My favorite author ever Daniel Lavery mentioned this book on his sub-stack. He mentioned "expanding his Marjorie Hillis collection." I did not know who Marjorie Hillis was, but I have such a strong desire to be able to write like Lavery that I must get familiar with his own inspirations. There was a long wait for the eBook on Libby so I had mostly forgotten about it by the time it popped into my library. It only took a couple of hours to read so by dinner I was going over my favorite lines with my mother. "It kind of reminds me of you!" I said. She was delighted. My father did not acknowledge any of this. The next evening at dinner they announced their divorce. I am now on a mission to expand /my/ Marjorie Hillis collection and gift them to my mom. She seemed extra interested in finding versions with the original covers.

The first half of the Israel Lobby proves that the United States treats Israel exceptionally- the extent of its financial, diplomatic, and military support. It debunks the arguments that Israel makes a good strategic ally for the U.S, or that our exceptional support of Israel is morally motivated. It discusses the history of the lobby, its tactics, and how it became so powerful. Part 2 of the book details the impacts of the lobby on US foreign policy in different middle eastern countries: Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

Except for Palestine is a shorter book with only 4 chapters. It covers the loaded question "Do you recognize Israel's right to exist?" and how recognition of Israel acts as a playing chip against Palestinian negotiation attempts. (Also, how recognition of Israel's right to exist has warped into recognition of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state- their "right" to sovereignty over the Palestinian people). It covers unconstitional attempts to criminalize the grassroots BDS (Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction) movement. It explains that Trump's reverence towards Israel is not unique to him, and that most of his actions (like making Jerusalem the capital of Israel) were first put into motion by former Democratic presidents. The last chapter details resistance movements from within Gaza (like the GMR, Great March of Return) and Israel's violent crackdowns against them.

Romancing Death was written in 2012 by born-again fundamentalist Christian, William Schnoebelen. It is a broad expose on Satanic forces bleeding into pop culture, with about a third of the book dedicated to recapping and reviewing Twilight. Schnoebelen explains that he is uniquely positioned to give this review as he is both an ex-Mormon like Stephanie Myer, as well as an ex-vampire. He describes his transformation in the late 70s, granting him superhuman abilities, an aversion to sunlight, and a lust for blood. But don’t worry, he was totally cured around five years later when a lady at the bank let him know she was praying for him.

Schnoebelen claims to have been (among other things), a warlock in the Church of Satan, an ordained spiritualist medium, a Catholic bishop, a 90th degree Freemason, a member of the Illuminati, a wizard, a vampire, the Moga of a Wiccan coven, a Mormon, and a substance abuse counselor.

He's also a Youtuber.

I discovered Romancing Death through Joseph Laycock’s book on the Satanic Panic, Dangerous Games. (Schnoebelen also claims to have been consulted as a proper sorcerer in the community for the Dungeons and Dragons rulebook). It covered a broader phenomenon of “moral entrepreneurs” on the Christian Right substantiating the existence of secret Satanic criminal networks by insisting they used to belong to one. No one ever claims to have been a low-level Satanist. Everyone who does this claims to have been the 90th degree high warlock of their chapter or the magus of their coven.

Mike Warnke: Published The Satan Seller in 1972, according to Laycock, “the seminal ex-Satanist text”. In the 80s he was regarded as an expert on Satanism before his book came under heavy scrutiny in the early 90s. It describes his journey from orphan to drug dealer to high satanic priest- with power over a network 1,500 members strong. He oversaw kidnappings, orgies, rape, and human sacrifice. When two of his sex slaves attempted to kill him via heroin overdose, he went to Vietnam, became a war hero, and converted to Christianity.

He is also a comedian. Here is a bit he did about how he doesn’t like airplane seatbelts and a wonderful corny religious broadcast Fire by Nite he specially guested on.

