Blood Work

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

Gareth and Gregk reconvene to tell the second chapter in the C18 saga which, naturally, features some sunlit uplands, a Swedish man named ‘Pie’, and a wizard.

Follow Gareth Watkins on Bluesky

Read his recent article, “Has Ukip Gone Full Nazi?” in The New Statesman
Read his excellent essay, “AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism” in New Socialist
Listen to the Death // Sentence podcast

Image: A title card from a C18 propaganda video tape, sourced from the third World in Action documentary about the group.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

 

For more:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: SURGES, EMISSIONS, FLOWS
ALSO AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

Following a few weeks in which the news has focused heavily on events which continue to unfold in Minneapolis and the broader United States, this week we’re shifting the focus to West Africa and the Middle East, to two conflict zones which still swirl and churn amidst the fallout of the 2011 Arab Spring, and the long first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Gareth and Gregk discuss what happens when a group of football hooligans decide to elevate their violent bloodlust into a fully-fledged political movement. (Spoiler: Bad, stupid things.)

Follow Gareth Watkins on Bluesky

Read his recent article, “Has Ukip Gone Full Nazi?” in The New Statesman
Read his excellent essay, “AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism” in New Socialist
Listen to the Death // Sentence podcast

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

If you enjoyed this episode:
– Support Blood Work via Patreon
– Leave a rating or review on your podcast app
– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: OLD WORLD BRB, NEW WORLD AFK
ALSO AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

This week, we took a look at Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent address at Davos in which he declared the end of the ‘rules-based international order’ (while conceding this had always been US hegemony draped in a convenient fiction) plus recent developments regarding Trump’s grotesque Board of Peace foundation, and provide some thoughts on where we now stand, how we got there, and who walked us there, step by step.

Sources:

Nick Lowles (2014 [2001]), White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18

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

We situate the favourite tool in the U.S. arsenal in its historical context, and try to make sense of that silent, peaceful, deadly weapon.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

For more:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – Witness, No Witnesses

This week, we look at two news stories which demonstrate the differing approaches to advancing right-wing politics in the US and UK. The rise of Donald Trump and his dominance of political discourse over the past decade has placed spectacle front-and-centre in our understanding of right-wing thought and, indeed, placed right-wing thought front-and-centre in our perception of dominant political ideology.

But as our second news story hopefully demonstrates, the brazenness of Trump’s particular political style at times serves to aid the advancement of right-wing cruelty and sadism elsewhere, when a comparative lack of ripples across the water creates the illusion that less is occurring beneath the surface.
Now available in audio

Image: An Iraqi mother nurses her sick child at a hospital in Baghdad in 1994. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

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 Ackerman is a national security journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Wired, The Nation, Zeteo and many other publications, and whose career has spanned almost the entirety of the Global War on Terror. In 2014, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his work at The Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures surrounding the NSA’s global surveillance programme.

In 2021, he published Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He also recently wrote a ten-issue run on IRON MAN for Marvel Comics, currently available in two trade paperbacks. His latest book is The Torture and Deliverance of Majid Khan: A Father, A Son and the War on Terror, forthcoming from Penguin.

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

If you enjoyed this episode:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

– Leave a rating or review on your podcast app

– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

 

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

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
This episode was produced by Thomas O’Mahony
Our theme song is ‘Dream Weapon’ by Genghis Tron
Our artwork is provided courtesy of KT Kobel

For more:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

 

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)