On Alderson Loops, Billionaire Cruelty, and Living Inside the Trap

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks[1]

I. The Loop

In computer science, there is a structure called an Alderson loop.[2] It is a program that appears to have an exit condition—a way out, a termination point, something that should resolve the process and let you move on. But the exit condition can never actually be met. The loop runs forever, cycling through its instructions with the cruel veneer of functionality. It lies to you in that it appears to work just fine but it traps you in an endless loop that can never be ended.

This is what it feels like to be a trans person in an increasingly authoritarians and autocratic America in 2026.

Every path that should lead to safety, to justice, to the simple baseline dignity of existing in public, has been engineered to dead-end. Advocate peacefully through institutions—the courts are captured by conservative super-majorities who will never uphold your rights.[3] Build coalitions and watch the funding dry up as foundations flee and donors go silent, and as organizations like the Human Rights Campaign hemorrhage staff in mass layoffs.[4] Appeal to moderates but the Overton window has already shifted so far that your mere existence is now the “extreme” position. Exhibit any outrage at the indignities perpetrated against you and you confirm the narrative they’ve spent years constructing that you are violent, dangerous, a threat to children. Stay quiet, get erased quietly. Every option looks like an exit. None of them actually terminates the loop.

I have written before about what Ernst Fraenkel called the “dual state,” the structure of fascist governance in which two legal orders operate simultaneously, one for the protected and one for the persecuted.[5] Trans people in America live inside the persecuted order. Our documents can be revoked. Our healthcare can be criminalized. Our right to exist in public space can be legislated away. The normative order, the one with constitutional protections and due process and equal protection, watches from the inside and tells us the system is working just fine.[6]

I have spent years inside this structure. I have spent years watching the people I work alongside—brilliant attorneys, tireless advocates, entire organizations built to protect our community—run the same instructions over and over, each time expecting the condition to resolve, each time watching it fail. I have done it myself. The loop does not care about your effort. It does not care about your expertise. It does not care about the moral clarity of your position. It simply runs.

II. The Architects

The Loop that traps trans people in America was not an accident. It was engineered, and the engineers have names. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, who purchased both a social media platform and a role inside the federal government to amplify the dehumanization campaign. J.K. Rowling, who leveraged one of the most beloved literary franchises in history, and the wealth that flowed from it, into a full-time crusade against trans existence in the UK. Joseph Edelman, a billionaire biotech hedge fund manager, has poured millions into undermining the medical consensus on gender-affirming care. There's the litany of far right conservative influencers that have built their entire platforms on dehumanizing and degrading trans people. There's the New York Times that viewed shifting editorial stances on trans people as a means of bolstering their credentials with conservative audiences. Then there’s the network of conservative foundations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, and the American College of Pediatricians, that have created the policy infrastructure to support their goals. They have all spent billions collectively to construct an information ecosystem where trans people are pathologized, criminalized, and erased.

They play God with our lives without permission. They dictate where we use the bathroom, how we are addressed, what our documents say about us, what healthcare we can access. Every aspect of our daily existence is subject to their whims. It’s an executive order here, a state law there, a Supreme Court decision that reshapes the legal landscape overnight. Yet, they face no consequences. None. Musk remains the richest man alive. Rowling is still celebrated with an HBO reboot of Harry Potter on the way. Edelman still runs his biotech VC hedge fund. The think tanks continue on as always with their minions slowly building their careers on the backs of trans people. The politicians who sponsor these bills get reelected. The asymmetry between what this costs them, which is nothing, and what it costs us, everything, is absolutely obscene.

What makes it uniquely maddening is the casualness of the cruelty. For them, our erasure is a culture war strategy, a tweet, a fundraising email. For us, it is Tuesday morning wondering whether our prescriptions will still be filled, whether our driver’s license will be honored, whether some new executive order just made our existence a little more illegal. They are playing with our lives like it doesn’t matter at all. In the only calculus that governs their behavior, power and profit, it actually doesn’t.

III. The Preemptive Trap

There is a deeper cruelty embedded in the Loop, one that reveals just how deliberately it was constructed. The architects have not only closed every exit, they have also preemptively delegitimized the very concept of resistance. For years, a coordinated disinformation campaign across conservative media and social media has seeded the narrative that trans people are inherently violent. In 2022, immediately after the Uvalde massacre, right-wing influencers falsely identified the shooter as a trans woman, spreading the disinformation to millions before any correction could take hold.[7] The Nashville shooting was amplified and instrumentalized endlessly. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, repeated the lie just this past week that trans people are responsible for most school shootings for his millions of listeners to hear.[8]  Every instance of violence committed by any trans person, anywhere, at any time, is purposefully elevated to national news by an ecosystem designed to make the anomalous appear endemic.[9]

This is not random. This is the oldest play in the authoritarian handbook, preemptively labeling a marginalized group as dangerous to justify whatever comes next and to foreclose any possibility of resistance. The Black Panthers were labeled terrorists to justify COINTELPRO.[10] Civil rights protesters were framed as violent agitators to justify state violence against them. Jewish communities were labeled subversive as a precondition for pogroms. Even the mere expression of anger at the constant indignities one must face becomes the confirmation of the propaganda they have spread. The mechanism is identical: create a trap where any action, even expressions of anger, confirms the narrative, and passivity is taken as permission to continue the persecution.

