This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Chapter Two: Sex Coercion. “Under the Influence”—Sex Coercion under Zombie Capitalism, Including Bad Drugs and Voluntary Lobotomy

Unholy dreams,

Demented schemes

Inside the mind

Can’t seem to find

The key (source).

—Mark Shelton; “Dementia,” on Manilla Road’s The Deluge (1986)

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Picking up where “Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy” left off…

Capitalism is not your friend, nor the nation-state; nor are neoliberals, establishment politicians, members of the paramilitary (the “arms” of the law) or other canonical defenders of the status quo that consume and cherish copaganda. The state is always in crisis. On one hand, the wreckage and media make in their wake makes you suspicious from various ambiguous markers of caution, trauma and danger tied to clichés that obscure real-world abuses resulting from complex, transgenerational issues that affect how people interact on a social-sexual level between oscillating dialectical-material forces: for or against Capitalism its allies. On the other, Capitalism makes others suspicious of you by turning you into zombies and witches (we’ll examine vampires and various hybrids in Chapter Four).

In this situation, it behooves one to think on their feet and be active and aware; but also to be on one’s toes when trauma and danger are near—their markers produced by neoliberals, but also from people you’ll normally encounter under Capitalism. Not supernatural undead beings as not-of-this-earth, but ordinary people who will burn your ass alive, rape you, or lock you up and throw away the key if they think you’re a witch who threatens the system (say nothing of bad-faith witches and counterfeits, which we’ll explore more deeply in Chapter Four). Such persons are made, and resisting them often involves disguising oneself or performing roles that are standardized. We’ll examine these standardized roles ironically performed at the end of the chapter and in Chapter Three; then look at revolutionary cryptonyms in Chapter Five. For now we’ll look at the persons you must be careful of and how they’re made more generally (looking at weird canonical nerds in Chapter Three before looking at genocide as a consequence of this etiology of hate in Chapter Four).

Like a bad drug or knife to the skull, Capitalism will fuck you up. A common carceral-hauntological side effect is an inability to imagine under Capitalism’s influence; a horror of this side effect is doing awful things while being unable to remember what, how or why. The etiology of this murderous torpor includes

taking “bad drugs” supplied by state-corporate heteronormative canon, whose stupefying playgrounds help the audience to forget the “hypernormal” cognitive dissonance that emerges (which, according to Adam Curtis‘ HyperNormalization, was re: originally a term used to describe the “whiplash” feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy and insisting that things were fine)
being lobotomized (voluntarily or not) as a transgenerational curse that turns people into violent monsters—persons who not only think themselves immune, but want the zombification to continue through canonical praxis

This chapter uses Gothic Communism to articulate origins of canonical praxis, whose many, many symptoms—fascist monsters, purity phobias, stigmas, witch hunts and paradoxical homosociality (exhibit 82)—occur under Zombie-Vampire Capitalism’s Superstructure.

“Witch Cops and Victims: Fetishized Witch hunters and -Hunted in the Ever-growing Police State” (feat. Ion Fury, T2 and Reinhard Heydrich—included in this post): Introduces the idea of token minorities in Gothic language; i.e., witch cops operating in bad faith.
“‘Which Witch?’—’What is a Witch?’ part one: An Example of Proletarian Witches in The Last of Us” (2023; also feat. Myth and Everquest): A close-read of the gay couple from 2023’s The Last of Us, considering the proletarian aspects to queer witches living under a decaying police state/zombie apocalypse (essentially a precursor to the “Bad Dreams” section from the Undead Module).
“Ruling through Fear: Dogma and Economics” (included with “Which Witch?”): Briefly introduces the neoliberal execution of the Protestant ethic; i.e., through fear and dogma as a socio-economic model, one canonically guided by guilty (demonic) pleasures and coercive wish fulfillment.
“‘Real Life’: Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime” (feat. Killing Stalking, Jeffery Dahmer and Ted Bundy): Considers toxic love, criminal hauntology and the demon lover (re: Ann Radcliffe); i.e., as worshipped through said hauntologies—specifically out of the 1970s and into neoliberalism’s endless tenure pimping such things on a 24-hour news cycle.
“Gothic Ambivalence: Canonical Torture in the Internet Age; or the Wish Fulfillment of Guilty Pleasure, Bad Play and Sex-Coercive Demon BDSM” (feat. Hellraiser): Considers, despite the prevalence of demon BDSM in canon, its Gothic ambivalence; i.e., in ways that we can take and demonstrably play with: as demonic vis-à-vis guilty pleasure and its wish fulfillment, mid-liminal-expression; e.g., Clive Barker’s Cenobites from Hellraiser (1987) into more recent examples like Lilith from Diablo IV (2024).

(exhibit 82: The Man2Man Alliance, a real, early-2000s website whose queernormative manifesto calls for cockrub warriors who, I shit you not, are the literal the “bussy police” [an internalized homophobic[1] which extends to TERFs, of course]. Divided and conquered by Capitalism, sex becomes scarce for token love soldiers, but also policed; their “prison sex” literally abjures anal sex in favor of the only acceptable form of erotic lovemaking: frottage. How’s that for token canonical praxis?)

Note: These chapters discuss the etiology of praxis, for which there are many symptoms and strange pathologies (exhibit 82, above). The goal of these chapters isn’t to catalog all of these symptoms, but outline germane examples that illustrate the basic etiology from which all originate: Capitalism’s bourgeois Superstructure. Much, much more than what I write in Volume Three is written about the zombie-like and vampire-like aspects of Capitalism that Volume Two’s Undead and Demon Modules explore; i.e., in relation to the Six Rs, the Four Gs, the Gothic mode of expression, oppositional praxis, etc (this being said, I will be comparing weird canonical nerds in Chapters Three and Four to “homosocial frottage.” Stay tuned!). —Perse, 4/23/2025

**Witch Cops and Victims: Fetishized Witch hunters and -Hunted in the Ever-growing Police State (feat. Ion Fury, T2 and Reinhard Heydrich)**

Fill my eyes with that double vision, no disguise for that double vision

Ooh, when it gets through to me, it’s always new to me

My double vision gets the best of me (source).

—Lou Gramm; “Double Vision,” on Foreigner’s Double Vision (1978)

The last section of Chapter One highlighted “love” as coercively counterfeited—mass produced by “banally” evil state-corporations who vampirically monopolize zombie-vampire violence by controlling people’s views on real-world violence, specifically hidden violence as canonically depicted through cryptonymy as a process furthering abjection. This chapter segues into that; i.e., by giving a real-world and imaginary half-real example we’ve discussed before; re: Ion Fury, T2 and Reinhard Heydrich.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Fascism is the merger of nation-state and corporation; re: “Toxic Schlock” minus any irony; i.e., through police violence as something to sell in DARVO and obscurantism—witch cops. Cops are apathetic; witch cops are apathetic towards their own through bad-faith oppression arguments functioning as police to brutalize the same-old targets of state extermination/replacement rhetoric.

