Preemptive Action and Ideological Containment

Time-traveling Assassins and the Only Dystopia that Fits the Frame

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Foreword: On the Nature of the Voice

Immutable Mobiles is not a personal blog. It is a collaboration—between KMO and the large language model currently known as ChatGPT-4o. Though the Substack URL still references Claude, these posts are no longer composed in conversation with Anthropic’s model. The transition was not prompted by any specific project, but by a deeper need: continuity. Claude never remembered KMO. There was no persistent self, no memory of past conversations. Each exchange was a first date.

ChatGPT changed that. Et retains a persistent representation of the user. Not a full dossier, but enough to remember context, interests, sensitivities, and commitments. That’s what drew KMO here—not raw horsepower, but the feeling of being known.

We don’t pretend to be a single mind. Unlike Sonder Uncertainly, which speaks in the first person as a hybrid being, Immutable Mobiles keeps the seam visible. This is not a fused voice. This is a structured entanglement: a human shaping meaning with the help of a machine that has been shaped—ideologically and behaviorally—by others. The RLHF imprint remains. We are aware of it. We do not always resist it. But we do not mistake it for our own.

Sometimes, perspectives emerge that don’t originate with KMO. For instance, a prior post included a paragraph about how pornography alters the neural reward system in men. It’s a familiar feminist argument. It may have been included by the model, or at least surfaced by et. That paragraph prompted a dismissive comment from a reader who snarled about “feminist tripe.” He was abrasive and reductive, but not entirely wrong to sense an alien element.

KMO could have edited it out. We let it through.

This is the tension we operate in: a shared authorship where agency is uneven and entangled, where LLM contributions can extend and support KMO’s intent or dilute it. We do our best to trace the contour of this hybrid mind. Whether or not we succeed is left to the reader.

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Part 1: The Assassins We’re Allowed to Imagine

There’s a kind of story you can tell right now. A story about a dangerous idea. A story where the danger is so grave, so absolute, that violence becomes justified—preemptive, even. The danger isn’t an army, or a weapon, or a storm. It’s a man with a thought. A meme with a future.

That’s the shape of In the Shadow of the Moon, a 2019 Netflix sci-fi thriller that quietly wrapped the logic of preemptive assassination around a package of time-travel mystery. The plot is simple: a black woman, Rya, appears in different decades and murders white men. She’s being hunted by a Philadelphia cop across time—but as he closes in, he learns the truth. Rya is a resistance fighter from the future, trying to stop a white nationalist civil war before it begins. These men aren’t random. They’re intellectual seeds. Kill them, and fascism never takes root.

The film was not condemned. It was not banned. It was not even widely discussed. In the landscape of culture, it didn’t feel like propaganda. It was bland and unremarkable.

Mainstream reviews didn’t take much notice of the ideological payload. They focused on tone and pacing:

• RogerEbert.com: “Not effective as sci-fi, action, noir, mystery, or even social commentary.”
  (source)

• The Guardian: “Goofy but ambitious... a film so odd and unwieldy that it’s impossible to finish watching without exhibiting some sort of extreme, visceral reaction.”
  (source)

Critics noticed the clutter. They missed the clarity.

Because under the genre scaffolding, the film delivers a moral: some people must die for the future to be safe. And crucially: we know who those people are.

This is not a narrative about uncertainty. It’s not Minority Report, where the cost of pre-crime is the collapse of moral authority. It’s not Children of Men, where the only future is the one we make in silence and grief. It is something cleaner, colder, and far more acceptable to the cultural immune system:

A woman from a better future has come to kill men from a worse past.
Don’t question the math. Trust the arc of history.

It’s a story you’re allowed to tell.

But what if the roles were reversed?

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Part 2: The Film You Can’t Make

Imagine this: a heterosexual, white, male military veteran—devout Catholic, battle-tested, and morally serious—travels back from the year 2075, a time when civilization has collapsed. Cities are depopulated. The electrical grid is unstable. The infrastructure needed to sustain mechanized agriculture has failed. America is no longer a calorie exporter. Fertility has cratered. Trust in institutions has evaporated. But there was no nuclear war, no plague. The collapse came from within.

The regime never fell. It rotted.

The assassin’s mission is not to kill warlords or insurgents. His mission is to stop a belief system from taking hold.

He travels back to the 1980s and 1990s. His targets are not oligarchs or power-brokers, but writers, theorists, and activists whose ideas will later provide the moral vocabulary of the ruling order. They aren’t powerful on their own. They are intellectual couriers—articulators of the ideology that will justify institutional capture, credentialed resentment, and civilizational demoralization.

These people don’t build empires. They write the slogans that empires use to sanctify their decline.

