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Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld

In the video, the penguin waddles across a frozen expanse. He is heading away from his colony, into Antarctica’s vast interior, alone. Nothing can stop his solitary march: even if he were caught and returned to the colony, we learn from the sandpapery, Teutonic voice of Werner Herzog, he would set right back out toward the mountains. “But why?” Herzog asks. The video’s caption answers: “Americans have always known ‘why.’” The organ music swells, fugue-like, and suddenly here is Donald Trump, smirking and holding up an executive order, or perhaps a bill. Dissolve again, into some scenes from the new world this document seems to have conjured into being. A man in a vest marked POLICE scans a Southwestern landscape with binoculars, while a blurry corrugated-metal structure — a wall, or the promise of one? — looms just out of focus. Supercops in full military gear pose in front of Humvees; Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (not yet fired) lowers her face in contemplation, almost melancholic in the flashing police lights, as agents carry out what looks like a home raid in the background. “God bless ICE,” a homemade sign reads. Prison gates open to swallow up a crowd; assault vehicles mobilize; people are hauled away; a politician pumps his fist. In the final frames, the logo of the Department of Homeland Security appears, superimposed over a clip of a lone trooper jumping from a great height. His parachute has not yet deployed, and he is free-falling into the void.

The video, which was posted to official DHS social media accounts late this January, got mixed reactions. Many commenters were fired up: “God bless ICE ❤️🔥,” one wrote. “Manifest Destiny,” wrote another. A third: “Unfathomably based.” The penguin, it seemed, was supposed to be an icon of American individualism. He is seen carving his own path, striking out into the wilderness that both terrified and beckoned to the Puritans. “It’s a metaphor for going your own way & exploring and doing things outside of the pact [sic],” one commenter helpfully explained. Around the time the first video appeared, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s accounts shared what appeared to be an A.I.-generated video of the secretary and the penguin headed for a range of snowy mountains, beneath the text: “The mainstream made us sick. Choose the healthier path.” The White House chimed in with its own riff: an image of Trump and the penguin, hand in flipper, the Greenland flag waving in the distance.

Before the DHS posted its video, according to Fox News, right-wing TikTokers had already seized on the penguin, editing the original clip from Herzog’s 2007 documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, to include “images of Western heroes: Joan of Arc, Alexander the Great, Aragorn, Jesus Christ, King Baldwin IV, and Luke Skywalker.” These figures did not just go their own way; they also, at least within the memes’ logic, rallied the people against the enemies of faith and country. The penguin answers the call, subordinates himself to the higher cause. One of the most-liked comments on the DHS’s Instagram post tellingly features a GIF of an endless army of cute cartoon penguins marching storm-trooper-like, brandishing American flags.

Outside the hothouse atmosphere of the extremely online right, many were puzzled by the DHS post. Did the staffers who run the government’s content mill somehow miss the setup for the penguin clip — in which Herzog poses the question, “Is there such thing as insanity among penguins?” — or the commentary that immediately follows it, in which he says that rogue penguins are “heading toward certain death”? Even without this context, how could anyone take a “nihilist penguin,” as the clip’s widely memed subject had already come to be known, as a symbol of the American frontier spirit? How could this figure embody both that rugged individualism and the self-sacrifice of a totally mobilized society? Is it cucked and soy to point out that Greenland and Antarctica are on opposite sides of the globe? Opposites converge: insanity and reason, self-actualization and self-annihilation, Jedi and Stormtrooper, bootstraps and jackboots, North Pole and South.

 

For the past year and a half, it has been someone’s job to generate and post content like this on behalf of the government. We have seen clips of deportations set to pop music soundtracks. These videos often contain jokes or puns or rhymes, through which some aspect of the soundtrack takes on new meaning when paired with footage of the state bringing down its might on non-white people: the Pokémon theme song playing as agents break into homes and haul people out; Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno,” with its mention of “freaky positions,” over shots of officers cuffing and manhandling people. We have seen supercuts of drones, boats, and other vehicles; these clips are more like car commercials, complete with active-rock guitar riffs. A more recent innovation has been silent, night-vision footage of soldiers commandeering oil tankers; these posts feel more like leaks, the kind of secret material previous administrations may not have wanted the public to see, and certainly did not want to distribute themselves. The “Macarena” pops up often — another unofficial anthem for a president who loves a line dance. Only when something particularly egregious happens, as with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, is the carnival of memes interrupted for a dull press conference.

If the first Trump administration was a regime of words — the years of presidential tweets and unfiltered musings; of covfefe, grab ’em by the pussy, not sending their best — the second is a regime of images. Of course there were totemic visuals in those earlier years: tiki-torch-wielding neo-Nazis, gas-masked cops streaming out of burning precincts, face-painted hordes descending on the Capitol. (Crowds and fire were notable motifs.) But for the most part, the novelty of the first administration’s political style lay in its desublimation of speech. How could he say that, liberals were always asking. Today’s unofficial MAGA slogan, in contrast, is You can just do things — that is, the government can flood the streets with murderous federal cops, or start a war with Iran without waiting for Congressional approval, let alone making any real effort to manufacture the public’s consent. Funnily enough, this change mirrors a reverse development, a shift from an administration of professional doers to one of professional talkers: from career bureaucrats like Steven Mnuchin and Jim Mattis to the posse of podcasters, news anchors, and health influencers who stalk the halls of government today.

