The Television Studies discipline, not to mention mainstream press, identifies the New Millennium as the advent of a so-called Golden Age. Beginning with the 1999 HBO premiere of The Sopranos and concluding with the Pandemic and then the 2023 Writers Guild strike, there was a continuous stream of cinema-quality content that extended beyond simple pop culture excitement into the realm of genuine critical reverence, with David Lynch’s revival of Twin Peaks being called the greatest film of the 2010s by the revered French journal Cahiers du Cinema.

But it is furthermore impossible to ignore the historical context of the television industry during this period. The majority of these shows were run by white heterosexual males who only reached their positions of authority after decades of access to promotions otherwise denied to women and nonwhite talent. The writers rooms of these shows likewise reflected these dynamics. As just one example, Twin Peaks was solely authored by Lynch and Mark Frost. It seems fair to argue, without much mental energy, that these limitations maintain a certain level of white supremacist ideology within the script writing practices of the industry. While there have been plenty of lurid examples of nonwhite actors playing deeply stereotypical and racist characters, including loads of Black gangbangers, Latino cartels, and Asian child pornographers, have we ever seen a nonwhite auteur deliver a BIPOC authored vision of urban ethnography that rivals the production values and critical estimation accorded The Wire? Lovecraft Country only lasted a single season. If I were to propose David Lindelof as both a pioneer and auteur of the period, one would be able to count viable BIPOC contenders on one hand, with Jordan Peele topping the list.

I decided to try comparing three different shows, The Sopranos, The Shield, and Rescue Me. What is it like in hindsight to look at these highly-acclaimed programs?

The Sopranos was unique as both the trailblazer and because it was a premium cable broadcast, meaning it was able to do things that basic cable could not allow. The explicit language, the gory mob hits, the graphic female nudity, and the solid hourlong broadcast uninterrupted by commercials created a unique mold where each episode functionally had the production values and norms of a medium-budget motion picture. This meant that basic cable television peers had to adjust their horizons to accommodate their censorship restrictions.

Mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), protagonist of the story, is never anything besides a monster. Throughout the show, his children Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and AJ (Robert Iler) demonstrate two distinct arcs of childhood innocence corrupted by proximity to his criminality.

Meadow is a self-professed liberal and it clearly serves as a form of youthful rebellion against the strictures of suburban Italian American conservatism. When she brings a Black boyfriend home from college, Tony openly disparages him with ethnic anti-Black slurs in order to sabotage the relationship. When one of Tony’s capos is outed, another one of Meadow’s boyfriends tears away the sheen of self-righteous hypocrisy and denounces her for trying to take on the world’s problems while refusing to intervene and stop the Medieval murder of a gay man.

AJ is a perpetual screwup. Every season includes a subplot where he does something plainly idiotic, starting with school vandalism and ending with bungling an attempted murder in the last season. He is the perfect example of what happens when a child has a negative adult role model for a parent. In the final season, when he is bailed for the attempted homicide, he explains that he was motivated by his father’s love of The Godfather films. Utterly dumbstruck by his son’s flagrant stupidity, Tony tells the boy he needs to grow up.

Showrunner David Chase has been clear about recognizing that the audience was made up of two types, those looking for serious drama and those looking for “less yacking and more whacking.” To that extent, he felt compelled to include regular “reality check” scenes that emphasized how villainous the characters truly were. Tony and his crew might have whimsical moments but ultimately they are a collection of moral degenerates, fiends, and barbaric psychopaths.

This is hit home explicitly when Carmela (Edie Falco), Tony’s wife, meets for a session with Dr. Krakower (Sully Boyar). Rather than offering Carmela a fast food therapy session, he blasts through layers of her self-delusion and holds her accountable, going as far as refusing payment for the session because he “won’t accept blood money.” Krakower even says aloud that this means she has been explicitly told that she was participating in evil, stripping her of plausible deniability. At one point in the series, Tony tells someone that the Mob is the heir to the ancient Romans and, in that sense, Krakower is the Oracle of the epic.

The Shield was based upon the scandalous Rampart Division in the Los Angeles Police Department, which was implicated for running the anti-street crime CRASH Unit as a criminal enterprise, including accusations of police brutality, planting of false evidence, theft, drug dealing, bank robbery, perjury and cover-ups. Released only a decade after the Rodney King rebellion, the gritty presentation of the streets and the cops walking the beat on them certainly seemed to have a documentary appeal, brought home by extensive use of handheld cameras and verité-styled setups.

Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) leads the Strike Team, which rampages around the fictional Farmington district in South Central Los Angeles at the turn of the century. He constantly locks horns with his Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), who is actively trying to catch the Strike Team and take them down. During the Pilot episode, Aceveda had secretly embedded a plant, Officer Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond), onto the Strike Force in order to catch Mackey in the act. In response, Mackey ends the Pilot by shooting Crowley point-blank in the face, killing him instantly. Within the following episodes, Aceveda comes to the conclusion that Mackey in fact did murder Crowley, leading him to the character arc he will follow over the rest of the series.

The weekly episodes all follow the same structure, an overall season-long story arc that is complimented by a “case of the week” procedural drama where the police investigate some truly deranged characters. And here the sensational insanity of the storytelling oversteps into exploitation early on. For instance, Season 2 includes child rape, tire necklacing, and hardcore drug warfare perpetrated by a Latino gang. It is hard to judge whether this story is set in South Central Los Angeles or South Africa during the collapse of apartheid. Invoking the symbol of the tire necklace, which is deeply encoded into popular memory as a reminder of Winnie Mandela’s embrace of revolutionary violence, carries much deeper meaning.

The casting uses a tokenizing method to create the “good/bad” nonwhites that collide in the show’s police station, euphemistically called “The Barn” and built inside an abandoned Catholic Church. Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) is a senior officer and Julien Lowe (Michael Jace) is a trainee. By positioning these two as “good” as opposed to “bad” nonwhite characters, white audiences are granted the insidious invitation to construct a hierarchy of respectability and acceptability politics that often prove deadly.

The Shield fundamentally presents a bifurcation between liberal democratic state violence and the violence of liberation. In some sense, this show seeks to make the claim that liberal democracy can be salvaged. In the end of the show, the system has eliminated the bad apples, in various gruesome ways. Ultimately, the series became an unbearable barrage of pornographic dialogue and I could only stomach watching the First and Second Seasons before checking out.

Rescue Me is perhaps the most insidious of these because it uses the highly-esteemed Fire Department as the fulcrum of navigating the racial politics of Outer Borough voters, the white ethnic middle class workers amped up on grievance politics. Tommy Gavin (Dennis O’Leary) is the ne’er-do-well Irish Catholic firefighter who was at Ground Zero on 9/11. At the start of the show, he is estranged from his wife and haunted by the ghosts of people lost in fires he responded to, including several service members. Tommy constantly seeks redemption via Catholicism, lighting candles at a local Church, making his vices seem like something he is trying to overcome as opposed to an insurmountable character flaw. This in turn provides an implicit justification and validation for his continuing antisocial behavior and pathology. Tommy Gavin embodies the prayer of St. Augustine, “Lord, make me holy, but not just yet.”

In terms of racial representation and sympathies, the show features a single nonwhite character, Franco (Daniel Sunjata), and his profile in the show is particularly sickening. Franco is a womanizer steeped in toxic masculinity. As the sole main character of color, he is presented as the “acceptable” or “appropriate” minority. By contrast, throughout the show, the firefighters confront various BIPOC side characters fitting various grotesque stereotypes and caricatures. Furthermore, when Tommy’s cop brother is killed in the line of duty, the over-wrought pathos turns the show into straight copaganda.

Again, the distinction between Sopranos and the latter two shows, which were both incidentally broadcast on Rupert Murdoch’s FX during the George W Bush administration, is the thesis of liberal democracy’s redemption. In contrast with Tony Soprano, the cops and firefighters in The Shield and Rescue Me are aspiring for a redemption that fails to reflect upon the privileges and structures of white supremacy built into the social contract that preserve their social and class standing. The implicit notion that America can be redeemed is absent from The Sopranos, which had a much more succinct and foreboding indictment of the neoliberal epoch’s peak and eventual decline. Tony is not a public servant, he is a criminal, and he corrupts all that he touches.

Consider an example of this corruption with Davey Scatino (Robert Patrick), the problem gambler that falls into hard debt with Tony and Richie Aprile (David Proval) in Season 2. Scatino operates a sports store and, when he is unable to pay his gambling debts, Tony and Richie force him to liquidate his business credit into bankruptcy until the expenses are paid. The decision to use a sports store as opposed to a grocery or liquor store is worth consideration, insofar as the business is one that primarily caters to youth scholastic sports players. Like a toy store, there is an implicit innocence invoked by the setting; this is a space where children go and seek things to play with, be it in terms of a soccer ball or various types of protective helmets and pads. Consider the scene below when Davey is on the phone ordering coolers, emblematic of the family trip and picnic at the park or beach. When Davey hits the lowest of low with the debt, he retreats into the store, sleeping overnight in a tent on the shop floor, almost as if he were in a nylon cocoon seeking semblance to a protective womb. The sports store is a symbol of a certain type of American innocence around sport and children that Tony Soprano shatters.

Poetically, Tony operates as the brute force of the capitalist system, using debt as a weapon to destroy Scatino, his business, and his family, who permanently excommunicate him after he has gambled away his son’s college trust fund. David Chase is invoking Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto’s quote “The bourgeoisie…has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.” Scatino’s sport store was owned by his wife as a result of inheritance from her father; the fact Scatino destroyed the business without her knowledge comes as part of the larger indictment against him at the end. His brother-in-law Vic (Joe Penny) is the one who delivers this condemnation when they meet in a bar. This is the major distinction between the three programs. The Sopranos fundamentally indicts the American social contract that the latter two programs seeks to absolve.

With the Providence Mayoral Primary Election less than a month away, the contest between David Morales and Brett Smiley intensifies in both fundraising and nastiness on the part of the incumbent.

I want to be clear that I have not participated in nor donated to the Morales campaign. This is by no means to be construed as an endorsement nor encouragement to spend money in terms of a campaign contribution.

I am older than David and the formative political struggle I witnessed as a young LGBTQ+ person was the Rhode Island Democratic Party procrastinating for far too long over marriage equality. The Rhode Island Democrats were indistinguishable from the Gingrich-era Republicans when it came to public expressions of queer-phobia and so there are only so many times you can have your heart broken in life.

But Morales and a new generation of Progressives are trying to change the Democrats on the municipal and state level into a social democratic party, or at least are trying to create a viable social democratic caucus within the party.

The blood-curdling anticommunist hysteria surrounding Morales is both laughable and ludicrous.

It is laughable because, in broad terms, Morales is quite different from a hardcore Bolshevik. If elected there will be no efforts to nationalize banks, break up the landed estates, or abolish the existing democratic system. Lenin he is not.

But it is ludicrous because, if you take Morales seriously, he comes out of a tradition directly opposed to Communism, be it in the form of Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, or about a dozen weirdo —isms that strangely worship the Soviet Union or China uncritically.

Morales is a social democrat, someone who believes in using the existing liberal democratic system to create reforms that revolutionize our social contract. The difference between a conspiratorial Bolshevik like Lenin and the parliamentary social democrat like Morales is not the goal, it is the means. Social democrats opposed Communist coups and the creation of the Soviet-style Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which they defined as a form of authoritarian state capitalism with a certain degree of state planning.

But they both shared a set of goals, such as the de-commodification of certain utilities (healthcare as the most popular instance for our contexts), stronger regulatory oversight for banking, universal suffrage, and increased protections for workers and their bargaining rights.

Here are three recently reissued titles by Morris Hillquit, a major thinker and theorist in the Debs-era Socialist Party who authored significant volumes on the history and practice of Socialist politics in the US. His writings on Municipal Socialism inform the goals that Morales seems to align with, though there is one further factor to consider.

Morales is a young Latino Socialist born and raised during the high watermark of the Pink Tide. Hugo Chavez, Lula, and the rest of these Latin American governments had a distinctive politics that embraced the growth of Liberation Theology and its preferential option for the poor.

This is deeply consequential. How will Bishop Lewandowski relate to this Mayor? The new Pope was stationed in Latin America for the majority of his priestly ministry before his election to the Throne. As a young priest, Fr. Robert Prevost was serving in ministry when American priests and nuns were being abducted and murder by the Reagan-backed Contras in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Will Bishop Lewandowski recognize a Morales administration as the opportunity for Church-state collaboration in ministry to the poor and undocumented? Or will he follow the tradition of his predecessors and engage in red-baiting nonsense over inconsequential issues a Mayor cannot impact, such as the legality of abortion?

If you want to understand the horizons of municipal socialism, here are some of the foundational documents of this politics.

Socialism in Theory and Practice: Democratic Governance, Municipal Socialism, and Social Democracy in the City

Unlike European Marxists, Hillquit held that the United States offered a uniquely favorable terrain for peaceful transition. Its democratic framework — universal suffrage, a free press, and freedom of assembly — gave the working class the tools to conquer political power legally. -Jacobin Magazine

Morris Hillquit here provides the most concrete summary of the Socialist vision for governance and taking state power via democratic methods. A lifelong advocate of democratic socialism, here he discusses issues of individualism, ethics, law, politics, and reforms that are directly pertinent to the creation of a viable municipal socialist project.

Socialism Summed Up

Originally published in 1912, this primer represents the summa of Hillquit’s political thought as a respected leader of the Socialist Party of America of Eugene V Debs. He outlines the causes, aims, trends, and methods before defining the Party program and its goals for the United States. This key volume of the Debsian era is now reissued at an affordable price for a new generation of readers.

If Debs embodied the moral passion of American socialism, Hillquit was its theoretical and strategic brain. -Jacobin Magazine

History of Socialism in the United States

Morris Hillquit was one of the most influential American democratic socialists in the twentieth century. His role in the creation of the Socialist Party, his disputes with the Industrial Workers of the World, and his role in the success of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union left a lasting mark on American society that continue to echo down the decades. This account of various forms of American socialism is a founding text of labor history. Beginning with the utopian religious movements and ending with the twilight of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party, Hillquit tracks a unique story of how Americans used a variety of methods, tactics, and strategies to confront the onslaught of industrial capitalism.

The early-20th-century socialist and New York mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit saw liberalism and democracy as providing a foundation for a transition to socialism. Alongside Eugene Debs, he helped to forge a distinct American socialist tradition. -Jacobin Magazine

The death of Black British scholar Jason Arday, an Education professor at the University of Cambridge in the UK, is a textbook case of academicide, the murder of a scholar by the academy. It is by no means a new development, academicides are taking place across the United States as state legislators and Trump-hyped local school boards pursue their Christian Nationalist Holy Crusade against “wokeness,” “DEI,” “critical race theory,” “gender ideology,” and all other varieties of nonconformity masked by racist dog-whistling.

Perhaps the largest wave of academicides were during the McCarthyite Red Scare. Hundreds of academics were driven to death by suicide after their careers were destroyed by mere insinuated association with Communism. To be clear, this mania was so lunatic that it overwhelmed the Democratic Party and sank a good many New Deal liberals as well. As a result of this collective social madness, the Asia desk of the State Department was strip-mined of talented analysts, leading directly to the missteps in the early days of the Vietnam War that entrapped us in that quagmire for three decades.

How so? By haphazardly laying the charge of “Communist” upon any well-meaning New Deal Democrat, the GOP purged the Asia desk, meaning it vacated itself of competent analysts who were telling their superiors that postwar Asian Communism was a legitimate expression of national liberation and self-determination. Without competent State Department analysts, military strategists and Pentagon leadership bungled their way into Korea and Vietnam. The Democrats were accused of “losing” China to Communism, leading to a witch hunt ousting hundreds of competent thinkers. On the municipal level, schoolteachers who advocated for minority students, integration, and elimination of racist textbooks were fired by anti-Communist school boards. Some of these highly-qualified scholars were able to survive, but many more died because of this.

