Love Island in the Fourth Reich
kill, distract, forget, repeat
I was sitting in Washington Square Park the other day watching a guy named Mitch perform a Native American hoop dance in the heat. He wore traditional Native regalia: layers of feathers and beads, swaying in fluid, practiced motion despite the 87-degree sun. He was from New Mexico but said he was affiliated with the Mohawk Tribe, visiting the city for a few days and dancing, basically busking. I gave him a hundred bucks because he was really good, and also because, I don’t know, it felt like the right thing to do. Call it my white guilt peeking through. We got to talking.
He mentioned being from Akwesasne, the Mohawk territory upstate that straddles the U.S.-Canada border, and said something about partridges. It stuck with me. Akwesasne means "Land Where the Partridge Drums." It's poetic and real at the same time. I didn’t know that then, but I looked it up later. The land where the partridge drums.
He asked if I knew that "Manhattan" is a Native word. I told him yes, and felt proud, in the embarrassing way that maybe people like me can sometimes be, that I knew it was the Lenape people. Self-satisfied, I cringe a little at the thought, recalling videos shared on social media during the George Floyd protests of white people raising their fists in solidarity. But still, a point of connection. I’d done a little digging a few years ago while writing something about the land in Manhattan and had tried to find someone from the tribe, an office, a representative. Couldn’t find much of anything. "Where are they now?" he asked. We sat in silence. For a moment he put his head in his hands, but I couldn’t tell if it was simple exhaustion from dancing in the heat, or something more.
It's the big joke, isn’t it? A whole civilization turned into a plaque on a wall or a land acknowledgment at a gala or a half-hearted bullet point on a nonprofit website. They’re gone because America needed them to be gone. This is what America does best: it kills, then forgets. That isn’t a one-off story or some distant past; it's a blueprint. A pattern repeated over centuries and scaled, over time, to fit the global stage.
America in the 20th and 21st centuries was not a liberator or a "global leader" but rather the architect of death. Over 4.5 million people have been killed in post-9/11 wars alone, according to Brown University's Costs of War project. Dozens of governments have been overthrown or destabilized by the CIA or U.S. military since World War II. Economic sanctions have starved civilians while allowing the U.S. to shift blame onto their governments—see Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and Gaza. And through it all, a trillion-dollar military budget ensures the killing never stops.
For fun, dear reader, I’ve recalled for you some of the most significant U.S.-backed regime changes:
Iran (1953) – Overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh
Guatemala (1954) – Removal of President Árbenz
Syria (1956–57) – Multiple coup attempts
Laos (1958–60) – CIA support for coups and anti-communist factions
Congo (1960) – Overthrow and assassination of Patrice Lumumba
Brazil (1964) – Military coup supported by the U.S.
Indonesia (1965–67) – Backing of Suharto’s rise; hundreds of thousands killed
Ghana (1966) – Nkrumah removed with CIA support
Chile (1973) – CIA-backed coup against Allende; Pinochet installed
Argentina (1976) – Supported military junta
Afghanistan (1979–89) – CIA-backed mujahideen during Soviet invasion. Does anyone know what happened to those guys?
El Salvador (1980s) – U.S. support for right-wing military regime
Nicaragua (1980s) – Funding of Contra rebels
Grenada (1983) – U.S. invasion
Panama (1989) – Invasion to remove Noriega
Iraq (2003) – Invasion based on false WMD claims
Libya (2011) – NATO bombing campaign; Gaddafi overthrown
Venezuela (2002, 2019) – Failed coup attempts; sanctions and support for opposition
This isn’t a full list by any means…just some credibly documented ones that I can think of with a little time and thought. Dozens of others exist in the gray zone of "advising," "training," and "supporting."
None of this is a secret. It’s just that many people don’t really seem to care.
And why would we? We’re busy. We’re tuned in to Love Island. To the 24/7 drip of spectacle. There’s something almost beautiful about the efficiency of it: America kills, then distracts you from the killing with highly (homosexually?) eroticized men scream-crying about betrayal in a luxury villa. Do people feel connected? Probably not. Entertained? Possibly. Maybe some even feel "represented."
Love Island started in the UK as a raunchy, sun-soaked dating show where contestants "couple up" and sleep together on camera. It’s not that different from reality TV of the early 2000s—Jersey Shore, The Real World—except now it’s sleeker, more global, and much more transactional. People go on the show not just for love or infamy but to sell slim belly teas and start careers as minor influencers. It is spectacle optimized, a simulation of romance and drama that feeds directly into an economy of useless products and meaningless status.
A few days ago, I thought again about something David Foster Wallace said. I hate to bring him up—really, I do—but it feels unavoidable. Referencing him is such a tired move that I almost want to flagellate myself in advance, as if my self-awareness could grant me immunity. But the man got this one right. In Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—technically a book by David Lipsky, who, frankly, always struck me as more of an asshole than Wallace himself—there’s a moment where Wallace talks about the danger of entertainment, of pleasure. That we’re not oppressed in the Orwellian sense; we’re sedated in the Huxleyan one. The screen wins not by force, but by being just enjoyable enough that you forget you’re alone.