We hardly need a decoder ring to see the images produced by this cadre as crude, jingoistic, and bloodthirsty. The images wear their malice openly, with shit-eating grins. One recent video shared to the White House’s X account — in which a clip of SpongeBob asking, “Wanna see me do it again?” is followed by night-vision footage of a drone strike, apparently on Iran — seems to respond tauntingly to Iranian cleric Shahab Moradi’s 2020 statement that SpongeBob and Spider-Man are the closest things the U.S. has to national heroes. Everything is right there on the surface. Already in the first Trump administration, debunking the government’s false claims was a losing game. Today it is utterly nonsensical: the penguin image cannot be “brutally fact-checked,” as one news organization purported to do to the post; it is not a claim to be awarded “Pinocchios” or designated “Pants on Fire.” It is something altogether different.

What are these images if not false pictures of the world? One answer has been that they are enforcement tactics. Noem, the now-fired Secretary of Homeland Security tasked with overseeing the second Trump administration’s mass deportation program, brought the style of the right-wing internet to the DHS. Last year, she posed in a military-chic outfit, complete with a fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex, in front of a cell full of prisoners at CECOT, the now-infamous Salvadoran prison to which her department has been sending people more or less indiscriminately. She invited Chaya Raichik, of “Libs of TikTok” fame, to ride along with her and document ICE raids. She ran “Alligator Alcatraz,” a prison hastily conjured from the muck of the Everglades, which mostly seemed to function as a set for producing content, while detainees faced conditions that according to Amnesty International constitute torture — “the concentration camp reimagined as a hype house,” to use Ryan Broderick’s apt phrase. This flood of content served a strategic purpose. As Melissa Gira Grant wrote last year, circulating these images of cruelty allows the DHS to “terrorize many more thousands of people than they can deport.” The image is deputized, put to work.

But the administration and its images often work at cross-purposes. Noem, to the extent that she had creative control, couldn’t seem to stop inserting herself into the DHS’s content. This self-promotional frenzy culminated with a video depicting her in a cowboy hat, riding a horse through a stretch of big-sky country. “Why do I love these wide-open spaces?” she asks. “They remind me of why our forefathers came here. Not just for its beauty, but for the freedom only America provides. I’m Kristi Noem.” A choreography of promise and threat follows: stock footage of skyscrapers and rocket ships and wine bars for those who “come here the right way,” in Noem’s words; platoons of armored cops for those who do not.

This video, which was part of a broader $220 million ad campaign with vague goals, seems to have drawn the president’s ire and likely contributed to her eventual firing. In a March hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to address concerns about her leadership, Republicans like John Kennedy and Thom Tillis took Noem to task for her dizzying expenditures on ads in which she “featured prominently,” as well as for making decisions primarily “for the expedient [sic] of social media.” There was a general sense among Noem’s Republican critics that the map had overtaken the territory, that she had prioritized making content over doing her job. Even in an administration of grifters, each official has only so much latitude for their own hustle. Noem had perhaps taken too seriously her mandate as chief nativist influencer. She had girlbossed too close to the sun, waddled too far into the icy wilderness.

 

Another way to describe the problem the Republican senators had with Noem’s videos is that they were both not doing enough and saying too much, more than they intended to say. Which is to say, they seemed to have an unconscious. Watching the Cowboy Noem ad, which seems to have been made for TV by a different group than the one in charge of the DHS social media accounts, I was struck by how closely the first shot — the secretary on horseback, facing away from the camera, heading out into the wild interior — mirrors the Herzog clip. The lone figure hoofing it, flippering it, into a terra nullius. Headed for destruction, but not knowing or caring. The second-term content we have seen so far tends not to advance a coherent argument so much as establish a chain of vaguely suggestive equivalences. The penguin is the archetypal American frontiersman, is Trump, is the squadron of ICE troopers, is Aragorn and Luke Skywalker and Jesus, is Kristi Noem.

The associations also ramify outward, away from the references that the images’ creators intend. The penguin clip rhymes obliquely with another video that circulated during the Minneapolis protests, in which a Viking in what appears to be a bathtub equipped with skateboard wheels speeds down a snowy street, ICE agents in hot pursuit. This, of course, was an A.I.-generated video meant to mock the DHS operation in the Twin Cities. But there is a way in which the DHS’s own content anticipates and incorporates this humiliation. If the hero is the one who walks or runs away, who evades capture by the representatives of enforced homogeneity, surely the penguin is also, peripherally, a figure of the people pursued and victimized by ICE.

We have a name for the type of logic where multiple people and situations congeal into one figure, where opposites converge, where the unconscious bubbles up and we are confronted with desires we have not admitted to ourselves that we have. It is called dream logic. Often a group finds itself inhabiting the same dream, turning aimlessly down its blind alleys and submitting to its altered laws of physics. At the turn of the millennium, the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss argued that the project of the twentieth century had been “the construction of mass utopia,” of societies that would enable human flourishing on a mass scale. In both Soviet communism and Western liberalism, Buck-Morss wrote, this project produced “dreamworlds,” woozy and often confused clusters of hopes for a better future. When these better futures didn’t come to pass, or did but in distorted photographic negative, the result was catastrophe.