The playbook was well-worn and the perp is boasting of the kill. Biology professor and neofascist “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who claims that Black intelligence is so low that, without artificial meritocracy, there would be no African-descended scholars tenured in the British system, picked out Arday and created a media sensation that was obviously aided by larger forces. Unlike a prior plagiarism case at Cambridge three years ago, this became a worldwide news story. This indicates something much more coordinated and planned than what occurred when the last plagiarism case took place. As of August 15, there had been 188 news stories about the plagiarism charges. Kehinde Andrews, a colleague of Arday, emphasized the disproportionate scale of that coverage in a Channel 4 interview. “If he was white, he would still be alive,” said Andrews, who described Arday’s treatment as a lynching. Andrews was not a close friend of Arday; however, last year, he independently reviewed the scholar’s Doctoral thesis at Arday’s request. While Andrews acknowledges sloppiness in certain questionable passages, he likewise said the sloppiness did not qualify as plagiarism and did not invalidate the thesis.

Sloppiness in citations are easily mistaken as plagiarism by auto-detection software systems, which have been available to schools and universities now as subscription services for 25 years. When I was in high school in 2001-2005, my English teachers required I digitally submit all my papers to TurnItIn.com, a private education technology firm. Cofnas and his boasts about using AI to uncover an elaborate conspiracy in Arday’s scholarship and promotion fails Kehinde’s snuff test. By Kehinde’s estimate, the shoddy citation issues actually should have laid at the feet of Arday’s Thesis Advisor Phil Vickerman, who should have called for a correction prior to the Thesis Defense.

In the following I hope to explore some legitimate questions people should be asking about Arday’s death. To be clear, I hold an undergraduate Bachelor’s degree in Film Studies, I am studying for a Master’s in Education, and I have seven years of experience as a classroom teacher in the urban core. Owing to my ability needs, I have a letter from my healthcare provider in the Office of Academic Affairs that I use so as to gain classroom accommodations, including issues of time and deadlines for testing and term paper submissions. This is to say that, as both a disabled person and as a trained educator, I have certain questions that arise in terms of both racial and disability justice.

Was Arday treated fairly by his employer as someone with tremendous challenges in terms of recorded mental health needs? Was he intentionally triggered by his critics so as to exploit the symptoms and outcomes of his health challenges? Was the extremely public discrediting of Arday done in a way that entailed either his colleagues or his employer violating the Laws of Governance for the Campus and Faculty?

Were his issues of neurodivergence adequately or inadequately supported during the entirety of his academic career? And if so, how is it possible that oversight and support officers in the multiple Academic Affairs Offices, the bastions of student disability justice provision on campus, failed to adequately oversee and audit his work for the failings he was accused of? How and why did he successfully defend a Thesis that was so significantly compromised by plagiarism and why were his Thesis Committee members and his Advisor Phil Vickerman so deficient in terms of balancing his neurodivergent needs against inviolable tenets of academic ethics? How was this missed by both Durham University and the University of Glasgow, where he had worked prior to the superstar appointment to Cambridge? Finally, three years ago, Cambridge had a white scholar face a plagiarism scandal; what was his name and how often have you heard about this white man’s failures?

WAS ARDAY SET UP TO FAIL?

Besides the levels of institutional, structural, and interpersonal racism that are well-known to readers, the realities of disability justice likewise are inflected into the academia system. Scholars pursuing tenure-track positions have well-documented health outcomes linked to the stress of job security. The advent of the neoliberal epoch has led to the normalization of adjuncts, with only 24% of US professors in service today holding tenure. Adjuncting is the gig economy work of the university and these scholars are treated as badly as Uber drivers. These jobs are extremely biased against the needs and requirements of disability justice.

Before continuing, it must be emphasized that the topic of Blacks, intelligence, and mental health capacities have been taboo for decades. Tools like IQ level measurement and standardized test scores have upheld social orders of white supremacy dependent upon the shared thesis that all Blacks are substantially less intelligent than Europeans owing to phenotype. Cofnas was absolutely trying to prove that the British academy and, more generally, a supposed “artificial meritocracy” had falsely elevated an outright fraud to a position of prestige. Cofnas claims that Arday is representative of a wider pattern of subpar intelligence being artificially elevated to positions of importance at the expense of (you guessed it) “genetically superior whites.”

But likewise, Arday was prominent in part because of his well-publicized health abilities and needs. Only days before his death, his North American publisher had issued a memoir in part about these topics. And so a competent and compassionate person is entitled to ask, without penalty, whether he was treated fairly or unfairly on account of his ability needs. Was he provided all the adequate accommodations possible under British employee workplace safety/protection laws as well as under the norms of Cambridge’s Faculty-Campus governance? Did his employer abuse or exploit talents that Arday had without accounting for or acknowledging his healthcare needs on the job? Was Jason Arday harmed because his ability/access issues made him more vulnerable to such acts caused by his employer, Cambridge? What role did Cambridge’s Campus Police play in monitoring and protecting a tenured Faculty member from the outside and flagrantly racist attacks of a political agitator with known neo-fascist views on race, acts that might have qualified as criminal stalking? How did the structures of power that traditionally protect tenured Faculty from this level of harm fail Arday? Kehinde Andrews argues that the University certainly failed to adequately protect their employee from the unwarranted and unrivalled level of international scrutiny.

As both a scholar and an employee, he was entitled to far more protection from these harms than that which was granted him by both his employer and the general public. The entire system of academia in the UK failed Arday on an epic level because it did not hold him to adequate accountability as a scholar with his health needs and abilities. If the matters of alleged plagiarism are as substantial as claimed by his racist accusers, it would speak to a wider lack of disability justice on the Cambridge campus that, in the United States, might trigger a federal or state audit or investigation. Instead, if we accept Kehinde Andrews’ judgment, the hard right made a mountain out of a mole hill, just as they did with Harvard President Claudine Gay’s flawed citations in scholarship from decades ago.

WHY WAS HE HIRED?

Given both the timeline and the retrospective comments from Arday’s colleagues, it is hard to ignore the question of why he was hired. It seems very evident that he was fast-tracked into his position, with Arday’s colleague Priyamvada Gopal saying “The extent to which this appointment was paraded in the media by the university…raises questions about whether the University sought public kudos for itself rather than teaching and research from this appointment. It is highly unusual, to say the least, to appoint such an early-career academic to a very senior post.”

Plainly stated, it is odd for this situation to arise in part because Arday shot to the top pinnacle of the Ivory Tower. There is something undeniably insidious and tokenizing about how the University used Arday as part of a virtue signalling advertising campaign, as described by Jason Okundaye in the Guardian, who writes:

This story has endured, stubbornly, because it is so perfectly calibrated for some of the most combustible charges of Britain’s culture wars: namely, that academic standards have been surrendered to a woke orthodoxy, and that minorities are unfairly advanced in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Was Arday a sensational grifter? Did the Employer want to be suckered by a con man? Or perhaps a symbiosis based on a convergence of interests occurred? The Guardian, which subjected Arday’s litany of claims to inquiry, included this quote from the scholar:

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said. “Why would I lie?”

This is where things became truly irresponsible. After his resignation, Arday granted Lanre Bakare with The Guardian what can only be called an all access, and presumably advantageous, interview in the final weeks of July. In retrospect, one is compelled to wonder if his statements to the journalist were coming from a place of wild delusion. In the interview, he makes claims of abuse that, taken individually, would be abhorrent hate crimes. But the amount of hate crimes he claimed to have survived in such a period of time became untenable and various police forces officially commented that none of these hate crimes had taken place. Given the tremendous amount of pressure he was already under when interviewed by Bakare, it is hard not to wonder if he was in a kind of manic state making wild claims of persecution, a common dimension of the delusional mental state that underwrites suicidal ideation. Was The Guardian interview the final plea of a madman that had completely broken with reality? Again, oppression can and does happen to anyone every day; the decision to cope with the issue via self-harm or suicide is another issue entirely, one that requires serious and intensive medical treatment to protect the person experiencing this tremendous health burden.

Ghanaian writer Kojo Ahiakpa said in a well-researched Facebook post:

…To treat the Arday scandal as a singular event or, worse, as evidence that DEI initiatives lower academic standards is to miss the forest for the trees. Academic fraud is not a British problem, a Chinese problem, an African problem or an American problem. It is a global epidemic, cutting across institutions, disciplines, and demographics with chilling impartiality. From the lecture halls of the Indian Institutes of Technology to the laboratories of McMaster University in Canada, from the postgraduate seminars of South Africa to the medical schools of Australia, the evidence points to a single, uncomfortable truth. The incentive structures of modern academia have made misconduct a rational, if reprehensible, choice for too many researchers… Much of this surge is linked to the collapse of Hindawi, a Wiley-owned publisher that became the target of industrial-scale fraud. Wiley had acquired Hindawi for $298 million in 2021, only to discover that organised paper mills had exploited its special-issue system using fake reviewers and manufactured manuscripts. By 2025, over 11,300 papers had been retracted, the largest mass retraction in publishing history forcing Wiley to write down 104 million and retire the Hindawi brand entirely. Paper mills, which churn out fabricated or recycled studies and sell authorship slots to desperate academics, have been found to approach journal editors with bribes of up to $20,000.

It is easy to quickly recognize how a young Black scholar with special education needs would find himself in over his head and without a sense of moral compass. The neoliberal corporate restructuring of the academy, a project that commodifies instruction and knowledge in ways they were never meant to be, normalized and de-sensationalized institutional fraud. The pressure from the employer to produce research and scholarship was not predicated upon the liberal art scholar’s desire to create knowledge, it was in order to publish papers and other materials as if they were music records to be sold publicly. Arday tried to survive within a larger ruse in the worldwide academic system that has begun to systematically and shamelessly incentivize wholesale fraud.

My point is to not disenfranchise the opinion from Kehinde Andrews regarding the plagiarism charges; rather, it is important to understand that Arday as a subject of his times was a brand within the greater Cambridge arsenal of brand academics. The neoliberal restructuring of the university entails this commodification and branding of the academic in service of capital accumulation. Research labs win the biggest grants based upon talent they accrue and College Presidents win the biggest donor checks by bringing their biggest star scholars to the fundraising dinners. (Indeed, one defense of Noam Chomsky’s association with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is that Chomsky was compelled to meet Epstein initially by professional compulsion to attend one such fundraising dinner for MIT, which has also taken substantial donor monies from the Koch family and other dubious sources.) Arday’s treatment reflects the altogether commodified sense of understanding that is accorded scholarship and research in the neoliberal university. The University, which classically was a nonprofit institution, has become a locus of profit generation, substituting professional certifications and graduate diplomas as commodities for the project of knowledge creation and scholarship. The profit motive becomes the sole motive of the student body and faculty. The readiness and ease with which Cambridge disposed of Arday reflects how they saw him as a failed brand to be retired from the shelves, just like last season’s fashions.

Arday was autistic and, if we grant meaningful acknowledgement of that diagnosis, we easily see that his downfall might have laid in trying to get an autistic professor to recognize the social cues and unspoken statements necessary for an academic department to maintain a fraud. This would then be a form of intentional and abusive manipulation on the part of the employer.

This is not a matter of “DEI hiring,” or not in the sense racist hate-mongers claim. Instead, we have a predatory hiring system that exploited the very genuine shortcomings and special education needs of a junior scholar who had been placed in a position well above his level in terms of experience and so extremely compromised that his workplace ability supports proved to be so significantly lacking. It would be like an employer laid an endless trail of thumbtacks on the surface of a wheelchair ramp so as to significantly damage the mobility device of an employee that needed use of the ramp. The University as Employer targeted Arday and set him up for the fall.

Arday’s appointment is publicly acknowledged in the British press as an outcome of the 2020 Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests in the UK. Ibram X Kendi rapidly entered and then exited employment at Boston University under similar circumstances. White power structures exploiting Black pain, white liberal guilt, and popular sentiments in service of an institutional rebranding is nothing new in the history of anti-Black white racism. What is so insidious is how this concluded with a physical obliteration.

In essence, Arday was hounded to the point of doing the dirty deed on behalf of the lynch mob that had pursued him incessantly.

WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT THE WHITE ACADEMIC ESTABLISHMENT IN THE UK?

Most immediately, the tone-deaf response from Cambridge has caught them with their pants down, perhaps out of both shame and embarrassment for their role in Arday’s death. “We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody,” Arday told the Times of London in an interview prior to his death.

This only became a sensation in the worldwide press because Arday was Black, he was a high-profile hire for a university with a miserably low number of Black Faculty members, and because the University had allowed the hard right to exploit the issue in the media. As Okundaye pointed out in his column, the last Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, William O’Reilly, barely registered as a blip in the British press radar when the case broke in 2023. But unlike O’Reilly, Arday is special and so must be turned into an international scandal. The mortification and desecration of Black flesh continues even after the life has expired from the corpus of the lynch victim.

The possibility that Arday’s work required further scrutiny is a rather pedestrian issue. Quite often, it is merely a matter of submitting a Correction to a publisher. Arday was not working on the cure for AIDS and his death did not release the nuclear codes to the Russians. The degree of hyperbole around this being proffered by both the right and tone-deaf British academics is absurd.

But there are multiple colleagues who likewise say that there are legitimate issues to discuss about his scholarly materials. However, and this likewise escapes many, his methods of scholarship and the research materials he produced were themselves, putting it mildly, distinctive. Arday produced various auto-ethnographic materials, meaning he used his personal experiences as the basis of his scholarship. The recently-published memoir was not only a product of commercial publishing, it was intended to be a component of his academic Curriculum Vitae.

As someone with experience studying in the same Education discipline that Arday worked in, auto-ethnography is not usually seen as a sole or primary element of scholarship. Instead, Education scholarship often includes datasets showing results-based outcomes for a cohort of individuals. This is to say that my Education projects and research projects often rely on data that I collect by demonstrating the project with a control group of students. Arday’s thesis in particular dealt with student teaching. The general rules of the discipline in the US are based upon documentation rules created by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Teachers-in-training use the APA style book because they rely primarily on pediatric developmental health literature in their research efforts and assignments. And because this is work that includes juvenile students, there are ethics of anonymity and student privacy implied by the larger structures of the Education system. Education scholars take semester-long courses on research methods wherein they are trained in not only types of research but also the ethical standards that are required to be maintained. The scholars raising concerns about Arday are failing to say aloud, in many circumstances, that there were many supervisors, professors, academic counselors, deans, department chairs, and other salaried, protected, and white university officials who let (allegedly) questionable materials and methods fly for close to two decades! How did so many drop the ball on supervising Arday’s work?

Memoir is highly-subjective, it has next to no method of measuring or evaluating alleged outcomes, and there is no independent data registration created by way of record keeping for student outcomes. While his Ph.D was repeatedly vetted and cleared of plagiarism, Arday had been forced to submit two Correction Notices to his journal editors. Again, was the position truly “dumbed down” for Arday? Or did Cambridge already have a vulnerability embedded within its standards for scholarship that accepted sub-par materials? Was Cambridge manipulating and misleading their new, highly-prized hire in a way that made both him and them vulnerable to this attack? And if that is so, this abandonment of their Faculty member is just that much more repulsive and racist. It would suggest, in essence, that Cambridge set Arday up to be the fall guy for a larger systemic issue they should have asserted responsibility for a long time ago.

Regardless, for the anti-Black British racist, this is part of a larger indictment against Black academics in not only the British but the entire Global Northern educational establishment. No less than the Thirtieth President of Harvard University, the Black political scientist Claudine Gay, was forced out of office after only seven months on false complaints of plagiarism in a campaign initiated by northeastern Zionist ideologues and financial interests such as Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a well-known patron of sex workers. Whether Tommy Robinson, Alan Dershowitz, or Robert Kraft, this is about trying to resegregate these highest echelons of the Ivory Tower so as to hinder the ascendancy of a particular kind of socially-engaged Black academic.

Both Arday and Gay study/ied matters of social science that easily extend to the examination of race. For Gay, she had been unwilling to accept the authoritarian demands of pro-Israeli donors regarding on-campus Palestine solidarity encampments and so the accusations of plagiarism were combined with a familiar-sounding accusation of “Black antisemitism” that has become common parlance again. For Arday, his prominence as a public intellectual with access to a prominent media microphone and state-backed platforms like the BBC meant that he was the rebuttal, the public voice of response, to the intensifying forces of reactions led by the Brexit coalition and figures like Nigel Farage. He was an appealing, impressive, eloquent speaker who articulated matters of race on a level that confounded and therefore threatened the embedded neo-fascist political project loosed upon the land by the Brexit vote a decade ago. (Unlike in the United States, where racist demagogues like Donald Trump are granted free airtime by magnates like Rupert Murdoch and Les “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” Moonves, British telecom regulations outlaw hate speech broadcasting, which has compelled Farage to equate the UK with North Korea. Arday was a frequent news broadcasting guest and had a prominent internet following.)

