The president gets to harm as many people as he wants defying whatever laws he pleases and our job is to be nice to him and make sure everyone agrees that he's cool. I'm not sure what you people don't understand about that. It's called democracy and we invented it here in America.

Today we have another great one from Corey Atad on the uniquely American carnage of the films of Jeremy Saulnier. Saulnier's Blue Ruin and Green Room are two of my absolute favorite films of the 2010s (although I didn't quite love the recent Emmy-winning Rebel Ridge as much as everyone else seemed to. I need my stupid vengeful catharsis baby!)

Paid subscribers can read it here or down below.

Jeremy Saulnier’s American Carnage

Corey Atad on Blue Ruin, Green Room, Rebel Ridge and American violence

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

What Saulnier sees in his vision of America—settings ranging from Delaware, to the Pacific Northwest, to Alaska, and down to small-town Louisiana—is the perpetual carnage baked into the country’s spirit. The idea of America as uniquely violent is a fiction those who’ve never been anywhere else like to tell themselves, but Saulnier sees a different truth about his country. It’s not the violence, but the blood on the soil, as it were. A land of violent conquest, its spirit irrevocably marred by the seepage from battered bodies, where dreams of civilization, democracy, and liberalism bump against the bloodshed that birthed those ideas. Saulnier’s America is an endless Wild West, the bloody mess at the edges of society, where rules of order break down and systemic failures reveal the limits of the social contract.

Either way it's always Nazi punks fuck off.

A very generous reader named Tim Thraves has donated some subscriptions for people who want one and cannot afford it so let me know if that is you and I'll hook it up.

Also today Eliza Dewey reports on the case of a terminally ill man imprisoned for life for murder in Massachusetts and his attempts to be medically paroled. Read that one here.

Parole Board Questions Dying Prisoner On 30-Year-Old Murder, Not His Health

For James Ware, an extremely ill Department of Correction prisoner, a final chance at release after medical parole denial By Eliza Dewey When the Massachusetts Department of Correction denied James Ware’s petition for medical parole in May, the commissioner who oversaw the proceeding acknowledged that the 52-year-old prisoner would

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

I can't really bring myself to watch any of these late night guys so I'm not sure if they "met the moment" or not last night regarding Jimmy Kimmel's show being canceled at the whim of the president. An honest to god instance of real deal government censorship I probably don't need to tell you.

I'm definitely not going to listen to this either but it is a pretty perfect encapsulation of How Things Are Now.

Marc Maron's perspective was pretty good I thought. Damon Lindelof put his money where his mouth is saying he won't work with Disney until Kimmel is reinstated. (Watch The Leftovers if you haven't by the way. My word.)

The canceling of Kimmel's show is indeed a Very Ominous Thing but it is of course not the first attack on the first amendment we've seen in the past couple years. So many people including the last president and the vast majority of elected Democrats and almost all of the so-called liberal media helped to bring us to this point. Equating any criticism of Israel's ongoing genocide with terrorism. Beating and arresting people for speech. Kicking students out of school. Getting people fired from their jobs. Intimidating people into silence.

We've long since tossed our country's bedrock principles about speech into the shitter so Israel could go on killing. Which they continue to do.

I've said this many times but it was so fucking blatantly obvious from the moment people started talking about "free speech" again a few years ago that it meant right wing political speech and not left wing. No one but the most craven career driven centrist media moron ever thought otherwise for a single second.

And yet it does not matter that they are hypocrites. The hypocrisy is a fun little part of it for them. Look at what we can do lol.

You will never win a debate against them with logic. You will never appeal to their empathy. It is about power. You will take what they give you until you don't. Until we don't.

Please read this stunning piece by Ismail Ibrahim about his time working as a fact-checker at a certain famous magazine (The New Yorker obviously). It's a goddamn horror movie script. It will be familiar to anyone on the left trying to navigate the centrist American legacy media albeit made all the more difficult when your bosses and colleagues all assume "your people" are by default murderous barbarians.

House Arab

I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues.

BidounIsmail Ibrahim

The editor-in-chief came by my desk. He was, my co-workers and bosses always said, a good guy. He really cares about us. They called him Dad. Everyone knew he could make their careers or blacklist them, and they pined for his approval. When he laid people off, he wanted the rest of us to know that it was a very difficult thing for him to do. He said fuck and shit a lot, remembered his employees’ children’s names, and drank cheap Prosecco with us when there was an award or promotion to celebrate. I was certain that he appeared in the dreams of every employee fiscal-quarterly. He told me, once, that he regretted his support for the Iraq war terribly, that it was the biggest mistake of his career. He’d been swept up — you must understand, he said, like I already understood — by the mood of the times.

...

The thought occurred from nowhere, like the urge to jump whenever I’m on a balcony: I could quit. At any time, I could just leave. I knew that if I remained on this path — sequencing, down to the last detail, the annihilation of a people, without working to stop it — then facts would become worthless to me. I knew that someday, years or perhaps decades down the line, when half of Gaza was still rubble and the other half Israeli skyscrapers, the magazine would offer a mea culpa. Maybe someone involved would end up considering it the biggest mistake of their career.

Anyway it turns out it's a lot easier to turn it all into state media when there are like 5 companies instead of 5,000 as there used to be.

With that in mind it would be great if people supported independent reporting and unabashedly left wing writing with their money. Always but especially right now. It doesn't have to be my thing but it has to be someone's at least.

Did you read the most recent Hell World from Chicago where people continue to be disappeared and protestors continue to be brutalized by government thugs?

They’re kidnapping people off the street cartel-style

I’ve become accustomed to being lied to every day by now. About Israel and immigrants and trans people to name but a few. But there has been a superlative concentration of lies this past week. A novel density of lying. Something that feels massive. And not just from the people

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Here's Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh being thrown to the ground like a rag doll by one of these pigs this morning. It's not the first video I've seen of her being handled like this either.

