Blood Work

Gregk speaks to the award-winning national security journalist Spencer Ackerman about the long shadows of 9/11 and the War on Terror, how America’s response to those events contributed to its current condition, the media’s role in justifying and legitimating state violence, and much more.

Spencer is also the founder and proprietor of FOREVER WARS, an ongoing chronicle, investigation and interrogation of the continuities, departures and permutations of the War on Terror

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Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – DEI-Codi

For this week’s newsletter, Gregk shares some of his thoughts on the extra-judicial killing of Renee Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 7, 2026, and reflects on the homologies between the Trump administration’s paramilitaries and the death squads that operated in Central and South America during the latter half of the twentieth century – in many cases backed, trained and coordinated by the United States.

Image: U.S. Military Police guard detainees within Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 2002. (Shane T. McCoy/U.S. Navy/Getty Images) 

This is a preview. To hear the entire episode and help Blood Work to survive and thrive, become a supporter on Patreon.

We look at the history and philosophy of a doctrine so broad and plastic that even its theorists concede it might not mean anything at all—because if it doesn’t mean anything, then maybe it means everything.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

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THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – FLORIDA RASHOMON

A few days ago, the United States knocked over Nicolás Maduro, Head of State of Venezuela, in arguably the most brazen U.S. regime change operations in the Western Hemisphere since the arrest of Manuel Noriega on the very same day in 1990. Everyone in the Trump administration agrees it was an act of bold, decisive leadership from America’s Commander-in-Chief – and yet no one can agree why it was done. This week’s newsletter takes a look at some of the competing justifications for the action from the mouths of America’s best and brightest.

Image: American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians walking through the streets of Huế in Central Vietnam (Getty Images)

For their first ever Christmas episode, Gregk and producer Thomas get together for a casual fireside chat, discussing some of the key questions animating Blood Work, reflecting on the project’s progress so far, where they’d like to take it next year, and offer some perspectives on how this thing that we call violence connects to that other thing that we call politics.

And then, as a little Christmas Treat, Gregk tells Thomas about the history of one of the worst hangovers of ‘90s counter-consumer culture jamming, and how it’s connected to some of the worst people in US culture today. New Yorkers, you knew it was bad, but if only you knew how bad it really is.

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Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – AUMF LAMF

The US’ Authorisation for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) 2001 is an authorisation so broad and loosely defined that it renders the problem of the square peg and the round hole moot; the hole’s aperture can always be widened, and virtually any peg can be hammered through. This week, I’ve picked three articles which demonstrate how its passage inaugurated a permanent, global State of Exception for US warmaking, how recklessly this aperture has been exploited, and how dangerous that is for global governance.

Image: Cover artwork from the 1985 The Christmas issue of An Phoblacht/Republican News.

Source: The Irish Republican Digital Archive

This week, Gregk speaks to Anthropologist Florin Poenaru about his essay for North South Notes, published on the one-year anniversary of Romania’s cancelled Presidential elections, in which ‘outsider’ candidate Călin Georgescu was alleged to have benefitted from a Russian-coordinated TikTok interference campaign.

In their conversation, they discuss the layers of power within a globalised political order, the capacity of intelligence services to produce as well as gather knowledge, and the question of where power resides in a country where politics, media, business and academia are constantly imbricated by a large and unruly security apparatus.

Read Florin’s article, ‘The Forest’ in North South Notes.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

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THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – FAFO-FI-FUM

This week, I share three pieces on wars old, new and prospective which reflect the festering wounds of America’s most recent imperial project; the licking of wounds and casting around for a space in which to reassert itself; and the early nicks and scratches we’re already seeing as both the war machine and US consent manufacturing apparatus (brrrrrrr) leap a little too enthusiastically on the latest champion of peace, liberty and justice only to learn that she… well, just might not actually be very ‘bout it ‘bout it.

Image: A satellite shot of the Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service (Serviciul de Informații Externe/SIE), situated within the Băneasa Forest in northern Bucharest.

In 1823, US President James Monroe declared an end to European colonial ambitions in the Americas. By the end of that century, his declaration had morphed into a license for the United States to pursue unilateral political, economic and military actions across the Western Hemisphere.

This week, we examine the history of the Monroe Doctrine and the wider geospatial order of the Americas, and see how, even two centuries later, Latin America continues to tremble in the shadow of that fateful doctrine.

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Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – The ‘Whatever’ Doctrine

This week, I share an excellent 2022 essay by Nathan DuFord which builds on the closing themes of last week’s episode on the fascist imaginary; my thoughts on a rancid essay about Venezuela by ice-chewing ghoul Elliot Abrams; and some thoughts on the ongoing criminality of US murder strikes in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea courtesy of Demented Donny and Pete ‘Drinks His Coffee on the Rocks’ Hegseth. It’s all so lazy and stupid – but after twenty years of the GWoT, it’s not like we should expect anything better. Available now for Patreon supporters.