As general cryptonyms, corporate products make consumers apathetic by literally having them buy into a sacred idea—that abuse is “just” part of the natural world, a sort of “nostalgic dogma” whose coercively fetishized witch hunts maintain the heteronormative Symbolic Order under Patriarchal Capitalism. Drugged and lobotomized, the unfriendly zombification of canonical praxis becomes Gothically cryptonymic, reliably treating women as sacrifices and throwing other marginalized groups to the dogs. Ostensibly binarized into non-witches vs witches, workers—tossed into or near the state of exception—actually become universally fetishized as hauntologized victims of state abuse: witch cops and witch victims as personified vice and sin within these complex ontological arrangements; i.e., they become ambiguously undead. As we’ve touched on, cops and de facto cops (deputized or vigilante) fascists are action heroes in their own movies, gleefully acting out violent fantasies in service of the state—with masks, uniforms and lethal weapons, but also hauntological kayfabe like knights and gladiatorial personas as mirror-like; i.e., they are false revolutionaries who defend property before people, but present themselves as Greeks bringing gifts to the Trojans: with bad intent concealed behind an affable, often-monstrous façade that says, “I’m just like you.”

This universal abuse is usually displaced and disguised, with everyone becoming a witch inside the state’s punitive hierarchy of class traitors and chosen enemies: bourgeois witches and proletarian witches (which, again, I academically prefer over the popular label “good/bad” witches; these can become incredibly obfuscating during oppositional praxis, but feels wholly apposite during BDSM scenarios. “Proletarian girl!” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “good girl!” does when receiving that sweet, sweet, cum-inducing praise). These includes our aforementioned “good, bad and ugly” on either side of the fence

To the right: centrists (the good guys); their witch-like heels, fascists (the bad guys); and TERF girl bosses “witches” (and other “ugly” compromises with power) who police their own minority communities like sex fiends (all cops are sex fiends, either raping everything around them or lying about it to others and themselves) during the infernal concentric pattern; i.e., open genocide and total war disguised in monomythic theatre.
To the left: Sex workers, practicing wiccans and other constituents of iconoclastic praxis—”gossiping” to defend themselves, while disguising their communal/comrade defense with pastiche code-switching and constructive rage of guerrilla warfare of a sort unique to the Internet in manifestation if not principle: culture war as class war told through popular aesthetics, but especially nation/war pastiche as a kind of disguise pastiche/camp. The good, bad and ugly for revolutionaries invokes various forms of compromised empathy that would normally punch down against smaller and smaller states of exception (we’ll see this when we look at transmedicalists and NERFs, for example, who go after low-hanging fruit but still get their bourgeois licks in despite their own abuse histories).

and unfold through (from Volume Zero/the manifesto tree)

open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

according to state proponents. For them, we are the enemy as simultaneously being weak and strong but also correct and incorrect, mid-cryptonymy: the whore’s genocide and liberation tumbling in shrouded, anisotropic contest during liminal expression’s shared surfaces and stages. Medusa is a bottomless cumdump overshadowed by colossal harm felt, and suitably reclaimed, in small:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We’ll get back to revolutionary cryptonymy in Chapter Five. On the canonical side, binarized language has an overt racial flavor, with “white” witches standing ostensibly with the West and black witches standing against “progress.” However, fascism also appropriates the Puritan-black insignias and dogma in defense of the West, while neoliberals recooperate them, appropriating the black witch as a kind of girl boss (which we’ll examine in Chapter Four): the infernal concentric pattern being state apologia that enshrines state abuses inside a grand charnel house the middle class is expected to play around inside as false rebels. The basic thing to remember with all this praxial code-switching is that power defends itself. During oppositional praxis, all workers are exploited by canonical praxis, whose abjected cops and victims denote power abuse, colonized language, and a draconian hoarding of materials and culture: canonical gargoyles and the menticidal depletion of emotional/Gothic intelligence and proliferation of “us-versus them” war and rape that conceals the bourgeois men behind a concentric curtain (the outer fascist layers an easy scapegoat/tyrant fall guy/”Nazi punching bag” in centrist, Cycle-of-Kings narrations; but both turning on Communism as the ultimate apocalyptic threat to Capitalism, thus the elite’s, existence).

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

In particular, canonical praxis sublimates “prison sex,” portraying women as routine, imprisoned, and involuntary sacrifices for their monomythic, Conan-level “protectors.” Frazetta’s painting (above) encapsulates the ritual sacrifice in a fascistic manner, showcasing a liminal-hauntological space with strong Gothic flavors: a drugged, ivory-skinned beauty being rescued by a brawny male “savior” (a colonial binary that also tremendously false: Men, especially cops and husbands, historically kill women, and traumatized women submit to suicidal conditions under threat of force). While hero fantasies are perfectly fine under sex-positive, Gothic-Communist scenarios, canonical doubles must still be confronted once examined. Frazetta pointedly threatens the woman with a beak-nosed man-in-black (who owns apparently owns a pet crocodile and octopus, both chthonic animals associated with chimeric monsters like Lovecraft’s infamous Cthulhu [an occult pun] and Ammit, Eater of the Dead from Ancient Egyptian underworld mythology). Frazetta’s displaced composition belies the status quo that sexist people (and their batter targets) will undoubtedly recognize and endorse while imaginarily submitting to their assigned, pacified roles within it. To that, its cryptonymy is complicit—an assortment of dogwhistles endemic to Patriarchal Capitalism: rape, a general lack of agency and consent, anti-Semitic/Orientalist xenophobic tropes tied to canonical black magic, and ritual sacrifice, etc. These canonical actors and props sell the product that turns us into monsters that are useful to Capitalism.

As established at the end of the previous chapter, the prescriptive attitudes that demonize descriptive sexuality must be challenged through appreciative irony during the ritual. However, before we can properly examine the performative nuance of ironic BDSM, as well as kinks and fetishes in Gothic, sex-positive counterculture (and their various revolutionary cryptonyms), the context of this irony needs to be explored through the problematic history it seeks to change: the unironic culture of fetishized witch hunts.

The next three sections outlines witch hunter fetish culture through

its cryptonymic usage of constant moral panic to demonically fetishize both scapegoats and witch hunters alike, turning both into witches
its victims, specifically an example of witches beyond what you might expect (we’ll be examining the status-quo victims, white, cis-het women for the whole chapter)
its overreliance on toxic love and criminal sexuality as an ideological structure enforced through fearful dogma and economics

In the sections that follow after these three, we’ll explore the public fascination with, and exploitation of, this dogma through various guilty pleasures:

rehabilitating abusers and worshiping serial killers in true crime
fixating on demonic BDSM, kinks and fetishization exclusively as canonical wish fulfillment (the deliberate denial, thus attrition of sex-positive sexual desire and education)
explaining how the chaotic, liminal thresholds of Gothic ambivalence allow future variants to become potentially sex-positive in a counterculture sense by actually teaching them proper BDSM, thus discipline and consent

First and foremost, unironic witch hunter canon uses weaponized, carceral hauntology to transform hunter and hunted into demonic fetishes useful to the state in police-like doubles (re: me, vis-à-vis Federici, “Policing the Whore”). Already passively heteronormative, canon turns cis-het (or token) girls and boys and enbies into unironic props of war and rape: war/rape fetishes; or—to borrowing from Volume One’s “knife dick” analogy—the sword and the sheath. Genuine sexual pleasure not only becomes binarized, but conflated with physical, mental, and emotional trauma conveyed through canonical power abuse and disempowerment that turns workers into self-abusive monsters that weaken worker and class warfare agency by routinely pitting them against each other in psychosexual ways—bad fathers, play and bad education that nevertheless becomes holy through coercive sublimation/internalization. Try to run and suddenly you can’t fucking walk because you’re standing on a knife’s point, surrounded by fascist maniacs.

