“First they came for the Communists. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a Communist.” — Martin Niemöller
Martin Niemöller’s postwar confession endures because it names the machinery of abandonment with terrifying clarity: the bargain of silence, the cowardice of believing that someone else’s persecution can remain someone else’s problem. The warning is not frozen in the past; it is a pattern, a sequence, a door opened inch by inch until no one is left outside the reach of the boot.
Weimar Berlin, for all its contradictions and dangers, became one of the great queer capitals of the modern world. Its bars, cafés, publications, clubs, and social networks offered a fragile but extraordinary public life for queer and trans people. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science stood at the center of that world: a place of research, healthcare, advocacy, and early gender-affirming understanding. Berlin police even issued “transvestite certificates” that could help protect some gender-nonconforming and trans people from arrest.
The Nazis understood exactly what that visibility meant. After taking power, they moved quickly to dismantle Germany’s queer culture: closing bars and meeting places, banning publications, harassing organizations, and, in May 1933, looting Hirschfeld’s Institute and destroying much of its archive in the Berlin book burning. Paragraph 175, already part of German law, was revised in 1935 into a broader and harsher weapon against gay men and men accused of sex with other men. Tens of thousands were arrested; thousands were sent to concentration camps. Queer women, trans people, and gender-nonconforming people were persecuted through other laws, police practices, denunciations, and the regime’s broader campaign against anyone deemed outside the Nazi “national community.”
This is why it is both grotesque and ridiculous for any faction of the left to imagine it can purchase safety by abandoning trans people. The rest of the LGBTQ community is next. Then every other person who refuses the shape of obedience: the migrant, the dissident, the disabled, the artist, the worker, the Jew, the Muslim, the anti-fascist, the woman who will not submit, the person whose body or faith or language or love is not “theirs.” Reactionary power does not stop when one group is sacrificed. It treats that sacrifice as permission.
That abandonment—that betrayal, that bitter recognition that someone you thought was standing beside you has quietly crossed the street—is what burns at the heart of Catherine Moan’s latest single, “Enemy.”
Influenced by broken friendships and liberal politicians abandoning trans rights, “Enemy” is a high-energy synth-pop declaration of war against those who have given up on you. It is not a plea for understanding. It is the moment the pleading stops.
The song rides a bouncy bass-synth pulse with a disco snap, a Moroder-via-Donna Summer rhythm wrapped in cool electronic charges. Moan’s vocals move between warmth and frost: sighed dream-pop melodies drifting through sleek synth architecture, with shimmering electronic lines spiraling upward between verses like alarm lights in an empty corridor. Beneath its pop surface, the track is all teeth. The hook lands with a simple verdict: “Guess you’re my enemy now.”
The video for “Enemy” turns that emotional rupture into a paranoid spy-thriller chase. Through circular binocular views, CCTV-like distortion, and split-screen surveillance, Moan appears as a suited figure on the move: black blazer, white shirt, dark sunglasses, and briefcase in hand. She stalks through fluorescent parking garages, concrete stairwells, urban plazas, and strange civic spaces with the tense precision of someone both hunting and hunted.
Figures blur in the background. A double seems to trail her. A face appears on a stark “HAVE YOU SEEN MY ENEMY?” poster, transformed into a black-and-white warning sign. Moan peers through binoculars from behind stone walls and trees, checks her watch, takes a phone call, and races beneath chains and railings as the video cuts between stealth, pursuit, and confrontation. The sickly green tint and VHS-like scan lines give the whole thing the air of a recovered government tape, a dossier from some alternate 1984 where friendship has become surveillance and betrayal has become statecraft.
Watch the video for “Enemy” below:
Listen to “Enemy” below and order CM Ultra here.
CM Ultra is the latest shimmering synth-pop masterwork from LA-based artist Catherine Moan. Five years after her debut album—released through Philadelphia’s Born Losers Records—her distinctive mix of 80s new wave, early 2000s synth pop, and modern electronic dance gains a bold new dimension. Both production and songwriting have evolved to surpass her initial efforts. Beneath its playful surface, the album harbors lyrical reflections on media-driven psychological battles, political struggles against queer rights in America, and her personal navigation through these turbulent times. With an optimistic sonic palette, CM Ultra emerges as a deeply intimate yet vibrant statement, truly worth the wait.
Catch Catherine Moan on tour this summer with Born Losers labelmate Johnny Dynamite.
Live Dates:
- July 22 — Los Angeles, CA — Zebulon
- July 29 — San Francisco, CA — Kilowatt Bar with Johnny Dynamite
- July 31 — San Diego, CA — Soda Bar with Johnny Dynamite
- August 21 — Brooklyn, NY — Public Records with Johnny Dynamite
- August 22 — Philadelphia, PA — PhilaMOCA with Johnny Dynamite
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