Ultimately, whether the final audit of Arday’s CV results in his name being completely cleared, totally discredited, or something in between, a Black scholar is still dead because his employer forced him into a terrible, unnecessary position. There was no reason for Cambridge and the larger British professoriate to participate in the public shame-and-blame of a minority colleague facing an undeniable barrage of hatred from the extreme right.

How is Nathan Cofnas, the instigator of this lynch mob, not yet in police custody for a hate crime? Oh wait, because he’s white.

On July 28, 2026, classicist Emily Wilson published her scathing London Review of Books essay on Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Oates in turn responded the next day with an extended rebuttal on X/Twitter, describing Wilson’s tone as “haughty superiority” that “strike[s] a sour note.” Oates continued:

One would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & [sic] respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.

This is quite the bizarre claim once one actually reads the LRB film review, which is both thorough and well-thought out. Wilson devoted 4234 words to a deep critique of the picture, an astonishing movie review. She famously translated Homer’s epic of wandering Odysseus in 2017 using language that emphasized the agency and depth of characters that had previously been relegated to the periphery. For instance, while older translators had intentionally changed a word to something mild like “servant,” Wilson leaned in and translated the original Greek into the correct English word, “slave.”

Oates claims that Wilson has benefited from the film release, which is only half-true. Some keen publicist used the release of Nolan’s film as an opportunity for a new round of reprinting of Wilson’s translation, but she has previously confirmed in interviews she never met with the director or anyone else connected with the film production.

The notion of Wilson’s essay having “the crude language of MAGA” is simply absurd. Furthermore, Wilson, despite living in the extraordinarily transphobic UK, has no complaint about the casting of Elliot Page in terms of the actor’s identity or performance. This is to say that Wilson is an outlier as opposed to the norm in the general British public regarding trans rights and representation.

What is it that would compel Joyce Carol Oates to choose Christopher Nolan as the metaphorical hill to die on? What kind of person would want that?

Since its initial inception in 1994, Rhode Island Kids Count has become a vital hub of information related to pediatric welfare in the Ocean State. With the publication of their annual Fact Book last May, it is possible to have a meaningful and data-driven discussion about childhood poverty and policy solutions.

High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

Both films under discussion this week are direct responses to postwar McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) prosecution of the Hollywood Ten, alleged members of the California Communist Party who refused to identify other party members, “name names,” and so faced extended prison sentences for contempt of Congress. Both pictures were produced by the liberal avatar Stanley Kramer, who eventually became the director/producer of the interracial marriage drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) starring Sidney Poitier.

But this is where the similarity ends, and it is to be defined by the trajectory of High Noon screenwriter Carl Foreman as opposed to Caine director Edward Dymytryk, both members of the Hollywood Communist Party at one point or another in the preceding decades.

Set in the real-time of the 85-minute picture, High Noon’s Will Kane (Gary Cooper) has just married the Quaker Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly) and agrees to resign from Hadleyville’s marshals service, part of a larger plan to leave the town behind for good. But then word arrives that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), initially sentenced to hanging, has been released from prison and has sworn revenge against Will, the cop that had him sent up the river. Miller’s posse is waiting for him to arrive on the noontime train, when they intend to initiate a gunfight, but that does not allow Kane to arrest them for alleged premeditation of a crime.

Despite being set in the once-upon-a-time of the “Old West,” there is high allegory afoot. The notion of Kane as the lawman granting civil liberties to the most detestable sorts, Miller’s posse, reflects the larger argument that the CPUSA was entitled to the same treatment. Rather than charge the CPUSA with espionage, they should have been granted fair hearing in the public square, unmolested and spared the persecution they faced, as was the case in Britain, France, and Italy.

Foreman had a longtime professional collaboration with producer Kramer, holding a +/— $250,000 stake (~$3,464,000 in today’s dollars) in the Stanley Kramer Corporation by the time of its maturity. While High Noon was still in production, he was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. After refusing to name names, he was blacklisted, effectively stalling his Hollywood career, which led him to cash out his stake with the Kramer Corporation to finance expatriation to England. He eked out a living on the bottom rung of various UK productions, often as an unaccredited script doctor on pictures like The Bridge Over the River Kwai (dir. David Lean, 1957). Eventually he would see his career revived in the 1960s as the wider erosion of the blacklist occurred, starting with his screenplay for The Guns of Navarone (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1961), but he never returned to the professional heights he had been approaching prior to being blacklisted.

Initially Will flees town with Amy but he relents, recognizing that Miller will never stop and that they must end this dispute now. It is in returning to town that he is shocked to find nothing but cowardice and moral compromise. When he tries to recruit deputies from the weekly church service, the congregant responses reflect the average American opinions on the Red Scare, including everything from noble speechifying to cowardly denunciation to populist screeds about “politicians up north” that would be at home in the mouth any Klansman of the period.

When Ezra (Tom Greenway) stands up and says “I can’t believe I’ve heard some of the things that have been said here” before arguing Miller “ain’t [Will’s] trouble, it’s ours,” it is hard to ignore how easily this would describe the debt that American workers owed the Communists and Socialists for their support of the 1930s labor union drives and the successful blossoming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) under the leadership of the Mormon John L. Lewis.

Foreman’s screenplay was written before his was subpoenaed but after he, as a former Communist, had seen five years of legal proceedings against the Hollywood Ten following their initial subpoena in 1947.

Foreman had seen Humphrey Bogart publicly defect from the Committee for the First Amendment, a lobby group including major Hollywood stars taking a public position in defense of the Ten, by publishing a column titled ‘As Bogart Sees It Now’ with the Hearst papers after a much-publicized 1947 appearance in DC:

I am not a Communist sympathizer… I went to Washington because I thought fellow Americans were being deprived of their Constitutional Rights, and for that that reason alone. That the trip was ill-advised, even foolish, I am very ready to admit. At the time it seemed the thing to do. I have absolutely no use for Communism nor for anyone who who serves that philosophy. I am an American. And very likely, like a good many of the rest of you, sometimes a foolish and impetuous American.

Foreman’s screenplay clearly reflects how, because of Bogie’s defection, the wider liberal defense of the Ten was abandoned and they were either incarcerated or exiled. Most egregiously, both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), bastions of liberal defense litigation and jurisprudence, refused to advocate on behalf of or offer legal services to Communists, instead deferring to the government claim that the Party represented a criminal conspiracy of espionage as opposed to a legitimate third party.

This generated a much greater level of harm in the film industry. The right wing gossip columnists employed by the Hearst press, such as Hedda Hopper, contributed to a culture of fear and intimidation that manifested as the popular talent guide Red Channels, a directory of alleged Hollywood Communists that were to be barred from working. Right wing film stars like John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Ward Bond led the anticommunist charge from within the acting community, seeking to establish an atmosphere of bullying and fear. There was a direct line of causation between the initial 1947 prosecution of the Ten, their eventual incarceration in 1950, and the conviction on false charges of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1951. Each event relied on the American public accepting the plausibility about the prior claim, leading the public further and further down a rabbit-hole of propaganda. All of this is the background underwriting High Noon as a high allegory for the era.

Five years prior to the film’s premiere, American labor had suffered its great defeat with the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which included an explicit anti-Communist clause. In terms of the Hollywood Communists, they were in a pitched battle with the mob-influenced International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), trying to unionize the studios in a way that would or would not grant the mob entree into the the various Hollywood locals. Quite notably, the MCA corporation under Lew Wasserman took on representation of Ronald Reagan, a partnership that would prove profitable for both in the following decades. Wasserman was long suspected of mob connections dating back to his early days booking the Chicago jazz scene inside Al Capone’s speakeasy machine. Mob lawyer Sidney Korshak played a significant role at MCA with labor relations, something that would impact Reagan’s anti-Communist leadership of the Screen Actor’s Guild during this period.

A great deal of this might seem ancillary, but I would argue otherwise. Foreman was being highly allegorical, like his contemporary Arthur Miller with The Crucible. The internal corruption that Ezra speaks to in church is the mob rot of the unions and the harm that would be caused because of the purges. “Communism” was a red herring to denounce clean unions, integration, and several other taboos in a Los Angeles where the public swimming pools were still segregated. Miller and his gang of thugs waltz into town as if they are Mussolini’s March on Rome. Despite the cowboy costumes, this is about the meaning of civic responsibility and democracy after the Second World War, distinctively Modern questions.

The Caine Mutiny (dir. Edward Dymytryk, 1954)

Released seven years after he had denounced the Hollywood Ten, Humphrey Bogart plays the tempestuous Lt. Comm. Queeg, whose haphazard methods and bizarre outbursts lead his men towards insurrection while serving on the USS Caine during the Pacific War. It is a form of public penance for Dymytryk and Bogart, dripping in some of the most ludicrous normativities.

Dymytryk had decided to name names in 1950 when the Ten had exhausted their final appeals and faced jail time. After testifying in 1951, he directed four low-budget pictures, including three produced with Stanley Kramer. The Caine Mutiny was his big-budget reward for testifying.

It is the most conformist film humanly possible in terms of Cold War politics.

First, consider a simple line deletion. In the original novel by Herman Wouk, Lieutenant Barney Greenwald (Jose Ferrer) makes a side-comment about the Nazi death camps. But in 1954, West Germany was our ally against the Soviet Union and so the line was deleted in service of the US interests with our ally in Bonn.

This is not mere speculation. In National Security Cinema by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker, they include a textual Appendix listing 814 individual film titles, produced between 1911 and 2017, that had active support from the US Department of Defense, including The Caine Mutiny. Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, they outline the parameters of a complex program trading script approval for access to military bases and hardware. Some of the most popular military films of the past century, not to mention unexpected outliers like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, allowed the Pentagon to re-write their screenplays in order to film on bases and battleships, something on clear display with the use of hardware to portray the USS Caine. The line about Germany might originally have been found in the First Draft, written by the Red-friendly screenwriter Michael Blankfort, but the Pentagon probably scrapped it in exchange for Bogart’s access to the cabin where the titular mutiny takes place.

We see this played out again and again in the script.

Here the real distinction in terms of government and power truly must be emphasized. In High Noon, the town is a modern liberal democracy, almost reaching “end-of-history” terms. But in The Caine Mutiny, for obvious reasons, this is a military dictatorship. Queeg takes on features reminiscent of Julius Caesar, with his moments of dysregulation almost like the Roman’s epileptic bouts. It is impossible to ignore the genuine failures culminating with the mutiny, not to mention that 75 years of behavioral psychology would dictate Queeg actually be relieved of duty. This is the key distinction: High Noon still speaks to a deeply complex question of civic engagement while Caine Mutiny relies upon discredited science. Along with all the context in terms of Hollywood Communism, there was also the simultaneous postwar engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis and all its invalidated claims about the mind. The over-wrought over-determination expressed by Ferrer’s drunken rant at the end is as scientifically correct as the moon being made of cheese.

If we look at the mutiny as a parable about the sacrificing of the Hollywood Ten, what do we see? We have Humphrey Bogart and Edward Dymytryk placing themselves in the center of the stage, a welch and a stool pigeon, begging for recognition as patriots. This is their forty pieces of silver, a big-budget war picture with military hardware and (still-convincing) model work that blares its exuberant conformity. In exchange, they said that people trying to desegregate Los Angeles swimming pools, including people like J. Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother Frank (onetime member of the Berkeley CPUSA club), were espionage agents, akin to mutineers at sea. My friend Paul Buhle, who wrote extensively about the Blacklist with his colleague Dave Wagner, tells me in correspondence that, when all these aged Red veterans were all teaching in a California university later in life, Dymytryk was actively shunned by his former comrades on campus.

Take into deep consideration this scene that is revealed to be so pivotal in the final estimate of the military attorney Barney Greenwald. In his view, Quig’s fall was caused by his men refusing to adequately police the insubordination in the ranks.

By Greenwald’s estimate, this was the first domino that led to a breakdown on the pivotal night at sea. In some sense, it is as if Humphrey Bogart is making a statement of justification about abandoning the Hollywood Ten. In the context of the Ten, we are dealing with an actor and a director who compromised themselves tremendously in service of the Red Scare apparatus. Bogart’s face and discussion of command as a lonely job is rather incongruous with the manifest largesse this picture granted him, undeniably, but it likewise suggests a certain form of Cold War liberal political rehabilitation. Underlying this conceptual apparatus, the ghost in the machine of Quig’s madness during a typhoon, is the implicit message for all “Friendly Witnesses”: name names and get your job back. Quig’s testimony here is Bogart publicly testifying onscreen in order to get off the blacklist.

There is something altogether homophobic in the film, in this sense. The Second World War was the greatest queer cultural event of the last century because, for the first time in US history, the queer community was part of a larger urban mass in-gathering of rural workers that were migrating to metro ports and defense plant work. For the first time in American history, queers in large numbers inundated the port cities looking for jobs, either by working in a defense plant or enlisting with the military. Boston, Newport, New York, and other port cities on both coasts were flooded with queers who were encountering both queer culture (urban theater, opera, the arts, bars, drag shows) and one another for the first time in their lives. Most famously, Ronald Reagan performed in a wartime film that featured actual drag queens, This is the Army (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1943). The postwar McCarthy witch-hunt included the Lavender Scare, which persecuted those promoting the “subversion and perversion” of homosexuality. Ensign Willie Keith (Robert Francis) is painfully white, Anglo Saxon, heterosexual, and male, so much so he absolutely requires an obligatory love interest sub-plot be obnoxiously tacked-on. This re-assertion of what “normal” Naval officers and crewmen were during the war is part of a larger project that sought to push wartime queers back into the closet. In 1948, as a response to the mounting crackdown on gay workers, the Communist Harry Hay would found in California the Mattachine Society, America’s first LGBT+ civil rights group. Considering this film’s climactic courtroom scene takes place in no less than San Francisco, it is hard to ignore the reassertion of heteronormativity presented by Ensign Keith.

Another issue rises with racial representation. Blacks are shown in two scenes as onboard crew but they never have significant interactions with whites. This is a norm from a period when Southern theater booking agents and owners refused to screen pictures with excessive “race mixing,” originally proscribed in writing by the diktats of the Hays Code. Limiting interracial interaction is therefore a matter of business sense in Dixie. While seemingly incidental, this in fact speaks to the true anxieties of the Red Scare. Again, a reassertion of American norms here includes suppression, this time in terms of the role of non-Europeans in the wartime Navy. No significant dialogue or characterization is granted the anonymous Black actors that enter and exit the film after properly saluting the white officers. No indication is given the heroic contributions of valorous Black and Puerto Rican/Latino Navy sailors like Doris “Dorie” Miller, Leonard Ray Harmon, or William Pinckney, all denied consideration for high commendation and rank advancement due to institutional racism. This story takes place in the South Pacific but looks like it hired the supporting cast out of a Utah American Legion post. By contrast, High Noon cast multiple Latino actors, most notably Katy Jurado playing Helen Ramírez, the widowed Mexican businesswoman and ex-lover of multiple townsmen, including Kane. It is fair, in this regard, to problematize the lack of representation as a political decision on the part of the producers.

The question of holding an older work to contemporary standards is a matter of debate and taboo. But the undeniable fact is that High Noon was far more intelligent and ethically complex than The Caine Mutiny because it had a lower budget, making it beholden to fewer financial stakeholders (not to mention a branch of the military). To hold up Caine to the standard of High Noon, by contrast, does not seem taboo at all.

