Film

Les Misérables (2019)

January 19, 2026 srogouski Leave a comment

For Americans, history starts and ends with the Nazis. On the neoconservative right, every foreign policy crisis is Munich. On the progressive left, every repressive move by the United States government is 1933 and the Enabling Act. The French, who apparently still read books, have a 19th-century literary canon serves the same purpose as World War II does in the United States. It lays down a baseline narrative that lets contemporary artists tell new stories in historical settings everybody will recognize immediately. Montfermeil, a suburb of Paris 10 miles away from the Eiffel Tower, is famous as the location of the Thénardier inn in Victor Hugo’s 1500 page doorstop Les Misérables. Almost everybody has seen the musical, and the story is quite familiar. It ends with a riot, a riot it’s easy to mistake for the actual French Revolution, but which in reality is only the abortive rebellion of 1832, a rebellion that wound up going nowhere. In 2005, Montfermeil, which is now a poor African banlieu full of dilapidated high-rises, street vendors, flea markets, and petty drug gangs, had a series of riots very similar to the one portrayed in the novel. It did not, quite obviously, overthrow the French government, but it did effectively rip Montfermeil out of the French republic, and leave it marooned in its own liminal space, a miniature world inside of France, but not of France.

In 2019, Ladj Ly, who grew up in Montfermeil, and was a key player in the 2005 uprising, released Les Misérables, a film set in 2018 immediately following France’s victory in the World Cup. It tells the story of three police officers, Stéphane Ruiz, who has recently been transferred to Paris to be closer to his estranged wife and kid, Chris, a cocky racist who likes to throw his weight around the neighborhood, and hassle teenage girls, and Gwada a tall, first generation French citizen descended from Malian immigrants who grew up in the banlieu and might be said to stand in for Ladj Ly himself. Les Misérables is not a simplistic “fuck the police” movie. Ladj Ly’s view of the French police is suprisingly nuanced and intelligent. Stéphane, Chris, and Gwada are not straight up villains. They are not, however, heroes like Captain Furillo in Hill Street Blues or Paul Newman’s Murphy in Fort Apache the Bronx. They are more like burned out high-school teachers doing time until they can collect their pension, trying to make the best of a bad situation where they do not represent the authority of a legitimate, democratic government, but are simply one gang among many.

Montfermeil, in Ladj Ly’s imagination is like Bosnia or current day Syria, a failed state full of competing factions never quite breaking out into open conflict, but always threatening a many sided civil war. There are the police, who do their best to keep the peace, but are in way over there heads. There are the local drug dealers and organized criminals led by a man known as The Mayor, who is played by Steve Tientcheu. There is the Muslim Brotherhood, a Salafist organization led by Salah, who is played by Almamy Kanoute, who emerged from the 2005 as a mediator between the banlieu and the police. There is the Zefferelli Circus, owned by a heavily armed gang of gypsies led by a man named “Zorro.” Finally there are the local teenagers, aimless youth with little or no chance to work their way into the French middle-class, who spend all day having out in the neighborhood looking for trouble so they can brag about it later on social media. Two of them, Issa, who is rapidly on his way to becoming a juvenile delinquent and petty thief, and Buzz, a skinny, nerdy looking boy who uses a drone to spy on local girls through their windows, provoke the crisis central to the film’s plot.

As Chris and Gwada show Stéphane around the neighborhood on his first day on the job, Zorro and the Gypsies from the Zefferelli Circus hold The Mayor and his gang at gunpoint. The police manage to stop an immediate bloodbath, but the clock is ticking. Someone has stolen “Johnny” the baby lion cub from the circus. Since Zorro is convinced that either the Mayor was behind the crime, or can very quickly locate whoever it was, and since the Mayor barely has a clue what Zorro is even talking about, the situation is extraordinarily dangerous, with the police trying to play the role of United Nations peacekeepers, and Zorro and the Mayor as Alija Izetbegović and Radovan Karadzic ready to kick off the seige of Sarajevo. With the help of Salah and the Muslim brotherhood, Chris, Stéphane, and Gwada figure out that Issa, who has a long history of trouble with the police, probably has the lion cub, but when they corner him on the playground, they are attacked by a mob of local teenagers and can’t get him into the car to take him down to the station. Gwada is pepper sprayed in the face with his own cannister, and in his pain, confusion and anger, fires off a flash bang grenade that hits Issa in the face. Stéphane, who is the most intelligent and sensitive of the three policemen, wants to take the boy to the emergency room lest he die from traumatic brain injury or lose an eye, but Chris and Gwada don’t want to file a report. Finally they look overhead to notice that the entire incident had been recorded by the drone piloted by Buzz. Things have gone from bad, the theft of the lion cub, to worse, Issa being shot in the face and gravely wounded, to catastrophic, a video that if released publicly could send the entire banlieu up in flames, and send Chris, Stéphane, and Gwada to jail.

The police, who started out the day trying to do the right thing and keep the peace, are now involved in a coverup where they kidnap Issa and refuse him medical care, bully the Salah and The Mayor, desperately try to appease Zorro and the gypsies until they can get them what they want, and hunt down Buzz so they can destroy the evidence. What’s striking about the transformation is that there is no transformation. Christ, Stéphane, and Gwada barely change. They have gone from incompent burnouts to incompetent burnouts trying to cover up a crime. The clever script finsesses us so easily into their mindset that we end up rooting for them as they chase down the terrified Buzz, a boy so unimposing that he’s bullied by the local teenage girls he tries to spy on, and destroy his drone. While Buzz may not be a tough guy, however, he is clever enough to take the secure digital card and the recording of the video to Salah, who is the only man in the neighborhood who can protect him not only from the police, but from The Mayor and the local criminals. Indeed, Salafi Islam is portrayed in a remarkably positive light with Salah, the reformed criminal, seemingly the most reasonable man in Banlieu. While Chris and Gwada get nowhere with their threats and bullying, Stéphane, who has maintained his sanity throughout the day and has done his best to get Issa what medical care he can, plays the diplomat. He carefully explains to Salah that the release of the video could mean civil war and apocalpytic catastrophe, that while Chris is an asshole and a racist and Gwada an incompetant who lost his cool, that he will keep the memory card and the video in his possession for safekeeping as a way to keep his volitile colleagues under control. Should Chris and Gwada misbehave more, he will threaten to turn the video over to the prosecutor, and send them both to jail. Salah hands over the video and the crisis is seemingly averted. The coverup is successful.

Stéphane, however, does not take into account the effect that the now mutilated Issa will have on the local teenagers. His clumsy attempt to make Issa apologize to Zorro turns into a disaster when Zorro jokingly locks the boy in a case with one of his lions and threatens to have him killed. Issa, who has rather remarkably been transformed into a bitter looking old man, snaps, realizes that in French society he is merely a piece of meat to be eaten. The three police officers go home that night to their estranged faimilies. Chris bullies his own daughters the way he bullied three random girls early in the movie. Gwada goes to his Malian mother for comfort, confessing that he doesn’t think he’ll ever fit into French society. Stéphane tries to talk to his estranged wife and son. All three men have miserable home lives that both reflect their burnout and unhappiness on the job, and make them unable to do the job well. When they show up the next day, Issa and his friends are waiting. They launch a violent, well organized insurrection that drives The Mayor off the streets and traps the three terrified police officers in a stairwell. Stéphane, who had performed competently on his first day on the job, now surrenders his reason and better judgement, and becomes a carbon copy of Chris and Gwada, a violent burnout trapped in a burning stairwell, pointing his gun at a group of teenagers who have him cornered with Molotov cocktails. The movie ends with the standoff, but strongly hints that they will all most likely die a violent death together, the burned out police, and the violent, nihilistic teenagers.

Les Misérables is free on Amazon if you have an account and are willing to watch several long ads. In many ways this movie is a bridge between Mathieu Kassovitz’s classic La Haine and an earlier American movie about a nihlistic teenage uprising called Over the Edge, which as many people know was the inspiration for Nirvana’s iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit video. Over the Edge is available free on Tubi and is well worth watching. Les Misérables is not a polished technical masterpiece like La Haine or a revolutionary manifesto like Over the Edge, but it is a highly intelligent examination of a failed state brought down to the mico-level of a single banlieu. It is a complex, subtle examination of a social stalemate and the effect it has on the people living in an eternally liminal space with no chance of progressing out of it to the mainstream. Unlike Over the Edge, which is set in the relatively conservative United States, where violent revolution is always far off in the future or buried in the past and still feels like a romantic dream, Les Misérables is weary of rebellion and revolution. Buzz, Issa and their fellow teenagers are trapped inside the underclass, and while they rebel, the film makes clear that they are going to end up in exactly the same place where they started. Les Misérables is a striking portrait of a frozen society with no way out, a hellish trap brilliantly put on screen in the film’s last scene, where the only resolution seems to be a universal conflaturation that will destroy everything.

History and Politics

Citizenship Is Not a Precious Metal

January 18, 2026 srogouski Leave a comment

The dramatic scenes from Minneapolis, the invasion of the city by heavily armed ICE agents, the astroturfed viral videos uncovering “fraud” at Somali run daycare centers, the high-profile confrontations between the federal government and Mayor Jacob Frey, the murder of Renee Nicole Good by Jonathan Ross, have been orchestrated by the Trump Administration for one specific purpose, to create a climate of fear and anxiety that will discourage future immigration to the United States from the global south. While many of Trump’s supporters have objected to the unhinged brutality of the highly publicized ICE raids, the MAGA movement as a whole supports the intent behind them, which is to increase the value of American citizenship by limiting its supply. American citizenship, they reason, is like a precious metal, valuable because it it rare.

