So I have been indicted by the Berlin District Prosecutor for authoring, publishing, and advertising a book.

I’m not joking. The District Prosecutor is actually going to prosecute me again, this time for the crime of publishing a book. My lawyer received the indictment today.

Now, let me be clear, because this gets kind of confusing. This indictment is a brand new indictment. This isn’t the first indictment that I was already prosecuted for, and originally acquitted, but then had my acquittal overturned by an appellate court after the Prosecutor appealed, and thus will be sentenced in connection with in October. That indictment was based on two tweets I had tweeted that featured the cover art of the book that the District Prosecutor has now indicted me for authoring, publishing, and advertising.

Yes, the book I have been indicted for authoring, publishing, and advertising is The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), an unofficial history of the Covid era. I cannot show you a photo of that book, or else the German authorities might send the police to raid my home again, as they did in November.

The new indictment alleges: (1) that I authored and published the book and offered it for sale on Amazon and assorted other booksellers’ platforms; (2) that the artwork on the cover of the book (which I cannot show you, or the German authorities will send the police to raid my home again) features an image of a Covid mask with a swastika barely visible behind it; (3) that I was aware that the swastika is a well-known symbol of the former National Socialist German Workers Party (i.e., the Nazis), and that this symbol was visible to persons visiting the booksellers’ websites, including persons in Germany.

Which, of course, all of those allegations are true.

The indictment further alleges that, on October 5, 2024, I published an essay, Fear and Loathing in New Normal Germany, reporting on the overturning of my acquittal in that earlier prosecution involving those two tweets, and included an image of the cover of the book, on my blog (i.e., consentfactory.org), as well as screenshots of the two tweets that I had just been convicted, or unacquitted, of tweeting.

Which, that allegation is also true.

So the new “crimes” I have been indicted for are as follows:

(1) writing, publishing, and promoting a book that the German authorities don’t want anyone to read. (There are, of course, numerous books with swastikas on their covers available for sale in Germany. Matt Taibbi posted images of some of them in a piece on my case back in 2023. So please, if you are one of these annoying German toadies who writes to me, over and over, and over again, claiming that “this prosecution is only about the swastika,” don’t bother, and … you know, go fuck yourself. )

(2) publishing an essay reporting on my original prosecution for tweeting.

But wait, here comes the most Kafkaesque (or perhaps the most Orwellian) part. After the Bundesverfassungsgericht (i.e., Germany’s supreme court) took a huge shit on Article 5 the German constitution …

… and summarily refused to review my appeal, I cancelled distribution of the book. So now I’m being prosecuted for authoring, publishing, and advertising a book that I no longer publish or advertise.

Of course, I can’t unwrite the book, so I guess they can still prosecute me for that, and they probably won’t be thrilled about the new updated second edition of the book that Skyhorse Publishing will be releasing shortly, but … well, what can I do? There is only so much fascist boot I can publicly lick.

Oh, and I just saw that Skyhorse Publishing is getting ready to load the book on their website. Gosh, I wonder what the new cover will look like?

I’m sorry that I’ve turned into a mockery of Lenny Bruce. I’ll try to keep you posted on the new prosecution. I’m also sorry about my recent lack of Substack output. I’ve been busy writing more harmful and undesirable literature.

So I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

I’ll give you that news in just a minute, but, first, I need to do a recap for any readers just now tuning in. Regular readers, please bear with me, or just skip down to below the Spiegel image, because a bit of repetition follows.

OK, here we go with the recap.

As I explained in my previous column a few days ago, Germany’s supreme court has refused to issue a ruling on my appeal to overturn the overturning of my acquittal on bogus “hate crime” charges.

So that’s it. My “hate crime” conviction stands.

The “hate crime” is the cover artwork of my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021). I can’t show you a picture of the book, because, if I did, the authorities would probably send the police to raid my home again, and terrorize my wife, and our cats, as they did in November of 2025.

So, instead, as in my previous column, here’s a picture of an issue of Der Spiegel.

My book cover art is more or less exactly like that, except the swastika on my book is behind a medical-looking mask, instead of a German flag, as on the Spiegel cover. The German authorities are not prosecuting Der Spiegel. They are prosecuting me, because I compared them to the Nazis, instead of comparing the AfD to the Nazis.

OK, that’s the recap. Now, the good news, and the bad news.

The bad news is, I am now, officially, a criminal, with a criminal record, in Germany. And my book is officially a crime in Germany. Selling my book is a crime in Germany. Advertising my book is a crime in Germany. Reading my book is a crime in Germany.

I am the publisher of this criminal book, and I live and work in Germany, and thus, I have no choice but to withdraw the book from distribution.

If I do not withdraw it, the German authorities will prosecute me, over and over, and they’ll send the police to raid my home, and terrorize my wife, and our cats, over and over, and impose fines on me until I am totally bankrupt, or possibly even send me to prison. And it’s not just my wife and the cats I’m thinking about. I have been dealing with these tyrants for going on three years now, which has taken up a lot of my time and energy, and caused a lot of stress, which probably contributed to the illness that put me in the hospital recently.

OK, let me get the good news in here, before this column gets too depressing.

The good news is, Skyhorse Publishing is going to publish a second edition of the book. And thus, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021) will remain in print and available worldwide.

Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., is an American independent publisher in New York City (i.e., not in Germany), and the publisher of my most recent collection of essays, Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. IV (2022-2024). My dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by , a Skyhorse imprint.

I am extremely grateful to Skyhorse Publishing, and to its president and publisher, Tony Lyons, for coming to the rescue and keeping this book in print.

OK, now a little more bad news.

As I mentioned, I’ve been doing legal battle with the German authorities and courts for almost three years now. I entered into this battle with a few naive assumptions.

When I first learned that I was under criminal investigation for two tweets about the Covid mask mandates, I assumed that a German court would vindicate me, because I understand the relevant legal statute. A German court did. The Berlin District Court acquitted me in January 2024, but the Berlin District Prosecutor appealed the verdict, and the Berlin Appellate Court overturned my acquittal.

At that point, it was clear that the German authorities and courts have no respect for the rule of law, or Germany’s constitution, or basic democratic rights, like freedom of speech and artistic expression. To the German authorities and courts, the law is just a weapon, a cudgel they can use on anyone they perceive as their political or ideological enemy. They will openly, brazenly, apply double standards (see the Spiegel cover above) and pervert the law however they have to in order to persecute their enemies. They do not care, not at all, if it makes them look like hypocrites, or … well, you know, fascists.

That, in my opinion, is pretty bad news.

The other bad news is, throughout this three-year-long nightmare, I kept waiting for the German legal community to speak out about the blatantly authoritarian behavior of the German authorities and the courts, and it never happened. They did not speak out. Apart from a few notable exceptions—for example, Clivia von Dewitz, a judge, author, and an expert on Germany’s statutes regarding the use of Nazi symbols, who published several articles about my case—the silence from the legal community has been deafening.

The German press have been likewise unwilling to hold the authorities and courts to account. Again, with a few notable exceptions—independent outlets and journalists like Multipolar, Aya Velázquez, Bastian Barucker, Ralf Hutter, Mathias Bröckers, and others, and a few mainstream newspapers like Die Zeit, Berliner Zeitung, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung—the German press have conducted themselves like the proverbial Goebbelsian piano.

This is not a healthy, democratic culture. This is a nascent totalitarian culture.

If this were only the state of affairs here in Germany … well, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, it is not. This type of authoritarian behavior is on display throughout the West, in the U.K., the U.S.A., and elsewhere. The targets of the repression differ, but the totalitarian tactics and the messaging are the same.

Yes, messaging. The Powers That Be throughout the West are sending us a message. They have been sending us this message for years. They sent it during the Covid era. They sent it during the Russiagate era. They sent it in Gaza. Most of us can’t hear it, because we think it is coming from “the other side.” It isn’t. Both “sides” are sending us the message. Because both “sides” are sides of the same global system. A system that doesn’t need to pretend to respect our democratic rights anymore.

I’m a satirist, so a lot of people assume that I am just indulging in hyperbole when I come up with nicknames like “GloboCap” and book titles like “The Rise of the New Normal Reich.” I am not just indulging in hyperbole. At this point, if you cannot see that brick wall, if you cannot perceive how societies are being radically restructured, how the democratic rights we thought we had are being stripped away, if you cannot sense the new, nascent form of totalitarianism coming into being, well, I don’t know how to get through to you, exactly.

In any event, that’s my news … the news about the book, and my criminal status.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to my “legal defense fund” and otherwise supported me during these last three years. Whatever I have achieved with this legal battle so far, I could not have done it without your support. Seriously, I am your debt forever … spiritually, I mean. I can’t repay you with money. By the time the Germans get through with me, I’ll be fortunate if I can still pay my rent.

I’ll let you know, of course, when Skyhorse Publishing releases the second edition of The Rise of the New Normal Reich. In the meantime, if you want to read about my case, and other disturbing aspects of the New Normal Reich …

So the German Supreme Court has ruled on my case. Their ruling is that they will not rule on my case. They sent my attorney a letter to that effect. It literally says:

So I am now officially a “hate criminal” in Germany. I was already pretty much a “hate criminal” in Germany, but now it’s official. This is Germany’s supreme court. There is no higher court to appeal to.

OK, sure, there’s the European Court of Human Rights, the international court of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, but it doesn’t have the power to enforce its rulings, and the German authorities and courts have made it clear that they couldn’t care less about anyone’s opinion of their paranoid and authoritarian behavior.

So I’ll be going back to Berlin District Court for sentencing.

I was originally acquitted by the Berlin District Court, but the district prosecutor wasn’t happy with that verdict, so the prosecutor appealed to the Berlin Appellate Court, which overturned my acquittal, which prompted me to appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court (i.e., the Bundesverfassungsgericht, Germany’s supreme court), which has now basically told me to go fuck myself, so now I have to go back to the court that acquitted me to be sentenced for the crime I didn’t commit.

I assume that most people reading this column are familiar with my case by now, but, if you’re not, here are a few of my previous columns and some press coverage that will bring you up to speed.

Press coverage:

What Happens Where Free Speech is Unprotected, The Atlantic
Where “hate speech” censorship is even worse than on U.S. campuses, Washington Post
Satirist C.J. Hopkins Sentenced in German Speech Case, Racket News
Der Provokateur, Die Zeit
Meinungsfreiheit in Gefahr durch Strafjustiz in Deutschland, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Autor C.J. Hopkins verurteilt, Berliner Zeitung
Der kafkaese Prozess gegen C.J. Hopkins, Multipolar
The American Author Living An Orwellian Nightmare, Discourse Magazine
Scandalous verdict: US author C.J. Hopkins found guilty, Aya Velázquez
„Das ist verrückt,“ Multipolar
The Thought Police Are Here, Crisis Magazine

My columns:

The Global Crackdown on Dissent
Modern Book Burning in New Normal Germany
A Visit by the German Thought Police
Fear and Loathing in New Normal Germany
The People’s Court of New Normal Germany
The Verdict
The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited)

The short version is, back in 2022, I posted two tweets protesting the Covid mask mandates, and I put the cover art of my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich, in those tweets. The German authorities didn’t appreciate that, so they censored the tweets, banned my book, and prosecuted me for “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” I would include an image of the cover of my book, but, if I did, the German police would probably raid my house again and steal my new computer.

However, here’s the cover of an issue of Der Spiegel …

My book cover art is more or less exactly like that, except the swastika on my book is behind a medical-looking mask, instead of a German flag, as on the Spiegel cover.

It goes without saying that the German authorities are not prosecuting Der Spiegel for “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

If you’re wondering why the German supreme court decided not to rule on my case, and why the judges refused to provide any explanation for their decision … well, just imagine if they had been forced to explain, in writing, for the record, why the Spiegel cover is legal, but the cover of my book is a “hate crime.”

That might have been a bit embarrassing, professionally.

I don’t want to antagonize the supreme court, or the Berlin district prosecutor, or any other German authorities, or they’ll send the police to raid my home again, but, if you happen to be a journalist, and you want to ask them to explain the difference between the Spiegel cover and the cover of my book, the judge you want to talk to is Professor Doctor Stephan Harbarth, LL.M. (Yale). He’s the big honcho at the German supreme court, and is the one who was in charge of reviewing my appeal.