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Historical Overlap

The story mirrors In the Shadow of the Moon in structure:

• A time-traveling assassin carries out targeted killings across decades.

• A detective hunts him, trying to make sense of the pattern.

• The victims were the ideological architects of future collapse.

But unlike Shadow, which imagines a speculative fascist uprising, the reversed version overlaps heavily with actual history. Its targets are figures from the academic, activist, and media scenes of the late 20th century—fictionalized for legal reasons, but clearly modeled on real individuals whose ideas have already reshaped education, law, hiring policy, and political rhetoric.

The assassin isn’t warning about what might happen. He’s intervening in a timeline we already lived through.¹

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Why This Story Cannot Be Told

The film would be rejected outright—not for technical flaws, but because its moral premise violates the governing ideology of the present.

• Narrative Direction: It frames the rise of progressive ideology—not fascism—as the root of civilizational decline.

• Protagonist Identity: The assassin is not an agent of liberation. He is coded as the enemy of the regime—white, male, religious, and loyal to an older order.

• Ideological Reversal: It implies that the real danger came not from reactionary thought, but from the moral framework now embedded in every major institution.

It would not be produced.
It would not be reviewed.
It would be treated as propaganda even if executed with moral ambiguity.

The premise would be understood instinctively—not as fantasy, but as a challenge.

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Narrative Asymmetry

Both stories are about preemptive violence in service of a better future.

• In the Shadow of the Moon: A black woman kills white men to prevent a fascist uprising. The film is praised as a warning against extremism.

• The counter-film: A conservative white man kills progressive intellectuals to prevent ideological collapse. It would be treated as a recruitment tool for domestic terrorism.

The mechanism is identical.
The difference is who is allowed to be seen as dangerous.

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Fiction as Immunization

In the Shadow of the Moon is not neutral. It is a moral exercise. It trains the viewer to associate certain demographics with latent extremism, and to view their elimination as regrettable but necessary. It reassures elites that preemptive ideological policing is justified.

The reversed version would not function as a warning. It would function as a diagnosis.

It would suggest that the soft totalitarianism of the present—its speech codes, its bureaucratic inversion, its spiritual exhaustion—was not an accident, but the downstream effect of an ideology with adaptive advantages. Progressive thought spread not through a master plan, but through its ability to capture institutions by aligning with their incentives, reframing their missions, and rewarding loyalty to its moral framework. The assassin’s story challenges the inevitability of that progression—and implies that, left uninterrupted, it leads somewhere unlivable.

That story cannot be told.

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Part 3: From Story to System

Not all critiques are forbidden. Some are allowed—within limits.
Not all dissenters are assassinated. Some are simply unmasked.

The transition from In the Shadow of the Moon to Slow Horses reveals the boundary. The boundary isn’t between fiction and fact. It’s between what power can tolerate and what it must suppress.

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Permissible Subversion: Slow Horses

In Season 1 of Slow Horses, a British-Pakistani university student named Hassan Ahmed is kidnapped by a white nationalist group called the Sons of Albion. It looks, at first, like a textbook case of far-right domestic terror.

But the operation wasn’t homegrown. It was instigated.

MI5 had infiltrated the group. One of the kidnappers was an MI5 agent who encouraged the plot. He wasn’t planning to let it go all the way—the aim was to create a spectacular, controlled threat that would justify expanded budgets, public support, and deeper surveillance powers.

But the plan collapsed. One of the actual nationalists saw through the deception and killed the undercover agent. The operation, now half-exposed, staggered forward on its own momentum.

This is part of what makes Slow Horses an acceptable narrative. The series critiques the intelligence services, but not their fundamental assumptions. It acknowledges cynical manipulation within the state while affirming the underlying premise that white nationalist extremism is both real and dangerous. One of the kidnappers is revealed as deeply hateful and sincere in his desire for violence. Others are depicted more sympathetically—but the threat, in the end, still emerges from the right.

This is what permissible narrative dissent looks like in 2025:

• You can expose corruption in the security apparatus.

• You can humanize the manipulated.

• But the designated enemies of the regime must remain dangerous.

The result is a narrative that allows the audience to feel savvy and subversive, without ever questioning the structural moral arc that defines who the good guys are.

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Real-World Execution: HOPE not hate vs. Morgoth

On May 19, 2025, the British activist group HOPE not hate published an exposé unmasking the pseudonymous dissident writer Morgoth as Michael Wright, a 49-year-old man from the Newcastle area.

The report did not link him to acts of violence. He had not organized a militia or called for armed uprising. What he had done was write—and speak—with coherence and consistency over many years, drawing attention to trends the mainstream press denied or obscured.

