FREUDIAN DEATH DRIVE

Your field guide to the outer edges, documented by Falk Whitaker freudiandeathdrive.com

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The Death of Kosher Conservatism

There is a specific kind of political commentator that dominated the mid-2010s. He was smart enough to sound credible, careful enough to stay monetized, and vague enough to avoid committing to anything that might cost him a sponsor. He talked about facts and logic, debated college students, building his brand around being the reasonable one in the room. These operations peaked around 2021 and have been quietly contracting ever since. The through-line connecting all of them is the use of bot networks to simulate cultural relevance and careful brand management to stay palatable to advertisers. If you want to understand how this brand of conservatism operates, and why it is failing, the Daily Wire is the most instructive place to start.

IMAGE: Moishe "Six-Shooter" Finkelberg didn't even bother to tuck in his god damn shirt before saddling up with his faithful companion, Patch

The Daily Wire was built by Orthodox Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro alongside co-founder Jeremy Boreing, with funding from Texas oil billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks, who also bankrolled Dennis Prager. What they got for their investment was the institutional home of what you might call Kosher conservatism: pro-Israel, willing to fight meaningless culture war battles on trans issues, DEI, and Hollywood, but careful to stay within certain limits. Never too edgy, and always advertiser friendly. The kind of conservatism that wins debates and changes absolutely nothing.

Read The Death of Kosher Conservatism at FREUDIAN DEATH DRIVE, your field guide to the outer edges.

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When Did Punk Become so Fucking Lame?

The progress pride flag, often accompanied by the trans flag, with that triangular stripe of black, white, brown, pink and blue bolted onto the front of the original rainbow like a bumper sticker on a bumper sticker. The flags are positioned at eye level, which is how you know they aren’t simply decoration but active indicators of the politics and policies of the space you’ve just walked into. Next to it, or near the door, or sometimes on its own folding signage, is often a list of rules: No racism. No sexism. No homophobia. No transphobia.

IMAGE SOURCE: Tumblr; Reclaiming slurs is one thing, but let’s be real: there’s no universe where a “Pansy” or “Faggot” patch reads as cool, tough, or edgy in any way

I have become accustomed to finding these same symbols in any space that advertises itself as a home for alternative culture: the pride flags, the posted rules, the promise of radical inclusivity extended warmly to every conceivable identity.

It’s in these moments I stop and ask myself: when did punk become so fucking lame?

Read When Did Punk Become so Fucking Lame? on FREUDIANDEATHDRIVE.COM, your fieldguide to the outter edges.

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Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick/Junk Food” Girl

One of the most revealing TikToks of Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick Girl”, is one in which she hauls a large speaker through the street, dressed in traditional Chinese children’s clothing. An AI narration explains in that familiar hollow, robotic female voice that she is off to work. We cut to her performing TikTok dances in a crowded street while passersby poke and prod her, smartphones raised, each hoping to capture their own viral moment.

“Girl” is hardly an appropriate word for Xiao Xiao as she is 39 years old. She is a street performer from rural Sichuan, China, born with Seckel syndrome and primordial dwarfism. She stands just over a meter tall and weighs less than fourteen kilograms. Xaio Xaio’s father left when she was young, with her disability being given as the reason, so her mother raised her alone. The two receive modest government allowances from the local Disabled Persons Federation and Women’s Federation, which have supported them since 2011.

Read at Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick/Junk Food” Girl FREUDIANDEATHDRIVE.COM, your fieldguide to the outter edges.

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In Her Own Language: The Untold Story of Amanda Baggs

Amanda Melissa Baggs (also known by her later legal name Amelia Evelyn Voicy Baggs, and online as ballastexistenz, cussinanddiscussin, and withasmoothroundstone) was a disability rights advocate based in Burlington, Vermont. Born in Mountain View, California on August 15, 1980, to Ronald and Anna Baggs, she relocated from California to Vermont in 2005, reportedly to be closer to a friend. She would remain in Burlington until her death in 2020.