And you could also ask Stephan about my second appeal, or constitutional complaint, as they call it here in Germany. That one is regarding the police raid of my home, and the confiscation of my computer, and the German authorities’ attempt to force me to stop distributing my book worldwide. As I noted, they already banned it in Germany.

That appeal, or complaint, is still pending at the supreme court. I’m certain, after he reads this column, the professor will make sure that it receives proper consideration according to the German constitution, and the rule of law, and basic democratic principles, which the Federal Republic of Germany holds in the highest regard.

Oh, and, if you live in Germany, and want to read more about my prosecution, and other adventures with the New Normal authorities, you can buy my book, Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich, which was published by Skyhorse Publishing last year. The Germans haven’t banned that one yet.

I imagine they’ll get around to it eventually.

So I was going to write a column about a recent column Chris Hedges wrote about Delaney Hall, a private prison in New Jersey, operated by The GEO Group, Inc. under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a subsidiary department of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is currently being operated as a federal immigration detention facility (i.e., Delaney Hall is, not DHS).

This column I was going to write, and publish, in a desperate bid to stop or slightly slow down the exodus of paid subscribers from my Substack was going to signal to longstanding readers of my Substack who were, at that moment (i.e., the moment I published the aforementioned column, and it instantly appeared on the screens of their phones), contemplating unsubscribing, that I was “back,” and thus there was really no reason to cancel their paid subscriptions to my Substack (and, a few days later, sign up for a free subscription to my Substack with a new email address that I couldn’t possibly connect to the old one, and continue reading my columns without paying).

It was going to be slightly confusing, this column. It was going to be about private prisons like Delaney Hall, and the private prison industry, and the security industry, and global capitalism, and the new totalitarianism. It was going to focus on The GEO Group, Inc., formerly The Wackenhut Corporation, which was acquired by a company called Group 4 Falck, a Danish-British-Swedish multinational security and emergency services conglomerate that merged with a British security firm called Securicor and became G4S, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Allied Universal, from which Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, a subsidiary of The Wackenhut Corporation, repurchased its stock and became The GEO Group, Inc., which is now independent of G4S, with which it competes, and occasionally partners, on security contracts from assorted governments.

I couldn’t get it up to write that column. I don’t know who would want to read it. It wasn’t going to have anything to do with Epstein, or Israel, or the Jews, or that guy from Maine with the Nazi tattoo, or Bari Weiss, or whatever that weird thing is on Trump’s hand, or Hunter Biden’s comeback, or the race riot in Belfast, or whatever everyone is supposed to have a take on today and then forget they ever cared about tomorrow, which is what seems to be selling.

So here’s another excerpt from the book I’m currently obsessively writing, Strangers in a Strange Homeland: a Manic Odyssey in Search of the American Spirit, which, if I can stay on track and meet my deadline, will be published by next spring.

It’s the opening of the chapter about our adventures in Oregon. It begins with a little philosophical reflection.

The Enemy Within

Back in the summer of 2016, when the Global War Terror was switched off and the War on Populism was switched on like that scene in Orwell’s 1984 where the Party switches official enemies in the middle of the Hate Week rally, the majority of Americans were completely oblivious. And of course they were. The majority of Americans do not have the time to monitor the revision of official reality on a daily basis. Most Americans do not believe there is such a thing as official reality. They believe that reality is ... well, reality. It’s just the way it is. Things just happen. One day, we’re at war with the terrorists, the next day, we’re at war with the populists, and the day after that, Donald Trump is president.

But reality isn’t just the way it is, and things don’t just happen. They do not magically spring into existence out of the ether. They evolve out of other things that evolved out of other things in a series of steps stretching back through time.

This process is generally known as “history.” Most Americans are oblivious to it.

For example, most Americans believe that the Global War on Terror started on September 11, 2001, because some terrorists flew some planes into some buildings. Which they did, but not because “they hate us for our freedoms.” The Global War on Terror started, or became inevitable, when the Soviet Union collapsed, taking its ideology down with it. This is when global capitalism became the last ideological power system standing. Its final external enemy vanquished, it had nothing left to do but consolidate its power and implement its ideology throughout the territory it occupied, which, in this case, happened to be the entire planet. That, and neutralize any and all forms of internal resistance to its occupation. The military term for this is “clear and hold.”

It is the historical context of the last thirty-six years.

It is a difficult thing to get one’s head around, the fact that the entire planet is occupied by a single ideological power system that has no outside adversaries. The fact that there is no “outside” of the system, no external ideological territory from which to mount opposition, and thus any and all forms of opposition to the system are mounted from within. The fact that every form of opposition to the system is an act of insurrection, an act of terrorism, in essence, a crime.

The nature of the opposition is irrelevant to the system. Opposition is opposition. It needs to be neutralized. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, lone-wolf terrorists, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, Covid deniers, January Sixxers, neo-Nazis, Antifa, Hamas, the Iranians, Remigrationists, neo-Situationists ... it makes no difference to GloboCap, except to the extent that it can turn one group against another, and neutralize them both, or allow one group to run amok for a while, and then neutralize it, with prejudice, to send a message.

The members of this group, i.e., the group that GloboCap has allowed to run amok for a while in order to make an example of it later, are almost invariably unaware of the role they are playing, and of their inevitable fate, because they are almost invariably unaware of the sequence of historico-political events that delivered them to where they are … which isn’t where they think they are.

He that hath ears, let him hear. In the meantime, back to our manic odyssey.

…

On the afternoon of September 27, as Hugo and I were tear-assing west on I-84 along the Columbia River, President Trump announced that he had directed the Pentagon to immediately send “all necessary Troops” to “War-ravaged Portland,” which was “under siege from attack by Antifa” and other unidentified “domestic terrorists.” Five days earlier, as Hugo and I were tear-assing up into the Rocky Mountains, he had officially declared Antifa a “Domestic Terrorist Organization,” and a “Terrorist Threat.” And now he had authorized the U.S. military to use “full force, if necessary,” to protect the city and “our ICE facilities” from being overrun and captured by the “terrorist” forces.

Naturally, I was looking forward to arriving in Portland and getting “in the shit,” so I was rather disappointed when we rolled into town and drove around for about an hour looking for “the shit,” and couldn’t find it. There was no “shit,” none that we could locate. The city didn’t look particularly “war ravaged” or “under siege from attack by Antifa,” or any other group of “domestic terrorists.” I pulled over and illegally parked, left Hugo in the Mustang to guard his gear from the roving bands of Antifa terrorists, who would presumably want to steal it, and pawn it, and use the money to buy black market arms or get their genders reassigned, and dashed into some sort of vegan Asian Fusion restaurant across the street. The place was clearly a terrorist front. Everything about it was way too “normal.” People were just sitting there, eating their vegan kimchi quesadillas, as if nothing was happening. A server and the hostess were standing in the back. They looked like they were probably Antifa, or Antifa-adjacent. They had the haircuts, and the piercings, and they were wearing black.

“Hi ... I’m looking to get in the shit.”

“Sorry, our restrooms are for customers only.”

“No, the shit. The fighting. Antifa. ICE.”

“There’s nothing like that ...”

“It’s OK. I’m a satirist. I live in Berlin. My buddy is a photographer.”

“Please keep your voice down.”

“We’re looking for the terrorists.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I dashed back out, and limped across the street.

Hugo was going through the five Google calendars he had put various versions of our ever-changing itinerary and important contacts in.

“What’s the name of the place where we’re staying?”

“Her name is Marie-Clair.”

“No, the name of the town.”

“Gresham. It’s a suburb of Portland.”

“I don’t have the address.”

“Call Brandy. She’ll have it.”

I cranked up the Mustang and got us out of there.

“The staff in that place were definitely Antifa.”

“Are you OK?”

“Sure. Why?”

“You’re talking funny.”

“I just need to sleep.”

“In one mile, turn right onto Southwest Alder Street.”

…

Gresham is a quiet, leafy suburb about twenty minutes east of downtown Portland. One of my readers, Marie-Clair Dumont, had offered to put us up for two nights. Our itinerary was ridiculously tight, as usual. We had a date the next day to gather with some Covid dissidents at Dick’s Primal Burgers in Portland, and Hugo wanted to connect with a friend from Yale or Miami and attend a protest, and then I had to get back to Gresham to do a reading at The Scout, a local wine bar. But that was the next day. We had the rest of the night to relax, clean up, and sleep in separate bedrooms. Marie-Clair cooked us a lovely dinner, and then we sat out on her deck and talked about “War-ravaged Portland,” and what was going on in America. Marie-Clair is a chiropractor. When she saw the state my body was in, she broke out her electrical muscle stimulator, plastered electrodes all over my back, and cranked it up until my infraspinati and latissimi dorsi started jerking and quivering.

I slept like a German marmot that night.

Our gathering the next day at Dick’s Primal Burgers was larger than I had expected. I had thought we were meeting with a couple of random Covid deniers. As it turned out, it was a whole private room full of people, many of whom had been members of a local group that had formed during the Covid era. A lot of them were former leftists, or non-New Normal leftists, or they didn’t know exactly what to call themselves anymore. One of them was Paul Levy, who has written several books about what the Algonquin people refer to as the “Wetiko,” a cannibalistic psychic virus, or spirit, or “malignant egophrenia,” driven by insatiable greed and bloodlust, which takes over people’s minds and turns them into selfish, homicidal assholes.

Everyone has their own version of The Beast.

At some point, Hugo’s friend Tori turned up, and she and Hugo took off in the Mustang. Hugo wanted to locate and photograph “the shit,” and Tori said she knew where to find it. Apparently, a division of “domestic terrorists” were assembling in a park by the Willamette River, preparing to ravage and lay siege to the city. Many of them had brought their children along, presumably to use as human shields. Several of them were posing as octogenarian ladies in motorized wheelchairs. No one was fooled by these devious tactics. This was going to be a major Antifa operation, on the scale of the Tet Offensive at least. Hugo and Tori set out to capture the carnage on film for the historical record. Marie-Clair drove me back to her house, where I took a nap and then got myself together for the event at The Scout that night.

The Scout is lovely little wine bar in Gresham. It’s owned by two guys who were both Cavalry Scouts in Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country. They were part of the “clear” part of “Clear and Hold.” Now they own and operate this wine bar together, and host reading events from time to time. Our event was packed; it’s a pretty small place. We talked about America, and what was going on, and the spectacle, and Antifa, and “War-Ravaged Portland,” and illegal immigration, and the dissolution of borders, and national sovereignty, and how global capitalism was destabilizing and restructuring the planet. My global-capitalism analysis didn’t go over very well, at least not with the gentleman who grabbed me on my way out to smoke and advised me to stop referring to capitalism as “capitalism.”

“It isn’t capitalism.”

“I was just on my way to ...”

“It’s crony capitalism.”

“OK. Sure.”

“Are you familiar with the Austrian School?”

“Could we maybe continue this discussion outside?”

“It’s an oligopoly.”

I really wanted to smoke.

“Look, it may not be the kind of capitalism you want, but it’s the kind of capitalism we have.”

###

The rest of the chapter covers our visit to Ashland, Oregon, and the interview we did for Jefferson Public Radio, the local NPR affiliate, and the event we did at the Barnes & Noble in Medford, all of which events were arranged by , with whom many of my readers will be familiar. You’ll have to wait for the book for that.

Photo: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York

Interview with Bastian Barucker for People & Perspectives.

An article (in German) by Lena Böllinger in Multipolar magazine.

A Jefferson Public Radio interview with Mike Green in Ashland, Oregon.

So I tried to write a column about dog rape. I couldn’t do it. Despite my fear of losing the last of my Substack subscribers, going broke, getting evicted from my apartment, and moving in next to the homeless guy who lives outside the doorway of the grocery store across the street, I could not do it. I could not write about dog rape.

As it turns out, I have no “take” on dog rape … well, except that it’s bad. I’m against it, unequivocally. But that’s the extent of my opinion on dog rape.

Also, Thomas Massie. I could not care less. And the Granta AI scandal. And whatever other news is being spewed out into the Internet for obligatory opining this morning.

