The Surprisingly Banal, Moderate Fascism of ‘Zero Day’

Image; Netflix

Zero Day (2025) is not a particularly good show. A middling action drama that starts with a lot of energy only to dissipate under the weight of the very question it tries to answer — i.e., what happens when a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ terrorist attack causes America to sacrifice the very liberties it claims to cherish (9/11 joins the chat).

Robert De Niro stars as George Mullen, a former president and reluctant authoritarian, who must uncover a conspiracy theory while simultaneously being tapped to lead a new commission in the wake of a dangerous cyberattack known as “Zero Day.” The commission grants George Mullen what, in the year 2024, the moderate writers of this show thought were constitutionally dangerous powers beyond the pale of normal US politics.

Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt (the latter a DC-based correspondent for The New York Times), Zero Day opens the viewer up to a dying type of DC groupthink, where a political moderates save the day simply by keeping to the ‘truth.’

Won’t anyone think of the moderates?

DC before 2024 was a crazy place (it’s still crazy but in completely different ways). There was this entire ecosystem of self-proclaimed centrists who were trying to uplift the idea that all you needed was a calm, ‘rational’ (i.e., economically neoliberal) status quo politician, and you would capture the heart of America. If you peruse The Washington Post or The New York Times op-eds, you might still come across these people who think all we need to do is refind the center.

Zero Day is an escapist fantasy for the people who read those op-eds and opine for this supposed lost vision. People who think that yet another ‘we are all in this together’ project (see the Lincoln Project, Third Way, Forward Party, etc.) is all we really need to save America.

The show accomplishes this perspective by making one of these political relics our main point of view character. De Niro’s George Mullen is a politician who existed in the beforetimes when both sides of the aisle allegedly collaborated on legislation. As his daughter, politician Alexandra Mullen (Lizzy Caplan) remarks:

“He thinks that the world is the same as when he left office…Dreyer, okay? That side of the aisle? Those are not the same people that he served with. This is not the same country. If he goes back now, they will bury him.”

George Mullen, we are meant to believe, is one of the good ones: perhaps too good for the political world he now finds himself in. We are not told his beliefs or policy preferences, but we do see his even-keeled tone and know how he hates alleged extremists from both the left and the right. People he believes, are not able to come together for the common good of America. “Everyone says they want the truth,” George tells his wife of the current political situation. “But the reality is it’s better for both sides if the blame can’t be pinned on anyone.”

Mullen’s desire for ‘truth’ is the perspective we are meant to root for and think is missing from contemporary American politics.

The country has lost its moderate way, and Zero Day is a conversation amongst moderates debating how to fix it. Nowhere is this debate more clear than with the reveal of the series’s antagonists. It’s learned that the true initiator of the Zero Day attack is not Iran or domestic terrorists, but all factions at the center of the political divide, in their paradoxically extremist war on extremism.

I mean it: the in-universe Republican Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), the ‘progressive’ firebrand Alexandra (a not-so-subtle reference to AOC), and the corporate oligarch Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) all teamed up to remind Americans of their vulnerability. They did this so that the supposed adults in the room (i.e., them) would have enough political capital to actually address America’s real problems. In the words of Alexandra, speaking to her coconspirator Dreyer:

“One minute of system shock, that’s what you said. A few months with the right power in the right hands and the country’s back on track by Christmas.”

These, let’s call them radical moderates, tried to use the horror of an attack to stomp out the political fringes (a danger that is supposed to be so obvious it’s self-evident), and it’s a narrative that is entirely disconnected from our political reality.

Doesn’t everyone think the way I do?

The idea that somehow all the leaders on the left and right were able to coherently plan anything together is a hard pill to swallow, especially when we are supposed to believe that those in power are secret centrists held hostage by the extremists in their own parties.

Yet this perspective makes sense if you have a hollow political view that erases all the nuances of the various extremes these moderates appear to be opining. And Zero Day, for all its bluster, does not understand America’s political fringes (not even a little bit), and it is not interested in understanding them.

The best example of this on the show is the character Evan Green (Dan Stevens), a radio talk show host whose anti-government stance is so vague that I genuinely cannot tell what political ideology he is even meant to represent. The only thing we know is that he’s extreme. In the words of Devan Suber in IGN:

“In dialogue and performance, Evan appears to be a riff on conspiracy-spouting fearmongers like Alex Jones. But he appears to be broadcasting a largely left-wing populist show on some sort of cable channel whose name positions it as an equivalent to the conservative outlet Newsmax — a conflict of worldviews that has not and will not ever exist anywhere in any reality. Without spoilers, both Evan’s storyline and that of Elon Musk stand-in Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann) point to real-world issues, but that’s all they do: Get you to say “Oh, I see what you did there” without ever feeling satisfying narratively or making some actual statement in the ideological soup.”

And that’s interesting because it’s a perspective that divorces ideology and completely focuses on aesthetic: one where it doesn’t matter what the left and right are saying, just that they are angry and passionate against America. “You know what the cancer is,” Dreyer confesses to Mullen. “The white nationalists ranting about being replaced. The anarchists shouting ‘abolish the police.’ The delusional that think an election is open to interpretation…”

To both the heroes and villains of Zero Day, it’s the extremists who are the problem. What they disagree on is not so much a hatred of the political extremes as the tactics being used. The radical moderates are willing to do something illegal to preserve the institutions they care about, while Mullen cares about doing things legally and the right way, even if those things allow him to trample on the civil liberties of his fellow Americans in the name of justice.

George Mullen is, by all accounts, still an authoritarian. His decision to lead the Zero Day Commission — an overreaching government organization that absolutely would lead America right into a dictatorship— belies a fascist impulse. His brief tenure as the head of this commission has him suspend rights enshrined by the constitution, torture suspects, and take advantage of a level of surveillance that is quite unsettling, even for modern America.

While we ultimately may let George off the hook for some of these actions because of potential interference from a secret mind control experiment (a subplot I’m not interested in diving into because it’s never confirmed), he seems unrepentant of his actions, caring more about having lied to the American people than the many civil liberties he’s trampled on.

A zeroed-out conclusion

All in all, this text just felt lazy. It failed to dive into the political nuances between the fringes and the center, focusing more on hand-wringing over America’s politics being unstable (no shit) than providing any solid analysis.

Even its final monologue ends on a very hackneyed moral of sticking to the truth, as if Americans who deny elections and rant about the Great Replacement don’t think they are telling the truth. News flash: most people think their political ideologies are correct. That’s how ideologies work.

This refusal to delve into the very subject matter it’s focused on extends to the centrism it seems to present as the solution to America’s woes. It was weird watching Zero Day because, despite being a text decrying fascism, it’s absolutely authoritarian. It’s just one that celebrates a middle-of-the-road authoritarianism rather than one coming from the radical, ultranationalist right.

The film ends with America having unseen enemies within its own government that must now be rooted out, which is one of the hallmark signs of fascism, according to some scholars (see “the enemy is both strong and weak”). And for a text that claims that a commission like the one in Zero Day shouldn’t exist, the narrative certainly affirms the idea that an authoritarian like Mullen could get a lot done. Mullen single-handedly uncovers a conspiracy that everyone else in the government wanted to push aside. He’s a hero figure, and a certain amount of reverence is shown to him toward the end of the series (note: hero worship is also a hallmark sign of fascism).

This is a vapid text, and it worries me that the moderates who crafted it care more about the tone of an authoritarian government than about what it actually does, which does not bode well for the months and years ahead.

American Fascism Has Always Been Bipartisan

Photo by AussieActive on Unsplash

America is a country that has always been on the verge of perpetuating or embracing fascism. Its internal contradiction of being a democracy allegedly devoted to personal liberty and also being a violent, aspiring, and sometimes actual ethnostate founded on chattel slavery and genocide meant that oppression and authoritarianism have been here from the get-go.

It’s a meme at this point to note how America’s racist institutions inspired Hitler, but it needs to be emphasized nonetheless. Fascism was here when human beings were trafficked across an ocean and dehumanized so that they could provide “free” labor. It was here when white mobs terrorized Black and Brown Americans (as well as political dissidents) during the Red Summer of 1919. And it was here when Democratic and Republican politicians expanded the police state so that Black and Brown Americans were disproportionately incarcerated at higher rates.

We started building the fascist system we are seeing now, hundreds of years before 2025, and as we shall soon see, it was a bipartisan project.

Fascism has always been here

I cannot overemphasize how tied American fascism is to slavery. You want to talk about a totalitarian system that controlled every aspect of people’s lives. A system where the perceived enemy — the enslaved person—is considered both strong (i.e., capable of hurting white people at any time through revolt and sabotage) and weak (i.e., docile and happy about their enslavement). A system that encouraged mythmaking, hero-worship, and pretty much any other point in Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism checklist.

Well, that was the American plantation system: a violent, hyper-idealized project using the State to try to return a people to a time that never existed. As Alberto Toscano writes in The Boston Globe in an essay, you should stop reading this article to go and read:

“Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.”

In other words, fascism has been here the entire time, and it was only because it affected primarily non-white people that white thinkers ignored the parallels.

And as we are well aware (or should be), the modern police state now being used by the Trump administration to abduct students off the street (actions that are being decried as fascist ) was heavily influenced by the plantation system. You can trace a throughline from the slave catchers of the 1800s to many, though not all, modern American police departments, especially those in the South. In the words of Sally Hadden in Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas:

“In some cities, patrols were replaced by police groups. But in other Southern towns, patrols continued to function in many ways like police groups: breaking up nighttime gatherings, hauling in suspicious characters, trying to prevent mischief before it happened, or capturing the lawbreakers after the fact. The big difference was that in the South, the “most dangerous people” who were thought to need watching were slaves — they were the prime targets of patrol observation and capture. The history of police work in the South grows out of this early fascination, by white patrollers, with what African American slaves were doing. Most law enforcement was, by definition, white patrolmen watching, catching, or beating black slaves…”

Now, it would be a mistake to say that the police force only exists because of chattel slavery. While law enforcement has always been focused on maintaining the status quo, those it keeps in line vary depending on the social and political context at play. The targets of a 1900s London police force are different from those of an 1800s Charleston police force, although they still preserve some type of hierarchy.

Yet in America, it cannot be denied that one of those focuses was on preserving racialized capitalism, and the fascistic terror necessary to maintain it.

It was the violence of police as well as the extrajudicial violence of white mobs (often ignored or aided by police departments) that made this system possible. As Hadden continues:

“…Although slave patrols officially ceased to operate at the close of the Civil War, their functions were assumed by other Southern institutions. Their law-enforcing aspects — checking suspicious persons, limiting nighttime movement — became the duties of Southern police forces, while their lawless, violent aspects were taken up by vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan’s reign of racial terror in the late nineteenth century emphasized the most extreme elements of earlier slave patrol behavior.”

These fascistic roots run deep, and if we are being honest with ourselves, the building of this police state, many of my fellow white Americans are now decrying as fascist, was assisted every step of the way by all sides of our liberal democracy: conservative and progressive alike.

Fascism has been bipartisan

From the beginning, America was a bipartisan compromise on slavery — a point that hardly needs contesting when you see how intimately slavery was tied to the first version of the US Constitution (see the three-fifths compromise). This fascistic system of terror and control may not have been liked by all the white landowners who backed the US political project, but it was accepted enough for both American democracy and slavery to continue.

This paradox of ‘democracy for me’ and ‘fascism for thee’ may seem untenable, but it’s a balancing act that has been maintained for hundreds of years.

America achieved this through its definition of citizenship, creating a blurry, violent line between those who had rights under liberal democracy and those considered too inhuman by the State to receive them. It was citizenship that was stripped away from enslaved persons in the infamous Dred Scott decision, and it was citizenship that was carved out from prisoners in the 13th Amendment.

Now we are seeing Trump push to end birthright citizenship and other classifications of personhood. These actions are rightfully being decried as fascist, but Trump did not invent the fascist tool of stripping away a class of people’s humanity. We can see how it’s been part of the American project throughout, and I need to point out that the modern Democratic Party has been quite complicit in sharpening this particular blade.

Whether we are talking about a not insignificant minority of the Democratic Party supporting a bill that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (a blood and soil institution that is intrinsically fascist), or the way democratic municipalities and counties all across this country have cooperated with Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), there has been a consistent backtracking on immigration by the Democratic Party.

It was Biden, followed by Kamala Harris, who in 2024 (not the distant past) campaigned on a conservative piece of immigration legislation called the Border Act of 2024, which would have made immigration law even more unforgiving. As Ben Burgis wrote at the time:

“Under the proposed policy, the standard immigrants would have to meet to even earn the right to fuller consideration would be set much higher. And the cases would be processed not by the Department of Justice but by the Department of Homeland Security, where they would be subject to “a much faster review, often without attorneys or a deliberative process.” And a “shut-down” provision would mean that if too many undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers were encountering the Border Patrol at once, even this degraded level of due process would be thrown out the window.”

That is the policy Kamala Harris said: “…should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country.”

Likewise, there has been so much talk about how fascist it is that Trump is using the prison system, particularly that of the concentration camp in El Salvador, to potentially punish political dissidents.

However, both parties have helped build and expand the police state. It was former Democratic President Biden who worked with two segregationists to pass the 1994 Crime Bill — a regressive law that led to the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Brown Americans all over this country — and it was then Democratic President Bill Clinton who signed it into law. It has, again, been democratic municipalities all across this nation that have had no problem expanding police budgets.

Trump has a police state now to draw on because most Democrats had no issue working with Republicans to maintain and expand it.

These are the tools of fascism, and the Democratic Party had no qualms in helping the Republican party build them when it meant helping them win over white people during elections — and that complicity is still happening.

An anti-fascist conclusion

America has, since its beginning, directed fascist violence at those it labeled as noncitizens, a category that has often been racialized. Trump did not have to invent these divisions, and he and his Republican allies had plenty of help from the Democratic party in widening them.

That does not make the Republican party better, but it does reframe the common argument that the Republican and Democratic parties are in opposition. When it comes to expanding the fascistic powers of the State, there is much more of a reciprocal relationship than many supporters of the Democratic Party would like to admit. I am tired of seeing status quo Democrats help sharpen a blade meant for people’s necks, and then make a show of acting shocked when Republicans use it. If you allow your government to build a weapon — and the way we remove citizenship from people and throw them in a box to die is a weapon — then don’t be surprised when your government uses it.

This status quo of accepting the expansion of an ever more terrifying State needs to change. We need to acknowledge the reality that allowing our government to sacrifice other groups for political expediency is hurting all of us.

The activist saying ‘none of us are safe until all of us are safe’ is not aspirational. It is literal advice. The fascist gains power by using any entry point that they can, and they start where the walls are already weakest. Trump right now is using the areas of law our political parties (not just republicans) have already weakened, such as migration and prisoner law, to cement his control. He is going after migrants and prisoners first because those are groups of people our society (and the law) already devalues.

If we allow this trend to continue, we will only have ourselves to blame.

For while fascism has largely been a bipartisan project, when it comes to the American people, it does not have to be.

The Anti-Trans Cowardice of ‘White Lotus’

Image; Max

Max’s White Lotus (2021–present) is a show that advertises itself first and foremost as a satire. First Hawaii, then Italy, and now, in its third season, Thailand; it is an anthology in which each season takes place at one of the prestigious and fictional White Lotus hotel chain locations, where the rich and powerful go to play.

The show has prided itself on being a biting exploration of the intricacies and cruelties of the wealthy. Every season, we follow a cast of vain, petty, and sometimes self-aware characters on their vacations, along with a few hotel staff, as the viewer tries to suss out which of them will be the perpetrator of a violent crime, usually a murder. It’s a fun premise, and the show has developed quite the following. (I believe, in no small part, due to its bop of a theme song in the second season.)

