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hampton.

@hampton

rhetoric PhD student @ UGA | senior researcher @ Princeton | staring into the abyss at: state violence & paramilitarism + radical memes & graphic media + paranormal realities & haunted presents

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12.05.2023
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Latest posts by hampton. @hampton

White House posted a San Andreas meme edit of the footage, too. Just such a wild time of doing war crimes and then posting shitty montages of it online

07.03.2026 02:06 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Everyone's a Hero in a Fascist Reading of Popular Media: Iran Strikes, Call of Duty, and Dudecore Soundbites The White House has been gloating through montage videos after striking Iran. This post disentangles some of the meaning-making involved in the properties they are posting.

I wrote some quick thoughts on the White House Call of Duty / divorced dad movie montages, you can read it on the blog if you'd like. It uses the work of Roger Stahl and Umberto Eco to try to make some sense of the work these posts are doing.

dead-air.ghost.io/heroic-educa...

06.03.2026 22:28 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

this is neither new nor an original thought. many have been saying this for years (including myself). just bears repeating

05.03.2026 21:10 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The state will take sites of resistance and treat them as laboratories. That they can forge authoritarian coalitions across race, party, and geography to create states of exception in Atlanta is all part of the program, and it's being prototyped for elsewhere, too.

05.03.2026 21:08 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

You really must understand how much Atlanta is the testing grounds for authoritarianism. Most surveilled city in the US, bipartisan support for police state nonsense, public-private partnerships for expanding cop playgrounds, renewed rhetoric of protesters as 'terrorists' or 'outside agitators', &c.

05.03.2026 21:06 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

so many people have headed calls to move off Google to places like proton. Actual useful advice is that you try to keep as much sensitive info offline as possible.

05.03.2026 20:57 πŸ‘ 376 πŸ” 94 πŸ’¬ 7 πŸ“Œ 1
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Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous β€˜Stop Cop City’ Protester A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the ...

SCOOP: Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.

05.03.2026 20:41 πŸ‘ 2786 πŸ” 1526 πŸ’¬ 89 πŸ“Œ 383

To be clear, the average pledge is like $169 right now (about $5 more than the tier that is essentially everything-but-the-stuffies). People are not only pledging to get access to these products, but paying into higher tiers than just the basic $10 for the Fires ebook

05.03.2026 14:20 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I'm not trying to be toxic (I am a fan of Sanderson), but he's essentially the biggest name in fantasy rn, if not all of speculative fiction. At what point does crowdfunding for millions in revenue become too gauche while tons of smaller writers struggle to find funding for their passion projects?

05.03.2026 14:18 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page.

"Corporate Media Buries Story of US and Israel Killing 168 in Girls School Attack. No front-page stories in NYT, WSJ, WaPo. No mention on NBC and CBS Sunday Shows. No stand alone segments on Evening News shows. A death count on par with the OKC bombing is relegated to the back page."

05.03.2026 03:43 πŸ‘ 103 πŸ” 75 πŸ’¬ 6 πŸ“Œ 3

my full paper got an honorable mention for best paper (pls clap). i'll be presenting another (different) WoW paper in April, so stay tuned (it's about virtually-embodied disruption/protest/ritual in Azeroth). thanks to everyone who saw the talk + shared their thoughts w me afterwards, too :)

01.03.2026 17:02 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

gotta say, really kind of embarrassing to see one of the "pre-eminent fascism experts" on the TL manufacturing consent for the Iran strikes ex post facto 😭😭😭 truly a Rube Goldberg machine of justifying logic 🫠🫠🫠

01.03.2026 16:37 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Retrobaiting Azeroth: Notes from a conference paper Tomorrow I’m presenting a talk about World of Warcraft’s nostalgia machine. In a few short minutes, I am set to describe how Blizzard, players, streamers, and those selling illicit services around WoW...

I'm skipping out on the first full day of early access to Midnight to present a paper I wrote on hauntological World of Warcraft today. I compiled some notes from the paper/talk on my blog here:

27.02.2026 11:08 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

Illustrating the Mussolini comparison (pics).

Perhaps also worthwhile to point out that the Mussolini faΓ§ade was on the former HQ of the Ministry of the Interior and the cheap Trump banner is over the HQ for the DOJ, an agency that has been (imperfectly) known for being independent of White House.

20.02.2026 13:08 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

RIP Jesse Jackson.

