Richard's Podcast
Discussions of Johnny Pulp
Richard's Podcast
Johnny Pulp's EarlyNovel: The Millenium GM Mutant Lesbian Baby Plague from 2005
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Imagine a world where global capitalism isn't destroyed by, you know, a massive stock market crash or even a unified workers' strike. Right. But instead, it's taken down by an army of hyper-intelligent, telekinetic, Marxist newborn babies.
SPEAKER_01I mean, it sounds like an absolute fever dream, but that is exactly the premise we are looking at today.
SPEAKER_00It really is. So welcome to another deep dive. Today, our mission is to explore one of the most bizarre, ultra-violent, and frankly hyper-polarized source text we've ever encountered.
SPEAKER_01Oh, definitely.
SPEAKER_00It's a story titled The Millennium GM Killer Mutant Lesbian Baby Plague.
SPEAKER_01Quite a title.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And we are going to trace the chronological and ideological escalation of this literal genetic apocalypse for you. Our goal is to help you understand how this text uses extreme, unrelenting gore and radical political warfare as a vehicle for a very specific, surreal kind of satire.
SPEAKER_01And um, before we get into the details, I do need to step in and make a very explicit disclaimer here. Good call. Yeah, because this source material contains extreme, highly polarizing, and politically charged content originating from both the far left and the far right. Right. So it is absolutely crucial to make it clear to you, the listener, that we as hosts are completely impartial. We are taking no sides here at all.
SPEAKER_00None whatsoever.
SPEAKER_01Right. We are not endorsing any of the violent, extremist, or radical viewpoints depicted in this narrative. Our job today is purely analytical. We are simply reporting on the ideas, events, and thematic mechanisms contained in the original text just to understand how the satire actually functions.
SPEAKER_00Okay, let's unpack this because the genesis of this plague is just wild.
SPEAKER_01It really is.
SPEAKER_00So we start with Karen. She's a working-class single mother who has just given birth to a daughter, Allison Finchley.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And Karen is squatting in these empty cottages, basically trying to survive in a world she views as fundamentally rigged against her.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, she's desperate.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So out in a field, she lets her newborn ingest some illegal genetically modified barley. And well, the result isn't just a stomachache.
SPEAKER_01No, not at all.
SPEAKER_00It is an instant terrifying biological transformation.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell The mutation is just staggering. I mean, Alison doesn't just grow quickly, her IQ immediately spikes to 11 million.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell 11 million.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. She develops super strength, telekinetic abilities, and most notably, she instantly acquires this highly articulated, militant, left-wing, feminist, and post-colonial political agenda.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Which is insane.
SPEAKER_01It is. She literally speaks in dense academic theory right out of the swaddling bands.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell, which is such a bizarre image, right? You have a literal infant dispensing post-structuralist critiques of patriarchal hegemony. Exactly. And if you're listening to this and wondering what that even means in this context, it's essentially the academic theory that society is built on these hidden power structures designed to keep men in charge and everyone else down.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00But the joke the text is making is really about the delivery. The author is mocking how dense, impenetrable academic theory is usually completely detached from the physical, violent reality it proposes. Yes. And Allison bridges that gap by backing up her college-level sociology lectures with extreme graphic violence.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. There is a scene early on where a neo-Nazi Sunday League football team, who are literally called the Tory Rich fuckers, tries to attack her. Oh wow. Yeah. And Allison essentially turns into a sci-fi monster and melts their brains with what the text calls zonk beams of pure intellectualism.
SPEAKER_00Zonk beams.
SPEAKER_01It's totally absurd, just blood and gunge exploding everywhere, which actually becomes a major repeating motif.
SPEAKER_00It really does. And any representative of the established order gets the exact same treatment. Yeah. Like there's a corrupt, racist police officer named Bob Rosser who tries to intervene. And Alison just aggressively lectures him on his complicity in false class consciousness before turning his brain into splurged, porridge-like snot. So gross. And then later, she slaughters an entire countryside alliance march just by glaring at them with terror hate waves.
