As I type this, a lawsuit is pending over whether or not the Trump administration can deploy federalized National Guard soldiers into Chicago. The lawsuit filed by Illinois comes after a whirlwind weekend where a federal judge blocked the deployment of federalized Oregon National Guard troops to Portland, Donald Trump tried to send previously federalized California National Guard soldiers to the city, the same judge blocked that, Trump ordered the Illinois National Guard federalized and tried to send the Texas National Guard to Chicago and Portland. All the while, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security have been openly brutalizing people in those cities and around the country.
It’s hard not to check the news and see footage of people being violently attacked. Groups that looked like the most well-equipped paramilitaries on Earth maraud through cities and towns. While protesters are smeared as paid agents or some vast terror group, you’ll also see footage and photos of people helping one another. In Chicago, people have stepped in to help prevent others from being grabbed off the street for instance. And you’ll also find moments of defiant bravery, like the story of Curtis Evans.
You’ve seen him. Stacey Wescott with the Chicago Tribune took a now-viral photo of Evans, a 65-year-old Marine veteran, holding an American flag and engulfed in tear gas at the Broadview ICE facility. I spoke with Evans for my job at Task & Purpose. He is a low-key guy who speaks methodically and has a fun sense of humor. He also spoke with clear morals. If you want to know the story behind the man in the photo, and what he thinks of tear gas (he’s been tear gassed a few times before this), check it out.
On the other side of the world, at the same time as these attacks expanded, the people in Nepal rose up against corruption and inequality. The protests, largely driven by the country’s youth, erupted into a revolution early in September after security forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing several. Protesters stormed the parliament grounds, burned the seat of government and the prime minister fled. In the middle of all of it was a British travel YouTuber, Harry Jackson. He was on a massive, continent-spanning trip on his moped, filming it all and arrived in Kathmandu oblivious to growing tensions. His videos, on his channel @wehatethecold, were some of the most intense and close-up scenes of the protests, and one of the ways much of the world, myself included, saw what was happening. I had a chance to speak with him in late September, about what that was like, if he considered what he had done journalism and what the protests meant. It was published in Wired, my first piece for an outlet I greatly admire.
Wescott’s photo of Evans, and Jackson’s footage in Kathmandu are both striking visuals capturing people standing up bravely in the face of violence by the state. They also are ways many people outside of the actions saw the protests.
These two articles both started out as pieces I was working on to truly relaunch the newsletter with. Both are about protests and how the wider world sees them in action. Both ended up going to other outlets — one because it ended up fitting the focus of where I work, the other because I saw a chance to sell an article; I’m a freelancer, cash rules everything around me.
But I’m sharing them here because they show two sides of ongoing worldwide protest movements. News is breaking and I have spent much of the weekend trying to keep up and report on the deployments. As Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket said, there is simply too much shit. So consider this post a kind of grab bag of news, writings and quick thoughts on some of the rather strange and worrying developments from the last week or so.
So with two very real instances of bravery and political protest in the face of violence and repression, let’s turn to something weird. Medbeds!
Late in September Trump posted a clearly AI video of the Trump administration touting a “historic new health care system.” People would get “medbed cards,” giving them access to “medbeds,” a chamber allegedly capable of healing all injury and disease. Trump deleted it hours later but it was the President of the United States sharing a far-right, Qanon-adjacent conspiracy theory. And one that is just weird.
The concept isn’t new; fans of science fiction have seen versions appear in literature, in the Bacta tanks in Star Wars and the sarcophagi in the Stargate franchise. It’s a great sci-fi concept. Turns out it’s also a prominent right-wing obsession.
Even though I was familiar with the concept and have been online enough to be familiar with various forms of usually right-wing conspiracies or at the very least anti-”elite” conspiracies, this one surprised me. It shouldn’t have, but it did, in part because it’s so clearly out of sci-fi. In fact, the way Trump and others seem to frame it, it feels very similar to the Med-Bay seen in Neil Blomkamp’s 2013 action thriller Elysium. IT sounded like these conspiracy nuts were just doing bad summaries of Elysium. Surely people aren’t taking a Matt Damon-starring future-set film as reality. Right?
That movie, set in the near future, sees the wealthy and powerful living in the titular space colony, with access to Med-Bays to prolong their lives, while the have nots live in squalor on Earth. Damon plays one of those guys, a former criminal who gets a deadly dose of irradiation. He joins a part heist-part revolutionary scheme, in the hopes he can get access to a Med-Bay to save his life.
Blomkamp’s film feels like a mirror image to the right’s paranoia. The same technology exists, That film was heavily flawed, with a script that probably needed a few more passes to flesh things out, but it was tapped into very real issues of inequality. And despite its plot weaknesses, much of the movie has aged well (the action scenes are also fantastic). It’s also a left-wing movie, highly critical of the hoarding of resources and poor treatment of labor and immigrants.
In her fantastic book Doppelganger (I cannot recommend it enough, it is the best book on the socio-political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of mirror reality that has festered and grown out of it) Naomi Klein touched on the mindsets of people who believe, surely, that the elites are hiding not just just the truth but secret tools and technologies. In the mirror version of Elysium, espoused by the medbed conspiracists, those “elites” (and you can guess what other conspiracies get coupled in with this) have this technology and are keeping it just out of reach. And apparently all that has to be done to access them is the president saying sure, go ahead.
Of course, that is the inherent contradiction of the idiotic ideology known as fascism. The enemy is all powerful, but can be defeated. And the fascists are strong, but their enemy always eludes them to be a constant looming specter. The idea of an all-healing device, just out of reach, fits that. This is America, healthcare and the health insurance system are a mess. Hospitals and clinics are shuttering, premiums are at constant risk of rising and actually being able to book an appointment with your primary care physician — not pull up to urgent care or the ER — is a Herculean labor. No wonder people fantasize about miracle beds. But of course, sci-fi ideas aren’t a solution to systemic issues. Even in Elysium the bigger issue was class war and inequality, not getting Matt Damon to space.
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And last, the journalist and writer Kaleb Horton died last month. Kaleb was, simply, an amazing writer.
Better writers who also knew Kaleb better than me have already written eulogies and tributes to him. They’re good, you should read them. Read Kaleb’s work and read how he impacted others. This is a late tribute, nothing revolutionary, but he was a good writer and by all accounts and from my own interactions with him, a good person. He deserves to be remembered well. Kaleb’s writings varied in topic — he would write about David Lynch one day and then do a deep dive into George Harrison’s love of Formula 1 another — but much of his work was about California. The parts of California that didn’t get as much love. Inland deserts, Valley neighborhoods, Bakersfield. He documented the state and loved it. He had struggled for work. The fact that he was not constantly being commissioned by the best magazines in the country is an indictment of the news media.
We were friendly but not friends. I greatly admired his work, and every new piece he released was thrilling. We shared a love for the band X, the seminal Los Angeles punk group. We often just missed each other — when David Lynch died and people turned the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank into an impromptu memorial this January, we both went there. I arrived just after he left, sad I had been too late to say hello and talk in person about Lynch and his work. I wish I had been there sooner, to get coffee and watch the vigil grow.
I’ll end this with an excerpt from something Kaleb wrote in February. I’m not alone in this, it’s a quote that’s taken off since he died. But it’s a good message. The entire entry is worth your time, but if nothing else, read this. RIP Kaleb Horton.
“I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I’ll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it’s actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called “wildly miscalculated” and you haven’t seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.
You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.”
More dispatches from the panic beat to come.