He spoke at my South Carolina public school right before the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, speaking in direct contradiction to the way SC demanded the war's history be taught. It was something that deeply resonated at the time and also whose impacts I didn't yet understand.

17.02.2026 14:53 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The article in the quote mentions the Black Mirror episode but I'm interested in two possibilities of tech dystopian fiction:
1) that these tech guys have no interest in engaging with speculative fiction that identifies the folly of such ideas, and/or
2) that they instead take inspiration from them

16.02.2026 23:55 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Black Mirror s2e01 (from 2013) aptly described the horrific inauthenticity of this idea. One of the more heartbreaking stories in Sequoia Nagamatsu's 2022 book, How High We Go in the Dark, also dealt with this (and the grief tech angle). Both really interesting fictional portrayals.

16.02.2026 23:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

The huge success of "actually eating steak and butter every day is GOOD for me" is great evidence for the Everyone is 12 Now theory

16.02.2026 15:37 πŸ‘ 750 πŸ” 117 πŸ’¬ 16 πŸ“Œ 1

Of course! And the real thanks is to you and your interlocutors, for putting in the work, collecting it all together, and putting it down on paper to keep the history current and easy to access

16.02.2026 16:14 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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To Catch a Fascist: The Fight to Expose the Radical Right The Fight to Expose the Radical Right

Just finished @letsgomathias.bsky.social's book. It's a stellar read, and it would be a really accessible gift for friends, family, or coworkers who have little previous knowledge but want to understand the last decade of antifascist work in the US.

bookshop.org/p/books/to-c...

16.02.2026 13:46 πŸ‘ 17 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1

Choose your border violence:

Reps: we'll institute a racialized regime of mass murder right here in your neighborhood!

Dems: we'll institute a racialized regime of mass murder, but it'll happen safely elsewhere such that nice white ppl don't have to see the dead bodies everyday. Like Europe!

15.02.2026 16:57 πŸ‘ 60 πŸ” 11 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
ZineLibrary

Much of my youth revolved around the website ZineLibrary. It went down around Occupy in a massive loss for a movement whose ideas and knowledge mostly doesn't circulate online but in person.

Anyway I've put it back online with a *thousand* anarchist zines:

zinelibrary.org

14.02.2026 00:53 πŸ‘ 725 πŸ” 339 πŸ’¬ 19 πŸ“Œ 21

Just got my copy in the mail, can't wait to dive into @augustacaesar.bsky.social's book!

You can order here:
bookshop.org/p/books/savi...

13.02.2026 12:57 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

something from the Epstein Files I cannot help but see printed so clearly: Byung-Chul Han couldn't have been more right

12.02.2026 13:49 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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"A modern-day concentration camp ... People have been killed by the staff here." Irish citizen Seamus Culleton has been in ICE detention since September, despite having a valid work permit and his own business in the US.

10.02.2026 10:09 πŸ‘ 8386 πŸ” 4447 πŸ’¬ 161 πŸ“Œ 473

Idk I'm still mulling this over - I might collect these notes into something for a blog but for now thinking aloud.

The Turalyon/Alleria and Light/Void split is a binary that WoW writers are obviously playing with, but it's interesting how old (and gendered) this conversation has been for so long.

10.02.2026 15:23 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

WoW writers have constantly talked about how seductive the Void is, parroting some of what Socrates et al were allegedly saying about rhetoric. It's interesting that the first major good (for now?) character representing the Void is a woman, notably one whose sister fell to a different corruption.

10.02.2026 15:23 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Applying this to the Ancient Greek binary (philosophy/rhetoric), it's interesting how the character who loses control in BT (Turalyon) is not the one whose whole character arc is not defined by harnessing ("taming" for Sutton) her source of strength to which she is always on the brink of succumbing.

10.02.2026 15:23 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Quick summary of these two married characters:

Turalyon: light-forged, priest turned paladin, who WoW writers have kept showing as adhering to a deeply manichean worldview

Alleria: void-touched, ranger from tragic house, who WoW writers keep making run from her issues or struggle to keep control

10.02.2026 15:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

In WoW, I had always thought of the Turalyon/Alleria split between husband/wife and Light/Void an interesting and dramatic decision on WoW storytelling, but reading Jane Sutton's 1992 essay on the gendered problems of the tradition, this perhaps brings these characterizations into clearer focus.

10.02.2026 15:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0