Rebecca Brown and Edna (Elaine) Moses: Published several tapes and books through Jack T. Chick outlining international Satanist Conspiracies. Rebecca Brown was a medical doctor who had begun weaving an erratic holy crusade into her medical practices- performing exorcisms in the intensive care unit. When she treated Edna Moses, they formed a partnership and moved in together. Moses claims to have been an ex-witch and Satanic high priestess who was "cured" by Brown. Brown then misdiagnosed her with several blood diseases and received 330 vials of Demerol, a highly addictive painkiller, through false prescriptions. Moses had been injected with so much of it that she could survive four times the lethal amount. After getting found out by the authorities, they moved to California and began publishing their theories. Moses claims that before meeting Brown, she had been crowned a “Top Witch” and had been married to Satan himself, travelling around in his private jet and negotiating arms deals.

Hershel Smith (AKA “the Skin Eater”): Publishers looking for a Mike Warnke clone found one in Hershel Smith. In The Devil and Mr.Smith (1974) he detailed converting to Satanism at 13 by blood sacrificing a dog. His nickname, “Skin-Eater,” refers straightforwardly to his apparent tendency of eating human skin. He didn’t keep the spotlight very long, but in 1973 he toured the Churches and Highschools in United States and Canada in “The Witchmobile”- an “Anti-cult mobile unit” and satanic curiosity cabinet. He acquired the vehicle when Warnke, its creator, started his own ministry.

I almost took an elective on revolutions in my junior year of highschool. I loved the teacher at the time, Jenna, who was also my homeroom advisor. I dropped it early on. I hadn't gotten medicated yet, and once I did I spent all of my time trying to make up for years of poor focus (primarily catching up in Mandarin). I dropped the class after a few sessions, but I got to keep this book they used for reading assignments. I wanted to prove that I was still committed to learning and tried going through anyways but had no follow through. I'm glad I dropped the class, especially since Ethan was in it. Ethan treated Jenna like his therapist/mother/girlfriend and used class to show off his wit* and humor*. Nobody else found this charming. I think I remember some other guy voicing annoyance with him once and feeling very vindicated. I liked Jenna less and less near the end of senior year (she talked about herself too much at inappropriate times. I worry our hyping her up got to her head). I actually read this book a few days before moving to Savannah. It was small and I wanted to get the small books off my "to-read" shelf.

Yes!... Maybe. I Think I learned more from The Wretched of the Earth, but it was a good overview. The first bit of the book posed big-picture questions. What is revolution? What causes one? Their processes, leaders, and outcomes. The second half catalogued major revolutions in rough chronological and geographical order.

It differentiates between "visionary" and "organizational" revolutionary leaders. Revolutionary leaders typically come from the elite class, though radicals are often less well-off than moderates. Pacifist revolutions can only be successful if the oppressing force is propped up via international support.

Revolutions don't just happen when conditions are poor enough, but when a society has entered an "unstable equilibrium". It lists five elements to look out for:

• hindered cash flow to national rulers
• alienation and opposition among elites
• organized popular groups angry at injustice
• Ideological mission bridging elite and popular groups
• favorable international relations

I heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel first through Damien, one of the teachers of a senior year Things You Should Probably Know workshop. She cited it while tearing into my classmate for his offensively underdeveloped presentation on Haiti. This classmate seemed to believe that a well-researched PowerPoint presentation is one that puts a lot of words on each slide. He was trying to compete with me after I made a very good presentation on the Sound of Music (I read three two research papers and connected the musical to Mary Poppins and the civil rights act of 1964. He admitted that he stopped researching past the Wikipedia page for Haiti. He still thinks he won.) Seeing how smoothly she was able to crumble his arguments into nothing and present counterpoints I'd never considered before filled me with awe and an ideal to strive to.

I brought the book with me to our senior retreat weekend in the woods. It gave me something to think about other than the horrors of the errors printed in the Yearbooks (which had been brought with us.) Some teachers gave me nods of approval, but others mentioned their distaste of the author, Jared Diamond, which I have since adopted. The chapters on agriculture made me realize how deeply woven this book had been in our history curriculum, but I feel like Damien had brought up points not mentioned in the book that I'm curious about, like monoculture farming.

