Category Archives: Archived

Liberals: Stop Tone Policing Normal Responses to the Death of a Terrible Person

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I was a hospice social worker for over 20 years, so I am quite familiar with death and human reactions to it. That said, I wanted to address some garbage pop psychology going around the internet the last couple days.

First, it is totally normal to feel relieved or to even feel glad when a terrible person dies. This does not mean you support the killing of that person. For example, I had a client whose father was incredibly abusive. He never made amends or apologized. In fact, he continued to be emotionally abusive. When he died, she went out to dinner with friends to celebrate. There was nothing wrong with her response to this. For her, it was cathartic.

Second, it is totally normal to feel joy about the demise of a horrible person. When the news of Hitler’s death reached people in concentration camps, they were jubilant. This was the man responsible for their enslavement and torture. He had murdered millions of people. So, celebrating the end of his reign of terror was to be expected. In fact, it would have been strange if people did not feel this.

Third, it is totally normal to laugh when an evil person dies. When Kissinger finally died, the internet exploded with humorous memes. This was because he was an evil man who was responsible for the deaths of countless people in the Global South and misery that lasts to this day. Laughing about the death of this odious person wasn’t pathological. It was an emotional release.

None of this means that a person approves of or is reveling in murder or violence because they feel this way. It simply means that they recognize that the person who is gone did horrible things to other human beings and now that they are gone, they will not be missed. And they are glad about it because their cruelty has ended.

So, enough with the shaming. Human emotions are complicated and messy. But tone policing them is not only annoying and counterproductive, it is often far more damaging in the long run.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

Ultimately, Iryna Zarutska was a victim of Capitalism

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Iryna Zarutska was a 23 year old Ukrainian refugee who had fled her home country after the Russian invasion. She emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she got a job at a pizza parlour. But Iryna had ambitions to become a veterinarian. Sadly, her dreams were cut short one night on a light rail train when she was fatally stabbed to death as she sat in her chair by a man with severe and untreated mental illness.

Train surveillance videos captured the entire, gruesome attack from before she sat down to after, when she had collapsed on the floor by her seat, bleeding out. After being stabbed, Iryna looked at her assailant bewildered and in despair. She held her hands to her face crying before losing consciousness from blood loss. None of the people around her came to her aid. It was a few good Samaritans from another car who eventually tried to help her. But it was too late.

Iryna’s story deserves to be told. Her life mattered. But there is another reason people need to know. The far right in the US is using Iryna’s tragic murder as a means to stoke racist hatred. They are also painting the unhoused and people who have mental health struggles as deranged and violent, when in reality only a minute percentage of these populations have aggressive tendencies. The Trump regime has been using it to justify more draconian crackdowns on the poor and unhoused. Even though statistics clearly show a decline in the crime rate in the US.

Progressives and those on the left should not ignore Iryna Zarutska. Her life deserves dignity. It is also imperative to address the conditions that led to her murder. The US, lacking in any kind of universal healthcare, has also steadily defunded mental health programs. And as rents soar, the population of unhoused people has soared with it.

Capitalist systems created these conditions. And its only solution to the inevitable problems that arise is carceral. To lock people up in for-profit prisons. In the end, this only creates more misery, especially for the working class who cannot afford expensive treatments or high end sanitoriums.

Capitalism has also created a culture of indifference. A social milieu where individuality is lauded as a virtue, and selflessness is seen as a weakness. Everything is transactional. Indeed, under the Trump regime, every naked cruelty that capitalism has to offer has been normalized and celebrated. And this is denuding working class communities of agency and solidarity.

Iryna’s life was cut short in a most brutal and heartless way. We should remember and honour her. But we should be reminded that she was ultimately a victim of capitalism. Of its neglect. Of its indifference. And we should not allow her legacy to be used by far right media and politicians to push for even more policies of brutality and heartlessness.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

Regarding Grief over the Death of a Fascist

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I just saw a video of a Palestinian child who was shot in the side by an Israeli drone. His intestines were coming out of the wound as he clung to his father. He could not have been more than 12 years old, probably younger. This is all made possible by the US and other Western governments.

So, let’s be clear about something. Those of you who are attempting to shame people who are not grieving the death of a fascist really need to stop. It isn’t working, it’s just incredibly annoying. This is especially true for those of you who haven’t said a damn word about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Your virtue signaling rings hollow. And it is preachy and tedious when not sealed in the vacuum you have created.

Anyone who peddles in hateful values and has the ear of one of the most powerful people on the planet isn’t just “a guy with a different opinion.” He is a powerful voice that can influence a society toward fascism. This. Was. Charlie. Kirk.

