Executed by the State / Screen-age Riot
An Interwoven Duology on the 2024 Election
[CW: incredibly violent language, use of homophobic/transphobic hate speech]
Bold sections were written immediately after Trump won Pennsylvania on: November 5th, 2024
Italics sections were written from compiled rhetoric we recovered with on: November 7th, 2024
I've left both unfiltered as a pure distillation of the emotions of living in this time. Please stay safe out there and don't read until you're in a stable headspace.
I reject shame. I reject restraint. It no longer has a place in my writing. I don’t have the privilege to opt out or stay quiet when this is what you’ve made of me.
We reject continuing this game. We reject the apathy from taking hold. We aren’t going to sit down and suffer anymore, hold my hand tightly.
I’m a faggot. I’m a filthy fucking faggot who deserves to hang from a tree. I deserve nothing but fragments of quickfire steel gliding through my scalp, fracturing my bone, chunks of bone permeating and rupturing my brain. That's what my country has decided this evening. I deserve a rope around my neck until my head swells with blood, until my skin is bruised and torn and until my limbs are pulled off with the elastic snapping of torn skin. They pay money to kill me; to stick box cutters in me. They rip out my tongue and use it as a finger puppet. They rape my throat with their prying fingers. They tear my back in two, peeling up the skin along my spine, plucking out my vertebrae one by one to toss around as toys. They castrate and pluck off my nails and shave my head and use my eyeballs as pincushions out of pure fucking apathy. They inject me with tar, forcefeed me dry powder until I suffocate, until my lungs fucking fail from being overloaded with the bitter poison flour. My head explodes under frags of lead. I’m shot dead in the streets. I’ve been executed by the state. I literally don’t matter anymore. The state has voted it such, though perhaps this is a realization of a truth that was there all along behind the empty, neoliberal words. Progress is idealism, stagnancy is privilege… This is utter rot. The self is some bourgeois bullshit I’ve been trying to get an in on. I’ve been wasting my time. I can’t afford to matter, to only self-preserve.
This is so much bigger than me. There’s so much danger suddenly upon us, so much reality immediately convalescing. I want to hug everyone I love, to hold them as closely as one possibly can, to pile in under the same roof and arm ourselves with rice and beans. Just the few of us, we can make it if we try. You’re welcome too, of course, if you’ve still got the strength to love. Love is our only means of endurance. The target of our hopes and dreams is awfully bleak right now, but we can still hope. Still endure. They can never take that away from us. Don't let this violence into your dreams. Don't let death and loss be dreamt preceding all actuality. Nihilism is deciding they win, both consciously and subconsciously. Despondence is becoming as hurt as they want to see us. Don't suffer for their perverted Schadenfreude for as much as it hurts. Steady and dream. Steady and dream.
My skull fractures into bits, explodes into chunks, internal hemorrhaging from the mere mass of anxiety that has befallen me. I’m going to fucking die. My mortality is suddenly upon me. Fuck dude, everyone I love’s mortality is suddenly a fucking question. Why the fuck is my life a question. WHY ARE YOU FUCKERS JOKING ABOUT THIS. HOW CAN YOU LAUGH? I refuse to die yet and I’m fucking scared. This isn’t a point of rejecting my natural life cycle, I have no interest in living past 50, but that’s not the point. I refuse to die a pessimist. I refuse to die not believing in greener pastures, that those I love won't be able to pull through. Dying not knowing everything only got worse is a brutal absence. I’ll die only with peace in the fact that life will go on, that life will thrive beyond a climate tipping point, a broken global economy and a white supremacist prosecution of all of our succulent expression.
My lizard brain, for once, moves in tandem with my heart and mind. Clarity has befallen me in my absolute destitution. I will make the world fucking beautiful even if no one wants it. “There’s something beautiful, somewhere beautiful, just beyond the fog”. I wrote those words in July, and fuck if they ain’t keeping me going. The fog is infinite, but yet we trudge on. The suffering is endless, but yet we trudge on. This has always been what life is about, unchangeably a universal truth. Ask any Buddhist. We will suffer, but that doesn’t mean we can’t rise to it, grow by it. To bond over a campfire in the desolate field, guns behind us for our own safety, bodies falling apart to fatigue, but still we tell each other jokes. We can still fucking smile. Don’t let your smile fade, that’s letting them win. It will hurt. There will be migraines and slurs, sinkholes and grief. All will fall apart except our love. I don’t give a shit about anything but our love. Fuck irony with ALL MY HEART, fuck irony. We can’t afford this pseudo-engagement. I’ve been jolted awake to how cowardly it is, how utterly divisive and insulating. Quit the lies, quit the veneer of jokes, quit the gossip, quit the insults. Don’t stoop ever to the same vitriol that brought us here. This is not a command, but goddamn will it make this all so much easier for us to pull through.
