OK, here’s the first chapter of Strangers in a Strange Homeland, the USA road-trip book, which will be published by Arcade Publishing later this year, hopefully. I don’t usually publish drafts of work in progress, but, as my regular readers know, I’ve been more or less totally out of commission for the last four months due to a serious medical issue, and I feel like I need to publish something. I’m just getting back to my desk now, and this is what I’ve started in on, so this is what I’ve got for you. Also, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t have much stomach (pun intended) for covering current events, currently. Every time I have glanced at the news recently or, God help me, social media, it has felt like some enormous maleficent entity was trying to suck the soul out of my body. So, if you are looking for speculation regarding the motives, political affiliations, and gender identity of the latest would-be Trump assassin, or someone’s take on someone else’s opinion of … whatever, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
I’m sure I’ll get back to my semi-regular satirical commentary on current events soon, or relatively soon, but getting this book going is the priority at the moment. I am way behind schedule, obviously, and I really want to get it out before the end of this year.
My heartfelt thanks again to all the generous readers who funded the USA road trip last year, and to everyone who organized events and gatherings for us in their cities and towns, and everyone who attended those events and gatherings. It was quite an odyssey. I hope I can make a decent book out of it.
Here’s how it starts, sort of. There’s a short prologue, but you’ll have to wait for the book for that.
The Map is Not the Territory
On the morning of September 11, the trunk and rear seat of our Mustang crammed with suitcases, books, and photography gear, Hugo goggled up like an Arctic explorer, we set out for New York City and beyond. Nothing going on here, officer, just two old geezers tear-assing down I-95 in a neon blue convertible.
The plan for the day was to make it to George’s, an old-school diner in the Financial District, a few blocks south of what used to be the World Trade Center and is now the 9/11 Memorial, meet with Anthony Freda, the artist who has designed the covers of most of my books, including the book that has gotten me prosecuted in Germany, and whoever else showed up, listen to their thoughts regarding the state of America, visit the 9/11 Memorial briefly, and then get back into the Mustang and tear-ass down I-95 to Philadelphia, arriving at Debbie Lerman’s house in Germantown in time for dinner.
The entire seven-week road trip was going to be like this, tear-assing from one place to the next, arriving just in time for whatever public event or private gathering one of my readers had been kind enough to schedule for us, passing out in some cheap motel, and occasionally more luxurious accommodations, and then getting up at dawn and doing it all again.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. What had happened was, Brandy Codswallow, the unpaid intern I had put in charge of creating our itinerary, had failed to adequately advise me as to how age-inappropriate and totally insane our schedule was becoming as she confirmed events and gatherings and booked accommodations for us all across the country for seven weeks. And, OK, part of it was probably partly my fault. Once I announced the project online, people flooded us with offers to organize events and gatherings and put us up for a night, and I just kept saying yes. In any event, we were locked into it now, twenty-four states, thirty-two towns and cities, in roughly forty-nine days on the road. It was going to be an endurance test, physically and mentally. Would we make it back to Connecticut by Halloween, or would one of us snap and murder the other while he slept in some roadside West Texas motel?
Hugo didn’t like our chances.
And, as if our itinerary wasn’t daunting enough, we were setting out to talk to Americans of all political persuasions about the state of America, Trump, Covid, Wokeism, and so on, which, well, we were kind of an odd couple of old geezers to be doing that. Hugo is a card-carrying, Democrat-voting, Rachel Maddow-watching liberal. I’m an old-school lefty with a rather conspicuous libertarian streak. In the 1990s, while I was writing and staging experimental plays in converted garages on New York City’s Lower East Side, Hugo was getting an MFA from Yale. He’s now a tenured professor in New York City. He and his wife have a charming three-level home in the exurban Connecticut woods, a mortgage, a home equity loan, self-cleaning oven, the whole nine yards. I live in a rundown building in Berlin in a neighborhood Germans call “Little Istanbul.” The city’s main heroin market is just up the street. During the Covid years, Hugo wore a mask, did the social-distancing thing, got the “vaccinations,” and so on. I did not. I was a “Covid denier,” an “anti-masker,” a “conspiracy-theorist.” Which is to say, I wrote and published a book of essays about the so-called “New Normal” (i.e., the pathologized totalitarianism rolled out during the Covid era), which the German authorities found so threatening that they banned the book and prosecuted me in criminal court for publishing and promoting it.
We are dear old friends, Hugo and I. We’ve been friends for going on fifty years. But our lives took different directions, and we have ended up in radically different places, both geographically and politically. What did we really have in common anymore? Did we even inhabit the same reality? How were we supposed to talk to each other, never mind the people we would meet out on the road, if we couldn’t even agree on basic facts, not just the interpretation of events, but whether they had actually happened?