Charlie Kirk was a rotten human being who called George Floyd a “scumbag,” said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake” and had only nasty remarks about the late Martin Luther King, Jr.. He pushed blatantly racist conspiracies like the “Great Replacement theory.” He said God’s word was clear in Leviticus when talking about executing queer people. He mocked the victims of gun violence, going so far as to say some deaths were necessary to protect his “God given rights.” He ridiculed Palestinian suffering while they are enduring a genocide.

These aren’t just “personal opinions.” Trump, Netanyahu and other fascists and war criminals are hailing Kirk as a martyr. His words have not only influenced many young conservative Americans, but they have contributed to an infrastructure of unspeakable misery for millions of people. Kirk was a champion and master debater for sadistic and murderous policies. If you don’t understand this, maybe it is because you live in a bubble of comfortable privilege.

If you want to grieve a fascist, have at it. But don’t expect me to show up at the wake. I grieve for the victims of Kirk’s rhetoric. I grieve for the political violence and that culture he celebrated. I grieve for anyone who had the misfortune of being in his orbit of cruelty.

But I’ll be damned if I shed one tear for a fascist.

Get your priorities straight before attempting to shame people who aren’t interested in sentimental rubbish for a person who did not care one bit about other human beings and made a living off of punching down.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

Never Again is an Empty Platitude Unless it Applies to Everyone

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This past weekend, the Los Angeles’ Holocaust museum deleted this Instagram post and apologized. It merely stated that ”’Never again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.”

It went on to say that “Jews were raised to say ‘Never Again.’ That means never again. For anyone,” followed by “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience,” and “Standing with humanity does not betray our people. It honors them.”

This is the Age of Absurdity we now live in. One where simply denouncing the killing of innocent people is seen as offensive to certain people. Thus far, Israel has made its genocidal intentions crystal clear to all but the willfully obtuse and sniveling apologists.

Israel has killed thousands, maimed thousands more, and is in the process of literally erasing Gaza off the map. Its crimes are well documented, with Israeli soldiers and politicians posting continuously about it on their own. And yet, there are some who expect us to ignore all of this and accept their apologia for atrocity.

Anti-Zionist Jews and Holocaust survivors have been at the forefront of the movement against Israel’s decades-long system of apartheid and its ongoing genocide in Gaza. This retraction and ridiculous apology is an affront to them.

Never again is an empty platitude unless it applies to ALL human beings. Shame on the LA Holocaust Museum for capitulating to these idiotic objections.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

Marco Rubio: Portrait of a Pitiful Representative of a Dying Empire

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Marco Rubio is one of several pitiful representative’s of a rapidly descending and increasingly irrelevant empire. He thought the world would bend to US bullying because that is what has happened so many times before. But he found out the hard way that American influence is waning fast.

When he tried to stop a Palestinian delegation from attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York this month by refusing to issue them visas, it backfired spectacularly. UN members voted 153-2 to relocate the 80th session to Geneva, Switzerland. You can guess who the two dissenting votes were.

The United States has forever tethered itself to Israel, its last colonial asset. It has gone too far and invested too much to stop now. Their destiny is intertwined with the genocidal ethno-state, the one they share so many “values” with.

And even though Israel is carrying out one of the most sinister and sadistic genocidal campaigns in history with full support and assistance from the US, it has all but sealed its own fate as a pariah state. It will forever be seen as a nation brimming with ghouls who relish in the mass starvation of millions of civilians. That celebrates burning, maiming and blowing up children. One that constantly lies to itself and to the world because it knows no other parlance.

Of course, don’t expect Rubio to grasp any of this. He thinks he will be remembered fondly. In reality, his creepy portrait will be hung in a gallery of shame along side every other odious genocidaire before him.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

A Generation of Hungry Ghosts

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Addiction to opioids, PTSD, depression and suicide are surging among Israeli soldiers. But this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Nazi soldiers would practically drink themselves blind in order to carry out massacres. American soldiers would shoot up heroin to cope with burning down villages in Vietnam. Committing atrocities not only kills the victim, it hollows out the soul of the killer.

There are very few true psychopaths among us. Those who are able to hone their psychosis and attain power are capable of influencing ordinary people to do the unthinkable. But it takes a heavy toll on one’s conscience.

Whether Israel is aware or not, it has created a generation of hungry ghosts. Doomed to live out their days under a cloak of shame that will cast a cold shadow on everything and everyone they know.