Sources:

Manuel de Campo (2019) ‘Splitting the world in two: the 525th anniversary of the Treaty of Tordesillas’, available at Languages across Borders: Language Collections at the University of Cambridge

Citations Needed Podcast (2021), ‘Episode 139 — Of Meat and Men: How Beef Became Synonymous with Settler-Colonial Domination’, available at Citations Needed (Transcript available at Medium)

John Gast (1872), ‘American Progress’ [Painting], available at The Library of Congress

Greg Grandin (2006), Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic

Greg Grandin (2019), The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

George C. Herring (2008), From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776

CLR James (1938), The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

Stephen Kinzer (2013), The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War

Lester D. Langley (2002), The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898–1934

Randall Lesaffer (2015), ‘The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815)’, available at Oxford Public International Law

James Martell (2017), The Misinterpellated Subject

James Monroe (1823), ‘December 2, 1823: Seventh Annual Message (Monroe Doctrine)’, available at The Miller Center, University of Virginia

‘National Security of the United States of America’ (November 2025), available at The White House

James Polk (1845), ‘December 2, 1845: First Annual Message’, available at The Miller Center, University of Virginia

Theodore Roosevelt (1904), ‘Theodore Roosevelt's Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1905)’, available at The US National Archives

Treaty of Ghent (1814), available at The US National Archives

Giles Tremlett (2020), ‘Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America’, available at The Guardian

Sylvia Wynter (2003), ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review (Vol. 3:3)

Image: An official from the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) inspects bunches of bananas in preparation for export from Honduras. (AP Photo)

What are ‘libidinal politics’? What the fuck is a ‘machinic assemblage’? Why are these men all terrified of women? This week, we explore four key ideas in the fascist imaginary and head down to the stables to look at some freaks.

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Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – Hit & Run

This week, I take a look at some articles about drone warfare in Ukraine, Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, and the transfer of those tactics to the US’ steady approach to War on Venezuela, and meditate on what these might portend about the new rules of engagement for warfare in the 2020s. Plus: Some further thoughts on a man and his horse, childhood romance, and the death of intimacy.

Available now for Patreon supporters.

Sources:

Walter Benjamin (1999), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1935], Illuminations

Richard Evans (2003), The Coming of the Third Reich

Richard Evans (2005), The Third Reich in Power

Roger Griffin (1991), The Nature of Fascism

Mark Neocleous (1997), Fascism

Klaus Theweleit (1987 [1977]), Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History

Image: German Freikorps soldiers standing by an armored car during the German Revolution, January 1919.

In 1971, a group of people cast aside by the state rose up and attempted to reclaim their humanity and political subjectivity. This week, we look at the Attica Prison Uprising to see what that event might tell us about the relationship between politics, law and violence.

If you enjoyed this episode:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

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– Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – Ground Zero

The first in a weekly series of posts where I share recent articles that have caught my attention and some brief commentary, along with some broader musings on the nature of violence. 

Available now for Patreon supporters.

Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron

Sources:

‘15 Practical Proposals of Attica Prisoners’ (1971), People’s Law Office

The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Depression Platform (1971), Freedom Archives

Traci Curry & Stanley Nelson (Dir., 2021), Attica

Fred Ferretti (Sept. 13, 1971), ‘Attica Prisoners Win 28 Demands, but Still Resist’, New York Times

Brad Lichtenstein (Dir., 2001), Ghosts of Attica

Charlotte Rosen (May 26, 2025), ‘How Should We Remember Attica?’, The Nation

Wendy Sawyer, ‘How much do incarcerated people earn in each state?’ (2017), Prison Policy Initiative

Heather Ann Thompson (2021), Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

Image: Participants in the Attica Prison Uprising raise their fists during a negotiating session on Friday, September 10, 1971 (AP)

Come join us, won’t you, for a deep dive into one of the twentieth century’s biggest assholes. Say hello to Carl Schmitt: Jurist, legal scholar, political philosopher… Nazi? Look: We’re only showing you him so you know how to get away from him.

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Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron

Sources:

Gopal Balakrishan – The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

Angus Brown – ‘The Left Should Have Nothing to Do with Carl Schmitt’, Jacobin

Stuart Elden – ‘Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos, territory and Großraum’, Radical Philosophy

Carl Schmitt – Dictatorship

Carl Schmitt – The Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt – The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum

Carl Schmitt – Political Theology

(Image: Carl Schmitt’s grave in Plettenberg, Germany. The Greek inscription reads, “KAI NOMON EGNŌ” / “And I Know the Law”)

We take a break from scheduled programming to commemorate the passing of one of the greatest monsters of the early 21st century, looking back at some of his greatest hits of being a rancid asshole and how they show our exceptional times might not be all that exceptional.

This episode is a little thing we've been calling internally, "The Gregk Directive", for when the news simply is too good to resist.

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Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron

In the mid-1990s, the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben began a 20-year project exploring the origin of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics – the governance of populations through technocratic management of aspects of their biological lives and the conditions intended to make live, or let die. Performing an archaeology of politics tracing back to the Greeks, Agamben identified a number of governmental apparatuses through which our world is both split, and bound, in two, between the included and the excluded; the inside and the outside; the human and the not-quite-yet.

In this episode, we talk to Serene Richards, a Lecturer in Law at New York University London, and author of the book Biopolitics as a System of Thought. During our conversation, we discuss the origins of two of Agamben’s most famous political concepts: Homo Sacer, the sacred man or ‘bare life’; and the State of Exception, the mechanism by which Law establishes its own ‘inside’ through the creation of an ‘outside’ that lies beyond it, and yet which must be included. Later we discuss Serene’s book, her concept of Smart Being, and how our techno-capitalist moment has seen biopolitical logics extend beyond the political realm, penetrating even how we think, perceive and understand our own lives.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/biopolitics-as-a-system-of-thought-9781350412095/

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Our theme song is Dream Weapon by Genghis Tron