Bria’s Note: I talked a little about this concept in my ‘Stick or Bigger Stick’ post, but I want to hit home the importance and ubiquity of the sentiment of “Do it to Julia” in the democratic politics of the meta-American Empire. My goal with these heavy political posts is not to lead you to fear and despair, but to anger and righteousness. I hope you read this and feel better resolved to resist those who are oppressing you, and who oppress us all.

The Politics of Punishment are essentially all that’s been on offer by either side of democratic government in North America for certainly most of my adult life. Since apparently everything’s been all cinched up and figured out by capitalism perfecting everything in society ever since the End of History, nothing can fundamentally be changed (duh). So all that can be done each election is offer your voter base promises of punishing your hated enemies! Conservatives get elected on promises of hurting immigrants, people of color, and queers, while liberals, once elected, try to shore up their popularity by promising to use the force of law to punish conservatives for being rude… without ever really doing anything to protect the groups conservatives target. In fact, the “protection” of liberals frequently just seems to paint a bigger target on our backs. They always seem to do it in a way is very easy to circumnavigate, while at the same time very annoying and preachy. Because if our rights are always under threat from conservatives, then we HAVE to vote for them, don’t we?

Take Canada’s Bill C-16 – the trans protection bill that Jordan Peterson used to launch his career of becoming a cult leader. It supposedly enshrines protections for gender identity and expression into the Canadian human rights code, but, despite all of the hollering about Nineteen Eighty-Four from conservatives and the patting themselves on the back by liberals, to date not one single person has been prosecuted under C-16. Of course, I shouldn’t need to tell you that this doesn’t mean that transphobia was solved in Canada. I assure you, quite a bit of transphobia goes on here every single day. The standard of evidence required for C-16 to be enforced makes it essentially toothless to combat discrimination done by anyone other than a dullard who openly states in a voice recording or in writing that they are firing you or refusing you service due to your gender. No protection for “We found a better candidate” or *blaming you for everything and holding you to a higher standard in performance reviews* or *no response* – you know, the ways that discrimination is actually expressed. Of course, conservatives are barely able to hide their throbbing excitement at being openly permitted to abandon subtext and say the quiet part out loud; their politicians have known that’s all they have to promise them to ensure votes for a long time. Meanwhile, all the conservative caterwauling around how C-16 supposedly polices their sacred right to be horrible to trans people has stoked the fires of transphobia around the globe.

The real issue isn’t that we need these kinds of protections to force people to behave politely, but real, universal protections for things like housing and employment. Make no mistake, I think there should be consequences for spreading disinformation and hate propaganda about groups of people. But if your boss can’t fire you at will or if your housing wasn’t a privately held – and therefor capable of being withheld – commodity, then it really isn’t of much consequence if some individual person has shitty opinions about trans people. What’s more, a lot of people’s bigotry would evaporate pretty quickly if their material needs were met and they didn’t feel like their existence was a constant precarious struggle of competition against others. Not to mention that benefits that are selectively given out to specific groups are far easier to demonize and take away than universal ones. To play the game of selective protections and benefits for certain groups in an environment of artificial scarcity, while outwardly trading on the aesthetic of social justice and helping the historically marginalized, is to continue to pit different groups of people against one another; to keep us fighting over the scraps that fall off the feast table of our masters.

But outside of these little back and forth trade offs between the two sides of the empire’s public relations wing every election, there is another form of punishment that is built in to our society.

It is the background radiation of constant war waged by the empire or on its behalf. It is the economic exploitation of previously colonized nations crushed under massive IMF loans designed to lock them into servitude (kinda like the loans we have here). It is the destabilization and toppling of socialist governments to ensure those nation’s loyalty to and subservient position within the capitalist economic order. It is all the dirty business it takes to keep the empire going… and that so many of its citizens turn a blind eye to.

Which leads me back to a certain scene in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

OK, I know, I know, Orwell is pretty tired. Conservatives drove that one into the ground years ago with their comparisons to C-16 or “woke razors” or whatever. George Orwell was kind of a pos and whether he intended to or not, his work played a large role in the capitalist undermining of the global socialist movement. But it doesn’t mean that some of that shit he wrote didn’t go hard.

In the scene I’m talking about, the protagonist, Winston, has been captured and is being brainwashed/tortured in the Ministry of Truth by an authority figure he once trusted. His torturer has placed a cage contraption on his face that will release a frightened rat (Winston’s greatest fear) upon him that will devour his face – a supposedly common torture in Imperial China. In his frantic desperation to avoid his own horrifying suffering, he sells out his lover, Julia:

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then—no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment—one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over:

“Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!”