It perhaps goes without saying that the project of the twenty-first century so far has been the selling of mass utopia for scrap. American liberalism’s dreamworld has shriveled and collapsed: the horizon of its better future is interest-free loans for Pell Grant recipients starting small businesses in majority-minority neighborhoods, and unlimited support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. The new right-wing configuration that has taken shape in Trump’s second term is palpably casting about for its own horizon. “It makes America dream again,” said Charlie Kirk of Trump’s designs on Greenland, which the two men visited together shortly before Kirk’s death. Indeed, with a reality TV president heading up an administration of podcasters and Gen-Z memelords, it is clear that the construction of a new, right-wing dreamworld is a priority for the government. And yet without a clear vision of a better future, the dreams the propaganda machine is straining to produce feel especially murky and confused, less like oracular revelations than the convulsive firings of an addled collective mind in the grips of a terminal fever.

Today’s right-wing dreamworld is made from salvaged pieces of old, wrecked ones. One of these wrecked worlds is fascism. As Kate Wagner recently wrote, it is beside the point to argue over whether the political style of today’s American government “is” fascist: “Today there is not a ‘return’ to fascism so much as an integration of fascist tendencies and practices — the fetishization of youth and violence, annihilationism, policies of racialized extermination, etc.”

Some of these tendencies are incorporated smoothly into the present moment; others are like lumps of unmixed batter. Among the latter are the intentional white-nationalist dog whistles that pepper today’s government propaganda. The soundtrack in the DHS penguin clip is different from Herzog’s original one. It is an organ cover of the 1990s Eurodance song “L’Amour Toujours,” a piece of sentimental kitsch that in recent years has been repurposed by German far-right groups into a nativist anthem. Over the recording’s syrupy strings, members of AfD shouted a new refrain: “Ausländer raus, Ausländer raus, Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus” (“foreigners out, foreigners out, Germany for Germans, foreigners out”). When the initiated hear that crescendo and those stepwise chords in the organ cover featured in the penguin video, they know to substitute the unspoken words.

“L’Amour Toujours” is an especially esoteric in-joke for the truly far gone. Often the dog whistles are easier to hear. “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN,” promised an image posted to DHS social media accounts following the killing of Renee Good, above the URL for ICE’s jobs page. Beneath the text, a lone shadowed figure — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — travels a frozen expanse on horseback. He is headed for the mountains in the distance. Above the text, the sleek black V of a stealth aircraft cuts across the gray sky, pointed in the opposite direction. Here are the two faces of American empire, the cowboy and the TIE fighter. The message is clear enough. The fact that “we’ll have our home again” is a lyric from a song by the far-right band Pine Tree Riots (another choice line: “In our own towns, we’re foreigners now”) does not serve as a hidden meaning so much as a redundant layer beneath the image’s obvious surface. 

Other features of fascist aesthetics have been melted down, denatured, and transformed. Nothing demonstrates this process as well as an ICE recruitment image posted by DHS last summer. Under the caption “Which way, American man?” — a riff on William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man?, the 1978 doorstopping screed against “World Jewry” — a dismayed Uncle Sam finds himself at a crossroads. Signs bearing the labels CULTURAL DECLINE and INVASION point in one direction; HOMELAND and OPPORTUNITY lie in the opposite direction; SERVICE, in a third. Are SERVICE and OPPORTUNITY incompatible? If the INVASION is headed away from the HOMELAND, why does the HOMELAND need protecting? Where is Uncle Sam standing if not the HOMELAND? If he is undecided, what are we supposed to do about it? Isn’t Uncle Sam supposed to embody civic duty rather than stand in for the recruit? Isn’t the whole point that he isn’t just some guy? Dream logic: at the crossroads between mythic fascist notions of collective will and dully literal American individualism, today’s right-wing imagination chooses both. It is apparently the grand destiny of white America to hang out in a van and, in the words of another ICE recruitment image, “deport illegals with your absolute boys.”

 

What about the agents themselves? In the videos, they are everywhere and nowhere. We see their equipment, the text on their uniforms identifying them as POLICE, their hands cuffing suspects, occasionally a glimpse of a gaitered neck or a masked face. (If they were to appear in these propaganda videos as they usually do in the streets, wearing superhero T-shirts and Wranglers, presumably they would not be identifiable as heroes.) We are told that the anonymity is for their protection. This produces some curious effects. For one thing, the only distinct faces on the government propaganda feed are the brown faces of the captured “worst of the worst” and the white faces of DHS leadership. To show your face is either to take credit for a victory or to stand as an example, a head on a pike. But the crowd is not celebrated above the individual. So much of twentieth-century fascist aesthetics was about the coordinated pulse of the mass: crowds waving and saluting, marching in formation, individual bodies dissolving into one People, united in ecstatic submission to the leader. In today’s right-wing dreamworld, especially following the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, crowds are a threat. The masses that appear on the DHS feed are bad and lawless: protestors marching against ICE, putting their bodies between justice and its targets. Where are the People? They are at home, praying that the masked warriors will keep the hordes from breaking in.

