On September 3 I had the pleasure to discuss American politics and my book Bernie Bros Gone Woke with Kiko on his YouTube channel Kiko’s Freethinker’s Forum.1 In order to prepare this discussion I re-read my book for the first time since publication. On two occasions I have discussed with Kiko some of the issues that were addressed in my Blog of Public Secrets post “Dark Academia, CRAPHEAD and Khoury Review.”2 That blog post was the first time I made a written public statement concerning the public secret that I have been confronted with since 1998, which began with a situation involving audio surveillance in my home and that snowballed into a widespread phenomenon that turned my life into an illicit Reality TV-type show that to this day goes unacknowledged. This situation has been exploited to various ends, some of them involving efforts to regime-change my lifestyle and sexual preferences. I have never considered this to be the original or only reason for the bullying, which I understand primarily through a class perspective, but it is one that has been used to justify and perpetuate these circumstances. Under conditions of surveillance, capture and feedback, I am moralized by people I do not know, anywhere at all, for whatever it is that day or that week that does or does not satisfy this anonymous mass. A public secret is an abusive structure that has been exploited in my case to include: surveillance, social blackmail and ostracism, public humiliations in classrooms, at work and in public places, abuse of privacy and habeas corpus rights, theft of personal possessions and money, credit card theft, harassment by neighbours, sleep deprivation by neighbours, home windows smashed by neighbours, sexual harassment in more than one workplace and in public places, sodomy rape, electric shocks, pushed off sidewalks, following, harassment and threats of violence in places of medical and dental care, poisoning by a local pharmacy, poisoning assault and attempted date rape, dizziness and concussion symptoms for over six years, threats by trucks on highways, stalking and assault, repeated “whack-in-the-face” micro-aggressions by thousands of people in public, cultural and academic settings, since 2008 inability to maintain paid employment, conditions of imposed poverty, difficulty maintaining social and family relations in this context.
This incomplete list includes hacking of my published work, which coincides with efforts by some publishers to discourage me from publishing at all, and that includes: waiting up to 12 and 18 months to have a valid proposal rejected, fraudulent peer reviews and peer reviews that seem to have been written by the individual who poisoned and assaulted me. The latter could have been written by someone who is imitating the style of that person, which is a phenomenon that I refer to as the CRAPHEAD collective phantom. For example, the review of my book Vanguardia that was published on the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books has many of the telltale characteristics of this individual, which I described in my last posting on this issue. This includes inanities, disingenuousness, and using points that I raise in my own work as arguments against me, as if I am not aware of what is being offered as a correction. Re-reading the entirety of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, I am now aware of at least 27 mistakes. The publisher Brill has a fairly strict process for getting a book from manuscript to design and print. After reviewing the manuscript, the series editor oversees one copy edit of the book, which is then sent to the designer, in this case the company Newgen that is based in India. Newgen produces a design proof and allows the author one set of corrections. I negotiated with them three proofs, working the number of mistakes down from 41 in the first proof to 1 in the third proof and zero in the fourth and final print proof. I am exacting when it comes to typos and do not like to see mistakes in print. The fact that there are only a few typos in my book Too Black to Fail is an indication of that fact. When I post something on this blog, for example, I now return to it a day or more later because there are now mistakes hacked into these postings every time.
Looking back, I started finding suspicious mistakes in my work when I was writing the Adrian Piper chapter of my PhD thesis. I would vouch for most of this thesis as my own but there are phrases in that chapter that I would, after the fact, have difficulty thinking are mine. When I edited the two volumes of Bruce Barber’s essays and interviews in Performance, [Performance] and Performers (2008), I was very annoyed to find that design proofs were being sent to me that had typos that were not in the previous proofs. I was also annoyed that a few consequential words in an essay I had written for Barber’s 2007 Artspace/Te Tuhi catalogue had been altered without consultation. A next instance is my book The Neoliberal Undead (2013), with the publisher mistakenly printing the before last version of the design proof, which contained more than a dozen mistakes. Although a correct version was later printed, I was promised that the misprints would be pulped. Over the years I have found that misprints remain for sale. In the case of the cover for Zapantera Negra (2017), I had insisted that the publisher remove the leaf pattern that was going into the anus of the Black Panther character. The publisher agreed to the change but then the Table of Contents was removed from the print version of the first edition of the book. Since that time, I have been obliged to be insistent with publishers who either feign or do not know that my work is being used to propagandize my own victimization. This was the case with my two Routledge publications, which had errors finessed by staff or hackers onto the back covers. One of these has been adjusted. When it comes to typos in the book text, some typos are telltale hacker signatures. Certain words are often tampered with, and, around the period 2014 to 2020, the spelling of people’s names was constantly altered. For a while, Jewish names were being misspelled and then later the names of right-wingers were misspelled. Unlike some people I know, I have never found it clever to misspell the names of people I disagree with or for any other reason.
