We were in the headlines again:
White Supremacists march on Ventura
June 5, 2021 / 10:12 AM / NPC News
A white supremacist mob terrorized the San Buenaventura City Hall grounds last Friday. For a quarter hour, they chanted into their bullhorns, “Islam is right about women,” accompanied by occasional shouts of “We are your men, O Bashar [Assad],” and “Takbir!”
“What they were saying doesn’t even make any sense,” observed Imam Khadijah Waqif of the Waḥdāt Ḥimāyat al-Marʼa Mosque (Ventura County). “They’re incomplete syllogisms. Literally sentences without subject-object-predicate. Grammar aside, it has nothing to do with Islam. This is just another example in the long history of whiteness hijacking the outer corporeality of brown culture to compensate for their own lack of achievements. The Moors in Spain had universities when the rest of Europe hadn’t invented toilet paper.”
The white supremacists hail from the notorious Black Hundreds, named after an early Russian proto-Nazi organization. The present day Black Hundreds fomented as recently as last year, though their roots go back to Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign.
“The Black Hundreds’ choice to align their ideology with a contrived Slavic image of whiteness speaks to a probable connection with Russian state agencies.” Said Jerome Eisenstein, a professor of sociology at Stanford. “Reliable sources inform me they’re drawing funding from Putin.”
On the human scale, Ventura residents have been subject to racist harassment by the white supremacists.
“I was just, like, walking on the street,” said Carlos Hidalgo, “when one of these skinheads shouted that he’d already learned how to cook enchiladas so I should go back to Mexico. I was born in this country and I’m not leaving.”
Reading that made my morning. None of us are skinheads but the media always misses the fine points. Of course they ignored the best part of the event, where I read the most misogynistic verses from the Quran.
“An-Nisa 4:34: If you sense ill-conduct from your women, advise them first. If they persist, do not share their beds, but if they still persist, then discipline them gently. But if they change their ways, do not be unjust to them. Surely Allah is Most High, All-Great.”
[Chanting] “Islam is right about women.”
“4:11: Allah commands you regarding your children: the share of the male will be twice that of the female.”
[Chanting] “Islam is right about women.”
“Al-baqarah 2:228: Call upon two of your men to witness. If two men cannot be found, then one man and two women of your choice will witness—so if one of the women forgets the other may remind her.”
[Chanting] “Islam is right about women.”
And so on.
The news report didn’t even quote Ben’s closing speech, where he finished with “Seriously, I hate Islam as much as the next guy but it’s right about the Jews too. Death to Israel!” [Cheers]
You take what you can get.
All this to say, I love my job.
I’m a paid informant. A shill. A fed. I report back on the devious doings of the Black Hundreds to my handlers and they shower me with shekels. Every now and then, I have to urge one of my friends to commit a federal crime, but that’s just part of the job. We know better.
I’d already written up the report on Saturday, so it looked to be an easy Monday morning. In all odds, no one read the stupid things but my handler insisted. He needed something to show for his work and I get that. Gotta earn your pay. We had a good working relationship. Would suck to have him replaced by some cone-head from Langley.
The coffee was bubbling, the bacon sizzling in its own fat and I was flipping through tabs on my laptop, rocking, if that’s the right word, to a harpsichord rendition of Scarlatti. A dozen or so ideas rattled around my skull. Perhaps it was time for another essay. I bit a chunk from a muffin. Bread was my latest hobby. Bought a grain mill and everything. No one is gonna catch me eating store bought graincuck fodder. They literally call it “enriched” wheat. Super gay! But I’d really started craving more butter and you gotta serve it on something. Trad bread is halal, okay, and (this isn’t just a meme) tastes ten times better. Maybe it was time for an essay on the Slavic glories of proper gleb.
Meanwhile our intellectual elite bloviates over privilege. You gotta live, guys.
A message from Ben popped up on the server.
Shalom, bro. Wanna hit the beach?
