"The Future Is Bullet-Proof."

Hey guys. It's approaching summer break. Recently, there is an influx of new people and I thought we can do something. Let's start small.

Redesigns with a little more thought put into them.

I struggled a lot with Apollo design since his suit and color palette was already so simple. Imo he hard to accessorize because of his power set.

his backstory was changed into him being kidnapped by aliens instead of Henry Bendix erasing his memory and giving him super powers (along with midnighter). He and Midnighter never spent 5 years on the run together, they didn’t meet until they both joined stormwatch. With his new backstory he remembers his past, which gets rid of his parallels with Midnighter. It is understandable for his backstory to have changed after moving to a new universe, but it didn’t have to be so dramatic.

And his daughter is gone

I keep seeing people say how crazy Mizi is and how innocent Sua was in comparison, but that’s just not true. I adore both Mizi and Sua, by the way. This isn’t criticism of either of them. But you can’t ignore what Sua does here if you want an accurate portrayal of their relationship in this world.

When Mizi becomes an idol, she’s manufactured into a sex symbol, crafted into something that can appeal to the male gaze despite how we KNOW she’s a lesbian. Specifically, we can see how Mizi’s breasts are often framed promiscuously to further her objectification:

So this shot where Sua finds Mizi, tied up and helpless, incoherent, and the first thing she does is frame an unaware Mizi’s breasts as if in a photoshoot—bitterly, ironically, before relief takes over—it goes to show something major about Mizisua’s relationship in both the ALNST and ZOMST verse.

In ALNST, Sua enables Mizi’s infantilization (something often levied against women in a misogynistic context) of herself by keeping Mizi “in the dark” (although Mizi is more aware than either of them want to acknowledge). People rightfully criticize Till for his innocent vision of Mizi to comfort himself with, but Sua has a version of Mizi in her head that she uses to comfort herself, too. She and Till aren’t incredibly different in this regard.

In ZOMST, this translates not to infantilization, but to objectification. Sua is bitter over Mizi’s decision to let the industry use her in this way, she’s disgusted by it, but then she wields it herself when Mizi is finally helpless and incapable of pushing Sua away again by miming taking a photo of Mizi’s breasts.

by Philmon John

Child of the Global South. Living in the Global North. Mootha Makkan.

Part Two. The Sequel.

I’m still here. 

About a year ago, I saved my own life by writing a personal essay. I bled onto the page instead of bleeding out in silence. I named the system: wealthy white patriarchal supremacy and the ongoing colonial Christian efforts that continue to Fracture my family. I named the cishet white supremacy my MAGA pastor father chose over his own bisexual, Brown son. I named the system, and I’m surviving it, for now.

Writing is how I survive: I take in everything: the news, the culture, the horrors, the hopes… and I write it down. It’s the only way I can look at what’s broken in this world and not break with it. I write it down to explain to myself. To understand. To keep my mind from shattering under the weight of what I see. I write because the alternative is madness.  

I am grateful to Tumblr for giving me the platform and I am grateful to this audience for their understanding and support. 

Seguimos aquí. We're still here. 

But so are the Architects and Builders and Workers that support this system and its suffering.  

I’m naming them as well.  

THE FRACTURE…DEEPENED  

My heart grieves everyday over the broken relationship I have with my parents and close family members. All of whom are religious. All of whom worship a religion crafted by colonial masters to dehumanize them, erase their history and act as foot soldiers for the next colonizing endeavor. 

Their refrain: “Return to MAGA white supremacist religiosity. Jesus Christ is coming soon. We must support Israel. We must support this pedophilic holy war and regime. And of course, we must make ungodly amounts of money at the same time, just like America wants for us.” 

My refrain: “Act like the community-driven Christ you claim to worship and see the world through his empathetic eyes. Protect and uplift the poor, the women, the children, the immigrant, the outcast.” 

I have innumerable relatives born in the 1950s, 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s and even relatives born in the 2010s. All of whom, across generations, have been born into colonial Christianity, and many of whom have become unwitting foot soldiers for misogyny, anti-intellectualism, pedophilia, Donald Trump, Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation and white supremacy.  

Deviate from that centuries-old design: queerness, Brownness, womanhood, poverty, immigrant blood, anti-capitalist thought, pro-community action, anything other than what the system demands…. and you become the outcast. 

I walk a very lonely path as a progressive, agnostic-atheist who loves everyone and believes in self-determination and dignity for all. However, I also walk around with a deep pit in my stomach and my brain is overwhelmed with all the hatred and pain around me.  

