RE-EDUCATION Draft Chapter: "You Might Be Wondering How I Got Here"
A draft chapter of a book I'm working on
The Red Menace Collective is a substack where you can read drafter chapters that I’m working on for forthcoming books before they are published. Think of it as a VIP book club with advance access.
YOU MIGHT BE WONDERING HOW I GOT HERE
Imagine you’re watching a movie. A camera slowly zooms in on a scene at a community center in Seattle. The event is the 2025 Seattle Anarchist Book Fair. In the entryway is a wall of photos of independent journalists and other undesirables who cover the far left.
My photo is in the dead center of the wall.
With a full bag of zines in my hands that I collected from people inside the event, instruction manuals on far-left ideology that explore everything from how to dress up in black bloc and avoid arrest to how to make your own DIY trans hormones, I stand in front of the wall and raise my phone to snap a quick photo before leaving.
:::record scratch:::
:::freeze frame:::
Voiceover: “You might be wondering how I got here…”
“What are you doing?” the organizer asks the people arriving as he hands out masks. “Why are you taking pictures of that?”
I respond, “Nothing, just taking a picture of the fascists,” then walk out of the building.
After getting a safe distance away, I posted online that the only sensible thing to do when Antifa puts you on a hit-list wall is to show up to the event in a disguise and take a selfie.
It was never my ambition to study the far left in America. This was not part of my life plan. But, in retrospect, everything in my life seemed to lead me in this direction from the very beginning.
I’ve always been obsessed with all things dystopian.
And there is nothing more dystopian that I can think of than the far left.
It’s everything you read about in an Orwell novel, a world obsessed with power dynamics, where language doesn’t mean what it sounds like, with plots to eliminate gender, abolish the nuclear family, grow babies in “bio bags” (seriously), take away private kitchens in people’s homes (and private homes entirely), all run by a group of people actively planning for a revolution that will topple the United States government.
It’s all around us, right now. It’s happening in activist subcultures, queer bookstores, college classrooms, and middle school gender clubs.
And it’s been going on for a long time, longer than most people think.
I stumbled into it by accident.
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