Ben is a prince. One the real ones. What the Persians would call broanbro but don’t take that to mean he’s Persian. I love this guy.
What are monday mornings for? but not all day. Work in the evening.
Sitting in his place, eight miles away, you just knew he had that Sandmann grin smeared on his face.
Hamdallah!
So much for a relaxing morning of Muv Luv.
We met up at the pier. The squid shack fries up an exceptionally tasty shrimp. We can hope they don’t use canola but sometimes it’s better not to ask. Ben flashed our secret hand signal and I gave the response. It sounds corny but we needed a way to a way to ask whether the other guy has his cellphone. The main point of going to the beach is the freedom of conversation without our handlers listening in. There’s no way they listen to us all the time but they probably record everything that goes through our cells. Niceties like search warrants don’t apply to dangerous terrorists.
“We gotta grow the business.” Ben helped himself to one of my shrimps.
“How you propose we do that, Mr. Rockefeller?” I asked.
He had the archetypal blond surfer look. He could have been in ads, back in the day when they put attractive people into ads. Excellent jaw line.
“The business” had been my idea. There were four of us: Ben, Sam, Zuiderman and myself. We’d all been working dead end jobs, except Zuiderman, who had learned to code. I flipped burgers, Sam repainted road lines and Ben was a Bezos serf. One day, we were shaking our heads over women and enrichers getting high paid make-believe jobs, when I joked we could make real cash in one of those glowie ops if we all informed on each other. That took off. In a couple months, we’d booted up the Black Hundreds: white supremacy with Slavic characteristics. After all, we’d met each other at the Russian church. Within half a year, we’d all been scooped up by one agency or another.
“We gotta think it over.” Said Ben. “My… uhh… my guy wants some fireworks.”
We kept strict rules. You never said “handler” or in any way directly referenced your position. Everything had to be couched in euphemism. Sure we weren’t being recorded at that moment but one bad habit, one careless word, could get us thrown in prison. The real glowies couldn’t find out the truth of our little experiment, so we didn’t much talk about the fed side. I didn’t even know what agencies had claimed the other guys.
We’d found seven more recruits. They were all real feds, of course, always trying to egg each other into a mass shooting spree or (how they must have salivated over the thought) a lynching. They took their jobs way too seriously. It had never occurred to any of them that the others might be shills too. Sometimes, I’d chuckle over that during our meetings. No doubt they looked at me, always laughing over something, and thought me a little unhinged.
So, we had everyone’s handlers screaming for results and no one willing to deliver. A total farce. Would make a good French movie. We’d sneak out after the bars closed and staple “it’s ok to be white” posters to telephone poles but the agencies want something flashier. We’d do marches and protests, like the Islamic women charade at the city hall.
“You got a plan?” I asked.
“No.” Said Ben. “Plumb out of ideas. You think Friday would have been plenty. Greedy buggers.”
That evening, I went to work at Burger King. I didn’t think of it as my job anymore but as my cover. The whole point of snitching on each other was to rake in globohomo shekels, (and, believe me, informants earn excellent pay), but just throwing around shekels without any apparent source would be too suspicious. I’d switched from cooking to cashier but that was getting boring too. The thought of switching to some other job weighed heavy on my mind. There had been a couple cool guys at Burger King earlier but almost all of them had left. Made the place lonely.
Two hours into my shift, some balding little soyboy with beady glasses was making his order when Ben and his girl Penny pushed through the sticky glass doors. We’d picked her up at the beach in April. Turns out its really easy to get girls when you’ve a band of men with a visible leader. They just sit around in little giggling clusters waiting to be claimed. Islam doesn’t mention that. I’d been through a couple girlfriends since then but Ben had kept Penny around. She followed him into the burger joint with a glare telegraphed across her face.
“You were staring at that bitch’s ass.” Her hiss carried across the store.
“She’s hot.” Ben replied without bothering to look at her.