The masked warriors want the public to stop antagonizing them, stop confronting them while they’re shopping, stop DMing their spouses things like “your husband, the ice man is a fuck and retribution will come your way eventually.” A screenshot of this message, apparently sent by a man in Massachusetts last year, was included in an official DHS press release that rounded up evidence of officers’ being “doxxed and threatened.” Another press release, written in the Trump-pastiche voice that echoes throughout so many of this administration’s official communications, decries the “lies being spread to demonize our brave ICE law enforcement who risk their lives to remove criminal illegal aliens.” One of the most telling videos on the DHS feed, posted jointly with the White House account, features a montage of protestors demonstrating against ICE, followed by a shot of JD Vance proclaiming his and Trump’s support for the agency. The sequence suggests that they may be the only two: twin penguins turning away from the brainwashed masses. This clip rhymes less with the administration’s triumphalist footage of kidnappings and more with the music videos for recent conservative protest songs, where the singer’s voice screams out, in the wilderness, at a world gone crazy. In a video for a 2021 solo song, Aaron Lewis, frontman of the hard rock band Staind, stands alone in front of a green screen as footage of Black Lives Matter protests rolls, juxtaposed with scenes of threatened small-town idyll. “Am I the only one not brainwashed?” he sings. And: “Am I the only one sittin’ here / Still holdin’ on, holdin’ back my tears / For the ones who paid with the lives they gave” — tears spilled for troops and cops, the fallen and the harassed.

One crying man against the world: this is a new type of hero for today’s maudlin right, with their increasingly sentimental death spectacles, from Charlie Kirk’s pyrotechnic memorial service to the White House’s ceremony for “Angel Family Day,” in honor of those with family members killed by undocumented immigrants. The forever wars introduced us to the figure of the operator, the technologically advanced supersoldier who works in the shadows, carrying out assassinations around the globe. Cinematic heroes like Iron Man of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Christopher Nolan’s Batman were avatars of this new kind of warrior. These figures, Richard Beck has argued, embodied a national fantasy that “the special ops soldier’s synthesis of training, human ingenuity, and cutting-edge technology would make the United States all but invulnerable in the fight against terrorism.” In the wake of the War on Terror, and all the wars following it, this sort of hero seems to have cracked up, gone rogue, gotten weepy. He is no dispassionate killing machine; he takes everything personally. He gets a psychosexual rush from violence, but what really gets him off is his own persecution, his own suffering. The war has come home, and he is a DHS agent.

We are just beginning to see this new type in film. The great hero of ICE cinema so far is Jim Caviezel’s character in 2023’s Sound of Freedom, a heavily fictionalized account of former DHS officer Tim Ballard’s apparent efforts to rescue children from a Colombian sex trafficking ring. The movie is less remarkable for its botched accent work and fanciful Rambo-esque climax — our hero poses as a doctor to infiltrate a FARC camp deep in the jungle, kills the group’s commander, and steals away in the night with the child that the jefe had been keeping as a sex slave — than it is for what could be called its erotics of crying. Caviezel in front of a computer, a single tear in his eye reflecting the glow from the screen, where what we presume to be footage of child exploitation is playing; police lights catching Caviezel’s misty eyes as he surveys the aftermath of a successful raid; Caviezel giving a weepy sermon about how “you can sell a five-year-old kid five to ten times a day, for ten years straight, and everyday, ordinary people, they don’t want to hear it.” The tears are visible proof of the burden he has assumed, caring about the children the world has abandoned. Caviezel is once again playing Jesus, as he did in 2004’s The Passion of the Christ. And as in Passion, his suffering and submission are made rapturous, ecstatic.

The real Tim Ballard briefly found himself a MAGA-sphere celebrity during the Biden presidency, especially in the wake of the film’s surprise success. Within right-wing circles, it became one’s patriotic duty to watch Sound of Freedom. Ted Cruz exhorted his followers to “GO SEE” it. Trump, the once and future president, hosted a private screening. The film’s distributor used an app called “Pay It Forward” to allow viewers to buy tickets on others’ behalf — a strategy that generated a lot of revenue but also reports of empty theaters. QAnon followers, encouraged by statements from true Q-believer Caviezel, latched onto the film, and it provided grist for right-wing conspiratorial thinking more broadly. A video posted to the “Senate Republicans” social media accounts seemed to draw inspiration from Sound of Freedom, accusing Joe Biden of creating, in his supposed reticence to enforce immigration law, “the largest child trafficking ring in U.S. history.” Meanwhile, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), the group Ballard founded after leaving the DHS, claimed to work around the world rescuing children and helping law enforcement arrest predators. In one case, donors could even watch the sting operations they had funded play out on live feeds. “With the help of OUR,” Meg Conley writes, “a rich person can become a vigilante hero for the day, their living room transformed into a personal situation room.” The raids were real, but they were also staged for consumption as spectacle, prefiguring the tactics of the Noem regime. In 2023, Ballard stepped down from OUR (now called OUR Rescue) amid several allegations of sexual misconduct from women who had worked for the organization.

The creepy side of the crying warrior was played for dark laughs last year in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Sean Penn’s character, Colonel Steven Lockjaw, is a border patrol officer pursuing a multiracial group of revolutionaries during the late aughts. He is merciless, but he is also sentimental. Penn plays Lockjaw as if he is constantly holding back tears, marshaling all his self-discipline to lock his passions inside. His clenched hobble, not altogether un-penguin-like, is one of the all-time great cinematic walks. He gets his kicks from torturing others, but even more so from being humiliated — in one scene, we see him rapt as Teyana Taylor’s character, the leader of the revolutionary cell, seemingly penetrates him with a pistol. Half a century ago, Susan Sontag pointed out the curious postwar association between fascist style and S&M. “Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience,” she wrote. “It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized.” Anderson shows us the backwash of this cabaret-fash aesthetics: the fascist warrior is not the sadist, but the masochist, the one whose subjection and debasement are made erotic. If he is crying, he is crying in ecstasy.