Heritage Americans, Mayflower descendants, people whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, Protestant Americans of British Isles, Huguenot or Dutch descent, are the equivalent of gold, the cultural baseline to which we all must aspire. The descendants of German and Irish immigrants from the 1840s, people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, and then helped settle North Midwest, are like Silver, less valuable than gold, not the material that was used to build the nation’s foundation, but still acceptable for commercial exchange. It is only when we get to the late 19th Century that the ethnic money supply has become severely deflated. Southern and Eastern Europeans, Poles, Italians, Ashkenazi Jews, Greeks, Serbo-Croatians, Finns, Bohemians, Hungarians, Syrians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians, are like bronze, not valuable in and of themselves, but acceptable in limited quantities to be mixed with gold and silver. They are not to be emulated. They can become Americans only insofar as they erase their old identities and do their best to imitate the original “heritage Americans.” Ellis Island Americans, who have remained in North America too long, and have not sufficiently raised their children to emulate heritage Americans, will tend to corrupt the culture and transform their environment into something like “Jersey Shore” or “The Sopranos.” The fall of America began in 1965, with the repeal of the Johnson Reed Act, which froze the demographics of the United States where it was in 1924, and the admission of non-white immigrants from the global south. The newer immigrants are like copper, the material that ruined the money supply of the Roman Empire during the Crisis of the Third Century. Ever since then the value of American citizenship has been like a late Roman coin, a lightweight shadow of its former self, a fraction of the value that it was in 1776.

Donald Trump and the Maga movement, however, make a critical mistake that comes from a fundamental misreading of American history. American citizenship is not a precious metal. It is paper money that must be backed by precious metals. American citizenship was valuable from 1776 to 1890, mainly for two reasons, slavery and free land. To be a white man in 2026 means nothing. From 1776 to 1890, however, a white man in America not only got to vote, he got own actual human beings. However he started out, it mattered little whether or not he was the younger son of a lord from the South of England who graduated from Eton or a poor Scot driven off his land by the Highland Clearances, if he had enough drive and brutality to buy a slave, he could lay claim to some ethnically cleansed Cherokee land in the Southeast and start a cotton plantation. If he got enough work out of the first slave, he could buy a female slave, and not only breed more either to work or to sell, he could sire his own offspring, who, being of lighter complexion, could be put to work in the house, or if they were attractive females who could pass for white, be sold at a premium. Even after slavery was abolished in 1865, that left 25 or 30 years where the frontier was still wide open. A German immigrant who served in the Union Army during the Civil War and had gotten practiced in the use of the rifle and bayonet could go out to Minnesota, maybe to the very spot where Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good, kill a few Indians, and settle down, the lord of his own private little domain, a practice that was backed with the full credit and faith of the United States government after Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law in 1862. Of course the Indians often put up a stiff resistance against having their hunting grounds invaded by immigrants and often killed or scalped white settlers without mercy. This meant that the better you were at violence, the more Indians you could kill, the more land you got. For the American ruling class, the immigrants and pioneers played a crucial role clearing and “civilizing” the west, so when they ran into a situation they couldn’t quite handle, like the Dakota War of 1862, the federal government would send the US Cavalry and stage mass executions, like the hanging of 38 Dakota Indians on December 26, 1862.

Later in the 19th Century, as new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flooded the industrial cities and the coal mines looking for work, three crucial events devalued the worth of American citizenship. In 1890, the Census Bureau declared that the frontier was closed. There was no more free Indian land to steal. All of it had either been claimed, or allocated to the federal government. This meant that unlike old stock heritage Americans, or the Irish and Germans of the 1840s, the newer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe no longer had the option of picking up a gun, heading west, shooting a few Indians and establishing a homestead. That Italian or Pole was stuck in the factory, his only way out either organized crime, or a labor union, both of which had to ruthlessly suppressed by the federal government. Even immigrants from England and Germany, however, also found themselves without real options in the west, and no longer had the ability to set themselves up as small capitalists on stolen land The English had the advantage of knowing the language. The Germans were probably literate. Other than that, however, they were no different from the newer immigrants, and probably knew less about navigating city hall and the civil service than the Irish. Anglo Saxon blood had become severely devalued.

It is no accident that in 1893, the same year that Frederick Jackson Turner published his classic The Significance of the Frontier in American History the Panic of 1893 began. The Gilded Age boom that had followed the end of the Civil War was officially over. The first Great Depression had begun. By 1895, things had gotten so bad that the United States government came close to declaring bankruptcy after the British called in their gold reserves. Only a last minute meeting between President Grover Cleveland and millionaire banker J.P. Morgan prevented the United States from going off the gold standard. If J.P. Morgan and Grover Cleveland saved the dollar, then something had to be done to save the value of American citizenship, which was becoming more and more worthless with the arrival of the new immigrants. The solution was Nordic Supremacy. Men like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard developed the theory that the American character had developed, not by raping slaves and killing Indians, but by the fact that the original American colonists were all descended from Northwestern Europe. They were Aryans, Nordics as compared to Alpines (Eastern Europeans) or Mediterraneans (Southern Europeans). They were tall, fair skinned, blond haired, blue eyed, and above all, had big heads and large brain pans. In 1924, the Johnson Reed Act, which severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, and left immigration from Germany, France, and the British Isles largely unregulated, essentially served to bail out native Anglo Saxon whiteness exactly the way the deal between Grover Cleveland and J.P. Morgan bailed out the dollar. Citizenship had been reestablished on a sound money basis, scarcity. Immigrants from European clamoring to move to North American would have to wait in line while they could be sorted according to their quality. A similar process happened in Germany. After the fall of the German Empire in 1918 and the deflation of the Mark in the 1920s devalued German citizenship, Hitler first tried to reestablish German identity along the lines of the Nordic supremacist pseudoscience developed by Madison Grant, and then tried to reestablish the American frontier in the East, with every German having the same rights to kill Slavs and steal their land as Americans used to have over the Indians. The German identity would be backed by the precious metal of Polish and Russian land ready to be cleared of its indigenous inhabitants.

For conservatives and the alt-right, for the MAGA movement, for Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, the Johnson Reed Act worked like a charm. Only thirty years later the United States was the hegemonic world power, not only financially and militarily but culturally. By limiting immigration and by putting the Aryan identity back on a sound money basis, the government had forced the newer immigrants to assimilate. Hollywood, for example, even though it was largely run by Ashkenazi Jews, and even though its actors and screenwriters were drawn largely from the newer immigrants, was quintessentially Americans precisely because the newer ethnic groups had learned to fake being “heritage Americans.” Jews and Italians took on Anglo Saxon stage names. Hair was dyed blond. Diction was refined into the “Mid Atlantic” accent, a way of speaking that let old school WASPS like Katherine Hepburn and Howard Hawks set the style. Even the Southern Italian Catholic Frank Capra told the story of Amadeo Giannini and the Bank of America by casting the eminently Anglo Saxon Jimmy Stewart as Giannini and renaming the Bank of America as the “Bailey Savings and Loan.” By the 1950s even the haughty French wanted to look like Humphrey Bogart. American culture was unified, strong, widely imitated, and above all white and conservative. In the 1950s, after the Great Depression had allowed too many Jewish communists and radicals to infiltrate the government and the movies, Joe McCarthy and the execution of the Rosenbergs purged the country of any potential pro-Soviet radicalism. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in turn, all dressed in identical corporate suits and ties, drove the mafia underground and the bootleggers back to the West Virginia Hills.

The idea that the Johnson Reed Act saved American culture and reestablished the value of American citizenship on a solid basis, however, is an illusion based largely on how closely the Great Depression followed the end of the new immigration, how quickly 1929 barked at the heels of 1924. What reestablished the value of American citizenship was not limiting immigration, but the strong social democratic policies of Franklin Roosevelt and the labor movement, the New Deal and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). The newer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe learned how to be productive citizens, not by pretending they were descended from the Mayflower, but on the picket line, in the labor school, and on the sitdown strike. In the 1930s, the Communist Party trained far more people to become good Americans than the Daughters of the American Revolution. While Franklin Roosevelt, the aristocratic, old school “heritage American” was the face of the New Deal, the newer immigrants were its muscle. The mass mobilization and full employment that came with World War II turned out to be a great university to train the raw material so recently arrived from Southern and Eastern Europeans to be good citizens of a democratic republic. The new ideal was not Anglo Saxon, but multicultural, not the Mayflower and the Puritan commonwealth, but the infantry platoon with a Polish, Italian, Irish and Hispanic soldier, and a young “heritage American” lieutenant, fresh from West Point, come to Europe to fight fascism exactly the way his grandfather fought slavery at the Battle of Gettysburg. The night before D-Day these people were still the children of immigrants, but when they got back home, they were 100% Americans as surely as if their ancestors had landed on Plymouth Rock with William Bradford and Myles Standish. With the GI Bill they went to college on the government dime, and bought houses in the newly built suburbs with low interest loans. The 1950s and 1960s were the highpoint of the United States as a country. Everybody not only wanted to be an American. Everybody in the world knew exactly what an American was.

1965 and the Hart-Celler Act were not responsible for the downfall of American civilization. The seeds of its destruction were already present in 1945. First of all, to state the obvious, the grand bargain of 1924, where Eastern and Southern Europeans gave up their identity to become 100% Americans, did not include blacks and native Americans. They never even got the offer. We fought World War II with a segregated army. Roosevelt segregated the New Deal, interned Japanese Americans for the crime of being Japanese, and refused to sign an anti-lynching bill for fear that it would alienate Southern Democrats. Largely denied the opportunity to serve in the Army, African Americans were denied the benefits of the GI Bill, redlined out of the newly build suburbs, confined to segregated schools in the inner city, denied the right to vote in the Jim Crow South, and erased from the popular culture we exported overseas. Indeed, since the anti-miscegenation laws in California were not repealed until the late 1950s, even a director who wanted to cast black or Asian actors did so at the risk of jail. The failure of Franklin Roosevelt to address racism and segregation is indeed one of the great tragedies of American history, a failure that still divides us today, but an even greater problem was the New Deal’s authoritarianism, its establishment of a permanent security state funded and controlled by corporate power. It turned a nation of pioneers and Indian killers into a nation of employees, a culture of independent small farmers into a culture of obedient middle managers. It did nothing to solve the crisis caused by the closing of the frontier in 1890. The new grand bargain signed by Ellis Island immigrants, that they would give up radicalism for upward mobility and prosperity, the sitdown strike for the two week vacation, the Communist Party for the Democrats and Republicans, the dream of revolution for the GI Bill and a house on Long Island, meant that the newer immigrants would never experience what it had originally meant to be an American, that they would always be loyal servants to some great corporation and never independent small farmers. The United States, the first country in the west never to have gone through feudalism, was now a series of great lords of great corporations, each with thousands of prosperous but still dependent serfs working on his estate.

