The long drop below
Today Andrew Quemere writes about Massachusetts governor Maura Healey's recent remarks on Trump's draconian immigration enforcement.
"To understand why Healey is praising Trump, you need to understand that she is not a liberal or progressive—she is a cop... It’s this cop worldview that explains what’s really going on: Healey is praising Trump’s border policies because she genuinely agrees with him."
Read it here or down below.
Luke O’Neil
Oh by the way it's been long enough since I did one that I forgot what a pain in the ass they are to put together so the next Hell World top 5 songs series is going to be about none other than Lana bb. Look for that in about a week or so if all goes well.
Support our work here if you can please and thank you.
First a new poem or whatever from me.
The long drop below
The bulk of the experts were in agreement that it was officially authoritarianism now. It technically counted as that. They had been batting the idea around for some time but by this late in the game had finally reached a consensus. The authors and academics and so forth. Many of them reporting as much from abroad having long since absconded.
It is imperative that you fight back they warned us.
And we thanked them for it. Thank you once more to them for the advice.
Authoritarianism is fairly boring I have come to learn.
Not for everyone no. Not by any stretch. For some people it seems really bad.
Not quite yet for me though.
And wasn’t it always so?
You mostly still get to walk around wherever you like. No one ever tells you about that part. Go to work. Get pissed off in traffic. You get to go to the store. Need to I should say. I gotta have my yogurts!
You can warmly greet your neighbors as per usual. Maybe not talk too in depth with them about anything of substance as a precaution as far as down the line is concerned but still.
Observing the comings and goings of the birds in your backyard remains free of charge. As does the feel of the sun warm on your face when it occasionally shines.
They can boil the earth slowly but they can’t yet control the daily weather haha.
If they could they would have announced it by now. They're far too stupid not to blurt out that they could do that. They’re not close enough to feel comfortable lying about it right to our faces so that’s a relief of a kind.
They have basketball on TV I should mention. The Celtics fucking blew it but there was in fact unrelated basketball on. For people less pissed off than me to enjoy.
So loud in the stadiums.
DE-FENSE etc.
All that shit.
This morning in particular in my corner of all of this it was the kind of cold and humid where the doors were closing weird. That hadn’t changed either. How oppressive humidity is. The main door chittering like a bad knee going down the stairs. The hinges whinging about a job that they had been perfectly content to perform for quite some time.
Doors and joints do not have emotions or labor standards I know that.
I fumbled and flicked the light switch I don’t normally hit and it briefly lit up someone else’s kitchen. A moment later I fixed it and then it was just my same old one.
My familiar kitchen under authoritarianism.
The coffee maker anticipating me in the dark of dawn.
Coffee was getting more expensive I suppose.
Coffee makers do not anticipate things I know that also.
I wandered away from it all and into the half bathroom and the bright bulbs above the mirror helped me convince myself I looked like a man ten years younger than I am for as long as I could hold my breath. I pulled my hoodie up over my head and played boxer. Flexed a little under the bulk of it.
I wondered for some reason how the actor Tom Hardy was faring. Wherever it is he is from. God he was so handsome. That was also still true under authoritarianism I imagined.
Everyone is so coiled and sharp and ugly now so when you come across something persistently beautiful it’s like a fleeting overdose.
Which you can’t really do anymore without significant effort. Not with anything you’d want to overdose on.
You can dream as per usual. About anything you want. Someone who once loved you waiting at the bar for you to walk in the customary five minutes late and half turning toward the door when they sense you. Smiling like a searchlight.
A playful punch in the arm.
Splitting the mussels. Dipping the toasted bread into the leftover broth.
Might want to keep the dreams to yourself too depending on the circumstances.
Reevaluate your relationship with your therapist too. They mostly want the cash upfront of late.
The flower shop down the road was open every other day and so I brought some home for my wife yesterday. Wives still appreciate flowers under authoritarianism.
I had just been to the dentist earlier in the week too so it wasn’t like we didn’t need to care for our teeth and bodies anymore. It wouldn’t make sense for them to want everyone’s teeth to fall out. How would that serve the cause?