He’d mostly gotten her to stop swearing but she’d relapse when she needed attention. The problem with American women is that they flaunt their vulgarity but they’re what we have, so we work with it.
“Double whopper—no pickles—with large fries and a large Diet Coke.” The soyboy repeated his order.
My attention had slipped when Ben came in, so the soyboy wasn’t wrong to repeat himself but it still made me angry. This stillborn shoot from a dying civilization had the nerve to criticize me in a room full of strangers. Intolerable. He even bleated out “Diet Coke” as if he weren’t going to take his cup like every other customer who ever walked through the door and fill it up himself at the soda dispenser.
“Would you like extra gay with that?” I asked.
“What?” The question startled him.
“It’s pride month, sir.”
“I mean—I support gay rights.” He took off his glasses and rubbed them compulsively.
“In 2014, Burger King began serving its burgers in rainbow wrappings and we continue this proud tradition to this day. Every year, every month, every week, we ask ourselves: what can we do to make Burger King a gayer place? By this point, we’ve done everything humanly possible. It’s up to you, the customer, to ask yourself what you can do to make yourself gayer.”
His eyes bulged. “Wait. Do you put some ingredient in my whopper?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Our recipe is a corporate secret.” I looked away. The family behind the soyboy openly stared at me.
“Yo!” Ben called out from the back of the line. “I want the gayest burger you got!”
Penny looked over up at him with a look of mingled horror and outrage.
“Sir,” I shouted, “you’ll have to be more specific. All of our products are maximum gay.”
“Nah, man.” He said. “When I take a bite, I wanna dream-quest to a San Fran parade.”
The entire store was watching. The tubby Mexican cashier next to me, with her register tray open and a twenty in her hand, stood frozen. It was exhilarating.
“You can get that from literally anything on the menu.” I shouted across the store. “Everything here, from the smallest fry to the biggest triple whopper, is gayer than an ER ward in the eighties.”
Suddenly, my manager drew me aside. I was buzzing like I’d had a couple beers. The manager would fire me, I’d have the rest of the night off and tomorrow I could look for another job. He sighed.
“Don’t do this to me, man.”
And then he walked off. Suddenly, all the fun was gone, like a popped balloon. When someone has every right to get angry, but doesn’t, it kills all the tension. I don’t mean upset-yet-calm but legitimately not angry. A couple minutes later, when the customers had cycled through, I went back to the registers. The tubby Mexican eyed me up and down.
“Are you gay?”
“I’m Ernst Röhm, baby.”
Of course, she didn’t get it.
The next day, the company sent a memo informing me I’d been fired. They booted the manager too, for the hate-crime of not firing me. Told you they were faggots.
Almost everyone attended the Black Hundreds meeting on Thursday. We sang our loyalty to the czar and ran through the rest of the LARP we’d invented when we first booted up the Hundreds. We always met at Zuiderman’s house ‘cause he has the space. At the very beginning, Sam had our all time top idea. He bought a box that blocked signals and we all threw our cells inside at the start of each meeting. In retrospect, that had to be what drew the agencies to us. They detected our crude recruiting, begged secret warrants off their friends in the judiciary, tried to listen in on us and got nothing. They panicked at this very basic OPSEC and flooded us with feds.
That’s just a guess how it went down but it’s our best guess.
After the ceremonies, we did some quick reports and then Ben opened the floor for ideas. The real feds yapped for a bit about winning the public over and growing the movement but they knew not to talk for long. Then we concluded the meeting and hung out for a few hours.
The girls weren’t members and were, of course, not allowed to attend our solemn ceremonies, so they did their thing in the kitchen until we were finished. Even then, they mostly preferred chatting with each other but from to time they’d bring food or one would come lean into her guy.