Right now, it doesn’t feel like hope will be productive. Right now it feels like I and so many I care about, so many in my community, are going to be lynched and butchered, that our career, our body, our identity, our future are all in the palms of capital fucking interest. I’m not gonna blow my head off, but they will: the state. I will be executed by the state on January 6th. I will witness the land of harassment, falsification, irony, destruction, ruinous deceit and beguilement take hold. I know death is kind. The black milk hugs all. Welcome mat laid out. Empty my stomach and, in writhing starvation, hallucinate myself to her realm. Death loves you. Life also loves you, but people? People love you, but some people don’t. Many people don’t. Those people have won tonight. Those people that use my identity as bile. Those people that seek to rip my flesh off my biological essentialism and shame me. Those people that make me a monster. Those people who made me get political, made me so invested in this bullshit, made me arm myself against their caustic ideological malaise. I can't imagine closing your eyes to it now, what a fucking privilege I will never again have.
It’s not people, it’s systems and bad ideas. Don’t bend the knee to succumbing to their hate. Mutual hate is how wars are born. There’s already going to be enough war, enough fighting against the very conditions that define us. If you’re reading this, do nothing but love. Find somewhere outside of the system, learn to farm, build boats and fish, learn medicine, produce poignant political art, teach the next generation there is an outside of the wall and not to villainize it. Don’t let yourself be bought by the bedazzlement of six-figures in big tech and military contracting. You’re better than that. We can asphyxiate them and scrape by together so much more easily. They want nuclear families, units powerful enough to feel that the economy isn’t broken for those outside of it, but just big enough to insulate and form a crucible ideology. Let’s show them one better. Dozens of us under the same roof. Our financial power will be unstoppable, we’ll be large enough to galvanize. They want the nuclear family because it’s still small enough that it can’t exploit capitalism’s greatest loophole: sharing. The state doesn’t need to know, we’ll keep our compound a secret. Marriage has always been symbolic propaganda anyway, designed because men didn’t trust women to stay exclusively loyal to them. Fuck that, right? Only they think sex is real, and that’s their weakness. They only see binaries, and that's their weakness. We're able to be as awake as possible, to build our own worlds and shape them free of set image and hegemony. We’ll accrue so much power through our love and get rid of the idea that only our partners and children ought to be loved and shielded from the machine’s bile. Individualism needs to die pronto and we need to let as many in as we can. We need to collectively organize before it’s too late, to build our own borders with plaster walls, carpets and fertilized soil, to keep each day tolerable through the turbulence, and create the comfort that will be stripped from us. Loss of comfort is the greatest gift to awareness.
God is dead, all gods are dead, religious morality and faith and divine authority have collapsed in on itself. We just get fascists pretending to be them. Cults of populist bile. No weight, no soul, no love but that of wanting to get your penis caught in the cogs of the great machine. Fuck and thrust the Oh mighty dollar! Let it suck away at your utter lack of virility and sexual insecurity and pray it curls its monkey’s paw so all the women are forced to swarm you, melt into you, convalesce on your state-codified machismo like vultures. Vile, disgusting men. Men who I have no place with and thus have become sidewalk gum. I’m nothing but a spittoon, a mantlepiece, to imbibe with spit. I’m a filthy fucking faggot. I’m a bad genes, born wrong, delusional, predatory, pedophilic, sexually psychotic, social justice nazi, better off dead, clockable, unfuckable, YWNBAW FAGGOT. I’m slop. I’m a waste of calories and economic resources. I’m a commie leech. I’m a sickness in the health of this great nation. I'm tired but barred from rest.
And that’s their weakness. Why bemoan it? Your words are fucking weak. I know I’m wiser, I know I can securely love, I know who I am, and you don’t. You cling to a pathetic narcissist, a pseudo-strawman on Dementia’s Door. You don’t need to. You don’t need to hate us the same way those losers do. No one has ever won through it's games than the machine. I thought you were anti-establishment? No one is more punk than us. We rejected objectification, indoctrination into hegemony, complacency into a system that wants us with no spending power to outrule it. Can’t you see? You haven’t been punk. You’ve never been punk. The oligarchs are using you. Don’t get it twisted that because we supported the liberal institution that that’s at all who we are. But do you know what else is true? You can still become punk, still show what it truly means to fight back against tyranny, overreach and the reduction of freedoms, and you don’t need to spite anyone to do it. Don’t get bought by rhetoric just because it’s from mouths you’ve been conditioned to like. Don’t be bought by falsified image politics of what the world is right now. Don’t be bought by the jingling keys buzzwords of the husk of Christian morality and what’s in the best interest of the richest among us. Fuck all of that. Don’t get bought by anything but the true underlying machinations of oppression by way of xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, transphobia and the same empty promises you’ve seen time and time again. All those things you had to learn. All those things were placed on you to beguile you from the fact of the matter that all of us are being suffocated by the same beast: hegemony. Hegemony of how things ought to be, not in our interest, but for the replication of these same feelings of populist despondence. The reality is no one who makes you promises is telling the truth. No one who tells you they have the means to fix everything is telling the truth. I promise nothing but an unknown stretch of fog and how we might cope with that, and I know things are broken, but we’ve just decided to break them more where those in power will end the least broken among us. It's all capitalism working as intended.