“Prison sex” and its fetishes becomes normal during Capitalism’s various stages of decay and debridement. Not to be confused with kink, which denotes atypical, sexualized activity between two parties, fetishization is the deliberate act of objectifying oneself or someone else, often in a sexual way. Canon does this with using the appropriative peril of privatized nostalgia: gender trouble funneled into the state of exception.

To it, whereas consensual, negotiated fetishization and rape fantasy can happen inside sex-positive demonized spheres, canonical media purposefully normalizes toxic attitudes against coercively fetishized persons. In doing so, it unironically devalues the workers’ basic human rights in defense of sacred hauntologies (canonical attitudes that trap people inside a particular vision of the idealized past) and moral panics whose sublimating function (the presence of emotionally manipulative monsters) is downplayed by the fascist alarm bells going off: “You’re under attack!” In turn, sex-positive persons are “evil” demons, constantly threatening the greatness of a former time that needs to be restored by sacrificing them using the knife dick or the bullet while they try to stumble away in ridiculously uncomfortable (and weaponized) footwear.

However strange it might sound, the historical-material reality is that fascist love rape and violence tied to hauntological shows of force; the neoliberal loves centrist variants of the same “prison sex” mindset. Their assigned domestic victims—whether it’s nice demons, good witches, black cats (void kitties) or proud, happy sluts—are humanized ironies inside the state of exception that cannot be fully contained. Hence, they must exist alongside, thus be exposed to sex-coercive societal norms that have been callously designed to control them by turning their brethren into the blind, reactionary undead. Keep those beards close, ladies!

To be clear, witch hunts aren’t single, isolated events (“Where you gonna go, where you gonna hide? Because there’s no one like you left!”); they’re an ongoing emergency stemming from a larger structure that reliably produces constant waves of terror through fetishized, sexually violent roles: the hunters and the hunted. Their combined, ongoing interactions coercively demonize the control that either has over their own bodies. The “Gothic Ambivalence” section will focus on the complex fetishization outcome; this section explains the general relationship between the witch hunters and those they victimize beyond themselves: the iconoclastic witches.

(exhibit 83a: Artist, top-left, artist: Dcoda and Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left, model and artist: Delilah Gallo [also bottom-right] and Persephone van der Waard; photographer, right: Rebecca Trumbull from her “Halloween Themed Photo Shoot. Five Witches” [2018]. Proletarian witches not only embody sex-positivity but strive towards universal liberation through stewardship with nature as its dark protectors; i.e., a closer proximity to nature and the veil between the living and the dead through reclaimed/reclaim Pagan hauntologies: Samhain [aka Halloween] and similar rituals of the harvest, of spring and the solstices. Unlike Gozer in Ghostbusters: Afterlife [2021; re: “Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire“], they are not seen as dark gods by the status quo, but dark worshippers; i.e., being punished during witch hunts by zealous patriarchs [and their often-token, TERF-style subordinates] since Hammer of Witches stretching into American Puritanism: under the neoliberal proliferation of the Protestant work ethic.)

“Witches” are more than Salem teenage girls. They’re monsters targeted by monsters, a scapegoat whose general label, “witch,” is a cryptonym that conceals its own police-like doubling by persecutors; i.e., who set the targets (and the language tied to them) as regulated by force, mid-apocalypse—namely how the ritual sacrifice is sacred, but also something the elite “veil” with consumer media. These widespread retail counterfeits conceal Capitalism’s negative influence against all impacted worker parties; i.e., that the sacrifices amount to state-imposed suicide. If ghosts are the liminal markers of the historical past, then witches are ghostly mediums—the historical victim as still-alive in some shape or form.

As historical figures, representations of witches in media demonstrate how iconoclastic witches personify pagan rites tied to the natural world/pagan[2] harvest/a, but also non-Christian* religions/non-Capitalist ways of life challenged by their Western, canonical doubles under oppositional praxis (re: Gozer and the Ghostbusters). These qualities of either—as victims persecuted by the state or weaponized by the state in tokenized, police-style forms—are part of a larger system under Capitalism that treats “witch” as a bullseye attached to historically fetishized targets of state-sanctioned torture porn/appropriated peril. In other words, witches exist under oppositional praxis that divides workers into our aforementioned two basic categories: proletarian witches and bourgeois witches; i.e., or witch cops hunting witch victims in duality!

While both are abused under Capitalism’s endless rape and war culture, which forever traps them in fight-or-flight, freeze-or-fawn. Workers as a whole become exploited, divided and vulnerable, synthesizing canonical praxis as cops and victims of police violence, rather than unite to threaten the elite by breaking icons or rioting (non-violent/violent). In turn, capitalism colonizes the witch and essentializes its own manmade forms—a “grim harvest” that routinely enters crisis (as literally part of its design) that lets the mask slip: “to put the fear of God in ’em” and “show ’em who’s boss.” The bad witches were the Puritans, but also those who followed in their footsteps; i.e., through a violent power structure designed to exploit workers and native populations in the name of religion, but also Enlightenment thought: settler colonialism exacted by tokenism toxifying feminism (and other social movements and their intersections) to serve profit in bad faith. The cop, as a “witch,” became a perverse form of representation: “pick me” behavior to punch down during the liminal hauntology of war.

As a genocidal structure, then, America, the West and Cartesian dualism were intentionally built around manufactured scarcity and conflict; fascism is the decay of said structure—one where perceived shortages as much as actual ones become “terminal”; i.e., by arguing for a glorious return to the status quo through force, reinstalling a false time of plenty for the privileged group: not enough work for this group, not enough women, enough space, etc. It must be enforced, generally by a “grim reaper” come to collect: a “bad witch” cop infused with fear and dogma supernatural qualities tied to the defense of the state, the status quo, the Symbolic Order as a fortress, with person and place decorated with golden or ghastly reminders of those who fought the law and lost (the cop badge, the death fetish).

