come out of Belfast, as far as I know, not Ireland, and so it creates an obscene security risk for them. (Save Sally Rooney, please, now, seriously! She cannot keep being programmed into living like a crisis actor! She’s too brilliant!) Like, here in the U.S., we only talk about The Troubles as happening from the 1960s onward, as if it is a new conflict, or as if there wasn’t an early 20th century period, starting in Dublin in the 1900s, then moving up into Belfast during the 1910s, to radicalize Catholics and Presbyterians against each other – and just in no nice way to put it, for entertainment value on the Hanovers’ behalf, like rabbits. Then, after a radicalization situation got out of hand in Belgrade, which I look forward to continuing to find out more about, World War I started, and the entire economy juiced itself up, and then it collapsed in on itself. And what I think happened is the Hanovers thought they could contain that conflict to the Balkans, where it could be classified, as Austrian-born British historian Karl Polanyi describes the Crimean war of the 19th century, a colonial conflict, rather than a great power war. However, it might not have been known to the British that the German military was set up to not just attack to its south or east, but first to its west (why? not sure, and I haven’t asked the Germans myself, just came across a book about it), so the Great War happened, and then the real troubles began. It wasn’t until the 1960s that younger Irish people realized socialism would just solve all their problems, but it’s just rhetorically confusing that Dolorous Price and her crew were in the IRA, which used to be the scary-to-moderate organization active in Ireland, but their philosophy lives on in today’s Sinn Féin, which, over here in the U.S., is the absolute scariest form of nationalism I have ever come across in my life.
Like, nothing tops it, mostly because, unlike all the “scary nationalisms” you read about, like Serbian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, or even Zionism, the U.S. Sinn Féin’s Irish Nationalism has absolutely no historical claim to most of Ireland’s culture, outside of the Protestant majority north.
That also might not have been a problem, until whenever the Queen (right?) started planning for 9/11, or at least quietly authorizing it. Because historically, like before 900 AD, Irish culture is defined by the land, Catholicism, and a language I’ve never heard the origins of, but I assume would sound quite like Cornish or Welsh, a Brittonic language, or maybe something entirely different, who knows, before the Norse forced them all to speak Gaelic, which is from Calendonia, presumably a Norse’d up version of what’s just referred to as Pictish in most history books, just so the American Sinn Féin-ers don’t find out. And as a culturally Gallowglass-descended lowland Scot, or otherwise just of these shitty royals, I have little opinion on this matter, but I interpret the Irish-Irish Sinn Féin’s embrace of Gaelic as a nod to the pan-Celtic culture, not ultra-nationalism, as well as a wave to their Norse neighbors across the North and Atlantic Seas.
Over here, however? I actually just cannot get over how sickening, as even a slightly Irish, mostly Scottish-American, poet, this actually is to watch in real life. Like, there are screenshots, but I’m trying to be mindful, because of how awful – awful – this is, and how close I am to it.
To connect with my fellow Irish, however, there appear to have been two pretty decisive cultural attempts to break off us Irish Americans from the actual Irish land we (well, you, I guess, as none of my Irish family came over without making money off of you) came from: Right around 1947-8, when the UKUSA agreement got extended after World War II, then the Catholic Church did Vatican II; and then again, right in the mid-to-late 1990s, when oop, all those Troubles magically ended, there’s a rainbow and a pot of gold, and then bam — all new Troubles go into place, right here in the United States.
And I wonder how far back the suggestion of this plan goes, really, knowing how much work James Cameron put into 1996’s Titanic – which was clearly meant to support the whole pan-Celtic culture, and make those of you who came over in the 1910s realize what a mess it was you’d left, what a blessing it was to be here in America. But the playlist I have for this post includes all kinds of Celtic Punk from that era, which was the music I grew up on, and probably why exactly zero of my Gibbs cousins ever managed to get me to commit to them. If you don’t at least tolerate Rise Against, Arab Strab, Taylor Swift, Charli xcx, or System of a Down you just probably won’t deserve me on my Belle & Sebastian Taylor Swift, or Charli xcx days, you know? I do see, however, why no one at Pitchfork would want you to think System of a Down, whose only political cause is “don’t do what was done to the Armenians to yourself or anyone else,” has bad politics — if you’re trying to playlist the covering-up of a sprawling, multicultural, ongoing genocide, slave-trading operation, and, for romance, a digital smash-and-grab rape factory. Anyway, when I started researching a book or multi-media project on the sonic history of post-Bad Brains/Go-Go hardcore, back in late 2021 / early 2022, still living in DC, I never thought it would lead to this. But I’m so glad I learned enough music theory along the way to keep knowing I’m on the right track as I write, no matter how dark what we all have to learn about is going to be.
Because what I don’t think most people realize is that, while the government can’t actually access a lot of data on you, private companies can – and a lot of social media companies are based out of San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and Dublin, all historic and current human trafficking hubs. London, of course, gets spared, but Cornwall, Somerset, Bath, the Isle of Wright – wow, no wonder Pitchfork wanted us to think Wet Leg was the psyop instead of awesome. (And Wet Leg’s not on this one of my playlists, but they’ve definitely been on some of my others, and will be on more.) And what’s mind-boggling here is that, to the extent I’m about to reveal, I guess, that I used to travel around at Palantir, and on my own, and use Tinder to hook up with people, mostly men (my taste in women is crazy, if you couldn’t guess), is that I think some of what crossed things up here is that some of the British aristocrats who have connects between Warwick, Hopkins, and Haifa started to get the moles for their side in early on, teaching their colleagues how to run a playbook to breed a master caste. That said, this Gibbs-y Achilles’ heel is that they are absolute fucking snobs, and so they’re clearly, as far as I can tell, refusing to work with anyone else to create second or third castes, just us and trash – or, them and trash, since I refused to actually fuck any of them, in retrospect. (Even if I would have, had I been in the mood, with the last Warwickshire man they sent, because he had clearly switched sides somewherewhere, in the Philippines or something, and obviously, once he told me what was going on, I could see why.) However, there’s something legitimately repulsive, a horror, in realizing Tinder, Hinge, Hostelworld, Uber, and who knows what other tech companies (Airbnb, I assume) were being used to stalk me as I moved around the world – just to try and fuck me, or kill me, or probably, ideally, both.