So what does it mean to be a citizen of the United States in 2026, to possess a currency no longer backed by the hard precious metals of slavery and free land. You can vote, but only for one of two identical corporate parties. You can own a house, but only if you pay the yearly rent to the state in the form of property taxes. You can send your kids to a public school, which will be grim, hierarchical, and teach obedience more than independent, critical thought. Your job can be taken at any time, by an immigrant or an H1B. Your ethnicity, your religion, and your history mean nothing. You have been mashed into an undifferentiated corporate goo. The only people who still have a frontier are Jews, the only religion and ethnicity still backed by the hard currency of stolen land is Judaism. Indeed, if I’m Jewish, I can, whenever I choose, pick up a gun, go to the West Bank, and steal a Palestinian’s house. My land acquisition will be backed by the full faith and credit of the Israeli and American government. If the owner tries to fight back, I can call him a terrorist and kill his kids. For everybody else, “whiteness” is deflated fiat currency backed by nothing at all. If an American of English descent went to London to reclaim his ancestral land from an immigrant based on some ancient claim, they’d lock him up in an insane asylum. Since citizenship, therefore, is no longer a hard currency backed by slavery and stolen Indian land, scarcity no longer increases its value. Indeed, in 2026, scarcity does the opposite. The more you limit citizenship, the less it’s worth.

By convincing so many Americans that by increasing the scarcity of American citizenship he is increasing its value, Trump has pulled off a great scam. Citizenship and identity backed by nothing only become valuable when they lead to mass collective action, and radical change. The illegal immigrants aren’t going away. They are here to stay. Americans have a choice. We can agitate for them to have the vote, the right to organize unions, and agitate for better wages, or we can let the ruling class keep a large part of the workforce as a permanent underclass of second class citizens with no rights at all. Our ancestors were smarter than that. Every 19 year old private in the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg well knew that if the Confederacy triumphed, then chattel slavery would inevitably not only reduce him to wage slavery, but probably chattel slavery as well. The call should be not only to “abolish ICE” but to enfranchise its victims. Let the whole working class go to the polls and vote, not just part of it. If you want to win the class war you don’t do your enemy a favor and limit the size of your army. We need all the soldiers we can get.

History and Politics

From the Johnson Reed Act to The Birth Certificate: How Trump Weaponized “The Bribe”

January 17, 2026 srogouski Leave a comment

When President Coolidge signed The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) into law, he tarnished what otherwise would have been a progressive record on racial issues. The same President who declared that “the rights of African Americans were just as sacred as those of any other citizen,” had effective endorsed a Nordic supremacist model of what it meant to be a “real American.” In spite of Noel Ignatiev’s argument that the Irish had to earn the right to be “white” by becoming the gendarmes of the WASP ruling class against African Americans, or the very obvious bigotry against Italian Americans demonstrated by the lynchings of Italian immigrants in 1891 in New Orleans, no distinction between old stock Americans whose ancestors had come over on the Mayflower and “Ellis Island Americans” had ever been written into law. The Johnson Reed Act changed all that, severely restricting new immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in favor of Northwestern Europe. As class warfare it was a masterstroke, driving a wedge through the “white working class,” and dividing the Germans and Irish, who were in the favored “nordic” category from Italians, Poles, Ashkenazi Jews, and Greeks, who had been declared “unfit to assimilate.” Yet few, if any, Americans of Southern and Eastern European descent at the time complained. By cutting off the horde of European refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution, Italian fascism, and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Johnson Reed Act had effectively opened up the path for full assimilation to those Southern and Eastern Europeans who had already arrived. It was in effect a bribe. Learn English, act Anglo Saxon, obey the law, and you might someday get to be that skilled German American foreman at the factory or that Irish police officer keeping you safe from the mafia and the Klan.

Often left out of the official liberal history of the 1920s is how black American intellectuals almost universally supported restrictions on immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. A. Philip Randolph, the African American labor leader who led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters said “we have to reduce it [immigration] to nothing… We favor shutting out the Germans from Germany, the Italians from Italy, the Hindus from India, the Chinese from China, and even the Negroes from the West Indies.” He justified his argument with purely economic reasoning, using language that mirrored the white nativists: “This country is suffering from immigrant indigestion. It is time to call a halt on this grand rush for American gold, which over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race-riots, and general social degradation.” W.E.B. Du Bois had a similarly “America First” stand on immigration. “The stopping of the importing of cheap White labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American Black labor.” He also mocked Madison Grant and the nordic supremacists, implying that when it came to reproduction, the blond, blue eyed elite was terrified of being replaced by Jews and Southern Italians. “The Nordics are a pure race… they are the salt of the earth and the chosen people. … And yet, despite all this, the Nordics are in panic… they fear that the ‘inferior’ races are going to swamp them.” In the 2010s, the semi-official liberal history of American racism, The 1619 Project, wrote Hispanics, Eastern and Southern Europeans, out of American history altogether, seeing the history of racism in the United States in purely binary terms, the old stock American slavemaster vs. the slave. The descendent of Eastern European serfs or Southern Italian peasants would still be on the hook for reparations, however, when the bill came due, since they now share in the “privilege of whiteness.” It also opens the door to antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Kevin McDonald, who argue, and not without reason, that once the bill for reparations comes due, Ashkenazi Jews will suddenly declare that they are not and have never been white. Indeed, many Zionists already argue that to label Israel a white, settler colonial project, is inherently antisemitic.

In 2008, Barack Obama pulled one of the great con jobs of all time, convincing the voters that his own resume was identical with the redemption of the United States from its dark, racist history. It’s not that he said anything out loud. He didn’t have to. The symbolism was too powerful, a black man sitting in the Oval Office where John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln once sat, the redemption too easy, “vote blue are you are forgiven for slavery and native American genocide,” for people to realize what would come next. From 2008 on, “progress” would be limited to the upper-class. Wall Street would get a bailout. Homeowners would get eviction notices. Silicon Valley would get massive government subsidies. Julian Assange would get a prison cell. There would be no more Great Societies, New Deals, or GI Bills. White women and black men who graduated from Ivy League universities would get a seat at the table and a profit sharing plan for the great American war machine. White men would go to the DEI seminar to be lectured about their “white fragility” by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Leftist and anti-imperialists were also left out in the cold. In the 2000s, if you believed that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime based on lies you were more than welcome at the antiwar march with the liberals who only believed bringing democracy to the Iraqi people was a good plan executed badly. If you had any questions about regime change in Syria and Libya, or the NATO proxy war in Ukraine you were labeled a “tankie,” and “Assadist” or a “Putin puppet.” It almost made you feel nostalgic for George W. Bush and the 2000s, where you were only told to “shut up and support the troops.” In 2016, elite liberals got a nasty surprise. Expecting a clean handoff of the Presidency from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton, they got Donald Trump, a man so openly racist, misogynistic, and reactionary he almost made George W. Bush look like John Quincy Adams. There was nothing in the liberal imagination that allowed people to understand what just happened, no imaginative framework that had allowed for Barack Hussein Obama to be followed by Donald Trump. All elite liberals could do was go full McCarthyite, screech “it was the Russians.” They had reached the terminus of their intellectual capabilities. From 2016, they would be irrelevant, and would no longer play any part in American history.

Back in 2008, when I attended a rally for John McCain in Scranton Pennsylvania, the one town in America that really seemed to define the idea of the “white working class” and the “Ellis Island Immigrant,” I got a preview of the future. Inside the rally there were signs that said “Country First” or “Clean Coal,” but once the rally was over and people emerged into the daylight, the official signs were quickly switched for signs that said “where’s the birth certificate.” The MAGA mentality was already out in full force, so much so that whenever I asked someone what the sign meant I only got a sarcastic remark or a quick brushoff, my confusion almost immediately identifying me as a liberal from New Jersey, or even worse yet New York City. Yes, I must have looked like an idiot asking them why they cared about John McCain’s birth certificate. I even brandished my own, which I still had in my wallet after renewing my passport. “Stanley W. Rogouski. Birthplace Newark New Jersey.” Who fucking cares about a fucking birth certificate. Jesus Christ.” Over the next year of course I realized that they had not been referring to John McCain’s birth certificate but Barack Obama’s, a conspiracy theory that had begun, not on the fringe, white supremacist far right, but with Sydney Blumenthal and the Clinton campaign. Barack Obama had not been born in Hawaii, which had never quite seemed 100% American anyway, but in Kenya. Essentially those “white ethnic Ellis Island immigrant” Americans in Scranton had been asking Barack Obama for his “papers.” A long simmering controversy had recently exploded in Luzerne County over the attempt of Mayor Lou Barletta to make English language the official language of nearby Hazleton and to fine landlords $1000 for renting to illegal immigrants. Little did I know this was the wave of the future, that grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people who had accepted the John Reed Act in exchange for becoming “Americans” were now demanding that the government enforce the same draconian restrictions on newer immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Two could play at that game, they had concluded. If liberals could win absolution from the sin of slavery and native American genocide in exchange for sending a black man to the White House, then “white ethnics” could demand that the bargain of 1924 be honored. Repeal the 1965 Hart Cellar Act and “Make America Great Again.” Like Henry Cabot Lodge and the old stock WASPS in 1924, Americans of Southern and Eastern European descent were demanding that the demographics of the United States be frozen in time, forever, the way they were during the Presidency of Calvin Coolidge.