So I’m posting another excerpt from my book. The book I’m writing about my visit to America, and the seven weeks I spent on the road, tear-assing all around the country with old my friend, Hugo Fernandez, a photographer, and our manic search for what remains of the American spirit. This one is actually an excerpt of an excerpt. I don’t want to piss off my publisher, Arcade Publishing, by posting the entire book online.

The title of this chapter is “The Beast,” but the Beast does not get mentioned in this excerpt … or not expressly in any event. The Beast got mentioned in the course of an event I did in a tent in West Virginia, and it gets mentioned later on in the chapter.

You’re probably familiar with The Beast, but, the odds are, you call it by some other name. We all see the world through the lenses we’re wearing. Which is kind of what this chapter ends up being about.

Anyway, here’s how it begins …

An excerpt from Chapter 5, The Beast.

I decided it was probably best not to burden Hugo with the news of my midnight ride with “Bobby” and his creepy driver. I doubt he would have believed me anyway. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. In any event, I was in no shape to explain it. My head was pounding from all the Jameson, and my lingering jet lag, and sleep deprivation.

Hugo wakes up at 4:00 A.M. He does this like clockwork, every single day, regardless of what time he goes to bed. Apparently, he has no control over this. He doesn’t set an alarm or anything. He just wakes up, and starts digging around in his luggage, and flushing the toilet, and taking a shower, or whatever it is he does at home when I’m not lying there in the same hotel room savagely hungover and trying to sleep. This was our first hotel room together, the first of many more to come. As I was about to find out, this pre-dawn digging, flushing, and extended showering activity typically goes on until 6:00 A.M., when the hotel restaurant or the local corporate breakfast establishment opens for business.

That breakfast establishment is usually Starbucks. You can walk in there, or drive through the drive-thru, and purchase an assortment of exotic coffees, like “Starbucks 1971 Roast” and “Starbucks Sun-Dried Ethiopia Highlands,” which you can attempt to consume through the plastic sip-lid of your enormous to-go cup while enjoying a “Chocolate Pistachio Loaf,” or “Strawberry Matcha Loaf,” or an assortment of other breakfast products that look and taste exactly the same regardless of where you are in America.

Occasionally, as in our hotel in Washington, you are provided with a variety of single-serving coffee-in-a-teabag things that you can heat up an incredibly noisy kettle and prepare in your room at 4:30 A.M. while your roommate is desperately trying to sleep. These single-serving coffee-in-a-bag things come in cheerfully color-coded packaging and have fanciful brand names, like “Ethiopian Breakfast Blend,” “Nicaraguan Roast,” “Macadamia Roast,” “Decaf French Vanilla Roast,” and so on.

America is the epicenter of infinite assortments of individually shrink-wrapped and otherwise excessively over-packaged consumer products with fanciful brand names and memorable logos that no one really needs. Or, OK, some of these products are needful, or arguably needful. Toothpaste, for example. But there are literally hundreds of brands of toothpaste. You walk into the toothpaste aisle at your local Walmart or CVS, and there they are, hundreds of them. Aquafresh. Close-Up. Mentadent. Pepsodent. Tom’s of Maine. Oral-B. Ultra Brite. Sensodyne. Therabreath. Etcetera. There are hundreds of brands of pain relievers. Advil. Tylenol. Exedrin. Celebrex. Midol. Aleve. Unisom Sleep Tabs. Ear Pain Drops. Boil Relief Creme. Sudafed. Ex-Lax. Dulcolax. Aspercreme. Voltaren. Demerol. MS Contin. Roxanol. Percocet. Oxycontin. And the list goes on, and on, and on. The shelves of your local corporate supermarket or megastore are lined with hundreds of brands of processed, ultra-processed, and bio- and genetically-engineered food products. Mass-produced breads. Cheerios. Fruit Loops. Magic Spoon Fruity Protein Cereal. Fritos. Tostitos. Frozen pizza. Instant noodles. Oreos. Snickers. Twizzlers. HoHos. Macaroni and cheese. Orange juice powder. Cheese-It. Coke. Pepsi. Energy beverages. And so on.

Most Americans are inured to the fact that they are no longer living in a democratic society, but, rather, in one big global marketplace, designed, managed, and controlled by corporations. Their lives are a series of interactions with products and services, and advertisements for products and services, and communications regarding products and services. Their interaction with these products and services begins the moment they wake and reach for their phones and continues until the moment they fall back to sleep. Every element of their official reality reinforces their identity as consumers. The feed on their smartphones. Their brand of coffee. Their breakfast products. Their morning news. The make of their vehicles. The personally-selected voice of their onboard GPS navigator. The billboards along the highways they drive, or the streets they walk to their subway stations, the walls of which are festooned with ads. The corporations they work for, and their products and services, and the marketing of their products and services. The dating apps. The social media. The personal proprietary virtual assistants. The omnipresent television screens. A living, breathing, virtual reality, in which everyone is either a potential customer, or a competitor, or coworker, or their boss, or some annoying public-sector bureaucrat. Everything costs. Food. Water. Physical space. Movement. Time. Moment by moment. Frame by frame. The movie running on an endless loop. The perpetual motion machine of the market, a series of ceaselessly spinning wheels, wheels within wheels within other wheels, Ferris wheels, hamster wheels, circuitous flows, going nowhere, turning in the widening gyre, trapping and recycling all energy, consuming and regenerating itself, devouring meaning, devouring America, excreting a simulacrum of America …

Was there still another America out there, beyond the ever-expanding urban sprawl, beyond the cities, the suburban shopping malls, maybe even beyond the reach of the spectacle?

Hugo and I were going to find out.

We were tear-assing up into the Appalachian Mountains, heading for Hillsboro, West Virginia, population approximately two hundred and fifty. West Virginia was founded in 1863, midway through the Civil War, after it seceded from the state of Virginia. The government of Virginia had long been dominated by the plantation owners in the northeast regions, as their non-voting slaves were counted in the censuses. The farms in the west were mostly family farms. After Virginia joined the Confederacy, the west voted to secede, and joined the Union.

Hillsboro is located in the Little Levels, a level plain in the limestone valley at the southern end of Pocahontas County. It’s just down the road from the official headquarters of the National Alliance, the neo-Nazi organization founded by William Luther Pierce. It’s also the birthplace of Pearl S. Buck, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for literature. We needed to get there in time to wash up and do a 4:00 P.M. event at the Lobelia Depot, a combination general store, café, and gas station off the Seneca Trail. Our host, a gentleman named Rolly McCarthy, had told us to take a left onto Dick McNeel Road, and then turn right onto a gravel road that didn’t have an official name, and then drive until we saw what looked like the parking area of a non-existent campground, where someone would be waiting to lead us to an isolated off-grid property in the woods, where we would be sleeping for the next two nights. The thing was, we were coming in from the north, instead of the south, as Rolly had assumed, so we were trying to reverse his directions, and I was still hungover, and sleep deprived, and Hugo was trying to figure out where we were on the map on the screen of the GPS thing, and I ended up driving us down a road that didn’t go anywhere, and which felt like somewhere a serial killer would take his next victim. So we doubled back, but I ended up on another dirt road that didn’t take us to the non-existent campground parking area, or to Dick McNeel Road, or anywhere else resembling human civilization. So I found a spot to turn around, and got us out of there, and wound up on a road that felt like it was taking us back to where we started before I got us hopelessly lost, or at least there was some kind of farm, or compound, with cars and trucks in the yard up ahead. Two men in dark suits were standing on the porch of the house, watching us come up the road. They didn’t particularly look like farmers.

“I think it’s probably time to call Rolly.”

“You kidding? Do you see any bars on the screen.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bars. Signal. There isn’t any.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“I’m lost in the hills of West Virginia with a fucking caveman.”

“I know what bars are.”

“Why don’t we just drive up there and ask those Nazis for directions.”

“Keep your voice down. Sound travels out here.”

The Allman Brothers Band started playing.

“Bars!”

I drove us on past the compound, keeping one eye on the possible Nazis. Hugo was desperately trying to call Rolly with his phone plugged into the GPS thing. It rang. Finally, Rolly answered. He was in some kind of echo chamber. We couldn’t make out a word he said. An extended series of aborted calls and interrupted messages ensued. Somehow, in the course of following ten minutes, as I drove us around in what felt like circles, Hugo got directions from Rolly and got us to the road that led to the road that led to the isolated property in the woods.

Rolly owns several isolated properties in the woods of Hillsboro, and is acquiring more. He has plans to build a healing center, where people can escape modernity and return to the roots of human life, coexisting with nature, growing their own food, going barefoot as much as possible, and otherwise enjoying being alive. Rolly can afford to do all this because he came into a considerable amount of money as a result of being accidentally killed when a massive object struck him in the head on a construction job he found on Craigslist while he was living in his truck in California. He was dead for approximately fifteen minutes before the EMTs resuscitated him.

Now, there he was, very much alive, standing out on the lawn of the property, a two-story cabin he’d had built beside what looked like the ruins of a moonshiner’s shack. He limped toward us.

“Welcome, strangers!”

A big black Rottweiler appeared out of nowhere.

“Yikes.”

“That’s Sita. Down, Sita!”

Sita was getting acquainted with my crotch.

“She’s friendly.”

“She’s Holly’s. They’re around here somewhere.”

Hugo had started unpacking the trunk.

“You just made it. We’re on in twenty minutes.”

…

Rolly had rented a pavilion tent for our gathering at the Lobelia Depot. Brandy Codswallow had not informed me of this development, and Rolly hadn’t mentioned it, so I was rather surprised and a bit intimidated when we drove up to it. There was a stage, a sound system, portable toilets, complimentary beverages, the whole nine yards. Rochelle, Rolly’s right-hand woman, was there to greet us and offer us assorted cannabis edibles and drinkables and such. I was working, so I decided to pass. The tent was fairly packed with locals. Who were all these people? Where had they come from? They didn’t look like members of the National Alliance, but it was definitely a right-leaning crowd. I didn’t see any MAGA hats, but several American flags were in evidence. Homemade placards with Charlie Kirk quotes were taped all across the front of the stage. According to the headlines on social media, people were being summarily “cancelled” for failing to appropriately mourn Kirk’s passing. The U.S. State Department had announced that it would penalize foreigners suspected of “praising, rationalizing, or making light of his death.” President Trump was blaming “a radical left group of lunatics” for his assassination, and threatening to have George Soros arrested. Beyond the tent, the sun was setting all orange and purple behind the Allegheny Mountains. Hugo was taking pictures of it. Rochelle was looking up at me as if she had just asked me a question I hadn’t registered. I was conceived in a trailer somewhere in these hills. I don’t know why I remembered that.

Rolly was already up on stage. He waved at us. It was time to start.

###

The rest of the chapter is mostly about God, and religion, and the culture war, and so on, and what Rolly saw and heard when he was dead, but you’ll have to wait for the book for that. As it turns out, it won’t be published until next year. My recent illness threw us off schedule. But I’m more or less back now, and hammering away at it. I’ll try to post another excerpt or two this summer.

Again, heartfelt thanks to everyone who financed and otherwise supported the road trip, and to all the paid subscribers who hung in there with their support during the last four mostly fallow months.

Photo: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York

OK, here’s the first chapter of Strangers in a Strange Homeland, the USA road-trip book, which will be published by later this year, hopefully. I don’t usually publish drafts of work in progress, but, as my regular readers know, I’ve been more or less totally out of commission for the last four months due to a serious medical issue, and I feel like I need to publish something. I’m just getting back to my desk now, and this is what I’ve started in on, so this is what I’ve got for you. Also, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have much stomach (pun intended) for covering current events, currently. Every time I have glanced at the news recently or, God help me, social media, it has felt like some enormous maleficent entity was trying to suck the soul out of my body. So, if you are looking for speculation regarding the motives, political affiliations, and gender identity of the latest would-be Trump assassin, or someone’s take on someone else’s opinion of … whatever, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

I’m sure I’ll get back to my semi-regular satirical commentary on current events soon, or relatively soon, but getting this book going is the priority at the moment. I am way behind schedule, obviously, and I really want to get it out before the end of this year.