This posing of a horrifying threat, of brutalization at the hands of the state, that can be avoided by allowing the state to inflict violence upon others, lies at the core of how so much consent is manufactured within the empire. Wars must be continued, borders must be guarded, and economic austerity must be enacted, all in order to maintain the tenuous “liberal coalitions” that are supposedly the only thing standing between us and conservative fascists taking power to brutalize the marginalized among us. We need to keep voting for the liberal status quo that just so happens to continue the violence of the empire that we totally don’t want to be doing at all but we have to for some reason, or else face the consequences of a conservative regime – who, naturally, will also continue the imperial violence but just also turn more of it inward. It’s ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop‘ – even when the ‘good’ cop is the one talking to you, their words carry with them the implicit violence that the bad cop could inflict on you if you don’t cooperate, so just tell them what they want to hear, okay?

[What I especially like about the Orwell scene is that the rat, too, is being coerced into violence. The rat is locked in the cage and forced with a flame towards Winston’s face. The rat has the choice of either eating through Winston’s face or be burned by the flame.]

With Gaza, they have proved that they can get away with basically whatever violence they want. People deemed disposable by the meta-American Empire can be brutalized essentially at will, regardless of what the United Nations or broader international community says. If you protest, they shut you down and call you a nazi. Now, upon being elected, Trump reportedly told Netanyahu in a phone call to “do whatever you want in the Gaza strip”, while Israel has now passed a bill stating that anyone who is a suspected terrorist (that’s suspected, not convicted) as well as anyone “praising or supporting attacks that target Israel” will be deported to the Gaza Strip. They have their own little human garbage dump where they can brutalize and destroy anybody within its borders in the name of “security”, and if you step out of line, you’re going there, too!

It could be worth pointing out that Israeli military and police train the military and police of the US and other imperial core nations. The weapons and surveillance technology they use is both supplied by America (and Canada) to Israel, and at other times, developed in Israel and supplied back to America – with the permanent killing floor that is Gaza as its testing ground. Of course, Gaza is a test for more than just weapons and surveillance tech; it is also where they test to see how far they can push it. Of how much they can get away with before people get too upset.

If the past year has been any indication, that is whatever they want.

And so now, everywhere is Gaza.

The Homeless Holocaust and The New American Slave State

The following section might freak you out a bit. Read it if you are wish to be prepared for the worst of what could be coming down the pipe in North America. Skip it and read the end if you are feeling fragile – look for the picture of a leopard.

Because, there is another, final piece of background radiation of implicit violence baked into our system. That is the continual, ever present threat of poverty and homelessness. If you fail to sufficiently tow the societal line and provide labor to capital, if you miss your rent or your mortgage on the property you supposedly “own”, you can be evicted and be unceremoniously dumped into total misery and squalor. Exposed to the elements and harassed by authorities everywhere you go. Looked down upon by all around you and blamed for society’s problems.

In every town and city in North America, there is a little Gaza strip. Shanty towns and encampments of disposable people cast out by the system. Like the Palestinians, their inhabitants are blamed for their own squalid conditions, accused of posing a danger to the nice, respectable people in the surrounding area, and every so often, the authorities come in and destroy what little they have, completely upending their lives even further and leaving them in even deeper ruin. But despite their massive mortality rates, more and more people seem to be ending up there all the time.

You are meant to see the homeless, just as the rest of the Global South is meant to see Gaza. You are meant to look at them and go “I don’t want that to be me!” and you keep your head down and you behave.

When people think of Trump doing a 21st Century Holocaust in America with his mass deportations and Project 2025 anti-queer agenda, they seem to imagine it being very direct and literal, rather than being enacted through layers of plausible deniability baked into the already existing structures of society. Yes, ICE gestapo will still round up immigrants and take them to militarized detention centers – Stephen Miller’s already announced plans to de-naturalize millions of American permanent residents. But this process will also likely involve simply expanding the current barbaric process of sweeping homeless encampments while also creating pressures that cause an increase in the already ballooning numbers of unhoused people in America. This time rounding up everyone in the camps, regardless of immigration status, as ‘illegals’ or ‘criminals’ or ‘terrorists’ and taking them alongside non-citizens to detention centers, deporting anyone not useful for work, with the rest to be used as slave labor in the for-profit prison system – you know, something America already does, and which liberal haven, California, recently failed to vote for a ban on such practices in the state.

[Notice how emptying out undesirables from America would be Trump doing that thing he and other fascists love to do – where they accuse others of doing exactly the thing they themselves plan to do.]