It is not necessarily news that Nolan has attempted a “trauma-informed epic,” making Odysseus (Matt Damon) the literal archetypal veteran with PTSD. (The level Nolan brings the argument to, narrated by the mysterious beggar Sinon, almost suggests that PTSD was loosed on the world as punishment for the Trojan War just as the Hebrew God loosed the plagues onto Egypt as punishment for holding the Jews in slavery.) Further rumors, insinuated by clever book marketers, have tried connecting the production with Classicist Emily Wilson’s popular Homer translations, which famously re-deployed the sexist and misogynist elements in the text as a way of problematizing the poem’s inherent disenfranchisement of the feminine perspective. Wilson has already confirmed that she was not consulted by Nolan’s production but that has not stopped Elon Musk from behaving like a predictable Culture War troll.

The last Homer adaptation on screen was Troy (dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), which also ironically featured a middle-aged blond heartthrob trying much too hard, one Brad Pitt playing Achilles. As was the case with that film, Nolan has decided to exclude the deities from rendition in the proceedings, which is cutting entire sections and character motivations from the story. Deities in the Hellenistic cosmology are not the same as in the Abrahamic ones and their role in the myths is tragically underestimated by Nolan. What makes this especially jarring is that Nolan retains the nonhuman non-deities, most notably the Cyclops, Calypso, and the Sirens.

Why?

Simple. In the original poem, Odysseus and his crew of sailors land on the island of the Cyclops, who proceeds to eat a few Greek soldiers. Later, Odysseus plays a word-game with the Cyclops before blinding the giant. But Odysseus, who is extremely vain and haughty, brags to his victim about maiming him and how he suckered him with the word game in order to get his guard down. This in turn leads the Cyclops to call down a curse from his father Poseidon the sea god. In terms of causality, Poseidon tells Odysseus he will not see home for many years as punishment for maiming his son. Homer uses this as a parable condemning haughtiness and braggadocio while presenting us one of history’s first recorded character arcs. Excising this from the story requires an entire reinvention of causation, which Nolan handles poorly again and again.

As I have said many times before, Christopher Nolan is the auteur director of HIMBOs, stupid white heterosexual men that gobble this crud up and treat it like Stanley Kubrick. After Dunkirk (2017) and Oppenheimer (2023), this is Nolan’s third war film and the lack of depth is deeply reactionary. Here he can say aloud what he only could suggest in the contemporary contexts of the earlier two films: Honorable imperialism is valorous and worthy of defending or regaining. Throughout the film, Nolan’s script refers to “People of the Sea” who have sown discord and brought Bronze Age civilization to the brink of chaos. This nostalgic hindsight for imperial restoration in the name of social order now is a phenomena for the entire Greek empire and not just the major motivation for Odysseus loyalists at court in his kingdom of Ithaca. It is as if Ithaca stands as a reflection of Odysseus.

Such Tory Lite sentiment should not surprise anyone, Nolan’s Classical Liberalism has been on display for years, going back to at least his second two Batman films and their guillotine-strong opposition to the uncontrollable demos. Oppenheimer falsely equated the anti-racist unionizing of the Berkeley campus with espionage on behalf of Stalin. In Dark Knight Rises (2012), the people of Gotham are given the choice between an unelected police government or an uncontrollable electoral system that enables the most malicious and malignant personages at the expense of the general social welfare.

Ultimately this is a three hour commentary about three decades of continuous war that carries all the emotional and intellectual intelligence of a three ounce nugget of Fool’s Gold. The color palette is incongruous with the possibilities of the setting. Several characters wear costumes that are laughably fake-looking. On top of everything else, it turns out that Nolan filmed at the Moroccan-occupied city of Dakhla in Western Sahara, eliciting protests and calls for a boycott by the indigenous Sahrawi people.

Whether this will be a summer hit or not depends on variables yet to be seen. But I cannot imagine a stupider movie being the summer king in terms of earnings.

But what evades most reviewers from the very outset is the anti-Blackness expressed towards Jody (Forrest Whittaker), the British soldier of West Indian origins kidnapped by Irish Republican Army (IRA) militants during the opening credit sequence. Whether overlooked or simply ignored, the screenplay was thirty years ahead of popular culture and discourse regarding the imperfections of national liberation struggles and how they contain deeper contradictions. Neil Jordan attempted to confront issues of intersectional feminism in his screenplay and, while I am deeply ambivalent about the results, it is likewise difficult to ignore the maturity of the subject matter. Given the contemporary political landscape and the tremendous consequence that Palestine solidarity has created for those complicit in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, one is compelled to query what insight this offers contemporary activists.

Stephen Rea’s performance as IRA cadre Fergus was uniquely informed by personal circumstances. As a young stage actor, he became romantically engaged with, and eventually married to, the IRA militant Dolours Price, who was a co-conspirator in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing in London that injured 243 and led to one death. Later, she confirmed that she was a part of the IRA section responsible for disappearing informants. It is impossible to ignore Rea’s own intimate politics as informing his performance here.

Fergus is inclined to exit the movement and start a new life in England after escaping a military attack on his comrades. Others refuse to allow him, showing that extremism is a matter of circumstance as opposed to ideology. The famous poster, featuring the femme fatale Miranda Richardson in an high-contrast black-and-white photo, places implicit fatality upon a whiteness that we repeatedly see commit violence against Black flesh. If anything, there is a striking resemblance between Richardson and Dolours Price, as if Rea were implicitly renouncing the extremism and sectarianism of Irish nationalism. This is not a simplistic Freudian intervention, instead it is part of a larger conversation in Irish politics at the time, the height of the Troubles. Dolours Price would eventually become a vocal dissident regarding the Good Friday Accords and the leadership of Sinn Fein head Gerry Adams.

So much of the conversation about this film does not actually derive from the message of the picture, instead it is based upon the sensational advertising campaign run by the ever-savvy Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who released it via Miramax. Television promotions for the film hyped “the secret twist,” that the Rea character unwittingly falls in love with a Black trans woman named Dil (Jaye Davidson). Given what we know now in hindsight about the Weinsteins and their company-wide culture of sexism and mistreatment of women, it is worthwhile to scrutinize this advertising campaign fairly as a project that was adjacent to, but not totally divorced from, the original film production. The advertising’s objectification and degradation of Black trans female sexuality was a racist trope to invoke and more responsibility was warranted for such a motion picture. Why not instead market it as a romantic thriller about the Troubles, emphasizing and accentuating Irish nationalism in terms of Celtic-themed music and use of clips featuring members of the IRA executing terrorist actions? Patriot Games (dir. Phillip Noyce) also was released in 1992 and featured Harrison Ford as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan battling with a revenge-driven IRA cadre played by Sean Bean. Just compare and contrast the two advertising campaigns below:

The actual twist, in reality, is that Fergus embraces his bisexuality in a way that maintains a trans-misogynoir approach to Dil. If this movie were being produced in contemporary contexts, the general social taboos and norms around gender identity would dictate that Dil toss Fergus’s abusive behind to the curb. After all his repeated scenes using misgendering pronouns, language, and insults, every one of Dil’s coworkers would tell her to lose him rather than applauding his romantic gestures, as is shown onscreen. Even more bizarrely, Dil is intentionally willing to engage in other toxic relationships with cis white men, something we see vis-a-vis her Euro-trash suitor Dave (Ralph Brown). There is an implied layer of sado-masochism here in terms of self-respect and boundaries with domestic violence.

But this is simply incongruent with the larger psychological profile of the characters.

Consider it thusly: Dil is the trans Black woman who is so well-integrated and socially adjusted that she holds down a hairstylist job and a normal schedule of healthy avocational activities at a gay bar that respects and protects her. By contrast, Fergus is a maladjusted antisocial personage that absconds to London so as to effectively stalk the romantic partner of the Black man he was responsible for kidnapping and killing. He is a complete monster and vocally acknowledges it. During the initial scenes where he pursues and courts Dil, it is impossible to ignore the altogether large debt Jordan owes Hitchcock, who invented this motif in films like Vertigo (1958).

But in defense of the film, can it be argued that these are intended outcomes? Is it filled with deeply-flawed characters that are not meant for happy endings? Are adult thrillers such as this required to uphold a standard of decency and morality that healthily-socialized individuals should naturally already subscribe to?

This is the stuff of complex ethical debate, for sure, but it also reflects a deeper question about whether interracial queer relationships should be normalized via sensationalism such as this. The paradox of this film can be stated thusly: The Crying Game pushed Black trans identity into the public discourse in terms that were sensational and certainly not in a coordinated or informed manner connected to the actual demands of the Black trans community of the period. Black trans identity is given sensational centering and voice by a cis heterosexual Irishman that acknowledges Irish socialization within pan-European whiteness, manifest when Jody describes being called slurs by the Irish while on deployment. This was not the exception of a habit in both narrative and nonfiction film, as was demonstrated by the critiques of Paris is Burning (1990).

This is where the larger social impact warrants discussion. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (dir. Tom Shadyac, 1994) included a transgender woman played by Sean Young. The character is revealed as both a corrupt cop and a trans woman in a manner creating the tautology of non-cis identity as moral failure. This is a re-staging/spoof of the infamous Crying Game revelation played for cheap queerphobic laughs. Being trans here is defined as a matter of intentional deception and “being a trap” as opposed to being an authentic human being. Contra Crying Games, Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura does not demonstrate any desire for trans women and his reaction inscribed itself into pop culture for decades.

The question arises whether this is the fault of Crying Game and its ambivalent resolution about queer identity and gender. Is Neil Jordan responsible for the Miramax ad campaign turning revelation of non-cis identity into “the twist” of the film? Did he handle the matter in a meaningful and responsible way? Look at how poorly Roger Ebert handled the conversation with Gene Siskel:

Should we read Dil and Fergus in the same we read Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) and Judy/Madeline (Kim Novak) in Vertigo? And if so, should we allow for the same sort of ambiguity and lack of closure or conclusive moral authority that is so often at hand with Hitchcock? Is Neil Jordan necessarily entitled to this as a cis man? Or is it precisely because he is a cis man that he does write a screenplay solely based from the cis man’s perspective? The great example of this is Fergus’s repeated fantasies about Jody in a cricket uniform. Initially, these soft-focus fantasias seem to be projections of Fergus’s desire to be acceptable to the (misgendered as cis) Dil. But, after the revelation of Dil’s non-cis identity, the repetition of the visions take on a distinctively voyeuristic and sexualized dimension, accentuating what we recognize now as Fergus’s bisexuality. He not only desires to be as acceptable as Jody, he also has erotic desires for the slain Whittaker character. Is this necessarily sensational, or is it simply normative bisexuality? Does Jordan sensationalize bisexuality here in a queerphobic manner?

This is a complicated film and I cannot judge it simply. But I think there is an undeniable fetish and spectacle around Black pain and suffering that is unresolved within the white gaze of the filmmaker. Neil Jordan’s screenplay fails to perfectly repudiate deeper prejudices it desires to confront and it enabled tremendous demonization of Black trans women. And in that sense I believe one must think critically about The Crying Game.

Over the years I have interviewed Dr. Gerald Horne about his latest publications, it has been clear that his aspirations revisit again and again major issues he raised forty years ago in his biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963. In the interview we conducted here, we discussed the republication of that volume as well as a new volume about post-bellum Confederates seeking to expand the slave trade via Egypt and an invasion of Ethiopia. Slavery, the Slave Trade and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism is slated for publication at the end of July.

Back in March, published a column with Rhode Island Current, a polemic reflecting wider disgust with the incumbent amongst Democrats, that denounced Gov. Dan McKee’s blustering February 26 comments to the North Kingstown Democratic Town Committee. “I’m a sitting Democratic governor elected and I am going to get primaried in my own party. After doing all the work that we’ve done, that’s disgraceful. Period,” exclaimed a belligerent McKee.

The past month has been a continuing fiasco for McKee’s campaign. On June 20, the state party voted not to endorse him for a second term. Polling gives Foulkes a 20 point lead. As an Independence Day mud-pie, State Rep. Julie Casimiro published an endorsement of Foulkes with GoLocalProv.

Let me begin by making it clear I think Dan McKee is an oh-so-typical Irish Democratic Party hack, a species of political mutant first bred in the depths of the New York City Tammany Machine.

He lucked out by getting into office when Gov. Gina Raimondo was appointed Commerce Secretary in the Biden administration, a political favor done for those on Smith Hill who could not wait to be rid of her. McKee was previously awarded a public distinction by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in 2009. And then last month, knowing quite clearly who butters his bread, he signed a three-year charter school expansion cap in order to secure the teacher union endorsement, leading the National Alliance to publicly rescind their award. Plus ça change…

To say his tenure has been one disaster after another is being fair, though it must be admitted that the first disaster he inherited was named COVID-19. He leaned hard into an austerity budget when first appointed. Then he almost destroyed the Northern Rhode Island restaurant sector with his epic bungling of the Washington Bridge breakdown.

He protected Rhode Island Department of Transportation Director Peter Alviti (another disaster inherited from Raimondo) from public scrutiny and criticism for far too long after it became known how DOT had dropped the ball for years on the Bridge’s upkeep, meaning it was all preventable. When the demolition crews began taking the old Bridge edifice down, the Governor admitted he would not want airborne debris from the wreckage blowing into his yard for his family to breathe, something that he never presumed would also occur to families in South Providence or therefore give rise to protest over the blatant environmental racism. The McKee administration is the definition of the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

But Helena Foulkes is dangerously competent. It took the Rhode Island Democratic Party ten years to get rid of Raimondo and electing Foulkes would be inviting those corporate interests right back into the State House. When Raimondo was first elected Treasurer, she and her Wall Street campaign donors invented a phony “pension crisis” with the help of the Pew Charitable Trusts organization and the media. These big Wall Street donors had identified mildly-underfunded pensions and financed the election of corporate Democrats like Raimondo, who, once in office, “reformed” the pension investment portfolio by giving significant capital to the same hedge funds that had financed her political campaign. As of this writing, the promised uptick in the investment value for the hedge funds, the so-called “dog-leg” Raimondo promised pensioners, has yet to materialize, making her investment strategy the greatest fiscal loss in Rhode Island history. Of course, being savvy as she is, Raimondo also invested the pension in her (not-exactly-blind) trust that she had put her assets into upon taking office. We need to understand Foulkes from this context and proceed accordingly. These are the same forces financing campaigns against candidates like Rep. Enrique Sanchez. Donor money is the great unifier here and it has built quite a clique in Providence.

First, Foulkes has zero political experience. Raimondo invented this advertising line of appeal when she ran for Treasurer, presenting herself as a “fresh face” unencumbered by the machinations of the Democratic establishment. With a pedigree including Harvard and Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship before entering the finance sector, Raimondo’s advertising apparatus made this level of education and practical private sector experience into a virtuous-seeming résumé in comparison with traditional Italian alpha males like her predecessor, Frank Caprio. Helena Foulkes likewise uses her experience in the private sector as a virtue despite the lack of justification. What in her experience will make her capable of tackling immense questions about the very definition of “educator” and “instruction” in the era of artificial intelligence being proffered as nothing more or less than a technological miracle seemingly dropped from the heavens unto us? Does she have some experience with a School Board or Teachers Union in the same sense as the incumbent? She is a political unknown coming out of nowhere, just like Raimondo did when she ran for Treasurer, yet she had the highest total campaign donations at $1.5 million according to the most recent Quarterly Reporting disclosure forms. Where is this campaign getting this kind of money? There are a lot of ways for Super PACs to spruce up corporate dark money with the sheen of white middle class feminism. Raimondo followed a similar playbook that was financed by Enron alum John Arnold and hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones. Foulkes is dripping in Big Pharma donations. She even networked Raimondo onto the Board of Costco, the popular wholesaler. Is Foulkes taking donor money from Arnold or Tudor Jones? How will this shape her approach to Medicare and Medicaid, particularly when it comes to hotly-debated topics like drug price negotiations or expansion of benefit availability? How will she approach state-level consumer protections regarding the corporate-favored Medicare “Dis”—Advantage plans that are often marketed in an aggressive and predatory manner towards seniors?

Second, Foulkes is utterly regressive. When McKee announced the charter cap last week, Foulkes issued a public statement denouncing the move. To be clear, now-Sen. Sam Zurier wrote in a 2017 report for City Council that, given the current tuition funding formula dynamics, further expansion of charters in Providence would “break” the extremely-underfunded public school district. Foulkes knows this. How anyone can possibly support the complete and total state-backed demolition of an entire public school district under the phony slogan of “school choice” boggles the mind.