I see it clearly. That is its own particular kind of hell—seeing the mechanism with perfect clarity and being unable to do a single thing about it. The Loop doesn’t require that you be ignorant of its structure. It only requires that the exit condition remain unsatisfiable. You can understand the Loop completely and still be trapped inside it.

IV. The Moral Hazard of Mercy

History offers a grim lesson for those of us looking for precedent. The revolutions and transitions that successfully overthrew entrenched power without replicating its atrocities such as Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, South Africa’s transition, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia all share a common feature that should trouble anyone seeking accountability: the oppressors got away with it.

The Apartheid architects received Truth and Reconciliation. The Portuguese fascists faded into private life. The Soviet-aligned leaders in Czechoslovakia simply became irrelevant. These were the good outcomes, the ones where the new order was humane, where institutions were built rather than destroyed, where the vulnerable were protected rather than consumed by the revolution that claimed to liberate them. And in every case, the people who inflicted the suffering faced no consequences proportional to the harm they caused.

We don't even have to look abroad for precedent of this lack of meaningful accountability for the transgressions of oppression of entire classes of people. The politicians and bureaucrats who effectuated the Lavender scare, which saw the full scale purge of LGBTQ Americans from federal employment in the 1950's, never faced any sort of repercussions for their actions. The Reagan administration officials that obfuscated and covered up the AIDS crisis that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in the LGBTQ community, likewise never saw any sort of consequences for their actions that resulted in mass death. I could go on and on.

This is a moral hazard of staggering proportions, and the oligarchs understand it intuitively even if they would never articulate it in these exact terms. They know they are effectively playing with house money. The best-case scenario for the opposition, a peaceful, democratic restoration of rights, the dismantling of the oligarchy, and the end of autocracy, is also the scenario in which Musk keeps his billions, Trump’s Administration escapes criminal prosecution, and the politicians who built their careers on cruelty and suffering retire comfortably. The worst-case scenario, from their perspective, is simply irrelevance. That is the entire range of consequences available to them within any political transition that is also capable of producing a just society.

Meanwhile, the revolutions that did exact retribution, the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, and the Maoists, all invariably became their own particular hellish nightmares. In every case, queer people, among others, were specifically targeted by the new regimes. Stalin recriminalized homosexuality. Castro’s Cuba persecuted gay men in labor camps, the same Cuba whose revolution Reinaldo Arenas supported before it turned on him and drove him to exile and death.[11]

The structure is elegant in its cruelty: the paths to accountability that preserve justice offer no accountability, and the paths to accountability that offer retribution destroy justice. The oligarchs sit comfortably in the space between these two possibilities, knowing that no outcome available to us reaches them where it counts. This is the Loop functioning as it was designed, the core function to protect power and insulate the powerful from accountability.

V. Living in Truth Inside the Loop

Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who was imprisoned for his opposition to the totalitarian Soviet regime, wrote The Power of the Powerless in 1978, under a regime that appeared permanent.[12] There was no visible path to change, no plausible mechanism for liberation, no reason to believe the system would collapse. The exits were all Alderson loops; the system appeared functional and yet there was no escape. And yet Havel wrote. Not from hope, exactly, but from a refusal to let the system’s description of reality go unchallenged. He called it “living in truth,” the act of naming what is actually happening even when the naming has no power to change it.

James Baldwin wrote from inside the same structure, mapped onto a different human geography. In No Name in the Street, after watching Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. murdered in sequence, Baldwin surveyed the wreckage of every avenue of hope and still kept writing despite his growing pessimism that liberation would ever be achieved.[13] He wrote, not because he believed the writing would fix it, but because the alternative of silence, surrender, and the acceptance of someone else’s description of your reality, was itself a form of death that preceded the physical kind.

Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist writing under Reagan, described exhaustion and despair as political tools wielded against marginalized people. She described the refusal to succumb to them through anger at the injustice as a motivating force.[14] This is not inspirational poster language. This is a strategic assessment from someone who understood that the system’s most effective weapon is not the law or the police or the executive order. It is the moment you stop fighting or being angry because you have concluded, rationally, that fighting or feeling anything but suffering is pointless. Within that framework that Lorde wrote so elegantly about, your anger and your rage at the systemic injustices around you are the fuel that must propel you through what appears to be an inescapable condition.