Good for her and all the people putting their bodies on the line. Here are some other reporters out there this week that you can follow for updates including Sean Beckner-Carmitchel who wrote for Hell World about police violence against protestors in Los Angeles a couple months ago.

It is happening here

Three days of escalation by the feds in Los Angeles

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Regarding the matter of equating speech with "terrorism" and Trump's recent announcement that he will designate "antifa" as a "major terrorist organization" – which he also promised to do in 2020 – I thought back to this great piece by Jake Romm I ran one year ago this week right after Israel's so-called pager attack (actual terrorism by the way) on Lebanon.

No Trump cannot legally do this and there is no such group as antifa anyway but,

Your death will serve as its own justification

Here’s a new poem. It appears in my book We Had It Coming out very soon. This is my blood I marvel at the design of our weapons. So sophisticated they can transform any man woman or child they pummel into a terrorist. Writing in their flight between launch and

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

All of what Romm writes about Israel is the blueprint for how immigrants and trans people and indeed any kind of leftwing protestor has been and will continue to be treated in this country.

"To have been harmed by the pager attack means that one is a terrorist, because the attack was directed against terrorists. This is the logic of genocide: we have marked all terrorists for death, a status only we can impose or remove, and thus your death will always serve as its own justification."

As Said correctly points out, “terrorist” comes to mean groups of people who, like animals (recall Yoav Gallant saying “we are fighting human animals”), exist outside the law, and are thus afforded no protection, even though their supposed violation of the law is, as discussed above, one of the things that allegedly constitutes the status in the first place. And, like the animal, the "terrorist" is also exempted from a number of moral prohibitions—namely, the prohibition against murder. The word, Said suggests, acts as a moral short circuit which enables us to treat those who we have designated terrorists, literally, like animals: beings which are incapable of political-goal oriented activity, who are driven by irrational hatreds and with whom rational communication is not possible and who, if they pose a danger, must be eradicated.

The hollowness and malleability of the term means that it can be applied to groups regardless of their actual conduct and regardless of their actual ideology. It admits only a circular definition (not too dissimilar from the definition advanced by the Israeli Counter Terrorism Law) that a terrorist is someone who carries out terrorist acts, and a terrorist act is violence carried out by a terrorist. Conversely, if someone is killed, it is because they are a terrorist, because to be a terrorist means to be killable. 

This circularity of the definition allows the designation to justify violence against entire populations both ex-ante and ex-post. Hamas and all of its supporters and members—military and government—have been deemed to be terrorists, and these “terrorists” control Gaza. Thus the bombing of the Gaza Strip can be, at any time, permitted. (Indeed Israel engaged in seven major military operations in Gaza since Hamas’s election in 2006.) Gaza, however, is populated primarily by ordinary civilians as well. But the circularity of “terrorist” occludes this fact: once there exists a category of persons upon whom one can inflict violence by virtue of their status rather than their actions, violence becomes constitutive of the status itself.

Come hang out in New York City on November 12 to see me and a great lineup of pals read for my book launch party (RSVP here please). There will also be one in Cambridge on November 8 I believe at The Sinclair and maybe one in Philly or D.C. if all goes well.

Thanks to Literary Hub for the nice mention of the book the other day.

Instead of getting stuck in the short video hell of TikTok, read some very short fiction, like Luke O’Neil’s collection We Had It Coming. This one’s out soon, and it’s excellent. Most of these stories are a page or two, but O’Neil packs a lot into a little space. The stories are hilarious, insightful, devastating—there’s something for every reader who is stuck in the spin cycle of modern life. Wouldn’t expect anything less from the writer behind Welcome to Hell World.

Here's one from the book that I may or may not have shared in here before. It goes a long way toward explaining what I mean in the title. I think.

And here's a nice piece on Hell and Hell World by Geoff Dutton in his fine newsletter.

Everyone knows these words. Most of us learned them by first grade as the Golden Rule. Yet, they’re so hard to live by because others, especially those with power over us set a bad example by disregarding them. Or they think their selfish acts have no impact on others. Afraid of losing out, they invert the rule to “Do unto others before they do it unto you.”

Maybe it’s because they believe they’re in a zero-sum game of competition for scarce resources, in which one person’s gain is another’s loss. They forget that we need one another and kindness is its own reward.

NEW WEDNESDAY ALBUM ALERT

Bleeds, by Wednesday

12 track album

WednesdayWednesday

Jeremy Saulnier’s American Carnage

by Corey Atad

A man has just been shot in the head. From a good distance by some kind of sniper rifle. A stunned Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) struggles to collect himself. Despite having already killed a man with a knife in bloody, intimate fashion, Dwight can’t quite comprehend the nature of what he’s just witnessed, though it spared him his life. “That’s his head,” he says in his state of shock, to which his saviour, the sniper, responds in a casual but grave tone, “That’s what bullets do.” Collecting the body, Dwight continues in a daze. What to do with the other parts of the man’s head? The violence he’s unleashed has upended any theoretical notions of vengeance that have lived in his mind and his heart for decades. What he’s left with is brain matter and bits of skull strewn across the grass, as though seeding the landscape, and a dawning realization that the sowing is far from over.

2013’s Blue Ruin was writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s breakout feature, though not his first. He and Blair had come up together, making movies as kids, and eventually getting their shit together enough to make the 2007 horror comedy Murder Party. Shot on the pretty crappy digital video of the era, the film is about a guy kidnapped by a group of art school freaks on Halloween, who are making a project out of torturing and killing someone for the sake of a grant application. Its satire is broad, its commentary facile, and it eventually wears out its running time, but its violence is at first genuinely startling before taking a turn for the gorily goofy.