What the fuck happened. What the fuck actually happened for this much self-hating ignorance to be bred. How much misdirected dissatisfaction with the state of things, how much fucking worse is it gonna get… how much more is going to radicalize and radicalize and blow itself up before we even get a taste of amelioration. On my own anarchical ideas, perhaps I should be pleased at the self-immolation of the first world, at the natural endpoint to capitalism, the impending supernova of the industrial world. But the hand tightens its grip around my neck. It calls me a faggot, and tells me to kill myself or get in line. I don’t want to, no, I refuse to kill myself and let you be happy. I’d rather slit your throat than get in line. I’m shell-shocked, genuinely. My reveries are of exploding limbs, shredded brain matter, popped blood vessels.
What happened is what has been there the whole time trumped what has also been there the whole time. Let them eat themselves, but I’m gonna make myself taste so foul. They’ll touch my body all they want, but even try licking my heart, my mind... it's sharp as a blade, they'll cut themselves. Please, give me more of your bullshit rhetoric that I can grow increasingly jaded and recalcitrant towards. My passion for writing won’t end even when my fingers are chopped off and my vocal cords are gutted. Let them rule, be happy in their own symbolic power. But keep it symbolic. Keep the power with the people. The law is nothing but fear mongering against what the state deems moral. But what is morality to the partisan quacks bought by CPAC and the billionaire class? Morality is not dead, but law cannot be the limit if it insists on becoming a birdcage of traditionalism. If you know love, if you reject hate, if you protect all and liberate from the grand machine, what else matters? Let egalitarianism reign socially, because leveling the power divide is the thing the machine fears the most. Flatten the curve. Organize. Win back what democracy is, embolden people by their despondence with the system. Don’t let them forget nothing has changed. Here’s your fucking populism and this time it’s a throbbing heart. A catch-all for the weak and sleighted. Pockets of impenetrable love that no one can burst. Never deny emotions. This has always been emotions. Pain, joy, hope, despair are all feelings. This is good, not because we ought to sift them out, but because we know what motivates us, we know how we can again blaze. This hasn’t been a logic game or a pragmatism game for decades. It’s about meaningfully touching the right hearts. But our hearts are too often stupid, too often beholden to what is. But hegemony is over as long as my love is at risk, as long as my onward trajectory is under the boot of grifting pundits and salacious lip-licking people who’s only pleasure is having their wallet fucked and stuffed by bills. We may live in their house, but that doesn’t mean we can’t steal their food. Stop drinking, stop smoking, stop eating or masturbaiting, no more overconsumption and overstimulation into a hedonic stupor. I make no demands, simply suggestions. We can’t afford to suffer in silence, to fill our lives with things that weaken us. We can’t afford weakness when so easily it is preyed upon. Passion and hope fortify the heart, abandoning one’s own body does not. Never get complacent in your comforts while people out there are crying out in pain. I will go further. Stop marrying, stop rioting and protesting, stop using their language. These are all systems of the man to make us visible, to wrangle us into conformity, to understand and herd us. We must learn from the past and not make ourselves visible until we’ve already won. Not while our love can still be broken and bought.
I’m dead. My public self is dead. I can’t afford myself, not anymore. My brain is elsewhere, and I’m gonna have to fight like hell to make sure that elsewhere is somewhere beautiful. I’ve witnessed my country reject me, my identity, the people I care abouts identity. It’s not just us, it’s every first-generation immigrant, every woman, every black person who has been utterly rejected by the not-so-silent majority. We’ve always known who the majority are, and we can’t believe just because they’ve bought some of us that they at all are us. Fuck all of you, in that majority or not, with no stake in this who treated it flippantly or ironically. You have no respect for me or so many of the people I care about. I hope you learn some fucking love and compassion. Anything beyond edgy, counterproductive, anti-intellectual nihilism.