VI. Exit Condition

I will not end this essay with hope. Hope is not owed to you, and I will not manufacture it to make this current situation seem more palatable. The honest assessment is this: the Loop is real, the exits are fake, the architects face no consequences, and the next decade or longer will be unimaginably difficult. The courts are captured. The funding infrastructure of our organizations is collapsing. The federal government has turned actively hostile and even blue states can no longer protect us. The billionaire class has consolidated enough power to sustain this Girardian scapegoating campaign indefinitely. If you are waiting for me to tell you how this resolves, I do not have that answer for you.

What I want to do though is be precise about what Gramsci actually meant when he wrote from a fascist prison cell that the task is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”[15] He was not offering some sort of neat little bumper sticker slogan. He was describing a methodology for survival under conditions of autocratic capture. The pessimism of the intellect means seeing the Loop for what it is with no illusions, no false exits, and no comforting narratives about the arc of history. The optimism of the will means refusing to let that clarity become paralysis. Not because you believe you will win but rather because the alternative is a surrender that the architects of your suffering did not earn and do not deserve.

Havel could not have known that the Soviet Union would fall eleven years after he wrote The Power of the Powerless. He wrote it assuming it would not. Baldwin could not have known that the Civil Rights Act would survive the reaction against it, even though by the end of his life, he was not sure it had. Arenas finished his memoir while dying of AIDS in a New York apartment, exiled from everything he knew, having been proved right about Castro at the cost of everything he loved.[16] None of them wrote from hope. They wrote from inside the Loop. They wrote because the record mattered, because silence was worse, and because, even when they could not see the exit, they refused to let the people who put them there have the last word.

The Loop runs until the underlying system changes. You cannot force the exit condition from inside the Loop. But the underlying system, the demographics, the economics, the cultural assumptions, and the tolerance of cruelty, is not static, even when it appears to be. Systems that look permanent are often most brittle precisely when they appear most dominant. I do not know when this one breaks. I do not know if I will live to see it. But I do know that the oligarchs who built this loop are building against time. And time is the only thing their god forsaken wealth cannot buy.

In the meantime, we are still here. Seguimos aquí. We are trapped, and we are furious, and we are not going anywhere. The loop runs. We run inside it. But we will not let these bastards have the satisfaction of our surrender or our silence.

That is not hope. It is will. And it is enough.

[1] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 175 (Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith eds. & trans., International Publishers 1971) (1929–1935).

[2] The term "Alderson loop" originates in computer science, colloquially describing a program structure that appears to have an exit condition, but where the condition can never actually be satisfied. The loop runs indefinitely, giving the illusion of functionality while being unable to end it without rebooting the system. Though it is often more formally called an infinite loop.

[3] See U.S. v. Skrmetti, 603 U.S. ___ (2025) (upholding Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors); Trump v. Orr, 607 U.S. ___ (2025) (per curiam) (granting application to stay preliminary injunction barring enforcement of State Department policy requiring passports to reflect sex assigned at birth); Mirabelli v. Bonta, No. 25A___ (U.S. Mar. 2, 2026) (per curiam) (vacating Ninth Circuit stay and restoring class-wide permanent injunction against California's AB 1955 and related policies restricting parental notification of students' gender identity changes in schools).

[4] Major Layoffs Coming at Human Rights Campaign | Advocate.Com, https://www.advocate.com/news/human-rights-campaign-layoffs.

[5] Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford Univ. Press 1941) (1940); see also Alejandra Caraballo, The Dual State of Trans Existence, The Dissident (Sept. 4, 2025), https://www.thedissident.news/the-dual-state-of-trans-existence/.

[6] Id.

[7] Odette Yousef, The Uvalde Shooting Conspiracies Show How Far-Right Misinformation Is Evolving, NPR, May 26, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101479269/texas-uvalde-school-shooting-misinformation-conspiracy-far-right.

[8] Joe Rogan Experience, Episode 2271 (2026) (falsely claiming trans people are responsible for most school shootings).

[9] There are even entire publications such as Reduxx that exist solely to mimic their ideological forbearers such as Der Sturmer to serve as the originator of much of this vile dehumanizing propaganda.

[10] See COINTELPRO, FBI Records: The Vault, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro (documenting systematic FBI operations to surveil, infiltrate, and discredit Black political organizations including the Black Panther Party through disinformation campaigns and provocateur activities).

[11] Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, Farewell p. 301 (Viking 1993)

[12] Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990, at 125 (Paul Wilson ed. & trans., Vintage Books 1992) (1978).

[13] James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972).

[14] Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Revised edition. ed. 2007).

[15] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 175 (Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith eds. & trans., International Publishers 1971) (1929–1935).

[16] Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, Farewell p. 301 (Viking 1993)

I understand the desire to be close with our friends, lovers, and families while enjoying a walk with them. What I don't understand is how it came to be that, while running on a popular path the other day, I made physical contact with someone because two separate groups of side-by-side walkers couldn't be parted from their companions for the actual second it would have taken for me to run past. 