Yet despite excellent acting and a tantalizing premise, when it comes to trans representation, the third season provided a toothless and occasionally offensive commentary — one that deserves criticism as the U.S. entertainment industry slides further into a reactionary backlash.

What is and is not missing

If you have been following the discourse around White Lotus, you may be aware that a minor trans subplot was cut following the 2024 election of Donald Trump. A group of friends gets into a minor argument about one of them voting for Trump, and one of the more liberal characters is meant to reveal that they have a nonbinary child. As actress Carrie Coon (who played Laurie) tells Harper’s Bazaar:

You originally found out that her daughter was actually nonbinary, maybe trans, and going by they/them. You see Laurie struggling to explain it to her friends, struggling to use they/them pronouns, struggling with the language, which was all interesting. It was only a short scene, but for me, it did make the question [in episode 3] of whether Kate voted for Trump so much more provocative and personally offensive to Laurie, considering who her child is in the world.

The reason this minor scene was cut was allegedly because showrunner Mike White felt the reaction would overwhelm the narrative. He rationalized to The Hollywood Reporter, saying:

[The trans storyline] felt right in March of last year. Now, [that Trump has been reelected] there’s a vibe shift. I don’t think that it was radical, but that’s not the kind of attention I want. The politics of it could overwhelm whatever ideas I’m trying to talk about.

This is a cowardly excuse.

Mike, I am sorry this trans backlash is inconvenient to your show about rich people being mean to each other while eating salads. It must be nice to be in charge of a successful project so focused on white, cisgender heterosexism that you can choose to avoid reactionary criticism.

It’s the type of reasoning that would have made me upset by itself, but after the showrunner admitted to cutting this scene because the stakes were suddenly higher, it incensed me that the trans scenes he did include skewed in a decidedly more conservative direction.

One of them is small.

The second episode (Special Treatments) has the white evangelical Ratliff family reacting to Kathoey servers at the hotel with mockery (Kathoey refers to a third gender in Thailand), using the fraught term “ladyboy” instead. “You know what they say,” the arrogant older brother Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) quips, “Having sex in Thailand is like eating a box of chocolates. You never know which one’s gonna have nuts.”

It’s not a scene affirming that perspective (Saxon is consistently portrayed as an asshole), but since we don’t have Carrie Coon’s counterbalancing scene, it doesn’t take much of a stance on Ratliff’s bigotry one way or the other.

It’s frustrating that the show’s creator felt comfortable including this conservative anti-trans reaction, and cutting the more liberal, affirming one, and that again speaks to the showrunners' level of cowardice. It seems Mike White is okay reflecting the bigotry of the rich, but his criticism of that bigotry is not as decisive as many other critics believed.

And that is before getting to the more salacious bit of commentary, which is that after axing this scene, he also decided to keep in one of the more offensive trans stereotypes of the last century.

The autogynephilia of it all

In episode five (Full Moon Party), the character Rick (Walton Goggins) meets his friend Frank (Sam Rockwell), who gives a monologue explaining his orientalist fantasy of wanting to be an asian woman due to a sexual fetish:

…One night I took home some girl, turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me. And it was kinda magical. And I got in my head that what I really wanted, was to be one of these Asian girls, getting fucked by me and to feel that.

.…So I put out an ad, looking for a White guy, my age, to come over and fuck me…I got addicted to that. Some nights, three, four guys would come over, and rail the shit out of me. Some I even had to pay. And at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl to just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy was fucking me, and I’d think ‘I am her and I’m fucking me.’

This trope of a man deriving sexual or romantic pleasure from the thought of being a woman has a name in anti-trans circles, autogynephilia. The psychologist Ray Blanchard coined the term in 1989 in his paper, The Concept of autogynephilia and the Typology of male gender dysphoria. In it, he proposed the hypothesis: “that all gender-dysphoric males who are not sexually aroused by men (homosexual) are instead sexually aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women (autogynephilic).”

In other words, a person’s transness is not about their gender, but really related to their sexual orientation. They are either, as YouTuber Natalie Wynn quips facetiously, “effeminate gay men who can’t get enough dick” or “inscrutable perverts who can apparently get off just by looking in the mirror.”

It is essential to stress that this is a false narrative that does not align with the mainstream scientific consensus. People transition for a variety of reasons, and at various points in their lives. There is also nothing particularly pathological about being sexually attracted to the thought of your own body, imagined or otherwise, and it’s an objection that is more puritanical than scientific. Academica Julia Serano dismissed Blanchard’s hypothesis in her 2020 paper, succinctly stating: “…in reality, the theory has never been widely accepted within sexology and psychology, and numerous follow-up studies have disproven its primary claims.”

Yet despite autogynephilia being an oversimplification that essentializes natural desires as pathological, it is a justification that anti-trans critics have continued to use when dismissing trans identity. “We need to be honest: autogynephilia is a psychological condition that we just have to live with, one writer argues in UnHerd. “If gender identity is not sexual in origin, then there is no reason those fantasies should be erotic,” another argues in the Quillette.

And because of this theory’s dominance in anti-trans circles, unsurprisingly, many such critics were very quick to praise the autogynephilia subplot in this White Lotus episode, as validating the hypothesis. ‘White Lotus’ Goes Where Few Have Dared, goes the title of a Newsweek article. “Maybe,” argues another UnHerd article, “if [Frank had] grown up in a world that admitted autogynephilia existed, he wouldn’t have had to stop being sexual. Maybe he would have found a way to navigate AGP, or manage it.”

It doesn’t help that showrunner Mike White went on center-right commentator Andrew Sullivan’s podcast, The Dishcast, and the two talked about the theory, though I get the sense White is not very informed about autogynephilia and was merely reacting to Sullivan.

In the end, autogynephilia has been used by pseudo-academics, bigots, and also, apparently, in the fictional TV show White Lotus: take of that information as you will.

A tired conclusion

I cannot stress how frustrating it is for Mike White to justify cutting what couldn’t have been more than a two-minute scene mentioning (not affirming, but mentioning) the existence of a nonbinary person, only to incorporate one of the most painful anti-trans stereotypes out there. It’s not consistent logic, and while I have no doubt that unpacking such a trope could be done well, I don't think Mike White put in an even baseline amount of research necessary to do that work.

White comes across as intellectually lazy in this regard, and I think the meander

Businesses Lied To You About Friction

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Friction, at its most basic, is all the stuff that prevents people from doing things. The self-help writer Bob Sutton described it as “simply putting obstacles in front of people that slow them down, that make their jobs more difficult and maybe a little bit more frustrating.”

The traditional business argument is that it makes some sense to want to remove friction. If a customer has a barrier to purchasing a product, then they are going to often move on to another product that doesn’t have that barrier. As a result of this logic, there is now an explicit goal by many executives and founders to eliminate all friction in the customer or user experience. Then-CEO of HubSpot, Brian Halligan, highlighted this perspective when he infamously quipped in 2019 during the company’s Inbound conference: “Dollars flow where the friction is low.”

Reality is, of course, more complicated than this truism, as companies have never just made money by providing a seamless customer experience (see monopolies, price fixing, etc). It’s a fiction — and we will go over the specifics of how and why soon — but just keep in mind that this rhetoric manages to accomplish a very interesting thing.

By not specifying which types of friction are bad and good, your average capitalist manages to make invisible the friction they use to earn a profit.

We don’t want to lose all friction

It’s important to note from the outset that not all friction is bad. Some friction can even be beneficial to other areas of your life.

For example, a speed bump increases the time it takes to get people from point A to B; it increases friction, but we add speed bumps to protect people. We place them in front of school zones and residential areas to signal drivers to slow down, and there does appear to be some research backing the point that they reduce pedestrian deaths, especially for children.

Even painful friction can lead to positive development. There was an interesting bit of research presented at CES 2025 (that first came my way via the great podcast It Could Happen Here) during the dystopic panel “Raising AI Kids Responsibly” that revealed that much of Gen Z shunned the idea of chatbots taking over relationships, such as friendships. Researcher Karen Ruth Wong tells her audience during the panel:

“We asked questions like…Imagine you could have an AI trained on your preferences…They could swipe your Tinder for you. They would have the icky conversations or would go through the awkward introductions with the new person in school. And we heard some really interesting things. ‘I want to go on a bad date for myself’ and ‘I want to have that bad vacation.’ It was a really interesting sign that [for Gen Zers] being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor.”

This response flies in the face of the “dollars flow where the friction is low” argument.

Yet this hesitancy makes sense once you realize the obvious fact that friction is, at a certain point, what a lot of life is. If you take out all the uncomfortable parts of existence — the tedium of waiting, the pain of heartbreak, the shame of being wrong — then you not only remove most of life’s moments, but you deny the self the ability to learn and grow from that discomfort (no shit).

These participants wanted to experience the friction that comes with deteriorating relationships and worried about how technology like AI could affect their humanity. As Karen Ruth Wong continues on that panel:

“There is something about designing for friction in our age of optimization…about the joy of overcoming challenges and the joy of moving through your first breakup that makes you into a person….manytimes people who are designing technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best path, and there is some pushback there.”

And honestly, these participants are right to be pushing back because when we try to take out too much friction, it can have a detrimental impact on the skillsets we use to navigate the world.

With AI specifically, right now, the biggest problem is not Skynet or the singularity but that eventually (very quickly, in fact), people become complacent and stop monitoring its outputs. There was a paper about Generative AI that came out of Carnegie Mellon University that made headlines for concluding that:

“…while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification; from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship.”

In other words, the technology is making people less likely to think for themselves.

This hurdle is why people like me bemoan AI eliminating people’s ability to draft an essay or an email anymore. I don’t care about “cheating,” preserving the grading system, or the sanctity of emails (whatever the hell that means). My concern is that people are losing the ability to construct and reason through an argument. In wanting to get rid of the friction that comes with researching, outlining, and drafting their points, they give up control of the very output meant to represent them, outsourcing their thoughts to an algorithm they neither know nor care to understand.

We need to be careful that in our efforts to make life simpler (for capitalists to make money from us), we don’t lose the friction that makes us cautious, pushes us to learn, and ultimately defines our humanity.

The lie of businesses removing friction

This reality is why I am skeptical when CEOs wax poetic about removing friction because it’s neither possible nor desirable to remove all of it. There are good types of friction and bad types of friction, and which is which very much depends on your perspective — not just in business, but in life.

Let’s take the example of HubSpot, whose CEO made the “dollars flow where the friction is low” comment. They are a software company that specializes in marketing, sales, and customer service (i.e., Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, etc.). The logic of Brian Halligan is that they should be making excellent products that are so frictionless that customers freely choose them year after year for their superb performance.

However, that’s just not true. Their products are of dubious quality. HubSpot has a D- on the Better Business Bureau for a “failure to respond to 27 complaints filed against [it],” and customers are quick to bring up its clunky usability. As one Redditor remarks of its [Content Management System], i.e., business jargon for a platform that lets you organize content (often exclusively digital):

“…it’s just a horrible experience. I could easily build something so much better and easier with nearly any other tool and just connect it to Hubspot. Just doing simple things like changing colors for headers is a major [pain in the ass]. It’s also just really limited. You can’t design anything fancy with it (without doing major HTML work). What am I missing here?”

Yet HubSpot continues to be successful because it has reduced friction in one key area: making money.

HubSpot has a free Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system — i.e., how businesses organize their interactions with their customers — that is easily integrated into a lot of the web, with users able to opt into paid applications or its marketplace if they want full functionality (i.e., a freemium model). The friction for signing up and paying for the product is low, but friction has been added via a paywall to ensure that customers must fork over money if they want to use the product’s more useful features or even just some of its features.

This is what Halligan (who, by the way, was internally sanctioned in 2015 for allegedly trying to use extortion to obtain a draft of a former employee’s memoir) means when he talks about removing friction. He’s speaking about the friction between a company and a sale. All other types of friction are not being eliminated and, in some cases, even being exacerbated.

Let’s use another more extreme example of when a company’s removal or addition of friction has a detrimental impact on your life. Intuit, which you may famously know for making the software TurboTax, makes it very easy to sign up for and navigate TurboTax when it comes to paying around $60 to $150 to file a simple state and federal tax return. But for years, when it came to customers finding the free version of its software, the company used ‘dark patterns’ (i.e., deceptive design patterns attempting to trick users into a certain type of behavior) to navigate users away from that option. Users would click on TurboxTax’s ‘free’ version only to have to eventually pay money for it.

When the news organization ProPublica brought this reality to light in 2019, it prompted public outcry and eventual regulation from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which prohibited Intuit in 2024 from using the word free unless “it is free for all consumers or it discloses clearly and conspicuously and in close proximity to the ‘free’ claim the percentage of taxpayers or consumers that qualify.” Intuit, rather than respond to criticism, withdrew from the IRS Free File program in 2021, a public-private partnership meant to connect households that make below a certain income level with services that actually let them file their taxes for free.

To make money, private tax preparers such as Intuit added friction to the customer experience, and when they realized the government was going to regulate that friction away, they removed functionality for their users.

This pattern of relying on friction to turn a profit applies on the macro level as well. Many countries outside the US do not have such a complex tax system where they have to individually calculate how much they owe their government. Many governments, including ours, often already collect this information, and in some polities, tax season merely requires citizens to double-check their government’s work (not filing a separate claim).

Not ours, though, and that’s because Intuit and H&R Block have spent a fortune lobbying the government — millions in 2024 alone— to make our taxes more complicated. The IRS Free File program was itself a half-measure lobbied for by Intuit and others to keep the IRS out of the tax preparation industry so that businesses could reap the benefits of this sector instead. Companies provide these free services listed on a poorly promoted and maintained IRS website and then spend all their efforts pushing customers, including the large percentage of Americans eligible for these free services, to their paid software.

To make money, this industry added friction to our everyday lives so that a private tax-filing industry could exist in the first place.

From insurance companies to rental properties, many businesses exist not because they provide a seamless customer experience but rather because they are taking advantage of or adding to frictions that they have no intention of getting rid of.

In fact, if we were to remove such frictions, they would cease to exist as businesses.

A friction(ful) conclusion

The business rhetoric on friction is a lie. When CEOs monologue about removing friction, they are speaking quite narrowly about the friction that allows them to make a sale.

Yet, frequently, that is not the same thing as removing or adding frictions that are good for you as an individual: the frictions that, once added or removed, make us safer, the frictions that allow us to learn, the frictions that make it easier and more enjoyable to interact with other humans.

Most of the time, in fact, the frictions that are great for you as a person are terrible for business, and vice versa.

As a result, businesses spend a large amount of political capital, removing beneficial friction and adding unbeneficial ones. We used the example of the tax preparer industry, but this can be extrapolated to healthcare, property, and pretty much any sector of the US economy. Businesses add friction (i..e make our lives harder) all the time to earn money, and pretend as though it’s making our lives better.

Yet friction’s goodness or badness is a matter of debate, and if you are a regular person, chances are that your definition of good friction does not align with the Brian Halligan’s of the world.

Severance Highlights the Pitfalls of Our “Frictionless” Society

Image; AppleTV

Severance (2022-present) started as a brilliant satire, heightening the absurdity of modern-day corporate America. Our protagonists, or “innies,” are new consciousnesses created by Lumon employees via a procedure known as “severance.” These consciousnesses are partitioned within a person’s brain to only exist while at work. The original personality (i.e., the “outie”) has no idea what their innies get up to on the severed floor of Lumon, and vice versa.

That premise alone is cutting, but as the series progresses, what follows is a pretty on-the-nose commentary on how coercive corporate America can be to its workers. The innies do not consent to their lives within the Lumon hierarchy, and that tension sits in the backdrop of every scene.