SPEAKER_01Right. So the text establishes a really clear mechanism here. Any representative of the right-wing, patriarchal, or capitalist system is met with instant, overwhelming biological force.
SPEAKER_00Let me stop you there, though, because I am struggling a bit with the internal logic of this.
SPEAKER_01Okay, what do you mean?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Well, the text presents Allison as this ultimate agent of liberation, right? Making these conscious, highly intellectual arguments against oppressive structures.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But isn't she just a killing machine programmed by GM Barley?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And the text goes out of its way to show that this kind of biological warfare is already brewing in this world anyway, because there's a brief detour where Karen and Allison travel to New York.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, funded by the stolen credit cards of an anthropologist they held hostage.
SPEAKER_00Naturally. And in New York, they encounter an AIDS activist named D. Drug Milky. Right. She's part of an underground group that is intentionally using the virus as a biological weapon against the elite.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, and she actually infects a right-wing anti-gay Republican senator through a violent sexual encounter before dying from the beating he gives her.
SPEAKER_00It's so grotesque.
SPEAKER_01It is. But structurally, it shows us that using biology as a political weapon isn't unique to Allison. It's just that D-drug Munkey is using a slow, flawed weapon.
SPEAKER_00Right, which totally sets up the transition. A localized biological weapon is one thing. But how do you take a localized threat and turn it into a global extinction event? Like how does this mutation actually scale?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Well, by removing the need for a host entirely. Yeah. Allison returns to London and suddenly her waters break. She hasn't made it or anything. She has become pregnant through sheer genetic self-replication.
SPEAKER_00She's spontaneously.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. At the South Bank, she gives birth to twins, Mildred and Bree, and then instantly dies, her biological clock just completely exhausted.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell But the nightmare is just starting there. Because Mildred immediately gives birth to twins.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And then one of those twins gives birth to twins. In a matter of hours, they have bred an exponential army of hyper-intelligent, superpowered militant babies. And their first target as an army is, ironically, a mother care store. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Which is, you know, the ultimate symbol of commercialized infancy. Exactly. They swarm the store, completely overrun it, and slaughter the manager, Tom Brightman. And the text paints him as a deeply misogynistic classist tyrant.
SPEAKER_00But the crucial part is what they do after they kill him. They don't just destroy the store, they radicalize a working-class employee named Millie Drank. Right. They surround her, lecture her on the systematic exploitation of her class and gender, and actually inspire her to walk out and start a civil rights leftist group.
SPEAKER_01So they weaponize both physical force and intellectual persuasion simultaneously.
SPEAKER_00Exactly.
SPEAKER_01But seizing a retail store is really just the warm-up, though. This is where the satire shifts from physical violence to systemic destruction.
SPEAKER_00Here's where it gets really interesting. Because the babies take their looted prams down the high street, face off against the police, and then hack into a local Nat West bank.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_00And because their IQs are in the millions, they don't just deal money, they write a computer virus that permanently erases all global financial records.
SPEAKER_01Everything.
SPEAKER_00Debts, savings, corporate accounts, mortgages, just everything. They destroy global electronic capitalism overnight.
SPEAKER_01What's fascinating here is how the text uses these literal infants to enact the ultimate Marxist fantasy, you know, the complete and instant destruction of capitalist infrastructure. Right. And the narrative actually stops the action right there to explore the philosophical debate that erupts in the aftermath. With all electronic records gone, economists and philosophers in the text start arguing about the very nature of money itself.
SPEAKER_00Right, because if you delete a bank record, the physical bank still exists.
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_00The physical factories still exist. So why does the world halt?
SPEAKER_01Right. And the debate centers on whether money was just a shared illusion, like an abstract figment of the mind, or an actual material reality. Because the moment the digital numbers vanish, human trust vanishes, and the physical world just grinds to a halt.