For example, when I started at Palantir, they recruited me via outreach on LinkedIn, then I flew out to Palo Alto for an interview, the vibes were weird, I probably asked too many questions about the fuck they were up to with this company (I adored the job I had at the time, just adored it, and was not looking for anything else at the time), and so, I didn’t get the job, although they told me that it was just being eliminated. That said, once I got called back in for an interview for a different job – all of this was as an executive assistant – I figured if they still wanted me after I worked through Palo Alto that hard, and they were offering me this much money, it was absolutely impossible to say no to the chance to see what they were up to. Also, for the record, just based on an old friend of mine who I thought they should have hired, where he was from, and the fact that he would have been so good with Foundry, I cannot see why they didn’t hire him, I’m about 99.7% sure they do have access to these English-Irish dog breeding charts, but probably not the Scottish ones. Like, I don’t share this stuff, although I would have shared what I’d known at the time, had I been asked.
Other people obviously have access to these English and Irish charts, too, which is why it seems so awful to look back at the man who I’d met, around the same time I got the offer from Palantir (June 2015), and realize he probably did really come to love me enough to, at the last minute, panic, and call off the part where my entire plane was supposed to blow up – before I went to onboard at Palantir. Or maybe someone else was the target? I mean, it was a flight from Dulles to San Francisco.
But, like, that was an odd relationship, as I really liked this guy, immediately, and he was always into seeing me, but sort of vague and strange and evasive as fuck about what he was doing with his life – which makes sense because, while he was definitely Celtic (like, he was a redhead; you can’t fake that inbred quirk that got out of control), so if he was with the Crown’s Intelligence Community, then what he was doing was a massive violation many international laws. And just to be clear, outside of the people who appear to have been taking downtown Ferndale, as well as the church I grew up attending – oh, and keep trying to take over my hometown of Pleasant Ridge (a whole different story, and more my dad’s to share) – every single other time that I think I’ve been contacted by Brits, it has been either in the UK, or otherwise in another nation-state entirely, including Thailand – and I’ve only been to Dublin or Ireland once, back in college, but I do recall a guy following me around Temple Street a lot there, too – so, like, it is overwhelming to realize how many people in the UK appear to be on payroll for some kind of a secret service or whatever. Either way, the American double-agent who seems to have decided to let me live, to see if I could keep breaking this thing down, he did send me a lot of shirtless photos, including of his tattoos, which I’ll obviously share, once the FBI is cleared out of Patel and his clique. I say that just to be honest about how hard it is for me to, knowing how well things worked out for me, dating a guy I liked, a guy who kept trying to convince me to run away to the woods with him, a guy who then, once I got back from Palo Alto, just sort of, like, ghosted me, told me ran into his ex and they were going to try things again … Like, I never saw him again, but just so everyone is aware, I do know these Brits work in teams, or against each other.
Because the reason I am so sure that I know exactly what happened in Butler, PA, and why, is that I got, like, attacked by at least a half dozen agents throughout Ayrshire, Belfast, Bushmills, and Glasgow in October of 2022 to collectively inform me about how to watch out for what was going to happen. Also, as I think that’s insane, I would not have believed it had the only one I slept with been so open with all of his secrets, because, I mean, had Thomas Crooks not missed (and on purpose, I assume), I would have then been forced into hiding by marrying him. Like, hope to see you again, dude, but it is nice to get a shot to save America, to save Detroit, to save Ferndale, to at least try and stop this all from getting more lethal than it already is.
And what creeps me out most of all is that, while I was looking back through my WhatsApps, I’d found a bunch of texts with a guy who had been super aggressive about meeting up with me on a solo trip I was taking in Glasgow, just for vacation, back in January 2018. Also, like, I’m probably not all that special, and this has happened to lots of people, especially in Scotland, where people are often so entrenched in the colonial mess, people you’d never expect are actually really high up in some kind of a Scottish or other British security apparatus, like random-ass bartenders and people you meet at hostels in Romania. And, like, that woman, I mean, obviously if she had some heads up Andrew Tate was going to be sent there, then it made sense for her to be there back in 2017, getting a sense of what the culture was before this monster no one could stop arrived in from the specter of capitalism, which knows no border, respects nothing … This stuff, I’m saying, is all connected, and obviously the Scottish girl that I met as a friend, honestly, she had no idea who I was, is a lovely and moral and intelligent person who does not support mass trafficking, but as of August 2017, someone in her network must have been, like, go find out what Romania is like before someone goes and fucks with it. Wonderful nation, Romania, do highly recommended for a holiday, as I was on, and capitalism has really made things brutal on them, but it’s so welcoming, to travelers, with exit plans, very beautiful, super fun road tripping, and the food is so good. But, at least in Transylvania and Wallachia, there’s not much of a party scene, just FYI.
Maybe not unrelated, we’ll find out, not even six months later, in late December 2017, while on in Glasgow, I matched on Tinder with an audibly English, and clearly educated and upper class at that, man named, on Tinder, just “T,” but on WhatsApp, Alex Snead (+44 7957 153695, was the WhatsApp number he used to contact me), who then went on an absolute warpath trying to get me to meet up with him.
I declined, and one reason is that, for whatever reason, he decided to tell me he was in an open relationship, and since he was not that cute, annoying to talk to (sorry, I am not into upper-class London or other English accents, especially when they try sounding Cockney, like an extra from My Fair Lady, to sound more relatable to me, which, yes, men do with me, and I hate it so much, but I’ve loved fucking around with real men from Manchester over the years), and, also, just, like, not respecting that I had my own opinions. Like, I think I ruled out meeting up with him right away, since he told me going to a show at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut was uncool, too popular, too crowded, rammed, something like that, which is just stupid – especially since I was going to see a pretty specific show, which I told him (again, before he got so aggressive, I then muted the conversation) and so anyway, if he was really interested in me as a person to date, he could have “run into me there,” but he didn’t. Also, this was when back Theresa May was in charge, if the UK needs someone to hate; I’ve always liked Jeremy Corbyn’s platform, and while I did mistake Keir Starmer for one of those creepy Maoists, I did a bit more digging and realized he’s probably a Trotsky, etc., Truther, too. So, anyway, fuck Theresa May, but also, there has to be some nastiness hanging out in “voting Labour,” too.