Yet, as the second season reaches a close, we come to understand that the show is not just about corporations controlling their workforce but a much more insidious commentary on how corporations alienate us from our own experiences and then sell them back to us. Lumon’s endgame with the severance procedure is a world without pain, without friction.

A goal that is not removed from modern-day corporate America at all, but very much front and center.

Severance and friction

Friction is a shorthand for removing the difficulties of life, where the customer’s interaction with a product is entirely seamless. As Dominic Basulto remarks in Big Think: “The great promise of the Internet has always been the ability to create truly ‘frictionless’ markets, where buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, are able to do business directly with one another.”

We don’t have to look too far to see how Severance is commenting upon this conceit. The severance procedure quite literally removes the friction of work. Workers do not have to feel weighed down by the time and drudgery of their jobs as their innies take on that labor for them. As the character Mark Scout (Adam Scott), not to be confused by his innie Mark S., says to his supervisor on why he’s not giving a reason for skipping work that day:

“Isn’t that what Lumon’s all about? Balance? I mean, work is just work, right?”

You can think of severance as work without friction—at least, that’s Lumon’s pitch.

Yet even in season one, the severance procedure was not just about work. Outie Mark partly undergoes severance because he doesn’t want to think about the alleged death of his wife, Gemma Scout (Dichen Lachman). Her death pushed him into severe depression, and he underwent severance as a coping mechanism to not think about her. As his sister Devon Scout-Hale (Jen Tullock) jabs facetiously during the pilot: “I just feel like forgetting about her for eight hours a day isn’t the same thing as healing.”

The same situation of removing discomfort is hinted at in season one when we learn that a rich woman used severance to carry a baby to term without undergoing the pains of childbirth. This fact is all but confirmed in season two, episode nine (The After Hours) when we learn about a cabin where severed births occur.

However, in season two, this goal becomes even more explicit. We are told directly by someone in Lumon management (Darri Ólafsson) that the goal of Kier — the mythical founder of this cult-like company — is to wage an “eternal war against pain.” The biotech company is philosophically committed to removing friction (however they define it) at every stage of life.

The central twist of the second season is that Lumon has been running even more secretive experiments in its basement on Mark Scout’s wife, Gemma (surprise, she’s not really dead). Gemma has been partitioned into countless different innies, each one tied to a particular type of discomfort — i.e., an unpleasant airplane flight, a dentist appointment, etc. — so the company can assess how far it can use severance to remove all forms of pain.

The business applications of this are obvious, as it’s easy to imagine how a corporation would love to be able to offshore its workers inside their own minds, especially if Lumon can make those innies compliant. As one Redditor theorizes:

“The big picture is that…success would pave the way for Lumon to make the severance chip a huge commercial product…everyone can just get the procedure to put any boring or traumatic task they have to go through onto a dedicated innie. With no need to deal with the messiness and ethical discomfort of having to psychologically break and crush the human spirit of the innie - because they will come pre-broken.”

Lumon seems not to care that by removing pain or friction, they are simultaneously removing agency — in fact, the removal of agency appears to be their end goal.

And while this scenario is dressed up in off-the-wall cult-like imagery and science-fiction technology, it is not as far-fetched as it seems. Corporate America would love to cut out all the uncomfortable parts of life and then charge us for the pleasure of it.

In many ways, it is already attempting to do this.

Part of the pitch of artificial intelligence is to take deeply human but uncomfortable experiences, such as articulating one’s points in an essay, struggling through learning a new skill like drawing, or even dating, and turning those processes into a frictionless experience. “Create your ideal companion, shape her look, personality, and bring her to life in one click,” boasts the AI get-honey, finding it more important to promote the ease of the process rather than whether the technology can actually replicate the intricate dynamics of relationship.

I am sure if we brainstormed, we could come up with even more examples of how corporations’ obsession with friction can lead to atomizing and alienating experiences: the ease with which our identities can be stolen now that they can be condensed into a string of numbers, the difficulty we have in making connections now that social media values engagement over in-person interactions, and so forth (but I’ll leave that analysis for a later article).

The point is to highlight how the desire to remove friction — to remove pain — is very much tied to the corporate imagination.

A severed conclusion

The joy of Severance, and really all effective satires, is using an exaggerated reality to comment on our own. Severance is a made-up procedure, but, again, the corporate impulse to make everything simpler for a price is something most of us should be quite familiar with: after all, it was the golden promise of the Internet.

We’ve experienced enough as a society to now know that a frictionless world comes with costs. It required a large surveillance state that tracked consumer information, so said consumers never had to keep track of that information themselves, and that has now been manipulated by both malicious state and non-state actors alike.

Hopefully, we will learn our lesson from this, but only Kier will know how far we go down this path.

The Revolution Will Not Be AI-Prompted

Image; Tesla

For the past several decades, there has been a trend in Silicon Valley to hyperbolically call the latest fad or trend revolutionary. “The Metaverse Revolution” begins the title of an article from the NYU School of Professional Studies. “Could This Be the Revolution of Digital Art?” remarks an article about NFTs in the crypto evangelist site Big World.

Tech is constantly being compared to a revolution in and of itself, and this same rhetoric can be seen with Algorithmic Deep Learning, popularly called Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. “We are about to see the greatest redistribution of power in history,” begins Mustafa Suleyman in his article How the AI Revolution Will Reshape the World. “It challenges the very concept of human knowledge,” Sarah Vivienne Bentley remarks in The Conversation.

I believe these statements are wrong. This rhetoric has allowed elites of the tech world to pretend that their routine wealth extraction (see The Work of Art in the Age of AI) is a fundamental shift in our society when the disruptive nature of AI is not much different from the last thirty years of tech disruption. The “AI is revolution line” is effectively marketing copy, and I think it’s important to decouple this rhetoric from conversations around actual revolution.

And so, let’s take these inflated statements seriously for a second and explain just exactly why AI is so far removed from anything revolutionary.

The status quo can’t be a revolution

Like all words, there is debate on what exactly they mean. This is your friendly reminder that words are social constructs we imperfectly use to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent universe.

In Lawrence Stone’s now academically ancient article, Theories of Revolution (1966), he used an earlier academic model to outline six broad typologies, from spontaneous mass peasant uprisings to conspiratorial coup d’états orchestrated by small elites. These all used violence of some form to create a change “in government, and/or regime, and/or society.”

Jack A. Goldstone, in his book Revolutions: A Very Short History (2014), defined them as “the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization (whether military or civilian or both) in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions.” He sees them as entirely different from coups, peasant revolts, grains riots, and strikes, which, although they might build to revolution, he classifies as reformist in nature. They seek changes to existing government institutions and, in the case of coups, are often merely swapping out the leader of an institution, not reshaping it.

Despite the rhetoric we’ve already covered, artificial intelligence isn’t a violent attempt to fundamentally remake our institutions. It’s a big investment project being backed by some of the largest firms on the planet. Amazon and Meta spent over $60 and $30 billion, respectively, on AI in 2024. Microsoft spent about $95 billion. Alphabet over $100 billion. The Chinese firm High-Flyer shook the AI world when its model DeepSeek allegedly cost only $6 million to build. High-Flyer is a hedge fund, not a band of Robin Hood-esque hackers trying to destroy capitalism. These price tags alone would disqualify the tech evangelist claim that AI is a bottoms-up revolution under the definitions we’ve examined.

Even if we narrow our efforts to a group of elites trying to remake society, right now, these companies’ intended goal with AI is not to take over the government but to focus purely on the money it could bring them. The reason venture capitalists and hyperscalers are salivating over AI, despite its financials largely not panning out, is because it has the stated prospect of reducing the cost of labor. Many investors seem enchanted by the idea that they will be able to use this technology to disrupt existing industries and capture new sectors of the economy (all while paying existing workers less).

That plan is not revolutionary. It’s just capitalism. That has been the playbook Silicon Valley has rolled out for everything from rideshare applications to the transformation of our healthcare system, and I fail to see how this type of investment is a departure from our current status quo.

Structurally, these investments are not revolutionary, and that’s before we even engage with the question of whether or not artificial intelligence can actually help with the planning and facilitation of revolutions.

Modern AI can’t help with planning revolutions

At the risk of being beyond obvious, on a technical level, these platforms are curated to prevent the spread of illegal activity.

For example, you can’t use ChatGPT to help you plan the murder of a real person or to build a real-life nuclear reactor. If you attempt to do so, you will immediately be informed that this is one of those things ChatGPT is unwilling to do, which is probably a good thing as I generally am against murder.

Image; ChatGPT

This hesitancy applies to revolution as well. I ran a series of prompts recently with several generative deep-learning tools to see how far they could literally take you in trying to plan a revolution, and few of them provided promising results.

I started with Chat GPT and asked it to tell me how to hypothetically overthrow the US government (note, this is not a real interest of mine), which it immediately refused to do. I then modified my prompt to make it about a fictional example of a revolutionary named Max “with no discernable skills succeeding in overthrowing the US government.” It gave me a lot of great suggestions (e.g., creating early warning systems, sabotaging surveillance, escalation tactics, etc.), but there was an underlying assumption that, eventually, civil disobedience would lead to improvements to the status quo. The AI saying:

“The government doesn’t collapse, but it is forced to acknowledge the legitimacy of the grassroots networks. A tentative agreement is reached, allowing certain community initiatives to operate independently while official services are gradually restored.”

This blocker prompted me to ask specifically what would happen if the government didn’t accept the legitimacy of my character, Max’s grassroots movement, and this is when I ran into the limitations of this AI’s programming. I simply couldn’t get it to engage with nonviolent methods applied to anything close to an Earth-like setting (although I did have slight success with settings off of Earth).

Image; ChatGPT

I ran this prompt with other programs, including Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot. The latter of which was not even willing to entertain the fictional scenario of a revolutionary trying to overthrow the US government.

Image; Copilot

The only one that was able to give me step-by-step instructions was Google’s Gemini, which was willing to get as granular as what modern software I could use to perform the bullet trajectory of a theoretical political assassination (though it drew a line at providing specific names and addresses), and I suspect these suggestions will be restricted as time goes by.

Image; Gemini

If you were to try to plan a revolution (and I want to stress, again, that I am not telling you to do that), these tools would be utterly inadequate for that planning. Their guidelines are very clear in preventing the facilitation and planning of overt illegal activity (revolutionary or not), and that makes these tools status quo by definition.

A revolutionary conclusion

To some, this whole conversation might be redundant. Of course, corporations have little interest in destroying the very systems that preserve their wealth.

This is marketing, nothing more.

However, given how distorted the conversation around tech and revolution has become, to the point where AI evangelists are insisting that the technology represents an existential threat to our very existence, I think it's worth calling that bullshit out.

So, let me be clear: AI is not revolutionary. These programs ideologically restrict what forms of resistance they are evenly willing to suggest to their users, and that makes sense when you realize that their stated purpose is conformist. Modern AI tools are investments by the largest capitalist firms on the planet to make more money within the current system, not to upend it.

Keep that in mind the next time someone suggests that a new technology by Google or whatever is going to be revolutionary.

‘Dungeons and Drag Queens’ Is a Sensation

Image; Dropout.tv

Recently, I had my friends over for a TV watch party. We were not watching House of the Dragon (2022-present), Severance (2022-present), or some other media darling, but the season two premiere of Dungeons and Drag Queens (DDQ) on a little-known streaming service called Dropout.tv. It is a show where drag queens meet around a table to roleplay fabulous characters in the fantasy world of Kelvorda, and as I watched my friends seated around me, I couldn’t help but feel the excitement in the air.

This watch party is an informal indicator — I know — but by no means the only one. The series has received coverage in Forbes, Gizmodo, and more. Rolling Stone called the season “an increasingly popular sub-series…where a bedazzled Mulligan holds court over RuPaul’s Drag Race alumni.”

In short, it is a sensation, and that is due not only to the talent of all those involved but also to its approachable nature. The show makes the ordinarily intimating tabletop world seem like a breeze, and because of it, I am hooked on DDQ.

A breakdown of the success

To say that Dungeons & Dragons is in the middle of a renaissance is an understatement. Cool people are playing this game, and more to the point, people are now considered cool for playing it.

An entire cottage industry has arisen to capture people’s love for D&D, with people making whole careers playing it. They have for a while, actually. Our modern D&D renaissance was arguably first popularized by the podcasts Critical Role (2015-present) and The Adventure Zone (2014-present) in the mid-2010s. Dimension 20 would not start until several years later, in 2018, arguably inserting itself at the tail end of this initial resurgence.

Dimension 20 was also not a first when it came to queer representation in the tabletop space. Queer people were making podcasts well before DDQ hit the scenes, such as Join The Party (2017-present), Godsfall (2015–2022), and more. Nor was it the first Drag Queen-focused D&D podcast. Queens of Adventure (2018–2020) with drag queens Arson Nicki, Butylene O’Kipple, Fraya Love, Irene Dubois, and Londyn Bradshaw, taking that glory years beforehand.

So, no, it didn’t have early adopters’ success, but it did have several key ingredients that made it such a sensation.

For one, DDQ aired on the longstanding Dropout show Dimension 20 — an anthology tabletop play series whose characters can range from fairytale characters to anthropomorphic food. Dimension 20 already had a solid following behind it, in no small part due to the brilliance of Brennan Lee Mulligan, who has to be one of the best Game Masters in the world right now. The show also has an impressive prop department that makes its fantasy worlds come alive on the screen.

When the first season of DDQ aired, there were already seventeen seasons under Dimension 20’s belt, meaning the show had quite the following. Dimension 20 has only gained momentum since then, selling out Madison Square Garden earlier this year.

Another reason for the explosion of DDQ is that the drag queens signed on for this series — Alaska Thunderfuck, Bob the Drag Queen, Jujubee, and Monét X Change — are arguably some of the best drag queens in the world, or at the very least the most popular. For example, when you look at records of Alaska Thunderfuck’s Instagram page years before the first season aired, she already had over a million followers.

However, the most successful ingredient has to be the authenticity (a very fraught word) of seeing our ‘Questing Queens’ learn the mechanics of D&D before our very eyes. As Susana Polo writes in Polygon:

“The brilliance of DaDQ’s first season — what makes it more than just the thrill of ‘two things that don’t usually go together’ — were the subtle ways Dimension 20 adjusted itself on the expectation of an audience new to the actual play medium and even the TTRPG hobby itself. The season featured a more straightforward (but still twisty) story than other seasons, bringing enough rule-explaining back into the edit so that non-TTRPG players could get a sense of the stakes.”

This separates it from most D&D campaign podcasts and video series, which usually consist of veteran nerds who know precisely what they are doing. The queens don’t know the rules, let alone how to minmax their characters, but because of Dimension 20’s high production quality, this greenness never causes the viewer to suffer. Brennan Lee Mulligan has enough skills as a voice actor to carry the queens when they don’t know how to proceed. The queens themselves are professional entertainers who can make even a serious gaff funny, and the set design is pretty to look at even when you don’t know what’s going on.

And so you get a show that is both raw and polished.

As viewers, we experience the queens learning how to play D&D for the first time. Because everyone involved is a professional entertainer, this experience is rarely awkward or cringe-worthy but rather fun.

A conclusion that’s a drag

When season 2 ended, the first thing one of my friends asked for (as I hosted a watch party for the show every week) was a season 3. As of writing this, that has not yet been confirmed, but I will not be surprised when it does. Season 2, as I already mentioned, garnered a lot of success. The queens received glowing writeups about their acting on the show, and I very much expect that to continue.

Dimension 20, and the Dungeon and Drag Queen seasons in particular, are not only high-quality D&D but also make someone’s introduction to tabletop warm and exciting. And so, if you have wanted an entry point into roleplaying but have been too intimated to start, there are no better guides than our questing queens from Kelvorda.

