#you’ve got swastikas at each end of the sentence’

[ausetkmt]

When Donald Trump talks about undocumented immigrants, he often brings up genetics.

Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year.

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he said earlier this month. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 

The former president’s language underscores a larger trend, experts tell STAT. The eugenics movement is once again taking center stage in the U.S. — both in the immigration policies and rhetoric promoted by Trump, and through a rise in race science in academic literature.

Eugenics — the pseudoscientific idea of fixing social problems through genetics and heredity via policies ranging from selective breeding to forced sterilization and genocide — was popular at the turn of the 20th century, before the devastation of the Holocaust quelled public support for it. The reasons for its resurgence include an increase in funding of race science from private donors, as well as proponents of scientific racism and white nationalists manipulating the push to make science more public. 

Even well-intentioned scientists have fed into this shift by promoting genetic determinism — the idea that genes are the primary driver of traits and behaviors — and by platforming problematic work in the name of academic freedom. 

“I wasn’t surprised that people are being demagogic about this stuff, but I am a little surprised that they’re so clearly not even hiding [it],” said Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University who has done extensive work on the legacy of eugenics. “This is not just saying the quiet part out loud. This is coming up with quotations in which, instead of using quotation marks, you’ve got swastikas at each end of the sentence.”

‘Bad genes’ and the birth of eugenics

Trump is frequently accused of racism, but the fact that he is embracing eugenic thinking has not drawn sufficient attention, according to Shannon O’Brien, a political scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has written a book on eugenics in American politics. 

While racists harbor hatred for others because of their ethnicity or the color of their skin, eugenicists take it a step further and “like to legislate people out of existence,” O’Brien said. “They are OK with sterilization. They’re okay with extermination, and they believe that certain groups are superior and it’s OK to enact things that make it difficult for other ones to exist. I find that far scarier than racism.” 

Asked about Trump’s rhetoric and the eugenics movement and his remarks about “bad genes,” Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, told STAT, “President Trump was clearly referring to murderers, not migrants.’’

The former president also has a history of statements suggesting that certain people are genetically superior. A 2016 documentary pointed out Trump’s father, Fred, introduced him to “racehorse theory” as a child — the idea that “that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.” He’s used this idea to promote his own intelligence as well. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor, Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart,” he told CNN in 2020. 

This way of talking about genetics is rooted in a long history that begins with the English anthropologist Francis Galton, who took his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and applied it to humans, first using the term eugenics in 1883. The nascent field of eugenics matured into a full-fledged field of study in the United States. Much later, in the 1990s, the sequencing of the human genome inadvertently created a new surge in eugenics — emboldened by the idea that scientists could isolate genes responsible for complex behaviors, like poverty, crime and intelligence. 

How companies like 23andMe bolstered genetic determinism  

Those affiliated with the Human Genome Project hoped sequencing the genome would end notions that genetics created significant differences in different groups — “that it would lead us to this post-racial world,” said Aaron Panofsky, the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

“But it turns out that both scientists and the public spend all their interest in the 0.1% of genetic variation that makes us different, not the 99.9% that makes us the same.”

In promoting their research to the public and getting research funding from the government, geneticists often hyped up the role genes play in people’s lives. The Human Genome Project “was a huge public undertaking,” said Emily Merchant, a historian of science at the University of California, Davis. “It was almost $3 billion and took more than a decade to complete. So it needed a lot of popular support. The scientists who were trying to generate that popular support did it by promoting genetic determinism.”

This sentiment persisted in ensuing years because of popular genetic testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, which marketed its products with the premise that an understanding of genetics held the secret to good health and could quantify people’s sense of belonging to racial or ethnic groups. 

In the early 2010s, there was another shift in how mainstream academic circles discussed ideas that intelligence was genetic or that race had a biological basis. Richard Lynn, a psychologist who claimed that people from certain countries had lower IQs, promoted a biased dataset on IQ differences between countries that became increasingly widespread in academia. Another theory, called “differential K theory,” began to circulate around this time, stating that Black people have lower IQs and are more aggressive. 

“The national IQ database, differential K theory, they should have died the death bad science deserves to die. They have no scientific merit,” said Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Brunel University who has documented the resurgence in eugenics in demography. “They’ve both been extensively critiqued. They are both currently thriving in the academic literature.”

While controversial among the scientific community, ideas like Lynn’s continued to spread in academia, in part because of the ethos of academic freedom — the idea that scholars should be able to research and debate any issues in their field, and that rejecting a paper based on problematic findings is tantamount to censorship.  

“That’s a very, very problematic argument, but I think it is quite widespread,” Sear said. “Academic freedom isn’t the freedom to say literally anything in an academic forum. It’s the freedom to say anything with a sound methodological basis.” 

While these ideas lacked scientific rigor, Sear explained, they were often not intended for other scientists. “Scientific racism really is not aimed at academia. It’s aimed at the outside world. And this, I think, is why it’s so often such bad science,” Sear said.

The appropriation of open science 

The open science movement around this time also proved to boost the spread of flawed research on race, ethnicity, and genetics. Academic journals increasingly were publishing papers without paywalls, so anyone could access them, and often requiring the data underpinning research to be available. 

Some scientists had also begun posting early drafts of their work, called “preprints,” on public forums. By doing science in the public square this way, people with explicit political agendas could access, manipulate, and reinterpret published research in a way that sometimes took academics by surprise.  

Online, white nationalists used popular genetic testing websites to prove how white they were, and reanalyzed scientific data with a bent to affirming biological differences between races. They also seized on uncertainty among biologists about how to discuss race in the academic literature. Discussion forums on the subject might lean on anti-science conspiracy theories, but users could sometimes make sophisticated arguments about statistical uncertainties or the distinction between correlation and causation.

“They read both against and with the scientific literature, and that’s the way in which it becomes a very complicated dance that they sometimes make,” said Panofsky, who has studied the ways that far-right movements weaponize genetics. 

The solution to the weaponization of genetics isn’t gatekeeping research, experts studying the issue agree. But, they say that academia hasn’t confronted the ways science can be used to embolden bigotry. 