And I say that because what I’m about to accuse the British Government of is so fucking serious, very serious, it could have happened to me. Alex Snead, presumably an agent of the British state or a British company, could have drugged me, raped me, and left me for dead, then dragged me back to my own hometown, as a “resettler.” Or, maybe, he was under the impression that, since I was working at Palantir at the time, I was on the side of people trafficking sexual assault victims to Metro Detroit to start a death cult. I mean, he sent me a link to a “resettler” forum about Detroit because I had mentioned I was from Detroit, which was strange – but I’ll be honest, since moving back to, again, my fucking hometown, there are so many people I meet who just have strange backstores about how they wound up here. Furthermore, I don’t look at places like Chicago, Minneapolis, Oakland, San Francisco, or quite frankly, most of the people I meet anywhere but the working-class parts of Los Angeles, and think there aren’t a lot of people who got trafficked there, brainwashed, told the world works a certain way, and then, well, all told when to die. Again, from “Born to Die,” Lana del Rey’s entire catalog is about this, and who in the fuck knows what The Grants are involved in! Clearly different things what The Gibbses are, or is it the same plot? I’m not sure, to be honest.
Because while we were chatting on WhatsApp, Alex Snead, and this is so weird to me, said things about U.S. politics like, “You and Kim have fun going back and forth with each other,” referring to Kim Jong-Un, tried to make me afraid of guns, told me the Italian Carabinieri was running around – and again, post Brexit vote, but not post Brexit – then, long after I had already stopped replying to him (because, keep in mind, I just thought this guy was annoying me for sexual purposes, and muted the chat before he even started sending me information about resettling to Detroit), sent me a text, on January 8, 2018, that read:
“lol - fire at Trump tower. poetic.”
Since I had muted the chat, I didn’t pay it any attention, but when researching this essay, I went to Google “Fire Trump Tower 2018,” and saw just stories about a fire happening at Trump Tower in April of 2018. Then, once I specifically searched for January 2018, I got two hits: One from the BBC, and one from Xinhua, Chinese state media.
OBVIOUSLY, had I noticed the above message back in 2018, not muted the chat, I would have told Palantir some weird foreigner who wouldn’t leave me alone from Tinder was texting me lol about a fire at trump tower, because that’s fucked up. Like, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Trump when he was running in 2016, and it was stressful to work for two of the companies he seemed to personally hate, plus fuck Jeff Sessions, but after working on Amazon’s Policy Team from 2019 - 2022, I hate Trump far less than some of the alternatives that could have run in his place, like Josh Hawley, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, that creep from 2016, John Kasich, – or, quite frankly, anyone who was yelling at Amazon, Apple, or Google, when Meta, Etsy, and eBay were all right there. Oh and I did not stop having big, active concerns about Microsoft until Satya Nadella’s “MSFT <3 Linux” post, but somehow to all those dolts like Amy Klobuchar in congress, they were not a problem in 2020-2022, but now no one but the other CEOs (and me) wants Nadella to be the intellectual leader of this “AI” moment? The fact that Trump will, I know from professional experience, listen to reason, reassures me, because Cruz fucking won’t – and he seemed way too ready to head down to Cancun, like he knew that storm was going to be bad. So, in short, I could see why Alex Snead, because I worked at Palantir, might think that I was on a side of someone trying to kill Trump, only because so many people seem to want to kill Donald Trump, but I certainly wasn’t trying to, and to the best of my knowledge, Palantir was not trying to kill Trump, either. But that, in retrospect, was a very concerning thing for this Snead guy to think I would find funny, knowing where I worked.
Oh and, to the extent I have a gut feeling most of what I’m saying is going to surprise a lot of the people at one company I used to work with, save for my former manager and a couple of others I worked with, but make perfect sense to everyone at the other, but my former manager (unless his wonderful, so very patient girlfriend got through to him): In addition to having picked up a bit of Scots; I used to be pretty much fluent in Spanish; I can figure out French fine (and speak it fine outside of Paris, where I just get bitched at for sounding like I’m from Québec, which, whatever); I took German when I was at Palantir; I had to crash learn quite a bit of Romanian to get around there on vacation; I can figure out most Italian phrasings, certainly the grammar; and I can often pick apart a lot of the bullshit philology that got mixed into the Celtic-Brittonic languages over the years. Those are obviously super specific skillsets, and what I will say is, at one company, I was a perfect cultural fit, while at the other, I had to fight pretty hard to get taken seriously – literally dressed up by some girls who wanted me to figure out how to pass as at least upper-middle class. Like, despite coming from some literal aristocracy, they all came through New England or New Jersey, mostly into Appalachia, or half of them congregated down in Florida. And then I grew up in Detroit which, to be honest, still is such a rough place, I get why, when I’m in another country, people who understand Anglophone accents seem to more often seem to assume I’m from, like, Newfoundland, or somewhere other intense spot in rural Canada, rather than the United States. Plus, when I’m in Spanish-speaking counties, thinking back on all of the things people have told me over the years on vacation and stuff, a lot of Spanish-speakers must have assumed that I either am Spanish or mestize or from somewhere in the Balkans. If so, none are true but I take all as a compliment, and, ah, muchas gracias, y lo siento. And, I’m sorry to the gringos, but this feels wrong to say in English, because:
Saber la verdad sobre Chile, por ejemplo, es tan atroz como suena; y saber cuántos chilenos vivieron, y murieron, sin saber que sus seres queridos sufrieron en medio de uno de los montajes del Imperio Británico, es algo que no alcanzo ni a explicar.