In the case of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, 26 of the 27 mistakes I found are in the first half of the book. This clearly indicates that whoever did this has an agenda. The epigraph to the introduction of the book has a quotation from the French revolutionary Saint-Just that states: “Those who make revolution halfway dig their own graves.” A grave of course can be interpreted as hipster talk that implies an anus. The black screen of the lower half of the back cover happens to transect Sanders’ anus. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Regardless, I now must do anywhere from two to ten times more work than I should have to if I want to prevent my published work from carrying this kind of subversion that is at cross-purposes to my ideas, sensibility, well-being and intellectual contribution. I had nothing to do with the design of the back cover of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, but I did design the repeated front cover image of Sanders at the Biden inauguration. Either someone at the publisher introduced these 27 or more typos into the final print copy or someone’s computer was hacked along the way. As for my own computer, I am more than aware that files have been retroactively altered, which makes it impossible for me to verify whether I made the mistakes. If I make printouts, there is no guarantee that these sheets of paper will not be altered while I am away from my apartment.
Between 1998 and 2003, when it became clear to me that I could not rely on anyone to do anything about what was happening, including leftists, I decided that I would not become obsessed with counter-surveillance, which is a fool’s errand unless one is as skilled in such matters as Edward Snowden – and he now lives in Russia. I decided I would allow the public to solve a matter that was out of my control, that is, without absenting myself from the process. This situation was then weaponized against me to make it seem as though I should be doing something that I was not doing, such as prostituting myself, which merely serves to justify an ongoing persecution. This public secret has been abusive from the start, causing me severe anxiety from the period 1999-2001, but I adapted to it over time. It became violent in 2016, a year in which I began to experience a more dangerous form of criminal harassment. After I moved to Montreal in 2006, the use cell phones played its part in “flash mobs” targeted against me. I was stopped by police several times on account of these flash mobs that cause me to behave strangely, sometimes crossing the street at random times or using an umbrella to symbolically fend off micro-aggressions, etc. It is easier for authorities to police one person than thousands and very likely, when they do so, that satisfies the anonymous mob for a while until the next round of provocations.
Of the 27 mistakes in the book, only 4 directly damage my work. On page 8, it states that 57 percent of Trump voters in 2020 were people of colour. This number is around 13 percent. I have discussed this mistake in my rejoinder to Elias Khoury, who pointed it out in an otherwise very misleading and banal book review that was published in the International Journal of Žižek Studies.3 This review does not address any of the intellectual frameworks or research findings of the book. While this issue of the journal has been posted online, the PDF for my response article has not, as of September 7, yet been posted. I also contacted Slavoj Žižek about this, who has no say on the contents of the journal. Bernie Bros Gone Woke mentions the statement made by Sanders that he is not the kind of politician who will send you a card on your birthday. As it happens, I was planning my gift to my sister for her 57th birthday at the time that I was editing this book. There is more to that story and why a hacker might refer to this but that is irrelevant to my arguments in this book for the simple reason that a book cannot be about everything all the time. The function of the hack is to create anxiety in the author about how their personal life could be said to inform their work or their politics. This is perhaps also a critique of Sanders, but this critique can be made by the hacker in their own work, in their own time, and people can decide for themselves who they agree with. When the Clinton DNC emails were hacked, these were relevant to revealing the illegal actions of a public official and her campaign team at the highest level of government decision-making, not the lowest level of personal life. To put it in the words of Antonio Gramsci:
“Descriptive, definitional philosophy may be a dogmatic abstraction, just as grammar and mathematics are, but it is an educational and didactic necessity. ‘One equals one’ is an abstraction, but it leads nobody to think that one fly equals one elephant.”
The problem with nihilists in our postmodern societies is that they no longer know how to think. Because they cannot think logically, they relativize everything as a zero-sum and mechanistic power game, conceived very often along lines that they could not openly defend were they pressed to do so. Ignoring notions of IQ, you could say that these people are programmatically and morally stupid, and of course even stupidity has its advocates in postmodern academia, along with shit, fascism and whatever else is marginalized in any random binary opposition. The game of topsy turvy is fine for things of no consequence, indulged in the art world for instance, but it wears thin for serious subjects, lest one confuse reason with matter, politics with people, etc.