I was running behind one group, and the oncoming group saw me, as I am visible. They were looking ahead, so I made eye contact with the man closest to me. I said to the group ahead of me, "on your left," like a human being who lives in a society with shared spaces. They did not separate or scoot over. In their defense, maybe I didn't give enough warning, maybe they didn't hear me, maybe they didn't understand me. Fair. But the oncoming twosome had zero excuse not to choose any evasive maneuver. When I ran around the other group (on their left), and the oncoming group made their choice to firmly hold their ground, I ended up shoulder-checking the man I had made eye contact with.

Apart from being surprised, I was pissed. This dude saw me coming, he saw the couple I was clearly going to have to run around, and there was time to react. Making a conscious choice to be rude is just rude. Do better.

And to all other side-by-side walkers: May you make better choices or be shoulder checked by people whose impact might make you rethink your co-walking formations. 

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.

In 1892, the French military decided to colonize big chunks of western Africa. That year, they rampaged across what is today Benin and engaged in a massive looting of that area’s amazing historical artifacts. The English, other Europeans, and the Americans were doing the same thing around the world, stealing stuff from all over the place to fill their museums. It’s gross and it’s a great example of how imperialism not only worked but continues to work. Because, see, the rich white nations don’t want to give any of it back.

But that’s getting harder to hold the line on. Nations want their historical artifacts back. And they have every right to them. Very slowly–painfully slowly, the European and Eurodiaspora nations and their museums are coughing things up. Benin has demanded France repatriate its stolen art. Mati Diop is perfect to make a film about the return of 26 major objects to Benin. She is half-French, half-Sengalese, full-excellent director. Her uncle is the legendary Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the astounding 1973 film Touki Bouki, among other films. So she filmed the return of these objects in her 2024 film Dahomey. This pretty short film, just a touch over an hour, has its slow moments. It starts with some static museum shots in France, the slow packaging of these objects, their return to Benin. She even put a camera in one of the boxes to show its closing in France and then opening in Benin. There’s some voiceover work from the perspective of the objects to think about what it was like for them in France, or their spirits anyway.

The best part of the film is in the second half, where for about 20 minutes, Diop films a conference of young people in Benin arguing over the return of the objects. It’s not that any of the students are unhappy about their return, but some see it is an outright positive and others see the fact that there are thousands of objects from Benin still in French museums and this just a drop in the bucket. In an era where the dreams of postcolonial liberation are long in the past, it’s fascinating to watch contemporary debates around this issue. So the film at its best ends up being about identity in a postcolonial world and the possibilities and very sharp limitations of that.

This film might not be for everyone. Film does not have to be “entertainment” after all. But it’s quite worthy of your hour.

The post LGM Film Club, Part 537: Dahomey appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

It goes without saying that there is a great deal of Psychology going on in Donald Trump's second term. None of it is especially complicated, because the people involved are without exception clammy, low-wattage sociopaths who universally dislike and distrust each other, see their hugely consequential jobs primarily as opportunities to make short-form video content and fly on private planes, and have not let their (correct) understanding that they will be going to go to hell when they die sway them from gulping down huge foamy draughts of humiliation every single day. But if none of it and none of them are very interesting, the volatility of the visibly decaying real-estate priss at the center of it all generally keeps it surprising.

For the most part, this is a matter of nausea and dread—a drawling executive digression revealing plans to invade "four or quite frankly five" new countries, the most powerful politician in the world either nodding along or nodding off as his chief health officials stammer through an endorsement of miasma theory. But sometimes it plays out as it does in this Wall Street Journal story about the president compulsively gifting pairs of Florsheim dress shoes to the underlings and supplicants that wind up sitting across from him at meetings. The Journal story quotes a woman who works in the White House saying "all the boys have them," and another laughing that "it’s hysterical because everybody’s afraid not to wear them."

In one sense, this sort of behavior won't really be surprising to anyone who has spent time around a disinhibited and declining older person; thought processes become both less linear and much more legible in that cohort, and in this case Trump's interior progression from "bored with person talking" to "noticing that person's shoes" to "telling them to put on new shoes" is no longer interior at all. The Journal story describes Trump interrupting a lunch meeting with Tucker Carlson to start talking about "his 'incredible' new shoes" and pausing a December meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to point out their "shitty shoes" before "retrieving a catalog" and getting to work on crafting a presidential solution to that issue. If this habit had in any way distracted the president from dropping bombs on foreign schools or his ongoing domestic terror campaigns, it would be much easier to laugh about it. As it stands, it's just one of those stupid things everyone gets to walk around knowing about while all the bombing and terror stuff continues. There's very little surprise left in that, either.

Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick.

This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results.

Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.