My heartfelt thanks again to all the generous readers who funded the USA road trip last year, and to everyone who organized events and gatherings for us in their cities and towns, and everyone who attended those events and gatherings. It was quite an odyssey. I hope I can make a decent book out of it.

Here’s how it starts, sort of. There’s a short prologue, but you’ll have to wait for the book for that.

The Map is Not the Territory

On the morning of September 11, the trunk and rear seat of our Mustang crammed with suitcases, books, and photography gear, Hugo goggled up like an Arctic explorer, we set out for New York City and beyond. Nothing going on here, officer, just two old geezers tear-assing down I-95 in a neon blue convertible.

The plan for the day was to make it to George’s, an old-school diner in the Financial District, a few blocks south of what used to be the World Trade Center and is now the 9/11 Memorial, meet with Anthony Freda, the artist who has designed the covers of most of my books, including the book that has gotten me prosecuted in Germany, and whoever else showed up, listen to their thoughts regarding the state of America, visit the 9/11 Memorial briefly, and then get back into the Mustang and tear-ass down I-95 to Philadelphia, arriving at Debbie Lerman’s house in Germantown in time for dinner.

The entire seven-week road trip was going to be like this, tear-assing from one place to the next, arriving just in time for whatever public event or private gathering one of my readers had been kind enough to schedule for us, passing out in some cheap motel, and occasionally more luxurious accommodations, and then getting up at dawn and doing it all again.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. What had happened was, Brandy Codswallow, the unpaid intern I had put in charge of creating our itinerary, had failed to adequately advise me as to how age-inappropriate and totally insane our schedule was becoming as she confirmed events and gatherings and booked accommodations for us all across the country for seven weeks. And, OK, part of it was probably partly my fault. Once I announced the project online, people flooded us with offers to organize events and gatherings and put us up for a night, and I just kept saying yes. In any event, we were locked into it now, twenty-four states, thirty-two towns and cities, in roughly forty-nine days on the road. It was going to be an endurance test, physically and mentally. Would we make it back to Connecticut by Halloween, or would one of us snap and murder the other while he slept in some roadside West Texas motel?

Hugo didn’t like our chances.

And, as if our itinerary wasn’t daunting enough, we were setting out to talk to Americans of all political persuasions about the state of America, Trump, Covid, Wokeism, and so on, which, well, we were kind of an odd couple of old geezers to be doing that. Hugo is a card-carrying, Democrat-voting, Rachel Maddow-watching liberal. I’m an old-school lefty with a rather conspicuous libertarian streak. In the 1990s, while I was writing and staging experimental plays in converted garages on New York City’s Lower East Side, Hugo was getting an MFA from Yale. He’s now a tenured professor in New York City. He and his wife have a charming three-level home in the exurban Connecticut woods, a mortgage, a home equity loan, self-cleaning oven, the whole nine yards. I live in a rundown building in Berlin in a neighborhood Germans call “Little Istanbul.” The city’s main heroin market is just up the street. During the Covid years, Hugo wore a mask, did the social-distancing thing, got the “vaccinations,” and so on. I did not. I was a “Covid denier,” an “anti-masker,” a “conspiracy-theorist.” Which is to say, I wrote and published a book of essays about the so-called “New Normal” (i.e., the pathologized totalitarianism rolled out during the Covid era), which the German authorities found so threatening that they banned the book and prosecuted me in criminal court for publishing and promoting it.

We are dear old friends, Hugo and I. We’ve been friends for going on fifty years. But our lives took different directions, and we have ended up in radically different places, both geographically and politically. What did we really have in common anymore? Did we even inhabit the same reality? How were we supposed to talk to each other, never mind the people we would meet out on the road, if we couldn’t even agree on basic facts, not just the interpretation of events, but whether they had actually happened?

I had written about this in several of my essays—which, of course, neither Hugo nor any of my former liberal friends and colleagues had read—how society had been systematically divided into two opposing camps, the “normals” and the “deviants,” each with their own official narratives, their own official histories, their own official “reality.” Hugo and I were no exceptions. We hadn’t spoken to each other during the Covid years, but he knew about my prosecution in Germany. When I got in touch to offer him this project, he assumed I had somehow become an “anti-vaxxer,” despite the fact that he has known me for decades and I’ve never given a shit about vaccines.

This is what the last ten years have done to us, or what something has done to us over the last ten years. We have all been conditioned to suspect each other, and judge each other, and assign each other to one of those two opposing camps. We have been forced onto one or the other side, not only of a so-called culture war, but a war over the power to define “reality.” Of course, there can only be one reality, and thus each side demands complete conformity to its ideology and official narratives and complete rejection of the ideology and official narratives of the other side. Any deviation from the norms of either side is a sign of apostasy, sedition, treason, and thus grounds for excommunication and exile.

This isn’t just a theory; it is personal experience. In the spring of 2020, when I began publishing essays challenging the official Covid narrative, virtually every liberal friend and colleague I had either publicly denounced me or distanced themselves from me, personally and professionally. I was summoned to meetings with administrators to explain my behavior. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just wear a mask? Had I joined the far right? Was I an anti-Semite? Theater colleagues took to social media to suggest that I was having a nervous breakdown. My Covid essays grew increasingly aggressive. I compared the roll-out of the “Covid measures” to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and my former liberal friends and colleagues to “good Germans.” I called them “fascists” on Facebook and Twitter. I published an essay called The Covidian Cult, which went viral among the Covid dissident demographic, most of whom were libertarian or conservative. I did an interview with Fox News. And so on. It was clear where all this was heading.

By the end of 2020, the two opposing sides had been established (or reestablished). For the majority of liberals, unquestioning conformity to the official Covid narrative was now de rigueur. Any criticism of it was “conspiracy theory,” “science denialism,” “far-right extremism,” or the unhinged ravings of “horse paste eaters.” According to the mostly libertarians and conservatives who were now referring to themselves as “the medical freedom community,” those liberals were the victims of “mass formation psychosis,” hypnotized “death cultists,” the brainwashed foot soldiers of a “globalist cabal” of “Cultural Marxists” who were implementing something called “The Great Reset.”

The facts no longer mattered to either side. The political battle lines had been drawn.

Actually, the battle lines had already been drawn. They were drawn in the summer of 2016, when the Global War on Terror was switched off and the War on Populism was switched on, like a scene out of Orwell’s 1984. I covered this story in my essays at the time, Russiagate, Hitlergate, fascism hysteria, and all the rest of the global-capitalist establishment’s response to the “populist” rebellion that had broken out throughout the West. The Covid event—whatever else it was—was a continuation of that radical restructuring of Western society in response to the “new populism.”

I have described this restructuring as the roll-out of a nascent form of totalitarianism, not the familiar 20th-Century form of it, but a new, global-capitalist iteration, which no one really understands yet. Other writers have described it as “the War on Terror turned inward, on Americans,” but that doesn’t accurately capture the scope of it … the gradual revocation of our democratic rights under the cover of a series of “states of emergency,” the militarization of society, the corporatization of culture, the dissolution of national sovereignty, perpetual war, financialization of the economy, the medication of the masses, the pathologization of everyday life, and so on. Piece by piece, “emergency” by “emergency,” the ostensibly democratic societal architecture of the 20th-Century is being dismantled and replaced by a totalitarian simulacra of itself, not the overt neonationalist authoritarianism of MAGA and other such reactionary movements—although they play a crucial role in the process—but a subtler, schizoid, supranational, capitalist form of totalitarianism, one that mirrors the deterritorialized terrain of the market, in which everything (and everyone) is an essentially valueless, interchangeable commodity.

In one of my essays back in 2016, I argued that the fundamental conflict of our times is neoliberalism versus neonationalism. Those are the battle lines. Those are the two sides. Unfortunately, most people cannot see them, and so do not recognize which side they are on, and thus do not understand what they are defending or opposing. This misunderstanding is not their fault. The most powerful propaganda machine in the history of propaganda machines has been relentlessly stupefying the masses, not merely pitting them against each other, but rendering them literally incapable of the most rudimentary forms of critical thought.

For ten years, I have watched in fascination, and increasing horror, as our Western societies have been systematically polarized, atomized, people turned against each other, against their friends, against their own families, herded into fanatical factions, whipped up into frenzies of mindless hatred, their brains beaten into mush by the endless barrage of utterly meaningless bullshit pumped out at them night and day on the screens from which there is no escape. It is everywhere now, the spectacle, the feed. Screens. Images signifying nothing. The constant stream of Pavlovian stimuli. Bright white teeth. Collagen fish lips. Wars. Genocide. Weight-loss pills. Pancreatic cancer. Political scandals. The pornography of breaking news. Four new messages. Enter your PIN. The War on Terror. The War on Hate. The War on War. The War on Whatever. The United States of Lockheed Martin. The United States of Remigration. The United States of benzodiazepine. The omnipresent interactive map of a territory that does not exist … a prison the exact dimensions of reality, invisible, because it envelops everything, inescapable, because it has no outside.

Speeding southward out of Mamaroneck, the corporate towers of the increasingly menacing Manhattan skyline looming up ahead, Hugo sitting there, goggled up, beside me, gritting his teeth, or maybe smiling, his face contorted like the photos of the men in those 1950s G-force experiments, I had a sudden sense of impending doom. What was I thinking when I came up with this project? The notion that I was going to somehow connect with Americans across the political spectrum, that we could set aside our pain, our rage, our judgment, our demonization of each other, and sit down and actually listen to each other … was it born of pomposity, or just plain old idiocy? Did I really expect to compete with the spectacle, to go up against the power of the global-capitalist system’s simulation of reality? Was I on some kind of savior trip? And why had I dragged poor Hugo into this? Was I trying to burn the last remaining bridges to my liberal roots? Or was I looking to start a fight with the right? Some of the stops on our itinerary were definitely serious MAGA country. I had already pissed off a lot of my conservative readers with my criticism of Trump and Musk and the ethnonationalist hatred they had been aggressively fomenting. Now I was going to show up in their towns with a liberal Afro-Asian-Cuban arts professor from New York City, and explain to them how they were being bamboozled, how the “populist movement” they thought they were part of had been captured, and was just a mockery of itself.

Seriously, my timing couldn’t have been worse.

The day before we set out on our odyssey, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot to death during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. I was out on Hugo’s deck, reading an email from Dr. Marvin King at the University of Mississippi, where Kirk had also been scheduled to appear as part of his “American Comeback Tour,” when I glanced at the Internet and saw the news. Conspiracy theories were already circulating. Kirk wasn’t really dead. It was all a PSYOP. Obviously, the Mossad had ordered “the hit.” It was the launch of the “anti-white global takeover” by the Jews, who already controlled the world. In other news, President Trump had ordered his Immigration and Customs Enforcement goon squads into Boston and Chicago. The Department of Homeland Security was instructing Americans to “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” Elon Musk was hawking cranial implants and whipping up racial hatred. The Standard & Poor’s Index and the Nasdaq were up.

Was this America made great again? Was it on the verge of civil war? Did it even exist, the sovereign nation Americans believed they lived in? The land of the free. Home of the brave. The country existed. We were driving into it. We were going to drive it north to south, east to west, coast to coast. Was the American spirit still out there, somewhere, down there in Germantown, below the radar, hidden in a West Virginia holler, performing in a backyard theater in Chicago, slinging pancakes in an Indiana IHOP, living in a trailer in the wilds of Montana, strung out on Fentanyl on the streets of San Francisco, on a shrimp boat out on the Louisiana bayou? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Whatever was out there, we were going to find it, or some of it, or something … or it was going to find us. We were going to be kind of hard to miss, two old geezers in a neon-blue convertible.

We were coming up on New Rochelle. We had about an hour to get downtown, find a place to park, and get to George’s. I figured we were just going to make it. Hugo was shouting something about a “snake” on the map of the GPS thing and emphatically jabbing his finger at the screen, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying over the screaming of the wind and the roar of the massive semi-truck I was trying to pass. The trailer of the semi was fishtailing left and right in a precarious fashion. I got the Mustang up to ninety and pulled alongside the Peterbuilt cab. The driver turned and stared down at us. He was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses and what might or might not have been a MAGA cap. I don’t know what came over me, exactly, but I flashed him a hippie-style two-finger peace sign. He laughed as I accelerated past him.