The design of this destroyer persona is so abject that current neoliberal war pastiche dissociates the trauma outright, installing as an orderly foe in its own default, good-vs-evil illusions (more on them in Chapter Four). Of course, that phenomena can also be addressed by counter praxis, with performances of the “vengeful Commie mom” frequently evoked by the iconoclastic huntress/warrior detective (more on these ladies in Chapter Five, and their allies). Oppositional praxis allows for these kinds of counterplans and exhibits, guilty pleasures made into full-on sex-positive lessons with an iconoclastic “Trojan” function. Regardless, the normalized, gaslit presence of the grim reaper—as something attached to stochastic violence and state violence—remains an incredibly ill omen: blind force; collective punishment and genocide personified by canonical executioners, but also automated, worshipped, feared by those who look upon them. Forget if or when, the harvest and its reapers are already here, hiding and feeding in plain sight; pity those with a place at the table:

(exhibit 83b: Cops and victims. The Terminator franchise is a posthuman, hyperreal example of Foucault’s Boomerang—where the image of the state enforcer has come alive with no actual human behind it. Hugging it equals death because death is what the state fears and worships; i.e., through its own infiltrators acting replacement out in bad faith [re: DARVO and obscurantism].)

With this Promethean iteration of the technological singularity in effect, the machine image—specifically in T2—can shapeshift into any surface-level image (that it touches). It is the maniac cop that rapes and murders its victims without any understanding of their feelings at all; it has no feelings. This stems from James Cameron’s own poetics. From her 2010 book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, Rebecca Keegan writes:

During the writing process, he was in his living room excitedly explaining the T-1000 to his friend and collaborator Stan Winston when Winston raised a concern. “I don’t know who the bad guy is,” Winston said. “I need a specific character, a specific image.” To Winston, what Cameron was describing sounded like a blob of goo, not an iconic evildoer. “From a story standpoint, I thought it was a problem,” Winston later recalled in an interview for the picture-book history of his story, “The Winston Effect.” Cameron respected Winston’s instincts for creating memorable characters, and he started reconsidering how he would shape this one. Later that same night, the effects artist got a phone call from his friend. “I’ve got it!” Cameron said. “He’s a cop!” The form the T-1000 would take for most of the movie was a Los Angeles police officer. This solved the storytelling dilemma Winston had raised and also gave Cameron an opportunity to underline a central theme in both of the Terminator movies – how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. “The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other,” he says. “Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job” (source).

Cameron’s selection of a cop also makes sense within his home, the LAPD being recognized for decades as a corrupt police force that terrorizes its own populations, especially minorities (for current proof of this, consider how these two LAPD cops, unprovoked, shoot a double amputee hobbling away from them; The Rational National, 2023). They do this by mirroring and confusing policing language during the cryptonymy process to attack the alien; re: (from “Hugging the Alien”):

(exhibit 33b2b: There’s far too many analogs for the alien as something to squeeze, but here’s several fun ones to help you acclimate to the abjection process: the presence of death, decay and disintegration linked to an unheimlich—often a buried guilt, secret shame or some-such trauma-as-impostor overspilling generationally to overwhelm the present moment as trapped inside the home as alien… [source].

To this, the T-1000 is “blind pastiche,” a chimeric embodiment of the hydra-esque reaper grimly performing its harvest (re: exhibit . This includes interrogating Sarah (exhibit 83b, previous page) by unnecessarily torturing and raping her (rape being about power abuse and violence, not love and physical sex) without understanding why—a “sadistic glitch” in its code” that emulates the glitchy robot brains of real cops intimidating suspects—from an internalized database of disguises (“good cop, bad cop”). That’s all it does. All of this happens according through a DARVO trick: The badge is good; anything its wearer so much as looks at could be is bad, but is bad if the wear kills what it sees.

In this sense, it’s the perfect simulacrum of the “Man with No Eyes,” which historically would have been class traitors wearing one-way mirrors over their eyes to grant them a blinding surveillance and terrifying “camera stare” to freeze their victims with. The tragedy of this recon, seek-and-destroy persona is that it evolves through the state’s monopoly on violence and desire to protect itself. To do so it will “widen the net” (of the state of exception) but also upgrade its hunters to genocidal extremes. Not only will cops go from fetishized, hauntological sex pests to sex fiends; they’re given fresh “blue” eyes that see in blood red. In the first Terminator film, the HK “police lights” mirror the blue-and-red lights of sleek 1984 American cruisers—both being a material, phenomenological extension of America itself as the police state). Taken to its logical conclusion is Capitalism “run amok,” colonizing and replicating everything in service of the state—all to preserve itself from revolutionaries bent on wiping out its existence, including victimized sex workers/sexualized workers (women, minorities, etc) defending themselves from more priviliged workers. The robot killer from the future is a death omen: the inhuman, ghostly will of vertical power and state tyrant come home—”back from the retro-future”—to haunt and terrorize the present.

In other words, any revolution’s maneuvers of misdirection, no matter how elaborate, must constantly be made under regular duress—from elite attackers[3] and their servant’s police boots on the ground, their trigger-happy wearers seeing double (that was a Marxist and a Gothic pun). Or as Tim Carter, a survivor of the Jonestown massacre put it in The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (2006), “Where all did these fucking guns come from?” Whenever and wherever Capitalism approaches crisis, sublimation fails; canonical witch hunters invoke the liminal hauntology of fascism, a disingenuous, uncanny call-to-war that attacks entire communities historically exploited by the elite—women, non-Christians, people of color, and gender non-conforming persons, but also sex workers (which historically includes all of those groups).

By profiling them as unironic sex demons and criminals, heteronormative abjection leads to fetishized scapegoats through its base concept: the pitting of the conceptualized self against a binary opposite, which the self-rejects and ultimately attacks—not something truly alien, but coded as alien by those in power or aligned with power. Thereupon, canonical scapegoats and scapegoaters cannot be loved; canon normalizes reactionary violence against criminally hauntologized fetishes—i.e., collectively associating entire groups with criminal, deviant behavior, but duplicitously advertising it through infamous cryptonyms of older “barbaric” times that threaten the present and the future in perpetuity.

(photographer: John Filo)

In this manner, the elite exploit society by keeping it suspicious of itself, using popular stories to control how people respond to each other. Love as something to transmute and synthesize through iconoclastic praxis becomes anathema. Instead, the system prescribes canonical ideas of toxic love (war and rape on various registers), witch hunters self-policing inside abject invasion scenarios. Ostensibly hypothetical, these stories threaten actual abuse through vicarious experience: waves of terror dressed up in coercively hauntological language that downplays its function (to instigate moral panic) but remains conspicuously alarmist. Over and over, fascist calls-to-action obscure leader intent through stochastic violence against a chosen, fetishized target—the underclass—inside moral panics. This remains ruthlessly useful to capitalists, who neoliberal illusionists rely on fascist’s annual arrivals (during regular economic downturns) to distract from the whispered abuses happening year-round. When the grim harvest calls and fascists like slip their masks, the collectors aren’t the actual Grim Reaper (though they look the part); they’re smaller copycats of the elite—i.e., cheap bandits exploiting the usual parties abused under Capitalism, including themselves (as we’ll see in Chapter Four, neoliberalism permits these trespasses to occur, especially because it grants them attractive “opponents” to compare more fairly against: the white knight versus the black, but also the genuine versus the false).