Even the fake idea of the cause.
It did feel kind of weird being pretend tortured like that for a bit. You could let your mind wander regarding their tools in your mouth.
People nevertheless had to try to live and to make a living yes but just between you and I we were long already fucking dead.
Suspended in mid-air after running off the side of a cliff. Most of us not even looking back at the camera for the sake of the bit. Not self aware enough to know that there was a camera in the first place.
Or the long drop below.
Maybe those scholars and all of them knew. Writing books about me and you from I don’t know Ottawa or Helsinki. Somewhere cold and imaginary like that.
What will happen to me specifically though?
What at long last will become of me?
What will happen to me?
Tom Hardy is from the UK. I just thought of that. I suppose each of us has to suffer in our own way.
Here's a guy I recently looked at.
Some readers wrote in about the last issue.
Luke O’Neil
- Goddamn ChatGPT by people in job interviews murdered some little part of me this week and replaced it with white-hot rage. Upon reflection, I started feeling less angry at them (it's capitalism and the way we have to compete for jobs, plus all the novel nonsense from Trump 2.0 and Co., and who hasn't stretched the truth in some interviews), but then I remembered they are feeding my voice and my questions into this evil machine and also lying and being so completely lazy that even I, notable loafer, feel disgusted, and also, I just had to hear multiple job candidates give the exact same answer to a question about their experience, so like the rage came back triple hot. At least a bullshitter gives you a song-and-dance, these people are just reading and doing fake pauses while they wait for the machine to catch up to me. And this is the least of my gripes with it...this theft of art and deluge of slop, plus all the denial of benefits and surveillance and predictive policing, that's much worse.
Commuting has made me realize that xenophobia in this country is worse than I thought...it's not just open in the white suburbs where the MAGA flags fly flagrantly, it's a poison circulating everywhere.
- "Novelty is pain’s cruelest device. " This is the fucking truth.
I got diagnosed with Celiac Disease recently (have to get an endoscopy next week just to be sure.)
And finding out there was something to the pain that sat just below my ribs - an explanation, a cause, a reason that could be changed if I just lived differently has really fucked me up. I had learned to live with it. Imagined 100 different reasons from mild to menacing for why that was there and why I deserved it.
Celiac is not the disease that starts with C I expected my internist to tell me was inflicting me. But it's still the beer I'll miss most of all.
And now that I'm (mostly) in control of it, knowing I don't have to accept that pain, makes every tinge hurt so much worse. It's new again, when it hits me. It's new and aggravating and just one more thing I have to learn to accept and live with and it pisses me off. Somehow I think my body deserves better or worse, but not this.
Luke, thank you so much for your writing. It truly is The Best
Alright let's get to the fuck "A.I." portion of today's newsletter.
Matthew Gault
Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: "I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:"
It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.
Come on buddy. I would expect better from the "author" of Darkhollow Academy: Year 2.
No it didn't. None of that is true.
"Everybody who uses AI is going to get exponentially stupider, and the stupider they get, the more they’ll need to use AI to be able to do stuff that they were previously able to do with their minds" gizmodo.com/its-breathta...
— Ketan Joshi (@ketanjoshi.co) 2025-05-24T19:02:33.172Z
Here is a relevant page from my upcoming book:
— Maris Kreizman (@maris.bsky.social) 2025-05-20T16:21:03.105Z
Unrelated to any of that I was reminded this morning of The Nature of Mass Demonstrations by John Berger from 1968 which goes in part like so:
A demonstration, however much spontaneity it may contain, is a created event which arbitrarily separates itself from ordinary life. Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.
A mass demonstration distinguishes itself from other mass crowds because it congregates in public to create its function, instead of forming in response to one: in this, it differs from any assembly of workers within their place of work – even when strike action is involved – or from any crowd of spectators. It is an assembly which challenges what is given by the mere fact of its coming together.
State authorities usually lie about the number of demonstrators involved. The lie, however, makes little difference. (It would only make a significant difference if demonstrations really were an appeal to the democratic conscience of the State.) The importance of the numbers involved is to be found in the direct experience of those taking part in or sympathetically witnessing the demonstration. For them the numbers cease to be numbers and become the evidence of their senses, the conclusions of their imagination. The larger the demonstration, the more powerful and immediate (visible, audible, tangible) a metaphor it becomes for their total collective strength.