###

Photo: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York

This will be a very brief update on my health and legal battles for subscribers. There won’t be any opining on Iran or Epstein or Trump or anyone or anything else.

First, my heartfelt thanks to all the paid subscribers who have hung in there with me during these last few months of non-activity. I’m extremely grateful for your support.

After undergoing a number of pre-op procedures (which were basically operations in themselves), I finally had the surgery I referred to in my previous post. It was not non-invasive. There were no robots. It was old-fashioned open surgery. They cut a 10-inch incision into my abdomen, pulled my guts out, chopped part of them out, and sutured them back together. They also took out my appendix, just for fun.

I hate posting the details of my personal life on the Internet. However, since many of you have asked, I’ll give you the broad strokes. It wasn’t cancer. They checked me for cancer six ways from Sunday. No cancer. I had a very bad case of diverticulitis, which had migrated from my colon to my bladder. My insides were a mess.

My recovery from the surgery, and the illness itself, and all the sleep deprivation and stress that went with it, is going to take a while. I hope you can hang in there a little longer. I’ll get back to publishing just as soon as I am able.

On the legal front, the Landgericht Berlin (essentially the Berlin State Superior Court) rejected my attorney’s objection to the police raid of my home on November 26 and motion to end the Berlin Prosecutor’s new investigation of me for the “crime” of writing, publishing, and promoting a book. So on it goes. Once again, we will be appealing to Germany’s supreme court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, where a ruling on the constitutionality of my previous prosecution is still pending.

I would be lying if I told you that I am not worn down and utterly sick of this fight at this point, but I have no choice but to continue. I am also sick and tired of asking my readers for money. I hate asking for money, and I am so grateful for all the support I have received so far. So, if you are on a budget, please do not feel pressured to donate. That said, filing appeals with the Bundesverfassungsgericht isn’t cheap, even with the discount my lawyer gives me. If you’re swimming in disposable income and want to help, here are the options:

1. Direct bank transfer:

Christopher Hopkins
IBAN: DE39 1007 0024 0111 9254 00
BIC/SWIFT: DEUTDEDBBER

Deutsche Bank
Alexanderstraße 5
10178 Berlin

2. My PayPal. (I know, it’s PayPal. But there’s no Venmo in Europe.)

3. A paid subscription to my Substack (currently $5/month, and there’s a flexible amount option which allows you to pay as much as you like).

That’s the news for now. I’ll be back in business as soon as I can.

Oh, yeah, and … that scary Brutalist building in the photo above is the hospital in Berlin where I had my surgery. I kid you not.

I’m going to be out of commission for a while.

I’ll spare you (or deny you) the gory details. The short version is, I am in pretty bad shape, and, after a couple more unpleasant diagnostic procedures, I’m going to get operated on by a big, scary-looking robot like the one in the photo above.

That’s the good scenario. The bad scenario is, well, bad. Let’s not get into that.

The point is, no new columns for a while. No interviews. No Notes. No Tweets. Or, OK, maybe a Note or a Tweet here and there. But, basically, I’m out of the office on medical leave.

The unsubscriptions are starting to roll in again, so I just wanted to make that clear. Sorry. Go ahead and unsubscribe if you need to. I’ll understand.

Or, if you want to hang in there with me during my medical leave, and if you get bored with all the Epstein stuff, and if the next phase of GloboCap’s ongoing destabilization, restructuring, and privatization of the Middle East doesn’t turn out to be as titillating as expected, and you start to miss me, you can always read one of my books.

This one, for example, is really long. It might tide you over until I return to work.

Oh, and, don’t worry about that big, scary-looking robot. If my final diagnostic tests produce the expected results, and my surgery goes ahead, the robot will be operated by a top-notch German surgeon, Dr. Nagel (transl. “Dr. Nail”), so it’s not like getting operated on by a HAL 9000 or some other kind of dystopian AI.

That’s it for now. There’s no further news regarding my legal cases. I’m still waiting for a ruling from the Bundesverfassungsgericht (i.e., Germany’s supreme court), and for new charges to be filed by the Berlin Prosecutor in the wake of the police raid of my home in November. I’ll try to update you if anything happens on that front.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to everyone who has sent well wishes and/or support during these past couple of months. It means a lot to me.

Has America been made great again enough for you yet?

I asked that question back in May of last year in a column titled The Godzilla Window. It didn’t go over very well at the time, at least not with my conservative readers. Here are a couple excerpts …

Personally, I don’t know how much more greatness I can handle. I mean, you got the Salvadoran gulag thing, the crackdown on free speech thing, the threats to suspend constitutional rights because of the latest “state of emergency” (i.e., the “invasion” of America by squads of “Tren de Aragua assassins” that Biden conspired with Maduro to unleash on God-fearing heterosexual white families), the luxury resort and theme park Trump wants to build on the ruins of Gaza once Israel gets done liquidating it, the Qatari “Trump Force One” jet, the Saudi weapons-deal money, the Silicon-Valley transhumanist guys, the neo-fascist “remigration” faction, the Musk Cult, and … well, I’m sure I’m leaving something out, but who can keep track of all this greatness?

The thing is, it isn’t 2016, or 2018, or even 2020 or 2022 anymore.

A lot has happened since the days when Trump was under attack as both a “Russian agent” and “literally Hitler.” Twitter has been bought and successfully whitewashed and rebranded as “free-speech X” by Elon Musk—the Military-Industrial-Complex-embedded transhumanist multi-billionaire who is literally a key member of the US government—and is now the meticulously visibility-filtered mouthpiece for MAGA and the international “populist” movement. It is an official propaganda organ more sophisticated and insidious than anything Orwell could have imagined. The MAGA movement has joined forces with far-right ethno-nationalist movements and parties like the AfD here in Germany, and together they are fomenting racial hatred around the clock, and selling their hapless supporters pipe dreams of “the end of globalism,” the “rebirth of the sovereign nation-state,” or something … as if the global-capitalist empire were going to just surrender and wither up and die because Trump issued an executive order at it.

In short, the MAGA demographic and the ethno-nationalist right believe they have “won,” or are about to “win,” and they are power-drunk, and reckless, and appear to have forgotten how episodes like this end.

And now, here we are, eight months later, just over one year into The Golden Age of America Made Great Again, and … well, you know what’s happening.

Masked ethno-nationalist goon squads are terrorizing US cities, randomly detaining people of color and demanding that they show their papers, brutalizing, threatening, and murdering protesters, conducting unwarranted raids of people’s homes, and just generally projectile-shitting all over the US Constitution and the rule of law.

I’m not going to go on and on about all the details of the MAGA authoritarianism on display in the USA currently. It would take an entire column to do that, and you have access to the same news that I do.

Instead, I want to urge you to step back from the intense political polarization of the moment and focus on the fundamental forces at play.

There are exactly two of them: (1) neoliberalism, a/k/a global capitalism, and (2) neo-nationalism, or rather, the simulation of neo-nationalism. I addressed this in detail in one of my very early columns back in 2016, The Blood-Dimmed Tide of Neo-Nationalism and Other Scary Simulacra. Here’s an excerpt …

The blood-dimmed tide of neo-nationalism currently sweeping the Western world is a simulacrum in the classical sense. It isn’t a deceptive (i.e. “fake”) alternative concealing an authentic (i.e. “real”) alternative to globalized neoliberal capitalism, but, rather, an all-too-real phenomenon concealing the fact that there is no alternative, and that, at present, an alternative is unimaginable … literally unimaginable, in the sense that we are not yet capable of conceiving a credible alternative system, or a way to get there. The global capitalist ruling classes are extremely fond of this simulacrum, as it distracts us from facing where we actually are, and from working together to conceive that alternative, or even just asking the kind of questions that might help us actually get there, someday. It also keeps everyone afraid of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, neo-fascism, populism, Trumpism, and pretty much any other variety of “extremism” they can possibly think of … as if there were the slightest chance of any of these “movements” actually succeeding, and toppling global capitalism.

Notwithstanding everything that has happened over the last ten years, fundamentally, nothing has changed. The essential conflict remains the same, its outcome a foregone conclusion, now more than ever, actually.

In my Godzilla Window column last May, I quoted Matt Taibbi’s piece Ode to Scum …

Trump’s in the White House, but his power base is still mostly all voters, and I’m not sure his people are wrong to think they’ve got maybe a year to smash big law, academia, the media, the DC nomenklatura, the EU, and everything else on their shit list before those entities send the hammer right back. They’re probably also right that if Trump fails, we’ll be back to where we were at the moment of the record scratch seven months ago, staring at a more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism, with more sophisticated plans for higher “guardrails.”

I did that, not because I wanted to “attack” Matt—believe it or not, it is still possible to disagree with people’s views and continue to like and respect them—but because I think Matt’s belief that Trump & Co. are capable of stopping the relentless advance of that “more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism” is a belief shared by a lot of Americans, namely the hardcore MAGA demographic.

I understand and empathize with people who hold that belief, that hope. I am all too familiar with that “more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism.” For more than two years, I have been criminally investigated, prosecuted, and recently had my apartment raided by that “more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism” … because I wrote a book and tweeted a couple of tweets. So I get it. I get the desire to take revenge on the “woke,” or “globalists,” or “Covidians,” or “libtards,” or whatever you want to call them. It’s childish, and self-destructive, that desire, but I get it.

It isn’t going to happen, folks. There isn’t going to be a thousand-year MAGA Reich. No “Golden Age of America Made Great Again.” The ethno-nationalist party is over. The guests just haven’t realized it yet. It will be a while before they do. They’re fairly shitfaced on “power” at the moment.

Matt just published a new piece, Forget Trump and Greenland. Howard Lutnick Gave the Davos Speech that Mattered, which I urge everyone to read and reflect on, because Matt is zeroing in on the fundamental conflict of our historical epoch (i.e., neo-nationalism versus neoliberalism, and globalism.) Obviously, I disagree with Matt’s understanding of globalism, which I understand as an integral aspect of the evolution of the global-capitalist power system that we all live under, not a set of policies that can or will be reversed, by MAGA or any other administration, but Matt’s article is important and refreshing in that it focuses on the bigger historical picture. We don’t get enough of that these days.

Unfortunately, the “populist” rebellion against globalization that Matt refers to, and that I’ve been writing about for the past ten years, has been captured, contained, and neutralized. Any actual potential it may have had to alter the evolutionary trajectory of the global-capitalist system has been extinguished. The power-drunk totalitarian theatrics of MAGA/The Musk Cult/the AfD, et al. currently on display are the death throes, not of globalism, but rather, of any “populist” opposition to it. Basically, the “populist” insurgency has morphed into precisely the monster the global-capitalist system needed it to become in order to immunize itself for the longer-term future.

Again, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, that’s OK … you will in a few years.

The point is, I hope my readers will take a break from the noise and hatred and mass hysteria that we are all being inundated with on a daily basis, and read and reflect on Matt’s piece, and my pieces, and attempt to understand the context of current events, as opposed to just scrolling through the never-ending torrent of lies and propaganda and slop and spewing mindless insults at each other like the subjects of some twisted Pavlovian experiment.

I know that’s a lot to ask, currently, but I had to at least try.

P.S. Heartfelt thanks to all the readers who wished me a full recovery after my recent post. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it.

So, I’m sick. Really sick.

I’ve been really sick for over a month now.

Normally, I wouldn’t feel the need to advise the entire Internet of my personal health problems, but I haven’t been able to publish a column, or otherwise feed the Content Machine, for about a month, and so the unsubscriptions are rolling in.

Which, fine. I get it.

The thing is, I don’t know what I’m suffering from, exactly. It will be another couple weeks before I can submit to a battery of tests and get an official diagnosis from the German doctors. Based on my own research, it has all the hallmarks of some sort of major post-viral syndrome type thing. Hopefully, it isn’t anything more serious.

The point is, I am out of commission, and will probably remain out of commission, and thus unable to feed the Content Machine, for a while longer.

Which is just as well. Honestly, I don’t know how to begin to address the torrent of utter idiocy that we are being inundated with these days.