They will never be able to hold a baby without seeing the faces of children they shot or starved to death. They will never experience tenderness without remembering the women and men they humiliated. They will never be able feel love without knowing they buried hope in a mass grave.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

The Fantasy that is Israel and the Erasure of History in Gaza

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Right now, Israel is attempting to erase history itself. It is obliterating Gaza City. Demolishing what is left of its historic mosques, churches, cafes, schools, parks and neighbourhoods. Forcing its inhabitants to flee and killing anyone who remains.

A city that once welcomed Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Ottoman travelers is rapidly becoming a killing field of dust and ash. Without a doubt, this destruction of one of the world’s most ancient cities is by design.

After almost two years of relentless atrocities, Israel is now trying to sanitize the scene of the crime. Killing journalists is one of its tactics. Witnesses, especially those with journalistic training and integrity, tell the truth. And they are the biggest threat to the machinery of colonization. But erasing the history of a people delivers a blow that is even more devastating.

Early on, Israel blew up Gaza’s universities and libraries. It razed its grand boulevards, reduced its archeological sites to rubble and even bulldozed its cemeteries. There was no reason to do any of this except to demoralize the Palestinians. To inflict both a wound and an insult to its collective and shared memory.

From its inception, Israel has been at war with the truth. It invented a homeland in a place that already had a people. It used the real generational trauma of Jewish suffering in Europe and elsewhere to instill perpetual fear and victimhood in its population and taught them to be repulsed by anything that smacked of “weakness.” It built a state that saw its neighbours as alien. As inferior. As savages.

But Israel itself is a fantasy. It is a beach resort built on a mass grave in Tantura. It is a soulless mall erected over the stones of a once bustling souk in Jerusalem. It is a bland settlement sprawling over uprooted, ancient olive groves. It is non-indigenous trees planted over the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. Trees that now ignite in flames each year thanks to an angrier climate and the fact that they never belonged to that land to begin with.

Israel took notes from the cruelest pages of European and American colonial settler projects and it modernized it. It learned from the Spaniards who razed Mayan and Incan temples and built cathedrals on their foundations. It studied the British who locked Indigenous Africans in concentration camps where they were starved and tortured. It copied the Americans who wiped out the Buffalo knowing it would mean certain death for Native Americans. And, as all settler colonial projects, its racist ideology led to its logical conclusion in the annihilation of its Indigenous peoples.

There is no such thing as a democratic ethno-state, yet this is what Israel has wanted the world to accept for 80 years. In doing so, it unwittingly created a psychosis that has poisoned its society and driven it into the iron grip of genocidal mania. In fact, polls show that most Jewish Israelis support its government’s actions in Gaza, with many believing it hasn’t gone far enough.

But even as Israel carries out its Final Solution in Gaza, its image and connection to the world has been forever soiled. Some dolts will forever cheerlead its sadistic project and attempt to smear those who oppose it as antisemitic, even if they are Jewish. But Israel will never be accepted as a democratic state again. And on some level, most Israelis know this. Many of those who have traveled abroad in recent months have found this out.

This is of small consolation to the Palestinians who are now living in a hell that is only made possible by the support of the US and other Western nations. But memory is imperative. It is the cornerstone of democratic values and the only bridge to a future where everyone is afforded the same rights. The same dignity. If we lose it, we are bound to repeat this horror again and again.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

There is No Greater Crime than Genocide

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Yesterday, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv demanding an end to the war and for a ceasefire in order to release the remaining hostages. Unsurprisingly, the Netanyahu regime accused them of participating in “Hamas support riots.” It has become a running joke that anyone who opposes Israel’s genocide in any way, big or small, is aligned with or supporters of “Hamas.” Ms. Rachel, Greta Thunberg, Piers Morgan, Marjorie Taylor Green, the entire country of Ireland. This paranoid delusional list gets longer every day.

To be sure, polls show that the majority of Israeli society is in the grip of genocidal mania. It is a social landscape drenched in the racist ideology of Zionism and its attendant infrastructure of apartheid, which has been meticulously constructed over decades. This, along with impunity for its litany of crimes, has created a society that is completely out of touch with its own character. Dehumanization of the Palestinians has been woven into the DNA of the Zionist state. And despite Holocaust scholars, prominent human rights organizations (including ones within Israel) and the ICJ correctly calling out Israel’s genocide, most Israelis continue to think of themselves as the victims.

But while it is easy to be cynical about Israelis, it is also important to recognize that human beings have agency. They can change. And this protest, while a minority in the country, is a sign that cracks are forming in the edifice of Israel’s mythological image of it being the “only democracy in the Middle-East.” These Israelis are finding out that they too are subject to the same smears. But the propaganda, or hasbara, isn’t having the same impact that it once had.