People talk about Trump’s ridiculous tariffs as being an economic wake-up call to those who voted for him, as they will find themselves paying 30% or more extra on most things they buy, as well as the massive shortage of labor created by deporting the undocumented migrants who are currently relied on for most agricultural work. But I suspect that their plan is to incentivize American manufacturing and agriculture by shoring up these domestic industries and offsetting costs of tariffed materials with an influx of slave labor via the prison system. Increasingly criminalized homelessness and increasing pressure put on people that make becoming homeless all the more likely will create a self-sustaining forced work pool. Pressures will be put on nations like Canada to side with the US and impose tariffs on China and Mexico in order to avoid some of the US’s tariffs, roping us into this depraved system of the New North American Slave State. If our conservative politicians, like Pierre Polliviere, get into power, they are almost certain to cozy up with Trump and enact the same sorts of policies leading to similar results. As Climate Change “opens up” the Arctic, Canada’s north may become the breadbasket of the increasingly desertified and industrialized United States via a similar system of enslaved farm workers.

RFK Jr has already said he wants to create ‘wellness gulags’ where “drug addicts” and the “mentally ill” (hmm, I wonder what that could refer to?) would be segregated from all communication with the outside world and made to work on “organic farms”. See, they don’t need undocumented migrant labor when they can just sweep up and enslave anyone they catch outside of the safety net of ‘being able to pay your bills on time’.

I mean, what’s better than paying low wages? No wages!

Anti trans and queer legislation will make it near impossible for openly LGBTQ+ people to maintain a living in many areas, and so they will become homeless at much higher rates (you know, like we already do), so you don’t even need to specifically, directly send queer people to concentration camps; we’ll “send ourselves there” by not being able to hold down a job. If Project 2025 goes ahead in anything close to its full form, then at some point openly queer and trans people could be labelled as sex offenders and sent off directly.

They probably won’t even need to gas chamber anyone themselves. They could, like the first concentration camps in colonial Africa that helped inspire the Final Solution, just deport them into Mexico and leave them to die in the desert – you know, the deserts that are getting increasingly lethal every year due to climate change. Or, like the rat in the cage, try to force Mexico to do the dirty work of genociding the growing mass of deported people and any others fleeing climate destruction in the South. Of course, there’s always a steady supply of readily available fentanyl to thin out a population of miserable people stuck at a border with no options. Either way, the streets get ‘cleaned up’, the gross trannies go away, and suddenly there’s all this free labor for corporations to take advantage of.

What else can you expect out of the empire built on the colonization and ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples’ land?

If you think this is hyperbole or that I’m just being delulu, as I see so many comments on Facebook suggest to people upset about Trump’s victory, I should remind you that both Canada and the United States forcibly interned their Japanese citizens and put them to work on slave farms less than 80 years ago. Nice, friendly Canada actually did it much worse than the US, in fact.

My wife is Japanese Canadian, so in my time together with her I have had the privilege of being immersed in the stories and experiences of the Japanese-Canadian community and given many opportunities to witness intergenerational sharing of oral histories. My grandmother-in-law was in the camps. My queer auntie was BORN in a camp. I can tell you that Internment was a big deal to not only the generation of people who were interred, but to each subsequent generation after. The wounds created by the betrayal of the government that they trusted, of having an entire generation’s property seized, of continuing racist suspicion after they were released – they continue to run deep into the grandchildren of the camp survivors, and working heal the scars left behind dominates much of the community’s politics. As such, a lot of incredible work has been done to preserve the memory of these events, so that history might not be repeated.

Japanese Canadians and Americans trusted their government and worked to be model citizens. When the order came for them to be interred, they obeyed, trusting that justice would be served. And they took everything they had, put them to work on plantations, and even made them build their own concentration camps. This happened within a human lifetime ago. The bigoted and hateful rhetoric surrounding this time is at least as volatile as it was then. Do you really think they won’t do this again?

What Trumpists who embrace such policies have done is asked that violence be done to others so that they might prosper. Those who say “Hitler did some good things” are talking about this – uplifting one group of people by immiserating another. This won’t so much “uplift” Trump supporters, since the homeless and undocumented migrants don’t have much in the way of assets to seize, but they sure seem to think it’s going to get rid of crime or whatever. All that is required in turn is that you embody the conservative orthodoxy of white Christian America, and you pay your rent. Or else you’re getting your face eaten, too.

It’s Face-Eating All the Way Down

To any who relish in Trump supporters getting similarly punished by their own evil policies, perhaps under the classic internet mantle of “I never thought leopards would eat MY face!”, I should remind you that you, also, voted for the Leopards Eating Faces Party.

The LEFP isn’t Trump or conservative politics, it’s America writ large. It’s the empire.