“We have basically a metric for how much Nazis like your research,” said Jedidiah Carlson, a population geneticist at Macalester College who led an analysis of how preprints circulate among right-wing extremists online. But it’s not a feature many are interested in. He wants to see researchers more attuned to the long-term impact of their work. 

Incentive structures in research are also responsible for the continued popularity of research on topics like the links between genetics and intelligence or educational attainment, Carlson said. It’s “easy to get money for it, because you can say this has immediate policy implications for education and immigration policy … It’s just treated as this generic ‘apolitical’ research when it never has been.”

Challenging the idea that genes are ‘in the driver’s seat’

The failure to deeply engage with the dark history of eugenics and the way it’s informed a number of academic fields is linked to current political hostility directed toward immigrants, according to Marielena Hincapié, an immigration scholar and lawyer at Cornell University who hosted a symposium on the 100-year legacy of eugenics and the Immigration Act of 1924. 

She points to recent attacks on immigrant communities carried out by people that believe in the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy that posits there is a concerted effort to diminish the power and influence of white people in the United States. The gunman behind one such attack, in Buffalo, New York, directly cited genetics research in his thinking.

The incident sparked some soul searching within the genetics community, which has also pushed back on problematic use of its research. In one case, a genetics consortium challenged the use of its data by a private company to screen embryos. On another occasion, a now-defunct app claimed it could test users on whether they had genes associated with same-sex sexual orientation, drawing on a paper published in Science. That prompted a protest petition signed by more than 1,600 scientists. 

There’s also growing interest in the scientific community in how social determinants, such as economic policies, racism, and climate change, shape people’s health, and in the field of epigenetics, which studies how the environment affects gene expression. These paradigms open up an understanding that “genes are not necessarily in the driver’s seat, but they’re in an interactive relationship with a whole bunch of other factors,” said Panofsky. “They seem to open a door to a post-deterministic biology and genetics.” 

Even so, the field has yet to truly rethink its buy-in of the idea that genes play a central role in people’s abilities and behaviors, Panofsky said. That thinking can inadvertently support the kind of problematic rhetoric Trump has applied to immigrants. While much of the U.S. has moved on and forgotten about its eugenic past, the country hasn’t done the work to refute the ideas it made so popular. 

“We presume that we’ve done the work of rooting these matters out of our society,” said Michele Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law and global health at Georgetown Law. “But that presumption is proving to be quite thin and weak in these times.”

Just over 100 years ago, eugenicist Harry Laughlin testified before the U.S. House of Representatives that “The character of our civilization will be modified by the ‘blood’ or the natural hereditary qualities which the sexually fertile immigrant brings to our shores.” His argument wouldn’t be out of place today.

[unbridgeabledistances]

I love your last fic so much it got me thinking could you write something about like the gallaghers( +Kev and v and sandy etc) observing Ian and Mickey’s relationship? Like their perspectives of seeing them be soft with each other and just their dynamic? I’m sorry if this doesn’t make sense lol <3

hiiiii anon!<3 okay i want to start off by saying that this got WAY too long, bc i loved this prompt a lot- so much that i think i might make this a multi-part thing on ao3! i started with sandy (since i am in love with her) but i’ll also go through the gallaghers/kev & v soon- lmk if u guys want me to continue, and who u would want me to write next if i do (or if u want me to continue with sandy lol i have lots of thoughts and feelings)

this ended up taking place in s10 when we first meet sandy, fyi:) also tw for brief mentions of abuse (as always, bc of terry 🙄) -- and there is a reference to the line in 10x07 that jokes about mickey and sandy for a brief moment

--

When Sandy heard her phone buzz on that Tuesday afternoon, sitting on the stained and lumpy couch in her shithead uncle’s living room while drinking a beer and arguing with Alek about what type of insurance fraud could make the biggest payout, she had no idea what to expect on the other end of the line. The phone kept ringing, the contact info lighting up the screen: MICKEY.

Mickey? Shit. It had been a long fucking time. Between her own various juvie stints as a kid and Mickey’s time behind bars overlapping just as she got released, Sandy hadn’t seen Mickey since�� high school, maybe? Whenever it was, it was back when Mickey was a grimy kid with spikey hair and dirty fingernails, a kid with an obsession with guns and way too much time on his hands, back when they would hang out by the train tracks and drink beer and get way too high and do stupid shit; all in all, back when everything was a hell of a lot simpler. Sandy assumed Mickey had met Royal and been clued in about her shitshow of a life at some point while she’d been gone, and they’d possibly overlapped at a family party or two a few years ago when they both were in town— but other than hearing about the aftershocks of Mickey coming out and driving Terry up a goddamn wall, so much so that Terry broke his parole and was headed straight back to prison hours after his release, Sandy hadn’t seen Mickey in forever.

Which is why this call intrigued her so much— Mickey was supposed to be in prison for at least a couple more years, or at least that’s what his brothers had said, so why the fuck was he using a cell phone right now?

Sandy nodded her head towards the cellphone, cutting Alek off mid-sentence and sliding her thumb across the screen to pick up the call. Before saying anything, she rose off the creaky springs of the couch and speedwalked out to the front porch before answering— whatever the fuck Mickey wanted, she assumed he was calling her because this conversation wasn’t for the ears of any other Milkoviches. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the post of the front stoop, listening to the silence hanging heavy on her phone’s speaker.

“Mickey? You there?”

A low chuckle came from the other end of the line.

“Fuck. Been a long time.” Mickey’s voice sounded the same; punchy and snarky, maybe a little gruffer and raspier after years of cigarette smoke. Sandy waited a moment for Mickey to give more of a reply, or an explanation for his call, but it was clear that Mickey wasn’t going to give one right away— it was like he was testing the waters, like he was deciding if making this call was the right move. Soft static echoed on the phone line.