Infinite Jest was written in the 1990s. It's been thirty years. We’re not just alone with screens; we are screens now. Our faces, our feeds, our feeds of faces. It’s trite to point out at this point but it’s undoubtedly our reality: we scroll through death in 30-second intervals, hit "like," then open another tab. We watch Love Island while our own world burns. We are told this is freedom.
It’s a remarkable system, really. While you're watching a short king named Aiden cry in a confession booth because his “situationship” fingered someone else under the cabana, Congress is busy euthanizing the working class via spreadsheet. On July 3rd, the U.S. House passed what lawmakers call the "One Big Beautiful Bill." In reality, it strips tens of millions of people of healthcare, food, housing, and any semblance of dignity. The name alone is tacky on top of everything else—insultingly stupid, like a rejected slogan for a mattress warehouse. It’s the perfect reflection of our political moment: exceptionally cruel, boorish, and dumber than it needs to be.
The bill slashes Medicaid by over $1.2 trillion over ten years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, an estimated 11.8 million people will lose coverage by 2034. It also imposes work requirements—80 hours per month—which experts believe will push another 4.8 million people into being uninsured. It's not about saving money; it’s about making poor people jump through hoops until they fall off.
SNAP benefits—the program formerly known as food stamps—aren’t spared either. With tighter eligibility and increased work reporting, 3.2 million people are expected to be cut off from food assistance. Researchers at Yale and Columbia project that this alone will result in 93,000 premature deaths over the next 14 years. People will starve to death in the richest country on Earth because someone in Congress wanted to validate some inane and likely untrue talking point.
Housing aid and basic welfare programs like Section 8 and TANF also take a hit. The cuts are deep enough that tens of thousands of people are projected to fall into homelessness or extreme poverty. Meanwhile, nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts are being handed to the top 1%, with $500 billion of that going straight to the top 0.1%. A little treat for the billionaires while everyone else gets sick, hungry, and evicted.
Despite all the obvious fake pearl-clutching about the “deficit,” the bill is projected to add between $2.4 and $3.3 trillion to the national debt over ten years. So it’s not even austerity, it’s just class war.
One of the more quietly devastating effects of the bill will be the collapse of rural healthcare. With Medicaid defunding, over 300 rural hospitals are now at risk of closure. The kind of places that serve entire counties. Places where people already have to drive an hour just to deliver a baby or get chemo.
Researchers estimate the bill’s cumulative toll will result in 51,000 preventable deaths every year. That's not a side effect. That's the point. And that’s just one estimation. The reality is probably far worse.
As always, there’s money for the cages and guns. Over $100 billion is allocated to ICE and border enforcement through 2029—more than a tenfold increase from previous years. That includes $45 billion for expanding detention capacity, $30 billion for enforcement and deportation operations, and nearly $46 billion for border wall infrastructure. That makes ICE the highest‑funded federal law enforcement agency in history, overtaking even the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons. So this isn’t a peccadillo—it’s a full‑blown militarization of migration, with terrifying permanence. They are building an apparatus meant to outlive the news cycle; one designed to disappear people with complete administrative efficiency.
As if to mock the idea that any of this might trouble the public’s conscience, Florida already has the theme park version: a new facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, a detention site right wing reactionaries now call “Alligator Alcatraz,” where asylum seekers are to be housed in rapidly constructed warehouse-style barracks that feel genuinely indistinguishable from photographs of concentration camps. The base went up in a matter of weeks. Visitors could purchase merch. T-shirts, hats. It is depravity in broad daylight.
We’re in our reality villa built on bones, catering to voyeurism, gleaming in every selfie. Did you catch Love Island in the Fourth Reich?
Sources:
1. The Daily Beast – "Trump Assures Americans They're Not All Gonna Die Because of Megabill"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-assures-americans-theyre-not-all-gonna-die-because-of-megabill
2. AP News – "Work requirements could transform Medicaid and food aid under US budget bill” https://apnews.com/article/medicaid-snap-states-house-trump-abortion-work-1556d8a594dc5668b298641081b759c9
3. AP News – “Trump Signs his tax and spending cut bill at the White House July 4 picnic” https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/04/trump-signs-megabill-at-july-4-picnic-00440025
4. “Rural hospitals brace for financial hits or even closure under Republicans’ $1 trillion Medicaid cut”https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2025/07/04/rural-hospitals-brace-for-financial-hits-or-even-closure-under-republicans-1-trillion-medicaid-cut/
5. Democracy Now – "Trump Budget Bill: ICE, Immigration Enforcement Funding Surges"
http://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/2/trump_budget_bill_ice_immigration_enforcement
such a brutal articulation of the world we are living, eating, sleeping, consuming, regurgitating in. everyone needs to read this.
Truly the ultimate manifestation of bread and circuses. Only now they’re also taking the bread away.