REVOLUTIONARY AUTOPSY

Daniel Woods inherited the perfect American lie—and spent twenty years watching it disintegrate in restaurant grease and borderlands heat.

Many generations of his family bought empire's seductive mythology whole. Virginia sharecroppers who "advanced" to Indian Territory, believing relocation meant progress. Dust Bowl refugees fleeing devastation down Route 66, convinced California promised salvation. Great-grandfathers who bled on opposite sides of WWII—both believing their sacrifices served something greater. A grandfather drafted for Vietnam as a conscientious objector, healing bodies yet still feeding the war machine; his father joining Desert Storm chasing advancement that never materialized. Every generation believed white skin, hard work, and military service guaranteed escape from working-class reality.

Growing up in New Mexico's militarized borderlands, Woods received his imperial education surrounded by Indigenous massacre sites and Mexican land seizures hidden under stories of honorable conquest. Twenty years in restaurant kitchens revealed the brutal truth of what the conquest was always about: "essential" jobs treated like post-bellum service work, degrading by design for no reason except society demanding it.

The 2014 police murder of James Boyd shattered his remaining illusions. Watching leaked footage of Albuquerque officers killing a homeless man simply for sleeping outdoors, then joining thousands in the streets, Woods experienced collective outrage that transcended individual perspective. That Albuquerque Police should kill a man for seeking rest on the very land defining the state's identity revealed empire's core contradiction—it destroys what it claims to protect.

The protests drove Woods to his first publication, a moderate appeal for institutional reform in the Daily Lobo. But institutional learning was already failing him. After dropping out of high school for restaurant work, he'd earned his GED at 21 and entered UNM planning a profitable career in mechanical engineering. Within three semesters, academic frameworks began decoding the "disparate things" he'd experienced but couldn't name. He pivoted toward constitutional law, then sociology, criminology, and public health, moving between kitchen shifts and constitutional law classes—someone living the class realities being merely theorized.

Pursuing degrees in Political Science, and then Organization, Information, and Learning Sciences, revealed how institutions manufacture consent and reproduce mythology. What he found in the “Land of Entrapment” was personally abhorrent: a slow unraveling of artificial identity that had always felt natural. Academic tools revealed empire's seductive mechanics, but Boyd's murder proved understanding wasn't enough—that moderate appeals only serve the machine.

His upcoming debut "Star-Spangled Serpent" employs "anticipatory realism" to show where white mythology leads when imperial contradictions intensify. Corporate feudalism. Climate collapse. Democratic erosion. All predictable outcomes of existing power structures.

This isn't external critique. This is revolutionary autopsy from someone raised inside the machine—who knows exactly how it manufactures consent among its most exploited foot soldiers.


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