Do I know too much? Damn this inquisitive, intellectually curious brain! I could have been like my MAGA family, ignorant of the realities and nuances of this world. Comfortably numb to thinking critically, learning history, and practicing empathy. I’m not supposed to know this much!  I'm constantly vacillating between succumbing to an ICE agent dragging me away to a concentration camp or fighting back and potentially dying in the process. Give me liberty or give me death, right?

Alas, I have evolved to become an educated, progressive, queer and bisexual immigrant South-Asian American Brown man. I am pro-choice, pro-Trans, pro-community and pro-dignity. 

And yet, the pedophilic wealthy white patriarchy see me as a threat. If they knew who I was, I would be disappeared by ICE or shipped to CECOT immediately.  

"Wealthy Christian cis white man." Those five words. Those five words are America's artificial default: the template for who gets to move through this country unquestioned. 

For every word you deviate from, you get a difficulty multiplier. Miss one, and life gets harder. Miss two, and you're climbing uphill. Miss three or four, and the system wasn't built for you to survive, let alone thrive. This is not an accident. This is by design. 

It’s incredibly risky discussing politics in America. There’s anti-socialist, anticommunist propaganda everywhere and this country is super hostile to leftist views.  

I’m still understanding what it is within me that seeks truth and wanting to tell The Truth*.  

But I do fear that I will be silenced one day for telling The Truth* and The Greater Truth**.

And yet I will tell it anyway.  

*The Truth: The World Is Run By A Deadly, Predatory, Pedophilic, White-supremacist Billionaire Class. 

**The Greater Truth: The World Remains Shackled To European Colonial Systems. The Billionaire Class Is Just The Latest Overseer. The Machinery, Architects, Builders, Workers, Is How It Stays That Way.

THE MACHINERY  

…of Global and American Wealthy white patriarchal supremacy. 

The Architects:

(The men and women who design and propagate the machine. The billionaires who fund it, the autocrats who model it, the pedophiles who party together while the rest of us suffer. The Puppet Masters who will never be held accountable and will watch us burn on the mainland from the safety of their yachts): 

Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr Dugin, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Mike Huckabee, Kevin Roberts, Russell Vought, Semion Mogilevich, Larry Ellison, David Ellison, David Zaslav, Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Karp, Sam Altman, Leonard Leo, Steve Bannon, Tom Homan, Brendan Carr, JD Vance, Les Wexner, Viktor Orbán, Roger Stone, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Harlan Crow, Robert Mercer, Rebekah Mercer, Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson, Erik Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, Narendra Modi and many more. Many operating in stealth-mode. Many who we will never know their names. 

These barbarians – yes, barbarians, their daily actions rooted in barbarism, not progressivism – want to turn back time. They want a world where only the wealthiest, the whitest, and the manliest can exploit the rest of us: the poor, the non-white, the women, the children, the queer. 

And yes, some of these architects are themselves POCs– Thomas, Modi, MBS – Children of the Global South who chose to serve empire rather than dismantle it. Assimilationists with power on the world stage. Collaborators in death, destruction, and the dismantling of democracy. 

Netanyahu is harder to categorize, but what Israel is doing to Palestine is a white supremacist settler colonial project, backed by Western money, Western weapons, and Western silence.  

But make no mistake… Bibi serves the system and the empire, whatever his ancestry. 

The Builders: 

(The mid-level operatives, the media propagandists, the influencers who launder barbarism into entertainment, the preachers who sell empire as salvation): 

Ghislaine Maxwell, Karoline Leavitt, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Marco Rubio, Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson, Matt Gaetz, Laura Loomer, Stephen Cheung, Alex Jones, Bari Weiss, Chaya Raichik, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Megyn Kelly, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, Greg Gutfeld, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, Dan Bongino, Tim Pool, Steve Crowder, Dennis Prager, Dave Rubin, Michael Knowles, Vivek Ramaswamy, Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Logan Paul, Jake Paul, Nathan Cavanaugh, Gavin Kliger, Justin Fox, Franklin Graham, Paula White, Kenneth Copeland, Asmongold, morally-compromised AI workers and many, many more.

These are the “Masterless Men (and Women)” of the 21st century. Kerri Leigh Merritt wrote about them: the poor whites of the antebellum South who owned nothing, had nothing, would never be anything, but who enforced slavery anyway because the planter class gave them someone to hate. They were never going to sit at the master's table. They just got to hold the whip. 

Meet the new overseers: men and women who monetize rage and call it philosophy. Who radicalize lonely boys in their bedrooms and call it education. Who platform fascists and call it free speech. 

