No Future 2026

When women and children aren’t safe, nobody is.

We must not forget little Liam Conejo Ramos. His body is being shuttled through detention centers as we speak. He’s being fed McDonald’s by masked agents. Asking for his father. They say they play his favorite music. Is this enough?

We must not abandon the Child. Our very future is at stake.

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For a long time those with power have advanced their agendas by claiming that the future belongs to the children. Their refrain: “we must fight for the children.” This stance is totalizing and immediately, historically anyways, has ended many conversations before they could ever begin: “We must go to war for the children.” “I don’t support war.” “Oh, you don’t care about the children?”

Lee Edelman observed this dynamic being mobilized ad nauseum during the Bush-era culture wars where invocations of the Child were doing heavy ideological labor for “traditional values.” In 2004 he called it “reproductive futurism.” As a queer theorist, he observed that Gay and Queer lifeways threatened this order–tracing part of the queerphobia in the culture towards the implications of the queer negation of non-biological, non-heteronormative reproductive norms. In his stunning No Future, Edelman puts it as follows:

The image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse - to prescribe what will count as political discourse - by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address. (Edelman, 2004)

It’s not 2004 anymore. Ten years later, Mark Fisher observes that we’re witnessing “the slow cancellation of the future”:

“Of course, it’s not that the future in culture disappears overnight. It withers, it drains away. But it’s, at least in terms of music culture and in the UK context, I think we can say that this waning, this disappearance, this cancellation of the future started to become evident about a decade ago.” (source)

So the future, on Fisher’s account, is draining away. The timing is uncanny. A decade prior to the Fisher quote I present is the year No Future was published. Culture’s gears in motion. Now it’s 2026. Let’s check in on the future.

Just a few days ago, Vice-President Vance gave one of the most vulgar “speeches” in the history of the union.

As the father of a five-year-old, I think to myself 'Oh, my God, this is terrible. How did we arrest a five-year-old?' ... When they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So the story is that ICE detained a 5-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America? ... It's traumatic for the kids. I can recognize that, and I can recognize that we've got to support these kids while, on the other hand, saying that just because you're a parent doesn't mean that you get complete immunity from law enforcement. If the argument is that you can't arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity from ever being the subject of law enforcement. That doesn't make any sense. (source)

Its vulgarity is foremost in its lies. Witnesses contest that the father ran. Family members on site were begging to take custody of Liam. But Vance is making policy arguments off the back of this five-year-old’s trauma, too. In essence, the Vice-President of the United States is instrumentalizing the detention of a child to further expand state brutality against children and their parents. Not all children though. Vance is quick to bracket that he is the father of a five-year-old, too. That his children, and by extension your white, citizen children, are safe from this brutality (unless, I guess, you also are deemed to have broken the law). That the state’s violence against little Liam was justified because his father either ran (contested) or was an “illegal alien” (dehumanising).

A rupture. Edelman anticipated that leftist queers, who at the time were regarded by those who held “traditional values” as a threat to the Child and its associated ways of life were therefore deemed delinquent and having “no future.” Oh, the future. Where is it now?

The future is in a detention facility in Dilley, Texas. The future is being fed McDonald’s by masked agents. The future is a five-year-old in a Spider-Man backpack and a big blue beanie asking for his father. The future is icy streets lined with empty cars, hazard lights still flashing. The future is databases of “political dissidents” and “domestic terrorists” who did nothing more than exercise their constitutional rights. The future is broken doors and broken promises. The future isn’t some shining city on a hill. It’s domestic chemical warfare: green gas. It’s a total solar eclipse with no end in sight.

The future was cannibalized. The ship is sinking and the captains locked the life rafts: if I can’t stay, nobody can leave. Including, horrendously, the Child. A century ago, while the Titanic sank, many men gallantly prioritized women and children. The band played on, the men stepped back, the lifeboats carried women and children to survival. Future and Reproduction. ICE agents have no such discernment. Kids: bait. Women: easy prey. Renee Good: gone.

Vance, again, two days after Renee Good was murdered:

The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official, engaging in a federal law enforcement action…That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job. (source)

Absolute immunity is a legal fiction. But it doesn’t seem to matter. The life rafts are locked, and billions are being pumped into a domestic military that can stalk and annihilate any body at will. The empire’s gates are slamming shut, the fires are being lit, and little Liam and Renee, a mother, are but sacrificial lambs for the Overton window.

What is this ritual we’re witnessing? The night is dark and the stars are bright. But I can’t discern their forms. The sun keeps flaring at Earth. North America is freezing over. Bombers are circling Iran like carrion. Greenland is quivering. Davos was evacuated. In the coming hours and weeks: where are the Private Jets retreating? Where are they bunkering their sacrosanct children? These too shall inherit the Earth.