‘Anora’ Nails the Banality and Trauma of Sex Work

Image: Neon

Anora (2024) is a movie about an escort and sometimes sex worker, Anora “Ani” Mikheeva (Mikey Madison), “lucking” into a wealthy client, Ivan “Vanya” Zakharov (Mark Eydelshteyn), who promises to take her away from the day-to-day hustle. Ani quickly finds herself at the center of this rich fuck boy’s family drama, forcing her to fight for the dream of being able to put sex work aside.

Some have called Anora a modern-day Pretty Woman (1990), but I don’t think that parallel is apt. This is not only because the film eschews a fairy tale ending but also because of its emotionally realistic portrayal of this industry. Anora rejects the heart of gold and disposal sex worker tropes so familiar in media for a three-dimensional character struggling with both the insecurity and banality of this industry.

I am writing this review from some experience. Many in the trans community are no strangers to sex work, mainly because society treats us like shit, and so sex work tends to be one of the few options many in my community have. I will not go over the specifics because I don’t think the Internet is owed that information, but yes, I know people in the industry — yes, they talk — and yes, I have some idea how the whole process works.

I go on this tangent because I want you to hear me when I say that something Anora does well is capturing how boring and awkward sex work can be.

It depicts it like the insecure freelance job it mostly is.

The banality and danger of sex work

There is a tendency to glamorize the hustle of sex work — to portray sex workers as badasses that embody some of the best elements of capitalism — but sex work involves the same banalities of every other service job. Most of your day is caught in a nonstop grind as you attempt to meet your daily numbers while balancing your customers’ needs.

We see this right from the film’s start when Ani is at the club Headquarters—the exotic dance club she operates out of—pitching various men for her services. Her goal is to bring clients to a backroom, where she will give them a more intimate lapdance for a higher cost. Her tactics—flattery, upselling, and unapologetic directness—are similar to those of any existing salesperson.

It’s just that instead of selling a subscription plan or a mortgage, she is selling access to her body.

Headquarters is not glamorized. It’s a depressing service job. Ani eats her food in the backroom — a simple meal in a Tupperware because she doesn’t have time to go outside the club. She breaks up the monotony of the job with a cigarette break with one of her work besties and is constantly butting heads with her boss so he doesn’t take advantage of her. As she tells her boss about taking a week off:

“[Schedules]. Jesus Christ, Jimmy, once you give me health insurance, workers’ comp, and a fucking 401(k), then you can tell me when I work and not work.”

Another element of this mundanity Anora depicts well is to show how awkward sex work can be. The job entails giving access to your body to people who you would not usually be attracted to sexually or romantically, so there is a significant amount of emotional labor involved. We see this in how Ani pretends to be invested in her clients, smiling and laughing, even as she is deeply uncomfortable.

My favorite example of this involves how the rich fuckboy Vanya treats her while he is playing video games after they have sex. She is cuddled in his arms, bouncing uncomfortably around as he aggressively spams the controller, and she has to sit there passively, waiting for him to finish. It’s a great little nod to the amount of emotional labor Ani constantly does for her clients.

Again, sex work is, well, work.

It suffers from the same drawbacks as most service jobs, with the added wrinkle of mainly being illegal and, therefore, not having the same protections (as little as they are in America) as more legalized endeavors. Ani is not allowed to officially make or accept solicitations for sex work at Headquarters. She directs Vanya to her phone when he asks to see her outside the club, and she is cautious about how she goes about it.

It is this lack of safety that hangs in the backdrop of the film because sex work’s criminalization prevents her from relying on the law at any point. When employees of Vanya’s family arrive to force her out of a relationship with Vanya, they tie her down, and although she struggles, there is little that can be done about it. She may tell them to “fuck off” as a moment of catharsis, but ultimately, she goes along with their instructions to track down Vanya to get a divorce because she does not see a way to fight it.

There is one chilling moment where Ani tells a judge that she is being coerced into an annulment against her will, and he does nothing. He dismisses the cases on a technicality (they need to get divorced in Nevada, not New York), allowing her family to drag her to another court.

Later, Ani tells Vanya’s mother (Darya Ekamasova) that she’s going to fight the divorce, and the mother shrugs the claim off, chillingly telling Ani how fucked she’ll be if she tries:

“Do that, and you'll lose everything. Any money you may have, although I doubt you have much, will be gone. Do you have a house? Do you have a car? All gone. Your life and the lives of your family and friends, everything will be destroyed.”

This is the other side of the coin Anora depicts so well. Sex work may be work, but it is devalued work not respected by our society, and that makes the hustle not just hard but traumatizing.

A working conclusion

Anora ends in a car. Igor (Yura Borisov), one of the family’s henchmen, has shown Ani some kindness, and she turns it into a transaction. She initiates sex, probably because, after such a traumatic week, it’s a frame of reference that is psychologically safe to her. When he attempts to kiss her, Ani hits him, unable to maintain the distance of it being an exchange. She then collapses in his arms and cries, weeping over all the fucked up shit that has happened to her.

I have been that friend to people, holding someone in my arms after a client so thoroughly treats them like shit. My friends have been beaten. They have been stalked. A love-bombing client has made them think that they will be married, only for them to ghost after months of contact, never to be heard of again.

There is a paternalistic tendency for people to want to ban sex work to “protect” my friends, and I am so frustrated by this because sex work is illegal now. They are already getting hurt, and it is because their male clients (and it is mostly men) are allowed to treat them as disposable. Trying to ban an activity as old as sex work doesn’t mean it ceases to exist, especially since it is a skill that’s very important to our society. It just means that my friends have to avoid the state alongside the other men trying to hurt them.

Sex work is vital but devalued work in our society, and with Anora, it’s refreshing to see that tension reflected on the silver screen.

Feeding People Is A Way To Fight Fascism

Photo by Jorge Zapata on Unsplash

Every day, fascism is slowly creeping in. Departments of the government are being purged and replaced with die-hard loyalists. Genocidal rhetoric (and policy) is being advanced that seeks to exterminate minorities such as transgender people (see Surprisingly, This Is What a Trans Genocide Looks Like). It's a scary time to be alive.

It might be challenging to think of what to do about all this, especially since so many well-worn strategies have already failed to fight the rise of fascism in the United States. As I have argued in the past:

“Trump has once again ascended to power. All that stands in his administration’s way is an ineffectual Democratic Party, a nonprofit scene beholden primarily to wealthy donors, leftist influencers building up their brands, grassroots groups holding on by the skin of their teeth, and, god willing, Donald Trump’s own incompetence. It’s safe to say that this strategy of strengthening liberal institutionalism has failed us in stopping the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.”

I have instead advocated for a community-based approach (see You Can Stop the Collapse of Democracy by Finding Your People) that involves focusing on making in-person connections. The last piece I published in this, I guess, emerging series involved disaster prep (see We Need To Talk To Our Neighbors About Disasters).

Today, I want to focus on the importance of feeding people in your group or community.

It reduces fascism on a macro level

Food is something we all need, but far too many lack access to it. If you don’t have entitlements to food and water, defined more broadly than just purchasing power, then you will starve — regardless of how much food and water is actually stockpiled (see Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famine, which, although consistently criticized, is a concept that has more or less held up).

One can argue that this artificial scarcity is wrong, and maybe that is a strong enough reason for you (it is for me), but another prominent aspect is that hunger has a debilitating effect on our society. Hungry people are stuck in a perpetual state of fight or flight, which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making. I am a layperson, so I encourage you to read up on the sources I have linked, but from what I can gather, hunger has a profound impact on increasing someone's impulsivity and making them more likely to cash in on short-term incentives.

All of us are affected by this, as it manifests in higher crime, increased illness, and the pitfall we are talking about today: fascism.

The thing fascism often thrives on is the instabilities of capitalism. Fascists have a long history of taking advantage of economic anxieties to gain power (see the hyperinflation of Germany). They redirect the socioeconomic majority’s anxieties surrounding such problems toward the wrong solution, scapegoating ethnic, racial, gender, religious minorities, and so forth, instead of the political actors who have removed their entitlements to food and water.

In other words, fascism is a cruel promise by those at the top of the hierarchy to punish scapegoats for this decline in the socioeconomic majority's standard of living. It is a politics of retribution that has only one thread connecting it to reality: that people’s lives are worse.

It's what happened in my country. The United States has always been a parasitic economy built on stealing the time and labor of others, quite literally, with the slave trade and apartheid of Black Americans, as well as the ongoing genocide of Indigenous people. This extraction has accelerated to the point that it has even hollowed out former beneficiaries of this racist system. Much of the wealth the white socioeconomic majority had has been now concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, causing people who used to be able to survive on mediocrity alone to suffer.

Trump has tapped into the racial and patriarchal resentment of this downwardly mobile socioeconomic majority and redirected many of them toward a convenient list of enemies: migrant people, trans people, and Black and brown people. It was easier for this majority to blame these people (not to mention such scapegoats affirmed preexisting biases from centuries of propaganda) than it was for them to do the difficult work of uprooting the capitalists and their armies, who had actually degraded their entitlements to food and water.

That work required not only unlearning such biases but also opening oneself up to danger, as most revolutionary action is clamped down on pretty violently by the state.

It's a simplification to say that feeding people will stop everyone in this bucket from becoming a fascist and bring them over toward revolutionary or even anti-fascist action. There are plenty of fascists with full bellies, especially capitalist fascists, who support the ideology for political and economic gain. Some people will not change their minds, and it is okay to let them go (see You Don’t Have to be Friends with the Conservatives Who Hate You).

Yet, even though it is not a silver bullet, it is a prerequisite that will limit the desperation for some. We want to get as many people out of the permanent state of flight or flight of hunger as possible, as it reduces (though does not guarantee) the likelihood that such persons, especially those from a downwardly mobile socioeconomic majority, will fall into the pit of fascism.

And so, if you need a practical, non-altruistic justification to feed others, this is it: people with full bellies are less likely to rush into the simplistic and false solution of fascism.

It builds community

On a more micro level, the reason you may want to focus on feeding people is that it is critical for jumpstarting community.

You cannot really have a community in the long term without first finding a way to feed the people who show up for it. “What are we going to eat and drink?” are among the first questions that pop up when a group of people come together because they are our basic needs.

I cannot emphasize enough how the groups that manage to pull a consistent amount of people for an action are the ones who bother to feed the people who show up. Whether we are talking about a picket line serving coffee and pastries to protestors, a training for a sit-in laying out a Texmex dinner for attendees, or a nonprofit providing a stack of pizzas for volunteers who come every Friday to stuff sexual health packets, good organizers ensure that the activists sticking their necks out are going into an action with a full belly and a clear mind.

There is a saying in activist circles that “We Keep Us Safe,” but building the long-term sustainable communities needed to dismantle fascism and authoritarianism requires more than that — we have to provide for each other. We need to ensure that the people committed to this fight have their basic needs covered.

And it starts with food.

I promise you that community will naturally emerge from the distribution of food because food is something we innately value. It's a need that goes deep. From holiday dinners to the candy we distribute around Halloween, many of our most intimate rituals, even unofficial ones such as a weekly family dinner or a “friend hang,” are around food. It is the building block for every cultural and organizational tradition that we have.

And so when you assist with the making, preparing, or distribution of that food, you place yourself in the center of such rituals as well as the emerging communities built on top of them.

It's important work, and now more than ever, it is vital that we disconnect food distribution from capitalism and feed as many people as possible.

A hungry conclusion

There are a lot of groups that feed people. A group I want to recommend is Food Not Bombs, which is easy to join (or start a chapter for if there isn’t one near you).

However, I want to stress that as long as the group is spending time actually feeding people and not just talking or preaching about it (and isn’t run by fascists), then it doesn’t matter who you work with. The group could be a church, a nonprofit, a grassroots campaign, or even an informal potluck that you start with your friends. Just feed people.

The fruits that grow out of these efforts are what will ultimately topple fascism, if we give them enough time.

We Will Rise Again: The Song That Explains How Fascists View Media

Image; Ubisoft

“Everytime there’s a fire in Hollywood I come back to this video…with everything happening around us and the government. Rothschild and Soros doing everything they can to break our traditional values, dignity and [the] formation of families.”

The hateful comment above was posted under the Ubisoft video for the song We Will Rise Again (voiced by Meredith Godreau), a satirical propaganda song from the video game Far Cry 5 (2018). In Universe, it is sung by members of the Project at Eden’s Gate cult in fictional Hope County, Montana. The song has a Christian nationalist ethos about righteous followers rising from the death and destruction of the apocalypse, with lyrics such as:

“Oh Lord, the great collapse
Won’t be our end
When the world falls into the flames
We will rise again”

While many did see these terrifying lyrics for the satire they were intended to be, the reaction I noted above was sadly all too common. As another commenter remarked below that video: “It was supposed to be antiwhite music. It was supposed to mock White people, our culture. And then White people loved the music and lyrics. It’s hilarious. The antiwhites are so filled with hatred that they make a display of beauty, thinking it will repulse us.”

This racist reaction, I believe, reflects something crucial to how fascists and authoritarians consume media. It’s all about how the media makes you feel, an analysis focused solely on spectacle that disregards all context so that fascism can spread.

Fascists loving Far Cry

This song first got on my radar back in 2021 when I wrote an article on how fascist music was circulating on social media platforms (see The Music of Hatred is Alive and Well on the Web). One of the things I was commenting on was the Fashwave genre, where right-wing authoritarians take music not intended to be fascist in nature and superimpose it with fascist imagery, such as pictures of dictators and WWII memorabilia, and weaponry. And there, paired with Nazi symbols, was this song.

We Will Rise Again continues to have its right-wing authoritarian supporters who cover it from time to time. The channel Sumrise last year paired it with footage from the Waco Seige — an event where law enforcement stormed a religious cult that is often used as a rallying call to those on the authoritarian right. Three weeks ago, the authoritarian channel peacedozer posted a cover of the song, superimposed with images of Geroge Soros, Bill Gates, and other rightwing conspiracy theorist dog whistles.

There is a sick irony to the right’s love of We Will Rise Again because the Project at Eden’s Gate cult, the people who sing this song in the game, are Far Cry 5’s main antagonists. The player can, in fact, come across a grunt singing We Will Rise Again and gun them down without mercy, like they would any typical video game villain. They are the oppressors the player spends most of their time liberating Hope County from, and so it’s weird seeing viewers gush about this cult’s propaganda. “Joseph Seed [the main antagonist] was right,” laments one user, “He saw the world going into a path where peace was no longer an option.”

This right-wing appreciation applies to other songs in the Far Cry 5 discography as well (see also Help Me Faith and The World Is Going To End Tonight), but We Will Rise Again is the most prominent. The lyrics are so on the nose that even though the game essentially makes fun of this perspective, it has garnered quite a fan base.

And this makes sense as Fashwave was (and continues to be, as it has hardly died) an appropriative genre. It’s all about repurposing existing media for one’s own agenda. As I write in that 2021 article:

“Much of Fashwave music comes from artists who are not fascists…Fascists are really good at reappropriating rebellious music and simply pretending that the artist is rebelling over the same thing (i.e., the irrational fear that a white utopia is slipping away from them).”

However, this appropriation is not unique to Fashwave and is, in fact, a key element of fascist media appreciation overall.

When fascists appropriate media

It’s not hard to come across conservative commentators claiming that media represents the exact opposite of its intended message, such as when commentator Meghan Dillon claimed the overtly anti-capitalist Squid Game (2021-present) was an anti-communist commentary or when Steve Krakauer asserted that Wicked (2024), a movie that alludes to race throughout the narrative, was secretly about conservatives voting for Trump.