I had written about this in several of my essays—which, of course, neither Hugo nor any of my former liberal friends and colleagues had read—how society had been systematically divided into two opposing camps, the “normals” and the “deviants,” each with their own official narratives, their own official histories, their own official “reality.” Hugo and I were no exceptions. We hadn’t spoken to each other during the Covid years, but he knew about my prosecution in Germany. When I got in touch to offer him this project, he assumed I had somehow become an “anti-vaxxer,” despite the fact that he has known me for decades and I’ve never given a shit about vaccines.
This is what the last ten years have done to us, or what something has done to us over the last ten years. We have all been conditioned to suspect each other, and judge each other, and assign each other to one of those two opposing camps. We have been forced onto one or the other side, not only of a so-called culture war, but a war over the power to define “reality.” Of course, there can only be one reality, and thus each side demands complete conformity to its ideology and official narratives and complete rejection of the ideology and official narratives of the other side. Any deviation from the norms of either side is a sign of apostasy, sedition, treason, and thus grounds for excommunication and exile.
This isn’t just a theory; it is personal experience. In the spring of 2020, when I began publishing essays challenging the official Covid narrative, virtually every liberal friend and colleague I had either publicly denounced me or distanced themselves from me, personally and professionally. I was summoned to meetings with administrators to explain my behavior. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just wear a mask? Had I joined the far right? Was I an anti-Semite? Theater colleagues took to social media to suggest that I was having a nervous breakdown. My Covid essays grew increasingly aggressive. I compared the roll-out of the “Covid measures” to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and my former liberal friends and colleagues to “good Germans.” I called them “fascists” on Facebook and Twitter. I published an essay called The Covidian Cult, which went viral among the Covid dissident demographic, most of whom were libertarian or conservative. I did an interview with Fox News. And so on. It was clear where all this was heading.
By the end of 2020, the two opposing sides had been established (or reestablished). For the majority of liberals, unquestioning conformity to the official Covid narrative was now de rigueur. Any criticism of it was “conspiracy theory,” “science denialism,” “far-right extremism,” or the unhinged ravings of “horse paste eaters.” According to the mostly libertarians and conservatives who were now referring to themselves as “the medical freedom community,” those liberals were the victims of “mass formation psychosis,” hypnotized “death cultists,” the brainwashed foot soldiers of a “globalist cabal” of “Cultural Marxists” who were implementing something called “The Great Reset.”
The facts no longer mattered to either side. The political battle lines had been drawn.
Actually, the battle lines had already been drawn. They were drawn in the summer of 2016, when the Global War on Terror was switched off and the War on Populism was switched on, like a scene out of Orwell’s 1984. I covered this story in my essays at the time, Russiagate, Hitlergate, fascism hysteria, and all the rest of the global-capitalist establishment’s response to the “populist” rebellion that had broken out throughout the West. The Covid event—whatever else it was—was a continuation of that radical restructuring of Western society in response to the “new populism.”
I have described this restructuring as the roll-out of a nascent form of totalitarianism, not the familiar 20th-Century form of it, but a new, global-capitalist iteration, which no one really understands yet. Other writers have described it as “the War on Terror turned inward, on Americans,” but that doesn’t accurately capture the scope of it … the gradual revocation of our democratic rights under the cover of a series of “states of emergency,” the militarization of society, the corporatization of culture, the dissolution of national sovereignty, perpetual war, financialization of the economy, the medication of the masses, the pathologization of everyday life, and so on. Piece by piece, “emergency” by “emergency,” the ostensibly democratic societal architecture of the 20th-Century is being dismantled and replaced by a totalitarian simulacra of itself, not the overt neonationalist authoritarianism of MAGA and other such reactionary movements—although they play a crucial role in the process—but a subtler, schizoid, supranational, capitalist form of totalitarianism, one that mirrors the deterritorialized terrain of the market, in which everything (and everyone) is an essentially valueless, interchangeable commodity.
In one of my essays back in 2016, I argued that the fundamental conflict of our times is neoliberalism versus neonationalism. Those are the battle lines. Those are the two sides. Unfortunately, most people cannot see them, and so do not recognize which side they are on, and thus do not understand what they are defending or opposing. This misunderstanding is not their fault. The most powerful propaganda machine in the history of propaganda machines has been relentlessly stupefying the masses, not merely pitting them against each other, but rendering them literally incapable of the most rudimentary forms of critical thought.
