It's Great To Be Back
How Vision Loss Helped Me To See Things Better
Blast From The Past
The last time I posted out here, Joe Biden was president and his party’s presumptive nominee. Donald Trump was on trial for crimes punishable by multiple life sentences, and was his party’s presumptive nominee. JD Vance was not bumping much over 5 WPM (words per million artifacts) in the news. ChatGPT was averaging just under ubiquity at 42 WPM. COVID was linguistically dead, down 24% in the first half of the year, while TRANS related terms were soaring.
Chased Into Wrong Bathroom… Then Phone Rings
Meanwhile, I was locked in combat with my own demons, both natural and unnatural.
First there was the series of spinal surgeries that had left one leg partially paralyzed. Then there was the Stage 3 cancer that had to be surgically removed. It still seems to be in remission. Then there was the campaign by new management to find a way to have me fired and replaced with their fair-haired boy. I lawyered up, management eventually backed down.
In the midst of all of this, a friendly voice from HR Wellness called to see how I was doing. Typically, employees who had been through what I had been through would go out on short-term leave, she explained, to focus on their recovery. Would I be interested in availing myself of the wellness benefit? Yes, I said. I would be very interested.
Part of the documentation for my ninety-day leave included submitting my medical records to the company’s disability insurance provider. It wasn’t the spinal issues or the cancer that got their attention, but a rare, genetically-driven retinal disorder I’d been living around for the past twenty years. You need to get this checked, they said, and sent me to a specialist.
“You’ve had a hell of a run, Mr. Oxenhorn,” the doctor informed me, “but you are legally blind and should not be operating a vehicle of any kind. And you should not be working at this kind of job. I know that will be distressing to hear, but these results tell me you’ve already begun to sense that for yourself. Am I right or am I right?”
“I spend half of my day looking for shit that’s right in front of me,” I confessed. “And I run into glass doors and find myself in the ladies’ room because I gotta pee and can’t find the signs.”
Where Women Are Forever Twenty-One
That was all the doctor needed to hear. He also notified the State Commission for the Blind. I went on permanent disability. My employer let me go generously. We say nice things about each other now.
And that’s the very short story of how I went from working for the greatest city in the world into permanent exile from the workforce.
During the past year or so of pilgrimaging about the few research hospitals that are looking for a cure for this thing, I can’t say I’ve focused much on recovery. Treatment is something still very much out there in the future. But I have thrown my name into a lot of hats for clinical trials, tried out some nifty technology, and downloaded some amazing apps.
I’m also able to move around a lot more confidently. I don’t bang into glass doors or find myself in the ladies’ room now thanks to my new blue glasses and white cane. Kids and dogs are fascinated by the cane— the way it collapses and expands like a massive yo-yo with this cue ball at the end that can roll in any direction. Those encounters really make my day. Also the women now all look like they are twenty-one. So there are some benefits to living in a dream-like state.
Less Vision, More Sight
Nevertheless, I am always mindful that darkness is coming, and somewhere a clock is getting ready to strike forever o’clock. And that has helped me to see things more clearly. Things that are not urgent, but simply are—
Like where the first Da Vinci lay hidden for two hundred and fifty years
And where all the icons are hiding in a world cluttered with idols.
Like what you must do to achieve real immortality.
And what’s making people so degenerate these days.
Like how past generations are shunned by the descendants they prayed for.
And how absurdly easy it has become to steal an election with just an iPad.
Decoding The Atrocity Algorithm
All of which have absolutely nothing to do with what this column has been about— analyzing the lifecycles of keywords injected into the media for the purpose of preparing the populace for government-sponsored atrocities. These malwords, as I have called them, follow a predictable curve—The Malwords Curve— and have been reliable prognosticators of uniformed lawlessness as far back as Black Wall Street. Malwords came into their own on a national scale during the mass incarceration of citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. We witnessed a similar pattern of government-media collusion under COVID, with the abuse of January 6 detainees and truckers’ crackdowns templating the fates of those who refused to comply.
Why COVID Failed
What kept that from happening—at least linguistically— was the Ukraine War, which sucked all the WPM’s out of the COVID malword cohort. It also didn’t help to have someone who belonged in a nursing home as your spokes-puppet. If you are serious about firing, felonizing, debanking, and incarcerating half your population, you need a steely-eyed, iron-willed executive leading from the front. But the Woke junta hiding behind Joe Biden never had the courage to show their faces. Had Kamala been competent or Hillary been in charge, the outcome would’ve been very different.