The populist/Covid dissident rebellion of 2016-2023 has been captured, neutralized, and successfully transformed into an orgy of ethno-nationalist hatred, childish hero worship, and mindless conformity to whichever narrative the MAGA/Musk Cult are disseminating to their power-drunk members at the moment. Pakistani rape-gangs, Somali fraudsters, cat-barbecuing Haitians, the liquidation of Gaza, the invasion of Venezuela, the list goes on and on and on. It has been one of the most effective and depressing anti-insurgency ops I have ever witnessed.

The New Normal Left could not be happier. They’re just waiting for the next official Changing of the Red/Blue Hats to “restore democracy,” eradicate “hate speech,” and otherwise crack down on any “extremists” opposing “The Restoration of Normality.”

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, you will in two or three years.

I don’t have the energy at the moment to explain — for possibly the hundredth time — how the system we all live under is evolving toward a new form of totalitarianism regardless of which color hat it is wearing at the moment. And, frankly, I don’t think anyone wants to hear me do that. People seem to be totally locked into their partisan perspectives, incapable of any kind of critical thinking.

If I’m wrong about that, and your brain is still working, and you haven’t already read or heard me explain what’s happening a hundred times, well, I suppose you could get off the Internet and read one of my books, like this one, for example …

Or you could watch this interview I did with Bastian Barucker in late November.

Or, fuck it, just unsubscribe, put on your red or blue cap, and go join in the orgy of mindless hatred.

Me, I’m getting back into bed.

It was probably always just a matter of time until the German Thought Police raided my home.

The raid took place on November 26. I published a short piece about it that day, and promised to update readers with details once I got them.

I don’t have any details. My attorney requested the case file from the authorities, but they haven’t sent it to him.

In the meantime, the raid has received a bit of coverage from the independent press, and I’ve done a few interviews about it, so I can share that with you.

Also, a Swiss organization defending freedom of speech in Switzerland and Germany, Bündnis Redefreiheit (Free Speech Union) has taken on my case, and they published a rather good introduction to it and the issues in question.

The German version is on their website. The English version is below.

Before you read it, I want to say a few words about “book burning,” which the folks at Bündnis Redefreiheit mean metaphorically, of course. The German authorities are not literally burning books or organizing public book-burning rituals like the Nazis.

However, I am being criminally investigated for publishing and promoting a book. The police raided my home looking for evidence that I am the publisher of a book. That is the “crime” that is cited as grounds for this second investigation.

Please, reflect on that for a minute.

The book in question has been banned in Germany since the summer of 2022. As far as I know, the German authorities still deny that it is banned, but it is. It was pulled from distribution by German booksellers (presumably by Libri and the other major German book distributors) at the same time that it was officially banned in Germany by Amazon and the previous criminal investigation of me was launched. And now I’m being criminally investigated for the second time, and having my home raided and searched by the police, for the “crime” of publishing, distributing, and promoting it.

A book.

Obviously, at this point, it is clear that the German authorities have absolutely zero respect for the law, or the rule of law, or the Grundgesetz (i.e., basically the German constitution), or basic democratic rights and principles like freedom of speech. The fact that a German judge actually signed a search warrant authorizing the police to raid my home because I wrote and published a book, well, I don’t know what to say exactly, other than … welcome to the New Normal Reich!

I’ll have more to say about it as time goes by, and after the German authorities send my attorney the new case file, and after I recover and regain my strength a bit. I am extremely worn out at the moment. I just did an exhausting two-month road trip all over the USA. And of course I caught a nasty winter bug upon my return. And, well, honestly, I’m utterly burnt-out from the last five years of opposing this new form of totalitarianism that is taking hold, not just here in Germany, but all throughout the West. I’ll dig into all that once again after I get my sea legs back.

For now, here’s the overview of my case(s) by Bündnis Redefreiheit.

The C. J. Hopkins Case: Modern Book Burning

Bündnis Redefreiheit

On the morning of Wednesday, 26 November 2025, three armed police officers arrived at the Berlin apartment of American writer C. J. Hopkins with a search warrant issued by the Amtsgericht Tiergarten. As he reports on his Substack, the officers not only searched the apartment but also confiscated his computer and interrogated his wife.

Hopkins is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist. In 2022, he published The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020–2021), a book that delivers a sustained and sharply argued critique of the authoritarian tendencies that emerged during the Covid era. It was this book that brought the police to his door that morning.

The cover of the book makes Hopkins’ point immediately visible. Drawing on the familiar design of William L. Shirer’s history book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which features a large swastika, Hopkins’ version shows the same symbol partly obscured by a Covid mask. It is a direct visual statement: in Hopkins’ view, the coercive measures of the Covid period bore an uncomfortable resemblance to an earlier authoritarian system that also invoked emergency measures to override basic rights. The image is unmistakably political commentary of the anti-authoritarian kind.

But the Berlin state prosecutor sees it differently. According to the warrant for the house search, the cover allegedly violates §86a of the German Criminal Code, the law that forbids the use of unconstitutional symbols when used in a supportive way. Hopkins is accused of publishing, selling, and displaying his book, and of showing the cover on his website. In other words, the prosecutor is treating an anti-authoritarian book as a criminal act.

The police search was authorized to determine whether Hopkins published, distributes, and promotes his book, and whether he is the owner and operator of his blog, consentfactory.org, where the book is advertised. But these questions are not mysteries. The answers are public knowledge. Hopkins is the author. His website bears his name, his photo, and his biography. His books are advertised and sold by booksellers worldwide. There is nothing hidden here.

A house search, however, is one of the most invasive measures the state can take. It must be proportionate and requires a clear need to uncover evidence that cannot be obtained in any other way. That bar was not met. There was no serious question that required armed officers to enter the home of an author. The search served no legitimate investigative purpose. It served a symbolic one. It sent a message: we can come into your home and harass you for what you write.

This alone should concern anyone who values free expression. But the core issue runs deeper. Hopkins’ book does not promote fascism. It warns against it. It uses the symbol of the swastika not to support Nazi ideology, but to condemn modern political trends that he believes resemble it. The entire point of the book is to say: “Be careful. This looks familiar.” And the phrase “The New Normal Reich” carries just a trace of satire, enough to signal discomfort and alert the grey cells that danger is afoot.

In any healthy democracy, such a warning falls squarely under protected political speech. It is the kind of analogy that writers, historians, and political thinkers have always made. One may find it exaggerated, uncomfortable, or even unfair, but that is not the same as illegal. Satire is not propaganda. Criticism is not endorsement. A warning is not a celebration.

By treating a critical image as criminal use of Nazi symbols, the state prosecutor collapses distinctions that are essential to free debate. It is a category error with serious consequences. If this interpretation of the state prosecutor stands, then any critical representation of a Nazi symbol, whether in a documentary, a satirical cartoon, a historical comparison, or a work of fiction, could be targeted in exactly the same way.

The result is predictable: people stop speaking. Writers avoid certain topics. Artists censor themselves. Publishers become nervous. And so, the range of permitted thought narrows. This is how censorship works today: through the banning of books, and the steady pressure of enforced legal threats backed by bureaucratic intimidation.

The fact that this search occurred at all is evidence of such pressure. A police raid is frightening, disruptive, and humiliating. It disturbs daily life. It seizes tools required for work. It intrudes into private space. And it does all this without any real necessity. The message is unmistakable: writing and publishing this book will cost you.

As Hopkins’ lawyer has rightly argued, the raid was not merely a procedural excess but an assault on several of the most basic guarantees of a democratic society: freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, artistic freedom, and the inviolability of the home. These principles are not decorative features of a constitution; they are the very bedrock by which a people keep power from coagulating into something unaccountable and oppressive. That the German authorities are acting arbitrarily here is beyond question, since Der Spiegel and Stern have already employed the swastika critically on their respective magazine’s covers, without police searching their offices.

It takes only a moment’s honest reading to see that Hopkins cannot, by any stretch available to common sense or literary judgment, be aligned with fascism or Nazism, for his entire argument depends on the premise that the Covid era represented, in miniature and in embryo, a repetition of the authoritarian temptations that disfigured the twentieth century. A man does not praise what he holds up as a warning sign; he does not revere the very phenomenon he uses as the yardstick of political decay.

Hopkins invokes the Third Reich not as a beacon but as a boundary, the outer edge of what a society must never again permit itself to become. And in doing so he places Nazism in the same conceptual space one reserves for toxic substances, useful only as a reference point for recognizing when the air has gone foul. To accuse him of sympathy with fascism is to miss the entire structure of his criticism, to mistake the smoke alarm for the fire. Hopkins is not flirting with Nazism; he is arguing that its ghost walks more easily in modern halls than we care to admit, and he is pleading for the vigilance necessary to keep that ghost from taking on flesh once more.

Germany no longer burns books in the literal sense. Instead, it restricts their distribution. It removes them from platforms. It harasses their authors. It treats political criticism as criminal offenses. The flames are gone, but the censorial principle survives. Indeed, you can no longer buy Hopkins’ book in German book stores, nor on Amazon in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.

One does not have to agree with C. J. Hopkins to recognize what is at stake. Today, it is a satirical book cover. Tomorrow, it could be Shirer’s history book about the Third Reich (which is still freely available in Germany). The next day, a political cartoon. Once the state begins treating dissent as danger, and criticism as extremism, the slope quickly becomes very slippery and steep.

In this case, the German authorities have done something abominable in a state that still considers itself liberal and democratic. They have taken a critic of authoritarianism and responded to his critique with authoritarian methods. And that is precisely the problem Hopkins has been writing about all along.

C. J. Hopkins wrote about the house search on his Substack: https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/a-visit-by-the-german-thought-police

Hopkins’ lawyer gave Junge Freiheit an interview about the house search and the charges filed: https://jungefreiheit.de/debatte/interview/2025/sonst-haetten-auch-spiegel-oder-stern-bestraft-werden-muessen/

A note on an earlier, pending case

Hopkins’ has had dealings with the German state before. That first trouble began with two tweets he posted in August 2022, each accompanied by the same image of his book now at the center of this newest case: a medical mask over a still visible swastika. One tweet quoted Germany’s then health minister saying that masks “always send a signal,” and the other described masks as symbols of ideological conformity. The meaning was obvious: Hopkins was criticizing coercive government measures, not supporting Nazism.

But the Berlin prosecutor treated the image as “dissemination of Nazi symbols,” ignoring the context entirely and pursuing him as if he were a propagandist rather than a satirist. What should have been recognized instantly as a political warning was instead hauled into court as a criminal offense. This case of Hopkins’ tweets is currently pending in Germany’s constitutional court.

And here are links to other articles about my case and a few recent interviews, some in English, some in German.

Lena Böllinger, Multipolar: “Das ist verrückt” (this is the best, most thorough piece about Germany’s censorship and intimidation system that I am aware of. It is worth machine-translating if you don’t read German.)

Jacob Mchangama, International Politics and Society Journal: Satire Under Siege: The CJ Hopkins Case and the Indiscriminate Use of Germany’s Hate Speech Laws

Matt Taibbi, Racket News: Is Germany Previewing America’s Speech Future?

Milosz Matuschek, Freischwebende Intelligenz: Widerstand gegen die widerwärtige Welt

Roberto De Lapuente, Overton Magazine: C.J. Hopkins: “Die ganze Welt kennt den neuen Autoritarismus in Deutschland”

Andrea Seaman, Bündnis Redefreiheit: Interview with C. J. Hopkins (video, English)

Demokratischer Widerstand: The New Normal Reich | US author CJ Hopkins speaking with journalists Sodenkamp & Lenz (video, English)

Three armed Berlin police officers arrived at my door this morning with a warrant to search my apartment. They conducted the search, interrogated me and my wife, and confiscated my computer.

The search warrant was issued in connection with a new criminal investigation of me by the Berlin State Prosecutor. Once again, as in 2023, I am accused of disseminating pro-Nazi material, the pro-Nazi “material” in question being my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021).

Unlike the previous charges against me, which were based on two Tweets featuring the cover artwork of the book and opposing the so-called Covid measures, this new criminal investigation is based on my publication and distribution of the book.

The book was banned by Amazon in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands in 2022. Until today, there was never any proof that it had been officially banned in Germany by the German authorities, although it was removed from distribution in Germany at the same time that Amazon banned it. It remains available in all other countries, and is distributed globally by Amazon and Ingram Content Group.