 

In the right-wing dreamworld, the ultimate form of sexy self-abasement is suicide. What the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land once called “the thirst for annihilation” runs throughout conservative culture. There are some overt expressions of this longing, such as the A.I. cultists who have enthusiastically taken up Land’s psychedelic edgelord writings, and who not only prophesy the techno-enslavement of humanity but also welcome it, indeed work to hasten it. “My prediction,” Land recently told the musician and occasional A.I. evangelist Grimes in a public conversation in San Francisco, “is that A.I. will persuade you that technology eating the universe is more beautiful” than human-made art. 

Less abstractly, there is also suicide on the human scale. In a perceptive recent essay on “suicide rightism,” Max Read enumerates a cast of suicides who have become unlikely heroes for the online right. There is Richard Russell, an airport ground crew worker who stole a plane and crashed it into Puget Sound. He became known in the digital MAGA-sphere as “Sky King,” a mythic champion of the downtrodden masses who dream of an escape from their everyday suffering and long to do one last barrel roll on their way out. And there is Marvin “Killdozer” Heemeyer, who in 2004 became so embroiled in a municipal zoning dispute that he destroyed a sizeable portion of a Colorado town with an armored bulldozer, then shot himself. He has been hailed online as a “true Patriot,” a “quiet man pushed to the edge,” and an embodiment of the all-American principle of “FAFO,” or “fuck around and find out.” This is to say nothing of perennial fascist favorites like the Japanese writer and right-wing militia leader Yukio Mishima, who committed seppuku after failing to overthrow the government.

Often, though, the thirst for annihilation bubbles up unexpectedly and unintentionally. At this year’s Turning Point USA Halftime Show, the conservative group’s counterprogrammed white alternative to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, country singer Lee Brice debuted a new song that began with these lines:

I just wanna catch my fish
Drive my truck
Drink my beer
Not wake up
To all this stuff I don’t wanna hear

Brice almost seemed to pause after singing “Not wake up,” before finishing out the line tremulously, as if on the verge of weeping. In that microscopic moment of hesitation, intentional or not, the void beckoned. And why not? When the enemy has breached the gates and usurped even the Super Bowl, wouldn’t it just be easier to catch your fish, drive your truck, and drink so much beer that you don’t wake up? “You can’t outrun the emptiness”: so speaks the Void, the villain in Thunderbolts, Marvel’s latest swing at reviving the old Avengers magic. The best path is the way of the martyr: martyred for protesting lost enjoyment, Christmas outlawed, burgers turned to woke lab-grown slop cooked in seed oil, a country somehow still controlled by a pro-pedophile, pro-immigration cabal, despite Donald Trump’s being president.

Then again, the full version of Brice’s line arguably gets closer to the truth of right-wing annihilationism. The oblivion Brice seeks, the oblivion the penguin seeks, is above all a form of shelter from history. The penguin traverses the same snowscape, perhaps, that appears in a photo of a playground posted by an X account called “Daily Nostalgia,” featuring the caption: “POV: it’s the last day at school before winter break in the early 2000s.” Quoting this post, another user chimed in with the most brutally distilled expression of the annihilationist position: “I literally don’t give a single shit about anything other than ensuring our country returns to this. The majority of the world can burn for all I care, as long as I get my homeland back.” (As of this writing, this user’s account no longer exists.)

Here is the wounded child at the center of the right-wing dreamworld. In the same way that the physical sensations we experience in the sleeping body are registered obliquely in our dreams, the right-wing imagination senses that history is coming for our treats: our conveniences and little indulgences. It senses, in other words, that the diminished horizon of its own political vision is entertainment, enjoyment, and consumption, insulated from the surplus populations that the American empire has produced around the world. And if Americans can’t have our treats, nobody can. As Nikhil Pal Singh writes of the second Trump administration’s spasmodic foreign policy strategy, “Maybe this is what happens when the actual, functioning empire enters its terminal, attritional phase: construction, growth and visions of progress are replaced by pyrotechnic convulsions.” The dreamworld summons hellfire out of desperation and spite.

It will make the world burn, and there will be no more enemies left alive, and there will always be a dusting of snow on the jungle gym and cups of hot cocoa waiting, and it will be recess. Frank Sinatra will be singing: “From now on, our troubles will be out of sight.” And they will be, because we won’t be able to see anything through the smoke.

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The Blonde

La Rubia lives here now. Even if we don’t talk about the events that led her to this place, she is here. Her back is straight and her chin points slightly forward. She is running her small finger over Tali’s old bookshelf. War: she reads one Céline title aloud. Next to it: War and War. La Rubia’s body is so unnervingly small that I can imagine it slipping between the cracks of the hardwood floor. She tilts back and forth, exaggerating her own delicacy.

“Have you read any of these?” she asks softly, pointing at the books. 

“On the shelf of horrors?” I respond. 

“What do you mean?” 

“You know,” I say. “They’re all about conflict and death. They’re just pornographies of sadness.” 

She doesn’t respond, and I fill in the silence. 

“It’s pseudo-modernist garbage for people dazzled by complicated syntax.” Tali liked that, though, I think to myself. She felt it exonerated her. 

About six months ago, La Rubia moved here from one of those states that Tali and I had only heard about in movies. She had met Tali online and inserted herself into our lives with the ease of a tick. La Rubia was an only child, had no friends in the city, and possessed a seemingly unending amount of money that she never cared to explain. Her real name, Rue, sounded impossibly American, and was hard for me to pronounce. I started calling her La Rubia, the blonde, because she was so uncannily different from us, with her straight, golden hair. In turn, perhaps as revenge, she pronounced my name in the Anglo fashion: Julian, like Casablancas or Assange, instead of Julián. 