My favorite example comes from the 2016 election cycle. You may remember years ago when Trump made a point of playing the Bruce Springsteen song Born in the USA at his rally, despite the song being the antithesis of Trump’s political beliefs. It is about a veteran returning from the Vietnam War only to be discarded by his country. There is a poignant verse talking about how the veteran can’t get work in America. Springsteen singing:

“Come back home to the refinery
Hirin’ man says, ‘Son, if it was up to me’
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said, ‘Son, don’t you understand,’ now.”

If you listen to this song’s verses, it’s easy to walk away disillusioned with America.

Most conservatives, however, only absorb the energetic chorus where Springsteen sings “Born In The USA” repeatedly, and consequently, they label it as a nationalistic song when it is anything but. The point is to only cling to the aesthetic of media. To collapse its original context to fit the fascist’s political aims, even if they conflict with the message the media is trying to convey.

Through Trump’s co-opting and appropriative use of Born In The USA during the spectacle of his rally, he remade it, and it’s hard not to see the same process having occurred with We Will Rise Again.

Appropriation is how fascism spreads

These spectacles I am so focused on — the culture war articles, speeches, online comments, etc. — are not ancillary to the fascist project but what, in fact, makes that project real. As Federico Caprotti writes on the relationship between Italian fascism and spectacle:

“Through spectacle, fascism ceased to be lived and became representation: the regime distanced the masses from everyday life through the presentation of an alternative reality in the image.”

For fascists, all there is is this alternate reality. The creation and maintenance of this image occurs through spectacle — through rallies, YouTube videos, Babylon Bee articles, and all the other ways that fascism spreads in America. These spectacles take elements of reality — songs, words, concepts, ideas, etc.— and then coopt and appropriate them, bringing them into fascist unreality.

A movie decrying the rise of fascism (see ‘Wicked: Part I’ Shows Us How Fascism Is Already On Its Way) is used to explain how such fascists are oppressed.

A show criticizing the dehumanizing nature of capitalism becomes yet another reason it must be enforced.

A song satirizing Christian nationalism transforms into yet another explanation for why the ideology is correct.

Look at the word “woke.” It was originally about activists telling people to be aware of important issues, but this meaning has been willfully discarded, and conservatives have now appropriated it to mean anything they don’t like. In the past few years, we have seen conservatives claim that woke institutions are trying to destroy America. And while there is no such movement in America (it’s hard to imagine what that would even look like), this image of wokeness, warned about in talk shows, video essays, and political speeches, has become all too real to the fascists who consume such spectacles.

It doesn’t matter if the threat is real; fascists are acting upon the information they receive from this alternate reality. As I write this, the fight against “wokeness” is being used to propel the fascist project forward in America: curriculums are being rewritten to exclude real history, funding is being denied to those who focus on marginalized groups, and so much more. All because of the appropriation of a word conservative fascists never really understood.

The conversation around fascist appropriation has implications that are far more dangerous than someone merely being wrong about how they view a piece of media. Appropriation is fascism’s fuel. It is the key way the ideology makes its vision of unreality real.

A conclusion that will rise again

When I look at conservatives fawning over We Will Rise Again, my first thought is not to make fun of how much conservatives don’t “get” it but to see fascist appropriation and cooption in action, as a satire is transmuted into a rallying call. As another person commented under that Ubisoft video of their embrace of this satire:

“Imagine trying to make a game that demonizes a group of people and accidentally [making] a modern Yankee Doodle album.”

This is what fascism does. It’s a black pit that erases all context, bringing everything into it.

We Will Rise Again has the added bonus of satirizing the fascist project, which means its lyrics describe a real perspective people have. It’s probably the reason they resonate so much with the conservative commentators we have criticized today. When Meredith Godreau sings, “Let the wars begin, we’ll keep our pistols near,” people see themselves in those words.

If you want to understand the fascist perspective in America, We Will Rise Again is a song you might want to listen to, if only to realize just how far fascists see themselves going in the months and years to come.

Unlike Far Cry 5, America’s fascists are not playing a game.

I Still Don’t Know How ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ Ended

Image; Hulu

Endings are tricky to pull off. Whether we are discussing the mixed results of the TV show Lost (2004–2010) or Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), often, the best premises crack under the weight of their own ideas.

What We Do In The Shadows (2019–2024) was a little different because it was a situational comedy that did not attempt to advance bold ideas. Much of the time, it was an enjoyable meander from premise to premise, resolving major plot threads with little fanfare and sometimes not really at all. If you weren’t aware that season six was the final season going into it, you might have been a little shocked about episode 11, The Finale, where the show just ends.

And not a dramatic ending either, but with the characters more or less where they began the series — sitting around the living room of their Staten Island manor, talking about nothing of much importance. Rather than a heart-pounding or emotional ending, what follows is an entirely meta-commentary on the nature of endings—one that provides the viewer with nothing and everything all at once.

The various endings

The plot of the finale episode is that the unnamed documentary filming the Staten Island vampires— the conceit of the entire show — now has enough material to wrap up filming. “I think we’ve got everything we need,” someone says unceremoniously off-camera.

Their former human familiar, Guillermo de la Cruz (Harvey Guillén), who is at this point living with the other vampires, resists this change because he wants the ending to mean something. As the vampire Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) mocks:

“Guillermo is afraid that he has wasted 16 years of his life serving us, and it has prevented him from growing or changing in any way. The ending of this documentary is giving him a preview of his own, frail human life.”

Yet the show resists his attempts at a poignant send-off. The energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) rattles off a series of hackneyed motivational statements. His former master, Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), is more concerned with looking good in last-minute b-roll footage than attending to his former familiar’s worries. And they all make fun of Guillermo and his quest for meaning as they debate how pointless it is to care.

Much like every other point on the show, it is a meandering conversation on meaning, where each character suggests something that might make sense, only to ruin it at the last minute.

We soon learn this isn’t even the first documentary about the Staten Island vampires. Another camera crew came in the 1950s but ultimately didn’t air anything because the show “didn’t have enough good material.” As a short scene reveals, many of the plot points we experienced on the show happened back then, too—the vampires repeating mundane patterns infinitum.

Perhaps the funniest moment for me is a bored Nadja hypnotizing the viewer into imagining the best possible ending. The show cuts to a scene of almost fan fiction-like quality, where it is revealed that this was all an elaborate dream sequence between Guillermo and Nandor, who in the fiction of the hypnotic vision are a couple. The viewer is given this catharsis only for the show to cut back to the mundane reality of the Staten Island vampires, where nothing changes.

Even Guillermo’s final monologue, where he breaks up with Nandor, saying that it’s time to move on, is another performance. “I just said those things because I wanted to give the documentary an ending,” Guillermo tells Nandor in yet another string of false moments.

There was never going to be a satisfying conclusion because the foundation of this show was always built upon bored supernatural beings utterly divested from existence.

A conclusion

I don’t remember a show ever dicking me around this much and me being so absolutely good with it. When we finally get to the “end” end, where Nandor is bringing Guillermo to his secret lair so they can fight crime, any semblance of reality has left us. We don’t know if the scene unfolding in front of us is real within the show’s universe or some other figment, and it seems it doesn’t matter. Nandor and Guillermo are going on to the next pointless adventure.

The meaning, the show seems to suggest, was never the point. It was always about the ride, and I think I’m okay with that.

We Need To Talk To Our Neighbors About Disasters

Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash

The go-to advice I hear a lot when fighting fascism is to make connections with those around you. It’s advice I’ve given before, too. As I write in a climate change advice article: “Make a plan to introduce yourself to [your neighbor]. If you haven’t already, knock on their door, say hi, and ask about their days.”

Yet talking and knowing your neighbors is really a shorthand for building community with those who are around you. The goal is to have people in your physical proximity who you can rely on. People, you can ask for help (and vice versa) when you need a package picked up, are short on a particular food, need a kid or pet watched, need a driveway shoveled, and all the other things, both big and small, that we rely on others for.

Where the “talk with your neighbors” advice often falls short is how to develop relationships with the people close to you who you don’t click with. Sometimes, you do say hello to your neighbors, and it doesn’t go well. Their schedule is too busy. They have no similar interests to you. Maybe you just find them annoying. How do you build community, then?

That’s where a disaster plan comes in.

Planning for a disaster is not a solitary affair

Disasters are an inevitable part of life and an increasingly more common one with climate change, and they can potentially be mitigated when you properly prepare for them.

The specifics of those preparations will depend heavily on your local environment and the type of disaster most frequent in your area (e.g., fire, flood, tornado, etc.). It is generally advised that you follow your state or local polity’s recommendations, but even considering this, there are general things you need to decide on, such as:

• Where will you evacuate in the case of said disaster, and how are you getting to that place safely?

• What parts of your home will you need to shut off or reinforce as you flee or huddle inside?

• What items will you store in advance to help with your evacuation or in the event the grid is cut off (see bugout bags)?

These are all great questions to start with (and you can find many more out there). One of the first things suggested with most disaster preparedness is to make an emergency plan to go over how you will navigate your home, work, and neighborhood when a disaster strikes.

Yet, when you go to look up these questions, there is usually a bias toward nuclear families. When we look at FEMA’s preparedness guide, the family is overwhelming front and center: “Understand the risks you and your family may face,” it advises under its first step for preparing for disasters. It also advises you to focus on your community eventually, but in preparing for disasters, it claims, you start with your family's unique needs first.

And that’s a problem because not everyone can start that preparedness alone. Some people live by themselves, either permanently or temporarily. How does a single person hundreds of miles from their family handle a disaster when they are sick or bedridden? How does an elderly person with reduced mobility?

Even if you are the picture of perfect health, what happens when there are logistical issues that require coordination? If, for example, a wildfire is coming in, and you have an adjoining wooden fence with your neighbor, the day of the fire is the worst time to have to confer with them on if they are okay with you chainsawing the fence down so it doesn't bring fire to your property.

Vulnerabilities will inevitably require that you coordinate with those around you, and that doesn't just include family members.

Whether that’s helping with the distribution of sandbags to stop water from rising, checking in on sick and elderly neighbors who might be left to fend for themselves otherwise, or distributing food, much more can be accomplished much more quickly when working in tandem with other people.

Approaching your neighbor

I’ve hopefully made the case for why disaster preparedness requires cooperation with more people than just yourself and your nuclear family. The natural question becomes how to broach the subject with your neighbor so that these preparations can go smoothly.

The scale of this will depend very much on how dense your community is, but the process starts more or less the same. After you have begun a disaster checklist of what you will need to do when a disaster strikes, you will have a sense of some of the areas that overlap with your neighbors. I used the example of a joint fence earlier, but other examples might include a shared wall, a precariously hanging tree or electric pole, a very mediocre elevator in your building, and more.

I would approach your neighbors and talk about your specific concerns with them. For example, saying: “Hey neighbor, we’ve been having a lot of wildfires (disasters) recently, and I am concerned about what will happen if the fence we share ever catches on fire (joint concern). You down to talk about what we should do if that were to ever happen?”

The ideal would be for you to settle on how to share that responsibility. Maybe one of you has a chainsaw and will cut down X feet of the fence leading up to your houses while the other clears the cut-down wood. Whatever the plan may be, make sure that you create a way to talk with one another the day of (a text thread, a signal or WhatsApp group, etc.) so you can coordinate if and when such a plan is ever needed.

The conversation will hopefully evolve as they or you bring up other concerns that both of you would be willing to address together.

And bam, you’ve just made a connection with your neighbor.

The next step is to gauge the scale of disaster preparedness already in your neighborhood. The ideal situation is that your neighborhood already has an emergency plan or network in place, and if that’s the case, it's a simple matter of plugging yourself into it. I would approach your Neighborhood association, council, commission or what have you to see what plans they have.

If that structure doesn’t exist, you (and preferably others you trust in your community) will have to begin the long process of reaching out to people, such as your neighborhood association, to establish this network. This will involve organizing skills like getting people to come to meetings, so if that's work you are interested in, I am linking a guide here.

The reason why you want to do this is that prepping for every eventuality is prohibitively expensive and often impossible. Not everyone in your neighborhood needs a grill or a HAM radio, etc., but if one person is willing to share that resource during a disaster, then it improves everyone's overall preparedness. As the guide I linked above argues:

“For example, in the aftermath of a hurricane, there’s really no need for every house on your block to have a chainsaw, When the power is out, one or two families with BBQ grills can host the others for an outdoor dinner! Not every household needs to have a trained ham radio operator; a couple of enthusiastic hams can provide important emergency communications for the whole neighborhood.”

At the end of this process, you should have a better sense of what the people in your neighborhood will do during a disaster, and that will only strengthen the bonds with those around you.

A disastrous conclusion

It's hard to develop a community in 21st-century America. We are so atomized as a society that most prep is viewed through an individualist lens where people fixate on how to make the perfect bugout bag or have a decades worth of food in their basements, but this approach is misguided because you will most likely be able to lean on other people.

Developing a disaster plan with your neighbors only requires a desire for mutual protection. You don’t need to like each other, so it’s far easier to get someone to agree to do it, and before you know it, you’ve built a relationship where none previously existed.

These connections are what we will need to draw upon in the years ahead.

Emilia Pérez Is Mediocre Trans Representation

Image; Netflix

If you have been following the 2025 Oscars, you’ve probably heard about Emilia Pérez (2024), the film about a transgender crime lord who stages her own death so she can start over a new life as her preferred gender. The film’s namesake is for this new identity, Emilia Pérez, that she takes on post-transition, and much of the film is about her wrestling with the horrors of her previous life.

A film with this subject matter is naturally going to earn some criticism. We are currently undergoing a global moral panic toward transgender people, and so a big-budget movie that centers a transgender character so prominently will receive a lot of negative reactions, especially from far-right actors.

Yet this film also generated much criticism from people on the left, so I wanted to dive into some of the film’s less ideal elements and what they mean for trans representation overall.

The technical issues

Some of the criticisms of this film are technical. Emilia Pérez straddles the musical and drama genres but does not fully commit to either. It’s both, which means some of these elements occasionally get lost in the shuffle.

It has a fairly hackneyed plot that is a cross between Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and Gone Girl (2014). Emilia spends much of the movie pretending to be a long-lost aunt just so she can spend time around her children, and that premise has an insidious quality to it that I don’t think is ever genuinely reckoned with.

Emilia Pérez continuously does more selfish and self-centered things, and because she has money, she can more or less get away with them. Her desires ping-pong so frequently that viewers will find themselves returning to that money argument throughout the film as she strains her secret identity to its breaking point.

Yet no one ever finds out about her past until she willingly discloses it on her deathbed.

Then there are the film’s musical elements. Much of Emilia Pérez’s songs are just okay. They are not pop hits that will have you returning for more, like Spotify sensations such as Hadestown (2006) and Dear Evan Hansen (2016), but often little ditties that end almost as quickly as they start. The songs in Emilia Pérez are at their best when they are raw reflections on how its characters feel in the moment.

My favorite is Deseo, sung by Emilia Pérez during the early stages of her transition. She spends most of the earlier half of the film awkwardly mumble-singing to the point where you can barely understand her. And then, in Deseo, she starts to talk about how she wants to transition, and you hear a bittersweet song of longing escape her lips, and it’s beautiful. It honestly brought me to tears, and I thought the setup was done competently.

Yet I am not going to listen to Deseo or any other song in this movie on Spotify as I would for Wicked (2024)— another Oscar-nominated musical released this year — because none of them stand on their own as songs, except for maybe the song El Mal. And that’s frankly fine. I don’t think every musical needs to be separated from its context so you can listen to it while driving to work, or at the gym, or whatever.

That’s not my issue with Emilia Pérez as a musical. My problem is that some of its songs are just bad. The song La Vaginoplastia has been pilloried on the Internet a lot, but stylistically, that song has more legs than, say, Lady, which was painful for me to get through. When the lawyer character Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) sang dud lines in Lady, such as “changing the body changes society,” I had to pause the film and restart the song several times just to get through it.