For many of you, it was apparently fine for the US to do all these awful things to others either outside of American borders or to those within them deemed non-persons, or to, you know, those who were here before America even existed and whose entire world was destroyed so that America in its current form might exist. Even if it made you squeamish, even as you expressed regret or a desire for an end to the bloodshed, you accepted that, on some level, it needed to be done in order to maintain some aspect of the social order that you benefit from – that it wasn’t a deal breaker for such violence to be done as long as your life didn’t get disrupted. But once the empire is turned towards you and your god-given American freedoms, then it’s suddenly unacceptable.

Similarly, to those I see decrying the Muslim and Arab voters who, by whatever means, did not cast a vote for Kamala Harris, blaming them for inflicting Trump upon America, I feel like pointing out that 1) Trump won by a whole lot more than the total number of non-Kamala voters over Gaza, and 2) even if they were responsible, what they would have simply done is democratize the suffering that you were apparently willing to inflict upon Gazans. Now all of America, and, in time, perhaps the rest of the nations in the meta-American Capitalist Empire, gets to be brutalized by the Empire, just like so many others across the globe. You, nice respectable liberal voter, were apparently fine with the US inflicting war and violence on everyone else, as long as you get to keep your “civil rights”. Well, now you’re in it with the rest of the world. Maybe you’ll do something about it finally? Of course, many of these people are already succumbing to the politics of punishment as they revel in the idea of these Muslims being persecuted and deported under Trump. We must resist this temptation to Schadenfreude. Fighting amongst ourselves is how autocrats maintain control.

I, myself, don’t want to relish in the immiseration of any of these citizens of the Imperial core – before long, it’s going to be me under that boot, too, for one thing. I don’t want any violence to be done. Not to me, not to someone else in my place, not to my hated enemies who themselves wish for violence to be done to me.

I would prefer a world where the state is not doing violence to people, thank you.

A nice, liberal order of civil rights is fundamentally built on a lie if it comes at the expense of doing violence for the empire. We shouldn’t wish that we might go to heaven by sending others to hell. We shouldn’t want to live in the liebenstraub community outside of Auschwitz. We shouldn’t wish to dance at a music festival next to a concentration camp. Had Kamala won and the American liberal order continued as it had, the empire’s violence would have also continued exactly as it had before. Gaza would have continued to be bombed, the borders would still be closed to the swathes of desperate climate refugees, and the merciless American economic system would have continued to grind the impoverished into dust. And liberals would have celebrated because “American Freedoms” would be maintained.

Change Your Heart or Die

Like many trans people, both in the States and in Canada, I have found myself fearful of the real possibility of a conservative government deciding it no longer recognizes trans identities. That they might stop issuing government ID that reflects trans people’s gender, or, like Texas, even start retroactively changing their gender marker on their government files and identification. As depressing as it is to think of social progress back peddling like that and the liberal social order that transitioning temporarily allowed me to believe in becoming unraveled, I try to remember that a state willing and capable of doing that to its citizens is nothing to be invested in. That a state that was fundamentally built on genocide and enslavement, both past and present, would do that to its citizens, wouldn’t it? If our social order is built on lies and oppression, then being excluded from it, as precarious and frightening as it might be, is practically a badge of honor. I don’t want to be a member of a privileged in-group at the expense of a tortured out-group. I already spent all of high-school eating lunch with the outcast kids, so if we’re casting people out, then I’m once again eating lunch with the outcasts. That’s what the Jesus that so many people claim to believe in did. But I guess I missed the part of the sermon where he said “Nah, fuck those people. Only my homies get fishes and loaves.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “they threaten you with something—something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.’ And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.”

“All you care about is yourself,” he echoed.

“And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t feel the same.”

I don’t write these things to shame anyone. I don’t wish to trade in fear and division… unlike some people. My hope for this awful moment, where the violence of the empire is looking set to turn inward to a far greater degree than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes, is that it eventually leads us to abandon imperial violence altogether, and free not just ourselves, but all people across the globe who’ve been trapped under that same boot. The brutal treatment we are forced to authorize be dished out to our fellow human beings is dehumanizing – both to them and to us. To dehumanize another is to dehumanize yourself. You stray further from your humanity the more you are willing to harm somebody, and the less you think of them as worthy of existence. To be forced to look at this brutality seriously may force us to see our fellow human beings in a new light, and to see ourselves in a new light, as well.

If we end the Politics of Punishment, and cease to inflict harm upon our neighbors, we may find we no longer feel the same, fearful way towards them that we used to.

Whew! This was a long-ass article to write, and it took a considerable amount of time to produce. If you get value from my works, and you have the means to do so, please consider supporting me on patreon.com/lifeofbria or sending me a tip on ko-fi.com/lifeofbria