Tali was like the oldest sister in our sinister triangle, a dynamic that was incestuous yet unsexed. She had left Tel Aviv for New York seven years ago, a refusenik with no money and scant charm. She managed to find work, avoiding the need for a green card thanks to a series of academic loopholes she’d identified by poring over immigration law like it was the Talmud. Before she had even written her first novel, she fell in love with a playwright named Luke. She was impressed, I think, by his preternatural capacity to put pen to paper, and to publish. They had found a rent-controlled apartment on Hester Street which, in her telling, had made her happy for the first five years of their relationship. Back then, Tali claimed to be in love, but her fiction doled out hints of a tortured private life slowly, as though by medicine dropper — cheating boyfriends, girlfriends driven mad. It always seemed to me like she and Luke took turns hurting each other as if it were an Olympic sport. I often wondered if they were doing it deliberately, for material, in order to write. 

Tali and I first met at a party for a magazine that had rejected two of my short stories. I told her this, half-drunk, and she laughed.

“You should find a way to be reborn as a well-connected American,” she said. “Maybe then they’ll pay attention.” 

We were both foreigners in a hostile city, working in everyone else’s mother tongue. Tali wrote in Hebrew and then self-translated. I spoke Spanish with a chilango accent but found myself at home in the English language. We both romanticized the Jewish-American literary tradition — all those assimilated men who tried to write themselves into the nation. We saw ourselves in them, except I was trying to flee my family’s wealth — the chauffeurs and servants in Mexico City’s glittering suburbs — and Tali was trying to pretend she’d been born anywhere but there. 

Our bond solidified when she became single again. Women do this all the time: they break up, realize they have no real friends left, and instead of dating again, they adopt men who are already infatuated with them. I belonged to the friendzoned army that helped Tali paper over her loneliness. When she and Luke called it quits, she told me her place was too big for one person and asked if I wanted to move in. We split the railroad apartment in two unequal parts. In those first few months of cohabitation, our relationship became symbiotic: I edited her pieces, correcting adverbs and commas and softening the needlessly scandalous politics of her characters. She introduced me to her friends, kept me company when dates ghosted me, and let me use her big, stately desk when she was out. We never slept together, although I think Tali knew I wanted to.

Tali often fancied her apartment an urban kibbutz, where everyone was welcome to stay over if they earned their keep with charm, drugs, or humor. She imagined herself as some cross between Edie Sedgwick and Gertrude Stein. But our visitors never lingered, returning to their home countries or moving to cheaper cities. When La Rubia came to town, late in the spring, Tali rejoiced in playing host every time she dropped by. They had found each other on a podcast’s subreddit, where they traded one-liners and ironic stances on the state of the world. Tali enjoyed that corner of the web’s disdain for American Democrats, while I suspect that La Rubia was attracted to its acceptance of body fascism and its authoritarian sense of cool. Online, La Rubia had said she wanted to move to New York to be closer to the internet, and Tali had encouraged her to come. I think she saw in La Rubia a younger version of herself. 

Tali was almost thirty, and La Rubia twenty-one. They both had a past with anorexia, a disease that they felt connected them permanently. Tali, though ostensibly recovered, still obsessed over her body during hours spent at a gym on Orchard Street. La Rubia had never really overcome her admiration for fasting; hunger and clonazepam created a thin, glittery layer over her eyes, and she always looked as if she were about to cry. 

I often wondered if Tali envied this emptiness in her. If she craved La Rubia’s hunger the way La Rubia craved Tali, or the softer ways in which I craved La Rubia, too — although I knew her to be off-limits, precluded by Tali’s tacit competition with anyone who was even remotely younger, or more attractive, than her. 

After she arrived, La Rubia found a sublet in Gowanus, but she seemed unhappy to be so far from Manhattan. Every day, she would take the F train and advance into our apartment, planting her flags like it was a contested territory. La Rubia idolized Tali, and often ogled her clothes and books, studied the way she chewed her food and the gestures she made while she talked. La Rubia longed to be a writer too, and often harassed us with ideas for essays about the deep web and the New York Experimental Ballet. Her opening paragraphs were always brilliant, but the pieces never materialized. La Rubia lacked diligence. 

During La Rubia’s visits early that year, she and Tali replaced their Reddit exchanges with long discussions about Tali’s readings, her bookshelf providing a series of topics about the titles La Rubia hadn’t read. The two became very close in a way I never understood, and often closed the door to Tali’s room and left me outside, like an idiot, imagining what they were doing.

At some point, Tali gave La Rubia a key without asking me, and she started coming and going with no warning. The first time La Rubia dropped by unannounced it was almost summer. I had dozed off reading while Tali cooked. 

“I saw this and thought of you,” she said to Tali, and I woke with a start. 

She walked in over the threshold and stood next to the kitchen table. La Rubia produced a small music box, wound the gears, and set it on the table. She was wearing a white tennis skirt and a pink shirt, and her hips began faintly swaying to the tune. It sounded like a Gagaku melody, naive and playful. When it was over, La Rubia started it again. I don’t know how long we listened. 

“Beautiful,” Tali said when La Rubia seemed to have finished. “Where did you find it?”