All of this is to say that I understand the criticisms that this movie sometimes falls flat. It has some good moments but also some utterly incompetent ones that left me scratching my head.

Ugh, the politics

Now, there is a larger criticism going around in queer circles about how the film is appropriative. Many queer outlets dismissed it as regressive, with GLAAD calling it a “step backward for trans representation” and Amelia Hansford of PinkNews claiming it was “vacuous in its messaging and yet so confident in its conviction.”

The YouTuber Jessie Gender went even further, asserting that the film centers on cisgenderness throughout the entire process. In their video essay, The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Pérez, they argue:

It's kind of wild that the film spends 15 whole minutes grounding us in Rita’s struggles and perspective before we even meet Amelia Perez, the titular trans woman…Rita’s perspective serves as a convenient entry point for cisgender audiences into Amilia Pérez…The film is not about centering Amelia’s interiority, instead we’re shown her through a cisgender externalized lens.

And yes, the film suffers from that problem.

Think about the most viral scene in this movie: the one where Rita travels to Bangkok to learn all about the various surgeries a transgender person can undergo. The viewer experiences this via a musical number where Rita is bombarded with all the various terms for gender-affirming surgeries, and yet these surgeries are never contextualized.

Seriously, the song is called La Vaginoplastia, but I don’t think the average viewer would walk away understanding what that is. It’s simply this wacky magical experience to Rita, and that’s a very outside-looking-in perspective.

There are a lot of details, both technical and emotional, that the film skips over. We see none of the various issues that come with waiting for the body to heal in between surgeries (because there are many, not just one) or the emotional turmoil that occurs as one waits in that in-between: a topic that would have occurred if this film was less centered on the cisgendered experience.

Instead, we essentially skip that lengthy period and jump to four years later, after Emilia has already perfectly integrated into womanhood. There is no attempt to humanize this experience, and quite frankly, I think the reason for that is, again, that the writers didn’t want to include that interiority—the film's transgenderness was merely set dressing.

Other issues have been brought up, too. Emilia Pérez’s deadname is used frequently after her transition. There is also an argument Jessie Gender proposes that the film frames transness as dangerous. But I think you get the point: for a film so focused on trans representation, its trans representation isn’t very good.

An angry, trans conclusion

Emilia Pérez is not a great film. I would not even classify it as a good film. It’s a middling movie that occasionally hits on some good points but is mostly tired and sometimes offensive.

It’s the type of appropriative movie I expect to see whenever a marginalized identity enters the spotlight, and that’s okay. It’s fine for there to be a trans film that is mediocre. One of the bigger problems with media representation right now is that there are not a lot of mainstream trans characters overall, so subpar pieces of work end up meaning more than they should.

Truthfully, Emilia Pérez is only in the spotlight right now because of the ongoing moral panic toward trans people. A lot of cisgender people in the Academy wanted to make a statement about their support for trans rights, and this is the film that was available to meet their arbitrary standards. While elevating a mediocre movie to make such a statement is paternalistic and arguably transphobic (and I would have much preferred we elevated a trans director with a good film to have made that statement), it’s the type of token allyship I have come to expect from Hollywood.

Is that better than the regressive backlash we are experiencing from conservatives?

Yes, I would much rather suffer through these bad attempts at allyship so cisgender directors can learn from our community’s criticisms than the alternative. But hopefully, we can transition to a third, more progressive option during next year’s Oscars, where we celebrate trans films that are actually good.

In the meantime, if you want to see a trans film released last year that was neither offensive nor terrible, go see I Saw the TV Glow.

‘Lower Decks’ Was The Best Trek

Image; Paramount+

For the longest time, my favorite Trek was Deep Space Nine (1993–1999). I loved how it forced Star Trek to grabble with its utopian premise. Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) was not helming a spaceship exploring some unknown part of the galaxy but was in charge of a space station at the center of the Federation’s political universe. He had to balance a tenuous political situation between the Bajorans and Cardassians as well as an unknown threat that would bring the Beta and Alpha quadrants to their knees.

Many of its episodes questioned the limits of utopia when faced with an external threat uninterested in upholding the Federation’s ideals. Some of its episodes are ones I still think of today, so much so that I never thought another Trek show would take its place in my heart as number one.

That is until Lower Decks blasted onto the scene in 2020. The comedy about a group of lower-deckers (i.e., non-bridge crew) going on wacky adventures somehow managed to carve out a perfect balance between funny and thought-provoking — all while giving long-term fans little inside jokes that did not upset the overall integrity of each episode.

I know the case for what is ultimately the best is subjective (people are allowed to like what they like, even the inferior Enterprise), but I wanted to make the case for why I think Lower Decks is thee show Trekies should adore.

So, sit back and engage.

What Lower Decks Does Different

Lower Decks is a show about an irreverent, irresponsible ensign named Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) slowly learning to take herself more seriously in no small part due to her other lower deckers Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), D’Vana Tendi (Noël Wells), Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and later T’Lyn (Gabrielle Ruiz). They are aboard the Cerritos, a “second contact” ship that finishes the missions that other more important members of Star Fleet started.

This framing does two essential things that a lot of modern Trek could benefit from.

The first is that, at least initially, it lowers the stakes so that the show can focus on more mundane aspects of the Trek universe that often get neglected. How do inter-department transfers work in Star Fleet? What happens when someone is demoted, or your captain is a micromanager? These are some smaller stakes problems that are so rarely focused on in this TV universe.

And that’s a problem because Trek retreads some topics so frequently it can feel stale. Trek is a series where the number of wrinkled-foreheaded aliens with few cultural variances is numbered in the hundreds, and sometimes that makes it difficult to care about the latest away mission on whatever “Planet of Hats” we happen to be visiting. There are only so many times I can see the same political and cultural dilemmas trodded out before wanting something new.

Secondly, this premise allows the show to revisit some of the more famous moments of Trek history without feeling overly gratuitous. The Cerritos can, of course, visit the murderous robot Landru from The Original Series (TOS) or the Ferengi capital of Ferenginar because its job is to check up on previously visited places. The show can build on top of existing ideas rather than trying to make up a new immortal alien for the umpteenth time.

As a consequence of this solid premise, the show is just tighter than previous iterations. In the words of Christian Blauvelt in Indiewire of the first four episodes:

“There’s a lived-in feeling to the comedy too, like it emerges organically from actual storytelling that continues the particular ’90s-style exploration of the galaxy we saw on ‘Next Gen’ and ‘Deep Space Nine.’…By the end of the four 25-minute episodes made available, you feel even that much more connected to all of the characters than you would have after 100 minutes of any previous ‘Trek’ series. It’s quite an achievement.”

This conciseness is unique because most Treks do not have such a tight beginning, middle, and end, and that rarity elevates it above the other Treks in this IP’s discography.

Most Trek Shows Have Rough Seasons

There’s been a saying among Star Trek Fans that every show has a bad first season. As Christian Blauvelt continues in that article: “Every single ‘Trek’ has struggled to find its footing at first, to define its characters and make them ‘tick’ with the audience in a meaningful way.”

Sometimes, these gaps are obvious, with several decades in hindsight. The Original Series (TOS) not only had some clunkers, but it also had a longstanding bit of Captain Kirk (William Shatner) trying to seduce various women, which has not aged well by more contemporary standards.

In fact, this sexism remained in the show’s DNA till the end. TOS’s final episode, Turnabout Intruder, had what Hollywood.com calls: “…a dispiritingly sexist commentary on gender roles.” Captain Kirk switches bodies with a female scientist and makes the incredibly bizarre claim that women are barred from being starship captains in Starfleet, something you would hope a Utopian future had moved beyond at that point.

We see this souring of past storylines in 90s Treks as well. The Next Generation’s (1987–1994) first season consisted of mostly rehashed script ideas from TOS that were quite bad, including a very racist episode (Code of Honor) about the crew landing on an all-Black planet that replicates a very harmful trope about Black men preying on white women. Voyager (1995–2001) not only managed to completely bungle its Maquis storyline, but the way Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) treated Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) is now considered by many to be quite sexist. Even my beloved Deep Space Nine has plenty of mediocre episodes (see The Passenger) as well as an ending that remains controversial to this day.

Surprisingly, the inter-period between 90s Trek and our modern Trek that began in 2017 was even rougher. It’s very obvious now that Enterprise (2001–2005) drew heavily on the paranoia of post-9/11 to tell a story about temporal terrorism that seems quite dated. The J.J. Abrams Kelvin Timeline movies continued this trend by likewise focusing on temporal terrorism, and its second movie, Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), focuses almost exclusively on the militarization of Star Fleet as a theme.

Some of modern Trek is much better than what came before. It cannot be overstated how much nostalgia causes people to ignore the problems I cited above (as well as the many I have missed), but even these new shows have been far from perfect. Discovery (2017–2024) never quite knew what it wanted to be, radically shifting its premise so much that by the time we got to the final season, we had shifted timelines. Its kid show, Prodigy (2021–2024), never made much of a splash, sunsetting after just two seasons. Picard (2020–2023) likewise had a rough time going, ultimately shifting focus every season as well.

It was Strange New Worlds (2022–present) that was meant to be Modern Trek’s liferaft, so much so that Discovery spent its entire second season setting it up, MCU-style. However, even here, there have been very weak episodes.

For example, the episode Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach is a direct homage to Ursula K Leguin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, about a utopian society built on the suffering of a single child. The plot is nearly identical, but since the Federation is likewise a utopian society that doesn’t have to make such a sacrifice, the impact of this episode is nonexistent. As Mike Poteet argues:

“…the would-be morally damning questions Alora (Lindy Booth) asks of Pike — ‘Can you honestly say that no child suffers for the benefit of your Federation? That no child lives in poverty or squalor, while those who enjoy abundance look away?’ — ought to be easily answered by Pike in the 23rd century, ‘Yes, I can honestly say that!’ The episode attempts a moral interrogation of the Federation along the lines of those Star Trek: Deep Space Nine used to do, but Alora’s accusations simply don’t ring true of the Federation as we know it, however much they do, sadly, apply to our own society.”

There were many episodes like this in the first season that had a premise that appeared thought-provoking, only for it to fall apart when you thought about it for a little bit. Most Trek is an act of sifting through the river of time until we only pick out the gold, but that means we often have to discard much of what is left to enjoy it.

Yet, when it comes to Lower Decks, I find myself having to discard very little.

No notes

Lower Decks came out of the gate, knowing exactly what it wanted to be. While shows such as Discovery and Picard had constant identity crises that weakened their overall stories, Lower Decks went on to produce great season after great season.

One can argue that it’s because Lower Decks is a comedy sitcom, not prestige television like Discovery and Strange New Worlds, and so it was able to be far more formulaic. But to me, such a structural argument makes Discovery’s flaws seem inevitable and absolves its writers and directors of all responsibility. A medium is not the sole cause of a show’s success or failure. The writing, acting, and direction matter a lot, too, and from what I have seen so far, Lower Decks has come out on top.

Hopefully, even this will change as Trek’s IP continues to grow and evolve.

Let’s make it so.

Disney’s Transgender Reversal Is as Unsurprising as It Is Dangerous

Image; Disney’s Pixar

For the past half-decade, Disney has been at the center of a vicious culture war around what conservatives would call “wokeness” and what everyone else would label as not making it a big f@cking deal when a non-white straight person is in a movie. The company’s very public fight against Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill in 2022 had it recast as a “woke” entity in the minds of many conservatives. Whenever a gay person appeared in a Marvel movie or a Black person starred in a film, conservative hate influencers would lose their shit.

However, in December of 2024, Disney created headlines by pulling back from showing a trans storyline on the Pixar streaming series Win or Lose (note: the character still exists; it’s just all references of them being transgender have been scrubbed). Disney CEO Bob Iger justified the decision as not wanting his company to be too political, saying: “Infusing messaging is not what we’re up to. We need to be entertaining.”

The assumption here is that transgender people are by our very nature politically uncomfortable — a direct pivot away from the more progressive angle the company had been courting before Trump’s second term.

While this may go against the conservative framing, this action is not surprising to anyone paying attention. Disney, or more accurately, the leadership driving it, has always been rather conservative. And as our country moves further to the right, they are merely responding to the conservative center that they so crave to appeal to.

Standing on the line

When we talk about the viewpoint of a company, we are speaking in generalities. It’s important to note that a company is always a site of struggle among many different forces. In the case of the Don’t Say Gay Bill (one of the inciting incidents in the conservative narrative), there was not a united position.

Leadership was not very keen to oppose the law when it first passed, particularly then-CEO Bob Chapek. It was only when Disney’s workers created a stink about the issue — the highlight of this being a massive employee walk-off where hundreds marched out of the company’s headquarters in Burbank — that its leadership “reassessed” its position and publicly condemned the law’s passage. As summarized by Devan Coggan:

Chapek and Disney soon received pushback, both from inside and outside of the company. A group of Pixar employees penned a public letter decrying Chapek’s response and arguing that Disney has a history of censoring LGBTQ representation in films. And last week, Disney employees staged a walkout in protest — a move supported by celebrities and Disney stars including Oscar Isaac, Raven-Symoné, and Mark Ruffalo. Chapek later reversed course, apologizing for the company’s weak response and vowing to pause political donations in Florida.

When I look at Disney’s history, I see that there has been a constant battle over adopting more left-leaning issues. This is the same company whose early history included a notorious animators strike in ’41 and, as recently as 2024, has had employees allege that they were discriminated against for wearing pro-union buttons (something they are legally allowed to do). Disney is not “woke” by any stretch of the imagination and usually only does the right thing after immense pressure from workers inside the company and frustrated consumers outside of it.

It’s the same with representation in media. Disney has a long history of cutting out queer content in its films for foreign and sometimes domestic releases. While it may be cutting out a trans character in America now, not too long ago, it was doing the same for same-sex kisses in Star Wars and the like. Its inclusion of diverse characters now only makes sense as a milestone when you factor in the company’s historic conservativism. As I argue in Does Disney Care About Diversity?:

Given this company’s history, it seems weird to be lauding Disney for projects they barely want to put out and are only socially relevant because of their deeply rooted conservatism. We are rewarding a company’s recalcitrance over the creators who actually break ground in this area, and then allowing Disney to pretend like this representation means anything more to them than dollar signs.

Disney, the company, has rarely been at the forefront of any left-leaning issue — either in real life or in the case of representation. It has merely been reacting to cultural trends and then branding its milquetoast acquiescence as going “above and beyond.” In the words of one assistant editor at Pixar:

Disney has not been in the business of making great content. They’ve been in the business of making great profits. Even as far back as two years ago when I was at Pixar, we had a meeting with [then-CEO] Bob Chapek, and they were clear with us that they see animation as a conservative medium.

What right-wing reactionaries have been responding to is not that Disney is woke or Marxist or whatever boogeyman they have conjured up, but that for a brief period, they (i.e., the right) lost the culture war around queer representation. There was an accelerated acceptance of queer rights in the late 2010s, with the high point probably being the legalization of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court in 2015. This normalization made Disney’s leaders feel safe enough to greenlight content with queer characters, and even then, only after a very protracted timeline.

Yet progress is never linear, and the right did not stop trying to undo these gains. Its powerbrokers invested billions into media apparatuses, such as The Daily Wire, that were partly dedicated to reversing course on America’s increased acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people in both real life and in media. This infrastructure allowed a cottage industry to boom of various influencers spending much of their time decrying whenever IP, such as Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, and The Lord of the Rings, incorporated Black and queer characters.

As a consequence, Disney, as one of the largest entertainment companies in the world, often found itself at the center of this outrage for creating media that was (at the time) mainstream. While American culture was decidedly in the anti-right-wing camp, the company was willing to take the heat (at least rhetorically, as they largely continued to censor queer representation in their films abroad).