O sea, toda la operación de Allende probablemente tuvo buenas intenciones, pero luego fue cooptada por unos cibernéticos británicos que, repito, creo que tenían buena voluntad, pero así es como yo veo que pasaron las cosas. Tampoco hay justicia, ni perdón, por las décadas en las que los gringos no hicieron nada al respecto; y de lo único que puedo pedir disculpas es de no haber imaginado que mis propios vecinos fueran capaces de tanta maldad, pero no creo que eso sirva de mucho, porque nada podrá traerlos de vuelta.
Es que ni siquiera me importa si creo en Dios, solo necesito creer en el Diablo y en que hay un infierno a donde esta gente se pueda ir, porque no hay forma de que ninguno de nosotros—los que hemos tenido el poder de ser cómplices en la magnitud de lo que hemos hecho parte—pueda saber si se ha absuelto de sus pecados sino hasta que estemos muertos.
Y por más crueles que otros imperios hayan podido ser, el hecho de que nos llamáramos ‘Iluminados’ mientras importábamos nuestros pecados de vuelta a nuestro propio terreno es una crueldad muy particular. No sé qué tan tenaz, qué tan horrible haya sido vivir todo esto desde afuera, pero... perdón por aquello en lo que nos convertimos, porque esto es maldad a otro nivel. Esos indígenas de verdad nos vieron tal cual éramos capaces de ser, y... juepucha.
Like, I had Gemini translate parts of that, since my Spanish is super rusty, basically out of use, I didn’t want to fuck it up (and I learned a few new words, like montaje and juepucha). But, like, to the extent that I just had to take one look at the back, the back, of The Manhattan Institute and City Journal fellow Douglas Murray’s book, On Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025), which reads –
“From the moment news of the massacre in Israel emerged, one thing in particular is worth noticing: There was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city. Not one.”
– and know this man’s hands are drenched in blood and that all of these motherfuckers are going down as far as I can pull them without going all the way back to Hell myself. Also, this book isn’t from some random “red pill” press, like the real Red Pill Press, but an imprint of fucking HarperCollins. And after October 7, 2023, I can still recall, from literally less than three years ago, that after Hamas’s attack, me and the rest of my stand-with-Israel Instagram feed (again, I may be a faggot, but that doesn’t make me progressive) was sincerely and very concerned about the hostages! Where are those hostages in Murray’s opening sentence?
And, like, just to throw Mossad a fucking bone here, the “Air Force” agent who I demoed Palantir’s software to at a trade show in June of 2017 didn’t seem like he knew he was going to do evil things with it – that he, like me, as I showed him the anti-ISIS demo path, thought ISIS and Hamas were real threats to his life, much realer than to me. And it’s just fucking bizarre that, not even a decade later, I’m trying to do what I can to stop a big mass suicide from happening in Detroit. AND WHO IN THE FUCK TOLD TA-NAHEISI COATES TO GO TO SENEGAL, OF ALL PLACES, NOT GLASGOW OR BELFAST? I HAVE NEVER KNOWINGLY LIED TO A BLACK PERSON, OR ANYONE, ABOUT A THING MY FAMILY DID TO THEIR FAMILY, SO CAN THE REST OF YOU STOP LYING TO “COLORED PEOPLE” WHO ARE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT YOU DID TO HURT THEM, JUST SO THEY CAN GET AWAY FROM YOU, US? YOU WHITE DEVILS ALL MAKE ME SICK.
Like, to be specific, to return to Doulas Murray, The Manhattan Institute, and City Journal – where, for the record, their anti-cop union stuff was so good, I had them on my shortlist of places to call for a job, whenever I got bored at Amazon, along with Niskansen, CEI, or The R Street Institute – I continued reading on to the following:
“The people who carried out the massacre and started a war did not find themselves the subject of criticism on the streets of one Western city.”
I’m not sure why you picked Detroit for the next one, then, unless you thought you could shut us up, with computers. And as Detroiters know, back in 2005, Trick Trick and Eminem got an anthem ready for something, but under no fucking circumstances did I ever expect to see this, this, in my Instagram feed (CW: RAPE AND VERY LIKELY HUMAN TRAFFICKING):
Obviously, I do not know this woman’s story. However, all the way back in 2018, that man named “T,” or Alex Snead, knew I was on a solo trip in Glasgow, aggressively tried to get me to meet up with him, and, due to the information I gave him, easily could have done so. Then, after I stopped talking to him, texted me a link to a “resettler” forum in Detroit, and then that fire at Trump Tower only the BBC and Xinhua reported on. Also, to the extent that guy might have been serious, recall, I had, as I would not have guessed at the time, truly randomly crossed paths with someone who works in a Scottish spy network (and, again, might not be with the government, Scotland has a lot going on, I don’t ask), and while she was on holiday so I didn’t see her, a lot of people seemed to want to talk to me as I was moving around Glasgow, including two guys who made sure I got home safe one night after a night of blether and bar hopping (Snead, it’s not called “chat” in Glasgow, you lying monster; these people are truly awful, and it’s not just the men, never just the men), and looked sincerely concerned for my life. Walking through Glasgow, “kidnapping” was obviously never on my mind, at all, ever, and literally never will be, for me, not in Glasgow, but you should not need so many bloodied friends, family, and lovers in the fucking Jacobite coalition to keep you safe in this world.
Because, this woman did not, and, from her profile, I can see why someone knew she wouldn’t.
I left just her last name in there, as well as the business names (as she’s clearly not the one with a clue what the fuck is going on at this new wine shop I’ve never been to – or heard anyone that I know recommend to me, although a new book and wine shop that was supposed to open up in Ferndale next to my hair salon is … not, last I saw, so …), because it is common, and because it is so obviously Irish. And while the phrase Tiochfaidh ár lá is Gaelic, translating to “Our day will come,” isn’t of concern, it’s a slogan of political Irish Republicanism – and while the last mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, knows a lot more about Irish Catholic Irish history than I do, I don’t need to be from the Catholic parts of Ireland to know this is all beyond barbarism. Tiochfaidh ár lá is not about to become the new Globalize the Intifada, a molotov cocktail thrown to fuck up the case for nakba being what did happen in Cornwall, Scotland, and Ireland, to name a few, what is happening in Palestine, and what appears to be about to be trying to be replayed in Ireland, again! Also what has been happening in Iran needs to just be … This really is too much, y’all.