In other words, Democrats and liberals in 2016 had no idea what kind of trap they had walked into by their nativist and McCarthyite turn to the far right in “Russiagate.” The more they accused Trump of being a Russian asset, the more “America First” conservatives accused Democrats of being Zionist assets dominated by Jews and neoconservatives. The neoconservatives themselves barely cared, now being in control of both major parties, having driving the few pathetic remaining McGovernites and non-interventionists out of the Democratic Party altogether and into the Quincy Institute. This not only let Donald Trump coopt traditional Republicans, it also let them market themselves as dissidents and rebels opposed to the “globalists.” Conservatism was now the “new punk.” Democrats and liberals were woke censors, school marms, scolds, frigid Me Too spinsters, Carrie Nation and the anti-Saloon movement, heirs to all the abuses that big government had inflicted on people over the centuries. What’s more, Democrats were not only prigs and moral scolds. They were not only elitists and servants of Wall Street. They were eugenicists and social engineers who intended to replace the “white working class” with cheap, low wage illegal immigrants, to destroy the power of American labor by flooding the country with a mass of raw material from the Third World. With the disintegration of cultural unity that came with the Internet and social media, the end of the monoculture, and the ensuing loneliness and alienation that already came with late stage capitalism only made worse, “papers” suddenly took on an exaggerated importance. You might not have any friends, but at least you had “papers.” You were “legal.” You might be a virgin at 25, but unlike Barack Obama, you still had “the birth certificate.” You might not have a job, plans for the future, stock options, savings, or even a home, but at least you were a real American. You had papers proving it. “They” didn’t.

Democrats and liberals, more out of touch the working class than ever, and believing that demographics were destiny, initially believed the problem would resolve itself. White people, they reassured themselves, soon wouldn’t even be the majority in the United States. They were bewildered, therefore, when Donald Trump not only won reelection in 2024, but won it by a comfortable margin. Even worse, many blacks, Hispanics, and Arab Americans appalled by the ongoing genocide in Gaza either withheld their vote from the Democrats, or just voted for the Republicans. The comic opera finally reached its crescendo in 2025 when Nick Fuentes, a Mexican American, became the most prominent “Generation Z” voice on the white nationalist right. “What’s going on,” liberals thought. “We’ve been wagging our fingers at the Irish for the past decade and reminding him that they weren’t even white 100 years ago and now Hispanics are claiming the privileges for themselves.” What liberals couldn’t comprehend and what they had chosen to forget was the bargain in 1924 that had been struck between old stock WASPS, German, Southern and Eastern European immigrants, and black labor leaders, that if you froze demographics in place the country could catch up and absorb everybody into the mainstream. The Great Depression, the New Deal and the full employment that came with the Second World War had nothing to do with the Johnson Reed Act, but they came so fast on its heels, 1929 to 1924, that they almost seemed connected. For Gen Z, cultural liberalism, immigration, multicultural tolerance, and sexual liberation had become associated with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Wall Street, and cheap labor. The New Deal, full employment, the GI Bill and the massive prosperity that followed the Second World War had become associated with the Johnson Reed Act and traditional “nordic supremacy.” Even Hispanics like Nick Fuentes had bought into the grand bargain of 1924. If liberals had fooled themselves into believing in trickle down progress, that if you diversified the board of directors at Raytheon, and got more blacks into Harvard and Yale, it would benefit black people and Hispanics doing gig work for DoorDash and Uber or working at the Amazon Warehouse, then conservatives had fooled themselves into believing that American citizenship was a precious metal, that the more rare it was, the more valuable it was. They never quite realized that it was the opposite, that American citizenship had no value unless everybody had it, that the ruling class had no intention of getting rid of the “illegals,” only keeping them permanently in a state of disenfranchised semi-slavery with no right to join unions and vote, or demand better wages, that the only reason they were being “replaced” was because they had made themselves replaceable by refusing to see any struggle for working class rights as collective and universal. They demanded everything for themselves and their own families and nothing for everybody else. They got nothing for everybody.

news

Trump Bans Immigration to the USA from 75 Countries, Including Kosovo (which is Serbia).

January 15, 2026 srogouski 4 Comments

It’s not an outright ban. But the State Department released a notice informing 75 governments that they will not process immigrant visas from their countries. Here is a list of the temporarily banned countries.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-immigration-visas-79909bd01e9e1e3dedde144f865a1b9d

I am not able to make sense of this list.

It’s not necessarily racist. There are plenty of white (or somewhat white) ecountries, Russia, Belarus, Uruguay, Moldova, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia, Brazil, Columbia, Lebanon, Georgia, Albania, and most suprisingly of all, Kosovo.

The United States will no longer take immigrants from Kosovo.

I have spoken to followers of the MAGA movement who have told me that what all of these countries have in common is that nobody likes Americans. This is not true. Some of the most anti-American countries in the world (like Greece and France) have not been banned. Yet Kosovo, probably the most pro-American country on earth, will no longer be allowed to send immigrants to the United States, even though the national anthem of Kosovo is called Thank You USA.

THE NATIONAL ANTHEM OF KOSOVO IS LITERALLY CALLED THANK YOU USA.

thank you usa lyrics
[chorus]
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend

[verse 1]
thank you usa
stopping genocide
helping small kosova
stopping the wrong fight
in 1999, helping in kosova
two men shaking hands
clinton and rugova
[chorus]
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend

[verse 2]
this work that we do
the way we thank you
this song that we sing
memories will bring
in so many countries
you are keeping peace
you are the life saver
you are pain release

[chorus]
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend
thank you usa
you are my best friend
you are the peace keeper
you are the legend

Poor Kosovo. The only three Balkan countries still allowed to send immigrants to America are Serbia (which is full of anti-American Russophiles), Croatia (which is full of Nazis), and Slovenia (which is where Slavoj Zizek is from). If I had to guess I’d say these are the only three countries in the Balkans anybody in the Trump adminstration has heard of.

I get Russia. It appeases Democrats and liberals. I get Belarus. They don’t send immigrants to the USA anyway. I don’t get Brazil and Uruguay. In fact, I live in a largely Brazillian neighborhood. Everybody is very nice, petty bourgeoisie and anxious to assimilate to white Anglo Saxon Protestant culture. My neighborhood is full of Evangelical Protestant churches that give services in Portuguese.

Some of the other countries are baffling. Why is Tunesia (which is largely secular) on the list but not Saudi Arabia (which is where all the 9/11 hijackers came from). Why is Montenegro on the list? They’re mostly Serbians. Why is Thailand on the list? Where are white American men going to get their sex slaves? Why Armenia? Armenians are like the Greeks of Southwest Asia. They are one of the richest, most educated diasporas in the world. Why Jamaica? That means Bob Marley could not have become an American. Most baffling of all is Kazakhstan. Borat has been officially banned from America.

At least the Johnson Reed Act made sense.

This list is just dumb. I guess it’s a list of countries where they forgot to bribe Trump and Stephen Miller.

Film, History and Politics, news

Did the Chickens Come Home to Roost for Renee Good?

January 15, 2026 srogouski 2 Comments

While John F. Kennedy is often remembered fondly by the post-millennial American left, especially for his promise to break the CIA into a 1000 pieces and to require AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, many American dissidents at the time thought much less highly of the 35th President of the United States. On November 10, 1963, shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, the black nationalist leader Malcolm X gave his then infamous, now classic remark on the “chickens coming home to roost.” John F. Kennedy, he argued, as the Commander in Chief of the American Empire, got what he deserved. While this sounds petty and mean spirited today, it’s important to remember that at the time the White House was rumored to have been involved in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Ngo Dinh Diem, the American puppet leader of South Vietnam. It has since been confirmed that President Eisenhower gave the order to kill Lumumba. Whether or not John F Kennedy gave the order to kill Diem or if Robert Kennedy was directly involved in numerous plots to kill Fidel Castro is still up for debate. In early December, after Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm X to be silenced, the New York Times reported on the controversy.

PDF file of the NY Times article from December 2, 1963 on Malcolm X and the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas

Unlike John F. Kennedy, Renee Good was not the Commander in Chief of the American Empire. She didn’t graduate from Choate or Harvard. Her father isn’t a bank president or the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, strictly speaking, she did have more “white privilege” then Kennedy, her original named “Macklin” indicating Ulster Scots descent. The 35th President of the United was a “white ethnic.” Renee Good was a “heritage American.” In fact, being of mostly German heritage and Protestant, even I have more “white privilege” than Kennedy did. For all my white privilege, I’m still worried about how to the rent. It is not, however, my intention to engage in a reductio ad absurdum, which is ridiculously easy when it comes to the terminally online far left. I want to examine seriously the argument that it is hypocritical to care about Renee Good’s extrajudicial execution by the American government when, for example, over 100,000 people in Gaza have been killed by the American client state of Israel over the past 2 years. African Americans are regularly gunned down by the police, and any American citizen who looks Hispanic is now likely to be arbitrarily detained at any time by jackbooted government thugs and asked for his “papers.”

A left-wing YouTuber who goes by the handle Bad Empanada, who appears to be an Australian currently living in Argentina, has taken the argument a step further. The American “left,” by which he means progessive Democrats and people who belong to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), are even more hypocritical than the the average apolitical American, or even the average MAGA supporter. Bad Empanada detests Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, but he reserves most of his scorn for a candidate for the Democratic nominee for the Maine Senate named Graham Platner. Platner, he argues, having served in the United States military in Iraq, and then as a Blackwater mercenary, is a bone fide war criminal. That Platner is a also democratic socialist who supports Medicare for All makes it even worse. Left wing social media influencers like Hasan Piker and Emma Vigeland, who support Platner, are the worst of the worst, hypocritical, chauvinist, white Americans who are willing to trade black and brown lives in the global south for “treats” for their fellow white people in the United States. Bad Empanada, like many third worldists and neo-Maoists, aggressively opposes any attempts to reform capitalism in Western Europe and the United States. Universal healthcare for people in North America and Western Europe will inevitably come from wealth extracted from countries currently suffering under American sanctions and proxy wars.

The Attlee government essentially pursued a policy of issuing ‘IOUs’ to the colonies in return for the dollars earned from key exports such as rubber and tin from Malaya and cocoa from Ghana. Britain’s post-war reconstruction employed ‘a more systematic exploitation of colonies than at any previous time in imperial history’ – with the active support of the labour bureaucracy.[1] The trade union leader, Ernest Bevin, declared: ‘I am not prepared to sacrifice the British empire [because] it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.’ As the Trinidadian Marxist George Padmore put it, these labour lieutenants of imperialism wanted to turn the British working class into collective ‘shareholders of the Empire.’