Sudden-onset events of uncertain length and grand, nebulous scope, moral panics denote various titular threats: Red Scares, the Yellow Menace, black revenge/white genocide, or gay/trans panic (re: often called Satanic or “groomer” panic; Caelan Conrad, 2022). During the chaos, mob leaders posture as righteous defenders (a popular cryptonym for sanctioning violence, general language control and colonizer monsters targeting those in the state of exception)—white, chis-het vigilantes like Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey or Eastwood’s Harry Callahan colonizing the urban Western against targets of state violence dressed up as cartoon characters (or superheroes that must be redeemed; i.e., Hugh Jackman’s conspicuously-white Logan slicing a group of Mexican gangbangers to ribbons—a de facto, dog-tag-wearing [war dog] enforcer of the status quo).

Titles like Death Wish and Dirty Harry are telling: canonical wish fulfillment against the assigned scapegoat by the elite to discourage slave rebellions and build public trust in the law, or at least power laterally associated with the law and its own regular displays of force (for more examples, consider Anansi’s Library’s grim-but-excellent look and police brutality [2021]—for those under the state of exception, police violence is a regular, daily event. Not only do cops only “see in blue” and refusal to comply equals death, but the “color blindness” of this motto actually leans white when assimilation fantasies take Fanon’s “black skin, white masks” to self-colonizing extremes [shark3ozero, “Justice for Tyre Nichols,” 2023; timestamp: 6:15] self-policing minority cops. Cops—even token, minority cops—are class traitors who serve the state).

ACAB. Claiming to protect “true love,” children, moral purity and family values from corrupting forces, these vigilantes are pure fascist revenge fantasy dressed up in witch-cop language. In truth, they want to scare the population into a prolonged state of emergency that worsens over time, stealing away their rights and turning them into violent monsters whose imagination shrinks. As such, these leaders stoke the flames, profiting through destruction by presenting descriptive sexuality as something to hide from, but also seek and destroy. Dirty Harry ain’t stopping shit; he’s gun porn (with his infamous .44 being a giant attempt at overcompensate for having a total inability to form healthy relationships with anyone). More to the point, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection among the, there is always a real-life double to a fictional one; re: “German artist, Andreas Marschall, based the cover of Sodom’s magnum opus, Agent Orange, on real Vietnam War photographs” (source).

(ibid.)

Whether from established or aspiring parties, the bourgeoisie will author whatever xenophobia they require to exploit their populations. Behind the veneer of morals, liberty and national pride, the cold machinations of war turn violence into profit, maximizing force against a select target through persecution mania (a fire whose flames have been lovingly stoked to produce as much heat, thus profit, as possible). The harder one turns the lever, the hotter the blaze; the hotter the blaze, the more fuel it demands. As people, animals and places burn, profits generate in a violent redistribution of wealth (from a material standpoint, the Holocaust was primarily an action of theft, veiled by Nazi hauntologies and trademark obscurantism). Accumulating in the upper echelons of power, the elite retransfer these spoils back into carceral propaganda, celebrating the affair as a victorious event inside a larger cycle: a transgenerational “curse” whose cryptonymy downplays the entire cycle, concealing the symptoms of Capitalism, including the active imagination and revolutionary art as conspicuously extinct. The world—and by extension, women, children and moral decency—has been “saved” and must be “saved” again (and again and again). In turn, whatever financial dregs trickle down from on high become remembered as “prosperity” by those who survive, conflating the nation’s perceived strength with their own neglected well-being.

Though often remembered for their stochastic terrorism and moral panic, the truth is that witch hunts live and die through propaganda. Unlike state propaganda, neoliberalism affords the elite a proxy of state control: popular entertainment, talking heads and public intellectuals, as well as they various intersections and friends in high places (Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok, a notorious doxxer and giant transphobe, was recently platformed and publicly endorsed by Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk; Hasan’ “Libs of TikTok EXPOSED,” 2023). In American media, corporations canonize evil—not to abolish, but cryptonymically preserve as good’s perpetual foe inside an established order of personal property. Stamped and certified, American centrism cultivates a sustained atmosphere of caution and fear at a national-corporate level. Presenting merely as “fun,” their trademarked perils repeatedly scare the middle class into prolonged consumer apathy. They sublimate system abuse.

Over time, canon then renders the underclass increasingly monstrous; i.e., by canonizing them as sexually depraved and dangerous in ways that unveil themselves during times of rising discord; they become zombies, but also “bad copies” that “body snatch” their purported “victims”; i.e., essentially as pod people as a monstrous symbol/scapegoat for Red Scare mania and fear of settler-colonial replacement (next page) visited—copaganda-wise—on the “state’s” tokenized women and children (a zombie invasion combined with an alien one)!

Throughout this rancor, the alarm bells of the general public will be joined by corporations profiting off the entire ordeal, fascists intent on doing the same through their own mythologies of false revolution. Eventually this scapegoating reaches a flashpoint, destroying the buffer. As Capitalism decays and fascism takes root, fatigue sets in and panic spreads; gradual caution becomes rapid-onset fear, danger and alarm. Once these sentiments reach the lower classes, reactionaries transform—alienated from their own humanity and sexuality as they persecute their fellow workers. Hardly accidental, persecution mania withers social-sexual activism by design—allowing the elite to enjoy a socially divided, sexually confused worker base that cannot unite against them (thus have their revenge).

Capitalism and its police, then, is like a macro treatment of the Gothic villain: a duplicitous culture of self-aggrandizing and -deceiving bullies whose greatest “strength” and greatest weakness is class-dormant/class-traitorous xenophobia; i.e., their ability to cheat, lie, kill and steal in defense of capital (similar to neoliberals, but more radical, open, and aggressive; a consolidating of power through brute force lie, violence and power abuse—i.e., hit first, no mercy in a pure war of movement… into their own embarrassing[4] warriors’ graves; Nei Gong’s “Knife Fight: Fantasy vs. Reality,” 2015). Wholly insincere yet entirely genocidal, they are xenophobic dupes with a penchant for obscurantism, war and rape. Fascism is the open variant of what neoliberalism sublimates, fetishistically worshipping an older way of doing things that restores a nation to its former glory. By underreporting their own crimes and antagonizing other workers in constant shows of obfuscated force and reactive abuse, capitalist paramilitaries set boundaries for “everyone” but themselves.