And again, the mind control must be insane, because the actual Sinn Féin is, like, not even just a normie political party, but they have one of the best platforms for a better political economy that I’ve ever read. This is all, truly, just so inhumane. Also, like, just based on this post on this poor woman’s story, from Friday, Feb 13, she’s being told to associate “Detroit” and “Palestine,” not in the way Detroit and Palestine are actually connected, to someone who’s from here, like me, but instead just trying to connect the dots so that it all seems like “it” was meant to happen, here, whatever “it” is, or was, I hope:
And so, since the Welsh band, The Manic Street Preachers, whose song title I cribbed for the title of this post, were so intentional on screaming “IF YOU TOLERATE THIS, YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE NEXT,” in 1998, I can see exactly why former Detroit Mayor and current gubernatorial candidate Mike Duggan is being run against so fucking hard in the r/Detroit subreddit. SHUT IT DOWN NOW, PLEASE, BEFORE THIS GIRL GETS CONVINCED THAT GOD WANTS HER TO POISON HERSELF – MAYBE AT MY CHILDHOOD CHURCH!
Yeah, I’m not fucking around. I was baptized in one of the old Scottish Presbyterian churches over in Appalachia, but growing up, I used to be a member of Drayton Avenue Presbyterian Church, and as of 2019, it’s called New City Church. The Oakland County Times, one of the few local-centric news orgs here in South Oakland County, and doing the work, talked to the new pastor, and he said this (my emphasis added):
“Although New City is connected nationally with the Presbyterian Church, most of our members do not have a Presbyterian background. From the beginning, New City has intentionally gone out of our way to be a place where people can find community whether they are churched, un-churched or de-churched; whether they are a committed Christian or skeptical, confused or curious about Christianity. No matter what your spiritual story is, New City is a community where serious and genuine conversations take place about the joys and pains of life, the claims of Jesus Christ found in the scriptures and about the brokenness and beauty of his church. New City is most definitely a broken and imperfect church, but we are honest about it –”’
And I am just going to cut them off right there. Because what that sounds like to me is that, after a multi-generational shift to get kids to think church is lame, to the point where a lot of the white bread white Americans I meet seem to even know where their grandparents came from – which is just so strange to me, obviously – then pull out some Evangelizing Hillsong-y remix to pull them back into a church that, as I lived it, may have been being prepped for some end times shit since I was in middle school. Like, a few years after 9/11, they pushed out the pastor I grew up with (and, you know, the youth pastor I grew up with died of AIDS in the 90s, so …), put in this fire and brimstone loser, and he started driving all the old members out – except for those who really worried about the end times.
Also, not to be racist, but a lot of you motherfuckers around that church have Irish names, and Presbyterianism is about as close as one can get to a tribal religion, but I can see why you all might have wanted to push that Roman Catholic Church to shut down, so the Jesuits could be the only ones nearby who can call you out on your own terms. But I think even the Jesuits, and the rest of that 20% of the Heritage Foundation-approved Catholics, might start to see the light after this, I hope. Because, fuck, this is so much more violent than I could have anticipated, and I fucking grew up here. And people got moved here thinking, from the media, it was supposed to look like Chernobyl all along? For fuck’s sake, Douglas Murray, you really couldn’t last a second in the sanctuaries where they raised me.
No matter how “DETROIT TO THE CORE” I still am, after all of this, I’m also not trying to blame my neighbors for being weird around me, as I get it, the fact that I no longer speak with a Michigan accent makes me sound like I’m not from here. However, when I was in college, I got so mocked for my accent, I just started adapting to speaking like I was from Appalachia, and so now I sound like I’m from, like, Western Maryland, Eastern Tennessee, somewhere super specific like that, because, yeah, people were, apparently, caste-ist as fuck toward Michiganders out East. From my end, it’s really so bizarre that, especially after working in defense stuff or at Amazon, where most of my colleagues were from either the Deep South or Appalachia, and having a job where I just talked for, like, four years straight, I’ll probably never not sound like I’m from, like, a crater in Appalachia, because that was a useful accent to develop around there. But, like, yeah, based on all of this – I get why I got kicked out of my local Facebook group, on sight, even though I was born and raised and my parents still live maybe a mile away, as the crow flies, from my current house. Plus, like, I really fucking get why my landlord has been so gung-ho about me, a Michigan native, even if I am just second-generation, as a tenant,, just so he doesn’t have to find a non-cult tenant, not without trying to break anti-discrimination laws. Fuck, I can’t believe Joan Didion was this unheard for this long.
But before any of this cult stuff started popping up on my feed, what really alerted me to the fact that something sinister was going on, and something evil, was the way I understood exactly, bad and good, has been happening with “AI.” A giant 2+2=5 machine isn’t a thing I support, at all, but a giant normal calculator is. And, like, I’m going to be honest, no one inside of Amazon seemed to be tracking what OpenAI was working on, at all, even though there was a ton of cybernetics work happening within the company – which means that if there was someone (like, I would start with, Jay Carney) who was lying about this AI thing, that person was too retarded or misinformed or something to have been put in charge of anything.
Like, I never learned “how to code,” but after watching everyone in Palo Alto screaming about LLMs, then realizing, by the start of 2025, they were not going away, I took everything I knew about computers, including some IP from Palantir and Amazon, sat down to read a few chapters out of an old Ray Kurzweil textbook I ordered online, Melanie Mitchell’s Machines for Thinking Humans, and then Karen Hao’s book on OpenAI, Empire of AI, after which point, I realized I could, if given the data, hack together one of these GPT things on my own. Do I see a use for that for my own purpose? No, Gemini and Perplexity are working fine for me, and it used to be fun to talk to Grok sometimes, but whatever.