From Suicidal Empathy to HomicidaI Mercy
But that was then and this is now. And now we have a word for it: propaganda media. Which, far from going out of existence, has upgraded from its mission of preaching suicidal empathy to demanding homicidal mercy— that you do the greatest good for the world and for those who disagree with you by exterminating them.
And you don’t stop until they are all dead. This much we learn from the Holy Koran and from the great imam Hakeem Jeffries’ whose malwords calling for “total and complete warfare” have justified three assassination attempts, and a bullseye on Charlie Kirk, praise be to Allah.
Loving Your Neighbor Starts With Your Neighborhood
Yes— yesterday’s battles are still waiting for you to fight them, most of them on pure principle, but some with generous sign-on bonuses.
Yes—you can fight other people’s wars. Or you can seek the peace of the city into which you have been sent as an exile, quoth the prophet Jeremiah. I’m not saying it’s a binary either/or, but for me it’s increasingly less about the enemies I can’t see, and more about the friends I can. You can love your neighbor in Gaza, in Tel Aviv, or on the zoom call. Or you can love your neighborhood.
Which is harder, but suddenly more attractive. Because there’s a certain sense— as you are forced to live more by faith and less by sight— of hands reaching through to help, from both around and beyond. Hands not urgent, but there. And when time gets short or you lose your driver’s license, you tend to pay attention to such things.
Life Is A Contact Sport… Until It Isn’t
Some will respond, “Well that may be easy for you to say, walking around in dark glasses, parting crowds with a staff of many colors. But for the rest of us life is still a contact sport.”
It is until it isn’t.
And that day comes like a thief in the night. I was not at all prepared for it. I did not want it. I was anticipating my best years were yet to come. But here I am now, in exile from the job I loved and had worked over a decade to be selected for— securing a city that never sleeps, working with the greatest public safety organization in the world, with experts at the tops of their games, people who even when you disagree make you better at what you do.
And I’m out.
Working on Mysteries Without Any Clues
I guess I could try to claw my way back. But all things, they say, happen for a reason—even if it’s for an unreason. And so what I’m not going to do is seek another city whose builder and maker is God—by re-naming or “re-branding” this page with some catchy new name, some exciting new theme, or some high-minded new mission, and slapping AI all over the place.
I think I’ll just try to be consistent with the arc of my own character, own what I have been, embrace what I am becoming, and write about things that— if not now—may one day equip you to solve your own mysteries without any clues.
Because, trust me, they will find you, too.
And I’ll keep it loose and keep the light on with the Malwords title. Because, hey, you never know. Maybe after ‘28— if the lights haven’t yet gone out— I’ll go back to “exposing the globalist dictatorship, one keyword at a time.” So for the time being, to paraphrase one of the last century’s last great minds, Britney Spears:
It is what it is, and I am what I am
Let me know your thoughts?
Harvey Oxenhorn, is a former cybersecurity consultant, founder of Malwords Weekly, and author of the upcoming book, Her Lost Boys: The Eternal Life of Ginevra de’ Benci (1520-2020). Follow him on X @HarvOxenhorn, and on Facebook and Instagram @Gatsby’s Angel
About Malwords
Malwords are keywords weaponized for information warfare. They function within public discourse as intellectual malware, verbal viruses designed to spread quickly for the purposes of a) silencing dissent through control of language, narrative, and speech, b) increasing public tolerance for government-sanctioned atrocity and c) emboldening officials to commit acts of atrocity.
Malword strength is measured by their frequency of appearance in the published body of language (corpus), and expressed in words per million (WPM) linguistic units (words, numbers, symbols, acronyms, etc).
Malword WPM’s typically follow a three-phase lifecycle: Pre-Curve test-markets the new term and puts up the store front; Curve, or Core, is launch phase, characterized by a rapid, exponential liftoff and sudden plunge; Post-Curve is a long, asymptotic tail and is the period in which primary-objective atrocities are implemented.
I just reread this out loud to my partner. It was worth it. There's a lot said there. I can only hope you say more. I'll be praying for you.
Happy you’re back! Keep battling.