SPEAKER_00It's so true.
SPEAKER_01The text turns money into postmodern kitsch, an empty, invisible concept that solely regulated human behavior. The babies prove that the only way to destroy an entrenched, invisible system like capitalism is with an equally pervasive, uncontrollable biological force.
SPEAKER_00But you know, erasing the rules doesn't create a utopia. If you wipe out global finance, you create this massive, terrifying power vacuum.
SPEAKER_01Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And society is a lot like a human body. The established order is the host body. The babies are this radical, highly contagious virus tearing through the system.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And when a host body is threatened by a massive viral load, the immune system doesn't just ask nicely for it to leave, it overreacts. It triggers a massive, fatal autoimmune response. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01That is a perfect way to look at it. The immune system in this text is the extreme right-wing counter-revolution. And its white blood cell is a man named Ponce Uber.
SPEAKER_00Ponce Uber. Yeah. He is a massive, hyperviolent neo-Nazi who becomes the figurehead of this fascist backlash. Right. He's built like a tank, completely fueled by supremacist hatred. But he's not an idiot. Yeah. He knows you can't fight a war with just fists. You need optics. You need the public on your side.
SPEAKER_01You need a spectacle.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So his forces launch a devastating, highly visible attack on the Millennium Dome using lasers and firebombs.
SPEAKER_01They literally turn the dome into a blazing inferno, deliberately slaughtering innocents just to ensure the cameras point their way.
SPEAKER_00And the media absolutely eats it up. We meet Honey Cloy, who is this ruthless television reporter. She doesn't condemn the violence of the dome. She sees a career-making exclusive. Oh, totally. She literally trades sexual favors to Ponce Uber and takes a physical beating from his henchmen, all just to secure a primetime interview with him.
SPEAKER_01The satire here is just biting. It's pointing out that modern media, at its core, doesn't care about ideology. It only cares about engagement. Yep. Honey Gloy catapults his fascist agenda right into mainstream living rooms because fascism is just good for writings. The media will co-awk any extreme if it drives viewership.
SPEAKER_00Spoiler alert for Honey Gloy, though. Her ambition catches up to her later when Dolores, who is Karen's radical hooker friend, beats her to death and stuffs her in a dustbin for trying to exploit their story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that does happen.
SPEAKER_00But the damage is done by then. Ponsuber has the platform, he has massive funding from terrified elites, and he converts the ruined Millennium Dome into what he calls the Millennium Oven.
SPEAKER_01Which is just terrifying. It's a massive blue-lit industrial complex, a literal death camp. Captured mutant babies are shipped in on the Jubilee line. Inside, they are tortured, experimented on by state and private doctors testing chemical weapons, and finally incinerated in a thousand ovens. The sky over London just turns black with the smoke.
SPEAKER_00It is horrifying. It's the absolute extreme of industrialized bureaucratic genocide deployed against the extreme biological anomaly of the babies. Right. And this pendulum swing is wild. The societal disruption initiated by the left-wing babies created the exact chaotic vacuum that fascists need to thrive and legitimize total control.
SPEAKER_01Disruption always breeds a demand for extreme order. But if we connect this to the bigger picture, the real tragedy is that neither the babies bleeding on the streets nor the neo-Nazis burning them are actually pulling the strings of this apocalypse.
SPEAKER_00No. And this is the wildest pivot in the text. We have to talk about the true puppet master, Gerald Reichmann.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00We leave the burning skyline of London and zoom into a tiny, mundane, terraced house in Sheffield. Reichman is a 30-stone bean-eating, chain-smoking, darts-playing geneticist.
SPEAKER_01Just a totally normal sounding guy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he lives this incredibly ordinary working-class life, but he literally owns 90% of the human genome.
SPEAKER_01And his backstory recontextualizes everything we've read so far. Reichman is actually a disguised Sikh ex-terrorist. Right. He originally went by the moniker NFBSBC. Back in India, years prior, he engineered an earlier prototype of GM killer babies.