Third, her connections to the Sackler family, the Purdue Pharmaceutical owners who personally unleashed OxyContin onto the consumer market and generated a full-scale opiate epidemic, should disqualify her from consideration for public office due to conflicts of interest. Foulkes should not be boasting about being part of the CVS corporation when they were playing their role in the opioid epidemic, including lax oversight for pill mill pharmacists at stores in Florida. Would a Foulkes administration lean on the Rhode Island Attorney General to not support or participate in suits against the Sacklers or CVS? It is impossible to ignore the labor complaints that pharmacists raised in the past few years, emphasizing how CVS has created workplace conditions that could be dangerous for both patients and the individual pharmacy workers processing customer orders. What role did Foulkes play in this? How does she intend to treat state and municipal employees? What is her view on time-management and increasing Fordist regimes of regulation or surveillance over public employees?

Fourth, a Foulkes administration will impose an austerity regime that will push more suburban voters to the right. I cannot judge if this registers with Eil, and I certainly do not begrudge him if it does not, but there are places in Rhode Island I do not feel safe as a trans woman going to anymore because of the 2024 election returns. My parents constantly urge me to be safe because of the political climate. The reality of the protest vote in Rhode Island is quite unique. The Democrats are so wide in terms of their political spectrum that the Republicans and, increasingly, the local conservative media, speak only to the most fringe element of political discourse. The return to more betrayals in service of the Wall Street interests connected with both Raimondo and Foulkes would unleash local demagogues, charlatans, hooligans, and hucksters that target vulnerable and confused voters with bigotries and idiocies. The MAGA phenomenon would see new life breathed into it by a distinctively local set of grievances grounded in material realities and quality of living. We already know what it is like when Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and Rush Limbaugh attack feminists, queers, minorities, and “globalists” (read: Jews) over the airwaves, it was called January 6th, 2021.

I understand that there are those who see McKee as beyond hope or redemption, and I admit I feel that way. Democratic Town Committees and various civic groups are throwing their lot in with Foulkes and the Rhode Island party was unable to decide on a nomination. But I also believe McKee is surrounded by progressive and liberal policy experts and advisors that are crafting bills and measures much more attuned to the welfare of the most impoverished in the state. By this I mean the following, and not with a shred of hyperbole: It is better to have an altogether mediocre and coalition-inclined governor than a competent technocrat with deep connections to Wall Street, Big Pharma, the corporate sector, and zero public sector experience.

There is something altogether Trumpian, in two ways, regarding Foulkes. First, she wants to pole-vault into the highest seat of elected state office without ever serving a day on a PTA, a City Council, in the General Assembly, or in a public agency such as RIPTA, which is pretty audacious. Second, there is something undeniable in the resemblance between claims made by both Foulkes and Trump, that their business experience and acumen somehow makes them capable and competent governors, a technocratic view that is distinctively anti-democratic.

Let me suggest only one point where private and public sector agencies diverge in their basic logic of governance, budgetary matters. In the private sector, common sense dictates that a business never run a deficit. By contrast, public sector deficit spending is a basic logical step for a public agency. Of course in the neoliberal epoch we have seen the ascent of the bipartisan deficit hawks, beginning with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich’s collaborations in the 1990s. But it is beginning to be clear that the mainstream of the Democrats in Rhode Island, meaning centrists and liberals, are willing to pursue deficit spending and other measures grounded in Keynesian/post-Keynesian theory.

With regards to her vow of a Millionaire’s Tax, I imagine it will contain so many loopholes and exemptions that Foulkes will end up collecting just enough cash to purchase precisely one bag of discounted candy on the day after Halloween at CVS. Furthermore, during this past legislative session, why did she not lend her voice to progressive issues on both the state and municipal level? Why did she stay silent on rent stabilization in Providence?

Oh, right. Remember that networking she did with Gina Raimondo? Part of that whole clique includes Mayor Brett Smiley, meaning Foulkes is going to be tied at the hip to the Mayor’s agenda, which in turn is subservient to the whims of his real estate mogul husband Jim DeRentis. Foulkes would never dare go before Providence City Council or the General Assembly to testify on behalf of rent control. And considering what a rancid presence the DeRentis real estate portfolio has been in the city, stimulating the gentrification of historic BIPOC neighborhoods, it becomes very difficult to take her serious in terms of the state’s upholding of civil rights in a period when federal enforcement is not simply lacking but borderline-criminalized by the White House. In terms of structural and institutional racism, Foulkes will weaken the state agencies necessary for civil rights enforcement in service of these real estate interests. Trump puts marginalized and stigmatized communities and people into survival time as opposed to thrive time. With Trump in office for another two years, our communities cannot risk Foulkes compromising our safety and our workplace protections in service of her Wall Street financiers.

In 2016, soon after the Election shocked every liberal in America, I attended a meeting where someone described asking their neighbor why they voted for Trump.

“You don’t hate gays, you don’t hate immigrants, why did you vote for him?”

“Because Gina Raimondo took away my COLA!”

Raimondo’s pension reform heist had robbed all retirees of their annual Cost-of-Living Adjustment, a basic increase of the monthly pension check’s value based upon inflation. Shutting pensioners out of their COLA locked these retirees into their own small version of a Depression, pushing them to the right in the name of a protest vote. Furthermore, because retirees were forced to be frugal, it meant one of the most reliable customer sources for local stores and restaurants, seniors, dried up, leading to a rippling effect that hit the entire retail and hospitality sector. This was the absolute worst thing to happen to the local economy. In Keynesian theory, the policy of counter-cyclical spending during a recession dictates increasing the money in monthly pensioner checks, thereby stimulating an increase in demand that in turn pulls the economy out of the slump. Simply giving more money to pensioners during the past 14 years would have revived the local economy in a way that could have helped minimize the impact of the Washington Bridge on the restaurant sector. Instead, refusing to do so fed these voters to Trump over justified grievances that the Republicans explained were caused by various conspiracy theories.

We do not need John DePetro blaming “feminism” and “globalists” for the austerity measures implemented against the middle class by a regressive neoliberal technocrat like Gov. Foulkes. We have been here before and know what a disaster it was.

Whether Eil is leaning into a certain strand of high-minded idealism about Jeffersonian democracy or he is genuinely past the point of forgiveness for a mediocrity like Dan McKee, I cannot judge. But I do understand precisely what it means for Foulkes to become Governor and bring Raimondo’s Wall Street interests, as well as her own Big Pharma interests, into the Governor’s office. I do understand what it will mean for the Sacklers and CVS to have an ally in office as various state governments continue pursuing remediation for the opioid epidemic and the diabolical role played by both. And I do recognize that there are still more public assets to be privatized at the benefit of the Wall Street donors, both public and dark money, who fund Foulkes.

And so not only do I think this primary challenge is as silly as can be, it is unnecessarily dangerous. McKee is simply one man in the Democratic Party machine, and not even the most powerful one at that (because in the State Constitution the most powerful official is the House Speaker). Christopher Blazejewski as the new House Speaker will find more cooperation from McKee than Foulkes, who will rapidly pivot into the agenda set by her Wall Street backers. We have to think in a long-game sense about how well Foulkes plays with the other kids on the playground and so far she has done little to nothing in that regard.

Who is this woman, where does she come from, and how is she planning to legislate with the General Assembly?

Ed Brubaker is ranked far and away as reigning don of the crime comic, with a bibliography spanning the major publishers as well as his own independent projects, and all accruing high acclaim consistently. Originally published in 40 issues over 2002-2006, Gotham Central is both a cornerstone of his oeuvre and the sub genre itself.

The police procedural is a unique subject for any literary critic. There exist two contending streams that inform the story. In the case of right wing writers, the late Mike Davis best described it when he told an interviewer “I hate Raymond Chandler, yet I’ve read him and reread him so many times. He’s a fascist, and I mean this in a precise sense. He represents the small businessman being trampled by outside forces,” which usually includes racialist and anticommunist representations of the villains. But for leftist writers, including Communist Party USA member Dashiell Hammett, the culprit at the end of the story is either society itself or someone so rich that they can escape prosecution. Right wing procedurals are colloquially called “Copaganda” while leftist procedurals have grown in popularity after the wild success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by the Scandinavian scribe Stieg Larrson. The history of leftist procedurals was outlined by my late colleague and comrade Louis Proyect in “Sweden and the Renaissance of Marxist Crime Stories,” a worthwhile read.

For the last few years, DC has been publishing its new Compact Collection, reformatting and releasing popular graphic novels as affordable trade paperbacks on sale for $9.99 MSRP. Starting with Watchmen, this collection has expanded to include some of the most popular and acclaimed titles in the DC catalog. Adding Gotham Central is a great decision because of its structured story system. The book contains the first ten issues, three opening and interlinked stories, and they are as gritty and brilliant as any episode of NYPD Blue. The artwork by Michael Lark is clearly indebted to Karen Berger’s era editing DC’s Vertigo label and its boundary-crossing drawings of brutality, gore, and gunshots. This is further manifest in the stories, which dare to broach taboos around police accountability, workplace sexism, and homophobia.

The book follows a bullpen of Detectives in the Major Crimes Unit (MCU) as they attempt to take on the various members of Batman’s Rogues Gallery. One character, Renee Montoya, is working with a new partner after her first, Harvey Bullock, was taken down on a corruption charge just before the book begins. With the first story arc, “In the Line of Duty,” the squad pursues Mr. Freeze, who kills a cop on the first page. The major motif for the boys on the beat is that they need to take Freeze in personally because of what he did to “one of our own.” This is in spite of the repeated episodes that demonstrate they are hopelessly outmatched, something that under normal circumstances would have compelled the (recently retired) Comissioner Gordon to light the Bat-Signal and call in the Caped Crusader’s aid. Ultimately, this stubborn egotism on the part of the police, refusing until the last possible moment to even consider asking Batman for help, shows the immanent critique of policing and its failures. As further chapters explore the homosexuality of a squad member, the instances of overt harassment and sexism further reflect upon this identification of policing’s performativity. Brubaker and cowriter Greg Rucka understand policing and have a mature analysis here.

Michael Lark’s artwork is gritty, using a heavy realism with chiaroscuro lighting and hatching to mimic the cinematography of popular television procedurals. This is not a glamorous or aesthetically-pleasing roster of uniformed officers. Such presentation emphasizes the further lack of trust in policing established by Brubaker and Rucka. Published in a period when DC was otherwise known for aesthetically-sterling superhero teams like the Justice League being given a base on the moon, this is by contrast grounded to earth with a different ethos. One character explains to a superior officer “This isn’t Metropolis, Captain… This isn’t the city of tomorrow, it’s not San Francisco, it’s not New York. It’s Gotham, and if you want to see what that means, just check out your squad room.”

Obviously readers will wonder what connection, if any, this book has with the television series Gotham (2014-2019), which followed a similar plot setup. First, in the most basic sense, the television program is a prequel to the Batman story while this novel is set during Batman’s career. But second, there is a distinctive tonal difference, with Gotham as a TV serial reliant upon tropes and gimmicks that are not as well-constructed as Brubaker’s plotting. The Renee Montoya character on television exists in a rather exploitative lens, titillating as a third party that complicates the relationship of one of the protagonists. Here, by contrast, an entire storyline is dedicated not only to her romances but her Sunday dinner with her parents, her complex relationship with her brother, and the secrets that come between them and her romantic interests.

Montoya, as is acknowledged across the web, is an out lesbian. This was the book that brought her out of the closet, it is not a pretty moment of collegial congratulations, and what Montoya ultimately experiences in the arms of her lover at the end of the story speaks yet again to Brubaker’s indictment of the superstructure. With Trump returning queer-phobic sentiments to the mainstream, the book carries an unexpected relevance worthy of consideration in contemporary circumstances.

This was the first overt challenge to Leo’s papacy and his authority over the Church. Since his election nearly two years ago, right wing forces have been congregating to form an opposition bloc.

For instance, the illicit consecration ceremony SSPX held in Switzerland on Wednesday counted in attendance members of several right wing Italian political parties and various individual operatives were likewise attached to the ceremony. Steve Bannon has previously spoken highly of the sect on his podcast. The election of Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV has brought to the surface a long-simmering divide between progressive and conservative Catholics, one underwritten by immense amounts of money. It provides key insights into the Christian Nationalist psyche of people like Vice President J.D. Vance and the conservative majority of the Supreme Court.

The most temporal manifestation of this rivalry arose when the late Pope Francis implemented financial oversight reforms in the Vatican Bank, a longtime money laundering outlet for organized crime, authoritarian dictators, and the CIA. This included closure of suspicious accounts and revising the rules of eligibility to become a depositor. This in particular was a point of antagonism for the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whose emails reveal communications with Bannon that sought to instigate a coordinated campaign against Pope Francis. One can imagine that Epstein either used the Vatican Bank or relied on those who did so to finance both licit and illicit operations in Eastern Europe. The email cache makes evident that Epstein trafficked women from the region and so it is possible to envision the utility of a Vatican Bank account as a source of clean and easily-accessed money.

The confrontation with the SSPX was never about the hobby-horses of the Latin Mass, or debates over the Second Vatican Council, or the meaning of the word “Tradition” in Catholic theology, it was a bald-faced act of insubordination trying to test limits. For example, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, an organization in full communion with Rome, offers the Latin Mass that SSPX insists would otherwise be lost were it not for these unauthorized consecrations. What truly laid behind the confrontation with SSPX was a power grab by those who subscribe to a strand of deeply-regressive and misogynist Catholicism that grants succor to various neo-fascist right ideologues in the European Union and the United States.

The next manifestation of this confrontation will be when Leo tries to reform the infamous Opus Dei, likewise known for its own litany of human rights abuses and cult-like practices. (Check out this interview with for further insights.)

It has long been suspected that several Supreme Court Justices, such as Alito and Roberts, either belong to the group or at least receive ministry from an Opus Dei chapel that is located quite close to the Court building. Known for using outdated practices like corporal mortification of the flesh and other Medieval extremities, Leo has indicated his intention make the group more accountable to local Bishops, who frequently report friction with Opus Dei groups in their Dioceses. This fundamentally changes the status Pope John Paul II granted them as a Personal Prelature, a group allowed to function with complete autonomy and only beholden to the internal leadership, a near-vigilante status in theological terms that can and does enable tremendous abuse of power.

At the heart of Opus Dei lies a warped revision of Catholic theology. It embraces the Protestant Prosperity Gospel and rejects not just a preferential option for the poor but the basic tenet of the Church’s millennia-long ministry to the impoverished. Wealthy and elite members of Opus Dei are treated regally in their facilities by a coterie of low-income workers called numeraries, many from the Global South, who experience extraordinary hyper-exploitation. In spite of Christ’s claim about camels and needles, Opus Dei seems certain that the Kingdom of God is Within Your Bank Account, a religion every Libertarian dreams of.

This is not an unforeseen development given the harsh repression of Latin American Liberation Theology by John Paul II in the 1980s. As Carl Bernstein reported in his 1992 Time Magazine story ‘The Holy Alliance,’ the Polish pontiff worked closely with the Reagan administration to support the Solidarność labor union in the homeland of His Holiness, collaborating with the CIA and AFL-CIO to import technology and materiel necessary for its survival under martial law by the Communist government when it experienced extended repression. According to Gore’s reportage, the Pope envisioned deploying Opus Dei missionaries behind the Iron Curtain to support the Solidarność faction backed by Lech Walesa, part of the logic that governed his decision to grant them the unique and extraordinary status of Personal Prelature.