But it’s been really difficult, as an American in this moment, to look at my own nation, even if I am aware this was a plan all along, to stupefy us, to drag us into cults, to make us look for moments of “glory” that lead us to our deaths, because I used to be in the boat at Amazon, and now I watch Palantir get tossed around, as if none of this matters to any of us, only someone else. Because it is heavy for me to walk around with the awareness of what my country has done, and I don’t have support, outside family and a few very close others, because many people believe I’m lying about having been part of a Nazi operation back in DC. That’s really unsettling, and I have spent a lot of the past few months more or less alone, because it got too hard to sit at drinks or dinner and get interrogated as if all of this is my fault, but also as if any information I have to share that might be of use, just to help, must be a lie. Like, if I had things my way, I would have retired out of tech after getting Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s voice actually burned into my head, written my slutty gothic novels, and not have gotten dragged into any of this. But what’s insidious is that, when you have books of straight misinformation out there, telling people there’s something called “The Stack” – already – or that, to paraphrase one book of philosophy, everything on the Internet collapses into a single point – without differentiating between whether capitalism would make computers do that or if computers would do that on their own – and then, I’m sorry, but people with PhDs hosting fake news agitprop podcast, using the Hollywood scripts we all (I thought) knew were made as psyop anti-metaphors for a fear we could overcome, just to tell us what to look for? Like, that’s just such a slick way to make it so I couldn’t, without having to go get a PhD myself, tell my audience the inside of a computer is not “The Stack” but actually, at least to me, looks and feels a lot like TRON (1982), because compared to these writers who keep getting published by HarperCollins, I must look delusional, not like I actually understand this.
(yeah, I can see why the OG Tron might be dicey in this economy, too …)
But, at some point during my “now I seem to be scared / to go outside” phase, I came across an interview with the academic Dr. Nick Srnicek (whose 2016 book, Platform Capitalism, was the first non-CS audience tech book I’ve come across where things aren’t just, like, to me, blatantly wrong, at least from this century; I really cannot overemphasize how frightening it has been to have been me, knowing what I know to be true, and then seeing the world fold in on me like this, with so few eyes on what is not a big ball), from a conference in the Czech Republic, with a full house. And on X, it just depresses me to see Srnicek’s posts get, like, a like, sometimes, because a democracy requires us to want to pay attention to things, but he’s been posting on there since like 2009, that points to a pretty massive collapse of people not following along with what has been making sense – mathematically. Like, I after Kevin D. Roberts, PhD, I obviously checked this Dr. Srnicek fellow’s PhD thesis out, because obviously, I never trust anyone, and he breaks down how the stock market-derived was formulated, down into just arithmetic, and it was first, impressive, and the, after that, difficult to swallow that he submitted it in, what, 2013, or something like that, when I was in undergrad studying the NRA as a sociology major and poetry minor, calculating all the ways the NRA’s media teams used symbolism of the frontier to train the men who tried to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who rocks, not just what to watch for, but how to feel. Obviously, the stock market and the National Rifle Association are connected, but to realize the apathy that has been worked into the system, the turning away of things that, as grim as it is to remind myself, at least I wasn’t the only one to have seen coming.
And even though I don’t know much, yet, about the Czech economy, or why the Slovakians and the Czechs were told not to talk to each other after the 1990s, it made me feel a lot better to be able to at least watch a recording of all these curious Czech-speakers in the audience, showing up to educate themselves, by choice. The Ezra Klein-backed group chats freaking out about democracy must have been told, at some point, not to ask other nations how they do things, because it’s not hard to imagine a better democracy once you’ve spent time somewhere like Romania, realizing it, as you had hoped, is not that fucking hard, so long as no one is trying to break your society down – and on purpose, at that.
At the same time, I keep watching all these cults pop up on X, trying to keep people from looking outside their own worlds, and so, before I move into the wrap-up and a playlist, here is just a very short list of books to read, if you want to better understand what’s been going on, and largely from a psychological point of view. Also, just, like, google a lot of these titles with + PDF on the end, and you can often find them, but shhhh.
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
The Rebel by Albert Camus
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
Political Ponerology by Andrew Łobaczewski - written by a Polish psychologist who learned how all this happened in Poland under “Communism”
Slouching Toward Bethlehem, A Book of Common Prayer, The White Album, Democracy, and, like, everything Joan Didion, Jon Dos Passos, Sylvia Plath, Zora Neale Hurston, Graham Greene, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote
Typical American by Gish Jen (which is still on my TBR!)
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx and all of her short fiction, too
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Less Than Zero and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Earth Angel, a (so fucking sharp) collection of short stories by Madeline Cash
My Ántonia by Willa Cather, as well as most notable American fiction written prior to 1925 – Melville, Alcott, Twain, Chopin, Whitman, for poetry, all of it was messy and strange and just like us, Americans
And, for a de-Hemmingway-ing of the romantic writer’s vision of the self, Mavis Gallant’s fiction is the perfect antidote – while still giving oneself a model of sitting around in a cafe somewhere, as you dreamed it, writing the world up as it goes through you.
Anyway, I am going to text this wretchedness to my connection at The Wall Street Journal, go take a shower, sleep, go to brunch in the morning, and hope some or all or any of this has blown open on the news. I don’t look forward to that. However, I really did start writing on Substack as a food blogger and photographer back in early 2021, after the Alison Roman thing, which … like, what is real here, y’all? Anyway, after a bit, I came back to it as a personal branding project about music and art and literature, then started writing a novel, very normal things. And I was actually a huge supporter of Joe Biden, figured Kamala Harris would just do more of the same (not … this … all this … her and Usha and Kash Patel, wow), and then, I mean, look, beyond the whole climate denialism, or disavowalism, thing, which Liz Cheney dragged with her to Harris regardless, the only things I really had a concern about coming into Trump II were the specific attacks they had against trans and Palestinian people, as well as the SBC trying to overthrow gay marriage, plus all the Federalist Society judges who are trying to bring back chattel slavery and ban the teaching of evolution, which, no. Just, no. But, like, if none of that makes sense, and if Ivana and Ivanka have been lying to him …
Look, I’m hoping for the best here; pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit, as Antonio Gramsci put it, and at least Gramsci can’t steer me wrong, mathematically.