To Begin the World Anew: (1580s-1850s)

Taking out the Trash

Starting around the 1580's, British merchants pitched America as a "wasteland". They claimed, as England was already burdened with an underclass of waste-people, they could solve both problems at once by shipping off the impoverished and turning them into productive overseas laborers. Richard Hakluyt the younger wrote his treatise: "Discourse on Western Planting" (1584) to convince Queen Elizabeth I to fund his expeditions to the new world. Indentured servants made this possible, and women were shipped over as breeding stock. These people were not meant to survive, they were the "manure" fertilizing American soil. 

John Locke's Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia

This chapter covers the settlements of North Carolina (poor Carolina), South Carolina (with its elite planter class), and Georgia. 

John Locke (1632-1704) never went to America, but he was the private secretary of the eight "absolute lords and proprietors" of Carolina (anointed in 1663 by King Charles II). He was also a founding member and the third largest stockholder in the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly over the British Slave trade. He wrote the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669) and Two Treatises of Government (1689) which was then quoted by Thomas Jefferson in the United States Declaration of Independence. 

James Oglethorpe was put in charge of Georgia, parceled out of the Carolinas in 1732. He banned slavery and put caps on the amount of land one could own. Georgia was a "Free labor buffer zone between English and Spanish colonies". Oglethorpe abandoned the colonies permanently in 1743 after an assassination attempt. By 1750, land caps were lifted, and slavery had been legalized. Slave merchants quickly monopolized the land. 

Benjamin Franklin's American Breed: The Demographics of Mediocrity

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine both used Pennsylvania for their models of social theory.

 Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790) was a Pennsylvanian Englishman who retired from a successful printing business in 1748 and was elected to the Pennsylvania assembly in 1751. He believed that the dispersal of people settling westward would reduce class tensions, and that migration caused stability. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) pushed class to the wayside in his classic "Common Sense." (1776) He saw white Americans as a distinct "breed" apart from the English, shaped by their environment. 

Thomas Jefferson's Rubbish: A Curious Topography of Class

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the third United States president, serving from 1801 to 1809 and overseeing the 1803 Louisiana purchase. He was fascinated by "agricultural improvements" and thought he could improve the productivity of yeoman farmers, or "cultivators" by teaching them new methods of farming. He wasn't a very good farmer himself, though. He thought that the nature of a people was shaped by the nature of the land they lived on, and wanted to improve the land to improve the people so they people would improve the land and so on. He was from Virginia, which was highly stratified, as (by 1770) 10% of white Virginians owned over 50% of the land. 

Andrew Jackson's Cracker Country: The Squatter as a Common Man

This chapter follows two "Cracker" politicians- Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) who served as president from 1827 to 1839, and David (Davy) Crockett (1783-1836). The term "Cracker" originates around 1760 in the records of British officials describing them as a "lawless set of rascals on the frontiers... backcountry 'banditti', horse thieves, and idle stragglers".  It was synonymous then to the term "squatter", both invoking the English's distaste for perceived idleness. Davy Crockett rose to fame as a politician through tall tales, describing himself as "the savagest critter you ever did see." He supported Andrew Jackson until his Indian removal bill. 

Degenerations of the American Breed: (1840s-1960s)

Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters

The North/South Free/Slave state divide was solidifying around the time of the 1845 Texas annexation and the Californian gold rush of 1848-1855. This chapter discussed the rise of the Free-Soil party in 1848. The Free-Soil party wanted to keep Texas a free state and stop the expansion of slavery westward. But they wanted this because they wanted to keep those states white- and saw slavery as "depopulating" Anglo-Saxon populations wherever it arose. 