Lieutenants of imperialism: social democracy’s imperialist soul

In an earlier article, I argued that Renee Good had been killed largely because she was a queer woman who had escaped from the conservative plantation. Jonathan Ross, her executioner, played the role of slave catcher and overseer. Good’s poetry, which spoke to her difficulty finding meaning in life after leaving the Christian church, reflected her struggle to leave her conservative hometown of Colordado Springs, and establish herself in the more liberal Minneapolis. In many ways, Good was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is no accident that the Trump aministration and the Israel Lobby are targeting the Somali diaspora in Minnesota. It appears that the breakaway state of “Somaliland” will be used in the not to distant future as a base to attack the Houthis in Yemen and as the eventual place where Israel will “transfer” what remains of the Palestinians in Gaza. What’s more, Ilhan Omar, a prominant American Muslim and critic of Israel represents Minneapolis in Congress. Tim Waltz, the Governor of Minnesota and Jacob Frey, the Mayor of Minneapolis, have been harsh critics of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. So in went thousands of federal immigration agents, and there was Renee Macklin and her partner Rebecca Good, who have both been confirmed as having been active participants in the anti-ICE demostrations. How seriously they were committed to defending the Somali community is open to question. Were they dilettante weekend protesters or serious activists? Were they actively committed to dismantling American imperialism or white supremacy, or were they in it just for the cheap kick of yelling at a federal agent?

In the the widely circulated video taken by Jonathan Ross himself just before Good’s death, we can hear Rebecca Good invoking her “white privilege.” You can’t do this to me, she essentially argues. I’m not only an American citizen but a disabled veteran.

0:29
NOT MAD. THAT’S OKAY. WE DON’T
0:31
CHANGE OUR PLATES EVERY MORNING.
0:32
JUST SO YOU KNOW, IT’LL BE THE
0:34
SAME PLATE WHEN YOU COME. TALK
0:35
TO US LATER. THAT’S FINE. US
0:39
CITIZEN. YOU WANT TO COME AT US?
0:40
YOU WANT TO COME AT US? I SAY GO
0:43
GET YOURSELF SOME LUNCH, BIG
0:44
BOY.

It’s not hard to mock Rebecca Good in this video for invoking her white privilege and her status as an American citizen against Johnathan Ross. There is a reason both women have drawn the scorn, not only of the far right, but of the third worldist left. Neither Renee Good nor nor her wife Rebecca realized that the “chickens had come home to roost.” Their particpation in the anti-ICE demonstration was a kind of self-indulgence, a way to deny that they had any stake in the “white privilege” that ICE is defending at gunpoint. In fact, as early as 1958, in his movie The Defiant Ones, the liberal director Stanley Kramer mocked the absurdity of invoking white privilage when either the state or a racist mob, or a racist mob paid by the state like ICE, has already decided that you’re the enemy. Playing two escaped convicts on the run from a chain gang, Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier are captured trying to rob a work camp supply store. After knocking the guard unconscious, they are accused of murder and summarily sentenced to death. “You can’t lynch me,” Tony Curtis says. “I’m a white man.” Poiter merely looks in his direction as if to say “are you kidding me?”

0:02 Don’t you know there’s a–a reward for escaped convicts?

0:07 Rewards always say “Dead or alive.”

0:16 Don’t you understand?

0:19 You can’t go lynching me.

0:21 I’m a white man.

0:25 MACK: You are?

0:26 I’ll tell you the kind of white man you are.

0:31 Spit on him.

0:32 For God’s sake, Mack.

0:32 Go on!

0:35 Mack. Mack.

0:35 Spit on him.

0:36 Let me alone, Sam!

0:39 We’re just having a little fun, huh, boys?

While I find “Bad Empada’s” tone grating and his use of outrage to work the YouTube algorithm for clicks and Patreon donations just as hypocritical as Rebecca Good’s protest that Ross couldn’t touch her because she was a disabled veteran — “you can’t lynch me I’m a white man” — I don’t necessarily disagree with him. In fact, I’ve enjoyed his many rants against liberal Zionists and anti-Zionist Jews denouncing them for thinking they’re special just because they go to a protst or two. It’s no different for Americans. Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re not exactly popular in the world. People are less and less willing to distinguish us from our government since we seem so unwilling to challenge it. After all, we didn’t protest the bombing of Serbia. We did protest the invasion of Iraq but they were mostly permitted protests on a Sunday afternoon in Washington DC or New York, which caused little or no disruption and could safely be ignored by the Bush administration. White Americans largely did not come out in support of Black Lives Matter or the Native Americans Obama attacked at Standing Rock. We did not protest the regime change in Libya. White American anarchists like David Graeber and the leadership of Occupy Wall Street actively supported the dirty war in Syria against Assad and the pseudo leftist, pseudo leftist because guarded by US Marines, enclave in Rojava. White Americans have not protested the genocide in Gaza on a mass scale. The small demonstrations on elite college campuses like Columbia were led by Arab immigrants, who were then targeted by ICE, the Trump Administration, and fascist Israeli organizations like Betar. White Americans deserve little or no sympathy from the rest of the world. If we are now perceived as the enemy it’s because our grace period has run out. We’ve acted like the enemy for far too long. So when one of us gets killed by the American state, all most people in the world can do is echo Malcolm X and point out that our karma has finally presented us with the bill. The chickens have come home to roost.

l don’t think anybody here would deny that when you send chickens out in the morning from your barnyard, those chickens will return that evening to your barnyard, not your neighbor’s barnyard. I think this is a prime example of the devil’s chickens coming back home to roost. That the chickens that he sent out, the violence that he’s perpetrated in other countries, here and abroad, four children in Birmingham, or Medgar Evers, or the mangrove in Africa. I think this same violence has come back to claim one of their own. Now, being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never made me sad. ln fact, it’s only made me glad.

And yet……….And yet……..Unlike Bad Empanada I’m not going to jerk myself off. Bad Empanada is not only a white man who grew up on stolen indigenous land in Australia, he’s a white man from a wealthy country, Australia, who moved to the still white but impoversished country of Argentina to live as a digital nomad off of Google ad revenue and Patreon donations. Since he performs most of his angry leftist rants in English not Spanish, it’s clear who his target audience is, rich, guilty white Americans and English speaking citizens of the former British Commonwealth, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Has he even bothered to learn Spanish? Has he risked his life organizing against the authoritarian (and highly pro-Zionist) Javier Milei regime in Argentina? Rebecca good at least had some skin in the game. She stood up against ICE to protect her immigrant neighbors. She didn’t spend her time milking the Google algorithm for influencer bucks from the same rich westerners neo-Maoists and Third Worldists despise so much. After awhile, an online grift is just an online grift, even if it decides to cloak itself in sackcloth and ashes, and indulge itself in fire and brimestone speeches. Trolling for patreon money denouncing a queer woman murdered by the American state just because she was an American leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Who the fuck is some social media influencer too look down on anybody, especially when he operates on YouTube, a platform run by one of the largest American defense contractors in the world.

In the year since, Google has only deepened its commitment to being a military contractor. Two months ago, in order to take advantage of the federal contracts the corporation can gain under Trump, Google abandoned its pledge not to build AI for weapons or surveillance. In rapid succession, Google then acquired Israeli cloud security start-up Wiz, pursued partnerships with US Customs and Border Patrol to update towers by Israeli war contractor Elbit Systems with AI at the US-Mexico border, and launched an AI partnership with the largest war profiteer in the world: Lockheed Martin.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/google-employee-speaks-out-war-contracting

Indeed, in some ways Bad Empanada reminds me of Polanius, the pompous egoist with a million empty words, and little or no action. Bad Empanada argues that we Americans should get nothing, as we deserve. But as Hamlet remarked, if every man got what he deserved, nobody would escape a whipping.

POLONIUS My lord, I will use them according to their
desert.

HAMLET God’s bodykins, man, much better! Use every
man after his desert and who shall ’scape
whipping? Use them after your own honor and
dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in
your bounty. Take them in.

https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/2/2/

Renee Nicole Good deserved much better than she got.

We all do.

news

Scott Adams (1957-2026)

January 13, 2026 srogouski Leave a comment

Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert later turned white separatist and Donald Trump supporter, has died at the age of 67. I don’t like to brag, but I never liked Dilbert. I hated Scott Adams even before it was cool.

Back in the 1990s, the former antiwar activist Norman Solomon wrote a book called The Trouble With Dilbert. He correctly pointed out that far from being a satirist who attacks the power, Adams “punched down” on low level white color workers. Adams was an apologist for corporate downsizing and financialization. He was the court poet of “Neutron Jack” Welch. In other words, his heel turn in the 2010s not only could have been predicted. It was.

Solomon’s paperback, The Trouble With Dilbert, due out Monday, takes aim at Dilbert, Dogbert, co-worker Wally, the pointy-haired boss, even strip creator Scott Adams. Far from seeing Dilbert as a hapless corporate everyman, Solomon contends he is no less than “a tiny bolt on humongous corporate machinery.”

Solomon’s argument runs like this:

Dilbert pokes fun at ordinary workers and middle management, as if it’s totally their fault workplaces are inefficient.

In an era of job cuts and corporate abuses, Dilbert lets upper management off the hook.

Adams is sympathetic to corporate downsizing tactics and is cynically making scads of money by licensing his creations to anyone.

“Instead of being a weapon against mind-numbing corporate blather, Dilbert is a tool for propagating more of it,” Solomon writes.

https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1997/11/14/author-dismisses-dilbert-as-a-corporate-shill/

He got much worse as he got older.

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to the poll — that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” he said on the podcast episode. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”

Fortunately for Scott Adams, like most upper-middle-class suburbs in corporate America, Hell is mostly white. Upon arriving he will be outfitted for his Klan robes by Satan, the Grand Wizard of the infernal regions himself. He never quite got the joke. The white culture that he loved and which was supposedly threatened by blacks, immigrants and Jews, was the very same corporate culture he made millions of dollars “satirizing.”