Sandy totally got it— reemerging from a life of cinderblock cell walls and barbed wire fences fucking sucked, especially when you were a Milkovich and the moment you got out you were faced with a choice, an opportunity: did you want to go back home, or did you want to start fresh, erase your own name, and forget this dysfunctional family ever existed? Sandy knew she felt the same way when she got out. Mickey deciding to call Sandy was a big fucking move, and she realized that— reclaiming your life as a Milkovich on the brink of a new beginning took guts.

“So, I take it you’re out of prison?” Sandy asked after a moment, inhaling another slow puff of her cigarette.

There was that laugh again— Sandy had weirdly missed it. Honestly, Mickey hadn’t ever been too bad to be around— they’d both felt like outsiders in the family, had both always had a strong head on their shoulders and a fucking moral compass, unlike the rest of Terry’s sheep who did his bidding and got swastikas tattooed on their chest. When he was younger Mickey used to follow Terry and his older brothers around like a lost puppy, and he even got those fucking knuckle tats—but later in high school, Sandy remembered seeing something deep snap inside him, bleeding out in “STAY THE FUCK OUT” and “FUCK LOVE” signs taped onto his bedroom walls. At the time she thought it was the fucked-up shit with Terry and Mandy driving him up a wall— but now she realized the constant bombardment of homophobia, coupled with the cuts and bruises blooming on his cheeks and the cigarette burn scars on his arms, must have been signs of Mickey realizing the rude awakening that was inevitably going to come if he wanted to be who he was. Sandy couldn’t even imagine— no one really gave a shit who she fucked, and her cousins didn’t know anything about her sex life—but she couldn’t fathom being Terry’s son, the pride and joy of the Milkovich clan, and needing to outwardly admit those deeper parts of herself.

“Yup, I’m free to join civilization as of this morning. Overcrowding or some shit.” Sandy could hear Mickey also taking a drag of a cigarette on the other end of the line. She smirked to herself. Guess we both didn’t break the Milkovich nicotine addiction.

“So, uh, listen,” Mickey continued, and Sandy immediately knew he was in deep shit if she was the one he was calling to ask for a favor. “I’m in a bit of a… situation. Don’t wanna go into too many specifics, but there might be a massive fucking Mexican cartel after me right now.”

Sandy barked out a laugh before she could help herself. Fucking Mickey. “Oh yeah? Sounds like you’re feeling thrilled to be a free man again.”

Mickey chuckled again. “Fuck you. But hey, d’you think you can bring my shit by to me, so I don’t have to stop by the house and get fucking killed? You don’t gotta rush or whatever, just didn’t wanna show my face quite yet.”

Sandy could feel all the unsaid things wrapped in the way Mickey’s sentence ended. Didn’t want to show his face quite yet because of this cartel bullshit, or because of Terry? She decided it didn’t really matter— Mickey was a good guy, she could spend an hour or so rounding up his shit and bringing it to him if that’s what he needed.

“Got it.” She blew out more smoke, watching it curl and drift over the wasteland of the front yard on a gust of summer air.

Mickey cleared his throat, like he was gearing up to say more. When he spoke, his voice was softer around the edges, more genuine than before.

“I’m, uh. I’m sure you heard everything about me while I was gone. About Terry flipping his shit. Probably not the best idea for me to come around the house quite yet—my brothers n’ I haven’t really talked much since then either.” He paused, inhaling another drag of his cigarette. “I figured you’d get it. And hey, if you can bring the stuff by, I’d love to hear all the badass shit you’ve been up to the past few years.”

Sandy nearly winced—yeah, if by “badass shit” you mean getting forcibly married to a douchebag and then couch surfing for months— but she tried to keep her shit together for Mickey’s sake. She stubbed out her cigarette on the railing of the porch, straightening from where she was leaning.

“I’ve got it Mickey, don’t worry about it. Where are you right now, anyways?”

She could hear the hint of relief bleeding into Mickey’s voice when he replied. “I’m at the Gallagher house? The grey one by the tracks.”

Sandy rolled her eyes. “I was in jail for a couple of years Mickey, not braindead. I know where the Gallagher house is.”

Mickey huffed out a breath, but there wasn’t any sharpness in it. “Excuse me for tryin’ to be helpful, smartass.”

“Why the fuck are you there, anyways?”

“I’m, uh, crashing with my partner for now. Ian?”

Holy shit, Mickey was still fucking Ian Gallagher? Sandy had pieced together that Ian was the reason Mickey came out months after getting married to some Russian bitch, and according to Iggy the whole reason Mickey went to jail in the first place was some love-crazed revenge plot on Ian’s behalf— but since getting locked up Mickey hadn’t kept in touch with anyone, other than a shady-as-fuck message to his brothers after he’d busted out of prison letting everyone know that he was in Mexico, despite getting thrown back into jail in Chicago a couple months later. Sandy didn’t really know the details, and she especially didn’t know anything about Mickey’s love life— but it was wild as fuck that someone as unsettled and ruthless and batshit crazy as Mickey could’ve been with the same person all this time, especially someone as seemingly bland as Ian Gallagher. Huh. Wonder if I’ll get to see Ian.

“Got it. I’ll round up your shit and bring it by the Gallagher house later today. And don’t worry, I won’t let anyone know you called til you’re ready.”

Mickey exhaled on the other end of the line. “There shouldn’t be much, just check the drawers or whatever. “

Sandy knew for a fact that most of Mickey’s lingering possessions had probably been taken, sold, or thrown out by a zealously homophobic Terry by now, but she wasn’t going to say as much to Mickey over the phone.

“I’m on it. See you in a couple hours.”

“Hey, Sandy?” Mickey blew out a long breath, and this time Sandy couldn’t tell if it was because he was still smoking or because he was riding a wave of relief, releasing the floodgates of anxiousness he’d been holding in the whole conversation. “Thanks. I fuckin’ owe you one.”

Sandy smirked. Maybe Mickey being let out of jail early was a good thing, despite how fucked his whole situation seemed— maybe, for once, someone in her family would be fun to be around, wouldn’t set her teeth on edge every two seconds by making a racist comment or forcing her to be something she wasn’t.