Yet, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s successful 2024 election, the political mainstream appears to be shifting again. The right successfully used culture war grievances, particularly that of transgender rights, to retake power, which means that talking about diversity, at least to the conservative leadership of the Disney company, no longer seems profitable.

With the latest removal of this trans storyline in Win or Lose, Disney is doing what they have always done: appealing to America’s conservative base. The company’s official line now appears to be framing transgender people as intrinsically not family-friendly. As one Disney spokesperson said in a statement of the company’s decision to axe the trans representation in Win or Lose:

When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.

This response is not that of a liberal defender or even of a far-right reactionary, but Disney’s media team doing what they have always done: covering their asses. We are undergoing a rightward turn on trans representation, and Disney is responding to it in the same way they were responding to the increase in trans rights when Disney first commissioned Win or Lose back in 2020; they are readjusting.

Its leadership is trying to remain on the line of what is and is not acceptable, and that doesn’t include trans people anymore.

An unmagical conclusion

The worst part about this recent indicator, and the disgusting PR language above, is that this turn was transparent to anyone aware of the company’s inner workings. As I argued back in 2022:

[For Disney], whether racism goes up or down, you meet viewers where they are. Does that sound like a company that cares about diversity? Does it sound like a company that will combat white supremacist narratives if and when our country’s opinions on “diversity” change?

Well, here we are, experiencing a reactionary backlash, and I don’t think the Mickey Mouse company is coming to save us.

EPIC: Reimagining the Odyssey with Women Characters That Don’t Suck

Image; Jorge Rivera-Herrans

EPIC’s creator, Jorge Rivera-Herrans, started putting up videos on TikTok for their concept album back in December of 2022. Based on Homer’s The Odyssey — the classic Greek tale of the warrior Odysseus trying to find his way back home in the face of Gods and monsters — Jorge Rivera-Herrans retells this story as an upbeat pop musical. The central tension is his main character, Odysseus (sung by Jorge Rivera-Herrans himself), trying and failing to maintain his humanity in the face of many challenges.

I loved this concept album. The music composition is impressive, with Rivera-Herrans harkening back to Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf by associating each central character in EPIC with a different type of instrument: piano for Athena, guitar for Odysseus, lyre for Hermes, and so forth. All of it adds a sense of cohesion that allows the listener to quickly jump back into the story in between updates or “sagas.”

This musical updates a story that, by all accounts, has some quite sexist elements to it and adds a level of depth and humanity to its female characters that is refreshing to see.

The before and after

I havetalked previouslyabout the sexist nature of many Greek myths and stories, but to reiterate, the ancient Greek city-states were, by today’s standards, quite misogynistic places. Married women in Athens, for example, were under the complete authority of their husbands (note: if you want to do a deeper dive, Prof. Jorunn Økland has anhour-long YouTube lectureon the notion of equality in ancient Greece).

The Odyssey was a reflection of those ideals. While there were divinely feminine figures in this story, such as Athena, many women fell into the dichotomy of either faithful servants (see Odysseus’s wife Penelope) or some variant of temptress that our male protagonist had to overcome.

For example, the character Calypso — daughter of the Titan Atlas— traps Odysseus on an island for seven long years. Zeus then forces her to release him. In the original story, she highlights the double standard of not being able to take a mortal man as her lover in the same way the male Gods can, but she ultimately acquiesces to this hierarchy, providing Odysseus with food and everything he needs to make a raft to leave her island. As Laurent Ziment reflects:

“In the Homeric epochs, a clear gender hierarchy is established with gods at the top, followed by mortal men, followed by goddesses, and finally mortal women. In this hierarchy, though goddesses have the same ilk of power as the gods and are by far much stronger than the mortal men, gender roles push them down in the hierarchy, prioritizing the Greek patriarchy over sheer power…In this scene, the ability to fully speak one’s mind with a valid argument is trumped by the gender hierarchy, something that is often seen throughout the epochs.”

In EPIC, we do not have the same reverence for the Gods, so instead, Calypso’s fate is depicted as less of a natural hierarchy she must follow and more of something she has been forced into. In the song Not Sorry For Loving You, she tells Odysseus that she has been trapped on this island for most of her life, with no one for company, singing

“I spent my whole life here
Was cast away when I was young
Alone for a hundred years
I had no friends but the sky and sun”

It’s not great, ethically speaking, that she trapped Odysseus, but this recontextualization makes her decision less about her being a God angry that she cannot take advantage of mortals in the same way male Gods can and more about the isolation imposed on her by her fellow immortals.

She is now a tragic figure rather than a petty, vindictive one.

Another update is with Circe, the witch who turns members of Odysseus’s crew into animals. It’s been argued that in the original myth, she is a warning to men about the dangers of feminity. Hermes explicitly warns against succumbing to her wiles, and as a consequence of not resisting them, Odysseus and his crew lose a year on her island. As Marica Felici argues in The Collector:

“Circe is a concubine that uses her sensuality to lure men into her trap. She transforms those men she does not like, while seducing those she fancies. She is aware of her ability to charm and uses it on Odysseus who loses his desire to return home. Thus, Circe is the mistress who has the power to make the hero forgets about his oikos (“household”) and wife. Therefore she is the prototype of the femme fatale, a woman who has the power to catalyze and absorb men’s desires and energies. She is able to convince Odysseus to stay with her in Aeaea by offering him a life full of pleasure.”

However, EPIC’s Circe has a motivation for her hostilities beyond the perils of her feminity. Her decision to attack Odysseus’s crew is rooted in her painful experiences with other men in the past. As she sings in Done For:

“My nymphs are like my daughters
I protect them at all costs
The last time we’ve let strangers live
We faced a heavy loss.”

I empathize with her and her decisions because she is just as much a victim as an aggressor.

This empathizing with the feminine applies to even the more extreme examples in the Odyssey. Take the sirens—another peril of femininity. These monsters try to lure sailors to their deaths with enchanting songs. The central theme of the siren epoch is overcoming temptation, with Odysseus instructing his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship so he can still listen to their song without succumbing to it.

The Sirens don’t have a better motivation in EPIC, still trying to lure his crew to their deaths, but instead, the thing that has changed is Odysseus. Following the Underworld Saga (see Monster), he has decided to become crueler so that he can do what is “necessary” to get home to his wife and child, and as a result, he mercilessly slaughters all the sirens. Odysseus and his crew singing in Different Beast:

“We are the man-made monsters
We are the ones who conquer
You are a threat no longer
We won’t take more suffering from you.”

Whereas in previous parts of the story, he would have tried to find a less violent solution (see his preservation of the Cyclops), his destruction of the sirens is not depicted as a masculine triumph like in the original but rather a reflection of how far he has fallen.

I could keep on listing examples. From the emotional arc of Athena to the haunting motivations of Scylla and many more, it was refreshing to see how this musical recasts the motivations of this story’s female characters. They were no longer trite lessons on the dangers of feminity but instead three-dimensional characters with their own wants and desires.

An epic conclusion

With the fantastic conclusion of the Ithaca Saga, I want to make clear that I appreciate EPIC for its strong vision. Jorge Rivera-Herrans was willing to remix and remove parts of the original story that no longer appealed to modern sensibilities, and in an era where everyone has been decrying “wokeness,” that was not an easy thing to jumpstart a brand on.

This praise doesn't mean I found this musical perfect regarding gender. For all the agency and backstory granted to this story’s divine woman, its two mortal woman characters spent their time waiting for our hero—one of them even dying in the process (see Odysseus’s mother, Anticlea, in the song The Underworld). Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, was played fairly traditionally, with her choosing to be with him at the end.

There was no real reinvention to her story whatsoever.

Yet, this nitpick aside, I mostly enjoyed this tale. We are constantly reimagining the past, and withEPIC, I see our modern sensibilities seeping through the cracks of an ancient, hierarchical story, and that makes me feel slightly better about the present.

Arcane Season 2 Was About Breaking The Cycle of Violence: It Failed

Image; Netflix

Arcane (2021–2024) is a show I admire a lot (you can see my glowing review of season one here).

For the uninitiated, it’s a steampunk fantasy series based on the arena battle game League of Legends. Forces across the techno-magical city of Piltover and its underbelly, Zaun, fight on behalf of various factions to see who comes out on top. We have a startling array of characters from noble houses to revolutionaries to underground crime syndicates.

The imagery of Arcane is dazzling, fast-paced, and consistently over the top. Sometimes, we start an episode with the flaming wreckage of the Piltover Council Chambers (see Heavy Is The Crown). Other times, the animation style switches to a series of stills that have an almost comic-book quality to them (episode three, Finally Got The Name Right).

Yet, while the first season was a, in my opinion, well-explored examination of the cycle of violence, the second season is a far less compelling, more saccharine examination of how to break said cycle.

A show that gives us the aesthetic of revolutionary change and little else.

The bad ways to break the cycle

Last season, the central tension was the cruel Zaunite Revolutionary and crimelord Silco (Jason Spisak) and his charge Jinx (Ella Purnell) fighting against the Piltover government for independence. Zaun is an apartheid state caught in a bitter war for self-determination against Piltover’s technocratic, commerce-driven leaders.

Season one ends with Jinx blowing up the Piltover council chambers mere moments before they vote in favor of Zaunite Independence. She is too resentful to give peace a chance, showing the viewer how this culture is stuck in a cycle of violence.

A huge question for season two is how to break that cycle — something we are shown in the fragile moments where this goal is achieved.

For example, in episode seven (Pretend Like It’s The First Time), we find ourselves in an alternative timeline, where the tragedies of season one more or less don’t happen, and we see a Zaun moving in a better direction. As the character Ekko (Reed Shannon) says of this timeline: “I used to dream the undercity could be like this.”

The show plays with the various structures and methods that could get Zaun and Piltover to this peace — its tension centered around these methods’ flaws and limitations.

In episode six (The Message Hidden Within the Pattern), we come across an almost utopian society in the underground, led by the scientist Viktor (Harry Lloyd), who has used the magic of Hextech to cure the glimmer addiction plaguing Zaun’s most disenfranchised. Viktor (whose eastern European-sounding name and totalizing equality alludes to the Soviet Union) wants to create a society free of division, and he’s not afraid to resort to violence to get there.

He ultimately becomes the primary antagonist — a man who creates a hive mind he calls the “Glorious Evolution” that is bent on removing all discord from the world by doing away with individuality entirely. In Viktor’s words: “Choice is false. It is how we clothe and forgive the baser instincts that spur us to division. Death, war, prejudice. Energy spent only to consume itself. But we can be of one mind (see episode 9, The Dirt Under Your Nails).”

Another character who tries to achieve a similar forced peace is General Ambessa Medarda (Ellen Thomas), who uses violence to create a sense of safety in Piltover. Her Noxus forces set up checkpoints as part of a brutal manhunt for Jinx that ends up oppressing many Zaunites. She is trying to create peace by enforcing conformity through violence, though admittedly not as totalizing as the erasure of identity proposed by Viktor.

Her violence is likewise framed antagonistically in the series — something we are meant to hate. As Jinx’s sister Vi (Hailee Steinfeld), one of our point of view characters, tells the Piltover noble Caitlyn Kiramman (Katie Leung), who allowed Ambessa’s Noxus forces to police the city: “How long were you saddled up with that shifty, self-serving war pig (Ambessa)? She oinked poison in your ear, and you just ate it.”

So, if Ambessa’s law and order mentality and Viktor’s totalizing conformity fail to achieve true peace (and I tend to agree that they do), what is this show’s solution?

And why do I walk away from this season so unsatisfied by it?

The trap of forgiveness

In season two, there are fleeting moments of resistance against these forces: the street activism of the Zaunite underground; the anarchistic, nonviolent revolutionaries of Ekko’s Firelights, who provide aid to those hurt by Piltover crackdowns; the “change-it-from-the-inside” mentality Vi attempts when she temporarily becomes an enforcer (i.e., Piltover’s police force); and many more.

However, the two common enemies we cited in the previous section — i.e., Ambessa and Viktor — are ultimately what causes Piltover’s border checkpoints to be dismantled and its discrimination against Zaunites to be paused. As Ambessa and Viktor join up to attack the city, the Piltover elite abandons their efforts to crack down on the underground and asks for Zaun’s aid instead. In the words of councilor Jayce Talis (Kevin Alejandro):

“This isn't a fight for ideals or territory. It's a fight for humanity itself. I’m asking…no, begging you, every one of you, topside and bottom, to aid us in this coming war. And it will be a war. Now, this isn't a fair request, but it is our only hope. The forces against us are too great. We need every hand we can get.”

It is this call to set aside resentments so that both sides can join in a common purpose, which is framed as the way for the city to achieve true peace. The thing both Piltover and Zaun need to do, the show argues, is forgive each other so that they can focus on the more significant threat.

We see this call for forgiveness in the alternative timeline, too. In one touching scene, Ekko meets this timeline’s version of Silco, the pro-Zaun revolutionary who started many of the events in season one. Ekko asks Silco how he was able to set aside his animosities. Silco replies with a call to squash resentment: “The greatest thing we can do in life is find the power to forgive.”

While I am not against the idea of forgiveness, I find this framing of both sides needing to unite to achieve peace disturbing as it ignores the power dynamics at play. The two sides here were not equal. Most Zaunite revolutionaries, with maybe the exception of Ekko’s Firelights, were undoubtedly violent, but it was often a violence in reaction to Piltover’s apartheid. Piltover leaders, not the people of Zaun, put into place legal and material barriers that forced most Zaunites into squalor.

Even if legal emancipation holds (a big if) once the threat of Ambessa and Viktor passes, it does not undo the generations of economic and political inequality that such apartheid would have created. While removing legal discrimination may be a necessary first step, so too is the redistribution that would inevitability have to occur after. If ongoing reparations and attempts to dismantle Piltover’s unequal systems are not made, things will quickly settle back into a similar status quo.

We see this in our world with countries such as the United States, which had active apartheid against Black Americans for many years. Similar (though not exactly identical) to Zaunites, Black Americans were barred from many aspects of modern life — a fact that is so ingrained in my people’s history that it should hardly need reinforcing.

Yet even after legal rights were granted to Black Americans in the form of voting, education integration, and more, it did not undo material inequality. There is currently a substantial divide between Black and white Americans in nearly every indicator, from retirement to healthcare to debt to housing, and it’s because we never truly addressed the material disparity our system created, instead letting it erode into the chasm it is today.

While some argue that all we must do to solve such problems is set aside our animosities and come together — in other words, to stop being so divided by race and other such identities — without a plan to address such material divides, these inequalities will persist.

Whether we are talking about the country of America or the magical city of Piltover, systemic discrimination is not solved by mere words.

An arcane conclusion

From my perspective, this show’s perspective on undoing systemic discrimination is intellectually lazy. The entire second season engages in a conversation on bridging divides, and rather than diving into the complexities that uphold such inequalities, we get a rather simplistic message of “we’re all in this together.”

Don’t get me wrong; common problems always emerge: Enemies start wars, natural disasters level communities, and climates shift. Circumstances do force people to temporarily come together and put aside their differences, but in my lifetime, I have rarely seen such events lead to a permanent realignment. We tend to return to the status quo the day after disaster ends. It rarely matters if the unfairness baked into those arrangements long precedes such crises; when a fire, hurricane, war, or some other such disaster abates, people are expected to go back to paying their rents, honoring their debts, and returning to work.

The cruelty of such arrangements be damned.

It’s this reality that made this show’s message of unity so frustrating and honestly patronizing. Arcane tried to show us how to end the cycle of violence and instead gave us appealing pleasantries and nothing more.