For ten years, I have watched in fascination, and increasing horror, as our Western societies have been systematically polarized, atomized, people turned against each other, against their friends, against their own families, herded into fanatical factions, whipped up into frenzies of mindless hatred, their brains beaten into mush by the endless barrage of utterly meaningless bullshit pumped out at them night and day on the screens from which there is no escape. It is everywhere now, the spectacle, the feed. Screens. Images signifying nothing. The constant stream of Pavlovian stimuli. Bright white teeth. Collagen fish lips. Wars. Genocide. Weight-loss pills. Pancreatic cancer. Political scandals. The pornography of breaking news. Four new messages. Enter your PIN. The War on Terror. The War on Hate. The War on War. The War on Whatever. The United States of Lockheed Martin. The United States of Remigration. The United States of benzodiazepine. The omnipresent interactive map of a territory that does not exist …
“The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.” – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
… a prison the exact dimensions of reality, invisible, because it envelops everything, inescapable, because it has no outside.
Speeding southward out of Mamaroneck, the corporate towers of the increasingly menacing Manhattan skyline looming up ahead, Hugo sitting there, goggled up, beside me, gritting his teeth, or maybe smiling, his face contorted like the photos of the men in those 1950s G-force experiments, I had a sudden sense of impending doom. What was I thinking when I came up with this project? The notion that I was going to somehow connect with Americans across the political spectrum, that we could set aside our pain, our rage, our judgment, our demonization of each other, and sit down and actually listen to each other … was it born of pomposity, or just plain old idiocy? Did I really expect to compete with the spectacle, to go up against the power of the global-capitalist system’s simulation of reality? Was I on some kind of savior trip? And why had I dragged poor Hugo into this? Was I trying to burn the last remaining bridges to my liberal roots? Or was I looking to start a fight with the right? Some of the stops on our itinerary were definitely serious MAGA country. I had already pissed off a lot of my conservative readers with my criticism of Trump and Musk and the ethnonationalist hatred they had been aggressively fomenting. Now I was going to show up in their towns with a liberal Afro-Asian-Cuban arts professor from New York City, and explain to them how they were being bamboozled, how the “populist movement” they thought they were part of had been captured, and was just a mockery of itself.
Seriously, my timing couldn’t have been worse.
The day before we set out on our odyssey, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot to death during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. I was out on Hugo’s deck, reading an email from Dr. Marvin King at the University of Mississippi, where Kirk had also been scheduled to appear as part of his “American Comeback Tour,” when I glanced at the Internet and saw the news. Conspiracy theories were already circulating. Kirk wasn’t really dead. It was all a PSYOP. Obviously, the Mossad had ordered “the hit.” It was the launch of the “anti-white global takeover” by the Jews, who already controlled the world. In other news, President Trump had ordered his Immigration and Customs Enforcement goon squads into Boston and Chicago and was warning anti-ICE protesters that they were “about to find out why it’s called ‘the Department of War.’” The Department of Homeland Security was urging Americans to “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” Elon Musk was hawking cranial implants and whipping up racial hatred. The Standard & Poor’s Index and the Nasdaq were up.
Was this America made great again? Was it on the verge of civil war? Did it even exist, the sovereign nation Americans believed they lived in? The land of the free. Home of the brave. The country existed. We were driving into it. We were going to drive it north to south, east to west, coast to coast. Was the American spirit still out there, somewhere, down there in Germantown, below the radar, hidden in a West Virginia holler, performing in a backyard theater in Chicago, slinging pancakes in an Indiana IHOP, living in a trailer in the wilds of Montana, strung out on Fentanyl on the streets of San Francisco, on a shrimp boat out on the Louisiana bayou? Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Whatever was out there, we were going to find it, or some of it, or something … or it was going to find us. We were going to be kind of hard to miss, two old geezers in a neon-blue convertible.
We were coming up on New Rochelle. We had about an hour to get downtown, find a place to park, and get to George’s. I figured we were just going to make it. Hugo was shouting something about a “snake” on the map of the GPS thing and emphatically jabbing his finger at the screen, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying over the screaming of the wind and the roar of the massive semi-truck I was trying to pass. The trailer of the semi was fishtailing left and right in a precarious fashion. I got the Mustang up to ninety and pulled alongside the Peterbuilt cab. The driver turned and stared down at us. He was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses and what might or might not have been a MAGA cap. I don’t know what came over me, exactly, but I flashed him a hippie-style two-finger peace sign. He laughed as I accelerated past him.
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CJ Hopkins
May 1, 2026
Photo: Hugo Fernandez, Professor of Fine Art and Photography, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, Long Island City, New York
DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, III, and IV of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive or threatening email, feel free to contact him directly.
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