“I’ll text you when I’m almost at your love nest.”

She imagined Mickey’s grin as he replied. “Fuck you. See ya soon.”

**

After scraping through every rickety dresser drawer in Terry’s house for nearly an hour, Sandy could barely come up with anything that was reportedly Mickey’s: a couple of tattered shirts, an impressively overused-looking bong, and a single sneaker she’d left behind because she couldn’t find the other one. She threw it all in some shitty burlap rucksack she’d found on one of the bedroom floors, assuming no one would miss it— it dawned on her that maybe her cousins were lying, and some of the other stuff in the house was still Mickey’s, but she’d collected what she could based on the whispered directions Alek and Iggy had given her when Terry was out of the room.

Sandy unlocked her phone, and typed a quick message to Mickey. “Out front.”

Mickey’s reply came quickly, and Sandy noticed the front curtains rustling on the top floor of the Gallagher house.

“Coming down”

The front door creaked open, and Mickey walked out onto the front porch. He looked good; he looked cleaner, sure, but also like a fucking adult—like he’d grown into himself, like he actually carried himself with confidence instead of just pretending to. He nodded his chin up at Sandy in acknowledgement.

“Long time no see.” He smirked, leaning on the banister. “You make a good delivery service. All those hauls we did with Terry must’ve been good training.”

Sandy lazily walked up the front steps, reaching the bag out in front of her for Mickey to take. “Here’s all the shit I could find. It’s not much.”

Mickey jerked his head to the open door behind him. “You wanna come in for a sec?”

Sandy grinned. Why the fuck not. “Sure."

So that was how she found herself perched on what was presumably Ian Gallagher’s bed, watching Mickey ruffle through the burlap bag, his brows furrowed as he realized just how much of his shit was actually gone.

“This everything?”

“As much as I could find.”

They comfortably chatted back and forth about how everyone was— Sandy decided to divulge the fact that Mickey’s brothers were idiots who tried to crawl in bed with her every night, which is something that she had to joke about so she didn’t go fucking insane sleeping under the same roof as them.

“Fuck ‘em, chop their nuts off next time they try it.”

Sandy smirked. Finally, a decent fucking relative. She made some hollow joke about staying with Mickey, alluding to the extra-shitty night decades ago when their cousins had forced them to make out when they were way too high on something.

“Or I could stay here with you. Have fun like we did when we were kids.”

“You know that’s fucked up, right? We’re fucking cousins!”

“Plus he’s taken.” A voice came from around the corner.

Ian Gallagher looked bigger, taller, and more solid than Sandy remembered; he was definitely miles away from the scrawny kid with the bangs who worked at the Kash N Grab that Sandy and her cousins endlessly used to fuck with in middle school. Ian’s shoulders were wide, his body imposing in the tiny room; immediately, Mickey’s aggravated stance softened when Ian walked in, wrapped in a towel from the waist down.

“Oh right, you.” Sandy grinned as Ian hunched over the bed and grabbed his deodorant from the nightstand.

Mickey had turned back to the bag of clothes. “Hey, I had shampoo and shit, is there soap anywhere?”

Sandy rolled her eyes. “You’ve been gone for years, you think your brothers would save that shit for you?” she bit out— and okay, maybe she was a little pissed at Mickey’s brothers for the constant-sexual-assault thing.

Ian just applied his deodorant and leaned in close to Mickey as he passed by the bed towards the doorframe. “You can use mine. We’ll hit Costco later, I’m getting paid.”

It was stupid, but Sandy felt something soft pang in her chest at Ian’s words; it was just now that she was realizing it, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen someone take care of Mickey before, or so… automatically factor Mickey’s needs into a situation. Being a Milkovich was all about scrounging and scraping, and guarding what little you had; a Milkovich would never let someone use their fucking soap just because they cared about them, or not as an immediate reaction anyways.

“Nah, I can’t, man. PO texted me when you were in the shower, he’s got a job for me.”

Ian kept looking at Mickey from where he was leaning in the doorway. “Then give me a list of shit you need, and I’ll pick it up for you,” Ian said in an overly simple tone, like he was mocking the fact that Mickey didn’t realize Ian would run an errand for him.

Sandy smirked. Jesus, Gallagher is whipped.

“Isn’t that cute, little domestic bitches,” Sandy crooned before she could help herself.

Ian stepped into the room again and leaned in towards Mickey, pressing a kiss to Mickey’s cheek while Mickey aggressively tried to uncrumple one of the pile of shirts from the bag.

“Mm, thank you,” Ian said in reply, his voice muffling as he smushed his face closer to Mickey’s.

Mickey instantly smiled smugly as Ian’s lips pressed against his cheek—then he noticed Sandy was staring, so he flipped her off and smiled even wider. What the fuck? Sure, Mickey had flipped Sandy off, but he was practically fucking beaming in a way that Sandy had never seen. God, wonder if I’ll find this shit someday.

Ian detached himself from Mickey and walked out of the room, Mickey’s eyes lingering on his torso. Once Ian had turned the corner Mickey snapped back to attention, fixing his eyes back onto the small mountain of clothes spread on the bed in front of him. Mickey lifted the bong off the bedsheets, and met Sandy’s gaze. 

“You have to go, or d’you wanna hang for a bit? I don’t have to be at work for a couple hours, and it’s gonna suck enough that I should probably be high before I get there.”

Sandy grinned. “Hell yeah, I’m down.”

**

They sat on the rickety back steps of the Gallagher house, silently taking hits and passing the bong back and forth. It had been years since they’d been in the same space, but Sandy and Mickey easily sank into a comfortable silence, passively surrounded by the shrieks of kids playing across the alleyway and the bubbling of water as they inhaled. Mickey blew smoke out of his nose, then sat back so he was leaning against the banister and passed the glass pipe to Sandy.

“So,” Sandy started as she held the lighter to the bong and inhaled deeply. “Ian Gallagher.”

Mickey huffed out a laugh. “Yup. That’s some Romeo and Juliet shit for ya.”