The next mistake that changes the meaning of my writing is found on page 39. The sentence reads: “With social activism defined in non-class terms, class consciousness was substituted for moral conscience and Oprah-style ‘awareness.’” This is an inversion of what I am saying. The words “substituted for” could be changed to “replaced with” so that the meaning is accurate. As it happens, there were 5 inversions of meaning in my two contributions to Identity Trumps Socialism (2023) that use the word substitute. I noticed 4 out of 5 of these during the editing process but one of these I missed, or was hacked in retroactively, inverting the meaning and placing the emphasis on identity rather than class. This is acknowledged in the introduction to my follow-up monograph, Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (2024). Thirdly, on page 66 of Bernie Bros Gone Woke, the number for the combined U.S. student debt was at that time $1.3 billion rather than $1.3 million. And lastly, on page 237, the only mistake I found that is not in the first half of the book, the health data of the 76,000 Chinese people with flu-like illnesses that the World Health Organization wanted to research was for cases recorded prior to December 2019 and not 2021. This section of the book refutes the lab leak hypothesis that was spun by the U.S. government into a conspiracy.
This book is the first book I published after Vanguardia. I had had difficulty publishing Too Black to Fail before this, with the manuscript for that book having been turned down by 29 presses, a few of them on the same day, and then, after an interval, a few more on another day, which indicates a coordination of rejection letters. I also had some 24 endorsement requests turned down. I consider this title to be one of my best books to date, with a relatively groundbreaking approach for contemporary Marxist art theory after the postmodern 1990s. I have no doubt that rejections of the book were not only in defence of postmodern approaches to identity politics, which is a reason given to me by insiders for the 18-month delay by Rowman & Littlefield, but also part of the sadistic carrot and stick logic I have referred to above in relation to efforts to control the minutest aspects of my existence. Bernie Bros Gone Woke, which was written after the Obama book but published before the latter, was turned down by 39 potential publishers and 18 potential endorsement writers. Although I do not believe it for one minute, I have been told on many occasions that persecuting me is beneficial to a community of people who do not share my sexual preferences and lifestyle, that I should sacrifice myself for this cause, and failing to do so, that I am a greedy, rich, selfish, etc., all of this along the lines of INCEL logic and a reversal of gay conversion therapy in the name of fighting heterosexuality that is in such a case confused and conflated with patriarchy, as though a George W. Bush style War on Vanilla, but acceptable to the postmodern pseudo-, non- and anti-left that thinks of everything in terms of tribalism, power relations and intersectional blackmail. I reject it wholeheartedly. When your so-called “sexual politics” amount to nothing more than nihilistic cruelty, you have forfeited your right to speak as a leftist.
My last word on these typos is that the remaining innocuous mistakes were on pages that had other words and ideas that allude to people and issues that I have adequately discussed elsewhere but that the hacker(s) of this book want to highlight to undermine my voice as the author of the text and to mislead readers regarding my actual views. This includes mistakes on pages that have words and phrases that could be thought of as clues: transgender (8), Serbia (33), feminist radicals (37), on the face of it, and, conspiracy theory (54), breach of sovereignty, and, WikiLeaks hacks (61), a future to believe in (63), annu-ally [word split] (63), Nina (71), Nina, and, emasculating (79), single error to cast doubt on the rest (88), if you can’t win based on your ideas, then get out of politics (89), she-cession, and, she-covery (109), Ocasio-Cortex (113), people assaulted, and, soap opera, and, One Life to Live (114).
That many of my colleagues and comrades have gone along with the gangsterization of my life in the name of “changing the world” is desperate and debauched. The proof to that effect is that although I have mentioned some of what has been happening to me over the years to people, the complete silence and lack of follow-up with even one question or one word of understanding says to me that they already know about it. I have seen and heard more than plenty to confirm this. I am still amazed that so many people go to so much trouble to carry on with this carnival of cruelty. The blame for some 26 years of persecution and torture by an anonymous mass public, some more aggressive than others, is imposed on me. To add insult to injury, and in addition to daily disclosures of my online activities by random people on the street, as well as random acts of micro-aggression by people with a chip on their shoulders who are emboldened by a mass pile-on, incidents, gestures and words that can be associated with past hostilities are accumulated and repeated. If the best and the brightest in academia and at large are not only indifferent but complicit, because this medieval witch hunt somehow benefits “children”, as I am often told, then something is indeed rotten in the state of the Denmark – or in this case the Netherlands.
Notes
1. Kiko’s Freethinker’s Forum, “Bernie Sanders, Neoliberalism, Class Struggle and Marxism w/Dr. Marc James Léger (KFF132),” YouTube (September 6, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlI9Un3mXKM. See also Kiko’s Freethinker’s Forum, “Too Black to Fail, The Obama Portraits, Identity Politics and Class Politics w/Marc James Léger (KFF118),” YouTube (April 23, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBgyFmV37vE, and Marc James Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2021/Chicago: Haymarket, 2022).
2. Marc James Léger, “Dark Academia, CRAPHEAD and Khoury Review,” Blog of Public Secrets (June 24, 2023), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2023/06/dark-academia-craphead-and-khoury-review.html.
3. Marc James Léger, “Dark Academia: A Reply to Elias Khoury,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 18:1 (2024), http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/1249.