SPEAKER_00Oh wow.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they were specifically programmed to destroy horrific child slavery rings. He waged a successful, brutal biological war against corrupt authorities before fleeing to England and adopting the Reichmann persona.
SPEAKER_00So he actually has a history of using genetically modified babies for radical social engineering. The current baby plague wasn't an accident from a barley field. Reichman engineered the barley.
SPEAKER_01He planned it all.
SPEAKER_00He engineered Allison. And infinitely worse, he programmed a hidden genetic trigger into the baby's DNA. Once they successfully conquer the world and overthrow the global capitalist system, that trigger will activate.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00It will force the entire clone army to submit to his absolute autocratic rule.
SPEAKER_01He is basically using their genuine fight for liberation as a Trojan horse for his own global dictatorship. It is a profound critique of how grassroots revolutionary movements are so frequently hijacked by autocrats waiting in the wings.
SPEAKER_00But while Reichmann waits in Sheffield, the text introduces one of its most grotesque subplots.
SPEAKER_01Oh, here we go.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If you're listening to this and wondering how a story goes from Marxist babies to what I'm about to describe, you really have to look at how the author views extreme consumerism.
SPEAKER_01Right, the gourmet pies.
SPEAKER_00The gourmet pies. A butcher's wife, Maureen Baxter, realizes the streets of London are littered with the corpses of dead mutant babies.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00She drags them into her shop, butchers them, and bakes their meat into these highly exclusive, astronomically expensive gourmet meat pies. It's so dark. And she markets them exclusively to the wealthiest London elites, you know, the bankers, the top-tier conservative politicians.
SPEAKER_01It is the literalization of capitalist consumption. The wealthy elites are physically eating the bodies of the revolutionary working class mutants.
SPEAKER_00But you can't just consume radical biology without side effects.
SPEAKER_01No, you cannot.
SPEAKER_00Maureen, who only nibbles the meat while she's cooking, begins to reverse age, literally turning back into a 20-year-old. The working class extracts vitality from the revolution. But the wealthy elites who gorge on the pies suffer a very, very different fate.
SPEAKER_01They are driven violently insane by their own ideological extremes. The text gives us this horrifying scene with a top city banker Maurice Fu and his wife Anastasia. After eating the pie, Maurice rips out the throats of his own dog. It's brutal. And Anastasia starts spouting hardcore Husserlean philosophy and right-wing foundationalism while actively gouging out her husband's eyes.
SPEAKER_00And we really have to unpack that because why is she screaming about Husserl while committing murder?
SPEAKER_01Exactly.
SPEAKER_00Husserlian philosophy is all about the rigorous fundamental structures of human consciousness. By having an elite socialite spout this incredibly dense foundational philosophy while literally tearing her husband apart, the satire is pointing out that high-minded elite intellectualism is often just a mask for savage self-interest.
SPEAKER_01Right. The elite consume radical ideology, but they can't digest it.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01Their intellectual frameworks break down into literal savagery. Even their servant, who is filled with extreme religious zeal, eventually murders and cannibalizes them both before her own head just explodes. The ruling class is poisoned by the concentration of the ideology they try to consume.
SPEAKER_00It's poetic justice via cannibalism. But while the elites are tearing themselves apart, and Reichmann is just waiting for his victory, the biological clock on his creations is ticking. Right. Which raises a massive problem for Reichman. How does a static programmed ideology survive when its biological host naturally ages and evolves?
SPEAKER_01It leads to phase two. The babies suddenly start breeding entirely, the exponential cloning halts, and the existing babies rapidly mature into 20-year-old, hyper-intelligent, superpowered lesbian bikers.
SPEAKER_00Just an incredible visual.
SPEAKER_01They are no longer vulnerable infants. They are fully realized adult killing machines.
SPEAKER_00The parameters of the war change overnight, and this triggers Reichmann to finally act.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he has to.