History and Politics

The Masters of Destruction

January 13, 2026 srogouski 11 Comments

There are no philosopher kings. All governments, all social movements, from the most top-down and authoritarian, to the most “horizontal” and anarchic, are run by flawed sinners. Greed, jealousy, and resentment, racism, sexism, and bigotry, narrow minded rigidity, incompetance, and corruption lurk in the dark corners of the liberal demoracy, the Stalinist dictatorship, the Islamic theocracy, the ethnonationalist monarchy, the anarchist polycule, the BRICS as well as the rules based western order. There are no exceptions. There are few, if any differences that change with religion, skin color, or national origin. We are all simultaneously children of God, and children of the devil. Any government can be destroyed from within. Any revolution can be put down by divide and conquer.

The United States, as the imperial hegemon, as the British, French and Spanish before us, and as the Ottoman Turks, the Byzantines, and the Romans before them, maintains a special elite corps of men and women Ward Churchill once called Little Eichmanns. They do not work at fast food restaurants, factories, or warehouses. They do not worry about paying the rent. They are never lonely or sexually unsatisfied. They live in places like Bethesda Maryland, Greenwich, Connecticut, Short Hills, New Jersey, and Palo Alto California. They graduate from high-schools like Exeter, Andover, Groton, Eaton, Sidwell Friends, and the Punahou School in Honolulu. They go onto Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Brown, Yale, the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Almost invariably they make the Dean’s List and earn the immediate approval of their teachers. They come in all shapes, sizes and ideologies, but they are invariably soft-spoken, polite, well-dressed, and above all profesional. They are experts in human weakness, corruption, and vulnerability. They are specialists is engineering societal breakdown. The know how to turn minor disputes into civil war. They prevent negotiation and make diplomacy impossible. They are the masters of destruction.

As Jim Morrison once said “they have the guns. We have the numbers.” The American ruling class know that they are the minority, not only worldwide, but within the United States, that if the working class united tomorrow, the American Empire would fall the next day. In the 2010s, the social and cultural unity of the United States, artifically propped up by the aggressive militarism that followed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, collapsed. The illusion of progress represented by the election of Barack Obama as President did not hold after Obama revealed himself to be a rather bog standard neoliberal beholden to Wall Street on economic policy, and had no intention of dismantling the high-tech torture surveillance state set up by Dick Cheney under George W. Bush. The far right was the first to seize on the opportunity in the form of the “Tea Party,” a movement that portrayed itself as “libertarian” but had a dark undercurrent of white supremacy lurking beneath the surface. “Do you see,” they argued, “the less white American become, the more vulnerable we are to the elite globalists who destroyed the economy in 2008, and got bailed out by the first black President.”

A more serious challenge to the American ruling class came in 2011 from Occupy Wall Street and the anarchist far left and then from the social democratic left in 2016 in the form of Bernie Sanders. It is here where the masters of destruction proved to be the most useful. The political vision of the Tea Party and the populist far right does not threaten Wall Street or the Pentagon because it relies on an unrealistic ideal of an all white, all Christian America. The idea that you could built a homogenous Christian nationalist society over a long history of immigration, multiculturalism, religious freedom, and social and cultural liberalism is honestly just fatuous. All it does is provide shock troops and paramilitary enforcers for the ruling class, as the ICE protests of the Winter of 2025 and 2026 have so clearly demonstrated. A multicutural class war lead by anarchist left in the form of someone like David Graeber or the social democratic and populist left led by Bernie Sanders, the William Jennings Bryan of his generation, was exceptionally dangerous. It was here where the masters of destruction, led from behind the scenes by Barack Obama, proved most effective. Unlike the far right’s vision of an all white, homogenous America, the idea of the 99 Percent vs. the billionaires immediately moblized popular support from across the political spectrum. We were all in it together against the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of the world.

Occupy Wall Street was broken up by a sophisticated counterinsurgency campaign, which painted the occupiers in the media, not as a rising insurgency, but as a public nuisance. When Obama finally ordered the eviction in November, a coordinated effort by big city police forces largely controlled by Democrats, few people noticed. Militarized riot police and made up stories in the NY Post about homeless rapists, however, could only be a short term solution. The long term solution came in the form of both social division and economic opportunity. The ideology of “intersectionality,” which was developed in the elite universities and first rolled out in theh ruling private high schools by activists and intellectuals like Peggy McIntosh, who graduated from Harvard and taught a variety of posh Manhattan prep schools before moving onto Wellesly College, attacked the idea of class war, not from the right, but from the left. The supporters of Bernie Sanders were sexist, racist, middle-class white males who rejected Hillary Clnton and Barack Obama, not because they were servants of Wall Street, but because they were a woman and a black man.

Even more important was the growth of the influencer economy. Anybody who rose to prominance in either the anarchist far left, the populist far right, or the social democratic and liberal center left, could be easily bought off with Google ad money and clicks on TikTok. The YouTube algorithm was tightened during the Google “adpocalypse.” Silicon Vally money poured into political consulting and media startups led by men like Charlie Kirk and Tim Pool. People who, at one time, would have been on the street organizing protests found themelves running their own little influencer businesses on corporate social media, far more worried about getting their Patreon shut down then about getting their heads busted by riot police. Even the anarchist and tankie far left found themselves in a position where they could make rent by farming outrage on the Google algorithm for clicks and ad revenue.

Rebellion was now a business model, the more culturally radical the better. There was no need even to police the influencer economy ideologically. Instagram and TikTok became a center of the pro-Palestine solidarity movement. Larry Ellison’s purcase of TikTok and the subsequent repression of anti-Israel voices seemed almost besides the point. As long as leftist influencers were stoking anti-American and anti-Israel outrage for clicks and ad revenue and not leading disruptive protests on the streets they were easily contained. Indeed, “intersectionality” and the inflluencer economy complimented each other perfectly. You could sell the Landback movement white nationalism on the same channel. Right wing conspiracy theories and anti-imperialist outrage both got you ad revenue and Patreon donations. All of it benefited from the end of the monoculture, and the social crackup of American society along the lines, not of class, but of race, gender and sexual orientation. You cannot do market research on “the working class” unless you break them down into discrete categories of race, religion, and gender identity. The seemingly hostile ideologies of white nationalism and intersectionality, therefore, became equally useful to the masters of destruction, who did not think of themselves as a tool of counterinsurgency, but merely good marketing professionals and social demographers. If you can divide and conquer people by their identity, you can not only sell them ads, but sell them careers selling ads. If you can sell them careers selling ads, you can sell them on surveillance and counterinsurgency. The most important spooks of the 2010s were not colorful CIA operatives like E. Howard Hunt, but hipsters and urban professionals carefully growing their LinkedIn accounts.

Now the masters of destruction have turned their attention to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s appalling to realize that the same people who study enivornmental science also study how to poison the environment. The liberal professionals who conducted the bombing of Pančevo Serbia also know who to plan an an environmental cleanup. If you know what deadly chemicals to spill, you know what deady chemicals to cleanup. If you know what deadly chemicals to cleanup, you know what deadly chemicals to vaporize and release into the air and the water. If you’ve studied the long term effects of global warming on world peace, you have also studied the long term drought the city of Tehran has been suffering under for the last decade. The Islamic Republic, an authoritarian state founded in 1980, was popular as long as it kept the roads open and the sanitation services working, as long as it maintained the supply chains and brought clean water to the taps. Once an authoritarian state loses the ability to provide basic services, however, it loses it’s legitmacy in the eyes of the people. It’s one thing to dodge the religious police on the streets of Tehran if I know they’ll take care of my elderly grandparents when they get sick. It’s quite another to put up with cultural repression and religious authoritarianism when everything is falling apart. Most people in Brezhnev’s Russia were willing to look the other way and lte the Communist Party run the government in the 1970s. After Chernobyl, everything changed.

Iran, like the United States, like the Yugoslavia of the 1990s or Poland of the late 1970s, is full of corrupt sinners yearing to be free. The masters of destruction, the masters of sin and redemption, are studying the Islamic Republic’s youthful population, who have an average age of 33, waiting for an opportunity to market treason as liberation, and social dissolution as progress. There they sit, in the Pentagon, in the West Wing of the White House, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, in the marketing firms of New York and London, in the World Bank, and in 1000 liberal NGOs, waiting for the opportunity amplify the social discord, to exploit the generation gap, to sell the rules based western order, not as a colonizer but as a liberator. It’s dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, Henry Kissinger once said. It’s even more dangerous to be its friend. For the people of Iran, I wish you good luck in overthrowing your oppressors in Tehran, but I want to warn you about your liberators in Washington. They are not your liberators. Because they have studied freedom, they are the masters of destruction..

History and Politics

The Environmental Murder of Pančevo Serbia by the Unted States of America

January 12, 2026 srogouski 2 Comments

I live in the Bayway section of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a city of 140,413 people 15 miles outside of New York City. It is a dense, industrial town just south of Newark Liberty Airport, right across the Goethals Bridge from Staten Island. The Bayway Refinery, about a half mile from my apartment, was once the largest oil refinary in the world. It’s a gigantic collection of oil, propane and chemical tanks, flares, pipes, and docks for container ships. In 1919 scientists at Bayway created the world’s first petrochemical: isopropyl alcohol. Sometimes, in the Summer, the chemicals leaking out into the air combined with the exhaust from cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, give the entire area an odor that will often give you the impression that someone had just scrubbed the floors with amonia. In 1979, an industrial accident at the refinary made the immediate area uninhabitable for almost a week, and peppered downtown Elizabeth with shards of broken glass and twisted metal.

ll in all, however, it’s not a bad place to live. It’s a quick 30 minutes away from downtown Manhattan by express bus. It’s cheap. It’s multicultural and multiracial. There are few, if any, conservative Republicans. Donald Trump doesn’t have many fans here. In fact my Congressperson LaMonica McIver is currently under indictment for assaulting an ICE agent. We all know how it goes. She went to a protest march, and got hit by some trumped up charges that a federal judge refuses to dismiss. It would be the very last place the Kingdom of Denmark, for example, would want to bomb in order to pressure Americans to overthrow the President of the United States in retribution for our threats to annex Greenland. Of course Denmark does not have the capability to attack the United States, but imagine they did. Imagine they slapped us with economic sanctions, and brought an indictment against Trump in a sovereign Danish court. Imagine the Commander in Chief of NATO, where Denmark is a founding member, said “if you don’t immediately impeach Donald Trump, we will mount an extended bombing campaign of all your major cities until you do.” Most people in Elizbeth and in Bayway would feel perfectly safe. “Surely they wouldn’t bomb us here. Donald Trump got less than 10% of the vote.”

