Pope Leo: "The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.”

Presenting today at @pcaaca.bsky.social, if you're up and make it down at 8AM come join. I typed up a quick summary of my paper/presentation on my blog that you can read here:
dead-air.ghost.io/protesting-a...
#pcaaca26 #pca2026

Collected some thoughts on the recent Iran war fiasco, using some literary/dramatistic approaches (and lots of media you might find familiar):

A composite image showing, at center, Corey Noel Scott, a white man with thinning dirty blonde hair and beard stubble wearing a black shot and smiling. The image of his face is up-close and in a circle with a light outline. Two other circles are floating in the image that read “PATRIOT FRONT MEMBER IDENTIFIED." That text is on a mock edit of a red, white and blue Patriot Front logo that crosses out their center fasces symbol with an X. Another floating image shows the red, white, and blue patch for Seal Team 7, which is a thin triangle facing downward with a large 7 in the center and the logo for the Navy on top of the 7, seven white stars are at the point of the triangle. All these images are sitting on top of a military group shot that’s faded in the background. The men in camo are holding up guns and a red, white and blue American flag and posing for the camera. Most soldiers are blocked by the various images except for one section where Corey Scott and Eddie Gallagher can be seen in sunglasses by the flag.

EXCLUSIVE at the newly relaunched @informant.news: We've obtained secret documents showing that a former Navy SEAL whose testimony helped overturn a war crimes case against his platoon leader has recently joined the white supremacist group Patriot Front.

www.informant.news/patriot-fron...

I'll be at PCA (@pcaaca.bsky.social) all week, presenting my paper on player protest in World of Warcraft this Friday morning as part of the game studies panel. If any friends are attending, let's link up! #pca2026 #pcaaca26

BiMonthly: Feb+Mar 26 - MilitiaWatch Updates on militia news in the United States, including threats, legal updates, and mobilization patterns for Feb and Mar 2026.

Good afternoon, folks -- here's another MW BiMonthly, covering February and March 2026. Some key stories:
+ More mobilization in Virginia, including known militias
+ Legal updates, including light sentencing for militia leader
+ Fighting among the right, from 'grassroots' to formal

Read here:

Most American Jews disapprove of US military action against Iran, new poll shows - Jewish Telegraphic Agency And a survey of "connected" American Jews detected declining support.

The domestic constituency for this war, in other words, is roughly the same as for the 2018 US embassy move to Jerusalem-- a sizeable (if slipping) majority of white evangelicals, and a minority of American Jews www.jta.org/2026/03/30/u...

So a big part of this story is it’s not just Piker; it’s disempowering the “groups” that are too lefty.

yeah so I don’t think the choice we’re being offered is “pay the police to play Candy Crush or pay them to lock up your neighbors” it’s that this even *being a job* is a choice and we can unmake it at any time

I've been too busy to write on my blog for a solid month but Trump is the human vessel of 40 years of prevailing financialization and quarterly profits logic, not some weird boil on the body public that came out of nowhere.

How weird are the folks in the post/transhumanist element of the TESCREAL bundle?

This weird.

Another data point for the theory that the only significant pushback Trump will ever get from Republicans will come from the absolutely weirdest ideological extremists in his coalition, not from the so-called “moderate” establishment types.

Kent, MTG, Massie, Rand Paul, etc

This is just the latest example I've seen, but it is really bleak how much political content on social media these days is being sponsored by dark money interest groups and how many content creators have been willing to take the cash and keep quiet about it.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

White House posted a San Andreas meme edit of the footage, too. Just such a wild time of doing war crimes and then posting shitty montages of it online

Everyone's a Hero in a Fascist Reading of Popular Media: Iran Strikes, Call of Duty, and Dudecore Soundbites The White House has been gloating through montage videos after striking Iran. This post disentangles some of the meaning-making involved in the properties they are posting.

I wrote some quick thoughts on the White House Call of Duty / divorced dad movie montages, you can read it on the blog if you'd like. It uses the work of Roger Stahl and Umberto Eco to try to make some sense of the work these posts are doing.

dead-air.ghost.io/heroic-educa...

this is neither new nor an original thought. many have been saying this for years (including myself). just bears repeating

The state will take sites of resistance and treat them as laboratories. That they can forge authoritarian coalitions across race, party, and geography to create states of exception in Atlanta is all part of the program, and it's being prototyped for elsewhere, too.

You really must understand how much Atlanta is the testing grounds for authoritarianism. Most surveilled city in the US, bipartisan support for police state nonsense, public-private partnerships for expanding cop playgrounds, renewed rhetoric of protesters as 'terrorists' or 'outside agitators', &c.

so many people have headed calls to move off Google to places like proton. Actual useful advice is that you try to keep as much sensitive info offline as possible.

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the ...

SCOOP: Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.

To be clear, the average pledge is like $169 right now (about $5 more than the tier that is essentially everything-but-the-stuffies). People are not only pledging to get access to these products, but paying into higher tiers than just the basic $10 for the Fires ebook

I'm not trying to be toxic (I am a fan of Sanderson), but he's essentially the biggest name in fantasy rn, if not all of speculative fiction. At what point does crowdfunding for millions in revenue become too gauche while tons of smaller writers struggle to find funding for their passion projects?

Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page.

"Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack. No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page."

my full paper got an honorable mention for best paper (pls clap). i'll be presenting another (different) WoW paper in April, so stay tuned (it's about virtually-embodied disruption/protest/ritual in Azeroth). thanks to everyone who saw the talk + shared their thoughts w me afterwards, too :)

gotta say, really kind of embarrassing to see one of the "pre-eminent fascism experts" on the TL manufacturing consent for the Iran strikes ex post facto 😭😭😭 truly a Rube Goldberg machine of justifying logic 🫠🫠🫠

Retrobaiting Azeroth: Notes from a conference paper Tomorrow I’m presenting a talk about World of Warcraft’s nostalgia machine. In a few short minutes, I am set to describe how Blizzard, players, streamers, and those selling illicit services around WoW...

I'm skipping out on the first full day of early access to Midnight to present a paper I wrote on hauntological World of Warcraft today. I compiled some notes from the paper/talk on my blog here:

Illustrating the Mussolini comparison (pics).

Perhaps also worthwhile to point out that the Mussolini façade was on the former HQ of the Ministry of the Interior and the cheap Trump banner is over the HQ for the DOJ, an agency that has been (imperfectly) known for being independent of White House.

RIP Jesse Jackson.

He spoke at my South Carolina public school right before the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, speaking in direct contradiction to the way SC demanded the war's history be taught. It was something that deeply resonated at the time and also whose impacts I didn't yet understand.