Centralia, Pennsylvania is the former town where an underground coal fire has been burning without interruption since 1962. It’s thought this (now retirement-aged) blaze was sparked by residents incinerating their trash in an abandoned mining pit. Because setting a trash fire in a basin lined with coal dust has gotta be the most distinctly American form of super smart So, the combination of conditions created by people, with the neglect of later people conspired to create literal hell on earth.

Which is where we are today: the nation has come to be a Centralia of our own making, intent on hauling the rest of the world down into this quenchless firepit with us. The Centralia we’ve been thrust into arises from shitty conditions avoidably created by people. Followed by a long accretion of neglect and compounding harms. So we find ourselves all standing astride a piece of earth that immolates underfoot. Each of us – every one of us, no matter how close or far we imagine ourselves to be from the blaze – has eyes filled with cinders, lungs seared by smoke, shoes blistered and split by the heat.

And while everyone, obviously, is free to read what we have to say, this site aims itself at those who remain able to recognize that the ground is on fucking fire. 

The goal of Guild of the Guillotine is to for fuck’s sake rouse us off this patch of burning ground. Our targets will not be the burning itself – diagnosing and re-diagnosing this now familiar fire is pointless, its modest satisfactions short-lived – we resolve to go after the arsonists who consign us to these flames, the perpetrators of the neglect and compounding harms that have placed us all in mortal goddamn danger. It is these criminals – political, cultural, economic – we will make the subjects of what we hope are eviscerating, vivisecting, public-execution texts that will lay bare their confounding wish to burn us.

The Guild of the Guillotine seeks to be a reclamation of satire.

Because the reality that satire is and must remain a WEAPON has been lost to us.

Satire, real satire, seeks to do damage. It is merciless, is necessarily assured that its targets deserve to suffer and writhe. Real satire must crank tight the lid of the killing jar and look without blinking as the subject inside it convulses and begs and dies. Too much of what passes for satire fails entirely in this impulse of righteous lethality – it’s too taken with itself, too eager to announce its own cleverness, too smitten with the prospect of your approval. It adopts the form of the fatal, sometimes, but lacks the spine to carry out its kill order. It’ll throw you a self-congratulatory wink and go Burn on you! and look needy as it awaits your high five. The so-called satirist will lick his thumb and sizzle-press it into his own ass. But in his mildness, he raises no welts, bubbles no flesh, doesn’t warrant so much as a wince. A so-called satirist too eager to please, his hip-toggling little dance and finger guns can cause no lasting injury; he calls himself “pirate,” but his cutlass is made of foam; he claims he is a hangman, but sticks googly eyes on his cowl.

And you might note I refer to this so-called satirist as a dude. Because usually he is. Since it’s men, mostly, prone to being filled with the manifold cowardice of the defanged satirist.

You might be asking: Why seek to do damage in an already damaged and damaging world?

A few reasons:

1.      Complacency has put down deep roots. To affect a return to arable soil, we gotta backhoe those fuckers out.

2.     Harm is the coin of the present realm. Online and in person, inflicting harm attracts attention. We must demonstrate that, to borrow Senator Lewis’ idea about causing good trouble, we are here to bring about good harm, harm aimed at provoking deep and probing thought, the harm of the surgeon that’s a necessary preamble to healing and change. The reason the political right sucks at parody and satire isn’t just a punching down problem, it’s that their targeting is invariably aimed at their own preconceptions, which are necessarily approximations bearing little resemblance to reality – to fire a blunderbuss and hit a barn door of stereotype is no achievement. When they call us mean, it must be because our stuff is closely, carefully observed, precisely imagined, and fiercely expressed.

3.     The current campaign is for hearts and minds. We are not here to convince the opposition of anything – theirs is a determined reality settled for them by the propagandists and panderers to whom they pay heed. It’s conceivable, of course, that we may nibble at the edges of their ranks, the most noncommittal of the remaining fence-sitters. But they are not our main focus. Our focus must be ourselves – a reassertion rooted in fidelity to the truth that despite their efforts to overwhelm and overtake us, to grind us down our minds and kill our hearts with a thousand cuts, we will attest and re-attest:

a.     We are not fucking crazy. Each time we punch up at you, we reclaim a little bit of our battered sanity.

b.    We see what you are attempting. Your multi-front war may entail tear gas in one place and market manipulation in another, rage-baiting here, graft over there, but you are so ham-fisted and transparent that can see plainly what you’re up to. Each hydra head that wriggles out from you earns its own blade till we cut and burn each one to a cauterized stump – not in your fevered hive mind, but inside of our own, in the degree to which we, in the sovereignty of ourselves and in solidarity with each other, are free of your poison.

c.     We reject the underlying premises of your ongoing outrages, so do not consent to their effects. Your obvious objective is to reduce us to a state where we are afraid and despairing, sundered and asleep. We will give unsparing witness to your insulting swill but will not ingest it; we will note your attempts at shock and awe and will remind ourselves that you are desperately ordinary. We will persist in calling out the race war you are waging as having been staged by the architects of the class war you’ve been losing for a century but are too deluded to realize you’re in. We will continue to contend that that your so-called religious convictions have been scripted for you by liars reaching into your pockets.

In Baltimore where I now for some reason live, the body of the assassin John Wilkes Booth lies beneath an unmarked stone in the family plot. But people know where it is. And leave Lincoln pennies on the nameless stone, each one a little totem attesting to his defeat. Yes, each coin says, you snuffed out the life of a man seated in a theatre. With a coward’s bullet to the back of his head. But the victory remains his.

Ian Belknap, March 2026

“It is the mind-forged manacles that are hardest to break.” – Christopher Hitchens