But this is exactly what happened on April 18, 1999 to Pančevo, Serbia.

If there were an Elizabeth, New Jersey of Eastern Europe, it might look a bit like Pančevo. A city of 115,454 ten miles northwest of Belgrade (the New York of the Balkans), it was the site of a massive petrochemical plant, used to make plastics, and a large oil refinery built by two American and one French companies in 1978. Both of these concerns had been built next to a fertilizer plant established in 1958 by the Spanish and the Dutch. In the 1990s, after the brutal, decade long civil war engulfed the former Yugoslavia, Pančevo became a center of opposition to Slobodan Miloševic and a bastian of pro-western, liberal sentiment. A year earlier, the Mayor of . Srđan Miković, the Mayor of Pančevo, and a member of the Serbian Renewal Movement, played host to an international women’s water polo tournament where the American team came in force. They receieved a warm round of applause as was the stars and stripes was raised and the American national anthem played during the awards ceremony. Only a year later, American bombs were raining down on the factories, chemical plants, and oil refineries of Pančevo, sending a deadly cloud of toxic chemicals into the air, poisoning the soil and the food supply, leaking into the Danube, and destroying the local economy. In 2000, the unemployement rate in Pančevo was 70%. Most people, who couldn’t afford to import food after the local food supply had been rendered inedible, went hungry. The effects of the bombing still linger on in the form of miscarriages, birth defects, and people in their 30s and 40s who regularly die of cancer.

If you read the papers the next day, you would have read that only 3 civilians died in the bombing of Pančevo, that the air strikes were precisely targeted against military infastructure, and had a humanitarian purpose, to take the pressure off of the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, who were under attack by Slobodan Miloševic and the Yugoslav Army. Yet Pančevo is nowhere near Kosovo. This was not a tactical air strike designed to maintain a no fly zone and to stop Miloševic’s troops from attacking an Albanian village. It was not an attack on a Serbian military installation or air force based to stop Miloševic from coordinating air cover for his troops. It wasn’t a weapons manufacturing plant or a facility that in any way supported the Yugoslavian Army. It was an industrial city largely built by western interests in the 1960s and 1970s, a suburb of Belgrade that soundly rejected Miloševic at the polls. Most importanly, it is a city that had the potential to poison everything downstream, including the city of Belgrade, a gigantic metropolis the size of Philadelphia. The bombing, in other words was “strategic” not “tactical.” It was intended to cause long term suffering, environmental and economic damage, to ruin the future of a whole generation, to weaken Serbia and guarantee that the multi-ethnic, communist state of Yugoslavia would not be restored. In the end it did little to help the Albanians in Kosovo, which is now the poorest country in Europe (although Ukraine is gaining fast). The immediate casualties of the bombing were fairly light. Three people died. Over the long term, an entire city was murdered. Chris Hedges, a New York Times war correspondent who only a few years later, would be fired by the paper for his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, eloquently describes the enivonrmental devastation.

The repeated air strikes on the industrial complex, which covers several acres, culminated in three huge hits at 1 A.M. on April 18. The bombs sent fireballs into the air and enveloped Pancevo in clouds of black smoke and milky white gases. Flames leapt from the site for 10 days.

The air strikes unleashed tons of chemicals into the air and water.

An estimated 1,500 tons of vinyl chloride, the building block of a type of plastic, 3,000 times higher than permitted levels, burned into the air or poured into the soil and river, said municipal officials in Pancevo, which is controlled by opposition parties hostile to President Slobodan Milosevic.

The chemical, which has left the banks of the river edged with white foam, still clogs the canals around the town. Huge quantities of other noxious chemicals burned or gushed out of storage tanks, said town officials and Yugoslav scientists.

Those chemicals included an estimated 15,000 tons of ammonia, used to make fertilizer; 800 tons of hydrochloric acid and 250 tons of liquid chlorine, used for several industrial products; vast quantities of dioxin, a component of Agent Orange and other defoliants, and 100 tons of mercury, the officials said.

By dawn after the night of the attack, dozens of people were hospitalized gasping for air, struggling to see and unable to digest food, witnesses said.

The sun was blotted out for nearly a day as people moved with rags over their noses and mouths through the fog.

Compared to what is currently happening to Gaza, the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was relatively limited. While the Israelis intend to destroy the Palestinians completely, NATO only wanted, in the words of Time Magazine, “to bring the Serbs to heel.” It was an attack designed to degrade the economy, not exterminate the people. Nevertheless, it was an invisible mass murder, a stealth genocide that permanently affected the birthrate in Serbia and vastly reduced the standard of living for decades. The hostility between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Kosovo is part of a long burning ethnic feud unlikely to end any time soon, but what the Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians and Croatians do have in common is a low fertility rate and a land that its progressively being depopulated. NATO deceptively marketed their bombing campaign as a humanitarian rescue mission, and ended up sending a generation of Albanian Muslims from Kosovo to the west, where they either get stuck in marginal jobs, or drift into organized crime. Serbs in Kosovo are relentlessly subjected to a low intensity campaign to destroy their culture and religion. Croatians wound up seeing little profit from their beautiful coastline, most of the property bought up by Germans and Italians and the profits funneled to western Europe. Bosnia remains in a permanent limbo, unable to either splinter into even smaller ethnostates or unite back into the old multicultural federation. But NATO got what it wanted, a gigantic military base in the Balkans and the neoliberal Clinton adminstration succeeded in killing off what was left of the last communist state in Europe.

I won’t sarcastically remark that “it can’t happen here in the United States” because it probably won’t, but we Americans are no more innocent than the Serbs were in 1999, and probably much less, so it probably should.

History and Politics, news

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

January 9, 2026 srogouski

On January 7, 2025, Renée Nicole Good, née Macklin, was killed by ICE agents as she tried to drive away from the scene of an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis. Almost immediately, before all the facts were in, President Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, made public statements that Good had threatened the life of the agent who fired three bullets into her head at point black range. Since then, there has been an online campaign against Renée Nicole Good by the MAGA right that has essentially amounted to a posthumous gay bashing. Ms. Good came out as a lesbian in her 30s after having children with two different husbands. She has also been accused of being a “domestic terrorist” and a left-wing extremist. I am neither a lesbian nor a domestic terrorist, but since I am a left-wing extremist, the death of Ms. Good concerns me personally. The mandate for ICE, which was officially charged with enforcing immigration laws, seems to have expanded to their having authority over native born American citizens.

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement was founded in March of 2003 in the wake of the consolidation of the federal government under the Patriot Act. It operates under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. In 2016, during his first run for President, Donald Trump made immigration a major issue, if not the primary issue of his campaign. The MAGA movement has been deeply concerned with demographic changes to the American population since the repeal of the Johnson Reed Act, claiming that the very nature of American society has been profoundly impacted by non-white immigration from outside of Europe. Beginning in his second term as President, Donald Trump has sent both ICE and federal troops into cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis, all of which are governed by municipal and state authorities run by the Democratic Party. In the weeks leading up to the death of Ms. Good, the Republican Party and the MAGA movement had been conducting a viral, social media campaign against Minnestora Tim Walz, claiming that he had been responsible for fraud committed against the federal government by Somali immigrants. Renée Nicole Good appears to be collatoral damage in the campaign of the federal government to undermine Governor Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis.

In 1776, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the “standing army” he complained about was the British Army. Things were much simpler because then. You had the local authorities in Great Britain, and you had the British Crown’s Army and Navy in the 13 colonies. Jefferson argued that since the 13 colonies had no representation in Parliament, the British Army had no authority to enforce the King’s law against the people of Massachusetts, Virginia, or New York. In the America of 2026, there is a baffling array of heavily armed troops on American soil, all American but all under the authority of a dizzying array of different jurisdictions. Every big American city has a heavily militarized police force. The Minneappolis Police report directly to Mayor Frey. ICE reports to the federal government. Since President Trump and Secretary Noem have a hostile relationship with Governor Walz and Mayor Frey, they have sent large numbers of ICE agents into Minneapolis to enforce laws they claim the local authorities have neglected. Whether or not ICE has authority over American citizens will be litigated in the courts over the coming years. Ms. Good, who was not an immigrant, was surrounded by heavily armed immigration enforcement agents who screamed at her to “get the fuck out of the car,” and then shot her in the head. For President Trump, Secretary Noem and their supporters, the intent was to send a message, not to illegal or undocumented immigrants, but to Americans. Any attempt to interfere with the federal government’s attemps to deport illegal immigrants, will be met by swift and violent retribution.

What makes you an American? For the MAGA movement, it’s largely about race. If you are descended from someone who would have been considered “free” and “white” back in 1790, you are an American. If you are descended from Asians or Africans, if you are a Muslim, you are not eligible. For liberals, it’s about what you believe. If you swear an oath to support the Constitution and you, or your parents, go through the required steps to be naturalized as an American citizen, you are an American, regardless of your race. The problem is that it’s never that simple. In 1790, being free, white and Protestant, I would have been just as American as John Adams or George Washington. Yet I have been told many times by MAGA supporters that if I don’t like the way the country is run I should get out. If I don’t like capitalism, I should to to Cuba or North Korea, two countries I’ve never visisted. In other words, for the MAGA movement, your identity as an American depends, not only on your race — a requirement I meet — but on what you believe, a requirement that according to them I fail. For liberals and people further to their left, especially the “land back” movement, nobody who’s not descended from the indigenous tribes who were living in North America before 1492 can genuinely be considered an “American.” For many people on the left, I am a European colonizer who could theoretically be expelled after the revolution. Even though this is highly unlikely. The descendants of Crazy Horse living on the Pine Ridge Reservation are a tiny minority without the resources needed to ethnically cleanse New Jersey of white people, but it’s still key to what defines an “American.” For them, it’s not that I will have to go “back” to Central Europe, but that I will have to pay taxes for reparations, and have no right to argue for restrictions on further immigration from the global south.

