Oct 29, 2025
It’s a place of residence. Viscerally, first and foremost, the White House is a place of residence.
In destroying a place of residence—a temporary place of residence where people, who are granted permission, live while serving their terms as a servant of the people—a visceral message is being sent to everyone: You are not safe.
It’s a place of residence. It’s somebody’s home. To see a place of residence destroyed with a disregard and sense of impunity is spine-chilling, with echoes of the monstrous lust for violence we witnessed on January 6, 2021. But the fact that this time it is a place of residence being defaced and demolished is what grips people in their innards. These images of the East Wing, demolished without our consent, grab us by our genitals. This selfish act and the images of it that are circulating are meant to strike us in our private places. When your home is broken into, you are prey: There is a helplessness, a sense of shame, a sense of terror that is animal-like. You feel raped. Because your home is an extension of your body: It’s a layer of yourself that is meant to protect the vulnerable core inside. Like your body, your house is meant to be a safe place for your inner being. When the same person who ordered the demolishment of the East Wing of the White House tore open the curtains of a dressing room in a high-end clothing store and raped a woman, I imagine she froze as we all do now as we watch the daily violations and trespasses against our rights and ourselves that this man is conducting.
This act of violence on the East Wing of the White House was done to intimidate and nauseate. In the same way that a sadistic parent or insane partner, unhinged overlord or syndicate family might kill the family pet first, it’s meant to arouse horror and disgust, and also be a sign of what is yet to come. This act of demolition was done to make people feel unsafe in their own homes, in their own bodies. I’m sure it isn’t just a coincidence that historically the East Wing has been associated with the female spouses of the U.S. presidents. When looking at the photos of the rubble and dangling wires that now remain, it is hard not to think of the rapes and mangled lives this servant of the people has left in his wake.
This so-called president makes up for his limited intellectual abilities with a genius for sending signals to the most primitive part of people’s brains. He doesn’t use words to communicate, he communicates with symbolic sadistic edicts, actions, and performances; maniacal media manipulation using comic book imagery, memes and tweets that work on the insides like pornography. He communicates through theatrical acts of violence made for TV and cellphone screens that send signals to all of us: We are not safe, not in our own homes, not in our own bodies, not in our own minds, which are now constantly invaded by images of savagery and cruelty on city streets and people’s homes on a daily basis. Bachelard famously wrote, “the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” I can only imagine this state of peace is unknown to the predator, but I am certain it is the responsibility of the dreamers to call out what is being desecrated and find a way to stop it.
Published on substack, https://amhoch.substack.com/p/why-the-demolishment-of-the-east.
© AM Hoch
