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They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.

In 1854, the USS Cyane burned Greytown, a dusty community on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, to the ground.

The pretext for the assault was to assist a white U.S. citizen threatened with arrest by local authorities for the murder of a Black man.

The backstory was that Cornelius Vanderbilt wanted to gain monopoly control for his steamboat and stagecoach business, which was conveying travelers rushing across Nicaragua for California gold. [...] President Franklin Pierce defended the ruin: Greytown was “a pretended community,” Pierce said, [...] comprised mostly of “blacks and persons of mixed blood.” Greytown, the president said, could expect nothing other than to be treated as a “piratical resort of outlaws or a camp of savages.” Washington was also competing with Great Britain for a [Central American] canal [...]

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A year later, in 1855, William Walker sailed out of San Francisco with a detachment of fifty-five soldiers, whom he called La Falange Americana, toward Nicaragua. A Tennessee mercenary who earlier had tried and failed to seize territory from Mexico, Walker was backed by both Southern slavers and Northern investors, including Vanderbilt [...]. Spanish Americans across the hemisphere were horrified when Walker, after a five-month war, grabbed power and proclaimed himself Nicaragua’s president. Even more so when he reestablished slavery, in a country that had abolished the institution three decades earlier.

Walker was popular in all the United States [...]. Nicaragua, a play celebrating Walker's conquests, opened at Manhattan's Purdy's National Theatre [...]. Migrants from the United States flocked to Nicaragua to settle [...]. Walker offered them hundreds of acres of land and Vanderbilt sold them discount tickets [...]. President Franklin Pierce quickly recognized Walker’s government. [...]

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United States gunboats were sailing further in Latin American waters than ever [...]. In February 1855, Paraguayan soldiers fired on the USS Water Witch, killing its helmsman.

The U.S. Senate was already annoyed with Paraguay for drawing up a commercial treaty that had contained the phrase the United States of North America. And so, in response to the attack and to satisfy congressional demands that Latin American nations refer to the U.S. by its proper name, President James Buchanan dispatched a fleet of nineteen ships carrying twenty-five hundred men and two hundred guns to deliver a revised treaty, with the word North struck out. Such a show of force left Paraguay little option but to sign the treaty, which opened the nation’s waters and markets to the United States. [...]

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The idea [...] of convening an assembly of “all the American States of Spanish origins from Mexico to Chile,” wrote U.S. ambassador to Colombia James Bowlin, is a “ridiculous farce.” Bowlin dismissed the “mad pranks, and silly nonsense of pretended Statesmen.” [...]

[In Paris] on June 22, 1856, at a gathering of Spanish American exiles, [Chilean philosopher Francisco] Bilbao gave a speech proposing to hold a congress [...] to create a Latin American confederacy. [...] If not, no resistance to Washington would be effective. “Look,” he said, “you can see the smoke from the campfires getting closer. Listen, the soldiers’ footsteps are ever nearer.”

Panama, then a province of Colombia, was strategically important as the potential site of a interoceanic canal or railroad. Bilbao called it “the fulcrum that the Yankee Archimedes is using to lift South America and suspend it over the abyss,” so to “devour the continent in pieces.” [...] “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States,” he said. [...] Central Americans [from Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador] did finally unite to drive out Walker in 1860 [...].

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There is societal pressure to concentrate almost all human needs (physical touch, deep affection, financial support, care for the sick, growing old together, etc) into one sexual relationship and to tie that relationship to sexual reproduction and raising children.

That creates closed units - nuclear families - that the state can more easily control because their strongest feelings of solidarity are limited to their household and their biological connections outside it. It discourages communal living, communal child raising, sharing of resources in larger groups. It makes singles easier to control because it makes people desperate to achieve the kind of relationship in which this full care-package is available.

You know, let's not challenge the psych ward, let's challenge the idea that queer people are "crazy." Let's not challenge medical abuse at its roots, let's challenge that we should be on the same tree as the schizophrenics and the intellectually disabled and the profoundly autistic.

And look mate, it didn't work last time. Removing homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 and "ego-dystronic homosexiality" in 1980 and then all references to it in 1987, removing it from the ICD with approval by the World Health Assembly in 1990, banning some conversion practices and blah blah blah, has not prevented the medical abuse and neo-institutionalisation of transgender people.

It'd be silly to say "it's because Native Americans are commonly shown in that era" because we've existed the whole time. Why? Why do you think it's common for Native Americans to be shown during the Wild West era vs like the Roaring 20's, or WW2 or the Tudor Era or the 1960s or 1980s?

The personal evils these people have been doing don’t even compare the systemic killing of millions for decades that the bourgeois specialise in. You’re only mad now you found loose threads that someone on tiktok told you were definitely cannibalism? Sounds just like a moral panic instead of critical analysis

My main argument here is that there are systemic factors that caused this whole situation and that using conspiracy logic and lacking critical thinking is a dampener on our movements. This outrage and spectacle is allowed to happen to keep us half entertained and enraged, it does not build class consciousness in a material way but makes it a “moral battle for purity” where we fight evil people instead of a system that props those type of people at the top

To the extent that his revealed networks indicate anything they show that he was a man with a lot of money who made it his business to be close to/entangled with/collect&generate dirt on powerful figures who were coming up on waves. Like, in the messages about trans women we see him noticing and describing trends, not, fucking, engineering them. He got close to people who were influential to online right-wing extremism, he didnt invent the idea!!

This doesnt change any preexisting analysis of how like. Capitalism, hierarchy, power, civ etc work. We know more about the lives of the people in the upper strata of these systems now but if anything it provides evidence to what we already knew. People at the top get to play systemic waves to their advantage and they get to use money and networking to add some shape to those waves but it is ultimately a machine, not like, a master plan. This is ONE highly visible example of how ONE individual moved. It looks like he's the main character cuz its thru his perspective we see all this, not because he's the puppet master.

Fuck he didnt even invent trafficking. The sex trade existed long before and it still fuckin exists now. Jeffery epstien is to trafficking as Donald trump is to fucking real estate. Money, power, big deals, but to even say that they had a defining impact on any era in or the overall shape of the industry is an aggrandizing illusion.

Also: why did so many people suddenly start thinking that """cabal""" is an ok thing to say. Like. I get that a huge amount of the references to "antisemitism" in the current discourse r bullshit but that doesnt? Mean you can start saying things like "omg the pedophile cabal is real"????