Penny kept draping herself over Ben. I suspected they were sleeping together and that troubled me because I was partly responsible for bringing them together. After the Burger King incident, he’d sent me a message saying how she complained she’d never been so embarrassed but acted like she’d never been so horny. In our religion, we’re not supposed to fornicate and its not like any of us (the real bros, not the feds) are insincere, so it had to be bothering him too. His parents, evangelical baptists, had gotten all upset about Penny and constantly kvetched over compatibility—a mammutwörter for you-need-to-know-a-woman-for-three-years-before-you-touch-her-or-you’ll-divorce. Can’t do anything because it might go wrong. Typical cuckservative mentality but they’re decent people. Shouldn’t think about them that way. On the other side, Ben couldn’t marry Penny before her baptism but our priest wasn’t even going to start catechism until fall. I had a nagging feeling I ought to pressure him but the thought made me uncomfortable. We belonged to the same Church but he belonged to the 20th century and I belonged to the 18th. We ain’t on boomer time, father!
Spike slumped down next to me. Kinda nerdy. Not the best physiognomy but he’d got into lifting and massively improved. Pretty rigorous about attending Church. The rest of the feds only showed sporadically, though I felt guilty about that too. You fools don’t know what you’re doing. One does not take the Body and Blood of Christ ironically. In one sense, it was their own business. In another sense, they were doing it because of me and what I had started.
But maybe a little spark of sincerity burned somewhere in their hearts. God knows.
Spike held an ale. He was only twenty but we didn’t care. Would be tragically funny if we ended up imprisoned over a matter of underage drinking. Ironic. He leaned close.
“So I’m thinking—” (a sip) “—aesthetic terrorism. We detonate these horrible post-modern structures and laugh as they crumble to rubble. I mean we don’t kill anyone. We blow them up at night. When they’re empty. Like Fight Club.”
“Fight Club is gayer than Burger King.” I opened a beer of my own.
He looked hurt. “I liked it.”
“It has some good scenes.” I threw him a bone.
“Yeah.” His eyes lit up. “First target—taking out an abortion clinic. Early this morning. No one gets hurt.”
“You should try aggressively staring at the clinic first.” The alcohol was going to my head. “That way, you don’t have to dig up any bombs. Silence is violence all by itself.”
Spike had grown agitated. He glanced around, like a startled rabbit.
“You’re not listening to me, man. Robert already gave me the C4. I was a little afraid to do it but he said the building is empty between twelve and one. There’s a gap in the security guard shift. I’m glad you guys picked me. I get it. You can’t talk. Deniability, right? But you don’t have to worry. I’m won’t get caught.”
He slapped my shoulder, took a swig, and swaggered out of the room. I blinked. Something clearly didn’t add up but the beers had left me muddled. Aesthetic terrorism? Was this a BAP meme? Moldbug? That didn’t seem right at all. And what was that tidbit about see-four? Robert was the most glowing of all the glowies. He looked like he was still in the Navy Seals. He even wore sunglasses everywhere but he’d already left he meeting that night. Slowly, it all came together.
I staggered upright.
“Ben. Ben! We need to talk.”
“I’m right here, bro. Why are you shouting?” He disentangled himself from Penny.
I looked at him with bleary eyes. I’ve always been a weepy drunk.
“It’s Cersei, Ben. She broke up with me.”
“Cersei” was my ex. She’d been with Penny when we picked up that gaggle and she’d immediately started babbling about Game of Thrones, which was why I saddled her with that particular nickname. She’d hated it then she got used to it. Funniest thing was that Penny, who’d known her for years, started calling her Cersei too. I can’t remember her real name. She broken up with me a month before, when I refused to fuck her. We been drinking that night and, in retrospect, she’d come with a plan to seduce me. Yeah, it’s a reversal of the natural roles but, you know, clown world. Honk, honk, doll. Anyway, I managed a soggy “the Lord rebuke you, harlot,” intended as funny but Cersei didn’t take it well.
The guys knew all this history.
“This is not like you.” Said Ben. “I’m gonna drive you home.”
I made my stumbling way to his car. As soon as we were alone, he turned scarlet with trembling fury.