In this period, Reagan appointed the conservative Catholic businessman William Casey as Director of Central Intelligence, where he oversaw operations that supported the Polish while simultaneously backing the forces repressing the Latin Americans. Fr. Ernesto Cardenal, a Jesuit who served as Minister of Culture for the Nicaraguan Sandinista government, was publicly shamed and sanctioned in 1984 by the Pope when the Vatican plane landed on the tarmac. By contrast, there never were penalties for anti-government priests in Poland, instead their efforts were validated by the Pope. In August of that year, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, published his ‘Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation,’’ solidifying the Vatican stigma of heresy upon the entire movement in a way that enabled Contra death squads. Whether a calculated outcome or a true accident of history, John Paul effectively and successfully horse-traded Nicaragua for Poland. By anathematizing Liberation Theology so publicly and blatantly, shaming and shunning its membership as ‘Marxist’ heretics, the Vatican removed whatever shield of protection that was traditionally accorded the Church and clergy/religious by the ruling elite. The oligarchic and latifundia classes, previously put on the defensive by a social movement widely embraced by the faithful, suddenly found themselves granted a powerful tool necessary for the construction of a white terror. The radical base communities were massacred, nuns and priests were murdered, and the rich were empowered once again.

And all along, watching on the sidelines, was Fr. Robert Francis Prevost. He was an Augustinian in Chulucanas, Peru, during a period when Americans were being killed by Contras, arriving in 1985 after completing his seminary studies, where he had participated in anti-nuclear proliferation protests. What and how he thinks about those violent early days of his priesthood remains to be seen. But it is impossible to ignore the historic confluence of forces that bring about these new developments.

After vowing since last February to consecrate four Bishops without Vatican authorization, the Catholic fundamentalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) followed through with the July 1 ceremonies at Écône, Switzerland, violating Canon Law and potentially incurring automatic excommunication for fomenting schism. “We are accused of not loving the Pope. They accuse us of not respecting him. It is precisely because we love the Pope as the Vicar of Christ, as the Head of the Church, that we don’t want to see the Pope humiliated anymore thanks to fake shepherds representing fake religions,” said Fr. Davide Pagliarani, Superior General of SSPX, during his sermon.

In the days leading up to these illicit consecrations, both Pope Leo and SSPX, which claims abandoning the old Latin Mass introduced irreversible heresy to the faithful, exchanged published correspondence that demonstrated the Society was intent on nothing less than a game of theological chicken and insubordination.

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“To tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity,” wrote Pope Leo in a public letter to Pagliarani. “The Church recognizes the devotion to liturgical life, commitment to priestly formation, apostolic zeal and desire for fidelity to Tradition that characterize many people and communities connected to your Fraternity. This has motivated the attentive and generous attitude that my Predecessors have consistently shown to you. In this spirit, and filled with Christian affection, I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!”

In response, Pagliarani wrote “We believe it to be our very duty to do everything possible to mend Christ’s seamless garment, torn by forces and pressures incompatible with a truly Catholic spirit. I ask only that You consider the authenticity of this intention before making a decision concerning the Society of Saint Pius X. It is not yet too late.” He continued:

I would ask You to reflect upon two very simple facts. First, in 1988 the Society was already declared schismatic, for reasons and in circumstances entirely analogous to those of today. Yet, after so many years, we are speaking together as a father and his son. Your Holiness is paternally urging me to avoid a schism which, theoretically, has already taken place. Does not Your very attitude—whose paternal concern I deeply appreciate—constitute proof that the Society is neither schismatic nor hostile to the Church?

Secondly, some years ago, the Holy See entrusted two bishops of the Church with the task of engaging in dialogue with the Society of Saint Pius X: Bishop Vitus Huonder, then Bishop of Chur, now deceased, and Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Astana. Both, after taking the necessary time for discernment, recognised the profoundly Catholic spirit of the Society and bore public witness to it.

This of course is contemptuous. The matter at hand is not in the past, it is the intention to consecrate new Bishops illicitly and incur the Church penalty of excommunication. Furthermore, this was an intentional re-staging of another set of consecrations in 1988, at the same location, under the same circumstances, and over the same theological debates, which concluded with the same kind of excommunications for the prelates involved. Pagliarani clearly demonstrated a certain contempt for the Magisterium in this letter.

But what was truly bizarre was the way Life Site News, a longtime anti-choice Catholic propaganda outlet founded originally by the Ontario-based Campaign Life Coalition, continued defending the SSPX in spite of this final act of defiance. Kennedy Hall, a right wing Canadian Catholic blogger, proffered the argument that “a grave general or public necessity” existed for the continuation of the Latin Mass.

“If I were being simply pragmatic, I would have to choose between going to Fr. Bob’s Novus Ordo Church in the Round with liturgical transvestism (which is girl altar boys) and sacrilege and heresy [or SSPX],” he claimed in a truly insightful utterance. To be clear, female altar servers were authorized under John Paul II, the most orthodox Pope of the postwar era.

Meanwhile, on June 30, Cassandra Hackstock published her own short memoir titled “Seven Years in the SSPX,” granting readers a long-neglected feminist lens on this organization. The insights are both horrific and typical in terms of religious sects that uphold intensive patriarchal norms and expectations.

“Stand by your chairs until the men have gone through the buffet line, and then we will eat.” My jaw dropped — I couldn’t help it. Most of the women accepted this business of the men eating first without any visible opinions, but there was sometimes another person present in Society gatherings who was more aligned with what I call “normal,” and as I looked at the other women, I found one. Her mouth was open, too, and we just looked at each other in disbelief…

People may not get divorces very often in the SSPX, but couples living under the same roof for decades in mutual, palpable hatred of each other can be worse, certainly for the traumatized children in these homes. Many of the young children grow up to lose their faith entirely, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, drift aimlessly and miserably into criminal behavior, beating their own spouses eventually. I have known more than one family who had to flee from a vicious father, running to relatives or cheap motel rooms to protect themselves…

We were constantly taught that women were subjective beings, so our thoughts could be readily dismissed as unreliable, that we were instinctively flighty, irrational, and emotional. Men were taught that they were objective beings who were rational, and were given the office of ruling their homes. Women had to obey the men in all things. Father X preached from the pulpit that if your husband told you to make mashed potatoes for dinner, you had to make them, or else be sinning. Fathers became tyrants who spent days at work, hopefully, and nights drinking with Society men, ranting about how men need brotherhood, while the wives struggled to raise their nine, eleven, fifteen children without support… The male alcoholism and the treatment of women as broodmares and sole caregivers continued, leaving broken fathers, mothers, and children in its wake. I knew one woman who had seven C-sections.

As of this moment, it is unclear what will occur now that SSPX has crossed the Rubicon for a second time. The Vatican previously indicated that it would be creating channels and methods for members of the SSPX to return to full communion with Rome. Meanwhile, another group that now appears on the horizon for a potential confrontation is Opus Dei, which Leo is actively proposing to reform in ways proving utterly horrifying to the membership.

But the Church has not indicated how it will respond to the larger issue SSPX truly represents, a tendency towards a much older and repressive strand of Catholicism that succors bigots, racists, misogynists, and cis-/hetero-sexists.

First Pope Francis and now Leo have subtly endorsed a renaissance of Christian Democracy and re-invigoration of a welfare state that will not exclude migrants. This is a source of consternation for nativists like Steve Bannon.

Another source of consternation was the decision of these two Popes to audit and reform the Vatican Bank, a longtime money laundering sink for various Latin American dictatorships, fugitive Nazis, the Mafia, and, obviously, the CIA. Recently declassified emails suggest that the deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was particularly irked by Francis’s decision to shutter accounts and severely limit the everyday consumer’s ability to open new accounts in Rome, cutting off a financial reservoir for both licit and illicit money operations in Eastern Europe.

This is to say that, underwriting this wing of the Church, it is possible to find truly disturbing parties with fiscal concerns quite far from righteousness.

The notion of spending any time at all with Vice President J.D. Vance seems like it would be a living nightmare, which means I grant credence to the very real possibility that his April 4, 2025 Papal audience with an ailing Francis is what finally pushed Jorge Bergoglio over the edge into eternity. In another era, we might have been lucky and seen Vance charged in a Church tribunal for assaulting the Pope, an offense meriting excommunication, but that is merely wishful thinking at this point.

Whether or not Vice President Vance’s mere presence is truly that toxic, there is an internal assault brewing against the new Pontiff with links to people like Steve Bannon, the right wing Catholic mega-donor Tim Busch, Mel Gibson, and a coterie of schismatic or near-schismatic clerics. Would-be social media influencer Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester, Minnesota certainly understands this, he just plays stupid.

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In a review of Vance’s recent memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Barron exposes his right flank and the undeniable fact that he grants his imprimatur to Vance’s fascist politics. Consider this passage, laced with contempt for the Church’s support of the immigrant communities nationwide:

Famously, JD Vance was one of the very last persons to meet with Pope Francis. The vice president had great respect for the frail pope and was extremely grateful that the pontiff had granted him an audience literally the day before his death. Vance’s meeting with Vatican diplomats was less satisfying. Cardinal Parolin, the secretary of state, raised serious concerns about the Trump administration’s policy regarding immigration. Though he acknowledged that the U.S. had a right to control its borders, he encouraged Vance to treat migrants humanely. But what did the Vatican object to exactly? Deportations in general? Deportations of criminals? The pace of deportations? Vance claims he got no answers and remained flabbergasted that “the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” It’s a damning observation, but I confess to sympathizing with it, for I have found the same tendency too often when the Church addresses complex political matters.

Was Bishop Barron as flabbergasted when he actively, alongside the rest of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, lobbied the federal government for decades to overturn a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion via the Dobbs Supreme Court decision? Of course not, even though abortion healthcare entails many more intricate ethical discussions than immigration justice. The Church is many things but, in terms of morality and ethics surrounding the rights of immigrants, it is certain of its social teachings, as absolute as it is over reproductive healthcare or same sex marriage. Senator Bernie Sanders was apt to publicly praise the work of Catholic Charities when he went to the southern border recently. What facetious nonsense Barron scribbles. The Bishop knows why family separation and incarceration of children at the border is an abomination, he just ignores it.

Underwriting Bishop Barron’s false credulity is, ultimately, a cynical desire to maintain his prestige with President Trump’s administration even as the first American Bishop of Rome denounces Washington’s immigration policies. Barron joined Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which claims “In recent years, Americans from all religious backgrounds have faced increasing persecution for their religious beliefs” in a June 26 report published by the Department of Justice. Pray tell mon père…

What makes this particularly notable is that Bishop Barron understands that he is not speaking into a vacuum, instead he is adding fuel to the fires of a wider sedition within the Church.

On June 24, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) published a so-called ‘Profession of Catholic Faith of the Society of Saint Pius X to Enlighten Souls in the Face of Modern Errors,’ which was followed the next day by the unveiling of the Coats of Arms and Mottoes that will be used by schismatic Bishops they plan to consecrate at Écône, Switzerland this week.

The SSPX is a ultra-right Catholic sect known for a long history of association with Nazi war criminals and providing spiritual succor to the French New Right. Founded in November 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, it uses the totem of the old Latin service as a smokescreen for a regressive political agenda. Known as the Tridentine Mass, this is an older, different, and much more authoritarian strand of Catholicism, one that includes a harsh and shameless level of antisemitism. Within five years of its initial founding, SSPX was formally suppressed by Church authorities, something that has remained unchanged for more than half a century. In July 1976, the New York Times carried a column about SSPX’s intransigence and responses from Church authorities:

Some 2,000 people attended the Mass said by Denis Roche, who was one of the 13 priests ordained by Bishop Lefebvre last week despite formal orders from the Vatican not to proceed with the ordinations.

Bishop [Pierre] Mamie denied “Mr. Roche any right to exercise priestly functions and forbade all Catholics to attend the mass that was held today.”

Despite gaining notice in the Gray Lady and formal reprimand from Rome, Lefebvre continued pushing the envelope, and so, in October 1976, Paul VI suspended the Frenchman from his priestly faculties (effectively banning him from public ministry) after these unauthorized ordinations of priests, exclaiming with exasperation “Can you have decided to attach no importance to the word of the Pope?” It is undeniable that Lefebvre was hungry for a confrontation with the Hierarchy, part of the SSPX propaganda narrative has always relied heavily upon a particular type of persecution complex.

In 1988, Lefebvre decided to go completely rogue and consecrate four priests as bishops without authorization from Pope John Paul II, an action described in the writings of Pope Pius XII as “gravely illicit, that is, criminal and sacrilegious.” Lefebvre died still excommunicated from Rome in 1991. The survivors later were brought back into communion with the Vatican in January 2009, during the papacy of the ultra-conservative Benedict XVI. And even after that, SSPX remained belligerent and intransigent regarding full submission to Rome, violating a basic condition Benedict had laid out as a requirement for lifting the excommunications. Adding further salt to the wound, one of the wayward clerics, Richard Williamson, who held very contrary opinions on whether the Holocaust had actually occurred, seemed incapable of being quiet while he was being re-admitted to the flock, gladly gabbing about his doubts regarding gas chambers. This was especially embarrassing for Benedict, who himself infamously had been in the Hitler Youth.

This latest episode repeats the same complaints from 1988, that the Second Vatican Council irreparably and unforgivably altered the True Faith in a manner that can only be recovered via regression on policies like ecumenism, religious liberty, and inter-religious dialogue. The SSPX dares Leo to excommunicate them for their actions, which they claim is about protecting the Church’s Tradition in the form of the Latin Mass. The following episode of the “Inside the Vatican” podcast offers a useful insight from several longtime beat reporters.

SSPX charges that Rome today, meaning both Pope Francis and Pope Leo, promotes active heresy in the Church. The ‘Profession’ published on June 24 is an inventory of grievances, real and imaginary, that makes obvious what kind of prejudices are the major sticking points:

I consequently reject all errors contrary to this Faith, and in particular those of liberalism, indifferentism, modernism, ecumenism, and laicism, condemned by Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, Saint Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII. These errors obscure revealed doctrine, falsify Tradition, disfigure the sacred liturgy, corrupt morals, weaken the missionary spirit, and disintegrate the Christian social order, gravely harming the salvation of souls…

I reject the diminished professions of trinitarian faith which, under pretext of religious unity or ecumenical prudence, deliberately pass over in silence what God has revealed about Himself. It does not suffice to say with the Jews and Muslims that God is one… This false irenicism pursues an illusory concord: by omitting to profess certain revealed truths, it substitutes confusion for clarity and threatens the integrity of the Faith…

I therefore reject political and religious liberalism: not only that which claims for error the same rights as for truth, and for false forms of worship the same official and public recognition as for the true; but also that which, in the name of human dignity and a false religious freedom, attributes to everyone the right to act publicly according to his conscience without being hindered by civil authority, even when that conscience is erroneous and opposed to the common good or to the true religion.

Quite a litany.

For the Catholic believer, this is clearly a spiritual melodrama that Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene would have loved, a thrilling story of theological intrigue including presidents, high finance, papal elections, and fascists.

For the rest of us, this is pretty frightening stuff. These rogue clerics and their reactionary followers are imposing their heretical version of Catholicism, tinged with the Prosperity Gospel and a rejection of the Church’s longstanding ministry to the poor, onto our bodies. Birthing people can no longer get abortions and non-cis folks cannot get gender confirmation healthcare because of these hard-right politicians and lobbyist-clerics who have imposed their faith onto America at large. With the exception of Justice Gorsuch, the majority of the conservatives on the Supreme Court bench subscribe to these tenets of faith. As Junno Arocho Esteves recently wrote in the Jesuit magazine America, “SSPX argued that heads of state have a ‘right and duty’ to favor the Catholic Church and oppose other religions and ‘false forms of worship,’” meaning Separation of Church and State is verboten for these Catholics.

This is not only a matter of religious dogma, it is only one front in the ongoing religious civil war taking place in American pews nationwide. It furthermore is not limited to Catholics or even Christianity. In American Judaism, the debate is defined by Zionism and fealty to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In American Hinduism, perhaps best exemplified by Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, it is underwritten by Hindu nationalist loyalty to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

And so Trump has constructed a new form of the Reaganite Religious Right coalition that is far more ecumenical than previously seen. And Bishop Barron is part of it.

Television studies is a relatively new field and it has yet to journey into the realm of considering particular storylines as opposed to seasons. Binging the totality of the show is considered implicitly virtuous in the spectrum on completest logic. Simply sampling a multi-part selection, reading what amounts to a “chapter excerpt” from the larger “television novel,” is judged less-than despite the virtue of this sampling method.

