Arrested Development or Civil War

I repeat: Shutdown architect Russell Vought loves traumatizing people, hates the government

In the peace of a green room, a standup comic with the whole world in his hands hones his schtick [edit for podcast version as of 10/10/2025]

[Please enjoy the following self-edited excerpts from the transcript to the improvised monologue posted above.]

Hey, everybody, how’s it going, and welcome to another episode of The Armenian Quarter or No Other Land. I’m your host, Sean M. P. Let’s get to it.

As many of you know, The Armenian Quarter or No Other Land is the “podcast” adjunct to my flagship Substack, The Book of Sean M.P., which is essentially a documentation of my comeback after I was put on paid leave at Gettysburg College just over five years ago. So that is in the distant past.

And I’ve been doing EMDR therapy for three or four months now, and I’m just passing my traumas left and right, my friends—like the trauma I just passed in the bathroom.

Here’s the T, as I’ve been saying.

When I submitted my dissertation officially on May 13th, 2020, I was seeing the world so well, but I didn’t want to write anymore, my friends. I was out of gas. The last thing I wanted to do was write and it turned out nobody wanted to publish my writing anyway.

Because as people will remember, I tried to publish a critique of the drive of some colleges and universities to reopen in the fall of 2020 in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Buzzfeed even.

Not Buzzfeed, sorry. I pitched another article to Buzzfeed that nobody wanted.

So I said, “Fuck this noise.”

Five years later, I’m back to my writing.

The government is shut down. Will it be for longer than in 2019? Or will it be for shorter? Who the fuck knows with this king of chaos in the White House [and] Russell Vought, one of the architects of Project 2025, [running the Office of Management and Budget]?

Vought said the following at some point [last] year:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

I’m laughing because this is just ridiculous.

Remember, Brendan Carr of the FCC, another idiot fascist like this dude, Russell Vought, threatened Disney over Jimmy Kimmel’s freedom of speech. And then they had to back all the way the fuck down, right?

Continuing:

We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Now, dear viewer…we have the intersection of all intersections here, so please take care and be safe.

On the one hand, Russell Vought, that idiot fascist bureaucrat who doesn’t understand that he himself is a bureaucrat because he’s a self-hating white man, like they all are in the White House—

On the one hand, Russell Vought opposes critical race theory. And on the other hand, Russell Vought wants to inflict trauma on people, including bureaucrats like himself.

Well, my friends, my study of critical race theory taught me that we should arrest the reproduction of intergenerational trauma. And what do we see on a moment-to-moment basis here in the US of Israel? The infliction of trauma. And the perpetrators of the trauma aren’t even arrested, let alone held accountable.

My friends, just like Hamas is holding Israelis hostage, the White House is holding the United States hostage.

And as my man Zohran Mamdani said on The View this week, just because Hamas started it—my paraphrase—with a war crime by taking hostages on 10/7 two years ago, that doesn’t mean the Israelis—with the United States’s express support across all dimensions—can then commit war crime upon war crime upon war crime. Because that is the infliction of trauma.

Oh my gosh, we’re back to square one.

Because then people grow up to become people like me—having survived the genocide attempted against gay men in the 1980s —who don’t ever shut the fuck up because silence equals death.

And I know, my friends. I’ve been making love, not war, my entire life.

Ciao for now,

Sean M. P.

ICYMI ⥥⥥