“You can’t drink like that around the glowies. One careless word and you could get us exposed and Rittenhouse’d. You gotta control yourself, bruh.”
“I’m a little fuzzy but not as bad as I’m acting. Cells.” I murmured. We ditched our phones. “Spike’s not a fed and come midnight, he’s getting himself arrested for terrorism.”
“You sure?” Ben looked incredulous.
“Oh, yeah.”
I brought him up to date. We dug out our phones, (batteries back in), and tried to call Spike. Nothing. Of course, he didn’t have his cell on him. Up until that moment, the situation seemed hilarious to me because I could tell him to abort the mission. I know, I know. It was the alcohol. Then we brought up maps and searched for the nearest abortion clinic.
“Our search history will look super incriminating if we don’t stop him.” I remarked.
“It will look incriminating to a retard.” Said Ben. “We’re not the kinda guys who throw together a bomb plot a half hour before carrying it out.”
“You are entitled to trial by a jury of retards.” I grinned.
“You’re so full of it.” He laughed.
A minute later, we blazed down the 101 in Ben’s convertible. His blond hair streamed behind him like a comet. It’s Ventura, so even close to midnight there were still all kinds of peasant-Toyotas crawling over the freeway, impeding our glorious onslaught. Spike’s little speech kept rolling through my head. He was only a kid, trying so hard to belong to something that mattered. He didn’t deserve this. What kind of a sicko was Robert to set him up like this? And how exactly did Robert mean to set him up? Was this to be a “foiled terrorist plot” or did the alphabet soup want “fireworks”?
We were off the highway, drawing close to the clinic.
“Hey, Ben.” I smirked. “Feel like gambling?”
“Not really, bruh.” His knuckles were white on the wheel. He glanced over, saw me powering up my cell, and his face turned to ash. “The hell are you doing? We need to get in, grab Spike and get out without leaving a trace. We can only pray God we don’t show up on the wrong cameras. And you’re pulling out your frickin’ jewgle tracking device?”
“Gospodi pomiluy, bro.” I dialed 911. “Yes. Hello. I am a leader of a dangerous white nationalist organization. Sorry, white supremacist. What I mean is; one my guys has gone rogue and he’s going to blow up the Beate Gordon Woman’s Health Center. Yeah, with a bomb in about five minutes. Think you could send some cops, por favor?”
I caught a glimpse of what might have been utter horror in Ben’s face but it was hard to tell because he was about to ram a parking meter and had to swerve violently back into the lane.
I continued my conversation. “Well, if it helps, his name is Robert.” The woman on the hotline asked me how I knew Robert’s plan. Are they supposed to ask that? I dodged. “Hey, you’ve a nice voice. How do you rate, like, on a one to ten scale? What? Oh, I’m sorry ma’am. Been drinking a little. Hey, I’m here. I gotta stop this guy. Later.”
We scrambled out of the convertible. We were in a suburban commercial district lit by the harsh glare of monstrous street lamps. First thing a real aesthetic terrorist would have blown up. We’d stopped a half block from the clinic.
Ben shook his shoulders and stretched his arms. “What are you gonna do if Robert’s not here?”
“Like I said, it’s a gamble.” I embraced him. “Sorry, Ben, but you can’t come. Think about it. How did I “know” that Robert planned to detonate Planned Parenthood. You think the two of us can cook up an airtight lie right here and keep it straight? This weight falls on one shoulder.” I grabbed his car keys. “Get outta here, moya brat.”
He saluted and ran the other way. I sprinted for the clinic.
Almost two dozen cars sat in the clinic parking lot. The doors were locked but the lights were on. There weren’t any windows because they don’t want to show what goes on in there. A paper flier behind the glass door read: Employee Struggle Session! Combat White Supremacy! Meeting at Midnight Friday Morning.
My heart sank. Robert wouldn’t be content with fireworks. He wanted bodies. Stacks of bodies. Police sirens shrieked through the night air. They were too far. But where was Spike and where were the explosives? Hastily, I circled the building.