This summer, Israelis have been finding out that they are not welcome when they travel abroad. Protests and other forms of shunning have happened in Greece, Thailand, Bosnia and beyond. And this has nothing to do with antisemitism, as some apologists would have us believe, but entirely to do with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

While there is a long road to travel for these Israelis to understand this, it is not naive to hope that most eventually will. Of course, this is small comfort to the millions of Palestinians who are now facing annihilation at the hands of the Israeli state. They cannot wait for Israelis to have a change of heart, as they are bombed, burned, shot and starved.

Gaza has been utterly destroyed by the endless cruelty of Israeli bombardment. Tens of thousands of children have been slaughtered, with thousands more on the brink of death due to Israel’s policy of starvation. But the Palestinians who remain need our solidarity and commitment. We cannot afford the privilege of giving up when they continue to fight for survival. And when our own governments are the primary engine of this entire nightmare, it is our duty.

Therefore, the lion share of pressure must happen from outside Israel. It, along with the US (its primary benefactor) must be isolated. Cut off from all relations with democratic institutions. And other Western leaders must be pressured to immediately enact sanctions and implement divestment. Every tool must be used to stop Israel’s horrendous crimes, just as was done with apartheid South Africa. Only now, the stakes are much higher.

Genocide is the endgame for humanity. There is no greater crime. If it is allowed to continue or its enablers and the genocidaires who perpetrate it are allowed to get away without consequence, everything else will be rendered meaningless. Therefore, it must be opposed in every way possible. And people of conscience should demand nothing less than its complete demise.

Kenn Orfanos, August 2025

The Plan for Greater Israel is no Longer a Conspiracy Theory

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said in an interview that he feels “very” attached to the idea of a “Greater Israel.” This crackpot “vision” is for Israel to conquer not only historic Palestine, but parts of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and parts or all of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

This used to be a conspiracy theory. But it isn’t anymore. It is out in the open for the world to see. And he isn’t alone in sharing this “vision.” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has also peddled the idea of a “Greater Israel”, along with many other far-right Israelis.

This past week, Netanyahu announced his plans to take over all of Gaza, something that Israel had already done in practice through a complete blockade of the enclave in 2007. But the world’s biggest concentration camp has been almost completely razed to dust by continuous Israeli bombardment over the last two years. And Israel intends to corral its remaining population into smaller and more squalid camps, for them to await deportation or worse.

In the occupied West Bank, the plan to annex the remaining Palestinian territories is already underway. In fact, pogroms, harassment, vandalism and murders of unarmed Palestinians committed by Israeli settlers is a daily occurrence, and all with the protection of the IDF.

So, it is clear that the words of Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders should be taken seriously. They have boldly announced their genocidal intent for two years. Israel has bombed Lebanon and Syria throughout that time, even as it carries out a genocide in Gaza. Now they are telling us what the potential next step will be. Whether or not they can pull it off isn’t the point. If it is implemented, it is the instability and untold suffering for millions of people in the region that should concern us.

It should not be surprising if all of this reminds us of the plans of another regime, in another country, on another continent, in another time… 1939. And we all know what happened when that “vision” was made into a reality.

Kenn Orfanos, August 2025

The Building of an American Police State

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As the American Empire descends into the abyss, the fascist Trump regime is rapidly building up the infrastructure of a classic police state, replete with militarized cities, concentration camps, and jackbooted Brown Shirts.

Its war on immigrants has expanded to the unhoused and mentally ill. And it won’t stop there. Once the internment camps are empty of the undocumented, they will be filled with the next targeted “other.” Scapegoats and distractions for the corruption and machinations of the powerful.

While many see the writing on the wall, others still believe in the myth of American exceptionalism. But the numbers don’t lie. The US is no longer the economic powerhouse it once was. And the Trump regime is working over time to ensure its unraveling. Through crippling tariffs and the slashing of what’s left of the social safety net, which will only hurt a struggling working class, cruelty and sadism have become policy.

Its increasing belligerence toward allies is also isolating it further. Already, the US has lost billions of dollars in tourism, as Europeans and Canadians, wary of being harassed, deported or detained by masked thugs, choose to take their holiday elsewhere. In the meantime, BRICS ascends.

Fascism has always simmered under the surface of American politics and culture. If nothing else, its support of a genocide should have demonstrated this. But the Trump regime has ripped the mask off completely. And now it is poised to tear down whatever remains of its fragile and besieged democratic institutions.

Kenn Orfanos, August 2025