It emphasized the importance of pedigree in the supreme court 1857 Dred Scott decision, which refused freedom to escaped slaves in free states. Chief justice Roger B. Taney's majority opinion claimed that freedom was inherited and based in blood. 

Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare

This chapter covers the Civil War (1861-1865). Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy had to convince large swaths of southern "white trash" to fight a war against their interests. Legalized slavery led to a tiny "planter aristocracy" holding monopolies on arable land. Because they relied on slave labor, paid work was in short supply. The war benefitted only the aristocratic slaveholding class, who coincidentally didn't have to fight in it because of the 20-slave exemption. Jefferson Davis claimed that the north was insulting their white working-class population by having them do the dirty work they reserved for slaves- calling them "greasy mechanics". Still, the war was unpopular with southerners. The confederacy did not meet its expectation with enlistments and resorted to a draft. Though they risked death for desertion, out of the 750-850k confederate soldiers, 103,000 left, 80,000 reenlisted to avoid the draft, 70-150,000 paid substitutes to take their place (only 10% of which actually showed up) 180,000 had to be dragooned, and 180,000 resisted until later in the war. Women led riots and raids against the hoarding aristocracy- hitting Jefferson Davis with a loaf of bread. 

Thoroughbreds and Scalawags: Bloodlines and Bastard Stock in the Age of Eugenics

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published "On the Origins of Species" in 1859 and "The Descent of Man" in 1871. His cousin, Francis Galton, (1822-1911) was a proponent of Darwin's ideas and was also the father of Eugenics. By around 1880, after a lackluster post-civil-war reconstruction, the North and South had reconnected. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) became president in 1901 after the assassination of William Mckinley and held office until 1909. He was a staunch eugenicist and passed legislation encouraging white women to breed. He made marriages and divorces a matter of federal law and encouraged tax exemptions for having many children. Poor white women were given opposite treatment. It covered Buck v. Bell - Wikipedia. 

Forgotten Men and Poor Folk: Downward Mobility and the Great Depression

By 1932 20% of Americans were out of work. This chapter cover's Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1882-1945) New Deal. In 1935, he created the Resettlement Administration (renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937) run by Rexford Tugwell (1891-1979). Its intention was to -retire bad land, -relocate the rural poor, -resettle them into new urban-adjacent communities, and -rehabilitate them into suburban life. This was a complicated plan with mixed results that the book doesn't fully cover and resulted in great destruction to inner city neighborhoods he aimed to tear down. He completed 3 "greenbelt" towns before the supreme court shut him down, claiming housing projects were outside the power of the federal government. (grrr)

The Cult of the Country Boy: Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ's Great Society

The last chapter of part 2 covers the 50s and 60s- from the Rise of Elvis Presley (1935-1977) to the emergence of trailer park communities from WW2 soldier camps. Suburban neighborhoods came out of unequally distributed veteran support programs, planned top-down to sort people in with their "type". It covered the racist backlash to the 1957 desegregation of schools in Littlerock, and the news coverage of angry "trailer trash" mobs. Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) was president from 1963-1969, presenting himself as an "updated, modern" southerner.

I picked this book up in an airport early Freshman year but failed to read it. During a pre-quarantine immersion program at school, I befriended the guest teachers, chef Zadi and his wife, Susan Park. The two of them ran a North African fusion taco restaurant called Revolutionario, that they used as a home base for their nonprofit, Asian Americans for Housing. What started as a cooking class became a crash course on community organization. Park gave a speech on corrupt for-profit nonprofits in L.A. that made one of my classmates (whose father runs an evil charter-school nonprofit) very defensive. I remember wanting to finish White Trash before the program ended, (hoping my class conscientiousness would get them to take me under their wing) but the whole thing was cut off due to the pandemic.