Vito Spatafore, played by Joseph R. Gannascoli, is a married contractor with two kids and a capo under James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. Starting with Episode 5 in Season Six, his subplot as a gay mobster is followed in a way that is truly heartbreaking. Unlike the exploitative and racist presentation of queerness on The Shield (2002-2008), where a gay Black Det. Julien Lowe (played by Michael Jace) all-but-lashes himself in self-loathing, Spatafore is complex. To be clear, he is undeniably capable of serious evil, as is the case when he shoots a man in his rural driveway after drunkenly rear-ending his car. Not only has his closeted homosexuality caused his wife hardship, he furthermore has a gumar, a mistress, meaning he pursued the preservation of his closet in the most sexist way possible. Vito is a real pig because of this closet.

But he also is capable of tremendous good and even love. After being spotted and then outed in a gay bar with mob ties, Vito fills a duffel bag with wads of cash he squirreled away in the house and runs away to a tiny town in New Hampshire. After hiding out in a bed-and-breakfast, he falls in love with Jim “Johnny Cakes” Witowski (played by the late John Costello), a line cook at a local diner who moonlights as a volunteer firefighter. Their relationship is not perfect, there are moments of tenderness as well as physical violence. And ultimately, Vito is unable to accept the idea that he can be a perfectly happy and integrated gay man, leading him to impulsively flee the relationship to return to New Jersey and certain doom at the hands of his very homophobic relative Phil Leotardo (the late Frank Vincent).

The Spatafore character is an important landmark of queer representation. The story arc was produced in 2006, when the Bush administration was leaning heavily into anti-gay rhetoric in order to shore up a viable conservative coalition of Culture War and Big Business voters for their last midterm election. This ended up being a pivotal plebiscite where the Democrats retook the House with Nancy Pelosi becoming Speaker and Harry Reid became Majority Leader in the Senate, an important lead-up to the 2008 Obama campaign that capitalized upon these Democratic voters. What matters is that Spatafore is a Bush voter, absolutely saturated in toxic masculine ethnic revanchist sentiments. He hates himself and other queers so much that he punches the man he eventually falls in love with. Spatafore is not a happily-integrated metropolitan gay man living on the I-95 corridor at the dawn of the new millennium, the Mafia code he is pledged to is a lumpen mess of bigotries and prejudices rooted firmly in Medieval Catholic superstitions about sex and sex/gender roles.

The most insightful moment comes when the boyfriend Finn (Will Janowitz) argues with Meadow Soprano (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), Tony’s daughter. After handling a case of Islamophobia at the legal clinic she interns at, she smokes weed with Finn in the evening while decompressing, venting about the injustices of the legal system. At a certain point, Finn finally throws up his hands in annoyance with the abject hypocrisy of her complaints. He tells her how ridiculous she sounds complaining about things “in this day and age” when, without a doubt, Vito Spatafore has been sentenced to torture and murder simply for being gay.

This is further enforced when Tony meets with his therapist Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). At first, he is recalcitrant in his homophobia. But after Dr. Melfi simply prods him on a few simple logistical notions (“I don’t think they see it as a deficit [to be gay]”) and exigencies (apparently guys in prison are given a pass for same-sex engagements while incarcerated), he finally discloses that he is able to accept gays. In the end, only Phil Leotardo wants to kill Spatafore as a power-play against Tony. By invoking all this prejudicial hysteria, Leotardo is able to make a serious thrust at Tony’s power by suddenly dictating which of his capos are able to be killed. This blatant attack on Tony’s leadership culminates later with the final season’s gang war between the Soprano and Lupertazzi Crime Families.

In a 1981 essay titled “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Gore Vidal wrote:

The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two nonexistent categories—gay and straight. Either you are one or you are the other. But since everyone is a mixture of inclinations, the categories keep breaking down; and when they break down, the irrational takes over. You have to be one or the other. Although our mental therapists and writers for the better journals usually agree that those who prefer same-sex sex are not exactly criminals (in most of our states and under most circumstances they still are) or sinful or, officially, sick in the head, they must be, somehow, evil or inadequate or dangerous. The Roman Empire fell, didn’t it? because of the fags?… Today, American evangelical Christians are busy trying to impose on the population at large their superstitions about sex and the sexes and the creation of the world. Given enough turbulence in the land, these natural fascists can be counted on to assist some sort of authoritarian…political movement… Jews, blacks, and homosexualists are despised by the Christian…majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situation and that of the same-sexers. At one level, the Jews are perfectly correct. A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact. Although sexual preference is an even more powerful fact, it is not one that creates any particular social or cultural or religious bond between those so-minded. Although Jews would doubtless be Jews if there was no anti-Semitism, same-sexers would think little or nothing at all about their preference if society ignored it. So there is a difference between the two estates. But there is no difference in the degree of hatred felt by the Christian majority for Christ-killers and Sodomites. In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. “After all,” said Isherwood, “Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.” The young man was not impressed. “But Hitler killed six million Jews,” he said sternly. “What are you?” asked Isherwood. “In real estate?”… I have described the shrill fag-baiting of Joseph Epstein, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Kazin, and the Hilton Kramer Hotel. Harper’s magazine and Commentary usually publish these pieces, though other periodicals are not above printing the odd exposé of the latest homosexual conspiracy to turn the United States over to the Soviet Union or to structuralism or to Christian Dior. Although the new class’s thoughts are never much in themselves, and they themselves are no more than spear carriers in the political and cultural life of the West, their prejudices and superstitions do register in a subliminal way, making mephitic the air of Manhattan if not of the Republic. A case in point is that of Mrs. Norman Podhoretz, also known as Midge Decter (like Martha Ivers, whisper her name). In September of last year, Decter published a piece called “The Boys on the Beach” in her husband’s magazine, Commentary. It is well worth examining in some detail because she has managed not only to come up with every known prejudice and superstition about same-sexers but also to make up some brand-new ones. For sheer vim and vigor, “The Boys on the Beach” outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion… Decter was disturbed by “the slender, seamless, elegant and utterly chic” clothes of the fairies. She also found it “a constant source of wonder” that when the fairies took off their clothes, “the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies. Chests, backs, arms, even legs were smooth and silky….We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual preference [previously known to right-thinking Jews as an abomination against Jehovah] and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones?” Here Decter betrays her essential modesty and lack of experience. In the no doubt privileged environment of her Midwestern youth, she could not have seen very many gentile males without their clothes on. If she had, she would have discovered that gentile men tend to be less hairy than Jews except, of course, when they are not. Because the Jews killed our Lord, they are forever marked with hair on their shoulders—something that no gentile man has on his shoulders except for John Travolta and a handful of other Italian-Americans from the Englewood, New Jersey, area.

This was written 18 years before the first season was broadcast. In between the two periods laid the vast ideological and cultural expanse of the Reagan/Bush eighties, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the consolidation of the Religious Right, the Clinton administration, and Fukuyama’s proclamation of History’s End. This rightward turn in American politics, where the remainders of the New Deal coalition were ejected in pursuit of high-dollar campaign donations from the financial sector, underwrites the self-loathing of the Spatafore character. Born in 1959, he came of age as the gay liberation movement was picking up full-steam. But the countervailing conservatism exhibited by this distinctively ecumenical neoconservative coalition that included Jews as well as Christians obviously hindered him from being able to become a healthily integrated gay man.

I once had a conversation over drinks with a colleague about the notion of moral ambiguity and its presentation on-screen. As I watched these episodes for the first time, I began to experience a visceral and uncontrollable flashback to high school homophobia when the show was first broadcast. Again, I never watched the show because our household did not have an HBO subscription. But suddenly, The Sopranos filled in the blanks on a lot of experiences. I went to an all-male prep school with a hearty dose of Italian jocks and wannabe gangsters. These bullies uncritically absorbed the content of this show in a way that idiotically ignored the deep level of moral ambiguity David Chase granted Spatafore. There are multiple scenes in multiple episodes where he is a despicable person. He repeatedly murders people, including innocent civilians, in cold blood. He has an active alcoholic who drives drunk. This ambiguity is likewise extended to the other characters, granting them a three-dimensional nature that needs to be adequately understood in terms of the real struggles 2SLGBTQI+ people face still. The reality is that a significant plurality, if not majority, of our community members face tremendous hardship, and particularly in terms of the struggles Black trans women face. The ongoing assault on trans rights is merely the latest iteration of the ugliness Vidal discussed in 1981. This level of oppression means that our community is full of a lot of hurt caused by this terrible world. If we can understand how the ambiguity in Chase’s writing informs a better comprehension of the community with trauma-informed frameworks, perhaps a wider dialogue about the meaning of responsibility and power within the community becomes possible. Spatafore is an exaggeration of a wider set of symptoms, including sexism, misogynoir, and racism, that are known shortcomings of gay men. How much distance really exists between Vito Spatafore and Jim DeRentis, the First Gentleman of Providence and scion of the Foxy Lady strip club fortune? DeRentis has never murdered anyone but he has his own reputation.

Happy Pride!

I admit having my blind spots, but I never imagined being indicted as a Zionist and a reincarnation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan because of voicing my opinions about Michael Jackson. I mean, leaving aside that karma is so fickle, it came as quite a surprise given my own history of taking decidedly pro-Palestine positions when possible.

But the cultural divide exists, it is real, and it resembles the divide over O.J. Simpson (who, incidentally, I thought was innocent). What is most disturbing, however, is that both sides traffic in the same prejudicial falsehoods and false tautologies that have been disproved by decades of criminology, medicine, and sociology related to child sex abuse. MJ nostalgia somehow has made everyone likewise regress back into Reagan-Bush Culture War ideologies, complete with the thoroughly repudiated elements.

So let me begin with the most categorical and basic point: Physical abuse of a child that is not sexual does not necessarily provide a singular catalyst for later sexual abuse pathologies. This is to say, in no uncertain terms, that paterfamilias Joe Jackson’s corporal punishment did nothing to cause any of his children to become sexual predators later in life. Indeed, the fact that the majority of the Jackson siblings are not known for their own histories of child sex abuse sufficiently disproves the thesis that Joe caused Michael to do anything untoward to a youth later in life.

However, we have to furthermore acknowledge that Michael Jackson repeatedly said that he experienced child sexual abuse while on the road with the Jackson 5.

Jackson stated on multiple occasions that he had to stay in the hotel room and pretend to be asleep while his older brothers had sex parties with groupies.

During the (in)famous Martin Bashir documentary Living with Michael Jackson (2003), he said “When we were on tour, my brothers would bring girls back to the hotel room, and I would pretend to be asleep. I would see and hear things that a child shouldn't see or hear."

Earlier, in his 1988 memoir Moonwalk, he wrote "My brothers would be having sex with girls in the next bed or on the floor... I'd lie there pretending to be asleep, but I could hear everything."

In a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, they said:

Oprah: I heard that when you were on the road, you used to share a room with your brothers, and you would have to pretend to be asleep while they had sex with groupies. Is that true?

Michael: That is true.

Oprah: How could that possibly have affected you, do you think, in your life later on?

Michael: I think it’s very damaging. I would see things and hear things that a child shouldn’t see and hear. It was very difficult. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of pain. I think I’ve paid the price for it.

Oprah: So you were exposed to sex at a very young age.

Michael: Absolutely.

Oprah: And you feel that’s been damaging to you.

Michael: Yes. I’m very embarrassed by it, and I try not to think about it, but it’s there.

This is a textbook definition of non-contact sexual abuse or exploitation. Exposing a minor youth to pornography, otherwise sexually explicit material, or allowing them to witness adults engaging in such activities, is deeply traumatic for prepubescent children who understandably lack the necessary social-emotional capacity to comprehend such mature activities. Most pointedly, we should emphasize in this particular circumstance that the child abuse stemmed from negligence as opposed to anything else. Young Michael Jackson was unsupervised in a sleeping arrangement where he was unintentionally traumatized by older siblings, who themselves had zero understanding of the tremendous harm that they were causing. This is at direct odds with the notion of an active and harmful intervention vis a vis Joe Jackson’s corporal punishment. Rather than relying on racist stereotyping of Joe Jackson as a sub-human violent ogre, this is an altogether very typical and very common form of child neglect that occurs across racial and class stratum. Being sexually traumatized at a party is one of many kinds of events that happen when juveniles and young adults host such unsupervised events. Sexual trauma at parties is a significant campus health and safety matter for all levels of higher ed, be it a community college or an Ivy League institution. Under different circumstances, if the older brothers had liked beer as opposed to girls, the outcome might instead have been young Michael experiencing a hangover. This underwrites the true tragedy of this sexual abuse he suffered, the pure accident of it all.

Male child sex abuse in the Black community has been a topic of taboo for decades despite public admissions of exploitation including everyone from Jackson to W.E.B. Du Bois. This is to be attributed to a number of factors, including lack of adequate sex education while in primary school, a culture of shame and silence underwritten with homophobia, and inadequate welfare state provisions to address child abuse as a public health issue. Understanding this issue is a key component missing from the larger conversation. Rather than talking about the complexities of exploitation and abuse, both sides of the MJ Debate are missing the point and instead are rendering it into a political argument. This is reliant upon an unspoken but ever-present emphasis from the pro-Michael side, which seems underwritten by a clear desire to reassert patriarchal and cis-/hetero-sexist norms in the representation and public memorial of Michael Jackson, particularly on the part of Jackson’s brother Jermaine, a producer of the recent Michael biopic directed Antoine Fuqua. There is a clear desire to uphold Jackson as an exemplar, for undeniably powerful and appealing reasons, but this is a sanctification that denies him the right to have been anything besides cis and heterosexual. Even tarrying with the notion of Jackson as queer in some shape or form invites tremendous backlash, including a pronounced level of biphobia that precludes the existence of Black queer men who are attracted to women as well as other men. Suggesting Jackson was bisexual fundamentally erodes a deep sense of assurance around his desires and inclinations. To discuss Michael Jackson as bisexual is to immediately confront the topic of pederasty as a current within queer literature and authorship. Spanning back to Homer and Plato, same-sex eros and pederasty have occupied a unique and oftentimes painful position within queer discourse. Well into the 1990s, the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) persisted with its Quixotic and gross quest to liberalize age-of-consent laws. This strict bifurcation, heterosexual/pedophile, is the most revanchist form of homophobia. Yet both sides of the debate subtly tarry with the logic, perhaps unknowingly, by refusing to adequately analyze and discuss male child sex abuse.

Jackson’s perpetual boy-like persona, Peter Pan with an amusement park in his back yard, should be understood as a symptom of a larger coping mechanism. For years, he was misread and therefore wrongfully coded as perverse or developmentally arrested in a fashion that did not grant him the space to be a survivor of sexual abuse. Depriving Michael Jackson that right to have survived a tragic accident that would have never happened if his older brothers had known better, something so consequential but also so ancillary as their hotel sleeping arrangements while touring on the road, is only further vilifying that which cannot be ignored as part of his humanity. To deny a survivor their right of recognition causes harm both before and after death. The overall thesis of the Jackson biography project will for all-time gravitate around the question of what catalyzed his erratic and ill-thought behaviors late in life. If we truly dignify this man as a great artist, we must acknowledge the idea of biography as an ongoing project, made up of all media types (memoir, nonfiction books, documentary, biopics, etc.), that will contemplate this issue of child sex abuse openly. In ten, twenty, or fifty years, if Michael Jackson is considered for the music video form what Charlie Chaplin was considered for the silent film form, something I would argue is a legitimate canonization for media historians, it is certain that the Jackson biographies will confront the topic of sexual abuse and will need to discuss what happened in those hotel rooms all those decades ago. This is going to continue to be a taboo discussion matter because of the challenges related to the topic of child sexual abuse.

Furthermore, the discussion is not about a novel or recent development. The celebratory spectacle of Black flesh’s mortification and destruction, dating back to the slave system and then lynching, is a powerful and insidious undercurrent in American entertainment culture. There is an undeniable need for nuance in approaching a discussion that rapidly seems to degenerate into a lynch mob indictment of the criminalized Black male body. In 1993, Michael Jackson was accused as a Black man of doing harm to white children at a particular juncture during the end of the Reagan—Bush era Culture Wars. In the three years prior, neo-fascist David Duke had run two formidable electoral campaigns in Louisiana that publicly demonstrated a Klansman still could get a legitimate shot at the big time.