“In one of those little stores,” La Rubia said, “the bric-a-brac shops on Mott Street.”

“Tchotchkes,” I translated.

“Yes,” La Rubia said without laughing. Her soft, raspy voice always sounded recently smoked.

“Thank you,” Tali said, rising from her seat. She took La Rubia in her arms, her large breasts brushing against La Rubia’s neck. I found myself imagining them naked. Next to each other, La Rubia and Tali looked like porn categories. Tali: Jewish, breasts, athletic, cheap, generic, curly hair, anal. La Rubia: angel, teen, skinny, casting couch, pillow princess.

Then Tali resumed her work, chopping carrots and squash as La Rubia watched. 

“How did you get the life of your dreams?” La Rubia said after a while.

“What was that?” Tali asked.

La Rubia tried again.

This time Tali stopped, turned around. “Is this the life of my dreams?” she responded. “Maybe it’s somebody else’s. More like a nightmare. Are you for real, Rue?”

“Of course.”

Tali clenched her jaw and shoved the pan of vegetables into an oven she had forgotten to preheat.

“I don’t know.” She laughed. “This isn’t a dream for me. Maybe if my mother would see me. Maybe if I could go back to Tel Aviv.”

“Tel Aviv?” La Rubia smiled. 

Tali shrugged. She knew that talking about her birthplace was anathema for the city’s bien-pensants. 

La Rubia became more persistent. How much did she write, she asked, and how did she find the time and discipline? What were her ideas? When had she become so curious, so well-read? What was her method, her process when developing a story, how much of herself was in her characters? Was she this sure of herself, this successful, when she had just arrived in America, or had she also dragged her body across the asphalt like a starving lizard? 

I listened as Tali responded curtly to these questions. She didn’t have real talent, she said, just extreme intention. She wrote every day, but that was more discipline than a gift — hers was a triumph of the will. She told La Rubia about the biography she wanted to write of an Israeli painter who had lived on the Lower East Side and died of AIDS in the 1980s; I had barely heard about this idea. I had never seen them interact this way, and wondered if this were normal, if La Rubia’s inquisitions also happened behind closed doors. 

“Could you teach me Hebrew?” La Rubia asked. “Then maybe I could translate your old work.” 

Without a second thought, Tali accepted. 

“How do you say beautiful in Hebrew, Tali?” La Rubia asked. “How do you say blood?”

Tali answered in Yiddish. La Rubia didn’t notice. 

“When did you fall in love for the first time?”

“With Luke,” she said. “The week after I landed here.” 

“How was he in bed?” La Rubia asked. “How was your mother growing up?”

“Both were tyrants.” 

“What was his personality like? What was his writing process?” 

Tali answered frankly. She spoke admiringly of her ex, with a twinge of sadness. I was puzzled by her sincerity, and a little alarmed. I rarely heard her speak this way; she was revealing too much, I thought. Few people knew her to be so lonely.

 

Late in August, I went to a bookstore not far from Hester Street, in a basement where Zebulon, the son of a once-famous mystic, was selling off his father’s estate along with other used books and some ephemera from the 1970s. Tali had introduced me to him, and I would often go pay him a visit, less to shop than to locate a sense of Judaism that my parents had never instilled in me. My Jewishness, I explained to Zebulon, was one of bankers and lawyers who out-glamorized each other with the lavish bar mitzvahs they threw for their children. Judaism’s rich intellectual tradition, its politics and its esotericism, had been entirely absent from my upbringing. But here, in Zebulon’s store, I could make up a new genealogy among the last Kabbalists of East Broadway.

I was browsing the collection when Luke came in. He was fatter than I remembered. Always cosplaying Woody Allen, he looked about Tali’s age but was maybe ten years older. Since they broke up, he had become a local micro-celebrity, an interesting figure to those who were bored by the inoculated art of our times. He was more or less conservative, incredibly learned, and his plays — leavened with references to Plato, St. Augustine, and Wagner — felt free and experimental, but without zest. His characters mimicked our desolate lives, the rotting effect that being on the internet had produced in our relationships to one another, but didn’t pose much commentary beyond a complaint. Some of his reactionary gestures — cocaine on stage, a fetish for abuse — made me uncomfortable, but like everyone, I remained intrigued by his provocation. 

I crouched down in the medieval section, next to a collection of rare Haggadahs, and watched him. He was alone but seemed to be expecting someone. He didn’t look evil, although out of loyalty I had vowed to detest him like one of my blood’s own foes. In our few interactions, he’d been slightly condescending toward me (older men usually are). I’d heard about the harem of actresses and dancers he’d dated after Tali, about how he’d supposedly induced at least two hospitalizations in those rehab clinics upstate. He had maligned Tali in some of his plays, but she tried to avoid the topic. From my hiding place, I watched him page through volumes of Elias Canetti and Irving Howe. His choices filled me with rage — what did this man know about Irving Howe? Why did he care? And what was he doing at Zebulon’s, this fortress of Judaica in Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood where union buildings had become luxury condos, Yiddish newspapers were now banks, and synagogues had been turned into designer stores? I thought about how I’d later report his literary choices to Tali. Then he seemed to get a text, bid Zebulon adieu, and promptly walked out. Before I could text Tali, I saw a scant silhouette walking toward him, the back of her white tennis skirt bobbing in my direction. Her blonde hair swayed as she encased him in a hug. 