Sandy smirked as she exhaled. “You really fucking love him, huh?”

Mickey eyebrows raised almost imperceptibly as he looked towards her. “Yeah. Guess I do.” He took the bong from Sandy’s outstretched hand. “Took me forever to get shit straight with him, though.”

Ah. So their road to domestic bliss wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed. Sandy’s curiosity was growing.

“Because of shit with Terry?”

Mickey stiffened, coughing a bit as he exhaled smoke, like Sandy’s question caught him off guard. “Shit. Yeah. That too. Let’s just say there were lots of fucking ups and downs, and we both had a lot of shit to unpack.”

Sandy snickered. “You sound like a fucking couples therapist.”

Mickey rolled his eyes. “If you wanna see couples therapy, I should tell you about the months me and Ian were sharing a fucking cell. We nearly ripped each other’s heads off. We literally stabbed someone so one of us might get sent to fucking solitary.”

Sandy’s laughter grew. “Are you fucking serious?”

Mickey grinned, and passed the bong back to Sandy again. “Fuck. Yeah. I fucking love him, though. He’s fucking crazy, and I still can’t let him go.” Mickey looked off into the distance across the alleyway, and either the weed was really hitting him right now, or he was being a very sappy motherfucker.

Sandy nudged Mickey’s knee. “You guys are cute together.” Mickey’s eyebrows raised when he heard the word “cute,” and Sandy quickly tried to rephrase. “Not cute, but y’know. Good for each other. You seem happy. Happy is... good.”

Mickey nodded pensively. “How’re you doing, anyways?”

Sandy shrugged noncommittally. “Eh. We can talk about me another time. How the fuck did you and Ian end up sharing a jail cell, anyways?”

Mickey let out a throaty laugh. “I heard Gallagher was getting locked up when I was down south, so I essentially pulled some strings and fucking snitched on the cartel I was working for. Hauled my ass back up here so we could be together.”

Holy fuck. Sandy’s jaw nearly dropped. “Mickey, you’re batshit crazy.” She shoved him squarely in the chest this time. “Are you fucking serious?! You evaded the feds, were living in Mexico, and you came back for Ian Gallagher?”

Mickey rolled his eyes again, placing the bong on the steps. “I can’t explain it, man. I just didn’t wanna be anywhere else, I guess.”

Sandy leaned back onto the banister. “Shit.” She paused for a moment, wondering if she should ask the next question. “Do you… want me to tell anyone you’re back?”

Mickey glanced over at her, his eyes alert. “Nah. Not yet. That okay with you?”

Sandy nodded. “Of course.” Mickey pulled out his phone, checking the time and presumably looking for a distraction from tiptoeing around talking about Terry— but Sandy had to tell him, had to let him know one more thing.

“Hey, Mickey?”

Mickey looked up. “Yeah?”

“I don’t really know the details of what went down with Terry, or whatever— but I just wanted to let you know that… if you ever wanna come home, I’m on your side. No questions asked. And I think a lot of the others are, too.”

The corner of Mickey’s mouth ticked upward. “Thanks.”

Sandy stood, checking her phone and zipping her leather jacket. “Well, I’d probably let you sober up a bit before your big parolee first day of work.”

Mickey raised a middle finger up to her from where he was seated, but then rose to stand.

“Thanks for comin’ by. And hey—you’re free to crash here anytime. There’s a million fucking kids running around all the time, but there’s always a couch or something open if everyone at home’s giving you too much shit.”

Sandy felt something warm growing in her chest. It had been a long fucking time since someone offered to take care of her, just because they could, just because they wanted to— maybe being a Milkovich wasn’t half bad. Maybe there were some good ones.

Sandy nodded in acknowledgement, and turned to walk down the creaky back steps. Wow. If Sandy was sure of one thing right now, it was that Mickey really, really fucking loved Ian Gallagher.

[analogscum]

HARD ROCK ZOMBIES (1985, d. Krishna Shah)

NOTE: I RECOMMEND WATCHING HARD ROCK ZOMBIES BEFORE READING THIS REVIEW IF YOU WANT TO AVOID SPOILERS!

Human ambition is a funny thing. It can lead to great triumphs, but also great tragedies. Without human ambition, we would not have rock n’ roll, the most vital of American art forms. On the other hand, human ambition also lead the Third Reich to exterminate more than six million Jews, Catholics, homosexuals, physically and mentally handicapped, and Romani people. How does this tie in to today’s film, Hard Rock Zombies? Well, for now, let’s just say that it is a testament to both sides of the coin of human ambition that the sickos who made Hard Rock Zombies said to themselves, we’re going to make Hard Rock Zombies…and then actually went out and made Hard Rock Zombies. I’m honestly not sure if I mean that as a compliment or not.

We open on two metalheads riding a T-Bird convertible down a winding desert road. Lo and behold, they stumble upon a buh-buh-buh-baaaaabe hitchhiking. What are they gonna do, NOT invite this bodacious blonde into their sweet ride? We now cut to a dwarf with an eyepatch and a troll dancing around with a guy holding a camera by a river. You read that right. The metalheads and the blonde pull up on the other side of the river, strip down to their skivvies, and do a little skinny dipping. Suddenly, she drowns each of them one by one! And also does something else, because the water turns blood red, but I have no idea what that could be. The camera guy takes pictures of this gristly scene, while the dwarf and the troll celebrate the carnage. They chop off one of the victims’ hands, blondie picks it up and sings “I wanna hold your hand.” Again, you read all of that right.

Cut to: our heroes, the band, whom the movie never bothers to name (seriously, this band has no name), rockin’ out before a sold out crowd. Right away, we’re confronted with the major problem of all of these 80s metal horror movies: these guys just do not sufficiently rock. I mean, they have a synth player, for cryin’ out loud! This was not too long after Van Halen risked losing their metal fanbase by adding synths to “Jump,” because synths were pop, and pop was for pussies. But seriously, these guys make Billy Joel sound like Napalm Death. Oh well, at least the crowd of roughly 12 people seems to be having a good time.