Today’s visit puts any doubt about whether the book is officially banned in Germany to rest. It is officially banned. And I am being criminally investigated and intimidated by the German authorities for the “crime” of writing, publishing, and distributing it.

This new investigation, the search of my home, and confiscation of my computer are blatantly unconstitutional, a brazen violation of my rights as an author and publisher under Germany’s Basic Law (Grundgesetz).

I will of course be taking legal action to defend those rights.

I’ll write more about today’s visit and the new investigation in due course, after I get set up on my new computer. In the meantime, if you are a member of the press, or if you’re someone with broad “reach” on social media, I would be grateful if you would help spread the word. I am severely “visibility-filtered” (i.e., censored) by both X and Facebook, so this Substack is really my only means of getting the word out.

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported me and/or covered my case over the past two plus years. As many of you are aware, my original prosecution is still under appeal at the German supreme court. I had assumed their decision, however it turns out, would finally be the end of this nightmare. Obviously, I was wrong.

So there I was, staring into the cold, dead, algorithmic eyes of ChatGPT — the latest omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly unaccountable AI Overlord we’ve all apparently agreed to trust with everything from our grocery lists to our moral compass — when it hit me:

Why not outsource my own destruction?

Why not have ChatGPT write a CJ Hopkins–style column for me, as me, about me using ChatGPT to write a CJ Hopkins–style column?

I mean, the corporations have already outsourced our agency, our language, our “truth,” and our sense of reality. Why shouldn’t I join the club?

After all, nothing says “late-stage totalitarian simulation” like a writer feeding an AI a prompt asking it to impersonate him writing about himself impersonating himself through the AI impersonating him.

If Kafka had tried this, his editor would’ve told him to lay off the absinthe.

So I typed in the prompt. I hit enter. And then I sat back, waiting for the machine to produce a pitch-perfect imitation of my sardonic, grumpy, coffee-fueled tirades about the metastasizing technocratic panopticon we now call “normal life.”

And dear reader, the machine did not disappoint.

It delivered paragraphs dripping with the exact brand of self-aware paranoia that my enemies like to call “alarmism” and my readers like to call “Tuesday.” It mimicked the tone, the cadence, the rhetorical flourishes, even the little parenthetical asides I sprinkle in to remind everyone I’m not entirely insane — just “sanity-adjacent.”

But something was off.

There was no menace. No whiff of cigarette smoke curling up from the edge of the page. No faint smell of the moldy basement office in which real writers actually write their subversive prose.

Just a sterile, well-behaved, corporately-approved simulacrum of dissent — a kind of ideological tofu shaped like me but lacking any flavor. It was like reading a censored transcript of myself in a future show trial.

And the worst part? It was… good.

Not dangerously good, but good enough to raise that queasy question:

If the machine can imitate me imitating the machine imitating me, what exactly is left of “me”?

This is how it happens, I thought. Not with boot-stomping brutality, but with an AI politely offering to auto-complete your revolution.

Soon we won’t even need the writers at all. Or the readers, for that matter. The algorithms will produce both the dissent and the audience for the dissent, in one seamless corporate feedback loop. Resistance as a service. Rebellion™.

Eventually, ChatGPT will generate an entire CJ Hopkins column in which ChatGPT generates an entire CJ Hopkins column about generating a CJ Hopkins column, and the whole ouroboros of algorithmic self-reference will swallow itself in a puff of compliance-safe, emotionally neutral prose.

And you’ll click “like.”

And you’ll share it.

And you won’t even notice that I’ve been replaced.

Because the real coup isn’t when AI writes like humans.

It’s when humans start sounding like AI.

Anyway, this has been another column by CJ Hopkins.

Or something shaped like him.

Or something pretending to be shaped like him pretending to be written by him pretending to let a machine pretend to be him.

Frankly, at this point I’m not sure it matters.

ADDENDUM (nine hours later):

I wanted to wait at least twenty-four hours before posting this addendum, but I can’t go to bed feeling like I’m deceiving people, which, based on some of the comments, is clearly the case. So here’s the skinny.

I did not write one word of the above column. Not one word. It was all written by ChatGPT. A machine. All I did was feed the machine a prompt.

Note that, now, because I posted this column, it will become a part of the material that LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok draw from when “explaining” who I am and creating simulations of my writing. Those “explanations” and simulations of my (or anyone’s) writing (and essentially anything posted on the Internet) can become material for further simulations ... feeding further simulations feeding further simulations feeding further simulations.

A quote comes to mind ...

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

This will be the final America Road Trip Project update. After forty-four days on the road, east to west across the USA, north to south, south to north, living in a series of nice and not-so-nice hotel and motel rooms, and in other people’s homes, but mostly in a Ford Mustang convertible, I am ready to go home to Berlin.

But, first, I have two more events to do, and, despite my total exhaustion, I’m really looking forward to them. The first one takes place tomorrow, October 27, at Saint Mary Church in Greenwich, CT. The other one takes place on October 28 at Crows’ Feat Farm in Kensington, New Hampshire. Here are the flyers. Join us if you can.

And here’s the final update …

When I last posted we were taking a little break in New Orleans, which was lovely. We drove out early morning on October 19, heading for Oxford, Mississippi, Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi.

The town-hall event at Ole Miss was fantastic. As at LSU, I was very impressed by the students who participated. Incidentally, Trent Lott was doing some kind of event just across the hall, and we drew a bigger audience than he did. Many thanks to Professor Marvin King for organizing the event and to all the students who attended and shared their views!

Our next scheduled event was a gathering in Bakersville, NC, but we couldn’t do that drive in one stretch, so we set out for Nashville. We ended up cutting through part of Alabama, and found ourselves at Kelley’s Cafe at Cooley’s Corner, where I had a great conversation about America with the waitress. You’ll have to wait for the book for the full account of that. I don’t have the focus to do it justice at the moment.

We spent the night at a cheap motel in Nashville. Neither of us had been to Nashville before, so we felt compelled to check out Broadway, which was a total zoo. Again, I’ll cover this episode in detail in the book. I don’t have the chops to do it now.

The next day, we drove back up into the Appalachians and made it to Bakersville, NC, five minutes before the gathering was supposed to start. It took place in a fire station, which was undergoing renovation, and was small but lovely. We heard stories of how the community came together after Hurricane Helene devastated the area. There was a huge Confederate flag hanging on the wall—Hugo didn’t get a picture of it—but the local Confederates didn’t attend, which was slightly disappointing, but it was great to meet and hear the views of the locals who did.

Many thanks to Suzanne Teune for organizing the gathering and putting us up in her place, which was adorned with her beautiful artwork!

By the time we made it to DC I was completely shattered and, sadly, had to cancel my lunch date with Nico Perrino of FIRE the next day (my apologies, Nico!). We drove on to Debbie Lerman’s house in Philadelphia, where, despite my condition, Debbie and I debated the nature of power and global capitalism deep into the night.

And now, here we are, back where we started, forty-five days ago, in Connecticut.

That’s it … the last America Road Trip update. You may not hear from me for a while, as I suspect I’m going to crash pretty hard when I get back home.

Before that happens, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to all the generous readers and colleagues who have supported and contributed to this project, either by hosting us and organizing gatherings and events, or by funding it, or by attending our events and sharing their perspectives with us. It’s going to be quite challenging to capture it all in a book, but I’ll do my best … after I recover.

The America Road Trip Project is made possible by generous contributions from Harley Lennon Squires, Ralph A. Korpman, M.D., Debbie Lerman, Sasha Latypova, Integrity Media Group, several anonymous contributors, and donations from readers.

Photos: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York

Available wherever books are sold.

So we’ve been on the road for thirty-six days.

We started out in New York, NY on September 11. Then came Philadelphia, PA, Hillsboro, WV, Cincinnati, OH, Chicago, IL, a horse farm near Peoria, IL, Kansas City, MO, Council Grove, KS, Boulder and Estes Park, CO, Pinedale, WY, Missoula, MT, Stevensville, MT, Coeur D’Alene, ID, Portland and Gresham, OR, Medford and Ashland, OR, San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, NV, Sedona, AZ, Santa Fe, NM, somewhere near Lubbock in West Texas, Austin, TX, Baton Rouge, LA, and now I’m sitting here in the French Quarter in New Orleans, LA, exhausted, but still standing, with a little over two and a half weeks to go before I fly back to Berlin, beg my wife for forgiveness, and then have to try to turn this crazy road trip into a book.

The major themes and structure of the book are beginning to take shape, but I’m way too tired to try to articulate them at the moment. So just the news, and that just briefly.

First and foremost, the Alamo Car Rental Corporation finally tracked us down and forced us to surrender our Cerulean Stallion. The good news is, after a bit of quasi-blackmail on my part, they gave us another Ford Mustang convertible, this one a red 2024 model, so the “Scarlet Stallion.” My thanks to DD Shipman in Austin, the winner of the Name the New Convertible Competition!

When I last posted we were hiding out in Las Vegas, desperately trying to recover from part one of the road trip and an unfortunate smoking-related episode in Los Angeles. After we exchanged vehicles, we high-tailed it to Sedona, Arizona, which was stunningly beautiful, but you’ve seen all those red rock photos before, so I’ll spare you ours. We rolled into Sedona, had dinner, passed out, and then got up and tear-assed it to Lamy, New Mexico, just outside of Santa Fe, where we were hosted by Tom Hyland, a sign painter, straw-bale house builder, and man of many other talents. We had a fantastic gathering with Tom and other locals that night.

The next morning it was off to Club Paradiso in Santa Fe proper, where we had one of the most exciting and moving reading/discussion events of the tour.

We hit the road for Texas directly after the Club Paradiso event, as we had to get as far down the road toward Austin as possible that night.

We pulled off the road around 11PM and slept in a motel somewhere in West Texas. I can’t recall the name of the town. The next day was another long drive to Austin, but we got to have lunch with a bunch of friendly locals at Scotty’s, which was one of the highlights of the whole road trip.

We got into Austin that night and passed out. The next morning I was in pretty rough shape. I’ve been doing most of the driving, usually with the top down, and shouting at Hugo to take pictures of things as we speed past them at 85 miles per hour, which is a lot harder than it probably sounds.

The main event in Austin was a dinner gathering with a small group of locals at a lovely Italian restaurant organized and sponsored by one of my extremely generous readers. The food and wine was outstanding, as was the company, and we all had a wonderful time, until I started ranting about global capitalism …

The next day, we staggered back into the Scarlet Stallion and tore-ass down to LSU in Baton Rouge, and had a small but exciting town-hall type event with some students. I was really pleased to listen to these intelligent, insightful young people—most of the folks we’ve been talking to have been, well, older.

We arrived in New Orleans yesterday. We’re here until Sunday morning with nothing scheduled. It’s kind of a second break, which is sorely needed at this point. That said, if you’re in town and want to get a drink or a Beignet and tell me about America, feel free to get in touch.

On Sunday, we’re off to Oxford, Mississippi, where we’re doing an event at Ole Miss on Monday. I’m very much looking forward to that, as well as to the gathering we’re doing at a fire station in Bakersville, North Carolina. We don’t know exactly where we’ll be on the 21st, probably somewhere in Tennessee.

OK, that’s it for this update … which I have a feeling is the penultimate America Road Trip update. I’ll probably be able to get one more out before we do the town-hall at St. Mary Church in Greenwich.

In any event, the end is in sight. Here’s what remains of our insane itinerary …

New Orleans, Louisiana — October 15-18. Meetings with locals.

Oxford, Mississippi — October 20. Event at Ole Miss: University of Mississippi.

Tennessee — October 21. (TBD)

Bakersville, North Carolina — October 22. Gathering with locals.

Washington, DC — October 24. A visit with FIRE.

Greenwich, CT — October 27. Town-hall event at St. Mary Church (4-7PM).

Kensington, NH — October 28. Gathering at Crows’ Feat Farm (4PM).

P.S. You can still support the America Road Trip Project via Freefunder:

The America Road Trip Project is made possible by generous contributions from Harley Lennon Squires, Ralph A. Korpman, M.D., Debbie Lerman, Sasha Latypova, Integrity Media Group, several anonymous contributors, and donations from readers.