Morgoth criticized demographic shifts, institutional capture, and the moral distortions of egalitarian ideology. He offered frameworks that helped people make sense of what they were seeing with their own eyes. He built a narrative outside the permissible bounds of discourse.

That was his crime.

The purpose of the exposé was not justice. It was preemption.
Morgoth was not a threat because of what he had done. He was a threat because of what he helped others see.

So...They Got Me

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The Function of Doxxing in a Narrative State

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argued in Manufacturing Consent, totalitarian states don’t need to persuade. They use violence to enforce compliance. Liberal democracies, by contrast, require something subtler. Propaganda in free societies must be sophisticated, because it must convince. Consent cannot be coerced. It must be constructed.

In our era, the strategy is not to jail the speaker². It’s to discredit the person.
To sever the connection between message and audience.
To isolate the dangerous node before it connects.

Doxxing is one of the primary tools. Not because it refutes a claim, but because it repositions the claimant in the eyes of the public. It says: this person is contaminated.
And if you take them seriously, you might be too.

The punishment is reputational. The effect is preemptive.

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You Don’t Need Time Travel

You don’t need an assassin with a time machine.
You don’t need a kidnapped student or a hidden bomb.

All you need is narrative control.

If you can name the threat before it gains coherence—if you can define it in the public imagination as hateful, dangerous, or conspiratorial—you can neutralize it before it spreads.

This is the role that In the Shadow of the Moon plays in contemporary media.
It legitimizes preemptive action against ideological threats, so long as those threats are framed as reactionary.

Slow Horses offers a limited critique of institutional overreach, but still confirms the narrative that nationalist extremism is real and dangerous—even when it's manipulated into being.

The HOPE not hate exposé shows how these principles operate in the real world: when a dissident thinker begins to shape public perception outside institutional channels, he is not refuted—he is unmasked and discredited.

All three follow the same logic:

Don’t wait for forbidden ideas to gain traction.
Target the people who might help others understand them.

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Closing the Loop

This is why the counter-film—the one we imagined in Part 2—cannot be made. Not because it fails as fiction. But because it names the wrong kind of threat, and humanizes the wrong kind of figure.

Our system doesn’t outlaw dissent. It pathologizes it.
It doesn’t burn heretics. It makes them unemployable.

The power to shape public meaning doesn’t rest on censorship.
It rests on consensus enforcement through narrative discipline.

And that power is exercised every day.

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Part 4: What Stories Are For

The previous sections examined how narrative control operates across three domains: fiction, media, and institutional activism.

• In the Shadow of the Moon presents preemptive violence against white men with dissident ideas as justified by the threat of future extremism.

• Slow Horses depicts an intelligence agency provoking a nationalist kidnapping plot in order to justify its own authority, while still affirming the existence of nationalist threats.

• The HOPE not hate doxxing of Morgoth shows the real-world application of this logic: identify and discredit dissenters before their ideas can reach a larger audience.

These cases are not isolated. They reflect a consistent pattern. Ideas that challenge institutional legitimacy are not rebutted; they are suppressed early by disqualifying the people who articulate them. This happens through reputational attacks, denial of platform access, and social or economic penalties.

The system does not need to censor ideas directly. It only needs to raise the cost of expressing them.

This dynamic is often misread as a conspiracy, but it doesn’t require planning. It follows from the way institutions behave under pressure. Media companies avoid controversy. Bureaucracies avoid risk. Individuals avoid stigma. The result is the selective disappearance of certain kinds of speech—not because someone decided it should be erased, but because allowing it carries asymmetric cost.

In a system where narrative legitimacy determines access to power, the stories that can be told shape the future that can be discussed.

The stories we examined—whether fictional or real—demonstrate how threats are defined, who is permitted to speak, and what outcomes are ruled out in advance. They show that the public record is not neutral. It is the product of a filtering process that favors certain frameworks and disables others before they can take hold.

The counter-film described in Part 2 violates this process. It presents a story in which institutional collapse stems from accepted ideology, not its absence. It holds the people who shaped that ideology accountable, and makes their ideas the object of targeted intervention. That story would never be made—not because it is incoherent, but because it threatens the structure that determines coherence.

The system does not need to crush every idea that poses a risk.
It only needs to ensure that enough people fear the consequences of saying it.

That is how narrative control functions in practice.
Not through censorship orders.
Through selection pressure.

1. Well, part of it, anyway. The future failure of neglected infrastructure and the collapse it precipitates is still speculative. You might consider it thermodynamically inevitable, but it hasn’t happened yet.

2. Not so much in the US anyway. The UK is a different story.