Backstage, the band strip down to their banana hammocks, and their manager, Ron, tells them that they have to have their photos taken with a bunch of groupies. None of the dudes in the band, especially the lead singer, Jesse, seem to want to do this. They’re incredibly ambivalent about potentially sleeping with these women. Which of course is par for the course for 80s metal bands. Most of Motley Crue’s autobiography, The Dirt, is about the dudes politely sipping Earl Grey tea and discussing Nietzsche. We soon get an idea as to why Jesse is not interested in all of these women who want to ride his mullet, and believe me, you’re not gonna like it.

As he’s escaping all of these annoying women who wanna show him their boobs, Jesse runs into Cassie. Now, the movie is not entirely clear on how old Cassie is supposed to be, but let’s just say she’s young. Like, teenage. Like, below the age of consent. She warns Jesse to stay out of the town of Grand Guignol (subtle), where the band is scheduled to play the next night. Jesse instantly falls in love with her, because this movie hates you, and we’re treated to white hot, sexually charged flirting such as this:

Jessie: You're neat.

Cassie: No, I'm not.

Jessie: Yeah, ya are.

Cassie: ...shakes head...

Jessie: Yeah, ya are.

Guys, it’s rare that I make a point of writing down dialogue in these movies that we talk about, but Hard Rock Zombies left me with no choice but to slam that pause button and record some of these lines, because holy macaroni, peep this screenwriting magic:

“I got it from a book. You know, a boooooooook?”

“You guys ready for the show? The loud show? Loud music show? Rock and roll?!?!”

“Oh bullshit, young stupid!”

“You suck, mister! I know it and everyone knows it!”

Eat your heart out, Aaron Sorkin!

So the band arrives in Grand Guignol, and wouldn’t you know it, they pick up the same hitchhiking blonde, who invites them to stay at her family’s mansion. The family is pretty normal, you’ve got blondie, the photographer, the dwarf, the troll, the groundskeeper who, um, is that a Swastika armband he’s wearing, and grandma and grandpa, who speak in thick German accents and we meet them while they’re in the bone zone and the dwarf and the troll are watching them. Oh, and by the way, they’re secretly Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, and Eva Braun is a werewolf. I PROMISE THAT ALL OF THIS IS TRUE.

As it turns out, everyone in Grand Guignol is a backwards rube who thinks that rock n’ roll is the devil’s music that will lead to “physical sex” (again, actual quote). So they get super duper outraged when the band engages in some antics that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of The Monkees. They skateboard around, do silly dances, and mug for the camera. The sheriff throws them in jail, the town council cancels their concert, and outlaw all rock n’ roll in general, leading to a scene where everyone throws their records and tapes in a pile and destroys them (again, subtle).

Meanwhile, Jesse and Cassie keep running into each other and falling deeper and deeper in love, and the movie keeps rubbing our faces in their obvious age difference, because apparently the overt Nazi imagery wasn’t cringeworthy enough. Just wait until we get to the song he writes about her, because you’ll have to go to jail once you hear it. They practice at the creepy mansion, and the family tries to electrocute them. That doesn’t work, so instead they murder the band members one by one overnight. The drummer is stabbed in a terrible homage to the Psycho shower scene, the keyboardist is felled by werewolf Eva Braun, I don’t remember what happens to the guitarist, I think he falls out of a window or something, and Jesse is crucified and disembowled with a weed hacker by the groundskeeper. This means Hitler is finally ready to turn California into the fourth reich…here we go…no turning back…complete with gas chambers. Which come into play later. THIS IS ALL FROM A REAL MOVIE THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

Luckily, before he croaked, Jesse gave Cassie a tape he made of a bass lick that can raise the dead. Look, just roll with me here, ok? You’ve made it this far. So Cassie plays the tape at the band’s grave, and they rise from the dead, ready to get revenge on Hitler and Eva Braun and co. In zombie form, they all sport weird mime makeup that kinda looks like KISS in the early days before they figured out their image, and they walk around as if they’re doing a combination of the robot and the Macarena. These are both choices that the filmmakers made. So they pretty much instantly murderize the Hitler clan with no problems, but whoops, they don’t stay dead for long, because now they’re zombies too, and they’re attacking all the hicks in town, which makes THEM zombies. Now we’ve got Nazi zombies and redneck zombies running around, which is not an ideal situation to say the least, but for now, the band have to go play their big gig.

This is where we finally get to hear Jesse’s love ballad to Cassie in it’s entirety, and, well, here it is…

“I’m so in love, but you’re so young.” BARF BARF BARF BARF ETERNAL BARF. Anyway, see ya in jail, which is where I live now because of this song!

I’m really loathe to talk about the rest of the movie, because at this point, it takes a turn into goofy comedy, and just completely falls flat. Not that their satirical bits about the PMRC and anti-metal hysteria were all that biting, but at least they were trying to say something, whereas these Zucker brothers-lite groaners are just insufferable. There’s a gag about a girlfriend who’s so possessive of her boyfriend that she won’t let any other women get near his severed head after a zombie rips it off, which the filmmakers obviously thought was beyond hilarious, but is really torturous. Then there’s an even less funny gag where some Pointdexter is like, hey, since zombies are brainless, they must be, like, allergic to brains? So if we all walk around with these giant cardboard cutout heads, they’ll leave us alone? Huh? And of course it doesn’t work, and of course the zombies just eat everybody, and as he’s being devoured, the Pointdexter yells, “Don’t believe everything you read!” Ugggh, read this: you suck, movie.

OK, there is one running gag from this section that I liked: after the troll becomes a zombie, he just eats his own body until he’s a burping skull. I happened to think that was charming and great.

Eventually the townsfolk try to sacrifice Cassie to the zombies, because they read that if the undead feast upon a virgin, then they’ll rest for another hundred years. Whatever. So Cassie is totally about to be gang banged and devoured by zombie Hitler and his gang (wow, what a sentence), when luckily the band shows up, and lures them away by playing that resurrection riff that Jesse learned from a book (you know, a booooooook?!?!) And where do they lure them? Ugh, sorry…here goes…they lure them to the gas chambers, where they’re all gassed to death. You know, like in the Holocaust? I have nothing more to say.