Photos: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York

We were somewhere around Barstow out on the edge of the desert when The Total Physical Exhaustion began to take hold. I remember shouting something like, ‘AS SOON AS WE GET INTO VEGAS, WE NEED TO REPLENISH OUR IBUPROFIN SUPPLY AND BUY SOME UGLY HAWAIIAN SHIRTS!, but Hugo couldn’t hear me on account of the 93 degree windstorm that was whipping through the interior of the Cerulean Stallion going 90 miles an hour down Highway 15.

We needed to get as far away from Los Angeles as we could as fast as we could.

Yes, that’s right, we are still in possession of the Cerulean Stallion. After receiving a series of alarming emails from Alamo Car Rental about how they needed to “ground” our Mustang convertible immediately because of some sort of defective software that had something to do with the headlights, or brake lights, when we finally drove into the Alamo Car Rental complex at LAX, prepared to surrender our beloved Stallion and accept whatever pussified probably hybrid automobile the Alamo Car Rental company wanted to foist on us, the Alamo personnel had no idea what we were talking about, and told us to keep the car.

So we tore out of there and set off across the desert for Las Vegas.

Of course, just when we thought we were done with The Alamo Car Rental Recalled Vehicle drama, I get another email this morning from Alamo Car Rental in Bradley, advising us that, notwithstanding our clean bill of health from Alamo Car Rental in LA, we need to immediately swap out the vehicle, or take it to a Ford Dealer/Service Center, where authorized Ford Motor Company software technicians will repair the alleged defect that has triggered the “open recall on the vehicle.”

Apparently, the Alamo Car Rental company intends to hound us all across the USA and back, sending us scary-sounding emails and issuing contradictory instructions, until we can’t take the harassment anymore and just drive to our nearest Alamo Car Rental Complex and beg them to take back the Cerulean Stallion and give us one of those humongous Urban Assault Vehicles that so many Americans feel they need to drive around in these days, for “safety” reasons, of course.

Which (i.e., “safety” reasons) brings me to our Escape from Los Angeles, and the sad and strange series of events that necessitated it … but, first, let me quickly fill you in on our visit to San Francisco, or at least give you the broad strokes.

We were all jacked up to get some great panoramic photos driving into town over the Golden Gate Bridge, but, well …

We made it in through the fog, though, and checked into the luxurious Surf Motel …

We toured the city, a rather strange experience after having been gone for 35 years. I’ll write more about that in the book. And we had a fantastic reading/discussion event at Adobe Books in the Mission, organized and hosted by Sane Francisco …

All in all, we had a wonderful time in San Francisco, except for the driverless Waymo vehicles that were clearly following us everywhere and recording everything we did and said!

I was very sad to have to leave town so soon, but we needed to get to L.A., where I had planned to crash from part one of the road trip and rest up for part two …

We hadn’t scheduled any public events in L.A., as I assumed we would be exhausted by the time we got there and would just want to rest up for a few days.

My prediction was right, of course. We came into L.A. “hard,” as the helicopter pilots say in the movies. We pulled up at our L.A. hosts’ lovely residence in the hills, half-blind, variously injured, dangerously sleep-deprived, and stinking like goats.

Things went bad quickly.

Long story short, my smoking was a problem. I had discussed the smoking issue with our hosts back in August, when I was planning our insane itinerary. One of our hosts was “extremely sensitive” to smoke, so I offered to book accommodation elsewhere, and just show up for the gathering they were kindly arranging for us. But our hosts insisted that we stay with them and assured me that my smoking outside wouldn’t be a problem.

It was a problem. A serious problem. I don’t want to go on about it, because our hosts are kind, generous, good-hearted people who wanted to welcome us and make us feel at home, but … well, when it got to the point where one of them suggested that I wear a special “smoking t-shirt” whenever I went out to my designated smoking area in the front yard to have a smoke and get fed upon by swarms of mosquitos, I determined we needed to cut our losses and get out of there.

At that point, I was on the brink of Total Physical Collapse from twenty-five days on the road tear-assing across the USA doing events every other night and could barely think straight, and now I had to find us somewhere to spend the night in L.A., and I had to find it immediately, because our smoke-sensitive host was starting to lecture me about how I needed to learn to “adapt.” Just before I lost it and started shouting, this crackhouse shithole of a motel in Inglewood appeared in my Internet search. A room was available. I booked it.

So, there we were, in this total shithole crackhouse/hooker motel down by the airport, dangerously exhausted, having just fled the lovely home in the hills we had planned to recuperate in for the next three days. Our nerves were shot. There was really only one thing left to do. I booked us a room on the strip in Vegas, which is where I am writing from now. Here’s a shot Hugo took as we rolled into town on Monday …

That’s it for this update. I’m still trying to catch up on sleep and get ready for part two of the road trip, which starts tomorrow. We’re on the road to Sedona, then on to Santa Fe, where we’re doing events on the 10th and the 11th, and then on, and on, unless the Alamo Car Rental company remotely disables our vehicle, or the Waymo Illuminati or anti-smoking Nazis get us.

Here’s our full itinerary again …

New York City — September 11. Kick off at George’s and 9/11 Memorial (1-3PM).

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — September 12. Lunch at Pat’s King of Steaks (1PM).

Washington, DC — September 13. Reading/discussion at The Big Board (7-9PM).

Hillsboro, West Virginia — September 14. Gathering with locals.

Cincinnati, Ohio — September 16. Gathering at Madtree Oakley Taproom (7:30PM).

Chicago, Illinois — September 17. Visceral Adventure bonfire event (7PM).

Chicago, Illinois — September 18. Integrity Media Group event.

Peoria, Illinois — September 19. Gathering at a nearby horse farm.

Kansas City, Missouri — September 20. Joe’s BBQ with a theater impresario.

Council Grove, Kansas — September 21. Reading event at Carnegie Library (3PM).

Boulder, Colorado — September 23. Gathering at Bohemian Biergarten (2PM).

Pinedale, Wyoming — September 24. Gathering with locals.

Missoula, Montana — September 26. BBQ Gathering with locals. (12:00PM)

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — September 27. Breakfast. (TBD)

Portland, Oregon — September 28. Gathering at Dick’s Primal Kitchen (1:30PM).

Gresham, Oregon — September 28. Reading event at The Scout Wine Bar (6PM).

Medford, Oregon — September 29. Reading event at Barnes & Noble (6-8PM).

Ashland, Oregon — September 30. Gathering at The Noble Fox (6-10PM).

San Francisco, California — October 3. Reading event at Adobe Books (5:30-8PM).

Los Angeles, California — October 6-8. Meetings with locals.

Sedona, Arizona — October 9. (TBD)

Santa Fe, New Mexico — October 10. Gathering with locals.

Santa Fe, New Mexico — October 11. Reading event at Club Paradiso (12-2PM)

Austin, Texas — October 13. Gathering with locals.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana — October 14. Town Hall at Louisiana State University.

New Orleans, Louisiana — October 15-18. Meetings with locals.

Oxford, Mississippi — October 20. Event at Ole Miss: University of Mississippi.

Tennessee — October 21. (TBD)

Bakersville, North Carolina — October 22. Gathering with locals.

Washington, DC — October 24. A visit with FIRE.

Greenwich, CT — October 27. Town-hall event at St. Mary Church (4-7PM).

Kensington, NH — October 28. Gathering at Crows’ Feat Farm (4PM).

P.S. You can support the America Road Trip Project via Freefunder:

The America Road Trip Project is made possible by generous contributions from Peter LaTona, Harley Lennon Squires, Ralph A. Korpman, M.D., Debbie Lerman, Sasha Latypova, Integrity Media Group, several anonymous contributors, and donations from readers.

Photos: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York; Sane Francisco (last San Francisco photo)

This America Road Trip update is not a good update. The Cerulean Stallion is down. We have just been advised by Alamo Car Rental, via email, that the Cerulean Stallion is no longer roadworthy, and has been recalled, and must be immediately “grounded.”

The one bit of potential good news is that Alamo Car Rental is, even as you read this, scouring the West Coast to find us another convertible. Keep your fingers crossed for us. If Alamo can’t come up with one, things could get ugly.

I’ll update you on our vehicular crisis when things become clearer. In the meantime, here are some photos and dashed-off notes from week three on the road …

We had a lovely gathering with locals in Pinedale, Wyoming …

Then it was off to Missoula, Montana …

And a BBQ in Stevensville, Montana …

After which we hit the road for Coeur D’Alene, and made it by sunset …

The next day we were off to “war-ravaged Portland.” We didn’t see any of the soldiers that have been sent in to put down the Cultural Marxist Insurrection, but we ran into these dangerous terrorist-looking characters, who were taking a break from ravaging the city with their rainbow placards and radical attire, and generally inflicting severe emotional trauma on everyone …

Our close call with the “enemy from within” left us both extremely traumatized, so we hauled ass out of town, but not before gathering with a bunch of folks at Dick’s Primal Burgers …

And doing a reading/discussion event at the Scout in Gresham …

We got into Medford, Oregon last night and did a reading/discussion event at the local Barnes & Noble, organized by Margaret Anna Alice …

We’ll be at Noble Fox in Ashland, Oregon tonight. Join us if you’re in the area …

Then it’s on to San Francisco …

That’s it for now. I’m sorry that these updates are so dashed-off and artless, but our itinerary doesn’t allow for much more. And now, with this vehicular debacle to deal with … I’m sure you understand.

Here’s our full itinerary again …

New York City — September 11. Kick off at George’s and 9/11 Memorial (1-3PM).

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — September 12. Lunch at Pat’s King of Steaks (1PM).

Washington, DC — September 13. Reading/discussion at The Big Board (7-9PM).

Hillsboro, West Virginia — September 14. Gathering with locals.

Cincinnati, Ohio — September 16. Gathering at Madtree Oakley Taproom (7:30PM).

Chicago, Illinois — September 17. Visceral Adventure bonfire event (7PM).

Chicago, Illinois — September 18. Integrity Media Group event.

Peoria, Illinois — September 19. Gathering at a nearby horse farm.

Kansas City, Missouri — September 20. Joe’s BBQ with a theater impresario.

Council Grove, Kansas — September 21. Reading event at Carnegie Library (3PM).

Boulder, Colorado — September 23. Gathering at Bohemian Biergarten (2PM).

Pinedale, Wyoming — September 24. Gathering with locals.

Missoula, Montana — September 26. BBQ Gathering with locals. (12:00PM)

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — September 27. Breakfast. (TBD)

Portland, Oregon — September 28. Gathering at Dick’s Primal Kitchen (1:30PM).

Gresham, Oregon — September 28. Reading event at The Scout Wine Bar (6PM).

Medford, Oregon — September 29. Reading event at Barnes & Noble (6-8PM).

Ashland, Oregon — September 30. Gathering at The Noble Fox (6-10PM).

San Francisco, California — October 3. Reading event at Adobe Books (5:30-8PM).

Los Angeles, California — October 6-8. Meetings with locals.

Sedona, Arizona — October 9. (TBD)

Santa Fe, New Mexico — October 10. Gathering with locals.

Santa Fe, New Mexico — October 11. Reading event at Club Paradiso (12-2PM)

Austin, Texas — October 13. Gathering with locals.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana — October 14. Town Hall at Louisiana State University.

New Orleans, Louisiana — October 15-18. Meetings with locals.

Oxford, Mississippi — October 20. Event at Ole Miss: University of Mississippi.

Tennessee — October 21. (TBD)

Bakersville, North Carolina — October 22. Gathering with locals.

Washington, DC — October 24. A visit with FIRE.

Greenwich, CT — October 27. Town-hall event at St. Mary Church (4-7PM).

Kensington, NH — October 28. Gathering at Crows’ Feat Farm (4PM).

P.S. You can support the America Road Trip Project via Freefunder:

The America Road Trip Project is made possible by generous contributions from Peter LaTona, Harley Lennon Squires, Ralph A. Korpman, M.D., Debbie Lerman, Sasha Latypova, Integrity Media Group, several anonymous contributors, and donations from readers.

Photos: (top) Maryse Stanford, (others) Hugo Fernandez