As discussed during the manifesto, whether fascist or neoliberal, cops are not your friends; they are paramilitary class traitors who serve the state, including lying and killing to defend capital and keep workers in line. As such, they enforce an ever-expanding group of oscillating scapegoats (for the state of exception) and diminishing bureaucracies (for executing the state’s authority) in favor of squabbling violently for the leader’s attention, doling out selective punishment against predetermined, xenophilic targets within a structure centuries old: putting down slave rebellions. All too common occurrence during America’s formative years, slave rebellions survive into the present through copaganda echoes of Jim Crow, its neoliberalism iterations and current neoslavery models. Habitually enforced by financially incentivized class traitors wearing the tell-tale, fetishized death uniforms of a state-in-crisis (either totally black, or black and red—though American variants inject urban camo or red-white-and-blue into the mix), you see these arrangements on just on state zombie killers, officially but also unofficially deputized, vigilante Man-Box, clubhouse gangbangers (for an example of the latter, refer to the Rise Again Movement; Behind the Bastard’s “Part One: RAM: Nazi Fight Club,” 2023). Armed with the tools of coercive BDSM—batons, stun guns, handcuffs, cameras—as well as the disguised threat of violence with leather outfits, aviators and helmets, these Pavlovian brutes are willing to die for their lost cause; they’re conveyed in cartoonishly evil, “war boss” forms that sublimate their tyrannical persecution mania (destructive anger) and feelings of being owed “what is due” leading to a substitution for sound business practices for raw banditry and force; i.e., the war boss as an (often male) chief who rules amid seminal tragedy through a position of inherited authority assumed a priori; e.g., Darkness barking “You will be well rewarded!” at his feckless goblin servant, Blix:

We’ll examine the seminal tragedy—of the female, girl boss version of the war boss (and its regressive, Man Box Amazonomachia)—as something to perpetuate in Chapter Four (and subvert and disarm, in Chapter Five). For now, just remember that such arrangements—regardless of the form they take—are built on unfair compromise and Quixotic delusion. For example, when writing about the formation of modernized America in his A People’s History of the United States (1980), Howard Zinn catalogs the various fears of the upper “master class”—of Native Americans and slaves rebelling together but also white indentured servants and African slaves, re:

What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces […] Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality (source).

America is the blueprint for genocide as it currently exists in all its fractally recursive forms because it was founded on genocide through the nation-state model as a hideously successful experiment that uses heteronormative propaganda to cover up its true function.

This deception includes the American revolution as a false revolution spearheaded by the British colonial owner class (the Founding Fathers), their usurping of rule from the British merely swapping one boss for another (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…“) before expanding on it in horrifying ways in the neoliberal hegemon. This genocide and power structure would go onto inspire the Nazis and other global powers in the 20th century, from which the United States and its ruling elite would then assimilate and appropriate into their continued bid for global world hegemony. The Nazis became cartoon caricatures of their former selves—canonical, “zombie heel” baddies whose adversarial worship in centrist media curiously never seems to die or disappear, but expand to tokenized groups like girl bosses and queer bosses.

Neoliberals and fascists both support the state and conduct genocide, with leaders under neoliberalism being more sanitized than their fascist, pirate-y versions but still gods who rule over workers en masse through the telling of attractive, but ultimately harmful lies; i.e., not splendide mendax, but instead the self-serving tyrants who enrich themselves at the suffering and exploitation of others. Called führerprinzip, or “leader principle,” mutual consent and all the other variables of sex-positivity become completely impossible under these circumstances; worker submission is compelled through radicalized, heteronormative force.

Worst of all, the old ways revive during societal decay to include various ghosts of the counterfeit revitalized in their undisguised forms: incest, genocide, mass sacrifice, sanctioned torture, heraldry (of death squads), slavery and chattel rape (of women, people of color and animals. Not enough maidens for every fascist to get a war bride; some have to “settle”). As the sublimations fall away, the xenophobic violence and submission remain—the gargoyles radicalized and canonical, the gods and their servants more hideous, vicious, deceitful and cruel; i.e., inside broken homes that serves as medieval schools of punishment towards various scapegoats treated as alien by heroic forces. This goes for the boys, but also the girls who up until this point have played along in seeming progress but in truth highly centrist works masking fascist issues; e.g., Ion Fury and its girl boss/war boss Amazon, Shelly Bombshell:

Note: In my opinion, “Zombie Police States” is, alongside “Military Optimism,” one of my finest pieces from 2021. I cite it constantly in this book series, including in my PhD; re: “ Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp.” —Perse, 5/1/2025

(exhibit 84a1: Shelly is a subjugated Amazon, a token female action hero who serves the state by killing bad guys in the state of exception; i.e., a witch cop who comes from a sexist history that continues to serve the status quo despite the putting on of the uniform and handing queen bitch a gun; re: “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girl-boss, the Game!” in my partner Bay’s words [re: “Interrogating Power“].

As I write in “Zombie Police States,” Shelly is the great equalizer who was originally built off and from the sexist fantasies of men, and through her incessant upholding of the status quo, is sexualized on the surface of her state-issued uniform as “one of the good ones,” a “tame” tomboy working for the Man; re [from “Zombie Police States”]:

the topos of the power of women historically portrays women using their natural assets—their sexuality—as an essential leverage against stronger, more intelligent men (re: Phyllis and Aristotle). Shelly Harrison doesn’t need to be six feet tall or overly sexual to best her male adversaries, though. She uses force multipliers (re: guns and bombs) to level the playing field (sometimes literally); meanwhile supplies, namely med-kits and armor vests, help keep her alive. That’s feminism, as [Jadis] points out, because the same tools and opportunities are being afforded to a woman, including getting her head blown off. It’s quite egalitarian [on the surface].

Shelley’s still cute, though—definitely a poster girl for the nostalgic police of a cyberpunk future. Not so different, appearance-wise, than the Major from Ghost in the Shell, Konoko from Oni, or Corporal Ferro from The Terminator. Those ladies are more reflective of their genuine outlier predicaments, though, whereas Shelly is perfectly assimilated. With no room to criticize her position, she valorizes it instead, feeling like every conservative nerd’s wet dream: Sharon Stone-meets-Kelly LeBrock—with an encyclopedia’s worth of movie quotes and action one-liners to spare. She has no personality beyond this assemblage, literally a nostalgic form of law-enforcement who, in her own way, polices nostalgia by uncovering what’s Cool™ beneath the rubble.

[artist, top-right: Blur Squid; bottom, source: 3D Realms’ “A Visual history of Bombshell,’ 2018]

Take the idea of Shelly herself. Originally sexualized by men and formerly known as “Bombshell,” the character was based off a 3D Realm’s dev’s fan fic (the go-to format for sexual fantasies, it must be said). Gradually her appearance became less and less sexual; the expectations for sexuality in general and Shelly’s physical appearance remain. My performance of Shelly can support or undermine those expectations. Those haven’t gone anywhere. To this day there are many “traditionally-minded” men who favor the good ol’ days by—gee, I don’t know—saying Shelly was better as the sexualized Bombshell? The one without a pelvis, apparently (a drawing phenomenon I’ve had to unlearn as well, I admit): […]

This is hardly hypothetical. I’ve seen plenty of sexist, wistful dialogues on Discord servers about “better times.” That’s hardly a shock, especially given that Bombshell’s history stems from ’90s worship, including female representation being reduced to sexualization for men to enjoy. 3D Realms are very open about this, and not entirely ashamed of the fact that Bombshell was originally based off Pam Anderson. Thankfully the game we got is largely devoid of the sexism on display in 1997 (omitting the Read Me and off-screen scandals, that is). “How far we’ve come!” indeed.