Spike was stacking bricks by a circulation grill. Found out later the gas line ran right underneath that spot. Wasn’t sure how much of an explosion one brick of C4 can make but there were enough bricks to fill a wheelbarrow.
“Spike.” I spoke in a low voice. “We didn’t order this. You’ve been tricked and you need to get out of here.”
“What?” He blinked. Poor guy must have been spiked with adrenaline. He’d been drinking too, come to think of it. Perfect.
“You’ve been set up. Do you hear the sirens? Get out of here, man.”
His mouth gaped open and he pointed wordlessly, with a stammering hand, to the pile of explosives. Of course. His fingerprints were all over them. If he got out of this, he’d have to scamper for Panama. I’d torn his life away from him. It was never supposed to be like this. The whole Black Hundreds schtick was just a way to grift. Should have done it white collar, like the Lincoln Project, but we were way past that point.
I grabbed Spike’s hand and pulled him after me. We’d only made it a few yards when Robert popped up, pistol in one hand, badge in the other, with an insufferable smile plastered on his lips.
“You’re both under arrest for attempted terrorism and aggravated hate crimes.” He sighed. “The attempted part makes me sad, Spike. Chickening out like this. As for you,” he sneered at me, “I don’t know what you’re doing here but you’re going to spend a lot more years in prison than I thought.”
Suddenly a shadow flickered behind him. There was a sharp crunch and he collapsed face first into the asphalt. Ben stood there, panting, with a tire iron in his hand. The elation of violence!
“Couldn’t leave you, habibi.” He threw me the tire iron and bolted.
I spent a month in jail, before the DA let me out on bail. The Black Hundreds were finished, as you’d expect. It was a big story, all about the foiling of a white supremacist terror plot until the absurd details came out. Here’s one of the articles from when it all wound down.
Ventura Pogrom: All Charges Dropped
November 19, 2021 / 7:55 AM / NPC News
Federal prosecutors have dropped all charges relating to the alleged Beate Gordon Women’s Health Center pogrom plot. Professor Jerome Eisentein, a criminal law expert at Stanford, weighed in: “This narcissistic spectacle over essentially nothing demonstrates the disturbing tendency of the media to promote and foster white narratives.”
Initially, authorities accused [my name] and [Spike], members of the notorious Black Hundreds White Supremacist organization, of collaborating to destroy a Planned Parenthood installation but [Spike and I] claimed they had acted to thwart [Robert] who planted the explosives on his own initiative. Court proceedings further revealed that both [me] and [Robert] were federal agents planted within the Black Hundreds to forestall such terror attacks. [I] claims that he had learned of a plan by [Robert], whom he did not know to be a fellow federal agent, to attack the Beate Gordon property, and that he and [Spike] immediately rushed to prevent what he thought was a terrorist attack. Police testimony confirms many details of this account.
Federal agent [Robert] claims that [I] ordered him to procure explosives and he then followed [me] to the women’s center with the intent of arresting [me] for attempting to execute a terrorist plot. In the confusion, a violent struggle took place, and [Robert] suffered a grave injury to the head, leading to diminished motor skills and loss of cognitive function. Federal investigation revealed that [Robert’s agency] procured the explosives and gave them to persons they believed to be a terrorist group but who were in fact [men working for a different federal agency.]
“It goes to show the extent to which institutional whiteness dominates our government.” Said Professor Eisentein. “These doddering agencies wouldn’t have given powerful weapons to minorities. We need to have a conversation about retiring the sclerotic white male workforce to make way for the future of government staffing.”
Undoubtedly, minorities have suffered the most damage from the debacle.
“Like... the intense emotional fatigue has been grinding me down.” Said Carlos Hidalgo, Ventura resident. “With what happened to the women’s center, and stuff, I feel exhausted every day.”
A short story by the Prisoner. Next time we'll return to commentary on other people's work.
Sides are orbital.