Amanda identified as genderless and nonbinary, preferring the neopronouns sie/hir and ze/zer. She also identified as a lesbian and described herself as ‘cognitively disabled, physically disabled, chronically ill, developmentally disabled, and psychiatrically disabled’. As an adult, she claimed to have lost all functional speech and communicated exclusively through a text-to-speech device.

Within disability and autism advocacy circles, Amanda was widely known and broadly celebrated. She created a website titled ‘Getting the Truth Out’ in response to a campaign by the Autism Society of America, arguing that the ASA’s messaging reduced autistic people to objects of pity rather than recognizing their autonomy and inner lives. She spoke at disability conferences, collaborated with researchers at MIT who were studying autism, and maintained two long-running blogs (Ballastexistenz and Cussin’ and Discussin’) which together built her a devoted online following over nearly two decades.

Read In Her Own Language: The Untold Story of Amanda Baggs at FREUDIANDEATHDRIVE.COM, your fieldguide to the outter edges.

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The Boy With the Keyblade: The Trauma Narrative of Soren Daniel Hayes

Between roughly 2012 and 2016, Tumblr was the internet’s most concentrated ecosystem of performative suffering. The more extreme your pain, the more engagement your posts received. Flower crowns and cigarette burns, soft grunge and eating disorders — Tumblr users built a whole visual language around the aestheticization of damage, with a reward structure that treated disclosed trauma like social currency. Ashley Anne Isaacs, who built an online following around her very public struggle with anorexia, was just one of these infamous figures — if you haven’t read that piece, I’d suggest starting there.

In 2015, a user posting under the name Soren Hayes (Tumblr: fawnsyndrome, shyfawn, sicklefawn, hurtc0re, faggotuglyhfukcingdickballs, umbillicalnoose, necrochotic, necromutilomania, oathful; MCR Forum: Dark Link The Assassin; Instagram: androeciums, sacrificalis, oathful, soratoys) published the first version of a document they referred to as their “Trauma Narrative” on their blog. It claimed to be a first-person account of nearly three years spent as a child sex trafficking victim in a Seattle warehouse operation. It was written with genuine literary skill. It was also, in every material sense, a fabrication.

A full compilation of Soren’s Trauma Narrative is available to download here: https://files.catbox.moe/2x4fo2.zip — the zip file contains two formats of the complete document (Standard and eBook-formatted PDF), including all three versions of the narrative and a master edition combining them into a single running text.

Read The Boy With the Keyblade: The Trauma Narrative of Soren Daniel Hayes at FREUDIANDEATHDRIVE.COM, your field guide to the outer edges.

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Bury Wingless Crows: The life and death of Ashley Anne Isaacs

Ashley Isaacs, also known as “Hamtaro-chan”, is a case study in early influence culture that I encountered on Tumblr as a teenager myself in 2014. All of the information included within this article comes from various image boards, forums, social media archives, and first-hand accounts from people who knew Ashley personally.

All primary sources are archived forum posts, social media screenshots, and firsthand accounts from people who interacted with Ashley online and in person. No single account should be taken as definitive truth; Ashley herself was an unreliable narrator, as were many who commented on her life. This piece does not intend to sensationalize her death or her illness, but to document the life of a real person who existed on the internet for nearly two decades.

Ashley Anne Isaacs was born to Rebecca Sue Isaacs and Michael Weist in Florida, USA. In 1999, Michael was arrested for battery and given 6 months’ probation with alcohol restrictions. In Ashley’s own blog posts from 2015, she recounts the physical abuse of her pregnant mother, inappropriate corporal punishment, emotional neglect and being compared to her peers by her father. Eventually, her father disappeared from he life sometime during either grade 5 or 6. Ashley later reflects on her father, asking “Where is he now? Fuck if I know. What has happened to ME now? Fuck if he cares.”

Read Bury Wingless Crows: The life and death of Ashley Anne Isaacs at FREUDIANDEATHDRIVE.COM, your field guide to the outer edges.