The film ends, in perfect fashion, by spelling co-writer/director Krishna Shah’s name wrong in the credits. Fantastic.

When a movie looks particularly bad, I often like to say that it reminds me of a fake movie meant to play in the background of a real movie. Well, as it turns out, that’s the actual origin story of Hard Rock Zombies. Originally, the film was supposed to be 20 minutes long and featured as the movie the characters in another Krishna Shah production, American Drive-In, go to see. Apparently Shah decided at some point that he could double his profits by turning Hard Rock Zombies into its own feature film. This begs the question: is this where all the Nazi stuff was added? Because it’s easy to imagine characters in a movie occasionally checking in with the drive-in movie and seeing a bunch of rockers rising from the grave, but that Hitler subplot is just so bizarre and so incongruous that I can’t help but think it was tacked on.

Hard Rock Zombies is the craziest film I’ve seen in awhile. It approaches Demonwarp and Spookies levels of what the hell am I watching madness. You genuinely will not be able to predict where this movie is gonna go from scene to scene. However, the tacked on nature of that madness keeps you at arms length a bit, and eventually it just becomes tiresome once you realize it’s not going anywhere beyond mere shock value. I mean, this movie is nearly an hour and forty minutes, and ends with a scene in a goddamn GAS CHAMBER. So, by all means, show this one to your friends, just don’t blame me if they never talk to you again. You may be right, they may be crazy, but in the end, it’s still rock n’ roll to me.

[anglenews]