Also, just one more thought: This Nick Land-y monstrosity could, probably still can, until Starmer gets to him (I was not given much on that team, thank God) control at least some parts of the weather, and some of the most paranoid sites I read on – like sott.net, places where you can read pretty compelling evidence about events like the Boston Marathon Bombing, Sandy Hook, or Fort Hood being false flags; which is why, on that note, I also by now fully believe Jan 6 was set up by the Cheneys, etc., as an Either/Or situation; like, get this: I was on the phone with Cassidy Hutchinson, interviewing her for a position at Amazon, one I was going to bring her onsite for, just to see if she was that good in person, despite all the Trump and Mark Meadows noise happening – when the phone cut off; then, a day or two later, one of my best friends in Amazon’s DC office (who I do really need to talk to Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio about, like, ASAP, after Kristi, Kash, Usha, and this Daniel P. Driscoll guy are all in chains), gave me a heads up that Cassidy had been subpoenaed for the January 6 trial; assuming they were tracking one or both of our phones, then if I were Liz Cheney, I wouldn’t let Cassidy have talked to me, or the EA I had shadowing me, for a second longer, either, because after 150+ interviews for Amazon, I can either get anything out of anyone, or tell they have something to hide, or both, at once, which is always scary, and Cassidy just seemed like she had no idea what’s going on – some of those sites do sometimes do act like climate change is a hoax.
And look, as a real 90s kid, I never trusted Tipper Gore, so why should I automatically trust her husband?
Also, truly, dear reader, don’t feel guilty about being tricked by paid actors. Like, when I finally got around to reading Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, back in 2022, I innocently thought she couldn’t read good, because “The Cyborg Manifesto” is not an easy text to work through, unless you know what you’re doing. However, lucky for all of us, she is one hell of a cocky bitch (or, I don’t know, part of a cult, it’s unclear how the ethics work here), and someone saw straight through that, then sent her to UVA, which is not a scary school, at all. Jia, Warwick, Hopkins, or AU was where you needed to go, if you wanted to look like you knew what you were doing, like you were from here, knew it in its dark parts – rather than just profit off us for your entertainment. Because I also did not realize, at all, when I was reading that book that Jia’s parents are, I’m sorry, were (they got busted) HUMAN TRAFFICKERS, and her getting crowned Tastemaker of the Millennial Generation, out of nowhere, right in 2016, is such a fucking obvious act. The fact that that shit came out in 2019, though, and everyone kept listening to her –
I mean, what was supposed to be going on in New York, holy shit. Was the plan just to nuke it? I mean, what were you doing, Jia? You’re with Airbnb now, you can’t play dumb about knowing all along what you were doing, no matter how stupid, and, like, actually racist, actually racist, which is not what we deserved, you look to someone who actually founded that Old Virginia, because even they know Maryland is the third-scariest state in America, after Wyoming took its place during the Teapot Dome situation, then Alabama remained Alabama.
Seriously, if fucking Charlottesville, fucking Thomas Jefferson and UVA – not even, in Old Virginia, George Washington and motherfucking Mount Vernon, but Jefferson and little old UVA – scared you, Jia, then you’re just a weak-ass bitch who was never going to hack it America on your own, anyway — which is why I’m actually still a low-key, honest-to-God anarcho-communist, even after all this. We will do better, because actual Americans never asked for your “cultural” advice. And you could have been one of us, too – had you, like my grandparents did, back in Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland, just told your Nazi slave-trader parents to leave their blood money in their bank, and do your best to start over. Obviously, of course, since Mount Vernon, Alabama, and Baltimore are all super scary, everyone agreed to do Unite the Right down in Charlottesville – what, just so you’d be able to get Trump saying something racist-sounding for the script?
Monsters, just monsters. That is all I have to say to these people. Pam Bondi, you get Kash Patel’s blockhead out of there, and then hot damn, this country needs some good work run through it.
PLAYLIST: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/keelies-wa-hae/pl.u-55D6Aq3IDV779D (sorry, I offish think Spotify has been corrupted since at least 2020 … Apple Music sounds so much better anyway, and they have amazing DJs - playlistly was how I got my library transferred over in, like, 45 minutes, and I had a lot of EDM remixes to run through from that phase in my life.)
Alright, so, as I have been processing the above, I put together this (not short, FYI!) playlist, trying to put a bit of structure on the story of Celtic music as it’s swung in and out of the Americas, as sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” to discover where one might actually be from, the sounds and rhythms and languages sound most authentic to you. This also is, very much, a personal playlist, by Emi Ruff, and there is a personal bend to it, with exactly one song on it that I do not like, at all – “Creep” by Radiohead – balanced out by Ruston Kelly’s “Radio Cloud,” a seeming joke, perhaps, but, well, I’m not sure what Kacey Musgraves’ deal is, either. We’ll get back to them, though.
And I also don’t want to tell anyone how to think about something as personal as music, so there is a book I highly recommend, This Is What it Sounds Like, by Susan Rogers, a neuroscientist who worked with Prince as a recording engineer, and Ogi Gas, a fellow scientist, to help get back into a groove about what you love, on your own terms. But insofar as Freud was right and culture is civilization and civilization is politics, here is a rough, short annotation of this playlists’ history and cultural context.
And, here’s a Google doc of just this section if you want to print it out: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BTev2n3YbU7QmzFjxzZN81lRqH_h4KZt0ip1xbT-zJs/edit?usp=sharing
Opener
“If You Tolerate This”
Self-explanatory, devastatingly
Pre-Modern
Folk Songs: “Loch Lomond” through “Danny Boy”
These are all, with some of my own judgement, laments or national anthems from all of the Celtic nations, plus England, with “Scarborough Fair” and ol’ “Danny Boy,” which originates around Derry/L’Derry, reportedly from an English tune.