I say metaphor because the strength thus grasped transcends the potential strength of those present, and certainly their actual strength as deployed in a demonstration. The more people there are there, the more forcibly they represent to each other and to themselves those who are absent. In this way a mass demonstration simultaneously extends and gives body to an abstraction. Those who take part become more positively aware of how they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate, and implies a common opportunity. They begin to recognise that the function of their class need no longer be limited: that it, too, like the demonstrations itself, can create its own function.
Revolutionary awareness is rehearsed in another way by the choice and effect of location. Demonstrations are essentially urban in character, and they are usually planned to take place as near as possible to some symbolic centre, either civic or national. Their ‘targets’ are seldom the strategic ones – railway stations, barracks, radio stations, airports. A mass demonstration can be interpreted as the symbolic capturing of a city or capital. Again, the symbolism or metaphor is for the benefit of the participants.
The demonstration, an irregular event created by the demonstrators, nevertheless takes place near the city centre, intended for very different uses. The demonstrators interrupt the regular life of the streets they march through or of the open spaces they fill. They cut off these areas, and, not yet having the power to occupy them permanently, they transform them into a temporary stage on which they dramatise the power they still lack.
Did you ever read this one? It's one of the first "good ones" I believe. From way back in 2018. It even has some commas in it awwww.
It's about Berger's “Understanding a Photograph” and people who die trying to take a selfie in a particularly beautiful but dangerous location such as a steep cliff or in front of a bear.
Luke O’Neil
The only decision the photographer can take “is as regards the moment he chooses to isolate,” he wrote. “Yet this apparent limitation gives the photograph its unique power. What it shows invokes what is not shown. One can look at any photograph to appreciate the truth of this. The immediate relation between what is present and what is absent is particular to each photograph: it may be that of ice to sun, of grief to a tragedy, of a smile to a pleasure, of a body to love, of a winning race‐horse to the race it has run.”
A photograph, he suggests, invokes not what is shown, but what is not seen. The totality of everything else in existence is brought to mind by its absence.
At least that’s what I think he was saying who can ever really tell what the fuck these nerds are talking about half the time.
...
It’s unclear what became of any of the selfies of the people who died while taking them. I wonder if any of them managed to capture the moment of their own death. The realization on their face of what was to come. The moment they transferred from the realm of the present to the absent. I wonder sometimes too if when we die we’re given a camera roll to scroll through like the iPhone does for you now where it arranges every captured moment of your life into location and time and the people you were there with and if I can get one last look at them all before I turn into nothing and whose faces would I see the most before I die and I wonder if they would be happy with the way they look as my life flashes before my eyes or if they would say here let me see that no no delete this one I don’t want this one playing in your fucking brain just as you’re about to atomize into a billion particles of absence Luke I don’t like my hair in that one.z
I know I just plugged this one the other day but it is actually Memorial Day now so here you go again. Sorry or you're welcome.
Luke O’Neil
Back over by the flags large groups of tourists were posing for selfies and taking pictures to post to Instagram so people would know that they had been there to see a symbol of something. There was a merry-go-round spinning right next to the flags and the kids on it all seemed happy waving their little arms around like bugs riding a horse.
What do you caption a selfie in front of a sea of death metaphors?
The flags look beautiful I have to admit but I don’t know why we make war memorials look good they should look terrible. Each of those flags is supposed to represent a noble spirit ascending to Valhalla or whatever but it’s really 37,000 individual deaths in the wet mud. A war memorial should be a guy with his guts hanging out crying for his mother or a guy without a leg getting denied mental health services at the VA.
Maura Healey hands it to Trump, praises migrant crackdown
by Andrew Quemere
Legendary poster dril has a handful of tweets that people can’t stop referencing. Here’s one of them:
Keep it in mind while you read these comments about immigration policy from Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, which were reported by the State House News Service:
"I told President [Joe] Biden that he needed to act on the border and shut it down two years ago, three years ago now. I think that some of what Donald Trump has done on the border makes a lot of sense, right? And the tightening there," Healey told reporters following an unrelated event [on May 20].