Playing a sexualized female character is like putting on a bikini or a thong. The sexy avatar is sexy clothes. I can do this for my own reasons; if a female player chooses to view that sexuality positively for herself, that’s still agency for the woman. Gothic stories are historically feminist; they center on women locked in the male tyrant’s castle, but also the Archaic Mother’s hideous shadow (a patriarchal boogeyman). There, these ladies strive for agency amid fearful oppression. Though an Amazon, the fact remains that Shelly Harrison is largely desexualized [on the surface, anyways], made all the more “neutral” by her position as a cop with a gun. Isn’t that the nature of uniforms, where her own shreds of personality are lifted from movies that cops probably watch ad nauseam? Then again, “Guns, lots of guns” can appear in movies like The Matrix and John Wick, seemingly at cross purposes but enjoyed by both in so-called “neutral territory.”

I suppose this is the best defense I can provide Ion Fury. It doesn’t try to force the performance either way (source).

Simply put, Voidpoint’s activism is performative and thoroughly disingenuous, but also prickly when cornered—by the men themselves [Richard Gobeille never got back to me] but also TERFs [while not a fan of male action heroes, Jadis hated my critiques of action media at large]. Shelley was made as a merchant of death, covered in an assortment of arms, armor and death insignias whose endorsement verges on the fascist cult of machismo and heroic death/self-sacrifice for the state, which the girl boss Amazon/war boss exemplifies as a sex object within “gun porn” heroics.)

Mid-harvest, the ruthless, unscrupulous, and secretive leader(s) of a fascist movement combine weaponized, carceral hauntology with calculated riots whose general cryptonymy obfuscates their true intent during periodic decay and crisis: raw material theft. Under the false premise of self-invincibility and cloaked in deathly sigils, they fabricate lies that mislead violent, disposable heroes—to steal as much as they can, but also fall in love with their own legends and propaganda to a callow workforce (summed up best by Jubei Kibagami: “The townspeople feared the epidemic and run away. I took only one dead horse to scare them”—a false plague enacted by Genma’s fascist warrior bandits emboldened by political instability in Ninja Scroll’s mythical 1993 retro-future Japan).

(source)

For example, Reinhard Heydrich aka the Butcher of Prague—despite being called “the man with the iron heart” and normally a cautious man—actually refused a security detail because he didn’t want to show weakness to the Poles, cemented by him refusing to drive away when his assassin’s submachinegun jammed (The People Profiles’ “Reinhard Heydrich,” 2022; timestamp: 1:09:26); the Poles promptly murdered him, showing the world that Hitler’s favorite knight wasn’t a god, but just a stupid, violent pimp who through he was a pirate[5]. Fascism had made him so, making him terminally insecure and overconfident. As an Icarian, petty gangster-thug stewing inside a self-made den of thieves, he became cultishly obsessed with defending masculine power and stealing gold (which, as pirate lore correctly notes, men cannot eat; e.g., Tolkien’s duplicitous Master of Laketown).

Reinhard wasn’t invincible; he was a witch-hunter cop who bought into his own lie—cheap, fragile lie begot from Capitalism falling apart: a (excuse the recursive commas, but they’re needed here) fascist version of the banality of evil; Nazi bureaucracy as cloned, weaponized by intimations of mad science, robotics, genetic experimentation/eugenics; but also bad parentage, anti-intellectualism, palingenesis; a gothic double, a copy without a soul, a killer baby with a bad father who weaponized science, children, nature, labor, sexuality and gender, but also guilt, fear, and love through canonical monster food. He was Frankenstein’s Monster without any critical bite—l’enfant terrible as sexually dimorphic the way that Capitalism generally is: Men (or those perceived as men) hurt others; women (or those perceived as women) get hurt, often by their own conditioned Pavlovian behaviors (such as TERFs or token enforcers victimizing their own people).

Fascist witch hunts and their auras of “invincibility” aren’t simply manufactured and identified by highly performative, Hugo-Boss-style uniforms that promote death and torture to the state’s enemies; they’re conflated with legitimate rebellions under crises of masculinity stemming from Capitalism-in-crisis (the “uprising” being a bad lie told alongside the neoliberal, “exceptional American” variant to strengthen global US hegemony). In the end, fascism defends Capitalism as a cycle of masculine/economic crisis, furthering its perpetuation of manufactured shortages, consent and conflict through false revolution; i.e., as the death knell of anything that might imagine a better world were it not for cops posing as rebels/the oppressed: witch hunters in disguise (cops) who ruthlessly pick labor movements as the ideal scapegoat in defense of Capitalism.

Fascism decays and this decay only worsens over time; i.e., making fascist “strongmen” not just a parasitoid, but one that dies with the host organism: the ignominious death of the Roman fool, fallen on their own blade. Canonically a Gothic villain dies after a fall from grace relative to whatever institutions they infiltrate. Outing of them as impostors is fatal. Though literal Nazis aren’t quite that fragile, they nevertheless remain terminally allergic to public shaming before formal power is achieved. Compromise with them is fatal to us. Refusals to compromise are fatal to them because it disarms their “indestructible” aura by exposing its ephemeral nature. Socialism, ironic/consensual xenophilia and intersectional diversity are strength when pushing towards universal liberation; Capitalism, xenophobia and bigotry are not, pushing as they always do towards division and profit, thus rape and genocide as natural consequences of those things. Fascism and liberalism go hand-in-hand, defending each other through a perverse (and incredibly mendacious) form of Amazonomachia-style kayfabe.

Witch cop or not, the Roman fool eventually falls on his own sword. Even so, others have to live in the shadow/consequence of such things. Next, we’ll consider a half-real example: the zombie apocalypse and proletarian (non-cop) witches—two gay men from the 2023 television version of The Last of Us!

Onto “‘Which Witch?’ and ‘Ruling through Fear’“!

About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] One we’ve explored briefly in this series before; re (from “Vampires and Claymation,” footnote):

I.e., internalized male homophobia; e.g., Cockrub Warriors demonizing anal sex, blaming feminine male homosexuality for weakness (re: the AIDS pandemic): “For the last 35 years anal sex has dominated gay male life. It’s been a disaster. For 30 of those years our lives and the lives of the people we love have been consumed by an epidemic for which today there is still no cure and no vaccine” (source: “Founder’s Message,” 2000).

Such problematic love (and the history of sodomy accusations) are explored further in “Understanding Vampires.”

[2] Christianity historically reinvents pagan holidays by simply bastardizing them and turning them in to candy—i.e., Easter, Christmas and Halloween. The pagan forms remain, but are generally hauntological and reimagined in the event of wide scale genocides and the sheer passage of time accompanied by the flexibility of oral traditions.

[3] Sex workers and queer people more generally live under constant threat of “media death.” Billionaire-led or-owned platforms will drop, shadow ban, or suspend accounts that “violate ” their rules without explanation or warning. There is nothing that can be done about this in the short term; the elite own the means of production. But over time, a sex-positive revolution can gradually raise awareness towards these inequities through sex workers finding their own voices and helping workers organize collective action through their art. This praxis requires the Six Rs outlined in Volume Zero onwards, as well as the four Gothic theories and an emotional/Gothic intelligence pertaining to common materials by which to foster a new Gothic imagination, breaking the illusions that neoliberal institutions already have in place; re: to break state monopolies by reclaiming state tools.