 

That year we spent Yom Kippur together, Tali and I. Ahead of the holidays, she’d been writing less and started talking about Luke every day, possessed by La Rubia’s lingering questions. She’d become erratic, picking up books and leaving them on the floor after five or so pages. Her reading choices were strange. Biographies of fake messiahs. First-person accounts of war. Catholic apocrypha, Simone Weil, Leon Uris’s sad little epics. 

During our fast we alternated between the couch, the kitchen table, and the floor. I drank coffee and sent apologetic emails to my ex-girlfriends. Tali was abstaining even from water. She looked at me with miserable eyes.

Outside, the world continued. To me, Jewish holidays feel like when Mexico’s national soccer team is playing: the gringo universe seems to go on with business as usual, while for me ordinary time stops. On those occasions, I could feel the presence of a sudden messianism that belonged to a different universe. My life was made in that discrepancy between this inner world and the outside, a private and public life. I was used to it, but that didn’t make it any less painful.

Tali’s turn inwards felt even more performative than mine — as if, for a sacred instant, she had a religious reason to return to her early, anorexic youth. Does redemption count if you enjoy hunger? Could the rabbis who drafted the precepts of Jewish law have known that the meaning of their prohibitions would change with the advent of eating disorders? Was Tali less holy if she took pleasure in self-abnegation? Was her mysticism real, or was she just applying her country’s military discipline to this extreme form of self-sacrifice? 

We spent most of the day in silence. Toward sundown, Tali crawled toward me, onto the couch.

“My friends are having a party at a gallery two or three blocks from here,” she said. “Everyone will be there.”

 

When we got to the gallery, Tali was holding my hand. The lights were purple and, although we were not ready to start drinking, the wine was free. We had showered hurriedly, and I inhaled leftover dumplings while she chose a white dress. Now we blessed our plastic glasses like Kiddush cups and gulped them down. La Rubia came late, and handed us each a blue pill. 

“Happy Yom Kippur,” she said. 

“Thank you,” Tali responded, raising her eyebrows cynically. She downed her pill, but I kept mine in my pocket. 

It was one of those parties where everything feels as though it happens on a stage. The characters that belonged to our shared life all seemed to be present: our mutual friends and my former lovers, my literary enemies, Tali’s American mentors, the acquaintances we made online but never dared to talk to in real life. When Luke waltzed in, Tali pretended not to notice. La Rubia grabbed her by the waist — like a book, or a small dumbbell — and pulled her to an improvised dance floor that the gallerists had set up. They started to sway. La Rubia took Tali by the hips, the shoulders. I watched Tali’s face, which looked both joyful and panicked. She didn’t seem in control of herself. It was beautiful, lame, and tragic. 

Luke was at the bar, staring at them both while pretending to read the label of a wine bottle. Were they rubbing each other for his attention? For mine? They lingered there for a long time, the effects of the drug prolonging Tali’s patience with La Rubia. Her limp body was turned into a puppet, and her limbs lifted and dropped to her dance partner’s caprice. Around them, people were talking, whispering. Then I saw La Rubia go in for a kiss, forcefully, which made Tali lose her balance. She fell to the floor violently, and her head bounced on the ground. A small thread of blood appeared on Tali’s neck, where the back of an earring had caught. Her legs pointed upwards, letting her underwear show, and a broken heel landed in the corner of the room.

La Rubia didn’t say a thing, but Tali lost control. Still on the floor, she shouted in Hebrew, slurs and outdated expressions overlapping. No one there could follow, and she was becoming the anecdote nobody wanted to be. La Rubia looked like a porcelain doll, God’s chosen gift beside Lilith the demon. For the first time since I met her, I was embarrassed by Tali. I ran toward her, and lifted her in my arms. 

“It’s going to be a bumpy night,” La Rubia said under her breath, and then Tali started screaming insults again, this time in English. 

La Rubia didn’t follow us. Tali refused to go home, and made me wander around until dawn. Barefoot, she told me anecdotes that emerged for her at every corner, repetitive and poorly narrated. When we reached our stoop, she threw up. Her life in the city lay jumbled before me. After a while, Tali looked at the sour puddle of wine that she had mistaken for dinner, and she started to cry. I hugged her, felt the bones in her back, and understood that she was truly afraid. 

When we entered the apartment on Hester Street, La Rubia was sitting at the table. Behind her, a half-naked Luke was caressing her neck. I suppose that he had never imagined that he would come back to that apartment, less so to live there permanently, and least of all with someone other than Tali.

Tali smiled with shame, looked at herself in the mirror, and went straight to her room. She grabbed her music box. She let her eyes linger delicately on the books that crowded each other clumsily, the cheap furniture, every spice and every ceramic piece she had bought. The material sum of seven years in a city. She gazed at the unpublished manuscripts, the letters that she had never mailed Luke, the correspondence with friends in the Middle East. She took only a couple of those, removed her bloody earrings and makeup, and left a pair of keys on the table. Then she nodded her head to La Rubia and Luke. Nobody said a word. 

And then she disappeared. She left me, La Rubia, and Luke in the apartment. I don’t know if she returned to Tel Aviv, if she was sent to an Israeli prison, if she moved upstate. Tali vanished from all of our lives and now we only have La Rubia, who continues to inhabit Tali’s world. I sometimes wonder if another woman will come to take La Rubia’s place, eventually, and if Luke will stay here the way men in New York always do. All I know for now is that Tali is finally free and that I still think of her, like a sister or a forgiven prophet who might someday return.