The DOGE "kids": Cavanaugh, Kliger, Fox, and many more. Little Eichmanns in hoodies, drunk on power they didn't earn. They gut agencies, cancel grants, and dismantle policies by keyword searching for "LGBTQ" and "DEI", as if governance were a ctrl+F exercise. They've terminated billions in foreign aid. Why? Because a billionaire told them to. And because they can brag to fellow Masterless young men about how much they owned the libs while serving Master Elon. 

The prosperity gospel preachers: Franklin Graham, Paula White, Kenneth Copeland etc. who turned Jesus into a capitalist and salvation into a grift. Who bless the bombs and sanctify the deportations and will answer for it, if any of what they claim to believe is true. 

Asmongold and the hordes of occasionally decentered gamerbros who gatekeep every gaming protagonist to be exclusively white and male and built for their gaze.  

For every Arjun Devraj, an extremely rare, Brown lead protagonist in Finnish Housemarque’s remarkably inclusive video-game Saros, played by South Asian British actor of Indian descent, Rahul Kohli, there are countless Brown-haired, white-skinned visibly male video-game protagonists across every console, every generation and every genre of gaming. 

From Resident Evil to Mario to Silent Hill to Final Fantasy, the white male has been exclusively catered to by a Global North country proximate to the Global South: Japan. Japan’s MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry), The Yoshida Doctrine and its concept of Mukokuseki “statelessness” promoted depictions without a concrete ethnicity or nationality, particularly in anime and manga, a stone’s throw from the gaming industry, which often defaulted to white and male visualization. And as we know, the white male default is still prevalent Hollywood as well.

Both in front of and behind the camera.                                                           

The influencer class: the Paul brothers, the Tates, the podcast bros, who discovered that young male loneliness is a market and exploited it until a generation of boys think misogyny is masculinity and cruelty is strength. 

They are not in the club. They will never be in the club. They are just useful, until they're not. 

And when the billionaires retreat to their bunkers and their islands and their escape plans, these useful idiots will be left outside the gates, wondering why the people they served won't save them. 

They are expendable, and deep down, they know it.  

Let’s not forget, along with these Builders are their respective institutions: The CIA, Mossad, and KGB/FSB that destabilize democracies and protect the powerful, The Heritage Foundation that wrote Project 2025. Turning Point USA that radicalizes teenagers. The Federalist Society that captured the courts. The Daily Wire that launders extremism as commentary. Fox News that taught a generation to distrust everything except Fox News. PragerU that puts propaganda in classrooms. The NRA that made massacre a policy choice. Citizens United – arguably the worst Supreme Court decision in modern American history and absolutely needs to be undone for this country to chart back into a true democracy – was the Trojan-horse victory billionaires and corporations were clamoring for decades. 

This is not a conspiracy. It's an ever-evolving, highly-matrixed, racist org chart. 

The Workers: 

(The foot soldiers. The true believers. The mercenaries. The ones who pulled the levers, wore the red hats, stormed the Capitol, and still think they're the heroes. The brain-rotted, algorithm-poisoned, prosperity-gospel-drunk masses who chose apocalypse over basic human decency, dignity and empathy.) 

The Co-Conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein (many of them women and even some POCs), ICE Agents, CBP Officers, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Moms for Liberty, white and non-white MAGA Christians, Non-white MAGA collaborators, Gamergate bros, Facebook grandparents who share videos from state-controlled RT, the 77 million+ who voted for Trump in 2024, the 90 million+ who stayed home… and the throngs of state-sponsored trolls from Russia, China, North Korea, and beyond, anonymous thousands paid by their respective governments to flood the zone with lies until no one can tell truth from propaganda anymore. 

Indian uncles who voted for Trump because they hate Muslims more than they love their own children’s futures. The Latino men and women who chose machismo over community. The Filipino aunties who share QAnon memes because they think it’s Christianity. 

Leopards are feasting, and will continue to feast for years, if not decades, to come.  

TWO DIVERGENT PATHS 

Both FBI Director Kash Patel's father (Pramod Patel) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's father (Mahmood Mamdani) were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 as part of the mass expulsion of South Asians. I should be proud of both Kash and Zohran’s achievements for being the first Indian-Americans in their respective positions. But I’m only proud of Zohran, why? As I wrote in my previous essay, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire recruited and exploited Indians by installing them as a merchant middle class over native Ugandans. This caused bitter resentment and led to Amin’s actions centuries later. 

Same wound. Same diaspora. Opposite paths. 

I'm making an assumption here, but it is extremely clear to me: Mahmood Mamdani did the hard, painful work of decolonization. Pramod Patel did not. 