How a white supremacist learned to leave hatred behind

December 23, 2017 | 10:16pm | Updated December 23, 2017 | 11:01pm Christian Picciolini had gone to sleep just after midnight when a noise outside his window woke him up. The 17-year-old had started many fights and beaten up a lot of black people, anti-racists — pretty much anyone who wasn’t just like him. He had also recently acquired an arsenal, including an AK-47, a 9mm pistol, a rifle and a sawed-off shotgun. Thinking one of his victims was out for revenge, he grabbed the shotgun. Taking a deep breath, he put his finger on the trigger, flung open the curtain, and found himself pointing the barrel directly into the face of his mother. “She sank down into the bushes weeping and quivering,” he writes. “‘Why do you have a gun? What life are you living?’” Piccolini was living a life of violence and destruction, he writes in his new memoir, “White American Youth” (Hachette Books), out Tuesday. Between the ages of 14 and 22, he was first a member, then a leader, of the white power movement in America, spreading the white supremacist and Nazi doctrine, and hurting anyone who disagreed with him. Picciolini was born in Chicago in 1973 and grew up bouncing between the suburb of Oak Forest and town of Blue Island, Ill. His parents, both hairdressers, were recent immigrants from Italy who worked long hours, leaving him with his grandparents during the day. He would later blame his embrace of hate groups and violence on his feelings of abandonment. Relentlessly bullied in school, the one bright spot in his childhood was the birth of his brother, Alex, in 1983. “When my mother came home from the hospital with Alex, my heart swelled with pride,” he writes. “It was as if I’d known him my entire ten-year life. He was a part of me, and I was a part of him.” The two played together all the time. When Alex was two, Picciolini gave him a doll called My Buddy. From that day forth, the two called each other “Buddy.” “Buddy filled a huge void in my life,” he writes. “I felt I had a family member who wanted to spend time with me.” Picciolini was 14 when he met Clark Martell, the 26-year-old founder of Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH), the “first organized white-power skinhead crew in the United States.” Picciolini was smoking a joint with a friend when Martell, emerging from a car, stormed over to him, grabbed the joint and stomped it out. “Don’t you know that’s exactly what the Communists and Jews want you to do, so they can keep you docile?” he said. Martell then launched into a speech about Picciolini’s regal ancestry and the greatness of Roman warriors, especially Centurions. He wrote “Centurion” on a piece of paper, instructed Picciolini to research it, then told him to “come find me and tell me what you’ve learned about yourself and your glorious people.” Picciolini saw Martell as the first adult to discipline him for good reason — the first to care. He swore off weed and hung around Martell every chance he got. He absorbed his beliefs as well as his fashion sense, dressing in Doc Marten boots and suspenders and shaving his head. But in early 1988, Martell was arrested for beating a woman who had left his group and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Picciolini never saw his mentor again, but he was lured in even more by the danger of the scene’s criminal element. As he went to racist rallies and concerts, developing a love of white supremacist music and its teachings, he noticed that Martell’s absence created a void. Without a leader, the gatherings usually erupted into beer-fueled chaos and infighting. At just 15, Picciolini decided to fill that void. He rented a post office box and began communicating with skinhead, Nazi and racist groups across the country. When one group sent him a piece of white power literature, he immediately copied it and sent it to other groups, becoming a conduit for white supremacists nationwide. “I missed no opportunity,” he writes, “to market the ideology of white supremacy.” He also embraced violence, seeking out fights. In school, when a black student deliberately bumped him, he split open the student’s nose with his fist and slammed his head into the steel doors of the school’s lockers. After he was expelled, he returned and spray-painted ‘Ni–ers Go Home’ in two-foot-high white letters across the school’s front doors, he writes in the book. Life at home, meanwhile, grew tense. His mother started snooping through his things and found a T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika, which led to a horrible screaming match. His mom brought in Buddy, then 6, to try to appeal to Picciolini’s warmer side, but her older son slammed the door shut. When he heard further knocking, he threw the door open and screamed, infuriated, “Leave me the f–k alone and stay the hell out of here!” Christian and Buddy But it wasn’t his mother knocking. It was Buddy. Picciolini tried to comfort him, but Buddy ran away sobbing. As Picciolini burrowed deeper into white supremacy, he distanced himself from his beloved brother, treating him as a nuisance and pushing him away. A leader in the movement by 17, Picciolini formed a white power band of his own. First called White American Youth (WAY), then Final Solution, they became the first American white power band to play in Germany. That same year, Picciolini met Lisa, a “nice little Irish Catholic girl” and a non-racist, through school friends. Aware of Picciolini’s reputation and disliking his views, she nevertheless fell for the charismatic and good looking teen. Making out in his car early on, she noticed the shadow of a swastika etched into the condensation of his car window. “Can I ask you something?” she said. “Of course,” he replied. “Why do you have so much hate inside you?” she asked. Caught off guard, he lied. “I don’t hate anyone,” he said. “I just love what I stand for so much that I’m willing to protect it from those who want to do it harm.” “I knew my answer was bullshit,” he writes. “It was a common practice within the movement to always spin our hateful agenda and wrap it up in a pretty little ‘white pride’ bow for the general public to consume. The truth was, we hated everyone who wasn’t like us.” Still, Lisa probed deeper. “But then why aren’t you doing anything positive,” she replied. “All you do is say such horrible things and get in horrible fights and hurt people. When you’re with me, you’re so caring and gentle, but all I can wonder is, which one is the real you?” Over time, Picciolini kept his racist activities out of her sight, and her feelings for him overrode any sense of disgust or confusion. Picciolini proposed marriage in December 1991, just after his 18th birthday, and they were married the following June. They moved into their own apartment and had two sons in short order, with Picciolini working full time at a pizza place to support the family. Meanwhile, he began to have doubts — “the first rational thoughts I’d allowed myself in years,” he calls them — about the movement. In September 1992, he attended a massive white power rally in Pulaski, Tenn., that drew far more counter-protestors than participants. The protestors reminded him of people from his past, including one friend’s gay brother and some black schoolmates, people who had treated him well. “I suddenly felt guilty and out of sorts,” he writes. “I was starting to question what this struggle was about.” In an effort to better support his family, he opened a record store selling white power punk. But these bands weren’t plentiful or popular enough to sustain the store, so he also stocked anti-racist punk and other music as well. “This was a legitimate business, after all,” he writes. “I needed a diverse inventory that would bring paying customers.” He was shocked to see the same anti-racist punkers he used to feud with enter his store and buy music from him. Some even became loyal customers. One day a man he called “Black Sammy” came into the store with “three of his minions.” Sammy was the co-founder of a local anti-racist skinhead group called Skinheads of Chicago and the sight of him left Picciolini shaken. “My blood froze when I saw him in the doorway,” Picciolini writes. “We held each other’s stares for a territorially awkward fifteen seconds.” Sammy had formed his group in direct opposition to Martell’s. “I think you might be in the wrong place, Sammy,” Picciolini replied, his hand “hovering behind my back, near my [9mm].” After an awkward back and forth, Sammy asked about a few bands. Picciolini said he didn’t want any trouble. Sammy asked if he took credit cards and the tension slowly dissolved when they began discussing the actual music. Thirty minutes later, Sammy and his friends spent over $300 on records, making it Picciolini’s largest sale to date. “Before I knew it, we were shaking hands, and a bizarre smile was forming on my face,” Picciolini writes. “What could I say? The ideological delusions that had led me so far astray were crumbling right before my eyes.” Over time, his racist beliefs were no match for his everyday reality, which found him interacting with a diverse assortment of people on a daily basis. He stopped selling white power music in the store and no longer considered himself an activist for the cause. But a white power concert in Wisconsin in August 1994 was the final straw. Less than an hour after it ended, an acquaintance he’d spoken to at the show was murdered in “a skirmish with black youths.” “I could no longer deny my growing disgust with this miserable existence I’d created,” he writes. “This life wasn’t for me anymore.” Still, certain parts of his life couldn’t survive his past. He and Lisa, fighting constantly, divorced when his second son was four months old. He moved back to his parents’ basement, but Buddy, now 11, ignored him. Any warmth between them was gone. Picciolini decided to rebuild his life. He got a temp job at IBM, which after a year and a half, became a full-time position in marketing and operations. Meanwhile, he used IBM’s tuition assistance program to attend DePaul University, where he got a degree in international business and international relations in 2005. Christian Picciolini in 2017AP His IBM colleagues never learned about his past, but he told his story for the first time publicly in 2002 while at DePaul. “I did it as part of an essay that I read aloud to [a] class,” he wrote in an email to The Post. “I broke down sobbing during it.” He expanded that essay into a graduate thesis, which became the first draft of this book. In 2009, he co-founded Life After Hate, an organization dedicated to helping people leave white supremacy. He participated in interventions, won an Emmy award for a PSA he produced for the group and left the organization earlier this year to focus on “building a global extremist intervention network for all types of extremism.” He and Lisa remained friends, and he is active in the lives of his sons, now 23 and 25. In 2002, he began a romantic relationship with a woman named Britton who worked in a different division of IBM, and they married in 2005. He also made peace with his parents, apologizing for the years of trouble and grief he caused them. One relationship, however, could not be repaired. Buddy grew into an angry teen. He drank, hung out with street gangs, and was arrested for marijuana and gun possession around 2001 or 2002. Offered community service, he demanded jail time instead, “to prove he was tougher than me,” Picciolini writes. He tried to talk to Buddy about his choices, but his own actions had removed any authority he might have had. “Who the f–k are you to tell me what to do? It’s not like you even remembered I existed until now,” Buddy countered. Buddy added another crushing blow. “My name is Alex,” he said. “I ain’t your buddy.” A year later, while driving around with a friend looking for weed one night, Alex was mistaken for members of a gang’s rivals and shot twice in the passenger seat, with one bullet hitting him in the femoral artery. He died just one month shy of his 21st birthday. Picciolini, now 44, still blames himself for Alex’s death. “I felt that his death was divine retribution for all the violence and hate I’d projected into the world,” Piccolini writes, “for the pain I’d inflicted on others for the color of their skin, and my misplaced idea that by hurting them, I could save myself.” Share this: Source http://www.anglenews.com/how-a-white-supremacist-learned-to-leave-hatred-behind/