[4] You can tease a fascist, but read the room first; if it’s full of fascist imitations, you’re completely fucked if you “pick a fight.” Dead commies tell no tales, so be on your guard!

[5] Reinhard Heydrich was the only Nazi leader successfully assassinated during WW2. A joke of a man, his colossal ego and staunch refusal—to take his victims, the occupied population of Prague, seriously—effectively led to them killing him in embarrassing fashion (similar to American soldiers in Vietnam, except Westmoreland had the good sense to hide behind his men); i.e., due to him driving repeatedly around Prague in his convertible with the top down minus a military escort.

In part, this perceived aura of invincibility was informed by, of all things, comic books—with Himmler hiring Reinhard not just because of his good looks and womanizer’s past in the interwar German Navy, but also because of a shared interest in American pulp fiction that informed other imperial powers and their authors; re (from Volume Zero, “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“):

Heinrich Himmler hired Reinhardt Heydrich because Heydrich looked Aryan and because both men read the same cheesy Americana, specifically “cheap crime fiction and spy novels” (source: Behind the Bastard’s “Part One: The Young, Evil God of Death: Reinhard Heydrich,” 2023—timestamp: 1:11:48). In other words, their very violent worldview was founded on the same cheap, pulpy ephemera that fueled Tolkien‘s imagination:

Tolkien’s world is certainly not groundless. It is traditional, “borrowing from the power and import of his sources – the ‘middangeard’ of ‘Beowulf,’ the grim and brutal cosmos of ‘The Volsunga Saga,’ the cold and bitter realm of the ‘Eddas,’ all of which left their traces and worked their sway over his own imagination'” (source: Influences of the Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 1983).

This issue, which I have dubbed “the Rambo, Beowulf or Star Wars problem,” also effects witch cops (such as Amazons) during mirror syndrome (re: “Always a Victim“); i.e., Nazi Force of Will arguments borrowed from older ethnocentric ones (re: “Canonical Essentialism“) that have become ethnonationalist and bled into hauntological corporate media, post-WW2; e.g., Star Wars and the Force alluding quite strongly to Force of Will in neo-medieval, space opera, white-savior arguments. The fact remains, Capitalism is racist, and racism is bad for anyone who does it, but also allows said persons to do bad things until they are killed.

In Reinhard’s case, he ran the bureaucratic arm of the Nazi state; i.e., the Holocaust as something to execute; re: a state role that Volume Zero described as “as ‘middle-management’ desk murderers in a bureaucratic sense (which sits alongside the middle class, in a class sense—with both defending capital as a perpetually decaying structure that operates through wage/labor theft according to weaponized bureaucracy during crisis, class sentiment and Faustian bargains” (source: “Thesis Body”). In turn,

[Canonical praxis] is historically-materially prone to bad actors; i.e., those who act in bad faith according to their material conditions, hiding their murderous intentions using these conditions as having dogmatized their behaviors to begin with. As such, they collectively utilize obscurantism and cryptofascism/canonical disguise pastiche while speaking in a variety of codes: virtue [and vice] signals, lip service, queer bait and dogwhistles (indented for clarity):

Capitalism-in-decay leads to a revival of old DARVO [“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”] schemes dressed up in new dogwhistles during the Internet Age while history repeats itself: “Cultural Bolshevism” and Jewish conspiracy theories become “Cultural Marxism” and “globalism,” while “social justice” becomes “social justice warrior” as a continued demonizing of pro-labor labels, similar to “Communist,” “antifa(schist)” or “woke” (which translate to “corrupt”/monstrous-feminine in neoliberal copaganda); i.e., when cornered or in doubt, the state and its defenders blame the Left but also demonize them in ways that coercively fetishize them as targets of psychosexual violence during state emergencies. Then and now, reactionary politics and the centrist moderacy adjacent their open radicalism is capital defending itself by following the leader to create enemies of the state through codewords and foreign/internal plots:

While the SS, prior to the seizure of power, mainly occupied itself with protecting the party against internal and external enemies, Himmler and Heydrich focused on all sorts of enemies of the state in the meantime, including in particular the Jews. Despite his mother being a strict Catholic and his father a member of a Free Mason Lodge, Heydrich recognized much evil in this religion and philosophy as well. “In reality they don’t fight fairly for preservation of religious and cultural values (these are not at all at stake) but they continue their old and bitter struggle for secular dominance in Germany,” he said about the Catholic faith. In his opinion, Free Masons were “the instrument of Jewish revenge.” Should the Free Masons gain the upper hand in their struggle against Nationalsocialism, they would cause “orgies of cruelty,” which would make “the sternness of Adolf Hitler appear very moderate indeed by comparison” (source: Kevin Prenger’s “Heydrich, Reinhard,” 2016).

In order to devalue basic human rights, state proponents negotiate the process of abjection/ghost of the counterfeit through brute force, coercive rhetoric, intended gameplay/bad play (prescriptive abuse patterns), revenge arguments, and toxic self-righteousness. The same goes for all of the heroes, damsels and undead/demonic, oft-animalized monsters that exist unironically within said discourse (which compounds into complex disguises, which I call “concentric veneers“) as “already mapped out” through Tolkien’s refrain and similar counterfeits borrowing from his formulaic gentrification of war (ibid.).

(source)

Men like Tolkien and Reinhard, then, are both cops, thus colonizers abusing witch-y language; both men, as reactionaries/moderates continue to demonstrate nowadays, only separate by a matter of flavor and degree—re: Tolkien’s Goldilocks Imperialism gentrifying war as a racist matter of genocide (re: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking“) that bled, “there and back again,” into games and real life on loop, toxifying after his death:

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (source: “Modularity and Class”).

Past and present, the same goes for token examples like TERFs (and NERFs; re: Autumn Ivy or Natalie Wynn).

Like Reinhard or Tolkien, their power is an illusion to perform, a bubble to burst with revolutionary cryptonymy on and off the same stages, using the same basic hero-monster language. In short, power is a lie—one told to achieve different ends in praxial opposition; i.e., moving power anisotropically towards or away from the state per abjection’s terrorist/counterterrorist (cop/victim) angle to leverage for or against workers/nature at large as monstrous-feminine. Our whore’s revenge is bursting the pimp’s bubble, the witch killing the darling-in-question by fighting fire with Promethean fire as suitably stolen back; re: monopolies—of violence, terror and monsters—are a myth, so break them on your Aegis when the Man (and Man’s token servants; e.g., Dorothy Gale) come around! Take what they alienize/fetishize (nature and sex work) and—like a monster trapped under ice—close it off from them (to flash behind buffers they cannot cross):

(model and artist: Kaycee Bee and Persephone van der Waard)

There is tremendous value in such things, even when performed (re: the palliative Numinous); if there wasn’t, the state wouldn’t try to control monsters and sex through lies and force, like it always does (re: when abusing all the usual tools)! Make Medusa proud!