SPEAKER_00He sends his superpowered enforcer, a man named Hideous Blackball, who, by the way, got his powers from genetically modified kangaroo codes, just to add another layer of surrealism to this.
SPEAKER_01Naturally.
SPEAKER_00He sends him to infiltrate Ponce Uber's Millennium Oven.
SPEAKER_01So Blackball sneaks into the fascist facility and discovers this horrifying lab where severed baby heads are being kept alive on electrical life support by the state doctors.
SPEAKER_00It's so grim.
SPEAKER_01Blackball unclugs the machines, expecting to just put them out of their misery. Instead, he watches in awe as the severed heads hit the floor and rapidly regenerate into fully grown, phase two adult mutants. Wow. The biological resilience of Reichmann's design is simply unstoppable by human machinery.
SPEAKER_00And this leads to the chaotic climax in the oven. Ponce Uber bursts into the lab, wielding an axe, ready to slaughter them all. Right. Blackball actually tries to reason with him. He tries to explain the truth that they are both just pawns of Gerald Reichman. But Ponce Uber is completely blinded by fanaticism.
SPEAKER_01He doesn't care.
SPEAKER_00No, he attacks. But before he can even land a strike, one of the newly regenerated phase two mutants steps up and with a single punch knocks Blackball's head entirely off his shoulders.
SPEAKER_01The physics of the scene are purely cartoonish, yet grimly effective. Blackball's flying, decapitated head acts as a biological projectile.
SPEAKER_00He's flying across the room.
SPEAKER_01Exactly, smashing directly into Ponce Uber's face. The sheer force knocks the fascist leader backward, straight into one of his own blazing incinerators where he burns to death. Oh man. The symbol of the right-wing counter-revolution is destroyed by the very machinery he build to exterminate his enemies, using the severed head of the man who tried to save him.
SPEAKER_00It is poetic, bizarre, and incredibly messy. But Ponceuber's death doesn't stop the war, it just removes the figurehead.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and the machine keeps going.
SPEAKER_00The text concludes with the revelation that his subordinates, Conrad Batchelard and his seven-foot enforcer, Jimmy Cheese, are taking over. They were organizing a global apocalyptic mega rally in Birmingham, calling on every neo-Nazi on the planet to initiate the final, ultimate bloodbath against the phase two mutants.
SPEAKER_01The text ends on the precipice of absolute, total global war. It offers no neat resolution, no winner, only the promise of escalating, unending conflict.
SPEAKER_00So what does this all mean? If we step back from the exploding heads, the hacked bank accounts, and the cannibal pies, we're looking at a dizzying, grotesque satire.
SPEAKER_01Definitely.
SPEAKER_00It's a text that takes the very real modern anxieties of unchecked bioengineering, corporate monopoly over genetics, and hyperpolarized political tribalism and literalizes them until the world is physically torn apart. It argues that extremism, whether from the left or the right, eventually strips away all humanity, leaving nothing but a chaotic cycle of violence.
SPEAKER_01This raises an important question, though, because amidst all the noise of this ideological warfare, amidst the millions of bodies and the global financial ruin, the true power doesn't rest with the armies bleeding on the streets. Right. It rests with a single man, Gerald Reichman, sitting quietly in a terraced house in Sheffield, holding a genetic kill switch.
SPEAKER_00And that is the exact thought we want to leave you with today. Think about Alison Finchley and her clone army. They are fighting, bleeding, and dying in the name of total liberation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00They genuinely believe they are overthrowing a corrupt, patriarchal capitalist system to build a better world. But they are secretly programmed at a molecular level to obey Reichmann's hidden code.
SPEAKER_01Which changes everything.
SPEAKER_00Right. If they win, if they successfully destroy the old world in the name of freedom, does their ultimate rebellion just inevitably become another form of absolute dictatorship? In trying to burn down a corrupt system, do they just end up handing the ashes to a new monster? Thank you for joining us on this deep dive.