"I won't get into specifics. But the general move and recognition that there needed to be more control brought to the border is absolutely correct. And certain things have been done that make a lot of sense," Healey continued.
Healey’s words raise a lot of questions. What exactly did she mean when she told former President Biden “to act on the border and shut it down”? Was she suggesting that the US should prohibit all migration into the country? Because it’s not clear what else that would mean, and it’s the sort of idea one associates with far-right racist cranks, not Democratic governors of solidly blue states.
And which of Trump’s border policies does the governor believe “make a lot of sense”? She said she wouldn’t “get into specifics,” but inquiring minds want to know! I asked Healey’s spokesperson to clarify her comments, but I did not receive a response.
I posted Healey’s remarks on Bluesky, and many people shared their thoughts. Most were just plain angry at the governor. But one person wrote, “The cardinal sin of democrats is feeling like they have to complement the despot before they criticize him.” Others said that Healey had made a “right turn” or was pivoting in preparation for a possible future presidential bid. Ironically, I saw even more of this sentiment on X the Everything App, where members of the frothing-at-the-mouth-racist Blue Checkmark brigade were convinced that Healey was being insincere and only praising Trump to play politics.
But that’s not what’s going on here. A recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey found that less than half of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policies. The survey found that only about four out of 10 independents and about two out of 10 Democrats support the policies. These are the people that Healey, a Democrat, should be appealing to if she wants to win another election.
If we’re thinking purely in terms of the horse race, it does not make strategic sense to concede an issue to your opponent if their policies are wildly unpopular with your base and relatively unpopular with independents. You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Trump for his immigration crackdown. And yet here we find ourselves.
To understand why Healey is praising Trump, you need to understand that she is not a liberal or progressive—she is a cop. Before being elected governor, she was the state’s attorney general, which makes her a prosecutor, which makes her a cop. As attorney general, Healey constantly defended harmful and regressive policies like cannabis criminalization. She advocated for loosening our state wiretapping law to give police expansive surveillance powers. And she pushed the state legislature to not prohibit police from conducting violent “no-knock” raids at homes with elderly people and children. Her ideology is cop.
It’s this cop worldview that explains what’s really going on: Healey is praising Trump’s border policies because she genuinely agrees with him. Healey views migrants as a burden that must be managed with the violence of the state, not as potential community members who will uplift us if we uplift them. Healey isn’t under pressure from her constituents to say she wished Biden shut down the border or that Trump actually has some pretty good points about keeping migrants out of the country if you think about it. This is not a trick. This is what Healey really believes.
If you want a leader who will fight for the causes you support, you need someone who shares your values. When someone shares your values, they won’t agree with you on everything—no one will—but they are persuadable. They might change their approach if you and enough like-minded others demand it. But if someone doesn’t share your values, they don’t care what you think and you’ll have a much harder time influencing them.
If you are someone who believes migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and welcomed into our communities, Healey does not share your values. She is trying to tell you that, and you should take her seriously.
P.S.: Every Memorial Day, I share this documentary about Denis Reynoso.
He survived the Iraq War only to be killed by cops back home in Lynn, Massachusetts while experiencing a mental-health crisis. Former Governor Deval Patrick literally gave medals to the cops for killing him.
Please watch it here:
Andrew Quemere is an investigative journalist from Massachusetts and the author of The Mass Dump newsletter. He writes about wrongful convictions, police misconduct, and government transparency.
Check out this great piece of reporting by Quemere for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and The Appeal.
ANDREW QUEMERE
More from him in Hell World:
Luke O’Neil
Luke O’Neil
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Luke's Movie Corner!
A very beautiful setting and the main girl was lovely. I like how they let the place and people be Canadian too. But on the downside I guess they only had Aubrey Plaza on location for like one day? Got a couple of tears out of me either way. ⭐⭐ 1/2
Alright let's leave with some good news for a change.
🚨 NEW WEDNESDAY 🚨