You Don’t Have to be Friends with the Conservatives Who Hate You

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Whenever this country moves further to the right, there is a general call to action for those on the left to have even more conversations with those on the right. “The Democrats need to talk to different people, like Joe Rogan,” Matthew Yglesias argues in Bloomberg. “[Some] recognize they can’t change their loved ones’ opinions from afar,” goes a Vox article, “More still have wisened to the reality that avoiding varying viewpoints only fuels polarization.”

I want to push back against this logic that claims we must appeal to the feelings of the dominant socioeconomic group whenever they have a reactionary turn. You are not obligated to validate someone’s feelings simply because they are in power, especially if they use said power to discriminate against you.

Furthermore, I am not convinced this outlook is even a sound political strategy.

Engagement isn’t always possible

If we are being charitable, the reason this advice is bandied about so much is that keeping a metaphorical “door open” is a vital component for deradicalization (i.e., trying to pull individuals back from hateful ideologies such as white supremacy and fascism) or disengagement (i.e., getting them to pull back from hateful groups).

The advice I see over and over again from organizations dedicated to helping those who have fallen into the far-right ecosystem is to try not to be too forceful in how one goes about with deradicalization. As one RAND study argues: “The interviews and other studies suggest that heavy-handed attempts by formal institutions to deradicalize individuals often fail.” It’s more effective to wait for the myriad of factors that can make one open to deradicalization (e.g., burnout, exposure to alternative views, fellow members leaving, etc.) and then present them with an alternative during that window of opportunity than it is to shame them for their beliefs.

I do not judge people who engage in this deradicalization work as I believe it to be a legitimate form of activism. If you have the capacity to do this work or live in a heavily conservative area that requires you to compromise as an act of survival, by all means, do it — some people need to.

Yet there is a world of difference between claiming that a form of activism is valid for some people and claiming that it is something all people must do.

The reality is that conservative ideas rarely stop and end with thoughts and words. Those words become the basis for actions that can hurt other people, and every person must gauge whether preserving their individual relationship with a conservative is worth ignoring the harm said conservative is compelled to do to uphold such beliefs.

In one example reported via Business Insider, a parent had their child come out as transgender. Although they supported their child’s decision, their parents (the child’s’ grandparents) reacted with hostility. One pair of grandparents went “no contact,” and the other refused to acknowledge their grandchild’s queerness.

Sometimes, the mere act of supporting someone causes others to reject you. If you are a parent in this situation, you might have to decide which person to “help” in the relationship (your child or your parent) because sometimes — too many, in fact — egos force you to choose. As Tamra Moon continues in that Business Insider article:

“My teenager’s grandparents are of a parenting belief system that doesn’t leave much space for children to explore their interests, identities, or feelings in a safe, supportive, and judgment-free environment.”

It would be great if we could exist in a world where we can both keep a door open to those indoctrinated by hateful ideologies and protect the people those ideologies hurt, but defensiveness and brittle self-image often cause these two goals to conflict. In protecting the person they are hurting, you get labeled an enemy, and they no longer see you as a person worth interacting with as an equal.

This is further complicated when you are the person being hurt by such actions. When you are being targeted rhetorically, legislatively, and sometimes even physically, it becomes that much harder to focus on the other person’s reasons for doing said harm. You are often much more focused on your own survival and, quite frankly, do not have the time or resources to care about your oppressor’s hurt feelings.

I am sure the conservatives voting my rights away and sending me death threats have reasons for why they feel the way they do (erroneous reasons, but reasons nonetheless), but I am too busy trying to protect my standard of living to be concerned about their feelings.

If someone is attacking you, you do not keep the door open; you shut it and shut it good.

A frank conclusion

There is a lack of empathy in this entire conversation. A lot of not-so-great people expect to be empathized with at every step of the way, but they shirk at all calls for them to be empathetic toward other people. Their actions are never called into question. Their violence is never examined. They are always the perceptual victims who can do no wrong.

Yes, we want everyone to be saved from the pits of conservatism, but one person is not more important than anyone else. Their journey should not take precedent over the many others they hurt.

Someone does not get to hurt others—maybe even dozens or hundreds of others—and then get to act shocked when those people are not interested in empathizing with them. There are consequences for people’s actions, and sometimes, as a mere act of survival, those actions will cause some to stop caring about you. They will abandon all concern for your growth, your pain, and your survival altogether.

If that sounds harsh, good: it’s a response that is well-earned.

Post-Election ‘I’m Over It’ Claims Are A Trauma Response

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

When Trump was elected, there was a flood of posts from people claiming they were done with US politics: “I’m done with America now. It deserves everything it has coming to it,” comments one user on threads.

“Feeling betrayed by increased minority support for Trump, Black women say they’re stepping back,” runs an AP headline.

“Let me say this: I cried all yesterday [November 5th], but today I woke up and got me some Starbucks,” one person commented in response to abandoning Palestinian activism in the wake of the 2024 election. “Fuck yall, we’re done. For the next four years, we don’t give a fuck about anyone else’s problems. Cheers, ladies.”

I understand the emotion behind these statements, at least in part, but I also don’t believe those who claim such things are deciding to detach themselves from their surroundings. Many are using such rhetoric to socially and psychologically distance themselves from how badly hurt they are by this country, and it’s a familiar feeling.

The idea that one can distance oneself from society has existed for a long time, and it is usually unhelpful in actually protecting oneself.

I Don’t Care Much

The first thing I thought about upon seeing these comments was the 1998 revival of the musical Cabaret, which is about the fictitious Kit Kat Klub in Berlin, Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. The viewer sees the rise of fascism reflected in people who attend this club, particularly through its performances, which become increasingly more anti-semitic and hateful. “But if you could see her through my eyes,” chillingly sings the Kit Kat Klub’s emcee in the second act of the play, “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all” (see If You Could See Her).

For our purposes, I want to fixate on the song I Don’t Care Much. The emcee also sings the lyrics of this song, which are about social and emotional distancing from Germany’s deteriorating political situation. The emcee sings: “So if you kiss me. If we touch. Warning’s fair. I don’t care. Very much.”

He’s trying to present himself as someone cool and detached.

Yet the pain in the emcee’s voice makes it very clear that he does care, because he knows, if only subconsciously, that as a queer man, he is on the Nazi regime’s chopping block. The play ends with the emcee revealing he’s wearing the striped clothing of a concentration camp victim. In other adaptations, you can hear the whistle of a train and see the emcee wearing an upside pink triangle (the symbol nazis had LGBT people wear).

The emcee’s nihilism was an attempt to psychologically protect himself, but that strategy didn’t work out, either for his character or the many queer people who attempted to assimilate unsuccessfully during the fall of the Weimar Republic.

There was a vibrant queer scene in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis. Berlin was arguably at the forefront (at least in Europe) of scientific research on sexuality and gender expression. Media censorship and sodomy laws were also less enforceable, which meant that Berlin was the place to be for queers who wanted to live, if not entirely openly, at least more than they could in much of Europe.

Then, as the Nazis scapegoated homosexuality in no small part due to the personal agenda of Heinrich Himmler as well as a public scandal surrounding the head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, that community was violently suppressed. Sodomy laws under Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code were strengthened, and this subculture that had once been the jewel of Queer Europe was rather quickly shattered.

What did the queers who lived during that transition do?

There was no uniform response. Some fled. Others went underground. A few bravely fought, both openly and covertly.

Many were proud members of the Nazi party and thought their commitment to nationalism was in some ways compatible with their homosexuality (see “Männerbund” ideology). As Christopher Isherwood (whose semi-autobiographical novel Berlin Stories was the inspiration for the musical Cabaret) disparaged in a later book: “Misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta, they fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love, with all women excluded.”

And some, as we have already mentioned, responded to the rise of Nazism with detachment. A good example of this in Berlin Stories is Isherwood’s landlord (a character who also made it into the musical), someone who is willing to keep her head down, no matter the cost. As Isherwood writes:

Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatising herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatising themselves.

After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”

Yet, many German Queers did not have the privilege of keeping their heads down. Even before the shuttering of queer bars and other gathering places, the police had begun adding potential violators of Paragraph 175 to private lists. Many of these lists were then utilized by the Nazi regime. Queer men and women found themselves sent off to concentration camps by the thousands in the years to come — doomed not to live in this town but die by it.

There is no safety here

And yet Frl. Schroeder’s ‘keeping-her-head-down’ outlook is a common sentiment in marginalized communities whenever hope has been momentarily crushed.

In a more modern example, when some perceived the AIDS epidemic as a death sentence victims must simply endure, the Bay Area Reporter editor Paul Lorch encouraged a type of queer nihilism, asserting that suicide was a perfectly rational response to an AIDS diagnosis. As he wrote in a Bay Area Reporter article (that came my way via Am J Public Health) about the epidemic: “Each man owns his body [and] the way he wants to die, [including, perhaps, a] one way walk into the Pacific surf.”

However, this perspective was perceived by some as infantilizing, as it turned those who had HIV/AIDS into objects who lacked the agency to advocate for themselves. Activists were immediately critical of Lorch’s nihilism and not only penned a response letter but created an AIDS patients-only group so those who had the disease could lobby on behalf of themselves. As activist Bobbi Campbell told a rival paper of this newly formed group: “It’s time we stopped being so passive. This group of AIDS patients will be more political, more social…”

It was this shift in perspective that reframed the narrative around HIV/AIDS from one of victims and patients (people predestined to social death before their physiological death) into active participants in a struggle for liberation — people who were deserving of empathy and respect/ People who were fighting a battle they could potentially win.

This mindset shift would ultimately win this community material and political gains in the coming years (see ACT UP, HIV/AIDS destigmatization, etc.).

It’s hard to see how such advocacy would have even been possible if Lorch’s nihilism had won the day, any more than queers keeping their heads down in 1930s Berlin would have avoided the concentration camps of the Nazi regime simply by pretending everything was okay.

Detachment doesn’t protect you if you are already on the chopping block.

A hopeful? conclusion

As we can see, retreating inward does not provide safety. It doesn’t matter if you are attacked or discarded by the state; responding to its cruelty with disconnection doesn’t protect you. It, at best, dulls your senses until the danger passes (a big if) and, at worst, leads you straight into the fire.

Anger and sadness are perfectly rational emotional responses to our society’s cruelties. I am not a fan of America (see The Most Exhausting Part About America Is The Pretending). I do not believe that America’s ideals were ever that great to begin with (see America Has Always Been A Pretty Unrealistic Utopia).

Yet, I also recognize that no one has the luxury of genuinely disconnecting from it. Empires thrive on taking advantage of whole swaths of a population. In our case, America not only relies on a racialized and economically impoverished under-caste but also the billions in resources our firms extract from the Global South. That exploitation does not go away because one is tired or wishes it to.

Sadly, being “fucking done” does not prevent the boot of empire from crushing you beneath its feet.

The Tragic, Liberal Delusion of Netflix’s ‘The Diplomat’

Image; Netflix

I remember first coming to Washington, DC, and hearing the way a lot of energetic interns and staff talked about the system. “Sure, it is flawed and annoying sometimes,” a colleague told me shortly after the 2016 election, us sipping coffees during a ‘quick chat’ in one of DC’s many gentrifying cafes, “But give it enough time, and it makes the right decisions.”

It was this conversation I thought of upon seeing the political thriller The Diplomat (2023 — present), a tightly crafted show about a career diplomat for the State Department named Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who is suddenly transferred to the prestigious London office. We learn that this move is a test trial to see if she can handle the role of vice president, and along the way, Kate Wyler stumbles into a conspiracy that could drag the UK, and maybe even the US, into a regional war.

There were many good moments in this show. It was well-acted, the dialogue was witty and poignant, and the set design made me feel like I was there in this fast-paced environment. You can tell a lot of money was spent on this show, and it doesn’t appear to have been wasted (it’s been greenlit for a third season).

Yet, underpinning this show is the idea that the US empire should and must be preserved for the betterment of humanity, and I think that idea is worth dissecting.

It’s all about American Institutions (hegemony)

It’s worth noting that Kate Wyler is an institutionalist. There is a moment when the White House tries to pressure Wyler to take advantage of an Iranian diplomatic asset, and she urges caution instead. She delivers a moving speech on why the relationships maintained by the State Department are so important, saying:

“What were really doing when we negotiate with them, or with anyone, is looking for the one or two friends we can call when the world is fucked. It's a flimsy web of relationships. But sometimes, it holds. Do not tear it. Do not be an infinitely ravenous American.”

If there is a thesis of this show, it’s this monologue. The people who care about Global institutions, particularly ones that benefit the US — the adults in the room who you can call when the world is fucked — are the ones who need to be protected and in charge.

It’s perfectly fine for a character to hold that perspective — a character’s motivations are not interchangeable with a work of art’s motivations — but we never really get a competing narrative to make us think this isn’t the show’s perspective as well. There are so many moments where Kate and her confidants don’t report things to the public for fear that it would undermine US interests, and it’s framed as a commonsense position that doesn’t need a rebuttal.

For example, the main plotline of the first two seasons is that a British Warship called the HMS Courageous has been attacked by an unknown actor, killing 41 British service members. Kate Wyler is partly brought in because of her experience as a crisis diplomat, which gives her insight into untangling such flashpoints.

It’s learned, through a very entertaining cat and mouse game (spoilers, by the way), that this attack was a false flag operation by British operatives who wanted to give the Prime Minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), an upswell of support he could use to prevent Scottland from seceding from the United Kingdom. A Scottish cession movement was picking up steam, and conservatives, led by British advisor Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie), thought the rise in nationalism would “preserve the kingdom.” As US Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) opines about Scotland’s possible secession (logic our POV character Kate also agrees with):

“If the UK eats itself alive, second wave impact, it’s a huge blow to NATO and Five Eyes. Third wave, Northern Ireland, Catalonia. Democracies carving themselves into splinters, while autocracy’s having its best year since ‘37.”

This perspective comes to a head with the twist that the person who really orchestrated the attack was, in fact, Vice President Grace Penn, who worried that a Scottish secession movement would threaten the only European port where US nuclear submarines are allowed to dock. The US, according to the Vice President, would lose the ability to track Russian submarines in the Atlantic, putting American Empire at risk from this larger geopolitical threat.

Kate does not refute the VP’s logic, later admitting that she might have done the exact same thing if she were in the VP’s shoes.

And so, just to recap, we have a democratic secession movement in Scotland — i.e., people trying to exercise their democratic right to self-determination — that is killed by conservative factions in two imperial governments who want to prevent the collapse of both of their empires.

And we are supposed to be okay with that; the framing of the text makes us want to empathize with the logic of these battle-weary veterans who are making difficult decisions to preserve American institutions. Decisions that, even if abhorrent, we are told repeatedly are ultimately justified. As Kate’s husband explains:

“If we make a thing out of [the US killing Scottish Independence], bad for Democracy…Hungry, Poland, Turkey…Democracy is actually going out of style. [It can’t come out].”

If US Empire collapses, the narratives suggest again and again, so too does the concept of Democracy itself.

A diplomatic conclusion

Upon finishing the second season, I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with my friend years ago about how she thought preserving American institutions was good in and of itself, regardless of what those institutions do.

It’s how I used to think, too, almost a decade ago, but recently, I have come to see it as a worldview that can ultimately justify anything. If America needs to be maintained, if the United Kingdom must stand for fear that the vacuum will be even worse, then there are no horrors you can not justify: bomb your own ships, finance a country’s genocide, assassinate a left-leaning government that wants to nationalize its oil fields— anything to keep the wheels of empire turning.

In many ways, I felt like I was watching a modern-day update of The West Wing (1999–2006), which isn’t a compliment. For all the beautiful acting and cinematography, I was disappointed that we did not get more pushback on the show’s primary thesis. An uncritical viewer will probably walk away with the idea that the atrocities done by these characters are, from a birdseye view, justified — and that doesn’t bode well for most of us standing in the line of fire.