Instead, Pramod raised his son Kash Patel with a vengeful attitude toward Africa and Black people. Kash went from playing hockey with MAGA-adjacent hockey bros in high school all the way to slamming beers at the Olympics, and eventually wrote a children's book casting Trump as King while positioning himself as the loyal servant, a modern-day sepoy. That's exactly the role he's playing right now. 

Now let me tell you about Zohran Mamdani. 

The system – wealthy white patriarchy – doesn't quite know what to do with him, other than being vitriolically racist and Islamophobic towards him every chance they get. They threw tens of millions of dollars at stopping him from winning. But here's what they're up against: an exceptionally articulate, strategic, Brown Muslim man who quotes history, cites policy, answers every question directly, and never backs down. 

He was raised by Mahmood Mamdani, the aforementioned Columbia University postcolonial scholar, and Mira Nair, a once-in-a-generation talent herself, an Oscar and BAFTA-nominated director and the first woman ever to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Zohran was loved into existence, not broken into compliance. His progressive politics aren't performance: they are inheritance. 

He wasn't supposed to win. He won anyway. 

At mid-30s, he's the youngest Mayor of New York City in a century. A political wunderkind, a visible Brown, naturalized Indian-American born in 1991 to that powerhouse combination of Mira and Mahmood. They raised their only child with love, warmth, and grace. They taught him to decolonize himself and to give back to the world with a spirit of generosity, running a winning campaign of free childcare, free buses and more affordability for the working person.

This is what colonization does: it splits the same wound into two futures.  

Two Divergent Paths.  

Both Indian-Ugandan fathers were ripped from Uganda, both carried the trauma of being Britain's middleman minority, weaponized against Black Africans and then expelled for it. But the evidence suggests that Pramod Patel let that pain curdle into rage, not at the Empire that used him, but at the people beneath him in that racist hierarchy. He passed that poisoned inheritance to Kash, who now serves the very white supremacist power structure that created this mess, working overtime to destroy the vulnerable and prop up fascism. Meanwhile, Mahmood Mamdani did the excruciating work of decolonizing his own mind, examining how empire pitted Brown against Black, how it made him complicit, how it damaged everyone it touched. He, along with his talented wife, Mira, gave that liberation to Zohran, who fights to lift people up, to dismantle the systems that hurt all of us. Same diaspora, same wound: but one chose to become the colonizer's weapon, the other chose to heal. And that's why decolonization isn't optional or easy. It's painful, deliberate work that every child of empire, whether from the Global South or North, must choose. Empathy as praxis. Zohran Mamdani is system-breaking empathy made flesh. And Barack Obama before him.

Nikki Haley changed her name from Nimrata, checked "white" on her voter registration, and converted from Sikhism. Her son Nalin, grandson of Punjabi immigrants who came to America on visas, now wants to ban naturalized citizens from federal office and end all legal immigration. He confirmed Catholic on Palm Sunday 2025. He is 24 years old. The system didn't just assimilate the Haleys. It weaponized them against everyone who looks like them. 

The colonial fracture doesn't heal on its own. It passes to the next generation, sharper each time. If you do not decolonize yourself, you become another tool of oppression, just wearing a Brown face this time. Kash Patel, Usha Vance, Nikki and Nalin Haley: you have a lot of work to do. 

THE RESISTANCE EVOLVED

The system is powerful. But it is not unopposed.

In February 2026, Ryan Coogler's Sinners received 16 Oscar nominations, the most in Academy history. Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor. Coogler won Best Original Screenplay and became only the seventh Black filmmaker ever nominated for Best Director. The film grossed more than any original domestic release in fifteen years.

Coogler called it "a hoodoo movie, deeply and unapologetically so." No code-switching. No apology. No softening for white comfort. And the audience showed up anyway, because the audience was always there. The gatekeepers were the obstacle, not the market.

That same ceremony, Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another won Best Picture, a film that names the machine directly. The Christmas Adventurers Club, the film's white supremacist secret society, is a cabal of wealthy old men who order the murder of a teenage girl for being mixed-race. Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw rises through anti-immigration enforcement, only to be killed by the very white supremacists he sought to join. Even the Brown bounty hunter hired to do their dirty work becomes empathetic and switches sides when asked to harm a child.

The machine eats its own. Sound familiar?

But progress is uneven. Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, a character Emily Brontë described as "a dark-skinned gipsy," a "Lascar" (South Asian sailor), found on the streets of Liverpool, a major slave-trading port. The 2011 Andrea Arnold adaptation cast James Howson, a Black British actor. It remains the only faithful casting in film history. Fennell's casting director said: "You really don't need to be accurate. It's just a book."

...

Dev Patel is literally right there, Emerald.