In this sense, the lynch mob mentality came out in the expression of scandal shown in the tabloids and the scandal-hype entertainment news broadcasts like Hard Copy or Entertainment Tonight. There was an undeniable animus and loathing.

But likewise, in the most generous reading of things, Michael Jackson unnecessarily and with great abandon exposed himself to tremendous liability by hosting those youths at his home in the manner and fashion he did. In terms of Mandatory Reporting laws, a job requirement obliging adults like teachers or coaches to both surveil for and report potential instances of child abuse or neglect, many would viscerally and instinctively jump out of their seats and make a report to the local child protective services bureau upon hearing a youth describe such interactions with an adult. Were a child to describe how they went to one of Michael Jackson’s slumber parties, a teacher or coach would immediately raise an alarm, if for no other reason than to avoid their own potential liability for failing to report an instance of potential abuse. He was one of the richest pop stars in the world, counting amongst his holdings the back catalog to The Beatles, a back yard amusement park filled with rides, and a petting zoo. Jackson was the adult in the position of power who made detrimental and consequential choices intentionally. Macaulay Culkin famously testified at trial that he had slept in the same bed as Jackson and never was sexually abused. Even if you take Culkin at his word and his experience was the same for everyone else, Jackson still exposed himself to that insane level of potential liability!

And that itself might fundamentally return to the child abuse he experienced.

What if there was a psychological mechanism or desire within Michael Jackson to constantly recreate the circumstances of the Jackson 5 touring hotel rooms, but in a highly-controlled and sterilized manner where no sex intruded into the purity of these interludes sleeping in the same bed as these youths? What if Jackson derived satisfaction from recreating the scenario his brothers put him into but, as the key intervention that granted him ultimate control, he kept the proceedings distinctively non-sexual as a kind of healing exercise? Was he re-staging the scenario of the hotel rooms but making the key intervention in order to reclaim his sense of lost power caused by the trauma, a cathartic form of inverted voyeurism? Rape and sexual assault are not issues of eros, they are issues of power. Was the undeniably risky nature of the sleeping arrangements satisfying the need for power that Jackson so desired? Unlike a fiend like Jeffrey Epstein, who cheerfully flaunted the law in spite of the risk created by his high profile, this would be a scenario where Jackson effectively was both not breaking a law while also flaunting a social taboo upheld and policed by the Child Protective Services authorities that had failed him as a child. This would therefore be an expression of rebellion, a response to the neglect he experienced that dared the state to suddenly start caring about child welfare. Was he, in this sense, constantly daring the authorities to come to find him guilty of nothing despite all appearances suggesting malfeasance, gaslighting Child Protective Services in California?

Such reckless abandon would certainly explain the performative naïveté Jackson exhibited in the Bashir documentary, when he allowed himself to be filmed in compromising circumstances with these youths. It would also align with other self-destructive habits, such as such as his substance use disorder that developed as a result of a set fire on a 1984 Pepsi-Cola advertisement that badly burned Jackson’s hair and head. Knowing now that he had a prolonged substance use disorder beginning when he had just reached the pinnacle of his career suggests further considerations in terms of Jackson’s own level of cognition and judgment abilities. Maybe his prolonged addiction to painkillers, sedatives, anti-anxiety medications, and hospital-grade anesthetics meant he was constantly stoned off his rocker in his final years?

Ultimately the tragedy of Jackson is that such terribly normal things as child neglect, substance use, and unexamined trauma underwrote his undeniably self-destructive behavior. The stalking horse of evil Joe Jackson has nothing on what a viciously racist society did to that angelic little boy we all still adore from all those years ago.

The old joke is that Marxists have successfully predicted nine of the last three collapses of world capitalism as we know it. But these are points being raised in the mainstream financial press by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Steve Eisman. The markets are looking over-inflated.

The major hub of growth for the last few years has obviously been AI. The various AI firms were able to attract a lot of capital by promising Management that AI would increase employee productivity and output. The problem, however, is that the Management Surveys of employee productivity are now returning the same statistical output: AI does absolutely nothing to improve productivity. Nobody is truly gaining from it because, fundamentally, the technology is not there. Despite the novelty and the advertising, AI is not the long-imagined “thinking machine” akin to Commander Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Data character follows an arc of aspiring to be “more human,” ultimately embodied in an emotions chip that can be activated so the android can feel fear, tenderness, and joy. By contrast, consider the words of Drs. Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull in a New York Times Opinion column from three years ago:

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence... That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects. [Emphasis added]

I’ve spent the past few years tinkering with AI and recognize several components as older computer programs we have been using for years. For instance, the information query, asking a question, is a hyper-powered search of EBSCO, JStor, Google Scholar, and Wikipedia. In that domain, the information validity and chance for false-positive statements are so substantial that the system is basically “Wikipedia: The Video Game.” With the graphics generation, the system uses automated versions of animation programs that have been on the market for decades, including the high-resolution iterations used in video game animation, only the results are atrociously bad. In terms of the coding ability, it can automate command functions but also can generate needless repetitions, HTML links to nowhere, and flawed code that needs to be repeatedly debugged. The technology is not there.

The only company that has genuinely seen growth because of AI is NVIDIA, a microchip processor production firm that has been a part of every American household since the day they bought their first desktop computer. NVIDIA was a regular component of every Dell and Gateway, the standard “out-of-the-box” complete hardware setup you ordered over the phone or purchased at a big-box store like Best Buy or Wal-Mart in the 1990s. The entire AI bubble itself is fueled by an advantageous circular revenue-sharing stream. Sam Altman is operating a self-serving capital circulation scheme that helps cook the books of multiple companies that partner with OpenAI. “By giving them revenue, NVIDIA isn’t so much paying them to buy the chips as it is guaranteeing them revenue so that their bankers don’t shoot them. I don’t think it should be legal… On some level it isn’t money laundering, just to be clear…it’s fully legal. I don’t think it should be because it is a fake economy. If you’re pumping your own stock by feeding your customers money so they keep buying your stuff, it is just eating cardboard,” explained Ed Zitron.

While NVIDIA is selling chips like hotcakes to AI firms, AI itself as a product is not just a lemon, it is unprofitable. AI firms doomed themselves by offering unlimited access for free to consumers at the start. Once consumers realized the service was only a gimmick at best, they treated it as such, meaning there are no significant subscribing customers. The level of investment in terms of electricity, natural resources, and other infrastructure commitments makes AI require power equivalent to that of multiple atomic reactors. The subscription cost for online user tokens cannot even try to reach profitability barring a build-out of nuclear plants that would make the Western hemisphere visibly glow green from outer space for the rest of eternity.

Solely considered as an investment in terms of capacity required for these data centers, putting your money into a business venture that is going to be wrapped up in potential decades of lawsuits brought by environmentalist and consumer advocacy groups is unsound business sense. You cannot have an AI data center building boom when all the projects have stalled due to protests. It is such a tremendously controversial matter that it has begun flipping various local-level elections with a wide group of midterm candidates who are running on a populist platform opposing data centers against incumbents. If the Democrats retake Congress after the midterms, do not be shocked to see federal inspection, zoning, environmental investigations, and other interventions in the AI data center build-out, either dampening or flat-out cancelling building projects.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is intending to use his IPO to effectively serve as a bail-out for his $29 billion in debts by targeting retirement index funds as potential investors. The SEC S-1 Form for SpaceX looks like a 400 page science fiction novel, complete with illustrations. Statistically speaking, it has been pointed out that Musk used the word “AI” more times in the S-1 than the word “Jesus” is used in the Bible, demonstrating he is still absolutely operating on the messianic level. As Eric Gardner reported for More Perfect Union, it looks like the initial valuation will add up to $1.75 trillion, wealth headed directly for Musk’s pocket. The S-1 is a complete disaster. For Q1 2026, rocketry is operating at a loss of $662 million, Starlink had a $1.1 billion profit, and AI lost $2.469 billion. As Patrick Boyle said, Musk is essentially using Starlink to bail out the AI firm, which burns through cash with no hope of revenue streams in sight. Ordinarily, this sort of thing would be a disgusting feeding frenzy of the most craven kind of Wall Street operators, who profit off the initial valuation before jumping quickly after the peak, leaving everyday retail investors holding the bag.

But Musk, Nasdaq, and the rest of Wall Street seems set on compelling everyday retail investment indexes, the staple of the retirement industry, into bailing out Musk via the IPO!

On March 12, Ryan Gould, Kiel Porter and Isis Almeida reported for Bloomberg:

S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC is considering changes to rules governing how companies join the S&P 500 Index, a move that would potentially fast-track SpaceX’s entry after its IPO, people familiar with the matter said. The rule change could mean that billionaire Elon Musk’s space transportation and satellite company would see a wave of billions of dollars in forced buying. Funds that track the index must buy newly added stocks, and roughly $24 trillion is tied to the S&P 500, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Translation: By being given early admission to the index (and to be clear, the average wait time for admission is usually only a year if you have the requisite market capitalization, something Musk easily surmounts), SpaceX is getting an extremely dangerous all-access ticket to your retirement plan’s stock portfolio by manipulating some of the most rudimentary consumer stock market trading protections. Being admitted to an index like the S&P 500, something ordinarily done only after a stock has been “seasoned” via open availability on the market, is supposed to connote stability, which is the complete opposite of a stock’s performance during the IPO phase.

This can be said doubly of the IPO so umbilically tied to a man like Musk, whose recent history of public antics and board room decisions have led to monumental corporate changes, such as the brand and product destruction of Twitter, whose highest valuation on February 25, 2021 was an intraday high of $80.75 per share, or a market capitalization of ~$64.5 billion. Now the X-shell of Twitter is known as a pathetic refuge of weirdos and neo-Nazis. This warrants mention because, in the view of many analysts, the SpaceX IPO is an attempted recoup on the losses Musk suffered by running Twitter into the ground within a year of his takeover.

Or consider how Musk has further endangered the viability of his Tesla car corporation. Musk was responsible for decertifying and terminating from employment whole swathes of unionized federal workers, dropping union saturation of the US labor market by significant percentage points. The public sector is the largest hub of unionized workers in the United States, it is likewise the largest employer of African Americans, and Black women are the largest membership demographic of the AFL CIO. Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” was a scorched-earth attack on labor that will never be forgotten or forgiven. It is almost for certain that Tesla trucks and construction equipment will become a target of boycott. The construction sector is one of the highest emitters of greenhouse gas in the US and this is due in no small part to diesel-powered machinery. Whether or not Musk will be able to invent the first viable renewable-energy construction machinery is meaningless, his harms to the labor movement will nullify his eligibility. It would not be shocking to even see the auto unions lobby a future Democratic administration to subsidize such technology developments in a manner excluding Tesla from the bounty, perhaps resulting in a sweetheart deal for Detroit automakers in their R&D departments.

In terms of both Tesla and X/Twitter, Musk has shown himself to be unfathomably, unforgivably erratic as a businessman, something we know was caused by a ketamine overdose.

Robin Wigglesworth at The Financial Times wrote:

However, if the S&P 500’s guardians take their jobs remotely seriously they should fight tooth and nail against the benchmark becoming just another tool for Elon Musk, his bankers and early SpaceX investors to engineer mechanical demand for the IPO — purely to support the ludicrous $1.75tn mooted valuation and indirectly force retail investors to cash out the company’s insiders.

So this is the way that Musk will get his bail-out from the AI bubble, compulsive investment from retirement portfolios. The absurd trillion-dollar valuation is about recovering the significant loss Musk has suffered by ruining Twitter. His IPO is meant to allow him to get into your retirement fund in order to recover from losses incurred by his history of bad business decisions during the past decade. But where will that leave the rest of us?

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire (dir. Michael Oswald, 2017)

When Americans think of the City of London, they flash to images of Big Ben, Piccadilly Square, Palace of Westminster, and Westminster Abbey. But nested inside of Greater London is a separate micro-municipality, known as the City of London, that has quietly blossomed since the end of World War II into a capitalist hub rivaling Lower Manhattan’s Financial District.

This hub of finance capital on the Thames is important to understand in contexts of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Given the information we know, it is obvious that his intercontinental criminal enterprise relied on the banking services offered by the City. The City offered Epstein products that he used to finance the larger European arm of his sex trafficking operation. As the central banking hub of not only England but the entire British Commonwealth, these services were very close to home for Epstein. He had the opportunity to exploit tax shelter and trust services offered in British dominions like the Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands, and Bermuda, located in our back yard, so as to secure the capital in accounts he could use as operational funds for both legal and illegal business operations.

This is where deep institutional enabling of Epstein truly begins. It is also where a deeper notion of understanding emerges.

Hortense Spillers famously laid out in her classic academic article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” an ontological reading of the flesh as text so as to adequately esteem the complexities of the slave trade. She identified the captive’s body and flesh itself as a text to be read as biography. From there she details a Black feminist reading of the enslaved woman’s body as a narrative of trauma and resistance.

Incidentally, the City of London also played a role in the slave trade.

If it is not so evident yet, I argue that Epstein’s litany of malfeasance can easily be equated with the treatment of African women during the Middle Passage.

In some sense, given the way the scandal has been degraded into a public circus of politicians making recriminations against one another, it is impossible to ignore the fact that much of this moral outrage stems from a large group of European-descended women being treated in the same way as the enslaved African woman was treated daily. Epstein did to white women the violence that only is allowed to happen to non-European women. This crosses a line in the settler’s republic.

The institutions supportive of Epstein may continue to flourish in spite of his death and the prosecution of various parties like Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten, son of the late Queen Elizabeth and brother of King Charles. Understanding their permanence is fundamental.

I first came up with St. Buddy on the day he died. It was impossible to ignore that this was the monumental passing of not only an individual but an epoch.

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People are evenly divided over Buddy, and that dictates how they respond to this image. A lot of people see this as sacrilegious. I respond in the following way:

• Sainthood is the expression of Catholicism in a populist arena. It is cultural expression.

• Cianci is the classic politician, the expression of representative democracy, a political expression.

• Bringing the two into conversation with each other reflects on a broader topic, the reality of hegemony. Cultural production and political satire are meant to reflect on the oddities of our times. Whether it is sacrilegious or blasphemous, the fact is that a significant portion of the Providence population has elevated Buddy to sainthood in the decade since he died.

Now, this fact befuddles most progressives, who are revolted by his documented history of domestic violence, corruption, and leaving City Hall chained to a deficit forecast that makes keeping the streetlights operational truly dubious.

But the undeniable fact is that Cianci was the first aggressive Affirmative Action hiring Mayor. When he was in high school, he had a Black roommate and it obviously was influential for Buddy. Cianci hired lots of Black and Brown clerical workers, janitors, recreation center staffers, and other public employees. He gave these families access to income and benefits that they would otherwise not have received. The ability to buy a house and build a credit rating is the cornerstone of inter-generational wealth and Cianci understood that by actively hiring people from the Black and Latino communities. He actually created more jobs than any Progressive has the capacity to do at this moment for Black and Brown Rhode Islanders. The reality is that racist hiring practices has resulted in the largest employer for these communities is the public sector and Black women are the largest membership constituency in the US AFL CIO. Cianci did more to build a Black and Latino middle class in Providence than any self-righteous vegan latte liberal that looks down their nose at Buddy while capitalizing on a variety of other local cultural oddities, such as the incontrovertibly psychotic cult of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a writer whose white nationalist lunacy is only matched in proportion by his absurdly rococo purple prose.

Besides, anyone who thinks that there have not been a few hundred sainthoods purchased by wealthy families should Google the word simony. The Vatican has even quietly “cancelled” a few that turned out to never have been anything more than urban legends and mythological figures imported from the Roman and Celtic pagans who eventually became the Western European churches. St. Brigid is a blatant example of simply adapting a pagan Irish warrior-goddess into Roman Catholicism. There’s currently a serious call for the reexamination of a few Saints, fast-tracked for canonization by Pope John Paul II, who ended up being responsible for serious sexual and other forms of abuse. John Paul II essentially transformed canonization into a blatantly political and frankly crass multimedia spectacle for the birth of a digital age and handed out the big St to anyone in conformity with his conservative political agenda.

Anyway, if you can spare a few dollars to support my efforts, I would deeply appreciate it.