UNCUCK Must Pass
My novella is mostly finished, though not set in stone. I’m teasing one more section of it before I take it down to enter anonymous literary contests. Comments are encouraged. Anyone interested in sharing comments on unpublished sections can get a working copy by IMing me.
The Midterms
Voters want more than their salaries and dividends can buy. In 2024, this was the Democrats’ problem. Trump told voters they were hard-working and should get big trucks, bigger houses, and airplane trips their dad’s boss never took.
His pitch worked. From Kenosha to Buckhead, voters chose Republicans who promised to shove it to the hoarders and rich egoists. But prices stayed high, and McMansions remained out of reach. By November of 2026, the inability of the average American to be above average was the Republicans’ problem.
Men proved especially fickle. Latinos who voted for the ravisher of Bergdorf Goodman, grew bored. Incels still weren’t getting laid, and most preferred video games and pornography to voting.
Republicans were down six points on the generic congressional ballot and performing poorly enough with Texas Latinos that the new gerrymander might backfire.
Trump’s remedy was simple: UNCUCK must pass. Neutering the Senate was just a welcome side effect. Men who could not get a date or finance an F-150 would vote for the Whole Head Guillotine, and for uncucking generally.
Trump whipped his caucus harder than ever before. He called in a few chits with Gulf sheikhs, and the FBI served up useful kompromat. In the end, only Susan Collins and Thom Tillis defied him. With help from Vance and the senate parliamentarian, the filibuster died, 51–49. UNCUCK passed by the same margin. Four days before the election, the House passed UNCUCK on a party-line vote. Republicans gained five seats in Texas and held the House by two votes. Democrats flipped the seat Tillis vacated, and Collins barely held on against a first-time candidate. No one knew whether the Texas gerrymander, WHIGA, or both had saved the Republican House majority.
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The substack intellectual attended college when some of the older professors still took moral philosophy seriously. He grasped the brute truth that ethics founder on infinite regress and, while learning little else about philosophy, graduated summa cum laude. What remained useful to him was not moral theory but predictive acumen. He spent many hours, without pay, predicting elections, tracing incentive structures, and testing whether stated principles aligned with observable behavior. He trusted forecasts more than arguments. Bad forecasts could be disproven; bullshit arguments were more insidious. He understood the cynical use of argument and sometimes could not tell whether he himself was being cynical or sincere, the two having alloyed into a structure he did not dare demolish.
The naturalistic fallacy having unburdened him of two millennia of moral teaching, the substack intellectual sailed on open water, far from shore. The question of how to live obtruded; it could not be avoided just because it had no answer. Literature was no lodestar, only a wandering planet—instructive for a time, then false.
He remembered when Bush was skewered for glancing at his watch during a debate, and was relieved that politicians charged with questions of life and death were no longer chosen for good manners.
Klein, Yglesias, even Hanania optimized for reading the room. The substack intellectual, too proud to pander, waited for the zeitgeist to change. The roaring twenties had not disappointed.
In his thirties, not having scaled the heights of his profession, he had nearly died climbing a volcano. In his forties, he played tournament pickleball. As he approached fifty, he understood that whatever glory remained to him would be intellectual.
The night Orozco’s head christened the guillotine, he worked his keyboard, hoping his year of destiny had come:
The Whole Head Guillotine can be honesty, humanity, and peace wrought in steel. Honesty means admitting who we are and what we are doing. I am an apex predator who knows a little calculus. I want to slay my enemies, yet I’ve never thrown a punch or spanked my son. The Whole Head Guillotine reminds us both that men are violent and that too much violence brings death. It tells an unflinching truth unflinchingly.
The Whole Head Guillotine is humanity alloyed with terror. With it we can earnestly seek the most humane execution possible. Give the prisoner any barbiturate he chooses. Give him a wholesome last meal, a chance to hug his mom, and every other decency he denied his victim. Give him a beer if he apologizes. We do not crave his suffering. We only demand his elimination. We are neither vengeful nor timid.
Peace, if it comes at all, comes through strength. What are fines, probation, jail, prison, and lethal injection if not increasingly determined efforts to cower the wayward into submission? Without terror, the law is impotent. The Whole Head Guillotine gives terror without torture, maximum deterrence for minimum pain.
Four centuries ago, Western European nations began systematically executing murderers. For centuries, one in two hundred men who lived to sixteen was eventually executed. The murder rate plummeted by a factor of twenty, and executions became rare. Perhaps Western Europe has achieved that degree of civilization where executions are no longer necessary. Maybe some societies can afford to flinch. We can’t. Our murder rate is five times higher than Western Europe’s.
Every year, American murderers kill as many people as died at Antietam. Most murder victims are young and healthy. Politicians should not tolerate twenty thousand young corpses a year. Their squeamishness is not more important than innocent lives. Squeamishness that kills innocents is grotesque, and among those sworn to protect us, it is abdication.
The people who cry loudest against the death penalty live far from the dead. They sip pinot and speculate about root causes while corpses cool on concrete. They call executions barbaric, then shrug off twenty thousand murders a year like it’s just another abstraction. They call one instant of medicated suffering cruel, while a man drags a screaming girl into a vacant lot and leaves her in pieces. They either want purity without sacrifice or else are willing to sacrifice others. I am not so precious. I would rather extol the Whole Head Guillotine than lament the deaths of innocents. Let them call that barbarism. I call it civilization.
The substack intellectual knew there were at least two sides to every story, so he thought it hygienic to write the steelman case against crushing skulls. He managed the following, not without enthusiasm:
Friends, Romans, countrymen. There is a land, mostly free, where the murder rate is 80% lower than in America. A land with fewer prisoners, longer lives, and almost no judicial executions for a generation or two. This place is called Europe. It exists, so it is possible.
Europe did not achieve this condition by terror. It dismantled its machinery of death slowly, amid doubt and compromise and occasional martial slaughter. The bodies stopped piling up anyway.
The key lies in Europe, that’s for sure. Did they get where they are by executing people back in the day, or is that correlation just a narrative mirage?
There had almost certainly been too few deaths under color of law to have much effect on the gene pool—he had modeled that—but executions plausibly carried memetic correlates. Europe abolished the death penalty only after murder had already fallen to low levels.
Then he thought about a completely different vector, Saudi Arabia, with judicial beheadings and safe streets. He surmised guillotine deterrence would work, but couldn’t escape messy narratives. Beyond his hunch lay fog; he did not grasp an eigenvector that could pierce the murk and he knew it futile to name what he could not instantiate.