Notably, the only Gaelic national lament/anthem from the Celtic nations is in Manx. Like, Gaelic is a language a lot of people connect with, but it’s historically spoken in the Highlands, Isle of Man, or in the North of / Northern Ireland, whereas Welsh is the national language of Wales, a critical part of its heritage, as with Cornish and Cornwall, and Scots is just what happens when Scotland happens. There’s also a known, as of now, still seemingly lost language in here, Northumbrian, but obviously, if someone has a poem from back in the day, I would love to hear it.
Seriously, though, Cornish was so close to being a lost language, Gwenno’s “An Stevel Nowydth” (from 2022, way down in the contemporary section) is one of the first Cornish-language songs I could find. Gwenno and I are going to have some fun, though, and she’s one of my favorite finds from doing all of this research!
National Pop and Indie Jams (pre 2000)
Irish Art / Indie Pop: “Spring is Coming With a Strawberry in its Mouth” through “When We Were Young”
This run of tracks, roughly the early 80s through the late 90s, is just a taste of some of the awesome Irish music, none of which sounds like a jig, but is so fucking Irish to an Irish person, even me, and I’m not very Irish. Like, Ireland is dark and strange, and what makes Enya’s Gaelic version of “Book of Days” so spectacular to me is the way she allows that haunting to sound so alive, yet from the beyond, all at once.
And, of course, “Zombie” by The Cranberries could have been another title track for this playlist, because this
Wales: “Motorcycle Emptiness” through “Something 4 the Weekend”
So as, prior to making this playlist, The Manic Street Preachers were the only Welsh band I knew of, this section is short, for now. I obviously look forward to finding out a lot more about Welsh music and start learning some more about the language!
In lieu of more Welsh music, however, I do want to recommend a recent memoir by a Welsh political philosopher, Brad Evans, called How Black Was My Valley, which put so much of Appalachia into context to me, as well as gave me a clearer sense of what “austerity” was like from a non-English perspective than I had since Shuggie Bain, another great read, but we’ll get to Scotland.
Oh, and fun fact: King Arthur was a Welsh legend, and a lot of the fancy stuff is new; old King Arthur rocks, and people should get more into this stuff, because it’s fun, to me, and it matters!
England: “You Really Got Me” though “Wonderwall”
To, England: as noted above re: austerity, British Conservatism is so cruel, it shows me where the American Democratic party gets it. To that end, it’s so wrong for you all to think your music sucks when, like, even Radiohead is kind of good! Like, even though my favorite musicians are Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian, Taylor Swift, Charli xcx, and Rise Against, I don’t argue these songs are some of the greatest songs, if not the actual greatest songs, in the world, of their time. Like, System of a Down is a better band, arguably, than The Cure in their Lol Tolhurst era, and that’s about as high of a bar as anyone can set. Stop hating yourself!
Anyway, as a defensive mechanism, I snuck Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe’s 1979 pop jam about this, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” American-born Ruston Kelly’s 2020 song “Radio Cloud” on after “Creep” – but seriously, Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me ‘Round (Like a Record)” and “Come on Eileen” and “Wonderwall” are ANTHEMS FOR A REASON! Listen to Billy Bragg, he gets it!
Oh, and, in addition to Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Siouxsie Sioux, and The Damned are, IMO, the the only classic punks to have come out of the UK, with the rest of the punk scene mostly being shit like Sid & Nancy getting drugged up for entertainment – a thing that makes the 1975 and Matty Healy / Taylor Swift not look cute, to me …
Scotland: “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” through “Get Me away From Here I’m Dying”
So, after The Proclaimers, the 1960s Scots folk anthem, “Freedom Come All Ye,” an Runrig’s “Alba,” yeah, the mood fucking drops. Welcome to Scotland. Glasgow is my favorite city in the UK, and maybe the world, but Anglo-Americans only think the things we love have to be all sunshine and rainbows because they don’t have all that access to the history of the Scottish currency system …
Fun fact: Junior/Senior year of high school, after finding it in a discounted CD bin, I listened to Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, like, most mornings on my way to school. I can still sing this entire album to myself, up through about Track 8, when I would usually be pulling into the parking lot.
Cornwall, Wales, Diaspora Songs, Celtic Punk, post 2000 generally
OK, so “Leave Her Johnny” was really where I started this playlist, back in late 2020 or so, as all of those TikTokkers were getting super into “Sea Shanties.” Those are all classic working sea songs, and mostly from Cornwall, who were sort of, like, shipped around as pirates – but again, there’s a lot of romanticizing slavery, where instead of trying to birth you, they just … let you fall overboard and get lost at sea. Like, Osama Bin Laden’s burial at sea felt … symbolic to me …
Anyway, moving onto Runrig, a Scottish band from the 1980s, I think people who feel lost in all of this should take a listen to some of the songs that have been coming out and in and out of the British Isles for a long time, and understand none of this was unprecedented. That said, it’s your fight, too. What I’m trying to break is the idea that no one is part of this world alone, and music is, by far, the most concrete way I can put that together, and listening to intellectual terrorists in the media tear down my, our, heritage has just driven me insane.
And on the question of color, first off, all of this is available to anyone, anywhere, but to Black and First Nations people who know they aren’t all Black or all Native, but you don’t know what your white ancestor is, because they were pretty far back, you’re likely Celtic, or working-class English. Fancy English, as we discovered, do not cross-fuck willingly. The rest of us, however, do it all the time. Also, obviously, rape is abhorrent, but to the extent a Black American has white ancestry, it was likely just a different kind of poor person, or otherwise, your rich white great-grandma decided to fuck one of the men out back, and her family let her keep the baby. There’s a lot of healing to be done in this nation, I know, but music is part of how we do it, how we keep moving, and I’m just so frustrated at how all of these operations have been pulling us apart, when we sound so much sweeter (and make so much more money) playing in concert.
Anyway, more to come, as always.
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