All three films: Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Wuthering Heights, were distributed by Warner Bros Pictures. The same studio, the same year: two progressive triumphs and one whitewashed. Studios don't have convictions. They have accountants and profit margins. In this system, progress happens when we make it profitable. Regression happens when we stay silent.

On February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny performed the Super Bowl LX halftime show to 128.2 million viewers in the U.S., and over 4 billion worldwide across all platforms. Benito performed entirely in Spanish, the first artist ever to do so, while ICE agents roamed the country with Supreme Court sanction to terrorize the very communities celebrating him. However, Benito was undeniable. He could not be denied.

His performance was a culture shift in America. Empathy as praxis.

Benito displayed the light blue Puerto Rican independence flag, not the American territorial version. Ricky Martin joined him to sing "Lo Que le Pasó a Hawaii," a song about US imperialism. Flags of every nation in the Americas filled the screen.

The football read: "Together we are America."

At the Grammys weeks earlier, Bad Bunny had spoken directly: "ICE out. We're not savages, we're not animals, we're not aliens, we are humans and we are Americans... The only thing more powerful than hate is love."

He closed the halftime show with these words: Seguimos aquí. We're still here.

And some saw it coming before the rest of us. In 2021, Bo Burnham released Inside, featuring a song called "How the World Works", a children's-show parody where a sock puppet named Socko says the quiet part loud:

"Every politician, every cop on the street, protects the interest of the pedophilic corporate elite." He named it in 2021, before the Epstein files went mainstream. What seemed like hyperbole then is documented fact now.

The system is in control. The machine is strong. But The People are waking up.

America is one giant washing machine.

Sane-washing fascists into "populists." Whitewashing history, the media etc. until slavery becomes "involuntary relocation". Pinkwashing corporations that slap rainbows on logos in June while funding anti-LGBTQ legislators in July. Greenwashing oil companies into "energy transition leaders." Sport-washing dictatorships through World Cups and Olympic bids. Art-washing billionaires who launder reputations through museum donations. And always, relentlessly, both-sides-washing, pretending that truth and lies deserve equal airtime, that fascism is just another valid perspective. Genocide-washing ethnic cleansing into "self-defense." Meanwhile, Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators trafficked and exploited young girls from both the Global North and Global South, American teenagers and international victims alike, and the powerful men who visited that island still walk free, still hold office, still run companies, still shape policy. The machine washes that too. It washes anything. But not everything… The system is not invincible. It has been broken before.

Fred Rogers, Bob Ross, Steve Irwin, white men born into every privilege the machine offers. They could have hoarded. They chose to give. They gave away wisdom, empathy, creativity, wonder, kindness. They broke the pattern.

Ms. Rachel carries that torch now, teaching toddlers empathy and sign language while the right wing attacks her for supporting Pride Month. Robert Irwin continues his father's conservation work. Walter Masterson infiltrates MAGA rallies with a deadpan camera, exposing absurdity one interview at a time. Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson using cinema to tell America’s dirty secrets. And then there are those who weren't supposed to win at all.

Barack Obama. Son of a Kenyan immigrant. Two-term President.

Zohran Mamdani. Son of Ugandan refugees. Brown. Muslim. Socialist. Mayor of New York City.

This is the path forward for America: FDR-level transformation, not incremental tinkering. A cross-racial coalition that recognizes what Heather McGhee documented in The Sum of Us, that white working-class Americans are also being robbed by the billionaire class, that racism is a tool to keep all of us divided while they drain the commons.

Empathy is not sentimentality. It's strategy. It's survival. It's the thing the machine cannot commodify or co-opt, because it requires seeing other people as fully human, and the machine depends on us not doing that.

The Children of the Global South, and the North, have a choice. Become the weapon, or break the cycle. Assimilate into the machine, or dismantle it. Pass the fracture to your children, sharper each time, or do the painful work of healing it yourself.

Kash Patel made his choice. Zohran Mamdani made his. The Haleys made theirs.

What will you choose?

THE CALL RENEWED

To the Children of the Global South: We're still here.

To the Children of the Global North: Stand with us.

Against the machinery of hate, we choose empathy. We choose love.

Stubborn. Strategic. System-breaking.

Everything we’ve learned about Lestat this past season. Louis saying he loves Claudia while repeatedly violating her privacy and agency by reading her diaries and letting others read them. Daniel is an asshole who often makes racist and ableist remarks, and his treatment towards his family and women in general is awful. Even Claudia, who is ultimately the biggest victim of the show, is also evil! She enjoys killing people. She’s manipulated the narrative just like Louis and Lestat. Everyone is evil!!!