I got about halfway through chapter one and then gave up on the book until the very end of senior year, where I picked it back up for my senior project. My original senior project was to code a custom SITS website, and I had drawn out many of my plans, but because the yearbook took up so much of my time, I couldn't prepare, and I was out of meds. I decided instead to get through my slowly accumulating stash of books that had been taunting me since the start of high school, then write a report. I downloaded White Trash as an audiobook on Libby and listened to most of it while walking or working on the SITS Riverclan camp, which I hate.

The first half of Dangerous Games gives a history of roleplaying games and the Satanic Panic through its emergence in 1979-1982, its peak in 1982-1991, and its shifting focus amidst the super-predator craze of 1991-2001. The second half breaks down the purpose of play, reasons why the Christian Right fears imaginary worldbuilding, and how they engage in it anyway. It looks at religion as a roleplaying game and roleplaying games as religion.

I was given this book for Christmas many years ago, but it sat on my desk. When I did a research project on Theophilus Riesinger, the priest who performed the infamous 1928 Earling Exorcism, I found references to a secret 1934 primary account that had been banned from publication by the Catholic Church. There were two original copies locked away in university libraries that weren’t available online. I discovered a book chapter covering the document on an academic journals website and saw the author allowed PDF requests. I emailed him in a haze at 3 in the morning and only afterwards, when checking his website, did I realize he was Joseph Laycock, author of Dangerous Games. The book was sitting right in front of me on my desk at the time, unread.

The next morning, Laycock emailed me back with a a 34-page PDF of his original scans of the lost texts from the university libraries- way more than I bargained for! This incident is why Joseph Laycock is my favorite author ever and also my best friend.

The Beats recounts the lives of poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, and William Burroughs. The second half of the book is dedicated to smaller informational guest comics covering Beatnik history, focusing on women poets, and music groups like the Fugs.

I got this book at the City Lights bookstore in San Fransisco while visiting to tour CCA. I didn't like CCA, but I did like this book! I knew nothing about Beat Poetry going in, but the City Lights bookstore has an entire upstairs section dedicated to it. City Lights recieved in 1956 when they publicly battled obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl in their Pocket Poets series. It was dedicated as a San Fransisco landmark for its importance in shaping literary and ideological movements in the city. I finished The Beats in a day and returned to snatch copies of Howl, Naked Lunch, On the Road, and Revolutionary Letters.

To me, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg fit perfectly into the iconic triad trailblazed by the chipmunks Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. Here is my rendition:

Tuli Kupferberg is my favorite featured Poet because of his “1001 ways” poems:

• 1001 Ways to Live Without Working (1961)
• 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (1966)
• 1001 Ways to Make Love (1969)

I also just discovered this Vice Article on him and the FBI.

Daniel Lavery's memoir, Something That May Shock and Discredit You, covers gender identity, family dynamics, and his evangelical Christian upbringing. He pulls from the Bible, Columbo, Arthurian Legend, Star Trek, Marcus Aurelus's Meditations, and the Golden Girls. Each chapter or interlude is a self-contained essay, many of which take the shape of lists or dialogues, similar to the articles on his blogs, The Chatner, and The Stopgap. My favorites might be "How I Intend to Comport Myself When I Have Abs Someday", "Chapter Titles from the On the Nose, Po-Faced Transmasculine Memoir I Am Trying Not to Write", "The Stages of Not Going on T", "Marcus Aurelius Prepares for the New Year", and "Columbo in Six Positions."

I discovered Daniel Lavery's writing through an artist I follow on Twitter recommending the article;I Stopped By Your Mind Palace, It Looks Like Shit By The Way. (He was comparing the speaker to Jayce Giopara from League of Legends). I listened to "Something That May Shock and Discredit You" (read by the author!) while building ponds in SITS Riverclan territory. I'm worried that the existential dread of the SITS project tinged my experience with the book. This was also (I think) when I was in a big "thinking about nukes" phase and had a meltdown during a chapter where he talks about the Golden Girls finale. Lavery mentions Columbo a few times throughout the book in a way that fascinated and enticed me, so I watched the pilot episode later.