We have to be very careful to not make this hate of each other. I find my despondent empathy becoming more and more spiteful as I lay out this screed. Burn your buzzwords and steady your heart. Populism doesn’t need to be fascistic and built on virility. No more posturing, no more pointing at strawman, no more generalizing, no more binaries. These have been killing us, the very substantiation of our divide. Point only to an apple you see, taste only the apple in your mouth. Live not off idealized cravings of what we want these things to be. This is why we turned on each other. It isn't about facts and logic, owns or biases, it’s genuinely finding love and community amidst the irony-poisoned cesspools of the wired manifested into real momentum. The attention economy is the ultimate democracy, the logical endpoint of image politics that grants any hack the veneer of outsider status. The institution is outsider populism in the right mouths. Yeah, we’re all in echo chambers and hugboxes, but there’s a difference between resistance and indoctrination. There's nothing wrong with a hugbox if the alternative is entertaining debates attempting to move us closer to ideological fascism or feel good about losing access to my body. That very centrist self-exposure to apologia and rationale is why we are where we are. I hope if we scream loud enough, we can pull people out from the gator’s mouth, but that's not my job anymore. The liberals thought they could and they were dead wrong. We can’t shrink from being the greener pastures we wish to manifest, at least in ideology, else all will be irreversibly tunnel-visioned on the irreconcilability of us and them. I want to ask everyone who they believe is truly worth fighting for right now. That’s the most I ought to do.
I’m struggling so hard right now to stay awake. I want to sleep and lock myself in my dreams. I want all of us to wake up with sweeter mindspaces than those flooded with the drivel of despotic collapse. My eyes can’t focus, all I can do is pound out my utter despondency. All I can do is say this was never in any of our hands. All I can do is restrain my finger from pointing as every fucker shines their yellow teeth and laughs in my face. Laugh at me for being a leftist, for being “cringe” or “extremist” or “a crazy person” or “too serious”, because look what you got us by not listening to me. I was fucking right to hate liberals, to call Kamala’s campaign a complete fuck up in the same breath I called it necessary. Don’t point fingers. We need to unify now, but FUCK man! How big is my camp really? Is it enough? Is anything enough to break away than dreaming through these four years, sinking, sinking like a 50’s housewife into Zoloft and Valium stupors? How far will they go to execute an enemy of the state? I don’t think I’m strong enough to lose my hormones, to lose any footing I might fight for, to not be able to even fucking fight it. I don’t think I could watch so many of my friends have their families torn apart, both by deportation and this partisan loyalty to fucking evil and more evil.
I mustn’t sink into my traumatic dissociations. I’ve been woken up from my own trauma, for the reality has made itself known. I’ve been voted against, yet suddenly those closest to me feel compelled to hold me closer. I’ve been so fucking empathetic the past few days, unfathomably so. There’s something profoundly beautiful, a shedding of careless, passive interactions, for our hearts to meaningfully touch each other again. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and jaded neutrality is a long absence. Everyone seems so happy in spite of it all. They seem so willing to appreciate the world’s little trinkets and intricacies. We’re talking more: about art, culture, making it through this safely. I take some solace in that. Maybe this is what us ideologically nihilist zoomers mean. Other’s don’t care, of course, and that hurts. It hurts bad. But my love goes to all who need it. We can make it if we try. If you don’t want to join, I can’t force you. That’s okay. I need to stop making judgements of people, to stop hating presences. Two years ago, I said “Sometimes I wish Soylent Green was real” as I walked through St. Peter’s Basilica. I don’t want to be that person anymore. Smell the roses, take your time, eyes up. Eye contact with all, seek your allies and smile. Seek your ideological enemies and look confident. It’s all image, and we can’t let our images falter. We’re paper dolls propping each other up. We can’t let the wind blow us into disarray. Collectivism is a great good if the other is never flesh, yet still blatantly real. Know it’s name, for without it, this whole framework is all there is: it’s always been capitalism. To know a name is to reduce it, to conceptualize it, to be able to blame it. Know it's name and know it's face. It’s always wanted us numbed into dissociation through its rapid-fire more-isms. Move faster, move faster. It’s dissatisfaction with all, it’s mastery over every biological shortcoming we have, are the false binaries of misdirection. With enough of us, we don’t need to play. We’ll grow food for each other, we’ll treat each other's wounds, we’ll reclaim art and the internet. It’s only over when we get comfortable, it's how we forget it, forget our own oppression, but we all just became really uncomfortable. Let's take advantage of this. Let’s win our lives back. Together, with love. By our means, not theirs.
Life finds away and life goes on, let's just hope we can all go along with it. I'm gonna be offline for a few days. Stay safe, I love all of you dearly. I shall return later.
And until I can die optimistic, keep returning I shall.