I grew up in America and Freedom™ was branded into my brain. But that was just more branding on more slaves. America always cribbed its branding from Rome, from the slavery to the shameless talk of freedom. Take, for example, the coin Brutus minted to commemorate his assassination of Caesar in 44 AD.

The Brutus coin shows the cap given to a freed slave, between two daggers for the kingslayers. But Brutus freed no slaves. He merely led a bunch of oligarchs in a petulant rebellion against a monarch, like American 'revolutionaries' did centuries later. It's all, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day.

As Ramsay MacMullen said in Enemies Of The Roman Order:

Most of the conspirators, if their innermost ideas had been examined, would no doubt have meant by it only “free” opportunity to exert the weight of their family in the old ways; “free” movement of power among all members of the traditional oligarchy, without constraint by faction or tyranny; in short, free access to the political trough for all the usual company of nobles and retainers.

This was, indeed, all the American revolutionaries were fighting for. Oligarchic privileges for slavers against a distant tyrant. They wanted the right to keep slaving and genociding with less taxes. America was founded as a slave state with the tax breaks, that's the entire story of their Revolution©. All foolscap about 'we the people' was mere branding, like the fool's cap on Brutus's coin flip. When America was founded, less than 10% of human beings on that land could vote, and even that power had to be diluted through electoral colleges in case it messed with actual oligarchic power. The American Revolution was really fought for the privilege of a few rich oligarchs—like Brutus's crew of high-born hitmen—only with much more brutality, and better marketing.

All of the writing of the American Revolution—all of the declarations and pamphlets—fits into the ancient Roman tradition of eloquentia, which as far as I can tell was proto-podcasting. MacMullen said, “Power over the written and especially the spoken word was believed to give power over the whole citizen body, and the needs and ramifications of this belief had been worked out very fully from Pericles' day forward.” And, indeed, American rhetoric did give them power over citizens and non-citizens alike, both pacifying local peasants and warifying the global proletariat. America's trademarking of freedom was a historical coup that has taken many people's heads clean off, myself included. It's only now that the labelling is peel ing off, and the same old slavery becomes obvious.

The revolution that America has been conserving all of these years is as Frank Wilhoit described it, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition… There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” You can visualize this idea as the fasces, a bundle with an axe pointing outwards. An ancient symbol showing the power of an in-group to overpower outsiders. This survives as the mafia logic of made men vs. fair game, and is in fact the still governing principle of western civilization, once you take off the fancy packaging. Fuck you, pay me. Freedom for the fucksticks inside the package and exploitation for every living being without, from chattel to cattle to the climate gods themselves. Fascism is no anomaly in western civilization, they've smeared fasces all over. You can see the fasces in coins minted by Brutus's ancestor as well as modern American coinage.

I actually don't think about the Roman Empire that much, but I've been reading about it as a news source, and it helps you understand the shape of the Overton Window today. American Freedom™ is really about the narrow freedom of a certain class of people to criticize their government. Free Speech® is a registered, licensed trademark which really belongs to the trader class, ie the oligarchs that took over a continent in 1776, and have been busting it out ever since. These class traitors are, in fact, (unwitting) traitors to all life on earth, mere voting proxies to the Corporate AI that has ruled the world since 1602, but that's another story.

I do think about the American Empire a lot, and the branding around Free Speech® is quite publicly falling apart. Britain arrests more people for speech violations than Russia, by far. Canadians get their actual bank accounts shut off for protesting, while they scare you about China's mythical social credit score. The biggest terrorists in the world calls the Resistance against their genocide terrorists, and kills our children (the children are all ours, re: James Baldwin). Now the wheels are falling off the whole imperial enterprise and they can't be bothered with lying convincingly.

Empire no longer claims that you're free, they just claim they're less evil than some tyranny they made up, propagandizing a Putin hiding under every bed, bloodthirsty Mooslims just around the corner, and scary Chinamen doing scary Chinese things. The only thing they offer at election is lesser evil, which is an irrelevant point when the choices are Genocide and Diet Genocide. Voting is a meaningless anointment of mendacious morons. The best description of imperial elections today comes from imperial Rome. As some dudes in robes said,

It is not liberty [for oligarchs] that is at stake now; that has long since perished. The question is whether the state shall belong to Caesar or Pompey. What have you to do with this dispute? It is no business of yours. A tyrant (dominus) is being selected. What is it to you which one wins?'

This is how I feel about the US elections, over 2,000 years since. Who gives a shit? A pox on both your houses, with literal fasces in the woodwork. The Romans were at least honest about themselves, they had slavery, they conquered people, they were honestly evil. In America, slavery is freedom, peace is forever war, and the boot stomping on a human face forever is Nike. It's real 1984 shit in 2024. Doublespeak.

That's the perspective you need to cut through today, which is actually same shit different day. Leo Tolstoy wrote the Slavery Of Our Times in 1900 and it's still better than reading the New York Times to understand current affairs. When they talk about freedom, you need to rip off the packaging to reveal the steaming pile of fasces beneath. The real question is not freedom vs tyranny, that's just old Roman whine in new bottles. The real question is freedom for whom? Those wielding the axe, or those on the business end of it? What does freedom for slavers mean for you and me? Jackboot shit. It's just marketing.

As Adolph the Younger rapped, “They say this the land of the free (That's a lie), It seem like the land of bullshit to me.” As Dolph said, before he was shot dead in Memphis, “Over the years, they have given us a little bit of freedom but it’s only a temporary pacifier.” Dolph's last album was called Rich Slave and he was right. What does freedom mean, coming out a slaver's mouth? It's just slavery with better branding. Right on our collective bottoms, same as it has been for centuries.