I have not, as of yet, had any encounters with ICE. Renée Nicole Good, née Macklin, was even more of a “heritage American” than I am, a claim I have some right to since my great great great grandfather was a German immigrant who served in the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg. Macklin is a Scots Irish name. Renée Nicole Good was born in Colorado Springs, a heavily conservative city dominated by evangelical Protestants. Most likely, her ancestors left Kentucky or Virginia back in the mid-1800s and emigrated to to the Rocky Mountain states. Nevetheless, for the MAGA movement, she was not a “real American,” an argument that has nothing to do with her race or national origin, but the fact that she was a lesbian who cut her hair short, wore flannel shirts, and allegedly went to anti-ICE protests in her neighborhood in Minneapolis. This for the MAGA movement applies to all native born Americans, white or otherwise, but especially to people on the left. For them, the United States was founded, not as a secular democratic republic by men of the French Enlightenment, but as an Anglo Saxon ethnostate similar to early Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were both expelled from Massachusetts because they believed in the wrong interpretation of the Bible. I am not a “real American” because I reject the Bible completely. Ms. Good was not a “real American” because she didn’t comply fast enough when the heavily armed man, masked up and playing soldier, screamed at her to “get the fuck out of the car.”

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson and the representatives of the 13 Colonies had two complaints against the British Crown.

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

The first was that the British Crown was artificially limiting the growth of the 13 colonies to protect the Indians, and playing “divide and conquer” between the Indians and white Americans.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

……

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In other words, King George III was standing in the way of what eventually would be called the “Manifest Destiny” of the American people. It is this side of the Declaration that has led many leftists to reject the American Revolution altogether. According to the 1619 Project and the book The Counterrevolution of 1776 by Gerald Horne, the entire purpose of the American Revolution was to protect slavery and steal more land from the Indians.

The second complaint that the Declaration makes against the British Crown is that they were violating the long tradition of “rights” that had been won by Englishmen over their long history from the Magna Carta to the English Civil War to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The British Crown, therefore, no longer had any authority over the colonists. Like Charles II, George III was a “man of blood” (as Oliver Cromwell said) and we all know what happened to Charles II. But being on the either side of the Atlantic, the colonists would not overthrow the king or chop his head off, but establish their own country, where the King no longer had any power.

If the left has used parts of the Declaration to declare that the American Revolution was all about slavery and genocide, then the right has used parts of the Declaration to prove that the rights Thomas Jefferson was defending didn’t apply to everybody, but only to Englishmen, or at least white people. It is my contention that both the left and the right should read the whole Declaration of Independence and stop proof texting it to prove conclusions they had already arrived at. Jefferson, for example, argues that the British Crown has committed “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” including “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Since the United States was not as of yet an independent country in early July of 1776, that meant that Jefferson was referring to people who lived outside of the jurisdiction of the British Crown, largely people from France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. He would not have referred to his fellow Englishmen as “foreigners” but as “new colonists” or “new emigres.” He chose the word “foreigner” for a reason. Jefferson was pro-immigration.

Whether or not Jefferson meant non-white people was the subject of extensive debate between 1776 and 1865, and was eventually settled by the 14th Amendment. My suggestion would be to read the Lincoln Douglas debates, where Abraham Lincoln clearly makes the case that “all men are equal” referred to non-whites as well as Englishmen and severely rebukes Steven Douglas for denying it. From there it follows that once naturalized, any American citizen has the same rights that the original colonists did, abominations like the proposals of the Know Nothings to deprive Catholics of the vote or the Chinese Exclusion act clearly being both unconstitutional and against the spirt of the American Revolution. Even the Johnson Reed Act and its supporters like Henry Cabot Lodge argued that once you were an American citizen, you had the full rights of an American citizen. This is part of the reason they wanted to limit immigration in the first place. Renée Nicole Good was by any definition an American citizen. By flooding cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis with federal agents, Donald Trump is violating the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, that he “has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” The people of Minneapolis have chosen their elected representatives. Their names are Tim Walz and Jacob Frey. Mayor Frey has made it more than clear what he thinks about ICE in his city. “Get the fuck out.”

Perhaps it’s time to alter or abolish Donald Trump.

news, poetry

Renée Nicole Good (1988-2026)

January 8, 2026 srogouski 14 Comments

Renée Nicole Good, née Macklin, was an award winning poet from Colorado Springs, Colorado, who was gunned down in the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 8, 2026 by Donald Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s Gestapo, otherwise known as ICE, for the human too human crime of having instincts, reflexes, and a perfectly natural “fight or flight” reaction to being surrounded by men with guns screaming “get the fuck out of the car.” It is unclear whether or not she was involved in an ongoing protest near her home, or if she just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. That did not stop Pam Bondi, Donald Trump, and hideous plastic surgery victim Kristi Noem from labeling her a domestic terrorist, or boot licking hyenas in the media like Jesse Watters from implying that she somehow deserved it for having “pronouns in her bio.” The original cellphone video of her killing is as usual difficult to find on YouTube or social media without being loaded down with ads and commentary. Fortunately the New York Times has put up a fairly clean version with minimal editorial interference and clean coherent commentary that proves almost beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was cold-blooded murder.

Renée Nicole Good’s hometown of Colorado Springs is nothing like my hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, which is full of Democrats, liberals, Polacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and former black panthers teaching in the public school system. Colorado Springs is the “Evangelical Christian Vatican.” It is one of the most right-wing, culturally conservative places in America. It’s not only the home of the Air Force Academy. It’s ground zero for Trump’s MAGA base. When Renée Nicole Good was Renée Nicole Macklin, she fit in well. She went on a mission to Ireland to help convert the Catholics to Christianity. She got married and had children, although whether it was 1 or 3 is also unclear. In the 2010s, her outlook on life began to change. In 2016, at the age of 28, she enrolled at Old Dominion University in Virginia to study English and Creative writing, graduating in 2020, just on time to beat the pandemic lock downs. A few years ago, her husband died at the age of 38 and she came out as a lesbian, putting those pronouns in her bio that so offended Jesse Watters, and getting gay married to Rebecca Good, now 40-years-old. Together they moved to liberal Minneapolis where she left rainbow flags on her social media with messages like “enjoying the Minneapolis vibe.” Renée Nicole Macklin from Colorado Springs had crossed over from Trump’s America to my own.

While at Old Dominion University, Renée Nicole Good wrote a poem called On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs. In 2020, just before she graduated it won the 2020 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize. On first glance it looks like the typical MFA style writing with big words designed to impress teachers who long ago had their brains addled by Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. Look more closely, however, and you can see that it concerns her struggle with religion and liberalism, spirituality and secularism. In many ways, her worldview reflects my own. She can no longer believe in the evangelical Protestant religion, and the Bible, of her childhood, but she finds the materialist worldview just as unsatisfying. No fetal pigs are mentioned in the poem outside of the title, but the message is clear. Without religion, without spirituality, creativity dies as an aborted fetus. Unlike the French singer Pomme, whose song En Brulera addresses a very similar struggle to leave “the Jesus farm” (as Pomme often phrases it) she cannot take any comfort in leaving the Christian church for a sort of nineteenth century romanticism, Lord Byron meets Barbara and Francoise Hardy. She finds herself sitting in an iHop trying to study for a biology test, wondering if her soul is “in there” between her pancreas and large intestine. At the end she wants to believe in God but she can’t, so she decided to face the truth. “Life is merely to ovum and sperm and where those two meet and how often and how well and what dies there.”

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin

 

i want back my rocking chairs,


solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

 

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

 

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

 

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

 

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

 

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

 

 

               now i can’t believe—

               that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

So what does it mean now that ICE has killed, not a Latino immigrant, or even a hard core leftist, but someone who even Jesse Watters or Matt Walsh would consider a “heritage American?” This is obviously an escalation of what has been going on for months. Poorly trained federal agents are being sent into cities like Los Angeles, Portland and Minneapolis to undermine the authority of local elected officials and intimidate grassroots political activists. I doubt the ICE agent who murdered Renée Nicole Good planned it in advance. If her reaction was an instinctual “oh shit I’m being car jacked I’d better get out of here,” then his was probably something along the lines of “that immigrant is trying to run me over so I’d better shoot now to defend America.” But it doesn’t matter. The escalation is not about the shooting. It’s about the decision of Donald Trump, Pam Bondi and the hideous plastic surgery casualty Kristi Noem to lie about it so blatently when the truth is right there on the front page of the New York Times on video. As George Orwell said, the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. As Voltaire said, or at least I think he said because I haven’t checked out the source of the quote, “anybody who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Whether or not the United States is about to turn into the Chile of Pinochet or the Argentina of the 1970s military junta is still up for debate, but we have certainly taken a step in that direction.

In any event, Renée Nicole Good is dead at the young age of 37, but there is no more honorable a death than being gunned down by knuckle dragging fascist goons because they believed you to have been part of a protest defending vulnerable immigrants.

	srogouski on Trump Bans Immigration to the…
	Cal on Trump Bans Immigration to the…
	srogouski on The Masters of Destruction
	Bawb Cawx on The Masters of Destruction
	Joe on The Masters of Destruction

Writers Without Money

Les Misérables (2019)

Citizenship Is Not a Precious Metal

From the Johnson Reed Act to The Birth Certificate: How Trump Weaponized “The Bribe”

Trump Bans Immigration to the USA from 75 Countries, Including Kosovo (which is Serbia).

Did the Chickens Come Home to Roost for Renee Good?

Scott Adams (1957-2026)

The Masters of Destruction

The Environmental Murder of Pančevo Serbia by the Unted States of America

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

Renée Nicole Good (1988-2026)

Liberating The Written Word From Capitalism Since 2014